The State Library’s brilliant archival program Digital Excellence has been digitalising various pieces of our written history recently, and now they have added the back issues of Australian Woman’s Mirror – a wildly successful and pioneering women’s magazine which ran from 1924 to 1961.
As Cathy Perkins explains: “The magazine was launched in November 1924 as an offshoot of the Bulletin, which, according to the Mirror’s first editorial, had been knocking back a ‘large amount of purely feminine writing’. The new weekly magazine would supply women in the city and the bush with conversation material: about theatre, film, music, sport ‘and a little about books and the people who write them’.”
The Mirror was circulating over 160,000 copies in the 1930s, and was instrumenting in publishing writing by many noted women, including Dorothea Mackellar, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Myra Morris, and Llywelyn Lucas.
In addition to the magazine’s archives being digitalised, Perkins is also hosting a free talk this coming weekend (Sunday, September 3 at 2pm) at Dickson Street Space in Newtown, as part of the History Council of NSW’s Speaker Connect program for History Week 2017.
Check out old issues of the Australian Woman’s Mirror, or RSVP to the free talk about The Mirror’s Writing Women.
