The Establishment of Periodicals | 53focal point of recent research. In England they emerged as early as 1700. Their
initial programme was aimed at giving advice on the conduct of daily life. The
first women’s periodical worldwide, The Ladies Mercury of 1693, promised
answers to ‘all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage,
behaviour, dress, and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or
widows’ (Adburgham 1972: 26) and encouraged women to send in questions
- a practice later imitated by its successors. Many periodicals established in
the eighteenth century tended to add the word ‘Female’ to their titles in order
to pass themselves off as the female counterpart to existing men’s periodicals:
for example, Female Tatler (1709–10), Female Spectator (1744–46) and Female
Guardian (1787).
In England, a number of women were politically active and indepen-
dent much earlier than in all other parts of Europe. The Female Tatler
and the Female Spectator, for instance, published several political articles
(Adburgham 1972: 57). The reputed publisher of the Female Tatler, Mary
de la Revière Manley, was arrested because of her satirical articles against the
Whigs, and subsequently took over the editorial office of the Tory newspa-
per The Examiner. For a short period in 1716, a decidedly political weekly
was published specifically for women: The Charitable Mercury and Female
Intelligence. Being a Weekly Collection of All the Material News, Foreign and
Domestick. With some notes on the same (Facsimile in Adburgham 1972: 65;
McDowell 1998). Despite being given several prison sentences, its editor
Elizabeth Powell could not be discouraged from acting out her journalistic
enthusiasm.
Other countries did not act as expeditiously in the question of women’s
periodicals. In France there was in fact only one long-running journal before
1789, the Journal des dames (1759–78), which was issued by a man, but it
employed women as well as men (Rattner Gelbart 1987). England’s great
freedom of press gave them more leeway, and their work as newspaper sellers
presumably further stimulated the distribution of papers amongst women
(Nevitt, in Raymond 1999: 84–108). Since reports on regional or social events
were common in England earlier than on the Continent, women also had
better access to the media. Elsewhere, such circumstances did not automati-
cally lead to the establishment of women’s magazines, as a glance at the United
States proves. Journals for women did not emerge until 1792/93 with The
Lady’s Magazine, in which literature, fashion and advice columns predomi-
nated (Aronson 2002: 49).
In the course of the eighteenth century, a variety of women’s periodi-
cals emerged in Germany which initially copied their English forerunners:
the Female Tatler was adapted into the first German women’s periodical with
the same name (Vernünftigen Tadlerinnen, 1725/26), edited by Gottsched;
the Female Spectator was transformed and translated into Die Zuschauerin