Wings and the Woman’s Signal: Reputation and Respectability in Women’s Temperance Periodicals, 1892–1899

Gemma Outen’s essay revisits a familiar genre of pressure-group periodical, the women’s temperance magazine, in order to complicate what we think we know about its political aims and effects. As Annemarie McAllister has pointed out, temperance periodicals were not just one-dimensional pressure-group publications run by ‘pious, life-denying hypocrites’ who aimed to ‘control a passive working class.’ Outen builds upon this idea by exploring how temperance periodicals reveal the ‘complexities within women’s temperance work and its relation to prevailing gender ideologies’ (p. 557). Taking Wings (1892–1925) and the Woman’s Signal (1894–9) as her case studies, she argues that women’s temperance periodicals functioned as ‘spaces in which debates about the private and public collided, where women were shaped both as reforming creatures, of both political and moral means, but also as gendered domestic beings, wives, and mothers’ (p. 566). While the Woman’s Signal was more overtly political, Wings ‘[equipped] its women readers with the tools to engage subtly in less transgressive forms of political activism’ (p. 566). Both periodicals included political columns but also implicitly addressed women’s issues in more surprising locations, such as advertising pages.

The Response of the Late Victorian Feminist Press to Same-Sex Desire Controversies

Molly Youngkin’s essay investigates the heterosexism of a fin de siècle feminist newspaper, the Women’s Penny Paper (1894–99, later retitled the Women’s Herald and the Woman’s Signal), highlighting its treatment of three controversies: the Oscar Wilde trials, the death of poet Amy Levy, and the emergence of Sappho as a model of lesbian new womanhood. When the paper did address these controversies it ‘reshaped narratives about this [same-sex] desire to fit its own heterosexist agenda,’ responded in a disapproving way, or avoided a discussion of sexuality entirely (p. 543). The overall effect of this editorial bias was to pursue an ‘overarching agenda of advocating for heterosexual women’ and to reinforce social purity debates about ‘the effects of men’s sexual practices on heterosexual women and their families’ (p. 544). These feminist papers thus constructed the ‘other’ in ways that upheld restrictive conventions of race and sexuality while claiming to be vehicles of progressive thought.

‘Afford[ing] me a Place’: Recovering Women Poets in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1827–1835

Drawing upon digital bibliographic resources and databases including The Periodical Poetry Index, Lindsy Lawrence presents a compelling corrective to the received opinion that women poets rarely featured in the homosocial space of Blackwood’s during the ‘Romantic Victorian’ period. In addition to demonstrating that multiple women poets contributed a considerable volume of verse to Blackwood’s, many of which were signed, Lawrence also shows that these contributors were canny professionals. Analysis of the correspondence between the poets and their editor, William Blackwood, sheds light on their business acumen, as well as their sharp understanding of the machinations of the literary marketplace. As Lawrence explains, for these poets, negotiating ‘a space within the pages of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine granted them the kind of cultural access important to the furthering of their work and careers’ (p.400).

Making Space for Women: The Labour Leader, the Clarion, and the Women’s Column

In this essay, Deborah Mutch considers the women’s columns of two socialist periodicals in the 1890s: the Labour Leader (1894–1922), edited by Keir Hardie, and the Clarion (1891–1935), edited by Robert Blatchford. In spite of the progressive, ethical brand of socialism promoted by the two male editors, Mutch demonstrates that broader anxieties about the place of women within the socialist movement can be mapped spatially in their periodicals. What emerges from a spatial analysis of the women’s columns in both is a clear sense of the relationship between column inches and the gender politics that undergirds each periodical’s editorial agenda. Measuring the space allocated to women in both periodicals yields the conclusion that ‘women’s voices and women’s problems held only a fraction of the importance of men’s,’ which functions to further highlight the ‘marginal position’ that women occupied within British socialism at this time (p. 377).

Making Space for Women’s Work in the Leisure Hour: From Variety to ‘Verity’

Drawing upon Margaret Beetham’s influential formulation of the periodical as a space imbued with both ‘open’ and ‘closed’ qualities (1989), in this essay Katherine Malone examines the often-competing models of women’s work that emerge from the interplay of those features in the penny weekly magazine the Leisure Hour (1852–1905) in the 1850s. The ‘closed’ trait of the magazine’s consistent fidelity to the evangelical rhetoric of self-improvement facilitated the ‘open’ sounding of more progressive notes within its pages. As Malone explains, ‘individual articles about women’s work and education could be read by different types of readers and interpreted in a variety of ways without forcing the magazine to take a clear editorial position within divisive debates’ (p. 320). By contrasting this content with the treatment of women’s work in the magazine’s dedicated women’s column, Malone demonstrates how the conflicting rhetoric presented within this ‘closed’ women’s space introduced tensions between it and the magazine’s implied editorial agenda, leading to a paradoxical tapering of the Leisure Hour’s support for progressive women’s issues more generally.

Women Journalists and Periodical Spaces

In this essay, Joanne Shattock discusses Margaret Oliphant’s mid-century work at Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine alongside the work of two lesser-known journalists: Mary Howitt (1799–1888) and Eliza Meteyard (1816–79). All three contributed copy to ‘mainstream publications on a range of subjects far beyond those often assumed to be the preserve of women journalists in the period,’ with each woman also making her own distinctive contribution to Victorian journalism: Howitt as an editor, Meteyard as a pioneering figure in the nascent field of investigative journalism, and Oliphant as one of the most prolific reviewers of the period (p. 303). Shattock’s analysis of their careers demonstrates the productive and individuated ways in which female journalists carved out a space for their work and their voices in the masculine sphere of journalism.

Victorian Women Wood Engravers: The Case of Clemence Housman

In this essay, Lorraine Janzen Kooistra explores the career of an important yet neglected artist whose work in the illustrated press deserves more concentrated attention. From 1885 to 1895, Clemence Housman (1861–1955) worked as an engraver for the Graphic (1869–1932), but by the mid-1890s there was little work in the trade since most papers were converting to systems of photomechanical reproduction. She then transitioned to fine-art wood engraving in the book trade, producing several exquisite titles in collaboration with her brother Laurence Housman, including The Were-Wolf (1896). She continued working the field until the 1920s, eventually producing her masterpiece, an engraving of James Guthrie’s ‘Evening Star.’ The trajectory of her career not only demonstrates how new reproductive technologies altered women’s work in the periodical press over the course of the nineteenth century but also reminds us of the thousands of other women who contributed to this industry but have been largely overlooked in press history. Indeed, as Janzen Kooistra’s essay makes clear, women were not just the subject matter or intended audience for periodical advertisements and illustrations; they were actively engaged in the production of the images that proliferated throughout the Victorian illustrated press.

The Rise and Rise of the Domestic Magazine: Femininity at Home in Popular Periodicals

In this chapter, Beetham offers a valuable overview of the emergence of the domestic magazine across the second half of the nineteenth century. Though acknowledging the ‘complex meanings of “home” and the “domestic” and how they relate to femininity,’ Beetham argues that ‘it is in the pages of the magazines read by the “ordinary” woman at home where those debates were and are worked through in that complex interweaving of materiality, emotion, and ideology in which we all struggle to give meaning to our lives’ (18). Beetham’s historical sweep of the domestic magazine as a publishing genre includes Samuel Beeton’s trailblazing Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine (1852–90), evangelical mothers’ magazines, and the cheap penny weeklies of the 1890s. She considers the ways in which we define such publications, account for their contradictions, and understand their relationship to earlier ladies’ magazines, together with new elements of their own invention and later of the New Journalism. In this way, she provides an important foundation for the essays in this section and the volume as a whole.

Introduction

WHEN AURORA LEIGH, the eponymous poet-protagonist of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s (1806–61) epic ‘novel in verse,’ discovers that ‘In England, no one lives by verse that lives,’ she moves beyond the rarefied sphere of poetry to secure a regular income by writing for the periodical press (1993: 3.307). Like many Victorian poets, Aurora writes for ‘cyclopedias, magazines, / And weekly papers’ (3.310), undertaking what she considers to be inferior hack work that appeals to the taste of ‘light readers’ (3.319). For Aurora, poetry, as a cerebral and pure form of art, should not be tainted by the vulgar dictates of the commercial marketplace. While Barrett Browning would have acquiesced with the spirit of the value-laden dichotomy that Aurora identifies between writing for art and writing for the market, she nevertheless balanced her own sense of poetry’s elevated artistic value against a pragmatic understanding of the cultural and economic significance of periodicals for the careers of literary authors. Her first publicly published poems appeared in the ...

Introduction

IN NOVEMBER 1886, MARGARET OLIPHANT (1828–97) wrote to William Black-wood, the editor of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817–1980), with an idea for a new, regular feature. Oliphant, who had by that time been a mainstay at the magazine since the 1850s, proposed to write a ‘standing article upon literature, a review of all the books of the month worth reviewing, with admixture of speculation and general comment, as would be natural’ (1899: 338). The pitch, Oliphant made clear, was not for ‘an occasional paper’ but ‘a regular one, for which people would look’ (338). As the letter reveals, the series had been a long time in gestation; it was, she explains, ‘a plan which has been long in my mind, and which, if I had ever had a magazine in my own hands, as I once thought I should, I should certainly have adopted’ (338). Oliphant’s plan was to assume life in the shape of ‘The Old Saloon,’ a recurring, if irregular, feature which ran in ...