The empire of opinion: Feminism, gender, and cultural authority in Victorian Britain

The study explores the ways in which mid-Victorian women's-rights activists vied for cultural authority in establishing distinctly feminist periodicals from 1857 through the 1870s as the basis from which to launch their campaigns. It traces the operations of feminist periodicals that made women more visible in the public sphere through a "social dialogue" that was constructed within the concentric circles of the feminist, women's, and mainstream Victorian periodical press. Thus, within the context of the broader, male-dominated periodical press, this study counterposes women-oriented "domestic" periodicals that assumed a generally middle-class readership with those "special periodicals" that were run by and largely for women with women's rights and opportunities as both the focus of their articles and the lens through which they presented their material.; In focusing on the contest for cultural authority, I refer to the process by which culture---particularly print culture---functioned as a site of power in effecting far-reaching historical change in Victorian social thought and everyday practice. Cultural authority was vital at the time because this period was caught between the earlier dominance of the Church and the later dominance of science in constructing explanatory systems for pressing questions of nature, society, and politics. The question of gender found interesting confluences with notions of class and national identity in this period as the increasing political and educational democratization in Britain affected the content and format of the periodical press and the status of contributors to it.; At the core of this study is an exploration of the effects produced by the textual practices of the women's periodical press and by the embodied performances by women's-rights women that were part of the mid-Victorian reconfiguring of normative gender expectations and the concept of gender. This exploration focuses on the influence of feminist periodicals on key cultural debates taking place in the mid-Victorian press: anonymity and the professionalization of journalism, the nature and possibilities of work for "surplus women," the gendered nature of citizenship as women adopted the masculine virtues of self-help, and the changing notions of race and national identity in the face of the expansion of the British empire.