Object Focus: ‘My Home’ magazine

Mondays can be tough for some, so we thought we’d help ease you into the week by introducing the newest addition to MoDA’s collection: A magazine series called My Home which makes for a fantastic and distractingly good read.

My Home is a typical woman’s consumer magazine of the interwar period with articles on cooking, household management, beauty, fashion and the latest news on film and theatre stars. What may be particularly interesting to MoDA researchers is the home interiors section. This is the only part of the magazine with colour printed pages and it showcases the latest fashions in home decorating with information about cost and suppliers.

My Home was a monthly publication that ran from the 1920s. In 1965 it’s name changed to My Home and Family. Eventually it went out of print, but it’s sister magazine, Woman and Home continues today. MoDA has been generously donated seventeen bound volumes of My Home covering the period December 1939 to December 1956.

Other regular features in each edition include knitting patterns, advice columns, fashion pages and of course, the fiction serial. The latter is always a love story, with beautiful heroines and a steady rotation of beaus: soldiers, sailors, vicars and of course  – a dashing doctor.

My Home is going to be a valuable resource for visitors to our study room. However, researchers be warned that you have to be very disciplined if you are going to use this magazine as primary source material: the content is very diverting and you will easily find yourself poring over text and images completely off-topic from what you came to study. If you have the self-discipline to thumb past the monthly romance series most likely you will come undone on the advertisements. Here is a selection::