ABSTRACT
Although the Young Woman (1892–1915) seems to support a traditional feminine ideal of marriage and children, the magazine adjusts this ideal by engaging with the ideas of social purists to assert a new conception of marriage that includes a single sexual standard. In articles by noted New Woman novelists like Sarah Grand (whose novel The Heavenly Twins moved conversations about sexual experience into the drawing room) and women's rights activists like Florence Fenwick Miller, a more progressive model of femininity encourages girls to seek options beyond marriage while also emphasizing the importance of marriage and maternity. Yet the magazine also includes depictions of conservative femininity, like those of Eliza Lynn Linton and John Ruskin. Thus the girl found in the Young Woman represents a unique figure within girls’ periodicals as the magazine encourages girls to marry but shapes its discussions of marriage to reflect the biological determinism of feminist eugenicists. The marrying girl responds to New Woman concerns about marriage, asserts new possibilities for marriage based on sexual and moral equality, and expands notions of girlhood by insisting that men be held to similar standards as women. This girl rejects the idea that only women can and should be held to an absolute standard of purity.
