Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain (review)

In October 1856, while on a visit to Edinburgh, the young Bessie Rayner Parkes, a journalist and campaigner for women's rights, caught sight of the Waverley Journal, a fortnightly publication "edited and published by ladies for the cultivation of the memorable, the progressive and the beautiful." This was the inspiration for a more ambitious undertaking, the establishment in 1858, of the English Woman's Journal (EWJ), which Parkes, together with Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, set up as a joint-stock company with capital of a thousand pounds. The journal's premises at 19 Langham Place in central London became a combination meeting and reading room, and the focus of a number of interconnected enterprises devoted to widening education and employment opportunities for women.

The EWJ was the first of the so-called "women's advocacy" publications whose history and impact Michelle Tusan traces in Women Making News. Tusan's subject is the development of a women-centred political culture and a women-run political press in the period between 1856 and 1930. She begins with the EWJ and its successor, Jessie Boucherett's Englishwoman's Review, and moves through the single issue "newssheets" of the late nineteenth century, to the women's suffrage press before World War I and the suffrage press at its most effective and varied up to 1928. The last chapter looks at Time and Tide in the changing climate of the 1930s, and the book ends with a brief glance at Spare Rib in the 1970s, which Tusan sees as the last in the line of women's advocacy journals.

The illustration on the dust jacket, of Mary Phillips selling Votes for Women on a London street in 1907, indicates the book's main focus and its strengths. Tusan is most assured in dealing with the women's press in the twentieth century, particularly the suffrage press, and its role in creating a political culture for women. The very act of selling papers on the streets, as she observes, enabled women to commandeer public space, and with some courage to put their beliefs to the test. Instructions on appearance appropriate to the occasion—no slit skirts or hats hanging over one ear, no garish colours, and a lady-like demeanour—indicate the importance of this public image of women. The chapters on the suffrage press both before and after the war demonstrate the variety and the tensions within this most successful area of women's advocacy journalism.

Tusan is less assured in dealing with the nineteenth-century press. She has trawled the Bodichon and Parkes papers at Girton College, Cambridge and a wide range of other archival material to good effect. But she fails to connect the modest achievements of the EWJ—it lasted for six years, had 624 subscribers, and its readership rarely rose above 1000—with the debates about women's legal rights, employment prospects, social conditions, and education, which were going on even more vociferously in the mainstream press, in the Westminster Review, in the Edinburgh, the Fortnightly, and the Contemporary reviews, and intermittently in virtually every monthly and quarterly from the 1850s onward. Women's domestic magazines also engaged with current debates as Margaret Beetham has demonstrated in A Magazine of Her Own (1996). The group involved in the Langham Place publications were activists rather than journalists, as Barbara Onslow has argued (Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain [2000] 174). The EWJ was characterised by enthusiasm and amateurism. It was not a training ground for journalism. As Onslow points out, Harriet Martineau's article on "Female Industry" in the Edinburgh Review for 1859 was far more influential than the articles by Bodichon and others in the Waverley and EWJ that inspired it. Similarly, Frances Power Cobbe's piece on "Wife Torture" in the Contemporary Review had an impact far beyond anything in the specialist press with which Tusan is concerned.

Tusan emphasizes the fact that neither...