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Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life
Barbara Green
Feminist Periodicals
and Daily Life
Women and Modernity in British Culture
Barbara Green
Department of English
University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, IN, USA
ISBN 978-3-319-63277-3 ISBN 978-3-319-63278-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63278-0
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947724
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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A
cknowledgements
This book has taken a long time to write, and has accumulated many
debts along the way. I’m delighted to have the opportunity to acknowl-
edge a few of them here. I am thankful for the support of Notre Dame
English Department Chairs John Sitter, Valerie Sayers, Stephen Fallon,
and Jesse Lander and for the support of the College of Arts and Letters
at the University of Notre Dame for granting me the time in which to
write. The Institute for Scholarship in the Arts at Notre Dame subsidized
a crucial research trip. In London, the staff of the Women’s Library (now
housed at the London School of Economics) as well as the staff of the
British Library provided vital aid in locating materials. At Notre Dame,
the generous staff of the Hesburgh Library can never be thanked enough
for all of their efforts on my behalf: members of the microtext depart-
ment worked tirelessly to make materials available to me, and Daniel
Johnson, English Literature and Digital Humanities Librarian, tracked
down elusive materials and dispatched seemingly intractable problems
with speed and efficiency.
I am especially thankful to have worked closely with and learned
from scholars whose innovative work in feminist print culture studies
has inspired my own and provided goals to aim for (though, perhaps,
not quite to reach). In their work, Catherine Clay, Lucy Delap, Maria
DiCenzo, Fiona Hackney, and Carey Snyder demonstrated new ways of
considering the feminist periodical archive and have provided encourage-
ment and suggested important resources along the way. Collaborating
with Catherine Clay, Maria DiCenzo, and Fiona Hackney on a volume
v
vi ACkNOWLEDGEMENTS
devoted to women’s periodical culture has been a joy and placed me in
the middle of stimulating conversations about the field. Catherine Clay
and Stella Deen provided thoughtful responses to my discussion of
Delafield’s middlebrow writing. Working with Sean Latham and Mark
Morrisson for a few years at the Journal of Modern Periodical Studies pro-
vided the best possible education in the field as it began to firm up its
contours. My new role as co-editor of the journal involves collaborating
closely with Patrick Collier, whose scholarship continually galvanizes the
field and sharpened my sense of periodical spaces. Holly Laird provided
sustained support and access to a lively community of scholars working
on modern women’s writing. I was fortunate to meet Ann Ardis early
in my career, and without her mentorship this work most likely would
not have happened: she provided key support, and in her periodical stud-
ies scholarship asked the crucial questions that have shaped my own. I
place myself in a long line of scholars who are in her debt. Ann Ardis and
Patrick Collier created stimulating spaces for the exchange of new work
in periodical studies in two seminars held at the University of Delaware.
Most importantly, this book began as an idea when I joined forces with
Mary Chapman on a shared project related to suffrage culture, and
it grew up alongside her brilliant study of American suffrage print cul-
ture. Her book suggested just what might be possible, and I’m deeply
grateful for her friendship and words of advice along the way. Deepest
thanks go to Pam Wojcik, who provided key guidance by reading every
chapter of this book and provided endless encouragement and support. I
learned more than I can say about writing from these encounters, and I
am warmed to see the many ways in which my book is better because of
her suggestions. Any deficits are, of course, entirely my own. Our conver-
sations about the everyday both as a theory and as a deeply felt practice
have been a delight through the years and I’m thankful for her friendship.
Scholarly endeavors and the routines and habits of teaching are never
that far apart. Opportunities to team-teach with Christina Wolbrecht,
Pam Wojcik, Liz Evans, and Patrick Collier at various stages of this pro-
ject’s development sharpened my sense of the relationship of a feminist
everyday to discussions of modernity as well as teaching me a great deal
about pedagogy. The chance to read emerging work by Tommy Davis,
Denise Ayo, Lauren Rich, and Melissa McCoul when they were in the
graduate program at Notre Dame gave me new insights into the workings
of the everyday, women’s print culture, the significance of food culture,
ACkNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
and representations of children’s play in the modern period. I’m grateful
for that early opportunity to see their ideas as they were developing.
A version of Chap. 2 was published as “Feminist Things” in
Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880–1940: Emerging Media, Emerging
Modernisms, edited by Ann Ardis and Pat Collier, and I thank Palgrave
Macmillan Press for permission to reprint it here within the con-
text of an expanded chapter. A version of Chapter Four was published
as “Complaints of Everyday Life: Feminist Periodical Culture and
Correspondence Columns in the Woman Worker and the Freewoman” in
the journal Modernism/modernity and I thank Johns Hopkins University
Press for permission to republish it here as well as the anonymous
reviewers who provided key recommendations. I’m thankful for per-
mission granted by the Board of the British Library to publish images
from the pages of the socialist paper the Clarion. Images of suffragettes
at work that illustrate Chapter One are courtesy of Alamy. My edi-
tors at Palgrave, Brigitte Shull, Ryan Jenkins, Paloma Yannakakis, Allie
Bochicchio, and Emily Janakiram, were endlessly helpful throughout the
process of publication; I’m deeply appreciative of their guidance and the
recommendations of the manuscript’s reviewer.
Jay and Jonah Dobrutsky, fellow travellers in the everyday, provided
many deep pleasures of the ordinary as well as supplying extraordinary
moments of delight during the period this book was taking shape.
c
ontents
1 The Feminist Everyday, Periodicals and Daily Life 1
2 Feminist Things: Votes for Women and the Circulation
of Emotion 41
3 Feminist Spaces and Women’s Pages: Rebecca West
and Socialist Periodicals 89
4 Complaints of Everyday Life: Feminist Periodical Culture
and Correspondence Columns in the Woman Worker,
Women Folk, and the Freewoman 147
5 “What to Eat in War Time”: Thrift and the Great War 181
6 Distraction and Daydream, Rhythm and Repetition,
in Time and Tide and E. M. Delafield’s “Diary of a
Provincial Lady” 241
7 Conclusion: Reading for the Middle of the Everyday 279
Bibliography 289
Index 307
ix
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 Miss kelley Sells Votes for Women 16
Fig. 1.2 Packing Votes for Women at the Women’s Press 25
Fig. 3.1 “Our Woman’s Letter” 112
Fig. 3.2 “Our Woman’s Letter” 113
Fig. 3.3 “Our Woman’s Letter” 114
Fig. 3.4 “Our Woman’s Letter: The Quiet Woman” 115
Fig. 5.1 Alfred Pearse [A Patriot] “The Two Wars” 187
Fig. 5.2 Alfred Pearse, [A Patriot] “Thrift-For Soldier’s Wives” 216
Fig. 5.3 Alfred Pearse, [A Patriot] “Equal Lunches
for Men & Women” 218
Fig. 5.4 Alfred Pearse, [A Patriot] “His Influence” 222
xi
CHAPTER 1
The Feminist Everyday, Periodicals
and Daily Life
The October 1909 issue of the British suffrage paper, the Suffragist
(which was actually the only issue of this short-lived paper) included a
short fiction by suffragist Rose Lamartine Yates entitled “Infection.”1
This light piece described an “epidemic” of the colors of the militant
suffrage organization, the Women’s Social and Political Union—purple,
white, and green. A family finds itself confronted at every turn by these
fashionable colors when they attempt to buy a variety of commodities—
invitations, hats, tea, vests, socks, and other items. At each encounter,
the family discovers that the militant suffrage colors are considered to be
“telling,” “the thing.”2 The suffrage colors have saturated the market-
place and seem to organize the family’s dealings with every public insti-
tution in reach—from the train to the Hippodrome. The narrator warns
that “[y]ou cannot be too careful if you would avoid this [epidemic].
It is far more prevalent than people think, and the germs can be con-
veyed not only by articles of clothing, but by such innocent mediums as
printer’s ink.”3 Within this context, the lines between ordinary activity
and political activity, between unwitting affiliation and deliberate state-
ment of political membership, become blurred. “A man doesn’t choose
his [vest] linings[,]” the narrator concludes, “Does he always his political
views?”4 By the end of the story, living within an environment saturated
with suffrage branding has done its work and the family has been con-
verted to the cause of votes for women. Within “Infection,” activism is
a matter of ordinary life and creeps up on one through a kind of conta-
gion rather than through deliberate intention or an epiphanic awakening.
© The Author(s) 2017 1
B. Green, Feminist Periodicals and Daily Life,
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63278-0_1
