ABSTRACT
School followed by paid work increasingly became the norm for girls of all social classes growing up in England between 1920 and 1950. The emergence of magazines for school and working girls in the interwar years testifies to the significance these features of girlhood had attained amongst publishers in this period. This proliferation of papers for different groups of girls is also evidence of the construction of difference as a means of legitimating the differentiation of publishing for a female audience; schoolgirls were distinct from their working sisters who, in turn, had different experiences and interests from wives and mothers. Having said this, the demise of magazines for business girls by the 1930s replaced by the long-running and successful mother-daughter papers, does suggest that the differentiation between adolescent working girls and married women in their twenties was deemed unnecessary or hard to profitably sustain. The publisher's distinction between schoolgirls and working girls was more successful, premised as it was on an important point of transition for girls growing up in this period. On leaving school, as we saw in chapter 2, girls tended to relinquish all things associated with school and being children. Circulation figures suggest that this included schoolgirl papers although they continued to attract some following amongst working girls. How did these different magazines address school and work?
