Mail and females

In the classic humorous recitation of one-line descriptions of national newspapers, the Daily Mail is listed as "read by the wives of the people who run the country".

That identity as a women's paper emerged soon after the paper's foundation by Lord Northcliffe in 1896, said Deborah Ryan, research fellow at Royal Holloway and Bedford New College, whose doctoral thesis was on the Mail.

"His emphasis on winning female readers is apparent in the correspondence between Lord Northcliffe and the editor of the Mail," she says.

Lord Northcliffe also employed Louise Owen, his secretary from 1902 to 1922, as "a sort of Everywoman - ringing her early every morning and asking for her critique of his papers".

Lord Northcliffe, she said, wavered between dedicated women's coverage and an overall "feminisation" of the paper with a greater emphasis on human interest stories and story treatment believed likely to appeal to women. One consequence of this was the frequent use of "housekeeping" as a metaphor in stories about the national economy.

The Mail expressed a "conservative feminism" - mindful of the opening of professions to women and of suffragism, but centred on the home.

This was particularly reflected from 1908 in the paper's Ideal Home Exhibition - in Dr Ryan's words: "A three-dimensional realisation of the two-dimensional world of the paper. It was a fantasy of the world into which they could project themselves with the atmosphere of free-floating consumerism frequently evoked by the Daily Mail, pandering both to traditional needs and consumer fantasy."