Pressing the Public: Nineteenth Century Feminist Periodicals and ‘the Press’

While studies such as Aled Jones’ Powers of the Press (1996) and Mark Hampton’s Visions of the Press (2004), or collections such as Andrew King’s and John Plunkett’s Victorian Print Media: A Reader (2005) have contributed to the recovery and analysis of related documents and the implications of these debates for a history of print media, limited attention has been paid to the ways in which women’s progressive periodicals engaged in overt and strategic ways with these debates – monitoring, evaluating, even exploiting the mainstream press of the day. Opening Doors to the Press: the Case of the Women’s Penny Paper [ 2 ] Aled Jones’s Powers of the Press remains a major contribution to our understanding of the central position the newspaper had come to occupy in the nineteenth century as “an essential reference point in the daily lives of millions of people” (2). The article quotes the written reply of the Sergeant at Arms, K. D. Erskine, who claimed it was “impossible for [him] to comply” because he had “no authority to admit any ladies into the Reporters’ Gallery” and the gallery was already “quite filled,” noting a waiting list of applicants in the event of a vacancy (“Women in the Reporters’ Gallery” 242). The report supplies details of a subsequent conversation in which Mr. Erskine assured the representative he was acting on “instructions,” not “personal feeling” but he thought the male journalists would “much resent their intrusion, and he was afraid that the consequent outcry would be terrific.”