ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that the English Woman’s Journal (1858–1864), the organ of the mid-century organized women’s movement, offered a new model of feminist professional journalism. The tendency to regard journalists whose survival did not depend on their earnings as amateurs has been particularly marked in critical appraisals of the EWJ. I revise this view by showing that the journal was far more interested in market profits than has been hitherto recognized. Drawing on extensive archival research in Girton College, Cambridge, which holds the personal papers of the journal’s founders and editors, I show that the EWJ presented its contributors not simply as reformers, but as accomplished professional journalists who could write rigorously and consistently on social and political issues. I examine the full run of the journal and pay close attention to its unique form to demonstrate that it foregrounded women’s political journalism in an unprecedented manner: it brought together in a single periodical, sometimes in a single issue, articles by pioneering women such as Elizabeth Blackwell (the first woman to attain a medical degree in America), Emily Davies (promoter of higher education for women and one of the founders of Girton College, Cambridge), and Maria Rye (founder of the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society) and underlined women’s ability to write on topics ranging from medicine to telegraphy, from marriage and divorce to the colonial labour market. The EWJ stressed that its specialised coverage of the ‘woman’s question’, unrivalled by any other journal of its time, made it worthy of the reader’s time and money.
