Alexis Easley, Clare Hill, and Beth Rogers (eds), Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in the Victorian Period,
Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in the Victorian Period, eds Alexis Easley, Clare Hill, and Beth Rogers, Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 2019. ISBN-13: 9781474433907. Published to Edinburgh Scholarship Online: January 2020 DOI:10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.001.0001
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1One growing area of research for Victorianists is arguably that of periodicals studies and the chapters constituting this comprehensive collection should be of interest to anyone specialising in Victorian print culture and Victorian periodicals, two domains that also imply gender issues. Discussing Victorian periodicals without taking gender into account misses the point, not only because of the separate spheres ideology prevalent in the Victorian times but also because women journalists (including proofreaders, sub editors, etc.) constituted a substantial part of the sector, along with the substantial segment of women readers. The three editors have therefore engaged in a comprehensive overview of a vast area of studies and the result materializes in no less than 35 chapters.
2Acknowledging the impact of new printing technologies and the abolition of taxes, the collection notes the increased opportunities for women to enter the profession and contribute to political debates. It does not focus on women journalists but broadens horizons to include women as subjects, readers and objects of discussion: ‘newspapers and periodicals directed at female readerships, as well as those aspects of the “general” press that were produced by and/or women … print media that was not marketed at women exclusively’ (4). Divided into 6 parts, it explores the construction of gender identities, the visual representation of women, their material presence in periodicals and their political input by relying on theoretical approaches and methodologies by scholars from a range of disciplines: English studies, media studies, cultural history, the digital humanities, art history, and book history. Addressing both content and formats, sometimes questioning the interrelation between periodicals and other genres such as travel narratives and scrapbooks, and noting the exceptional status of some women journalists without neglecting those that were or have become invisible, it envisages periodicals under a gender lens to underline how complex women’s engagement with both the press and magazines was. Firstly because of the heterogeneity of the market, secondly because of the ambiguity of the very idea of women in the press that includes not only women as they appeared (or did not) as women journalists in a time characterized by the rise of the woman journalist, but also as readers and consumers of the press in general, and finally because discussions on ‘the Woman’s question’ were prevalent in all periodicals. Another attractive element of the collection is that it engages in empirical research on a selected number of periodicals, while pointing out at other titles and journalists that deserve further investigation. Some essays focus on well-known women journalists, other essays explore the various representations of women and gender identities in the material spaces of the press including advertisement, a section with more subversive possibilities than meets the eye. Other contributions point out to the powerful role that discussions about the ‘Woman’s Question’ played in disseminating knowledge and forming attitudes that were instrumental in the development of women as professionals. Victorian periodicals stand at the intersection of different debates and contributed to shaping them, amplifying some and silencing others. Visual representations of women in periodicals are ambiguous, sometimes suggesting a radical potential for advocating the expansion of women’s roles, sometimes fetishizing the female body for the pleasure of the male viewers in fin de siècle magazines, sometimes reproducing hegemonic forms of femininity as was the case with photographs of women in fashion and society magazines. Still, contributors insist that those representations can also be read as adroit means to destabilize prevailing gender norms. Likewise, the spatial positioning of heterodox content can balance heterogeneous demands from diverse audiences, and subversive possibilities of specific spaces for women’s voices can be found within general-audience print media in a way women-only magazines could not achieve. The press was instrumental in constructing the performance of gender while anonymity or pseudonymity enabled fruitful identity cross-dressing with a radical function in terms of gender politics.
3Envisaging the relationships between class, gender, and work, Part I highlights the place of women as verbal subjects, as producers and readers within the broader network of the British press, and transnational networks of exchange to demonstrate the instability of the category of the domestic magazines. Part two explores the construction of the new gender identity of modern girls and young women from the 1860s, arguably a promising field of study, with contributions on Beeton’s Young Englishwoman, the English Woman’s Journal, on Ellen Johnston’s ‘conversations in verse’ with her working-class correspondents in the letters of a Glasgow newspaper, the Penny Post, on Alice Corkran, editor of the Girl’s Realm through her ‘Chat with the Girl of the Period’ column, and a discussion of the ambiguous ‘American Girl’ functioning as a form of contested femininity in Britain but also as a growing fetishization of America in British print culture. Part III focuses on the visual representation of women in the proliferation of illustrated content in a variety of forms. From the advertising of cosmetics in the Queen and Woman, to newspapers produced by the Ingram Brothers in the 1880s and 1890s (Illustrated London News, Sketch, Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News) with their ubiquitous images of women coexisting with women’s feminist politics discussed in the women’s columns, this part also includes an article on Clemence Housman as a woman wood engraver for the Graphic before she transitioned to fine-art wood engraving in the book trade in the 1890s. As new technologies affected women’s work in the periodical press, they also were engaged in the production of those proliferating images. The stereoscope, that typical Victorian invention officially introduced at the Great Exhibition, is also discussed along with photography, both being topics of discussion in the mid-Victorian periodical press such as Leisure Hour and All the Year Round.
4Part IV discusses the politics of gendered space in Victorian periodicals, which proved ambiguous in terms of possibilities for women. Unsurprisingly, women journalists found it hard to negotiate a space in the masculine sphere of journalism and never had the same access to the press as men: chapters precisely investigate that access and the space reserved for those newcomers. Margaret Oliphant’s mid-century work at Blackwood’s (without a formal contract!) is discussed along with the work of lesser-known journalists: editor Mary Howitt and investigative journalist Eliza Meteyard. Another contribution demonstrates the emancipatory function of Oliphant’s late journalism in the Saint James’s Gazette and The Spectator. The place of women in Leisure Hour is discussed, and letters pages (admittedly ‘amongst the most fictive, manipulative spaces of the press, playing regularly on the feeling reader’, 347) of the Pall Mall Gazette are examined to highlight men’s attempt to regulate women’s press contributions as a public space, as are the gendered implications of women writing anonymously in the predominantly male space which demonstrate the transgressive possibilities that the obfuscation of identity created for female humourists. Women contributors utilized anonymity in order to sidestep the gendered dictates of comic journalism in the arch conservative Punch but anonymity proved ineffective to combat societal prejudice against female-authored comedy. The discussion of women’s columns in The Clarion and the Labour Leader (Socialist periodicals of the 1890s) highlights that politically progressive as they were, those periodicals let broader anxieties about the place of women within the socialist movement percolate spatially and reserved a tiny place for women.
5Part V addresses the construction of women readers and writers with contributions on the digitized bibliographic resources and databases including the Periodical Poetry Index which proves a corrective to the opinion that, for instance, women poets rarely appeared in the homosocial space of Blackwood’s while cheap magazines of the 1830s are shown to have provided women with new publishing venues. Gaskell’s publication of North and South and Wives and Daughters is explored both as serials and books to demonstrate how both novels were formed in response to the periodical context of publication which Gaskell confronted as she challenged the interventions of male editors. The press reception of novels by Mrs Humphry Ward investigates the possibilities of women to contribute to theology and examine theological issues in fiction, with Ward being almost an exception for obtaining both respect and sales, the former being fuelled by influential reviews from male contributors. Fin de siècle poetess Amy Levy engaged in a dexterous placement of her poetry in popular periodicals to become the ‘strategic newspaper poet’ (397), while journalist L. T. Meade first edited the girls’ magazine Atalanta (1887–98), wrote novels for girls before contributing to The Strand with detective fiction. Such radical departure from her literary focus on girl’s print culture shows the Irishwoman as a clever journalist securing her position as a Strand regular contributor. Part VI discusses women’s interventions in political debates and their political identity which depended as much on the characteristics of available periodical formats as on the identity politics of those located inside or outside the readerly communities they imagined and constructed. Chapters discuss Mary Smith’s contributions under different avatars in the Carlisle Journal which furthered her causes as a lower-middle-class woman, Violet Fane’s poems in the Lady’s Realm, the aestheticizing images of violence of which obscured her political aim of criticizing the Hamidian Massacres (1894–96). Fin de siècle heterosexism in the feminist Women’s Penny Paper and the Woman’s Signal is explored through three journalistic controversies: Oscar Wilde’s trials, the death of Amy Levy, and the emergence of Sappho as a model of lesbian new womanhood. Women’s temperance periodicals (Wings, The Woman’s Signal) are discussed to show how women were shaped both as reforming creatures and gendered domestic beings while the publicization of private issues proved a valuable tool to engage in transgressive forms of political activism. A chapter on African-American women explores the history and presence of black women’s journalism, highlighting the near complete lack of history on the topic and the need for comparative studies.
6Those jargon-free and well-documented chapters should provide beginners with an extensive introduction to women and periodicals, fuel further research in some neglected sectors such as Black women journalists and publications, while constituting an excellent collection of research on Victorian women in journalism as it stands in the 2020s. To be used without reservations.
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Bénédicte Coste, « Alexis Easley, Clare Hill, and Beth Rogers (eds), Women, Periodicals, and Print Culture in the Victorian Period, », Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens [En ligne], 94 Automne | 2021, mis en ligne le 01 novembre 2021, consulté le 16 mars 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/cve/10040 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.10040
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