ABSTRACT
Charles Brockden Brown’s Monthly Magazine and American Review contained little that was of compelling interest to women or that was immediately relevant to their lives, and the repeatedly unsympathetic portraits of women suggest that Brown might have aimed to discourage women readers. But the magazine must have had some readers; otherwise it would have gone the way of one of its contemporaries, Thespian Oracle, which lasted for all of one issue in 1798. If women likely were not reading the Monthly Magazine, men, at least must have been. What did Brown offer men beyond derogatory pieces about women? How did he imagine his audience, and how did he use his periodical as a vehicle for exploring and constructing early republican masculinity?
