Woman's Journal

▪ American periodical

      American weekly suffragist periodical, first published on January 8, 1870, by Lucy Stone (Stone, Lucy) and her husband, Henry Blackwell, to address a broad segment of middle-class female society interested in women's rights. As an official publication of the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA), it published the views of the AWSA. Because the periodical was “devoted to the interests of Woman—to her educational, industrial, legal and political Equality, and especially to her right of Suffrage,” it printed speeches, debates, and convention notes that pertained to suffrage for women. The publication, however, also featured short stories, poems, and columns such as “Gossips and Gleanings” that made the Woman's Journal a more moderate, less-politicized periodical than the rival newspaper of the more radical National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA), The Revolution (Revolution, The). The Woman's Journal's audience supported suffrage as a means of obtaining for women better education, greater access to the professions, and property rights for married women (see Married Women's Property Acts). The publication remained silent on such “scandalous” topics as prostitution, abortion, and contraception.

      Despite sometimes scarce finances, the Woman's Journal outlived The Revolution and eventually became the leading publication of the woman suffrage movement. Until 1893 it was edited primarily by its founders and Julia Ward Howe (Howe, Julia Ward). After Stone's death in 1893, her daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (Blackwell, Alice Stone), held the editorial reins until 1917, when the periodical merged with The Woman Citizen (Woman Citizen, The).

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