LESBIAN PORTRAITS (14) Joan Werner Laurie and Nancy Spain - SHE Magazine

Nancy Spain

In 1955, a quiet revolution occured in the hitherto cosy world of women's magazines:  SHE was launched onto an unsuspecting world - in more senses than one.  The magazine's editor was Joan Werner Laurie and its main contributor was Britain's best-known female...
media personality, Nancy Spain.  What most SHE reades were unaware of was that Joan and Nancy had been a couple since 1950 and were raising two sons in what was, for the time, a remarkably publicly avowed ''pretend family''.
Nancy's flamboyant, show-off articles, coupled with Joan's steady, astute editing, made SHE the women's magazine that broke the mould and paved the way for the likes of Cosmopolitan and Marie Claire.  By a strange quirk of fate, Nancy and Joan died together in a plane crash in 1964.
From the book LESBIAN PORTRAITS
By Rose Collis
M.Q. Publishers, 1997