Talks on Women's Topics.
Croly, Jane Cunningham [Jennie June, pseudonym]. Talks on Women’s Topics. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1864.
8vo.; t.e.g.; green cloth, spine stamped in gilt; light rubbing and wear to extremities.
First edition of the first of three collections of ladies columns by “Jennie June”; followed by For Better or Worse (on marriage, 1875), and Thrown on her Own Resources (on financial independence, 1891). The essays in this volume span the range of topics most pertinent to 19th-century conservative womanhood: courtship, marriage, social life for every season, public interaction with others, housekeeping, and child rearing, as well as health and faith.
Born in Leicestershire, England, Jane Cunningham (1829-1901) was raised in and around Poughkeepsie, New York. Having lived for a time in Massachusetts with her minister brother, writing a semi-monthly “newspaper” which she regularly read to his congregation, at the age of 25 she struck out for New York. There she started one of the earliest “ladies departments” in a city paper: “Parlor and Side-walk Gossip” by “Jennie June” appeared first in the Sunday Times and Noah’s Weekly Messenger, and by 1857 was syndicated in New Orleans, Richmond, Baltimore, and Louisville. In 1856 she married fellow journalist David Goodman Croly of the New York Herald, to which Cunningham also contributed, and for over twenty years the two worked on various papers in a variety of capacities. Cunningham, eventually chief staff writer of Mme. Demorest’s Mirror of Fashions (later Demorest’s Monthly magazine) for 27 years, often derided oppressive fashions such as “long skirts which swept the streets, the difficulties caused by hoops and crinolines, and the bizarre dress of the emancipated reformer who believed that bifurcated trousers would bring a ‘terrestrial Paradise.’” She also added to her roster dramatic and literary criticism, and met socially with the likes of Alice and Phoebe Cary, Robert G. Ingersoll, Louisa May Alcott, Oscar Wilde, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
Cunningham promoted rights for women by exhorting them to aim high in their personal and professional lives. Though she believed that there was no nobler calling than to be “the caretakers, the home-makers, the educators of children,” she knew that just as women had to carry their own weight (and more) in the home to earn domestic equal rights, so too “for equal pay they must give equal work…in quality as in quantity; for equal education they must show equal energy and aptitude and for equal political rights, an intelligence beyond the eternal discussion of the trimming of a dress or bonnet.”
Among her achievements in the world of fashion writing was the establishment of a newspaper guide to shopping (NAW, 410), a seemingly small feat when juxtaposed with her founding of “Sorosis,” a women’s club which inspired the formation of satellite women’s clubs all over the country, “becoming in effect ‘the middle-aged women’s universities’” which together formed the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (ibid.). Cunningham also founded the Women’s Press Club of New York, twice reincarnated the Godey’s Lady’s Book, and published her compendious History of the Woman’s Club Movement in America (1898). Her
lasting contribution to the progress of American women was her insistence that sex be submerged in competent performance. Her belief that financial independence and economic equality were more important than the right to vote, as well as her criticism of the tactics of most militant reformers, kept her on the sidelines during the suffrage battle, although she believed that victory should and would come eventually. (ibid.)
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