A brief history of the domestic goddess through pages of women’s magazines

From the benefits of a hot cup of cocoa to the F-plan diet and cosmetic surgery, Sarah Freeman reports on 50 years of diet advice.

MealTimes in 1940s Britain, were a much simpler affair.

Back then no-one had heard of balsamic vinegar, sun-dried tomatoes had yet to invade their way into kitchen cupboards and rationing meant there was not much room for experimentation.

However, even in those austere times, women’s weekly magazines still managed to fill their pages with pearls of wisdom on the best way to eat yourself fit.

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“An omelette or scrambled eggs is a first-class builder,” began one article in Woman and Home in June 1944. The magazine was keen on foodstuffs which helped build muscles. “Add some lightly cooked green vegetables or a salad – some watercress or mustard and cress is excellent and some fried potatoes or bread and margarine and you have a perfect meal. So easy to prepare, too, and a boon if you have to return from you own war work to cook.”

The mere mention of bread and margarine would send today’s army of diet gurus and lifestyle coaches reaching for their calorie counters. However, when women were engaged in the war effort, working in jobs that required hard manual labour, a few extra slices of bread didn’t matter too much. As an earlier edition of Woman and Home put it, “Today we have all got to be fighting fit. Nothing helps more than the right food...If we eat more of these foods our resistance to strain and fatigue will be stronger too.”

When rationing was gradually phased out in the 1950s, the message changed and as Dr Margo Barker discovered when she trawled through five decades worth of women’s magazine, our preoccupation with looking good and eating well is not a recent phenomena.

Dr Barker, who is a lecturer in nutrition at the University of Sheffield, analysed thousands of recipes, advertisements and articles spanning half a century for the first comprehensive study tracking diet advice from the Forties to the Noughties.

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“There had been a little bit of research carried out into this area, but no-one had really looked at how nutritional claims and consumer claims in food advertising had changed over the years,” she says. “The aim of the research was to discover why people eat what they do and advertising plays a big part in that.

“It seemed to me to make perfect sense to take back copies of Woman and Home and Women’s Own and see just how the advice to women had changed.

“They are both long-standing British women’s magazines and they are a good reflection of how our lives and our eating habits have changed.”

While advice from the Ministry of Food dominated the years from 1939 to 1945, post-war it was all about boosting energy and encouraging people to improve their health and well-being.

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“In the 1940s food was another weapon of war and well into the 1950s advertisements and magazine articles repeated government policy advice verbatim,” says Dr Barker. “Perhaps unsurprisingly there was a great deal of emphasis on how a good diet could enhance sleep and strengthen nerves.”

According to Woman’s Own, there was no need for stressed-out readers to book an appointment at their GP. A cup of hot cocoa was just as good as any prescription.

For “wives and mothers with the cares of a home on their shoulders” it recommended a cup of Rowntree’s cocoa claiming it would not only soothe “jangled nerves” but as an extra bonus would also “aid digestion”.

“Rationing didn’t end with the war and with food shortages commonplace there was a real emphasis on encouraging housewives to be economical and stretch their weekly shop as far as they can,” adds Dr Barker. “In some ways things have come full circle as we have begun to see the same kind of articles in today’s magazines, but we should resist the temptation to think that in the 1950s it was all about practicality.

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“Yes, there were many articles about how to make food go further and advertisements for Ovaltine, which apparently had the perfect combination of nutrients, but there were also a lot of articles which weren’t so different from today. People wanted to look good and food was marketed as a means to an end.”

The Ministry of Food knew a thing or two about marketing and appealed to the female reader’s vanity in a series of articles promoting the benefits of fruit and vegetables.

“If you could be granted three wishes about your looks,” the editorial began. “Wouldn’t they run something like this; a lovely complexion; a good figure; a lively and attractive personality? Well, these wishes can come true, or very largely. You see there’s a lot in eating for health and beauty.

“What you eat turns into you; and the right foods turn into a better looking you than the wrong foods or very largely. You see there’s a lot in eating for health and beauty.”

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The Ministry of Food was clearly wary of offering any 100 per cent guarantees to the readers of Women’s Own, but the manufacturers of nutritional supplements, who in the 1950s suddenly discovered a gap in the market, weren’t so backward in coming forward and many were heralded as miracle cures.

“Here at last is a truly comprehensive vitamin product for you!,” promised an advertisement for the new Rexall Plenamins vitamin supplement in 1954. “Unless you get sufficient vitamins it is impossible for you to enjoy perfect fitness, alertness, health and energy, clear eyes and a glorious fresh complexion. Yet, without knowing it, your daily diet may quite easily be deficient in some of these essential substances.”

The tablets would be later endorsed by the US Olympic team and by the end of the decade the floodgates had opened Each week brought some new supplement which promised even better results and the market proved a lucrative one. However, by the 1960s life in Britain was changing. Women had the pill, feminism was on the rise and there were stirrings of discontent among traditional housewives.

While the largely conservative Women’s Own still churned out knitting patterns and tips for dinner party success, even it couldn’t ignore the fact that the domestic goddess of the 1950s was breaking free of her apron strings.

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“For a long time when it came to food advertising, the housewife and mother was portrayed as being responsible for the happiness of the rest of the family. If she prepared a decent meal every evening, then all was well with the world.

“That kind of image went into decline in the 1970s and there was a clear shift in the tone and content of dietary advice.”

While subsequent decades brought leg warmers, aerobics and the F-Plan diet, the fitness craze clashed with a desire for convenience food. For a while, microwave meals eaten in front of the television were seen as the height of sophistication and no kitchen was complete without a Sodastream.

But by the 1990s, it seemed everyone had a gym membership and while obesity levels have risen, our preoccupation with staying slim has never been greater.

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“Over the past five years there has actually been a downturn in the quantity of adverts which carry a nutritional message,” says Dr Barker. “However, this has been matched by an increasing number of articles in magazines giving diet and health advice.

“As a country, Britain has changed enormously since the Second World War and what and how we eat has also gone through a massive shift. Many of the articles we read were very much of their time and reflected the age in which they were written. However, whether it was a magazine from the 1940s or one from the 1990s one thing which hasn’t changed is our desire to look and feel good.”

Dr Margo Barker will be giving a talk on Diet Advice in Women’s Magazines on July 7 as part of the Sheffield Food Festival, which runs from July 4 to 10. www.sheffieldfoodfestival.com.

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