Women and the Eighteenth-Century Print Trade

Abstract

This chapter discusses some of the essential ways that women were active in the printing trades as printers, editors and periodical writers. The chapter includes studies of journals and publications beginning with the late seventeenth-century The Ladies Mercury and The Ladies Dictionary, which although addressed to women readers were not in fact written by women, as well as the eighteenth-century journals The Lady’s Magazine, The Lady’s Monthly Museum and Ladies Own Memorandum-Book. The study contributes to the growing realisation that concepts of ownership, work, property, and business dealings of women, as well as the men who worked with and for them, need to be revised. Women’s work in the print trade and periodicals was much more complex and contradictory than previously understood. The chapter also includes a case study of Anne Fisher and the print trade.