Since the 1970s, the literary and cultural politics of the turn-of-the-century New Woman have received increasing academic attention. Whether she is seen as the emblem of sexual anarchy, an agent of mediation between mass market and modernist cultures, or as a symptom of the consolidation of nineteenth and early twentieth-century political liberation movements, the New Woman represents a site of cultural and socio-political contestation and acts as a marker of modernity. This book explores the diversity of meanings ascribed to the New Woman in the context of cultural debates conducted within and across a wide range of national frameworks including the UK, Canada, North America, Europe, and Japan. The key concept of 'hybridities' is used to elucidate the national and ethnic multiplicity of the 'modern woman' as well as to locate this figure both within international consumer culture and within feminist writing. The book is structured around four key themes. 'Hybridities' examines the instabilities of New Woman identities and discourses in relation to both national/ethnic contexts and the textual parameters of New Woman writings. 'Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass' is concerned with the periodical press and its production and circulation of New Woman images. 'Feminist Counter Cultures?' interrogates feminist efforts to influence and shape this process by mimicking or subverting dominant models of representation and by establishing alternative spaces for the articulation of New Woman subjectivities. 'Race and the New Woman' inspects white New Women's investment in hegemonic racial discourses, looking at the way in which black and non-Western women inserted liberationist discourses into the New Woman debate. This book will be essential reading for advanced students and researchers of American Studies, Women's Studies, and Women's History.

Contents:
Introduction
Part One: Hybridities
1. Bertha Thomas: The New Women and Ango-Welsh Hybridity Kirsti Bohata
2. A Hungarian New Woman Writer and a Hybrid Autobiographical Subjact: Margit Kaffka's 'Lyrical Notes of a Year' Nóra Séllei
Part Two: Through the (Periodical) Looking Glass
3. Writing Women's History: 'The Sex' Debates of 1889 Laurel Brake
4. The American New Women and her influence on the Daughters of the Empire of British Columbia in the Daily Press (1880-1895) Françoise Le Jeune
5. Locating the Flapper in Rural Irish Society: The Irish Provincial Press and the Modern Woman in the 1920s Louise Ryan
6. Subverting the Flapper: The Unlikely Alliance of Irish Popular and Ecclesiastical Press in the 1920s Maryann Gialanella Valiulis
7. Riding the Tiger: Ambivalent Images of the New Woman in the Popular Press of the Weimar Republic Ingrid Sharp
Part Three: Communities of Women
8. Romance, Glamour and the Exotic: Feminity and Fashion in Britain in the 1900s Hilary Fawcett
9. Charged with Ambiguity: The Image of the New Women in American Cartoons Angelika Köhler
10. The day of the Girl: Nell Brinkley and the New Woman Trina Robbins
11. 'The Woman of the Twentieth Century': The Feminist Vision and its Reception in the Hungarian Press 1904-1914 Judit Acsády
12. The New Woman in Japan: Radicalism and Ambivalence toward Love and Sex Kazue Muta
Part Four: Race and the New Woman
13. 'Natural' Divisions/National Divisions: Whiteness and the American New Woman in the General Federation of Women's Clubs Jill Bergman
14. The Birth of National Hygiene and Efficiency: Women and Eugenics in Britain and America 1865-1915 Angelique Richardson

Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?
A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. It is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading.

Like the corset, the women's magazines which emerged in the nineteenth century produced a `natural' idea of femininity: the domestic wife; the fashionable woman; the romancing and desirable girl. Their legacy, from agony aunts to fashion plates, are easily traced in their modern counterparts. But do these magazines and their promises empower or disempower their readers?
A Magazine of Her Own? is a lively and revealing exploration of this immensely popular form from its beginnings. In fascinating detail Margaret Beetham investigates the desires, images and interpretations of femininity posed by a medium whose readership was and still is almost exclusively female.
A Magazine of Her Own is at once a chronological tracing of the history, a collection of intriguing case studies and an intervention into recent debates about gender and sexuality in popular reading. It is a book which anyone who is interested in the unique, influential world of the woman's magazine - students, scholars and general readers alike - will want to read

This anthology makes available to students and general readers the rich variety of Victorian magazines for women. The extracts range from fashion magazines to feminist journals, from serious works for Christian mothers to tales of romance and passion for 'sweethearts'. Focusing on the historical development of the British women's magazine, this extensively illustrated work gives access to texts which few readers ever see. The first main section describes and illustrates eight kinds of magazine for women. Though they have common features, the differences between the drawing room journal of the 1830s and 1840s and the cheap domestic magazines of the 1890s are clearly demonstrated. The second section focuses on those elements which made up the magazine's typical mix of ingredients, including fiction, the fashion plate, poetry, political journalism, advice columns and reader's letters. The last section is the most comprehensive listing of British Victorian women's magazines which currently exists. This is a work of scholarship but one which will appeal to students of Cultural, Historical, Literary and Women's Studies, as well as to the general interested reader. Like the magazines it represents, it offers its readers both entertainment and instruction. -- .