NEW CONSUMER MAGAZINES

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29061, 25 November 1959, Page 2

NEW CONSUMER MAGAZINES

Influence On British Manufacturers

Two new consumer magazines in England were having such an influence on the buying public that one manufacturer had altered the design of an electric kettle in order to conform with the publicised safety requirements, said % Women’s organisations could be very powerful in influencing manufacturers,, said Lady MacDougall. The British National Council of Women had been partially responsible for the emergence of these consumer magazines, as it had created a public demand for unbiased information on a wide variety of products.

Lady MacDougall is the president of the National Council of Women in Oxford, where her husband ,is a lecturer in economics' at Nuffield College. The Oxford Council had been very active recently in working for World Refugee Year, she said, besides striving for reformed legislation on abortion. For the last three months Lady MacDougall has been with her husband in Canberra, where he is a visiting professor of economics at the National University of Australia. Lady MacDougall often accompanies «her husband on trips. When he was working with O.E.E.C. (Organisation for European Economic Co-operation) she spent a year with him in Paris and she accompanied him to Venezuela for three months.

Caracas, the capital, was a city where the incredibly rich rubbed shoulders with the incredibly poor, said Lady MacDougall. It was not a place where a freedomloving person would be content While they were in South America she and her husband spent some time in the Andes. They are both keen on mountaineering but Lady MacDougall said that their interest now takes the milder form of hill climbing. Lady MacDougall, who describes herself as an “ordinary housewife," has a 19-year-old son who is studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford, and a daughter of 15 who is still at school. She likes "messing about in boats,” gardening and sewing. Before she married, she worked in a court dressmakers in London and has continued to sew for her family since her marriage. After they have quickly toured the South Island, Lady MacDougall and. her husband will go to Wellington, where Sir Donald MacDougall is addressing a meeting. Lady MacDougall will fly back to England early in December, stopping at Boston on the way home to buy her Christmas presents.