OTHER “GIRLS OF THE PERIOD.”

BY FANNY FERN, OF NEW YORK.  1869.

I am inclined to believe that there are a great many kinds of women, both in England and America.  This idea seems to be lost sight of by the writers of both nations, who have lately undertaken to describe the feminine element under such titles as “The Girl of Period,”(1) or “The Woman of the Time;”(2) presenting to our view monstrosities, which no doubt exist, but which are no more to be taken as specimens of the whole, than is the Bearded Woman, or the Mammoth Fat Girl(3).

     New York, for instance, is not wholly given over to the feminine devil.  Angels(4) walk our streets, discernible to eyes that wish to see.  Noble, thoughtful, earnest women; sick of shams and pretence; striving each, so far as in her lies, to abate both, and to diminish the amount of physical and moral suffering.  Then, I never go into the country for a few weeks’ summer holiday, that I do not find large-hearted, large-brained women, stowed away among the green hills, in little cottages, which are glorified inside and out by their presence; women who, amid the press of house and garden work, find time for mental culture; whose little book-shelves hold well-read copies of our best authors.  Women – sound physically, mentally, morally; women, whom the Man of the Period(5), who most surely exists, has never found.  Now and then some man, fit to be her mate, in his rambles in the sweet summer time, is struck as I am by these gems hidden amid the green hills, and appropriates them for his own.  But, for the most part, the more sensible a man is, the bigger the fool he marries.  This is especially true of biographers(6)!

     What a wrong then, to the great army of sensible, earnest women, in either country, to pick out a butterfly as the national type!  Because a few men in New York, and London, and Paris, wear corsets, and dye their whiskers and hair, and pad out their hollow cheeks and shrunken calves(7), it does not follow that Victor Hugo(8), and John Bright(9), and the great army of brave men who won our late victory(10), are all popinjays(11).  For every female fool I will find you a male mate.  So, when the inventory of the former is taken, the roll-call of the latter might as well be voiced.  Are women so “fond of gossip?”(12)  Pray, what is the staple of after-dinner conversation(13), when the wine comes on and the women go off?  Do women “lavish money on personal adornment?”  How many men are there who would be willing to tell on what, and on whom, their money was worse than lavished?  Do women “leave their nursery altogether to hirelings(14)?”  How many corresponding men are there, whose own children, under their own roofs, are almost entire strangers to their club-frequenting fathers(15)?  And yet, what good, noble men are to be seen for the looking?  Faithful to their trusts, faithful to themselves, unmoved by the waves of folly and sin that dash around them, as is the rock of Gibraltar(16). 

    I demand that justice be done by these writers, on both sides of the water, to both sexes.  Fools, like the poor, we shall have always with us(17); but, thank heaven, the “just” man and the “just” woman “still live” to redeem the race.  Men worthy to be fathers, and large-brained women(18),who do not, even in this degenerate day(19), disdain to look well after their own households.

 

 

               Notes on the Text

 

(1) “The Girl of the Period”:  Written by Eliza Lynn Linton, printed in the original edition of the Saturday Review, London, 1868 March 14.  "The Girl of the Period" was written as a social critique and instructional guide for the English "girl of the period".  Linton's essay suggested that British women, once the pinnacle of womanhood, had fallen from great heights through the obsession with cosmetics, fancy dress and expensive frivolities.  Linton suggests that the "girl of the period" aspires to imitate the demi-monde, a nineteenth-century term for a mistress who lived on the fringe of respectable society and was "kept" in fashion by a wealthy lover / lovers.  Linton suggests that, though the "girl of the period" has not yet sunk to the moral lows of the demi-monde, she "has already paid too much  - all that once gave her distinctive national character."  Linton goes on to argue that respectable men will be wary of marrying the "girl of the period," because they know that she "is only a poor copy of the real thing" and that she will not be an ideal wife and mother, but instead will spend their husband's money with little concern for the consequences.  Fanny Fern's response to Linton's article most likely appeared first in the American periodical, New York Ledger, under the title, "Woman's Millenium".  An 1869 edition of the British periodical, Reynold's Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science and Art reprinted a cut version of the article, renaming it "Other 'Girls of the Period'".  The same article also appears in the American periodical, Colman's Rural World.       

 

(2) "The Woman of the Time":  A play on the "girl of the period" and likely a general reference by Fern, critiquing Linton's characterization of the "girl of the period."

 

(3) the Bearded Woman, or the Mammoth Fat Girl:  A reference to the residents of the "freakshow" or "sideshow," a popular nineteenth century diversion where audiences could pay a small fee to see people with extraordinary physical characteristics or talents.  These same people might have once been considered special or divine because of their physical anomalies, but by the nineteenth century, they were objects of spectacle (Adams).  Fern's reference points out the freakish and anomalous nature of these women, citing them as extreme examples, not representative of the whole, much like Linton's "girl of the period."

 

(4) Angels: A reference to the "angel in the house" ideal, inspired by Coventry Patmore's 1854 poem of the same name.  In the United States, this ideal was more commonly known through the "cult of true womanhood," the main ideas of which were purity, piety, domesticity and submissiveness.  John Ruskin further explored this idea in the essay "Of Queen's Gardens" in the book Sesame and Lilies." 

 

(5) Man of the Period:  Probably a general reference, an implication by Fern that women are not the only ones open to critique.

 

(6) This is especially true of biographers!: This rather cryptic statement may be a sharp jab at William U. Moulton, Fern's former editor at the True Flag and probable author of an unauthorized 1855 biography on Fern, The Life and Beauties of Fanny Fern.   According to Joyce Warren's introduction in the Rutger's 2003 edition of Fern's novel, Ruth Hall, Fern created a markedly unfavorable impression of Moulton with her editorial character of Mr. Tibbetts (xvii).    Enraged by the characterization, Moulton began to reveal Fern's identity in the True Flag around 1854, before he printed the biography.  However, Fern may have been thinking of two people with her reference to "biographer", implying both Moulton and her third (and last) husband, the famous biographer, James Parton.  In this context, Fern's tongue-in-cheek humor would imply that "sensible" men favoring traditional values (Moulton) would not select a "large-brained" wife: hence they marry fools.  Likewise, if Parton is considered sensible, he has also married a "fool", Fanny Fern, and she is poking fun at herself.  Parton's work covered such famous figures as Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Voltaire, Andrew Jackson, Horace Greeley, and Aaron Burr. 

 

(7) wear corsets, and dye their whiskers and hair, and pad out their hollow cheeks and shrunken calves:  A reference to the very beginnings of the aesthetic movement, where men were just as prone to flights of fancy and vanity as women.  Once patterns and sewing machines were readily available, people could easily dress outside of the norms for their class, or even gender (Gilbert, Roberts, Showalter).   

 

(8) Victor Hugo (1802-1885): Influential French statesmen, novelist, poet, and playwright.  He is most popularly known for his novels, Les Miserables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame.

 

(9) John Bright (1811-1889): British radical and statesmen.  He was also a Quaker and intellectual.

 

(10) "the great army of brave men who won our late victory...":  Fern is referring to veterans from the American Civil War (1861-1865).

 

(11) popinjays: "With allusion to the bird's gaudy plumage or its mechanical repetition of words and phrases: a shallow, vain, or conceited person" (Popinjay).  Fanny Fern, pseudonym for Sara Willis, was well familiar with the men which she described as popinjays.  Joyce Warren writes in her introduction to Ruth Hall that Fern based her article "Apollo Hyacinth" upon her brother, N. P. Willis, as well as the "pretentious dandy, Hyacinth Ellet, Ruth's brother" in Ruth Hall (Warren xiv).  As the character Hyacinth Ellet, Fern's brother is described as "...a miserable time-server...Fashion is his God; he recognizes only the drawing-room side of human nature.  Sorrow in satin he can sympathize with, but sorrow in rags is too plegeian for his exquisite organization" (Fern 207).

 

(12) “fond of gossip?”:  Possible a reference to Linton's assertion in "The Girl of the Period" that these girls talk slang and lead "the conversation to doubtful subjects."

 

(13) after-dinner conversation:  After the meal was concluded at a dinner party, the hostess would signal for the other ladies in attendance to leave the men in the dining room, and adjourn to the drawing room.  The men would remain in the dining room to continue to enjoy the wine and conversation without the female sex (Mallery 206-207).

 

(14) Hirelings:  Fern is referring to the child-rearing practices of the wealthier classes in 19th century America, who often relied on hired help or governesses for educating, raising, and entertaining children. Of course, the use of "hirelings" was an accepted practice on both sides of the Atlantic, and therefore a recognizable issue to American and British readers.

 

(15) club-frequenting fathers:  Refers to social and professional clubs frequented by men.   Women were not the only ones faced with expectations of their role in domestic life.  Men were also expected to contribute to the elevation of the home through their marriage, economically providing for and asserting appropriate patriarchal discipline over their dependent wife and children, and acting as appropriately affectionate husbands and fathers.  Many men sought to break away from the rigors of domestic life through clubs, a homosocial environment where their masculinity was validated in a setting away from hearth and home.  Women were explicitly excluded from these clubs, a continuation of social practices that kept women out of universities and certain professions, preserving patriarchal control (Showalter, Tosh).

 

(16) rock of Gibraltar: "The name of a fortified town on the south coast of Spain, since 1704 a British possession.  Used fig. for:  An impregnable stronghold" (Gibraltar, OED).  "Gibraltar has been of strategic importance throughout its long military history.  The Rock has endured many sieges, the most famous being the Great Siege of 1783" (About Gibraltar).  "As a fortress and a colony, Gibraltar has been a symbol of British military strength since the 1700s.  Commonly referred to as 'the Rock,' it is a British air and naval base that guards the Strait of Gibraltar.  This important waterway between Spain and Africa connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Atlantic Ocean" (Gibraltar, Britannica).

 

(17) "Fools, like the poor, we shall have always with us":  Fern’s phrase here is a turn on Biblical scripture, based on the 26^th chapter and 11^th verse from the New Testament gospel, Matthew.  “For ye have the poor always with you; but me ye have not always.” (KJV).

 

In context of the scripture, Jesus is with his disciples, in the house of Simon the leper.  The time of Jesus’ betrayal by Judas Iscariot is close at hand.  While Jesus is teaching, a woman comes to Simon’s house and pours expensive oil on Jesus’ head in honor (and symbolic preparation) of his coming death.  The disciples criticize the woman for spending money on oil that could be used to feed the poor.   Fern uses this scripture to point out that as it is impossible to rid the world of poverty, it is also impossible to rid the world of “fools”.  On a second level, Jesus admires and defends the woman for sensing and honoring his sacrifice, something the disciples have not yet recognized.  In context of this article, Fern is possibly juxtaposing the disciple’s “blindness” with society’s inability to see the real “fools” among them.

 

(18) large-brained women: A reference to the debate over sexual differences.  Many early thinkers and anatomists theorized that women's hips were broader than men's, indicating their reproductive capacities, while their muscles and brains were smaller, indicating their lack of strength and intellect (Schiebinger).  The larger brained woman here seems to represent the clever or intellectual woman, one who chooses not to let men think for her, but instead thinks for herself.

 

(19) this degenerate day:  Degeneration was a cause of much anxiety throughout the nineteenth-century.  After Darwin's On the Origin of Species was published in 1859, many social and scientific theories came out of Darwinian thought, spawning a belief that white, Western men (followed by white, Western women) were the pinnacles of evolutionary progress.  In addition to concerns about physical degeneration, exemplified by Robert Louis Stevenson's 1886 novella, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there was also concern that the widespread urbanization and urban poverty would lead to a social degeneration (Malchow and Showalter).

 

 

 

                Commentary on the Text

 

 

Linton, Fern, and Publishing - Kristin Huston, 31 March 2008

 

 

    “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” by Fanny Fern fits into a subset of journalism focused on the woman question – an idea that encompassed many issuess dealing with social and cultural reforms for women.  Fern’s piece is a response to Eliza Lynn Linton’s inflammatory and antifeminist essay “The Girl of the Period,” published in the Saturday Review.  While Linton’s writing has often been looked at in light of this antifeminism and suppositions about her sexual orientation, recently scholars have been more carefully examining the role her work plays in issues of women’s publication and journalism.  Specifically, Andrea L. Broomfield has suggested that after the failure of her novel, Linton exploited a subject in journalism, women, that had particular resonance for a nineteenth-century audience (“Antifeminist” 268). This was a self-serving move on the part of Linton, who wanted to conquer the world of publishing.  It is ironic, but important, to note this move by Linton; using her anti-feminist rants to push herself into publishing, which would appear to be a radically feminist goal, and to become the first salaried British woman journalist (“Antifeminist 267).

    Like other women, most notably the New Woman writer Sarah Grand, Fanny Fern engaged Linton in a public debate over the woman question with her response to “The Girl of the Period.”  From examining Fern’s other writings, including her autobiographical novel Ruth Hall, we can see that Fern clearly had a feminist agenda, proclaiming the strength and abilities of women.  However, Fern also understood the nature of publishing.  In Ruth Hall, Fern stresses the femininity of her title character protagonist to create a sense of sympathy for her and, unlike Linton, whose ambition drove her to write, Ruth only writes because she has no other option to sustain her family after her husband’s death.  Ruth’s interaction with publishers and her reinforced domesticity demonstrate how clearly Fanny Fern understood her audience and what was acceptable for female members of the press.

    Along with this understanding comes Fern’s undeniable ability to tap into writing about and in such a way that engages her audience.  While Linton may have been using controversy to make her career, promoting an antagonism with her critics and other authors in order to keep her name and writing in the public eye, Fern engages with Linton in such a way that demonstrates her own sophisticated understanding of the nature of journalism (“Spectacle”).  Fern directly takes on Linton, cleverly spinning the woman question in her own favor.  She adeptly uses the newspaper editorial format and cultural references, such as the corset wearing dandy, angel in the house, and civil war soldiers, to draw in her audience. 

    Ultimately, Linton and Fern share more in common than their oppositional ideologies would suggest.  Both women were enormously successful in a male-dominated and controlled industry.  They both used vivid writing and contemporary cultural examples to make their point.  And both Fern and Linton used controversy to catapult themselves to success, making publishing work for them through their responses to the woman question.

 

 

Fanny Fern and Periodical Writing in the Nineteenth-Century Reprint Culture -- Kelly Mathews, March 31st, 2008.

 

When Fanny Fern (Sarah Payson Willis Parton) died in 1872 she had eliminated the bleak deprivation from two decades before and secured the best possible livelihood from her novels and newspaper columns.  Fern’s satisfaction with the business of authoring was obvious, even to her readers.  Acknowledging her literary success in personal terms, Fern dedicated her 1868 collection of newspaper columns, Folly As It Flies, to Robert Bonner of the New York Ledger , the editor who advanced not only her column's popularity but also Fern's notably increased pay.  A short tribute to her "friend", the dedication boasts of the carefully executed partnership between writer and editor that succeeded in making Fern and the New York Ledger a financial success, “For fourteen years, the team of Bonner and Fern, has trotted over the road at 2.40 pace, without a snap of the harness, or a hitch of the wheels. -- Plenty of oats, and a skilful rein, the secret” (dedication, Fern).   Fern’s bright and snappy outspokenness about her pen’s cash flow is also apparent in earlier work.  The preface of the 1857 newspaper column collection, Fresh Leaves, emphasizes the author’s view that writing , at least for some, is about making money, “...Secondly, the ‘hundred-dollar-a-column story,’ respecting the remuneration of which, skeptical paragraphists have afforded me so much amusement.  (N. B.—My banker and I can afford to laugh!)” (preface, Fern).  As brief as they are, these examples clearly show that Fern viewed herself as a business woman in a profit-centered author/editor partnership: a writer capable of exploiting her skills for personal gain, “plenty of oats” and a “skilful rein”.

 Fern and her pen could afford to laugh about money far longer and harder than most authors in the mid to late 1900’s.  In her extensive biographical introduction to Fern’s novel, Ruth Hall, Joyce Warren recalls that Fern made her first ten thousand dollars within less than a year: 70,000 copies of Fern’s 1853 Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio were sold in America, 29,000 copies in England (xvi).  In addition, the 1855 contract with Bonner that earned Fern the unprecedented and outrageous sum of $100 per article all but guaranteed that Bonner’s new authorial investment would want to continue her columns in the New York Ledger for sixteen years (xviii-xix).  The numbers reveal Fern’s business acumen, as well as Bonner’s, but they also point to the widespread influence of reprinting, which characterized the nineteenth-century periodical industry.  Since most editors did little or nothing to secure copyright protection for what they printed, the situation left Fern with no choice but to exploit reprinting, if she wanted the pen to earn money: a point nineteenth-century copyright scholar, Melissa Homestead, has thoroughly substantiated through Fern’s letters, books, legal documents, newspaper articles and other publications (229).  Reprinting was a profitable opportunity; one that would also be certain professional liability if it was ignored.  

Anyone can spend a few moments with Fern’s articles and see her active participation in protecting and promoting her authorial interests.   For a comprehensive analysis of Fern’s work and other authors writing within the reprinting environment, Melissa Homestead’s thorough reconstruction of nineteenth-century publishing practices aptly positions the massive importance of the copyright and the reprinting culture (what Homestead refers to as the “exchange publication”) within nineteenth-century periodical studies (211).  In America, reprinting was born out of free postage, allowing editors to regularly collect material from other periodicals they wished to subscribe to, instead of waiting for new authors to come with offerings of material that would be attractive to subscribers.  From this, editors could style their publication by reprinting the latest literature found in their chosen subscriptions.  The opportunity created avenues of exponential access and distribution: a phenomenon that shares a few similarities with today’s internet highway. 

For Fern, this reprint highway meant almost immediate advertising of her pen name as unauthorized editors wantonly copied her pieces into their publications.   The reprinting system created the market for her books, paving the way over name recognition obstacles with the sheer magnitude of its consistent advertising power, which all but guaranteed increased book sales.  However, two players were always represented on this vast publication chess-board: the all-powerful editor with open access to everything in print, and the author, who with care, might develop a style that rapidly moved from periodical to periodical through reprinting, picking up handfuls of interested subscribers everywhere she or he was welcomed.  Fern’s book sales indicate she certainly was this type of player.

Similar to the interest today’s audiences have in reality TV shows, Fern was masterful at creating reality literary dramas.  Using the correspondence and events she shared with readers and editors, Homestead claims that Fern maximized these for public display, injecting them with the perception of her status as a lady and the insidious literary theft enacted against her virtue when people copied her work without giving her credit: “He steals her literary reputation without rendering her any equivalent; although she never wrote a line for him…A man who would deal thus basely with a lady, and build up his own success on her popularity, would not scruple to sell his own grandmother to a soap-maker, for five dollars” (213).  Fern’s quick wit, manipulation of contemporary culture and her reader’s values culminates in a style that thoroughly exploits the benefits of reprinting, boosting Fern’s name recognition in every household, although the continuous “theft” results in the loss of royalties. 

One of the more notable exchanges in which Fern deployed her pen to exploit readers and culture within the reprinting system occurred after Eliza Lynn Linton’s 1868 “Girl of the Period” series broke out in the upper-class Saturday Review, a conservative periodical.  The series Linton contributed viciously stereotyped working-class girls as shameful and greedy marketers of false beauty, opportunists adorned with trashy embellishments and cold hearts.  Positioning her voice within this opportune framework, Fern’s caustic response to Linton’s anti-feminist stance probably made its first appearance sometime in an 1869 issue of the New York Ledger, under the title “Woman’s Millennium’”.  In 1870, Fern included this piece in one of her last collections of articles, Ginger-Snaps.  The article opens with the legal judgment from a divorce case and moves to the reasons for a woman’s discontent in marriage and the home.  Later, Fern aggressively narrowed in on Linton, cutting into her anti-feminist argument with an open attack on her illogical stereotype of girls, “I am inclined to believe that there are a great many kinds of women…This idea seems to be lost sight of, by the writers of both nations…” ( 81).  In the end Fern decides that if women can be so base, men are just as capable of base actions; they are capable of foolishness.

While extensive gender and feminist studies have engaged both Fern and Linton’s work, not to mention their private lives, this particular dialogue between Linton and Fern is more important for its demonstration of possible literary techniques that were used to exploit the thriving reprint culture.  Linton was certainly as skilled as Fern in creating interest among readers.  According to Andrea Broomfield, Linton’s exchange of authorial punches with Sarah Grand about the woman question was good business practice, “…antagonism was partly staged and their rhetoric exaggerated to promote themselves and to bolster certain periodicals’ reputations and sales” (254).   Already advanced in her career when “Woman’s Millennium” was published in 1869, Fern was a manipulator of periodical authorship; she certainly understood the opportunities in responding to Linton’s piece.  To start, Fern ensured her typical wit and sarcasm would remain equal with Linton’s.  Yet, Fern took additional care to further exaggerate the contrast between Linton’s crass descriptions of working-class women with the pure, sentimental, idyllic, rural images of graceful, angelic, intellectual, working class women and their doting husbands.  The tactic not only undercut Linton’s illogical short-sightedness and dragged men into the light where their capacity for base living was equal to that of women; it employed a new take on the controversy, providing a sure defense subscribers would want to read.  Success meant an increase in interest among readers, which meant more subscribers among the working classes that Linton attacked.  The strategy, similar to Linton and Grand’s exchanges in the more high-brow Saturday Review, would grow New York Ledger’s subscriber list while assuring that existing ones would remain committed to their periodical and wanting more of the same content in future issues.    

It is unknown if Linton carried on the controversy game with Fern.  Regardless of how long the exchange of responses might have gone on, Fern’s “Woman’s Millennium” travelled abroad and landed on Linton’s English soil via the working-class periodical Reynold’s Miscellany of Romance, General Literature, Science and Art (or Reynold’s for the shortened title).   Reynold’s picked up Fern’s “Woman’s Millennium” and trimmed off the first three pages to immediately before the first sentence, where Fern first mentioned Linton’s “Girl of the period”.  With an additional change of title that succinctly reflected Fern’s attack on Linton’s theme, the “Woman’s Millennium” became the much shorter and obvious “Other ‘Girls of the Period’”.    Adapting the text and title of the original version allowed Reynold’s editors to highlight Linton’s disparaging stereotype against the appealing and sentimental idea of many “large-brained”, virtuous, women within the working class (Fern, 189).  With an eye for precision, Reynold’s reprint and revision techniques created a hotter incendiary, one that would land effectively in the reader’s minds and burn with stronger interest than Fern’s longer, more complex original.   

Trimming unnecessary portions of articles gave Reynold’s room to print more material.  Fern’s shortened article is surrounded by other opinion pieces, all of which are printed below an illustration of some geographical interest.  Issues of Reynold’s from 1869 have many wood-engraved illustrations, and the top half of the front page always includes one that represents the main action for that week’s portion of a featured story, a serialized fiction full of sentimental and sensational plots and characters.   Saturday, February 27^th 1869, the week preceding Fern’s article, included a story written by “…the author of ‘The Marvel of Marwood,’ ‘The Fly in the Golden Web,’ etc”.  The story is accompanied with an illustration titled, “The Last Victim,” which depicts a man plunging a knife into the chest of his startled wife and with only a glimpse of the hilt showing.  The horrified and innocent lover that claims to have “bought him” [the murderous husband] is in the background, running for the door (161).   

In addition to opinion pieces like Fern’s and the large selections of fiction, Reynold’s also incorporated travel features, places of interest, advice on chess plays, and advertisements.  The advertisements in Reynold’s perhaps best characterize working-class subscribers and their concerns.  The March 6^th issue, where Fern’s reprinted article is featured, has a lengthy advertisement for “Emigration for the Working Classes” (184).  The ad provides details about free or assisted third-class steerage female domestic servants and small families could obtain for passage to Australia.  Ironically, this non-descript ad for inexpensive travel by ship is also featured on the same page with a large wood-engraving called “The Pirate’s Doom”.  In the illustration, an alarmed couple watches helplessly from the beach as a nearby ship sinks in a stormy ocean (184).  No pirates (or survivors) are in sight.

Of course, it is possible a periodical other than Reynold’s revised and reprinted Fern’s “Other ‘Girls of the Period”.  However, this piece is not the only Fern article reprinted by Reynold’s, nor is Reynold’s the only British periodical that reprinted her work.  As early as 1853, Reynold’s reprinted the articles, “Whom Does it Concern?”, “The Incident at Mount Auburn,” “The Calm of Death,” “Celebrity,” and “The Two Models”.  Certainly the number of articles Reynold’s selected for reprinting suggests they were familiar with Fern’s work and willing to take additional liberties with her much later “The ‘Other Girls of the Period’”.  Issues from the 1857 The London Journal, which is equal to Reynold’s in style and number of illustrations, also reprinted Fern’s “A Gauntlet for the Men,” “To Gentlemen. A Call to be a Husband,” and its companion piece “To the Ladies.  Call to be a Wife”.  Fern was obviously a popular author among English working-class periodicals. 

In a possible variance on the traditional reprinting scheme where editor takes from author, a Missouri periodical, the St. Louis-based, Colman’s Rural World (mentioned as Colman’s here), appears to have subscribed to Reynold’s and reprinted their version of Fern’s article.  Reynold’s printed “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” in a March 1869 issue; it next appeared in an October issue of Colman’s from the same year.  This Transatlantic crossing highlights the broadest possibilities available through the periodical exchange system: national and international reprinting between similarly designed periodicals, where editors looked not only to authors but to other editors for revisions, styles, and selections.  From this point of view, periodical sales were best achieved through reprinting the most eye-catching material, even if the selections were more the work of editors, not authors.  With the wide geographical distance between Colman’s and Reynold’s, the advantages of these techniques were improved; there was little or no chance of the two periodicals ever competing within the same subscriber base.      

The reprinting incident between Reynold’s and Colman’s demonstrates how editors of periodicals with similar subscriber bases and literary styles may have borrowed, perhaps unknowingly, from one another in order to increase sales.  Considering the added context and length of Fern’s original article, it is possible that Colman’s did not see the attraction of Fern’s “Woman’s Millennium,” if they ever subscribed to the New York Ledger.  Logically, a working-class periodical like Reynold’s would be a more obvious subscription for Colman’s to review in its search for material and whose targeted subscribers were also working-class, although they were farmers, not city workers.  Reynold’s decision to eliminate the first three pages of Fern’s article positioned rural imagery at the second paragraph of the revised piece, making the rural ideal a key feature of “The ‘Other Girls of the Period’”.  With the title change, Reynold’s drew more attention to rural themes, and the more ambiguous “Woman’s Millennium” became the precise, “Other ‘Girls of the Period’”.  Suddenly, the working-classes, in both city and country communities, were invited to consider: who exactly, are the selfish, artificial women Linton attacked and Fern defended?  What women in the working classes fulfilled the role of Fern’s “other girls?”  The answer was, at least to Colman’s readers, country women.  Colman’s certainly intuited that farmers and farmer’s wives would align themselves with Fern’s opinions on rural domesticity and female contentment; no farmer could dislike Fern’s passionate argument against Linton’s stereotypes; “Then, I never go into the country for a few weeks’ summer holiday, that I do not find large-hearted, large-brained women, stowed away among the green hills in little cottages…” (189). Linton’s “girls,” while certainly in existence somewhere, were not Colman’s girls. 

In addition to the rural themes, Fern took on men and their responsibility to married life and fatherhood.  “How many corresponding men are there, whose own children, under their own roofs, are almost entire strangers to their club-frequenting fathers?” (189).  However, the nineteenth-century woman question Fern wrestled is perhaps, through editorial conquest, more engaging because of the deft staging of the issue within the reprint culture.  New pens became good friends to original work, enhancing the author’s voice.  While some may disagree on what was the better article, between Reynold’s revisions of Fern’s work and Colman’s publication of the revision, the lines of authorship were certainly blurred; the transatlantic marketplace in the nineteenth-century periodical world was a shared and mixed reprinting culture: from author to editor to publication and editor to editor to publication.  Therefore, editorial style was as important to reprinting as was finding the right author and article to reprint, in addition to the continual search for the fresh, new, literary contributors of the day.

The juxtaposition between Fern’s original “Woman’s Millennium” and the revised “Other ‘Girls of the Period” offers several possibilities that are intriguing for their available insights into the shared and mixed reprint culture of editorial practices, exchange, and market needs.  As mentioned before, it is not so much a significant difference in the understanding of the reprinting culture if it would be found that Reynold’s was not the first periodical to revise this specific piece of Fern’s work; the fact that it was revised and reprinted by any periodical tells a story of editorial power and authorship; although, a shift in historical events would emerge with additional information concerning another periodical’s involvement in Fern’s “Woman’s Millennium”.  Still, this would only advance the history of reprinting and its effect on Fern’s career.  Therefore, much can still be learned with additional analysis of these pieces.  As for Fern and her contemporaries, a better understanding of nineteenth-century writers and publishing practices against the culture authors and editors lived and worked in depends on a clear understanding of the importance reprinting and the exchange system had on literary careers.  The first cannot happen without the other, and to the canon’s benefit, these opportunities greatly expand the field, particularly the area of nineteenth-century women’s studies, where even contemporary scholars have been quick to presuppose authorial intent and the literary value of female authors.  Certainly – white male the field is not – as more and more dusty volumes and rolls of microfilm are pulled into the light, and the actions and words of the nineteenth-century female author is studied against the backdrop of reprinting and exchange.

 

            In conclusion, reprinting and periodical exchange were the marketing, advertising, and technological tools of the nineteenth century, and limited restrictions on copyright usage allowed for these tools to be fully exploited.  Interestingly, we can consider in future conversations if Fern’s work could have been more efficiently promoted, during any other era; today’s internet age being the only exception.  In this copyright age, where public debates about the issue inspire sympathy for artists, we find it easy to sympathize with Fern.  In light of the displeasure Fern felt about copyright abuse, the means she took to secure copyright and protect her financial interests, and what caustic remarks she might have said about the significant editorial revisions made to her “Woman’s Millennium,” it would be easy to sympathize with all nineteenth-century authors and their difficulties in the reprinting environment.  To do this without consideration of the reprinting environment and its very real importance to Fern’s success significantly discounts some relevant conversations and misrepresents possible meanings.  Examining even the smallest productions from the reprinting environment brings a new and more accurate focus to nineteenth-century periodical scholarship.   

 

 

 

Fanny Fern’s Unchanging Rhetoric – Cynthia Knight, 8 April 2008

 

            While it has been successfully substantiated that Fanny Fern’s 1868 article “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” was written in response to Eliza Lynn Linton’s “The Girl of the Period,” it is interesting to note that Linton’s article did not inspire within Fern new feminist sentiments.  Rather, archival research of Fern’s articles from more than a decade earlier reveal Fern used much of the same feminist rhetoric in many of her published writings.  In the period from 1853 to 1854, Fern wrote four articles that foreshadow the rhetoric used in “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” concerning men, women’s ambition and men, the model lady, and the fashionable young lady.

            On April 14, 1853, Fern wrote “A Fashionable Young Lady,” which appeared in the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel.  This article also appeared in the Pawtucket Gazette and Chronicle on March 24, 1854, and in the Great Salt Lake City’s Deseret News on September 21, 1854.  Out of Fern’s articles published during the years of 1853 and 1854, “A Fashionable Young Lady” most closely and ironically parallels Linton’s article “Girls of the Period.”  Fern is not abandoning her feminist rhetoric because the article clearly derides the young lady who is a product of societal dictates; however, her tone of disrespect for the “fashionable young lady” is reminiscent of Linton’s tone.  Fern writes that the goal of the fashionable young lady “is to go to a model boarding-school, kept by an ex-French milliner;--to be put into a room with four promiscuous young ladies, and to learn in three days more mischief than her grandmother ever dreamed of” (Fern, “Fashionable” Deseret, col. E; Milwaukee, col. A; Pawtucket, col. E).  On the other hand, Fern leaves her tirade of the fashionable young lady, to move on to share rhetoric that parallels her 1868 article.  Fern writes of the fashionable young lady and her desire, which is “to have Mr. Fitz Humbug, some fine day, get on his knees, and request mademoiselle to make him, what she has all along been desiring to do, ‘the happiest of men’” (Fern, “Fashionable” Deseret, col. E; Milwaukee, col. A; Pawtucket, col. E).  In the later part of “Other ‘Girls of the Period,” Fern writes of women who “leave their nursery altogether to hirelings” (Fern, “Other”).  Fern was still critical of fashionable young ladies who married men of their desire, and whose goal it was “to commence housekeeping where ‘the old folks’ leave off; it is to patronize fast horses, ruinous upholsterers, operas, concerts, theatres, balls and fetes of all kinds.  It is to bring a few sickly children into existence, to be tortured into eternity by careless hirelings” (Fern, “Fashionable” Deseret, col. E; Milwaukee, col. A; Pawtucket, col. E).  Fern’s “A Fashionable Young Lady” predates Linton’s article by a decade, and clearly indicates that in America, at least, the fashionable young lady left much to be desired and the women that Linton wrote of were not a new phenomenon.  It is significant to note that by the time Fern wrote “Other ‘Girls of the Period’,” she did acknowledge that there were “gems hidden amid the green hills” (Fern, “Other”).

On May 28, 1853, Raleigh’s Daily Register published Fern’s article “Fanny Fern,” which expounded on the subject of men.  The article was also published in the Weekly Raleigh Register on June 1, 1853.  Both the Daily Register and the Weekly Raleigh Register noted the article was “from her correspondence for the Boston Olive Branch” (Fern, Daily, col. C; Weekly, col. C).  In this article Fern scathingly speaks of “a ‘pretty man’—a pink and white Sir Brainless—the united work of a tailor, hatter, shoe-maker, and perfumer!  Heaven save the mark! Women know better!” (Fern, Daily, col. C; Weekly, col. C).  Fern’s 1853 rhetoric on men closely resembles her opinions of men in “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” when she writes despairingly of men who “wear corsets, and dye their whiskers and hair, and pad out their hollow cheeks and shrunken calves…” (Fern, “Other”).

            On September 3, 1853, the Pensacola Gazette and on October 1, 1853, the Ripley Bee published Fern’s article “What is the Height of a Woman’s Ambition?” (Fern, “What,” col. A; “Punch,” col. D).  In this article Fern addresses much of the same subject matter that she does in “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” when she writes that men find “the more ‘diamonds’ a woman owns, the more precious she becomes in the eye of [their] discriminating sex” (Fern, “What,” col. A; “Punch,” col. D).  Further deriding men, Fern writes “Would you stop to look (connubially) at the most bewitching woman on earth, whose only diamond were ‘in her eye?’” (Fern, “What,” col. A; “Punch,” col. D).  In the “Other ‘Girls of the Period’”, Fern writes of her experiences of “large-hearted, large-brained women” who are “gems hidden amid the green hills” who are often overlooked (Fern, “What,” col. A; “Punch,” col. D).  Just as the men in the Fern’s 1853 article wanted a woman for her diamonds, Fern writes in 1868 that “for the most part, the more sensible a man is, the bigger the fool he marries” and overlooks the “gems” (Fern, “What,” col. A; “Punch,” col. D).             

            On December 21, 1854, Fern wrote “The Model Lady,” which was published in the Great Salt Lake City’s Deseret News.  “The Model Lady” is only a paragraph in length, but most clearly shares the rhetoric from the last paragraph of “Other ‘Girls of the Period’”.  In “Other ‘Girls of the Period’,” Fern not only derides women who leave their children in the nursery with hirelings, but also disdains men who have children who “are almost entire strangers to their club-frequenting fathers” (Fern, “Other”).  In “The Model Lady,” Fern writes the lady “puts her children out to nurse, and tends lapdogs—lies in bed till noon—wears paper soled shoes, and pinches her waist…runs mad after the last new fashion—doats on Byron—adores any man who grins from behind a mustaches—and, when asked the name of youngest child, replies, ‘Don’t know, indeed; ask Betty!’” (Fern, “The Model”, col D). 

            Although research indicates the “Other ‘Girls of the Period’” was written in response to Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Girls of the Period,”  analysis of these four archival writings by Fanny Fern from 1853 through 1854 indicate that throughout her career she was a staunch and unfailing feminist, which was consistently evidences in her rhetoric.

 

 

 

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                For Additional Reading

 

 

 

                Project Group Members

 

Member Name	University	Course
Cynthia Knight	University of Missouri - Kansas City	EN5555D
Kelly Mathews	University of Missouri - Kansas City	EN5555D
Kristin Huston	University of Missouri - Kansas City	EN5555D

 

 

 

 

 

     Project Completed: semester and year: Spring 2008

 

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---. “The ‘Other Girls of the Period’”. Reynold’s miscellany of romance, general literature, science,

 

    and art. Ed. George W.M. Reynolds. March 6^th, 1869. 189. University of Missouri-Kansas City

 

    microfilm collection. Early British Periodicals: 825-832. microfilm collection.  American Periodical Series III:

 

     752.