AustLit

'In her essay on mid twentieth-century women's journalism, Susan Sheridan considers some of the strategies that women writers used to bridge the gap between their hard-earned place in the literary field and their bread-and-butter work for popular women's magazines. Her case studies of Kylie Tennant, Charmian Clift and Barbara Jefferis suggest that writers must negotiate different forms of professional identity as they move from one literary institution to another - from the novel to women's magazines - each of which has its unique networks of sociability and values. When Tennant began writing for the Woman's Mirror in 1961, for example, she felt that she had made her name as a novelist by 'opposing all the things' the women's magazines stood for. Jefferis dealt with the problem by adopting the pen-name 'Margaret Sydney' and assuming the persona of 'an everywoman'. While writing for the women's pages created 'a fragile community of women writers and readers, Sheridan argues that it was too bound up with the gendering of the domestic sphere to constitute 'a positive counter-public sphere', which was not achieved until the rise of women's presses, like Virago, in the 1970s.' (Kirkpatrick, Peter and Dixon, Robert: Introduction xvii)