Respectable Femininity Research Articles

Tim Reinke-Williams. Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London.

Bernard Capp supervised the Ph.D. thesis upon which this monograph is based, and his influence is visible in its approach. Like Capp, Tim Reinke-Williams focuses on everyday life as a window into social relations and feminine identity in the period roughly encompassing 1550–1700. Unlike Keith Thomas and Laura Gowing's influential work demonstrating the centrality of sex to early modern women's reputation, Women, Work and Sociability in Early Modern London builds on shorter studies by scholars such as Garthine Walker, Martin Ingram, and Anthony Fletcher to argue that women were judged by a broader range of criteria. Feminine respectability could be derived from prowess in a variety of areas: motherhood, housewifery, domestic management, retailing, and sociability. These categories form the organizational structure for the book. The result is a very readable and compelling account of women's activities at home and abroad in the early modern metropolis. Though its insights are possibly not earth-shattering—the author himself states that the book's originality is in undertaking a full-length study of a topic that historians had previously only examined in shorter essays—it definitely breaks new ground in the final section on sociability. In addition to neighborliness and civility, Reinke-Williams discusses the diverse ways in which women “kept company” with other women and men. This included drinking in public houses and could involve rituals similar to those found in masculine culture. Reinke-Williams unearths references to women drinking to one another's health and to a woman ritually raising a mug to a man with whom she had quarreled earlier (pp. 146–147). While the author is careful to show the many ways in which alcoholic indulgence might damage a woman's reputation, he nonetheless offers significant insight into its potential to bond women to their companions in ways that resonate with male practices.

Try it at home: Avon and gender in Brazil, 1958–1975

This article examines the entry of US-based cosmetics firm Avon into the Brazilian market from 1958 to 1975. Avon's direct-to-home distribution model and family brand strategy gave the company a competitive advantage in the Brazilian cosmetics market. However, Avon's branch managers had to adapt the company's marketing strategy and recruitment practices to accommodate Brazilian standards of feminine respectability and in response to saleswomen who expanded distribution beyond the company's original target markets. Avon's Brazilian branch excluded women from management positions, and the company's marketing materials emphasised conservative gender roles for women. Nonetheless, Avon sales increased many women's economic agency.

Negotiating ritual duty in degenerate times: The goddess Mathamma and the legal secular in rural South India

In India, religious practices deemed incompatible with liberal governance are often legally curtailed in the name of “morality,” “health,” or “public order.” These “secular” laws are historically backed by significant efforts to reform “former” practitioners in a manner compatible with legitimate religious practice and belief. Among practitioners of the legally prohibited Devadasi custom in South India, these reform programs consist of legal education and empowerment programs that seek to inculcate a “respectable femininity” in female ritual specialists that the state regards as “ritual prostitutes.” I track the manner in which these projects of “surveillance” and “normalization” are received in Devadasi communities beyond a presumption of marginalization and constraint. I argue that the legal prohibition of the Devadasi custom constitutes the starting point for a form of legal procedure that ensures the preservation of the custom, even as it draws on the idioms of secular state law.

Haunted by ‘Miscegenation’: Gender, the White Australia Policy and the Construction of Indisch Family Narratives

This paper traces complex negotiations of multiraciality in the context of transgenerational genealogy work in the wake of historical violence, genocide and colonialism. Basing the analysis on detailed ethnographic material about Indonesian-Dutch (Indisch) genealogy and memory work, I explore how the regulation of ‘races’ [sic] during the Japanese occupation of the Dutch East Indies and under the White Australia Policy employed genealogical charts to determine freedom from imprisonment and/or rights to full citizenship for Indisch individuals, and how these feature in the genealogy work of the children and grandchildren of those subjected to racial regulatory norms. Centring the analysis on a specific family history writing project, I demonstrate how such a project is haunted by the ghostly figures of historical ‘miscegenation’ – the Indonesian foremother, and the white woman who crosses lines of respectable white femininity by marrying an Indisch man. The paper explores how narrative strategies of exclusion are used differently across generations as a way of dealing with feelings of shame, guilt and secrecy produced by institutionalised racism, historical violence and imperialism. The paper argues that genealogy work operates not only as a vehicle for self-exploration and belonging for transnational families of historical diaspora, but is also central for the collective identity formation and the production of Indisch peoplehood.

Achieving respectable motherhood? Exploring the impossibility of feminist and egalitarian ideologies against the everyday realities of lived Welsh working-class femininities

Synopsis This paper explores the tension between post-feminist discourses of freedom and the everyday negotiation of feminised identities in private and public spaces, for mothers residing in a marginalised locale in urban south Wales, UK. Applying the lens of gender to examine and foreground the place of ‘choice’ in mothers' lives, the paper works with visual and narrative accounts of the negotiation of acceptable motherhood. The paper argues that despite a pervasive rhetoric of agency and equality, the practice and performance of motherhood continues to operate within asymmetrical gendered and classed spaces inside the confines of respectable femininity. Challenging the concept of new motherhood, where women are led to believe that they can maintain the status of breadwinner, domestic goddess and primary care giver, the paper theorises agency as operating within the impossibility of unachievable ideals.

Who is a “real woman”? Empowerment and the discourse of respectability in Namibia's Zambezi region

Synopsis The third Millennium Development Goal expresses a commitment to promoting gender equality and women's empowerment. We use respectability discourse as a lens for understanding constraints and opportunities for women's empowerment. A case study of Kwandu Conservancy, located in Namibia's Zambezi region, generated 49 interviews with women. We also collected data through participant observation, document review, and twenty key informant interviews. Our analysis revealed that a “real woman” construct embodies feminine respectability in Kwandu. While the construct reinforces a woman's power to provide a livelihood through educational achievement, hard work, and collaboration with supportive community members, spouses, and children, its narrow definition of respectability also disempowers. Fear of losing respect and access to resources restrict strategic choices like choosing to divorce or remain single, saving rather than sharing resources, valuing and pursuing informal knowledge, and directly challenging limitations, uncertainties, and inequalities that can deter women from achieving a ‘better life’.

"Dying a hero": parents' and young people's discourses on concurrent sexual partnerships in rural Tanzania.

BackgroundConcurrent sexual partnerships (CSPs) have been speculated to drive the HIV pandemic in many sub-Saharan African countries. We have limited understanding of how people think and talk about CSPs, how beliefs are transmitted across generations, and how this might affect the practice. This paper explores these issues to understand how CSPs are perpetuated and help identify opportunities for interventions to modify them.MethodsThe study employed an ethnographic research design involving: participant observation in 10 households, 60 in-depth interviews (IDIs), and nine participatory focus group discussions (FGDs). Participants were young people aged 14-24 and parents/carers of young people within this age group. The 60 IDIs were conducted with: 17 fathers, 13 mothers, 13 young men and 17 young women (six of whom had had unplanned pregnancies and 11 had no children). The nine FGDs were conducted with groups of: fathers (2), mothers (2), young women (2), and young men (3). A discourse analysis was carried out with all the transcripts. Data were analysed with the aid of NVIVO 8 software.ResultsSix distinct discourses were identified from the way participants talked about CSPs and the norms driving the practice: 1) predatory masculine sexuality; 2) masculine respectability; 3) feminine respectability; 4) empowered modern women; 5) traditional health beliefs; 6) public health. Discourses legitimating CSPs were drawn on and reproduced primarily by young people and the media and only indirectly by parents. Discourses discouraging CSPs were used primarily by parents, religious leaders and learning institutions and only indirectly by young people themselves.ConclusionBetter knowledge of the discourses through which young people CSPs, and how these discourses are transmitted across generations, might help develop “culturally compelling” interventions that modify these discourses to enhance sexual health.

‘I Don’t Really Like Tedious, Monotonous Work’: Working-class Young Women, Service Sector Employment and Social Mobility in Contemporary Russia

This article contributes a global perspective to the emerging literature on girlhood in western contexts by examining the changing shape of transitions to adulthood amongst working-class young women in St. Petersburg, Russia. As in many western countries, new forms of service sector employment and an increasingly accessible higher education system appear to offer young women new prospects for social mobility. In contrast to the increasingly impoverished and denigrated traditional pathways into work, the young women in the study derive significant value from these new opportunities, constructing narratives of self-actualisation and approximating notions of respectable femininity. Nevertheless, actual social mobility is elusive, as familiar patterns of classed and gendered stratification limit their prospects. Despite its specificity, the case thus further illustrates the limited nature of the transformations available to young women through the new forms of education and work characteristic of global neoliberal contexts.

Penis as Risk: A Queer Phenomenology of Two Swedish Transgender Women's Narratives on Gender Correction

Based on narratives from two transgender women with experiences of undergoing a Swedish gender correction, this article offers important insights in a cultural context situated in a time and space when Sweden's transgender population was legally obligated to leave their reproductive capabilities behind, and if married divorce, as they struggled for legal gender recognition (the rigid legal terms being newly abolished from the law in 2013). I argue that ‘real’ preoperative transgender women are expected to be well-behaved, modest, and sexually passive, in line with the white, middleclass standard of respectable femininity that informs the obligatory psychiatric assessment required to alter legal sex. Such respectability is intimately bound to the cultural genealogy of the penis of flesh. Ideas of original, non-performative, sexually active, white and superior masculinity clings to the penis of flesh, just as the penis of flesh always sticks to its history – the phallus. As a result transgender women who desire legal gender recognition but not genital surgery are positioned within the sphere of the unthinkable, uninhabitable, unintelligible and less human. Thus, I argue, the penis, and transgender women's acceptance of it, becomes a risk.Swedish authorities have been consistent in requiring vaginoplasty as obligatory terms for transgender women's legal gender recognition. Importantly, transgender men do not face these conditions. They have the possibility to be legally acknowledged as male without undergoing genital surgery. Thus, I ask: What alternatives do transgender women who undergo Swedish psychiatric gender assessments have for articulating and embodying alternative forms of femininity?

A Fine Balance: Negotiating fashion and respectable femininity in middle-class Hyderabad, India

AbstractDrawing on twelve months of fieldwork in suburban Hyderabad, this paper explores the double binds experienced by middle-class young women as they attempt to meet the competing demands of ‘respectable’ and ‘fashionable’ femininity. For middle-class women, respectability requires purposeful movement, demure posture and modest clothing when in public, as well as avoidance of lower-class spaces where men congregate. Status can, however, also be achieved through more revealing fashionable clothing and consumption in elite public spaces. Whilst respectability for some sections of the middle class necessitates avoidance of even platonic relationships with the opposite sex, upper middle-class informants encourage heterosociality and for some upper middle-class and elite youth pre-marital romance is a form of ‘fashion’ due to its location in high-status spaces of leisure and consumption. The tensions described in this paper reveal the fragmentation of Hyderabad's middle class and the barriers to social mobility experienced by women for whom the relationship between legitimate cultural capital and feminine modesty is becoming increasingly complex.

Keeping out of trouble: Female crack cocaine dealers in England

This paper offers a rare insight into women’s experiences dealing crack cocaine. Drawing on interviews with eight women, this research finds that, although the retail-level crack trade is male dominated, it is not simply a man’s world. This paper examines the strategies that successful female dealers employed, demonstrating that women reflexively took their gender into account to made cognizant choices about what, when and how to deal. Dealing strategies were a response not solely to the gendered nature of the drug market but also to women’s gendered social positions, relationships and identities. Performing respectable femininity was a key strategy for keeping dealing hidden and keeping out of trouble. This paper is underpinned by the concept of ‘doing gender’.

Respectable Femininity and Career Agency: Exploring Paradoxical Imperatives

This paper places respectable femininity at the very centre of career enactment. In the accounts of 24 Sri Lankan women, notions of being a ‘respectable’ woman recurred as respondents described how important it was to adhere to the powerful behavioural norms for women in their organizations and society. However while such respectability was vital for women's career progression, it ultimately restricted their agency and conflicted with other requirements for advancement. Based on our empirical findings, we propose that being a respectable woman was experienced as paradox, where at times it was seen as impossible to be both a good woman and a successful careerist. We highlight the implications of our findings for women's careers in South Asia and more widely.

Becoming (M)other: Reflectivity in Le Journal des Demoiselles

This article explores the complex positioning of Jeanne-Justine Fouqueau de Pussy (J.J.), editor-in-chief and columnist for the long-running Journal des Demoiselles (1833–96), vis-à-vis the dominant ideology of the feminine in nineteenth-century France. From 1833 to her retirement in 1853, J.J., a self-supporting and mature divorcée living alone, presented herself as a jeune fille who lived at home with her parents and corresponded about the latest fashions and trends with an anonymous and imaginary reader. This article argues that, in spite of the journal’s markedly conservative tenor as a vehicle for promoting respectable femininity and its explicit aim to prepare young girls for bourgeois marriage, the columns of its principal spokeswoman can be read as the expression of an alternative agenda centred in female sociability and autonomy. Analysing fashion plates and sewing patterns alongside sample columns from the twenty-year span of J.J.’s ‘Correspondance’, the article traces the idea of literal and figurative ‘reflectivity’ to investigate J.J.’s mixing of surface and subtextual messages.

Benevolent ladies and irrepressible busybodies: contesting the bounds of ‘genuine’ philanthropy

Female philanthropy in the nineteenth century presents as a site for the contestation and reinscription of hierarchical hegemonic ideological constructs of gender and class. Female philanthropists were complexly and contradictorily positioned as both agents of social control while simultaneously being subjected to socially determined notions of respectable womanhood and genteel femininity. Dominant discourses prescribed that relationships between the providers and receivers of assistance be circumscribed by difference, deference and distance. These boundaries were challenged by social reformers who sought to address and eliminate the causes of poverty rather than provide palliative charity. This article explores the tensions that arose in the Auckland and Melbourne philanthropic communities in the early to mid-1870s when women's rights advocate Mary Ann Colclough proposed a number of schemes to provide for women in need. Dubbed by the periodical press as an ‘irrepressible busybody’ and a member of the ‘shrieking sisterhood’, her actions challenged accepted notions of who was deserving of assistance, the nature of appropriate assistance, and who was entitled to provide that assistance. This is clearly evident in the newspaper debates her actions engendered, debates that essentially sought to delineate and reinscribe the bounds of ‘genuine’ philanthropy.

White gazes, brown breasts: imperial feminism and disciplining desires and bodies in colonial encounters

This article examines the colonial encounters of gender, race and sexuality in the United States and the Philippines in the early 1900s. It traces the anxieties over US men's moral degeneracy and the representation of Filipinas as libidinal temptations, which mobilised US women's active participation in colonial biopolitics and governmentality. It contends that white women as imperial feminists asserted their principled crusade and superiority over white men and brown women by becoming bearers of racialised heteronormative traditions and feminine respectability and becoming barriers to inter‐racial sexual relations. White women focused on the white male domains of military and government and on the colonial education of brown women. Ultimately, the article supplements the Spivakian claim that “white men are saving brown women from brown men”, which has become the quintessential narrative of colonial justification and redemption, with “white women are saving white men and brown women from each other”. Drawing on government, newspaper and school documents, the article engages feminist discussions on the role of women in empire and education.

‘Stuff It’: Respectability and the Voice of Resistance in Letter to Brezhnev

Exploring Letter to Brezhnev through concepts of respectability as feminine cultural capital this article suggests that the film’s affective impulse stems from its representation of a female, working class experience under Thatcherism. This experience is articulated through two structures of feeling derived from the intersecting conventions of social realism, and the consumerist and romantic tropes of the ‘woman’s film’. Through this intersection the daily abjection of women through degrading work or unemployment is traced, whilst being counterpointed to the escapist pleasures of a ‘night out’ constituted through the spatial and aesthetic shifts of the narrative, and the feminisation of the ‘jack the lad’ staple of British screen culture. In this way, Letter to Brezhnev exposes the centrality of respectability to women’s social mobility, or lack of it, thus offering a powerful critique of Thatcherite ideologies and women’s position as primary consumers within them. The article also offers a corrective to existing scholarship that has focussed on cinematic representations of a crisis of masculinity under Thatcherism to the neglect of its corrosive impact on feminine respectability.

Dead Husbands and Deviant Women: Investigating the Detective Widow in Neo-Victorian Crime Fiction

Over past decade, detective widow has become a well-established character in little-explored subgenre of neo-Victorian crime fiction. In Tasha Alexander's Lady Emily series, author argues, detective widow investigates gendered characteristics and com- plexities of Victorian widowhood while detecting artistic crimes associated with historical fiction's imitations and adaptations of past. In outlining scope of academic journal Neo-Victorian Studies, Marie-Luise Kohlke describes neo-Victorianism as the contemporary fascination with reimagining nineteenth century and its varied literary, artistic, socio-political and historical contexts; this fascination is perhaps most evident in proliferation of so-called neo-Victorian novels (Aims and Scopes). Fictional revisitings of nineteenth century by authors such as A. S. Byatt, Michel Faber, Amitav Ghosh, and Sarah Waters have topped bestseller lists and have begun to form part of a neo-Victorian canon that, since turn of new millennium, has begun to receive significant critical attention. 1 Despite this burgeoning aca- demic interest in literary manifestations of neo-Victorian, however, critics have largely neglected neo-Victorian crime fiction. 2 This essay considers significance of one partic- ularly striking feature of recent examples in subgenre: figure of detective widow. A dilettante sleuth, this character strives to break, or at least occasionally transgress, boundaries of respectable femininity, not only through her investigative association with crimes of others but also through her own deviant (if not criminal) intellectual pur- suits (usually in form of certain reading and/or writing activities) as well as her partial disregard for mourning customs and other matters of social etiquette. This figure, who usu-

‘It is a colour thing and a status thing, rather than a gender thing’: Negotiating difference in talk about feminism

Young women's rejection of feminism is well-recognized if seemingly paradoxical. Based on 40 qualitative interviews with a diverse group of German and British research participants, this article adopts a performative approach to enhance our understanding of young women's relationship with feminism. First, the article argues that rejections of feminism as anti-man, lesbian or unfeminine should be read as performances of femininity. Second, the article regards performances of femininity as racialized and classed. It traces how race and class are assumed in talk about feminism and examines how young women's positionings intersect with feminist dis-identification. The construction of feminists as unfeminine, for example, posed particular challenges to women who were positioned at a distance from notions of ‘respectable femininity’ because of their class background. While the relationship between young women's positionings and stances towards feminism is not predetermined, the article investigates how gender identity, sexuality, race and class matter in engagements with feminism.

Book Reviews

85 Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Vol. XXXIV, No.4, Summer 2011 Book Reviews Edited by Nadia Barsoum INDIA, PAKISTAN, BANGLADESH, TURKEY A HISTORY OF THE PAKISTAN ARMY, 3rd ed. By Brian Cloughley. Oxford University Press, 2006, 392pp. Provides a wide and in-depth analysis of the Pakistan Army from its beginning to its most current campaigns. INDIA, PAKISTAN, AND THE UNITED STATES. By Shirin R. Tahir-Kheli. New York, NY: Council on Foreign Relations Press, 1997, 156pp. Discusses the past, present and possible future relations between these regions and the effects of the end of the Cold War on all of them. CONTESTED REPRESENTATION: PUNJABI WOMEN IN FEMINIST DEBATE IN PAKISTAN. By Tahmina Rashid. Oxford University Press, 2006, 403pp. Examines the legal rights, political representation and socio-economic status of women in Pakistan. ESSAYS IN INDIAN HISTORY: TOWARDS A MARXIST PERCEPTION. By Irfan Habib. London: Anthem Press, 2002, 426pp. Compilation of essays representing three decades of research and providing an interpretation of the main trends in Indian history from a Marxist historiography. AFGHANISTAN: A MODERN HISTORY. By Angelo Rasanayagam. London: I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd. Angelo Rasanayagam has revised and updated his magisterial work, which is the first major history of modern Afghanistan. DHOW CULTURES OF THE INDIAN OCEAN: COSMOPOLITANISM, COMMERCE AND ISLAM by Abdul Sheriff, Columbia University Press, New York, 351pp. For centuries the dhow, a traditional Arab sailing vessel, operated according to the principles of free trade, carrying sailors, traders, passengers, and cargo to ports within Africa. Abdel Shariff unravels this rich and populous history, recasting the roots of Islam as they grew within the region, along with the thrilling story of the dhow. CONTRADICTORY LIVES: BAUL WOMEN IN INDIA AND BANGLADESH by Lisa I. Knight, Oxford University Press, New York, NY 2011, 217pp. In literature and popular imagination, the Bauls of India 86 and Bangladesh are characterizes musical mystics: orange-clad nomads of both Hindu and Muslim backgrounds. Knight examines the contradictory expectations regarding Baul Women: on the one hand, the ideal of a group unencumbered by societal restrains and concerns and, on the other the real constrains of feminine respectability that seemingly curtail women’s mobility and public performances. THEATRE IN COLONIAL INDIA: PLAY-HOUSE OF POWER edited by Lata Singh, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, India 2010, 354pp. This volume explores various aspects of colonial theatre in terms of its politics, its linkages with modernity, and as a domain for intersection of “high” and “low” cultures. The essays also emphasize the multifaceted relationship between gender and theatre. DEMOCRACY IN INDIA edited by Niraja Gopal Jayal, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, India 2010, 571pp. This volume situates India democracy in the context of the basic principles of democratic theory and discusses its relationship with civil society, cultural diversity and development. While identifying tensions between political and economic development, it looks at how democracy is experienced at the local level. It also examines the future of Indian democracy as a variety of political discourses. THE PERSIAN GULF AND PACIFIC ASIA: FROM INDIFERENCE TO INTERDEPENDENCE by Christopher Davidson, Columbia University Press, New York, 145pp. Davidson examines the Middle East rapidly changing economy, details the eastern and western factors that have brought Asia and the Gulf closer together. Although this relationship has yet to include military arrangements, evidence suggests that the two regions have bolstered other non economics ties. ATTATURK: AN INTELLECTUAL BIOGRAPHY by M. Sukru Hanioglu, Princeton University Press, 2011, 273pp. Hanioglu provides the first in-depth look at the intellectual life of the Turkish Republic’s founder. In doing so, it frames him within the historical context of the turbulent age in which he lived, and explores the uneasy transition from the late ottoman imperial order to the modern Turkish state through his life and ideas. He shows how Attaturk drew on a unique mix of scientism, materialism, social Darwinism, positivism, and other theories to fashion a grand utopian framework on which to build his new nation. ...

“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”: Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper

“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”:Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper Kristine Moruzi (bio) and Michelle Smith (bio) Under Charles Peters’s editorship until his death in 1907, the Girl’s Own Paper (GOP, 1880–1956) reflected and responded to its readers’ needs for practical information about employment opportunities. Articles such as “On Earning One’s Living,” “Female Clerks and Book-Keepers,” and “Nursing as a Profession” all appeared in the magazine’s first year. The correspondence sections likewise discussed issues of employment. For example, in response to her letter, “Isolated Hetty” is asked whether her elderly relatives would be inconvenienced by her seeking employment and, if not, she is advised “to apply to some hospital for nursing” and directed towards other numbers of the GOP, where “much has been said about”1 nursing as a profession. Alongside these informational articles and advice columns were fictional stories depicting working girls in their struggles to support themselves and their families while also remaining virtuous and pure. Despite this overt support for working girls, however, the popular Girl’s Own Paper contains a curious ambivalence towards girls’ employment. Although it was ostensibly targeted towards working- and lower middle-class girls, most of whom would have worked, the GOP reinforces a traditional feminine ideal discouraging middle-class girls from working outside the home, while also reaffirming the necessity for working-class girls to earn income through paid labour. The magazine presents middle-class girls’ employment as admirable and acceptable only when such work is inspired by necessity and only when it remains within the bounds of respectable femininity. This idea of girls’ employment is complicated by the GOP’s fiction, which attempts to contain working girls by portraying them as victims of circumstance with few opportunities to express themselves. The freedoms of employment emerge most obviously in the frequent first-person evidence in the correspondence [End Page 429] sections, which suggests girl readers are more concerned with the practicalities of employment than with perceived notions of femininity. Mediated by the middle-class editor and contributors to the magazine, working-class voices appear as novelties, enabling the presentation of urban working girls as needing middle-class intervention. By including articles and stories about the lives of working-class girls, the GOP allows middle-class readers to gain vicarious insight into the world of employment beyond the home, yet the magazine’s depiction of urban work is narrowly defined, and the frequently negative renderings of such work not only promote an outlet for middle-class girls to channel benevolent impulses but also form part of the editorial strategies that contain middle-class girls’ work within the home. When the Religious Tract Society first began publishing the Girl’s Own Paper in 1880, it was responding to two troubling trends it perceived in the publishing industry. The first was the popularity of inexpensive, weekly penny dreadful magazines full of lurid stories of murder and intrigue. The second was the frequency with which girls were reading magazines intended for their brothers including, but certainly not limited to, the Boy’s Own Paper, which the RTS started in 1879. Flora Klickmann, editor of the GOP from 1908, describes how the GOP was originally intended “to foster and develop that which was highest and noblest in the girlhood and womanhood of England,”2 highlighting the magazine’s focus on femininity and morality. As a weekly one penny magazine the GOP was intended to compete with the penny dreadfuls. It was aimed at working- and lower-middle-class girls, and it tried to hide its evangelical origins by publishing the magazine under the auspices of “The Leisure Hour Office,” a popular family magazine, rather than explicitly identifying its RTS origins. As Aileen Fyfe explains, a magazine published by the RTS would have been viewed with suspicion by working-class readers, for many of whom “the name ‘RTS’ would be more likely to suggest patronising middle-class interference than trustworthy information”3 because of its long history of publishing and distributing improving evangelical religious tracts to the working classes. Situating Work in the Girl’s Own Paper While the GOP’s purpose was to instruct readers presumed...