''The Life of a Bachelor Girl in the Big City'': Selling the Single Lifestyle to Readers of Woman and the Young Woman in the 1890s

Abstract

"The Life of a Bachelor Girl in the Big City":Selling the Single Lifestyle to Readers of Woman and the Young Woman in the 1890s Emma Liggins (bio) In her discussion of outraged responses to the New Woman across a range of mainstream journals in the early 1890s, Ann Ardis has identified three serious questions behind the hyperbole: "First, what happens to the New Woman herself as she ventures out into the public world? Second, what happens to the nuclear family when women choose careers other than marriage and motherhood? And finally, what happens to the social system as a whole when women enter the workplace in significant numbers for the first time?"1 As it gradually became more acceptable for young women to refuse or at least postpone marriage, the late-Victorian periodical press had to cater to a growing number of female readers who were perhaps more interested in work and education than household management and family life. This partly explains the unprecedented launch of a number of new women's magazines, some with female editors, throughout the 1890s. Such publications helped to shift periodical debates around the figure of the working woman away from virulent attacks on the asexuality and mannishness of the "unnatural" female towards a muted admiration for the modern woman's greater freedom of movement in public and the choices available to her. In her 1899 article "Why Women are Ceasing to Marry," the New Woman novelist and editor of The Englishwoman (1895-99), Ella Hepworth Dixon, set out the "social liberty" enjoyed by the modern spinster, now permitted "to go to college, to live alone, to travel, to have a profession, to belong to a club, to give parties . . . and to go to theatres without masculine escort," rather than bowing to the "duties and responsibilities" of maternity.2 This was the emancipated figure, labelled by some as a bachelor girl, who was dissected in the ongoing discussions about the pros and cons of married and single life popular in the press at the fin de sie`cle. [End Page 216] This article focuses on the coverage of the bachelor girl, or female bachelor, throughout the nineties in Woman and the Young Woman, two new women's magazines which enjoyed a broad readership and remained popular well into the new century. The penny weekly Woman (1890-1912) and the monthly Young Woman, priced at 3d (1892-1915), are notable not only for their longevity, but for their mixed format, printing articles favourable to the New Woman alongside more conservative material directly aimed at woman as homemaker and follower of fashion. Unlike the relatively short-lived radical women's journals launched around this time such as the Women's Penny Paper (1888-90), Woman's Signal (1894-9), and Shafts (1892-99), all of which were edited by women, these male-edited magazines appeared to owe their success to their refusal to alienate the homemaker at a time when, according to Margaret Beetham, "addressing the strong-minded woman seemed incompatible with selling copies."3 Both did manage to address the strong-minded single woman, offering careers guidance, interviews with female "breadwinners" and serious articles on living alone and the growth of women's clubs, but they also included the more traditional elements of the domestic magazine, such as recipes, fashion, fiction and advice on child care, servants and marriage. The format of these new periodicals -part domestic magazine, part journal for emancipated women- was therefore instrumental in mediating mixed messages about spinsterhood to their implied readers, both questioning and endorsing the legitimacy of woman's position outside the domestic sphere. I argue that their presentation of the single woman remained contradictory and ambiguous, and that their appeal to what became a split readership may have meant that ultimately "bachelor girl" readers had to struggle to resist being repositioned as housewives. The Contradictions of Emancipation in the Woman's Magazine The fluctuation between the conventions and format of the domestic magazine and advanced journal in both types of publications ensured that contradictory messages about female emancipation emerged in their pages. As a cheap popular paper with a large circulation of about 50,000, Woman was perhaps...