ABSTRACT
A home with all modern conveniences became a reality for an increasing number of people, including aspirational lower middle- and working-class families, in the interwar years. Magazines such as Modern Home and Weldon’s Ladies’ Journal helped forge a burgeoning home consumer culture and were an important factor shaping dreams of home ownership. This article examines the ideal modern home—its pleasures, discontents, and potential meaning for women—as it was constructed in and disseminated through domestic women’s magazines. Conceptualizing periodicals as hybrid, composite texts, it argues that the multiple ways in which they framed, positioned, and reproduced word and image set up tensions and connections, opening a space for more diverse readers to engage with magazines in new ways. The metaphor of the magazine as both a “window” and “mirror” helps show how editors strove to balance appealing visions of modern living with advice that reflected readers’ real circumstances. A focus on the dominant ideal of the modern cottage/suburban home helps unpack the complex relationship between rural and modern, the past and the present, conventional femininity and modern womanhood, and private and national life that operated in the pages of these popular magazines.
