The Female Spectator, published by Eliza Haywood between 1744 and 1746, is generally considered to be the first periodical written by women for women.
Publication
The Female Spectator was launched anonymously in April 1744. It eventually ran for 24 numbers,, a longer run than most periodicals of the time.
Audience and reception
The primary audience for Haywood's journal was women – possibly including the middle classes, but mostly focused on the upper strata with leisure time and money. However, judging by some letters, she also expected some men to read the journal, and she stated that she wanted it to be "as universally read as possible". A poem by an anonymous male author in The Gentleman's Magazine in December 1944 praising the Female Spectator suggests that it was indeed read by some men.
Contents
The Female Spectator was loosely modelled on The Spectator by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. But instead of a narrator gathering news about town and pontificating about politics, foreign affairs, art, and criticism, it focused on issues of interest to women. To do this it employed four characters. Firstly was the eponymous "Female Spectator" who shares the benefits of her lifetime experience with the aid of three assistants representing the three stages of female life: Euphrosine, the beautiful unmarried daughter of a wealthy merchant; the happily married and sophisticated Mira; and a Widow of Quality. Each issue of the journal was published in book form, covering a single topic in the form of an essay. Topics were usually "love and marriage", emphasising moral attitudes. The essays used a straightforward structure of premise, development, conclusion, with few digressions. The sentences were leisurely and well-balanced, with simple but forceful language. The moral instruction and advice of the essays was further developed with exemplary or cautionary anecdotes showing the women's point of view of different situations, and the consequences of certain behaviours. Such anecdotes included stories of a young woman who disguised herself as a boy to follow her lover in the army; another, raised in ignorance, who eloped with the first man to court her; and a womanunsatisfied with marriage whose love affair yielded an illegitimate child. Over the run of the journal such stories numbered sixty, some detailed enough to be likened to "miniature novels". Haywood defended the omission of current affairs by pointing out these were adequately represented in the newspapers of the day. However, she also argued the need for women to be educated. She devoted one series of issues to the study of Baconian empiricism and the natural world and thus is said to have fostered women's interest in the microscope.
