Tone Rasch: Showing up feminine modernity
Curator
The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology, Oslo
In the 1930’s different processes of modernization changed many women’s life. Women took part in working life in a greater extent than earlier. New domestic technologies and new ways to build and decorate homes meant less housework and more leisure time to spend on sport and social life outside home. Women’s magazines mirrored these changes and in some extent contributed to set the standards for what the modern woman should be engaged to. One of these magazines were the Norwegian journal Ourselves and Our Home (Vi selv og våre hjem), published in the years 1933-1956. The journal’s themes were taken from both working and domestic life and dealt with travels, literature, and arts. Taste and stylishness were considered to be important.
In this paper I will discuss how modernity and modernism were expressed in this journal and how these were linked to femininity, textiles and fashion. With modernity I mean what was considered as a modern lifestyle and modern individual and social attitudes. With modernism I mean the stylistic characteristics within fashion and home decoration. I regard both of them being important for a woman of the 1930’s that intended to be up to date. How clothing, interior textiles and fashion were promoted and contextualised are of special interest to me.
The journal’s three female editors were of great importance. One of them, Helen Engelstad played an important role to establish textile as a strong subject area within the discourse of professionalism of design in the middle of the 20th century. She was an art historian writing books on textiles and the head of the educational institution in aesthetics, now the OsloUniversityCollege, Faculty of Art, Design and Drama. She was eager to make textile handicraft visible for the public. Her articles in Ourselves and Our Home contributed to that time’s interest in textiles.
The relations between the ideal of the modern woman and the role of clothing and textiles in the thirties are to be discussed in the light of some selected articles from the magazine. In 1935 a competition was held among the journal’s readers to describe the modern woman. Some of the contributions were published and show the readers’ opinions at that time. The next theme I will discuss is the special textile issue from May 1935. Textiles and clothes made by the Norwegian textile industry were promoted. These textiles were intended to appear as fashionable for the active modern woman. The last article deals with the Paris exhibition in 1937 where Norwegian hand weavers showed furniture textiles. The exhibition was presented in the journal by Engelstad and shows the strong position handicrafts had among the bourgeois women, that was the journal’s target group. Did the journal express textile production, fashion and femininity as a “natural unity”? My aim is to discuss the relations between these three elements in a modernistic context where publishing played a most important role.