Ladies of the Times: Elite women’s voices at the turn of the twentieth century

This paper draws on a wider study of letters to the editor of the Times published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is specifically concerned with the nature of women’s contributions to this, the United Kingdom’s “paper of record”, at a crucial historical period. At this time, rapid transformations of social and cultural power and status were linked to equally rapid transformations of the role and function of the press. Women’s contributions are of particular interest as women’s public-facing work was often at the forefront of changes in cultural power. The paper examines the ways in which women used the forum of letters to the editor and what this reveals about the nature of publicity and feminine public identity in the period.