Publishing Respectability: Almira Spencer and the Young Ladies' Journal of Literature and Science

Abstract

Almira Spencer’s Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science (1830-31) was the rare magazine both published and edited by a woman in the early nineteenth century and illustrates how such publications were creative and capitalist ventures that allowed women to exercise an unusual amount of freedom in business and exert social influence. Spencer's magazine was an instrument for expressing her opinions, an occasion to be an arbiter of middle-class values, and a means to earning a living. Spencer harnessed her experience as a respectable woman, mother, and teacher to guide, inform, and educate the daughters of America's middle class through a magazine carefully crafted to consider their unique intellectual needs, moral responsibilities, and role in society. By launching her opinions and judgement into the public arena through a magazine, Spencer embodied both the possibilities of empowerment and obstacles of constraint in middle-class women’s lives in the 1820s and 1830s.