“Learning What Real Work . . . Means”: Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl’s Own Paper

"Learning What Real Work . . . Means":Ambivalent Attitudes Towards Employment in the Girl's Own Paper Kristine Moruzi (bio) and Michelle Smith (bio) Under Charles Peters's editorship until his death in 1907, the Girl's Own Paper (GOP, 1880–1956) reflected and responded to its readers' needs for practical information about employment opportunities. Articles such as "On Earning One's Living," "Female Clerks and Book-Keepers," and "Nursing as a Profession" all appeared in the magazine's first year. The correspondence sections likewise discussed issues of employment. For example, in response to her letter, "Isolated Hetty" is asked whether her elderly relatives would be inconvenienced by her seeking employment and, if not, she is advised "to apply to some hospital for nursing" and directed towards other numbers of the GOP, where "much has been said about"1 nursing as a profession. Alongside these informational articles and advice columns were fictional stories depicting working girls in their struggles to support themselves and their families while also remaining virtuous and pure. Despite this overt support for working girls, however, the popular Girl's Own Paper contains a curious ambivalence towards girls' employment. Although it was ostensibly targeted towards working- and lower middle-class girls, most of whom would have worked, the GOP reinforces a traditional feminine ideal discouraging middle-class girls from working outside the home, while also reaffirming the necessity for working-class girls to earn income through paid labour. The magazine presents middle-class girls' employment as admirable and acceptable only when such work is inspired by necessity and only when it remains within the bounds of respectable femininity. This idea of girls' employment is complicated by the GOP's fiction, which attempts to contain working girls by portraying them as victims of circumstance with few opportunities to express themselves. The freedoms of employment emerge most obviously in the frequent first-person evidence in the correspondence [End Page 429] sections, which suggests girl readers are more concerned with the practicalities of employment than with perceived notions of femininity. Mediated by the middle-class editor and contributors to the magazine, working-class voices appear as novelties, enabling the presentation of urban working girls as needing middle-class intervention. By including articles and stories about the lives of working-class girls, the GOP allows middle-class readers to gain vicarious insight into the world of employment beyond the home, yet the magazine's depiction of urban work is narrowly defined, and the frequently negative renderings of such work not only promote an outlet for middle-class girls to channel benevolent impulses but also form part of the editorial strategies that contain middle-class girls' work within the home. When the Religious Tract Society first began publishing the Girl's Own Paper in 1880, it was responding to two troubling trends it perceived in the publishing industry. The first was the popularity of inexpensive, weekly penny dreadful magazines full of lurid stories of murder and intrigue. The second was the frequency with which girls were reading magazines intended for their brothers including, but certainly not limited to, the Boy's Own Paper, which the RTS started in 1879. Flora Klickmann, editor of the GOP from 1908, describes how the GOP was originally intended "to foster and develop that which was highest and noblest in the girlhood and womanhood of England,"2 highlighting the magazine's focus on femininity and morality. As a weekly one penny magazine the GOP was intended to compete with the penny dreadfuls. It was aimed at working- and lower-middle-class girls, and it tried to hide its evangelical origins by publishing the magazine under the auspices of "The Leisure Hour Office," a popular family magazine, rather than explicitly identifying its RTS origins. As Aileen Fyfe explains, a magazine published by the RTS would have been viewed with suspicion by working-class readers, for many of whom "the name 'RTS' would be more likely to suggest patronising middle-class interference than trustworthy information"3 because of its long history of publishing and distributing improving evangelical religious tracts to the working classes. Situating Work in the Girl's Own Paper While the GOP's purpose was to instruct readers presumed...

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