Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x The Feminist Periodical Press: Women, Periodical Studies, and Modernity Barbara Green* University of Notre Dame Abstract The study of feminist periodical culture is playing an increasingly important role in the larger fields of modernist periodical studies and of feminist or womens print culture. Treated as important objects of study in their own right and for their own sake, the feminist periodicals of the early twentieth century suffrage papers, avant-garde feminist journals, feminist literary reviews and more give researchers a glimpse into the intersection of gender and discourses of modernity. Feminist periodicals embed literary texts plays, short stories, poems as well as book and theater reviews in the context of economic and political discussions, personal journalism, investigative journalism and advertisements to highlight connections between Edwardian feminist literature and the central issues for feminism the vote, imperialism, socialism, womens professional labor, and womens engagement with commodity culture. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Britain saw the creation and rapid expansion of the field of feminist journalism movement and advo- cacy papers, avant-garde periodicals, literary reviews aimed at feminist readers, and more. 1 An investigation of feminist periodical culture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century gives researchers access to the rich and varied literary output of the British feminist movement. For some writers and artists, the gender struggles of the new age signaled new possibilities for the arts. For others, the new age of impassioned and politicized artistic work pointed out the necessary and complex connec- tions between propaganda and aesthetics. In 1908, for example, in the pages of the Womens Social and Political Unions suffrage paper, Votes for Women, May Sinclair wrote that the future of Art lay in the hands of the women and that [t]he coming generation will . . . witness a finer art, a more splendid literature than has been seen since the Elizabethan Age (211). Three years later, G. L. Harding pondered the relationship of propa- ganda and literature in the pages of The Freewoman. Harding wrote that we seem to be feeling toward something like honour. Never was a large civilised community, either artistically or politically, more conscious of itself than is ours to-day (77). The serials Votes for Women and The 192 The Feminist Periodical Press 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd Freewoman are only two of a large number of feminist periodicals which should capture the attention of researchers: between the 1850s and the 1930s, nearly 150 feminist periodicals were published in Britain (Tusan 1). Time and Tide provided a consistent window on the literary scene of the interwar years, and published work by Winifred Holtby, Vera Brittain, and others. The Hour and the Woman edited by Teresa Billinton-Greig and Maude Fitzherbert, published Billington-Greigs own stories and essays, work by Cicely Hamilton and an essay by Ford Madox Ford (then Heuffer). Suffrage was such a central topic in the popular culture of the Edwardian era that a high-class monthly illustrated magazine devoted to the lighter side of the votes for women movement was launched in 1909 promising The Best Artists, The Best Writers, and The Best of Everything, though The Suffragist did not live to produce more than one issue (Suffragist 1139). The suffrage paper Votes for Women published short stories, poems, brief plays, sketches and both book and theater reviews, featuring the work of Edwardian feminist writers such as Christopher St. John, Cecily Hamilton, Evelyn Sharp, Elizabeth Robins, May Sinclair, Gertrude Colemore and others. 2 It is not, however, the fact of the authors of literary texts, known or little-known, who published in these periodicals that should make femi- nist papers important for researchers working on gender and modern literary cultures. It is instead the ways in which feminist periodicals function as unique texts, compelling in their juxtapositions of diverse and eye-catching materials, that yields a glimpse into the cultures of modernity. Feminist papers during this period generally included both literary materials and cultural materials (theater reviews, book reviews, etc.) within the rich context of economic writings, political writings, notes on meetings and political strategies, investigative journalism, interviews, histories, polemical writings, essays on fashion, cartoons, and other materials. In addition, feminist periodicals also often offered a rich assortment of advertisements that catered to the independent feminist modern woman and provide a glimpse into the lives of women addressed by commercial culture. Votes for Women, for example, a paper fully embedded in the commodity culture of modernity, included advertisements for cigarettes, furs, soaps, dresses, furniture, in addition to advertisements for feminist presses and periodicals. Its cartoons, attention-getting headlines and fonts, use of spectacular photographs, all worked to make the paper, as text, a complex and open blending of image and discourse. And, as Maria DiCenzo notes, advertisements for reading materials, when read in relation to advertisements for services and publications, classified columns, announcements/notices, and reviews yield a fuller picture of how women lived, worked, and what they read (Militant Distribution 118). For example, an advertisement for The Womans Press (the WSPUs press and suffrage shop located on Charing Cross Road) lists books by Cicely Hamilton, Christopher St. John, Elizabeth Sharp, Olive Schreiner, Bernard Shaw, along with pamphlets 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Feminist Periodical Press 193 and leaflets by suffrage activists and supporters, an edition of the suffrage anthem, The March of the Women, composed by Dame Ethel Smyth, and badges, brooches, buckles, bags, and leather novelties in the colours of the union (Womans Press 436). 3 With the exciting development of recent scholarly studies such as Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain by Michelle Tusan and The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century by Lucy Delap, in addition to critical articles on individual figures or journals by Mary Chapman, Maria DiCenzo, John Mercer and others, a special issue of the academic journal International Journal of Womens Studies devoted to the feminist press and feminist media, and an important three-volume facsimile collection of original source materials edited by Lucy Delap, Maria DiCenzo, and Leila Ryan, it can be said that the feminist periodical press is once again making news. 4 Of interest to scholars of media studies, media history, womens history, and those engaged in feminist literary study, this emerging subfield is characterized by a diversity of methodologies coming from very different disciplines. Yet, like the larger field of periodical studies recently described by Sean Latham and Robert Scholes in the pages of PMLA, the study of feminist periodical culture is benefiting from interdisciplinary inquiry and is now able to explore the nature of the feminist periodical in its own right and for its own sake. Just as periodicals in general are increasingly being appreciated as autonomous objects of study, as texts requiring new methodologies and new types of collaborative investigation, so are feminist periodicals increasingly seen as significant and complex texts (Latham and Scholes 518). 5 This turn toward the study of feminist periodicals is a development that should be of great interest to literary scholars involved in studies of modernism, modernity, and feminist literary study. In the following pages I will outline some of the important theoretical areas of inquiry coming out of scholarly work on the feminist periodical press that will be of particular interest to literary critics working at the intersection of gender and modernity: 1) descriptions of the workings of the feminist public sphere; 2) the relationship between feminism and the varied literary and cultural movements of modernity including, but not limited to, literary modernism and the feminist avant-garde; and 3) the study of womens experience of modernity. Though much new important work on the feminist press concerns American journals or nineteenth- century periodicals, and much important additional scholarship explores the Anglo-American womens press or addresses modernism directly through the lens of periodical culture, I will be mainly concerned here with the feminist periodical press in Britain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 6 And though the study of the feminist periodical press is challenging the way media history and media studies organize themselves, and is contributing greatly to the field of womens history, I will be limiting my comments to the ways in which the field of feminist 194 The Feminist Periodical Press 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd periodical studies offers not just exciting new source materials for literary critics, but also requires the development of new critical questions and methodologies for feminist literary studies. 7 The beginnings of the feminist periodical press in Britain are generally traced to the late 1850s when the women of the Langham Place Circle launched the English Womans Journal and the 1860s when serious journals [took] positions on feminist issues and target[ed] women as a principle audience (Levine 294, 295). Central to the history of the feminist press is the establishment in 1860 of Emily Faithfuls all womens printing press named the Victoria Press which forged connections between the construction for new venues for the discussion of womens issues and the development of new professional opportunities for women (Tusan 403). Rather than offering a coherent single vision of advancement for women, nineteenth-century feminist journalism was characterized by its diversity of aims, interests, and approaches. According to one team of researchers, the Victorian feminist press was supported by a close relationship between feminism and moral ideas associated with nineteenth-century British social reform. Working for the interests of social justice, became a way of working for womens advancement: for many feminists the promotion of broader social justice issues through the periodical press, such as public health, universal education and child welfare, also served as a mechanism for promoting the interests of women (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 146). In addition, the development of the feminist periodical press allowed for a valuable means of literary, artistic, social and political expression (147). The development of the feminist press in the nineteenth century surely owed some of its success to the rapid expansion of women into the field of journalism generally during this period. 8 By the end of the nineteenth century, women journalists had their own professional organization, and a number of professional advice books such as Arnold Bennetts Journalism for Women were available on the market. The rise of the New Woman phenomenon at the end of the century was also deeply associated with the periodical press in the cultural imagination, so much so that new publications would often market their newness through affiliating themselves with the image of modern femininity on the one hand (Stetz 273), and anxieties about the rise of New Journalism were tellingly conflated with the rise of the New Woman on the other (Beetham Periodicals 234). Within this setting, the periodical press became an ideal site for debates about gender; as a medium the periodical press most readily articulates the unevennesses and reciprocities of evolving gender ideologies and offers material realization, generically and formally, of that dynamic and relational cultural process (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 2). In the early years of the twentieth century the feminist periodical press experienced a rapid expansion, fueled in part by the proliferation of movement papers which served as organs of various womens suffrage organizations: the Womens Social and Political Unions Votes for Women, 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Feminist Periodical Press 195 the Womens Freedom Leagues The Vote, the Nation Union of Womens Suffrage Societies Common Cause and many others. The feminist periodical press from the beginning of the century through the interwar years was extremely diverse in terms not only of aims (the single issue approach that defined many movement papers or a broad consideration of gender issues that defined the radical or avant-garde feminist press), but also feminist stance (militant or constitutional, radical or traditionalist), market (a literary review priced for an upper-class reader or a penny paper aimed at a broad readership), and financing. Circulation too varied widely, an Edwardian avant-garde paper like The Freewoman had a relatively small circulation, while Votes for Women attained a circulation of 50,000. A quick glance at David Doughan and Denise Sanchezs important resource, Feminist Periodicals 18551984: An Annotated Critical Bibliography of British, Irish, Commonwealth and International Titles, gives a sense of the range and importance of the feminist press, for they describe not only the movement papers of large national organizations, but also branch papers, papers affiliated with womens religious organizations, temperance papers, feminist literary reviews and more. 9 And the substantial three-volume collection Feminist and the Periodical Press 19001918 gives a sense of the range of opinions and topics considered in the feminist press: from international feminism, to race and empire, domestic issues, the vote, intersections of socialism and feminism, literary and cultural matters, the changing nature of femininity itself, and more. The feminist papers during the early twentieth century were sometimes tested by and sometimes benefited from the dramatic changes that characterized the press revolutions of the late nineteenth century. The much declaimed modern commercialization of the press was closely associated with the emergence of the woman reader, so that the snappy bright style, briefer pieces, entrance of personal journalism such as interviews and human- interest pieces, and the use of illustrations in advertisements, particularly fashion advertisements which the Daily Mail placed on its front page, became signs of the feminization of the press (Bingham 32). What was often seen as the loss of the presss educative function and the substitution of entertainment as a goal, was widely read as a gendered cultural shift. 10 According to Adrian Bingham, the Northcliffe Revolution brought sexual difference to the forefront of popular journalism with the development of womens pages and womens magazines all designed for the woman reader (27). Placing feminist periodicals in the context of this larger shift in print culture highlights the feminist advocacy papers oppositional position, a point made by Michelle Tusan who links the feminist paper to the inheritance of the radical press and counters the notion that the radical press faded with the advancement of the commercial press. It also places in stark relief those sensational techniques and commercial strategies that some feminist papers liberally borrowed from the commercial press and put to quite different purposes. 196 The Feminist Periodical Press 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd From the beginning, the early-twentieth-century feminist periodical press was aware of itself as occupying a specific niche, a position different from and often marginal to the mainstream press on the one hand and the offerings of the womens press, on the other. Frederick Pethick Lawrence, co-editor of the WSPUs Votes for Women, saw the feminist press fulfilling a unique role for its readers: Do the daily newspapers cater sufficiently for this new class of readers; do they attempt to give the womans point of view? I think there can be no doubt that the answer to this question must be in the negative. The ordinary London daily newspapers, with their almost exclusively male staff, devote by far the greater part of their space to questions which are of special interest to men, and, quite regardless of the fact that their mere fashion page is not sufficient to satisfy the large number of potential women readers, they exclude from their papers the new point of view. This has been undoubtedly a bad thing for women, but it is also an exceedingly foolish and suicidal policy for the papers themselves. (841) Similarly, the editors of The Vote, official organ of the Womens Freedom League, positioned their paper between the mainstream press and the womens press: There would appear to be an opening for a weekly paper appealing primarily to the increasing class of educated women who have intellectual, industrial, or public interests. The number of such women grows daily larger. . . . The general aim [of this paper] will be to fill in the gaps left on the one hand by the so-called womens papers, and on the other by the daily newspapers. In the former attention is mainly directed towards the frivolous, personal and material aspects of life: dress, amusements, society gossip, cookery, &c.; in the latter the interests of women are dealt with either on an inadequate scale or not at all. (Proposed 1) Both Frederick Pethick Lawrence and the editors of The Vote noticed the same dynamic in modern print culture, that while women were being invited into the pages of the daily press, they had been sequestered into the womens pages, their distance from the public sphere . . . reinscibed (Bingham 28). At the same time that the daily papers imagined their readers as women, they often papered over the news that was the innovative campaigning of suffragettes and suffragists. John Mercer has shown, for example, how the WSPUs paper Votes for Women evolved to challenge and compete with the press by collecting and publishing extracts from the mainstream press to reveal and counter anti-suffrage press bias (Mercer Making the News 188, 191). The feminist press provided an alternate sphere or space for the promotion of feminist ideas outside of the movement and for the circulation of important information, the fostering of debate, and the cultivation of feminist ideas within the movement. By the time the deliberately avant-garde and independent journal The Freewoman was launched by Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe in 1911, feminist print culture had established itself through cross-referencing, cross-pollination, 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Feminist Periodical Press 197 and critical commentary on other journals or feminist activities to such an extent that The Freewomans editors could proclaim analysis of feminism itself as its mission. 11 For editors Marsden and Gawthorpe, The Freewoman would lead feminist periodical culture to become self-aware: The publication of The Freewoman marks an epoch. It marks the point at which Feminism in England ceases to be impulsive and unaware of its own features, and becomes definitely self-conscious and introspective. For the first time, feminists themselves make the attempt to reflect the feminist movement in the mirror of thought. That this can be done, argues at once the strength of the movement, and the conscious knowledge of that strength. (Notes 3) This self-conscious and specific journalistic field of feminist inquiry and debate is productively read in much recent scholarship as a feminist public sphere or a feminist counterpublic. Following Nancy Frasers revision of the Habermasian formulation, a number of studies of the feminist periodical press stress such a counterpublic which is subaltern, a parallel discursive arena[s] where members of subordinated social groups invent and circulate counter discourses (N. Fraser 81). Michelle Tusan, for example, traces the emergence of counterpublic spheres or multiple spaces for public discourse in the feminist advocacy papers of the turn of the last century (108). For Tusan, the periodical became both a real and imagined space for female intellectual and political community (2). Similarly, Maria DiCenzo uses the example of the suffrage paper Votes for Women to put pressure on the notion that women were necessarily excluded from the Habermasian public sphere by focusing on the ways in which feminist editors viewed their paper as a mechanism for influencing public opinion and entering into the wider public debate: Votes for Women demonstrated that it was possible to gain access to the public sphere from which women were formally excluded through the denial of citizenship rights in spite of the rising costs of production and managed to maintain a political stance while negotiating a market system. (Militant Distribution 115, 117) Drawing on the work of Nancy Fraser and Rita Felski, DiCenzo argues that Votes for Women worked both to provide a space for alternative discourses and identity formations (a counterpublic sphere) and to engage in and broaden the field of larger debate (11718). In addition to placing feminist debate at the heart of modern democracy, the emphasis of public sphere theory on both the disinterested rational discourse of citizens and the social spaces of rational-critical debate have offered a rich vocabulary for describing the function of a variety of feminist institutions: tea-rooms, open-air meetings, at-homes, deputations, feminist reading rooms, womens papers, womens presses, and the ritual of street-hawking. 12 As Tusan puts it, the expansion of . . . associational networks encouraged the growth of a womens press industry, in part by providing a space where gender-based social and economic agendas could develop in an independent political forum. Like the 198 The Feminist Periodical Press 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd coffeehouse sociability that men had enjoyed since the eighteenth century, womens clubs offered women a place to discuss news and contemporary events. (62) The idea of a feminist public sphere is a particularly attractive approach for literary critics not only because it highlights the ways in which feminist print culture was embedded in the rich cultural spaces and activities of feminism such as bookshops and clubs, but because it allows scholars to trace the rich variety of cultural forms and modes through which feminist literary and cultural works articulated themselves. For literary scholarship, this means a productive decentering of the term modernism to describe the literary activities of the feminist movement. Indeed, feminist periodical culture can be seen to promote or showcase literary work that is modernist (Chapman) or proto-modernist (Miller), avant-garde (Lyon, Delap), appropriating popular forms (Park Suffrage Fiction), or like suffrage literature itself essentially hybrid (Norquay and Park 304) depending upon where one looks. Much current work on feminist periodicals conducted by literary critics continues the project of unsettling dominant definitions of literary modernism and expanding the field. For example, Mary Chapman complicates our understanding of the evolution of literary modernism by placing suffragist Alice Duer Millers quoting poems which borrowed liberally from anti-suffrage and suffrage rhetoric, well before the experiments in quotation and appropriation that characterized the modernist poems of Eliot and Pound (80). Similarly, Ann Ardis locates in feminist Beatrice Hastingss many essays for the New Age, an interrogation of Pounds early articulations of the tenants of modernism which were themselves published in the journal. These two scholarly essays continue in some ways the work of Mark Morrison, who placed the feminist periodicals Votes for Women and The Freewoman in conversation with modernist little magazines such as The Little Review and with literary reviews such as The English Review to establish a shared modernist investment in the idea of the public sphere. A different take on the cultural scene of the Edwardian period focuses not on the debates concerning the rise of literary modernism, but on the existence of a rich feminist avant-garde. Modernists are generally familiar with The Egoist which, under the guidance of Ezra Pound as literary editor, helped introduce literary modernism to its readership. But literary critics are often less familiar with The Egoists precursors, The Freewoman and The New Freewoman, feminist avant-garde periodicals which under the editorship of Dora Marsden and Mary Gawthorpe (and then Marsden alone) circulated through an active progressive and international feminist community. With the publication of Lucy Delaps The Feminist Avant- Garde, modernists can no longer overlook the significance of The Freewoman and The New Freewoman which played a central role in developing an extensive intellectual formation, a feminist network that was highly influential in defining and shaping the politics of feminism for the entire 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Feminist Periodical Press 199 twentieth century (3). Publishing work by Rebecca West, Teresa Billington- Greig, Richard Aldington, H. D., Havelock Ellis, H. G. Wells, and others, The Freewoman and The New Freewoman developed a stance that was individualist, rather than focused on the collective, and that figured advancement in terms of internal transformations rather than the acquisi- tion of new civic rights from the state. 13 While suffrage papers were silent or conservative on complex issues such as free love or homosexuality, the editors of The Freewoman saw themselves as leaders. Lucy Delaps The Feminist Avant-Garde shifts our attention away from discussions of literary experiment to the experimental lifestyles and debates about the nature of femininity itself that invigorated the discussion groups, networks, and periodical writings of advanced feminists. Like the cultural avant-garde, advanced feminism organized itself around the idealization of originality, rejection of forebears, and sense of rupture with the past (4). 14 The periodical, argues Delap, was central to the evolution of what was referred to as vanguard or modern feminism during the Edwardian Period, for feminism was closely bound up with its representation in print to be a feminist was very centrally a reading experience. As a key venue for debate and discussion, periodicals formed the site in which feminism was most commonly enunciated and observed (4). It is through the periodical culture of Edwardian advanced feminism that Delap is able to locate an extensive network of feminist thinkers that connected women on both sides of the Atlantic. A study of transatlantic print culture, Delaps book explores the intense cross-pollinations between periodicals such as the U.S. publications The Masses, The Little Review, The Forerunner, British publications such as The New Age and groups such as the New York womens luncheon club, Heterodoxy or the London-based Freewoman Discussion Circle. Indeed, it its ability to connect readers across national borders, it is the periodical that enables and allows for the construction of transatlantic communities, an insight that should be stimulating to literary scholars interested in tracing the networks and group formations that characterize the cultural movements of the early twentieth century (78). Other work on feminist periodical culture or literary culture displaces literary modernism and the avant-garde from the center of investigation altogether. Glenda Norquay and Sowon Park, for example, have argued that literary material of the suffrage movement cannot be explained within the framework of literary modernism, or the considerable shadow of Modernist aesthetics, in part because generic diversity is one of the most salient and significant aspects of the literature of this period (302, 304). Arguing that suffrage texts are essentially hybrid, Norquay and Park remind us that we employ too narrow a framework when we look exclusively for examples of modernist experiment or limit ourselves to the naturalism/ modernism divide. Borrowing liberally from established forms the Bildungsroman, Romantic fiction, anti-romance, problem-plays, New Woman novels, sensational fiction, adventure narratives and roman-a-clefs 200 The Feminist Periodical Press 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd suffrage texts benefit greatly from the kind of genre study that hasnt yet been dominant in the field. 15 Though not specifically devoted to the periodical press, Norquay and Parks work is instructive in its concentration upon the diversity of feminist literary materials. Attention to the periodical press can only heighten our appreciation of this diversity, since the periodical is essentially a mixed form, fractured and heterogeneous, as Margaret Beetham has written. Beethams argument regarding the development of womens magazines in A Magazine of Her Own, can be applied with great profit to even those suffrage papers that seemingly organize themselves with discipline to a single issue. For just as the magazine itself developed in the two centuries of its history as a miscellany, that is a form marked by variety of tone and constituent parts, so has the feminist paper organized itself around a diverse set of topics and discourses that together recognize the complex nature of the feminist reader (Beetham, Magazine 1). Even movement papers, which are decidedly more specific in their focus than, say, an advanced feminist journal like The Freewoman, are not mono-vocal or characterized by a single focus, but employ a range of materials, discourses, and rhetorical approaches to explore feminist issues. Refreshingly, then, feminist periodical culture necessarily changes our focal point from modernism as the centering focus of literary study to the gendered cultures of modernity. As Latham and Scholes have argued in the case of periodical culture more generally, feminist periodicals reward a cultural studies methodology which explores the literary in relation to other aspects of modernist culture. As a fluid and heterogeneous form, feminist periodicals embed the literary in the rich mixed medium of economic writings, political journalism, interviews, personal journalism, information regarding the business of political meetings, marches, and meeting minutes, book and theater reviews, articles concerning fashion, and more. If a researcher is looking for examples of the gendered discourses concerning modernity, or for representations of womens diverse experiences of modernity, feminist periodical culture offers an exciting resource. 16 Indeed, as the introductory section of Feminism and the Periodical Press shows, a good deal of feminist debate during the Edwardian period organized itself around the definitions of the terms modern and woman, and around their relationship to one another. Pinning the new age to a new idea of femininity, feminists explored the idea that a new century made possible the articulation of a new revolutionary kind of femininity, and that the revolutions of modernity were typified by the revolution in womanhood. For example, Feminism and the Periodical Press reprints an essay written by Teresa Billington-Greig for the Contemporary Review entitled The Rebellion of Woman in which she wrote that [t]oday woman is in rebellion, and her rebellion is the fact of the age (1). The three-volume collection Feminism and the Periodical Press encourages study of feminist serials and suggests just how profitable such work can be. Organized to isolate debates and conversations around key themes that 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Feminist Periodical Press 201 preoccupied feminist thinkers between 1900 and 1918, these volumes allow us to see difference rather than consensus, diversity of approach rather than a singular vision, in the Edwardian feminist press. The materials here are arranged not only to target issues such as Race and Empire, Women, Law and Citizenship, The Professions, Work and Education, but to suggest through conflict and conversation how complex such topics were. For example, a section devoted to Redefining Public and Domestic Space juxtaposes material concerning womens movement into the public sphere such as coverage of suffrage marches, with materials that complicate the idea of the private sphere such as an announcement of the Woman Suffrage Partys housewarming at new headquarters or discussions of womens clubs and Womens Lodging Houses. The inclusion of promo- tional materials, including as well some advertisements, yields important materials for scholars working with the commercial and promotional cultures of modernity. The world that supported and made possible the vibrant print culture of the suffrage movement provides rich material for any study of the circulation, promotion, and sale of literary materials in the modern marketplace of ideas. Michelle Tusans Women Making News, in its careful examination of the publication, circulation, marketing and promotion of feminist papers, reveals how exciting a field this may be for students of modern marketing culture. A wide range of approaches to the problem of producing oppositional feminist papers during the second half of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth century were taken up, from depending upon the support of an editor/patron to the formation of corporate organizations, from the adoption of New Journalist commercial strategies to the creation of informal associational networks (Tusan 2). Central to the innovative practices of the womens press was the cultivation of vertical integration strategies; the creation of women- run printing enterprises strengthened womens advocacy networks by involving more women in the practical aspects of social reform (41). At the same time that the womens press used volunteers and feminist networks to produce, promote, and circulate journals, newsletters, and papers, many publications also exploited the commercial techniques of the New Journalism, binding radical networks with commercial strategies. One of Tusans largest contributions lies in her ability to make the case for a successful alternative presence in the public sphere just when many histories of the newspaper press mark its decline. This continued presence of an alternative and critical press which sometimes operated through a blending of radical and commercial strategies, as in the case of Votes for Women, Tusan points out, challenges the idea that the modern mainstream press was characterized primarily by a commercialism which silenced oppositional voices and undermined the educative role of the press. There are challenges to the study of feminist periodical culture as well, for the feminist serial necessarily puts pressure on the centrality of authorship 202 The Feminist Periodical Press 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd as a central focus of scholarly investigation. While feminist periodical culture certainly provides substantial resources for the recovery work that has long supported feminist literary criticism and greatly expanded the canon of early twentieth-century women writers, periodical culture in general imagines authorship as a collective rather than a singular enterprise (Brake 18) and often requires or promotes pseudonomous or anonymous publication (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 279). Rather than focusing literary study on the creative work of one figure, periodical culture can encourage our study of networks, communities, debates, and conversations organized around some of the key shifts and changes of modernity. Indeed, it is no accident that two new publications on feminist periodical culture, Tusans Women Making News and Delaps The Feminist Avant-Garde, in both method and theory prioritize the idea of the feminist network. This is just the (tantalizing) beginning, for as the special issue of Womens Studies International Forum devoted to early womens movements, print media and digitalization suggests, a whole new set of investigative priorities and methodologies will become possible once digitalized editions of important feminist serials are made available. 17 And these new materials will encourage and foster networks of feminist researchers to explore their potential. 18 Short Biography Barbara Green is an Associate Professor of English and a Senior Fellow in Gender Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Spectacular Confessions: Autobiography, Performative Activism, and the Sites of Suffrage 19051938. She is currently working on a study of feminist periodical culture and everyday life. Notes * Correspondence address: Department of English, University of Notre Dame, 356 OShaughnessy Hall, Notre Dame, IN 46556, United States. Email: green.15@nd.edu. 1 Lucy Delap in The Feminist Avant-Garde shows how the term feminist arose in the Edwardian period to describe a specifically radical, progressive or avant-garde stance. She differentiates, importantly, between the womens movement and the feminist avant-garde of the Edwardian period. The three-volume collection of original materials from all branches of the periodical press associated with the womens movement in the early twentieth-century takes the title Feminism and the Periodical Press, and uses the term feminism as we commonly do to describe the womens movement. Since my focus will be on a broad range of materials related to the womens movement, and for simplicitys sake, I will use the terms feminism and womens movement, for the most part, interchangeably. 2 Feminist literature of this period, of course, cannot be limited to that which appeared in periodicals. The suffrage movement, to take one example, generated a rich and diverse body of novels, plays, short stories, autobiographical sketches, comic writings, poems, essays which sometimes appeared in the suffrage papers of the Edwardian period, and sometimes did not. Some of this material has been anthologized: see Norquay Voices and Votes, Green and Chapman in Scott, Nelson, Marlow. The team of Katharine Cockin, Glenda Norquay and Sowon Park 2008 The Author Literature Compass 6/ 1 (2009): 191205, 10.1111/j.1741-4113.2008.00595.x Journal Compilation 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd The Feminist Periodical Press 203 have made full texts of important suffrage novels, plays, and short fiction available in six volumes through Routledges History of Feminism Series. See Womens Suffrage Literature. 3 For more on the Womens Press, see Murray. For suffrage shops, see Mercer Commercial Places. 4 In addition to these important sources, new work in the wider field of gender and periodical culture should be of interest. See Fraser, Green, and Johnston on gender and the nineteenth- century periodical; Beetham, Magazine of Her Own? On the womens magazine; Jean Lutes on American women journalists; Ann Ardis on Beatrice Hastings and The New Age in Diaglogics of Modernism(s). Margaret Beetham and Ann Heilmanns co-edited collection New Woman Hybridities includes a section on New Women and periodical culture. 5 Maria DiCenzo, especially in her essays Militant Distribution and Feminist Media and History, makes the case for studying feminist periodicals in their own right. 6 For new work on modernism and the periodical press, see Collier and Churchill. Susan Marek and Mark Morrissons books are essential reading on the topic. A new collection of essays considering modernism through the lens of periodical culture co-edited by Ardis and Collier is forthcoming. 7 For an example of how the study of the feminist press challenges the ways in which media history does its work, see DiCenzo, Feminist Media and History. 8 By the 1890s, then, the female journalist had well and truly come out. She had a professional association, in the form of the Society of Women Journalists, founded in 1894 by Joseph S. Wood, editor of the Gentlewoman, and she had a platform by virtue of her assured place in the pages of the periodical press (Fraser, Green, and Johnston 41). 9 In addition, see DiCenzo, Feminist Media and History, and Barbara Crawfords entry on newspapers and journals in The Womens Suffrage Movement for additional bibliographic materials. 10 See Lee on the loss of an educative function for the British press in the nineteenth century; Hampton for a complication of his views. 11 Lucy Delap argues that the Edwardian eras advanced feminist press was neither an outcome nor product of the womens movement, nor marginal to it, but instead was in dialogue with the womens movement throughout the Edwardian period. 12 For readings of feminist institutions in the public sphere, see Murray on the WSPUs Womens Press, DiCenzo Gutter on street selling feminist papers, Morrisson on the role of the periodical in the public sphere, Mercer Commercial Places on the suffrage shops, Tusan on the periodical press as constructing counterpublics. 13 In its later incarnation as The Egoist, the journals publication of literature by H. D., Joyce, Pound, Eliot, Lewis, and others has recently been read as an expression of [Marsdens] desire to align the journal closely with the literary avant-garde and typical of her well-known propensity for intellectual transformations ( Joannou 605). 14 Delaps work dovetails nicely with Janet Lyons earlier explorations of connections between the suffrage movement and the avant-garde. See Lyon, Militant Discourse. 15 Sowon Parks own essay on the popular fiction of the suffrage movement and the employment of the techniques of romantic fiction is one fine example of this kind of study. See Park, Suffrage Fiction. 16 I borrow these phrases from two key texts among many others that have shifted discussions of gender and modernism toward modernity: Rita Felskis The Gender of Modernity and Womens Experience of Modernity edited by Ann Ardis and Leslie Lewis. 17 See Latham for a detailed meditation on the new opportunities for scholarship made possible by the digital archive. 18 On the cultivation of networks of scholars for digital projects, see Latham and Scholes. For a theorization of virtual imagined communitites in relation to feminist periodical culture see Beetham, Periodicals. Works Cited Ardis, Ann. The Dialogics of Modernism(s) in the New Age. Modernism/Modernity 14.3 (2007): 40734. and Patrick Collier, eds. Transatlantic Print Culture, 18801940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms. 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