Carving out a Place for Women in Punch

My work explores the strategies that female Punch authors adopted to gain acceptance and to make space for women in a male-dominated culture. This paper will focus on one particular approach: framing their work as a contribution or a response to an existing Punch series that was originated by men. This approach made their work more acceptable by demonstrating conformity with the existing culture of Punch, but it also allowed them to move beyond the works they were responding to and introduce a female perspective. I will focus particularly on Matilda Betham-Edwards, the first known female Punch author, and her series ‘Mrs Punch’s Letters to Her Daughter’ (1868), which was written in response to Douglas Jerrold’s ‘Punch’s Letters to His Son’. Although Betham-Edwards’s series sometimes reproduces the negative stereotypes about women found elsewhere in Punch, it also offers an alternative perspective on Punch’s ridicule of women’s fashions and appearance, and it draws attention to the changing position of women and their increasing educational opportunities. I will also discuss Mrs Goodhart’s ‘Studies from Mr. Punch’s Studio: IX – The Girton Girl’ (1886), which conforms to the style and approach of the ‘Studies from Mr. Punch’s Studio’ series but uses this framework to counter negative stereotypes about higher education for women. Taken together, these examples highlight the difficult balance to be struck by female Punch authors between conformity and distinctiveness, and they demonstrate the authors' strategies for fitting in without selling out.