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.