The Colonial "Dolly" Magazine: Ethel and Lilian Turner's Parthenon

The Parthenon, 11 August 1890

The age of the print magazine may be over, especially for younger readers who are not as familiar with the idea of traipsing down to the newsagent each month, as I once did, to seek out a copy of the newest Smash Hits. Magazines are nevertheless still considered influential on girls in particular. In the past few weeks, a petition to encourage Cleo magazine to stop their practice of using Photoshop to erase blemishes or bodily imperfections from the images it publishes has gathered over 13,000 signatures. Earlier in the year, Dolly, a magazine with a younger readership,  drew criticism for resurrecting its model search competition. The competition ran throughout my girlhood, but was put on hold ten years ago. The editor of the time, Mia Freedman, felt that the quest for cover girls fuelled the pressure that girl readers feel to live up to a particular ideal of beauty and also launched girls into an industry that she described as "all about rejection".

The history of British and American girls' magazines is a developing and exciting field, but the girls' magazines of Australia and Canada have been barely examined. In part this is because fewer magazines were produced in the colonies and those that do exist are not easily accessible. My colleague Kristine Moruzi has spent hours in church archives in order to read some of the Canadian girls' magazines, which were mostly published by religious organisations. Because magazines such as the Girl's Own Paper were readily imported from Britain, there is really only one example of a nineteenth-century Australian girls' magazine, the Sydney-based Parthenon (1889-1892).

The writers Ethel and Lilian Turner, who were still in their teens, began publishing the Parthenon in January 1889. Ethel edited a magazine at her high school, the Iris, but after her graduation soon moved to build a viable commercial venture. The sisters not only edited the magazine, but wrote most of its content, managed subscriptions and sought out advertisers. There are only two complete sets of the magazine in Australia, so when I finally saw copies of the Parthenon I was surprised by the professionalism of the design and the quantity of advertising that the sisters managed to attract as the magazine established itself. It is an astonishing and unique achievement for young women of the period.

Masthead, 1 February 1889

While the Parthenon includes some of the traditional fare of women's magazines, such as fashion and society news, it set out to be most especially a literary magazine. It sought to transform a situation in which Australian readers tended to prefer to import English and American magazines, and to foster locally produced print culture. Though the Turner sisters were trailblazers in their publishing venture, the magazine is not radical in its gender politics. It actively supports better conditions for women journalists and higher education for women (so long as it does not interfere with the duties of home: see article about aligning your tablecloth with mathematical precision), but does not support women's suffrage without reservation. I've written an article recently that compares the Parthenon's attitude on these issues with the feminist women's magazine the Dawn, and ultimately the kinds of beliefs they share about women's careers and responsibilities are not too dissimilar in most areas.

The magazine ran for 39 issues and in its time it featured early versions of some of the works that Ethel Turner would go on to publish during her long writing career, including Miss Bobbie. She was assigned responsibility for writing the serials for the children's page by Lilian, a serendipitous delegation that no doubt contributed to Ethel taking up a lucrative post writing for the children's pages of the Illustrated Sydney News soon after their enterprise could not find a buyer and was forced to cease publication in 1892.

Victorian-Era Beauty Advertisements: Part One

I had the pleasure of being invited to speak at The Johnston Collection (which includes the wonderful Fairhall House museum) last week on beauty in Victorian girls' and women's magazines. I chose magazines in particular because the second half of the nineteenth century was a time in which more people became literate, more magazines were able to be published more affordably, and technological improvements meant illustrations and fashion plates became commonplace. Magazines were the dominant media form, especially as books remained relatively expensive. Not only were women specifically targeted as readers in the nineteenth century, but they were also newly imagined as consumers. The arrival of the the department store, a concept borrowed from France, transformed how items for the self and the home were bought, with their extensive ranges of branded goods arranged in lavish displays designed to be browsed. The illustration above of a woman selecting from a choice of hats from Myra's Journal of Dress and Fashion (Sept. 1885) is one of many depictions of women in the act of shopping that showed its new-found importance to femininity.

Most magazines became heavily dependent on advertising. Even quality publications like The Queen (which became Harper's and Queen) placed ads on almost half of its pages by the mid-1880s. While people complain about ads taking up column inches and screen space today, the strong presence of advertising in the print media is not new. For girls' and women's magazines, the ads that were included were often for products that promised to improve the reader's appearance, with corsets, skin creams and hair products featuring regularly.

Cosmetics, however, had a bad name for encouraging artifice and deception. Charlotte Yonge, the editor of the Anglican girls' magazine The Monthly Packet and author of popular books such as The Daisy Chain opposed cosmetics as a form of lie: "All attempts to pretend to beauties that we do not possess are clearly falsehood, and therefore wrong." Young women in particular were warned away from cosmetics because they were considered more vulnerable to potential damage to their "moral character" because of their sexual associations.

Cosmetics were therefore not commonly advertised but products that would purportedly improve the skin by removing freckles, tans, redness and roughness were promoted because they did not transgress beliefs about "natural" beauty being superior than artificial aids. This ad for Beetham's Glycerine and Cucumber from Woman (11 April 1894) promises to give the user soft, smooth and white skin that "blooms".

Along with facial creams, hair products also promised natural improvements to a woman's beauty. Koko for the hair, for instance, is described as a "hair food" that promises to do everything from preventing greyness to eradicating dandruff, but it was not only the hair that benefitted from treatment, as the ad suggests that Koko also stimulated the brain. After brushing with Koko readers are directed to look into a mirror to see the increased "brilliancy" in their eyes, which suggests a benefit to health and well-being, not only appearance.

In the lecture I showed a contemporary Maybelline magazine ad featuring the company's familiar slogan "Maybe She's Born With It. Maybe It's Maybelline" to show the continuation of these ideas about natural beauty (or at least cultivating the appearance of natural beauty) in advertising. It's a real conundrum that women are encouraged to desire products that will "improve" their looks, but they ought to be working to make it seem as if they were "born with" their cosmetically enchanced charms. The many contradictions surrounding women's beauty in Victorian magazines seemed to strike the audience at the lecture as none too dissimilar from those we see in the popular media today. And nowhere are these resonances more obvious than in early advertisements for weight loss, such as Trilene tablets, which promised to "cure corpulency permanently". With that degree of effectiveness, how surprising that they're not still in manufacture.

PART TWO TO COME...

British Library Rare Book Finds

I've just returned from a 3-week long jaunt around the world that included stops in Frankfurt, London, Winnipeg, Leipzig and Munich. In that order too, which meant a crazy loop of the globe in the middle of the already unbearable Australia to Northern Hemisphere journey.

In London, I had a brief stint at the British Library, a wonderland for researchers interested in somewhat ephemeral texts like Victorian girls' books. As the BL was a copyright library, the odds are that they hold one of every book commercially published in the United Kingdom. So where that frivolous, childish book of no account was thrown out, read to ruin or simply deemed unworthy of archiving elsewhere, one, usually-untouched copy, is usually hidden away in the St Pancras vaults.

For my current project on colonial girlhood, I wanted to see if I could find any books and magazines for British children about the colonies. I was congratulating myself for my sheer awesomeness in merely typing some terms into the catalogue when it returned the result, "The Child's Empire Annual" (1912). When I opened the book, I saw the amazing frontispiece pictured above. We have drovers running sheep in Australia, snow capped peaks in Canada, the astonishing Taj Mahal and an African tribe glancing out at the reader, prefiguring The Gods Must Be Crazy by 70 years. This was going to be it in showing British attitudes to Empire for children. Strangely, the volume, and the subsequent ones I looked at, made nary a mention of the countries of Empire. There were a few token references in the first volume, so as to live up to the title, but it seemed that the idea of an Empire annual was more important than the practice. Unless the idea was that the children of the Empire should read the annual?

The story was the same for The Empire Annual for Girls (1909), whose cover featuring heart-shaped topiary intimated how little rough-and-ready content the book would contain.

The Girl's Realm was an amazing magazine for girls that was published from 1898 (you can read a whole article about it in relation to the Boer War here). In comparison with the Girl's Own Paper, it is so much more progressive and interested in girls' lives beyond the home. Perhaps, as my scholarly friend and author of the above article, Kristine Moruzi, suggested, this is explained by the 18-year distance in its debut in comparison with the first edition of the GOP, but it was exciting to come upon lengthy articles with photographs of girls in New Zealand and Australia from 1899/1900. Not only that, but they included Aboriginal and Maori girls within them!



There's also room in the magazine for a story by boys' adventure fiction writer G.A. Henty in 1901 called "A Frontier Girl: A Tale of the Backwood Settlement". It features two illustrations of the heroine, Mary, boldly wielding a rifle. She can shoot "with a skill equal" to her father, and no wonder that's she's perfected her aim with all the "Indian attacks" that are crammed into the tale's five pages.

The Collector's Impulse

I've got two Girl Guide projects on the boil at the moment. And for this reason I've become a somewhat compulsive eBayer, trawling for interesting ephemera that might make for good illustrations. I've now got a giant box of Guide books, photo albums, camp diaries, badges, certificates, letters, application forms, even an original belt. Here's hoping a book results or I'm going to have a busy time relisting a hundred back issues of the Waratah (New South Wales Girl Guide magazine) from the 1950s.

I've also nabbed a few fairly scare weekly issues of the Girl's Own Paper with their advertisements still intact. Anyone working in this area knows that advertisements were usually removed for libraries and binding into annuals. I've only ever seen advertisements from this magazines contained in a Library of Congress microfilm, which include issues from the early twentieth century. The copies I found are from the 1880s, the earliest years of the paper.

Some contained additional fold-out ad booklets, usually for soap, including the pictured advertisement for Brooke's Soap, which I think became well-known as Monkey Brand soap. I've been reading Anne McClintock's article on the history of soap, and she mentions mirrors, soap, light and white clothing as the four domestic fetishes of the period. In this image, we've got a kind of mirror in the form of the artist's canvas, but it's depicting a humanised monkey that the girl has proudly painted. As I'm intending to write a paper on Tarzan in light of Victorian popular understandings of social Darwinism, I'm not sure what to make of the monkey in the suit. Can he be humanised and civilised like native peoples with the influence of femininity and whiteness? But what on earth is that giant furry thing on the girls' chair? An animal skin? If so, is there a reversal of the monkey in the tuxedo with the idea of the girl in the monkey's fur? A strange one, that's for sure!