“Very Female, with the Allure of a Foreign Aura”: Vocality, Gender, and European Exoticism in the US Careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente

Abstract“How can America import ‘American’ jazz?,” asked the music editor of Good Housekeeping, George Marek, in 1956. Marek answered, “Singers, particularly if they are very female, give the home-grown music the allure of a foreign aura.” Taking these statements as a starting point, this article gives an account of the US careers of Alice Babs and Caterina Valente. Gender, class, and ethnicity were key elements in the US construction of Babs's and Valente's musical personae, which was especially heard in their vocality, with an emphasis on high-pitched vocal stylings, melismas, and “white” timbres to signify gender and European exoticism. The US careers of Babs and Valente show us that musical Americanness or Europeanness are not created separately on either side of the Atlantic. Their European identities were not created in Europe and then imported to the United States but were created in the process of transmission into the United States. Importantly, the article argues that race and ethnicity were used by musicians, critics, and listeners to position Babs and Valente as Europeans. Their whiteness was transposed in a US context and their stories tell us as much about US ideologies of whiteness as it does about European ethnicities.

Fate of recycled tyre granulate used on artificial turf

The production of granulates as infill for artificial turf is able to process 21% of the end-of-life tyres in Europe, approximately 600 million kg per year. In doing so it avoids an annual CO2 emission comparable with the amount that could be absorbed by around 30 km2 of forest. However, dispersal of rubber infill to the environment is perceived as a problem. An amount of 3000–5000 kg granulate per field per year is currently used as underpinning for a European proposal to ban rubber infill as part of the intended restriction on intentionally added microplastics in 2021. By reviewing grey research reports, we found out that the dispersal rates are based on the false assumption that the annual granulate demand for refilling is necessary because of granulate losses to the environment. However, it has been ignored that part of the refill is needed because the infill layer settles and becomes more dense (compaction) and that part of the lost infill is collected and reused on the fields. In combination with unawareness and improper piling of snow in the past, these are the causes of the high estimates of infill dispersal per year. This paper shows the current state-of-knowledge about ELT granulate dispersal and shows that approximately 600–1200 kg refill is required annually to compensate for compaction and for some infill waste on pavements and in drainage sinks. Recommended mitigation measures are containment through optimized field and drainage construction, suitable maintenance equipment and practices and good-housekeeping rules for players and groundkeepers and handling end-of-life pitches. If these recommendations are implemented, the emission of ELT granulates to the environment can be reduced to virtually zero.

‘Continental Connotations’: European Wine Consumption in 1970s Britain

This article considers the significant increase in wine consumption in Britain in the period 1965–85. It explores the social and cultural meanings attached to wine through a case study analysis of Good Housekeeping, a women's magazine aimed at a mainly middle-class readership. The vast majority of wine consumed in Britain at this time was European, the appeal of which was, for many, rooted in an idealised evocation of continental sophistication. In illuminating the development of new socio-cultural habits, this article reveals the influence of continental tourism is bolstering enthusiasm for wine, as well as the impact of greater availability and affordability in popularising consumption.

Virginia Woolf and Aldous Huxley in Good Housekeeping Magazine

In 1931, Virginia Woolf was commissioned to write a series of six articles for Good Housekeeping, a middlebrow women’s magazine, which have typically been read by critics as five essays and a short story. Woolf’s series takes her readers on a tour of the sites of commerce and power in London, from the Thames docks and shops of Oxford Street, to ‘Great Men’s Houses,’ abbeys, cathedrals, and the House of Commons, ending with a ‘Portrait’ of a fictitious Londoner. This chapter has three aims. First, it suggests that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping publications can be read not simply as five essays and a short story, but, considering Woolf’s ethics of the short story, as a series of short stories or, as the magazine editors introduced them, word pictures and scenes. Secondly, this chapter argues that Woolf’s Good Housekeeping series responds to, and resists the Stalinist politics of, Aldous Huxley’s series of four highbrow essays on England, published in Nash’s Pall Mall Magazine. Finally, this chapter analyses a critically neglected short story by Ambrose O’Neill, ‘The Astounding History of Albert Orange’ (February 1932), published in Good Housekeeping, which features both Woolf and Huxley as characters, and which critiques, satirises, and destabilises the boundaries of highbrow literary culture. Thus, the focus turns from highbrow writers’ short stories to a story about highbrow writing, all published in the supposedly middlebrow Good Housekeeping, demonstrating the rich complexity of the magazine, its varied politics, and its generically hybrid publications.

Lower-middle-class Domestic Leisure in Woman’s Weekly, 1930

Eleanor Reed explores the status of domestic leisure in issues of Woman’s Weekly during 1930 when many middle-class housewives looked to labour-saving technologies to produce status-defining domestic leisure. Woman’s Weekly initiates and reflects the aspirations and anxieties of a readership eager to cement its position in an expanding, diversifying and competitive middle class. The magazine’s lower-middle-class distinctiveness emerges through comparison to Good Housekeeping, a glossy domestic monthly targeting middle-class housewives with larger budgets. Rather than following Pierre Bourdieu and others in portraying lower-middle-class culture as an inauthentic copy of leisure-class culture, this essay argues that Woman’s Weekly contributes to the production of an ideologically distinctive lower-middle-class domestic culture in which its readers can take pride. This culture is problematized however by its suspected source in the magazine’s unknown producers, some of whom were men; a circumstance alluded to in Stevie Smith’s 1936 Novel on Yellow Paper.