The Australian Women’s Weekly take on the Cold War for ’50s housewives
Monash University PhD candidate, Hannah Viney, explores how the Womens Weekly communicated about the Cold War with the ‘everyday’ Australian woman in this crossposting from The Conversation.
Under editor Esmé Fenston, by the end of the 1950s, the Australian Women’s Weekly was selling over 805,000 copies a week. More than half of all Australian women read the magazine.
It focused on promoting a vision of the “everyday” Australian woman. Of course she did not represent all women — she was white, middle class, not working in paid employment and devoted to her home and family. Articles on fashion, cooking, homemaking, motherhood and romance supported this image.
But the Weekly also saw itself as a “women’s paper” with a responsibility to educate its readership by including current affairs and news stories in each issue.
