Woman's Weekly / 30th April 1965
Let me know whether you’re interested in the story that this picture accompanies, but I thought it was a rather lovely example of the type of line drawing that went out of use in magazines not that long after this was published. It certainly looks like an intriguing plot…
Tags: romance, social history
Woman's Weekly / 7th May 1965
I’m sure a good rinse with Optrex will sort Bern out. (From ‘The Ranger In The Hills’)
Tags: blatant sexism, romance
Woman's Weekly / 2nd April 1965
It’s our Mary again! Here she gives reasonable advice to a woman who is contemplating an affair with a married man (although note that she can’t resist implying that she’d be a ‘home wrecker’, as if the man involved had no responsibility at all), but what struck me was her reference to a ‘special boyfriend’ in the second reply.
This reminded me of my mother and aunt suggesting that I could go on dates when I considered myself to be in a committed long-distance relationship, and I think this change is probably down to the fact that relationships can now be serious without marriage getting involved. A generation or so ago, it was far more common to date (in theory, without sexual intercourse taking place), then getting engaged once you felt you’d found ‘the one’, whilst my generation haven’t really dated in that respect, as sex tended to happen at an earlier stage, meaning that a series of serious relationships are now more the norm.
Other letters of note here include the rather sweet enquiry about having youngsters around the farm (I would have loved to go on holiday at Mrs T’s place), and the mother who was clearly dying to address her son with the letters ‘B.A’. I presume he was the first in his family to get a degree!
Tags: blatant sexism, marriage, Mary Marryat, problem page, romance
Woman's Realm / 6th October 1967
I see we’ve got the old ‘indulge your sulky husband’ advice again, but Clare’s probably right about the cause, so I would have advised a good chat after dinner myself. However, the real interest lies in some of the other letters here. The woman who hasn’t told her daughter who her real father is because of shame over the divorce is a sad case, and although I’m not sure what Clare means by ‘legal difficulties’, the daughter clearly has a right to know. The poor woman who’s not been able to tell her husband about her problems with sex is a real sign of the times, but it’s reassuring that Clare tells her that help is readily available, and I can’t, thankfully, imagine a parent reacting to a blind boyfriend in the same manner nowadays as the letter writer’s mother here.
Tags: motherhood, problem page, romance, teenagers
Woman / 9th December 1967
Let’s face it, most of us like a good gossip, and there’s nothing like a magazine problem page to really reveal how a nation ticks. Woman‘s agony aunt was Evelyn Home (of whom nothing on the internet appears to have been written), although the famous Marje Proops also puts in a few appearances in Woman in 1967 (which isn’t covered by any obituaries I can find).
Evelyn gives level-headed, if unremarkable, advice, but this page is notable for her reply to the unprinted letter of Mr C.S.G. (Lancs.), which gave me a bit of a start. I’m far more used to it being discussed in the modern-day Scarlet (still, for some reason, causing feathers to ruffle in some areas of the Press), than in the 1967 Woman, and it’s interesting that (according to Wikipedia at least) Evelyn’s quite right to state that he’s actually committing an illegal act, as anal sex between heterosexual couples wasn’t legal until 1996.
Also, I hope everything turned out OK for Worried Girl (Lancs.). There’s a depressingly high number of these letters, and it’s almost criminal that over 40 years on, the UK still hasn’t really properly sorted out its sex education and support in this area.
Tags: Evelyn Home, misplaced morality, problem page, romance, social history