England’s oldest weekly magazine for women
This year The Lady celebrates its 120th anniversary.
At the time the idea of a women’s magazine was still quite radical.The decade before it started women had begun to claim the right to be recognised as people in their own right and the magazine’s founder, Thomas Gibson Bowles, took a gamble that there were enough women sufficiently educated and interested in various topics to subscribe to a journal specifically designed for them.
However, the first editor thought that the magazine should concentrate instead on practical information. Even today the magazine prides itself on it’s philosophy of containing no sex, no religion and no politics. After all, as the magazine stated in its first publication, “to look beautiful is one of the first duties of a lady”.
Anna McNamee went to The Lady’s offices, in the heart of London’s Covent Garden. There she met Arline Usden the magazine’s current editor.
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