Victorian: Request for Papers

“Gender, the Professions and the Press” Special Issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies

Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies is a peer-reviewed, online journal committed to publishing insightful and innovative scholarship on gender studies and nineteenth-century British literature, art and culture. Contributions of 5,000-8,000 words are sought for a special number of NCGS on “Gender, the Professions and the Press” to be published in the summer of 2009.
In the nineteenth century, the professions made enormous use of journals and journalism to establish their collective identities. Taking advantage of the proliferation of online material from nineteenth-century periodicals, the special edition of NCGS we propose would focus on what periodicals and newspapers can tell us about the gendered aspects of these professional identities.

Jennifer Ruth in her Novel Professions: Interested Disinterest and the Making of the Professional in the Victorian Novel (Ohio State University Press, 2006) has argued provocatively that the novel attempted to theorise the professional in ways political economy failed to do. In fact, however, it is the periodical press that most extensively addresses the complex issues involved in professional identity. Of course the professions were discussed in fiction in periodicals (e.g. Trollope's "Editor's Tales" first published in St Paul's Magazine consider the role of the professional writer) and we should welcome discussion of the professions and gender in periodical fiction, but enormous numbers of non-fiction articles also appeared in general periodicals about all kinds of professions (E.M. Palmegiano's Health and British Magazines in the Nineteenth Century lists many concerned with the medical profession, for example, and the Wellesley Index is invaluable to locate material on other professions). Then again, hundreds of specifically professional periodicals arose with titles like the Accountant, Army and Navy Gazette, Builder, Engineer, Financial News, Missionary Chronicle, Schoolmaster and Schoolmistress. With varying degrees of detail, these portray lifestyles, working practices and networking procedures and etiquette besides the ostensible domain itself, providing rich and often unexpected insights into nineteenth-century gender relations.

The traditional professions of the church, law, medicine and the military were set up as exclusively male, and there was a strong patrilineal element in professional recruitment (sons either following fathers or entering a neighbouring profession). This of course does not mean these professions were or are “ungendered” as Anne Witz, Cynthia Cockburn and many others forcefully showed in the 1980s. They are, rather, tied to particular versions of masculinity, only one component of which (albeit a large one) was concerned with the exclusion of women. More recently Priti Joshi in her case study of Edwin Chadwick (Victorian Literature and Culture (2004), 32:2: 353-370) and John Tosh more generally have shown that the relationship between masculinity and the practice of a profession was not always easy. What can the periodical press tell us about the construction of masculinity in particular professions? How does the relationship between the two change over the century? How are the masculinities associated with the established professions - themselves divergent from one another - different from emergent ones such as chemists or engineers?



The limited inroads that women made into medicine and teaching have been studied since before Martha Vicinus’s famous Independent Women (1985), but there is still room for more work on women and the professions. Why and how for example, were women kept out of the law or engineering altogether? Why were there only a half-dozen women architects in the Census of 1901 and just 19 accountants in 1911? Perusal of the relevant journals may suggest some answers. H. Byerley Thomson's The Choice of a Profession (1857) noted that music, art, literature and acting were professions already open to women. While work has already been done on how gender was negotiated in these occupations, periodicals such as Actors by Gaslight, the Art Journal, the Musical Times or the Journalist offer new and specific source material on how both women and men trod the gender tightrope at work.



Finally, we should like to direct attention to the place of advertisements in professional journals. While advertisers paid careful attention to the readership profile of publications they appeared in, we find unequivocally women's products advertised in periodicals directed to professions which only men practised. Does this signify only control of women's consumption by men, or are other explanations possible? Perhaps a study of contemporary advertisers’ manuals on where to place products may yield some answers. We raise this issue only as an example of how advertisements can yield many kinds of data relevant to the study of gender.



The recent appearance of the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (British Library/ Academia Press, January 2009) as well as the online resources of ncse, the British Library, Gale-Cengage and others will be a significant aid to identifying hitherto neglected periodical sources. In drawing attention to periodicals, to their fiction, their non-fiction and their adverts for this special issue, we are seeking to generate through a vast but hitherto largely invisible textual palette an ever more finely shaded and sharper picture of nineteenth-century gender relations at work.



Enquiries are welcome, as are completed articles. Please send either to Andrew King (andrew.king@canterbury.ac.uk) or Marysa Demoor (marysa.demoor@ugent.be).



Articles (5,000-8,000 word) should be in MLA format with a brief biographical note which will be posted if accepted for publication. To facilitate the peer review process, please send two files—one with your article void of any identifying information and another with your brief biographical note. The deadline for completed submissions is 31 May 2009.



We look forward to an exciting issue.