What Every Woman Should Know: Lifestyle Lessons from the 1930s

Състояние: Много добро
Забележка: Почти отлично състояние - неизползвана книга.
Издателство: Transatlantic Press
Град на издаване: Croxley Green, Hertfordshire, United Kingdom
Наличност: singular
Ширина (мм): 225
Височина (мм): 280
Дебелина (мм): 17
Корици: Твърди

The Depression, caused by a slump in world prices, lasted until 1933. Wages fell; unemployment hit three million, the highest total ever. Vet there was another side to this picture of gloom. Despite the Depression, living standards were actually rising. By 1933 the National Grid had been completed, allowing hydroelectric power to free industry from its dependence on coal and iron. Most towns had their own gasworks, providing light, heat and the power needed to operate labour-saving devices in the factory and in the home. Meanwhile new synthetic products meant that all kinds of goods could be produced more cheaply.

As What Every Woman Should Know illustrates, the 1930s, for all its forebodings, marked the beginning of the modern era. It ushered in the consumer revolution, in which new industries sprang up to provide goods to the individual consumer. Houses, cars, clothes, presents, new foods - everything from ice-cream to new breakfast cereals - were manufactured by companies who advertised intensively to create a mass market.

Women were the powerhouse of the consumer revolution. They at last had the vote, on equal terms with men, and increasingly they had money to spend. This appetite was whetted by a raft of new women's magazines and newspaper sections which instilled the conviction that interior decoration was as changeable a fashion as a summer wardrobe.

The facsimile pages from 1930s editions of the Daily Mail reprinted in this book give a revealing and entertaining insight into a bygone age, when women were at the hub of the new consumer society, yet still wrestled with timeless themes of health, beauty and household management.

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What did women want? For the first time in our history it really made a difference. In the 1930s women had the vote, they had independence and increasingly they had money in their purse.

The Daily Mail was one of the first newspapers to recognise this and to cater for what women wanted. It led the way in capturing fashions and sometimes creating them, paving the way for the consumer revolution well before the Second World War.

Its advice for the modern 1930s woman ranged from beauty and fashion tips to counsel on how to remove butter stains using petrol (a task best accomplished out of doors!). It informed women that housework, performed correctly, could yield "the slimness and grace which every woman desires, and explained how economies could be made, such as learning how to rejuvenate elderly' fowl for the table.

The facsimile pages from 1930s editions of the Daily Mail, reprinted with startling clarity in this book, give a revealing and entertaining insight into the preoccupations of the new consumer age.

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Contents

7 Introduction
8 Cookery
28 Household Hints
44 Fashion
76 Beauty
96 Lifestyle
114 Answers to Correspondents