Ladies of theTimes

Abstract

This paper draws on a wider study of letters to the editor of the Times published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is specifically concerned with the nature of women's contributions to this, the United Kingdom's "paper of record", at a crucial historical period. At this time, rapid transformations of social and cultural power and status were linked to equally rapid transformations of the role and function of the press. Women's contributions are of particular interest as women's public-facing work was often at the forefront of changes in cultural power. The paper examines the ways in which women used the forum of letters to the editor and what this reveals about the nature of publicity and feminine public identity in the period.

Green Passion Afloat

“…Reader (2015, 148) maintains that public fora for audience commentaries are "spaces for collective action … virtual communities that can be just as rewarding, contentious, cohesive, or divisive as any other community" (also see Conover and Searing 2005). They may form a feminist counter-public sphere where women engage with each other as points of reference, sidestepping the biases of the malestream news agenda (Pedersen 2004;Cavanagh 2016); a site of post-colonial frustration (Ansari 2011); and a stimulus to nascent progressive movements (Thornton 2007). Hart and Curry (2016) go so far as to describe letter writers as the "Third Voice of American Politics" alongside politicians and journalists.…”