A New Partnership: Art, Money and Religion

Abstract

This chapter begins by identifying marked changes in the appearance and content of Time and Tide from the mid-1930s, including a decrease in female signatures, more masculine-coded advertisements, and a distancing from cultures associated with the ‘feminine middlebrow’. In early accounts of the periodical such changes have been interpreted as representing a dilution of Time and Tide’s feminism and a move away from its female readership. However, here and in the following chapter it is argued that while Time and Tide gradually distanced itself from the feminist label it did not abandon its feminist commitment. This chapter considers the significance of the new partnership formed between Time and Tide’s political editor, Lady Rhondda, and the religious and highbrow intellectual Theodora Bosanquet, whose appointment as literary editor in 1935 brought both ends of the paper under female control. Exploring a conversation about art, money and religion between these two women in and outside the pages of the magazine and noting a new emphasis on class in the paper’s columns, the chapter argues that Rhondda’s materialist feminist and professional interests and the more mystical and spiritual interests of its new literary editor are not as oppositional as they seem.