This paper argues that the formal qualities and discursive dynamics of
the American magazine offered particularly utility to editors and contributors
of the first feminist magazines of the 1850s. Owing primarily to the magazine's
miscellaneous contents and ongoing dynamics of reader response, contributors
variously pushed the boundaries of the popular gender discourse of "domesticity"
into new realms of female empowerment. The article uses contributions to
the longest-lived feminist magazine of the first generation, The Lily
(1849-58), to illustrate some of the many strategies by which this conversion
was enabled and endorsed.
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Last updated: March 9, 1998.
Comments to: Communication Department
