The South African Lady's Pictorial and Home Journal as a subtle agent of change for British South African women's view of race relations in southern Africa

Abstract

This article seeks to explore how the reading matter in a monthly magazine may have influenced its readers’ views of race relations during the first half of the 20th century. The South African Lady’s Pictorial and Home Journal (1910–1940) claimed to be the first leading women’s magazine to circulate throughout the four provinces of the Union of South Africa. It also had readers in the major centres of Rhodesia, South West Africa, Mozambique and the Congo. Its target market was white, English speaking-women who, at the time, formed a community of readers with still strong ties to ‘home’ and, as the years went by, were attempting to work out what it meant to be South African. The magazine reflects and may have influenced its readers’ changing views on their position as English South Africans in relation to the other races, both in this country and globally, through informative articles, reader correspondence, short stories and book reviews.