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Diffusion of Ideas by 19th Century Feminists: The Growth of Women's Magazines.
- Publication Year :
- 1986
-
Abstract
- The communications of suffragist Lucy Stone illustrate the changes that the growth of women's magazines brought to nineteenth century feminists. As indicated in letters to friends and family, Lucy Stone became an active proponent of women's rights at a time when public speaking tours were the best means of reaching a wide audience. As the printing industry grew, she adopted the magazine as a way of communicating her ideals. One of several magazines for women that conformed to traditional sex roles, Stone's "The Woman's Journal," which appeared in 1870, was aimed at an audience of well-educated club women, professionals, and writers as yet uncommitted to the cause of women's suffrage. Contents included editorial matter on the political issues of the day as they related to women's issues. Stone's "personals" were aimed at (1) helping professional and intellectual women to know what their contemporaries were doing, (2) highlighting the most praiseworthy activities of such women, and (3) giving the "Journal" a touch of "high-society" polish and thus adding legitimacy to women's activities outside their prescribed roles in the home. The adjectives, nouns and titles that describe women in the "Journal" frequently resembled the patronizing language used in the newspapers of the time. This dichotomy has been explained by historians as a deliberate effort by the women's rights groups to "tone down" their message, to engender in the general public a belief that ordinary feminine women might actually want women's rights. The coincidence of prosuffrage publications with the grassroots populist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries suggests that targeted publications carrying what is essentially an advertisement for a cause are a better means of communicating an ideology than is attempting to communicate that ideology individually. (HTH)
Details
- Language :
- English
- Database :
- ERIC
- Publication Type :
- Conference
- Accession number :
- ED271777
- Document Type :
- Speeches/Meeting Papers<br />Reports - Descriptive