Women making news: gender and the women's periodical press in Britain
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uike doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400402
Women making news: gender and the women’s periodical press in Britain Michelle Elizabeth Tusan; University of Illinois Press, Champaign, IL, USA, 2005, 320p, ISBN 0-252-03015-X, $45 (Hbk, in USD)
The story of the women’s advocacy press in Britain may be one of ‘a series of failed experiments’ (p. 243). Yet Michelle Tusan’s analysis of these repeated efforts is not in vain, as it adds depth to our understandings of the connections between activist women from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century. It documents the persistent attempts made by women to create an imagined community of their own through the printed word. It also traces the real-world development of the women’s press as an industry and alternative infrastructure, which took advantage of new technologies and modes of economic organization book reviews
feminist review 88 2008
175
such as vertical integration. The focus on the industry and its product as discursive institutions also contributes to women’s history by showing, for example, that there was a growth in the number of newspapers and periodicals for women during the First World War, not the patriotic diminution posited by much historical literature. The first five chapters centre on the women’s advocacy press before the end of the First World War, leaving just one chapter on the interwar period. Each chapter of the book is grounded in its historical context, in terms of the journalism market as well as gender and laws in society. The bulk of the book traces the origins of the women’s political press as a business, the mutual aid networks that women built, their public interventions in the representation of women – notably around the ‘New Woman’ debate, their contribution to the Edwardian liberal imperial concept of Britishness and their negotiations between critiquing and supporting the state during wartime. A number of common threads emerge in terms of both issues and organization. Tusan provides evidence of the development of a discourse of political womanhood, such as a set of concerns, for example, employment, education, suffrage and the welfare of women and children, that the advocacy press legitimated as ‘women’s issues’. Within this discourse, certain behaviours which were proscribed by mainstream gender ideology, such as selling women’s newspapers in the street, were important to the individual becoming a female activist, and as such were mythologized by the very papers she read and sold. The central characterization of this woman activist was distinctly white – publications which looked beyond British borders did so in a similarly imperial spirit as their male counterparts and were much concerned with ‘civilizing’ missions. However, a small number of titles for the British working class woman persisted in attempting to represent their own point of view, even if their leaderships still tended to come from higher classes – Sylvia Pankhurst’s Dreadnought being a case in point. The industry experimented with hybrid forms of economic maintenance
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