ABSTRACT
The period 1850-1945 was, as we saw in Chapter 5, significant for the development of schooling for girls. This education was differentiated by both social class and, importantly, gender. The education of girls and young women was not solely the province of formal institutions. Gendered lessons, infracted by social class and also by age, were conveyed informally through the organization of everyday life; the structuring of home, workplace and community; relationships; appearance; and leisure.1 Historical research has begun to unravel the ways in which gender was embodied in, and transmitted through, historically specific cultural practices, including reading.2 It also addresses representations of girls and women and the construction of femininities, especially in popular literature.3 This interest in popular literature stems from two main sources. First, the recognition that throughout the period, popular novels and magazines attracted a large and wide-ranging female audience.4 Also, that the print media was important in the cultural reproduction and construction of gender. Secondly, the period after 1850 is seen as being particularly significant for the advent and proliferation of popular literature targeted specifically at women and girls. Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century, girls and women were constituted as a gender-specific market for the expanding publishing industries. Somewhat more ambiguously, this market was also differentiated by social class and age.
