A Magazine of Her Own? : Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, 1800-1914

ISBN-13: 9780415141123 / Angielski / Miękka / 1996 / 256 str.

Margaret Beetham

Opis

The woman's magazine has been central to popular reading throughout the 20th century, but the history of the form has been almost completely neglected. How did it come to occupy this place? How did it develop its familiar elements - the agony aunt, the fashion plate, the repeated promise to transform the reader into a desirable woman? Did it empower or disempower readers in the process of defining themselves as gendered and sexual women? This study addresses a range of such questions as it charts the history of the British woman's magazine through the 19th century. It is simultaneously a chronological story, a set of detailed case studies, and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. The author argues that the two elements in the term woman's magazine are dynamically related. The magazine has been shaped by its association with women as readers; the meaning of femininities - whether of the domestic woman, the fashionable lady or the romancing girl - have been made in and through the magazine.

Spis treści

Chapter 1 Introduction; Part I The Making of the Magazine, 1800–50; Chapter 2 The ‘Fair Sex’ and the Magazine: The Early Ladies’ Journals; Chapter 3 The Queen, the Beauty and the Woman Writer; Chapter 4 Family and Mothers’ Magazines: The 1830s and 1840s; Part II The Beetons: The Domestic English Woman and the Lady, 1850–80; Chapter 5 The Beetons and the Englishwoman–s Domestic Magazine, 1852–60; Chapter 6 The Female Body and the Domestic Woman, 1860–80; Chapter 7 Re-Making the Lady: the Queen; Part III New Woman, New Journalism, the 1880s and 1890s; Chapter 8 The New Woman and the New Journalism; Chapter 9 Revolting Daughters, Girton Girls and Advanced Women; Chapter 10 Advancing into Commodity Culture; Part IV The Reinvention of the Domestic English Woman: Into the Twentieth Century; Chapter 11 Woman at Home: The Middle-Class Domestic Magazine and the Agony Aunt; Chapter 12 ‘Forward but not Too Fast’: the Advanced Magazine?; Chapter 13 Woman-Talk As Commodity: The Penny Domestic Magazine;

O autorze

Margaret Beetham teaches in the Department of English and History at the Manchester Metropolitan University, where she is Course Leader in the Women’s Studies MA programme. She is a co-author of Women’s Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman’s Magazine (1991).