Mary Grieve: Lessons from a Crisis

This paper charts the life and career of Britain’s most successful—and currently undeservedly obscure—women’s magazine editor, Mary Grieve, and looks at what lessons her success as an editor has for today’s women’s magazine editors. Grieve successfully piloted Woman magazine through the crisis of World War Two, rationing (which did not end until 1954 nearly ten years after the war had ended) and the changing attitudes of the nineteen fifties and early sixties, so her success may give pointers as to how editors might respond to the current unprecedented circumstances caused by the global pandemic and the change in social attitudes and economic circumstances it is likely to engender.