Parallel Session 1.

Chair: Nora Ramtke

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Artemis Alexiou

Fenwick Miller’s The Woman’s Signal (3 October 1895– 23 March 1899): Targeting the bourgeois reader from the periphery

During the 1890s, feminist periodicals existed in the periphery of the mainstream periodical press. As peripheral publications, they typically expected to have less subscribers than conventional ladies’ periodicals, and less of an appeal to advertisers. For that reason, it was often difficult to keep feminist periodicals afloat simply by relying on few loyal subscribers. Florence Fenwick Miller, a successful professional journalist, was fully aware that if a feminist periodical remained in the periphery, it would probably not be able to survive in the long run. With that in mind, when she took over the editorship of The Woman’s Signal, she made it her mission to edit the periodical in such a way that would attract the general female reader. This paper presents some of the methods Fenwick Miller utilised to implement the concept of bourgeois propriety in a bid to lure in the average reader, hoping that eventually she would develop an interest in women’s suffrage. Particularly, it focuses on paratexts, such as advertisements and advertorials, that targeted the bourgeois reader, explaining how they may not have been as helpful to a non-mainstream periodical, such as the Signal, as initially thought. This is brief journey in some of the challenges feminist periodicals faced, and the solutions their editors designed to tackle them, emphasizing the complications of targeting the bourgeois reader from the periphery.

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Eloïse Forestier

Challenging “centres” and “peripheries” through 19th century Swedish women’s press

Sweden lies in northern Europe, a peripheral place. Its periodical market is termed “regional,” as opposed to “central,” a distinction which is often understood in terms of inferiority. Nineteenth-century Sweden was also one of the poorer countries in Europe; the physical distance to more “cultured” grounds was insurmountable for most of its people. Swedish women of letters had to travel, as feminist activist and writer Fredrika Bremer did, to America, France, Germany, Switzerland, Britain. Wealthy women writers, translators, and editors in Sweden expanded the notion of geographical place to that of cultural space. My contribution shows how Sophie Adlersparre and Rosalie Olivecrona, the editors of Tidskrift för hemmet (1859–1885), trans-placed cultural knowledge to the homes of their readers, thus subverting central/peripheral (and public/private) dichotomies in more than one way. They asserted the position of Sweden within a European network of women periodicals that stretched from “more central” markets, such as the British and French, to “more regional” periodical markets such Scandinavia, in a horizontal rather than a hierarchical structure of power. To support this central claim my presentation will be divided in the two following parts: (1.) I show how the editors of Tidskrift included regular international news, foreign scientific and economic progress, and blended French and British sources to their arguments; (2.) I point to the partnerships Tidskrift developed with other periodicals such as the British English Woman’s Journal (1858–1864), and the French Journal des économistes (1841–1940).

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Šárka Malošíková, Klára Brůhová and Petra Hlaváčková

Where are the women? Architectural canon and the periodicals

The paper will focus on representation in architectural media from a gender perspective. It will focus on a discursive analysis of professional architecture magazines published in the second half of the 20th century in Czechoslovakia. The main emphasis will be on the 1980s and 1990s, i.e. the period around the turning point of 1989. The primary sources will be the professional periodicals Architektura ČSR and Československý architekt (both published until 1989), and Architekt, the most widespread magazine on architecture in the post-revolution period, which functioned as an important creator of the local architectural discourse. In our contribution, we will try to discern which realisations, themes, and projects were published, therefore, which areas of Czech (Czechoslovak) architecture were considered worthy of attention or marginal. The main parameter of the analysis will be the representation of women architects and their works.
The magazine Architekt was published by the Architects' Association, which co-founded the Czech Chamber of Architects and in 1993 started the prestigious Czech Grand Prix Award. It was therefore probably the most important professional periodical in the Czech Republic at the time and its content largely determined the "image of the architect", the direction of thinking about what "good architecture" is, and what its characteristics should be. Given the importance of the periodical, the editorial selection of published works and architects often became the basis for the formation of post-revolution Czech architecture canon. In this context, our paper reflects on works of women architects through the processes of popularization/marginalization of certain architectural roles, but also, for example, through the creation of memory/forgetting and the citation of authorship (the preference for "big names" and the marginalization of co-authors, the problem of women's surnames or their career breaks during and after maternity leave).