"The Only Efficient Instrument": American Women Writers and the Periodical, 1837-1916 (review)

In a 1788 letter to Matthew Carey of Philadelphia, reprinted later that year in Noah Webster's American Magazine (1787-88), President George Washington endorsed the American magazine as "such an easy vehicle of accessible knowledge as [to be] more happily calculated than any other to preserve the liberty, stimulate the industry and meliorate the morals of an enlightened and free people." American women, closed out of the national calculus for liberty and industry from the start, took these promises to heart.

As "The Only Efficient Instrument" nicely demonstrates, American women have leveraged the magazine form and format to make various incursions into politics and the public sphere. As the editors note, "writing women . . . employ the periodical . . . concurrently in three ways: for social and political advocacy, for the critique of gender roles and social expectations, and for refashioning the periodical as a more inclusive genre that both articulates and obscures such distinctions as class, race, and gender" (1).

The collection focuses primarily on comparatively well-known women writers—Margaret Fuller, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frances Harper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Rebecca Harding Davis, Kate Chopin, and others. Yet, the editors have effectively provided a new vision of these uncommon success stories. For one thing, the collection mainly discusses the writing of these major women in "minor" or devalued venues, such as their own shoestring independent publications or children's magazines. This alone reveals the obstacles women writers faced and the trade-offs they often had to make to keep working. In some cases, notably that of Stowe and Chopin, articles address their efforts at career-building, a focus that raises women's inner and outer conflicts when operating in the public sphere as speakers, even as they were gaining stature and fame. Moreover, since articles on well-known women are accompanied by a few strong articles on marginalized writers, notably Zitkala-Sa and Maria Mena, the collection moves fluidly from margins to center, bringing out contrasts and also continuities.

The magazine form, with its internal variety and unfolding periodicity, can help divulge hidden dimensions of an idea, author, or milieu, especially over time. This collection capitalizes on that tendency, revealing unexpected strains within these writers' minds and times. For example, in her Tribune dispatches from Italy in the 1840s, Margaret Fuller, a high-brow intellectual, "helped to promote nineteenth-century American nationalism," writes Annamaria Formichella Elsden, "but . . . also critiqued gender constraints" (24). In time, Fuller's pieces culminated in suggestions for radical reform. At roughly the same time, editorials, short fiction, and poetry by female factory workers published in the Lowell Offering accepted gender inequality, celebrating American femininity, which at the time was virtually synonymous with disparity and acquiescence to it. "Many factory operatives attempt to embrace the dominant middle-class Cult of True Womanhood," writes Susan Alves, "by constructing a poetic voice that is pious, pure, submissive, and concerned with the domestic sphere" (151). Or, toward the end of the century, Rebecca Harding Davis, writes Michele L. Mock, "devoted her life's work to designing a textualized social activism, one that utilized the public gaze as a . . . reformatory force" (126). Yet her presumably more radical cousin, Emma Goldman, Craig Monk reveals, "widely acknowledged orthodox literary values." In editing Mother Earth, Goldman "excluded the sort of artistic experiments that defined the 'little magazines'"—experiments that could invite audiences to re-think authorized subject matter, storyline, social and political "reality" (113).

Still, for all their differences, both surprising and expected, the writers featured here also share many of the same concerns. As women, all the writers struggle against exclusion and marginalization and carry an inherently critical or at least ambivalent attitude toward dominant social and industry norms. Whatever else distinguishes them, this common positioning affects the trajectories...