Dr. Paula Hunt is an independent scholar who researches women in the press. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to research the life and works of Almira Spencer?
A: She was mentioned briefly in a book that I read. I had never heard of her before, and I was intrigued by the name of this magazine called “The Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science.” And I thought, “well, that’s kind of interesting.” I started looking into her and there was very little information about her literature other than the magazine that she published and the advertisements about her school.
Sarah Josepha Hale looms large in women’s magazines in the nineteenth century. Then, here was a woman who had a very similar background to Hale, and yet started her own magazine and was its publisher—which Hale never was. I just thought this was an interesting person whose story should be told.
Q: What was your most interesting discovery?
A: It’s difficult because I can’t choose one single element of her life or what I found ‘most interesting.’ I think overall it was the discovery that this woman, who had obviously fallen into poor circumstances with the death of her husband, had carved out a career for herself as a teacher. She then used that experience as a springboard to say “I am going to educate all these other people. You can’t come to my classroom, but I have the confidence to extend my teaching to a far broader audience.” So, it was more like an arc of all the things that I found about her life that were the most rewarding.
Q: Knowing the patriarchal society Spencer lived through, do you think she believed it was merely impossible for a woman to pursue scientific professions?
A: Well, it’s hard to know what she felt other than what she wrote about in her magazine. The Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science was the only voice that we have, and I must say it’s a very distinctive voice.
When you read her writing, you really get a sense of her person. In terms of thinking about a career in science, what we can glean from women’s education at the time for young girls was that teaching them science was not out of the ordinary. It was a very, very popular subject for women. Understanding Almira Spencer as a woman of a certain class and respectability, this was a respectable thing to teach. It was part of a culture at the time where science was of interest to everybody. There were lyceums, museums and people started examining rocks. The people of this era were going out and they were exploring the natural world, geography, astronomy and more. So, science was a piece of what society was interested in. With that, I don’t get anything from what she published that explicitly details reasons why women couldn’t become scientists.
However, she did have a series in her magazine called “Pretty Pastimes.” This series does seem to suggest that this was not a career pursuit for these women. In terms of men, they would not have the opportunity to run out and become scientists either. At this time, science was seen more as a hobby than a career. It was something you did because it was interesting and everybody else was doing it. We can assume that Spencer thought “If I am an educated woman, this is something that I can engage in conversation with other people. I can teach my children about it.” So, it did have a very practical purpose.
Q: What do you think motivated her to value the advancement of women education?
A: There is certainly a domestic element in her magazine. It may not necessarily talk about raising children and housework, but the things Spencer taught through her magazine were elements that were important for young women to know—to be young, educated, marriageable women. When she’s cautioning against marriage being the be-all-and-end-all, Spencer does mention that there are more intelligent women being educated, and fewer good men to choose. So, instead of choosing somebody who is not your intellectual equal, you may be better off being single. She wasn’t completely dismissing marriage, but we must consider her life experience. We know she was married to a doctor, had two daughters, became a widow very early, came from an educated family and two of her brothers became doctors. Her life experience tells you a little bit about her status. Spencer probably never thought that she was going to have to work, and yet she had to find a way to make a living for herself.
Unless she explicitly came out and said something, I try not to speculate on what she thought. But Spencer’s writings obviously came from a place where she had a great deal of passion. You read her writing and you think, “oh, this is interesting.” Perhaps she was thinking of herself, other young women and maybe her students in several of her articles. She’s saying “don’t settle for less, you’re better off single than choosing a man who is beneath you. If you’re an educated woman, you’re better prepared to make a better choice when it comes to a husband.”
Spencer had a very definite, lively, and confident voice. She had to have some kind of gumption to not only be a writer, but also a writer who publishes her own magazine. Many women were writers and made a living that way. Spencer took things a step farther and said, “I am going to have my own magazine.” With thirteen issues, The Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science survived for about a year. It just suddenly stopped and there was no indication anything happened. During my research, I found a newspaper with an advertisement promoting Spencer’s school. In that advertisement, she mentions that many students and parents believed she was spending too much time on her magazine instead of teaching. She then confirmed that she stopped publishing her magazine. This advertisement suggests that the magazine was taking a lot of her time and she had to choose between the magazine and her teaching, and she chose the latter.
Q: Why do you think notable figures who acknowledged her accomplishments didn’t aide in the continuation of the Young Ladies’ Journal.
A: Based on what was happening with other magazines at the time, it was very difficult to make a magazine a going concern if you weren’t independently wealthy. We must acknowledge that Spencer was doing everything on her own. It was problematic at the time because magazines were almost exclusively supported by subscriptions. When you are relying on people to pay for their subscriptions, it becomes a very poor financial model. That was the bane of magazines until they really started gearing up with advertising.
We can assume that The Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science wasn’t getting enough subscriptions. Her brother was selling them, but maybe that wasn’t enough. There was a lot of competition, and she was obviously connected in certain circles. However, we can’t tell if those figures did try to help or contribute to the magazine’s continuation. We can only put Spencer’s magazine in the context of what was happening to other magazines at the time. If you were someone like Sarah Josepha Hale who had Louis Godey to be your publisher, sell your subscriptions and fund your enterprise, the situation would be much different. Your primary responsibility would be to corral all your writers and write. It’s a more secure position because you wouldn’t have any financial responsibility. Almira Spencer did not have that privilege because she was her own publisher. It was hard to have a magazine get going and make money. She wanted her magazine to make money because she couldn’t fund herself.
When Spencer stopped publishing her magazine, she continued teaching. She then met an elocution teacher at her school, they got married and they both moved to New York City. In a new city, she attempted to start The Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science once more. Sadly, it only lasted for about two issues. You would think that since she was married, her financial situation would be better, but her magazine did not survive. This also tells you that after about five or six years, she started The Young Ladies’ Journal of Literature and Science again in the same name because she was constantly thinking about it. It wasn’t like she gave up on it, no. She had the ambition and the desire to restart this project. There was a clear passion she had for doing this kind of work.
Q: Though Spencer’s Young Ladies’ Journal was short lived, what impact did her publication have on the youth?
A: Unfortunately, it’s very hard to measure this because it’s difficult to find anything about this in her magazine, secondary sources, and even primary sources. It’s just not mentioned. It would be nice to come across it in somebody’s diary or writings. I do think that in the bigger picture, her story does show us how women could be entrepreneurial, particularly in publishing. There were many barriers to women’s ambitions at the time, but there did not seem to be one when it came to being a publisher. Almira received a great reception from newspapers and other outlets. It seemed like she took great joy in writing about the different things that she is learning as a publisher.
I think for us to look back and think that women’s lives were circumscribed by their gender and circumstances that maybe she did not think of herself in those terms. Perhaps she thought, “I run a school and I’m able to teach all these young women.” She marketed her respectability and that is something she could use as the backbone of her expertise. You look at her life and you see Spencer is someone who was faced with a financial challenge, and she made it work. So, I think that maybe she did change women’s lives. Though there is no way to measure this, I think she can teach us about women’s lives in the nineteenth century.
Q: What are some of the lasting impacts of Spencer’s contribution to “respectable work” for middle-class women?
A: I think one of the ways she has shown us respectability is that it could be a marketing tool and a sense of your expertise. It’s this era where you’re starting to see middle class values and culture. I don’t think we necessarily see it as a job, skill, or expertise, but that is simply how she positioned herself as having this middle-class respectability. She saw this as an opportunity and used her expertise to market herself, the school and magazine.
I think the exciting thing about Almira Spencer’s life is, you know, who else is out there that we’ve missed? Should we be looking at footnotes more? Or should we just have our antennas up for all the other women who carved out extraordinary careers? Just looking at Spencer’s experience, we see that the barrier to enter publishing becomes more difficult as the nineteenth century progresses because it becomes more expensive. And then you think, “what other women are out there? Are they just publishing magazines? Do they have a small newspaper? Are they publishing their own books?” So, I think Spencer’s story tells us that there are other women out there who are doing these entrepreneurial endeavors.
Q: In your essay, you said the following: “no other field offered a woman such a powerful and public platform from which could guide, inform and inculcate.” Considering the social strain imposed on women, why do you believe this was possible?
A: Certainly, magazines and newspapers are a platform for anyone’s voice. Women at the time had the freedom of the press and lived in an environment in which women could publish. Women had the opportunity to speak through their magazine and to speak to women across the country. Where else could women really do that? These were women who seem to be very comfortable with their literary aspirations, confident in their opinions, satisfied with being women and supported women’s values. It is a platform for women because they could wield power through the press. There was a variety of women’s magazines throughout the nineteenth century, and it wasn’t just what we think of as traditional women’s sphere or domestic sphere. There were intellectual magazines, agricultural magazines and even fashion magazines. So, women had an incredible opportunity to be heard through these publications.