Women, Work, and Periodical Literature

Speaker: Margaret Higonnet (University of Connecticut)

As Edmund Birch states, periodical literature including both newspapers and magazines underwent enormous growth in the mid-19C, in part because of technological innovations such as lithography, the Mergenthaler linotype press, and photographic reproduction, and in part because of the expansion of education, especially among women. While creating his machine Mergenthaler noted down, "more books — more education for all.” My short intervention here speculates on the question how these transformations were linked to the emergence of new bodies of authors and readerships, specifically including women. Periodicals also required fresh fodder, and thus generated a revenue stream, however modest, for women writers who were entering into this new public arena. But why would women’s entry into the literary marketplace be linked to the practices of realism? That, at least, is the premise of the fourth chapter in Ellen Moers’s classic study, Literary Women . While money and jobs seemed “vulgar” for readers such as Stael and Emerson, they offered thematic concerns linked to “realism” for literary women from Austen onward.

Many of the women writers who have been considered realists and who represented their own art as realistic were also journalists who published essays and reviews as well as fiction on those platforms. Both journalism and female labor figure prominently in their fiction. Henry James considered the connection to journalism to be a key for some women writers and their practice of potentially “indecent” realism about social lowlife. Examples we might consider include Elizabeth Gaskell, George Eliot, George Sand, Rebecca Harding Davis, Louisa May Alcott, Fanny Fern and Matilde Serao. A striking example of a periodical platform that enabled the intersection of women’s industrial labor, journalism and fiction is the Lowell Offering (1840-1845, 1848-1850), a monthly collection of essays, poetry and fiction published by workers in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts. One of my hypotheses will be that women’s traditional gendered assignments ostensibly confined them to the domestic arena, but also licensed and even fostered the expression of their moral ideals and reformist activism through documentary strategies in their writing. Periodicals, with their mix of reportage, satire, fiction, and essays broke down generic boundaries. That blurring of boundaries might even explain the elusive narrative structures of some realist writing.