Date, Women’s Story Magazine, True Magazine: women’s romance magazines of the 1950s and 1960s
The increasing disposable income (‘You’ve never had it so good’, and all that) along with shifting social values offered big opportunities for magazine publishers in the 1950s and early 1960s. One genre which blossomed was the women’s romance magazine. Some such magazines came with the holiday brochures and leaflets we recently featured, all courtesy of the Lindsay family of Dublin.
There are three titles to mention. The first is Date, a 5d weekly from 1960. Ours was number 21, so it was a start-up from the same year. This magazine didn’t come out of nowhere though – Picturegoer magazine had been in decline throughout the 1950s, and had already combined with Disc Date. Its final issue, 23 April 1960, featured a three-page spread describing how it was going to become Date, which indeed appeared the following week, on 30 April. Picturegoer (we have a good run from the 1940s, including the final issue) had become rather sensationalist, although the editor, in the final issue put it rather more diplomatically: ‘Have you noticed how, in recent years, Picturegoer has widened its coverage? Once it was films only. Then discs and all aspects of popular entertainment were brought in. Now comes the next step. The launching of Date means there is a sparkling new magazine especially for the teens and twenties.’
However, few men would have read Date, I suggest. Its diet of gossip, ‘Beauty club’, heart-throb columns (Tony Curtis is in our copy), true-love stories and fashion tips would have seen to that. I suspect too it didn’t last as a title much beyond 1961 (I’ve seen one for sale, dated 28 January 1961, but no later). All a bit of a sad end for Picturegoer, a title that went back to 1911. Incidentally, I can find no trace of Disc Date – can anyone help?
The second title is Women’s Story Magazine, a monthly with the strapline ‘True love and romance’. Ours is from October 1958 and cost 1s 3d, and I can’t find any history about this magazine at all. With its content of knitting patterns and stories of finding love with Mr Right, it covered the same ground as our third magazine, True Magazine, and this is where it gets really complicated. This latter magazine, another monthly, costing 1s 6d, is from February 1959 and has the strapline ‘Romantic stories from real life’. Tracking this latter magazine down was very difficult, not least because of other, more popular, titles from the time with ‘True’ in them, such as True Story and True Romances.
Did I say there would be three magazines? Well, there is a fourth, My Home, but this has a different target audience. This is a monthly, costing 1s 3d, and ‘The magazine for the woman who loves her home’. Can we assume that the likely reader of this magazine had got her romance done and dusted? Not quite. Our copy, for 1958, also has true love stories, but leavened with recipes, knitting patterns, suggested colour schemes for your front room – again, you get the idea. The sample ad shown here, for Persil, is amongst others for wool, groceries, medicines, gas (to heat your bath so you can wash your baby), underwear, soap – everything you’d want for your home… My Home magazine had been running since at least the 1930s, and, I think, was available as a digital download in 2021 – but I can’t be sure it’s the same magazine.
The other ads we’re showing here are from Date. One has a very young Julie Andrews promoting Ryvita, and some lovely colour ads for Stergene and Burlington, and a page with quarter-page ads for Marmite, Field’s Skel-Croft Plus rugs, Peek-a-boo thermal underwear and the Pifco hair clipper.
