For my final project, I plan to examine the undervaluing of women-made work as “lesser scholarship” due to categorization practices and its relegation within the domestic sphere. Historically, much of literary works made by women have been viewed as less technically refined and socially significant as public perception renders these works as “craft” rather than “art.” Such examples like scrapbooks, chapbooks, and women-made journals reveal how the creativity and intellect of female narratives have been excluded from the literary canon as this work was seen as amateur and of the private sphere. With the distinct character of these female voices as often intimate and communal, understanding the richness of their practices and multimodal forms of craft in publication is critical to understanding female authorship, visibility, and cultural contributions that have been barred by gatekeepers.
My project will be completed through a scholarly essay to thoroughly explore this topic and represent the aforementioned research in the most straightforward manner. I will begin by situating female authorship within historic contexts, tracing how the domestic sphere shaped the material form and cultural perspective of female work. With this foundation of women-made texts, I will then explore how such perceptions of women-led genres like journals and magazines are taken as less serious works; however, these publications are vital to literary culture, intersectional scholarship, and the circulation of the female voice. The examples I’d like to observe are journalistic works of the Modernist period as this era signified women assuming more dominant roles within publicly recognized works despite lack of critical acknowledgement and Ms. Magazine, a landmark feminist publication of the 20th century. Across different time periods, these works highlight women’s continued output of literature in journalistic forms which assert intellectual authority and build a communal voice despite being categorized outside of “serious scholarship.” The purpose of this paper will be to acknowledge the scholarship of women that falls outside of the normative canon and suggest a necessity to push the boundaries of what constitutes scholarship for inclusion of all voices through representation by their characteristic mediums.
As a creative portion of this project, I am considering including the new issue of the magazine that I am working on as I feel like this is a modern-day representation of the issues that I am presenting. I have personally edited all the writing within the magazine and designed the page layouts, but I’m not sure if this will be acceptable for submission as it was not made for the direct purpose of this project. Another creative element that I am considering is creating a scrapbook page and taking inspiration from Woman’s World in connecting the medium with my project’s message.
Thesis: By examining the historic roots of female literary scholarship and how such material forms of scrapbooks and chapbooks have been dismissed as “craft” due to confinement within the domestic sphere, this paper observes how historic cultural perceptions and oppression have perpetuated marginalization of later female-produced works. Thus, by acknowledging the significance of these formats as characteristic of female scholarship, the legitimacy of these multimodal formats is vital in correcting absences of women in the literary canon and understanding the representation of their “art” through their own craft which has been excluded by male-defined categories.
Annotated Bibliography
Baxandall, Rosalyn, and Linda Gordon, editors. Dear Sisters : Dispatches from the Women’s Liberation Movement. Basic Books, 2000.
Together, Baxandall and Gordon have compiled in their novel broadsides, cartoons, manifestos, and other forms of media that influenced the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s and 1970s. Included in this collection is Ms. Magazine which is analyzed by this source as an intellectual hub for female scholarship and gathering for the movement. By analyzing works by women for the betterment of women, this source analyzes the significant ties of medium and message in female scholarship and creates these various modes as worthy forms.
Black, Jennifer M. “Gender in the Academy: Recovering the Hidden History of Women’s Scholarship on Scrapbooks and Albums.” Material Culture, vol. 50, no. 2, 2018, pp. 38–52. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27034312. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.
The article examines what is considered “high” and “low” forms of media and how such work created by men is professional while comparable work by women is deemed amateur. In this source, scrapbooks and albums are studied to argue that men have been hierarchically privileged in academia while women have been pushed to the margins. This source will demonstrate how the view of women’s work as inferior stems from issues of gender rather than medium of materials alone.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic : The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 1979, https://bac-lac.on.worldcat.org/oclc/421550916.
The Madwoman in the Attic is a foundational work in considering female literature as it acknowledges the “double bind” female authors are positioned within as they position themselves against the male literary canon while also needing to rely on it for scholarly acknowledgement. Key female authors including Mary Shelley, Charlotte Brontë, and Emily Brontë are cited for their works and the maddening they are placed in within the private sphere as the novel’s title suggests. Through characteristics of these female authors’ texts, Gilbert and Gubar point to female literature having distinct traditions outside of a male-defined literary tradition. This work is important to my research in critically acknowledging the hypocrisy in the vitality of female works despite dismissal. Gilbert and Gubar set the foundation for gendered cultural hierarchies dismissing all work by women because of creation by female and that this is not dictated as a result of medium selection.
Huyssen, Andreas. “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other.” Media Studies: A Reader: Media Studies, 2019, pp. 124–37.
In considering mass culture, like magazines, Huyssen considers it to be gendered as feminine in the ways that it is devalued against modernist art. This gendering of mass culture is connected historically as genres like romance and drama are associated with women while modernist principles stand for autonomy and intellectual rigor. Despite women being key players in the Modernism movement, their lack of recognition reflects modernism’s roots in misogyny and elitism as illustrated by its fears of commodification into popular culture and falling outside of “true” art. Huyssen’s argument that modernism’s aesthetic can not be separated from gender politics helps illustrate the devaluation of women in production.
Jordan, Tessa, and Michelle Meagher. “Introduction: Feminist Periodical Studies.” American Periodicals, vol. 28, no. 2, 2018, pp. 93–104. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26528615. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.
This article examines feminist periodicals through the lens of scholarship with the aim of examining how “print culture tell[s] us about feminism’s past(s), its present articulations, and its future aspirations” (Jordan and Meagher). In defining feminist print culture, this work includes zines, periodicals, feminist presses, scholarly periodicals, popular periodicals, textbooks, and blogs to understand how these sources expanded feminism politically and culturally. Utilizing this article will be beneficial in my examination of 20th and modern day female publications as sites of scholarship.
Marek, Jayne E. Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History. 1st ed., University Press of Kentucky, 1995. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jcxv. Accessed 15 Nov. 2025.
Women Editing Modernism: “Little” Magazines and Literary History acknowledges the work of women in the Modernist literary movement and the critical underexamination of their labor. Citing many female contributors and the “little” magazines they worked on, Marek gives credit to these women as being guiding hands in pushing key authors of this period, like Ezra Pound. This novel restores women’s editorial effort in literary history and challenges narratives of these women as “only” editors and not influential contributors to the movement, creativity, and history. In relation to my work, this source confirms the marginalization of women even in periodical culture due to gendered separations rather than effort. This reinforces my work to establish women as characteristic to the publications they work on in adding to what is culturally recognized as legitimate scholarship
Rawle, Graham. Woman’s World : A Novel. First Counterpoint edition., Counterpoint, 2008.
Woman’s World is a mixed media novel as Rawle took 40,000 fragmented words sourced from women’s magazines to create a narrative which reflects on the female experience of fragmentation and how society views women. This work is a powerful piece as it legitimizes women magazines as the novel is constructed by such material and the subject of the novel, Norma, compares her life to these magazines that are said to be made for her. Woman’s World exemplifies why multimodal work by women deserves space within the canon as a form or scholarship that pushes creativity and women’s stories to combat the rigidity of genres that consequently marginalize.
Senchyne, Jonathan. The Intimacy of Paper in Early and Nineteenth-Century American Literature. University of Massachusetts Press, 2020.
Senchyne’s novel is the piece that inspired my research as I was interested in how women in the home produced writing. In his book, Senchyne looks at the earliest form of paper production and what materials groups who did not have access to paper would use to write. In relation to women, textile workers would weave cloth and housewives would save rags. This archival evidence contains work by many lesser-known figures, many of which were women, and sets forth a new perspective on literary periodization founded on materiality. In this look of paper, the page is seen as political in its relation to gender, labor, and race access.
