Helen Damon-Moore and Carl F Kaestle bring up important points about “gendered” literature. Interestingly, as I read along in their article, Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own suddenly pervaded my reading experience. The reason her book was brought to mind and why I couldn’t get the idea of her writing out of my reading of this article is because she discusses in great detail the need for distinctly female literature, which is the topic upon which Moore’s and Kaestle’s article is based. Woolf urges not for literature that is necessarily targeted toward women for publication purposes or commercial success, but she declares the need for women to create a world of their own through reading and writing. She brings up the notion in her extended essay of 1929 that the world of literature had always been a male-dominated culture. Women were not considered “literates” in the academic sense of the term, and she was concerned with the development of that sense of urgency and importance that men’s literature had established in its maturity. Clearly women were already established as writers by the time Woolf writes her essay. Sarah Stickney Ellis wrote in 1839 about the Characteristics of the Women of England and just as Moore and Kaestle point out, Puritan women held a vital role in the education of their children. However, in both cases the way that women wrote and the topics upon which they wrote were dictated by the patriarchal constraints of their time. Ellis’s work was a guidebook for the middle-class domestic angels of the industrial revolution, and the Puritan women’s literacies were molded by their domestic duties. Woolf’s concern in 1929 was that women should create works that are written with a woman’s voice. Rather than drawing upon the formulas which were dictated by men’s literature, Woolf urges women to build their own literary history. She says what women lack is a mother up to whom we can look for inspiration. Certainly it would seem she could pull from the great romance writer Jane Austin or from the gothic Bronte sisters or Mary Shelley, but she declares that while Austin’s work reinforces gender segregation and sex- roles, the Brontes and Shelley write works which could hardly be distinguished from that of male authors. She declares that women’s writing lacks proper lineage. She urges the development of what sounds and feels female (not feminine).
Now, Moore and Kaestle seem to possess a similar view of women’s magazines. They seem to be embittered to the fact that women’s magazines were not only edited by mostly male capitalists, but that they (perhaps) inadvertently reinforced sex-roles and gender segregation through the consumer culture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Women’s magazines were created by men and the men who created them decided what women ought to read and in turn depicted how a properly nineteenth- and twentieth-century woman should look and behave, in what they should be interested, and what conversations they should have. This is not to say, however, that the consumers of these magazines did not have a huge role in the phenomenon. Indeed, by purchasing the magazines and purchasing the products that were advertised in and endorsed by the publications the female consumers were supporting the industry and the consequential “sexism” in which it partook (and still does in many ways). All this said, however, I think there is a definite positive message to be taken from the article, and that’s the fact that it was the female readership that drove the success of these publications. Taking into account the general illiteracy of the female population right before the emergence of the first magazines, this fact is quite incredible. It just goes to show how unstoppable a force we can be when we’re taught how to read and write. And indeed the sought-after content of the magazines (and the need for the information within them in some cases) must have encouraged the development of literacy skills in the female population. However, the airy content, the non-intellectual and non-thought-provoking subject matters of these women’s magazines (especially as compared to the male business magazines with investment advice and political discussions and intellectual conversations) do not seem to help the issue with which Virginia Woolf and Moore and Kaestle are concerned: they do not establish a thoughtful female literary community.
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