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Women Making News
Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain
Women creating the space for their own political voices in the press
Michelle Tusan's Women Making News tells two stories: first, it examines alternative print-based political cultures that women developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and second, it explores how British female subjects themselves forged a wide range of new political identities through the pages of "their press."
Starting in the mid-nineteenth century, a rising cohort of female editors and journalists created a new genre of political journal they proclaimed to be both "for and by women," which continued until the 1930s. The development of new specialized periodicals, such as Women's Penny Paper, Votes for Women, Women's Gazette, and Shafts, fostered the proliferation of diverse political agendas aimed at reimagining women's status in society. At the same time, the institutional infrastructure of the women's press provided new opportunities for women in nontraditional employments.
Tusan's approach employs social and cultural historical analysis in the reading of popular printed texts, as well as rare and previously unpublished personal correspondence and business records from archives throughout Britain. Women Making News is the first book-length study to uncover the important relationship between print culture and the gender politics that provided a vehicle for women's mobilization in the political culture of modern Britain.
"[Tusan's] detailed treatment of the journals and a splendid appendix . . . make this book an invaluable tool for researchers in British women's history. . . . Tusan has done a real service to women's historians by writing such a thorough survey of the women's advocacy press. Those wishing to draw on women's periodicals in their research, and those wishing to historicize the journals they are working with already, will find Tusan's book an invaluable reference. Her thorough research and her ability to put a multiplicity of journals into a compelling social context give two-dimensional print culture a three-dimensional character."--American Historical Review "Women Making News has excellent illustrations of the front pages of papers both familiar and rare, of women in press offices, and of women on the streets selling papers."--Victorian Studies "Tusan's Women Making News: Gender and Journalism in Modern Britain offers a richly researched analysis that advances women's journalism history beyond fragmentary accounts of individual experience to place the women's advocacy press at center of the cultural and political emergence of the British woman citizen between 1856 and 1930. . . . The book is the most intellectually ambitious and creatice book on women's journalism history that I can remember in the past decade."--JHistory
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