Pens, Petticoats, and Revolutionaries: Women and the Power of the Press

Separated by nationality, political views, class, racial and ethnic backgrounds, the women portrayed in these six books share several common characteristics. They illustrate the lost history of many women whose lives and publications deserve to be reclaimed. Moreover, they show how energetic and ambitious women of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries turned to journalism and its multiple products both to earn a living and to express their views as they moved from private lives to a public stage. Writing and publishing offered opportunities to women denied them in other occupations. They required no specific credentials and were quasi–respectable outgrowths of the literary lady phenomenon that marked the early nineteenth century. Moreover, in an era marked by increasing speed and ease of communication, they permitted women to advocate for what they believed.

But many obstacles lay in the path of those who sought to pursue journalism, as these books make plain. Some women had to hide behind pseudonyms. All women who aspired to journalistic ventures had to battle gender constructs that made it twice as hard for them to succeed compared to males. It was bad enough to be a reformer, a dissident, a revolutionary, a seeker after justice and fairness for others, but to be a woman, too, was asking for scorn, outrage, and elimination from the pages of history books.

Helen Macfarlane, the subject of David Black’s intriguing book, illuminates well this ugly thread of gender discrimination. Few today have ever heard of Macfarlane, although Black, an independent scholar, identifies her as the first British Marxist. Since practically nothing is known about her life, Black has written “a biography of an idea,” based on her published essays and correspondence with radical thinkers like George Julian Harney, Friedrich Engels, and Karl Marx (3). Harney, who owned the weekly Red Republican in London, anonymously published the first English translation of Marx’s The Communist Manifesto in 1850. It came from the pen of Macfarlane, who contributed to Harney’s press under the nom de plume Howard Morton. Fluent in German, Macfarlane voiced the visionary concepts of German idealism and translated into English the works of George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, which attacked the greed of capitalism and paved the way for Marxism.

Black’s book is not easy going. In this relatively brief work, Black cannot fully explain the context that produced Marxist thought in nineteenth–century England. While his ambitious attempt to produce a “biography of an idea” falls short, it is a commendable effort and may stimulate other scholars to advance the neglected study of women journalists in intellectual history. The reader needs a background in both philosophy and European history to understand the complicated interweaving of social, political, and economic movements that underlay Macfarlane’s work. What is clear is that she has disappeared from history; this would not have surprised her, judging from one of her condemnations of British society because it regarded women under the...