‘Girl of the Month’: The politics of beauty, gender and citizenship in the postwar Black British press, 1948-1965

Building on a literature that has established the history of beauty and Black women’s bodies in the long twentieth century as a contested and political terrain interwoven in global Black liberation movements (Craig, 2002; Haiderali 2005, Rowe, 2009, 2013; Ford 2015; Hussain, 2023) this chapter takes up the case of the commercial Black press in Britain that grew with the expansion of the Black populace in Britain following the Second World War. Whilst it is clear that the West Indian Gazette, edited by exiled intellectual and activist Claudia Jones, fostered an internationalist and Black feminist project within its pages (Boyce, 2008; 2011) a project that extended to a utilisation of Black beauty culture (Rowe, 2013, Hussain, 2023), there is still much scope to explore historical representations of beauty, blackness and gender Britain as new research (Rowe, 2025; Wyatt, 2025; Parkes, 2025) attests. This chapter answers the call for more attention to the Black popular press in Britain as a source for Black diasporic history (Oppenheim, 2019), to consider the politics of gender, beauty and citizenship at work in the development of Black diasporic identities in Britain, exploring representations of women and men in sometimes fractious ‘Black beauty discourse’ (Hussain, 2023: 208). Looking beyond the West Indian Gazette, where most scholarship to date has been focused, it attends to glossy commercial publications of the postwar period, Checkers, Bronze, Tropic and Flamingo and JOFFA.