ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the ways in which nineteenth-century publishers specifically targeted women readers. It shows the importance of public libraries to the later nineteenth-century woman reader and writer. The chapter outlines the technical revolution in illustration that changed the look of what people read, particularly periodicals, in the last years of the nineteenth and the first years of the twentieth century. Among the many specialized markets that were emerging in the nineteenth century, one of the most obvious ones was that of the female reader. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, newspapers and magazines were the predominant form of reading matter for most readers. Many of the new women's magazines, probably under pressure from their readers, started running personal problem pages. Publishers have always benefited from the socially aspiring, so at least a portion of those reading an up-market journal aspired to rather than realized the social class of its assumed readership.
