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News with an Attitude: Ideological perspectives in the historical press
Edited by Claudia Claridge
[Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture 105] 2025
► pp. 177–199

Chapter 9
“Girls of the period”

Debating gender ideologies in the British feminist press (1894–1914)

| University of Insubria
Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British mainstream press had hostile views on the Woman Question, while the new feminist periodicals exposed distortions and omissions and became the ideal site for debates about gender. However, these magazines showed competing internal ideologies: the aim of this paper is to investigate on how these were represented within the movement. The corpus consists of 880 articles published by The Woman’s Signal, Votes for Women, The Vote and Common Cause (1894–1914): the analysis of keywords related to gender (woman, suffragette, and lady) reveals different sets of beliefs concerning womanhood and the emergence of internal ideologies, too, which reflected the conflicting ideas within the British first-wave feminist movement.
Keywords: feminist periodicals, gender, ideology, historical news discourse, corpus linguistics, discourse analysis
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1The feminist press
    • 1.2Gender ideologies at the turn of the century
  • 2.Materials and methodology
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1Womanly women
    • 3.2Ladies
    • 3.3Suffragettes
  • 4.Conclusion
  • Author queries
  • Notes
  • References
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References (61)
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The Woman’s Signal 1894–1898, [URL] (last accessed 10 June 2023)
Votes for Women 1907–1912, [URL] (last accessed 10 June 2023)
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