Chatelaine

The majority of my doctorate took place during the pandemic, which was not ideal in many ways. Primarily, research ground to a near-halt. Instead of haunting libraries and collections of important art galleries or museums, I was holed up in my apartment, bent over my keyboard, hunting desperately through digital files, hoping against hope to find something useful. A second, less pressing but equally upsetting outcome was realising just how closely the life of a grad student compared with lockdown and curfews. I never knew (and still don’t know) if I should be distressed by how little my life changed when lockdown happened, or grateful for the relatively small shift from normalcy to the pandemic - either way, I was stuck at my desk. The world was upside down, but deadlines are deadlines, and I had two thousand words to write a day if I hoped to finish within my lifetime. It often felt as though the work would never end. In the evenings, my beleagured little brain could only manage to read books I’d already read, and watch children’s films - animated, if possible. I wonder sometimes if, had my experience been a bit more normal, I would have taken in more appropriate media, or if I would have turned to Don Bluth and Hayao Miyazaki, regardless of the outside world.

One of the things I could rely on, at least when it came to research, was magazines. Loads of magazines have been digitised - in some cases, every issue of a publication is available through wonderful platforms like Library Archives Canada. The subject librarians at my school library were veritable angels, ministering digital copies and offering alternative sources, support, and kindness to the sobbing grad student - many, many and varied blessings upon their heads. The result was that much of my workday was spent combing through page after page of back issues of Chatelaine and Canadian Living, and I found that the advertisements for Sanforized curtains were as fascinating, sometimes more so, than the articles about Expo 67 or the Canadian Handicrafts Guild. I loved to get lost in the pages of these publications, with their faded colour photographs and snappy ad patter, written as though the author is in a hurry. I was charmed, and more often than not, bewildered, by the sorts of things advertised to women reading these magazines - silverware, curtains, horrific printed chintz sofas in polyester velveteen, rusty red wall-to-wall carpets, and, eventually, enormous vacuum cleaners to manage those carpets. There were sleek, boat-sized cars on offer, and more ads for alcohol and cigarettes than one would think possible to cram into a single issue. And hair dye, which was relatively new in the 1960s, will almost certainly pop up in the pages of these magazines. The women’s hair is huge and bouffant, matched only by their winged eyeliner and frosty pale lipstick. Perhaps my favourite part is the choice of font - from serious, sans serif fonts to show you just how modern and sophisticated the magazine is, to traditional fonts for articles, possibly for ease of reading, and finally the kooky, psychedelic confections to catch the eye. These publications proved to be rich repositories of material, of advertisements and imagery, and of the kinds of conversations Canadians were having in the 1960s about Canada itself - which was exactly what I ended up needing for much of my doctoral work.

This process of poring over digital pages echoed the fascination I had for old issues of Canadian Living or Women’s Weekly, that my mother had in her kitchen cupboard, along with the cookbooks. I loved to peruse those old magazines, delighted by the letters to the editor page, by the bizarre ads and the recipes for all sorts of questionable dishes - tuna in aspic, tomatoes in aspic, little Vienna sausages in aspic - are you sensing a theme, dear reader? I would sit at our table and flip through these magazines over breakfast, or sometimes in the afternoon on chilly winter weekends, imagining making the elaborate meals for fanciful parties, wearing frosted peach lipstick and wearing heels in the kitchen. This enjoyment for paging through magazines only increased when annual Christmas catalogues would arrive, touting the wares of department stores, with sections dedicated to children, women, home, and a handful of pages for men - in that order. Evidently, the folks in charge of the catalogues knew who was really doing the shopping! But whether it was an autumn issue of Women’s Weekly or a hefty Christmas catalogue, I think of both with nostalgic fondness. They were like a window into another world - a world that no longer exists, but whose echoes can be found in unexpected places.

Obviously, I am now spending much of my time reading texts that are noticeably devoid of images, which, for an art historian, can be tricky sometimes, but there is something very pleasing and soothing about returning to the thin, glossy pages of a magazine - whether I’m reading it for work, or to while away an hour with a cup of tea.

Jennifer