The women's press both created and resisted the ideology that determined the terms of its existence, and sheer necessity to survive market demands produced a response to shifting notions of womanhood. Because magazines and newspapers are composite, commodified expressions of labour, art, intellect, industry, talent and social conversation, they offer a record of social and political desire during an important moment of the historic drive towards women's equality and independence, and an increasing number of studies in recent decades have explored these points in some depth (Adburgham 1972; Beetham 1996; Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003; Palmegiano 1976; White 1970). A study of women's spaces in the nineteenth-century press opens a window onto an exciting intersection of industrialisation and domesticity, where women editors, authors, readers, correspondents, proprietors, illustrators, needlework designers, columnists and a host of silent female workers in print production participated in the expansion of the women's press, as well as the larger press throughout Britain.

Laurel Brake argues that ‘most if not all space in the nineteenthcentury press was gendered; that is, it was either directed at male, female, or “family” readers. Little or no space was gender neutral. The male reader represented the default position’ (Brake 1995: 104). However, the idea of a woman's space need not be understood as the wholesale restriction of women writers or women's interests to special gendered categories or genres. Most periodicals and newspapers featured articles with women as a topic: of seventy-four titles surveyed in E. M. Palmegiano's Women and British Periodicals, 1832–1867: A Bibliography, 1,631 articles published in a thirty-five-year span are about women (Palmegiano 1976). The record of accomplished professional women writers such as Harriet Martineau, George Eliot and Margaret Oliphant also demonstrates how the mainstream press integrated women as contributors and editors. The practice of anonymity further destabilises gender determinants: many women writers assumed a masculine identity and discourse in the press, resulting in a ‘radical refusal of the limits of Victorian identity politics’ (Fraser, Green and Johnston 2003: 17). Because of anonymity and pseudonymity, we will be unable to write a definitive history of gender politics in the press.