American literature and publishing was largely male-dominated throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth century, but women nonetheless made significant inroads into American literary culture as writers, consumers, and subjects. A number of women-oriented periodicals emerged in the mid-nineteenth century, including Ladies Literary Cabinet, Ladies Magazine, Godey's Ladies Book, Ladies' Companion, Graham's Magazine, Frank Leslie's Ladies Gazette, and Mrs. Stephens's Illustrated Monthly. Circulation numbers attested to the fact that women were a significant audience, with, for example, Godey's Lady's Book attaining a circulation of 70,000 in ----.
Women-oriented publications had distinct editorial voices that both celebrated ideal domesticity and the duty of women to maintain a bucolic home and hearth. Yet many of these publications also advocated for expanded women's rights and featured pieces that endorsed greater independence for women.
Writers such as Fanny Fern, Lydia Maria Child, and Margaret Fuller were among the first women to forge successful careers as newspaper writers, while Ann Stephens, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Helen Hunt Jackson were among the most prominent magazine novelists. Women writers produced romantic and realist fiction in serial form, and slowly established themselves among male colleagues while gaining a widening public audience.
While there is an extensive body of scholarship devoted to the better known writers of "magazine fiction" (published in the mainstream periodical press), there has been very little study of the non-canonical yet prolific authors of popular fiction (e.g., Frank H. Sweet, Marah Ellis Ryan, and F. Roney Weir) serialized in the farm weeklies and monthlies.
Many of the fiction writers and poets who published in the farm press were women, and many of the stories, regardless of the gender of the author, concern domestic themes or narrate romances from the heroine's point of view. Serialized fiction was a mainstay of the farm press.
Baym, Nina. American women writers and the work of history, 1790-1860. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995.
Casey, Janet Galligani. 'This is YOUR Magazine': Domesticity, Agrarianism, and The Farmer's Wife. American Periodicals 14(2004): 179-211.
Coultrap-McQuin, Susan. Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990.
Suzuki, Noriko. The re-invention of the American West: women's periodicals and gendered geography in the late nineteenth-century United States. Lewiston, NY: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2009.
