Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830-1910 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 Juliette Berning Schaefer (bio) Sharon M. Harris , ed., Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910 (Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004), pp. xxxvi+279, $45.00 cloth. In Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, editor Sharon M. Harris includes twelve essays that examine American women editors during the period from 1830 until 1910, as well as representative selections from the original periodicals. She groups the essays into three main parts, depending on the subjects' role in editing periodicals: "Apprenticeship," "Editing as Impetus," and "Career Editors." In the foreword, Ellen Gruber Garvey states that "new research on women editing periodicals is allowing us to examine and reexamine questions about magazines as a genre: about their creation, about the communities surrounding them, about how women, who might have been excluded from other kinds of careers, created and ran them" (xxii). Harris states in her introduction that "[p]erhaps the most important aspect of studying women editors and the periodicals they produced is understanding how women wielded the editorial pen to influence public opinion" (xxxv). In Part I, "Apprenticeship," Harris includes essays that address young schoolgirls who published a school paper and editors of special issues. Lucille M. Schultz writes about The Jabberwock, a student-run school paper, and argues that it "provided a site where a girl might experience herself as a writer in a public forum of students, faculty, and friends of the school" (7). In the next essay, Ann Mauger Colbert discusses women's editions of newspapers from 1894–1896. Colbert states that "[w]hatever the rationale for publishers' permission, the women used their foray into publishing to form firm links of communication and marketing with other women's groups around the country" (23). In Part II, the longest section of Blue Pencils & Hidden Hands, "Editing [End Page 83] as Impetus," Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was an impetus to other kinds of literary or activist endeavors" (xxvi). Jennifer Blanchard argues that Ann S. Stephen's "rhetoric of modesty, femininity, and local loyalties" in the Portland Magazine is "steeped in nineteenth-century ideals of gender and class" (46, 44). Linda Frost describes Miriam Frank Leslie's "Ladies' Conversazione," a column that invited female readers to engage in a "free exchange" with the editor, as an outlet for "the domestically isolated reader" (60, 63). Carolyn Karcher describes Frances Wright's mission in the Free Enquirer as an attempt to "raise the level of the American press" by adopting "an aggressively masculine voice" (85, 80). Katharine Rodier describes the life and work of lecturer and activist Lucy Stone who used the The Woman's Journal, "a weekly newspaper dedicated to women's issues," to "help create a public record of her remarks" (99, 100). Jacqueline Fear-Segal asserts that Marianna Burgess created an anonymous persona who interjected "comments and opinions all through the paper," the Carlisle Indian School's publication The Indian Helper, to "control, intimidate, and manipulate the children" who read it (124, 126). Hanna Wallinger discusses Pauline E. Hopkins's work on the Colored American Magazine, where she "chan-nel[ed] ... her literary activities" which were replete with her main political concerns, gender and race (148). In the final essay in this part, James H. Cox explains that "we can understand [Gertrude] Bonnin's work as editor [of The American Indian Magazine] most clearly by focusing on her role within the context of continuing and emerging Native intellectual traditions in the era in which assimilation was federal policy" (174). In Part III, Harris includes essays about "women for whom editing was their primary work" (xxvi). Steven Fink discusses antebellum periodical editors such as Sarah Josepha Hale, Caroline Kirkland, and Ann Stephen, as "engaged in the business of periodical publication" in their relationship with the owners/publishers, with contributors, and with readers (208). In the next essay, Paula Bernat Bennett argues that Mary Louise Booth "exploited" Harper's Bazar from its inception "as a cover for her advocacy of social and, in particular, gender reform" (226). In the final essay, Gary Scharnhorst discusses Kate Field and her "campaigns for progressive causes" in her Kate Field's Washington. This volume...