The Akron Offering: A Ladies’ Literary Magazine, 1849–1850 ed. by Jon Miller (review)

In this edited, periodical commentary, Jon Miller offers an insightful vignette on the intellectual, literary pieces The Akron Offering presented to its antebellum, largely female audience, which mirrored broader social issues such as public reforms, slavery, and women’s suffrage. The introduction analyzes problematic typographic errors that inundated print material throughout America, positing that many republished selections became victims of “textual corruption” by printers’ errors, often significantly impacting an original work’s interpretation and meaning (5). However, not all print errors resulted from ignorance or haste; some editors purposefully adulterated a submission to protest an author or his or her ideas. Moreover, pervasive written works such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and other national publications also contained careless orthography and printing errors, symptoms not anomalous to a regionalized periodical, but a result of rapid print demand and dissemination (19).

Many middle-class women in mid-nineteenth-century America read the proliferation of prescriptive books, journals, and magazines meant wholly for female consumption during the “market revolution,” which significantly affected print culture with its mass distribution but also the influx of women agents as subscribers, writers, and public educators. Frequently used as a tool for social reform and reinforcing viewpoints on gender roles, ladies’ literary magazines held widely varied readerships in northern and midwestern states, such as The Akron Offering, hailing from northeastern Ohio. However, few accounts reveal the perspective of the rare, overtly criticized female editor who played a part in turning out edifying literature for other women.

The Akron Offering’s editor, Calista Cumings, experienced a brief professional life printing her magazine from 1849 to 1850, compared to her contemporaries, Sarah J. Hale and Catharine Beecher, who spent many years employed as writers, educators, or editors. Miller illuminates that Cumings, like other female, middle-aged, or unmarried professional counterparts in her time, self-identified as anti-suffrage, promoting traditional gender-role reinforcement in her writing, while in reality contributing to expanding women’s domain in the public sphere with her own professional and independent efforts. Cumings, although a noteworthy, progressive woman, fell through the cracks in the public historical records as an unmarried woman, a common oversight within government census data. Despite her short-lived success, Cumings and her contributors, many using pseudonyms or anonymity, stand as a reminder that many women participated and claimed a public voice in the midst of their own inner turmoil regarding their domestic duties and opinions on women’s “appropriate sphere” (29).

Miller’s exceptional work as an editor contextualizes Akron’s place in ante-bellum society as a microcosm, a young city that flourished from the booming canal industry, burned with religious revivalism, and hosted a woman’s rights convention in 1851, complete with Sojourner Truth’s speech about being a woman and women’s intellect. The Akron Offering’s readers conveyed their sentiments on the California Gold Rush and the conversion of native Hawaiians, proving that virtually no literate American could be isolated from or apathetic toward national news and global events. Miller’s contribution to historical and literary scholarship effectively demonstrates the value of looking past popular, well-known periodicals at lost-and-found literature, exemplified by this annotated edition.