{"title":"Promoting a Do-It-Yourself Spirit: Samuel Beeton’s Young Englishwoman","authors":"Jennifer Phegley","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0008","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter focuses attention on the domestic-feminine ideal promoted in the 1860s by the Young Englishwoman (1864–77), a successful fashion and domestic magazine that has received scant scholarly attention on account of its ostensibly overt didacticism. While the magazine’s concentration on fashion, needlework, and household management may have contributed to its being overlooked by previous scholars, Phegley significantly recasts the magazine’s domestic preoccupations in more progressive terms. The Young Englishwoman emerges in this account as an important cultural space for the championing of female agency in the domestic sphere through the promotion of what Phegley calls a ‘do-it-yourself spirit’ among nascent domestic managers (104). By stressing female agency, education, and independent consumerism on the home front, the magazine trained young women to be, in the words of Isabella Beeton (1836–65), ‘the commander of an army’ (108).","PeriodicalId":174109,"journal":{"name":"Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s","volume":"45 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127385166","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The ‘Most-Talked-Of Creature in the World’: The ‘American Girl’ in Victorian Print Culture","authors":"B. Nicholson","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0013","url":null,"abstract":"As a celebrated and vilified figure in the British press, the American girl constituted yet another prominent form of contested femininity in Victorian Britain, one which Bob Nicholson suggests was reflective of a growing fetishisation of America in British print culture, as well as of a broader cultural anxiety about the effects of the same. If Eliza Lynn Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’ constituted a threat to the moral health of the nation from within, then the American girl was seen by many as an invasive threat to femininity from beyond Britain’s borders. Nicholson’s essay demonstrates the potency of the girl as a symbolic force in Victorian Britain, as well as the crucial role of the periodical in shaping the various, often competing cultural forms that she assumed.","PeriodicalId":174109,"journal":{"name":"Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s","volume":"13 2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116758811","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Beauty Advertising and Advice in the Queen and Woman","authors":"Michelle Smith","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0015","url":null,"abstract":"In this essay, Michelle J. Smith explores the ‘visually spectacular’ advertisements for cosmetics that appeared in late Victorian women’s periodicals (p. 218). Focusing specifically on the Queen (1861–1970) and Woman (1890–1912), she argues that editorial and advertising content were aligned in their treatment of cosmetics, recommending natural beauty over artifice, personal hygiene over self-fashioning. Advertisements figured older actresses as models of natural beauty rather than as practitioners of the cosmetic arts. Meanwhile, editorials, along with the ‘advice provided in advice columns and articles,’ enabled the woman reader to ‘negotiate acceptable use of branded products in tandem with home-made methods and daily attention to a beauty regimen grounded in hygiene’ (p. 229). Cutting-edge cosmetic preparations and technologies of image reproduction were thus used to disseminate rather conventional ideas about women’s health, natural beauty, and artless femininity.","PeriodicalId":174109,"journal":{"name":"Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"131245504","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Gender, Anonymity, and Humour in Women’s Writing for Punch","authors":"K. Birch","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0022","url":null,"abstract":"Where existing scholarship on anonymity tends to focus on its liberating effects for women who wrote on ‘serious’ (masculine) subject matter, in this essay Katy Birch considers the transgressive possibilities that the obfuscation of identity created for female humourists. The female contributors to Punch (1841–2002) discussed in this essay are shown to have harnessed the practice of anonymity in order to circumvent the gendered dictates of comic journalism. In the contributions of May Kendall (1861–1943), for example, we see the deconstruction of the masculine triptych of science, humour, and brotherhood through the strategic deployment of anonymity, which accorded Kendall and other female humourists the authority to move beyond the social limitations imposed on them by their gender. Yet as Birch cautions, women writers’ use of the anonymous voice ultimately both imprisoned and emancipated them, not only in the sense that the practice ‘prevented these writers from receiving recognition for their work’ but also because anonymity did nothing ‘to combat the societal prejudice against female-authored comedy’ (p. 362).","PeriodicalId":174109,"journal":{"name":"Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s","volume":"229 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116440218","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women Editors’ Transnational Networks in the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and Myra’s Journal","authors":"Marianne Van Remoortel","doi":"10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3366/edinburgh/9781474433907.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter considers the transnational collaboration between Samuel Beeton’s Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine and the French magazine Le Moniteur de la mode, run by Beeton’s French counterpart Adolphe Goubaud. Using a range of historical source material, Van Remoortel explores the behind-the-scenes contributions made by women to the success of this venture and to each magazine. In particular, she argues that Louise Goubaud’s contribution to the emergence of the cheap fashion press ‘has been consistently misunderstood’ and that Beeton’s trailblazing status was in fact indebted to her work in a range of ways (47). In democratising women’s access to fashion and design, the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine ‘promoted a new kind of femininity’ (46). Indeed, the pattern postal service made fashion more accessible in literal terms as well, bringing international fashion into the lives of women who were unlikely to find themselves in the boutiques of Paris. Van Remoortel’s essay brings to the fore the significance of transnational exchange, a topic highlighted in a number of other essays in this volume.","PeriodicalId":174109,"journal":{"name":"Women, Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1830s-1900s","volume":"3 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"1900-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128385888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}