SIR,—I suppose what Lois Mitchison is saying in her discerning
letter regarding Woman's Own is that the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin. 'Are social and educational differences Jess important for women than for men?' she asks. 'De all women have basically the same day-dreams and the same things they want . . .7'
It is precisely in this belief and on this basis that Woman's Own is conducted and designed. To us a reader is 'class-less'—in the sense that she belongs to all social levels; and age-less—in the sense that she will find the editorial matter to her liking, whatever her age.
Another important factor, I think, in the phenomenal success of the magazine is to be fotind in the bond that is created between magazine and reader. Women's magazines have succeeded in meet- ing woman's deeply needed feeling of 'belonging*— belonging to a friendly magazine, belonging to a great group of women reading the same magazine, belonging to a vast new money-earning woman's world which their particular magazine understands and is sympathetic towards.
Women since the war, largely as I have said through economic circumstances, have created a new special kind of world for themselves, and a magazine like Woman's Own, read by 7,000,000 women every week, has become an important and necessary- part of it.
I still say, in spite of the letter from Robert HO- cock, that almost every woman in this country today is earning money, either part-time or whole-time; and Mr. Hancock can produce no figures, I see, to pr4ve otherwise. With nearly 8,000,000 women in full-time work, his other figure for 'chars and counter hands' is purely suppositious. In addition to the 'chars and counter hands,' who can number the hordes of part- time (an hour a day or a day a week) typists and secretarial workers, nurses, baby-sitters, models, teachers in reserve—but why go on? You have only to be aware of life to be aware of the 'monstrous regiment'—without, of course, even thinking of the millions of housewives who, in their own right, have money to spend.—Yours faithfully,
J. W. DRAWBELL
Managing Editor of Woman's Own Newnes & Pearson's, Tower House, Southampton Street, Strand, WC2
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