"Girls of the period": Debating gender ideologies in the British feminist press (1894-1914)

Between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the British mainstream press had hostile views on the Woman Question, while the new feminist periodicals exposed distortions and omissions and became the ideal site for debates about gender. However, these magazines showed competing internal ideologies: the aim of this paper is to investigate on how these were represented within the movement. The corpus consists of 880 articles published by The Woman's Signal, Votes for Women, The Vote and Common Cause (1894-1914): the analysis of keywords related to gender (woman, suffragette, and lady) reveals different sets of beliefs concerning womanhood and the emergence of internal ideologies, too, which reflected the conflicting ideas within the British first-wave feminist movement.