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  • Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915 by Kristine Moruzi
  • Holly Blackford (bio)
Constructing Girlhood through the Periodical Press, 1850–1915. By Kristine Moruzi. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012.

In her detailed research into contested discourses of girlhood articulated in the periodical press, Kristine Moruzi analyzes sweeping changes and conflicts in late nineteenth-century England. By investigating the range of written and visual materials in periodicals, she demonstrates that girlhood took on a variety of meanings, changing from one page to the next. Moruzi should be commended for her precision and scholarship; although the story of how girlhood shifted during this period is a familiar one to scholars, it is told here with a sensitivity to the paradoxical messages embedded in the same periodicals and issues. Not only are mixed messages apparent in the very same issue of a popular publication, but also girls themselves interacted with presses in sometimes spirited ways. Published correspondence from girls on contemporary issues demonstrates an interactive reading experience.

Moruzi begins her study with the magazine Monthly Packet, edited by Charlotte Yonge for most of its publication life (1851–99) and therefore a vehicle for religious conservatism. However, in spite of the periodical’s predictable emphasis on duty, charity, sacrifice, virtue, domesticity, and nostalgia for an earlier femininity, Moruzi is able to parse out complexities in the publication’s recognition of the reality of girls’ lives, independent reading, and “appropriate” women’s work in the home and community (primarily charity). Emphasis on mental development and moral character becomes a dialogic matter in the “Notices to Correspondents” section, which reveals girls’ own voices as they interacted with and gently challenged the feminine ideal circulated in the periodical. Moruzi discusses some of the more spirited responses from readers as well as the Monthly Packet’s attempt to keep hold of its audience as the century advanced, including the removal of Yonge as editor in 1894, after which new topics such as “Work and Workers” attempted to increase the magazine’s relevance to girls’ lives. [End Page 365]

Chapter three, on the humorous 1869 Girl of the Period Miscellany, is refreshing. Although this was a short-lived publication, its unusual tone and depiction of the “girl of the period,” a response to Eliza Lynn Linton’s unsigned 1868 article in the Saturday Review, make it a vivid representation of shifting girlhood as a site of humor and gentle satire for a mixed audience of readers. Detailed readings of images and illustrations of girls doing various activities are analyzed alongside fiction that both challenges the feminine ideal and constructs new theories of how less idealized girls might still be marriageable. The comic nature of the magazine makes the “Girl of the Period” less threatening in some ways, but it also points to the way in which the trope of the “fast” girl (losing virtue) was diffused and female character reinscribed. For example, in an article “The Flirt of the Period,” girls are satirized but claimed to be “no worse” than prior generations; they are even figures of fun. This chapter is a breath of fresh air after the conventional tone of Yonge’s “religious girl” structuring the Monthly Packet.

Chapter four frontloads the increasing emphasis on health in the Girl’s Own Paper (1880–1907) as a response to Social Darwinism and England’s anxiety about reproduction and degeneracy. The healthy girl who exercised yet maintained her femininity became the ideological construct to challenge the earlier feminine ideal and promote a new aesthetic. I enjoyed the discussion of images in the magazine that deconstruct fashion and promote healthy bodies for girls as preparation for motherhood. Throughout Moruzi’s chapter, the now familiar story of how women’s rights were won for nonradical reasons takes on a new cast; the “medicalizing” of girls’ bodies both enables gains in freedom—of movement and independence—and justifies concerns about excessive study and higher education. To have ideal female health, girls should not be laced too tightly, the magazine recommends, but they should not study too much either, a prescriptive and paradoxical tightrope (a tightrope walked whenever adults say what girls should and should not do). One thing Moruzi does not...

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