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London Morning & Fall Dress
Lady's Magazine, August 1810 |
In my second post on beauty in Victorian women's
magazines, I'd like to consider how British women's magazines came to focus on fashion
and appearance such that the beauty advertisements in my earlier post slotted in seamlessly within an already existing genre of women's print culture. The origins of
what we recognise as a women's magazine rest at the end of the eighteenth century,
yet it was in the nineteenth century that magazines moved to a central place in
popular reading. Part of the reason why magazines became so prolific,
profitable and important to advertisers was because publishers began to target women readers as a specific audience.
A small number of titles intended especially for
women were published in the eighteenth century, such as the Lady's Magazine or Entertaining Companion for
the Fair Sex, Appropriated Solely to Their Use and Amusement (1770) (from which we
can see a hand-coloured engraved fashion plate here, a feature which the
magazine popularised in England). But most periodicals were directed at the household
generally or were intended for men, such as the The Gentleman's Magazine (1731). Other magazines of the period had
strong affiliations with church groups and were therefore uninterested in
discussing fripperies such as clothing and hairstyles.
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| Court Dress, Gallery of Fashion, July 1794 |
In the
1790s, a number of specialised publications devoted to fashion began to appear,
such as the Gallery of Fashion (1794)
and the Magazine of Female Fashions of
London and Paris (1798). These magazines encouraged existing magazines for
the women's market, such as the Lady's
Magazine, to pay greater attention to fashion coverage amid the usual content
of short stories, serial fiction, poetry, essays on modesty, advice for wives
and mothers, recipes, biographies of famous figures and local and international
news reports.
Dress and appearance entered the women's magazine as
"fashion" through the inclusion of reports of what was being worn by
court ladies in London and in Paris. As Margaret Beetham explains in A Magazine of Her Own?, this type of
content "was to become a staple of women's magazines for the next 200
years and has entered deeply into the ideology of gender" (31). From the
nineteenth century, then, women have learned through women's magazines and how
they present and construct ideas about women's dress and appearance how to be
appropriately feminine.
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| La Belle Assemblee, 1809 |
La Belle Assemblée or Bell's
Court and Fashionable Magazine addressed particularly to the Ladies, which began publication in February
1806 and continued until 1837, was the first popular interest fashion magazine.
It was an expensive publication at 2 shillings and six pence for each
edition, which was reflected in its elaborate production values and high-quality engraved portraits. In addition to fashion, the magazine also featured
intellectual content pertaining to science, biography and political news to
develop its female readers' knowledge.
This mixture of article types was common until around the 1820s when La Belle Assemblée, and women's magazines more generally, began to increase the
quantity of fashion and domestic articles designed to entertain and intellectual
and literary content was reduced.
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| Young Ladies' Journal, January 1881 |
While
women's status was undergoing a seismic shift through higher education and the
opening up of careers outside the home later in the century, many women’s
magazines do not mirror these changes and are devoid of content about
intellectual matters, education or employment. The Young Ladies’ Journal , which was published from 1864 to 1920,
focused on news of Paris fashions, patterns for needlework, recipes, correspondence, household tips,
court gossip, fiction, and sentimental poetry. Like other women's magazines of the
time, Katherine Ledbetter argues that the Young Ladies' Journal “models
feminine beauty in relation to [a woman's] traditional role in domestic ideology as a
potential partner to a young man” (British
Victorian Women's Periodicals 135). A woman's beauty, or her ability to
cultivate her appearance to fit beauty ideals, were an indicator of her ability
to be a successful wife and mother.
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| Homes Notes, July 1894 |
One
of the most influential books about beauty was published in 1836
and was entitled Beauty; Illustrated
Chiefly by an Analysis and Classification of Beauty in Women. The author, Alexander
Walker, identified three main kinds of classic beauty in women: the locomotive
type, which was “striking and brilliant”; the Vital or Nutritive type which was
“soft and voluptuous”; and the Thinking Beauty who displayed “intellectuality
and grace”. Walker suggested that the expanded bosom and “general plumpness”
of Nutritive Beauty was more aesthetically pleasing than the other types, but
these features were also symbolic of women's proper mothering role. Ideas
about women's maternal beauty often inspired angelic connotations, as in this
cover from Home Notes
from 1894 that uses the familiar phrase "The Hand that rocks the Cradle Rules
the World" to suggest women's maternal influence on the next generation. (And you can't miss that she's surrounded by nature in the form of flowers and a bird.)
While I am just starting to think about how women's
beauty is understood in the Victorian period, there is no doubt that we have
abandoned the phase of admiration for the "plumpness" of Nutritive
Beauty. Men no longer consider outward signs of a woman's ability to bear and
nurture children, such as wide hips or sufficient body fat, as integral to
sexual allure. Indeed an extremely thin woman with artificial breasts that may
even hinder mothering are what are most often found on the covers of men's
magazines today. Though I've yet to look at men's magazines at all, I'm of the
understanding that women aren't featured on their covers in the nineteenth
century as they are today. How do we move from maternal beauty as an ideal? And
how do images of women end up selling magazines for both men and women? These
are some of the questions I hope to answer with future work on beauty in
Victorian print culture.
