The Journals of Martha E. McMillan

elegantly as rank and station warrant” (qtd. in Melnyk134). As this example of a woman’s writing shows, women valued their sphere in the home and took power from it. Religious, female writing also justified women’s domestic work on economic and moral grounds: women must work to eat and save themselves from the temptations of laziness, and they must reject “the standards of gentility that bar middle-class women from lucrative occupations” (Melnyk139). Women wrote that they should have “mercantile talent equal to that of men,” and emphasized that every woman should be able to accomplish her job successfully (Melnyk139). Women’s writings in domestic, religious periodicals gave women subjectivity as the owners of their homes. An understanding of Victorian periodicals, especially those edited by women with domestic and religious emphases, helps readers clearly understand McMillan’s 1868 journal. Because she was a first-year mother and second-year wife, Martha focused on building a Christian home. The poem “Between Two Years” by Susan Archer Weiss, which Martha clipped out of a newspaper and put between pages 54 and 55 of her 1868 journal, is under the title “THE HOME.” Martha’s quotation of Fanny R.’s poetry (see January 15, 1868) comes from Fanny R.’s Essay “Home,” which outlines the importance of keeping a godly, Christian home, a refuge for the family. Martha’s quotation of Elizabeth Akers Allen’s poem “Little Feet” (see February 8, 1868) was also published in a collection entitled Poems of Home (1866), and was published in many national newspapers and magazines. All of these poems and the journals/books they were published in emphasize the home, reflective of the domesticity discourses of her day. Although it is near impossible to know which specific periodicals Martha may have read, other publications of the above poems are included in journals such as The Christian Diadem and Family Keepsake: Volume 6 and The Medical Missionary of Battle Creek, Michigan. Reading 50