Writing for a cause: The 'English Woman's Journal' and women's work, 1858--1864 (Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes)

Although the essays on political, economic, and social topics written by Victorian "sages" for leading periodicals have long been central to the study of Victorian cultural and intellectual history, very little attention has been paid to the leading feminist journals of the mid-century period. Indeed, assumptions about "Victorian beliefs" ignore the journalism in feminist periodicals. To study the influence of women's prose in the nineteenth century, I analyze the English Woman's Journal (1858--1864), a feminist periodical central to the British middle-class women's movement, co-founded by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and Bessie Rayner Parkes. Focusing on one of the journal's key efforts, to expand employment opportunities for middle-class women, this study considers the collective voice of this feminist journal and the authors who wrote for it as a factor in the intellectual and cultural history of the mid-Victorian period. Because the English Woman's Journal has never been fully examined, my dissertation uses the journal as a primary source to investigate the means through which these feminists sought to recast public rhetoric and reshape ideology to serve women's ends.; Chapter Two, "The Right to Work: The Challenge to Domestic Ideology," examines the Journal's response to nineteenth-century middle-class ideologies of femininity and gentility and explores their numerous strategies to establish work and economic self-reliance for single and married women as acceptable for middle-class women. Chapter Three, "Some Appointed Work: Claiming the Gospel of Work," analyzes how the Journal promoted widening women's opportunities for meaningful paid employment through a consistent effort to degender the gospel of work and countered the cult of feminine idleness by extending the gospel of work to include women. Chapter Four, "Enlarging the Sphere: Redefining Respectable Occupations," investigates how the Journal sought to expand the range of occupations through which middle-class women could participate in the gospel of work while still preserving their ideological femininity. This concluding chapter also uses John Ruskin's Sesame and Lilies to test the Journal's influence and to demonstrate that our assumptions about Victorian beliefs have largely ignored influence of feminist periodicals.