News Magazine | Women's

professional woman's magazine constantly reflects the changing view of women’s part in society. In the 18th century, when women were anticipated to share in social and political life, those magazines aimed primarily at women were fairly robust and stimulating in content; in the 19th, when domesticity came the ideal, they were inclined to be insipid and humorless. After about 1880, magazines began to widen their midairs again.

 

Typical of the late Georgian and Regency magazines in Britain were The Lady’s Magazine (1770), a sixpenny yearly that, along with its erudite benefactions and fashion notes, gave away embroidery patterns and distance music; The Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798), which had a half-monthly “ Cabinet of Fashion” illustrated by colored drawings, the first to appear in a women’s journal; and La Belle Assemblée (1806), which encouraged its compendiums to unburden themselves in its correspondence columns. 

These three intermingled in 1832, the first case of what was to come to a common circumstance, but desisted publication in 1847. Latterly women’s magazines included The Ladies’Pocket Magazine (1824 – 40), The Ladies’Cabinet (1832 – 52), The New Monthly Belle Assemblée (1847 – 70), and The Ladies’Treasury (1857 – 95). All contained verse, fabrication, and papers of high moral tone but low intellectual content. There were attempts to swim against the drift, similar to The Female’s Friend (1846), which was one of the first diurnals to espouse women’s rights, but they infrequently lasted long.

In 1852 a wider request began to be tapped by The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine, a yearly issued by Samuel Beeton at twopence rather of the usual one shilling; it was also the first women’s journal to concentrate on home operation and offer practical advice to women rather than give entertainment for the idle. Beeton’s woman ( author of the classic Book of Household Management, 1861) visited Paris regularly and acquired fashion plates from Adolphe Goubaud’s Moniteur de la Mode. A point of Beeton’s magazine was the “ Practical Dress Educator,” a forerunner of the paper dressmaking pattern. In 1861, Beeton followed up his success with The Queen, a daily review of further topical character.

 

The great expansion of women’s wealth magazines into a major assiduity may be dated in Britain from Myra’s Journal of Dress and Fashion (1875 – 1912) and Weldon’s Ladies’Journal (1875 – 1954), both of which supplied dressmaking patterns and met the requirements of a mass readership. Several new quality magazines were started, similar as The Lady ( innovated 1885) and The Gentlewoman (1890 – 1926), one of the first to admit the fiscal necessity of announcements, but there were numerous further cheap weeklies, similar as Home Notes (1894 – 1957), Home Chat (1895 – 1958), and Home Companion (1897 – 1956); these were of great help in tutoring women about hygiene, nutrition, and child care.

Among the foremost women’s magazines in the United States was a yearly published in Philadelphia called Godey’s Lady’s Book (1830 – 98), which employed up to 150 women to hand- shade its fashion plates. Of the early public magazines, one of the stylish and hardiest was Harper’s Bazar (1867; Harper’s Bazaar after 1929), modeled on a Berlin women’s journal, Der Bazar, from which it attained its fashion material. The practical trend was begun in 1863 by Ebenezer Butterick, who cooked the towel-paper apparel pattern and, to vulgarize it, brought out the Ladies’Quarterly Review of Broadway Fashions and, latterly, Metropolitan.

These intermingled in 1873 into the Delineator, which had a largely successful career until 1937. The field of women’s magazines was eventually converted, still, by Cyrus Curtis with his Ladies’Home Journal ( innovated 1883), edited by his woman, Louisa Knapp Curtis. This soon reached a rotation of and, under the editorship of Edward W. Bok, from 1889, broke with saccharinity and piety to come to a stimulating journal of real service to women. 

Other popular magazines were Ladies’Home Companion (1886; called Woman’s Home Companion, 1897 – 1957), McCall’s Magazine ( innovated 1897), and Pictorial Review (1899 – 1939). Two taking special citation were Good Housekeeping ( innovated 1885), which established a testing station for consumer goods beforehand in the 20th century, and Vogue ( innovated 1892), a fashion weekly ( latterly a yearly) devoted to “ the conventional side of life,” which was designed for the nobility of New York City and had Cornelius Vanderbilt among its backers.

 

Literary and scientific magazines The critical review developed explosively in the 19th century, frequently as an adjunct to a book-publishing business. It came to a forum for the questions of the day — political, erudite, and cultural — to which numerous great numbers contributed. There were also numerous magazines with an erudite flavor, and these reissued some of the stylish fabrication of the period. Many marked the morning of specialization —e.g., in wisdom.

 

Britain was particularly rich in reviews, beginning with the Edinburgh Review (1802 – 1929), innovated by a triad of blessed youthful critics Francis Jeffrey, Henry Brougham, and Sydney Smith. The high and independent tone they espoused was said by Samuel Taylor Coleridge to mark a “ time in journal review.” Though Conservatives, including at first Sir Walter Scott, wrote for it, the Edinburgh Review gradationally came decreasingly Whig in station. Scott consequently transferred his constancy to the Quarterly Review (1809 – 1967), the Edinburgh Review’s Tory rival, innovated by the London publisher John Murray and first edited by William Gifford. Gifford had preliminarily edited TheAnti-Jacobin (1797 – 98), with which similar numbers as the Tory statesman George Canning were associated. In opposition to these, and more political than any of them was the Westminster Review (1824 – 1914), started by Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as an organ of the philosophical revolutionaries. 

Two other early reviews were the Athenaeum (1828 – 1921), an independent erudite weekly, and the Spectator ( innovated 1828), a nonpartisan but conservative-leaning political weekly that nevertheless supported administrative reform and the cause of the North in the American Civil War. Latterly reviews included the Saturday Review (1855 – 1938), which had George Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm as drama critics (1895 – 1910); the Fortnightly Review (1865 – 1954), which had the Liberal statesman John Morley as editor (1867 – 83); the Contemporary Review ( innovated 1866); the Nineteenth Century (1877; latterly the Twentieth Century, until it closed in 1974); andW.T. Stead’s Review of Reviews (1890 – 1936), a more limited interpretation of Reader’s Digest.

 

Of the nearly affiliated erudite magazines, one of the foremost and stylish was Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817 – 1981), innovated by a book publisher, William Blackwood, as a rival to the Edinburgh Review, but a less ponderous bone than the Quarterly. It provoked in turn the founding of the London Magazine (1820 – 29), in which Charles Lamb’s Essays first appeared. The contest between these two publications led to a dogfight in which John Scott, the first editor of the London Magazine, was mortally wounded. 

Other erudite diurnals included the Examiner (1808 – 80), edited by the radical essayist Leigh Hunt, who introduced the poetry of Shelley and Keats to the public through its columns; the New Monthly Magazine (1814 – 84); Bentley’s Miscellany (1837), which had Dickens as its first editor and Oliver Twist as one of its diurnals; and the Cornhill (1860 – 1975), first edited by William Thackeray and the first magazine of its kind to reach a rotation of. Eventually, two rather different diurnals must be mentioned Nature ( innovated 1869), which began to make scientific ideas more extensively known and to which Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley contributed; and Punch ( innovated 1841), which handed a daily humorous comment on British life illustrated by numerous distinguished draftsmen.

 

International European reviews tended to be more erudite than political, maybe because of the continuity of suppression. The most notable in France was the Revue des Deux Mondes ( innovated 1829; latterly La Nouvelle Revue des Deux Mondes), with similar contributors as Victor Hugo and the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and its rival the (Nouvelle) Revue de Paris ( innovated 1829), which published authors disapproved of by the other, especially Gustave Flaubert. 

In Germany, F.A. Brockhaus, the book publisher, tried to emulate the Edinburgh Review with Hermes (1819 – 31) but had further success with Literarisches Wochenblatt (1820 – 98). Two after reviews were the conservative Deutsche Rundschau ( innovated 1874) and the liberal Freie Bühne (1890). Two influential Italian reviews were the Nuova Antologia ( innovated 1866) and La Cultura (1881 – 1935).

 

The early erudite magazines in the United States included, among numerous others frequently of further original interest, the Philadelphia Literary Magazine (1803 – 08); the Yearly Florilegium (Boston, 1803 – 11), which came to the daily North American Review (1815 – 1940), with a host of notorious contributors; the New York Monthly Magazine (1824); Dial (1840 – 44), the organ of the New England essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Transcendental Club (there was an alternate, erudite Dial, 1880 – 1929); and De Bow’s Review (New Orleans, 1846 – 80). 

The dressed daily Home Journal (1846 – 1901; also continuing as Town and Country) introduced Swinburne and Balzac to Americans, while Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (New York City, 1850; latterly called Harper’s Magazine), innovated by the book-publishing Harper sisters, reissued numerous of the great British novels and came one of America’s finest quality magazines. 

It was battled only by the Atlantic (Boston, 1857; latterly called Atlantic Monthly), which had a long line of distinguished editors, beginning with James Russell Lowell, and published utmost of the great American pens, from Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes onward; it sounded to enjoy “ a perpetual state of erudite grace.” Analogous in quality was Scribner’s Monthly (1870), which came the Century (1881 – 1930) but was renewed as Scribner’s Magazine (1887 – 1939). A fine magazine in the Far West was Overland Monthly (San Francisco, 1868 – 1935), first edited by Bret Harte.

 Non-literary technical magazines included Scientific American, which was innovated in 1845 by Rufus Porter, a talented innovator whose magazine encouraged other formulators; Popular Science Monthly, which was innovated in 1872, to spread scientific knowledge and which had the proponents William James and John Dewey among its contributors; and the ever-popular National Geographic Magazine, innovated in 1888 and published ever since by the National Geographic Society, which used some of the proceeds to finance scientific peregrinations.