Complaints of Everyday Life: Feminist Periodical Culture and Correspondence Columns in the Woman Worker, Women Folk, and the Freewoman

Abstract

This chapter explores the ephemeral aspects of everyday life through marginal forms of periodical culture—the lively correspondence columns of two very different feminist papers, the avant-garde little magazine, the Freewoman, and the socialist woman's paper, the Woman Worker. Letters columns reveal the traces of readers’ interactions with a paper and highlight the ways in which feminist periodicals addressed their readers, invited them to try on new identities, and engaged them in the debates of the public sphere. Using Lauren Berlant's description of a “female complaint” of modern mass cultural forms, this chapter unpacks the ways in which the letters that aired female discontent with the everyday open a new view onto the feminist readings of daily life offered by feminist print.