British Girls’ and Women’s Magazines at the University ofWaterloo

Abstract

I am a European historian, specializing in British girls’ magazines, but I do my research in Canada. How can this be? Like many, my path in academia has not been a straight one. I completed the bulk of my BA with one daughter; my second daughter was born the summer before I began my fourth year. It was around the same time that I decided to change my original plan of becoming a high school social studies teacher, opting instead for graduate school. Entering my MA with two children – one six, the other one – I had to carefully balance studying, researching, working as a TA, and family. I was grateful to stumble upon a microfilm collection of the first two years of The Girls’ Best Friend, a British girls’ publication, at the University of BC, facilitating my first foray into girls’ magazines and permitting me to more easily balance the various parts of my life. Entering the PhD program at Simon Fraser University, however, I thought that I would need to travel to England to continue my work on girls’ magazines. I was concerned: how would I fund this travel? How would I secure sufficient time to do my research? What about my family? For personal reasons, packing everyone up and relocating to England to allow sufficient time to go through my sources was simply not possible; going alone would mean frequent, short trips to minimize the impact of my time away. Each of these options, though, resulted in a significant amount of stress.