Women's writing for Punch magazine, 18681918: Negotiating gender and humour

Women's writing for Punch magazine complicates the image of Punch as a misogynistic, male-authored publication by recovering the history of female Punch writers. Rather than being passive victims of misogyny, these authors were women with agency who made strategic use of humour to fit into Punch and help to shape its representation of women. Women’s writing for Punch magazine explores the strategic negotiations with gender and humour in female authors’ contributions to the comic magazine Punch in the long nineteenth century.Through identifying anonymously published female authors of Punch and examining their work in detail, this book offers a more nuanced history of Punch’s relationship to gender than in previous studies. The book argues that, as outsiders in a male-dominated periodical, these writers had to use their humour tactically to show that they belonged in Punch while also pushing back against the anti-feminist attitudes often found in this publication. The book marshals detailed evidence including archival materials, published sources, and Punch contributions by authors such as May Kendall, Ada Leverson, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Jessie Pope to reconstruct female Punch authors’ experiences and the strategies they adopted in their work. By focusing on female authors’ strategic uses of humour, this book moves away from the common depiction of women as passive victims of Punch’s misogyny and instead shows female writers with agency who helped shape the depictions of gender and society in an influential publication.Examining the strategies female Punch authors adopted in their work broadens the history of the magazine to encompass women and sheds light on female-authored comic writing, undermining the idea of comedy as a historically masculine field. In the first book-length study of Punch’s female contributors, Katy Birch explores the strategies adopted by female humourists to carve out a space for themselves in a male-dominated comic periodical. 'Women's writing for Punch magazine' complicates the image of Punch as a misogynistic, male-authored publication by showing Punch’s female contributors as women with agency who were able to wield humour to their own ends. As well as recovering forgotten female writers and their experiences as Punch authors, the book explores their responses to themes such as anonymity, the New Woman, the campaign for women’s suffrage, and the First World War. Drawing on archival research as well as readings of Punch itself, this book offers a new perspective on a well-known periodical and challenges the common perception of comedy as a historically masculine field.