The decline and fall of the bible of feminine gentility

The Woman, Britain’s longest-running girls’s journal, has formally introduced that it has ceased publication.

The journal is famed for its etiquette recommendation and adverts for butlers, nannies and discreet liaisons with well-heeled 60-somethings.

In a press release, the publishers confirmed latest media stories that the April version of the journal would be the final, however added that the web site with its jobs board and recruitment company will proceed.

This is a glance again at its place in, and impression on, British tradition over 140 years.

The Woman was established in 1885 by Thomas Gibson Bowles, as {a magazine} for gentlewomen, a weekly information to navigating the social minefield of well-to-do British life.

Its very distinctive character was affectionately lampooned by PG Wodehouse. In his Jeeves tales, Bertie Wooster is briefly employed by {a magazine} referred to as Milady’s Boudoir, which was housed “in a kind of rummy streets within the Covent Backyard neighbourhood”.

The true Woman Journal simply occurred to be in Bedford Avenue in Covent Backyard.

The Woman’s fame owed a lot to its recommendation to girls on the mysteries of the British class system. In 1936, as an example, its readers got an replace on the acceptability of novels.

“The studying of fiction, not way back thought deplorable by almost all social employees, is now turning into nearly a advantage,” it famous.

It is first version started with an evidence that its goal was to cowl “the entire discipline of womanly motion”.

Virtually all of it was written by a person – Bowles – utilizing numerous aliases. It was not an enormous success. Fortunes modified in 1894 when he appointed his youngsters’s governess, Rita Shell, to be editor.

Below Shell’s management, it turned a profitable weekly information to girls who discovered themselves answerable for each a family and a finances to outsource the each day drudgery to the decrease courses.

In December 1927, it cautioned younger girls “to turn out to be a very good prepare dinner earlier than you marry, darling. Then you may be competent to rebuke a workers of domestics or to dispense with one”.

Eighty years later, these considerations remained central. Editor Rachel Johnson was a agency believer in not being too aware of workers, writing: “By no means sit within the kitchen chatting to your nanny, it’s going to finish in tears earlier than bedtime.”

And even at this time there are nonetheless pages of labeled adverts for livery employees and different assorted types of home assist however the demand now’s extra for live-in carers for the aged than butlers or nannies.

That age profile has lengthy been a priority. In 2009, Johnson was taken on to offer the journal a younger rebrand. She was requested to halve the common of the reader, which was, when she began, 78.

A Channel 4 documentary revealed it was not universally welcomed, and Johnson’s diaries later catalogued all of the difficulties of aiming articles at youthful readers amongst adverts for walk-in baths and absorbent underwear together with merchandise to take away their related odours. It was an eventful three years that made various headlines.

Nonetheless, whereas the readership did briefly improve, like most print magazines, gross sales have been in sharp decline lately. As soon as a weekly, it went from fortnightly to month-to-month. The final revealed figures in 2023 revealed it bought just below 18,000 copies a difficulty.

And whereas the web site will proceed, it’s the finish of the road for a really distinctive little bit of British tradition.

The present proprietor of the Woman is the good grandson of the founder, Thomas Bowles. Ben Budworth has spent 17 years making an attempt to maintain it afloat.

He took over the operating of the journal in 2008 and oversaw the controversial rebrand. His resolution to unload the Covent Backyard workplaces and transfer manufacturing to a enterprise park in Borehamwood in Hertfordshire was met with protest.

The premises on Bedford Avenue have been seen by most of the workers as extra than simply one other workplace, they helped outline The Woman’s character.

No-one had a direct telephone line. As an alternative, calls all went by way of a telephonist. One former editor stated work would cease at 2pm to take heed to the Archers, and once more at 3:30pm for tea.

Johnson stated the wall secure was the place the tins of custard lotions have been saved. One explicit perk was her personal peach-coloured WC. Every day she could be handed two freshly laundered towels.

The constructing was a reminder of its lengthy historical past and the journal’s many contributors, amongst them Lewis Carroll, Nancy Mitford and Stella Gibbons, who whereas giving the impression of being onerous at work wrote Chilly Consolation Farm within the journal’s workplaces.

Nevertheless, heritage doesn’t pay payments. Issues with a tax demand made headlines in 2024 and instructed the transfer to Hertfordshire had not solved the monetary woes. The issue of the shrinking and ageing readership was by no means going away.

Even the phrase woman has shifted through the years from being an aspiration to a time period extensively thought to be demeaning and disparaging.

And whereas there are older magazines, akin to The Individuals’s Good friend (which didn’t start as {a magazine} aimed particularly at girls) and the American Harper’s Bazaar, which absorbed the even older British stalwart Queen, the Woman has a very good declare on being the UK’s oldest surviving girls’s journal.

Nevertheless, 140 years on, {a magazine} that when billed itself as an indispensable information to society has discovered that society has moved on.