Look Out! The Femorabiliacs Are Leaving

When I saw this internship advertised, I agonised over whether or not to apply. Not because I wasn’t sure if I was interested; it looked like my dream internship, but it took place at the same time that I was to be writing my masters dissertation. Taking on an 8-week internship as well as finishing my dissertation didn’t seem like a very practical idea but I am researching women’s magazines and hoping to pursue further research in the field, and I had been hoping to work with the Femorabilia collection for a while and here was an opportunity to do so. I couldn’t be happier that I went for it and got a place on this internship, I knew I’d regret it if I didn’t and although it has been challenging working on my dissertation around it, I’m just about managing to keep on top of everything!

For my dissertation I am looking at the early 20^th century magazine editorship and writing of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Jessie Redmon Fauset. Their respective work on The Forerunner and The Crisis is a far stretch from the 1970s and 80s teenage magazines like Jackie and Just Seventeen that I have been working with on this internship, but the work has fed in to my wider research in various ways.

Although I have visited volumes of The Forerunner and The Crisis in the British Library, the majority of my research has taken place using the digital archives of The HathiTrust and the Modernist Journals Project. At the beginning of this internship we were encouraged to spend plenty of time simply reading the magazines in the collection, and I found the process of physically holding and turning the pages of magazines helped me to understand the ideas about magazine editorship I had been reading and thinking about. As I read more and more issues of Jackie for example I started to understand the format of the magazine, its regular features, the tone of its writing and the intricacies of its layout.

Noticing patterns in this way made me think about the decisions of editorship, how features are always positioned on the same page of the magazine, or how advertising impacts upon the layout of a story interrupting a three-page spread.

These details helped me to think in new ways about the magazines I was reading as digital copies, it makes a big difference to the way I read if I am reading on a computer and I found that spending so much time with physical copies of magazines helped me to think about the “patterns” and editorship of the magazines. I have taken to making colour-coded spreadsheets inspired by my archive cataloguing so I can “track” the regular features of Gilman and Fauset’s writing, and I have printed off a few copies of magazines and assembled paper copies to think about how it alters how I read the material differently.

As well as helping me to develop areas of my knowledge and research that I was already working on this internship has allowed me to learn lots of new skills like digitising, creating archive catalogues, working with photoshop, planning and creating posters and materials for exhibition cases, expanding my blogging and social media experience, recording podcasts and making a range of teaching and learning resources for future students, to name a few! I have also learned a lot about the magazines in the collection, and I have of course developed favourites.

We have been mainly working with Jackie magazine and have created a full catalogue list of domestic tasks for the whole run of magazines the collection holds. As well as the wacky 70s and 80s recipes, photo stories and interesting sewing ideas, my absolute favourite feature of the magazines has to be the illustrations. The Jackie documentary (link here) made in 2009 says that because the magazine couldn’t afford photographers and models in its early days, they hired illustrators instead to do the fashion spreads. It’s interesting because that surely isn’t true of the costing of magazines now, but the illustrations are also just so painfully beautiful that I can’t help but wish that every magazine was illustrated as well.

The fashion spreads are always stunning, but my absolute favourite illustrations are those that are attached to the fortnightly feature Look Out. Look Out was a round up of fashion tips and featured sewing patterns and sometimes crafts as well as the latest in fashion and accessories. The title of the feature was always accompanied by a drawing of two very fashionable girls, usually seasonally themed and I love them. I love both the beautiful illustrations and also the idea of them being regular features, the attention to detail in each issue is really fascinating. I have seen on the Charlotte Perkins Gilman digital archive that Gilman, who edited and wrote her magazine entirely by herself for seven years, kept cuttings of her page headers, and epitaphs that she would rearrange or each issue and I love the idea that a similar thing was happening in the Jackie offices, illustrations laid out on tables and mixed around for each issue’s layout.

Here’s my absolute favourite Look Out illustration from the 19^th August 1978 issue. This is basically how I imagine I look when I am on the beach with my friends, just exceptionally stylish and cool, my ice cream only producing one perfect drip that won’t make me sticky, as I listen to a crab giving a lecture (that’s what it looks like to me anyway).

And here are some more equally as gorgeous examples, I’ve kept the full pages on as well so you can see the rest of the illustrated features.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been so fascinated about how these pages were put together that they have inspired some of the resources Rosie and I have made for teaching, learning and public engagement. We have turned the best Look Out illustrations into postcards and made an interactive ‘edit your own Look Out’ activity. I think this is a good example of how well this internship has worked; we have been able to immerse ourselves in the magazines and transform our reading experience into a wide range of other media. I have learned so much and been able to develop my ideas, creativity and skills throughout this internship and I hope it’s clear from our tweeting, blogs, and podcasts that it has all been incredibly fun at the same time! You should, ahem, Look Out for us in the future because I have a feeling we won’t be shutting up about Femorabilia anytime soon….

By Katie Taylor, a Femorabiliac for life.