Shakespeare's ‘Lady Editors'

The basic history of the Shakespearean editorial tradition is familiar and well-established. For nearly three centuries, men – most of them white and financially privileged – ensconced themselves in private and hard-to-access libraries, hammering out 'their' versions of Shakespeare's text. They produced enormous, learnèd tomes: monuments to their author's greatness and their own reputations. What if this is not the whole story? A bold, revisionist and alternative version of Shakespearean editorial history, this book recovers the lives and labours of almost seventy women editors. It challenges the received wisdom that, when it came to Shakespeare, the editorial profession was entirely male-dominated until the late twentieth century. In doing so, it demonstrates that taking these women's work seriously can transform our understanding of the history of editing, of the nature of editing as an enterprise, and of how we read Shakespeare in history.

Gender Imbalance in the Editorial Activities of a Researcher-led Journal

Editorial decision-making is a fundamental element of the scientific enterprise. We examined whether contributions to editorial decisions at various stages of the publication process is subject to gender disparity, based on analytics collected by the biomedical researcher-led journal eLife. Despite efforts to increase women representation, the board of reviewing editors (BRE) was men-dominant (69%). Moreover, authors suggested more men from the BRE pool, even after correcting for men's numerical over-representation. Although women editors were proportionally involved in the initial editorial process, they were under-engaged in editorial activities involving reviewers and authors. Additionally, converging evidence showed gender homophily in manuscripts assignment, such that men Senior Editors over-engaged men Reviewing Editors. This tendency was stronger in more gender-balanced scientific disciplines. Together, our findings confirm that gender disparities exist along the editorial process and suggest that merely increasing the proportion of women might not be sufficient to eliminate this bias.

The gender gap on the Spanish Wikipedia: Listening to the voices of women editors

Wikipedia is one of the most widely used information sources in the world. Although one of the guiding pillars of this digital platform is ensuring access to the diversity of human knowledge from a neutral point of view, there is a clear and persistent gender bias in terms of content about or written by women. Through semi-structured interviews with current and former women editors, our research offers a closer look at the different factors that influence editing practices on the Spanish Wikipedia: the educational and social contexts that prompt women to start or stop editing; their perceptions of the treatment of gender equality in the encyclopedia; and their feelings about taking part in the creation of content in an environment where they find themselves in a minority. Self-organized events known as edit-a-thons (in Spanish, Wikiquedadas), where women meet to discuss and share editing practices, have emerged as self-inclusion strategies to enable more women to enter, remain, and be recognized in this male-dominated editing environment. Smaller Wikipedia communities are also perceived as more inclusive environments. Lack of digital competences or difficulty using the platform do not appear to be aspects that negatively influence the participation of women in the editing process, though time spent on unpaid care work does seem to be a critical factor.

Editorial Identities, Business Models, and Social Strategies: Spanish Women Editors in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This article examines women’s periodical editorship in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Spain. Drawing on library collections and digital periodical databases, it revisits the pioneering research on a small number of major figures undertaken since the 1990s and tests it on a much larger scale. Was female editorship a negligible phenomenon in the history of the Spanish press, or are we only beginning to discover its scope? And if more women editors are identified, to what extent can we extrapolate insights into the profiles, networks, and strategies of a few grandes dames to larger numbers? Our approach not only enables us to answer these questions on a quantitative level, it also opens up a large corpus of periodicals for more in-depth qualitative research. Specifically, after presenting some quantitative findings and general observations, we examine three factors that played a role in the success and failure of Spanish women’s periodical editorship: editorial identities, business models, and social strategies.

Women Editors in Europe

This special issue of the Journal of European Periodical Studies contains a selection of eleven papers presented at the 2019 Women Editors in Europe conference at Ghent University. It explores women’s editorship in a wide range of national and transnational contexts in five full-length articles by Judit Acsády, Lola Alvarez-Morales and Amelia Sanz-Cabrerizo, Aisha Bazlamit, Andrea Penso, and Joanne Shattock, and five shorter pieces by Petra Bozsoki, Zsolt Mészáros, Marie Nedregotten Sørbø, Zsuzsa Török, and Alicja Walczyna, headed by a provocative essay by the conference keynote speaker, Fionnuala Dillane. Spanning three centuries and seven European languages, the special issue not only offers insight into the breadth and diversity of women’s editorial work for the press; it also draws together different national and language traditions in periodical scholarship and makes them accessible to an international audience.

Editorial Strategies of Hungarian Women Editors in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century

While significant research has been done on periodicals for women readers published in Hungary in the second half of the nineteenth century, little is known about the editors of these periodicals. This article offers a brief discussion of how Hungarian women’s editorial strategies differed from those adopted by their male colleagues. It argues that although periodicals edited by women tended to feature more female literary authors than those edited by men, they generally had no aim of creating a female group consciousness. The essay then goes on to focus on one significant exception, the first periodical edited by a woman in the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Emília Kánya's (1828–1905) Családi Kör [Family Circle] (1860–80), which, on the contrary, connected its marketing strategy with female community building. The analysis draws on insights from the fields of women’s studies, history of literature, and history of journalism.

Mary Howitt and Howitt's Journal (1847–48)

This article examines a rare phenomenon in nineteenth-century British print culture, a periodical jointly edited by a husband and wife team. Howitt’s Journal, a weekly miscellany with a progressive political agenda, ran for only eighteen months from January 1847 to June 1848, edited by William and Mary Howitt. The history of Howitt’s Journal is particularly relevant to the question of women’s agency in the world of periodicals, the ways in which women editors could have a public voice and engage in debate on political and social issues. One methodological issue the article raises is how we assess an editor’s contribution to any publication, the nature of their input, and the extent to which they drive the agenda. In the case of a joint editorship, how do we identify the contributions and responsibilities of each editor? The paper is based on an examination of Mary Howitt’s unpublished letters in the Houghton Library, Harvard, which provide new evidence of the extent of her involvement in the Journal. It tests the Howitts’ editorial style, and Mary’s in particular, against theories of editorship put forward by Patten and Finkelstein (2006) and Matthew Philpotts (2012) and suggests that these models of editorship are essentially masculine.

Editors and Afterlives

This chapter reveals the complex afterlives of Peninsular War memoirs, many of which outlived their authors and continued to be published and re-published in different formats over the long nineteenth century. It considers the many different groups of people involved behind the scenes in the production of a Napoleonic military memoir: family members, especially women; editors; publishers; indexers; printers; illustrators; archivists; lawyers; even luxury booksellers. It shows in detail the alterations that were made to veterans’ autobiographies over time, from omitting or adding sections of text to changing the title, inserting portraits of the author, or commissioning artist’s impressions of his battles. Along the way, some war memoirs underwent an almost total transformation, becoming dry family biographies, ‘boy’s own’ adventure stories, regimental histories, consumer objects, or, in the decades before the First World War in Britain and France, tools for national military education, targeted to children.