Michelle Tusan's Women Making News examines how periodicals helped to shape women's political culture from the mid-Victorian period into the early twentieth century. From the 1860s through the 1930s, journals and newspapers founded by and for politically engaged British women provided a crucial center for the many organizations and individuals who were engaged in various political and social reform movements throughout this period. Women's “advocacy” papers were conceived primarily as a means of communication for women's organizations, rather than as commercial ventures seeking to profit from them. Often managed and run by volunteers, largely financed by contributions or patronage rather than by subscriptions, these periodicals “played a crucial role in establishing a new politically minded community of intellectuals and activists based not on the more familiar divisions of class but on gender” (20).

Women Making News discusses more than seventy women's political periodicals and constitutes a valuable companion volume to A Magazine of Her Own? (London: Routledge, 1996), Margaret Beetham's study of women's domestic periodicals during roughly the same era. Like Beetham, Tusan covers both well-known, long-running journals and much more obscure, short-lived ones. Readers knowledgeable about either periodicals or women's history will find a few new details about expected titles, such as the Englishwoman's Review (1866–1910) and Women's Suffrage Journal (1870–90), both born out of the Langham Place circle, and Vote (1909–33), the organ of the Women's Freedom League (WFL). The more interesting—because harder to come by—information comes in Tusan's accounts of little-known publications, such as The Rose, the Shamrock, and the Thistle (1862–65), modeled on the English Woman's Journal and published by the Edinburgh-based and women-run Caledonian Press, under the leadership of Mary Anne Thomson; Woman's Opinion (1874), a penny paper launched by journalist Amelia Lewis, who also published the newssheets Woman (1872) and the National Food and Fuel Reformer, and who invented a “People's Stove” to encourage the economical use of fuel; or the Freewoman (1911–12), a weekly feminist review published by Women's Press member Dora Marsden. This last paper, which included explicit discussions of sexual issues, including homosexuality, is reported to have so offended Millicent Garrett Fawcett that she tore the first issue to shreds; the WFL, under whose auspices it was to be published, refused to have anything to do with it (222).

Few previous studies have looked in such detail at either the internal workings of the papers or the ways in which the publications mutually reinforced both the efforts of the organizations and one another. Particularly interesting are Tusan's accounts of the staffing, funding, and production costs of many of the periodicals. Not only is it useful to have such behind-the-scenes information in order to better understand the content of the various papers, but such information can help readers to (re)assess a particular periodical's real or potential influence and also to gauge the relative progress (in economic and other terms) made by the women who launched and sustained those papers. For example, Tusan notes that by the turn of the century, a weekly penny periodical required an initial capital outlay of about two thousand pounds—fully twice what it had cost to launch the English Woman's Journal in 1858—and that such a paper would need a circulation of at least thirty-five thousand to be profitable. The fact that women's organizations were increasingly able to put up that kind of initial investment suggests the real gains made by women in the economic sphere through the course of the nineteenth century; furthermore, that potential readers might be counted in the tens of thousands is testimony to the growing level of support for and interest in the many kinds of projects that women's organizations were undertaking. Tusan describes the variety of economic schemes employed by individuals and groups to support their publications, ranging from straightforward underwriting by a well-to-do editor or supporter, as in the case of Margaret Shurmer Sibthorp's weekly Shafts (1892–99); to joint-stock ventures like the Women's Cooperative Printing Society (WPS), which enabled the economic printing of the Englishwoman's Review (and other women's periodicals) after 1876; to more commercially conceived, advertising-supported publications, such as Votes for Women (1907–18), edited by Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and her husband Frederick.

Also of interest in Tusan's account is the way in which the various publications contributed to an overall sense of community for women reformers and activists. Details about suffrage merchandising at Selfridges and Liberty are fascinating, as are the tongue-in-check admonitions to WFL members not to make spectacles of themselves when selling Common Cause (1909–20) on the streets: no dramatically slit skirts, please, “even if the words ‘The Vote’ are printed in yellow on a green underskirt” (175). Tusan also notes that it was Christabel Pankhurst's radical Suffragette (1912–15) that prompted the first government shutdown of a newspaper in over seventy years (177). While Tusan's claims that previous scholars have merely “mined women's political periodicals as sources rather than studied them as a discrete historical subject” and that she is the first to examine them “as a crucial part of women's political culture” (17) seem overbold, she nevertheless does provide useful links between the founders of one paper and the readers of another, and her accounts of the evolving nature of such papers—often from simple newssheets giving accounts of meetings and developments to increasingly elaborate and outward-reaching full-fledged papers or magazines—is compelling. Additionally, by bridging World War I, Tusan reveals to both Victorianists and modernists how much continuity there really was in the women's movement over this stretch of time.

The only areas of concern in this study may be more a result of editorial, rather than authorial, carelessness. The prose is occasionally hampered by a wearying repetitiveness, and readers who consult the bibliography may be nonplussed by some omissions. Barbara Onslow's Women of the Press in Nineteenth-Century Britain (New York: Palgrave, 2000) is a serious oversight (it does, happily, turn up in the footnotes), and neither the Wellesley Index nor the Waterloo Directory are mentioned. Still, this account of how seventy-some years of advocacy press helped nourish and sustain British women activists is a very useful and welcome addition to the literature.