ABSTRACT
The Girl's Own Paper was undeniably the most popular girls’ magazine of the century. In some ways, with its extensive serialized fiction, informational articles, and correspondence section, this evangelical periodical that focused on morality was little different from other magazines of the period. Yet, for the first time, the importance of the popular and the visual became embedded in a girls’ magazine. The lavish illustrations provided girls with images of themselves, in a magazine designed especially for them. Editor Charles Peters hoped “to foster and develop that which was highest and noblest in the girlhood and womanhood of England” (Klickmann 1). Priced at one penny and appearing weekly, the popular and long-running GOP offered girls “stories of their own” (Briggs and Butts 158). 1 Moreover, the presentation of a girl's health as an important facet of her femininity reflects a significant shift in girls’ periodicals. The healthy girl is active, physically capable, and beautiful; thus health in the GOP is both an aesthetic category and a feminine ideal. This chapter will argue that the GOP developed girls’ health as an aesthetic ideal as well as a feminine ideal while also placing limits on girls’ behaviour to ensure their modesty and decorum. Retaining these aspects of femininity was essential to the successful expansion and redefinition of girlhood to include health. Exercise and beauty are intertwined to depict a girl whose good health is visible on her body and whose health is part of her feminine appeal. Girls’ participation in the male domains of sport and fitness was met with unease, and the magazine refigured some traditionally male activities to reflect girls’ desires for freedom and health, while maintaining the bounds of acceptable femininity.
