1st Edition

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

By Margaret Beetham Copyright 1996
    256 Pages
    by Routledge

    254 Pages
    by Routledge

    Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?
    A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female.
    A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read

    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;

    Biography

    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).