Barbara Green

2008 The Author
Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x
The Feminist Periodical Press: Women,
Periodical Studies, and Modernity
Barbara Green*
University of Notre Dame
Abstract
The study of feminist periodical culture is playing an increasingly important role
in the larger fields of modernist periodical studies and of feminist or womens
print culture. Treated as important objects of study in their own right and for
their own sake, the feminist periodicals of the early twentieth century suffrage
papers, avant-garde feminist journals, feminist literary reviews and more give
researchers a glimpse into the intersection of gender and discourses of modernity.
Feminist periodicals embed literary texts plays, short stories, poems as well as
book and theater reviews in the context of economic and political discussions,
personal journalism, investigative journalism and advertisements to highlight
connections between Edwardian feminist literature and the central issues for
feminism the vote, imperialism, socialism, womens professional labor, and womens
engagement with commodity culture.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain saw the creation and
rapid expansion of the field of feminist journalism movement and advo-
cacy papers, avant-garde periodicals, literary reviews aimed at feminist
readers, and more.
1
An investigation of feminist periodical culture of the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century gives researchers access to the
rich and varied literary output of the British feminist movement. For
some writers and artists, the gender struggles of the new age signaled new
possibilities for the arts. For others, the new age of impassioned and
politicized artistic work pointed out the necessary and complex connec-
tions between propaganda and aesthetics. In 1908, for example, in the
pages of the Womens Social and Political Unions suffrage paper, Votes for
Women, May Sinclair wrote that the future of Art lay in the hands of the
women and that [t]he coming generation will . . . witness a finer art, a
more splendid literature than has been seen since the Elizabethan Age
(211). Three years later, G. L. Harding pondered the relationship of propa-
ganda and literature in the pages of The Freewoman. Harding wrote that
we seem to be feeling toward something like honour. Never was a large
civilised community, either artistically or politically, more conscious of
itself than is ours to-day (77). The serials Votes for Women and The
192 The Feminist Periodical Press
2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x
Freewoman are only two of a large number of feminist periodicals which
should capture the attention of researchers: between the 1850s and the
1930s, nearly 150 feminist periodicals were published in Britain (Tusan 1).
Time and Tide provided a consistent window on the literary scene of the
interwar years, and published work by Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, and
others. The Hour and the Woman edited by Teresa Billinton-Greig and
Maude Fitzherbert, published Billington-Greigs own stories and essays,
work by Cicely Hamilton and an essay by Ford Madox Ford (then
Heuffer). Suffrage was such a central topic in the popular culture of the
Edwardian era that a high-class monthly illustrated magazine devoted to
the lighter side of the votes for women movement was launched in
1909 promising The Best Artists, The Best Writers, and The Best of
Everything, though The Suffragist did not live to produce more than one
issue (Suffragist 1139). The suffrage paper Votes for Women published short
stories, poems, brief plays, sketches and both book and theater reviews,
featuring the work of Edwardian feminist writers such as Christopher St.
John, Cecily Hamilton, Evelyn Sharp, Elizabeth Robins, May Sinclair,
Gertrude Colemore and others.
2
It is not, however, the fact of the authors of literary texts, known or
little-known, who published in these periodicals that should make femi-
nist papers important for researchers working on gender and modern
literary cultures. It is instead the ways in which feminist periodicals function
as unique texts, compelling in their juxtapositions of diverse and eye-catching
materials, that yields a glimpse into the cultures of modernity. Feminist
papers during this period generally included both literary materials and
cultural materials (theater reviews, book reviews, etc.) within the rich
context of economic writings, political writings, notes on meetings and
political strategies, investigative journalism, interviews, histories, polemical
writings, essays on fashion, cartoons, and other materials. In addition,
feminist periodicals also often offered a rich assortment of advertisements
that catered to the independent feminist modern woman and provide a
glimpse into the lives of women addressed by commercial culture. Votes
for Women, for example, a paper fully embedded in the commodity culture
of modernity, included advertisements for cigarettes, furs, soaps, dresses,
furniture, in addition to advertisements for feminist presses and periodicals.
Its cartoons, attention-getting headlines and fonts, use of spectacular
photographs, all worked to make the paper, as text, a complex and open
blending of image and discourse. And, as Maria DiCenzo notes, advertisements
for reading materials, when read in relation to advertisements for services
and publications, classified columns, announcements/notices, and reviews
yield a fuller picture of how women lived, worked, and what they read
(Militant Distribution 118). For example, an advertisement for The
Womans Press (the WSPUs press and suffrage shop located on Charing
Cross Road) lists books by Cicely Hamilton, Christopher St. John,
Elizabeth Sharp, Olive Schreiner, Bernard Shaw, along with pamphlets
The Feminist Periodical Press 193
and leaflets by suffrage activists and supporters, an edition of the suffrage
anthem, The March of the Women, composed by Dame Ethel Smyth, and
badges, brooches, buckles, bags, and leather novelties in the colours of
the union (Womans Press 436).
3
With the exciting development of recent scholarly studies such as
Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain by Michelle
Tusan and The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early
Twentieth Century by Lucy Delap, in addition to critical articles on individual
figures or journals by Mary Chapman, Maria DiCenzo, John Mercer and
others, a special issue of the academic journal International Journal of
Womens Studies devoted to the feminist press and feminist media, and an
important three-volume facsimile collection of original source materials
edited by Lucy Delap, Maria DiCenzo, and Leila Ryan, it can be said that
the feminist periodical press is once again making news.
4
Of interest to
scholars of media studies, media history, womens history, and those
engaged in feminist literary study, this emerging subfield is characterized
by a diversity of methodologies coming from very different disciplines.
Yet, like the larger field of periodical studies recently described by Sean
Latham and Robert Scholes in the pages of PMLA, the study of feminist
periodical culture is benefiting from interdisciplinary inquiry and is now
able to explore the nature of the feminist periodical in its own right and for
its own sake. Just as periodicals in general are increasingly being appreciated
as autonomous objects of study, as texts requiring new methodologies
and new types of collaborative investigation, so are feminist periodicals
increasingly seen as significant and complex texts (Latham and Scholes
518).
5
This turn toward the study of feminist periodicals is a development
that should be of great interest to literary scholars involved in studies of
modernism, modernity, and feminist literary study.
In the following pages I will outline some of the important theoretical
areas of inquiry coming out of scholarly work on the feminist periodical
press that will be of particular interest to literary critics working at the
intersection of gender and modernity: 1) descriptions of the workings of
the feminist public sphere; 2) the relationship between feminism and the
varied literary and cultural movements of modernity including, but not
limited to, literary modernism and the feminist avant-garde; and 3) the
study of womens experience of modernity. Though much new important
work on the feminist press concerns American journals or nineteenth-
century periodicals, and much important additional scholarship explores the
Anglo-American womens press or addresses modernism directly through
the lens of periodical culture, I will be mainly concerned here with the
feminist periodical press in Britain during the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.
6
And though the study of the feminist periodical
press is challenging the way media history and media studies organize
themselves, and is contributing greatly to the field of womens history, I
will be limiting my comments to the ways in which the field of feminist
periodical studies offers not just exciting new source materials for literary
critics, but also requires the development of new critical questions and
methodologies for feminist literary studies.
7
The beginnings of the feminist periodical press in Britain are generally
traced to the late 1850s when the women of the Langham Place Circle
launched the English Womans Journal and the 1860s when serious journals
[took] positions on feminist issues and target[ed] women as a principle
audience (Levine 294, 295). Central to the history of the feminist press is
the establishment in 1860 of Emily Faithfuls all womens printing press named
the Victoria Press which forged connections between the construction for
new venues for the discussion of womens issues and the development of new
professional opportunities for women (Tusan 403). Rather than offering
a coherent single vision of advancement for women, nineteenth-century
feminist journalism was characterized by its diversity of aims, interests, and
approaches. According to one team of researchers, the Victorian feminist
press was supported by a close relationship between feminism and moral
ideas associated with nineteenth-century British social reform. Working
for the interests of social justice, became a way of working for womens
advancement: for many feminists the promotion of broader social justice
issues through the periodical press, such as public health, universal education
and child welfare, also served as a mechanism for promoting the interests of
women (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 146). In addition, the development
of the feminist periodical press allowed for a valuable means of literary,
artistic, social and political expression (147). The development of the
feminist press in the nineteenth century surely owed some of its success
to the rapid expansion of women into the field of journalism generally
during this period.
8
By the end of the nineteenth century, women journalists
had their own professional organization, and a number of professional
advice books such as Arnold Bennetts Journalism for Women were available
on the market. The rise of the New Woman phenomenon at the end of
the century was also deeply associated with the periodical press in the
cultural imagination, so much so that new publications would often market
their newness through affiliating themselves with the image of modern
femininity on the one hand (Stetz 273), and anxieties about the rise of
New Journalism were tellingly conflated with the rise of the New Woman
on the other (Beetham Periodicals 234). Within this setting, the periodical
press became an ideal site for debates about gender; as a medium the
periodical press most readily articulates the unevennesses and reciprocities
of evolving gender ideologies and offers material realization, generically
and formally, of that dynamic and relational cultural process (Fraser, Green,
and Johnston 2).
In the early years of the twentieth century the feminist periodical press
experienced a rapid expansion, fueled in part by the proliferation of
movement papers which served as organs of various womens suffrage
organizations: the Womens Social and Political Unions Votes for Women,
the Womens Freedom Leagues The Vote, the Nation Union of Womens
Suffrage Societies Common Cause and many others. The feminist periodical
press from the beginning of the century through the interwar years was
extremely diverse in terms not only of aims (the single issue approach that
defined many movement papers or a broad consideration of gender issues
that defined the radical or avant-garde feminist press), but also feminist stance
(militant or constitutional, radical or traditionalist), market (a literary
review priced for an upper-class reader or a penny paper aimed at a broad
readership), and financing. Circulation too varied widely, an Edwardian
avant-garde paper like The Freewoman had a relatively small circulation,
while Votes for Women attained a circulation of 50,000. A quick glance at
David Doughan and Denise Sanchezs important resource, Feminist Periodicals
18551984: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth
and International Titles, gives a sense of the range and importance of the
feminist press, for they describe not only the movement papers of
large national organizations, but also branch papers, papers affiliated
with womens religious organizations, temperance papers, feminist literary
reviews and more.
9
And the substantial three-volume collection Feminist
and the Periodical Press 19001918 gives a sense of the range of opinions
and topics considered in the feminist press: from international feminism,
to race and empire, domestic issues, the vote, intersections of socialism and
feminism, literary and cultural matters, the changing nature of femininity
itself, and more.
The feminist papers during the early twentieth century were sometimes
tested by and sometimes benefited from the dramatic changes that characterized
the press revolutions of the late nineteenth century. The much declaimed
modern commercialization of the press was closely associated with the
emergence of the woman reader, so that the snappy bright style, briefer
pieces, entrance of personal journalism such as interviews and human-
interest pieces, and the use of illustrations in advertisements, particularly
fashion advertisements which the Daily Mail placed on its front page,
became signs of the feminization of the press (Bingham 32). What was
often seen as the loss of the presss educative function and the substitution
of entertainment as a goal, was widely read as a gendered cultural shift.
10
According to Adrian Bingham, the Northcliffe Revolution brought sexual
difference to the forefront of popular journalism with the development
of womens pages and womens magazines all designed for the woman
reader (27). Placing feminist periodicals in the context of this larger shift
in print culture highlights the feminist advocacy papers oppositional position,
a point made by Michelle Tusan who links the feminist paper to the
inheritance of the radical press and counters the notion that the radical
press faded with the advancement of the commercial press. It also places
in stark relief those sensational techniques and commercial strategies that
some feminist papers liberally borrowed from the commercial press and
put to quite different purposes.
From the beginning, the early-twentieth-century feminist periodical
press was aware of itself as occupying a specific niche, a position different
from and often marginal to the mainstream press on the one hand and the
offerings of the womens press, on the other. Frederick Pethick Lawrence,
co-editor of the WSPUs Votes for Women, saw the feminist press fulfilling
a unique role for its readers:
Do the daily newspapers cater sufficiently for this new class of readers; do they
attempt to give the womans point of view? I think there can be no doubt that
the answer to this question must be in the negative. The ordinary London daily
newspapers, with their almost exclusively male staff, devote by far the greater
part of their space to questions which are of special interest to men, and, quite
regardless of the fact that their mere fashion page is not sufficient to satisfy
the large number of potential women readers, they exclude from their
papers the new point of view. This has been undoubtedly a bad thing for
women, but it is also an exceedingly foolish and suicidal policy for the papers
themselves. (841)
Similarly, the editors of The Vote, official organ of the Womens Freedom
League, positioned their paper between the mainstream press and the
womens press:
There would appear to be an opening for a weekly paper appealing primarily
to the increasing class of educated women who have intellectual, industrial, or
public interests. The number of such women grows daily larger. . . . The general aim
[of this paper] will be to fill in the gaps left on the one hand by the so-called
womens papers, and on the other by the daily newspapers. In the former
attention is mainly directed towards the frivolous, personal and material aspects of
life: dress, amusements, society gossip, cookery, &c.; in the latter the interests of
women are dealt with either on an inadequate scale or not at all. (Proposed 1)
Both Frederick Pethick Lawrence and the editors of The Vote noticed the
same dynamic in modern print culture, that while women were being
invited into the pages of the daily press, they had been sequestered into
the womens pages, their distance from the public sphere . . . reinscibed
(Bingham 28). At the same time that the daily papers imagined their
readers as women, they often papered over the news that was the innovative
campaigning of suffragettes and suffragists. John Mercer has shown, for
example, how the WSPUs paper Votes for Women evolved to challenge
and compete with the press by collecting and publishing extracts from
the mainstream press to reveal and counter anti-suffrage press bias (Mercer
Making the News 188, 191). The feminist press provided an alternate sphere
or space for the promotion of feminist ideas outside of the movement and
for the circulation of important information, the fostering of debate, and
the cultivation of feminist ideas within the movement. By the time the
deliberately avant-garde and independent journal The Freewoman was
launched by Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe in 1911, feminist print
culture had established itself through cross-referencing, cross-pollination,
and critical commentary on other journals or feminist activities to such
an extent that The Freewomans editors could proclaim analysis of feminism
itself as its mission.
11
For editors Marsden and Gawthorpe, The Freewoman
would lead feminist periodical culture to become self-aware:
The publication of The Freewoman marks an epoch. It marks the point at which
Feminism in England ceases to be impulsive and unaware of its own features,
and becomes definitely self-conscious and introspective. For the first time,
feminists themselves make the attempt to reflect the feminist movement in the
mirror of thought. That this can be done, argues at once the strength of the
movement, and the conscious knowledge of that strength. (Notes 3)
This self-conscious and specific journalistic field of feminist inquiry and
debate is productively read in much recent scholarship as a feminist public
sphere or a feminist counterpublic. Following Nancy Frasers revision of
the Habermasian formulation, a number of studies of the feminist periodical
press stress such a counterpublic which is subaltern, a parallel discursive
arena[s] where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate
counter discourses (N. Fraser 81). Michelle Tusan, for example, traces the
emergence of counterpublic spheres or multiple spaces for public discourse
in the feminist advocacy papers of the turn of the last century (108). For
Tusan, the periodical became both a real and imagined space for female
intellectual and political community (2). Similarly, Maria DiCenzo uses
the example of the suffrage paper Votes for Women to put pressure on the
notion that women were necessarily excluded from the Habermasian public
sphere by focusing on the ways in which feminist editors viewed their
paper as a mechanism for influencing public opinion and entering into
the wider public debate:
Votes for Women demonstrated that it was possible to gain access to the public
sphere from which women were formally excluded through the denial of
citizenship rights in spite of the rising costs of production and managed to
maintain a political stance while negotiating a market system. (Militant
Distribution 115, 117)
Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and Rita Felski, DiCenzo argues
that Votes for Women worked both to provide a space for alternative
discourses and identity formations (a counterpublic sphere) and to engage
in and broaden the field of larger debate (11718). In addition to placing
feminist debate at the heart of modern democracy, the emphasis of public
sphere theory on both the disinterested rational discourse of citizens and
the social spaces of rational-critical debate have offered a rich vocabulary
for describing the function of a variety of feminist institutions: tea-rooms,
open-air meetings, at-homes, deputations, feminist reading rooms, womens
papers, womens presses, and the ritual of street-hawking.
12
As Tusan puts it,
the expansion of . . . associational networks encouraged the growth of a womens
press industry, in part by providing a space where gender-based social and
economic agendas could develop in an independent political forum. Like the
coffeehouse sociability that men had enjoyed since the eighteenth century,
womens clubs offered women a place to discuss news and contemporary
events. (62)
The idea of a feminist public sphere is a particularly attractive approach
for literary critics not only because it highlights the ways in which feminist
print culture was embedded in the rich cultural spaces and activities of
feminism such as bookshops and clubs, but because it allows scholars to
trace the rich variety of cultural forms and modes through which feminist
literary and cultural works articulated themselves. For literary scholarship,
this means a productive decentering of the term modernism to describe
the literary activities of the feminist movement. Indeed, feminist periodical
culture can be seen to promote or showcase literary work that is
modernist (Chapman) or proto-modernist (Miller), avant-garde (Lyon,
Delap), appropriating popular forms (Park Suffrage Fiction), or like suffrage
literature itself essentially hybrid (Norquay and Park 304) depending upon
where one looks. Much current work on feminist periodicals conducted
by literary critics continues the project of unsettling dominant definitions of
literary modernism and expanding the field. For example, Mary Chapman
complicates our understanding of the evolution of literary modernism by
placing suffragist Alice Duer Millers quoting poems which borrowed
liberally from anti-suffrage and suffrage rhetoric, well before the experiments
in quotation and appropriation that characterized the modernist poems of
Eliot and Pound (80). Similarly, Ann Ardis locates in feminist Beatrice
Hastingss many essays for the New Age, an interrogation of Pounds early
articulations of the tenants of modernism which were themselves published
in the journal. These two scholarly essays continue in some ways the work
of Mark Morrison, who placed the feminist periodicals Votes for Women
and The Freewoman in conversation with modernist little magazines such
as The Little Review and with literary reviews such as The English Review
to establish a shared modernist investment in the idea of the public sphere.
A different take on the cultural scene of the Edwardian period focuses
not on the debates concerning the rise of literary modernism, but on the
existence of a rich feminist avant-garde. Modernists are generally familiar
with The Egoist which, under the guidance of Ezra Pound as literary
editor, helped introduce literary modernism to its readership. But literary
critics are often less familiar with The Egoists precursors, The Freewoman
and The New Freewoman, feminist avant-garde periodicals which under the
editorship of Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe (and then Marsden
alone) circulated through an active progressive and international feminist
community. With the publication of Lucy Delaps The Feminist Avant-
Garde, modernists can no longer overlook the significance of The Freewoman
and The New Freewoman which played a central role in developing an
extensive intellectual formation, a feminist network that was highly
influential in defining and shaping the politics of feminism for the entire
twentieth century (3). Publishing work by Rebecca West, Teresa Billington-
Greig, Richard Aldington, H. D., Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, and others,
The Freewoman and The New Freewoman developed a stance that was
individualist, rather than focused on the collective, and that figured
advancement in terms of internal transformations rather than the acquisi-
tion of new civic rights from the state.
13
While suffrage papers were silent
or conservative on complex issues such as free love or homosexuality, the
editors of The Freewoman saw themselves as leaders. Lucy Delaps The
Feminist Avant-Garde shifts our attention away from discussions of literary
experiment to the experimental lifestyles and debates about the nature of
femininity itself that invigorated the discussion groups, networks, and
periodical writings of advanced feminists. Like the cultural avant-garde,
advanced feminism organized itself around the idealization of originality,
rejection of forebears, and sense of rupture with the past (4).
14
The
periodical, argues Delap, was central to the evolution of what was referred
to as vanguard or modern feminism during the Edwardian Period, for
feminism was closely bound up with its representation in print to be
a feminist was very centrally a reading experience. As a key venue for
debate and discussion, periodicals formed the site in which feminism
was most commonly enunciated and observed (4). It is through the
periodical culture of Edwardian advanced feminism that Delap is able to
locate an extensive network of feminist thinkers that connected women
on both sides of the Atlantic. A study of transatlantic print culture, Delaps
book explores the intense cross-pollinations between periodicals such as
the U.S. publications The Masses, The Little Review, The Forerunner, British
publications such as The New Age and groups such as the New York
womens luncheon club, Heterodoxy or the London-based Freewoman
Discussion Circle. Indeed, it its ability to connect readers across national
borders, it is the periodical that enables and allows for the construction of
transatlantic communities, an insight that should be stimulating to literary
scholars interested in tracing the networks and group formations that
characterize the cultural movements of the early twentieth century (78).
Other work on feminist periodical culture or literary culture displaces
literary modernism and the avant-garde from the center of investigation
altogether. Glenda Norquay and Sowon Park, for example, have argued
that literary material of the suffrage movement cannot be explained within
the framework of literary modernism, or the considerable shadow of
Modernist aesthetics, in part because generic diversity is one of the most
salient and significant aspects of the literature of this period (302, 304).
Arguing that suffrage texts are essentially hybrid, Norquay and Park
remind us that we employ too narrow a framework when we look exclusively
for examples of modernist experiment or limit ourselves to the naturalism/
modernism divide. Borrowing liberally from established forms the
Bildungsroman, Romantic fiction, anti-romance, problem-plays, New
Woman novels, sensational fiction, adventure narratives and roman-a-clefs
suffrage texts benefit greatly from the kind of genre study that hasnt yet
been dominant in the field.
15
Though not specifically devoted to the
periodical press, Norquay and Parks work is instructive in its concentration
upon the diversity of feminist literary materials. Attention to the periodical
press can only heighten our appreciation of this diversity, since the periodical
is essentially a mixed form, fractured and heterogeneous, as Margaret
Beetham has written. Beethams argument regarding the development of
womens magazines in A Magazine of Her Own, can be applied with great
profit to even those suffrage papers that seemingly organize themselves
with discipline to a single issue. For just as the magazine itself developed
in the two centuries of its history as a miscellany, that is a form marked by
variety of tone and constituent parts, so has the feminist paper organized
itself around a diverse set of topics and discourses that together recognize
the complex nature of the feminist reader (Beetham, Magazine 1). Even
movement papers, which are decidedly more specific in their focus than,
say, an advanced feminist journal like The Freewoman, are not mono-vocal
or characterized by a single focus, but employ a range of materials,
discourses, and rhetorical approaches to explore feminist issues.
Refreshingly, then, feminist periodical culture necessarily changes our
focal point from modernism as the centering focus of literary study to
the gendered cultures of modernity. As Latham and Scholes have argued
in the case of periodical culture more generally, feminist periodicals reward
a cultural studies methodology which explores the literary in relation to
other aspects of modernist culture. As a fluid and heterogeneous form,
feminist periodicals embed the literary in the rich mixed medium of
economic writings, political journalism, interviews, personal journalism,
information regarding the business of political meetings, marches, and
meeting minutes, book and theater reviews, articles concerning fashion,
and more. If a researcher is looking for examples of the gendered discourses
concerning modernity, or for representations of womens diverse experiences
of modernity, feminist periodical culture offers an exciting resource.
16
Indeed, as the introductory section of Feminism and the Periodical Press
shows, a good deal of feminist debate during the Edwardian period organized
itself around the definitions of the terms modern and woman, and
around their relationship to one another. Pinning the new age to a new
idea of femininity, feminists explored the idea that a new century made
possible the articulation of a new revolutionary kind of femininity, and
that the revolutions of modernity were typified by the revolution in
womanhood. For example, Feminism and the Periodical Press reprints an essay
written by Teresa Billington-Greig for the Contemporary Review entitled
The Rebellion of Woman in which she wrote that [t]oday woman is in
rebellion, and her rebellion is the fact of the age (1).
The three-volume collection Feminism and the Periodical Press encourages
study of feminist serials and suggests just how profitable such work can
be. Organized to isolate debates and conversations around key themes that
preoccupied feminist thinkers between 1900 and 1918, these volumes
allow us to see difference rather than consensus, diversity of approach
rather than a singular vision, in the Edwardian feminist press. The materials
here are arranged not only to target issues such as Race and Empire,
Women, Law and Citizenship, The Professions, Work and Education,
but to suggest through conflict and conversation how complex such topics
were. For example, a section devoted to Redefining Public and Domestic
Space juxtaposes material concerning womens movement into the public
sphere such as coverage of suffrage marches, with materials that complicate
the idea of the private sphere such as an announcement of the Woman
Suffrage Partys housewarming at new headquarters or discussions of
womens clubs and Womens Lodging Houses. The inclusion of promo-
tional materials, including as well some advertisements, yields important
materials for scholars working with the commercial and promotional
cultures of modernity.
The world that supported and made possible the vibrant print culture
of the suffrage movement provides rich material for any study of the
circulation, promotion, and sale of literary materials in the modern
marketplace of ideas. Michelle Tusans Women Making News, in its careful
examination of the publication, circulation, marketing and promotion of
feminist papers, reveals how exciting a field this may be for students of
modern marketing culture. A wide range of approaches to the problem
of producing oppositional feminist papers during the second half of the
nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century were
taken up, from depending upon the support of an editor/patron to the
formation of corporate organizations, from the adoption of New Journalist
commercial strategies to the creation of informal associational networks
(Tusan 2). Central to the innovative practices of the womens press was
the cultivation of vertical integration strategies; the creation of women-
run printing enterprises strengthened womens advocacy networks by
involving more women in the practical aspects of social reform (41). At
the same time that the womens press used volunteers and feminist networks
to produce, promote, and circulate journals, newsletters, and papers, many
publications also exploited the commercial techniques of the New
Journalism, binding radical networks with commercial strategies. One of
Tusans largest contributions lies in her ability to make the case for a
successful alternative presence in the public sphere just when many histories
of the newspaper press mark its decline. This continued presence of an
alternative and critical press which sometimes operated through a blending
of radical and commercial strategies, as in the case of Votes for Women,
Tusan points out, challenges the idea that the modern mainstream press
was characterized primarily by a commercialism which silenced oppositional
voices and undermined the educative role of the press.
There are challenges to the study of feminist periodical culture as well,
for the feminist serial necessarily puts pressure on the centrality of authorship
as a central focus of scholarly investigation. While feminist periodical
culture certainly provides substantial resources for the recovery work that
has long supported feminist literary criticism and greatly expanded the
canon of early twentieth-century women writers, periodical culture in
general imagines authorship as a collective rather than a singular enterprise
(Brake 18) and often requires or promotes pseudonomous or anonymous
publication (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 279). Rather than focusing
literary study on the creative work of one figure, periodical culture can
encourage our study of networks, communities, debates, and conversations
organized around some of the key shifts and changes of modernity.
Indeed, it is no accident that two new publications on feminist periodical
culture, Tusans Women Making News and Delaps The Feminist Avant-Garde,
in both method and theory prioritize the idea of the feminist network.
This is just the (tantalizing) beginning, for as the special issue of Womens
Studies International Forum devoted to early womens movements, print
media and digitalization suggests, a whole new set of investigative priorities
and methodologies will become possible once digitalized editions of
important feminist serials are made available.
17
And these new materials
will encourage and foster networks of feminist researchers to explore
their potential.
18
Short Biography
Barbara Green is an Associate Professor of English and a Senior Fellow in
Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of
Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of
Suffrage 19051938. She is currently working on a study of feminist
periodical culture and everyday life.
Notes
* Correspondence address: Department of English, University of Notre Dame, 356 OShaughnessy
Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, United States. Email: green.15@nd.edu.
1
Lucy Delap in The Feminist Avant-Garde shows how the term feminist arose in the Edwardian
period to describe a specifically radical, progressive or avant-garde stance. She differentiates,
importantly, between the womens movement and the feminist avant-garde of the Edwardian
period. The three-volume collection of original materials from all branches of the periodical
press associated with the womens movement in the early twentieth-century takes the title
Feminism and the Periodical Press, and uses the term feminism as we commonly do to describe
the womens movement. Since my focus will be on a broad range of materials related to the
womens movement, and for simplicitys sake, I will use the terms feminism and womens
movement, for the most part, interchangeably.
2
Feminist literature of this period, of course, cannot be limited to that which appeared in
periodicals. The suffrage movement, to take one example, generated a rich and diverse body
of novels, plays, short stories, autobiographical sketches, comic writings, poems, essays which
sometimes appeared in the suffrage papers of the Edwardian period, and sometimes did not.
Some of this material has been anthologized: see Norquay Voices and Votes, Green and Chapman
in Scott, Nelson, Marlow. The team of Katharine Cockin, Glenda Norquay and Sowon Park
have made full texts of important suffrage novels, plays, and short fiction available in six volumes
through Routledges History of Feminism Series. See Womens Suffrage Literature.
3
For more on the Womens Press, see Murray. For suffrage shops, see Mercer Commercial Places.
4
In addition to these important sources, new work in the wider field of gender and periodical
culture should be of interest. See Fraser, Green, and Johnston on gender and the nineteenth-
century periodical; Beetham, Magazine of Her Own? On the womens magazine; Jean Lutes on
American women journalists; Ann Ardis on Beatrice Hastings and The New Age in Diaglogics
of Modernism(s). Margaret Beetham and Ann Heilmanns co-edited collection New Woman
Hybridities includes a section on New Women and periodical culture.
5
Maria DiCenzo, especially in her essays Militant Distribution and Feminist Media and
History, makes the case for studying feminist periodicals in their own right.
6
For new work on modernism and the periodical press, see Collier and Churchill. Susan Marek
and Mark Morrissons books are essential reading on the topic. A new collection of essays
considering modernism through the lens of periodical culture co-edited by Ardis and Collier
is forthcoming.
7
For an example of how the study of the feminist press challenges the ways in which media
history does its work, see DiCenzo, Feminist Media and History.
8
By the 1890s, then, the female journalist had well and truly come out. She had a professional
association, in the form of the Society of Women Journalists, founded in 1894 by Joseph S.
Wood, editor of the Gentlewoman, and she had a platform by virtue of her assured place in
the pages of the periodical press (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 41).
9
In addition, see DiCenzo, Feminist Media and History, and Barbara Crawfords entry on
newspapers and journals in The Womens Suffrage Movement for additional bibliographic materials.
10
See Lee on the loss of an educative function for the British press in the nineteenth century;
Hampton for a complication of his views.
11
Lucy Delap argues that the Edwardian eras advanced feminist press was neither an outcome
nor product of the womens movement, nor marginal to it, but instead was in dialogue with
the womens movement throughout the Edwardian period.
12
For readings of feminist institutions in the public sphere, see Murray on the WSPUs
Womens Press, DiCenzo Gutter on street selling feminist papers, Morrisson on the role of
the periodical in the public sphere, Mercer Commercial Places on the suffrage shops, Tusan
on the periodical press as constructing counterpublics.
13
In its later incarnation as The Egoist, the journals publication of literature by H. D., Joyce,
Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and others has recently been read as an expression of [Marsdens] desire
to align the journal closely with the literary avant-garde and typical of her well-known
propensity for intellectual transformations ( Joannou 605).
14
Delaps work dovetails nicely with Janet Lyons earlier explorations of connections between
the suffrage movement and the avant-garde. See Lyon, Militant Discourse.
15
Sowon Parks own essay on the popular fiction of the suffrage movement and the employment
of the techniques of romantic fiction is one fine example of this kind of study. See Park,
Suffrage Fiction.
16
I borrow these phrases from two key texts among many others that have shifted discussions
of gender and modernism toward modernity: Rita Felskis The Gender of Modernity and Womens
Experience of Modernity edited by Ann Ardis and Leslie Lewis.
17
See Latham for a detailed meditation on the new opportunities for scholarship made possible
by the digital archive.
18
On the cultivation of networks of scholars for digital projects, see Latham and Scholes. For
a theorization of virtual imagined communitites in relation to feminist periodical culture see
Beetham, Periodicals.
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