'Use Your Hands for Happiness':: Home Craft and Make-do-and-Mend in British Women's Magazines in the 1920s and 1930s

Abstract

‘What is needed is an outflow of nervous energy into other paths, and it probably is a self-protective instinct that makes a woman pick up her sewing or knitting while sitting still.’(Modern Woman 02.1935:10). With their kits, transfers, patterns, coupons, colourfully visualized transformation tips and step-by-step instructions, home craft features were a prominent and popular component of women's consumer magazines in the 1920s and 1930s. More recently, this form of consumer craft has been accused of limiting and even suppressing women's creativity. In contrast, this article will argue that home craft, as a component of a new commercial culture of home-making in the period, offered women opportunities for self-expression, agency and self-determination. It was a significant means of materializing distinctive skills, values and an aesthetic that was central to a feminine culture of modernity promoted through popular magazines and other media. Furthermore, some Home Editors, such as Edith Blair at Woman, were committed to improving women's taste in line with contemporary design discourse. Yet, it was the business of editors, unlike design reformers, to be well attuned to their readers' needs and aspirations. As such, home craft features may be read as a means of addressing the problems and anxieties surrounding the acceleration of modern life (unemployment, the strain of new work processes and their effects on physical and mental life) as well as imaging the cluster of aspirational dreams and desires symbolized by the ideal home, modern or otherwise.

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