Kristine Moruzi

Constructing girlhood through the periodical press, 1850-1915

Contents: Introduction: girls of the period The religious girl: girlhood in the Monthly Packet (1851-99) The latest sensation: girlhood and the Girl of the Period Miscellany(1869) The healthy girl: fitness and beauty in the Girls Own Paper (1880-1907)The educated girl: Atalanta (1887-98) and the debate on education The marrying girl: social purity and marriage in the Young Woman (1892-1915) The modern girl: heroic adventures in the Girls Realm (1898-1915) Conclusion Works cited Index.

Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840-1950

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Notes on the Contributors 1. Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith PART I: THEORISING THE COLONIAL GIRL 2. Colonialism: What Girlhoods Can Tell Us Angela Woollacott 3. Fashioning the Colonial Girl: Made in Britain Femininity in the Imperial Archive Cecily Devereux PART II: ROMANCE AND MARRIAGE 4. Explorations in Industry: Careers, Romance, and the Future of the Colonial Australian Girl Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver 5. Deflecting the Marriage Plot: The British and Indigenous Girl in Robina Crusoe and Her Lonely Island Home (1882-1883) Terri Doughty 6. Coming of Age in Colonial India: The Discourse and Debate over the Age of Consummation in the Nineteenth Century Subhasri Ghosh PART III: RACE AND CLASS 7. My blarsted greenstone throne!: M?ori Princesses and Nationhood in New Zealand Fiction for Girls Clare Bradford 8. Black Princesses or Domestic Servants: The Portrayal of Indigenous Australian Girlhood in Colonial Childrens Literature Juliet OConor 9. The Jam and Matchsticks Problem: Working-Class Girlhood in Late Nineteenth-Century Cape Town S. E. Duff PART IV: FICTIONS OF COLONIAL GIRLHOOD 10. The Colonial Girls Own Papers: Girl Authors, Editors, and Australian Girlhood in Ethel Turners Three Little Maids Tamara S. Wagner 11. I am glad I am Irish through and through and through: Irish Girlhood and Identity in L.T. Meades Light O the Morning or, The Story of an Irish Girl (1899) Beth Rodgers 12. Making Space for the Irish Girl: Rosa Mulholland and Irish Girls in Fiction at the Turn of the Century Susan Cahill 13. Education and Work in Service of the Nation: Canadian and Australian Girls Fiction, 1908-1921 Kristine Moruzi and Michelle J. Smith PART V: MATERIAL CULTURE 14. Picturing Girlhood and Empire: The Guide Movement and Photography Kristine Alexander 15. Material Girls: Daughters, Dress, and Distance in the Trans-Imperial Family Laura Ishiguro 16. An Unexpected History Lesson: Meeting European Colonial Girls through Knitting, Weaving, Spinning, and Cups of Tea Fiona P. McDonald Bibliography Index

The British Empire and Australian Girls' Annuals

This article explores two series of girls annuals: the Empire Annual for Australian Girls (1909–30), published by the Religious Tract Society, and the Australian Girls Annual (1910–3?), published by Cassell. Although both series were seemingly targeted at Australian girls, they were published in Britain before being given a new title and sent to the colonies. This article examines the implications of these British models of girlhood for their explicitly colonial girl readers. The British publishers of these annuals addressed an apparently homogenous readership comprised of girls from white settler colonies and Britain without attempting to customize the contents of their books for different audiences. In both fiction and illustrations, the annuals simultaneously employed and produced a British model of girlhood that was attractive to Australian girl readers.

I am content with Canada: Canadian Girls at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

This essay focuses on British girls periodicals and novels published around the turn of the twentieth century that generate an imagined picture of Canadian girlhood; I also begin to contrast these representations with those produced and published in Canada.

Ethics and Children's Literature

any generalization about working-class fathers must immediately be tempered by acknowledgement that there were many exceptions. For scholars of children and childhood this study of fatherhood enriches our understanding of the familial contexts in which children grew up. There are other sources about fathers that could add to and perhaps modify Strange’s findings, but she has chosen to limit herself to how they were remembered by their children in autobiographies. The book is as much an exploration of how memories shaped adult lives as an attempt to unearth how children, as children, experienced life. Strange is a sensitive reader of the autobiographies, and, although she doesn’t entirely escape the verbal obfuscation that infects the modern writing of cultural history, the book is an absorbing read.

Serializing Scholarship: (Re)Producing Girlhood in Atalanta

In the second half of the nineteenth century, the number of magazines targeted at British middle-class girls rapidly increased. These magazines were the primary mode through which girls consumed print culture. In their pages, girls found serialized fiction, short stories, advice columns, informational articles, and scholarly competitions as well as correspondence sections that attested to the readers’ engagement with the magazines and with other readers. As part of a strategy to obtain a healthy and growing readership, many girls’ magazines attempted to define a specific type of girl within their pages that was reinforced through serial production. One focus of the girls’ magazine Atalanta, launched in 1887, was higher education and learning. Each month, the magazine included features on women’s colleges, correspondence and editorials discussing the relationship between education and femininity, and a regular Scholarship and Reading Union section designed to help its readers develop their scholarly capabilities and habits.

Colonial Girlhood/Colonial Girls

Settler colonies and colonies of occupation, such as Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, Ireland and South Africa, provided a space for girls to experience freedom from, and the potential to reconfigure, British norms of femininity. For Indigenous girls, colonialism brought with it new kinds of scrutiny and competing feminine ideals. Colonial Girlhood in Literature, Culture and History, 1840–1950 draws together leading and emerging international scholars for a multidisciplinary examination of how colonial girlhood was constructed, and redefined, in both British and colonial texts and cultures. Since girlhood in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries extends from childhood to the age of marriage, it represents a complex category encompassing various life stages and kinds of femininity, as well as differences based on class and race.

Education and Work in Service of the Nation

Canadian and Australian girls’ fiction of the early twentieth century contains surprising differences in feminine ideals with respect to education and work. In Chapter 4, Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver explain that the question of a young women’s career in post-federated Australia ‘saw a convergence of narratives that each competed for relevance along very specific lines of argument: to do with propriety... job security, reasonable rates of incomes and expectations of career advancement, working conditions, and, in each case, the impact or effect these things might have on femininity and the role it plays in the nation’s future’.1 This same question remains central to girls’ fiction in both Canada and Australia in this period. Girls’ fiction in these white settler colonies has many similarities, containing strong ideals related to domesticity, education, employment and femininity. The question of a girl’s occupation and the skills she needs to become a successful young woman is central to these texts. The important differences are based on education, in which the Canadian attitudes towards women’s higher education and employment are generally much more positive. Although Canadian girls’ texts also typically conclude with marriage (and presumably motherhood), Canadian girls like L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and Nellie McClung’s Pearlie Watson are offered the opportunity to pursue higher education and use this education to teach others.

“NEVER READ ANYTHING THAT CAN AT ALL UNSETTLE YOUR RELIGIOUS FAITH”: READING AND WRITING IN THE MONTHLY PACKET

The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church (1851–99) reveals the interest that Charlotte Yonge had in promoting and supporting girls as readers and writers. As the editor and as a major contributor, Yonge provided a variety of material for the magazine as part of a strategy for the development of girls reading and writing habits in ways that were consistent with their High Anglican beliefs and that would never cause them to question their faith.