Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century eds. by Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell (review)

Women's Periodicals and Print Culture in Britain, 1690–1820s: The Long Eighteenth Century is not simply a collection but a collaboration among contributors that interrogates and often dispels a number of longstanding critical assumptions regarding eighteenth-century periodical print culture. Chief among these is the notion that women played a minor role in this culture. In their excellent introduction, editors Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell explain that this assumption rests upon a critical approach skewed toward authorship. They note the variety of roles scholars must consider in relation to the production and circulation of periodicals—not only authors but also editors, sellers, readers, and subjects. Such a consideration reveals the significance of women's participation in early periodical print culture.

The essays within this collection work together to construct this larger and more complex picture. As they do so, they dispel other mischaracterizations of eighteenth-century periodical print culture, some of which have to do with periodical readership. According to Batchelor and Powell, women made up a significant portion of the readership of periodicals traditionally associated with men; likewise, periodicals ostensibly geared exclusively toward women catered to a readership that included men as well. This collection complicates previously held assumptions about who readers were and how they read. As Batchelor and Powell note, many of the essays in the book problematize periodicals' association with a process of gender construction that configures women as passive consumers of a coherent ideology that consigns them to the domestic sphere. Essays in the collection emphasize how periodicals' fragmented and dialogic form defied the unity of any particular ideological perspective, encouraging critical reflection and developing an active and discriminating readership. Such active engagement with periodical content created multiple opportunities for women's self-fashioning. This understanding of the interrelationship among form, content, and reading practice disrupts the traditional association of eighteenth-century periodicals with "fair-sexing," or the rather transparent rhetorical strategy of couching condescension toward women within complimentary language. To use a term introduced by contributor Eve Tavor Bannet and adopted throughout the collection, many British periodicals are "woman-championing"; far from condescending to women, they sought to expand women's intellectual capacities while providing them with knowledge—sexual, legal, political, and cultural—that went beyond skills associated with the domestic sphere.

The thirty essays in the collection are grouped into six sections. In part one, "Learning for the Ladies," James Robert Wood investigates how women's periodicals throughout the period endeavored to integrate learning into women's everyday lives. Eve Tavor Bannet considers how male-authored periodicals geared toward women allowed readers to actively negotiate diverse viewpoints on education and developed women's capacity as rational beings. In her essay on the Lady's Museum (1760–61), AnnaK. Sagal explores how Charlotte Lennox combined history with romance in tales of brave and resilient women from diverse cultures in order to teach Englishwomen how to navigate a restrictive society. Meanwhile, Koenraad Claes argues that the Lady's Magazine (1770–1832), which previous criticism has associated with an ideal of apolitical femininity, educated readers about politics as it participated actively in the controversy surrounding the French Revolution, consistently featuring radical reformist content by writers such as Catherine Macaulay, Thomas Paine, and Helen Maria Williams.

In part two, "The Poetics of Periodicals," Dustin D. Stewart discusses the exchange of Platonic epistolary poetry between John Dunton and Elizabeth Singer Rowe published in the Athenian Mercury (1690–97), while Tanya M. Caldwell explores the poetic correspondence between Della Crusca (Robert Merry) and Anna Matilda (Hannah Cowley), which appeared primarily in the World (1753–56). Jennifer Batt describes how participation within periodical print culture could be both beneficial and exploitative for women poets and looks particularly at the experiences of Anne Ingram, Mary Wortley Montagu, Mary Leapor, and Mary Jones, as well...