Marks, Patricia. /a>Bicycles, Bangs, and Bloomers: The New Woman in the Popular Press. Lexington: Kentucky UP 1990. Describes the anxiety about the "New Woman" in the caricatures and satire of late-century periodicals. The New Woman began appearing consistently as a comic icon in the 1870s, according to Marks--just as The Ladies was attempting to find a definition of womanhood that encompassed both fashion and suffrage.
Morgan, Marjorie. Manners, Morals and Class in England 1774-1858.New York: St. Martin's Press 1994. See particularly Ch. 2, "The Problem of Influence: Print, Cities, Fashion and 'Society,' 32-51. Morgan describe a movement from personal to impersonal forces influencing behavior from the late 18th to the 19th century, particularly noting the transition from conduct books to etiquette books as guides in the mid-Victorian period. She outlines an anxious Victorian reaction to the increasing power of "print, cities, fashion and fashionable Society at the expense of traditional personal persuaders" to determine conduct (33). Morgan traces the rise of the print medium and the importance of etiquette books and magazines, a tradition into which The Ladies connects with its advice on dress and manners. Morgan also reiterates the
increasing ambiguity and insecurity of social ranking that required publications such as The Ladies to help provide guidelines for clarification.
Shevelow, Kathryn. Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical. London: New York: Routledge 1989.
VanArsdel, J. Don and Rosemary T. Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society. Aldershot: University of Toronto Press 1994.
White, Cynthia. Women's Magazines 1693-1968. London: Joseph 1970. Contains the only direct
mention of The Ladies I have uncovered (below). More excerpts.
Even the mildest advocates of the advancement of women trespassed too far to be acceptable. The
Ladies, a sixpenny monthly published in 1872, was in every respect, save one, a model publication. It
was ‘A journal of the Court, Fashion and Society’, and true to the traditions of polite literature for the
upper classes, set out to ‘aid woman to be beautiful in her person, elegant in her dress and artistic in her
tastes’. In case this might be thought too frivolous a programme, the Editor assured readers that the
magazine would by no means neglect a woman’s ‘less conspicuous but more needful duties which fit her
to take a proper place in the home as a wife and mother’. In all these respects, the periodical faithfully
adhered to the formula which had brought success to its competitors, but it nevertheless survived for only
one year. The reason for this may well have been the Editor’s admission that:
‘We are heartily and earnestly at one with those who claim for women many rightful, political, and
social privileges from which they are now fairly excluded.’ (White 48)
