by Koven, Seth
27. This is one of the central arguments in David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986).
28. There is a vast literature on the New Woman in Britain, much of it by literary scholars. See Sally Ledger, The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997); Gail Cunningham, The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1978); Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds., The New Woman in Fiction and in Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (New York: Palgrave, 2001); Ann Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990).
29. Banks, Campaigns, 153–154.
30. See Marion Marzolf on women in the United States in Up from the Footnote: A History of Women Journalists (New York: Hastings House Publishers, 1977), ch. 1; Laurel Brake, Subjugated Knowledges: Journalism, Gender, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century (Washington Square, NY: New York University Press, 1994); Cynthia White, Women’s Magazines, 1693–1968 (London: Joseph, 1970); Margaret Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own?: Domesticity and Desire in the Woman’s Magazine, 1800–1914 (London: Routledge, 1996), parts 1 and 2; Mark Hampton, “The Fourth Estate: Theories, Images, and Ideals of the Press in Britain, 1880–1914,” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1998), esp. ch. 5.
31. These journals were closely associated with the Langham Circle, whose members espoused radical sex equality based on liberal principles of political economy. See Sheila Herstein, “The English Woman’s Journal and the Langham Place Circle: A Feminist Forum and its Woman Editors,” in Joel Wiener, ed., Innovators and Preachers: The Role of the Editor in Victorian England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1985); Pauline Nestor, “A New Departure in Women’s Publishing: The English Woman’s Journal and the Victoria Magazine,” Victorian Periodical Review 15 (3) (1982: 93–106; Jane Rendall, “‘A Moral Engine’? Feminism, Liberalism, and the English Woman’s Journal,” in Jane Rendall, ed., Equal or Different? Women’s Politics, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), 112–138. Similarly, American women journalists made no effort to emulate Victoria Woodhull’s notorious career as a journalist in the United States in the early 1870s. She subsequently moved to England where she edited a progressive review devoted to social issues called the Humanitarian.
32. See Beetham, A Magazine of Her Own? 68–69.
33. Census data in Britain and the United States dramatically testifies to women’s emergence into the profession of journalism. The 1841 census in Britain listed fifteen women professionally engaged as authors, editors, and journalists; by 1891 this number had soared to 660. Between 1890 and 1900 the U.S. census reported an increase in the number of female reporters and editors (a much narrower and more useful definition than the one available in the British census) from approximately 1,000 to almost 2,200.
34. As editors increasingly courted women readers through women’s columns in the mainstream press or through newspapers and periodicals specifically geared toward female readers (such as the Woman’s Herald, Queen, and the Lady’s Pictorial), demand for women journalists increased. According to the Woman at Home in 1898, “hundreds of thousands of pounds of capital are employed in the ladies’ newspapers of today; hundreds of bright, talented women, and men too, are busied incessantly in providing by pen and pencil every conceivable sort of information and illustration which can help to tell all the world what the feminine half is doing.” Based on women’s journalistic prominence, the article concluded that “the Victorian Era has been above all else the women’s era.” See “Two Great Ladies’ Paper,” The Woman at Home (April 1898), 561.
35. “His Vile Face and Vicious Eye. Mr. T. P. O’Connor on Descriptive Personal Journalism,” St. James’s Gazette (January 5, 1894), 5.
36. Many women journalists, including Banks, shared the belief that women possessed a distinctly female voice as journalists that suited them to do interviews and write in a light and charming manner. Mary Billington went even further and insisted that most women lacked “the more abstract ability to judge tendencies and the feelings of masses” that was so essential for the serious work of reporting about questions of domestic politics and empire. More compellingly, the widespread perception that men and women reporters wrote differently reflected the widely varying character of the stories editors gave to them. There was very little competition between male and female journalists because their assignments reflected gendered notions of male and female spheres. There were a few notable exceptions, however, foremost among them Flora Shaw, the Times’s colonial correspondent and analyst, and Emily Crawford, the special correspondent in Paris of the Daily News. On Shaw’s involvement with politics, journalism, and imperialism, see Jonathan Schneer, London 1900: The Imperial Metropolis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 134–146. On women’s skills as interviewers, see Hulda Friederichs, “Difficulties and Delights of Interviewing,” English Illustrated Magazine (1892), 338.
37. See the annual reports, The Society of Women Journalists, 1894 onward, British Library, 011899.e. The formerly all-male Journalists Institute granted women full and equal membership. As Mr. Clayden, president of the Journalists Institute (founded in 1889), proudly told the assembled audience at the First International Conference of the Press in Antwerp in July 1894, “There is no more democratic body in the world than the Institute of Journalists of the United Kingdom. It rests on universal suffrage as its basis, it knows no distinction between man journalists and woman journalists.” Speech of Mr. Clayden as quoted by Catherine Drew, “Women as Journalists,” Englishwoman’s Review (October 15, 1894), 245. Some women established the Society of Women Journalists, which numbered more than two hundred women within a short time of its founding in 1895. The data on membership is compiled from several different articles. In addition to serving as a lobby to advance the professional interests of women journalists, the Society of Women Journalists offered free legal assistance and medical treatment for the one guinea subscription required of its members. For attacks on the single-sex basis of the society by a woman journalist, see “Woman’s World,” St. James’s Gazette (February 21, 1894), 12. On professional associations of journalists, see Mark Hampson, “Journalists and the ‘Professional’ Ideal in Britain: The Institute of Journalists, 1884–1907,” Historical Research 72, no. 178 (June 1999): 183–201.
38. Sheila Braine, “London’s Clubs for Women,” in G. R. Sims, ed., Living London, vol. 1 (London: Cassell, 1903), 116. See also, Amy Levy, “Women and Club Life,” Woman’s World 1 (1888), 364–367, reprinted in Melvyn New, ed., The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861–1889 (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1993). On women’s clubs and the ways in which activist women “remapped” space in London in forging political, social, and professional networks, see Lynne Walker, “Home and Away: The Feminist Remapping of Public and Private Space in Victorian London,” in Rosa Ainley, ed., New Frontiers of Space, Bodies and Gender (London: Routledge, 1998): 65–75.
39. A useful summary of women’s entrance into the professions in international perspective is provided by Women in Professions: Being the Professional Section of the International Congress of Women, London, July 1899 (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1900).
40. Anonymous, “Ladies at Work,” The Spectator (November 4, 1893), 635.
41. The flavor of this world is effectively conveyed by G. R. Sims, My Life: Sixty Years Recollections of Bohemian London (London: Eveleigh Nash Company, 1917); and Henry Vizetelly, Glances Backwards through Seventy Years, vol. 2 (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, & Co., 1893), 35, 116.
42. See William Beveridge Papers, letters to his mother and R. H. Tawney, IIa/49–51, BLPES. On Beveridge’s career as a journalist after leaving Toynbee Hall, see José Harris, William Beveridge: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), ch. 5.
43. The young Irishwoman Charlotte O’Conor Eccles felt keenly that all male institutions and prevailing norms of male
and female behavior effectively barred most women from seeking and getting positions on metropolitan newspapers. “A man meets other men at his club,” she opined in an anonymous article published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1893. “He can be out and about at all hours; he can insist without being thought bold and forward; he is not presumed to be capable of undertaking only a limited class of subjects but is set to anything.” Even the physical layout of Fleet Street, the center of the London newspaper world, frightened her and prompted her to fantasize that its “mysterious little alleys and side streets” were “cut-throat sort of places” where a provincial young lady might be “robbed and murdered.” See [Charlotte O’Conor Eccles], “The Experiences of a Woman Journalist,” Blackwood’s Magazine (June 1893), 831.
44. See Bram Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity: Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); and Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Viking, 1990).
45. G. Holden Pike, “Young Women as Journalists,” Girl’s Own Paper (March 1891), 396.
46. XYZ [pseud.], “Women in Journalism,” Author (July 1892), 62.
47. Grant Allen’s controversial and best-selling novel, The Woman Who Did (London: J. Lane, 1895), only confirmed XYZ’s suspicions that the female journalist was a source of “morbid” danger to the social fabric. As critic John Stokes perceptively notes, it was no accident that Allen’s heroine was a female journalist who advocated free love and was subjected to vicious attacks by press reviewers. See John Stokes’s excellent analysis of gender, sexuality, and the New Journalism in In the Nineties (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), esp. ch. 1, “‘Is It a Revolution?’: The Economics of the New Journalism and the Aesthetics of the Body Politic.” Stokes sets the New Journalism against aestheticism and decadence in this essay.
48. See the writings of the Star’s leading female journalist, Miss Strutt-Cavell (who wrote under the nom de plume “Stella”), which perfectly capture the anxiety to be an advanced woman in journalistic methods while staunchly defending women’s essentially domestic nature. See Stella, “Woman Up To Date,” Star (December 9, 1893), 4. On Stella’s work as a woman journalist, see Leily Bingin, “Some Interesting Experiences of Lady Journalists,” Cassell’s Magazine (September 1898), 356.
49. See Billington, “Leading Lady Journalists,” 104; see also Bingen, “Some Interesting Experiences of Lady Journalists,” 353–357.
50. Billington, “Leading Lady Journalists,” 102.
51. See Seth Koven, “How the Victorians Read Sesame and Lilies,” in Deborah Nord, ed., John Ruskin’s “Sesame and Lilies”: Rereading the Western Tradition (Yale University Press: New Haven, 2002).
52. Denise Riley offers an important analysis of the relation between the categories the “social” and “woman” in Am I That Name?: Feminism and the Category of “Women” in History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).
53. Elizabeth L. Banks, “London Invites Plague,” Chicago Evening Post (August 6, 1901), 5; and “Pink in London Gloom,” Chicago Evening Post (August 24, 1901), 3.
54. Mrs. Crawford, the Paris correspondent for the London Daily News and the New York Tribune, whose first-hand reports of the street battles of the Paris Commune in 1870 had laid the foundation for her illustrious career, reminded her readers that she was a wife and mother and that journalism was compatible with “home duties.” At the same time, she acknowledged that the perils she confronted as a journalist had “deconventionalised” her. Emily Crawford, “Journalism as a Profession for Women,” Contemporary Review (September 1893), 369–71.
55. W. T. Stead, “Young Women in Journalism,” Review of Reviews, American ed. (November 1892), 452. This article is a reprint of a published interview in the magazine The Young Woman.
56. Apparently, Stead was impressed with Banks’s “Cap and Apron” articles in the Weekly Sun. On Stead’s views of Banks, see Frederick Whyte, The Life of W. T. Stead, vol. 2 (London: J. Cape, 1925), 70–71.
57. Banks, Autobiography, 185.
58. Ibid., 95–97.
59. Howard Good examined the interplay of autobiography and journalism in the work of several leading American women journalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Howard Good, The Journalist as Autobiographer (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993), esp. 73–102.
60. Marion Leslie, “An American Girl in London,” An interview with Miss Elizabeth Banks, Young Woman (November 1894), 60, hereafter cited as “Interview.”
61. Nisbet and Co. published a pamphlet under the title “Only a Factory Girl,” which recounted the experiences of two evangelical young ladies who had disguised themselves as factory girls “in order that they might visit their haunts, become acquainted with their habits and associations, and learn how best to meet their needs.” The ladies ventured from the factory to the theatre, the music hall, and the gin-palace. See a short review of “Only a Factory Girl” in The British Weekly (July 1, 1887), 136. I have been unable to locate any record of this pamphlet’s existence beside this short notice. See Judith Walkowitz’s analysis of the social and cultural meaning of women’s new access to the streets of London in the 1880s, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), ch. 2.
62. Billington, “Leading Lady Journalists,” 110.
63. Sarah Tooley, “The Growth of a Socialist: An Interview with Mrs. Sidney Webb,” The Young Woman (February 1895), 148.
64. Deborah Nord, The Apprenticeship of Beatrice Webb (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 154.
65. Banks was in Lima at the time Potter published her articles.
66. See Brooke Kroeger, Nellie Bly: Daredevil, Reporter, Feminist (New York: Times Books, 1994), 86–105. See also Jean Lutes, “Into the Madhouse with Nellie Bly: Girl Stunt Reporting in Late Nineteenth-Century America,” American Quarterly 54, no. 2 (June 2002): 217–253.
67. Elizabeth L. Banks, “American Women as Journalists,” Author (December 1893), 252–253.
68. See “The Newest Journalism,” Ladies Pictorial (September 8, 1894), 322. One married woman journalist was appalled that Banks had disdained the generous food allowance her mistress had given her and demanded to know whether Banks, “our amateur casual—very ‘amateur’ and very ‘casual’—knows that many respectable working men bring up large families” on the sum Banks had found inadequate to pay for her own luxurious meals. See “A Kensington Martha,” letter to “Voice of the People” column, Weekly Sun (December 10, 1893).
69. Banks edited out her comments on female prostitution when she published her campaigns in book form.
70. Banks, Campaigns, xvi.
71. Marion Leslie, “Interview,” 61.
72. Banks, Autobiography, 95–97.
73. Miss Heather Bagon, letter to “Voice of the People” column, Weekly Sun (November 3, 1893), 3. On the ways in which women readers constructed a sense of themselves and their worlds through women’s magazines, especially the correspondence columns, see Lynne Warren, “‘Women in Conference’: Reading the Correspondence Columns in Woman, 1890–1910,” in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein, eds., Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (London: Palgrave, 2000): 122–134.
74. Elizabeth Banks, reply in “Voice of the People” column, Weekly Sun (November 12, 1893), 3.
75. E.L.S., letter to “Voice of the People” column, Weekly Sun (November 26, 1893), 3.
76. Arthur Chitty, letter to “Voice of the People” column, Weekly Sun (December 10, 1893), 3.
77. Lynne Warren has examined the ways in which women readers used correspondence columns and, more generally, shaped their identities “as progressive ‘woman’ or conservative ‘lady’” through reading print media that targeted their sex. See Lynne Warren, ”‘Women in Conference’: Reading the Correspondence Columns in Woman 1890–1910,” in Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkel
stein, eds., Nineteenth-Century Media and the Construction of Identities (London: Palgrave: 2000): 123.
78. See “Another Woman Journalist,” letter to “Voice of the People” column, Weekly Sun (November 19, 1893), 3.
79. Through the Social Science Association, women had played significant parts in these controversies from mid-century. See two fine studies about these contributions, Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Orum Press, 1996), part 2; and Lawrence Goldman, Science, Reform, and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), ch. 4. On the role of journalists in debates about women’s work, see Carolyn Malone, “Sensational Stories, Endangered Bodies: Women’s Work and the New Journalism in England in the 1890s,” Albion 31 (Spring 1999): 49–71. On the rise of women’s columns in the socialist press, see Chris Waters, “‘Masculine Socialism’ and the Development of Women’s Columns in the British Socialist Press, 1884–1914.” Paper presented to the work-in-progress seminar, Department of History, University of Sussex, May 1983.
80. See Liselotte Glage, Clementina Black: A Study in Social History and Literature (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1981), part 1.
81. On Black’s intimate relations with Karl Marx’s family, see Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx, vol. 1, Family Life (New York: International Publishers, 1972), 219.
82. For an assessment of the editor of The Nineteenth Century, James Knowles, and his contributions to journalism, see Neil Berry, Articles of Faith: The Story of British Intellectual Journalism (London: Waywiser Press, 2002).
83. Clementina Black, “The Dislike to Domestic Service,” Nineteenth Century (March 1893), 454–455.
84. F[rank]. M. Butlin, “International Congress of Women,” Economic Journal 9, no. 35 (September 1899): 452.
85. For example, see Clementina Black, “London Tailoresses,” Economic Journal 14, no. 56 (December 1904): 555–567.
