Women and the Welsh Newspaper Press: The Cambrian News and the Western Mail, 1870–1895

Newspapers were an important space for imagining women’s domestic lives. Women’s pages, columns, and advertisements were designed to reach a growing female readership. As Tom O’Malley notes in this chapter, newspapers contributed to separate spheres ideology by depicting women as subordinate to men and by highlighting their roles as wives, daughters, mothers, and consumers in the home. Yet, O’Malley notes, such ‘ideological convention was always under pressure from the heterogeneous content papers were obliged to contain if they were to appeal to the men and women in the locality on whom they depended as purchasers, readers, and advertisers’ (95). Consequently, at the same time that newspapers constructed the angel in the house they also imagined women as litigants, entertainers, labourers, and charity workers—identities that defined women as participants in world outside the home. Newspapers, then, by virtue of their differentiated readerships, dismantled separate spheres ideology at the same time they seemed to confirm it.