Suffragettes, ladies, and working women: a corpus linguistic investigation of social and gender ideologies in the British feminist press (1894-1914)

Revolutionary trends and major social shifts are often encoded within the pages (and the language) of newspapers and periodicals (Conboy 2010); for example, the so-called Woman Question filled the British print media between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. While the mainstream press tended to have hostile views on the matter (Murray 2000), the new generation of feminist periodicals exposed such distortions and omissions, thus becoming the ideal site for debates about gender and an alternative, parallel sphere for the promotion of feminist ideas (DiCenzo 2010 and Green 2009). However, these magazines showed competing internal ideologies, too, as they reflected different interests and were extremely diverse for aims, stance, market, and financing. The aim of this paper is to investigate on how social and gender ideologies were represented in these periodicals, and how they influenced the discussions inside the movement. The study considers a corpus of 880 articles published by four feminist periodicals (The Woman’s Signal, Votes for Women, The Vote and Common Cause) between 1894 and 1914: keyword analysis confirms that discourses around gender were prominent across all magazines, but a closer inspection (which looks at collocations and concordances of words such as suffragette, suffragist, and lady) reveals different sets of beliefs and values concerning issues of womanhood and femininity, as well as gendered social roles. The combination of corpus linguistics techniques and discourse analysis sheds light on how these ideologies were also grounded and ordered in news discourse (Baker 2006 and Philips 2014). Results show not only an alternative view on the Woman Question, but the emergence of internal ideologies, too, which reflected the feminist interpretation of the social and gender roles attributed to women at the time, but also the conflicting ideas at the core of the British first-wave feminist movement.