Selections from The Girl’s Own Paper, 1880-1907

Book excerpt: The Girl’s Own Paper, founded in 1880, both shaped and reflected tensions between traditional domestic ideologies of the period and New Woman values in the context of the figure of the New Girl. These selections from the journal demonstrate the efforts of its publisher (the Religious Tract Society) to combat the negative moral influence of sensational popular literature while at the same time addressing the desires of its audience for exciting reading material and information about topics mothers could not or would not discuss. Selected fiction gives a rich sense of the conventions and the domestic ideology of the time; the nonfiction prose ranges from essays on conduct and household management to articles on new opportunities in education and work.