From fashion colours to spectrum analysis: negotiating femininities in Mid-Victorian women's magazines

This article argues that supplements are indispensable to Victorian periodical research, for together with their parent periodicals, they function to construct specific cultural values. The authors' case study of the Treasury of Literature (1868-75), literary supplement to the Ladies' Treasury (1857-1895), examines how this addendum enabled the Ladies' Treasury to negotiate the tensions between the restrictive social and domestic roles prescribed to Victorian middle-class women on the one hand, and women's own varied everyday experience on the other. Conceived just as the contemporary women's movement was beginning to gain strength, its scientific and informative content, reminiscent of the 'enlightened' women's journals of the late eighteenth century, provided a perfect counterpart to the more traditional values of domesticity which predominated in the main magazine. As such, it provides further insights into the unstable construction of femininities during this critical period