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The Woman Reader and What She Wanted
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Journal Article
The Woman Reader and What She Wanted
2020
Overview
2 The potential subversiveness of the periodical text can be linked to its “radical heterogeneity,” its empowering diversity.3 The focus on interviews with women writers and activists, advice columns, and readers’ letters helped to invigorate debates about the woman reader, women’s uses of magazines for political purposes, and the complex identity of the female editor, all strands which have been taken up in the endeavours of the next generation of researchers. In “Meeting Mrs Beeton: The Personal Is Political in the Recipe Book” (2017), Margaret’s further investigations of the now famous cookbook author and editor Isabella Beeton show how periodical research intersects with food studies, as well as the gender politics of the archive. In this semi-autobiographical piece, memories of the giving and receiving of cookbooks within the family are interspersed with reflections on archival work in the 1970s and 1980s, when male librarians were reluctant to bring out inappropriate texts for an “uppity woman” who did not appear to be a serious researcher.6 By challenging patriarchal restraints, the woman reader/researcher becomes a potentially dangerous and disruptive figure, threatening authority by requesting texts lost in the archives. Since the 1990s a new generation of scholars has been making effective use of data from both physical and digital archives to develop knowledge of readerships, periodical communities, and the complexities of the relationship between women’s history and print culture.
