Norelia Arroyo
Eugenia Ghartey
Christina Massie
As a group we decided to look into how women influenced The New Age. We divided the time span into 3 blocks of five years each, each of us taking one block of years. Therefore, we will each explain how we individually attack this project and describe the lens that we were looking through. As you read, you will notice that we each came up with different issues due to the changes that occurred during the passing of time.
Years from 1907 to 1912 :
As I first skimmed through the journals I notice that there were a hand full of articles that had to do with women’s suffrage only in the first 4 volumes. For example in the first volume in number 2 and number 4, written in 1907, there were articles on the women’s right to vote. The writer of these articles was Teresa Billington-Greig. She was strongly believed in equal rights and her articles were very clear on that. In 1907 ‘Women in Finland was published’. This article spoke about the victory that women in Finland had because they were given the right to vote and they voted 200 deputies into the Finnish Parliament. The writer of this article, Dora B. Montefiore, pointed out that the women in Finland took advantage of their privilege to vote and voted women into power.
Another female writer that has also written several articles in the early part of the journal’s life was Florence Farr. She believed that “intelligent women” should not have children until the prevention of disease, and the feeding of starving children are dealt with. Florence also believed that men should pay a tax and organize a system that would support mother’s of young children. She believed that the state should look into helping the family economically because the family was the backbone of society.
Volume 3 # 13, written in July of 1908, had an interesting article titled, ‘The Other Women’. This article criticizes how “Other Women” are messing things up for women who are fighting for the right to vote. They describe the “Other Women” as being ignorant of the issues that are going on around them, such as poverty and starvation. This article was written by “A reluctant Suffragette”. Another article in volume 3 talked about Socialism and Women, which claims that sex dominance is evident in socialist’s men. The suffragettes did not believe that socialism was going to give them the rights that they were fighting for.
In 1909 I came across two articles in volume 5# 19 and 23 written by W.L. George, the titles were the same, ‘Woman’s Suffrage – A Lost Cause?’ George states that, “The obstinate demand by a minority of women, backed by the sympathy of a large number, actively opposed by a smaller number, is deadened and almost nullified by the apathy of most British women.” He claims that 1 adult woman out of 20 takes any interest in voting.
After 1909, I did not come across many other articles written on this topic, which made me wonder why? Therefore, I looked into the history of Britain during that era to see what was going on. I learned that between the years of 1910 and 1912, the sufferagettes were being imprisoned by the hundreds due to violent and destructive crime. They were setting fires and destroying thousands of letters and they were committing militancy acts against the government. I question whether this type of militancy behavior made the editors of The New Age stop publishing articles about women and their right. I also notice that many of the early female writer’s who favored suffrage no longer were found after 1910.
Years from 1913- 1918:
During the period of 1907- 1922 there were many issues that had risen, such as WWI , women’s movement, etc.. I narrowed in on the dates 1913-1918 from volume 13- volume 18. In each of the volumes I perused; there were more male representation than women. Since there were very few women representation in the magazines, many of the women’s names appeared in many of the other volumes.
Based on the small group of women that wrote in this magazine I concluded that the women who wrote for the New Age had to either belong to a particular group or made connections that allowed them to become part of this elite group.
It appeared that many of the women who wrote in the magazines wrote poetry, about women literature, issues of slave trade, and issues concerning womanhood. Alice Morning wrote the Impression of Paris. In this article, she criticizes people, “for not devoting their time to discovering one another’s literature during the time of the war.”
She also expresses her critique of another writer and in her writing expresses herself as a woman and a mother. Another writer that I came across a few time was Beatrice Hastings. I found what she wrote about interesting.
She was as most women were a literary critic. She wrote about issues concerning the white slave traffic (which I was unfamiliar with and did a little more research about it). She also used her platform to what I saw as belittling or making sure that women stayed in their place. In Tesserae she stated that, “ women are moved by their feelings and not by their intellect.” This article puts women down and somewhat praises men for using their intellect. I believe Beatrice Hastings wrote articles similar to this in order to continue with her literary recognitions.
As mentioned previously, there were very few women who wrote in the New Age. After researching a little more, I found out that Beatrice Hastings was the pen name of Emily Alice Haigh. Beatrice also had other pen names such as Beatrice Tina, D. Triformis, Alice Morning, Robert a Field, and others. The various women’s names that were seen in the New Age could have been written by the same person; also articles that were written by men or where the initials of the first name were provided could have also been written by a women.
Years from 1918-1922 :
My approach was somewhat overwhelming because when I first looked on the website I looked at everything. What I noticed was that the font changed through the years, the advertisements disappeared and the actual articles were less in number than the earlier years. There was a distinctive format and there were numerous repetitive authors. I specifically narrowed in and then looked at the volumes twenty two through thirty. I found that a woman more frequented the magazine in 1918, but it was not until the 1920’s that more than one woman author wrote more consistently in the New Age. Not that this hadn’t been done at all earlier by one woman, however it was rare and I did not see evidence of more than one woman author in the volumes I skimmed through. Having two women at once was a huge feat, for the entire magazine was male dominated.
I approached the New Age in a vast variety of ways. I first looked at the pages and then the index to see if any issues were being written about women. I also looked at the thumbnails to find a certain article and also go to the author page to distinctively find what women were writing in that volume. Some of the names were unisex like Frances or Jan that was hard to determine which sex was writing the article. Although after reading the articles I can’t imagine they were written by a woman but you never know. In these articles I am talking about, for example, are about the woman’s labor movement. The tone is that the women are just getting in the way and making things worse for the men. These were some articles I chose based on their title relating to woman’s issues. When the men were writing on these issues they voiced that women should leave it to the men.
It seemed to me that the women authors who were writing in this periodical were often the same few group of ladies like Ruth Pitter, Rachel Fitzpatrick and Dorothy Ireland to name a few. The articles of these women were mainly at the end of the volume, nearly if not the last page. Their pieces were artsy and consisted of poems or reviews that could relate to the art going public. When there was amore serious topic in the volume these women authors seem to only give a rebuttal of what was already printed. And again it was mostly a small article stuck in the back and mixed between other articles or reviews. There was a sense you did not even know what the woman’s complaint was about until you back tracked the rest of the entire periodical.
My guess is that is why it is put in the paper that way. For instance, Elizabeth Gerard Smith’s letter to the editor on the article Woman gives her definitive disgust over the article. But she seems on a rampage and you do not quite know why. She then becomes depicted as a hysterical woman. Some of the reviews I found to be bland and too much plot summary. It may be the lack of space provided in the magazine and the precedence a woman’s review has under a male reviewer. Hence when one of the ladies such as Valerie Cooper in her review of Anna Pavlova and her Ballet are given the space in which to write, the writing of the review is then precise, descriptive and objective to her eye. The Pastiche was nearly in each edition of the New Age. Found at usually the last page, the Pastiche or mixed bag of information focused on a common topic of music and poetry. Ruth Pitter in my research was the most consistent writer to appear in this section. Her poems and tales had rhythm, iambic pentameter and alliteration. Some of them seemed romantic and light. She also had a few with a tone of sadness and depression. This section I think is to mainly entertain the audience. Women were bunched together whether they were writing a letter to the editor, review or Pastiche. They were enabled to have some voice to what was going on around them but not much.
I sensed that they were often given this voice only to have it shot down with the more male dominated writer voice. The question then really becomes did woman really read the New Age or not? The same women who were sporadically writing throughout all the years were probably hoping that they were reading. The input may have been minute at the time but that voice has grown from nineteen twenty-two on with the ratification of the nineteenth amendment.
In summary, what we noticed is that the editors in the beginning of the journal’s life were more open minded to liberal women writers. We suppose that after several women’s groups became more militant in their approach for equal rights the editor’s took on a change of heart. Therefore, censoring The New Age and doing away with the pro-suffrage writers and allowing only a few female writer’s who were happy writing artsy articles and poems. Apparently, the male editors were not ready to step aside and give women equal power or equal say for that matter.
