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Cover of A Magazine of her Own?

A Magazine of her Own? Domesticity and desire in the woman’s magazine, 1800–1914

  • Published: 18 Apr 1996
  • DOI: 10.4324/9780203360323
  • Print ISBN: 9780415049207
  • eBook ISBN: 9780203360323

Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?

A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female.

A Magazine of Her Own? is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read.

Contents

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    Front Matter
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    1
    Introduction
  • The Making of the Magazine, 1800–50
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      2
      The ‘Fair Sex’ and the Magazine: The Early Ladies’ Journals
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      3
      The Queen, the Beauty and the Woman Writer
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      4
      Family and Mothers’ Magazines: The 1830s and 1840s
  • The Beetons: The Domestic English Woman and the Lady, 1850–80
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      5
      The Beetons and the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, 1852–60
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      6
      The Female Body and the Domestic Woman, 1860–80
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      7
      Re-Making the Lady: the Queen
  • New Woman, New Journalism, the 1880s and 1890s
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      8
      The New Woman and the New Journalism
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      9
      Revolting Daughters, Girton Girls and Advanced Women
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      10
      Advancing into Commodity Culture
  • The Reinvention of the Domestic English Woman: Into the Twentieth Century
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      11
      Woman at Home: The Middle-Class Domestic Magazine and the Agony Aunt
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      12
      ‘Forward but not Too Fast’: the Advanced Magazine?
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      13
      Woman-Talk As Commodity: The Penny Domestic Magazine
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    Back Matter