Compare the gender of contributors charts to how words pertaining to women are distributed in the texts.
In the charts below, we look at the frequency and variations of the words “woman” and “women” in the pages of The Masses, which should indicate how discourses about women are distributed through the contents of the magazine. The first three charts involve transcripts of the magazine during its first three years (from Jan 1911 through Sep 1913), which we’ve organized by date of publication to coincide with three periods when the magazine was run by these four different editors:
These three charts, accordingly, may reveal if the discourses about women in the magazine differed under these editorships. By contrast, the final two charts below represent all seven years (and 79 issues) of the magazine, which we’ve organized by the genre of the magazine’s contents instead of their date of publication. These charts should reveal how keyterms related to “women” are distributed through the following sections of the magazine: advertisements, articles (or non-fiction prose), table of contents, drama, fiction, images (captions), letters, miscellaneous (which includes the masthead and other texts about the magazine itself), and poetry.
All of these charts were produced using tools freely available on Voyant.
Because The Masses is often regarded as having come into its own after Max Eastman became editor, we wanted to see how the discourse of women in the magazine during the first year of his tenure compares with what appeared in the magazine’s two previous years. (In fashioning three periods to study, we additionally wanted to see if there was any difference between the magazine’s first year, edited by Seltzer and then Winslow, and the magazine’s second year, edited by Vlag.) Interestingly, the charts below seem to indicate that variants of the word “woman” appear most frequently during the magazine’s first period, edited by Seltzer/Winslow. Though each chart tracks the relative frequency of a handful of related words (like “woman,” “women,” “woman’s” and “womanhood”), by clicking on the “collapse terms” box in each chart you can produce a single trend line that summarizes the frequencies of all the charted words, which makes it easier to compare their results.
Frequency of “woman” in Seltzer/Winslow issues (Jan-Dec 1911)
Frequency of “woman” in Vlag issues (Jan-Aug 1912)
Frequency of “woman” in Eastman’s first ten issues (Dec 1912-Sep 1913)
Closer examination of the numbers represented in the trend lines above confirms the impression we get from looking at the charts: the magazine edited by Seltzer/Winslow contains an average of 38.1 instances of “woman”-related words per issue, whereas the magazine during Vlag’s editorship contains 35.1 such words per issue while an issue during Eastman’s first year contains on average only 26 such words. This suggests that during the first two years of the magazine, women were a more frequently-cited topic, and showed up more frequently in discourses, than during Eastman’s start as editor.
The word cloud below represents the most frequently recurring words among the 2,000,821 words that appear in nine volumes of The Masses. The size of each word in the cloud expresses approximately how often it shows up in the magazine relative to the other words in the cloud. You can find the exact count for each word by hovering your cursor over it; thus, the cloud tells us that there are 1631 references to “woman” and 1512 references to “women” in the Masses. Clicking on each word will bring you more information about it in the magazine.
The text of the Masses for this corpus has been divided into nine documents, each representing a different genre. Accordingly, we can see how the 1631 instances of “woman” are distributed through these different genres over the nine volumes of the magazine: 572 instances in articles, 463 in fiction, 432 in advertisements, and 74 in poems (Document Terms/Count).