Victorian Studies

Victorian Studies 45.1 (2002) 165-167

Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Barbara Onslow; pp. xii + 297. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave, 2000, £47.50, $65.00.

Barbara Onslow's study of Victorian women journalists endeavors to fill a longstanding need in the scholarship of nineteenth-century literary labor: an overview of how women fit into what Onslow and other historians have presumed was the "very masculine world" of journalism (xi). Onslow, a lecturer in English at the University of Reading, notes that several studies in recent years have illuminated women's literary work in particular areas (for example, Margaret Beetham's excellent 1996 examination of women's periodicals, A Magazine of Her Own?) or have focused on individual women writers (most notably Margaret Oliphant and Eliza Lynn Linton, who are experiencing something of a revival). There have also been a number of overviews of Victorian journalism (Onslow mentions Laurel Brake's 1994 Subjugated Knowledges; Brake's most recent work, Print in Transition, 1850-1910 [2001], was not yet in print). No one has attempted, however, to combine these fields of study in a systematic way. Onslow's book admirably covers the field, setting nineteenth-century British women journalists in the contexts both of women's writing and of journalistic practice. Onslow makes readily accessible a vast amount of scholarship by pulling it together in one volume, and she lays the groundwork for future scholarship to fill in the remaining gaps and further expand our knowledge of this emerging field.

Onslow begins with a list of the fundamental questions that previous studies have left unanswered:

What kind of women turned to journalism? How did they get started? To what extent did they support each other? What problems did they face and how did they tackle them? How far did they professionalize? To what extent was their work concentrated in the "quality" market and did women restrict themselves to "ladylike" subjects? How successfully did they harness the power of the press? Was there a "Woman's Voice"? (8)

In the first eight chapters, Onslow surveys the "obstacles and opportunities" faced by women journalists and examines the particulars of their work as newspaper journalists, reviewers and critics, contributors to both general and women's or children's "special" periodicals, and editors. She continues with three chapters that delve more analytically [End Page 165] into women journalists' motivations and influence, concentrating on their work with issues-oriented periodicals (in particular the religious press and various feminist periodicals) and the connections between journalistic work and fiction. The book concludes with a brief but extremely useful biographical appendix of 100 Victorian women journalists and a thorough bibliography.

As Onslow states forthrightly at the opening of chapter 2, "Money, or rather the lack of it, was a major reason why women entered journalism" (17). Like other forms of literary endeavor, journalism offered educated women who sought or were pressed into earning an income "considerably better pay and more freedom than the alternatives" (17). The general cultural resistance to women's participation in the workforce obtained in journalism as it did in other forms of literary work, and resistance appears to have been more entrenched and forceful in the field of newspaper journalism. Onslow documents the ways in which women journalists overcame the cultural resistance they encountered, usually either by seeking to domesticate their journalistic work or by adopting masculine personae. The defensive comments of Mary Cowden Clarke, a frequent contributor to various periodicals and editor of the Musical Times from 1853 to 1856, are fairly typical of the feminizing move: "a woman who adopts literary work as her profession need not either neglect or be deficient in the more usually feminine accomplishments of cookery and needlework" (qtd. 20); artist and writer Clotilde Graves's cross-dressing was an extreme example of the masculinizing move.

If the cultural barriers to women's journalism were significant, the material ones were even more so—but again, they could be surmounted. Onslow notes the general restrictions on Victorian women's mobility and participation in public life...