Newspaper The Kaleidoscope : a family journal, devoted to literature, temperance and education

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About The Kaleidoscope : a family journal, devoted to literature, temperance and education

Rebecca Broadnax Hicks, editor and proprietor of the Kaleidoscope, was born in Lawrenceville, Virginia, in 1823. At 21, she married Dr. Benjamin Isaac Hicks, had three children and embarked on a writing career. Encouraged by her success as a writer, Hicks left her family in Lawrenceville and headed north to Petersburg to start a newspaper. It was there she began publishing the weekly Kaleidoscope, “A Family Journal Devoted to Literature, Temperance, and Education.”  In its first issue, printed on Jan. 17, 1855, Hicks wrote that her paper would be an “original journal of the highest intellectual order . . . Its objects are to interest, amuse, instruct, and elevate.”

Literature took center stage in each eight-page issue of the Kaleidoscope. Virtually every edition contained stories written by Hicks herself, like “The Miser’s Daughter.” On June 13, 1855, the novella the Model Virginian, also by Hicks, made its first appearance and did not conclude until December 19, 1855. Prior to printing her own literature in her newspaper, Hicks authored two novels, The Lady Killer in 1851 and The Milliner and the Millionaire in 1853. The Kaleidoscope also contained poems, short stories, essays, practical advice and biographies, with many pieces written by women.

An outspoken temperance advocate, Hicks used the Kaleidoscope to expose what she perceived as the evils of liquor. “Our paper is a temperance paper,” she wrote on Jan. 31, 1855, “thoroughly temperance.”

One of the missions of the Kaleidoscope was defending “Southern values.” Hicks explained in the Jan. 25, 1855, issue, “We like to record Southern meetings, Southern speeches, Southern enterprises, and to lend our aid in any way to our Southern friends.” In the article “We Slaveholders,” printed on Feb. 14, 1855, she asked Northerners to reconsider their “isolated, self-loving, self-sustaining” attitudes toward the slaveholding South, to “check their tauntings, their ridicule, and their brutal mobs,” so that sectional tensions might ease. This commitment to the Southern cause initially won her praise among editors like John R. Thompson, of the Southern Literary Messenger.

In the February 7, 1855, issue of the Kaleidoscope, Hicks began a weekly column called “Woman’s Rights – A Chapter for the Women of Virginia, with a word now and then for the Men.” Airing her thoughts on the subject, she wrote, “that the sole object of a woman’s life is not fashion, dress, establishments, and matrimony I sincerely hope the nineteenth century will triumphantly prove.” She emphasized, though, that there was a “womanly way to prove our great mission on earth,” condemning women’s rights activists like Emma Snodgrass for their “masculine” approach to achieving more equity between the sexes.

Though Hicks believed that that men should act as the political stewards for women, she rejected the idea that women were the intellectual inferiors of men, and her public role as an editor allowed her the rare autonomy to express such ideas. As Jonathan Daniel Wells explains in Women Writers and Journalists in the Nineteenth-Century South, “In Hicks, the political power and intellectual freedom of editorship was the vital platform for denouncing gender discrimination.” Her perception of her role as editor of the Kaleidoscope was reflected in a new masthead that appeared on March 25, 1855. Elaborately illustrated, it shows men and women in a whirlwind of activity, with one woman, presumably Hicks, in the foreground stooped over a desk, peering through a kaleidoscope at her surroundings. In the image, she is the captain of the ship, a calm observer amid the chaos.

On May 2, 1855, her husband wrote a “special notice” for the paper making it clear that he fully supported his wife’s endeavors. He explained, “those who profess to be his friends would remember that nobody can be a friend of him who is not a friend to his wife.” Despite her husband’s public defense, Hicks continued to face marginalization. In November 1855, she was not invited to an editors’ convention in Richmond. The November 14, 1855, issue of the Kaleidoscope responded saying, “We have only been ten months in the profession, and have not yet learned the tricks of the trade. Nor have we the least conception of the position we occupy, among the journalists of Virginia.”

The Kaleidoscope was short-lived, likely because Hicks printed editorials that were openly critical of men. Initially an apologist for the South, she veered from other Southern women writers by criticizing a society that underestimated women. Hicks became disheartened with publishing and with her beloved South, saying, “Public opinion is the tyrant of the South — and public opinion . . . keeps down Southern enterprise and individual talent.” Hicks shut down the Kaleidoscope in February 1857, never publishing anything else during her lifetime. After her husband’s death in 1860, she moved to Washington, D.C., and married Union officer, Capt. Hobart E. FitzGerald.