Women Work And The Victorian Periodical

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.

Table of contents

Presents 35 thematically organised, research-led essays on women, periodicals and print culture in Victorian Britain.

Covering a wide range of magazine work, including editing, illustration, poetry, needlework instruction and typesetting, this book provides fresh insights into the participation of women in the nineteenth-century magazine industry.

Ledbetter explores themes and patterns of poetry publication in a variety of women's periodicals published throughout the Victorian era using taste, style and the significance of poetry to advance our understanding of women's lives in the nineteenth century.

Focusing on the historical development of the British women's magazine, this book begins with descriptions of different kinds of magazines. This is followed by an exploration of elements that made up the mix of ingredients and a comprehensive listing.

The late Victorian period brought a radical change in cultural attitudes toward middle-class women and work. Anxiety over the growing disproportion between women and men in the population, combined with an awakening desire among young women for personal and financial freedom, led progressive thinkers to advocate for increased employment opportunities. The major stumbling block was the persistent conviction that middle-class women - "ladies" - could not work without relinquishing their social status. Through media reports, public lectures, and fictional portrayals of working women, From Spinster to Career Woman traces advocates' efforts to alter cultural perceptions of women, work, class, and the ideals of womanhood. Focusing on the archetypal figures of the hospital nurse and the typewriter, Arlene Young analyzes the strategies used to transform a job perceived as menial into a respected profession and to represent office work as progressive employment for educated women. This book goes beyond a standard examination of historical, social, and political realities, delving into the intense human elements of a cultural shift and the hopes and fears of young women seeking independence. Providing new insights into the Victorian period, From Spinster to Career Woman captures the voices of ordinary women caught up in the frustrations and excitements of a new era.

'This book should be regarded as rescue work. It salvages from pre-Victorian periodicals from the limbo of forgotten publications, and exhumes from long undisturbed sources a curious collection of women who, at a time when it was considered humiliating for a gentlewoman to earn money, contrived to support themselves by writing, editing, or publishing... sometimes even supporting husbands and children as well...The women who emerge make a motley gallery; but over the years that I have been getting to know them, they have won my respectful affection. More, indeed. To me they are all heroines...'Alison Adburgham, from her ForewordMagazines addressed to women have a long history in English, and have been subject to condescension for just as long. Alison Adburgham's groundbreaking volume, first published in 1972, rescues the so-called 'scribbling female' from such scorn, not least by documenting just how hard was the struggle for women writers to live by the pen.