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Eighteenth-Century Women's Magazines

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SOURCE: “Eighteenth-Century Women's Magazines,” in Women's Worlds: Ideology, Femininity and the Woman's Magazine, pp. 43-74. London: Macmillan, 1991.

[In the following essay, the authors discuss the nature of women-oriented periodicals in the eighteenth century.]

In 1745, a correspondent to The Female Spectator wrote seeking advice from its editorial board on the respective merits of three suitors for her hand. Bellamonte opens her letter with the declaration:

Dear Female Sage, I have a vast opinion of your Wit; and you may be convinced of it by my asking your Advice;—a compliment, I assure you, I never paid to my own Mother, or to any other Soul besides yourself.

(vol. 2, p. 105)

Here, it appears, we have a form and tone instantly recognisable to the twentieth-century reader of women's magazines. The magazine functions as surrogate ‘family’, providing an intimate and private space for the discussion of issues to which even, or perhaps especially, a mother cannot be made privy. … Despite the striking continuity this early example of the ‘agony column’ illustrates, we will also seek to highlight and analyse significant differences in the history of the construction of a new genre directed at the woman reader.

The history of the women's magazine is intimately connected to a larger history of modern representations and discourses of femininity. Indeed the magazine for women only becomes possible with the emergence of a consensus, which we locate in the late seventeenth to early eighteenth century, that gender difference, rather than distinction of status or wealth, is the primary arbiter of social power for women. This is not to suggest that gender was not a significant register of social inequality prior to this period, but that it was at this historical moment that it came to be articulated as such. The history of modern patriarchy's construction of ‘the feminine’, and women's relationship, resistance and submission to that ideological construction, is, however, neither linear nor absolute. It is, rather, a history of struggle and contradiction. Women's magazines have, since their first appearance, registered and responded to such conflicts within ideologies of gender. In order to trace this history, we have chosen to consider a small number of influential publications in some detail. These we take to embody certain ‘key moments’ in the making of a genre. We concentrate on the dynamic process of exchange in the discourse of the women's magazine by which the genre is developed in relation to new ideological formations of femininity and, in turn, offers its female readers ways of negotiating and defining themselves in relation to those formations.

Any attempt to provide a material account of the readership of women's magazines before the mid twentieth century faces some specific problems. It is not easy to establish who bought, let alone actually read, many of the periodicals we discuss. Until the establishment of the Audit Bureau of Circulations in 1931 there was no central record of the gross circulation figures of periodical publications. We have very limited evidence, beyond the inevitably aggrandising claims of the magazines themselves, of the number of consumers—in the sense of purchasers—which any individual magazines commanded prior to this date. Even where publishers' figures and records are available they rarely indicate the ratio of men to women purchasers, or the different social classes to which men or women readers belonged. In late-twentieth-century Britain the majority of women's magazines are purchased over a shop counter. In previous centuries they were bought largely by subscription, a pattern still common in the United States. Where they do exist, early publishers' records, especially subscription lists, are therefore a potentially valuable source of information on the class and sex profiles of magazine readers of different historical periods. Here, too, difficulties arise however. Because men were the primary wage or salary earners it is more than likely that they would have subscribed to magazines on behalf of their wives or daughters.

If we seek to discover not just who bought but also who read these magazines, further problems emerge. Actual numbers of readers of magazines are notoriously hard to establish. This is because they command so many ‘hidden’ readers—those who do not subscribe to, or buy, the magazine, but have access to it by some other means. In the twentieth century these readers are most commonly other family members and friends, but in earlier centuries they would have included the domestic servants of those who could afford the full subscription. This potential for cross-class readership of the same magazine was increased by the fact that throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, periodicals appeared in bound annual volumes, as well as the weekly or monthly parts. With the establishment of lending libraries in the mid eighteenth century, those who could not afford the full cost of the magazine could borrow it for a minimal sum (Ellegard, 1957). More significantly, perhaps, the magazine was not always consumed in its original periodical form but rather under the same conditions as a single, double or triple decker novel. These factors, compounded with the absence of reliable market research or empirical data on readers and the separation of the ‘ideal’ or projected reader from the ‘actual’ or material reader, make readership figures and profiles in these earlier periods even more difficult to establish than those of modern magazines.

… [B]ecause women's magazines define their readers as ‘women’ they embody definitions of what it means to be a woman in a culture at any given historical moment. However, we know that a contemporary woman reader often does not feel she matches the image projected by the magazine. She may be ‘fat’ and forty, whereas the magazine defines femininity in terms of being slim and young; she may be childless, whereas the magazine defines mothering as central to womanliness. Furthermore, we know from market research that substantial numbers of men read women's magazines, which, of course, position them as women (Mintel, 1986). We must assume, then, that magazines of earlier periods functioned in a similar way in relation to their readers. We can only interpret them as evidence of the discursive constructions of femininity available to and normative in their period of publication, just as we do in relation to magazines of our own period.

Another constant is the magazine's continuing status as commodity. Moreover, its history has always been a smaller part of the growth of the print market as a whole. The magazine's methods of finance and distribution have, however, undergone significant changes through the centuries, as the last few paragraphs have made clear. There are other shifts we chart in the next two chapters. It was not until the mid nineteenth century that advertising became a crucial source of revenue for magazines; throughout the eighteenth century they were maintained on their sales figures alone. The introduction of advertising on a large scale in the magazine radically altered the appearance of the women's magazine as well as its normative representations of femininity. Likewise the growth of periodical publishing as an industry has led to increasing professionalisation and specialisation within the genre. Twentieth-century women's magazines thrive on the appearance of ‘amateurism’, particularly in the use of readers' ‘true-life stories’ and letters. Eighteenth-century magazines maintained themselves in reality by drawing upon their readers as an unpaid resource for material.

Another common phenomenon of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century periodical press which has altered is the power of the individual proprietor, publisher or editor. Unlike the newspaper barons of today, the press men of the past could combine the roles of editor, journalist, publisher and proprietor. This was true in all areas of the print industry, of course, but the fact that it was men who were likely to have the economic and discursive power in publishing has particular implications for magazines addressed to women. Some of the leading women's magazines were conceived, financed and published by one man as, for example, was George Robinson's Lady's Magazine (1770-1830). Samuel and Isabella Beeton's Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine (1852-79) offers an example of production by a husband and wife team but one in which the man played the leading public role. Male editors frequently wrote the bulk of the magazine under a variety of different, often female, personae. As late as the 1890s the ‘advanced’ magazine, Woman, was being written in large part by its editor, Arnold Bennett, who adopted a series of pseudonyms including ‘Barbara’, ‘Marjorie’ and ‘Marguerite’. Most modern women's magazines, in contrast, are edited by women although a few, such as Woman, make much of the persona of a sympathetic male ‘editor’. However, aside from the interesting question of how editorial persona functions to establish readers' relationship with the magazine, the modern editor's role cannot be equated with the economic and ideological power these early male ‘magnates’ wielded over the content, style and structure of their magazines.

The shape of the women's magazine has, then, been dictated both by changing ideological conceptions of the status and condition of women and by general, not specifically gendered, causes—such as changes in print technology, government intervention in the press, the emergence of other new forms of periodical publication and improvements in marketing techniques. Such changes are not, however, without their effects in the construction of modern gender ideologies; indeed the dominance of the modern conceptual division of women into consumers and men into producers could not have been possible without these sorts of technological advance under capitalism. The history of the development of the women's magazine as a commodity is also the history of the construction of woman as consumer, and it is the peculiar and specific relation of these two factors that gives the women's magazine its distinct and separate place within the economic and ideological determinants of the publishing industry.

ADDRESSING WOMEN

On 27 February 1693 the first number of the Ladies' Mercury was published in London with a direction to its readers that:

All questions relating to Love etc., are desired to be sent in to the Latine-Coffee-House in Ave-Mary-Lane, to the Ladies' Society there, and we promise that they shall be weekly answered with all the Zeal and Softness becoming to the Sex. We likewise desire we may not be troubled with other Questions relating to Learning, Religion, etc.

The first magazine addressed exclusively to women, claiming female authorship and focusing entirely on issues designated as appropriate to ‘the Fair Sex’, had come into being, and not inappropriately it took the form of a ‘problem page’. The Ladies' Mercury was a spin-off publication from the highly successful question and answer periodical, the Athenian Mercury, brainchild of a maverick publisher named John Dunton. The Athenian entertained the public for six years from 1691 to 1697 with answers to ‘all manner of Nice and Curious Questions in Divinity, Physick, Law, Philosophy, History, Trade, Mathematick &c. … proposed by Either Sex’ (vol. 3, no. 19, 3 October 1691, Q.1). The Ladies' Mercury had a less auspicious history, surviving for only four short numbers. However, the Athenian continued to provide a fortnightly ‘women's page’ and, from the 1690s onwards, all new periodical publications seem to have felt obliged to address or placate their ‘fair readers’, while a number dedicated themselves wholly to the latter's interest.

Women's magazines did not develop as an adjunct to magazines addressed to men. It is our contention that the emergence of the early modern ‘magazine’ as a form went hand-in-hand with the development of a specific address to female readers as a definable ‘special interest’ group. From its first inception, in its earliest form as the single-essay periodical, the magazine's publishers and authors felt obliged to attract the attention of female readers by invoking their interests as discrete and important.

The periodical that, along with its successor the Spectator (1711-14), was to dominate magazine writing through the eighteenth century as a model of bourgeois taste and thinking, Joseph Addison's and Richard Steele's Tatler (1709-11), made, in its first number of Tuesday 12 April 1709, a clear commitment to female readers. The fictional author of the Tatler, an amorous and pompous elder statesman of the coffee-house named Isaac Bickerstaff, announced his resolve ‘also to have something which may be of entertainment to the Fair Sex, in Honour of whom [he has] invented the Title of this Paper’ (vol. 1, no. 1, p. 15). By the tenth number (Tuesday 3 May 1709), readers were introduced to Bickerstaff's half-sister, Jenny Distaff, who figured as an occasional correspondent in his absence. Distaff represented her brother's project as a benevolent attempt to inform women about contemporary political events and debates in the world beyond the domestic enclosure of the drawing-room, informing them that her ‘brother Isaac designs, for the Use of Our Sex, to give the exact Characters of all the Chief Politicians who frequent any of the Coffee-Houses from St. James to the Change’ (vol. 1, p. 89).

Only a year after Isaac Bickerstaff laid down his pen, Addison and Steele introduced the Spectator, a daily rather than thrice-weekly paper, which also oriented itself toward a female market, claiming that ‘there are none to whom this Paper will be more useful, than to the female World’ (vol. 1, p. 46). Addison goes on to complain that women's ‘Amusements seem contrived for them rather as they are Women, than as they are reasonable Creatures.’

The Toilet is their great Scene of Business, and the right adjusting to their Hair the principal Enjoyment of their Lives' (vol. 1, p. 46). Here too, then, the magazine offers to alleviate the triviality of women's domesticated existence, by bringing the world into their living-rooms, if not their living-rooms into the world. However, in the fourth number of the same paper (5 March 1711), its co-author, Richard Steele, took a somewhat different approach toward his female readers. He promised them a ‘Woman's Day’ once a week, in which Mr Spectator would ‘lead the Young through all the becoming Duties of Virginity, Marriage and Widowhood’ while ‘endeavour[ing] at a Stile and Air suitable to their Understanding’ (vol. 1, p. 21). He hastens to add that this does not mean any depreciation of the journal's high intellectual standard:

I shall take it for the greatest Glory of my Work, if among reasonable Women this Paper may furnish Tea-Table Talk. In order to do it, I shall treat Matters which relate to Females as they are concern'd to approach or fly from the other Sex, or as they are ty'd to them by Blood, Interest and Affection.

(vol. 1, p. 22)

Whereas Addison's comments suggest that the Spectator will act as a spy or surrogate for women in the larger political world of the coffee-house and government from which they are debarred, Steele's imply that it will provide a guide or counsellor for them in the domestic world of love and affection that is their ‘proper’ realm. This seeming conflict should not stand merely as testimony to the different visions of the journal's co-authors. It is, rather, symptomatic of a division that characterised periodical address to women until late in the eighteenth century, between the ‘society’ periodical (concerned mainly with party political and aristocratic scandal) and the domestic journal (modelled on the conduct book and centering on the concerns of home, hearth and the pursuit of marital happiness). It might also be understood as a division that continues in the women's magazine today. Does the women's magazine provide a women's perspective on a political and social order from which they are generally alienated, or an alternative female community that centres on issues generally assumed to be women's especial concern such as family, home and love?

This last perspective, that of the domestic journal, was finally to triumph in eighteenth-century periodical publication for women, and the history of that triumph is also, in many respects, the history of changed conceptions of sexual and class difference in early modern social structure. Indeed, in the eighteenth century, magazines acted as central media for the shaping and expression of populist interests and taste. In particular they were instrumental in the development of a bourgeois leisure industry habitually represented as ‘feminine’. The fascination with defining ‘proper’ femininity exhibited by the Tatler, Spectator, and a host of other less influential periodicals, whether explicitly identified as ‘for the ladies’ or not, was central in the formation of early modern class as well as gender ideology.

Any assessment of the ideological gains and losses that inhere in the contested conceptions of femininity for women as producers and consumers within the newly emergent magazine industry must take into account the material and ideological conditions which brought the magazine into being in this period. In the next section, therefore, we go back to trace the rise of the magazine as a publishing genre. We then turn to look in more detail at the growth of magazines for women, paying particular attention to two of the more successful ventures in the field, the Female Spectator (1744-46) and The Lady's Magazine (1770-1830).

THE RISE OF THE MAGAZINE

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, until 1640 the word ‘magazine’ referred exclusively to a storehouse for arms or supplies. In the seventeenth century it came to be employed in booktitles to refer to ‘a storehouse of information’ or miscellany. Not until the eighteenth century, and specifically with the first publication of the Gentleman's Magazine in 1731, was it used to denote a periodical publication directed toward a general readership. What, then, were the reasons for the emergence and success of this particular brand of periodical literature in the early eighteenth century?

Throughout the seventeenth century the British public gained its news information from newspapers, broadsides and pamphlets. The periodical essay paper, and later the magazine, offered a quite different mode of consumption for the ‘news’. The first of these most commonly took the form of a single-sheet, long prose essay, written by one author. The magazine or ‘miscellany’, by contrast, at least pretended to multi-authorship and offered a variety of not necessarily interrelated items. Both these forms were marked, however, not by the claim to be the first to provide the public with an account of contemporary events at home and overseas, but by being the first to pass comment on, interrogate, challenge and explore the import of these current affairs. As Isaac Bickerstaff, fictional editor of the The Tatler (1709-11) puts it, the singularity of the periodical journal lay in its aim to instruct the ‘worthy and well-affected Members of the Commonwealth … after their Reading what to think’ (The Tatler vol. 1, p. 15).

There were pragmatic reasons for this shift in emphasis in the treatment of news. On a purely practical level, the magazine appears to have been born as a response to government legislation. In 1712 the Tory government endeavoured to control the flood of political propaganda in cheap large-circulation newspapers by imposing a Stamp Tax of a penny or a halfpenny on every copy of a single- or half-sheet publication. It also introduced a tax on paper and advertisements (a major source of revenue for newspapers). Newspapers and single-essay periodicals (such as the Spectator) effectively doubled in price, but publishers succeeded in finding a loophole by expanding the length of such productions beyond the single sheet so that they qualified as pamphlets and were taxed at the lower rate of two shillings per impression. These new six-page journals compensated for the paucity of material by switching to weekly or monthly rather than daily, twice and thrice weekly publication and padded the text with commentary, literary extracts and reviews, popular fiction, readers' letters, and so forth. In 1725 the Whig government headed by Robert Walpole tried to prevent this evasion by requiring the use of stamped paper (taxed at a halfpenny per sheet) in all journals and newspapers. Weekly journals now reduced their print size to save space, reduced the number of pages from six to four, and raised their price to two pence per copy. The Gentleman's Magazine found another ingenious loophole here, in that the tax applied only to publications engaged in transmitting ‘news’. Edward Cave, the magazine's publisher and creator, produced a forty-eight (later forty-six) page journal once a month at the price of sixpence, pieced together out of the best extracts from weekly and daily papers accompanied by the claim that he was only reprinting the news. This tactic also evaded the copyright law of 1710 regarding reprinted material in that it applied only to publications in volume form, so that extracts, abridgements and serial publications were exempt from duties.

The magazine, then, appears to have been the result of some clever manipulation on the part of the new demagogues of print culture in response to what they saw as invasive government legislation. However, it also met the needs of a large body of readers. Cave's Gentleman's Magazine survived for twenty-seven years. Robert Mayo estimates that the publisher, George Robinson, through his ownership of the Lady's Magazine (1770-1830) and Town and Country (1769-96), cleared a profit of twelve thousand pounds a year (Mayo, 1962, p. 421). The savings on Stamp Tax and copyright payments alone would not produce this kind of profit or longevity without the added determinant of large circulation. In the early to mid eighteenth century, improvements in communications of both road and mail between London (Britain's publishing centre) and the provinces, along with decreasing paper and publication costs, made it possible for the magazine to reach a far larger audience than newspapers and single-essay periodicals had done previously. Moreover, the magazine was eminently suited to a provincial audience, providing an extensive update on political and social changes along with fiction and other forms of entertainment in a (relatively) cheap and accessible form (see Fergus, 1986, pp. 43-4). The first number of the Gentleman's Magazine declared its aims to be:

in the first place to give Monthly a View of all the Pieces of Wit, Humour or Intelligence daily offer'd to the Publick in the News-Papers (which of late are so multiply'd, as to render it impossible, unless a man makes it a business to consult them all) and in the next place, we shall join therewith some other matters of Use, and Amusement that will be communicated to us.

(‘Introduction’, vol. 1, n.p.)

The miscellaneous form of the magazine incorporated features of both the single-essay periodical and the newspaper, reprinting reports of births, deaths and marriages, current events at the same time as it provided political commentary, theatre and literary reviews and synopses, short fiction, and moral argument. However, it lacked the aesthetic and ideological coherence of the singleessay periodical, culled as it was from a variety of sources.

The emergence of the miscellany or ‘magazine’ in the midcentury was a register of political change as well as changes in the economics of publishing. As J. M. Downie has demonstrated, in the years following the Glorious Revolution of 1688 the periodical press was instrumental in the formation of party political discourse (Downie, 1969). From the election of a Tory government in 1710 to the death of Queen Anne in 1714, Swift's Tory Examiner and the Whig Medley were engaged in a bitter struggle to rewrite political history according to their opposing party ideologies. Addison and Steele made no secret of their Whig sympathies in the Tatler and Spectator. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in her short-lived periodical The Nonsense of Common-Sense (1737-38), critiqued the misogyny of the Tory and country Whig opposition paper Common-Sense. The fact that Montagu's journal only ran for nine issues might suggest that by the 1730s the exclusively party political journal was no longer viable or popular. More generalised class conflict seems to have become the focus of the magazine's political discussion rather than party conflict. By this point, magazines, if they were vehicles for a coherent ideological position, represented a broad bourgeois consensus, the result of long years of Whig mercantilist government under Robert Walpole (Goldgar, 1976).

Literary study has traditionally identified the magazine with the novel as part of an attempt to satisfy the demands of a newly formed literate and leisured bourgeois reading public, eager for entertainment and amusement but without access to the formal education in the classics that would have made other literary forms, such as Augustan verse satire, available to them (Davis, 1983; Mayo, 1962; Richetti, 1969; Watt, 1957). We do not wish to fundamentally challenge this interpretation, but we would argue that attention to the ‘woman question’ which figured so large in all periodical publication throughout the eighteenth century might reveal more complexity in this history of complicity between the rise of bourgeois hegemony and the development of ‘popular’ narrative forms that both cater to and shape the ideology of a class. Such a reassessment has begun to take place in recent feminist analyses of the novel (Poovey, 1984; Armstrong, 1985). But the significance of the magazine, and in particular the women's magazine, in the simultaneous ‘feminisation’ of culture and the development of a dominant bourgeois ideology in Britain from the mid eighteenth century onwards, has yet to be assessed.

THE SINGLE-ESSAY PERIODICAL: TATTLING AND SPECTATING

We deal here with two periodicals of the early and mid eighteenth century which claim female authorship and address themselves to a female readership: the Female Tatler (1709-11) and the Female Spectator (1744-46). Both were, probably, written by a single author and consisted of a long single essay. Both, as their titles suggest, were produced in response to a leading male-authored journal and both solicited the support of a female readership in their critique of and challenge to masculine control of periodical literature. As earlier comments on Addison's and Steele's famous periodicals have implied, the customary invocation to a female reader in the ‘man's’ periodical probably signified something other than a selfless interest in alleviating the boredom of the leisured bourgeois lady. Rather, we suggest, the condition of the bourgeois woman, condemned to a life of triviality and mundanity as a result of her enforced alienation from the public world of politics, business and trade, was employed as a metonymic substitute for that of her male counterpart, one of ‘the Fraternity of Spectators who live in the World without having anything to do in it’, ‘the Blanks of Society’ (Spectator, vol. 1, p. 45). Like the Spectator himself who, having made his money in the city has retired to the country, bourgeois women have no declared ‘interest’ in government and politics. Addison and Steele, as Terry Eagleton and John Barrell have argued, succeeded in turning the apparent alienation of a class into an asset (Eagleton, 1984, pp. 9-27; Barrell, 1983, pp. 17-50). The bourgeois gentleman emerges as the ideal arbiter of political morality because he has no material interest in its processes. The positioning of the bourgeoisie is essentially a feminine one, tattling and spectating rather than acting in the world of politics, defined precisely by its inactivity, identified as a class precisely because of, rather than in spite of, its supposedly ‘apolitical’ stance.

The most successful of a number of journals produced in response to the Tatler was the Female Tatler which ran in a variety of forms from 8 July 1709 to 31 March 1710. Its ostensible author/editor was a Mrs Phoebe Crackenthorpe, ‘a Lady that knows everything’ who insists in the first number that her ‘Design is not to Rival his [Bickerstaff's] Performance, or in the least Prejudice the Reputation he has deservedly gain'd’. Mrs Crackenthorpe develops an almost exact feminine mirror to the Tatler itself. She suffers similar difficulties with her manservant, Frances, to those undergone by Bickerstaff with his Pacolet. Her journal appears thrice weekly on those days that Bickerstaff's does not. Whereas Bickerstaff controls his operation from Will's Coffeehouse, Mrs Crackenthorpe sets up her ‘Scandal-Office’ in her drawing room, where, she says in the first number, ‘half the Nation visits me, where I have a true history of the World’.

The Female Tatler, like many eighteenth-century journals, has a complex publishing history. A version of the magazine was published by Benjamin Bragge from 8 July 1709 to 31 March 1710, but in the eighteenth number the author announced her plan to transfer to the publishing house of Anne Baldwin. Through numbers nineteen to forty-four, two rival issues emanated from both Baldwin and Bragge. Numbers forty-five to fifty-one (19 October to 2 November 1709) continue from Baldwin alone. On 4 November 1709, ‘A Society of Ladies’ took over the editorship, concluding their work on 31 March 1710 (numbers fifty-two to one hundred and eleven). Moreover, the real identity of the author behind Phoebe Crackenthorpe is still in dispute (Anderson, 1931; Graham, 1936-7; Harrington Smith, 1951-2). Despite the fact that in July 1709 a Whig paper, the British Apollo, clearly cited Thomas Baker as the journal's author, strong claims have been made for Delarivier Manley, a Tory propagandist and the most well-known writer of scandal fiction during the reign of Anne. The figures behind the ‘Society of Ladies’, who took over in November 1709, were certainly not all female. Bernard Mandeville, satirist and philosopher, and Susannah Centilivre, playwright, are known to have been part of the group.

Whatever the sex of her creator, Phoebe Crackenthorpe remains one of the first instances of a female journalistic persona who trades on her femininity as a means of access to social power. The Female Tatler was a party political paper, a Tory riposte to the Whiggish ideologies of its male counterpart, but its themes were almost wholly feminocentric. In its two year life it addressed, among others, issues of women's education, female learning, prostitution, the moral import of the stage, and the new phenomenon of the actress. The second number (11 July 1709) refuted accusations of triviality, claiming that the paper was ‘not an impertinent Rotation of Chit Chat but a well-grounded Design, divertingly to lead People into good Moral Instruction whose intent in reading this Paper might be only to find out some invidious Reflection, or laugh at an idle Story’. Specifically, the paper insisted that ‘women's issues’ were a matter for political, indeed party political, concern. The Female Tatler marks a sadly short-lived moment in the history of the women's magazine when party politics and contemporary ‘scandal’ could be claimed as the special provenance of the woman writer and reader. By the 1770s, and with the first appearance of the Lady's Magazine, such an equation had become impossible and any attempt to introduce ‘politics’ into the domestic environs of its women readers was met with immediate and vociferous complaint. The drawing-room that served as Phoebe Crackenthorpe's ‘Scandal Office’ came to be viewed as a sanctuary from, rather than a magnet for, political debate.

Eliza Haywood's periodical, the Female Spectator, was instrumental in the transformation of the women's magazine from scandal shop to domestic retreat. Published in twenty-four monthly numbers from April 1744 to March 1746 with two numbers omitted, Haywood's magazine amalgamated some of the best features of the single-essay periodical and the newly developed popular ‘miscellany’. Where the Tatler and Spectator on average ran to sixteen hundred words per issue printed on two sides of a single half-sheet in double columns, the Female Spectator took the form of a six page ‘book’ in single columns of some six thousand words at a cost of sixpence. Despite these typographical and presentational differences, the Female Spectator did imitate its male counterpart. Haywood provided herself, like Addison and Steele, with a fictional circle of informed contributors. The Spectator's six men were replaced by four women, introduced in the first number by their leader, the Female Spectator herself. ‘I shall,’ she writes, ‘in imitation of my learned Brother of ever precious Memory, give some Account of what I am, and those concerned with me in the Undertaking’ (vol. 1, p. 2).

The contrast between the two editorial boards is striking. If the Spectator's gentlemen contributors embodied the diversity of profession among men of the educated classes in the early eighteenth century (two peers, a lawyer, an army officer, a farmer, and a clergymen), the ladies make us aware of the lack of professional choices available to women of those same classes. The ladies are defined by their marital status—a widow, a wife (Mira), and a virgin daughter (Euphrosine). Significantly, only the anonymous editor herself is defined autonomously without reference to a man, husband or father, in the only ‘profession’ available to the respectable middle-class woman, that of writer.

Like Phoebe Crackenthorpe, the Female Spectator is a well-defined journalistic persona, a woman of the world who ‘never was a Beauty’ and who, in her maturity, has come to regret the ‘Hurry of promiscuous Diversions’ that filled her youth (vol. 1, p. 2). This may be a concealed reference to the personal history of Haywood herself, who, in the 1720s, was notorious as a producer of erotic novels and scandal fiction (Whicher, 1915). However, the Female Spectator converts her disreputable past into an asset for a woman editor, asserting:

whatever Inconveniences such a manner of Conduct has brought upon myself, I have this Consolation, to think that the Public may reap some Benefit from it;—the Company I kept was not, indeed, always so well chosen as it ought to have been, for the sake of my own Interest or Reputation; but then it was general and by Consequence furnished me … with the Knowledge of many Occurrences, which otherwise I had been ignorant of.

(vol. 1, p. 3)

Haywood's editorial persona is a complex one, which seeks to resolve a number of contradictions for the woman writer in this period. Sexual and moral innocence are desirable commodities for the young woman in search of a husband, but they make for tedious copy in the periodical. Haywood conveniently splits her authorial psyche, into the members of her editorial board and a series of imaginary correspondents, as well as the past and present history of the Female Spectator herself, in order to resolve these paradoxes.

The declared aim of the Female Spectator is a moral one, but the first number locates the periodical uneasily between a scandal or ‘society’ journal and a moral conduct book. The Female Spectator announces that she has secured herself ‘an eternal Fund of Intelligence’ through ‘Spies’ placed not only in London but in the provincial Spas of England and a number of European cities, but not, she insists, with the ‘Design of gratifying a vicious Propensity of propagating Scandal’ (vol. 1, p. 6). Yet the twenty-four numbers of the Female Spectator contain no contemporary scandal, no veiled references to the sexual and political misdemeanours of the rich and powerful of Court and Commons such as the Female Tatler had indulged. It offers instead, month by month, a series of ememplary tales that expose women's vulnerability to male sexual lust, avarice, and marital abuse, from which the Female Spectator draws moral conclusions and advice to her female readers about how to avoid a similar fate. By the fifth month Haywood had introduced a number of (probably fictional) correspondents who write to the Female Spectator seeking advice, suggesting improvements to or criticising the journal. Increasingly, the magazine took the form of two or three lengthy ‘readers’ letters', followed by the judgment of the Female Spectator and her editorial board. This format allowed Haywood to experiment with male personae. A philanthropic gentleman named Philo-Naturae writes in to encourage women to take up the study of Natural Philosophy, and the editorial board accordingly sets off on a country ramble, magnifying-glasses in hand, in order to report back to their readers about the habits of caterpillars and snails (vol. 3, pp. 141-56, 290-303). John Careful points out the debilitating effects of regular tea-drinking, characterising the vice as ‘a kind of Debauchery no less expensive, and perhaps even more pernicious in its Consequences, than those, which the Men who are not professed Rakes, are generally accused of’ (vol. 2, p. 95). The Female Spectator dismisses the complaint of expense, arguing that wives have a right to expect a husband of means to supply them with this small indulgence, but concurs with his fears about the dangers of excessive indulgence.

The Female Spectator herself is one of the first agony aunts in British periodical literature. Her first correspondent, Mrs Sarah Oldfashion, declares herself at her wit's end in her endeavour to prevent her headstrong daughter Biddy from taking morning walks in Ranelagh Gardens. The Female Spectator's advice consists of some pious commentary on the wrong-headedness of the younger generation, the remark that Mrs Oldfashion ‘will find all her Endeavours for this Purpose unavailing’, and a warning not to carry out her project to exile Biddy to a relative's home in Cornwall as likely only to exacerbate her rebellion (vol. 1, p. 271). Ten months later the Female Spectator righteously defends herself from Sarah Oldfashion's reproaches, reminding her of her explicit injunction against Cornwall (vol. 3, p. 176). Biddy, it appears, has eloped with the groom of a neighbouring gentleman in order to escape the horrors of her exile.

This example demonstrates that the Female Spectator, despite its professed moralistic aims, was not repressive in its attitudes toward female education and equality. Indeed, a letter from one Cleora in book ten, pointing to women's continuing slavery to men through ignorance, inspires an impassioned meditation from the editor on the necessity of education and, in particular, philosophical training for women (vol. 2, pp. 230-4). However, like most discussions of the value of women's education conducted in eighteenth-century magazines, pamphlets, tracts and novels of the eighteenth century, it is seen only as a commodity that would enhance women's prospects on the marriage market: ‘supposing her an excellent Œconomist, in every Respect what the World calls a notable Woman, methinks the Husband would be infinitely happier were she endued with other good Qualities as well as a perfect Understanding in Household Affairs’ (vol. 2, p. 234).

The Female Spectator, then, offers an example of the new ‘domestic’ magazine that came to dominate women's periodical literature from the mid eighteenth century onward, concentrating on the struggle to achieve marital happiness and perceiving ‘women's issues’ as determined solely with regard to this single ‘career’. In many ways it provides a ‘conduct book’ in regular periodical form, for its female readers (Hodges, 1957; Koon, 1978-9). It carried no needlework patterns, recipes, medical or childcare advice, as did later examples of the form, focusing almost exclusively on the trials and tribulations of ‘romance’. Yet, we can see in the Female Spectator a departure from the conventions of the single-essay periodical of the early eighteenth century and a shift toward the new miscellany structure combined with the development of a genteel, didactic editorial voice which was to become the hallmark of the later Lady's Magazine. Eliza Haywood probably wrote every word of the magazine herself, but through a variety of personae she succeeds in creating an atmosphere of intimacy and female community. Whether all her correspondents were fictional creations or not, the magazine broke new ground in presenting itself as a medium for women's concerns, a conduit for dialogue and exchange between women produced collectively by women. Specifically, it created an artificial imaginary community in which its readers could participate from the isolation of their homes. Like the editorial board, the Female Spectator's readers are invited to consider themselves as ‘several Members of one Body, of which [she is] the Mouth’ (vol. 1, pp. 5-6). Also, like the board in their supportive editorial practices, the appearance of consensus is produced by insisting that ‘everyone has the liberty of excepting against, or censuring whatever she disapproves’ (vol. 1, pp. 71-2).

A letter exchange in book eight of November 1744 reveals the extent to which the magazine was seen to have departed from the conventions of the single-essay periodical and its customary manner of addressing the female sex (or, if we take the correspondents to be the fictitious creation of a single author, the extent to which Haywood herself saw it as such a departure). Curioso Politico, writing from White's Chocolate-House, accuses the Female Spectator of reneging on her promise of the first number to provide extensive commentary on British and European current events. Expectant readers, he argues:

instead of that full and perfect Account of the most momentous Actions you made them hope … find themselves for several Months together entertained only with Home-Amours, Reflections on Human Nature, the Passions, Morals, Interferences, and Warnings to your own Sex;—the most proper Province for you, I must own, but widely inconsistent with the Proposals of your first setting out.

(vol. 2, pp. 118-19)

The magazine, in other words, had failed in its projected task of political organ, ignoring foreign wars, internal national strife and momentous political events in favour of the provision of purely private domestic advice. The Female Spectator, as always, defends herself, insisting that ‘the better we regulate our Actions in private Life the more we may hope of public Blessings’ (vol. 2, p. 125). Moreover, she makes one of the earliest statements about the distinction between magazine and newspaper, identifying them as the mouthpieces of different sexes:

Several of the Topics he reproaches me for not having touch'd upon, come not within the Province of a Female Spectator;—such as Armies marching,—Battles fought,—Towns destroyed,—Rivers cross'd and the like:—I should think it ill became me to take up my own, or Reader's Time, with such Accounts as are every Day to be found in the public Papers.

(vol. 2, p. 123)

With Haywood's Female Spectator we see the articulation of a separation between the public and the private spheres on the basis of gender distinction through the association of specific forms with specific genders—the newspaper as masculine and public, the magazine as private and feminine. This is not to say that women's magazines were less ‘political’ in the broadest sense of the term because of the emergence of a ‘domestic’ orthodoxy, but rather that female political influence came to be defined precisely by the avoidance of party political statement or commentary.

The Female Spectator, then, marked the advent of two major changes in the history of the women's magazine. First, it marked a generic transformation from the single-essay periodical to the miscellany form, and second, it marked a political change from the party journal which included women among its readers as one section of a politically interested public, to the popular women's magazines which defined its readers in terms of domestic enclosure and their absence from or lack of interest in state, as opposed to sexual, politics.

THE DOMESTIC MISCELLANY: LADIES' MAGAZINES

The Female Spectator came to a close with its twenty-fourth ‘book’ at the end of March 1746. The editorial board announced their plan to establish a new ‘League’ with several gentlemen, including Mira's husband, who had discovered their identities. This may be a reference to the publication in 1746 of two conduct books by Haywood, entitled The Wife. By Mira, one of the Authors of the Female Spectator and The Husband. In Answer to the Wife. Haywood embarked on another much more short-lived periodical project entitled The Parrot. With a Compendium of the Times, which ran for only nine weekly numbers from 2 August to 4 October 1746. The Parrot was, however, a return to the format of the ‘scandal sheet’ perfected by the Female Tatler, rather than an emulation of that of the Female Spectator. After the latter's final appearance the publisher promptly brought it out in a four-volume octavo edition and the book version ran into six editions until 1756, proving its affectivity as a conduct book as well as ongoing periodical. A seventh and last edition did not appear until 1771.

The period between 1756 and 1770 saw a series of experiments in the production of a miscellany magazine for women readers equivalent to the Gentleman's Magazine, which remained spectacularly indifferent to a prospective female readership. The annual ‘Prefaces’ attached to the Gentleman's Magazine made no mention of ‘the Fair Sex’ and it eschewed all fiction until six years into its life. The first piece of fiction it offered, entitled ‘A Story Strange as True’, ran from April 1737 to March 1738 (vols 7-9). It opened with an account of a conniving woman who tricks a clergyman into marriage, pursuing him to the Continent, and ended on an amour between a French priest and a sexually voracious Lady Abbess. Clearly, such fiction was aimed to titillate its male readers rather than appeal to the supposedly more delicate taste of their wives.

Robert Mayo remarks that the Gentleman's Magazine's ‘typographical ugliness was a badge of its fundamental sobriety and practicality’ (Mayo, 1962, p. 168). It sought to attract, in particular, men engaged in commerce and business, keeping them abreast of recent events, facts, advances in knowledge in as abbreviated but thorough a fashion as possible. The woman reader of the magazine in this period was far removed from this profile. Leisured, with a reasonable amount of ‘pin-money’ to spend, but only poorly educated, her life revolving around husband and home, she sought entertainment, pleasure and, to a certain extent, escape. The popularity of the oriental tale and exotic travel narratives in miscellanies of the period addressed to women are clear indicators of the inexhaustible demand for fantasy among female readers of the time (although surprisingly, the Female Spectator conscientiously avoided both forms, sticking firmly to the sentimental domestic tale of the seduced maiden).

Before the first appearance of The Lady's Magazine in August 1770 a number of less successful or abandoned projects attempted to move away from the single-essay periodical into the form we now recognise more readily as the women's magazine. One of the earliest attempts was Records of Love, or Weekly Amusements for the Fair, which ran for only twelve numbers in 1710. The first (7 January 1710) promised that ‘Each Paper will contain something new and diverting, according to the example of the first Novel, without any Personal Reflections or Immodest Obscenities’ (p. 15). Each number consisted of a series of short fictions demonstrating the triumph of virtuous love. Records of Love proves more interesting in its complex initiatives to enable female subscription, offering reduced rates to subscribers and promising early delivery to the subscriber's house (by 4 p.m. on the day of publication, a Sunday). Bourgeois women readers, unlike their fathers, husbands or brothers, could not rely on a regular visit to the coffee-house to furnish them with printed news and entertainment.

Prior to Records of Love, the publisher John Tipper had enjoyed remarkable success with his annual Ladies' Diary which sold out of all four thousand copies of its first edition for 1704 by New Year's Day, despite the fact that it cost half as much again as other almanacs offered for that year. The Diary was a small four-page sheet, including a calendar, some cookery and medical receipts, beauty hints, verses, moral tales, and a space left blank for personal entries and accounts. By 1706, Tipper had introduced the ‘brain-teaser’ in the shape of enigmas and mathematical questions provided by his readers, and these proved so popular that by 1710 the cookery and medical features were abandoned in their favour. In 1711, Tipper embarked upon a monthly equivalent to the diary, entitled Delights for the Ingenious, or a Monthly Entertainment for the Curious of Both Sexes, and consisting entirely of enigmas, mathematical questions, epigrams, songs, anagrams, and small pieces of verse and prose. It was this kind of material, along with short fiction in the mould that offered by Records of Love, that was to become the staple for women's miscellanies or magazines later in the century.

It was not until 1749 that the first full-blown miscellany for women was launched in the shape of Jasper Goodwill's Ladies' Magazine, or the Universal Entertainer, a venture which ran uninterrupted at fortnightly intervals from 18 November 1749 to 10 November 1753, only closing with an announcement of the unfortunate author's sudden death. Goodwill was the first of a series of strong-willed male authors and author-publishers who endeavoured to produce a particular ‘recipe’ for a successful women's magazine in the second half of the century. Despite his prefatory claim for the first volume (published at the year's end with a supplement) that it would be ‘a most innocent, diverting and profitable Entertainment for young Masters and Misses’, the magazine inclined toward the sensational, particularly in its penchant for trial reports. The first number offered the confession of seventeen-year-old Amy Hutchinson, executed by burning for the murder of her husband at the instigation of her lover, a narrative which itself conformed to the tragic fictions of seduction and betrayal that had proved popular in earlier journals for women. The rest of the magazine consisted of reprinted stories (Goodwill, for example, provides a lengthy summary of Henry Fielding's Amelia from January to April 1752 in five parts), home and foreign news, an ambitious ‘History of England by Question and Answer’, enigmas and poetry. Goodwill did not solicit contributions from readers and the fictional material he employed was rarely original, usually abridged versions of already published novels and reprints of fiction from other periodicals. Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, first published in 1688, was serialised in fifteen parts in the fourth volume from 14 April to 10 November 1753 (vol. 4) and presented as the first in a projected series of novels that ‘may at the same time, divert and instruct’ requested by ‘many of [Goodwill's] female correspondents’ (vol. 4, p. 115).

The involvement of well-known authors in periodical fiction publication did not stop with reprints of their fiction. Oliver Goldsmith and Charlotte Lennox, both leading literary figures, briefly joined the race to produce a profitable and popular ladies' miscellany, following Goodwill's demise. From September 1759 to 1763 Goldsmith, adopting the female persona of a Mrs Stanhope, edited the Lady's Magazine, or Polite Companion for the Fair Sex. He proved, however, particularly averse to publishing fiction and offered his readers only two serial stories and a handful of histories, apologues, and oriental tales. Otherwise, the magazine was a sober piece of work, like Mrs Stanhope herself, privileging history, biography, natural science and news reporting. Lennox's was an equally solemn attempt doomed to failure, entitled the Lady's Museum, which ran for only eleven numbers in the years 1760 and 1761. In this case, however, presumably because of her sex, the real author's name was given prominence and was clearly meant to be a selling point. The London Chronicle advertisement for the first number (28 February/1 March 1760) described the journal as ‘a Variety of Original Pieces in Prose and Verse, for the Information and Amusement of the Ladies. By the Author of the Female Quixote, Henrietta, &c’ (p. 212). Lennox published a new novel serially in the magazine, ‘The Story of Harriot and Sophia’, which later appeared as a two volume novel entitled Sophia (1762). Indeed, we might speculate that the magazine itself was a vehicle for this novel since it ended with its conclusion and that we might view the Lady's Museum as an experiment in expanding into new areas of the fiction market. Like many other writers of magazine fiction in the eighteenth century, Lennox made no attempt to adapt her narrative to the serial structure in which it appeared, simply concluding each instalment when she had filled the space allocated to it.

The first number of the Lady's Magazine, or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex when it appeared in August 1770 saw the most effective fusion of the disparate features and techniques of different prior miscellanies discussed above. The magazine was first launched by the bookseller John Coote over the name of the publisher John Wheble. In April 1771 Coote sold his interest in the magazine to the publishers Robinson and Roberts, but Wheble did not give up his interest without a fight. He continued to publish his rival version of the magazine, continuing the serials already begun and enlisting readers' support from April 1771 to December 1772. His issue of July 1771 contained a lengthy account of the trial over the right of property for the magazine in which the court found for the plaintiffs (Robinson and Roberts), charging the defendant the nominal sum of one shilling (vol. 2, pp. 41-52). Following the court case, however, Robinson and Roberts seem to have won over the public and Wheble's rival publication was forced to close.

From this point on, the Robinson publishing house had the controlling interest in the two most successful magazines of the late eighteenth century, The Lady's Magazine and Town and Country Magazine, or Universal Repository of Knowledge, Instruction and Entertainment (1769-96). As Robert Mayo argues, these two magazines were ‘the powerful leaders of two divergent tendencies in popular taste—the one increasingly modish, raffish and satirical; the other predominantly decorous, sentimental and moral’ (Mayo, 1962, p. 188). Both claimed a readership of sixteen thousand, a remarkable figure in a period where literacy levels and earnings remained low and technology in the printing industry was still underdeveloped. By the last decades of the eighteenth century, however, Town and Country, along with other ‘society’ journals, such as the Court and City Magazine (1770-71), Westminster (1772-85), Bon Ton Magazine (1790-96), seems to have fallen into decline. It was not until 1806 that a successful alternative appeared in the shape of the Belle Assemblée, or Bell's Court and Fashionable Magazine. In contrast, the pseudo-genteel and sentimental emphasis of the Lady's Magazine spawned a number of imitations in the 1790s, including among the most successful the Lady's Monthly Museum, or Polite Repository of Amusement and Instruction (1798-1806), the New Lady's Magazine, or Polite and Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1786-95) and the Sentimental and Masonic Magazine published in Dublin (1792-5).

The Lady's Magazine seems to have struck the right chord with an eager reading public. Its first ‘Address to the Fair Sex’ that accompanied both first number and volume stated that ‘the subjects [the following work] treats of are such as appropriated to the fair’. The address goes on to promise ‘elegant patterns for the Tambour, Embroidery, or every kind of Needlework’ as well as ‘engravings [to] inform our distant readers with every innovation that is made in the female dress’ and ‘Interesting Stories, Novels, Tales, Romances, intended to confirm chastity and recommend virtue’; ‘[the] housewife as well as the peeress’, the editors pledge, ‘shall meet with something suitable to their different walks of life’ (vol. 1, p. A2). The principal novelty of the magazine was its appearance. Unlike the Gentleman's Magazine and Goodwill's earlier attempt, the Lady's Magazine did not reproduce the close print of the newspaper, except for its appended foreign and domestic news and birth, death, marriage and bankruptcy listings. It was lavishly illustrated with copperplate engravings and supplied pull-out needlework patterns and sheet music for readers' use. Its fifty-odd pages were available at the cheap price of sixpence.

It was also the principal purveyor of magazine fiction in the late eighteenth century. At least a quarter of the magazine was taken up with fiction, much of it published serially and ‘commissioned’ expressly by the magazine. The serial with which the first number opened, ‘A Sentimental Journey, By a Lady’, was modelled on Laurence Sterne's novel of the same name which had enjoyed enormous success two years earlier but stripped of Sterne's humour and occasional sexual frankness. Amounting to eight parts, and twenty-seven thousand words, the serial ran for seven years (from August 1770 to April 1777) and was only ‘dropped on account of the desire of many Correspondents’ as the editor commented with regret in October 1782 (vol. 13, p. 506). By this stage the lady had traversed most of the British Isles, detailing the sentimental beauties of Henley, Dorchester, Oxford, Bath, Bristol, the southwestern counties, London, Canterbury, Dover and the Midlands. Robinson also made use of trial reports as Goodwill had done, opening the August 1775 number with an account of the trial of Jane Butterfield, who was accused and cleared of poisoning by mercury the man who had engineered her abduction from her home at the age of fourteen, seduced her and forced her to cohabit with him for six years (vol. 6, pp. 395-400). Here, too, the sympathy was with the accused woman whose history was one of abuse at the hands of an autocratic man, and who acquired the status of a sentimental icon.

The opening number of the Lady's Magazine had not solicited contributions from its readers and, indeed, its promise to display ‘the whole treasure of the Muses’ implied that most of its fiction and poetry would emanate from established authors. However, the second number provided a French text with a request for a translation from the readers on the grounds that:

As the French language is almost universally spoken, and as it is deemed a necessary accomplishment for young ladies, it is requested by several of our friends that we would appropriate about one page of our Magazine to some little essay or tale in that language.

(vol. 1, pp. 57-8)

Very soon readers were not simply supplying translations but serial fiction, enigmas, poetry, and letters detailing their thoughts on love, marriage, women's education, and responses to previous articles. According to the comments in the editor's ‘To Our Correspondents’ section, at least one third of the fiction published between 1775 and 1805 in the magazine was contributed by readers without payment. Indeed by 1784 the editors found it necessary to announce that they could not accept any correspondence unless the postage had been remitted (vol. 14, p. 1).

With regard to serial fiction, the reliance on unpaid amateur contributors caused considerable difficulties and ‘To Our Correspondents’ (which itself expanded from a half column in the 1770 number to a full page at the front of each issue by 1773) increasingly became a litany of requests for continuations of material. The editors struggled to introduce some order in the chaos by setting deadlines for receipt of material. The issue of May 1771 included a statement that no more enigmas would be accepted unless accompanied by the solution, and a request that literary contributors should send their work ‘as early as possible in the month, by which means we shall have it more in our power to oblige them’ (vol. 2, p. 486). Despite the undertaking to provide provincial readers with a monthly fashion update, the Lady's Magazine had considerable difficulty obtaining a regular correspondent. In May 1775 we find the editors abjectly seeking to contact a Miss Charlotte Stanley who had provided a description of ‘Ladies' Dress for May’:

We are obliged to this correspondent for resuming her pen, and we hope she will watch every minute alteration in the female dress, and transmit her observations as early as possible in the month, that our patronesses at a distance from the capital, may have their curiosity satisfied without being tortured by suspence, or rendered uneasy by too long expectation.

(vol. 6, p. 235)

No response was forthcoming and in 1777 Miss Stanley was brusquely informed that she had been replaced (vol. 8, p. 618). The new correspondent proved equally unreliable, however, and it was not until 1790 that a regular fashion report was established.

Yet the Lady's Magazine appears to have thrived because of, rather than in spite of, its unabashed amateurism. The editors were as haphazard as their correspondents. In May 1775 they admitted to having lost the remaining text of a whimsical serial novel entitled ‘The Adventures of Cupid the Little’ (narrated by a lap-dog to a gentleman who, by means of an obscure ancient document, has acquired the knowledge of animal language) and requested that the (female) author supply another copy (vol. 5, p. 213). The author did not oblige and readers continued to mourn its arrested development as late as November 1778. However, as one shrewd contributor put it in a letter of November 1770 ‘if you will but permit us to scribble, you never can have any want; for the desire of seeing our own productions appear, will be encouragement sufficient for the whole sex to purchase’ (vol. 1, p. 171).

Despite the many interrupted ventures, including half of the forty essay serials offered by the magazine between 1771 and 1807 which ran to ten numbers or less under various titles such as ‘The Female Rambler’, ‘The Censor’, ‘The Reasoner’, and ‘The Lady's Monitor’, the Lady's Magazine did enjoy some remarkable successes. In particular an essay serial under the title ‘The Matron’ which opened in January 1774 ran for seventeen years. The Matron was a Martha Grey, a widow who introduces herself as ‘in [her] grand climacterick … having been deeply engaged in numberless scenes, variegated and opposite, serious and comic, cheerful and afflicting’ (vol. 5, p. 34). Mrs Grey regaled her readers with the dynastic fortunes of her son and daughter, both widowed, her foppish grandson Charles, her granddaughters, the flighty Emily and shy Sophia, and comic spinster niece, Miss Pen Partlett. Almost immediately, Mrs Grey's serial essay came to incorporate a problem page in which she gave bracing advice to anxious young ladies trying to decide between lovers, or confused about social protocol, as well as to their irate parents. Her advice column proved so popular that in 1789 it was exported to the United States; the letters and answers were reprinted in a Boston monthly entitled Gentleman and Ladies' Town and Country Magazine. Like many agony aunts, Mrs Grey was troubled by sceptics, and in August 1774 we find her roundly dismissing allegations that her correspondents were ‘a set of fictitious beings’ (vol. 5, p. 434). In many respects Martha Grey recalls the Female Spectator in her stern, often old-fashioned moralism, her frankness, her contempt for modern foppery. In a magazine that frequently printed opposing opinions in the same number (publishing diatribes against the whims of fashion side by side with copperplate engravings of the latest hairstyles, squeezing attacks on the pernicious effects of fiction-reading on young minds between an oriental tale and a letter serial), Mrs Grey's single-essay serial provided a certain coherence and continuity.

Another popular feature was the medical advice column, and in particular that of Dr Cook, a gout-ridden retired practitioner who offered his services in September 1774. Cook's choice of topics in his column, ‘The Lady's Practitioner’, seems surprisingly progressive, covering menstrual pains (vol. 5, p. 578) to sore nipples from breast-feeding (vol. 6, p. 257). Correspondents wrote in requesting his recipes for both restoring and removing hair (vol. 6, p. 537; vol. 8, p. 599). However, like the tight-lacing controversy that occupied so many pages of the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine in the mid nineteenth century … it appears that Dr Cook's column occasionally provided a means of indulging prurient sexual curiosity and a more vulgar brand of humour than the magazine commonly sanctioned. In June 1775, for example, we find him pontificating upon the superior beauty and breeding capacities of the redhead:

Time was when golden locks were looked upon as very beautiful, and even the lass of golden hair was, for that very reason, the more eligible, and preferred before those of the sex who bore any different colour;—but the case is changed, and red hair is not so agreeable; though this I can say, such women have the finest skins, with azure veins, and generally become the best breeders of the nation.

(vol. 6, p. 316)

Dr Cook's elderly eccentricity and his status as a medical practitioner, as well as his masculinity, enabled the magazine to broach issues that a female persona could not address, providing a sexual frisson in a magazine that otherwise prided itself on its morality and decorum in contrast with both predecessors and contemporaries.

It is clear that by no means all of the Lady's Magazine‘s correspondents were female. Jean Hunter's extensive research establishes that contributions with a male signature were never less than a third of the total, and often exceeded those with a female signature (Hunter, 1976, pp. 108-9). The issue is further confused by the fact that most of the contributions were pseudonymous, and it was not until the late 1790s that the magazine began to publish the contributors’ real names. Correspondents themselves repeatedly questioned the declared sex of another contributor. In June 1773 a ‘Friend to the Fair Sex’ complained bitterly:

I confess I do not know under what predicament to address you; for the pieces you publish under the signatures of ladies are so masculine, and those under the signature of gentlemen are so feminine, that my embarras is at least veniable.

(vol. 4, p. 313)

Even the sex of the editors, then, was under dispute. While it seems more likely that a man should have concealed his sex under a female pseudonym in order to get published in a magazine expressly designed ‘for the Fair Sex’, it is also true that the Lady's Magazine consistently defined women as the consumers rather than producers of its more edifying material, if not its light fiction. With this in mind, it is possible that some female contributors wrote under male signature in order to join the host of ‘friends’ and ‘admirers’ of the sex who regularly enlarges upon philosophical and metaphysical questions of the respective capacities of the male and female of the species, rather than confine themselves to the habitual diet offered by ‘female’ contributors of epistolary fiction, translation, needlework patterns, songs and cookery receipts. Some women clearly did employ male personae for their contributions. In February 1774, when an irate reader wrote in to take issue with an article representing women as slaves to fashion and assumed its author to be male, the editors added a note that ‘by the writer's hand [they were] led to think the author was a lady rather than a gentleman’ (vol. 5, p. 64).

Whatever the actual sex of the majority of the Lady's Magazine's thousands of contributors, it is apparent that it was formative in the development of the modern women's magazine. Every feature common to the twentieth-century form we know so well appears at one time or another in its pages; the agony aunt, occasional news reporting with a ‘woman's’ slant, features on famous women (past and present), cookery recipes, sewing patterns, medical advice, readers' letters, regular contributors. Like the modern women's magazine, and unlike the single-essay periodical, the Lady's Magazine was not constructed to be read from beginning to end, but rather according to the reader's interests and priorities, article by article. Also unlike the single-essay periodical, it makes little or no attempt to establish an internally consistent ideological position on contemporary issues. In December 1774 the editor was arguing with respect to the Queen that ‘the virtues of her present majesty are living exhortations on her subjects to practice all the tacit duties of domestic life’ (vol. 5, p. 626). Only four months later (April 1776), the same editor embarks on another aborted attempt to provide a history of famous women, opening with praise for the heroism of the martial Queen Boadicea without a thought for her failure in these same domestic virtues he had considered so requisite for a female monarch (vol. 6, p. 177).

This inconsistency in the interpretation of proper queenliness is in itself an indicator of changing taste and ideology in the women's magazine. The Lady's Magazine was always fascinated by royalty and, in particular, the royal ladies. In this respect, it foreshadows twentieth-century women's magazines' fondness for the ‘inside story’ on the royal family. However, it moves uneasily between the representation of queens and princesses as classical models of femininity—distant, beautiful, objects of fantasy and idealism for their ‘public'—and the now more familiar rhetoric that locates the royal family as an extension of the ‘family’ of the magazine and its readers—well-known, much loved, and fallible human beings. The history of women's magazines' attention to royal figures would provide enough material for a full separate study. Suffice it to say that the tension registered in the Lady's Magazine signifies the incompleteness of the shift from a ‘society’ to a ‘domestic’ emphasis in women's magazines of the eighteenth century. The dominance of domestic ideology and its application to the representation of royalty in popular women's magazines was not to be established until well into the nineteenth century and, most significantly, through the development of photographic media which, to some extent, closed the gap between royalty and their public, transforming the former into familiar cultural icons.

Despite the striking symmetries of content, then, the late-eighteenth-century magazine was, in many respects, worlds away from its nineteenth- and twentieth-century successors. In particular, the Lady's Magazine, despite its many inconsistencies, consistently defines femininity in terms of leisure as opposed to labour. Its own readers militated against the magazine's provision of cookery receipts as inappropriate mundanity for a magazine that was supposed to provide entertainment and edification. Monthly articles entitled the ‘Lady's Handmaid’ and ‘Confectionary Receipts’ ran from its inception to the end of 1774, but were then summarily dropped. In 1780 we find one correspondent enraged by another's request to the editor for some culinary advice; she complains, ‘Did the lady suppose you made cooking your study?’ (vol. 11, p. 282). Needlework patterns, like cookery recipes (confectionary not Sunday roast), were designed to produce ornament, not useful domestic articles. The doctors' columns, similarly, were rarely solicited for ‘practical’ advice that might entail labour, such as the rearing of young children, but were viewed as beauty consultants. Mrs Grey was asked to provide advice about the control of amorous or unruly adolescents, but not how to manage a household or economise on domestic expense. Thus, a ‘lady’ was measured not by her domestic labour, but precisely by the number of leisure hours she had to fill by rehearsing from the magazine's music sheets, dressing according to its fashion plates, reading the morally instructive and fantasy literature it recommended to them.

A correspondent of February 1772 provides the editor with an outline and picture of a dream vision in which she observes the goddess of beauty presenting a Roman lady with a volume of the Lady's Magazine while a small boy at her feet reads a pattern for decorating an apron. The correspondent sums up the pleasures of the magazine thus:

The Magazines which preceded yours were evidently calculated to corrupt the morals and vitiate the taste of the rising generation. Those which were more chaste, were in no respect adapted to the circle of the FAIR. What have we women to do with elaborate discourses on the legend of a piece of rusty metal; or the qualities of an unknown animal; the pretended speeches of a stammering senator, or the description of things invisible?


Our sex was almost overlooked by the almost innumerable doers of Magazines. You first, and only you, thought the ornaments of the species worthy of being made more ornamental; by cultivating their understandings, at the same time as you provided them with rules to preserve, though not to sophisticate, their personal charms.

(vol. 4, p. 64)

The correspondent here points to a number of significant features of the magazine that ensured its extraordinary longevity and financial success—its identification of women readers as a ‘special interest’ group with strictly delimited interests, its attention to female ‘pleasure’ or ‘leisure’ rather than labour, its representation of women as above all consumers rather than producers.

In the eighteenth century, then, we can observe in the vicissitudes of periodical literature the ‘making’ of a female reader provided with her own, gender specific, genre of the magazine. Men may be both readers and contributors to the genre, but the text constructs them as ultimately marginal to its activities. The Lady's Magazine offers its women readers a programme of femininity as ornament; becoming feminine is a task to be accomplished through the acquisition and consumption of the magazine itself, but a task wholly identified with the world of leisure, and a task that can be a pleasure, not a labour. The fact that women's magazines throughout the eighteenth century could only define women in terms of their relation to men (as wives, widows and daughters) is not so much an indicator of the increasing dominance of gender being the primary means of constructing identity (as opposed to class or status) as an indicator of the increasing identification of a particular class, the bourgeoisie, with the attributes of a particular gender, the feminine, newly defined wholly in terms of a domestic and private sphere. Women, as the Lady's Magazine insistently demonstrates, were perceived as the ornaments of a class, a class defined by its patterns of consumption rather than production, and which sought to display its new affluence and influence as part of its struggle to achieve cultural and political hegemony. This construction of class as gender, and in turn the linking of femininity with leisure and ornament, came to condition the making of the genre.

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