Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain, and: Newspapers and Empire in Ireland and Britain: Reporting the British Empire, c. 1857-1921, and: From Grub Street to Fleet Street: an Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (review)

This is an exciting time for historians of the Victorian press. Following a generation in which much newspaper and periodical history was written in a strikingly internal mode, even while mainstream social and political historians mined newspapers chiefly for information, the past decade has seen an outpouring of books and articles that examine the press critically, as institutions and cultural products, within a wide range of contexts. At its best, such work has been both theoretically sophisticated and deeply empirical, demonstrating how newspapers shaped the wider culture. Meanwhile, an increasing number of media and communication scholars (whose concern, in the first instance, is contemporary) have engaged meaningfully with the Victorian press. When added to the well-established literary critical approach embodied in the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, recent developments in historical and media scholarship have turned the Victorian press into the subject of lively study. While a plethora of revisionist works has outrun our ability to synthesize all of them into a comprehensive and convincing synthesis, they have meant that newspaper and periodical history is increasingly reconfigured more broadly as cultural history, and that historians of race, nation, gender, empire, and political culture are now well-equipped to understand the press's important role within all of these areas.

In a field of several excellent recent monographs on the modern British press, Michelle Tusan's Women Making News is among the most impressive. Not only does it use untapped sources to provide fresh angles on the well-developed historiographies of both journalism and the suffrage movement, but it provides a compelling example of how the 'social history of ideas' should be written.

Other historians have shown the nineteenth century press's rolein reinforcing 'separate spheres' and gender hierarchies: the 'mainstream' daily newspaper was coded as masculine, while women's magazines constructed their readers as domesticated consumers. Indeed, much of the anxiety surrounding the New Journalism derived from the fear that a medium crucial to citizenship was becoming feminized,as many features associated with women's magazines (as well as with working-class Sunday papers) were imported into the daily paper. ¹ In this widely accepted portrayal, the feminization of the press went hand in hand with its commercialization, and the late-Victorian press lost its educational and civic purpose in its efforts to appeal to a wider range of readers. ²

While Tusan does not dislodge this picture of the mainstreampress, she reveals that it was strongly and importantly contested by an alternative feminist print culture. Following the repeal of the 'Taxeson Knowledge' in mid-century, suffrage newspapers joined a wider proliferation of new titles. From the start, these papers emphasized political rather than commercial goals, accepting that advocacy journalism meant small circulations; their viability derived only from affiliation with organizations such as the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. Yet any limitations that followed from small circulations were amply compensated by the readers' devotion and the communities the papers helped build. Not only did committed readers learn from the content of their papers, but they also became loyal volunteers in the papers' production and distribution.

Although pointing out that the most successful papers of the late nineteenth century remained those associated with organizations, Tusan demonstrates that they increasingly borrowed from the styles and techniques of the New Journalism – increased reliance on advertising and an emphasis on...