International Feminism, Domesticity, and the Interview in the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald

Abstract

International Feminism, Domesticity, and the Interview in the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald Marianne Van Remoortel (bio) The Women's Penny Paper (1888–90), later the Woman's Herald (1891– 93), was the first British feminist periodical to adopt the interview as a regular feature. Launched on October 27, 1888, it published over 160 interviews with famous and lesser-known women during the first four years of its run. This period largely coincided with the tenure of founding editor and prominent women's rights activist Henrietta Müller (1845?– 1906), who edited the weekly paper under the pen name Helena B. Temple. The inquisitive format of the interview seemed to fit well with the paper's ambitions, as outlined in an editorial in the first issue: "[To reproduce] the ideas of the day in their freshest and newest form" and "reflect the thoughts of the best women upon all the subjects that occupy their minds."1 The fin de siècle interview, however, was a key vehicle of the New Journalism, famously dismissed by Matthew Arnold as "feather-brained" on account of its human interest stories, celebrity news, emotive reporting, and mass circulation.2 As such, it seemed, in the words of F. Elizabeth Gray, to be an "unlikely weapon for political transformation," yet that is exactly what Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald became under Müller's editorship.3 This article builds on Gray's argument that the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald wrestled the interview from the sensationalist press to make it "fundamental to the feminist agenda of the paper."4 In doing so, it merges insights from periodical studies with Benedict Anderson's views on community formation and Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to examine how the interview's voyeuristic preoccupation with the domestic lives of individuals paradoxically enabled the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald to establish itself as a clearing-house for emancipatory thinking and to attune the fragmented voices of early British feminism to the nascent international women's movement. [End Page 252] A Wide Array of Interviewees The Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald began publication in the decade before "feminism" entered the British political vocabulary. Indeed, if a full-text search in Gale Cengage's 19th Century UK Periodicals database can be relied upon, the word was never used in the paper until it was absorbed into the Woman's Signal (1894–99). Feminist activism emerged as a distinct political force in Britain from small-scale initiatives and local organizations championing issues such as education, employment, and the right to vote. The Women's Co-operative Guild was founded in 1883. In 1885, the mixed-sex Conservative Primrose League established a Ladies' Grand Council, and in 1886, the Women's Liberal Federation was formed from fifteen local branches of the Women's Liberal Association. Organizations were often divided on the issues they addressed. British women's movements, in Jane Rendall's words, were "fractured, split by differences, allowing fragmentation and choices."5 Female suffrage, in particular, was a site of ongoing discussion. It caused divisions in the Women's Liberal Federation and led to a schism in the National Society for Women's Suffrage in 1888. Early support from the Women's Co-operative Guild largely depended on the efforts of local branches. Meanwhile, the Primrose League kept its distance, arguing that it could not "enter into questions of contentious politics."6 Within this atmosphere of conflict and debate, Henrietta Müller established the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald as explicitly non-partisan. An unsigned inaugural editorial, presumably written by Müller herself, announced that the paper would be "open to all shades of opinion, to the working woman as freely as to the educated lady; to the conservative and the radical, to the Englishwoman and foreigner."7 These discussions were spread across the whole of the paper, including the news, articles, book reviews, and correspondence pages—with the Primrose League and the Women's Liberal Association "being placed amicably side by side," as the Scottish Leader noted.8 Yet the policy was most evident in the interview section, where even...