History that puts woman in her place

 

Mary Stott, journalist and editor of The Guardian’s women’s page 1957-71

By Michael Herbert

Mary Stott was a journalist for a number of Manchester newspapers before becoming editor of The Guardian’s women’s page from 1957-1971. After retiring she was active in an organisation called Women and the Media and wrote 2 volumes of autobiography as well as editing an anthology of writings from The Guardian women’s page.

Early life

Mary was born in Leicestershire in 1907. The smell of newsprint was in her nostrils from birth as both her parents and her uncle were journalists. She later recalled in her autobiography, Forgetting’s No Excuse:

When as small child I told my dolls “I have some copy to write now”, I was only imitating my journalist parents, not indicating my destined future. That future was to be working in newspaper uninterruptedly for almost half a century, but it was also to be a human being with affections, passions and pursuits, and a child of my times. The strands of my life cannot be separated out; it is their interlocking, heredity and environment, work and home, that makes a pattern. Being a journalists’ child made me a journalist; having a working mother made me expect to go on working myself; being born female hindered me from becoming a the kind of newspaper journalist I would have liked to be; being a wife and mother probably made me a more effective women’s page editor.

Mary’s parents were active Liberals and one of her earliest memories was of riding around in a car wearing a green ribbon during the 1911 general election.

The beginnings of a career in newspapers

Aged just 17, Mary started work on the Leicester Mail as a temporary copyholder in April 1925, though the union would not let her join because she was a woman. She progressed to the reporters room and was then, at the tender of 19, given the women’s page. She also learned the craft of sub-editing and layout.

In 1931 Mary was sacked from the paper as the slump deepened but got a new job just a few weeks later at the Bolton Evening News, reporting on meetings and writing a weekly “women’s diary”. After 2 years she moved to the Co-operative News in Manchester where she edited the Women’s Co-operative Guild pages as well as Women’s Outlook, the monthly children’s magazine Our Circle, the monthly Co-operative Youth and, finally, Sunshine Stories for very small children.

…I loved and venerated the women of the co-operative movement, whose courage, persistence and loyalty seemed to me often heroic, for though most of them were under-educated and many were scarcely above the poverty line, they learned to speak in public, go on deputations, organise and preside at great conferences. To me the most remarkable thing about the Women’s Co-operative Guild was the training it gave in the art of government, its completely democratic structure.

There was no money for publication so Mary and her colleague Nora Crossley wrote practically everything themselves, including some of the fiction. They copied recipes from cook books and borrowed illustrations from other magazines. They also made-up the pages themselves, becoming experts in fitting in text and pictures. Mary was the obvious candidate to get the editor’s job when it became vacant, but her gender counted against her even in the progressive Co-operative movement.

In 1945 Mary went to work for the Manchester Evening News as a news sub-editor, She loved the job, ”I got to rather good at this swift cutting and piecing, this remorseless battle with the clock” but was sacked in 1950 to allow a man to take the job. She devoted herself to looking after her daughter Catherine before going back to work for the Co-operative Press again as editor of Woman’s Outlook. In 1957 the new editor of the Manchester Guardian, Alastair Hetherington, asked her to edit the women’s page which was called ‘Mainly for Women’.

The Manchester Guardian

The‘Mainly for Women’ page had started in 1922 when it was edited by Madeline Linford. As she later recalled in a piece written for Mary in 1963, she had been the only the woman on the staff of the newspaper and had been instructed by the editor, C P Scott, to start a women’s feature on 6 days a week. “…my briefing was lucid and firm. The page must be readable, varied and aimed always at the intelligent woman…I saw her as an aloof, rigid and highly critical figure, a kind of Big Sister, vigilant for lapses of taste, dignity and literary English.” Madeline recruited a talented set of contributors which included Vera Brittain, Leonora Eyles, Winifred Holtby and Evelyn Sharp.

During her stewardship of the page, Mary also relied on contributions from readers, receiving upwards of 50 unsolicited manuscripts each week. “I reckoned myself a Guardian woman through and through so that my range of interests was likely to be shared by a fair proportion of women readers.”

The page led directly to the creation of women’s organisations. In February 1960, for instance, Mary published a letter from Maureen Nicol living in Eastham, Cheshire, who wrote that “perhaps housebound housewives with liberal interests and desire to remain individuals could form a national register, so that whenever one moves one can contact like-minded friends.” She received 400 letters in response in one week which led her to set up the National Housewives Register. Other organisations that the page acted as midwife to included the Pre-school Playgroups Association, Invalids at Home and the National Council for the Single Woman and her dependants.

In the late 60s and early 70s, the women’s page reflected the emerging women’s movement. Jill Tweedie, who started working for the paper in 1969, wrote later that to be “young, female and a hackette when the Women’s Movement was getting into high gear was very heaven, the icing on the Sixties cake, which for all its excitements, hadn’t done much more for women than shove us into bed with a lot of stoned hippies playing rotten guitar.”

Mary retired in 1971 and was given an honorary fellowship by Manchester Polytechnic. She remained active after retirement, helping to found Women in the Media, for instance. In February 1973 Mary led a march by the organisation to 10 Downing Street. They were not received but the duty policeman, Sergeant Garnham of Cannon Row, said that 2 of them could deliver a written message. The women had pens but not a sheet of paper between them. The sergeant kindly tore a page from his notebook and they left a note for Ted Heath. Mary also wrote 2 volumes of autobiography, Forgetting’s No Excuse (1973) and Before I Go (1985), and edited Women Talking, an anthology from the women’s page covering 1922-35 and 1957-71 which was published in 1987.

Conclusion

Mary died in 2002, aged 95. Lena Jager in her obituary of Mary in The Guardian wrote

Part of her strength - and perhaps why so many men read her page - was her belief that discrimination, in any form, was a total sin. She cared about poverty, unemployment and disability, wherever lives were diminished. She tried hard to win equality for women, but not as an isolated problem. She could be combative in all her campaigns, but never a bigot.

In July 2007 the Guardian introduced the ‘Mary Stott Prize’ to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the women's pages and the centenary of Mary Stott's birth. Anyone aged 18 or above can enter and the prize is a week spent editing the women's pages in the Guardian's London office.

Mary Stott is commemorated in a group portrait at the National Portrait Gallery, pictured with fellow Guardian Women's Page contributors Jill Tweedie (who worked for the Guardian until 1988, 5 years before her untimely death from motor neurone disease), Polly Toynbee, Posy Simmonds and Liz Forgan.

Michael Herbert has been researching and writing about Manchester’s radical working class history for many years. He is a Trustee of the Working Class Movement Library and has edited the North West Labour History Journal. From time to time he leads radical history walks. His published work includes Never Counted Out! The Story of Len Johnson, Manchester’s Black Boxing Hero and Communist (1992) and The Wearing of the Green: A Political History of the Irish in Manchester (2000).

 

This article was priginally published on the Radical Manchester blog in April 2010.