In the 1950s the Australian Women’s Weekly published an etiquette guide advising the reader not to raise financial issues when her husband was in a bad mood and to always be pleasant and smiling when he arrived home from work.
The Weekly’s current editor-in-chief, Nicole Byers, says the etiquette guide she uncovered while preparing for the magazine’s 90th anniversary is “quite shocking to read now”. “We had a bit of a chuckle about the etiquette guide that we used to run that had a lot of very strict rules for women,” Byers said.
The guide demonstrates the way the magazine has balanced the feminine and the feminist side of women during its 90-year reign as the most popular magazine for Australian women.
“It always stood up for women and encouraged them to get jobs; to go out into the world, but then balanced that with the home servitude kind of values,” Byers told Guardian Australia on the 90th anniversary of the magazine on 10 August.
The September issue features 86-year-old model and TV personality Maggie Tabberer on the cover and profiles some of the women who have shaped the magazine including Evonne Goolagong Cawley, Bindi and Terri Irwin, Olivia Newton-John, Nicole Kidman and Quentin Bryce.
The launch editor in 1933 – an era when only 10% of journalists were women – was a man. But after five years the entire editorial hierarchy was female and has remained so.
Byers, who is celebrating the milestone with not one but three special anniversary issues, says you can chart the change in the role of women in society through the pages of the magazine.
“In the 1940s and 50s it definitely was centred around creating that perfect home and the wording of the editorials and advertising was very much around providing for your children and husband,” she said.
“In the 60s and 70s of course it was more about the liberated woman and the sexual revolution. And then in the 80s it was around career and ‘having it all’ and the powerful woman.”
But even back in the 1950s when the perfect housewife wore an apron and a smile, the Weekly published articles about politics and international affairs, such as the cold war, and during the world wars it was a service magazine which championed the roles women played in the war effort.
Of course the magazine would always find a unique take on current affairs, such as the cooking secrets of Wallis Simpson published months after King Edward’s abdication in 1936.
Byers argues the Weekly was somewhat ahead of the curve, publishing in 1964 a factual article about the contraceptive pill and a few years later a feature titled “Sex and Marriage” which took a clear-eyed view of sex education.
“Alongside the stories about making meals for your husband and children were the stories encouraging women to seek careers,” she says. “And there was a careers section in the 1940s and 50s, which was quite unheard of.”
In the 1970s the magazine encouraged women to enjoy a career and their sex lives, and when one of the more famous editors, Ita Buttrose, came along, she championed childcare for working mothers.
It’s always been somewhat of a celebrity magazine but not solely so. The biggest celebrity of them all, Diana, Princess of Wales, dominated the magazine throughout the 1980s with a special edition commemorating her wedding to Charles selling a record 1.1m copies.
For Byers the golden age in terms of style was the 50s and 60s when the magazine had a staff illustrator who designed all the covers.
“It was the most beautiful era when it became a coffee table magazine,” she says.
The first female governor of New South Wales, Dame Marie Bashir, told the Weekly’s September issue she believes the magazine brought women across the country together and gave them authority in a male-dominated world.
“The Women’s Weekly legitimised the fact that women had an enormous role to play, as has always been the case in Australia,” Bashir says.
Circulation numbers are no longer published but according to the latest Roy Morgan readership data, the Weekly print readership is up 9% year-on-year to 1.3m with a cross-platform audience of almost 2.6m a month. Byers says the print magazine still outsells the digital edition.
One of the most loved features of the Weekly since 1980 is the Australian Women’s Weekly Children’s Birthday Cake Book, which has become a national treasure.
Photographs of readers’ cakes are on display in Bendigo Art Gallery, as part of an exhibition titled The Australian Women’s Weekly: 90 Years of an Australian Icon.
Byers and the Weekly staff will celebrate the anniversary with a private office party where they plan to enjoy a duck cake and a train cake specially baked for the occasion.
