Gender, Citizenship and Newspapers

Historical and Transnational Perspectives

Jane L. Chapman

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137314598
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The gendered nature of the relationship between the press and emergence of cultural citizenship from the 1860s to the 1930s is explored through original data and insightful comparisons between India, Britain and France in this integrated approach to women's representation in newspapers, their role as news sources and their professional activity.

Part I

Setting the Parameters

1

Introduction

Tracing Patterns, Linkages and Evidence

Boundary Crossing

Contemporary sources between the 1860s and the 1930s point emphatically to the existence of wider debates not only about the changing role and attitudes towards women, but also concerning the nature, influence and role of the press. Gendered analysis of this adds to our understanding at a time when conflicting, multifaceted ideas and female images were emerging within the public sphere, but a connection needs to be made between press and social attitudes, between media development from a gendered standpoint and wider trends in society. How such trends or strands, as expressed and mediated in newspapers, contributed to the process of cultural formation forms part of our general appreciation of modernity.¹

This is an integrated exploration of: women’s representation in the press; their role as news sources and their professional activity; women as an influence on editorial matter; how women were perceived as a readership and/or as consumers by newspapers; and how through their actions in the public sphere they sought and received coverage.² These are the traces from the past of female influence in the relationship between newspapers and society that are analyzed through examples of print mass communications across continents, empires and periods. Arguably, historians do not know enough about the connections between women’s emerging citizenship and the communication of that process by the public press and other communications distributed to the wider polity. Every example presented in this study focuses on the issues of press and democracy, press and change, and press as a vehicle for the articulation of female citizenship. This historicization addresses the extent to which newspaper mediation and women’s attempts to influence public opinion for political demands constituted a form of citizenship specific to the process of knowledge and information production.

This text focuses on the phenomenon of cultural citizenship, associated newspaper-related consumerism and the relationship between ideology and economics as evidenced through the communication of women’s protest in the public sphere and the way it impinged upon newspaper commercial considerations. The approach is a comparative historicization of the concept of cultural citizenship, revealing aspects of its origins and development transnationally as these related to the agencies of gender and print communications. How female citizenship was framed and evolved through the prism of the public press is analyzed with examples taken from the 1860s through to the 1930s. The development of newspapers as mass communication systems in several different countries provides the framework for a series of detailed cameos of usage, representation and influence at selected formative and critical periods within media history. For Britain and France, this was the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century – the ‘golden age’ of newspapers. For India it was during the 1920s and 1930s.

The years between the1860s and the 1930s are examined thematically, with chapters on developmental aspects of cultural citizenship. The aim is to trace patterns, linkages and evidence of gender through and in newspapers that existed in places and in ways that are not immediately obvious.

Choice of trends and ‘moments’

Moments

The task is addressed via a collection of selected aspects and moments transnationally that provides insight into the process of negotiation between women and some organs of communication, in varying contexts. This is a mosaic of complementary and conflicting influences that are explored in detail, each contributing to an evolution in the manifestations of female cultural citizenship, but in different ways at differing periods of modern history, according to the country studied. Any emerging patterns are uneven.

Van Zoonen, referring to media as part of feminism’s material and cultural struggle, reminds us: ‘Mass media are central sites in which these negotiations take place, evidently at the level of media texts, but also at the level of the other “moments” of the mass mediated production of meaning’ (1994: 148). Selection of ‘moments’ in this study has been made around some dates and events that were important as turning points, although not necessarily successful ones. These include, during Europe’s ‘golden age’ of the press: the launch of Europe’s first mass circulation daily – Le Petit Journal – followed by the launch of Britain’s first mass circulation daily – The Daily Mail – to cater for women by acknowledging them as a readership; the launch of two separate, and very different dailies – La Fronde and The Daily Mirror – run by and aimed at women; the adoption of direct action as a tactic by British suffragettes; and the peak years of militant violent agitation for the female franchise.

In a colonial context, the criteria for the study was also to look at local press, rather than those produced in metropolitan France or imperial London. Counter citizenship is traced through the launch and struggle for survival in the face of censorship of an indigenous paper in French Indian territory – Swandanthiram – that, at the time of writing, still exists. Most other contemporary journals were short lived. In British India, a local colonial daily – The Pioneer – has been selected because it supported women’s emerging citizenship in a period of heated politics during the twilight of empire when constitutional negotiations and the economic effects of pro-independence protest were making headway. The moment selected coincides with a crucial change of editorship.³

Trends

These ‘moments’ have been selected because their significance goes beyond the event itself, allowing for wider contextual analysis. For example, Part II addresses the way in which pioneering popular dailies in Britain and France catered for women. A theme that emerges is a wider tension between the old and the new, between commercial considerations and political content. As people became defined not only by production but also by consumption, women were acknowledged as a market for newspaper consumerism. Although circulation doubled between 1896 and 1906 and then doubled again by 1914 (Williams, 1961: 203–4), by and large female oriented content was still decided upon by men on behalf of readers belonging to the opposite sex. Perceptions about the nature of this communication were challenged by some women, who had a different vision of both content and operation.

Part III identifies a parallel formative experience for women who participated in labour organizations in Britain and in French India, where they were able to acquire experience of collective activities in the public sphere that were rooted in class actions. The emergence of subaltern women from private to public sphere in French territory is significant in timing because it heralded the origins of an independence movement.

Part IV continues the study of female activists by addressing the effectiveness of women’s interactions with the media in Britain and in British colonial India when it came to protests and other direct action tactics, as opposed to more peaceful lobbying and ‘educational’ activities. Many women took to the streets, using newspapers to disseminate specific messages to a wider polity, seeking publicity for social and political reasons, important also because of the organizational and leadership experience that they gained and for their impact on the development of the media.

In Part V, the conclusion, attempts to draw together some common transnational experiences, continuities over time and the identification of similar processes across class, cultures and time periods.

Scope and positioning

For the purposes of this study, a distinction should be noted on the one hand between ‘feminist’ publications, sometimes but not exclusively allied to progressive organizations or groups with a structured membership who aimed to achieve the emancipation of women in some way, and on the other hand what British suffrage supporters called the ‘public press’. Scholars have studied the way in which campaigners used the former – that is, specialist publications – and also the general trend for the nineteenth century and earlier, focusing on individual pioneers, female journalists, feminist writings and/or social movements (see for example Mills, 1998; Onslow, 2000; Gleadle, 1995, 2002; DiCenzo, 2011).

There were also commercial publications, mainly dailies, which aimed to bring news and features to a wider ‘public’ audience (usually national) of women and men, but recognizing the female interest within that large audience⁴ – mass dissemination is the focus here. Within this area of research there is still inadequate understanding by scholars about the ways in which people, usually organized into their own interest groups and specific communities, aimed to influence the ‘public press’. At a time in history when opinion management was largely unprofessionalized, with ‘PR’ and corporate lobbying very much in their infancy, records of attempts to influence press coverage have to be sought elsewhere. We are mostly dependent on anecdotes from individual memoirs, internal administrative communications (such as reports from colonial officials to their ministers), the coverage itself, reader letters, ‘op-ed’ and other newspaper editorials commenting on the views of competitor journals and the discursive press environment more generally at the time.

Women’s history and gender studies are now well established at the cutting edge of new approaches in many fields of study, yet there is still a need for more in-depth, cross-disciplinary understanding of the role that gender considerations played during the development of mass communications from the second half of the nineteenth century. Although working-class people and women constituted a new readership in the Western world from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards, press historians still know very little about the details of how the new market for popular daily newspapers became more female oriented. It is acknowledged that the popular press contributed to the expansion of public discourse, but the precise nature of representation of women in its pages is less clear. A process of ‘feminization’ of the British popular press has been identified during the 1880s and 1890s (Holland, 1998: 19) but the full details of how this development evolved have yet to emerge. This book adds some comparative, transnational pieces to the historical jigsaw, for it was not confined to Britain. While this study focuses on neglected areas of scholarship, it nonetheless builds on research in allied fields that has helped to prepare the ground by challenging generalizations concerning how far women were restricted to the domestic sphere (DiCenzo, 2011: 10).

The potential for newspapers to act as an efficacious tool for democratic expression in the discourses of the public sphere has been an ongoing theme throughout the history of communications (Chapman and Nuttall, 2011⁵). As Holland points out, ‘Women’s democratic participation, and the role of a newspaper in furthering democratic involvement, is also an issue. A democratic press must also appeal to women and, by the end of the nineteenth century, women were already demanding the space to express their public concerns. Democratisation entails feminisation’ (1998: 18). Unfortunately attempts to examine this tend not to be transnational: Bingham’s (2004) study of the popular press and gender, for example, deals uniquely with Britain between the wars; that of Rogers (2000) is also uniquely British. Sometimes studies concentrate on different time periods (for instance Holland deals with the 1970s onwards) or do not address the topic from the standpoint of institutional development of the press.

These research findings contribute to the ongoing task of feminist historians and their work.⁶ This has raised awareness of gender difference in a variety of ways across a full range of aspects of life. The effort is being redefined constantly, for discussions on women are germane to literature, anthropology and sociology where for some time there has been interest in historicizing fields of study and opening up to interdisciplinarity, exemplified, for instance, by the work of Clifford Geertz (1983: 30) and Michael Schudson (1982: 97–112). Equally, ‘New Cultural History’ has been influenced by literary studies, resulting in close examinations of texts (Hunt, 1989: 22). Yet an acknowledgement that the relationship between gender and communications is primarily (although not exclusively) a cultural one, made by scholars such as van Zoonen (1994: 148) does not necessarily mean that research has connected historical aspects of gender and media. In fact, the attention given to topics relating to women, media and politics has not been proportionate to their societal relevance (Krijnen et al., 2011: 5).

Although media history tends towards boundary crossing, mainly between media studies and history (O’Malley, 2002: 170), it is still a relatively new field,⁷ which may account for the shortage of gendered analysis of mainstream communications. Furthermore, interdisciplinarity has sometimes been neglected in gender studies (Krijnen et al., 2011).

However, the task is not merely to fill important gaps in knowledge: it is also, to borrow a now famous phrase from John Berger, to record a different way ‘of seeing’. Joan Scott summarizes the challenge in her reappraisal of gender and history in the light of deconstructionist theory: ‘Feminist history [then] becomes not the recounting of great deeds performed by women but the exposure of the often silent and hidden operations of gender that are nonetheless present and defining forces in the organization of most societies’(1999: 27). The way that other historians have come to accept the need for such an approach, and how this has transformed the field of study, has been elaborated by Laura Lee Downs (2010). While she draws on cultural and social analysis to explain the move from women’s to gender history and the poststructuralist challenges to that history, the issue of media agency is left out in the cold.

Defining cultural citizenship

Over recent years there has been a considerable revival of interest in citizenship, a concept that can be broadly defined as encapsulating shared rights, responsibilities and symbolic aspects of membership within a polity. For John Corner, culture centres on ‘the conditions and the forms in which meaning and value are structured and articulated within a society’ (1991: 131). It is a shared experience involving symbolic forms, as defined by John B. Thompson: ‘patterns of meaning embodied in symbolic forms, including actions, utterances and meaningful objects of various kinds, by virtue of which individuals communicate with one another and share their experiences, conceptions and beliefs’ (1990: 132). Nick Stevenson elaborates on the significance of ‘meaning’: ‘in the interpretation of an event it is the meanings that become attached to the “event” that are crucial for understanding its significance’ (2003: 17). In fact, the ‘public press’ developed its own organizational methods to produce distinctive categories of representation, knowledge and power as a form of interpretation and influence by women: these are analyzed here as the symbolic media category of gendered cultural citizenship. In a present day context, Jan Pakulski (1997) argues that cultural citizenship can be seen as satisfying demands for full social inclusion. Cultural citizenship encapsulates activities conducted in the public sphere for political and/or social ends, in this case articulated through or by the media.

The concept is a relatively fluid one – it can involve difference as much as sameness (Stevenson, 2003) and is interpreted in a range of different ways by scholars, witnessed by its hybrid location at the intersection of diverse fields of study that include the sociology of culture and of art, cultural studies, social and political theory, international relations and multicultural studies. Therefore, it impinges upon social phenomena that are bigger than the constituent parts as evidenced in the pages that follow.⁸ For Stevenson, ‘cultural citizenship is overwhelmingly concerned with communication and power’, and should be considered within ‘the context of social transformation’ (2003: 33).

In fact, cultural citizenship can be discerned both inside and outside formal structures of power, for questions of exclusion and inclusion are central. Media manifestations of cultural citizenship were not confined to formal rights such as the vote, although that is an important aspect. Research in this study addresses marginalization, stereotyping, lack of visibility, concurring with Renato Rosaldo who argues that cultural citizenship is about ‘who needs to be visible, to be heard, and to belong’ (1999: 260). In terms of this particular historicization, a number of different strands of developmental explanation are examined: business factors, labour movement roots, direct action protests, questions of entitlement, women participating in representational politics and ‘educational’ or peaceful persuasion for reforms, sometimes as journalists themselves. More generally, this involves an enquiry into how mediated cultural citizenship encapsulated ways in which, in their movement from private to public spheres, women wanted to be perceived by others. Cultural citizenship addresses attitudes such as ‘the degree of self-esteem accorded to . . . [the citizen’s] manner of self-realization within a society’s inherited cultural horizon’ (Honneth, 1995: 134).

The concept is also applied in this study as a normative phrase to describe the effect and the process of engagement in newspaper publicity by women. Cultural citizenship emerged as part of the act of press mediation – an ever changing phenomenon – and as a phrase that encapsulates a mobile process, as it became embedded within civil society and public consciousness.It has been assumed in the West, for instance, that the widening of audience and new products catering for the working class and women for the first time were necessarily positive ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Detailed Chapter Summary
• List of Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Setting the Parameters
• Part II Pioneers and Emerging Commercial Tensions
• Part III Labour Movement Roots and the Politics of Exclusion
• Part IV Cultural Citizenship and Direct Action
• Part V Traces and Outcomes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index