In this talk, Dr Sarah Dredge, will discuss her work in the Girton College archive last year researching the ‘Advertiser’ section of the English Woman's Journal, which was (finally) following up on some work she did in the archive nearly 20 years ago.
The English Woman's Journal, which ran from 1858-1864, was set up and run by the same group of middle-class women’s movement campaigners who established Girton College: Emily Davies, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Barbara Bodichon. It always amused Sarah that the high-minded tone of the articles in the journal was, for its first readers, approached by first leafing through a very heterogeneous selection of advertisements. Some of these reflected the interests of the journal, its writers, and the readers it hoped to attract - those supporting professional work and a political voice for women – other advertisements, however, very much did not seem align with these interests. Mostly, the adverts were stripped out when the monthly numbers of the journal were bound together in the volumes we most often find on library shelves, but coming across at Girton a volume that included the Advertiser section, set Sarah off on a near two decade long interest and treasure hunt to find more surviving Advertiser pages. The EWJ advertiser offers a fantastic window into the business decisions and compromises of running a feminist journal in the mid-Victorian period, but also allows Sarah to reflect on what gets saved and hence forms the ‘archive’ of a journal, both in its own moment, and as students and scholars increasingly rely on digitised versions of selected library holdings. The ‘text’ of the English Woman’s Journal looks very different when approached via an advertisement for F.M. Herring’s patent magnetic brushes!
Dr Sarah Dredge did her undergraduate degree in English Literature at Queens’ College, Cambridge, before going on to McGill University, Canada for my PhD. She has been a research fellow at Queen’s University, Belfast, and is currently Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Sheffield Hallam University. Her research mainly concerns 18th- and 19th-century women writers’ engagement with political economy, and recent publications have focused on Harriet Martineau and Jane Marcet, Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell and Mary Seacole. Sarah is currently working on an edited chapter on Margaret Oliphant, and her article on the English Woman’s Journal advertiser!
All Girtonians are warmly invited, and guests are very welcome. As places are limited, bookings will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis. If you have any questions about the event, please contact alumni@girton.cam.ac.uk.