84 | Mass Media and Historical Change
even children were sold as ‘white slaves’. This triggered mass protests number-
ing 150,000 demonstrators, generated a flood of signed petitions, and finally
achieved the goal towards which Stead had been working: the age of consent
was raised (Schults 1972: 128–68).
These arresting modern developments, for which the popular press had
paved the way, also included the ‘New Woman’. As Jane L. Chapman argued,
popular papers like the French Le Petit Journal and the British Daily Mail
presented not only conservative representations, but also a ‘a form of female
empowerment’ (Chapman 2013: 196). By 1900, the most important popular
journal Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung regularly printed pictures of prominent
women who were moving into male-dominated fields. These pictures, which
circulated worldwide, showed female surgeons and policewomen from the
United States, female ‘city fathers’ from Norway, women election campaigners
and suffragettes from England, women lawyers from Paris, and the first ‘female
university professor’. Although these photo essays reached millions of readers
and were certainly very important for women’s liberation, they have often been
neglected in the field of gender studies. The women’s movement that estab-
lished itself in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century and gained a
tentative foothold in Europe during the following decades relied on new media
of its own as well, which had emancipatory content quite different from that
of women’s magazines in the eighteenth century. This already applied to The
Lily, founded after a women’s congress held in New York in 1849 and boasting
six thousand subscribers. It was even truer of other magazines that followed,
such as The Woman’s Journal of the American Woman Suffrage Association.
From 1858 until 1864 The English Woman’s Journal served as the most import-
ant forum for the early feminist movement in England. In Germany, Louise
Otto, chairwoman of the Allgemeine Deutsche Frauenverein, published the
magazine Neue Bahnen from 1865 until 1895. The Social Democrats pub-
lished Die Gleichheit (The Equality) as part of their programme, and Helene
Lang Die Frau (The Woman) as a new voice of middle-class women. In so
doing they attempted to shed light on the contemporary political situation,
voiced criticism of specific laws, and provided a platform for the exchange of
controversial opinions. The debates in middle-class papers usually skirted the
issue of male–female differences, whereas Die Frau expressly underlined them.
In contrast, the Social Democratic organ Gleichheit concerned itself primarily
with the balance between work and capital, and integrated women into the
social context (Kinnebrock 1999: 157).
The English women’s movement reached a broad public because it made
use of spectacular actions geared towards the media: English women fought
against prostitution and the forcible physical examination of prostitutes, with
proto-feminists like Josephine Butler organising campaigns in the 1870s after
several scandalous incidents; the suffragettes who fought for women’s rights