For four weeks in the late winter of 1693 C.E., a single double-sided sheet circulated through London promising to answer “all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or widows.” It was a modest object. It was also a landmark one.
Key facts
- Ladies’ Mercury: Published by the Athenian Society in London, this four-issue periodical ran from 27 February to 17 March 1693 C.E. — making it the first known periodical in English specifically designed for women readers.
- Women readers: Publisher John Dunton had already cultivated a female audience through The Athenian Mercury (founded 1690 C.E.), devoting one Tuesday per month to questions submitted by women — proving demand existed before the dedicated publication launched.
- Advice column format: Each issue consisted of a single sheet structured as an advice column, fielding reader questions on courtship, marriage, behavior, and dress — an editorial format that would echo through centuries of women’s publishing.
What came before
London in the early 1690s C.E. was already becoming a city of print. Coffeehouses circulated pamphlets and news sheets, and John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury, launched in 1690 C.E., had pioneered something new: a general-interest periodical that invited reader questions and published answers on science, religion, and private life.
Women were part of that readership from the start. The editors noticed. In June 1691 C.E., The Athenian Mercury announced it would dedicate the first Tuesday of each month to questions from “the fair sex.” Those issues proved popular enough to prompt an entirely separate publication.
The idea that women constituted a distinct reading public — with their own interests, questions, and desire for a dedicated public forum — was not yet assumed. The Ladies’ Mercury made that assumption explicit, in print, for the first time in English publishing history.
A short run with a long shadow
The publication lasted exactly four issues. Scholars have speculated that its brief run may have been strategic: a dedicated women’s periodical risked pulling female readers away from The Athenian Mercury itself, which Dunton still needed to sustain.
Though Dunton is widely assumed to have been the editor, he never acknowledged it. Editorial credit was formally given to a “dimly realised Ladies Society” — an early instance of women’s publishing being attributed to a collective feminine authority, real or constructed, rather than a named individual.
Despite its brevity, the publication’s place in literary history has been recognized as far exceeding its four-issue run. As one scholar put it, The Ladies’ Mercury “occupies a position in literary history that is incommensurate with its brief, four-issue, run.”
Lasting impact
The publications that followed tell the story. The Female Tatler took its name from The Tatler. The Female Spectator, edited by Eliza Haywood and published from 1744 C.E., drew its title from Addison and Steele’s The Spectator — and was the first magazine in English edited by a woman. Each of these built on the premise The Ladies’ Mercury had established: that women were a reading public worth addressing directly.
That premise compounded. By the 18th and 19th centuries C.E., women’s periodicals had become a major sector of the publishing industry across Britain and the American colonies. Titles like The Lady’s Magazine (1770 C.E.) reached mass audiences and shaped how women understood their own social roles — sometimes reinforcing conventions, sometimes quietly expanding them.
The advice-column format pioneered in those single sheets of 1693 C.E. never disappeared. It traveled through Victorian magazines, 20th-century women’s journalism, and into digital media, where women continue to make up a significant portion of engaged news audiences globally.
More fundamentally, The Ladies’ Mercury helped establish that women had intellectual and social questions worth taking seriously in public — a simple idea, stated in print, that kept traveling forward.
Blindspots and limits
The women The Ladies’ Mercury addressed were almost certainly literate, urban, and relatively prosperous — a narrow slice of the female population of London in 1693 C.E., let alone England or the wider world. The topics it covered (courtship, marriage, dress, behavior) reflected the social world of a specific class, and the framing of women’s concerns as primarily domestic was itself a constraint even as it created space.
It is also worth noting that the editorial voice behind the publication was almost certainly a man’s, with Dunton presumed to be the guiding hand behind the “Ladies Society” credited as editors. The first periodical for women was, in all likelihood, largely written by a man imagining what women wanted to read.
Read more
For more on this story, see: Wikipedia — The Ladies’ Mercury
For more from Good News for Humankind, see:
- Marie-Louise Eta becomes the first female head coach in men’s top-flight European football
- U.K. cancer death rates down to their lowest level on record
- The Good News for Humankind archive on the United Kingdom
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