Jaine Blackman discovers what Oxford women were reading about 100 years ago

Comment on skinny models, the latest fashions, household tips and recipes... the format could be from any modern magazine.

But For Those at Home are pages which featured in the Oxford Journal Illustrated 100 years ago and give a fascinating glimpse in to women’s lives in the city in 1914.

Looking through its issues, it’s striking to note both similarities with present day concerns and startling differences.

At the beginning of the year, writer Barbara Bocardo notes a cold snap has been blamed for causing a rise in the death rate but states: “Statistics are well known to be able to prove anything so they may as well be left alone.” So nothing new there.

In the same issue (January 14, 1914) she also counsels bargain hunters that during the sales “it is possible to get spring coats and skirts made up at a reduced price, so the woman with a limited income, whose happiness does not depend upon wearing the fashion of tomorrow, may profitably turn her attention to her spring outfit”.

The outfit she describes is portrayed as a drawing but she says: “Somebody has promulgated the theory that the attenuated style of figure is going out of fashion and that by summer women will all have become Junoesque.

“There always have been plenty of Junoesque women about – if that is not too poetical a way of describing the ladies of ample proportions who have compressed themselves into narrow skirts, because nothing but an elegant slimness ever appeared in the fashion-plates – but whether fashion will see fit to clothe them as the Junoesque should be clothed remains to be see.

“One hardly expects that sort of thing of fashion,” she finishes rather sniffily.

Yes, we’re still waiting for that, Babs.

On the week war was declared, it hardly ruffled For Those at Home, “ a page of fashion, social news and domestic hints” . While it did get top billing, the story got less space than a discourse on what was being taught in schools.

Under the heading War and what it means to us, Barbara says: “Unfortunately it is not the people who start fighting who bear all the suffering it brings. Already the prospect for ourselves, who desire peace, is gloomy in the extreme, looking at it only from the point of view of the housekeeper.”

She bemoans the fact that the price of flour has risen, offers tips for making meat go further (add more vegetables, pulses or pasta) and then points out the “the poor” – who are spoken of as if they were a different race – “very often waste pieces of dry bread”. The following week it’s noted that: “A few people made a rush to buy up stores, but I think the majority here bought very little more than usual.”

Barbara tells a story that as the government had bought up the horses from Oxford store Morrell’s, Hall’s Breweries and the Co-operative Stores people placing their orders were told their goods might not be able to be delivered.

“Britons never shall be slaves and I know a case in which the dignified head of a household commandeered a friend’s bath-chair and solemnly trundled it to the stores and fetched home the family provisions in triumph!” she says.

Wow, man picks up his own shopping – that must have showed the Hun.

And the focus stayed very much on the home. While it’s suggested that women could cut and roll bandages for the Red Cross Society “nobody must neglect their primary duties of looking well to their own households”.

However, some of Barbara’s culinary delights would certainly have helped the war effort... by getting husbands signing up in droves to avoid dishes like banana salad: “Peel the bananas and lay them on lettuce leaves and pour over them a salad dressing to which a little sugar has been added.”

What?! Elsewhere on the page she appears rather condemning of wartime weddings.

“While a few prudent couples have announced the postponement of their marriage, the outbreak of war has hurried many many marriages and most of the prospective bridegrooms seem to be rushing off to get a special licence while the bride tidies up her best frock or hustles up her dressmaker to send home something out of the trousseau by express messenger,” says Barbara, who was somewhat more gushing over the wedding of the Marquis of Tavistock later in the year.

Household budgets remain to the fore. In November she writes: “For the middle-class household threepence on the pound of tea is not ruinous but for the poor, that and the halfpenny on the glass of beer make a difference. Perhaps the easiest way of meeting the situation is to drink a little less of each.”

Yes, the page certainly shows the vast inequalities between classes and gender but also how the minutiae of life continues.

Barbara takes exception to a letter published in The Oxford Times which “suggested that when our warriors came back from the war they would tell their womenfolk that they did not know how to sweep and dust, they did these things better in France and Flanders.

”It is not a cheerful prospect for peace if it means an access (sic) of masculine grumbling and odious comparisons, not with their mothers, which sensible women can all more or less forgive, but with women of other countries.” The horror, the horror.

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