‘Surprised and delighted at “getting into print”’: The Lady of the House 1890–1923 and its Historical Readers

This essay works to establish contributor demographics for Lady of the House, Ireland's foremost mass-market women's magazine at the turn of the twentieth century. To do so, it focuses on contributions to its ‘Women's Parliament’ section, which solicited short reader responses to a wide range of questions primarily dealing with women's place in society. Because the ‘Women's Parliament’ feature ran every month from 1894 until 1924, it presents a rare and valuable opportunity to map the magazine's demographics (including age, address, religion, and number of servants) based on its actual contributors. A fuller understanding of the magazine's readership will in turn shed light on its unique commercial model: established on behalf of prominent Dublin grocer Findlater and Company, the Lady of the House was free to the store's clients, but its longevity suggests that it quickly found popularity well beyond the grocer's clientele. Working from its own quantitative findings, this essay also explores how the Lady of the House's ‘implied reader’ – the one inferred on the basis of material within the magazine – compares to its ‘actual readership’ as represented by the quantitative data amassed in the first part of the essay. By tracing the divergences between these readerships, the essay offers insights into the reading habits of early twentieth-century Irish women and into the Lady of the House's aspirational readership.