• Response: Looking Back on A Magazine of Her Own?
• Margaret Beetham (bio)

The summer number of Victorian Periodical Review (VPR) in 1996 was a special issue on nineteenth-century women and periodicals. Edited by D. J. Trela, it included articles by Tamara Hunt, Solveig Robinson, and Linda K. Hughes, among others. Putting himself firmly in the tradition of Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own,” Trela saw his task as seeking to inspire Woolf’s “sisters to discover their mothers’ histories.”¹

In the following year, the winter number of VPR carried a review by Andrea Broomfield of two recent books: Helen Damon-Moore’s Magazines for the Million: Gender and Commerce in “The Ladies’ Home Journal” and “The Saturday Evening Post,” 1880–1910 and A Magazine of Her Own?² As Broomfield made clear, these two volumes were very different in approach, focus, and style. Looking back now, however, it is clear that, taken together along with the previous year’s special issue, they were evidence that the task of recovering the history of the foremothers, or at least of the foremothers’ magazines, was now well established.

Laurel Brake and Maria DiCenzo in their contributions to this round table indicate the pioneering work on women’s magazines on which I and others built. This ranged from the bibliographies by E. M. Palmegiano and David Doughan and Denise Sanchez to the broad histories written by journalists like Alison Adburgham and Cynthia White. White, in particular, had not been afraid to deal with a wide historical sweep and provided one model for this work. These were our immediate foremothers, as were literary scholars like Elaine Showalter, whose pioneering 1977 volume, A Literature of Their Own, paid homage to Woolf and gave my later homage a double resonance. Meanwhile, doctoral students at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, notably Janice Winship and Angela McRobbie, were writing on contemporary women’s magazines for the centre’s series of “Stencilled Occasional Papers” while other students contributed articles to feminist magazines like Spare Rib.³ In short, the years preceding the publication of A Magazine of Her Own? were characterised [End Page 616] by a ferment of work both in periodical studies and in histories of women’s reading and writing.

Propelling all this research and writing was the women’s movement, sometimes called second wave feminism, which washed late into the academy. Feminism provided a way to engage with the wide range of material available: bibliographical documentation, scholarly work on periodicals, and more journalistic histories, along with new ways of reading and evaluating “low culture.” These made the seed bed for A Magazine of Her Own? Looking back, I see that the diversity of these sources may have led to those aspects of the work which annoyed Andrea Broomfield, who complained in her review that “Beetham’s argument is often disconnected and hurried,” that the distracted style “substitutes headings and subheadings for much-needed transitional paragraphs,” and finally, that the book failed to offer a formal conclusion or make explicit important points of argument.⁴

These criticisms follow a very full and fair account of the book’s contents and they now seem to me just. It is perhaps significant that the first review of the book was not in an academic journal but in the weekly Sunday Times, though the reviewer was as interested in taking a pot shot at feminism as he was in discussing the book. The wide scope of A Magazine of Her Own? owed as much to serious journalists like Cynthia White as it did to the scholarly work undertaken by the scholars Brake names.

All of us who write on periodicals know the feeling of frustration involved in making sense of the range and mix of material even a single magazine can present. Taking on a variety of magazines multiplied the problem many times over, as I was finding out. It was this which produced the somewhat frenetic “Oh, look! Here’s another one” aspect of A Magazine of Her Own? of which Broomfield complained. The book does indeed lack a conclusion. I struggled with that at the time. The question mark in the title...

• 回应：回顾自己的杂志吗？
• 玛格丽特·比瑟姆（生物）

1996年夏季的《维多利亚时代期刊评论》（VPR）是有关19世纪妇女和期刊的特刊。它由DJ Trela编辑，收录了Tamara Hunt，Solveig Robinson和Linda K. Hughes等人的文章。特雷拉坚定地坚持弗吉尼亚·伍尔夫（Virginia Woolf）的“一个自己的房间”的传统，认为他的任务是寻求启发伍尔夫（Woolf）的“姐妹们发现母亲的历史”。^1个

在第二年，VPR的冬季发行由Andrea Broomfield进行了回顾，包括两本书：Helen Damon-Moore的《百万杂志》：《女性家庭杂志》和《星期六晚报》 1880年的《性别与商业》。 –1910和一本自己的杂志？²正如布鲁姆菲尔德（Broomfield）明确指出的那样，这两本书的方法，重点和风格截然不同。但是，现在回头来看，很明显，连同前一年的特刊，它们证明了恢复祖先或至少祖先的杂志的历史的任务现在已经很成熟。

劳雷尔·布雷克（Laurel Brake）和玛丽亚·迪岑佐（Maria DiCenzo）在此圆桌会议上的贡献表明了我和其他人所创立的女性杂志的开拓性工作。从EM Palmegiano和David Doughan以及Denise Sanchez的书目到Alison Adburgham和Cynthia White等记者撰写的广泛历史，不一而足。尤其是怀特（White），不怕面对广泛的历史扫荡，并为此工作提供了一个典范。这些是我们的直接祖先，例如伊莱恩·肖纳特（Elaine Showalter）等文学学者，其开创性的1977卷《自己的文学》，向伍尔夫致敬，并向我的后来的致敬产生了双重共鸣。同时，伯明翰当代文化研究中心的博士生，特别是詹妮丝·温菲尔（Janice Winship）和安吉拉·麦克罗比（Angela McRobbie），正在为该中心的“临时场合用纸”系列撰写当代女性杂志，而其他学生则为诸如Spare Rib之类的女权主义杂志撰文。³简而言之，《自己的杂志》出版的前几年？在期刊研究和女性阅读和写作历史中，工作的特点是[End Page 616]。

推动所有这些研究和写作的是妇女运动，有时被称为第二波女权主义，后来又冲入了学院。女权主义提供了一种与多种可用材料互动的方式：书目文献，期刊学术著作以及更多的新闻史，以及阅读和评估“低文化”的新方式。这些为《自己的杂志》打下了温床？回顾过去，我发现这些来源的多样性可能导致工作的某些方面惹恼了安德里亚·布鲁姆菲尔德（Andrea Broomfield），后者在她的评论中抱怨说：“ Beetham的论点经常是不连贯和仓促的”，分散注意力的风格“代替了标题和副标题”。最后急需的是，该书未能提供正式结论或提出明确的重要论点。⁴

这些批评是在对本书的内容进行了非常全面和公正的阐述之后，在我看来，这些批评现在才刚刚出现。这本书的第一次审阅不是在学术期刊上，而是在每周的《星期日泰晤士报》上，这很重要，尽管审阅者对讨论女权主义的兴趣与对女权主义的抨击一样感兴趣。她自己的杂志的范围很广？像辛西娅·怀特（Cynthia White）这样的严肃新闻工作者，应归功于“刹车片”学者所做的学术工作。

我们所有人都在期刊上写书，他们都感到沮丧，甚至连一本杂志也无法理解各种材料的种类和种类。正如我所发现的，接受各种杂志使问题倍增。正是这个原因引起了狂热的“哦，看！这是《自己的杂志》的另一个方面吗？其中布鲁姆菲尔德抱怨。这本书确实没有结论。当时我为此感到挣扎。标题中的问号...