Women’s Magazines & Newspapers
A growing, award-winning collection of the most historically important women’s magazines and newspapers, offered in a variety of affordable packages.
Godey’s Lady’s Book
In Philadelphia in 1830, Louis Antoine Godey (1804-1878) commenced the publication of Godey’s Lady’s Book, designed to attract the growing audience of American women—to entertain, inform, and educate. In addition to extensive fashion descriptions and plates, the early issues included biographical sketches, articles about mineralogy, handcrafts, female costume, the dance, equestrienne procedures, health and hygiene, recipes and remedies, and the like. Each issue also contained two pages of sheet music. Gradually, the periodical matured into an important literary magazine containing extensive book reviews and works by Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and many other celebrated 19th-century authors, who regularly contributed essays, poetry, and short stories. Godey’s Lady’s Book also was a vast reservoir of handsome illustrations, including hand-colored fashion plates, mezzotints, engravings, woodcuts, and chromolithographs.
In 1836, Godey purchased the Boston-based American Ladies’ Magazine and merged it with his own publication. Most importantly, Sarah Josepha Hale (1788-1879) became the new editor, bringing substance to the magazine and writing frequently about the notion of “women’s sphere.” In 1846, she stated, “The time of action is now. We have to sow the fields—the harvest is sure. The greatest triumph of this progression is redeeming woman from her inferior position and placing her side by side with man, a help-mate for him in all his pursuits.” Her steadfast devotion of purpose and her unwavering editorial principles regarding social inequalities and the education of American women made her one of the most important editors of her time.
Under Mrs. Hale, the magazine flourished, reaching a pre-Civil War circulation of 150,000. Godey and Hale became a force majeure in American publishing and together produced a magazine that today is considered to be among the most important resources for examining 19th-century American life and culture.
This most successful publisher-editor relationship lasted for over forty years. Louis A. Godey died in November 1878 and Sarah J. Hale, five months later.
This collection provides the complete run of Godey’s Lady’s Book and is the only one containing the color plates as they originally appeared. The platform allows searchers to limit by Image Type, with filters for chromolithograph, color plate, color plate fashion, advertisement, cartoon, drawing, engraving, fashion plate, illustration, map, mezzotint, portrait, sheet music, table, and woodcut.
The Woman’s Tribune
The Woman’s Tribune, with its masthead motto “Equality Before The Law,” was launched by Clara Bewick Colby from her home in Beatrice, Nebraska, in August 1883. For the next year, it was the official publication of the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association. Colby would become one of America’s most outspoken proponents of woman suffrage and political rights.
The Tribune’s audience included many leading activists, along with potential converts in the trans-Mississippi West.
Susan B. Anthony considered The Woman’s Tribune the organ of the National Woman Suffrage Association, even though the Tribune was never formally affiliated with any national group. Elizabeth Cady Stanton considered it “the best suffrage paper ever published” and allowed it to serialize two of her most important works, her autobiography and The Woman’s Bible.
It was the second longest running woman suffrage newspaper. Unlike many others, the Tribune was designed for general circulation. Colby believed that her newspaper should connect suffrage to other issues of importance and interest to women, particularly to the rural women of the Midwest and West, so political and international issues were presented. The Tribune was probably the first woman’s paper published by a woman, and during the Spanish-American War, Colby was the first officially recognized woman war correspondent representing a woman’s newspaper.
Colby published the newspaper in Beatrice through 1889. After her husband moved to Washington DC, she commuted between Washington and Beatrice, all the while continuing to publish. She moved to and published from Washington starting in 1893, then in 1904 moved publication to Portland, Oregon, where she lived until the paper ceased in 1909.
This collection comprises the complete run of all 724 issues.
The National Standard
The National Standard: A Women’s Suffrage and Temperance Journal exploded onto the popular stage in 1870, supporting two of the major social movements in the late 19th century: the Woman Suffrage Movement and the Temperance Movement. The publication provided an outlet and forum for women’s viewpoints on social and political reform and literary culture, and it highlighted efforts to ban the scourge of alcohol.
The publication evolved through three publishing efforts by Aaron M. Powell and Lydia M. Child, publishers and chief editors.
The first began in May 1870, titled The Standard: A Journal of Reform and Literature, published as a monthly. From its lead article on Native Americans by Child in the first edition, the publication set out to rally its readers to the cause of women’s rights and social reform.
In July of that year, the publication turned to a newspaper format, renamed The National Standard: An Independent Reform and Literary Journal, focusing primarily on women’s political rights, suffrage, and social and economic reforms.
The final change came in January 1872, when Powell expanded the focus to support the burgeoning temperance movement. The National Standard: A Temperance and Literary Journal ran to December 1872, with a motto highlighting its final purpose: “An Independent, Reform and Literary Journal—Justice and Equal Rights for All.”
The Lily
The Lily, the first newspaper for women, was issued from 1849 to 1853 under the editorship of Amelia Bloomer (1818-1894).
Published in Seneca Falls, New York, and priced at 50 cents a year, the newspaper began as a temperance journal for “home distribution” among members of the Seneca Falls Ladies Temperance Society, which had formed in 1848.
After a number of early obstacles, the Society’s enthusiasm for the paper died out, but Bloomer felt a commitment to publish and assumed full responsibility. In 1850, “Published by a committee of ladies” was replaced by only Bloomer’s name on the masthead.
Although women’s exclusion from temperance societies and other reform activities was the main force behind the initial publication, The Lily was not at first a radical paper; it conformed to the stereotype of women as “defenders of the home.” The paper’s earliest articles dealt with temperance, childbearing, and education. Fillers often told horror stories about the effects of alcohol. (“A man when drunk fell into a kettle of boiling brine at Liverpool, Onondaga Co. and was scalded to death.”)
It is woman that speaks through The Lily… Intemperance is the great foe to her peace and happiness. It is that above all that has made her Home desolate and beggared her offspring… Surely, she has the right to wield her pen for its Suppression. Surely, she may… use her influence to lead her fellow mortals from the destroyer’s path.
Amelia Bloomer in the first issue of The Lily
But gradually the newspaper began to include articles about other subjects, many from the pen of Elizabeth Cady Stanton writing under the pseudonym “Sunflower.” Bloomer was greatly influenced by Stanton and gradually became a convert to the cause of women’s rights, writing about laws unfair to women and demanding change.
Bloomer also became interested in dress reform, advocating that women wear the outfit that came to be known as the “Bloomer costume,” a knee-length dress with pants as worn by Elizabeth Smith Miller of Geneva, New York. Although Bloomer refused to take credit for inventing the pants-and-tunic outfit, her name became associated with it because of her articles and illustrations in The Lily.
The circulation of The Lily grew from hundreds to thousands per month because of the dress-reform controversy. At the end of 1853, the Bloomers moved to Mount Vernon, Ohio, where Amelia continued to edit The Lily. When she and her husband prepared to move to Council Bluffs, Iowa, where no publishing facilities were available, Bloomer sold The Lily in 1854 to Mary Birdsall.
Bloomer remained a contributing editor for the two years The Lily survived after she sold it, until the final issue December 15, 1856.
The National Citizen and Ballot Box
The National Citizen and Ballot Box was a monthly journal deeply involved in the roots of American feminism. It was owned and edited by Matilda Joslyn Gage, an American women’s rights advocate who helped to lead and publicize the suffrage movement. In 1878, Gage bought The Ballot Box, a publication of a Toledo, Ohio, suffrage association, renamed it The National Citizen and Ballot Box, and stated her intentions for the paper in a prospectus: “Its especial object will be to secure national protection to women citizens in the exercise of their rights to vote… it will oppose Class Legislation of whatever form… Women of every class, condition, rank and name will find this paper their friend.”
Gage was the primary editor for the next three years, producing and publishing essays on a wide range of issues. Each edition bore the motto “The Pen Is Mightier Than The Sword” and included regular columns about prominent women in history and female inventors. Gage wrote with a dry wit and well-honed sense of irony. Writing about laws that allowed a man to will his children to a guardian unrelated to their mother, she said, “It is sometimes better to be a dead man than a live woman.”
Gage was born in Cicero, New York, in 1826. Raised in an abolitionist home that was a station on the Underground Railroad, she was well educated and a prolific writer—the most gifted woman of her age, claimed her devoted son-in-law, L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, who had married Gage’s daughter, Maud.
Along with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Gage was a founding member of the National Woman Suffrage Association and served in various offices of that organization for twenty years. She coauthored with Stanton and Anthony the first three volumes of A History of Woman Suffrage. In 1879, The National Citizen and Ballot Box published the early sections of this work, including Stanton’s account of the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls in 1848. Gage also worked with Stanton on The Woman’s Bible, and in 1893 she published Woman, Church and State, her most widely known solo publication.
An avid opponent of the various Christian churches, she strongly supported the separation of church and state, believing “that the greatest injury to the world has arisen from theological laws—from a union of Church and State.” In October 1881, she wrote: “Believing this country to be a political and not a religious organization … the editor of the National Citizen will use all her influence of voice and pen against ‘Sabbath Laws’, the uses of the ‘Bible in School’, and pre-eminently against an amendment which shall introduce ‘God in the Constitution’.”
Gage spent six months of every year with Maud and Frank and died in the Baum home in Chicago in 1898. Though she was cremated, there’s a memorial stone at Fayetteville Cemetery that bears her slogan: “There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven. That word is Liberty.”
The Revolution
The Revolution, a weekly women’s rights newspaper, was the official publication of the National Woman Suffrage Association formed by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. Published from January 1868 to February 1872, the paper was edited by Stanton and Parker Pillsbury and initially funded by George Francis Train, a wealthy and eccentric Democrat.
A rival organization, the American Woman Suffrage Association, believed success of the equal rights issue could be more easily achieved through state-by-state campaigns. A scant three years after the end of the Civil War, the United States was embroiled in the issue of suffrage for African American men, and many suffragists felt it necessary to postpone the fight for woman suffrage. The editors of The Revolution emphatically disagreed and maintained their uncompromising position. In 1890, the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association merged to form the National American Woman Suffrage Association.
The Revolution’s motto, printed on the masthead of the first edition’s front page, was, “Principle, not policy; Justice, not favors.” Beginning with the second edition, the following was added: “Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.” Later editions had this motto: “The True Republic—Men, their rights and nothing more; Women, their rights and nothing less.”
Although its circulation never exceeded 3,000, The Revolution’s influence was enormous, confronting subjects not discussed in most mainstream publications of the time, including sex education, rape, domestic violence, divorce, prostitution, and reproductive rights. It was instrumental in attracting working-class women to the movement by devoting columns to unionization, discrimination against female workers, and similar concerns.
By May 1869 the paper began to operate in debt. Train’s contributions to the paper had declined after he was imprisoned in England for backing Irish rebels. Anthony insisted on expensive, high-quality printing equipment and paid women workers the high wages she thought they deserved. She banned advertisements for alcohol- and morphine-laden patent medicines, all abhorrent to her. Revenues from other advertisements were too low to cover costs.
On May 22, 1870, Laura Curtis Bullard bought The Revolution for one dollar, with Anthony assuming its $10,000 debt (nearly $240,000 in 2023 value). Anthony used her lecture fees to repay the debt within six years. Bullard was a Brooklyn-based writer whose parents became wealthy from selling a popular morphine-based medicine called “Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup”. Under Bullard, the paper reorganized as a literary and society periodical that included more social gossip and mainstream literature—and the lucrative patent-medicine advertisements that Anthony had banned. Without Stanton, Pillsbury, or Anthony, The Revolution could not thrive, and its last issue was published in February 1872.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
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The New Citizen, Seattle, Washington
Western states led the nation in approving woman suffrage. Wyoming voters approved the first constitution in the world granting full voting rights to women in 1889. By the time the Nineteenth Amendment was approved by Congress in 1920, Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Washington, California, Kansas, and Arizona had also granted women the full right to vote.
Scholars have speculated as to why Western states and territories were more favorable to woman suffrage than Eastern ones—to reverse a shortage of women in the West by encouraging female immigration; as an acknowledgment of the role women played in frontier settlement; or simply to bolster the strength of conservative voting blocks.
Activists concentrated on the single issue of suffrage and went directly to the politicians and newspaper editors to educate and persuade them.
Considered the first woman newspaper publisher in Washington State, Missouri Hanna was the founder and editor of The New Citizen, the successor to her earlier publication, Votes for Women.
With the tag line “The magazine that won equal suffrage in Washington,” it focused on the role of newly enfranchised women there. Articles discussed a variety of state and regional issues, including labor legislation, divorce laws, wage disparity between men and women, reproductive rights, and more.
The Western Woman Voter
Established to serve all women voters throughout the West, The Western Woman Voter began publication following the passage of suffrage in Washington State. Adella Parker, a popular Seattle lawyer and prominent suffragist, was its driving force, and the publication served as a print forum for her progressive sympathies.
The Western Woman Voter promised to be “a publication primarily designed to be a journal of information for the women voters of the West. It will discuss questions relating to the government of the city and state, questions dealing with the legal rights of women, and with the home, the child and the school, insofar as they are affected by law. It will aim to keep women of each of the suffragist states informed as to the civic activities of women voters elsewhere, and will make a special feature of good government news from everywhere.”
The expansion of woman suffrage in the West set the example for the rest of the country. Eastern suffragists pointed to the accomplishments in the West as the best example for the benefits of extending voting rights to all American women.
The Remonstrance
While it might seem that most women would be in favor of the right to vote, the suffrage movement did not represent the wishes of all. The Remonstrance was the official publication of the Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women. First published annually and later quarterly in Boston from February 1890 to April 1919, it provided a forum for women in Massachusetts, Maine, Rhode Island, New York, Illinois, Iowa, Oregon, Washington, and other states who opposed the expansion of voting rights.
These women believed that the great majority of their sex did not want the ballot, and that to force it upon them would not only be an injustice to women but would lessen their influence for good and imperil the community. Every front page of The Remonstrance carried this sentence: “The Remonstrants ask a thoughtful consideration of their views in the interest of fair discussion.”
Articles covered state and municipal suffrage defeats, efforts to rescind suffrage, the radical politics of suffrage, class distinctions between the suffrage and anti-suffrage movements, benefits of the woman’s place in the home, anti-feminism, the anti-suffrage movement in Great Britain, and radical British Feminism’s effects on American women.
These anti-suffragists were vocal in their opposition and the threat to their ideal of womanhood. While female suffragists largely ignored them, it’s important to acknowledge their presence in American history.
Following the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, women within the anti-suffrage movement did not disappear, but instead organized themselves into a broad political movement that opposed expansion of social welfare programs, women’s peace efforts, and feminism in general. Their movement persisted throughout the 1920s, using its influence to try to halt what they saw as subversive legislation, before largely disappearing by 1930.
The Nineteenth Amendment Victory
Women’s Magazines and Newspapers also includes 18,000 articles from related titles pertaining to women’s rights in Coherent Digital’s African American, Civil War, World War I, and state newspapers collections.
The ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 18, 1920, was a long and arduous undertaking that started during the Revolutionary period, when American colonists were fighting against lack of representation in government.
The first half of the 19th century found strong women, a sizable number now educated, running businesses, moving across the country as pioneers, and participating in reform movements. They were making their voices heard. This collection follows the issues leading up to the 1848 Seneca Falls convention in upstate New York organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, with articles about how the demand for women’s legal rights relating to property, inheritance, and education compared to the mandate for voting equality.
The 1870s saw women attempting to vote in federal and state elections—and suing for the right when they were thwarted. In 1875, the Supreme Court intervened, rejecting women’s demands with Minor v. Happersett, ruling that voting rights were not written into the Constitution. Activists realized the next step was a constitutional amendment. Even though the Nineteenth Amendment was introduced to Congress in 1878, it was not passed until 1919, after years of debate, rejection, and reintroduction of the bill. Women’s efforts throughout World War I were instrumental in winning the right to vote.
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Women’s Magazines & Newspapers is currently on the Accessible Archives platform and will move to the History Commons platform early in 2024. We offer annual subscription and one-time-purchase options.