Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Kathryn Shevelow

Critical Essay by Kathryn Shevelow

SOURCE: “‘Fair-sexing it’: An Introduction to Periodical Literature and the Eighteenth-Century Construction of Femininity,” in Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical, pp. 1-21. London: Routledge, 1989.

In the essay below, Shevelow explores how the rise of the periodical aimed at women in early eighteenth-century Great Britain helped define them, by promoting an idealized, middle-class woman. Shevelow also relates this periodical culture to the rise of the novel.

I'll not meddle with the Spectator—let him fair-sex it to the world's end.

(Jonathan Swift, Journal to Stella)

During the eighteenth century, as upper- and middle-class Englishwomen increasingly began to participate in the public realm of print culture, the representation practices of that culture were steadily enclosing them within the private sphere of the home. That is, at the same historical moment that women were, to a degree unprecedented in western Europe, becoming visible as readers and...
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