British Girlhood

IN HER 1868 ESSAY “The Girl of the Period,” Eliza Lynn Linton disparaged the freedom of the nineteenth-century girl. This new breed of girl was “far too fast and flourishing to be stopped in mid-career by these slow old morals; and as she lives to please herself, she does not care if she displeases every one else.” As women’s legal, social, and political rights advanced, girls’ education and girls’ reading became increasingly critical sites. Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press explores the complexities of girls’ culture and the construction of British womanhood during the latter half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. Kristine Moruzi’s close reading of full runs of Monthly Packet, Girl of the Period Miscellany, Girl’s Own Paper, Atalanta, Young Woman, and Girl’s Realm considers the cultural forces surrounding the production and marketing of magazines to girls and young women.

Moruzi’s project identifies “different kinds of girls and different models of girlhood that attempted to address and adapt to the radically shifting terrain regarding girls’ future roles as wives, mothers, and workers while also capitalizing on the rapid increase in books and magazines available to middle-class girl readers.” Her focus on periodicals, as opposed to novels, sets the study apart from recent work on nineteenth-century adolescence and girlhood because periodicals, as Moruzi points out, “created and reinforced” the “reading culture of the period.” Despite pervading anxiety about the expanding freedom demanded by young women, “these periodicals demonstrate that there was not a universal model of young femininity”; rather, they reveal editorial attempts to “manage the tension between a traditional feminine ideal and the shifting expectations of girlhood throughout the second half of the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century.” Girl readers used their letters to the editors and their purchasing power to resist constructions of girlhood that sought to confine them. By devoting one chapter to each magazine and each type of girl, Moruzi contextualizes the history of each publication to explore “the complex and often contradictory girls who are simultaneously present within its pages.”

Readers will appreciate the clear, accessible style and deft summary of nineteenth-century feminist scholarship. Building on two definitive works, The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915 (1995) by Sally Mitchell and The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (1993) by Kate Flint, Moruzi illustrates why girls’ reading was a fraught and contested subject. In addition to a nuanced reading of stories, poems, and articles, specialists and nonspecialists will appreciate the selection of black and white cover images, cartoons, and advertisements—critical components of the Victorian illustrated periodical.

Moruzi begins by addressing the complexity of the word girl in nineteenth-century England. The word did not signify child since “a girl in Victorian England often remained a ‘girl’ until she married. ‘Girl’ was a useful signifier of marital status since it suggested a female who was not yet contained within the domestic space of marriage and maternity.” Moruzi explains that the audience for the six magazines included in her study were “likely between 15 and 25”; thus, the stories, poems, and articles are often concerned with romance and marriage in ways not usually found in children’s literature. Girls, as Mitchell has pointed out, were at a transitional moment in life. They were able to think, feel, dream, or act in ways that grown-up, married women could not, yet they were on the brink of married domesticity and child-producing. Therefore, authors and editors of girls’ magazines sought to educate their readers in an attempt to shape appropriate behavior.

Moruzi observes a primary niche or target market for each magazine, but her thoughtful readings also reveal that each magazine presented elements that undercut or contradicted its dominant model of girlhood. Chapter two, “The Religious Girl: Girlhood in the Monthly Packet (1851–1899),” explores inherent contradictions in Charlotte Yonge’s conservative Anglican editorial influence from 1851 to 1894. Yonge, an independent, professional writer, believed in “the inferiority of woman,” yet encouraged women...