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| Periodical: | Una |
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| Summary: |
From Pat Deveney's journal database:
Una, The. Davis's plan for the journal was "to publish a paper monthly, devoted to the interests of woman . . . . Our purpose is to speak clear, earnest words of truth and soberness, in a spirit of kindness. To discuss the rights, sphere, duty and destiny of woman, fully and fearlessly; and our aim will be, to secure the highest good of all. So far as our voice shall be heard it will be ever on the side of freedom." The title of the journal was said to be, mystically, "Truth," although no explanation was given or is apparent for that interpretation. Mrs. Paulina Kellogg Wright Davis (1813-1876) was one of the wave of formidable women in the decades surrounding the American Civil War who advocated woman's rights and various forms of universal reform. She started in the 1830s with petitions for the right of women to own property and moved in time through all the various manifestations of the movement, including "free love," with which term she was labeled even though her form of that fad consisted in opposition to compulsory child bearing and a husband's right to sex. One facet of the feminist movement of the period was women had the ability to perform what had been thought of as men's tasks, including publishing, and this journal and several of the other early feminist journals made much of the fact that they were edited, composed, set and printed by women without men's aid and that women would soon be privileged to earn $5.50 a month for setting twenty thousand ems of type a week. In fact, however, The Una and others of the kind frequently had the unacknowledged support of men. As J.B. Buescher has shown, although the journal is listed as being edited and published by Davis in Providence, Rhode Island, it had in fact the editorial help of A.E. Newton and was printed by Simon Crosby Hewitt, editor and publisher of the New Era, at Hopedale, Massachusetts, before being moved to Boston at the beginning of 1855 and taking on Hewitt as asknowledged editor. See Buescher, "George Weeks: The Con Artist Who Launched Women's Literary Magazines," http://iapsop.com/jbb/2025__buescher___george_weeks.pdf. In December 1854, Davis announced that "all the labor of our paper has, with the exception of the type setting and pressing, been done by our sister and self," and sadly announced the cessation of The Una, only for the journal to reappear the next month from Boston with Hewitt as publisher and Caroline Healy Ball as co-editor with Davis. With Ball's help the journal supplemented reform with an increasing emphasis on "literature" (beginning the publication of George Sand's "Spiridion"), but could not attract the subscription base necessary to continue and the last issue appeared in October 1855, devoted wholly to filler, a summary of the laws of Massachusetts concerning women. The Una was not a spiritualist journal. It mentioned the new phenomena only in passing but very many of its contributors and those associated with it (like A.E. Newton and S.C. Hewitt) went on to play a prominent role in the reform side of Spiritualism. The two movements were compatible but not necessarily connected, and The Una rationally advertised itself regularly in the pages of the Spiritual Telegraph. Paulina Wright Davis later became corresponding editor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton's The Revolution and after her death, a fate shared by many reformers, appeared as a spirit through the mediumship of Jennie S. Rudd and, appropriately, as the spirit communicator with Lois Waisbrooker, declaiming on "Religion, Science and Spiritualism." Caroline Wells Healy Dall (1822-1912) went on to become treasurer of Emma Hardinge's Home for Outcast Women and a correspondent of George H. Felt's of Theosophy fame.
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| Issues: | Una V1 1853 |
| Una V2 1854 | |
| Una V3 1855 |
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