Key Points
The history of 18th-century print is littered with striking instances in which women, like Featherington, used cheap print such as magazines and periodicals to deliver stunning satirical blows to the male-dominated status quo..
This was a practice the writer Jonathan Swift disparagingly called fair sexing: appealing to a second-hand readership of women who might inherit the paper when their husbands had finished with it..
Proudly presenting itself as a magazine by women and for women, however, Haywood self-consciously carved out a space to celebrate female readers and campaign for female education...
However, though Lennox hopes that this new print culture offers an opportunity for female education, she also warns against assuming that women of prior eras were not keen and capable thinkers..
But reading 18th-century women writers like Haywood, Ingram and Lennox reveals that we dont need fantasy to find these values there were voices expressing them at the time..
