A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Empire 9781350048140, 9780857851017, 9781350009813

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series preface

A Cultural History of Women is a six-volume series reviewing the changing cultural construction of women and women’s historical experiences throughout history. Each volume follows the same basic structure and begins with an outline account of the major ideas about women in the historical period under consideration. Next, specialists examine aspects of women’s history under eight key headings: the life cycle, bodies/sexuality, religion/popular beliefs, medicine/disease, public/private, education/work, power, and artistic representation. Thus, readers can choose a synchronic or a diachronic approach to the material—a single volume can be read to obtain a thorough knowledge of women’s history in a given period, or one of the eight themes can be followed through time by reading the relevant chapters of all six volumes, thus providing a thematic understanding of changes and developments over the long term. The six volumes divide the history of women as follows: Volume 1: A Cultural History of Women in Antiquity (500 b.c.e.–1000 c.e.) Volume 2: A Cultural History of Women in the Middle Ages (1000–1500) Volume 3: A Cultural History of Women in the Renaissance (1400–1650) Volume 4: A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Enlightenment (1650–1800) Volume 5: A Cultural History of Women in the Age of Empire (1800–1920) Volume 6: A Cultural History of Women in the Modern Age (1920– 2000+) Linda Kalof, General Editor

list of illustrations

INTRODUCTION Figure 0.1: Post card for the Women Writers’ Suffrage League.

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Figure 0.2: Women Carrying Jeanne Deroin (1805–94) in Triumph.

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Figure 0.3: “The Daily Governess.”

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Figure 0.4: “No Home Life for Them,” 1906 Sweated Industries Exhibition catalog.

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Figure 0.5: Eliza’s flight from Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

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Figure 0.6: Madame Sarah Grand and bicycle, c.1897.

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Figure 0.7: Indian suffragettes in the Women’s Coronation Procession, June 17, 1911.

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CHAPTER 1 Figure 1.1: Frances Power Cobbe, ages 20, 40, 55, and 72, Strand Magazine.

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Figure 1.2: Photograph by Arthur Munby of a female pithead worker, 1866.

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Figure 1.3: Very poor household interior, ca. 1900, with mother and two children.

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Figure 1.4: Grand wedding of Maud Cecil and the future Lord Selborne, 1883, Illustrated London News.

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Figure 1.5: Three generations of the Gladstone family, 1919.

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Figure 1.6: Poor woman caring for a child in East London, 1876.

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CHAPTER 2 Figure 2.1: A Bath Ball or Virtue in Danger, George Cruikshank, 1820.

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Figure 2.2: “The Schariwary Cycling Costume,” Punch, July 24, 1897.

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Figure 2.3: The Turkish Bath, Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1862.

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Figure 2.4: Love and Beauty—Sartjee the Hottentot Venus, Charles William?, 1822.

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CHAPTER 3 Figure 3.1: “Neutrality under Difficulties,” Punch.

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Figure 3.2: “Daniel Deronda,” Punch’s Pocket Book for 1877.

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Figure 3.3: “Sketches in Cairo”: “Old Jewish Woman of Cairo” and “Young Jewish Woman of Cairo,” Illustrated London News.

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Figure 3.4: Frontispiece, Harry Furniss, Jewish Portraits, 1888.

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CHAPTER 4 Figure 4.1: “A Man-Mid-Wife.”

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Figure 4.2: A woman doctor examining a young girl’s finger.

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Figure 4.3: Portraits of Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Sophia Jex-Blake.

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Figure 4.4: Woman doctor in India.

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Figure 4.5: “Syphilis.”

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Figure 4.6: “Woman considering suicide.”

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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

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Figure 4.7: “She had a heart.”

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Figure 4.8: “Touch for Touch; or, a female Physician in full practice.”

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CHAPTER 5 Figure 5.1: Susanna Moodie’s farm of 1871, Belleview, Canada.

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Figure 5.2: Charlotte Brontë’s birthplace, Haworth, Yorkshire.

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Figure 5.3: Home of Alice and Wilfrid Meynell, No. 47 Palace Court.

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Figure 5.4: “Ouida,” Punch’s Fancy Portraits, no. 45 (Linley Sambourne, artist).

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Figure 5.5: Condover Hall, a country house of the Cholmondeley family, The Bookman, 18 (May 1900).

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CHAPTER 6 Figure 6.1: Marianne Farningham, portrait, A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography, 1907.

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Figure 6.2: “An End of Our Classroom,” A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography, 1907.

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Figure 6.3: Hannah Mitchell photograph in 1924, The Hard Way Up, 1968.

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Figure 6.4: Flora Thompson.

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CHAPTER 7 Figure 7.1: “Our Magistrate’s Wife.”

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Figure 7.2: “Our Ball.”

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Figure 7.3: “The judge’s wife watches over housekeeping.”

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Figure 7.4: Portrait of Flora Annie Steel.

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Figure 7.5: “Class in progress in girl’s school, Karachi.”

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Figure 7.6: Photograph of a khitmatgar by John Edward Sache taken between 1865 and 1882.

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CHAPTER 8 Figure 8.1: Barbara Leigh Smith, Ye Newe Generation, ca. 1850.

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Figure 8.2: Anna Mary Howitt, illustration of “Old Mill near Heidelberg” (1870).

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Figure 8.3: May Alcott, “St. Malo Cathedral, near Dinan,” 1870.

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Introduction teresa mangum

For women in North America and Europe, the long nineteenth century was a time of breathtaking change. Women who had worked the fields or supported themselves and their families at home through cottage industries at the beginning of the century found their way into factories and servant’s quarters. Impacted by the fluctuations of free trade, others ended up haunting the midnight streets and foul, overcrowded tenements of major cities. As workingclass women began to recognize that laborers across Europe suffered the same injustices, working women and even middle-class women broke with custom and stood side by side with working men in protests and union meetings by century’s end. While wealthy women often remained in privileged social networks bounded by country estates, urban mansions, “the season,” and the “marriage market,” many demanded better education, meaningful work, voting rights, and economic independence. Perhaps most importantly, the increasingly diverse legions of women and male supporters in between these economic extremes produced leaders whose words and deeds still affect the world today. Thousands of women from a broad, cross-class sector that included workers with access to education and skilled trades, women from the modest to the very successful merchant and professional classes, and the moderately wealthy drew upon education to solve problems—often economic challenges—and in so doing deliberately or inevitably forced social changes in gender practices, relations, and institutions.1 Among the most important of these change agents were women writers.

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In treatises and novels, magazine articles and suffrage posters, and photographs of suffrage protests and even turn-of-the-century films of suffrage marches, these women and their male supporters have left stirring records of their demands for education, access to universities and medical schools, the right to work in every profession and to vote and hold political office, and even the right to have sex without marriage and to love and live with partners of the same sex. Women writers, alongside other dissatisfied thinkers, saw connections between their social constraints and those of a host of allegedly inferior beings. Many of these “strong-minded women”2 found themselves fighting against slavery, the abuse of children and animals, the exploitation of workers, and the sexual uses and abuses of women, as well as seeking to improve the lot of women. But they, like us, were fallible. The desire to right wrongs could lead to impositions of ethnocentric, religious, and class values on women that members of the white North American and European upper and middle classes deemed Other—from laborers in their own communities to African slaves to Muslim women in purdah and people in polytheistic cultures such as Hindus. This collection of chapters explores a fascinating, complex, and often contradictory century in which women worked to improve their lives and those of their friends, families, fellow citizens, and counterparts across the world. Their goal of achieving progress was often derailed by fear and confusion in the face of change and difference. The nineteenth-century race of the United States, Great Britain, France, Germany, and other European nations to establish themselves as world powers—in the shadow of earlier civilizations’ rise and fall around the globe—was often described in contemporary writing as heroic, but to twenty-first-century readers can look horrific. Because the rise of industrialism and the expansionism that development made possible were such powerful forces in Britain, many of the authors who wrote chapters for this volume focus on that world location. At the same time, this collection attempts to demonstrate the impact of British and North American events on the world’s women as well as the shift from regional and national to global activism over the course of the century. Feminist historians point out that Anglo-American women’s movements tend to focus more on individual rights than women did in many other cultures. Karen Offen argues that what she calls “relational feminists” in western Europe at times distanced themselves from what they saw as selfish, anticollectivist arguments of British and American activists.3 Offen does see common ground among those working to improve the lives of women in their insistence on the “validity of female experience,” their claim that women suffered due to institutional rather than personal obstacles, and their shared belief that to end injustice women would have to grasp the tools

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they needed to gain greater personal power while also demanding structural social and political changes to make the exercise of that power possible.4 As women’s groups began to hold international conferences, especially later in the century, women struggled with these differences even as collaboration reinforced their sense of shared, systemic oppression based on gender. A transnational approach reveals intimate intellectual influences, personal encounters, and collaborations among British, European, North American, and colonial supporters of women’s rights throughout the century.5 We still have a great deal to learn from the many arenas in which women worked for change. One of those lessons is humility as we continue to seek the best life for the greatest number in our own century of chaos, fear, swift change, high hopes, and grave responsibilities. What the history of women, as reflected through the history of their literature, reminds us of again and again is the need to value what individuals and groups of women accomplished while holding them to account for their oversights and failures. Thanks to the groundbreaking recovery work of feminist literary historians like Nina Baym and Elaine Showalter, among many others, scholars today have access to a rich, diverse trove of literature from the period.6 Literature is not history and should not be read as a factual or objective record of the past, but we can approach literature as an archive of emotions, sensations, anxieties, and distinctive points of view that illuminates debates, contexts, perspectives, affects, values, and expressions in a historical moment. In effect, particularly in a period in which many writers themselves attempted to address social concerns through the devices and forms of realism, literature offers one powerful lens through which to consider political and social history in its vast ideological and perspectival complexity. Realist novelists sometimes went so far as to claim a kind of documentary status; today we see that realism itself is as much style as substance, a set of strategies that create a seemingly coherent narrative, eliding discontinuities, discrepancies, and possible alternatives. Yet as Nancy Armstrong has pointed out, during this period “everyone knew what realism was; authors wrote in relation to it, and readers read with a standard in mind based on the fidelity of language to visual evidence.”7 In a sense, literature claimed for itself the status of history. While resisting the impulse to read literature as a substitute for history and maintaining critical distance on the “history” works of literature strive to construct, we can use literature as one means of tracing what Hayden White called the “deep structure of the historical imagination of nineteenth-century Europe.”8 Reading nineteenth-century women’s literature offers a particularly poignant window on the social challenges and the combination of reflection, analysis, self-interestedness, personal and class, and race and nationalist exclusions and

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abuses, but also the self-sacrifice and brave activism those challenges sometimes inspired. By midcentury, important treatises, poems, and novels by women were rapidly translated, so that a community of readers existed across the United States, Britain, and Europe. Those same books spread quickly to India and other remote locations, as Priya Joshi demonstrates in her study, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India.9

FIGURE 0.1: Post card for the Women Writers’ Suffrage League.

The Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

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The status of a group, including women, never exists in a vacuum, of course. The nineteenth-century stage had long been set by religious arguments. In the West, biblical accounts of Eve’s fall were repeatedly used against women, as were positive stereotypes such as the story of Ruth, which insisted that modesty, self-abnegation, loyalty, and submission to fathers, brothers, husbands, and even children were noble aspirations for women. Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97), the woman writer who had a tremendous intellectual impact on what we now call feminist thought throughout the nineteenth century, sternly criticized women’s economic dependency, its impact on gender relations, and the religious arguments that supported claims of female inferiority. She also connected these arguments to religion. In chapter 2 of A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Wollstonecraft introduces one of the themes of this volume, the tension between the progressive struggle for women’s rights and a lack of self-consciousness about reproducing another set of hierarchies that kept Western women in a privileged position. While denouncing Milton’s treatment of Eve, Wollstonecraft comments: “Thus Milton describes our first frail mother; though when he tells us that women are formed for softness and sweet attractive grace, I cannot comprehend his meaning, unless, in the true Mahometan strain, he meant to deprive us of souls, and insinuate that we were beings only designed by sweet attractive grace, and docile blind obedience, to gratify the senses of man when he can no longer soar on the wing of contemplation.”10 These hierarchies were reinforced by systems of religious and secular law and precedence throughout the world. British and European women writers repeatedly attempted to shame their culture into improving women’s position by comparing the West to the denigrated East. Moreover, as missionaries from across Britain, Germany, the United States, and other largely Christian nations spread across the world, missionaries’ wives and women missionaries spread not only religious training and literacy, but also white, Western superiority. From the early years of missionary movements, writes Susan Thorne, “each of these organizations actively courted female support and evangelical women responded enthusiastically.”11 In Britain, the Society for the Promotion of Female Education in the East was founded in 1834, sending single women missionaries to China, India, and South Africa and firmly embedding legions of women in the empire and beyond.12 After 1839, new colonial policies pushed the numbers of single women emigrating to far-flung corners of the empire up further, and the formation of the Female Middle-Class Emigration Society encouraged the emigration of “distressed gentlewomen.”13 Thus, women themselves participated in the circulation of religious teachings that encouraged women to be submissive despite the fact that they as missionaries bravely and adventurously traveled the world.

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FIGURE 0.2: Women Carrying Jeanne Deroin

(1805–94) in Triumph, from Les Femmes Celebres, vol. 1, Paris, Mazenod, 1848 (engraving) (b/w photo) by French School (nineteenth century). Courtesy of the Bibliotheque Marguerite Durand, Paris, France, Archives Charmet, the Bridgeman Art Library.

Religious arguments reinforced concerns about property and inheritance when it came to marriage laws. In most Christian and Jewish cultures, marriage was considered a religious covenant, an analogue to the religious covenant between “man” and God. In Britain and the United States, marriage law was based on coverture, the claim that a wife became one with her husband so that she could not have a separate identity (and so could not claim inheritance, vote, or conduct business that required being a legal subject).14 With the passage in Britain of a series of married women’s property laws, beginning in 1870, women’s political status began to improve, but access to divorce and the right to have custody of minor children remained a struggle until the twentieth century. As revolutions roiled Europe, novels rebelled against gender oppression with an army of characters and plots. Anne Brontë (1820–48) took up gender inequities with shocking honesty in her novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) about a female character that

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FIGURE 0.3: “The Daily Governess,” London Society

1 (June 1862): 433–34. Illustrated by Adelaide Claxton and engraved by Edmund Evans. Courtesy of the Database of Mid-Victorian Illustration: http://www.dmvi. cf.ac.uk.

suffers violence at the hands of an alcoholic, philandering husband. Repeatedly, he abuses her “in a volley of the vilest and grossest abuse it is possible for the imagination to conceive or the tongue to utter.”15 The character is trapped in her marriage because she will lose her son to the abuser if she flees, and the novel depicts her suffering in graphic, violent terms that still stir students today. European women were similarly unprotected. Because the Napoleonic

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Code influenced laws not only in France, but also Italy, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland, and the grand Duchy of Warsaw, the code’s 1804 institutionalization of the husband’s authority deprived women of rights to property and legal protection. The code explicitly separated society into the male sphere of business transactions and the female domestic sphere within the family, but even there the husband was the clear authority.16 In France, women novelists responded with narratives that rejected marriage, exploring the possibilities of free love in the tragic, absolutist, epic terms of romantic philosophy. George Sand (Amantine-Lucile-Aurore Dupin, Baroness Dudevant, 1804–76) fascinated (and horrified) educated women throughout Europe for adopting a male name and clothing and writing highly eroticized novels of illicit love including Indiana (1832) and Lélia (1836).17 Arguments for gender parity and female self-possession were countered by women journalists such as Suzanne Voilquin (1801–77), Désirée Gay (1810–91), and Jeanne Deroin (1805–94). In a series of journals, they wrote collectively to argue for economic versus sexual independence.18 Deroin also wrote letters of support to Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902) from a prison in France in 1851.19 Offen suggests that the strong presence of Catholicism and therefore of the Mother Mary meant that many of these early arguments were also grounded in claims based on motherhood, a strategy that emerged in different groups and countries throughout the centuries, right up through demands in the name of “eugenic motherhood” at the end of the century.20 The 1840s prompted an outpouring of what now looks like protest against the limited lives of women. In France, Jeanne Deroin, who was a working-class mother, not only fought for women’s rights but also attempted to become a candidate for the legislative assembly. She was one of if not the first woman in Europe to try to run for office and to urge men and women workers to unite in protest. After being arrested, she moved to London.21 In England, Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) published Jane Eyre: An Autobiography22 under the pseudonym “Currer Bell.” The character’s fury at her lot as a poor governess shocked audiences then and inspired Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s feminist study The Madwoman in the Attic a century and a half later.23 Scorning the advice of conduct books such as Mrs. Ellis’s The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (1839),24 Jane sees her choice between teaching at a school for charity girls and advertising to be a governess in the bleak terms so many single women faced: “I desired liberty; for liberty I gasped; for liberty I uttered a prayer; it seemed scattered on the wind then faintly blowing. I abandoned it and framed a humbler supplication; for change, stimulus: that petition, too, seemed swept off into vague space: ‘Then,’ I cried,

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half desperate, ‘grant me at least a new servitude!’ ”25 Kathryn Hughes’s study of the nineteenth-century governess provides a clear-eyed economic and social account of the loneliness, insecurity, and hopelessness women faced in this position.26 Caught between the suspicion of the lower servants in the house and the family’s condescension or even fear of her appeal to men in the household, the governess represented the fears of any educated woman who suddenly found herself forced to find work. The snobbish, wealthy Blanche Ingram in Jane Eyre provides a quick condemnation of governesses: “ ‘we all know them: danger of bad example to innocence of childhood—distractions and consequent neglect of duty on the part of the attached—mutual alliance and reliance; confidence thence resulting—insolence accompanying—mutiny and general blow-up.’ ”27 However, this brilliant novel of protest against the failure of a society to provide adequate education and employment for women also participates in the demeaning of “other” women. Once Jane becomes engaged to her master, she is angered by his attempts to control her even through gifts: “The Eastern allusion bit me again: ‘I’ll not stand you an inch in the stead of a seraglio,’ I said; ‘so don’t consider me an equivalent for one.’ ”28 Even more blatantly, Jane’s mysterious adversary (and angry double, according to Gilbert and Gubar) is the Caribbean heiress Bertha Mason. Mr. Rochester marries Bertha and then locks her in the attic after she goes insane.29 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s groundbreaking reading of Jane Eyre as representative of “feminist individualism in the age of imperialism” was a critical early recognition of the imperialist underpinnings of even many radical women’s novels throughout the century.30 As Rachel Fuchs demonstrates in her study of gender and poverty, between 1750 and 1850 the population of eastern and western Europe increased dramatically, despite such checks on the population in the 1800s as increased awareness of contraception and abortion and a shift to later marriages. The increase continued through the end of the century. The incidence of births outside marriage also increased.31 At the same time, growing numbers of workingclass and impoverished middle-class women sought work outside the home. In response, the 1840s saw a burst of writing about the lives of workers in the growing industrial centers of England in what are often called industrial novels or condition-of-England social problem fiction. Elizabeth Gaskell (1810–65) situated her study of Manchester life, Mary Barton (1848), in the midst of Chartist agitation.32 In 1838, William Lovett drafted a six-point charter, demanding votes for all men, general elections, a secret ballot, and other means for workers to gain political representation. The Chartists gathered more than 1,280,000 signatures of support, only to be refused entrance to the House of

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Commons in 1839 and later in 1842 and 1848. The agitators included women and women leaders such as Mary Ann Walker and Susanna Inge, who headed the City of London Female Chartists Association.33 Little else is known about either woman. The swirl of European revolutions in 1848 in addition to a series of labor protests in Britain provoked a sense of what Benjamin Disraeli called “the two nations” as well as a huge setback for the working classes. In Mary Barton, Gaskell vividly paints the starvation of women and children during factory lockouts. The novel focuses on the temptations to women workers as a master’s son seeks to seduce (and abandon) young Mary, who is saved in part from seduction and presumed prostitution by her aunt, who has suffered precisely the same fate. Determined to save Mary, Aunt Esther also acts as a conscience to middle-class readers who were disgusted by the prostitutes who haunted urban streets in the second half of the century: “ ‘What shall I do? How can I keep her from being such a one as I am; such a wretched, loathsome creature! She was listening just as I listened, and loving just as I loved, and the end will be just like my end. How shall I save her?’ ”34 Henry Mayhew’s ethnographic street studies painfully documented the lives of these women workers and prostitutes in London Labour and the London Poor (published from 1851 to 1862).35 Flora Tristan (1803–44) had already described the suffering of English prostitutes for French audiences in Promenades dans Londres (Walks around London).36 Gaskell returned to the two-nations theme in North and South (1855), published in Charles Dickens’s magazine Household Words, just after he had serialized his own study of factory workers’ lives: Hard Times.37 The author opens Mary Barton by offering her novel as an attempt to help the men and the masters understand one anothers’ points of view, in part through their mutual sympathy with working women. North and South focuses on a parson’s

FIGURE 0.4: “No Home Life for Them,” 1906 Sweated Industries’ Exhibition catalog. Courtesy of the Museum of London.

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daughter who is thrust into an industrial city and whose contact with workers and poor women provides an education in economics, class privilege, and the impossibility of separating the interests of women across class lines. The ultimate test of class relationships is, again, a factory lockout. Both novels depict grueling scenes of starving children, men suppressing hunger with laudanum, the violent protests, and the indifference of factory owners and the women in their families to the starving working families. These novels brought to life the writing of social reformers who fought for legislation to protect women workers and drew attention to the social reformers who sought to redeem and reincorporate prostitutes into society. As the catalog for the 1906 Sweated Industries’ Exhibition organized by the Women’s Trade Unions suggests, grim working conditions for women and the poor lasted well into the twentieth century. The 1840s and 1850s were also years of growing international connections among activist women and women writers. Between 1849 and 1851, Fredrika Bremer (1801–65) traveled to the United States and Britain, meeting leaders in the women’s rights movements as well as women writers who reinforced her own critiques of women’s status in Sweden. Her novel Hertha; or, The Story of a Soul (1856)38 is often credited with beginning the feminist movement in Sweden; the novel built support for laws passed in 1858 and 1863 that provided support for unmarried mothers (like herself).39 In London, the so-called Ladies of Langham Place, including Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon, 1827–91), Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925), and Anna Jameson (1794–1860), worked toward education, employment, and marriage reform. They collected thousands of signatures in support of married women’s right to property in 1855. Queen’s College opened in 1848, and Bedford College for Women in 1849; Girton College would follow in 1869. In the United States, Elizabeth Blackwell (1821–1910) received a medical degree in 1849. American women were also among the first to organize effectively for women’s rights.40 After being prevented from speaking at the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention in London, a group of American women including Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848. Stanton composed the “Declaration of Sentiments,” in imitation of the Declaration of Independence, which 300 women at the convention debated and adopted. Many women writers saw connections between their legal and social constraints and the far more extreme case of slaves. Women were active in antiabolitionist circles in Britain and the United States.41 Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–96) wrote her best-selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) as a pulpit from which to argue against the violence and abuses of slavery.42 Stowe used sentimentality and melodrama to make a passionate

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FIGURE 0.5: Eliza’s flight from Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “With one wild cry and flying leap she vaulted sheer over” (1897 ed.). The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Courtesy of the New York Public Library.

emotional argument pitched to what we might now think of as readers’ emotional intelligence, particularly in regard to the terrible vulnerability faced by enslaved black women. Horrified by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, Stowe expressed her belief in the power of literature to affect politics to her friend and editor of the weekly antislavery magazine National Era: “I feel now that the time is come when even a woman or a child who can speak a word for freedom and humanity is bound to speak,” adding, “I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.”43

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Both Gaskell and Stowe attributed their commitment to social reform to their experiences of religion and to the loss of young children. While religion and motherhood, in their distinctive but sometimes ideologically linked ways, are often seen as sites or motivations for conservative beliefs, the opposite was the case for many nineteenth-century women. In a letter to abolitionist Eliza Cabot Follen in 1852, Stowe described her feelings at the death of her eighteenmonth-old son: “It was at his dying bed and at his grave that I learned what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.” She added, “much that is in that book had its root in the awful scenes and bitter sorrow of that summer.” Those feelings left her with “deep compassion for the sorrowful, especially for mothers who are separated from their children.”44 In Britain, Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–61) joined the fray. Though she is still best known for her love poems, Sonnets of the Portuguese, Barrett Browning was truly a poet-activist. In 1843, she helped build support for Lord Shaftsbury’s Ten Hours Bill when she published the poem, “The Cry of the Children” in Blackwood’s Magazine. Many of the details of the poem were drawn from the parliamentary commission’s report.45 Like Gaskell, she was moved by the grim stories uncovered during a royal commission’s investigation of child labor in mines and factories conducted between 1841 and 1842. After she and Browning married and moved to Italy, Barrett Browning met rebellious women from across the world, including Margaret Fuller (in 1849), George Sand (in 1852), and later Harriet Beecher Stowe (in 1857 and 1860). The writer’s international life powerfully influenced her work. The two-part poem Casa Guidi Windows (1851) and Poems Before Congress (1860) took strong positions on the Italian struggle for independence.46 The Barrett family like many well-off British families drew their wealth from slave labor. R. A. Barrett describes deep connections to Jamaican sugar plantations on both sides of Barrett’s family.47 Other scholars have tried to make the case, on the basis of Barrett Browning’s letters, that she may herself have had African antecedents.48 Though the 1833 Emancipation Act abolished slavery in British colonies, she wrote powerful antislavery poems: “The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point” and “A Curse for a Nation.” The first was written in 1846 at the request of friends and published in the American abolitionist journal the Liberty Bell in 1848. The gripping poem is a dramatic monologue spoken in the voice of an escaped slave who puts her child to death both to blot out its whiteness, inherited from a white rapist, and also to spare the child from slavery. The poem is a fierce attack on Christian hypocrisy and violence against black women. Later, in 1857, Barrett Browning published one of the most daring poems written by a woman of her era, Aurora Leigh.49 The poem narrates

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the relationship between a working-class woman who suffers terribly and the upper-class poet, the heroine Aurora, who tries to rescue her. As women of different classes and world regions struggled to find common ground, Barrett Browning offered a tough vision of possibility. The poem was impressive for its epic length and arguments, its rigorous debates among characters over women’s rights, rape, domestic abuse, the impact of class on women’s relationships with one another, women’s rights to education, socialism, and the role of the woman artist under patriarchy. The poem had an enormous impact on women writers and activists in Britain in the United States; quotations from the poem appear in literature by women writers across Europe. The claim that women should be protected from the corruptive influences of the world (and their own weakness) was reinforced by sentimental literature and poems and novels celebrating the pleasures of domesticity. In Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth, Nina Auerbach demonstrates the ways in which the myths of the disobedient woman mutated into fictions of female monstrosity.50 Figures such as mermaids appear repeatedly in nineteenth-century fiction; the beautiful face and breasts lure men to their deaths as they encounter the hidden horrors beneath the waves. William Makepeace Thackery’s scheming Becky Sharp in Vanity Fair and the many paintings of femme fatales were the horrors that nineteenth-century women writers struggled to counter. Once again, Gaskell played an important role by publishing Ruth (1853), a fallenwoman novel in which the seduced, abandoned, and pregnant heroine, along with her illegitimate child, are taken in by a brother and sister.51 After posing as a widow and serving as a governess, Ruth’s “sin” is exposed due to the jealousy of her young female charge. Following the path of Florence Nightingale, Ruth works among the poor as a nurse, ultimately sacrificing her own life to care for the poor, including her seducer, during a fever epidemic. Ruth horrified moralists and led to harsh criticism of Gaskell, but the novel opened imaginative space for attempts to reclaim rather than jail or transport prostitutes. Gaskell’s novel followed on the heels of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s defense of the fallen women in The Scarlet Letter (1850). Later, in 1891, Thomas Hardy would challenge social attitudes toward fallen women with even greater irony, beginning with the very title Tess of the d’Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Represented. By the 1860s, middle-class women were beginning to organize actively around a number of causes: education, property rights for married women, an end to legalized prostitution, and entrance to universities and medical schools. Formal women’s rights organizations were emerging in France, while in Germany Louise Otto (1819–95) founded the General Association of German Women. Her Women’s Journal was a powerful voice from 1849 to 1852.

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In Britain in 1857, divorce proceedings were moved from the ecclesiastical courts to the civil courts, but this did nothing to give women status as legal subjects. Meanwhile, Anna Maria Mozzoni (1837–1920) and other pioneers in Italy lobbied for a stronger position of women as the new Italy began to take shape.52 The London Society for Women’s Suffrage, led by Elizabeth Garrett (1836–1917) and others, formed in 1867, and was followed by a series of organizations and suffrage journals like Women’s Suffrage Journal (1870), edited by Lydia Becker (1827–90). The imagined psychological dangers of these looming changes, both to women and to society, threatened readers in a burst of novels that pictured the fears, anxieties, and even madness of unchecked women and allegedly feminized men. In Britain, a group of women writers attacked the hypocrisy that subordinated women through the disreputable form of the sensation novel. Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), known by her contemporaries as the “queen of sensation fiction,” offers a powerful demonstration of the stunning ways in which a number of fearless (and impoverished) women challenged the social and moral systems by means of a literary career. During her lifetime, after attempting an acting career, she supported herself and her mother with her pen. Early on, her father had driven the family into debt and despair. After working for a magazine published by John Maxwell, Braddon moved in with Maxwelll, whose legal wife was incarcerated for insanity. For much of her life, Braddon supported a large household with an extraordinary outpouring of literary and editorial work including eighty-five books, most of them novels. She was also an important translator of French literature. Braddon edited Belgravia, a wildly popular magazine and venue for sensation fiction.53 The novels and short stories in the journal, often lurid, addressed every imaginable social and psychological obstacle to gender equality: divorce law, child neglect, domestic violence, sexual violence, murder trials, bigamy, blackmail, forms of insanity attributed to mothers and reserved for women and effeminate men, lesbianism, the threat of servants who exploited middle-class secrets, and the new professional detectives. As Lyn Pykett explains, sensation fiction was quite willfully the “improper feminine.”54 Braddon herself wrote to fellow writer Edward Bulwer Lytton, “the amount of crime, treachery, murder, slow poisoning and general infamy required by the halfpenny reader is something terrible.”55 New sciences and social sciences, including psychology and anthropology, find their way into sensation novels as explanations for women’s behavior. Like many sensation novels, Braddon’s served up unnerving, extravagant plots rooted in social issues of the day. Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) hinges on a bigamy plot and saves the murderous heroine from execution by excusing her

16

INTRODUCTION

attempts at murder through the intervention of doctors quoting from contemporary theories of insanity.56 Lady Audley, whose delicate, girlish, blonde appearance hides an amoral, violent interior, suffers from “moral insanity” to which women were believed to be especially vulnerable.57 Braddon and other sensation novelists, including Wilkie Collins and Ellen Price Wood, actively engaged with gender-discriminatory legislation such as the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857. In the United States, Louisa May Alcott (1832–88) was a successful writer of sensation fiction, the underside to her novels of family life and female development. Even in her domestic fiction, Alcott provided a depiction of the challenges faced by women writers and their reasons for writing in devalued popular forms like sensation fiction. Jo March, heroine of Alcott’s best-known Little Women, finds herself humiliated when her mentor, “the Professor,” learns that she has published a wildly sensational magazine story. The character perceives scandalous magazine fiction as her only hope for breaking into a well-paying market that will allow her to afford remaining in the city in pursuit of a career. However, the exaggeration of sensation and later gothic literature allowed the sometimes shockingly free revelation not only of angry protest but also of prejudice, stereotypes, and imperial fervor. Shelley Streeby demonstrates the international, imperialistic alignments of many of these novels in American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture. Whereas India figures prominently in the British context, Streeby demonstrates that women writers like Alcott, Mary Denison (1826–1911), and E.D.E.N. Southworth (1819–99) connect gender tensions to racial conflicts in U.S. cities or in Cuba and Mexico.58 In the second half of the century, major national suffrage organizations took shape first nationally and then internationally. The London Society for Women’s Suffrage formed in 1868 after the Reform Act failed to secure votes for women. In 1869, two leading U.S. suffrage groups emerged: the New York National Woman Suffrage Association and, in Boston, the American Woman Suffrage Association. These groups worked for the vote until 1920. In Britain, philosophical struggles would eventually lead to the division between the moderate National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (founded in 1897) and the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed by Emmeline Pankhurst (1858– 1928) and her daughters Sylvia (1882–1927) and Christabel (1880–1958) in 1903. These more militant women were called suffragettes (rather than suffragists) by 1909. The International Conference of Women’s Rights met first in Paris in 1878; representatives of twelve countries attended. The organization met again in Washington, D.C., in 1888, a convention that led to the formation of the International Council of Women. International conferences were also held

INTRODUCTION

17

by women’s temperance groups. The Woman’s Temperance Union held its first international conference in 1876. When that group endorsed women’s suffrage in 1881, it became the world’s largest suffrage organization.59 By the 1890s, the voices of women who explicitly and directly demanded women’s rights in all areas of social and political life were growing louder and clearer as what were increasingly emerging as feminist collaborations moved into prominence across Europe and the United States. As Karen Offen points out, the words feminist and feminism were first popularized in France in the late century and then rapidly took root in other languages.60 Even by the 1880s, the so-called woman question had been expanded into a panoply of questions about fundamental human rights and about the forms of intersecting oppressions that intensified the difficulties women faced when they were also subject to other social disqualifications on the basis of economics, class, education, religion, race, world region, age, and other devalued affiliations. In Britain, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and others fought successfully for the Married Women’s Property Law, which passed in 1882. Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House appeared in theaters in 1879.61 The character Nora’s choice to leave her husband and small children because she could not be a fit mother without being independent played on stages across Europe and strongly influenced a generation of women novelists and playwrights. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, women across Europe and the United States and in the spaces of empire were more widely, directly, and forcefully demanding the right to represent themselves legally and politically. The focus on marriage that would ignite one last powerful group of novels can be gauged by the fact that in 1888 a series of articles by Mona Caird (1854–1952) criticizing marriage in the prominent Westminster Review generated 27,000 letters in response.62 When the Married Woman’s Property Law passed, women writers like the self-styled Madame Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth Bellenden Clarke McFall, 1854–1943) who could now lay claim to their earnings suddenly could imagine economic independence. Many women simply had more time for life outside the home; the birth rate was dropping as they took more control over their reproductive lives.63 Grand moved out of her husband’s house and headed to London where she launched a successful career as one of the leaders of what was first ridiculed and then categorized as “New Woman” fiction, and became active in dress reform, suffrage organizations, and women writers clubs.64 Many of these novels, like Grand’s The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book: Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius (1897), demonstrated the terrible effects on women of poor education, enforced innocence, and repressed ambition and desire.65 In The Heavenly

18

INTRODUCTION

Twins, the lives of boy and girl twins demonstrate how gender differences were enforced throughout childhood and adolescence, regardless of the natural predilections of a tomboyish girl and an unconventional boy. The novel gained great notoriety for the cross-dressing experiments of the female twin after she found herself bored by the companionate marriage urged by middle-class mothers. The novel also contains a shocking portrait of a syphilitic mother and child, who suffer horrible fates after being infected by a philandering husband. Even more radically, the novel allows the wife, Edith, and the similarly infected mistress who has been abandoned by Edith’s husband to encounter one another and encourages readers to sympathize equally with both. The Beth Book, like many New Woman novels, tells the story of Beth’s miserable marriage to a doctor. He is the archvillain of these feminist novels: a vivisectionist who torments animals as he does women, a doctor in a lock hospital where suspected

FIGURE 0.6: Madame Sarah Grand and bicycle,

c.1897. This photograph by R.W. Thomas was published in “Women in the Queen’s Reign, Some Notable Opinions,” Ludgate Monthly 4 (1897), p. 217. Courtesy of Daniel Brown, Bath in Time, and the Bath Central Library.

INTRODUCTION

19

prostitutes are quarantined under the Contagious Diseases Acts while men go free, and an abusive husband. Beth models hope for new women by escaping him, finding her vocation as a feminist speaker, and even hinting at the possibility of an extramarital affair with a new man. Grand’s were but a few of many powerful feminist novels of formation, often stories of a female artist, as in Mona Caird’s Daughters of Danaus (1894).66 Caird’s main character, like so many New Women protagonists, is defeated by the eugenic, biological, and psychological claims of motherhood. Leading Italian feminist Sibilla Aleramo (1876–1960) would make similar arguments in her 1906 fictionalized autobiography, titled simply A Woman.67 American actress and playwright Elizabeth Robins (1862–1952) also emphasized the relationship between middle- and working-class women through their sexual vulnerability in her play Votes for Women! (1907); it premiered in London. Robins wrote a novel, The Convert, based on the play and published in the same year. Both address class struggles within the women’s movement and the issue of abortion.68 New Women novels also addressed the ways that empire and race complicated women’s lives and encouraged further levels of violence and inequality. One of the best-known New Woman novels of empire is South African Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) The Story of an African Farm (1883).69 Her brutal account of life in South Africa brings together German missionaries, farmers, Africans, and British

FIGURE 0.7: Indian suffragettes in the Women’s Coronation Proces-

sion, June 17, 1911. Members of the WSPU contacted Indian women living in Britain and invited them to join the Imperial Contingent to demonstrate worldwide support for women’s suffrage. Courtesy of the Museum of London.

20

INTRODUCTION

characters that are destroyed by dynamics of colonialism and false religion. As New Woman literary scholars of empire Iveta Jusová and LeeAnne M. Richardson demonstrate, the New Woman novels both participate in the assumption of white women’s superiority and begin to locate the shared energies of imperialism and patriarchy, both in literature and in women’s travel narratives.70 At the same time, women from the empire, particularly from India, were traveling to Britain to pursue degrees in law, medicine, and other fields. Sukanya R. Banerjee offers a fascinating portrait of Cornelia Sorabji (1866–1954), who was the first Indian woman to study law at Oxford and to have a legal career in India. Sorabji’s autobiography India Calling (1934) provides a powerful counteracting voice to Western liberal feminism at the turn into the twentieth century.71 Antoinette Burton offers an especially trenchant analysis of the way feminist arguments for women’s rights often relied on the “other woman” to assert the need for emancipatory progress in so-called civilized countries. As Burton says in the midst of a powerful analysis about white feminists’ uses of nonwhite women, “suffrage was not an end to empire but the road to a more ethical kind of colonial rule.”72 By the opening years of the twentieth century, women around the world were fighting for and often grasping their rights. Offen documents organized women’s movements not only across Europe but also in the Middle East and Asia.73 Slowly, over the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries women gained access to education and employment without access to equal pay and opportunities. Marriage, custody, and divorce laws inched toward improvement, but social practices were often intransigent. While white, Western women made headway, they nearly always left women of color behind. Suffrage came gradually as women of certain ages and property-holding status were given the vote in one country, working women in another, and married women in another. In retrospect, narrowing the focus to the fight for suffrage in the women’s movement and in histories of the movement masked not only continuing injustices but also conflicts among women, including the struggle of working-class women, women of color, and women outside of the West to be recognized as equal to white, wealthy women. In the twenty-first century, we live with the legacy of those successes and failures. Much work remains before gender justice is achieved, which only makes occasional breakthroughs all the more significant. Thus, women of the world have cause to celebrate that in 2011 their fellows in Saudi Arabia were given the right to vote in 2015 elections. The chapters in this volume remind us that the vote is merely one of the many demands and achievements of the long nineteenth century. Together, they suggest the rich history that both informs and imposes responsibilities upon men and women today as we continue to seek justice for all while remaining mindful of the relationships that must be forged across differences.

CHAPTER ONE

The Life Cycle: Women and the Life Cycle, ca. 1800–1920 P AT T H A N E

Throughout the nineteenth century, women lived, on average, longer than men, so they contemplated and experienced a longer life cycle. This had probably always been true, but it is only from the early nineteenth century that we begin to have reliable censuses and statistics of births and deaths, at least in wealthier countries. In the United Kingdom, in 1841, males at birth could expect, on average, to live to age thirty-nine, and women to forty-two. By 1921, the figures were sixty-one and sixty-eight, respectively.1 However, this represents less a startling increase in longevity than the fall in infant deaths in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These sad deaths severely reduced average life expectancy at birth. Those who survived the hazardous earliest months and years of life had long had a respectable chance of living to old age. But, at most ages, women had a better chance of survival than men, the rich a better chance than the poor, and some ethnic groups a better chance than others, though this was also related to income. In the United States, for example, in 1900, a white male at birth could expect to live, on average, 46.6 years; a white female, 48.7; and black or African American male and female, 32.5 and 33.5, respectively. We know very little about survival rates in poorer countries (i.e., most of the world at this time).

22

THE LIFE CYCLE

High infant mortality afflicted all countries until the mid-twentieth century, when it was conquered in higher-income countries by improved living standards and medical care. Girls in most countries were more likely to survive infancy than boys. But in Britain, and no doubt elsewhere, from 1838 to 1854 females had higher death rates at ages ten to thirty-nine, but not at earlier or later ages. This higher female mortality at younger ages gradually declined; by 1911–12, it was evident only at ages nine to fifteen. Death in childbirth was one reason, but obviously not among young girls, and childbirth was never a mass killer of women. The major cause was tuberculosis, which until the early twentieth century was a major scourge to which women were particularly vulnerable because, especially in poorer families, they had inferior diets, with more food being allocated to male workers. In addition, women and girls spent more time indoors, sometimes—again, mainly among the poor—in poorly ventilated, unhygienic environments (see descriptions later). And, in all classes, women were responsible for nursing the sick, which increased their risk of infection. Improved living standards and efforts by public health authorities to prevent tuberculosis led to its gradual decline and increased survival rates of females.2 There were other exceptions. Women in North America are estimated to have had a lower expectation of life than men from the mid-seventeenth century to the 1890s, probably due to the rigors of migration and settlement in often inhospitable territory.3 The likely explanation for the general tendency of women to longer life expectancy than males is genetic and related to the need for women to be resilient enough to bear and to survive and rear children.4 The chances of survival and the life experiences of surviving women and men throughout the period varied according to location, as the previous examples suggest, as well as to their relative wealth or poverty in the culture in which they lived. This chapter will focus mainly on relatively wealthy Britain, as a case study in trends in high-income countries at this time. There were important cultural, economic, and legislative differences across otherwise similar countries in Europe, North America, and countries of white settlement in the New World at this time, but also common experiences. Britain, as the first industrial nation to develop rapidly economically through the nineteenth century, exemplified international trends while, like all cultures, displaying its own peculiarities.

INFANCY, CHILDHOOD, GIRLHOOD Infant mortality declined in Britain and in other high-income countries gradually from the mid-nineteenth century and faster in the early twentieth century,

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due above all to improved living standards as industrialization spread and to the improved incomes, diet, and housing conditions that resulted. Due to pollution and overcrowding in the growing cities, which were another outcome of economic growth, the decline was slow, and it was slowest among the poorest people. Children could be born into terrible squalor and overcrowding. Even just before World War I, an observer described a not untypical poor home in London where in a double bed in one room will sleep father, mother, baby and ex-baby, while in another bed in another room will sleep the four elder children . . . in cases of illness it goes on just the same. Measles and whooping cough just go round the bed as a matter of course. When a new baby is born, the mother does not get a bed to herself . . . these people are respectable, hard-working, sober and serious. They keep their jobs.5 Or they might be born into the comfort of a middle- or upper-class home, tended by servants, amid gardens and plentiful space. The future feminist Frances Power Cobbe, for example, was born in 1822 on her father’s spacious landed estate in Ireland, the fifth child, following four brothers. Her mother’s health was poor, and, in extreme contrast with the poor children described previously, young Frances spent most of her time with nurse Mary Malone in a large nursery, “so distant from regions inhabited by my parents” [as she wrote later in her autobiography]. Far from parental authority, the Cobbes’ little daughter could do as she pleased and make as much noise as she wanted. For an active four year old who was subject to temper tantrums it was very liberating.6 Despite this comfortable beginning, in later life she rejected the life conventionally expected of a wealthy young lady, symbolized by her refusal to wear the corsets that molded women into the hourglass shape idealized by men and that were widely worn by middle- and upper-class women. Cobbe described them as “English suttee for a living husband.”7 She argued, rightly, that they contracted the lungs, pinched the heart, and made the ribs cave in, causing ill health among many women. Cobbe did not marry, and had a lifelong partnership with a woman, Mary Lloyd; she became a writer and an active feminist reformer and campaigner against domestic violence and for medical training for women, among other things.8

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THE LIFE CYCLE

FIGURE 1.1: Frances Power Cobbe, ages 20, 40, 55, and 72, Strand Magazine. Courtesy of the University of Iowa Library.

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Such extreme social differences continued through life. Poor children, male and female, were sent to paid work as soon as they were able, in agriculture, services, including domestic service, or, increasingly, in industry. Poor children had always worked to help support their families, but, as the scale of industry grew in Britain, earlier than elsewhere from the end of the eighteenth century, the concern of social reformers was aroused at the sight of children, especially girls, toiling in factories and, even more shocking, underground in coal mines, where adult men worked nearly naked due to the heat. Factory workers, too, campaigned for improved conditions for all workers, including children. These campaigns led to restrictions on factory work in Britain, beginning in 1802 with the prohibition of night work and restriction of daytime employment to twelve hours per day for some factory children aged eight to thirteen. From 1833, all children under eight were banned from working in textile mills, and in 1844, those under thirteen were forbidden to work more than six and half hours daily and were required to attend school when not working. In 1842, all females and boys under ten were banned from working underground in mines, though they often continued to carry out hard work on the surface.

FIGURE 1.2: Photograph by Arthur Munby of a female pithead worker, 1866. Courtesy of Trinity Library, Cambridge.

26

THE LIFE CYCLE

Older forms of child employment continued uncontrolled. Children might be hired out for farmwork, often living away from home by the age of twelve. In Devon, southwest England, in 1808, ten-year-old girls were “expected to load dung, scrape the [farm] yards and roadways and drive horses.” This was criticized at the time because it prevented the girls acquiring “those domestic qualifications upon which the comfort of a peasant family so essentially depends.”9 For these, and for more humane reasons, there were philanthropic campaigns to restrict this and other forms of child labor. But these, and other, more private, smaller-scale forms of work were hard to control when families were in desperate need of income. Around 1850, the journalist Henry Mayhew surveyed the working people of London in London Labour and the London Poor. Among many others, he talked to an eight-year-old watercress seller who had been selling cress on the streets very near a twelvemonth . . . Before that I had to take care of a baby for my aunt. No . . . it wasn’t heavy—it was only two months old; but I minded it for ever such a time-till it could walk . . . Before I had the baby I used to help mother, who was in the fur trade . . . My mother learned me to needlework and to knit when I was about five.10 Such children would have little or no education, though some poor parents did their best to send them to school when they could, if only on Sunday, the day that they did not work. The gradual introduction of compulsory education was designed to remove children from the workforce. The British state subsidized and encouraged the provision of education for working-class children from the 1830s. In 1880, full-time education became compulsory for all children aged five to ten. Girls were included in the education system equally with boys, and levels of illiteracy dwindled. In 1840, about 50 percent of women were so illiterate that they could not sign their names in the marriage register (compared with 33 percent of men). By 1910, that number for both sexes had dwindled almost to zero.11 But the school curriculum was often gender divided. Particularly from the later nineteenth century to the 1920s and beyond, there was much concern in Britain and other richer countries about the falling birthrate, the continuing high infant mortality rate, and high levels of unfitness in the population. One attempted solution was to train schoolgirls in cooking and other domestic skills, to redress what was seen as the neglect of their families by wives and mothers who lacked such training, causing ill health and death.

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FIGURE 1.3: Very poor household interior, ca. 1900, with mother and two children. Courtesy of the Library of the Society of Friends, London.

Poor families continued to need their children’s help in order to survive. Many girls and boys worked before and after school, or were absent for part of the year, for instance, to help bring in the harvest. Girls were more likely than boys to be kept away from school to help with housework or the care of younger siblings, often while their mothers worked to support the family, or they helped their mothers work at home as laundresses, dressmakers, or at other activities like straw-hat plaiting and cardboard-box making. A clear division between classes was that as soon as a family could afford to do without their income, females were prohibited from working for pay at any age. Girls from better-off backgrounds were, like their poorer sisters but with greater likelihood of doing so, nurtured to expect lives of almost exclusive domesticity, with marriage and motherhood their primary goal. They were likely to receive less education than their brothers and, particularly among the very wealthy, to be educated at home by governesses rather than at school, as was Frances Power Cobbe until the age of thirteen. Her brothers went to boarding school, with the expectation that they would continue to university, which was not considered an option for Cobbe. She was taught at home by governesses until she was twelve, when a doctor advised that she should have no lessons after noon. In fact, “most medical men at this time advised that girls approaching puberty should reserve their energies for the development of their

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THE LIFE CYCLE

reproductive organs, not of their minds, for it was around the former and not the latter that their lives would revolve.”12 But there were always exceptions, including progressive fathers who insisted upon educating even their daughters, at least up to a certain age. Mary Carpenter, born in 1807, went on to campaign for and provide free schools for poor children. She was educated, along with boys, in chemistry, physics, Latin, Greek, and much else that was normally closed to most women at a school run by her idealistic father. The family was Unitarian, members of a nonconformist faith group known for their progressive views. Her generation of women had no hope of going to university. In any case, her father’s breakdown when she was twenty plunged the family close to poverty, and she had to work as a governess, the classic occupation of the impoverished gentlewoman at this time, before becoming a schoolmistress. Like Frances Power Cobbe, she did not conform to the social norm. She never married but devoted herself to paid teaching and to unpaid work rescuing poor children.13 Other parents recognized that their daughters might not be able to marry, that the family was not wealthy enough to support them throughout life, and that they would have to earn their living, for which they would need an education at least to secondary level. From the mid-nineteenth century, an emerging women’s movement campaigned for more secondary and university education for women, with gradual success as more schools and university places opened up through the later nineteenth century. Many women, especially in the wealthiest families, had to struggle to be allowed to attend a university or take up a career. Florence Nightingale (born 1820) grew up in a prosperous family, like Mary Carpenter’s Unitarian family. Her father taught her and her sister at home in Greek, Latin, German, French, Italian, history, grammar, composition, and philosophy. She was not expected to move on to a career, but to follow conventional expectations and devote herself to her family, then to marriage. But she became very interested in the work of schools and hospitals and determined to work in health care. After years of struggle, particularly with her unsympathetic mother and sister, when she reached the age of 32, still unmarried and assumed to be too old to be marriageable, her father gave her the substantial income of £500 per year and permission to work at a small hospital for sick ladies. This led to her career as a pioneer of nurse training and public health reform.14 As in Nightingale’s case, when women, even from prosperous backgrounds, gained an education, it rarely went beyond secondary level, stopping short of enabling women to compete with men in the professional workplace. From the 1870s, women were increasingly admitted to universities, but in small numbers. In the most elite British universities, Oxford and Cambridge, women

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were segregated in separate colleges and forbidden to receive degrees equally with men, though they could attend the same courses and take the same exams, at which they often outperformed the men. Oxford conceded equal access to degrees in 1921. At Cambridge, this was bitterly resisted until 1948.15 It took until the late 1970s and the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act for the residential colleges of both universities to become coeducational and for women to become more than a small minority of students at either institution.

FIGURE 1.4: Grand wedding of Maud Cecil and the future Lord Sel-

borne, 1883, Illustrated London News. Courtesy of the British Library.

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THE LIFE CYCLE

MARRIAGE Despite the exceptions cited previously, most women in Britain and comparable countries married. Thereafter, they were subordinate to their husbands. They had limited or no legal rights over their children, no rights to property or an independent income, limited freedom to be active in the public sphere, and almost no means to escape from an unhappy marriage. They were brought up to aspire to an ideal of lifelong contented domesticity and contented motherhood. The reality, again, was more diverse and changed over time. Marriage might mean repeated pregnancy throughout the reproductive years (it was not unusual for women to give birth in their forties), childbirth, miscarriage, all too often the pain of the death of children, and the death in childbirth of the mother herself. Even Queen Victoria had nine children, and, unusually even in a very privileged family, they all survived infancy. Their father, Prince Albert,

FIGURE 1.5: Three generations of the Gladstone family, 1919. Courtesy of the British

Library.

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attended at least one birth, that in 1841 of their heir, the future King Edward VII, and he paid close attention to the upbringing of the children.16 Attendance of the father at childbirth, and close involvement with their children, seems to have been not uncommon, at least among the elite, in mid- and late nineteenth-century Britain. In 1831, Lord Porchester left Parliament during a crucial debate to attend his son’s birth. The future prime minister W. E. Gladstone was present during the painful birth of his first child in 1841, an experience repeated by that same son forty-two years later.17 Births in all classes normally took place at home, among the better off due to fear of infection rife in hospitals, and among the poor (often in overcrowded and unsanitary conditions) due to inability to pay for hospital care. Poorer fathers were also likely to be present, if they were not at work. Childbirth was normally followed by a long period of lying-in for those with servants or family to care for their domestic work and children.18 In 1914, a working-class woman described her very different experiences: I do hope that I shall never see the young women of today have to go through what I did. I am a mother of eleven children . . . I was only nineteen years old when my first baby was born. My husband was one of the best and a good father. . . . as my little ones began to come, they wanted providing for and saving up to pay a nurse and instead of getting nourishment for myself which we need at those times, I was obliged to go without. So I had no strength to stand against it, and instead of being able to rest in bed afterwards, I was glad to get up and get about again before I was able, because I could not afford to pay a woman to look after me. I kept on like that until the sixth little one was expected and then I had all the other little ones to see after. The oldest one was only ten years old. . . . Oh, the misery I endured! My poor old mother did what she could for me, but she was seventy years old. . . . Then in another eighteen months I was expecting another. After that confinement being so weak I took a chill and was laid up for six months and neighbours came in and done what they could for me. Then there was my home and little ones and husband to look after, as he was obliged to work. It was the worry that kept me from getting better. . . . After this I had a miscarriage and another babe in one year and four months. I got on fairly well with the next one, and then the next one which was the eighth, I had two down with measles, one two years old with his collar-bone out and a little girl thirteen with her arm broke.

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THE LIFE CYCLE

. . . and my dear husband worried out of his life. . . . For twenty years I was nursing or expecting babies . . . this is only a short account of how I have suffered.19 Throughout the nineteenth century in Britain, 5 mothers died for every 1,000 children born alive, figures that did not improve until the later 1930s when antibiotic drugs could at last control the infections that all women risked in childbirth, regardless of social class. Death rates were somewhat higher in higher social classes.20 Not all couples were able to conceive children, and some who could had none that survived. Instead couples in all classes might adopt children who were orphaned, illegitimate, or whose parents could not afford to support them. On average, between the 1790s and 1860s, married women had around six children, but there was a wide dispersal of family size. In the 1870s, about 5 percent of families fell into each size category from zero to ten; 10 percent of families consisted of eleven children or more. From the 1870s to World War II, birthrates gradually fell, in all social classes, though with regional differences even within Britain, also affecting all classes, that are difficult to explain.21 By 1930, the average completed family consisted of two children, while, as we have seen, infant mortality also fell. Such changes dramatically influenced how women lived and could imagine living their lives. For those who had children, in place of the historical norm of repeated childbirth, miscarriage, childrearing, and child death from the late teens and early twenties to menopause, a small family, born early in marriage, gave women much easier lives and freed them to imagine a new phase of middle life, independent of responsibility for children in which, particularly after World War II, they could think of devoting their time to roles outside the home. The reasons for the decline in the birthrate throughout the Western world from the late nineteenth century to World War II are uncertain. Modern methods of birth control, such as condoms and caps, became available but were expensive and not always trusted; the birthrate was kept down mainly by the use of the traditional methods, coitus interruptus and abstention.22 The decline was possibly linked to the concurrent rise in the levels of education of women and workingclass men and the greater assertiveness and independence of women who wanted more control over all aspects of their lives, combined with recognition by both women and men, especially in the poorer classes but among many middle-class people also, that, in the modern world, smaller family size could lead to higher living standards and avoidance of the misery they had themselves observed and experienced as children. As one working-class woman wrote in 1914:

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I have only had one child and no miscarriage. . . . My mother, whom I loved with all my heart, brought fifteen little lives into the world: twelve are still living. I remember many a time she has gone without food, before and after confinement, and without fire in winter. I have gone round the house many a time to try and find a few rags to sell for food. I have seen my father strike my mother before confinement, and known her to be up again at four days’ end to look after us. You see, my mother had no education, and had been brought up to obey her husband. . . . When I got married to the man I loved, and who loves me, he said I should never suffer as our dear mothers had done, and that we should only have what little lives we could make happy and give a chance in life. My son will be eighteen years of age in June and is still at Technical College, for which he won a scholarship. I get no grant-in-aid and I go out to work for two hours every morning to help him as he is a good lad. Please excuse my ramble, as I only wish I was better educated. . . . I had to leave school at the age of ten years, to go into farm service.23 More couples came to think like this in the early twentieth century. On the legal level, the experience of marriage also changed. Divorce, property, and family law varied from country to country and even within the United Kingdom, but everywhere married women had more limited rights in marriage and over children and property than men or unmarried women. In England and Wales from 1857, divorce became legally possible for the first time, but a man could divorce his wife for adultery alone, while a wife, until 1937, had to prove some additional fault, such as violence, bigamy, or incest. Scottish law had since 1643 allowed both husband and wife to divorce only for adultery or desertion for four years. In England and Wales, not until 1937 could either partner divorce for desertion alone, in this case after three years. These and other changes in family law were the outcome of campaigning by women. Caroline Norton (born 1808) was an English society beauty who at age nineteen married the aristocratic George Norton. She later described her married life: We had been married about two months, when, one evening . . . we were discussing some opinion Mr Norton had expressed: I said (very uncivilly) that “I thought I had never heard so silly or ridiculous a conclusion.” This remark was punished by a sudden and violent kick . . . it caused great pain for many days, and being afraid to remain with him, I sat up the whole night in another apartment.24

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THE LIFE CYCLE

Women of all classes could suffer domestic violence, a serious problem against which Frances Power Cobbe was an especially active campaigner, though with little apparent effect. Until at least the 1970s, British police and courts were reluctant to interfere in relations between husband and wife, except in cases of extreme violence. Caroline Norton continued to endure this violence for nine years, while she supported the family by her writing and her husband squandered both his and her income. She left him several times but always returned because she could not legally have custody of their three sons. When she left after a quarrel in 1835, he sent the children away and refused to allow Caroline to see them, as was his legal right. They separated, and a court order allowed her access to the children, but he took them to Scotland, where there was a different legal jurisdiction and the order had no force. She used her social connections and skills as a writer to campaign for the right of mothers to custody of their children. With support from male politicians, she persuaded Parliament to pass legislation in 1839 granting a mother access to and custody of children aged under seven, provided that she had not committed adultery. Mothers still could not gain custody of older children. The father was legally the sole parent. This remained so until the 1920s, when newly enfranchised women demanded and gained equal custody rights.25 Caroline still had problems with her husband. He reluctantly granted access to her sons, but to her great grief, he failed to tell her that one had a serious accident until he was dead. Also, under current property law, he was able to claim a legacy left her by her father and successfully demanded that her publishers pay her earnings to him. In 1855, she gained revenge in one of the few ways that a married woman could at midcentury: she ran up large debts for which her husband was legally liable.26 In English law at this time, husband and wife were deemed to be one person, and that person could only be the husband. Before the law, the wife did not exist; hence, she could not incur her own debts. Married women had almost no control over income or property, which was deemed to belong to the husband, unless their families were cautious and wealthy enough to provide for them in a carefully prepared legal trust. Their inability to own property had some bizarre effects. In the 1870s, Millicent Garrett Fawcett, a leading suffrage campaigner, had her purse snatched in the street. The thief was charged with “stealing from the person of Millicent Fawcett a purse containing £18.6d, the property of Henry Fawcett.” She commented: “I felt as if I had been charged with theft myself.”27 The campaign to change the property law was initiated in the 1850s by Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon), who was then unmarried with a comfortable

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private income, but increasingly committed to equal rights for women. She was a leader of the central London feminist movement that emerged in the 1850s and a campaigner for higher education for women and for the vote, among other things.28 A petition to change the property law was sent to Parliament in 1856 signed by 3,600 women, including the writers Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Jane Carlyle, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Harriet Martineau; 24,000 women signed seventy other petitions. They were mostly middle and upper class, since working-class women rarely had sufficient income or property to be inconvenienced by the law. The campaigning led to the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870, which gave married women the right to their own earnings and to property inherited after marriage, but no more. A further change in 1882 gave the wife ownership of all property she owned upon marriage or acquired after, as well as the right to sue or be sued. She also acquired responsibility for her own debts. She gained no rights over properties held in common with the husband, which were still held to belong to him. This continued to cause difficulties, especially in cases of divorce or separation, which women successfully campaigned to change in the 1920s. The significance of the nineteenth-century legislation was that, at last, wives and husbands were recognized as separate beings before the law. As these campaigns suggest, women, even married women, were not all rigidly confined to the private sphere of home. Though middle- and upper-class women were debarred by social convention from the paid workplace, many of them were active in voluntary philanthropic work and in political campaigns, for a variety of women’s causes, against slavery,29 for free trade,30 and much else. Through campaigns of this kind, women—mainly but not exclusively of the middle and upper classes—were active in politics long before they had the national vote, including in local politics. From 1869, women who were independent property holders, mainly widows and single women, had the vote in local government elections. By 1900, about 1 million women could vote. From the 1870s, they could be elected to certain local authorities dealing with poor relief and education, activities thought to be within “woman’s sphere,” as national politics still were not. Hundreds of women were elected to these bodies, and from 1907, they could be elected to municipal councils.31 The success of women in local politics fueled the demand for the national vote, making its absence seem all the more absurd. However in 1889, 100 women, many of them eminent (such as Beatrice Webb and Florence Nightingale, both of whom later changed their views), signed an “Appeal against Female Suffrage,” initiated by the writer Mary Ward (who published as Mrs. Humphrey Ward), arguing that, due to natural gender differences, women should confine their political

36

THE LIFE CYCLE

endeavors to the local level and cease to campaign for inclusion in national politics.32 Mary Ward did not change her views, and from 1908, she led the Women’s Anti-Suffrage Association. This appears to have alienated many women and led to a decline in the popularity of her books, especially in the United States.33 Many married and unmarried women, including many of those involved in the suffrage and other campaigns, were also active in voluntary philanthropic work with disadvantaged groups and individuals of all kinds. Philanthropy flourished in nineteenth-century England, as in other countries, due partly to the growth of a prosperous middle class with cash and time to give, fueled often by the religious conviction that the rich had a duty to help the less fortunate. Women provided most of its workforce, unpaid if they were middle or upper class, paid if they were poorer. It is easy to caricature this as the work of “Ladies Bountiful,” the patronizing dilettantism of idle women, but working among the poorest people in the slums of the big cities was never easy or comfortable. Increasingly, unpaid women workers—such as Louisa Twining, member of a prominent business family and never-married leader of reform of the Poor Law and health care in the later nineteenth century34—took a highly professional approach to their philanthropy and social reform, realizing that it required knowledge and skill, initiating forms of training that later developed into formal social work education.35 Philanthropic work drove many women into the suffrage campaign. Horrified by the social conditions tolerated by an exclusively male parliament, they believed that women were needed in politics to diminish social inequalities. British women aged thirty and above gained the vote in 1918. The high age limit was designed to prevent a majority female electorate, but equality could not be refused forever in the face of campaigning women, and in 1928, women gained the vote at the same age as men, twenty-one. In the later nineteenth century, more younger, unmarried middle- and upperclass women, generally beneficiaries of the improved education for which other women had campaigned, were demanding entry to a wider range of paid employment than the demeaning role of governess. Despite opposition, they had some success, first in occupations within the assumed “female sphere” where women did not compete with men, in particular the growing professions of nursing and teaching in girls’ schools. Entry to elite male occupations, such as medicine, met strong resistance. By the mid-1890s, there were still fewer than 180 female doctors in Britain.36 However, from the 1870s, women began to enter the lower levels of the civil service, as clerks, typists, and telephone operators. Women’s “nimble fingers” and supposed tolerance of repetitive, subordinate work were said to make them particularly suited to working with this new technology.

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By the end of the century, a very few were appointed at rather higher levels of the civil service, but none at the highest. Women were paid less than men in most occupations and, in all professions, were required to give up work upon marriage, due to the so-called marriage bar. They were admitted to male occupations only for a limited period of the life cycle, between completing education and marriage. They were excluded from the legal profession until 1919, and even then a small number of determined women had a hard struggle against unwelcoming male colleagues. World War I offered opportunities for women at all social levels to take on male roles. Medical schools were opened to women as never before, due to the absence of male doctors at war. Many of these opportunities, including in the medical schools, closed again after the war, though the expansion of business and of government, including of state health and education services, created lasting opportunities for mainly unmarried, middle-class women. Much of the public activity of better-off women was possible because poorer women looked after their children and their homes. Married working-class women had never been absent from the public sphere of paid work. Very many of them needed to work at least part time to help underpaid or irregularly employed husbands support their families. For such women, a purely domestic role was a distant dream to which few could aspire before World War II. Nor was that role easy, given housing conditions in town and country throughout the period. The social researcher Maud Pember Reeves described conditions in London just before World War I: Two sets of basement rooms . . . extremely dark and damp . . . both the women in these two homes were languid and pale and suffered from anaemia. The first had lost three children out of seven; the second one out of four. . . . The question of vermin is a very pressing one in all the small houses. No woman, however clean, can cope with it. Before their confinements some women go to the trouble of having the room they are to lie in fumigated. In spite of such precautions, bugs have dropped on to the pillow of the sick woman before the visitor’s eyes. . . . The mothers accept the pest as part of their dreadful lives, but they do not grow reconciled to it. . . . The blame is [not] to be given to the people living in these houses. In spite of being absurdly costly, they are too unhealthy for human habitation.37 Conditions in the countryside could be equally terrible.38 The double burden of paid and unpaid work was indeed a burden for poor women.

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THE LIFE CYCLE

WIDOWHOOD Though women were prepared from their earliest years for marriage as their lifetime goal, marriage might not last, due, above all, to the death of the husband. The higher death rates of men left many women, in all classes, to bring up young children alone. There were as many lone mothers in late nineteenthcentury Britain as in the late twentieth, but the reason changed from widowhood to divorce and unmarried motherhood. Also, the great majority of older people were female because women outlived men. These situations were major, continuing causes of poverty among women. Of marriages made in the 1850s, about 19 percent would not have lasted ten years and about 47 percent not beyond twenty-five years, due to the death of one or the other partner, usually the husband. For those marrying in the 1880s, the figures were 13 and 37 percent, respectively. In the second half of the century, about 2 percent of men and 3 percent of women aged twenty-five to thirtyfour were widowed; 4 and 8 percent, respectively, aged forty-five to fifty-four; and 14 and 30 percent, respectively, aged fifty-five to sixty-four. These figures fell slowly through the nineteenth century and faster through the twentieth. Widowhood could be a devastating blow for some women, as the death of Prince Albert was to Queen Victoria when she was forty-two. She withdrew from public life for the remaining forty years of her life, slept with his nightshirt in her arms and a cast of his hand within reach, and continued to have his clothes laid out each evening. Yet, for some better-off women who were less bereft by widowhood, it could bring independence denied to married women: a widow had control of her own property and her own children and a new freedom of action. This might make a widow reluctant to remarry. Fewer widows than widowers did so. Millicent Garrett Fawcett became active in the moderate suffrage movement after the death of her husband, a professor at Cambridge and a radical member of Parliament to whom she was happily married, but who was blind and needed a lot of support. Emmeline Pankhurst, the leader of the militant suffragists, also became more publicly active after the death of her husband, with whom she also had had a good, supportive relationship. But not all widows, even from the middle class, inherited property or had families able to support them. The widow of an army officer, left penniless with five children, told Henry Mayhew in 1849: Needlework is what I have done ever since I have been a widow. But it is shocking payment for such hard work. I cry over it, but I am ill and we want food so badly . . . during this last month my daughter (aged 18) and I have earned only 2s.4d a week, and had to pawn our blankets and

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FIGURE 1.6: Poor woman caring for a child in East London, 1876. Courtesy of the British Library.

bedstead, so now we sleep on the floor. . . . I cannot but think it hard that the children of those who served their country for so many years should be as destitute as we.39 All too many working-class women had similar experiences. Such women had an incentive to remarry to gain security for themselves and their children. State pensions for widows and children of servicemen were introduced for the first time amid the devastation of World War I and extended to civilian widows and orphans in 1925, partly as a result of campaigns by women’s groups.

DIVORCE, SEPARATION, COHABITATION Other marriages ended, like Caroline Norton’s, due to incompatibility, adultery, or violence. As discussed previously, divorce was almost unobtainable

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THE LIFE CYCLE

in England and Wales before 1857 (except for those rich enough to obtain a private Act of Parliament for the purpose) and was then expensive and more difficult to obtain for a woman, although it was easier in Scotland. A divorced woman was also socially stigmatized. Divorces were few: an annual average of about 150 in England, Wales, and Scotland in the 1850s rising to around 600 just before World War I.40 Many more couples separated, though there are no reliable statistics. The difficulty for a poor woman of bringing up her children alone was a strong incentive to put up with an abusive or unhappy marriage, but escape gradually became easier. From 1878, a procedure for legal separation and maintenance existed for wives of husbands convicted of aggravated assault or, from 1886, of desertion or neglect; 10,000 women, mainly working class, obtained maintenance orders in the early years of the twentieth century.41 Unknown, but possibly quite large, numbers of couples formed new, illicit partnerships after separation, sometimes disguised by bigamous marriages or, more often, living as husband and wife unknown to neighbors. When such an irregular partnership became known to neighbors or family, especially among the working class, it might be accepted if the partnership was successful because some marriages were recognized as intolerable and for most of the population there was no legal means of escape. Campaigns for reform of the divorce law became increasingly active from the later nineteenth century, including among women’s organizations such as the working-class Women’s Co-operative Guild; campaigners emphasized the need for a cheap and easier divorce law to eliminate the need for illicit cohabitation, which they believed, from their own experiences, was extensive.42 Scotland, like nearby Scandinavian countries, traditionally had a more relaxed approach to irregular partnerships, which were an accepted part of the culture, especially in some rural areas. Other, less common reasons for cohabitation were cross-class relationships, generally where the family or peers of the partner from the higher social class disapproved. Arthur Munby (1828–1910), a writer and civil servant, lived with a working-class woman, Hannah Cullwick, undetected because she presented herself to outsiders as, and was, his servant. She refused, as she put it in her diary, to “become a lady” and made clear her preference for a relationship with a “gentleman” who she felt respected her rather than for a subjugated, struggling marriage with a working man. They eventually married in 1873, but she resented his refusal to acknowledge her openly as his wife; in 1877, this very independentminded working-class woman returned to work in domestic service in the countryside.43

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A small number of radicals lived together because they opposed the legal subordination of women within marriage and saw no reason for legal or religious sanction of a close partnership, notably Mary Wollstonecraft, first in the 1790s with Gilbert Imlay, and then after Imlay abandoned her and their child, with William Godwin, whom she married after she became pregnant.44 The novelist George Eliot (Marian Evans) eloped with the married George Henry Lewes in 1854, and they lived together unmarried for the rest of their lives, though, like many cohabiting couples, she took his name, called him her husband, and believed the union to be a “sacred bond.”45

UNMARRIED WOMEN Not all women married or cohabited with a man. Women were a majority of the British population throughout the period. In 1801, at the first national census, there were 1,057 females for every 1,000 males in England and Wales, and 1,176 females for every 1,000 males in Scotland. By 1851, the disparity had fallen to 1,042 and 1,100 per 1,000, respectively. By 1911, it had risen again in England and Wales to 1,068, while continuing to fall in Scotland to 1,062. Apart from differential death rates, the reason was the greater propensity of males to emigrate, especially from Scotland. Deaths of servicemen in World War I further increased the gap to 1,096 and 1,080 in 1921.46 Consequently, some women could not marry, and some did not wish to. Florence Nightingale, for example, infuriated her family by refusing offers of marriage because she felt that she had a higher spiritual calling, to devote her life to care of the sick. This was not because she disliked men. She wrote after turning down an offer: I have an intellectual nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a passionate nature which requires satisfaction and that would find it in him. I have a moral, an active nature which requires satisfaction and that would not find it in his life. . . . I could be satisfied to spend a life with him in combining our different powers in some great object. I would not satisfy this nature by spending a life with him in making society and arranging domestic things.47 Like other women, she could imagine fulfillment outside marriage and the home. In England and Wales, more than 10 percent of women in the midnineteenth century were never married, rising to about 14 percent through the first third of the twentieth century. In wealthy families, women who failed to

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THE LIFE CYCLE

fulfill the expectation of marriage could be supported financially, often living with close relatives. They were still expected to play a domestic role, looking after family members, whether the children of a dead sister or sick, disabled, aging parents and other relatives. Caring for parents, especially, was the expected role of unmarried “dutiful daughters,” even if they had independent lives and careers. Harriet Martineau was recalled from her journalistic work in London to look after her mother in Norwich in the 1830s. In the 1880s, when her sister unexpectedly married, Helen Gladstone, vice principal of Newnham, one of the first colleges for women at Cambridge University, was called to care for her parents, the aging politician William Ewart Gladstone and his wife, despite the fact that both were extremely active and surrounded by servants. Thereafter, Helen sacrificed her academic career until the deaths of her long-lived parents in 1898 and 1900.48 Even feminists accepted this as the “spinster’s” primary duty. Frances Power Cobbe gave many years to nursing her father and wrote in The Duties of Women in 1881 of the absolute obligation of daughters to care for their parents. In 1883, Beatrice Potter (later Webb, at this stage of her life doubtful about feminism and not yet the socialist she later became), as the eldest unmarried daughter of her family, cared for her retired businessman father after their mother’s death and wrote in her diary: It is almost necessary to the health of a woman, physical and mental, to have definite home duties to fulfil: details of practical management, and, above all things, someone dependent on her love and tender care. So long as Father lives and his home is the centre of young lives, I have mission enough as a woman.49 Unmarried women from poor backgrounds had to earn a living, sometimes alongside caring for and financially supporting family members, another double burden. They struggled on, like the rest of their class, not necessarily in a worse situation. Unmarried women, especially from the middle classes, were often seen as a social problem of surplus or redundant women, with no obvious role, especially if parents had died and they had no family to care for. A solution that was increasingly promoted was to encourage and assist them to emigrate to the colonies, where they could meet the need of the excess numbers of male emigrants in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere for wives of suitable racial origins and could export women’s supposed civilizing influence to rough, male migrant societies. From the 1830s, voluntary organizations were established to assist such emigration, and the numbers of women taking this option seem to have increased over time.50

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Some of these so-called emigrant gentlewomen duly married. For others, the colonies offered possibilities of independence unimaginable in Britain, such as running their own businesses or farms. A high proportion of the first female medical graduates practiced in the colonies, particularly in India where there was a demand for women doctors to treat women in purdah whose bodies could not be exposed to the gaze of an unrelated male, and where they could live as independent, prosperous, respected members of the community as often they could not in Britain. Some women, on the other hand, moved from being governesses or teachers in Britain to working as servants in Australia, where the role was seen as less demeaning.51 They felt freer and more independent as servants in Australia and Canada than as exploited governesses in Britain. Later in the century, demand for nurses, teachers, and office workers grew in the colonies, and increasing numbers of single women were attracted to migrate by greater opportunities for employment, independence, and even the vote.52 New Zealand was the first country in the world to allow women to vote, in 1893, followed by South Australia in 1894, and later the other Australian states. The first European women allowed to vote were in Finland, in 1906.

OLD AGE More women than men survived into their sixties and beyond, the generally accepted definition of “old age.” Perceptions of aging and old age were, broadly, gendered. Women could be defined as “old” as soon as they reached menopause, men not until they were unable to work for a living. But, contradictorily, postmenopausal women had long been seen as dangerously liberated and avid for sex, once there was no further risk of pregnancy—behavior stereotypically condemned in older people. In everyday life, men and women tended to be regarded as old if they looked and behaved in conformity with popular stereotypes of older people, which might occur at very diverse chronological ages. At this life stage, as at others, there was a gulf between popular norms and the behavior of many people.53 Older people were a smaller proportion of the British population in the nineteenth century than ever before or since. People over sixty were about 10 percent of the English population in the mid-eighteenth century, but only about 5 percent by the end of the nineteenth, due mainly to the rising birthrate, which increased the proportion of younger people. From the early twentieth century, the birthrate fell, life expectancy grew, and the proportion of older people grew also. Women were more likely to suffer poverty in old age, as at younger ages. There were, of course, many very poor older men, but fewer. Unless they had prosperous husbands or families, women had few opportunities to save for old

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THE LIFE CYCLE

age, due to low pay and working lives interrupted by caring responsibilities. Few working men could afford to save for a comfortable old age for their widows or, often, for themselves. The social researcher B. S. Rowntree pointed out in his report on poverty in the city of York in 1899 that “the life of a labourer is marked by five alternating periods of want and comparative plenty.” He or she was poorest as a child, especially in a large family, then after marriage, as a parent, and again in old age.54 Families helped when they could, but the families of poor older people were often very poor themselves. There might be no surviving children, or adult children might have migrated far away. They might send remittances to aging parents in Britain from Australia, Canada, and other colonies and kept in touch as best they could, but closer emotional and physical support was impossible. In all classes, as we have seen, unmarried daughters of older people were expected to live with and care for them. In the working class, this could also be true of unmarried sons. World War I revealed how many young men were supporting their parents, and for the first time, the state paid dependents’ allowances in such cases. But still, many older people were alone and had no families able to support them. They survived by working for as long as they were able. There were no state old-age pensions in Britain until 1909 (they were first introduced in Germany in 1889). Before this, the only resort for those unable to work and with no other resources was the growing number of charities supporting impoverished older people or the publicly funded Poor Law. This at best gave a minimal weekly allowance and at worst provided support only in the workhouse, which met basic needs but in conditions of strict discipline. Spending the end of one’s life in the workhouse was dreaded by working people, and they avoided it for as long as they could. Older people in workhouses were disproportionately male because they were less able to care for themselves than older women and were less likely to have maintained close family and friendship ties. As one investigation put it: A woman is more adaptable, more ready to turn her hand to any way of earning that presents itself; she is more useful also in the home of married children . . . she can keep her little home together and do for herself on a small income.55 Workhouse inmates were also disproportionately people without close family. The first British state pensions were particularly designed to relieve the severe poverty of older women, which had been revealed in a succession of investigations and surveys. Pensions were paid in January 1909 to almost 500,000 people, two-thirds of them female, who were immensely grateful. But

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they were paid only at age seventy. Most campaigners had advocated payment for ages fifty-five, sixty, or sixty-five, when they believed people became incapable of supporting themselves. The state chose age seventy in order to save money because many people were dead by that age. The pension was also strictly means tested and so was available only to the poorest. Henry Mayhew in the 1850s met many aged Londoners struggling to survive, such as the woman selling bootlaces who told him, “I just drag on, sir, half-starving on a few bootlaces rather than go into the workhouse.” Happier was “an old woman who with the assistance of her son and daughters continued to live in a most praiseworthy and comfortable manner . . . in a large airy room on the first floor.” But in a miserable attic he found: A poor old woman resembling a bundle of rags and filth stretched on some dirty straw in the corner of the apartment. The place was bare. . . . There was nothing in it except a couple of old tin kettles and a basket. . . . To my astonishment I found this wretched creature to be, to a certain extent, a “superior” woman; she could read and write well, spoke correctly and appeared to have been a person of natural good sense, though broken up with age, want, and infirmity. She had suffered gradual decline through the illness and death of her husband and children.56 A survey in 1909–10 found all too little change. A widow of sixty-nine was working in a Yorkshire woolen mill: Her husband always sickly ceased work in 1886 and she had to work for both and meet the expenses of protracted illness. Her savings disappeared and when he died in 1891 she owed £12 in rent. She has paid off every penny of debt, but been unable to save anything. She went back recently to rag-picking at 10s a week, in the hope of keeping off the Poor Law until she can claim her pension. . . . In spite of all her troubles and hard work she has brought up a large family. She has had fifteen children of whom seven are living and 22 grandchildren. It is touching to learn that this old lady, having been ill, was fearful she would not live long enough to draw her old age pension.57 Better-off older women, of course, had a more comfortable old age and were cared for by servants if they had no family. Older women, then as now, were often expected to withdraw from the public sphere, dress drably, and behave respectably, avoiding any suspicion of continuing interest in sex. Of course, not

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THE LIFE CYCLE

all women conformed to the stereotype, so long as they remained fit and active. Frances Power Cobbe, despite weakening health, like many other campaigning women, remained as controversial as ever in her seventies, protesting in the 1890s against medical experiments on live animals, the passion of her later life. Women writers had the freedom, and often the financial need, to keep writing and publishing in later life. Frances Trollope (1779–1863) did not start publishing until late middle age, desperate to support her family. She then published thirty-four novels and several works of travel writing. Her son, Anthony Trollope, described in his Autobiography how she “continued writing up to 1856, when she was seventy-six years old—and had at that time produced 114 volumes, the first of which was not published until she was fifty. . . . Her career offers great encouragement to those who have not begun early in life, but are still ambitious to do something before they depart hence.” She spent her last years comfortably with her family in Florence, though she became deaf and mentally impaired.58 Another late starting writer, Hester Piozzi (1741–1821, formerly Mrs. Thrale, who had been close to Samuel Johnson in her early and his later life), first published at age forty-five and kept writing to the end of her long life. She also continued to enjoy life, throwing an eightieth birthday party, which gathered about 600 friends to the Bath Assembly Rooms for a concert, ball, and supper, at which she danced with “astonishing elasticity.”59 This led her into debt. She had difficulty getting published later in life. Her last full-length work, written when she was seventy-five, “Lyford Redivivus; or, A Granddame’s Garrulity,” and signed “A Old Woman,” impressed her agent but did not appeal to publishers. Hannah More (1745–1833) had a wealthier but less happy old age. She made great wealth from her popular tracts, but outlived the sisters who had been her companions and by her eighties lived alone with servants, confined to two upstairs rooms, until friends discovered that her servants were taking advantage of her and her money—always a risk for vulnerable, wealthy older people. They moved her to a nursing home where she lived for her last five years, still writing but not publishing. Throughout the life cycle, females everywhere were aware of pressure to conform to powerful norms and expectations. The reality of their lives was much more diverse, due both to major social and economic differences and differences of individual upbringing and temperament. During the nineteenth century, the possibilities open to them, at all ages, grew in historically unprecedented ways, though slowly and above all due to the determined campaigning of many women, unwilling any longer to accept subordination throughout life. This chapter has sought, all too briefly, to survey as much as possible of this change and this rich diversity.

CHAPTER TWO

Bodies and Sexuality: Sexuality and Bodies in the Age of Empire E llen

bayuk rosenman

Women’s sexuality is at once one of the most familiar and most complex subjects in the age of empire. Until recently, bourgeois sexuality has preoccupied scholars, if only because middle- and upper-middle-class writers dominated public discourse, bequeathing a vast archive of self-constructions. From this perspective, social others appeared as the foils and doubles through which bourgeois identities were constructed. The expert discourses of medicine, reform movements, and the law established categories of what we might call legible sexuality and policed the boundaries between acceptable and unacceptable subjects. As Foucault argues, whereas individuals were previously understood as engaging in discrete sexual acts, they now became sexual subjects identified by their particular practices.1 Useful as they are, however, these formulations cannot sustain themselves for long without gathering complications and anomalies. Historical sources disclose a wider range of beliefs and experiences, even for the bourgeoisie. Furthermore, working-class women, women of color, and women in same-sex relationships occupied somewhat different sexual cultures that represented and interpreted sexuality in divergent ways. Instead of attempting to identify a set of stable beliefs, it is more useful to examine sexual assertions, representations, and

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(when possible) experiences as they unfold within specific contexts, including physical spaces, institutions, and geographies; professional discourses; artistic representations; and communities defined by class, race, and sexual orientation.

ELITE WOMEN: EXPERIENCE AND REPRESENTATION 2 Ideas about women’s sexuality underwent a sea change from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. In the earlier period, in most of Europe, doctors believed that women’s sexual anatomy was much like men’s, supporting an equal capacity for enjoyment. Dominating public representations of sexuality, aristocratic models valued pleasure and freedom over modesty and monogamy for both sexes. Plunging necklines and form-fitting garments revealed women’s bodies. With expedient marriages as the norm, extramarital affairs flourished.3 This brief sketch of early nineteenth-century life is obviously reductive, ignoring public backlash against aristocratic excess and the more decorous behavior of most women (and men) of the gentry and middle classes. Still, sexual attitudes and behaviors among the most privileged, visible members of society were permissive and pleasure-oriented for women as well as men.

FIGURE 2.1: A Bath Ball or Virtue in Danger, George Cruikshank, 1820. Courtesy of the British Museum.

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By Victoria’s ascension to the British throne in 1837, femininity and virtue had been yoked together in mainstream thought as the middle- and uppermiddle classes established their dominance in print culture. Complex historical developments lay behind this reformulation. Seeking to distinguish themselves from licentious aristocrats, the middle classes promoted respectability and selfrestraint, bolstered by the influence of the Evangelical movement. At the same time, however, the ethos of industrial capitalism, which fueled the ascent of the middle classes, demanded a competitive, striving spirit at odds with these values. Symbolically resolving this tension, domestic space was redefined as a haven of goodness, anchored by the wife and mother. Entwined with these developments, medicine developed the “two-sex” model of physiology, asserting that women’s biology was significantly different from men’s, resulting in a weaker sexual drive.4 The common shorthand for mid-nineteenth-century women’s sexuality arises from these (greatly simplified) developments: the ideology of separate spheres, based on the moral distinction between public and private space; and the angel in the house, the idealized image of chaste, modest femininity memorialized in Coventry Patmore’s poem of the same name.5 Thus, the burden of symbolizing and enacting sexual purity fell disproportionately on women. Morality and custom established the double standard as the unofficial law of the land. Even after the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857, which made divorce more accessible legally and financially, women were held to a higher standard within marriage: a wife’s adultery was sufficient cause for divorce, but a husband had to commit bigamy or incest in addition, all but ensuring that male infidelity would go unpunished. Men could not simply flout moral standards; “virtuoso asceticism” was an essential component of masculinity.6 A pervasive “anti-sensualism” characterized the period as a whole.7 Still, male transgressions were more accepted and less disturbing, understood as regrettable missteps rather than perversions of an innate nature. Virtue was a quality men should strive for, but many writers considered it the defining essence of femininity. Belief in a coherent female nature produced the familiar binary of angel and whore: either a woman was wholly pure or she was another being altogether. In spite of their power, however, these constructions—the angel in the house, separate spheres, the double standard, and an innately pure female nature—did not function as universal articles of faith.8 It makes sense to regard them as forceful, even debate-setting assumptions, but even the most tenacious assertions were subject to considerable debate throughout the century. Visible gaps open up between ideological tenets and concrete experience, and within the broad strokes of ideology one finds nuance and give. The stark opposition

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of the angel and the whore all but guaranteed that that the relationship between these categorical identities would form a recurring problematic of the period, generating constant anxiety about their instability. Women occupied public spaces in many different capacities, and the simple spatial and gender binary of the public/private formulation was consistently contested throughout the century. Yet underlying these possibilities is a distinctive historical understanding. In the nineteenth century, for the middle classes, sexuality assumed its modern form as a profound and defining aspect of subjectivity: an index of the moral self, an expression of the most personal emotions and psychological conflicts, and a marker of class and race. For this reason, it remained an obsession throughout the period, whatever its shifting and variable forms.

Domestic Sex: Courtship and Marriage Most Victorian writers—even progressive advocates of female employment and defenders of celibacy such as the journalist Frances Power Cobbe—treated marriage as women’s happiest destiny. The married state was routinely advanced not only as the fulfillment of female nature but also as the cornerstone of a healthy society. Built on affection and compatibility, the “companionate marriage” distinguished itself from the aristocratic model of expedient unions, which diverted emotional and sexual intimacy into extramarital relationships.9 Thus, courtship and marriage became the main sites of acceptable, if sometimes complicated, pleasure. Opinions collided over young women’s conduct during courtship. With their belief in an essential female purity, religiously inspired conduct books required the young girl to resist sexual advances instinctively, as if by magic: “If she cannot shrink from [them] without knowing why she does so,—may God help her!” cried Elizabeth Sewell in her well-known Principles of Education.10 More pragmatically, other writers urged discretion: “Always be the wooed, never the wooer,” advised “A Lady.”11 Still others, taking a more worldly perspective, acknowledged the double bind of courtship: “Girls are . . . to aim at fascinating the men they meet, but without flirting,” Fortnightly Review wryly observed, recognizing the impracticality of such strict decorum.12 In fact, the binary implied by the roles of wooed and wooer oversimplified the subtle dance that brought men and women together. Mild flirtation was an inevitable and acceptable part of young adulthood. Eliza Lynn Linton’s essays “Paying One’s Shot,” “Flirting,” “Privileged Persons,” and “Popular Women” extol women’s ability to tease, dress to effect, flatter, and entertain as invaluable

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and expected forms of social labor. Praising flirtation as “the epitome of all that is pleasant, and all that is lovely,” Linton suggests that the drawing room welcomed erotic play if it was practiced with delicacy and tact and led to the stabilizing hierarchy of marriage.13 Channeling desire into the socially useful ends of marital stability and procreation, monogamous sexuality was a celebrated part of adult life. Particularly since sexuality was understood as essential to subjectivity itself, the conjugal ideal knit together moral, emotional, and bodily intimacy. Women as well as men expected marriage to provide erotic enjoyment.14 Within the sanctity of the home, virtue and sexuality went hand in hand, complicating the equation between purity and sexlessness implied by the “angel in the house” rhetoric. Engaged couples could experiment with sensual pleasures—“sweet communings,” in the words of one Victorian observer—that would lead to consummation in marriage.15 Although the medical establishment pathologized the female reproductive system, regarding it as the delicate, unpredictable engine of women’s entire existence, most doctors did not consider moderate pleasure a risk.16 Then as now, the ideal of conjugal intimacy was not always realized. Given the risks posed by pregnancy and childbirth, many wives would probably have dreaded intercourse. Since young women were often kept ignorant about sexuality, they might experience their wedding night as “ ‘a nightmare of physical pain and mental disappointment.’ ”17 Whatever the range of individual experiences, novels powerfully register the cultural commitment to marriage as a union of bodies as well as hearts and souls. Enthusiastically promoting the ideal of companionate marriage, they offer evocative representations of the sensual rewards of romance in what literary critics call “the erotic plot,” one of the few detailed, widely circulating depictions of sexual attraction.18 Of course, many female characters suffer for their attraction to exciting, unscrupulous men, suggesting an uneasiness about desire untempered by reason. However, such warnings are balanced by recurring plots that favor love matches over attachments that, though morally unobjectionable, feel merely obligatory, as in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) and George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1872). One of the most explicit examples of this plot occurs in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her? (1864), in which Alice Vavasor compares her planned marriage to George, for whom she feels a complicated obligation but no love, with her attachment to John, another suitor, in highly evocative language: Was she to give herself bodily,—body and soul, as she said aloud in her solitary agony,—to a man whom she did not love? Must she submit to

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his caresses,—lie on his bosom,—turn herself warmly to his kisses? . . . [George] had come to ask her for a kiss, and she had shuddered before him, when he made the demand. Then that other one [John] had come and touched her hand, and the fibres of her body had seemed to melt within her at the touch.19 Precisely because sexuality was understood as a deep, authentic aspect of selfhood, to marry without desire was akin to a sexual fall. Especially in the second half of the century, however, marriage did not appear to be a secure repository for female sexuality. Legislation such as the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act (1857), the Married Women’s Property Act (1870), and a second Matrimonial Causes Act (1878) began to change the conjugal balance of power. While these changes responded to the sense that women were unjustly disempowered in marriage, they also threatened to unsettle familiar assumptions about gender. The 1857 Divorce Act was especially disturbing because of ensuing press coverage of “crim. con.,” or criminal conversation, the charge brought against a straying spouse’s lover. Following the double standard, such coverage focused obsessively on women’s transgressions as more shameful and therefore more newsworthy.20 The virtuous wife, it turned out, could actually be an adulteress—a shocking discovery British readers made again and again in the sensation fiction of the 1860s, such as in Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and East Lynne (1862). Abroad, adultery novels also appeared as requisite additions to national literatures. Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (France, 1857), Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (Germany, 1894), Leopoldo Alas y Ureña’s La Regenta (Spain, 1884), and Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Russia, 1878) delineated the awful consequences of women’s infidelity.

Erotic Play: Allure and Anxiety Outside marriage and courtship, women’s bodies were widely eroticized for male pleasure. Artistic representations such as Pre-Raphaelite painting and medical materials solicited “the male gaze,” offering up alluring and safely inert bodies. A staple of European medical museums, the Anatomical Venus depicted a seductively reclining female figure, naked, with her internal organs exposed, in a somewhat gruesome insistence on the exhibit’s scientific rather than sexual status. Such jarring images reflect constraints on male sexuality and the pressure they exerted on representations of the female body. While

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men enjoyed somewhat more freedom than women, the emphasis on bourgeois virtue forbade representations that frankly sought to arouse.21 The flâneur, an emblem of modernity, could also deploy the gaze to admire female pedestrians. Though scholarship has emphasized his unilateral power, there is some evidence that women were agents as well as objects in these encounters, participating actively in what critic Lynda Nead calls “a world of scopic promiscuity.”22 A sophisticated public life of art galleries, theaters, leisure parks, and promenades created new opportunities for interaction among European men and women. Because the customs of this urban environment had not yet been codified, it was difficult to agree on what constituted proper behavior. Signifiers of respectability became increasingly ambiguous: a direct look, a slow walk, gaudy clothing, or simple presence in certain locations might denote anything from ignorance of modern customs to solicitation. These public spaces opened a certain latitude for female behavior. This new world forms the context for Eliza Lynn Linton’s “Girl of the Period,” whose title character became a social type like Patmore’s angel in the house. First published in 1868, it was one of a number of diatribes about “fast” behavior by women that began to appear in the 1860s. In contrast to Linton’s celebration of innocent flirting, “Girl of the Period” expresses the fear that cosmopolitan culture was creating a new kind of sexual subject who, though respectable, aped the brazen manners and ostentatious dress of “the queens of the demi-monde” in defiance of the sacred distinction between angel and whore.23 In a suggestively tactile metaphor, Linton complained, “they brush too closely by each other.”24 In fact, there is some evidence that they really did brush by each other; Regent Street, for instance, was both an elite shopping district and a daytime haunt for elegant prostitutes. Linton preferred a simple binary in which virtuous women could always be identified, but the urban world, with new spaces for mild erotic adventuring, demanded more subtle interpretive categories.

The Rhetorical Uses of Sex: Female Purity and the Changing Roles of Women Because purity was a crucial, constitutive part of the feminine ideal, references to women’s sexuality were a powerful rhetorical tool throughout the nineteenth century. As the example of the “Girl of the Period” suggests, prostitution in particular was invoked to condemn behaviors that deviated from stereotypical femininity. Both conservative and progressive commentators made use of this reference to advance their agendas.

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Because prostitutes plied their trade on the streets and were not safely contained in domestic establishments—hence the term “public woman”—women who took on other public roles could be pathologized by analogy. Actresses, dancers, and acrobats were frequent targets for obvious reasons: they displayed their bodies for money, often in revealing costumes, and worked in close geographic proximity to prostitutes, since theater districts were prime locations for the sex trade. While the most famous performers managed to lead public lives with their reputations intact, the actress as a social type was charged with being vain, pleasure loving, antidomestic, and loose.25 The charge was also leveled against more respectable women who sought public notice, including reform workers and even writers.26 Opponents of political change reached for this weapon repeatedly to shame activists. British reformers who sought the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, designed to regulate prostitutes, were coded as sexually transgressive themselves.27 Simply by appearing at public meetings, reformer Josephine Butler became an object of “obloquy . . . abuse and violence.”28 This antagonism dogged suffrage workers later in the period. On November 18, 1910, the “Black Friday” of the movement, opposition reached a brutal peak. When women protesters attempted to march on the Houses of Parliament, police assaulted them, tearing their clothes and molesting them.29 More surprisingly, the ideal of female purity was also used to critique marriage as economically coercive and unequal. The celebration of conjugal intimacy collided with the recognition that, since the professions were open only to men, marriage was an economic necessity for many women. A perceived demographic imbalance, in which marriageable women outnumbered men, only underscored this recognition: if there were not enough men to go around, women would have to compete aggressively to win a mate.30 The phrase “marriage market” appeared regularly in the periodical press.31 From this financial metaphor, it was a short step to the Westminster Review’s claim that “marriage can be viewed in no other light than that of a legalized prostitution.”32 Abruptly erasing the gap between the wife and the streetwalker, this equation supplied a powerful rhetoric for progressive women (and men) arguing for increased education and employment for women. Thus, counterintuitively, reverence for companionate marriage could be used to promote opportunities that lay outside its sacred borders.

The Future of Heterosexuality at the Fin de Siècle By the 1880s, incremental changes in women’s roles crested into a full-blown crisis—what scholars have called the “sexual dissidence” or even “sexual anarchy” of the fin de siècle.33 While at midcentury a range of ideas existed, it was relatively narrow compared to the torrent of arguments in play at the end of

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the period. Across Europe, some of the most basic beliefs about women were called into question. The defining association between middle-class women and virtue unraveled into a series of controversies over clothing, exercise, marriage, monogamy, and motherhood. Inevitably, these controversies challenged the traditional link between gender and sexuality, and the binary structure of femininity and masculinity.34 Their impact was visible on women’s bodies. Condemning corsets and bulky petticoats, the rational dress movement advocated looser, more comfortable clothing, including split skirts to facilitate the bicycle riding that became the ubiquitous, often parodic, image of the

FIGURE 2.2: “The Schariwary Cycling Costume,” Punch, July 24, 1897. Courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries.

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newly assertive woman, who had better things to do than wait demurely for a gentleman caller. New Women—a heterogeneous group of writers and activists in Europe and the United States—attacked traditional sexual and social roles on a broad front. Coined by the popular novelist Ouida (Marie Louise de la Ramée) in an attack on an 1894 essay by Sarah Grand (Frances Elizabeth [Clarke] McFall) entitled “The New Aspect of the Woman Question,” the phrase spread quickly throughout the periodical press.35 Like the angel in the house and the girl of the period, the New Woman became a cultural icon, but unlike those other labels, the term New Woman encompassed a range of attitudes espoused by different writers who did not always agree with one another. Contraception, for example, was among the most controversial subjects for progressive women as well as for the culture as a whole. While some women such Annie Besant, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird argued that birth control would secure women’s sexual freedom, others feared it would actually benefit men by removing the most serious consequence of intercourse.36 Nor were New Women united on the future of marriage, despite important areas of agreement. As a rule, they attacked hierarchical unions and the double standard, especially the tacit acceptance of men’s extramarital liaisons. Most important, they blame the social system, reflecting a new sense of oppression as a wide-scale integration of values, laws, customs, and assumptions rather than an occasional problem in an essentially sound society. But opinions also diverged in important ways. Famous for essays and novels, especially The Heavenly Twins (1893) and The Beth Book (1897), Sarah Grand marked out a relatively conservative position. Directly indebted to the social purity movement, she sought to renovate rather than radically alter marriage, urging men to emulate female virtue. Condemning free love, Grand extolled matrimony as “the most sacred institution in the world.”37 In contrast, Mona Caird thoroughly repudiated traditional marriage as “a mere moldering branch of the patriarchal tree.”38 Valuing personal freedom over sexual purity, Caird promoted women’s economic independence, which would eliminate the necessity of marriage and transform it into a purely voluntary contract. Caird insists on “the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul, to give or withhold herself body and soul exactly as she wills” (original emphasis).39 An integral part of the movement, New Woman fiction vividly depicted the costs of traditional gender roles and boldly imagined other possibilities. Instead of conjugal intimacy, wives face unwanted sexual relations with unworthy men, as in Caird’s Wing of Axrael (1889), Grand’s The Heavenly Twins, and Emma Frances Brooke’s A Superfluous Woman (1894). The most shocking novels, such

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as Grant Allen’s The Woman Who Did (1895) and Olive Schreiner’s Story of an African Farm (1891), present heroines who insist on bearing children out of wedlock. At their most radical, New Woman novels such as Story of an African Farm, The Heavenly Twins, and Edith Johnstone’s A Sunless Heart (1894) reached the endpoint of the erotic plot, crafting stories of genderless friendship and sibling attachment as alternatives to the deformations of heterosexuality. Deliberately estranging themselves from the conventions of nineteenth-century realist fiction with new plots and technical experimentation, these novels decisively repudiate gender and sexual mores and the narratives that naturalized them.

Same-Sex Relationships Prevailing values shaped the same-sex attachments of elite women (they were not the only women who formed these relationships, but they were more likely to have the educational, social, and economic capital to lead lives independent of men, and to have left records of their lives). While, of course, such attachments have always existed, Martha Vicinus argues that they take on a new character in the nineteenth century. In keeping with the new understanding of sexuality as central to subjectivity, women claimed “a personal identity based on a sexualized, or at least recognizably eroticized, relationship with another woman.”40 Honoring domesticity, they drew on familial relationships to authorize and express their passion. Sharon Marcus examines the diaries of a number of female couples, such as Eleanor Butler and Sarah Ponsonby, Harriet Hosmer and Louisa Ashburton, and Annie Hindle and Annie Ryan, who explicitly borrowed from marriage “the quality of . . . commitment to a sexual partner” without adopting its gendered, hierarchical roles, essentially perfecting the companionate ideal.41 Other women adapted the mother-daughter relationship to express a tender eroticism. Edith Simcox framed her unrequited love for George Eliot as daughterly devotion, referring to herself as a “loving child” and indulging in affectionate gestures such as kissing Eliot’s hands, cheek, and feet.42 While same-sex relationships were not officially recognized, they managed to coexist in an insistently heterosexual society by borrowing the dynamics and rhetoric of more acceptable attachments. Among progressive intellectuals and artists, same-sex unions were accepted without fanfare. (Marcus calls these groups “networks” to emphasize their weblike connections and heterogeneous members, in contrast to subcultures, which are organized around a single, self-defined identity and a declared separation from the mainstream.)43 Within such networks, Frances Power Cobbe, Charlotte Cushman, and Rosa Bonheur lived comfortably in

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female partnerships. This tolerance was a welcome relief from what Bonheur called “ ‘the mortifications and stupidities’ ” they endured from society as a whole.44 Although public disapproval and the absence of an official category may have cramped or hidden some of these relationships, it also left them open to multiple definitions and flexible forms of expression. Same-sex relationships were also transformed at the turn of the century. The rise of sexology made lesbianism visible as an alternative orientation, part of the Foucauldian transformation of individual acts into official categories. Influenced by Kraft Ebbing’s Scientia Sexualis (1886), Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897) attempted to rescue same-sex attraction from the stigma of immorality only to redefine it as a biological abnormality.45 Ellis’s influential theory saw lesbianism as a congenital “inversion” of normal heterosexuality, a mistake of nature that misplaced desire for women in a female rather than male body, and asserted that “the chief characteristic of the sexually inverted woman is the degree of masculinity.”46 Thus, he perpetuated midcentury assumptions, linking gender to the choice of erotic object, assuming heterosexuality as the normative orientation, and understanding sexual behavior as the bedrock of subjectivity. While Ellis’s formulation shaped popular understandings of same-sex desire, individual women forged their own models and identities. In the late nineteenth century, women writers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) and Michael Field (Katherine Harris Bradley and Edith Cooper) drew on the sensual intensity of the aesthetic movement to craft vivid evocations of female passion. The early twentieth century saw the emergence of an international lesbian community that owed very little to sexology’s grimly medicalized model. Swirling around the expatriate American writer Natalie Barney, this community found its home in cosmopolitan Paris. British writers Renée Vivien (Pauline Tarn), Radclyffe Hall, Vita Sackville-West, and Violet Trefusis; American painter Romaine Brooks; French designer Colette; American writers Gertrude Stein and Djuna Barnes; and Russian dancer Armen Ohanian all entered Barney’s orbit at one time or another. Unlike the nineteenth-century networks that discreetly absorbed same-sex couples, Barney’s salon created a genuine subculture, taking Sappho rather than science as its model, celebrating pleasure, community, and art.47 Some members of the group adopted mannish dress, but, except for Hall, none owed any particular loyalty to Ellis’s formulations (Hall fit them with a vengeance, dressing in male clothing, calling herself John, and asking Ellis to write the preface for her coming-out novel, The Well of Loneliness, to attest to its psychological authenticity). Tracing the story of this subculture would take us well into the twentieth century, beyond the limits of this chapter, but it is

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a noteworthy outcome of the “interestingly mobile” sexual innovations that Yopi Prins locates on the cusp of modernity.48

WOMEN OF THE WORKING CLASSES If there are gaps in the historical record of elite women’s sexual experience, the lives of working-class women are even more obscure. They become visible through the eyes of doctors, photographers, journalists, reformers, and novelists—that is, primarily (though not exclusively) through the eyes of middleclass men. From this vantage point, working-class women appeared decidedly Other. Lacking the delicacy of their social superiors, they seemed to have escaped from dangerously porous homes into the workplace, the street, and the pub. Their mobility and lack of bourgeois decorum made them vulnerable to charges of promiscuity. At the same time, their very difference from the ladies whom men were taught to revere made them objects of desire. Captivated by their brawny arms and blackened hands, Arthur Munby compulsively sketched and photographed working women, ultimately marrying a domestic servant, Hannah Cullwick. In fact, the limited evidence that does exist points to a looser sexual code, especially earlier in the period. According to journalist Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861), many women lived in common law marriages or sequential relationships without qualms or social ostracism.49 The “sweet communings” that enraptured middle-class fiancés often led directly to premarital intercourse among the working classes.50 Bearing a child out of wedlock caused no shame to either party as long as they married or remained in a committed relationship. In fact, baptisms often preceded weddings in rural parishes. In a reversal of the bourgeois double standard, “the Fornicator’s Court”—that is, the local pub—pressured reluctant fathers into providing for their offspring without stigmatizing the unwed mothers.51 Of course, greater sexual intimacy did not translate into greater happiness. Husbands expected their wives to be sexually available on demand, while the physical stresses of poverty made pregnancy and childbirth even more hazardous for workingclass women than for their middle-class counterparts.52 And if men ignored the verdict of the Fornicator’s Court, women had little recourse. As journalists, reformers, and public health advocates took increasing authority over the urban poor, working-class women as a group were forced to bow to their standards. If her partner left her, a woman had few economic options, especially since the Bastardy Clause of the New Poor Law (1834) made women solely responsible for their illegitimate offspring, relieving men

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of the legal responsibility for maintenance and leaving unwed mothers at the mercy of the courts and the Foundling Hospital, which promised to raise illegitimate children in a wholesome if spartan atmosphere.53 The influence of middle-class morality is obvious in the narrative women were required to provide in order to receive assistance. We can sum up this formula as seduced and abandoned: the woman had truly loved the father of her child, believed his promise of marriage, slipped in a moment of weakness, and bitterly regretted her mistake. The supplicant could not reveal active desire or pleasure, could not admit to a merely casual or physical interest in her partner, and could not disclose a history of multiple lovers. Passivity, self-blame, and remorse, mandatory in these confessions, constituted a sexual type, the fallen woman. Framing her as a helpless victim, this melodramatic narrative distinguished the fallen woman from the common prostitute, a vitiated creature who polluted society. Despite her transgression, the fallen woman believed in monogamy and female virtue. The narrative of the fallen woman thus consolidated the middle classes as the locus of virtue. Reformers focused their efforts on moral rescue, which meant aligning working women’s sexuality with middle-class norms. Urania House, the home for unwed mothers founded by philanthropist Angela BurdettCoutts and novelist Charles Dickens, attempted to save women from the “long, long years of shame, want, crime, and ruin” that lay ahead if they did accept bourgeois supervision and models of femininity.54 Cultivating domestic virtues as the path to redemption, Uraina House sent its reformed charges to marry in the colonies, considering these outposts appropriate homes for their somewhat tarnished housewives. Though Burdett-Coutts and Dickens were sincere and undoubtedly saved women from harsh lives, opportunists such as W. T. Stead were happy to exploit tales of victimization for their own gain. In his Pall Mall Gazette series “The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon,” Stead exposed the horrors of child prostitution and the white-slave trade in what Judith Walkowitz characterizes as a mixture of “melodrama and pornography,” depicting the violation of powerless young girls in lurid detail.55 The common prostitute generated a different story altogether. She was condemned as an urban contagion, like typhus or sewage, circulating depravity. The common prostitute (a term that was never defined but was nevertheless used to prosecute women) fit squarely into the disciplinary discourse Foucault identifies as typical of the nineteenth century. A woman could not simply engage in an act of prostitution; she became a prostitute, a deviant sexual subject. In contrast to the fallen woman, the common prostitute was labeled vile, polluted, coarse, filthy, wretched, barely human—“an animated bundle

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of rags,” as described in London Labour and the London Poor.56 Her life followed a predictable trajectory: loss of beauty, poverty, disease, despair, and death. French stereotypes were similar: prostitutes were characterized as selfindulgent and pleasure loving, doomed to eventual sickness and death, though, according to some nineteenth-century social critics, with a distinctively Continental detour into lesbianism.57 As historian Judith Walkowitz asserts, the middle classes were all but incapable of understanding prostitutes “outside the realm of pathology.”58 Strikingly, prostitutes were seldom understood as economic victims, still less as economic agents. Authorities such as Mayhew and the surgeon William Acton attributed prostitution to female vice rather than poverty; Mayhew classified prostitutes, bizarrely, among “those who will not work.” To admit money as a primary motive would be to recognize the commodification of the female body as an overdetermined outcome of the economic system rather than as a deplorable perversion of an individual. In fact, there is evidence that, for many working-class women, prostitution was a sensible choice, especially given the uncertainty of other forms of employment. Walkowitz characterizes prostitution as a “trade largely organized by women” that gave rise to a “strong female subculture.”59 These women undoubtedly led difficult lives, making do with the best of a severely limited number of options for survival. They were usually poor, often hounded by the police, and sometimes physically endangered by violent clients and criminals. But prostitutes as a rule were not the tragic outcasts of the middle-class imagination and were occasionally well integrated into working-class communities. Especially in urban settings, the line between respectable women and prostitutes was blurred, and sex work did not disqualify women from marriage.60 In large part, the narrative of the harlot’s progress was a projection of the bourgeois fetishization of female purity.

WOMEN, SEX, AND EMPIRE Although the reach and diversity of Western imperialism make generalization difficult, persistent assumptions about racial and cultural difference undergird narratives of women’s sexuality, both white and native. Belief in the superiority of white, European cultures rationalized the exercise of colonial power, and sexual practices formed an important component of this hierarchy. Racial anthropologists, bolstered by Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution later in the period, sought to reconstruct the development of (European) civilization by looking at what they considered to be extant primitive societies, such as the ones they “discovered” in West and South Africa. Markers of primitivism

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included sexual customs such as promiscuity; the development of monogamous marriage was almost universally identified as the marker of a truly human civilization. These ideas were interwoven in imperial practice and ideology. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, they made “a racially coded notion of who could be intimate with whom—and in what way—a primary concern in colonial policy.”61 Because most colonial outposts originated as homosocial communities, native women were exploited as a valuable resource, appropriated as sexual partners and often doubling as unpaid household servants. Stoler reports, “Colonized women living as the concubines of European men—referred to as nyai in Java and Sumatra, congai in Indochina, and petite épouse throughout the French empire—formed the dominant domestic arrangement in colonial cultures through the early twentieth century.”62 Because they were so useful in providing stability and pleasure to European men, concubines were a fixture of colonial rule. At the same time, the concubinage system produced some disquieting outcomes, including the mutation of European customs and the creation of a mixed-race population. In response, white women were increasingly encouraged to join husbands and fathers in the colonies as part of “a strategic policy” to curb interracial intimacy.63 Disrupting accustomed freedoms and pleasures, white women were not always welcome, but they quickly took on enormous symbolic importance. Purity, whiteness, and vulnerability were written on their bodies, a seeming invitation to voracious natives. Because of the alleged rapaciousness of darkskinned men, white women were understood as constantly at risk. Although actual incidents of rape involving native men and white women were virtually nonexistent, scenes of interracial peril were rife in colonial documents, from fiction to memoirs to newspaper accounts to military dispatches, and crossed cultural settings from India to New Guinea, Fiji to Indonesia, Rhodesia to Kenya.64 The brutal native and the violated white woman were figures of the European social imagination, produced in part as a reflection of racial and gender stereotypes, and in part as a rationale for violence against indigenous populations.65 In particular, the 1857 sepoy uprising in India launched a wave of rape narratives, both journalistic and literary, that helped justify British reprisals and increased military control.66 The stereotype of the primitive native also led to prurient and deprecating responses to native women, who were imagined as hypersexual and amoral. Orientalist fantasies abounded: references to harems saturated accounts of the East, simultaneously figuring native women’s sexual appetite, desirability, and subordination. The harem was already a literary staple in the early nineteenth century when Byron compared Spanish beauties to those “Houries” from hot

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climes “which poets love to laud” in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage.67 Along with writers, visual artists developed a cast of seductive Eastern characters: odalisques, Cleopatras, slave girls, and harem dancers. Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s painting The Turkish Bath (1862) takes aesthetic spectatorship to a new frontier, beyond lush but clothed Pre-Raphaelite beauties and classical nudes. Here realistically depicted, naked women lounge unselfconsciously, while the circular shape of the painting loosely evokes the voyeuristic pleasure of spying through a keyhole. The painting also dabbles in another facet of exotic sexuality: homosocial settings such as the harem and the bath are linked to lesbianism. Draped over each other, women stretch languorously while one fondles another’s breast. Significantly, except for the servants, all the women in the painting are light skinned. The most luscious objects from elsewhere were racially Other without being too strange or carrying the negative connotations of blackness—sin, evil, disease. Egypt, Persia, and Turkey were privileged sites

FIGURE 2.3: The Turkish Bath, Jean Auguste-Dominique Ingres, 1862.

Courtesy of Réunion des Musées Nationaux. Art Resource, NY.

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of this erotica. The Orientalist vocabulary of this region made its way into Western descriptions: “Turkish beauties” were well-developed buttocks, while a “seraglio figure” signified voluptuousness.68 A cruder version of Orientalist fantasies depicts women with disgust rather than attraction. Asserting the primitive characteristics of other cultures and races, anthropological and evolutionary theories underwrote the stereotype of native women as animalistic and subhuman, especially the darker-skinned inhabitants of Africa and the West Indies. Pornographic and degrading, representations of these women exaggerated their breasts and buttocks. The bestknown figure of this sort is Saartjie (or “Sara,” the Afrikaner version of her name) Baartman, also known as “the Hottentot Venus” (“Hottentot” was the onomatopoeic European term for the Khoisan language). A South African slave who was bought by a Frenchman and sent to London in 1810, Baartman

FIGURE 2.4: Love and Beauty—Sartjee the Hottentot Venus, Charles William?, 1822. Courtesy of the British Museum.

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was exhibited as a freak until she died in 1815 at the age of 25 (her short, sad career as an anthropological specimen continued after her death, when her genitals were removed along with her skeleton and brains, and continued to be displayed in France until 1974). In depictions of Baartman, racist and sexist stereotypes intersected in a cruel parody of sexual difference. Wearing little but war paint, she smokes a pipe and carries a spear, while a rosy Cupid sits on her enormous haunch warning viewers ironically, “Take care of your hearts.” This pseudo-Venus might be ripe for ravaging, but her grotesque body would certainly not win any hearts.69 Sexuality was a central aspect of what the British called “the woman question,” a wide-ranging problematic that engaged issues of marriage, employment, education, and political participation. The very existence of an official woman question reflected a new self-consciousness about gendered categories of experience and expectation. Linking the most private longings, fears, fantasies, physiological processes, and bodily acts with public categories, women’s erotic experience spoke directly to and arguably underpinned all of its interrelated issues. Doctors, novelists, conduct-book authors, and members of Parliament all attempted to define and regulate women’s sexuality, but they inevitably failed to establish a party line. Nor did they fully integrate the challenges posed by working-class and colonial cultures, or by same-sex relationships, into a full recognition of the context-specific character of female sexuality. The period never completely relinquished the notion that women had an innate sexual nature. The interplay between essentialist assertions and the sheer diversity of attitudes and behaviors ensured that sexuality remained a hotly contested subject throughout the period. The writing of New Women and sexologists exploded at the end of the century, not only as a rebellion against earlier constraints but also as the culmination of the obsessive, unresolved questions with which earlier generations struggled.

CHAPTER THREE

Religion and Popular Beliefs: Women and Wandering Jews after Daniel Deronda susan david bernstein

George Eliot’s publication of her last novel, Daniel Deronda, in 1876 prompted, and continues to provoke, diverse responses to her allusion about a return to a Jewish homeland at the novel’s close. When Theodor Herzl first visited London in 1895 to introduce his political project for a Jewish state in Palestine, he heard from Hermann Adler, chief rabbi of the British Empire, that his scheme was “the idea of Daniel Deronda.”1 While many readers, both Eliot’s contemporaries and more recently, read “Palestine” as the unequivocal goal of that journey, others have observed the ambiguities surrounding a wedding cum exploration trip “to the East”2 from England, a voyage that does not quite set sail on the last page. Some scholars have even commented on the novel’s open-endedness as gesturing toward uncertain possibilities or indicative of a formal shift from literary realism to modernism or a blurring of generic boundaries.3 Because Daniel Deronda had such a powerful role in shaping views of Jewishness across Europe and beyond for decades after its publication, this chapter explores the various responses to the novel—both its proto-Zionist

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conclusion and its female Jewish characters—by readers within and outside Britain. To offer a focused aperture on women and religion in the nineteenth century, I explore this key literary representation of Jewish women and the critical and creative writing it prompted, along with historical background about Jews and religious emancipation in Britain. I use Eliot’s engagement with Jewish exodus and return to investigate the larger landscape of these ideas in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century culture. In particular, I want to consider how women writers, both Anglo-Jewish authors Katie Magnus and Amy Levy, as well as Mathilde Blind, who did not embrace a Jewish identity, respond directly or imaginatively to the closure of Daniel Deronda. In doing so, I offer a context for thinking through the conditions and stakes of Jewish acculturation specifically for women. By considering the literary forms writers employed to explore diasporic exile, national belonging, and themes of exodus and return, we can chart the intersecting or colliding meanings of religious, national, and gender affiliations. As I will argue, narrative and lyric provide different formal ways to conceptualize Jewishness and wandering, but the shape of genres supplies only one dimension of this investigation. I begin with historical and cultural frameworking of Jews and Zion in nineteenth-century England before and around the initial publication of Daniel Deronda. Then I move to how Eliot’s novel, through its elusive closure, treats Jewish wandering and return, and how women figure into this plotting of modern diasporic identity. Next I turn to a reception study of the novel, the critical insistence that the novel is bifurcated into two distinct plots—the “Gwendolen” or marriage plot and the “Daniel” or Jewish plot—despite Eliot’s assertion that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else there.”4 The balance of this chapter explores the literary revisions of Eliot’s glance at Jewish exile and return through poetry, essays, and fiction by Magnus, Levy, and Blind to show the precarious and uneven place of Jewish women in metanarratives of modern identities based on religion, race, and belonging. Assembling this facet of nineteenth-century history requires that we understand the complex attitudes around the subject of Judaism, gender, and nationality; literary texts and their aftermath provide a potent lens for viewing this terrain.

HOME QUESTIONS: LIBERTIES AND DISABILITIES, JEWISHNESS AND GENDER A dichotomy frames the condition of Anglo-Jewish women in nineteenth-century Britain: while increasingly women pressed for a wider sphere of engagement, through education and work, beyond the private home, Jewish citizens in Britain

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wished for more secure civil liberties in their national home. In historical accounts of Jewish emancipation in Great Britain, the chronology of advances is typically referenced to Jewish men.5 Accordingly, the landmark case most often mentioned is Lionel de Rothschild, elected to Parliament for the city of London in 1847 and reelected three times but unable to take his seat until 1858 when he was permitted to omit the words “on the true faith of a Christian” from the required oath of abjuration. There was never an emancipation act for Jewish subjects of Great Britain, as there was for Catholics in 1829 or for members of dissenting faiths in 1828.6 This somewhat invisible process of emancipation may be explained by the ambiguous and unstable status of Jewishness. As Jonathan Freedman has argued, “the Jew” is a kind of threshold figure where racial, ethnic, national, and religious categories of identity merge and collide.7 This multiplicity and instability around the meaning of Jewish difference offered a provocative trope for imagining modern identity. On the whole, Jewish emancipation in Britain was more liberal than in other European nations such as Germany where, as Heinrich Heine’s life exemplifies and which I turn to later, conversion to Christianity was required for some professions and Christians were not permitted by law to convert to Judaism. By the same token, AngloJewish citizens were active in colonizing activities across the British Empire, while Jews were not permitted to live anywhere throughout the Spanish Empire after the Inquisition. Nevertheless, conversion projects, including the London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews (founded in 1809) and the British Society for the Propagation of the Gospel among the Jews (established in 1842), were part of the cultural landscape surrounding Daniel Deronda.8 Eliot mixes into her novel many attitudes about conversion and acculturation. On the one hand, Lady Mallinger recommends “a Society for the Conversion of the Jews, and that it was to be hoped Mirah would embrace Christianity.”9 Hans Meyrick, among other characters, supports “the amalgamation of races”10 or the total assimilation of Jews through intermarriage and reproduction. On the other hand, Mordecai urges a return to the spiritual energy of ancient Judaism precipitated through a geographic journey eastward from London. As Michael Ragussis and Nadia Valman both point out, Daniel Deronda functions as a revisionist conversion novel, with Daniel as both Moses and Christ figures. However, Valman notes the alloyed portrayal of this narrative for female characters who, like Daniel’s mother, are either oppressed by Jewish men and lost to religious and cultural Judaism altogether or else who, like Mirah Lapidoth, resist the threat of a narrative of conversion or sexualized ruin by remaining steadfastly faithful to the religion of her mother.

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It is altogether possible that Eliot drew inspiration for Mirah’s exemplary Jewishness from Grace Aguilar, an Anglo-Jewish author whose fiction, poetry, and religious writings were widely circulated in Victorian England. Although Aguilar had died in 1847, her work continued in print, with a collected Works issued in London only a few years before Eliot commenced her research on Daniel Deronda.11 Aguilar’s publications took up two principal agendas: the place of diasporic Jews in Britain and the social position of Anglo-Jewish women. Her “History of the Jews in England,” published in Chambers’ Miscellany in 1847, supplied the first printed account of Anglo-Jewish historiography.12 The article maps this chronology from the initial arrival of “Hebrew strangers” before Christianity took root, the persecution of Jews under the influence of the Crusades, including the martyrdom of Jews in the Clifford’s Tower massacre at York in 1189, the expulsion of Jews from Britain in 1290 to Jewish resettlement from 1656 when a synagogue and Jewish cemetery were established in London. With this history of exile and return, Aguilar constructs the British Empire as an adopted homeland for Jews: “From that time the Jewish nation have found a secure and peaceful home, not in England alone, but in all the British possessions.”13 Aguilar also points to continuing discrimination of Anglo-Jewish citizens “still considered aliens and foreigners” despite the fact that they are Jews only in their religion—“Englishmen in everything else.”14 Despite this insistence on Jews at home in England and across the British Empire, throughout the essay Aguilar maintains a tension between “the Englishman” and “the Hebrew,” a division that implies only partial assimilation. Indeed, in her conclusion, Aguilar still figures Jews as “exiles of Judea” with a provisional “home” in Britain.15 Aguilar’s writing about gender and Jewishness approaches this diasporic condition of an exilic home by depicting Jewish women through traditional roles consistent with her Christian contemporaries. In her book The Women of Israel, Aguilar profiles biblical Jewesses who accentuate qualities of religious devotion and domestic selflessness, echoing Christian portraits of virtuous femininity. As Valman argues, “In this text, Aguilar is particularly anxious to put forward a case for the conservative sexual politics of the Hebrew Bible and the Jewish tradition” in order to promote Jewish emancipation, and she accomplishes this by using the Protestant rhetoric of the Evangelical revival of the 1830s and 1840s.16 Reading the biblical story of Sarah and Hagar, for instance, Aguilar exonerates Sarah’s harsh treatment of the bondswoman forced to bear a child with Abraham; according to Aguilar, by banishing Hagar and Ishmael to the wilderness, Sarah showed strict obedience to the will of “the Eternal Himself” and to maintaining a household consistent with contemporary

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Christian values.17 For Aguilar, the political problem of Jewish difference requires gender compliance. By the time Eliot writes Daniel Deronda some three decades later, a discourse on “the woman question” has developed sufficiently so that Eliot can juxtapose a feminist critique of patriarchal structures of family and marriage with “the Jewish question” of maintaining Jewish difference at the cost of complete assimilation. Yet Eliot, whose family background was solidly at home in the Church of England, did not experience this instance of an unstable cultural place of her Anglo-Jewish contemporaries, despite the evident grounds for her identification with religious and sexual outsiderness.18

OTHER HOMELANDS: CHRISTIAN ZIONISM AND THE IDEA OF PALESTINE Political and religious motives shaped nineteenth-century ideas about a Jewish homeland in Palestine; as Barbara Tuchman has argued, political interests underwrote the notion of “England in Jerusalem” while Christian religious aims fed the vision of a “Jerusalem in England.”19 Eitan Bar-Yosef observes that English constructions of the Holy Land revealed a range of attitudes about what Englishness meant.20 Within Zionist historiography, Christian Zionism circulated as a vision, but not an organized political position, in nineteenthcentury British culture until the last decades.21 This Christian Zionism emerged through millennialist Evangelical discourse that championed both the conversion of Jews in England and their restoration to Palestine as the necessary fulfillment of Christian typological readings of Hebrew scripture as the prefigurement of Christian scripture, such as Christ’s second coming.22 In Evangelical women’s writings, the Jewess functioned rhetorically as savior ensuring “the apocalyptic redemption of the English nation as a whole.”23 Possibly, such premillenarian zeal spurred Anglo-Jews like Moses Montefiore to pursue Jewish colonies in Palestine.24 Yet any Zionism was largely millenarian doctrine until the 1870s, when British imperial interests demanded a stronghold and “gateway to the East” in this region of the Ottoman Empire. While the relationship between millenarian and imperial interests has a complex history, the language of “Chosen People” and “Promised Land” remained steadfastly the rhetoric of Protestant millenarianism until the end of the nineteenth century, when modern Zionism emerged.25 In the immediate period around the publication of Daniel Deronda in eight parts from February to September 1876, the controversy known as the Eastern Question erupted in British culture over political events in the Balkan Peninsula, part of the Ottoman Empire. A nationalist uprising of Bulgarian Christians

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unleashed many accounts in the British press of atrocities perpetrated by Muslim Turks. Disraeli, then the prime minister of Britain, who pursued a foreign policy of calculated neutrality, drew severe attacks. Because he was Jewish by birth and race, according to Victorian concepts of biological race, and despite his conversion to the Church of England as a boy, his detractors claimed his fundamental allegiance was with Ottoman Turks, also Orientalized, like Jews, in contrast to Occidentalized Christians.26 Cartoons depicted Disraeli either through Orientalist tropes or as indifferent to the plight of Christians in the Balkans. For instance, a cartoon in Punch bears the title “NEUTRALITY UNDER DIFFICULTIES” with the figure of Disraeli reading a pamphlet while Britannia, in her signature armor, gestures to a scene of massacre. The caption attributed to Disraeli reads: “Bulgarian atrocities! I can’t find them in the ‘Official Reports’!!!”27 This debate around British foreign policy raised the question of whether Anglo-Jewish citizens could be patriotic or whether their innate allegiances, through this calculus of race and religion, compromised their politics. Thus, Goldwin Smith asserted in “Can Jews Be Patriots?” that “a Jew is not an Englishman . . . he is a Jew with a special deity for his own race.”28 Hermann Adler retorted that Jews were bound by religious belief, not by racial or national interests. Furthermore, he affirmed the patriotism of his coreligionists in Britain: “We consider ourselves citizens of the country in which we dwell, in the highest and fullest sense of the term, and esteem it our dearest privilege and duty to labour for its welfare.”29 Bar-Yosef spotlights this political uproar around the Eastern Question: “Empire, Protestantism, Orientalism, Jews: this was the stuff that restoration dreams were made of.”30 The millenarians read the Eastern Question as prophetic, while the Jewish Chronicle responded to this controversy by pointing out the invisibility of Eastern European Jews in accounts of the violence in the Balkans.31 These events staged the question of Jewishness in Victorian culture around 1876 when Eliot’s novel first appeared. But in the following decade, the grounds of these questions shifted as many Eastern European Jewish immigrants, fleeing pogroms, substantially increased the London Jewish population. Acculturated Anglo-Jews provided welfare support including education for their poor, exiled coreligionists through such organizations as the Jewish Board of Guardians and the Anglo-Jewish Association. At the same time, xenophobic attacks surfaced as poor non-Jews blamed unemployment on these new refugees, and this situation increased anti-Semitism. Prosperous Anglo-Jews were eager to differentiate themselves from these new arrivals, and so the idea of Zionism—of a homeland for diasporic Jews of Eastern Europe—was promoted by acculturated Jews enjoying full civil and financial liberties in Britain as a way to further ensure their social difference.

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FIGURE 3.1: “Neutrality under Difficulties,” Punch LXXI (August

5, 1876): 51. Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.

EXODUS, RETURN, AND THE QUESTION OF CLOSURE IN DANIEL DERONDA When the Punch cartoon of Disraeli as indifferent to Ottoman outrages against Bulgarian Christians appeared in August 1876, the sixth book of Daniel Deronda had just been published in the previous month. In this book, titled “Revelations,” Mordecai communicates his restorationist vision during the Philosophers’ meeting at the Hand and Banner, a scene into which Eliot folds a wide range of views about Jews, from separatism to assimilation and

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conversion. Mordecai exhorts his coreligionists to “revive the organic centre; let the unity of Israel which has made the growth and form of its religion be an outward reality. Looking towards a land and a polity, our dispersed people in all the ends of the earth may share the dignity of a national life which has a voice among the peoples of the East and the West.”32 The “rational” Jew Gideon responds, “As to the connection of our race with Palestine, it has been perverted by superstition till it’s as demoralizing as the old poor-law. The raff and scum go there to be maintained like able-bodied paupers. . . . The most learned and liberal men among us who are attached to our religion are for clearing our liturgy of all such notions as a literal fulfillment of the prophecies about restoration, and so on.”33 For this profile of Palestine, Eliot drew on a description of Jerusalem that appeared in the Academy in April 1874, which begins: “Jerusalem, it will surprise no one to be assured by the most recent commercial reports from there, is one of the least commercial or industrial of cities. Its population is estimated at 18,000, of whom about 5,000 are Mohammedans, 8,000 to 9,000 Jews, and the rest Christians of various denominations.” The item concludes with an invitation to colonize: “There can be no doubt that the country could support a population many times larger than its present scanty number of poverty-stricken inhabitants.”34 The novel offers at least three ideas of Palestine: as an abstract concept for the renewal of a modern notion of ancient Jewish faith, through Mordecai; as a poorly administered community of assorted paupers, a place beckoning to British colonizers, through Gideon’s version here; and as a place of possibilities, both Jewish and more broadly a new spiritual humanism, to which Daniel prepares to travel. In Daniel’s final interview with Gwendolen, he informs her of his recently recovered Jewishness as well as of his travel plans: “ I am going to the East to become better acquainted with the condition of my race in various countries there. . . . The idea that I am possessed with is that of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre, such as the English have, though they too are scattered over the face of the globe.”35 The destination of Palestine or the Christianized Holy Land is not explicit here in the allusion to “various countries” in “the East.” Still, a doubleness of purpose seems to qualify these words. First, a kind of missionary zeal infects his language as he speaks of being “possessed” with an “idea,” and, second, the restorationist plan, so popular in millenarian discourse, is evident. Yet Daniel’s “national centre” for his “race” preserves the diasporic structure of “scattered over the face of the globe,” which he also compares to the English and the British Empire. Foremost is the notion that this travel is meant to educate Daniel about the condition of Jews beyond

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Europe, a journey that complements his earlier tours of Jewish communities in Europe. Mordecai’s dream of restoration is more symbolic, more a return to the spirit of Judaism rather than the land of Judea, even in his idea of “a new Judea, poised between East and West.”36 This vision resembles what Gillian Beer identifies as “an uncertain edge of possibility” on which both Daniel’s and Gwendolen’s narratives conclude.37 In effect, the ambiguity or in-betweenness of return that figures thematically at the novel’s end has been read as form and content. The novel concludes with both Gwendolen and Daniel as wanderers, the first a spiritual wanderer, the second embarking on a mission to the East. Gwendolen has returned to her mother and younger sisters, who in turn have been able to return to Offendene, a domestic restoration that resolves Gwendolen’s earlier status as “princess in exile.”38 What is noteworthy, both in Eliot’s treatment of the topic of a Jewish return to Palestine and in the reception of the Zionist theme accenting the novel’s closure, is the absence or uncertainty of women’s positions or views. The extended debate about the Jewish question at the Hand and Banner is a conversation among many men. Mirah has already been established as an exiled and wandering Jewess who has lived her short life in Vienna, New York, and London. When she relates her diasporic narrative to Mrs. Meyrick, Mirah confesses her religious faith as the center that holds her back from the brink of suicidal despair; this faith does not have a geographic center, but rather a spiritual location. In contrast to her foil, Daniel’s mother, whose conversion to Christianity is part of her rebellion against the sexism of Jewish patriarchal culture, Mirah is the idealized daughter, sister, and wife, mostly compliant to masculine wills. When Daniel’s mother asks him whether Mirah is “ambitious” and “seeks a path of her own,” he replies, “I think her nature is not given to make great claims,”39 a view compatible with the subservient and contingent agency of women in traditional Judaism, precisely what Daniel’s mother has rejected. Nevertheless, there are glimmers of Mirah’s gender difference even within this overarching conservative framework. Where Eliot affiliates Jewishness with poetic form and spiritual redemption, Cynthia Scheinberg argues that Eliot excludes women from this equation by insisting on “a distinct differentiation between Jewish male and female poetic capacity,” with women limited by the role of the public singer.40 However, Mirah’s memory of her mother reverses this gendering of Jewishness with poetic power, as she frequently recalls her mother through the “Hebrew hymns she sang” and asserts, “I will never separate myself from my mother’s people.”41 In this way, Eliot complicates the genealogies of Jewish identity; Mirah claims her matriarchal inheritance, while Daniel and Mordecai embrace a patriarchal legacy of

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Jewishness. Even Mirah’s wandering or “terrified flight from one parent”—her father—is also “a yearning after the other”42 parent, a quest to return to her mother whom she identifies with her Jewish faith, just as her father becomes a marker for faithless and immoral secular Jewishness. Nowhere is there an indication of Mirah’s independent perspective on their wedding voyage “to the East,” as she becomes assimilated into the convergence plot of the ending where her husband Daniel pledges to follow her brother Mordecai’s vision. Accordingly, some of the last words of the novel are channeled through Mordecai’s dying breath. Suggesting a spiritual marriage between him and Daniel, his phrasing echoes Ruth’s pledge to Naomi in the book of Ruth, yet with critical differences: “Where thou goest, Daniel, I shall go. Is it not begun? Have I not breathed my soul into you? We shall live together.”43 In the scene, Mirah is present, although only in the narration. She is never addressed or mentioned by her brother or husband. This culminating arrangement replays the moment when Daniel tells Mordecai of his revealed religious heritage: “The two men clasped hands with a movement that seemed part of the flash from Mordecai’s eyes, and passed through Mirah like an electric shock.”44 In both instances, Mirah plays the role of vessel, a silent link that provides an embodied seal for this homospiritual bonding.45 Where more recent scholars have relished the open-ended closure as a formal experiment or have reasoned that the ending of Daniel Deronda foreshadows in complex ways the modern Jewish Zionist project, many initial readers found the Jewish plot tedious or perplexing.46 From Henry James to F. R. Leavis, critics condemned this perceived bifurcated plot as aesthetic error. For James, the novel was not a coherent “river,” but instead “a series of lakes” or “uneven ponds” as if seen in a shattered mirror.47 At least one reader published a novel that rejected wholesale the tenor of a Jewish return that seems to prevail in Eliot’s ending. Anna Clay Beecher’s 1878 Gwendolen; or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to Daniel Deronda by George Eliot is a different narrative of return in its quest to reclaim Daniel from the Jewish plot and from Judaism altogether by restoring him to Gwendolen. In this version, Mirah dies with her baby in Cairo, while Daniel returns to Continental Europe where he and Gwendolen travel separately, searching for each other until their reunion at the end, when she is reclaimed. Daniel’s wandering across Europe is wrenched away from a Jewish diasporic meaning and instead construed as “but one continuous fleeing from a real desire,”48 namely, Gwendolen. In effect, Daniel Deronda too is reclaimed from Judaism.49 As John Picker observes, the varieties of sequels recommended or enacted are particularly ironic given that the novel “goes out of its way” to refuse closure.50 Beecher frames her sequel by inserting into the front of the

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volume an 1877 review that asserts “the almost universal disappointment at the unanticipated conclusion of the story—a conclusion which many readers have resented as though it were a personal grievance or affront.”51 The critics’ refusal of the ending refers entirely to Deronda’s marriage to Mirah rather than Gwendolen, and most sequels attempted to rectify this. Punch’s Pocket Book of 1877 offers a compressed sequel, with the image “Daniel Deronda,” in which Gwendolen and Daniel snuggle together at the domestic hearth, a scene nowhere implied in Eliot’s novel itself. The profile of Deronda resembles many of the Punch caricatures of Disraeli that resort to the stereotyping of Jewish noses. Unlike Clay’s anonymous novel a year later, here Deronda is not quite reconverted from Jewishness. Some Jewish readers moved in the opposite direction by privileging Daniel’s relationship to Mordecai and Mirah over Gwendolen’s story. Reina Lewis notes, “Like their Gentile counterparts who concentrated only on the Christian half of the novel, reviews and debates in the European Jewish press focus mainly on the Jewish characters and Zionist narrative.”52 For Bar-Yosef, “The Jews and premillenarians recognized the Zionist plot immediately, highlighted

FIGURE 3.2: “Daniel Deronda,” Punch’s Pocket Book for 1877, p. 188. Courtesy of the

University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.

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and embraced it, albeit in different ways not always consistent with Eliot’s own vision,”53 yet not all Jewish readers did embrace the implications of the drift of the voyage. James Picciotto, who had contributed a series on post-resettlement Anglo-Jewish history to the Jewish Chronicle, clarified that the vision of return shared by Mordecai and Daniel would “likely remain dreams for the present. Not only are there no signs of their speedy realization, but it is not at all sure that such a consummation is desired by the bulk of the Hebrew nation. The Israelites have become too firmly attached to the countries of western Europe” for them to be receptive “to exchange the splendour and luxury they enjoy in the European capitals, for a residence in an arid and semi-civilised land.”54 The Spectator objected to Eliot’s open-endedness where a clear itinerary vanishes: “We cannot dismiss Deronda on his journey to the East without feeling uncomfortably that he is gone on a wild goose-chase.”55 Whether readers found themselves at sea or read the ending as a “wild goose-chase,” this vagueness certainly prompted diverse ways of reading the projected travel out of England “to the East.” Readers who insist on a realist and narrativized interpretation of the last pages of the novel resort to surgical sequels or repudiate the ending as clumsy or unfathomable, or they read it as an endorsement of Zionism.56

READING FORMS, WOMEN, AND JEWISH RETURN AFTER DANIEL DERONDA I would like to use Eliot’s proto-Zionist vision as a catalyst for exploring figurations of exodus, exile, and return in the writing of three late-Victorian AngloJewish women writers, Katie Magnus, Amy Levy, and Mathilde Blind. Each of them responded in print to Eliot’s novel and to the idea of a return to Palestine, the specific locale all three writers name as the implied destination. Magnus, Blind, and Levy wrote about Jewishness and about Eliot across different genres and publishing venues that suggest their diverse connections with modern Jewish diasporic consciousness. By reading these literary texts and their authors’ depictions of Jewishness in a culture where Christianity dominates, I want to expand conventional nineteenth-century histories of women and religion. The first part of this section offers background on Magnus, Levy, and Blind, who lived in late Victorian London, and whose Jewish identifications and affiliations differed markedly. Then I will consider how poetic vision and narrative closure shape their engagements with exile and return as a Jewish ideal and as a Zionist idea. Of these three writers, Katie Emanuel Magnus (who published under the name “Lady Magnus”) was the most immersed in Jewish practice and belief.

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A 1924 obituary in the Jewish Chronicle described Magnus as “deeply religious, though of course not orthodox in observance.”57 Her husband, Philip Magnus, served as rabbi from 1866 to 1880 at the West London Synagogue of British Jews, the vanguard institution in the Anglo-Jewish reform movement.58 Magnus wrote about Jewish history for students, including two books, About the Jews in Bible Times (1881) and Outlines of Jewish History (1888), and she authored a collection of poems and assorted magazine essays on both Jewish and secular subjects. Like many of her middle-class coreligionists, Magnus was socially active on behalf of poor, immigrant Jews; in 1886, she founded the Jewish Girls’ Club in East End London, and she assisted Lily Montagu with a similar organization, the West Central Jewish Girls’ Club.59 In the 1880s, Magnus published a few articles that became the core of her 1888 book, Jewish Portraits, which included essays on Jehudah Halevi, Heinrich Heine, Manasseh Ben Israel, and Moses Mendelssohn, along with a chapter on Eliot’s title character, Daniel Deronda. These portraits accentuate a diasporic narrative of exile and wandering as the quintessential Jewish condition. For instance, Magnus traces Ben Israel’s relocation from Amsterdam to London with the seventeenthcentury Jewish resettlement in Britain, and Heinrich Heine’s displacement from Berlin to Paris a century later following his religious conversion from Judaism. “The Story of a Street” offers a portrait of a different kind, a history of the Jews’ quarter in Frankfurt, which includes poverty, plagues, and persistent persecution of “the poor pariahs of the Ghetto.”60 And in “Charity in Talmud Times,” Magnus cites a Talmudic passage that privileges women above men in receiving welfare because “man is accustomed to wander, and [that] woman is not.”61 Mathilde Blind offers a counterexample to Magnus’s immersion in Jewish and familial culture in late Victorian London. Recent scholars tend to distance Blind from Jewishness with only brief mention of her background “from a Jewish banking family by the name of Cohen.”62 After her father’s death when Blind was a young child, her mother, Friedericke Ettlinger, remarried the German revolutionary Karl Blind. An entry in the 1901 edition of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography notes that Blind “became practically an Englishwoman” after she emigrated with her mother and stepfather from Germany to London where they associated with republicans and radicals who favored secularism.63 Whether the phrase “became practically” references Blind’s German or Jewish ancestries, this not-quite status captures an equivocal element of Anglo-Jewishness. If recent readers have been blind to the significance of Blind’s Jewish origins, one of her contemporaries was not. In an 1886 Jewish Chronicle essay, “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day,” Amy Levy proclaims, “Among distinguished women of to-day who are of Semitic origin we may mention . . . that

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graceful poet and writer of belles lettres, Miss Mathilde Blind.”64 Blind and Levy knew each other through the London literary network of salons, clubs, and the Reading Room of the British Museum, where they both worked in the 1880s. Nevertheless, Blind’s identity raises the question of what constitutes Anglo-Jewish writing; she never aligns herself with Jewishness either by family or by belief or practice and is often cited as an atheist. Still, a diasporic consciousness, one consistent with ideas of Jewish exile, inflects her poetry, especially in the 1895 collection Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and the Occident. The cover design of the second edition of 1896, from Chatto & Windus, displays a motif with scarabs of ancient Egypt. In this edition, opposite the title page, are excerpts from several reviews. One commends Blind for “a breadth and variety of view uncommon in a poetess,” another for “charming pictures of Eastern and Western life and characters,” and still another for her “curious, indeed unique, impression of the Orient.”65 The last and lengthiest endorsement, from the Academy, installs Blind in the pantheon of English literature, but with gender qualifications: “Miss Blind has attained a high and definite position among English poets. . . . She has the distinction also of being one of the very few women poets, whether of our own time or of any other, who have made any mark in English literature.”66 If these reviews of Birds of Passage reveal the hierarchical binaries of gender and genre, global place, and nation, the volume itself seeks to reorient these categories. The “Prelude” poem that frames the collection emphasizes flight, voyage, and transience—both spatial and temporal. This lyric concludes: “Even as shadows Birds of Passage cast upon their onward flight / Have men’s generations vanished, waned and vanished into night.”67 An updated variation on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” these lines suggest the grand sweep of evolutionary time and the ephemerality of “men’s generations.” Across Birds of Passage, the poetic persona remains skeptical of a Western God, but as a nomadic or diasporic Arab, this speaker inhabits the realm of Semitic wanderers, even depicted in the Illustrated London News. As I will discuss in more detail, Blind’s biography of George Eliot also emphasizes exclusion and difference, a subject she addressed in her publications about the lives of other exiled, intellectual women, including Marie Bashkirseff and Madame Roland. While Blind’s publications rarely or obliquely address Jewishness and Magnus’s often do, Amy Levy’s career was bifurcated between Jewish and secular subjects and venues of publication, as her own writing performs a meandering trajectory of departures from and returns to Jewish topics. Born into a London middle-class Anglo-Jewish family in 1861, Levy enjoyed an usually progressive education; she was the first Jewish student to study at Newnham

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FIGURE 3.3: “Sketches in Cairo”: “Old Jewish Woman of Cairo” and “Young Jewish Woman of Cairo,” Illustrated London News LXXXI (November 18, 1882): 513. Courtesy of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Library.

College, Cambridge, and only the second Jewish woman at that university.68 Levy’s double minority status as a Jewish woman may explain why she left Cambridge after two years to return to London. Only since 1871 had Catholics and Jews been able to enroll at Cambridge, Oxford, and Durham Universities, when the University Tests Acts abolished the student requirement of membership in the Anglican Church and mandatory attendance at church services.69 In a sense, Levy is the middle term, the textual connective tissue between Magnus and Blind. She mentions Blind in her essay on modern Jewish women, and Magnus cites Levy in two of her Jewish portraits. Levy knew Blind through literary and feminist connections, while her acquaintance with Magnus most likely came from the West London Synagogue congregation to which Levy’s family belonged when Magnus’s husband was a rabbi there and when Magnus herself taught classes in the synagogue’s religious school. In Magnus’s essay, “Heinrich Heine: A Plea,” first published in 1882 in Macmillan’s Magazine, and later included in Jewish Portraits, she uses Levy’s translation of Heine’s poetry. These lines appear in the context of a discussion about Heine’s perpetual unrest or keen sense of exile following his conversion to Christianity. In another Jewish portrait in her book, Magnus credits Levy with translating

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Jehudah Halevi’s Hebrew verse indirectly from a German translation. In these two instances, Levy appears in footnotes of Magnus’s male Jewish portraits. Levy twice refers to Daniel Deronda and Eliot’s vision of modern Jewishness, first in an 1886 Jewish Chronicle essay, “The Jew in Fiction,” and second in her novel Reuben Sachs, published in late 1888 just after Magnus’s Jewish Portraits. Blind writes about the novel’s ending in her 1883 biography of George Eliot, and Magnus responds to Eliot’s allusion to Palestine in her chapter on Daniel Deronda in Jewish Portraits. Although many Jewish readers were pleased with Eliot’s educated depiction of a range of Jewish characters and her advocacy of tolerance, some, such as Picciotto, dismissed the protoZionist dream as against the grain of acculturated Anglo-Jewish experience. Nevertheless, there were abundant endorsements of this murky plot of return at the novel’s end among Anglo-Jewish men besides Hermann Adler. Joseph Jacobs wrote in his Macmillan’s review, “Mordecai’s views of the resumption of the soil of the Holy Land by the holy people are the only logical position of a Jew who desires that the long travail of the ages shall not end in the total disappearance of the race.”70 Despite their very different relationships to Jewishness, neither Magnus, Blind, nor Levy share Jacobs’s assessment of Jewish restoration as “the only logical position of a Jew.” All three women read Daniel Deronda’s mission (quoting Eliot’s novel) “of restoring a political existence to my people, making them a nation again, giving them a national centre”71 as unsatisfying narrative closure. The chapter of Jewish Portraits addressing Eliot’s novel takes the form of a rebuttal to a recent publication, George Eliot and Judaism, a book by David Kaufmann of the Jewish Theological Seminary of Budapest, which had been translated from German and issued by Blackwood. Titled “Daniel Deronda and His Jewish Critics,” the chapter conflates the character with the book as Magnus takes particular issue with Kaufmann’s contention that most readers find the Jewish world of the novel “foreign, strange, and repulsive.”72 On the contrary, asserts Magnus, readers like Kaufmann should be able to discover poetry within the sordid realism of these sections: “Poetic insight, one might almost venture to think, should be able to discern in poetic aspirations, however unfamiliar and even alien to itself, something different from bran.”73 Given this correction on Kauffman’s assumption that many readers cannot derive the poetry from the “bran,” it is surprising that Magnus does not follow this reading instruction when she turns to the novel’s end. Indeed, it is on the concluding vision of return in Daniel Deronda that Magnus’s critique of Kauffman turns. In response to his assertion that the novel is “a Jewish book,” Magnus asks, “Does this, then, mean that the ‘national’

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idea is a rooted, practical hope? Do English Jews, indistinguishable in the mass from other Englishmen, really and truly hold the desire, like Mordecai, of ‘founding a new Jewish polity, grand, simple, just, like the old’? . . . Was Daniel’s honeymoon-mission to the East to have this practical result?”74 Magnus faults Eliot for converting a symbolic Palestine into a literal destination of return, as she defines Jewish nationality as a “spiritual” rather than a “temporal sovereignty, to a supremacy of mind rather than of matter.”75 Magnus argues that the lyric form is more suitable than narrative for rendering Jewish exile and return as religious ideals rather than embodied, material acts. Thus, she reads Daniel’s planned exodus from London as “out of harmony with the general tone of modern Jewish thought” in which “Jews of the present day would be ready to follow Mordecai in imagination than Deronda in person to Judea,” and so Magnus underscores a distinction between “the ideal rather than the idea of Judaism.”76 By aligning Daniel’s departure with the “idea” rather than the “ideal,” Magnus implies that the novel’s narrative closure cannot convey any allusion to a Hebrew poetic tradition in which “Jerusalem,” “Palestine,” and “Judea” bespeak a spiritual union, not a material resettlement. While I have already highlighted how more recent readers have appreciated ambiguity in the novel’s closure as both generic experimentation and political possibilities rather than colonizing determinism, Magnus resembles other initial readers in this insistence on narrative teleology. But she does depart from male coreligionists like Jacobs and Kaufmann who celebrated a Jewish homeland. By contrast, Magnus has no difficulty perceiving this metaphoric meaning of Jerusalem as religious renewal in her essays on Jewish poets. The lyric poetry of Heine and Halevi opens up space for a visionary Jerusalem in ways that narrative construction closes down for Magnus in Eliot’s novel. Lyrical return through the figure of Jewish wandering fosters this “ideal” reading. Jewish Portraits concludes with a composite portrait titled “Women in Israel.” Complementing Aguilar’s 1845 The Women of Israel, this essay uses “Israel” to refer to Jewish women, both biblical characters, as Aguilar does, and contemporary female coreligionists. “Israel” means the nation or community of Judaism. The essay attempts to bridge ancient views of women and their proscribed roles with modern attitudes. Accordingly, she renders “women’s rights” a subject of importance from Hebrew scripture to the present as she identifies “a delightful continuity of wholesome womanhood, an unbroken line of fit claimants for fitting woman’s rights.”77 The title “Women in Israel” extends even to Girton and Newnham graduates, yet here Magnus strives to align scriptural injunctions that women serve the needs of men with ambitions of “modern maidens,” although she ultimately delivers a traditional portrait

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of gender relations compatible with Hebrew biblical examples. As with her treatment of “Israel” itself as an ideal rather than a real geographic location, Magnus promotes transhistorical and transnational ideals of gender in these terms too: “Realities may shift and vary, but ideals for the most part stand fast, and thus, despite all superficial differences, in essentials the situation is unchanged between those daughters of the desert and our daughters of to-day.”78 Where Magnus’s ideal of Zion in response to the closure of Daniel Deronda might ensure civil liberties for diasporic Jews who embrace diverse geographic homelands, her ideal of women in Israel advances a conservative composite portrait. The frontispiece to the 1888 book redeems contemporary stereotypes of unassimilated Jewish “old-clothes” men by affiliating them with scholars and rabbis; the caption below the sketch reads: “The pedlar and hawker fathers, with their packs cast off, were priests and teachers too.”79 The one female figure in the drawing remains in the background, looking at domestic wares offered for purchase, while in the foreground is an old bearded man with a skull cap, one hand resting on a large tome, the other on the top of a young boy’s head. Condensed in the image are the traditional gender politics Magnus attempts to reconcile with modern campaigns for women’s rights. In Blind’s 1883 biography titled George Eliot (the first published on Eliot), the question of Palestine is the single most salient issue in her treatment of Daniel Deronda. More emphatically than Magnus, Blind dismisses both the ideal and the idea of a Jewish national identity. Writes Blind, “This notion that the Jews should return to Palestine in a body, and once more constituting themselves into a distinct nation, is curiously repugnant to modern feelings. As repugnant as that other doctrine, which is also implied in the book, that Jewish separateness should be still further insured by strictly adhering to their own race in marriage.”80 Blind protests with vehemence the idea of Jewish return both as a geographic event and as a commitment to “Jewish separateness” through marriage. Blind’s critique of Eliot’s treatment of Anglo-Jewishness is compatible with her own acculturation into a radical, feminist secularism in which a Jewish state, whether symbolic or literal, has no place or appeal. Blind comments, “[Ma]ny of the most eminent Jews, so far from aspiring towards such an event, hardly seem to have contemplated it as a desirable or possible prospect.”81 Repeatedly, Blind insists on Eliot’s excessive embrace of Jewish return: “This seems carrying the principle of nationality to an extreme, if not pernicious length. If there were never any breaking up of old forms of society, any fresh blending of nationalities and races, we should soon reduce Europe to China.”82 Using “Europe” for modern cultural diversity and “China” for an older and insidious sameness, Blind Orientalizes Jewish nationalism.

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FIGURE 3.4: “The pedlar and hawker fathers, with their packs cast off, were priests and teachers too.” Harry Furniss, Frontispiece, Jewish Portraits (1888). London: T. Fisher Unwin. Author’s personal collection.

However, Orientalism provides a figurative vehicle for diasporic displacement and uprootedness in the lyric form, as in Blind’s poems in Birds of Passage. In this chapter on Eliot’s novel, Blind advocates for an updated, secularized identity by listing some of the very names populating Magnus’s Jewish Portraits. Here she qualifies her group of eminently modern European Jews whose “sympathies” were “not distinctively Jewish but humanitarian.”83 In this respect, she parts company with Magnus, who maintains a claim to Jewish exceptionalism along with her assertion of modern acculturated Anglo-Jewry, just as Magnus also clings to gender essentialism alongside her endorsement of women’s rights. Blind underscores a collision between Eliot’s conviction about a “modern tendency toward fusion” of Jews in her Theophrastus Such essay, “The Modern

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Hep! Hep! Hep!” and the “stress on the reconstruction, after the lapse of centuries, of a Jewish state”84 in the novel. To illustrate her point that “many of the most eminent Jews . . . hardly seem to have contemplated it [a Jewish state] as a desirable or possible project,”85 Blind names Spinoza, Heine, and the Mendelssohns, as well as one woman, Rahel Levin Varnhagen, whose patronage through her Berlin salon in the early nineteenth century fostered Heine’s early career.86 Some scholars have speculated that Varnhagen supplied Eliot with a model for Daniel Deronda’s mother, who likewise converts to Christianity. In this context, Blind does applaud Heine’s lyrical (in her words) “love and longing of a Jewish heart for Jerusalem,” but only after she clarifies, by quoting Heine, “The country of the Jews is the ideal, is God.”87 From her distanced or possibly disowned Jewishness, Blind reads Eliot’s novel without Magnus’s reverence for Jewish ideals. For Blind, return is foreclosed through this condition of secularized, assimilated exile, even though diasporic displacement thematically haunts her Birds of Passage: Songs of the Orient and the Occident poems and her reading of Heine’s poetry. Like Magnus and Blind, Levy rejects Daniel Deronda’s mission of return. In her essay, “The Jew in Fiction,” Levy acknowledges Eliot’s (as Levy puts it) “sincere and respectful attempt . . . to portray the features of modern Judaism.” But she diagnoses the ending of the novel as a flawed vision of return and restoration: “It was, alas! no picture of Jewish contemporary life, that of the little group of enthusiasts, with their yearnings after the Holy Land and dreams of a separate nation.”88 For Levy, these “yearnings” and “dreams” are incongruent with acculturated Anglo-Jewishness. She does not distinguish between figurative and literal return in her reading of Eliot’s novel as Magnus clearly does, but unlike Magnus, Levy does separate modern ideals of gender from what she understands as the ongoing reality of traditional, patriarchal restrictions for Jewish women. Levy’s critique of the sexism embedded in conservative AngloJewry first emerged through two letters she sent to the Jewish Chronicle in 1879 when she was seventeen. Levy responded to a letter in which a correspondent urged Jewish women to resist contemporary calls for women’s rights and instead adhere to traditional domestic obligations as outlined in Jewish texts. Noting that both “circumstance or temperament”89 often prevent women from marrying and necessitate their independent employment outside the home, Levy challenges the assumption that Jewish women by nature and by scriptural precedent are naturally fit for domestic work. Unmarried women especially bear the burden of the restrictions of traditional Jewish femininity. Writes Levy, “But I doubt if even the great thought of becoming in time a favourable specimen of the genus ‘maiden-aunt’ would be sufficient to console many a restless,

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ambitious woman for the dreary performance of work for which she is quite unsuited, for the quenching of personal hopes for the development of her own intellect.”90 Levy advocates for a different exodus, the freedom for women to escape traditional domestic roles. Due to their minority status in the larger English culture, Anglo-Jews tended toward more conservative gender values, a point Levy amplifies both in her critique of the ingrown “tribal duck-pond” of middle-class London Jews in Reuben Sachs and in “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-day.” The essay begins, “Conservative in politics; conservative in religion; the Jew is no less conservative as regards his social life; and while in most cases outwardly conforming to the usages of Western civilisation, he is, in fact, more Oriental at heart than a casual observer might infer. For a long time, it may be said, the shadow of the harem has rested on our womankind; and if to-day we see it lifting, it is only in reluctant obedience to the force of circumstances, the complex conditions of our modern civilisation.”91 Similar to the charges against Jewish patriarchal culture rendered by Daniel Deronda’s mother in Eliot’s novel, here Levy implicates Jewish men as “more Oriental at heart” in their sexism, which lags behind “Western civilisation.” Where Blind uses Orientalist imagery to explore exile and homelessness, Levy wields the clichés of Orientalism to lambast the patriarchal restraints of Anglo-Jewish culture on “the position of single women.”92 For Levy too, the lyric form is more suitable for capturing the spiritual and psychological displacements of exile. As an illustration, Levy’s poem “Captivity” expresses the complexity of diasporic interiority, although nowhere does it identify a specifically Jewish exodus or return. Nevertheless, the words convey what Scheinberg describes as “the tradition of Jewish poetic lament concerning the exile from a mythic Jewish homeland.”93 Published in Levy’s final collection of poetry in 1889, A London Plane-Tree and Other Verse, “Captivity” intimates the brokenness of memory, the loss of a linking remembrance to an originary place: “I cannot remember my country, / The land whence I came.”94 These verses work evocatively across the strictures and estrangements of the two subordinate identities of Jewishness and gender Levy explores in her fiction and essays. Here the longing for return overshadows the possibility of return to a homeland, the “country,” which is foreign, unfamiliar, and insubstantial, as the poem clarifies the problem of exilic memory. As Magnus, Blind, and Levy’s literary texts impart, poetic forms effectively imagine diasporic homelessness and the ideal of return, but conventional narrative structures of nineteenth-century realism lack this visionary elasticity. Although George Eliot may have been experimenting with this structure of closure at the end of Daniel Deronda by rendering Daniel’s journey as only an

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evocative possibility, without a terminus, few readers understood the ending in these terms. Even Levy’s characters in Reuben Sachs read the conclusion of Daniel Deronda as the exodus of English Jews from London to Palestine. In one scene, a group of cousins joke about an English gentleman converting to Judaism after attending the family’s breakfast meal following Yom Kippur. As they imagine his surprise that they do not resemble the Jewish characters of Daniel Deronda, one cousin wonders if this guest had expected “to see our boxes in the hall, ready packed and labelled Palestine.” Another cousin refers to this culminating voyage out of England at the end of Daniel Deronda as “that elaborate misconception” of George Eliot.95 With this Anglo-Jewish cousinhood ridiculing an English gentleman’s assumptions about modern Jewishness based on a novel by an Anglo-Christian writer, Levy explores the challenges of representing and reading Jewish diasporic experience. This reversal of the typical conversion story demonstrates the transcultural complexity of Levy’s novel where outsider and insider positions are varied and queried from several directions. At the same time, the novel explores the divided subjectivities of several acculturated Anglo-Jewish characters. Only when Levy disrupts realist narrative conventions at the end of Reuben Sachs is she able to effect in form this condition of diasporic estrangement and nostalgia conveyed through lyric poetry. In the epilogue, the central female character, Judith, moves from the insular world of Jewish West London into the Kensington fashionable society of her freshly converted husband, the English gentleman. Like the speaker in “Captivity,” Judith is seized by “a strange fit of home-sickness, an inrushing sense of exile” as she laments her loss: “She was in a fair way to drift off completely from her own people; they and she were borne on dividing currents.”96 The skewed verb tenses in this sentence enact a kind of dislocation. Like this tidal rush of diasporic homelessness, the narrative itself whirls into closure through formally fragmented pieces of foreshortened text divided by asterisks. By experimenting with staccato-like shards of images and irregular verb tenses in the final passages of Reuben Sachs, Levy resists the restorative nature of narrative closure and instead concludes her novel with a lyrical enforcement of suspension and betweenness. In these formal, literary ways, Levy creatively represents the condition of acculturated Anglo-Jewishness. Magnus, Blind, and Levy have similar objections to George Eliot’s vision of Jewish characters preparing to set sail from England to the East. Their inability to read this vision of restoration from diasporic homelessness as lyrical vision rather than as narrative inevitability is a consequence of literary genre. Their treatments of the novel’s end reveal aspects of Anglo-Jewish diasporic

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consciousness just before political Zionism became a reality at the end of the century. Perhaps we should pay attention to the ways in which Anglo-Jewish women’s writing about exile, wandering, and return engage with similar themes in narrative and lyric forms in English literary traditions. One might indeed read Reuben Sachs as a sequel to Daniel Deronda. After all, George Eliot described Gwendolen Harleth, the heroine of Daniel Deronda, as “a princess in exile.” And it is with this Anglo-Christian character, rather than the Jewish women in Eliot’s novel, that Levy ultimately identifies Judith Quixano, the heroine of Reuben Sachs. Both Eliot’s focus on Jewishness within the larger Christian culture and the writings of these three women in the wake of this influential novel offer a corrective to the general historical account of women and religion in the nineteenth century. To catch a sense of a lived past, in this case a minority religious identity for women at a particular time and place, imaginative writing enriches the texture of that history.

CHAPTER FOUR

Medicine and Disease: Women and Medicine in the Age of Empire pamel a k. gilbert

Lo! in that house of misery A lady with a lamp I see Pass through the glimmering gloom, And flit from room to room. And slow, as in a dream of bliss, The speechless sufferer turns to kiss Her shadow, as it falls Upon the darkening walls. ... A Lady with a Lamp shall stand In the great history of the land, A noble type of good, Heroic womanhood. —Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Santa Filomena”1

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The Thames nocturne of blue and gold Changed to a Harmony in gray: A barge with ochre-colored hay Dropt from the wharf: and chill and cold ... But one pale woman all alone, The daylight kissing her wan hair, Loitered beneath the gas lamps’ flare, With lips of flame and heart of stone. —Oscar Wilde, “Impression du Matin”2 The lady with the lamp and the woman (who is no lady) under the lamp represent two poles of Victorian thinking about women. The poem “St. Filomena,” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, honors the efforts of Florence Nightingale, angel of mercy but also strong-minded reformer for women’s rights to work in medicine, a role that Longfellow may not have had as much in mind. Wilde’s poem situates the urban prostitute in her usual setting by the Thames and under the gaslight, “pale” victim or villainess with a “heart of stone,” a stone’s throw from her final end in a suicide’s watery grave. Both of these images draw on a nineteenth-century commonplace—that women were fundamentally different from men in ways defined by their sexuality—either as self-sacrificing caregivers or as degraded temptresses. The period was also marked by the development of more intensive regulation over both what counted as medical caregiving and over a medicalized sexuality, particularly of women. And Britain’s encounters with racial and cultural Others in an expanding empire offered women both opportunities and unique challenges. The nineteenth century saw the expansion of Enlightenment discussions of what we would now call human rights, which included the rights of women. Since Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792),3 a growing number of literate middle- and upper-class women had agitated for a wider sphere of public influence (and later, the vote), the right to education and meaningful work, and more rights of their own even in the domestic sphere. They demanded freedom from violence, the right to divorce, or control of their own property. These struggles were part of the political and educational backdrop to the changing circumstances of women’s general health, as a larger proportion of the British population became increasingly affluent and leisured. But such changes also contributed to women’s growing involvement in health

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care, which itself was becoming professionalized in unprecedented ways and at unprecedented levels. At the beginning of the period, few medical practitioners were degreed doctors or surgeons, and all those were male. Doctors were not required to have what we would now recognize as specifically medical training, and surgeons trained largely by apprenticeship. Nursing was a form of paid servant labor requiring no training or was done by the women of the patient’s family. Midwifery was practiced by some surgeons or, more commonly, by women whose training was informal and whose experience varied wildly. By the end of the period, there had been a proliferation of degrees or certifications, and women practiced in all of the recognized medical professions, including as physicians and surgeons. Nursing was a recognized female profession.4 And doctors, surgeons, midwives, and apothecaries all were required to have differing specialized training and examinations. At the same time that women were moving into these professions and challenging assumptions about their proper sphere, women’s bodies were being pathologized in new ways. Although women had long been considered to be especially influenced by their reproductive physiology, new theories about the nervous system and human development suggested that women were more vulnerable to disease than men, both of the body and the mind. Advances in medicine and medical technology and in biology, such as midcentury evolutionary theory, seemed to some to provide evidence of women’s basic biological difference from, and inferiority to, men. The Victorian turn to domesticity and middle-class values coincided with an increased emphasis on the importance of women’s supposedly natural domestic and maternal functions. Woman’s caregiving function was considered biologically driven, based on her sexual difference, and it served as an entry point for various forms of surveillance—as did her sexuality itself. The regulation of sexuality through legislation about prostitution and venereal disease became a flashpoint for early feminist activism, as well as for women medics’ intervention in the public sphere.5

WOMEN AS MEDICAL CAREGIVERS Women had long been the primary providers of health care. It was considered part of women’s caregiving function to nurse sick relatives and children, and even the very ill and often the dying remained at home instead of in a hospital until fairly late in the century. That vademecum of Victorian housewives, Isabella Beeton’s The Book of Household Management, notes the following:

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All women are likely, at some point of their lives, to be called upon to perform the duties of a sick nurse, and should prepare themselves as much as possible, by observation and reading, for the occasion when they may be required to perform the office . . . Where serious illness visits a household, and protracted nursing is likely to become necessary, a professional nurse will probably be engaged, who has been trained to its duties; but in some families, and those not a few let us hope, the ladies of the family would oppose such an arrangement as a failure of duty on their part.6 In addition to this general feminine caregiving role, some women, especially among the working classes or agricultural working classes, had long specialized in assisting with births, nursing the old or very sick, helping with the ills of infancy and childhood, and doctoring with herbs and other remedies. Given this tendency, it seems logical that nursing, once it did professionalize, should be one profession that would be easily entered by women, and to some extent this was true, though caregiving’s long-standing associations with domesticity meant that many resisted middle-class women leaving the home environment to nurse strangers. Still, literary scholar Catherine Judd notes that nursing was already becoming a profession for middle-class women before the advent of the “lady with the lamp,” the charismatic and energetic Florence Nightingale, became a heroine of the Crimean War in the mid-1850s.7 The 1840s saw the foundation of Anglican nursing sisterhoods in England,8 and Judd argues that the stage was set for the middle-class professional nurse’s emergence even as early as the 1820s with representations of historical saintly sisters devoted to nursing in the Middle Ages.9 Of course, the abolition of Catholicism in Britain in the Renaissance meant the end of nursing sisterhoods such as still existed in France and elsewhere on the Continent, which were used as models for the Anglican sisterhoods of the 1840s. But the older women who dominated paid nursing up to the early nineteenth century in England were largely working class and were often distrusted in classed terms as intemperate, thieving, and sexually immoral, as well as indifferent to the suffering of their patients. Florence Nightingale and others like her were determined to change the public perception of nursing. Nightingale already was a nursing superintendent in London when the Crimean War began. But it was the war that gave Nightingale the stage on which to reach a broad audience, when she was sent as superintendent of nursing to Turkey.10 The war required nursing in hospitals, overseas, on a large scale. Nightingale successfully made the public face of nursing the middle-class “angel of mercy” on the battlefield. This project required a good deal of policing to get just the right cohort of young Englishwomen of impeccable behavior to represent the profession. Mary Seacole, a Jamaican woman

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who sailed to England to join Nightingale’s crew, was evidently considered an unsuitable representative and turned away, likely because of her mixed African and European descent (Seacole went on to establish herself in the Crimea as a nurse and grocer on her own terms and to write about it in her autobiography).11 Judd points out as well that the new emphasis on hospital nursing, as opposed to nursing in the home, led to concerns about the nurses’ mingling in the company of male staff,12 and Nightingale and others like her were very careful to monitor the sexual behavior of their recruits. But Nightingale succeeded in creating the public perception of the nurse as a young, attractive, self-sacrificing angel of mercy. As Judd says, the nurse was a seductive figure, but simultaneously one very much aligned with purity. Elizabeth Barrett-Browning observed rather tartly that the men who cheered this ideal on the battlefield would be the first to object if women stepped out of their approved role at home in Britain.13 Of course, women had a key role in medical caregiving both as nurses and in other capacities long before the nineteenth century. But in the late eighteenth century, as certain areas of medicine began to professionalize, control shifted to male medics. Birth, especially, was largely female territory until the eighteenth century, when the upper classes began to employ man-midwives, in imitation of the new French fashion. This shift initially required a good deal of effort to overcome the prejudice that a man in the birth chamber was an indecency. As one of Laurence Sterne’s characters says in the novel Tristram Shandy (1767),

FIGURE 4.1: “A Man-Mid-Wife.” Courtesy

of the Wellcome Library, London.

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defending his sister’s desire to have the “old woman from the village” attend her rather than a man-midwife, “—My sister, I dare say, added he, does not care to let a man come so near her ****. I will not say whether my uncle Toby had completed the sentence or not;—’tis for his advantage to suppose he had,—as, I think, he could have added no One Word which would have improved it.”14 Historian Jeanne Donnison observes that the development of forceps in about 1720 and their increasing use during births led to an increased dependence on men. Men alone were allowed the use of “surgical” instruments, among which forceps were classed.15 Tristram Shandy also satirizes the figure of the man-midwife hired by Mr. Shandy’s up-to-date husband, who seeks the man of science known for publishing a pamphlet attacking women midwives. Dr. Slop, the “accoucheur,” as he prefers to be called,16 patronizes the woman midwife, promptly breaks the baby’s nose with his forceps, and then requires the father to be thankful he has not castrated the child instead.17 By the late 1700s, however, the attendance of the man-midwife or doctor at births was widely accepted as a desirable form of expertise, and Scotland and Ireland began to regulate midwifery in the eighteenth century. By 1812, the Society of Apothecaries in England moved to professionalize and control access to what had come to be recognized throughout Europe as a medical specialty. Once women were pushed out of midwifery at the professional level, it was very hard to get back in. Historian Anne Digby affirms that most general practitioners (men who combined certification as apothecaries and surgeons) founded their practices on the treatment of women and children and that obstetrics were the bread and butter of the profession.18 Men charged much more than women. By the late 1870s, men saw the ability to charge “nothing under a guinea” for births as a sign of the respectability of their practices, and they might go as high as five guineas,19 whereas women might charge half a crown to ten shillings.20 Digby points out that according to an 1869 survey, the wealthy West End of London saw fewer than 2 percent of births attended by midwives (as opposed to male doctors).21 But the same survey shows that, in poorer areas of London, up to one-half may have seen a midwife and in “large manufacturing towns the figure might be as high as 90 per cent. GPs’ fees therefore needed to be kept low in a competitive market.”22 This certainly sheds light on the resistance of men to the attempts of middle-class women to reenter the medical profession as professionals certified in midwifery. When Sophia Jex-Blake, one of Britain’s first women doctors striving to get recognition for women doctors in England, suggested that she and her women medical students, who had completed all the training for a medical degree, should be allowed to be registered in obstetrics, the reaction was not generally favorable.23 She describes the result of their application to the College of Surgeons for the license in midwifery in 1876:

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If it suited certain members of the profession that we should be relegated to a side-door for admission to the Register, it was as offensive as possible to another section that this portal should be specially connected with the practice of midwifery, which Dr. Andrew Wood and others most loudly assured the public “was just the branch of practice for which women were least fitted.” The Obstetrical Society were at once in a flutter when the mere idea got wind, and, within a few days of our dreadful application, the medical papers solemnly informed the public that the Obstetrical Society had determined to appoint a committee to watch the proposal to render women eligible to the license in midwifery. The watching committee evidently passed into a condition of grievous trepidation, and on February 18th they forwarded an urgent remonstrance to the College of Surgeons, that “persons so imperfectly qualified” (i.e. who had attended the full course for a University degree in Medicine, and who were willing to submit to any required examination) must really not be admitted to the Register, for that such admission would be most “injurious to the interests of the public (!) and of the profession.”24 Yet the numbers also suggest that, all over England, the babies of families who could or would not pay for a male doctor were being delivered by women with no formal training or certification at all. And despite the attitude described by Jex-Blake previously, there were also men who saw the incursion of male midwives into the medical profession as a humiliating vulgarization of the profession. Donnison gives the example of Sir Anthony Carlisle of the Council of the Royal College of Surgeons, who considered childbirth to be a natural process under the purview of women, repudiating efforts to pathologize it as commercially driven. He also felt it was beneath the dignity of a professional surgeon to subject himself to hours of the “humiliating events of parturition.”25 As the medical profession consolidated its position and power, women demanding access to meaningful work also appealed to their traditional connection with caregiving and healing to justify their fitness for doctoring more generally. Jex-Blake pointed out in her defense of women doctors that the barring of women from medicine was quite recent and historically anomalous: a woman medic appears in The Iliad26 and a woman midwife attended the queen in 1470.27 Although women had been doctors in Britain in the Middle Ages, under Henry V, women were barred from surgery.28 Even later, and in England, women regularly treated the ill; St. Bartholomew’s Hospital in London had women on staff skilled in the treatment of skin diseases throughout the seventeenth century.29 However, by the early nineteenth century, the development

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FIGURE 4.2: A woman doctor examining a young girl’s finger. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

of “morbid pathology” and the science of dissection, especially in France, had resulted in a new professionalism. The profession began to self-regulate more, developing increasingly stringent requirements and exams for certification to practice from which women were effectively barred. As medicine professionalized, it became crucial to have a proper medical education beyond apprenticeship, unavailable to women as medical schools were male only. The first medical school for women in the West was opened, largely supported by Quakers, in Philadelphia in 1850. The first woman to become a doctor in the British Isles was probably James Barry, who studied at Edinburgh.30 Barry, who died in 1865 (birth unknown), was an army surgeon who served in the Caribbean, North America, and Africa.31 However, since she studied and practiced as an (undiscovered) transvestite, she cannot fairly be counted as an effective advocate for female doctors. The first declared woman doctor in Britain was Elizabeth Blackwell, born in England and educated in New York. She was able to practice in England because she had been in practice before the 1858 Medical Act excluded foreign diplomas. Since no medical school in the United Kingdom would admit women, 1858 was the end of prospects for women doctors educated abroad to practice in Britain.32 In order to attend medical school and practice, women often had to go abroad to the United States or, later, France. Some were credentialed abroad and came home to build professional lives without access to certification as doctors or surgeons.

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Finally, Jex-Blake, already credentialed in the United States, was able to persuade the University of Edinburgh to open their medical school to women in 1869. Still, women students’ initial reception by their fellow students and often even by professors in this formerly all-male domain was predictably cold, and tales of harassment and expressions of male resentment abounded. The authorities insisted women had to take the same courses but pay for separate lectures. The university was embarrassed when one of the women, Edith Pechey, took highest honors in the chemistry exam. The score should have earned her a prestigious scholarship but was given to the man who scored closest to her exam results.33 Subsequently, the women were mobbed and pelted with mud when they tried to enter an examination, although once they got in, they were also defended by several male students on the walk home.34 Twentythree of the male students also signed petitions for the women to be allowed to stay.35 However, the women were subject to much hostility on the part of some male students, and many authorities contrived to overlook it: The filthiest possible anonymous letters were sent to several of us by post; and the climax was reached when students took to waylaying us in some of the less-frequented streets through which we had to pass, and shouting indecencies after us, making use, sometimes, of anatomical terms which they knew we could not fail to understand, while the police were equally certain not to do so. This abominable practice was brought before the University Senatus by an indignant Professor, but it was decided that nothing could be done, because the students were in no way under College control except during class hours.36 The tone was often set by the professors. Jex-Blake remarks, in defense of mixed classes, “I, for one, cannot believe that less good and gentlemanly feeling should be expected from English and Scotch students, wherever their professors set them an example of courtesy, than is found among the undergraduates of foreign universities,”37 where in her experience, male students were courteous to the women (italics in original). In Edinburgh, the reaction was more mixed: “One medical Professor, Dr. Laycock, calmly told me, when I called on him, that he could not imagine any decent woman wishing to study medicine,—as for any lady, that was out of the question” (italics in original).38 Of course, women faced resentment and ridicule from their own sex as well. The novelist and critic Margaret Oliphant observed in 1867 that “women’s rights and women’s duties have had enough discussion, perhaps even from the ridiculous point of view. We have most of us made merry over Mr. Mill’s

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crotchet on the subject, and over the Dr Marys and Dr Elizabeths; but yet a woman has one duty of invaluable importance to her country and her race— and that is the duty of being pure.”39 When women asked to be admitted to medical schools, the objections raised were couched in terms of gender but also of class. Medicine was now an educated profession, which meant middle to upper class. It had been fine for working-class women to bind wounds and set bones when their male competitors were barbers (who had doubled as surgeons until 1745, when the surgeons formed their own separate professional group). But now surgery was a profession for gentlemen and those who aspired to be considered so. It also now included regulated training in groups that, like most formal schooling, were male domains. The dissecting room and lecture theaters were considered an inappropriate environment for a middle- or upper-class woman, especially an unmarried one, who would be materially exposed to facts she should not even know about in theory. The presence of women also made many men feel uncomfortable and uncertain of appropriate behavior. Jex-Blake describes the reasons given by the University of Edinburgh for resisting granting degrees to women: “Mr. Turner and Dr. Andrew Wood upheld the reputation of the Edinburgh medical clique for bigotry and intolerance; the former actually being not ashamed, as an anatomist, to quote the

FIGURE 4.3: Portraits of Elizabeth Blackwell, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, and Sophia Jex-Blake. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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worn-out old argument about the smaller size of women’s brains.”40 As both aspiring women doctors and others pointed out, however, the existence of women nurses made this argument less persuasive. One professor remarked that “he had never been present at an important operation without seeing women-nurses in attendance, and that therefore it failed to strike him as an enormity that women-students might be present also.”41 The women at the University of Edinburgh, even after a court battle, were not allowed to complete their degrees. Jex-Blake then opened the London School of Medicine for Women in 1874. Finally, in 1877, Jex-Blake and several students were allowed to take examinations in Ireland, becoming the first women to be certified for medical practice in the United Kingdom. For all the resistance, women doctors and surgeons were figures of cultural fascination. Punch ridiculed them, editorials discussed them, and novels were written about them. As women pushed the discussion into the public eye, several such characters appeared, for example in fiction by Charles Reade (A Woman Hater)42 and Wilkie Collins (“Fie! Fie! Or, The Fair Physician”).43 By the end of the century, the women doctors began “writing back,” producing their own novels about women in medicine. Literary scholar Kristine Swenson discusses novels written by some of the first British women doctors, Mona Maclean, Medical Student by Margaret Todd (1892) and Dr. Janet of Harley Street by Arabella Kenealy (1893).44 These were not the first novels to portray women doctors, but they were the first by women doctors, and perhaps the first to take a strongly progressive position. A slew of novels portraying women doctors positively also appeared in the United States and no doubt contributed to Britons’ interest in the figure. A congratulatory review in the United States predicts, “As likely as not we shall have a ‘Mona Maclean craze,’ for this romance will find its way into many study rooms and hospitals. Medical folks of both sexes and training schools of nurses will read and devour Graham Travers’s brilliant piece of fiction.”45 Importantly, in Mona Maclean, it is love and family that drive Mona’s success in medical studies; her caregiving desire is what makes her a successful doctor, and she is inspired to care for women who wish to see a woman doctor rather than a man. Thus, it is precisely the nineteenth-century idea of woman’s difference—her innate caring as a doctor and modesty as a patient—that makes Mona’s practice successful. This portrayal valorizes what women like Jex-Blake had long argued—that women’s fitness for medicine was not based on their rights to be like or as good as men, but on their innate difference. Nineteenth-century women doctors were often as overtly feminist as anyone of their day, but their feminism often also relied on the general medical and

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cultural essentialism that had been used to justify their disenfranchisement and exclusion from the professional world to begin with. Mona ends the novel in partnership with her husband, also a doctor, and the last scene of the novel has him call her in to consult a miserable girl who is too “hysterical” and ashamed to tell him of her condition, probably an illegitimate pregnancy. Women doctors were especially suited to the problems of women. The opportunities for women professionals were often better abroad than at home, and the empire provided an arena for women’s work both through government and the more traditionally feminine domain of missionary organizations. British activity in the East particularly provided an arena for women medical professionals in a culture in which many women would die—literally— before seeing a male doctor (although this was not unique to India or Eastern countries; Jex-Blake points out that many women in England never sought medical care for certain complaints out of delicacy in revealing them to a male doctor).46 Women doctors, especially those specializing in obstetrics, could see ample practice in such places as India, whereas their brethren in the British Isles were protected from such competition. Fanny Butler, who graduated from Jex-Blake’s London School of Medicine for Women, was among the first women who were sent out as doctors by various missionary societies (in her case, the Baptist Zenana Missionary Society) in 1880.47 Florence Nightingale called for women doctors in India, pleading that “there are at least 40 million [women] who will have only women doctors and who have none.”48 India already had, of course, its own healing practitioners, among them women. For example, smallpox inoculation had been practiced there by women for years before vaccination came to be practiced in the West,49 but Britons’ initial interest in and respect for Indian local practices in the eighteenth century gave way, over the course of the nineteenth, to a dismissive attitude toward “folk” and “old wives’ ” medicine versus allopathic, or Western scientific, medicine. Western medicine was identified with order, cleanliness, science, and modernity, and Indian knowledge with backwardness, dirt, and superstition. As historian Alison Bashford notes, “The literal whiteness of late-nineteenth-century British nurses symbolized and embodied a moral cleanliness and ordering: a racialized bourgeois culture where cleanliness was whiteness.”50 Soon, under the influence of Western women doctors, India also began to have (usually higher-caste Hindu) women who were willing and able to study Western medicine abroad. Esther Lovejoy, in her study of women in medicine, cites the early case of Anandibai Joshee, a young woman sent by her husband to Pennsylvania to study medicine. She was appointed head of a department at a hospital in Kohapur at

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FIGURE 4.4: Woman doctor in India. Courtesy of the Wellcome

Library, London.

the age of twenty-one in 1886. Sadly, she died the same year. By the 1890s, the first medical schools had been established in India for Indian women.51 Western women also sometimes qualified in the colonies, as did Mary Scharlieb, a Briton who studied midwifery and surgery in Madras. She defended her career choice by appealing to the special needs of Indian women.52 Kumari Jayawardena, in her work on the relation of Western and colonial women in medicine, notes that one of the first areas in which white medics took up the cause of native instruction in Western medicine was the education of midwives (dhais). A British civil service surgeon started a school for midwives in 1866,53 and by the 1880s, it was being run by women. Edith Pechey, the young woman who had been deprived of the prestigious Hope scholarship for chemistry in Edinburgh, ran a training college for native nurses in India as well as a hospital for women staffed by European women doctors.54 As historian Antoinette Burton has pointed out, the power relationships between white women and their “suffering sisters” in the colonies were complex.55 Driven by philanthropic desire and often by a feminist ideal of solidarity, white women had in the colonies an unquestionable authority and power, which they used to advance their views, often at the expense of local beliefs and values. “Sisterhood” was a vision of a big, white sister and a little native sister with a long way to go to reach her majority and who should submit to the superior will and knowledge of her Western counterpart. That said,

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relations between white women medics and patients and native women medics and patients were transformative on both sides of the imperial divide in the age of empire, as these women often spearheaded not only religious and sanitary changes, but also legal challenges to child marriage and even to the status of wives’ and widows’ rights in the colonial setting. In turn, native and European women’s experiences and achievements overseas provided models of and arguments for change in the metropole.

WOMEN AS PATIENTS As some elite women of the nineteenth century fought the battle to enter professional medicine, all women experienced a role as patients, probably in more thoroughgoing ways than in previous periods. Historian Anne Digby observes that the Victorian period saw a shift from earlier, “more robust” views of women’s health to “a biological reductionism that identified femininity with invalidism.”56 She cites a “well-known medical manual,” E. J. Tilt’s 1851 On the Preservation of the Health of Women, to the effect that “a woman’s life was ‘a long chain of never-ending infirmities.’ ”57 In part because of this sense that a women’s normal state was pathological, many women perennially dosed themselves and their daughters with various medications, both prescription and quack. Many apothecaries and doctors made their fortunes on such prescriptions and the consultations attending their use; others inveighed against the overmedication of women, as did many novelists. Young girls in George Meredith’s The Ordeal of Richard Feverel are dosed by their mothers both as aids to health and as forms of discipline. The redoubtable Mrs. Grandison keeps her bevy of girls in order with a regime of gymnastic exercise and frequent medication: The elder ones [daughters] had, in their ignorance, wished to marry young gentlemen of their choosing. . . . If they rebelled, as model young ladies occasionally will, Mrs. Caroline Grandison declared that they were ill, and called in Dr Bairam to prescribe, who soon reduced them. Physic is an immense ally in bringing about filial obedience.58 Such medication was likely to include not only iron-rich beverages, but also strong digestive purgatives such as castor oil or salts and senna (these last given alike to women and men). Women whose menses were blocked were given cramp-inducing potions to restart them; on the other hand, a young woman who menstruated early in her parents’ view was as likely to be given

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a low-protein diet and kept on bread and milk or water in order not to overstimulate her systems. Indeed, once a middle- to upper-class young woman began to menstruate, generally in her midteens, she could expect to be considered a candidate for more or less constant medical intervention throughout her life. (Working-class girls of that age were usually already laboring, and their families or employers may have been less likely to devote disposable income to such concerns.) The various stages of development, in women, were associated with dangers to health both physical and mental. In 1828, George Man Burrows writes, [e]very body of the least experience must be sensible of the influence of menstruation on the operations of the mind. In truth, it is the moral and physical barometer of the female constitution. . . . the functions of the brain are so intimately connected with the uterine system, that the interruption of any one process which the latter has to perform in the human economy may implicate the former.59 Literary scholar Andrew Mangham has lately discussed the association of the menstruating adolescent with murderous crime. Among a multitude of examples, Mangham cites the case of the servant Martha Brixey, eighteen years of age, who cut the throat of an infant under her care. Her doctor, John Mould Burton, explained that it was her amenorrhea, the suppression of her menses, that caused insanity.60 Motherhood, of course, had its own dangers—pregnancy was a period of particular nervous sensibility, and many believed that a fright to the mother could injure or imprint the unborn child. Puerperal mania, a state of insanity that attended childbirth, was a danger beyond the infections and fevers that often weakened new mothers. And menopause could be most dangerous of all: The critical period . . . when menstruation ceases, is certainly a period favourable to the development of mental aberration. . . . The moral character, at the age when the menses naturally cease, is much changed . . . and every care or anxiety produces a more depressing or permanent impression on the mind. . . . Besides . . . the age of pleasing in all females is then past, though in many the desire to please is not the less lively. . . . It is now especially that jealousy exerts its empire, and becomes very often a cause of delirium. Many, too, at this epoch imbibe very enthusiastic religious notions; but more have recourse to the stimulus of strong cordials.61

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FIGURE 4.5: “Syphilis.” Courtesy of the Wellcome

FIGURE 4.6: “Woman consider-

Library, London.

ing suicide.” Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

A good deal of argument about the causes and nature of insanity took place in the nineteenth century, but the general opinion about women’s natural likeliness to fall mentally ill during adolescence, pregnancy, or menopause seems to have changed little over time, though the analysis of how and why multiplied over the period. Despite a growing interest in male mental illness (including “male hysteria”), women were considered more likely to derangements caused by the reproductive system. Additionally, they were also considered by many experts to be more likely to pass along inherited madness.62 Women’s sexuality was considered the source of their weaknesses, mental, physical, and moral. Whereas the eighteenth century had largely figured women as being as much or more sexually desiring than men, nineteenthcentury thinkers tended to be more conflicted about the naturalness of women’s desire. Concern about the poor and a growing sense that abject poverty was not inevitable also gave rise to the sense that something should be done to help women on the streets. The “fallen” woman came to be seen, at least by some, more often as a victim than a villainess. The rise of morbid anatomy (the dissection of dead bodies as a fundamental training for medics) led to a need for bodies to be dissected, and in 1832, the Anatomy Act responded to anger about grave robbers selling bodies to medical schools by designating the bodies of the workhouse poor, the criminals, and unclaimed suicides for this purpose. The practice gave rise to the cliché of the pathetic corpse of the young and beautiful suicide found drowned and left to the indignities of the dissection room. Indeed the drowned young woman was a staple image of the period,

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whether dissected or not. The fallen woman by the river was a staple of paintings, such as Augustus Egg’s 1858 Past and Present triptych, the third panel of which shows the unfaithful wife homeless under a bridge with her illegitimate child. Thomas Hood’s poem “Bridge of Sighs”63 exemplifies the image of the seduced and abandoned woman drowned: Take her up tenderly, Lift her with care; Fashion’d so slenderly Young, and so fair! ... Touch her not scornfully; Think of her mournfully, Gently and humanly; Not of the stains of her, All that remains of her Now is pure womanly. ... The bleak wind of March Made her tremble and shiver; But not the dark arch, Or the black flowing river: ... Picture it—think of it, Dissolute Man! Lave in it, drink of it, Then, if you can! Hood’s poem presents a typical scene with river, bridge, a dark arch, and a typical protagonist. Her “stain” is wiped clean by her death, bringing her back into the pale of human sympathy and inspiring indignation against her seducer. The woman whose suicide was the actual occasion for the poem was neither young nor seduced and abandoned, but this was a more familiar and acceptable story than a middle-aged woman’s victimization by robbery, which in fact was what happened. The pathos of the poem is spoiled somewhat by repeated images of the water as “muddy impurity” sullying the corpse, resulting in some unintentionally bathetic moments:

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Still, for all slips of hers, One of Eve’s family— Wipe those poor lips of hers Oozing so clammily. But the poem was wildly successful, so we should perhaps assume that Hood’s audience was not as put off by the rhyming of family and clammily as might be the modern reader. The corpse, however, also sullies the water, as the ending “drink . . . if you can!” suggests, given that this was also a period in which the pollution of the Thames was very much at issue. The body of the woman is that of a victim, but a dangerous one, for all that.

POLICING WOMEN’S SEXUALITY AT HOME AND ABROAD Empire brought new diseases into the experience of Britons, just as the activity of imperial Europe altered the colonial environment in ways that often inadvertently promoted the spread of diseases within the colonial setting. Just as the colonies provided opportunities for women medical professionals, they had long done so for many more European men. And those men entered an existing environment in which they encountered gender standards and behaviors unfamiliar to them. The colonial environment was perceived as both sexually threatening and seductive. Historian Philippa Levine notes that Britons were likely to believe colonial women to be more available and also more sexually developed and aware than “white” women.64 This “sexual excess” was identified with evolutionary and intellectual inferiority of the races these women belonged to and, of course, of the women themselves.65 Early in the century, British men were likely to travel abroad to make their fortunes, either leaving a wife at home or marrying after a period of time abroad. Predictably, this led to irregular liaisons with women overseas and a growing population of mixed-heritage children. In 1845, the American writer Charles Edward Lester quotes an informant in India as saying: The licentiousness which prevails among the British servants of the Company is shocking in the extreme. Most of them go out there unmarried; and such is the social state of India, that it presents strong temptations to young men connected with the military, civil, and medical professions, and the great mass of them indulge in the most vicious and abandoned habits. While marching with the troops, and during their journeyings

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into the interior on business, the most brutal outrages are often inflicted by them upon Indian girls.66 Early on, these relationships were tolerated; later, especially as race science gained traction and as the British population in India increased, they were increasingly discouraged. And, Levine notes, the rare white women in a relationship with a nonwhite man was simply excluded from white society nearly everywhere in the empire.67 Later in the century, as military actions displaced larger British populations and innovations in transportation allowed quicker transit to South Asia, more midlevel government managers and officers brought British wives to live with them. For the common soldier who could not afford to bring a wife, however, there were brothels, staffed with native women and certified healthy by Her Majesty’s army surgeons, where the women were forbidden to accept native clients.68 Mary Spongberg shows evidence that although all women were pathologized in relation to venereal disease, the disease was “raced” insofar as the bodies of nonwhite women and the habits of nonwhite people were conceived as producing particularly “virulent” disease.69 Women overall increasingly came to experience their sexuality as an object of medical intervention in this period, and the women most vulnerable to medical policing were the poor, the transgressive, and nonwhite women in the colonies. A principal concern of the nineteenth century was the spread of venereal disease, particularly as the empire came to require the long-term stationing of occupying troops overseas. Early in the century, women were considered actually productive of disease, as well as vectors for disease; that is, venereal disease was thought to develop spontaneously in “licentious” women, and then to be communicated to men. Spongberg traces a trend in the 1820s and 1830s to emphasize the vagina as a natural producer of disease, as some doctors believed that even a female virgin could be the source of venereal disease, and that prostitutes would inflict a proportionately more severe infection.70 In her study on perceptions of venereal disease in the period, Spongberg argues that this tendency drove policy that treated prostitutes as something different from other women and as less than fully human.71 While this belief certainly is prevalent in the writings of some doctors and policy makers, others countered just as strongly. However, as Frank Mort points out in his historical study of the moral aspects of nineteenth-century medicine, Victorian doctors like William Acton, who published extensive investigations into prostitution, employed “polarized oppositions between pure and impure women connected with a whole range of representations regulating female behavior in the 1850s and 1860s . . . in literature and art as well as in medicine.”72

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FIGURE 4.7: “She had a heart.” Courtesy of the Wellcome

Library, London.

In 1850, several doctors testified as experts before a select committee investigating the treatment of venereal disease. Discussing plans to implement the Contagious Diseases (CD) Acts, they argued that syphilis was spontaneously produced by the bodies of women.73 Although doctors came to better understand the etiology of such illnesses over the latter part of the century, the general pathologizing of women and of women’s sexuality is a remarkable feature of the period. Feminists fought back by asserting that women who were infected were victims of men’s lust and part of a pernicious system that supported prostitution in the first place. Literary scholar Kristine Swenson notes that New Woman novels tended to locate the source of venereal disease in men, in opposition to the widespread tendency of medical literature to locate it in the prostitute. Novels of this type by women doctors offered women medics as protectors of such female victims.74 Indeed, activists fighting to abolish the Contagious Diseases Acts included some of the earliest women doctors, such as Elizabeth Blackwell. Government attempts to control venereal diseases in the military also focused on the prostitutes, rather than their clients. The Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1867, and 1869 allowed police to seize women suspected of prostitution in port towns, forcibly examine for signs of venereal disease with a speculum, and forcibly imprison and treat them in “lock hospitals” if signs were found. The CD Acts provoked an outcry and galvanized middle-class women into action to protect working-class women from what some indignantly called “instrumental rape.” The CD Acts were finally repealed and ceased to operate in Britain in 1886, though such practices continued elsewhere in the Empire.

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British presence in India meant a constant battle against disease. White Britons were believed to be vulnerable to tropical environments, and women often more so than men. In late-nineteenth-century India, British women died at a much higher rate than the military men stationed there, largely because of complications following pregnancy, such as puerperal fever.75 Bashford notes that “being ‘out-of-place’ was understood to be a biological and medical (and later a psychological) problem, literally productive of disease.”76 Many Britons died of cholera and other tropical diseases, which the British attempted to control by setting up cantonments at some distance from native communities. But as the majority of Britons overseas after the Indian War of 1857 were military, the CD Acts were of great concern to military authorities abroad. Here were diseases the authorities thought they knew how to control. In India, Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katherine C. Bushnell wrote of the continuation of the practice of licensing brothels and lock hospitals in 1898 (published in 1899):77 the Contagious Diseases Acts . . . [were] carried out under Cantonment Regulations . . . There were placed with each regiment (of about a thousand soldiers) from twelve to fifteen native women, who dwelt in appointed houses or tents, as the case might be, called “chaklas.” These women were allowed to consort with British soldiers only, and were registered by the Cantonment magistrate, and tickets of license were given them. Besides the “chalda,” i.e., the Government brothel, there was in each Cantonment a prison hospital, in which the patients were confined against their will. To these Lock Hospitals the women were obliged to go periodically (generally once a week) for an indecent examination . . . The compulsory examination is in itself a surgical rape.78 When a woman was found to be infected, she was kept in the hospital; if the exam found her to be healthy, she was given a license to return to the brothel. Andrew and Bushnell quote the military order that provided for the Indian brothels: “In the regimental bazaars, it is necessary to have a sufficient number of women, to take care that they are sufficiently attractive, to provide them with proper houses, and, above all, to insist upon means of ablution being always available.”79 Andrew and Bushnell were particularly angered that women who developed advanced cases of disease were said to be turned out of the hospitals and away from the British brothels to fend for themselves.80 The order exemplifies the belief that men could not be expected to restrain themselves from the use of women for sexual hire, a belief that was more obliquely expressed in Britain but that still drove the legislation around prostitution and paternity.

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Whereas Englishwomen who practiced prostitution were either thought depraved or victimized, native (or nonwhite) women were often considered to be “natural” prostitutes. Philippa Levine observes, “Prostitution . . . could be represented as a throwback to primitivism. Colonial officials routinely argued that prostitution was normalized in nonwhite societies and held no stigma. This, they argued, was proof that subject peoples were less evolved.”81 Britons argued that such societies could be measured by how they treated their women, and the status of women became central to the discussion of British policy in the colonies.82 Ironically, this position allowed the British to claim that prostituting women to the troops was kinder than leaving them to their own people; British licensed brothels in Hong Kong, for example, were argued to be protecting women who otherwise would be miserably enslaved in brothels run by Chinese men.83 The relationship of British troops to colonial subjects was often reduced to a problem of managing sexuality, which, in turn, meant in the first instance, managing venereal disease. Paradoxically, several people felt that the ideal job for a woman doctor would be in the colonial lock hospitals; these included some of the inmates, who petitioned for a woman to be hired.84 Women doctors who had campaigned for

FIGURE 4.8: “Touch for Touch; or, a female Physician in full practice.” Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

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entry to the profession to minister to the poor and unfortunate of their own sex found themselves targeted for recruitment into these positions. Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain wrote in 1898 to C.B.H. Mitchell, the colonial governor of Hong Kong to advise that it would be desirable for the Colonial Government to engage one or more women doctors, to assist in the treatment of women afflicted with these special diseases, as well as of those admitted to the Government Hospitals for other diseases, in the hope of gradually overcoming the reluctance, common among Asiatic women of all classes, to take advantage of hospital treatment. The experiment has already been tried in Ceylon of appointing a woman doctor to look after the Women’s Hospitals.85 Apparently, the plan succeeded. Similar suggestions went out to other colonial governors. Some British women who supported the CD Acts also felt that this was an appropriate solution. Andrew and Bushnell cite a letter of April 21, 1897, in the London Times, by Lady Henry Somerset, president of the British Women’s Temperance Association of England, to Lord George Hamilton, in which she proposes that the brothels continue and that “no woman should be allowed to remain in this quarter unless periodically examined by properly qualified women doctors.”86 But there was a difference between ministering to prostitutes in the United Kingdom, where it was considered an opportunity for rescue work, and in the colonies, where the goal was to keep prostitutes working in good health. Andrew and Bushnell indignantly indict such British supporters who sacrifice the Indian women “for the health of British soldiers and their ‘future wives’ and ‘unborn offspring’ in England! and fifty per cent. of these victims [the Indian prostitutes are] from fourteen to sixteen years of age! And will women physicians be induced to attempt the task of keeping these mere children in health under such conditions?”87 Since most of the European women doctors overseas opposed both the CD Acts and prostitution on moral and religious grounds, they were understandably loathe to work in lock hospitals. Most women doctors in the colonies thus focused on midwifery and general practice with women patients, and those who were affiliated with lock hospitals found themselves in opposition to many of their peers. But it is hardly surprising that the lady with the lamp and the woman under it found themselves (often unwillingly) sharing space in the colonies and in the imaginations of British empire builders. This collapsing of categories was simply an extension of the pathologizing of women’s sexuality, combined with the strategic

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use of that essentializing tendency by the women who entered the medical profession to argue for their own unique suitability for practice among women. Throughout the end of the age of empire, women doctors would be enmeshed in the question of women’s sexuality, and if the scope for their professional activities was most generous abroad, whether these women were European doctors or native women, at home they were associated with sexual license and danger. Both as medical practitioners and as patients, women continued to be defined by their sex.

CHAPTER FIVE

Public and Private: The Fault Lines between Public and Private Selves in Women’s Autobiographical Writings linda h. peterson

The concept of separate spheres has become such a staple of nineteenth-century studies that we often forget its constructed nature and its contested application in the lives of Victorian women. The belief that men and women had different spheres of influence—public versus private, civic versus domestic, political versus moral—came into prominence early in the nineteenth century but was used in later decades to argue for various agendas and actions by both liberal and conservative thinkers. Few women rejected the concept outright or ignored its relevance to their life writing, whether they consciously refer to their feminine influence in the home or quietly refute the separate spheres binary by documenting personal contributions in the public arena. Virtually all women acknowledged that becoming an author or writing an autobiography was, to some extent, an act that made them “public property,”1 with a loss of privacy that they were willing to risk for a greater common good.

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This chapter discusses the genres of Victorian auto/biography as they aided in the development of the concept of separate spheres and also contributed to its demise. The private half of the binary produced a specific genre of auto/ biography—the domestic memoir—that reflected the dominant ideology by locating the woman firmly in her home and highlighting her experiences as wife and mother, sister and daughter. Yet many women auto/biographers resisted this confinement to the private realm and turned to genres more commonly associated with masculine action in the intellectual, religious, and political realms. These included the narrative of intellectual bildung, the spiritual autobiography of (de)conversion, and the res gestae account of public achievement. Whatever the position of the auto/biographer or her attitude to separate spheres, Victorian life writing contends with a widespread belief in the differences between men’s and women’s natures, roles, and realms of influence. As I shall argue, however, separate spheres creates a paradox for every woman auto/biographer, whatever her ideological position: to produce an auto/biography is to make public a life that has been private, and to publish a life narrative invariably unsettles the rigid demarcation of the spheres.

CONCEPTUALIZING SEPARATE SPHERES, WRITING DOMESTIC MEMOIRS Men and women may always have recognized themselves as two sexes, but the ideology that placed men firmly in the world of business, economics, and politics and women safely in the realm of home, family, and private life had its roots in the changing character of English domestic architecture. As Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have shown in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, the design of houses began to change at the turn of the nineteenth century, with modern arrangements banishing “productive work” from the “domestic area.” This change literally created two spheres: one for business and moneymaking, the other for private affairs and family life. During the century, moreover, productive work was further separated from domestic space as middle-class manufacturers and businessmen ceased living adjacent to their factories or “above the shop” and moved into suburban villas. According to Davidoff and Hall, “it was the middle ranks who erected the strictest boundaries between private and public space.”2 Such changes in architectural space inevitably brought changes in the wife’s role within the middle-class household. Instead of a participant in a family business, working near or alongside her husband, the wife became a manager of a distinct domestic space called “home.” She oversaw her children’s education,

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managed the servants, kept accounts of household expenditure, regulated the domestic routine, and engaged in suitable philanthropic activities as an extension of her domestic duties. Whereas the husband’s social power stemmed, as Davidoff and Hall note, “from his ownership of property, farming activities, local business and charitable activity as trustee, witness or governor,” the wife lacked such power; instead, “the minutiae of everyday life, the family’s personal behavior, dress and language became [her] arena to judge and be judged.”3 Women became the social and moral arbiters of good taste and good behavior. This changing sense of woman’s role did not occur automatically but was imagined, explained, and elaborated—indeed, invented—by Victorian men and women writers. Perhaps needless to say, they invented different versions of separate spheres. On the conservative end of the spectrum, Sarah Lewis published Women’s Mission (1839) to consolidate women’s new domestic position and to oppose the campaign for women’s suffrage launched in the era of the 1832 Reform Act. Lewis argued that God has “given to man the power, and to woman the influence, to second the plans of Almighty goodness”; thus she endorsed the “principle of divided labour” as “a maxim of the divine government.” In her view, a woman’s relationship to politics should not be one of “interference” but of “beneficial influence.” Woman should not seek direct participation in the political sphere, but rather should function as “the guardian angel of man’s political integrity, liable at best to be warped by passion or prejudice, and excited by the rude clashing of opinions and interests.” In general, Lewis urged that “women’s mission [should be] to exhibit Christianity in its beauty and purity, and to disseminate it by example and culture.”4 This high calling, as Elizabeth Helsinger, Robin Sheets, and William Veeder have pointed out, is as much a “celebration of . . . woman’s newly exalted position” as it is an argument against political equality.5 Of course, in the mouths of some Victorians, the concept of woman’s mission became less a celebration than a tactic to suppress advances in women’s education and careers. When, in Alfred Tennyson’s The Princess (1847), the “hard old king” urges force to remove the princess from her academic high tower, he asserts: Man for the field and woman for the hearth; Man for the sword and for the needle she; Man with the head, and woman with the heart; Man to command, and woman to obey; All else confusion.

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The king’s version of separate spheres endorses strict binaries, with woman as a passive counterpart to an active man: “This is fixt,” he decrees, “as are the roots of earth and base of all.”6 But other Victorian writers mobilized the concept of separate spheres to urge women’s greater action in the public realm. In The Communion of Labour (1856), for instance, Anna Jameson argues that both men and woman have duties in the private, domestic realm and that these, in turn, define their roles in the public realm. Her “communion of labour” depends on the extension of “domestic life” into the “social community.” “As civilization advances,” she asserts, “as the social interests and occupations become more and more complicated, the family duties and influences diverge from the central home,—in a manner, radiate from it.” Thus Jameson’s conception of work, while highly gendered, is also feminist: “The man governs, sustains, and defends the family; the woman cherishes, regulates, and purifies it; but though distinct, the relative work is inseparable,—sometimes exchanged, sometimes shared.”7 As social historian Ellen Jordan has suggested, The Communion of Labour initiates a new discourse of women’s work, one with a slippage between an aristocratic discourse of work (work as philanthropy and public service) and an entrepreneurial discourse (work as self-dependence, selfrealization, and self-help).8 This slippage allows an expansion of women’s roles outside the home and makes possible new careers for women. Even John Ruskin, often considered a conservative thinker, accepts in “Of Queens’ Gardens” (1865) a version of the separate spheres of action that Jameson advanced in The Communion of Labour.9 Like Sarah Lewis, Ruskin assumes a principle of divided labor: “We hear of the mission and of the rights of Woman,” he begins, “as if these could ever be separate from the mission and the rights of Man;—as if she and her lord were creatures of independent kind and of irreconcilable claim.” Yet Ruskin uses this notion of divided, yet complementary, work to urge women to pursue greater philanthropic and moral action in the public sphere. Like Jameson, he suggests that both men’s and women’s duties radiate from the home into society at large: Generally, we are under the impression that a man’s duties are public, and a woman’s private. But this is not altogether so. A man has a personal work or duty, relating to his own home, and a public work of duty, which is the expansion of the other, relating to the state. So a woman has a personal work or duty, relating to her own home, and a public work and duty, which is also the expansion of that.10 Ruskin concludes “Of Queens’ Gardens” by urging Victorian women, traditionally sheltered in their gardens, to move into the “terrible streets”

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where they might create, in the midst of urban blight and industrial distress, gardens for the poor and needy: “Will you never go down to them,” he asks, “nor set them in order in their little fragrant beds, nor fence them in their shuddering from the fierce wind?”11 The Victorian women who composed autobiographies and biographies reflect a similar spectrum of attitudes toward separate spheres, with texts published earlier in the period tending to endorse the doctrine and later texts modifying or challenging it. In keeping with newly articulated concepts of woman’s domestic role, early Victorian women began to write a specific genre—the domestic memoir—in great numbers. This genre had originated in the seventeenth century, usually emerging from an aristocratic woman’s desire to pass on the family history to her children. In Ann Fanshawe’s Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (1829), for example, a Royalist account published two centuries after its composition, the women writer addresses her story to her “most dear and only son.” She begins with a hagiographic sketch of her late husband, the boy’s father, and provides elaborate genealogies, one tracing the paternal line, the other the maternal, both giving details of the family estates, finances, and public honors. When her own life story finally gets underway, Fanshawe bases it on the career of her husband, who served as secretary of war to Charles II and later as ambassador to Portugal and Spain. She provides intimate anecdotes about her marriage, including her husband’s tears on their first separation; demonstrates her faithfulness during his imprisonment in Whitehall, when she secretly visits him in the dead of night; and gives a lively story of dressing as a cabin boy so that she can fight at her husband’s side when pirates attack their ship.12 Fanshawe’s Memoir records political events from a “feminine” perspective—with public, political history underlying the domestic and personal narrative. Victorian women of all classes adapted the domestic memoir to new purposes, recording their homely memories and passing on ordinary family histories to their descendents. Indeed, by using the domestic memoir, women became the historians of daily English life. Some, like Janet Bathgate in Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow in the Beginning of the Century (1894), conceive of their task as transmitting family values and moral wisdom to “the circle of her own relatives and friends, to whom she thought they might be interesting and useful.”13 Others, like Frances Oke Alford in Reminiscences of a Clergyman’s Wife (1860), emphasize the good influence of a wife who supports her husband’s career. Alford recounts her work among the “London Poor” and the “Country Poor” as she follows her clergyman husband from parish to parish (and eventually to the deanship of Canterbury), offering domestic advice and exemplary models of communal service along the way.14 Still others, like Elizabeth Johnston in The Lotus

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and the Rose (1859), provide accounts of domestic life in the empire, with an emphasis on preserving the religious and cultural values of their native England and fulfilling their womanly duty “to exercise a high and good influence” on the family and domestic circle.15 While these autobiographers may present themselves modestly as private women writing for a private audience, they nonetheless assert the value of women’s contributions to the community and nation at large. Once published, their accounts came to be valued not only for the models of domesticity they display, but also for their lively tales of home life in remote parts of England, the colonies, and the empire. In a series on autobiography written for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, Margaret Oliphant argued that such domestic records represent as interesting and important a genre as public, political histories: “The narrowest domestic record widens our experience of human nature, which, of all things involved, changes least from one generation to another.” She particularly valued “those narratives of the back-stairs and records of all the underplots that influence a great event . . . the full and catholic story of human life.”16 While Oliphant may have emphasized the gossipy episodes that lay behind official history, the writers of domestic memoirs more often emphasized their role in shaping national history and in transmitting British values to the lower classes or onto colonial soil. Theirs was private action for public good. The poet and journalist Mary Howitt, for instance, used personal experiences from home life to transmit domestic values (i.e., middle-class values) to readers from the working and artisanal classes. In her column “The Children’s Corner,” written for the radical Howitt’s Journal, which Mary edited with her husband William, she presents a thinly fictionalized record of life in the Howitt household, focusing on activities appropriate for children and discussing problems that mothers commonly face as they raise them. (Her opening column, for instance, deals with the death of a favorite bird and gives a zoological lesson in avian migration and a moral lesson about leaving wildlife alone.)17 In her book The Children’s Year, Howitt traces the lives of her two youngest children throughout a year, endeavoring to “enter fully into the feelings and reasonings of the child.” She opens with an overview of “The Children’s Home,” depicts the family reading together, and describes the setting up of a miniature house by Meggy and Herbert, in which the children reproduce ordinary domestic activities, from decorating and gardening to cleaning and repairing to entertaining guests at dinner or tea. Howitt seeks to exemplify the development of “very happy little children” who “had kind parents, a pleasant home, a kind brother and sister older than themselves, good health and loving hearts.”18 By example she spreads a good version of English home life. Howitt’s goals in such writing

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include the education of the working and middle classes, the social and professional advancement of women, and (in her retrospective statement in “Reminiscences of My Life”) “the universal progress by mental, moral, and physical education of the human race.”19 Women’s memoirs were similarly used to transmit English domestic values to the colonies. The emigrant sisters Catherine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie wrote domestic memoirs of life in Canada—The Backwoods of Canada (1836) and Roughing It in the Bush (1852), the latter with a sequel, Life in the Clearings (1853)—for such purposes. Along with their husbands and brother, Traill and Moodie were part of an extensive emigration of British citizens to Upper Canada between the years 1815 and 1835. In this period, with a view to the union of Upper (English-speaking) and Lower (French-speaking) Canada, the British government campaigned to settle Upper Canada (now Ontario) with a better-educated class of emigrants, in order to provide a counterweight to the poorer class of Irish and Scottish emigrants flooding the colony and to the French-speaking population already established in Lower Canada (now Quebec). Their husbands, Thomas Traill and John Moodie, as demobilized officers left without employment at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, took land grants in Upper Canada in lieu of half-pay from the British army. Their brother, Colonel Samuel Strickland, who had settled in Canada in the 1820s, wrote his sisters that “independence and comfort” could be found “on the other side of the water and even wealth after a few years of toil.”20 Catherine Traill and Susanna Moodie knew that their role as settler women was to transport British middle-class values to North America. They also knew that their task as authors of settler memoirs was to convince other women of their class to follow their lead. In the preface to The Backwoods of Canada (1836), Traill explicitly states that she wrote her book in order to convince “gentle and well-educated females,” the “higher class of settlers,” to emigrate to Canada and to “bring into these rough districts” the “mental refinements” that will “soften and improve all around them.” Traill praises the half-pay officer (like her husband), along with his wife (like herself), who “is serving his country as much by founding peaceful villages and pleasant homesteads in the trackless wilds, as ever he did by personal courage, or military strategem, in times of war.”21 In Roughing It in the Bush, Moodie puts the task of transmitting British political and cultural values succinctly in her poem, “Canada,” which prefaced the first edition: CANADA, the blest—the free! With prophetic glance, I see Visions of thy future glory, . . .

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Even now thy sons inherit All thy British mother’s spirit. Ah! No child of bondage thou: With her blessing on thy brow, And her deathless, old renown Circling thee with freedom’s crown, And her love within thy heart, Well may’st thou perform thy part, And to coming years proclaim Thou art worthy of her name.22 In Moodie’s vision, Britain, the mother of worthy sons, passes on her virtues and values via the British-born mothers who transmit them to their Canadian children. Such memoirs as these focus on private family life, but they nonetheless have a clear public purpose. As Françoise Le Jeune notes, Traill and Moodie understood themselves as participating in the building of the British Empire; like Canada herself, each was a “dutiful daughter of Britannia.”23 The memoirs that settler women wrote depend significantly on revealing private aspects of frontier life, even aspects embarrassing to the writer as a middle-class Englishwoman. In Roughing It, Moodie records a series of trials in which her model of domesticity is severely tested before she finally emerges as the heroine of her tale. She must learn to live in a log house, paddle a canoe, milk a cow, substitute native herbs for English tea, adopt the Yankee practice of making “salt-rising bread,” and, worst of all, join her husband in “field labour” when there is no other servant to bring in the crops. In the chapter “Disappointed Hopes,” she describes her “hard struggle with my pride”— a struggle that involves a loss of class as she becomes a field hand and that leads her to construct a religious mandate for physical labor: “Providence had placed me in a situation where I was called upon to work.” “Ah, poverty! Thou art a hard taskmaster, but in thy soul-ennobling school I have received more god-like lessons, have learned more sublime truths, than I ever acquired in the smooth highways of life.”24 Paradoxically, it is by adopting some of the native skills and practices that the Englishwoman and the colonial settlement can survive and transmit core British values. The sequel to Roughing It in the Bush, titled Life in the Clearings, celebrates this successful transmission, complete with illustration of the English-style home established by the Moodies in the Canadian wilderness. By narrating experiences atypical for an English gentlewoman, moreover, Moodie became a popular writer and earned her place as a founding mother

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FIGURE 5.1: Susanna Moodie’s farm of 1871, Belleview, Canada. Courtesy of the Yale

University Library.

of Canadian literature. Much of the appeal of Roughing It derives from the “romance” it creates, with Moodie as its “heroine” who eventually survives to build a fine home “in the clearings.” These phrases—“genuine romance” and “true heroine”—come from a contemporary review of Roughing It, which praised its lively quality and appealing story. As Carl Klinck, Moodie’s modern editor, notes: “Middle-class England and America had found a substitute for chivalric romances: the modern knight could be any person seeking a way to live in the midst of social dislocation, philosophical nullity, economic slavery, [or] decline of wealth.”25 This particular knight, however, happened to be a lady! Moodie may seem unusual in narrating personal experiences that diverge from the domestic ideal, yet many Victorian women’s memoirs include episodes that represent problematic behavior or challenge the domestic norm. Fanny Kemble Butler’s Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838–1839 (1863) represents an extreme version of publicizing divergence from exemplary domesticity—not so much her own as her American family’s. In 1834, Kemble, a celebrated English actress, married a Philadelphian who was not then a slave owner but who soon after inherited his grandfather’s

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Georgia plantations complete with slaves. Upon visiting her husband’s estates, Kemble witnessed the degradations of slavery and realized the implications of her marital choice. Her Journal records her disgust at domestic life in Southern America. Writing, for instance, of Southerners’ complaints about the offensive smell of their black slaves, Kemble observes: This very disagreeable peculiarity does not prevent Southern women from hanging their infants at the breasts of negresses, nor almost every planter’s wife and daughter from having one or more little pet blacks sleeping like puppy-dogs in their very bedchamber, nor almost every planter from admitting one or several of his female slaves to the still closer intimacy of his bed.26 Kemble uses her observation of reprehensible details of private life in the South to expose the illogicality of reasons given in support of slavery (the “personal offensiveness” of blacks being one). But, though she protested against slavery in principle and in practice tried to improve the living conditions of local slaves, Kemble eventually gave up, divorced her husband, and published her Journal in 1863 to aid the Northern abolitionist cause. One can read her Journal as either an admission of an inability to transmit English values to her American home or as an exposé of the abhorrent home life of Southern America—or both. In Kemble’s hands, the domestic memoir becomes a vehicle to castigate a vicious “domestic institution,” as Southern slavery was called, and the degraded version of domesticity that resulted from it. Interestingly, the decision to publish her Journal involved a careful negotiation of the private/public divide. In 1840, after Kemble left the plantation, she felt that she could not publish without violating a social code of privacy and hospitality; writing to her friend Harriet St. Leger, she stated: I think such a publication would be a breach of confidence, an advantage taken on my part of the situation of trust, which I held on the estate. As my condemnation of the whole system is unequivocal, and all my illustrations of its evils must be drawn from our own plantation, I do not think I have the right to exhibit the interior management and economy of that property to the world at large, as a sample of Southern slavery, especially as I did not go thither with any such purpose.27 Only two decades later, after her divorce from Pierce Butler and the sale of his estates to cover his debts, did Kemble feel she could make public her private

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experience. Her motive was to aid the American Union war efforts. Even then, as John A. Scott has shown, she delayed until the “hysteria of the London press,” mostly pro-Southern, convinced her that it was her duty to “illumine the nature of the Union’s newly declared war aim . . . and strike a blow at the proslavery apologetics of the government and the London press.”28 Nonetheless, the publication of the Journal embarrassed Kemble’s daughter Frances, who defended her father and felt that her mother had exposed private matters to public scorn.

DEMARCATING THE SPHERES, CHALLENGING THE BOUNDARIES As Kemble’s example suggests, auto/biography was a genre for fighting public causes by means of recounting private experience. Auto/biography provided space for Victorian women to debate the principles and practices of domestic life, to trace links between the private and public spheres, or to shatter the boundaries altogether. Women writers knew that, by publishing, they were, as Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna put it, “abandon[ing] the privacy from which no one ought to be forced,” but, as she added, “which any body may relinquish.”29 Women were willing to lose privacy for the sake of what Tonna called “literary usefulness,” what Harriet Martineau considered duty—“the duty of recording my own experience.”30 (Such cases are what Dorothy Mermin, quoting Martineau, calls “Godiva’s ride.”31) In their life narratives, then, women described and debated aspects of private life that lay within their sphere (or, in their view, should lie within it), especially childrearing, education, and training for careers, all of which this section considers by pairing texts that take oppositional views. With the new domestic authority allotted to them, women became the guardians of their children’s moral, emotional, and spiritual development. In Woman’s Mission, Sarah Lewis emphasizes this role above all others: “To be a mother! Have the duties of maternity—the nature of moral influence—been pointed out to her? Has she ever been enlightened as to the consequent unspeakable importance of personal character as the source of influence?”32 Lewis adds, coining the term moral maternity: “It is not from instinctive maternal love, but from moral maternity, that we gain the unbounded influence.”33 Despite general agreement about the importance of women’s influence, however, the specific practices of moral maternity varied considerably from one household to another. In her Personal Recollections (1842), Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna presents a “Christian” model of the household: her mother as an ideal pattern of influence and her father as the representative of divine justice. Describing her religious

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training, Tonna explains, “My mother had taken infinite pains to assure us of one great truth—the omniscience of an Omnipresent God—and this I never could for a moment shake off.” Belief in this “great truth” prevents Charlotte from many a childish misstep. When she or her brother “committed a fault,” they went “hand in hand, to our mother, and the one who stood clear of the offence acknowledged it in the name of the transgressor, while both asked pardon.”34 In her role as moral compass, Charlotte’s mother upholds biblical standards, yet forgives her children for small errors. Serious sins, however, require the intervention of the father. Tonna recalls how she was led into a lie “through the contrivance of a servant girl, for whose benefit it was told.” For this “dreadful sin”—what her father calls “a base, mean, cowardly action”—the servant is dismissed and Charlotte is physically beaten. Whereas we might treat this episode as an occasion for questioning the value of corporal punishment or for inquiring about domestic conditions that led both servant and child to lie, Tonna reads it as an instance of divine punishment administered by an earthly agent: I took the punishment in a most extraordinary spirit; I wished every stroke had been a stab. I wept because the pain was not great enough; and I loved my father at that moment better than even I, who almost idolized him, had ever loved him before. I thanked him, and I thank him still for I never transgressed in that way again.35 In this version of the domestic ideal, the mother serves as moral influence, and the father exercises the power of judgment and punishment. Heavenly government is replicated in the earthly home. Harriet Martineau, born into a Unitarian family and later an agnostic, takes a different approach to domestic models in her Autobiography (1877). Rather than reproducing commonplace wisdom about maternal influence, she instead uses episodes of lies and lying to probe child psychology and class relations within the middle-class household. Martineau puzzles, for example, over her childish dilemma of “being sent with insulting messages to the maids,— e.g., to ‘bid them not be so like carthorses overhead.’ ” On the one hand, she knew that it was “a fearful sin to alter a message”; on the other, she found it impossible to relay such class-based put-downs.36 Her dilemma leads her to analyze the development of moral principles from the (sometimes confused) perspective of the child. She includes a critique of domestic management based on a “taking-down” system, where master and mistress insult servants, elder children ridicule younger siblings, and hierarchy allows breaches in good manners. Martineau’s critique explicitly blames religion for its “doctrine of

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passive obedience,”37 but implicitly places blame on her mother for endorsing the system—a point that Margaret Oliphant recognized when she reviewed the Autobiography for Blackwood’s Magazine and chastised Martineau for the bad taste of exposing her mother to public disapprobation.38 Martineau’s analysis of middle-class domesticity further leads her to speculate about the source of other personal failings, notably her lack of social “goodmanners” and “habitual untruthfulness” as a child. She records her frequent sulks and occasional lies, especially to her mother: “To my mother I would in my childhood assert or deny any thing that would bring me through most easily, even harmless things.”39 She argues that fear drives the child to lie and that a warm, open confidence in a mother’s love might have prevented some of her social and moral deficits. In this sense, she endorses the Victorian belief that mothers best influence their children via the affections; in Sarah Lewis’s terms, that “the grand objects . . . in the education of women ought to be the conscience, the heart, and the affections; the development of those moral qualities which Providence has so liberally bestowed on them, doubtless with a wise and beneficent purpose.”40 Yet Martineau also credits her mother with trying to correct the “domestic criticism” that had become an unfortunate family practice: “My mother received and administered a check now and then, which did good for a time; but the family habit was strong.”41 She ultimately recognizes that the wife and mother cannot regulate the domestic sphere wholly on her own, that regional and historical patterns impose their influence, and that the private family circle is subject to many external pressures. Martineau’s Autobiography thus draws on sociological paradigms to analyze the workings of a Victorian household—one with essentially good aims in childrearing, but with mixed results—and to show the ever-widening public contexts in which the private family operates. Like childrearing, education fell within the purview of women’s influence in the private sphere. Whether titled “Study” (Tonna), “School Life” (Martineau), “School and After” (Frances Power Cobbe), or simply embedded within a narrative of childhood, women autobiographers discuss their educations, noting both the achievements and the inadequacies of what was on offer. Indeed, education, both at home and at school, may be the most frequently analyzed topic in Victorian life writing, no doubt because the nineteenth century saw massive reforms at the grammar-school level and in the founding of the colleges of higher education for women: Queen’s College, London, in 1848; Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge in 1869 and 1871; and Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford in 1878. In making these reforms, Victorians debated multiple aspects of the private/public split: what aspects of women’s education

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were better pursued at home versus in a formal setting; whether education should prepare women for futures as wives and mothers or for careers in the professions; and, eventually, whether higher education for women would unsettle the comfortable divide between the separate spheres. As Martha Vicinus observes, many “feared that the new-style schools would make their daughters discontented or argued that they needed their help at home.”42 A girl’s education began at home, usually with religious education. According to Davidoff and Hall in Family Fortunes, among the middle classes “women’s first duty was to train themselves for a religious life”—as it was men’s first duty; “but for women this could also be the central aim of education.”43 A sound religious education receives central consideration in Tonna’s Personal Recollections (1842). As an Evangelical Christian, Tonna emphasizes the importance of early biblical study and advocates a method of reading scripture practiced by her parents: “unaccompanied by note or comment,” but simply presented “as histories, the fact being carefully impressed on our minds that God was the author, and that it would be highly criminal to doubt the truth of any word in that book.”44 Tonna warns against any other kind of reading that deflects the child’s attention from the Bible, whether fairy tales, novels, or Shakespearean plays. She even suggests that she was punished with temporary blindness for overstudy of French and with deafness from overindulgence in Shakespeare: “Reality became insipid, almost hateful to me; conversation, except that of the literary men, to whom I have alluded, a burden. . . . God, however, had his own purpose to work out, which neither Satan nor man could hinder.”45 False accomplishments, false stories or plays, a false sense of pride— all were to be rejected or subdued. Interestingly, though, Tonna advocates—in addition to sound biblical training—the benefits of a pastoral education, where the child can roam freely in nature and take pleasure in “the glorious works of God.” Like other Evangelicals of the romantic era, she emphasizes the revelation of God in his word and his works. In The Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself (1895), Frances Power Cobbe also derides false female accomplishments, but in the context of historical advances in women’s education and in praise of free, unrestricted study, even of controversial theological subjects. Born into a well-off Anglo-Irish family, Cobbe was educated at home by governesses, then sent to a prestigious girls’ school in Brighton, and finally self-educated through extensive reading in the family library. In the chapter “School and After,” Cobbe describes the fashionable education that her mother had received in the 1790s in Queen Square, Bloomsbury, with its instruction in modern languages, musical accomplishments, and social decorum. She compares it with her own education at Brighton in the 1830s, still with an emphasis on modern languages and musical accomplishments:

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Everything was taught us in the inverse ratio of its true importance. At the bottom of the scale were Morals and Religion, and at the top were Music and Dancing; miserably poor music, too, of the Italian school then in vogue, and generally performed in a showy and tasteless manner on harp or piano.46 Cobbe criticizes the exclusive focus in young women’s education on French, Italian, and German, with “no Greek or Latin”; the infrequent attention to “composition in our native tongue”; and the mindless reading of chapters of scripture as “religious instruction.”47 “If true education be the instilling into the mind, not so much of Knowledge, as the desire for Knowledge,” she writes, “mine at school certainly proved a notable failure.”48 Only after returning home did Cobbe take up serious learning, engaging a tutor from Dublin College to teach her Greek, reading her way through the ancient and modern classics, and pursuing “various hobbies from time to time—Astronomy, Architecture, Heraldry, and many others.”49 Eventually, she studied theology intensively, to the extent that she abandoned orthodox Christianity and formulated her own brand of theism.50 In this intellectual bildung, private education trumps public schooling, and household education surpasses formal female learning. Yet Cobbe’s liberal education at home also underwrites an argument for a full and free course of women’s study parallel to men’s. Like Harriet Martineau, who had the unprecedented opportunity to attend a boys’ grammar school and later embarked on a similar course of self-education, Cobbe uses her Life to write in support of better (and higher) education for women. Cobbe admires the opportunities of girls who could (by the 1890s when she wrote) attend Girton and Newnham Colleges at Cambridge or Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. Despite her endorsement, she nonetheless discerns the detriments of an education based on a masculine model and criticizes the “hurried, anxious gobbling up of knowledge, its competitive examinations,” and “the eternal necessity for getting something else beside knowledge; something to be represented by M.A. or C. Sch., or, perhaps, by £.s.d.!”51 Cobbe’s Life shows, then, how women writers could use auto/biography to intervene in pedagogical debates—not in the abstract as in advice books or periodical articles, but based on the evidence of personal experience and family practice. In so doing, women attempt to map out what kinds of education are better pursued within the home and what kinds profit from formal education at a public school. Victorian women never cede responsibility for the religious and moral education of their children, nor do they abandon their commitment to the traditional skills of domestic management, but as the century progresses, they increasingly advocate formal education for women in colleges and at university.

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Education for the professions became a key component of learning outside the home, and it moved women visibly into the public sphere. Although Cobbe, following in a liberal arts tradition, emphasizes knowledge as a desire rather than an acquisition of information, she nonetheless recognizes the value of learning that leads to a career. In her Life, she praises the English master at her otherwise useless girls’ school “who taught us to write ‘themes,’ and to whom I, for one feel that I owe, perhaps, more than to any other teacher in that school.”52 And she proudly, if humorously, describes her career as a London journalist, “trudging three times a week for seven years to an office in the purlieus of the Strand to write articles for a halfpenny newspaper.”53 So, too, Harriet Martineau praises the grammar schoolteacher who taught the girls, as well as boys, the principles of composition. Describing her all-too-brief year of formal schooling, she recalls: Composition was my favourite exercise; and I got credit by my themes, I believe. Mr. Perry [my teacher] told me so, in 1834, when I had just completed the publication of my Political Economy Tales, and I had the pleasure of making my acknowledgments to being turned so decidedly in that direction.54 These women explicitly link formal education with future careers in the public realm as journalists and essayists—as do women like Anna Mary Howitt who, in An Art-Student in Munich, advocates training in art schools and professional studios in preparation for careers as artists.55 In a more guarded way, Elizabeth Gaskell links education and profession in The Life of Charlotte Brontë when she describes the devoirs (the lessons in French composition) that Charlotte received from her Brussels schoolmaster, M. Paul Heger. Charlotte and Emily Brontë traveled to Belgium to study French and German in preparation for careers as English schoolteachers. Yet Gaskell recognizes that, at the Pensionnat Heger, Charlotte also acquired many skills for writing fiction and much substance for her novels. She quotes extensively from Heger’s account of his pedagogical method—how he set writing assignments, how he provided literary models, how he encouraged the “parts” to contribute to “the complete effect of whole”—to document Charlotte’s literary training. “This kind of exercise delighted Charlotte,” Gaskell adds, obviously thinking of her future as a novelist. “It called into play her powers of analysis, which were extraordinary, and she very soon excelled in it.”56 Although Gaskell also emphasizes Brontë’s genius and her commitment to domestic duty, her biography implicitly supports women’s formal education and their work in the literary field.

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Even women auto/biographers who seem firmly to oppose the unsettling of the private/public boundary find ways of justifying their appearance before a public audience. Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna pursued an active career as a writer of religious tracts, industrial fiction, and anti-Catholic polemic, editing the Christian Lady’s Magazine from 1836 and the Protestant Magazine from 1841 until her death in 1846. In her Personal Recollections, however, Tonna treats this writing as a “literary avocation” or, in biblical terms, a “free-will offering.” The biblical metaphor justifies her work within a religious framework. The amateurism implied by “avocation” is deliberate, a refusal of professional status compatible with her belief that women’s writing should be of a “homely simplicity,” fully intelligible to a five-year-old child.57 Tonna explains her explicit—and frequent—writing on politics, particularly during the debate over Catholic Emancipation, in terms of her domestic roots. “I am often charged with being too political in my writings,” she acknowledges. But by describing the spirited debates of “literary men” who frequented her father’s house, and her father who “was himself of a turn so argumentative, so overflowing with rich conversation,” she concludes: how could “a little blind girl” who listened to the conversation “avoid becoming a thinker, a reasoner, a tory, and a patriot”? “What else,” she asks rhetorically, “can you expect from a child reared in such a nursery?”58 Even for the conservative Tonna, then, the nursery and the nation represent not a binary, but a continuum.

FROM PRIVACY TO CELEBRITY: WOMEN AUTHORS FROM THE 1830 s TO THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Women who entered the public sphere as authors faced a particular challenge in negotiating the private/public divide. Whereas women who merely wrote memoirs for families and friends needed no justification, women who wrote regularly and professionally—that is, published in books, annuals, and periodicals for financial profit and literary acclaim—needed to authorize their work and their careers. At the start of the nineteenth century, a split divided the modest “proper lady” from the publishing “woman writer,” as Mary Poovey has shown: “Nearly every woman who wrote [had] to internalize a self-conception at least temporarily at odds with the norm, . . . and the legacy of this period is a repertoire of the strategies that enabled women either to conceive of themselves in two apparently incompatible ways or to express themselves in a code capable of being read in two ways.”59 By the middle of the century, however, Elizabeth Gaskell was able to conceptualize the woman author’s life in terms of parallel duties or “currents.” In her biography of fellow-author Charlotte

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Brontë, Gaskell distinguishes between “her life as Currer Bell, the author” and “her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman,” thus separating the identity of the public figure from that of the private woman, even while emphasizing the importance of “duty” in both spheres of women’s work.60 By the fin de siècle, the woman author had become an active participant in celebrity culture—not that she abandoned the domestic sphere but rather that she used domesticity as an underpinning of, or vehicle for, positive publicity. Following these shifts, this section traces the links between domesticity and women’s writing that feature as a common topos in the auto/biographies of Victorian women authors.61 In 1840, when the sister of Felicia Hemans published the biographical Memoir of the poetess’s life to preface a new edition of the works, she began by assuring the public of the domestic woman behind the literary author. One goal of this posthumous Memoir was to reveal the dutiful daughter, affectionate sister, and solicitous mother who, more than any individual, “would have shrunk more sensitively from the idea of being made the subject of a biographical memoir.”62 Heman’s sister was not alone in using the modesty topos. The sister of Frances Ridley Havergal, a famous Evangelical hymn writer, prefaced her Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal (1880) by noting her reluctance to print entries from her sister’s private diary: “In simple dependence on God’s overruling guidance, a selection is now made from what she little thought would ever be published,” Maria Havergal explains, in effect leaving the selection to God.63 Even Emma Roberts, a friend of the flamboyant Laetitia Landon, similarly prefixes an account of the poetess’s private life to the posthumous Zenana and Minor Poems of L.E L. (1839), testifying to Landon’s exemplary domesticity and countering claims that the poetess had committed suicide after an ill-advised marriage to George MacLean, governor of Cape Coast, Africa.64 Romantic and early Victorian biographies presented woman writers of originality, even genius, who were also, invariably, domestic paragons. In emphasizing exemplary domesticity, these biographers were countering the separate spheres binary and a common myth that put the pen in opposition to the needle. After Madame de Staël’s wildly popular Corinne (published originally in French in 1807 and translated the next year into English), novelists imagined the artistic woman as distinctly different from the domestic daughter, wife, and mother. Corinne taught the lesson of their incompatibility and the fate of the artistic woman as decline and death. Although its Scottish hero is attracted to the poetess-heroine, a dark half-Italian, half-English woman, he marries the fair, pure English girl to whom he is betrothed—and when he does, Corinne declines and wastes away. Laetitia Landon reproduced the Corinne myth in her poetry, most notably “A History of the Lyre” (1829), where Eulalie, a poetess, wastes away after her English lover returns to his Emily; in

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the final scene, the abandoned female artist erects “a sculpted form” that is both her grave marker and a monument to fame.65 Geraldine Jewsbury modified the Corinne tradition in The Half Sisters (1847) to proclaim the lesson of the complementarity of the two female types, the artistic and domestic as two “sisters.” Even so, Jewsbury’s novel does not suggest a wholly satisfactory end for the artistic woman. When Bianca, the actress-protagonist of the novel, decides to marry “Viscount Melton, of Melton Hall, in Staffordshire, and of Fort Vernon, in Scotland,” she gives up her career. In the final scenes, Bianca appears in a cozy domestic setting “working a cushion in crochet for Lady Vernon” and assuring her readers that “genius” can be shown in more than “one special mode of manifestation.”66 In these versions of the woman writer’s life, the artistic is divided from the domestic and treated oppositionally. In The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), Elizabeth Gaskell became the first major author to posit the compatibility of domestic and artistic within a single woman’s experience. Gaskell does not unite the domestic woman and the woman writer; the metaphor she uses suggests parallel, not merged, currents. But Gaskell effectively disrupts the oppositional mode of the earlier nineteenth century to reformulate them as compatible within the life of her subject. Perhaps speaking for herself as much as for Brontë, Gaskell suggests that there are “separate duties belonging to each character—not opposing each other; not impossible, but difficult to be reconciled.”67 Throughout The Life of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell maintains a focus on duty, familial responsibility, and moral integrity as she selects and quotes from Brontë’s letters. She shows Charlotte leaving home for a schoolteacher’s life “with necessity ‘as her mistress’ ” (early June 1837), then returning home to care for Tabby, a servant who has broken a leg (December 29, 1837), and functioning as housemaid at Haworth by “cleaning, sweeping up hearths, dusting rooms, making beds, etc.” (April 15, 1839).68 Gaskell reinforces Brontë’s domestic character by quoting an exchange with the poet laureate Robert Southey, who advised that “literature cannot be the business of a woman’s life, and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it”—to which Brontë replied, “I have endeavoured not only attentively to observe all the duties a woman ought to fulfill, but to feel deeply interested in them.”69 After Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë, women authors began to imagine (and implicitly debate) different relationships between the domestic and literary spheres. These range from wholly integral to wholly distinct, though not oppositional. In her Autobiography (1899), Margaret Oliphant offers an integral relationship: she locates the origins of authorship in a domestic space. Oliphant recalls that she began novel writing when her mother “had a bad illness” and the family faced “new trouble.” Writing fiction while nursing her mother

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became an alternative to needlework, an activity “to secure some amusement and occupation for myself while I sat by my mother’s bedside.”70 The book that results—Christian Melville (1845), the story of an angelic unmarried girl who “had the charge of a family of motherless brothers and sisters, and who had a shrine of sorrow in her life in the shape of the portrait and memory of her love who had died young”71—is published under her brother’s name, but it nonetheless launches Oliphant’s authorial career. Throughout her Autobiography, as in this scene, Oliphant grounds her literary work in the domestic sphere, depicting her marriage to a stained-glass artist as a family collaboration, turning to journalism in her widowhood to support her young children, writing her novels in “the little second drawing-room where all the (feminine) life of the house goes on,” and eventually bringing her younger son into the family business.72 De facto, the Autobiography is a domestic memoir, written for her sons and conceptualized as a family history of artists. Only after both sons die does Oliphant shift to the genre of professional author’s life, written “consciously for the public” and studded with literary anecdotes to make it sell. In this shift from domestic to public, Oliphant feels that she is making “pennyworths of myself,”73 and that she is somehow abandoning her domestic ideals. In contrast to Oliphant, Harriet Martineau and Frances Power Cobbe posit different relations between the domestic and professional spheres. Martineau separates them in her Autobiography, creating a scene of literary origins that opposes the needle to the pen. She explains how her brother James, on his departure for college, advised her “to take refuge . . . in a new pursuit” and encouraged her “in an attempt at authorship”; then she records the response of her elder brother Thomas who, when he read her anonymous debut in a Unitarian magazine, praised her essay and “said gravely (calling me ‘dear’ for the first time) ‘Now, dear, leave it to other women to make shirts and darn stockings; and do you devote yourself to this.’ ” “That evening,” she writes, “made me an authoress.”74 Thus, Martineau gives a family-sanctioned narrative of her literary pursuits yet distinguishes literary work from domestic duties. In another model, Cobbe locates her literary origins within an intellectual quest, but explicitly without the sanction of her family. When she pursues a course of reading in modern theology and eventually loses her Evangelical faith, her father banishes her from the house, sending her into exile with an uncle in Donegal. There Cobbe “occupie[s] [her]self, often for seven or eight or even nine hours a day, in writing an ‘Essay on True Religion,’ ” her “first literary effort.” This manuscript remains unpublished, but the publisher Longman accepts another, an “Essay on the Theory of Intuitive Morals.” When she publishes it, to her father’s great displeasure, she does so anonymously “to save him annoyance.”75

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Despite the fact that Martineau and Cobbe separate domestic duties from literary work, both women proudly assert their skill in domestic matters. Cobbe records that she took over household management as an adolescent to help her invalid mother, “and ever since I have really liked housekeeping.” She tells of an Irish materfamilias who objects to Cobbe’s encouraging her daughters “to learn Greek and Mathematics,” saying, “I think the duty of a lady is to attend to her house.” When Cobbe visits this woman’s country estate and is shown the “underground china closet,” she humorously describes its “disorder and slatternliness”: There, on the shelves and the floor, lay piled, higgledy-piggledy, dishes and plates of exquisite china mixed up with the commonest earthenware jugs, basins, cups, and willow-pattern dishes; and the great dessert-service among the rest—with the dessert of the previous summer rotting on the plates! (original emphasis) Cobbe concludes the anecdote with an imaginary retort to the lady who considers intellectual learning a disqualification for capable housewifery: “Do you know, I always take up all the plates and dishes myself when they have been washed the day after a party, and put them on their proper shelves with my own hands,—though I do know a little Greek and Geometry, Mrs. L.!” (original emphasis).76 Martineau similarly insists that literary work is no disqualification for skillful domestic management; indeed, in her Autobiography she asserts that “no true woman, married or single, can be happy without some sort of domestic life.”77 Martineau proves this axiom by documenting the training in needlework and other “household cares” she received from her mother, thus rebutting any assumption that she was “a literary lady who could not sew.” “I have been wont to explain, for my mother’s sake,” she adds, “that I could make shirts and puddings, and iron and mend, and get my bread by my needle, if necessary,—(as it once was necessary, for a few months), before I won a better place and occupation with my pen.”78 Her modern editor and biographer, Deborah Logan, further shows how Martineau contributed fancy needlework and crochet to raise funds for abolitionist causes.79 Later in her Autobiography, Martineau moves beyond these conventional feminine skills to show an even greater commitment to domesticity as she designs and builds a home. Martineau believed that the home should be a repository of moral integrity and a site of physical and emotional health. After suffering for nearly six years from a serious illness, she moved to Ambleside in the Lake District where she built the Knoll, her permanent home, with the profits of her authorial career.

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In her Autobiography, Martineau reproduced the architectural design and two sketches of the Knoll after its completion. The sketches represent a clever twist on a nineteenth-century auto/biographical practice. It was common in women’s life writing to include a frontispiece illustration of the writer’s home, either as proof of her respectable origins or as evidence of the regional contexts that shaped her work. (The frontispiece to volume one of Martineau’s Autobiography shows the former; and the frontispiece to The Life of Charlotte Brontë, the latter.) Martineau turns this convention to new purpose in volume two by including sketches of the Knoll with the author’s signature. She thus confirms both her domestic knowledge and her professional success in earning sufficient income to buy a piece of land and build a solid middle-class home. At the end of the nineteenth century, with the rise of celebrity culture, women authors varied Martineau’s tactic to advance (rather than retrospectively affirm) their careers. A woman might use a beautifully designed and appointed home as a means of exhibiting her high cultural status, or she might allow a peep into her private, domestic space as a means of popularizing her work and career. As Ana Parejo Vadillo has shown for the poet and essayist Alice Meynell, a public image of professional and economic success was achieved through a careful deployment of urban domestic space; the Meynells’ various homes, located in Kensington amid professional artists and writers of the highest status, projected social and

FIGURE 5.2: Charlotte Brontë’s birthplace, Haworth, Yorkshire. Author’s personal

collection.

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financial stability, as well as aesthetic taste and modern architecture.80 Meynell adopted the second strategy as well, consenting to magazine interviews that highlighted details of her private, family life in order to publicize her career. In an interview for the ladies’ magazine Sylvia’s Journal, for instance, she discussed her work as an essayist, stating: “I never write poetry now. My little volume of poems was published years ago, before I was married. I have never written a line since.” Then, according to the interviewer, “she pushed back fondly the dark curls from the face of the little child by her side, with a look in her eyes that made me wonder if the ‘living poems’ had absorbed her singing.”81 In this interview, as in others, the woman writer projected an “angel in the house” image.

FIGURE 5.3: Home of Alice and Wilfrid Meynell,

no. 47 Palace Court. Author’s personal collection.

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FIGURE 5.4: “Ouida,” Punch’s Fancy Portraits, no. 45 (Linley Sambourne, artist). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

The publicizing of private, domestic space was not without its hazards. As early as the 1830s, when celebrity journalism was in its nascence, the woman writer would invariably be shown in a domestic setting, either to her praise or blame. “Normal” domesticity might signal approbation of her work—as in the sketch of Mary Russell Mitford published in Fraser’s Magazine (1833), which shows her with a faithful dog and praises her essays on village life, “so pretty a basket of good-looking and sweet-smelling natural flowers.”82 In contrast, “aberrant” domesticity might be used to discredit a woman author’s work—as in the Fraser’s sketch of Harriet Martineau,

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FIGURE 5.5: Condover Hall, a country house of the Cholmondeley family, The Bookman,

18 (May 1900). Courtesy of the Yale University Library.

which shows her in her lodgings and chastises “any lady, old or young,” who would use her pen to write on Utilitarian themes, “on the effects of a fish diet upon population” or the “preventive check” of Thomas Malthus.83 At the fin de siècle, journalists might still deploy a domestic image to satirize an author’s career—as in the Punch cartoon of Ouida smoking a hookah.84 But the greater risks lay in the collapse of the private/public boundary that fin de siècle authors sanctioned when they willingly allowed publicity of their private lives. Charlotte Riddell lamented such loss of privacy in her autobiographical novel A Struggle for Fame (1887), where she nostalgically recalls an earlier era when “in the literary world females still retained some reticence, and males the traditions at least of self-respect.”85 Her heroine suffers a creative decline when she plunges into the social whirl of celebrity culture. Other fin de siècle women winced at the way celebrity journalists misrepresented their lives or misquoted their words. When Alice Meynell allowed an interview with Sylvia’s Journal, she privately wrote to her publisher: “It makes me talk frightful grammar and say things I could never have said.”86 Even so, she allowed the article to see print because she knew it would boost sales. Still other women found that the mode of modern celebrity deflated their artistic

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independence and creative imagination by reducing the scenes and characters of their books to biographical origins. An article on the New Woman writer Mary Cholmondeley in The Bookman grounds her literary production in social and psychological experience, identifying her fiction with her experiences in the country houses of her aristocratic family and equating her heroines, especially Hester of Red Pottage, with a personal struggle for self-realization.87 The Bookman’s lavishly illustrated sketch, with celebrity portraits of the author and photographs of Condover Hall where her early novels were set, suggests that women’s writing emerges from personal experience, that it is rooted in biography, and thus that it is less imaginative creation than lively transcription of what the woman writer sees around her. This made the woman writer a producer of popular but inevitably second-rank literature. For the Victorian woman writer, then, there was no escaping the binary of private/public, domesticity/celebrity, feminine sphere/masculine sphere. But there were different ways of negotiating the binary. Early in the Victorian period, writing in Society in America (1837), Harriet Martineau argued: The truth is, that while there is much said about “the sphere of woman,” two widely different notions are entertained of what is meant by the phrase. The narrow, . . . the more conservative notion is that sphere appointed by men, and bounded by their ideas of propriety:—a notion from which any and every woman may fairly dissent. The broad and true conception is of the sphere appointed by God, and bounded by the powers which he has bestowed. This commands the assent of man and woman; and only the question of powers remains to be proved.88 Throughout the century women—not only authors, but also artists, actresses, nurses, doctors, social workers, indeed all professional workers— answered the “question of powers” in their lives and life writing. By the end of the century, the boundary between private and public proved to be more permeable than most had imagined.

CHAPTER SIX

Education and Work: Women and the Education Acts florence s. boos

When the political scientist Morton Grodzins introduced the notion of a tipping point in 1958 in a book devoted to The Metropolitan Area as a Racial Problem, he had a relatively clear phenomenon in mind: a threshold-number or percentage of black families in a neighborhood that generated “white flight” en masse. Historically, certain phase shifts of enlightenment (rather than bigotry) and social justice (rather than social injustice) have been subject to much greater forces of inertia, and their tipping points have been less inevitable in their course than hindsight seems to suggest. Put somewhat differently—in the literary-Marxist language of Frederic Jameson’s Political Unconscious—“every social formation or historically existing society has in fact consisted in the overlay and structural coexistence of several modes of production all at once, including vestiges and survivals of older [forms] . . . as well as anticipatory tendencies which are potentially inconsistent with the existing system.”1 If one substitutes “education” for “production”— plausibly enough, for those who might consider education a form of (national) “capital”—Jameson’s remarks about “vestiges and survival” apply well to the tortuous provision of universal primary (not secondary) education in Victoria’s reign.

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Beyond the means of subsistence, it is difficult to think of anything more important to the well-being and self-worth of most nineteenth-century Britons than education. The Education Act of 1870, which acknowledged and codified for the first time a Crown responsibility for elementary education, was indeed a watershed in the provision of universal instruction, and working-class women’s memoirs trace something of the rivers’ flow. England, the world’s most advanced industrial economy, was nonetheless remarkably backward in this regard. In The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe, David Vincent followed rates of literacy— as recorded on census forms or manifested in the ability to sign a marriage register—in several European countries through the century and observed that by this standard about 60 percent of women and 40 percent of men were illiterate at the beginning of the century.2 By 1895, when the effects of the Acts of 1870 and 1880 had affected an entire generation, the rate of literacy in Britain finally surpassed 90 percent. Rates of literacy in the Netherlands, Scotland, and much of Scandinavia, by contrast, were noticeably higher throughout the century, and by the 1870s, Prussia was well on its way to universal education, a fact to which some have attributed its success in the Franco-Prussian War. France’s rates lagged slightly behind Britain’s until the “radical” Jules Ferry laws introduced free, secular, universal, and mandatory education at secondary as well as primary levels, a standard reached in fits and starts by Britain and only achieved in 1944. Middle- and upper-class education took place in private schools, which were much better—whatever their social atmosphere—than the “voluntary” or “adventure” schools available to working-class children. More tellingly, care was taken at such schools to set fees sufficiently high to avoid unwanted “mixing of the classes.” According to the Newcastle Commission Report of 1862, only one-seventh of the population belonged to the upper and middle classes, who expected to pay for their children’s education.3 Two predominantly sectarian organizations—the National Society for Promoting the Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Church of England and the British and Foreign School Society, its nondenominational (Dissenting) counterpart—offered more than 90 percent of the school places available in this period to everyone else.4 In 1833, the Crown began to offer grants to these schools and depute officials to inspect them. Nevertheless, the general level of instruction in small government-aided schools for poorer children remained low, as the Newcastle Commission reported in 1862: “[Girls leaving school] can scarcely read, or write, and certainly

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not spell, and [only] a few can cast up a simple sum. They have no knowledge of needlework, [and] cannot cut out or even mend.”5 Also pernicious was a tendency to relegate pupils whose parents paid lower fees to segregated classes, as observed by H. M. Du Port at Holy Trinity Church in Marylebone in the early 1860s: I was behind the scenes as a curate-manager of large and highly esteemed schools in London, teaching in them daily; . . . the lower two-thirds fraction of the school was little better than an unorganised mass of children of all ages; of teaching properly so called they had none.6 Another influential view was bluntly and concisely expressed even by the Newcastle commissioners: Independence is of more importance than education; and if the wages of the child’s labour are necessary . . . it is far better that it should go to work at the earliest age at which it can bear the physical exertion rather than it should remain at school.7 June Purvis, author of the sole book-length study of Victorian workingclass women’s education, notes that schools of the aforementioned societies enrolled more boys than girls and, in some cases, set the age of entry two years later for girls than for boys.8 As suggested by the one of the passages just quoted, girls’ curricula were heavily weighted toward needlework,9 and even that was often neglected. In Hope Deferred, Josephine Kamm reports that the managers of one local school submitted the same garment for inspection year after year, made not by pupils, as claimed, but by an old woman in the village.10 Less evident to us now is the fact that even these inspected schools mainly served lower-middle-class children and rejected the poor, who attended— if they were lucky—a poorly stocked “adventure” or “Dame” school. Phil Garner, a rare defender of these institutions, has argued that they were at least more informal, less concerned with teaching morals and “decorum” (for which read “subordination”), and more tolerant of parents’ desires for children to help out at home.11 In addition, a few aptly named “Ragged Schools” existed in which instructors taught the rudiments of reading to destitute children of (part of) the urban proletariat. And they, in a sense, were the lucky ones. Historians have been unable to determine how many British children were untouched by any of these forms of elementary instruction. One has set the estimate at

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one-third,12 but an 1851 survey found that fewer than half the children of Manchester and Birmingham had benefited from any form of current education. Obviously, then, the need for more systematic educational provision of the sort advocated by the Newcastle Commission report was apparent to all reflective observers. The Second Reform Bill of 1867, for example (the Representation of the People Bill), effectively enfranchised workers who could already afford to educate their children, a limitation that tacitly acknowledged the disgrace of a shadow populace kept in ignorance as well as destitution.13 The Education Act of 1870 finally established a minimal system of national primary education that permitted counties to set up school boards and levy taxes for schools for children ages five through thirteen. Establishment of such boards was not mandatory, however; cumulative voting for board members favored defenders of an essentially sectarian status quo, and once elected, members were free to brush aside any alternatives. Board schools, once in place, could also charge tuition, condone full-day labor for children over eight (not until 1918 was labor restricted to three hours a day for children up to fourteen),14 and, until 1891, impose a surcharge for the two highest grades.15 An 1880 amendment exempted or partially exempted children who had already reached standard IV (at about age ten), as well as older children who worked and all children who lived more than two miles from a school.16 Such evasions finally disappeared in 1918, when Parliament abolished fees and raised the school-leaving age to fourteen,17 and the age rose gradually to fifteen in 1944 and sixteen in 1973. Efforts to provide meals to children too hungry to do their lessons met with resistance for some time, even after the Provision of Meals Act in 1915 provided for committees to investigate such needs.18 Board school classes themselves were large, in classrooms designed for as many as eighty students. Pay for teachers was set each year on the basis of examinations in reading, writing, and arithmetic alone, which may have led to the teaching of arithmetic to girls for the first time,19 but ensured that writing from dictation, oral reading of short passages, and simple arithmetic would constitute most of the curriculum. Observers noted that children were seldom encouraged to formulate judgments or relate what they learned to their own experience. Despite all this, the failure rate was high: inspectors reported that 53 percent of pupils failed one of the first four grades in reading, and 57 percent in writing.20 Lessons in literature, science, and history were almost nonexistent; an inspection in 1882 found that 98 percent of the pupils in the system’s

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highest grade could neither “take up a pen to make up their own sentences” nor “read a passage from one of Shakespeare’s historical plays, or . . . a history of England.”21 The Education Act of 1902 established a fee-based system of secondary education; but 1 in 14 boys and 1 in 20 girls entered a “maintained secondary school” before World War II, and 1 in 100 boys and 1 in 300 girls made it to a university.22 Against the background of this institutional narrative, in what follows I will bring together five working-class women’s often quite intense recollections of their encounters with formal education before and after the Education Acts of 1870 and 1880.

BEFORE THE “ACT” School attendance for women born early in the century was a precarious privilege, carefully negotiated with the help of impoverished parents. For example, Janet Greenfield Bathgate (1806–98), the author of Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow in the Beginning of the Century (1892),23 was born into the devoutly Cameronian family of a farm laborer, John Greenfield, and his wife, Tibbie. Writing in a narrative present tense at age eighty-six, Bathgate described her mother’s wary response to a neighbor’s offer to employ little Janet as a servant: she’s just a bairn, no eight years old till the fourth of June; and more than that, she has got no schooling to speak of; we are so afar from any school here, and I am just giving her a bit lesson at odd times mysel’. Her gang to service! it would be nonsense to think about it. Na, na, that’ll no dae.24 But a neighbor falsely promised to give the child some tutelage, and her father sent her into service over his wife’s strong objections (“she just looks like a bit innocent lamb gamboling with its companions on the green hill-side, all unconscious of the butcher’s knife”).25 Back home six months later, Janet learned to read more individual words from her mother and was entranced one day when she discovered she could decipher whole chapters of the family Bible. But another “opportunity” forced itself on her a few months later. While tending sheep for her new employers, Janet struggled with some threads and a piece of cloth to send a little map of her surroundings to her parents. Frustrated that she could not convey her description more effectively, she studied a letter her father had written to her employer:

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She takes it out of her pocket and reads it for the twentieth time or more. She considers the letters, and thinks she could copy them, but then she has neither paper, pen, nor ink; and more than that, though she could make out the sense of her father’s writing, there were some of the letters she was not very sure about. For instance, she could not distinguish very well E from F. At last she notices that there is a little bit of blank paper on her father’s letter, This she cuts off, takes out the Question book, looks carefully how the letters in it are formed, then takes a pin, and on the blank piece of paper pricks with the point of the pin their form, and thus “writes” a letter to her father.26 Unable to decipher this “piece of paper . . . [on which they] thought she had been trying to make some flowers,”27 her parents showed it to neighbors who decoded it and insisted that she be sent to school. More than seventy years later, Janet remembered the result: [Janet] is put into a class of boys and girls somewhat in advance of her in years and also in knowledge, but none are more attentive to their lessons. On the Saturday they have each to repeat a question out of the “Shorter Catechism,” also each get a portion from a psalm to learn on the coming Sabbath, which they are to repeat on Monday morning ere they commence their lessons.28 Her short-lived happiness lasted six weeks, after which her father found employment elsewhere. In her new home, she was sent to a newly established “seminary” “for teaching little girls reading, writing, and sewing,”29 where she was “not long in gaining the kindly notice of the superintendent—a widow lady of kindly disposition, but very delicate in health,”30 who became bedridden and died shortly thereafter. “Here,” the elderly memoirist remarked, “end[ed] Janet’s schooldays.”31 As a young adult, when Janet’s husband died young, she refused to return to service and opened instead her own little “infants’ school.” Here she found her calling, and for many years offered religious homilies and instruction in reading to local children for two pence a week.32 Mary Smith (1822–89), an ardently critical soul, also began her working life as a servant. Her father, an Oxfordshire shoemaker and devout Dissenter, defended little Mary’s passion for letters against a stepmother who “looked upon reading, even when I was a little child, as a species of idleness,” and she could “make out the sense and meaning of an ordinary book” when she was first sent to school at four.33

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She could not remember “any lesson or tuition at all” at her first Dame school, and recalled her second as a place “where I learned to knit and sew, the sole object for which I attended.”34 Her schoolmistress, sadly, may have been someone no more educated than Janet Bathgate: [The teacher’s] knowledge was very small. The girls had a lesson once a day in the New Testament, and the little ones read out of the “Reading Made Easy.” But knitting and sewing occupied nearly the whole time of the girls, who perhaps might average from nine to ten. I was a diviner of spirits even then, and did not admire the mistress. . . . I do not remember to have had any lessons there.35 The child of Dissenters, she “omit[ed] the profound curtsies which the village children never dared to miss giving, when any of the vicar’s family came into the school,”36 and remembered the discrimination she faced even though her answers were the best in the school: The mistress told them my father’s name, and the significant exclamation was, “But he does not attend church!” Hence it followed that I had no commendation . . . it was evident I was looked on as an alien.37 At her next institution, a Methodist day school,38 two ladies inculcated sewing, more sewing, and “lady-like manners”: A girl’s education at that time consisted principally of needlework of various descriptions, . . . including muslin and net, on which we worked on flowered squares for the shoulders, veils, caps, collars, and borders; likewise a multitude of things not in wear now, but then considered very necessary. Parents were prouder then of their daughters’ pieces of needlework than of their scholarship.39 Only at her father’s express request was she given some instruction in basic arithmetic. She reserved her harshest criticism, however, for the mean-spirited punishments the “Dames” meted out: Punishments were then different in ladies’ schools, as in the one I attended for example. To stand erect in a corner for an hour; to wear a frightfully ugly dunce’s cap, standing on a stool; and similar chastisements were constantly occurring.40

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She considered such petty chastisements “a hateful ordeal, robbing a child of its self-respect, which should always be kept inviolate, if at all possible,”41 and she banned them in later life during her lifelong career as a teacher. Marianne Farningham (1834–1909), born Marianne Herne in Farningham, Kent, was the eldest of five children of a “small tradesman” and papermaker’s daughter, both Primitive Baptists. Known in later life for her authorship of hymns such as “Just as I Am, Without One Plea” and editorship of the halfpenny Sunday School Times and mildly ecumenical Christian World, which at its peak reached more than 130,000 readers,42 Herne published poetry, fiction,

FIGURE 6.1: Marianne Farningham, portrait, frontispiece, A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography, 1907. Author’s personal copy.

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essays, and an autobiography, A Working Woman’s Life (1907);43 became a popular lecturer; and was the first woman to serve on the Northampton school board. As a small child, Herne’s hopes were constrained by the fact that there was no day school to which we could go. A young ladies’ boarding establishment existed, to which, quite early in my life, I turned longing eyes, but the charges were too high for my father’s means. There was also the national school connected with the Church of England, but we were never allowed to go there. It was then, as now, a Nonconformist principle not to allow Chapel children to learn the Church Catechism, and [my father’s] fellow-members considered it a far greater sin to send children to the National school than to let them remain uneducated.44 Taught in any event by her mother at home, Marianne became an avid reader and composed verses from earliest childhood after a neighbor taught her to write. Once again, an ardent young girl longed for escape from the tyranny of the needle: Dear mother! she did not like my always having a book in my hand or pocket, and would have been better pleased if I had been equally fond of the brush or the needle; [and] she did her best to keep me at work all day, only letting me have books and magazines when my tasks were done.45 Her formal education finally began between nine and ten when there was a grand achievement by the Nonconformists of our villages, and I had my heart’s desire, and went to school! . . . The necessity of educating the children was felt more and more, and therefore, under the auspices of the British and Foreign School Society, a building was erected at Eynsford. One the day of the opening of the school . . . we were among the first scholars enrolled.46 Like Smith, she chafed under the sanctions visited on her and others for such sins as letting a bucket and clothing be carried downstream while she played by the brook. She considered herself “plenteously punished at school for my general naughtiness, and at home for my lack of reverence for the solemn subject of baptism. . . . [Even so] I loved both the day and the Sunday school, being passionately eager to learn, and I really wanted to be good.”47 In old age, this believing Christian wryly recalled the religious warp of all her early instruction:

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FIGURE 6.2: “An End of Our Classroom,” A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography, 1907, facing p. 124. Author’s personal copy.

Sixty years ago the elementary education of the British schools was carried on by very different methods from those of the Council schools of the present day. The great book of the school was the Bible. The teachers were not obliged to pass government examinations, but they were required to be members of some Christian Church, and to love, revere, and teach the Book of books. The first hour of every morning was devoted to religious instruction. We sang a hymn, and our teacher prayed with us, after which we repeated a prayer ourselves. Then we had a long Bible-lesson. . . . Not content with the morning scripture-lesson, the Friday afternoon of each week was given to religious instruction. . . . what would school managers say to such a teacher now?48 She particularly disapproved of the punitive cast of such instruction (replete, like Joyce’s Jesuit institution, with threats of hellfire49), and also objected to Christian literature’s rampant sexism: Reading was my chief consolation, and I had not much time for that. My father gave us two monthly magazines published by the Sunday School

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Union. . . . In one of these was a series of descriptive articles on men who had been poor boys, and risen to be rich and great. Every month I hoped to find the story of some poor ignorant girl, who, beginning life as handicapped as I, had yet been able by her own efforts and the blessing of God upon them to live a life of usefulness, if not of greatness. But I believe there was not a woman in the whole series. I was very bitter and naughty at that time. I did not pray, and was not anxious to be good.50 Like many nineteenth-century girls, Marianne had to leave school when her mother died; at home, at the age of twelve, she confronted her father’s prohibition of her reading: “He said it was not honourable of me to say ‘Good night’ to him at the door and pretend I was going to bed, and then wait up to read.”51 He finally agreed grudgingly to let her return to school for two more years if she would pay her way as a part-time shoe binder: One of my greatest regrets, even now, is that my attendance at the Eynsford British school was so perfunctory and intermittent. It was all the schooling that I had, and it can well be imagined that it has been exceedingly difficult to follow out the various pursuits of my life without any learning worth the name. I am so glad that compulsory education has been secured for the children of these happier days.52 Among the memoirists who wrote recollections of their unrequited yearning for education before 1870, therefore, only Farningham was affected in any way by government provisions for the rudiments of elementary education. The others were either homeschooled (Farningham, Bathgate) or attended Sunday schools (Smith, Farningham) and/or Dame schools (Bathgate and Smith), private denominational schools (Smith), or, in instances not discussed here, parish schools, which charged a small fee (Christian Watt and perhaps Elizabeth Campbell).53

AFTER THE “ACT” The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel was published posthumously after its author’s death.54 Mitchell (1871– 1946), a lifelong socialist and Labour Party activist,55 was born Hannah Maria Webster in 1871 in the rural Peak district of Derbyshire, as one of six children of a farm laborer and his wife. As Hannah describes it, her mother’s “temper was so uncertain that we lived in constant fear of an outbreak which often lasted several days,”56 and she was insistent in her demands that her daughter learn housewifery rather than book learning, but Hannah could not “remember

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a time when I could not read. I was passionately fond of books, which as events turned out were to be almost my only source of learning.”57 For several years, her education was postponed, for the nearest school was five miles away by the shortest cut over the hill, which made daily attendance impossible. So my parents decided we should attend school in turn as we grew old enough to go into lodgings. The two elder boys went first, living in the school house during the week.58 In exchange for her performance of their chores, her brothers brought a book for her to read each Friday. Unlike Bathgate, who fondly remembered the modest loan of two books from her benefactors,59 Hannah was able to borrow

FIGURE 6.3: Hannah Mitchell photograph in 1924, frontispiece, The Hard Way Up, 1968. Author’s personal copy.

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books such as Kenilworth and Cranford freely from her neighbors. She recalled her grief when her parents reneged on their willingness to permit her to follow her brothers to school. She had loved her family’s garden, but remembered one bright day in early spring when even these lovely flowers failed to console me for a bitter disappointment. Standing among them weeping, I told my uncle that my sister was to start school the following week. I had expected to go with her but my mother said she needed one of us at home, and I must wait until Ellen had finished her “schoolin.” We never spoke of education at home but only of a “bit of schoolin.” Perhaps, indeed, it was no more than that, but to me it seemed the magic key which would admit me to the treasure-house of learning.60 When her uncle’s protests brought a brief respite in which she was allowed to attend school with her sister, I was very happy, for the schoolmaster was so pleased with my proficiency in reading, writing and spelling, and was so kind and patient that I have no doubt he would in time have revealed the mystery of figures to me. But my luck did not last. It was winter and the journey was too long and rough for girls. The school was badly heated and [w]e both fell ill, and were kept at home for the rest of the winter.61 When her sister returned to school, Hannah, “almost heartbroken,”62 was again confined to her parents’ house. Her dogged efforts to study and ask the local parson questions about her books were suppressed by “my mother [who] thought this was a reflection on her, and it usually earned me a beating.”63 A passing traveler—in a scene reminiscent of the visit of Lyndall’s stranger in The Story of the African Farm— gave her an inscribed copy of Wordsworth’s poems, but Hannah’s mother ruthlessly imposed her hostility to “book learning” and insisted once again that she “leave books alone . . . and settle down to work.”64 “Work” at home was a sixteen-hour day of domestic chores and more abuse when her mother “strove to enforce her will by nagging, ravings and beatings,”65 and Hannah, apprehensive that she was “ill-equipped for the battle of life,”66 resolved at length to leave. She found service for four shillings a week in a schoolmaster’s home where she enjoyed access to his books, then worked as a seamstress and burned the midnight oil reading poetry, history, and fiction. Among other things, Mitchell’s story reveals that even in the 1880s

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it was possible for an ambitious woman to begin life with only six weeks of formal education. In Manchester Fourteen Miles,67 published in 1947 as the first of a threevolume autobiographical novel, Margaret Penn described the early life of her fictional persona Hilda Winstanley, an orphan whose father was unknown. Conceived by her mother in a brief encounter with an unnamed “gentleman,” Hilda was raised after her mother died in Moss Ferry near Manchester by Joseph and Lizzie Winstanley, who received a five-shilling weekly stipend from her grandmother.68 At three, Hilda was sent to St. Margaret’s, a National Church school in her village that had two rooms, one for “infants” and the other for all other grades. The infants had their own teacher, and standards I and II were taught by an “uncertificated” pupil teacher, standards III and IV by an accredited one, and the upper standards V–VII by the headmaster, Mr. Woodville. Contrary to the general practice of the period, she was also encouraged to write essays: For Miss Holroyd [the standard III and IV teacher], perceiving her natural quickness at all lessons but arithmetic, made much of her and took extra pains to get her forward with her sums. . . . More than once, when the class had been set an essay to write, Miss Holroyd had taken Hilda’s effort in to Mr Woodville. And Mr Woodville had come in with it and smiled at Hilda and said: “Now children. I want you to listen to Hilda Winstanley’s essay on ‘The Trip to Llandudno,’ and next time try to do as well. Hilda uses her imagination. And that’s what Miss Holroyd wants all of you to do. Now pay attention while I read it.”69 She was also proud that her presence was considered necessary for standards III and IV to pass the annual inspection. When on one occasion she was taken ill the day before the examination, Miss Holroyd personally begged Hilda’s doctor to let her attend school for the hours of the inspection. When she arrived in woolen wraps, she did well except for a misspelling in her essay “The Royal Family,” and cried with relief when the examination was over. Unfortunately, Mr. Woodville sometimes took out his apparently rather severe domestic problems on his higher-standard students. After one such violent family quarrel, he caned savagely right and left for the smallest fault, and Hilda, failing to get one of her sums right, was unjustly caned on both hands and went

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crying back to her place, emptied of all desire for further education at St. Margaret’s, and wishing passionately that she could afford to go to a proper school like Manchester High School, a hopeless, lovely dream that was always with her.70 In his introduction to a 1979 reprint of Penn’s book, John Burnett observed that “an educational provision of 1907 had introduced the ‘scholarship’ system at 11+ to grammar school, [but] no word of it had apparently . . . penetrated to Moss Ferry.”71 Hilda later incurred her stepmother’s wrath when she joined a two-penny-aweek cooperative library, “causing many scenes between herself and her mother” until the vicar interceded on her behalf.72 She nevertheless persevered in school and Sunday school, winning several prize books, and amazed her mother when she announced that she wanted to learn French: “Learn French, our ’Ilda! Reckon you’ve gone clean daft. What do you want to do a thing like that for? . . . Nay—Ah never ’eard anything like it. What’s to be gained by it, any road? Tell me that! Learning French! And where’ll you get t’books to learn it with? Out of t’Co-op?”73 Undeterred, Hilda asked the Sunday school superintendent to give her for one of her prizes a volume from which she could learn French, and he obliged her with a French-English dictionary, “the most expensive book the Sunday School had ever awarded.”74 After she completed standard VII, Hilda refused to become a servant as expected and instead apprenticed herself as a seamstress in Manchester. Tensions between her and her hurt and baffled stepparents worsened,75 and when the offer came, she made the somewhat Dickensian decision to leave for her deceased biological father’s family in London. In Lark Rise to Candleford, the first volume of another autobiographical triple-decker, Flora Timms Thompson (1876–1947), the second of six children of a stonemason and his wife, offered one of the most detailed accounts we have of a post–Education Acts school.76 Sponsored by Anglicans, Fordlow National School was a one-room schoolhouse that enrolled forty-five children. As Thompson described the curriculum: Reading, writing, and arithmetic were the principal subjects, with a Scripture lesson every morning, and needlework every afternoon for the girls. There was no assistant mistress; the Governess taught all the classes

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FIGURE 6.4: Flora Thompson, from the Flora Thompson World Collection, Buckingham Heritage Trust. Reproduced by permission of Henry Westbury and Tony Webster.

simultaneously, assisted only by two monitors—ex-scholars, aged about twelve, who were paid a shilling a week each for their services. Every morning at ten o’clock the Rector arrived to take the older children for Scripture. . . . His lesson consisted of Bible reading, turn and turn about round the class, of reciting from memory the names of the kings of Israel and repeating the Church Catechism. After that, he would deliver a little lecture on morals and behavior. . . . The writing lesson consisted of the copying of copper-plate maxims: “A fool and his money are soon parted”; “Waste not, want not” . . . and so on. Once a week composition would be set, usually in the form of writing a letter describing some recent event. This was regarded chiefly as a spelling test.77

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This was exactly the curriculum prescribed by the Education Acts of 1870 and succeeding years. Thompson’s critique of its narrow emphasis on basic literacy had been shared by other observers at the time: It is easy to imagine the education authorities of that day, when drawing up the scheme for that simple but sound education, saying, “Once teach them to read and they will hold the key to all knowledge.” But the scheme did not work out. If the children, by the time they left school, could read well enough to read the newspaper and perhaps an occasional book for amusement, and write well enough to write their own letters, they had no wish to go farther. Their interest was not in books, but in life, and especially the life that lay immediately about them. At school they worked unwillingly, upon compulsion, and the life of the schoolmistress was a hard one.78 The caning that Smith, Farningham, and Penn described was still the principal instrument of discipline, and Thompson, like Hilda in Manchester Fourteen Miles, also recalled the mandatory school inspections, for one of which she was awarded a calf-bound Book of Common Prayer. Like Smith, Farningham, and Penn, Thompson criticized the failures of instruction: When the papers arrived and the examination results were read out it was surprising to find what a number had passed. The standard must have been very low, for the children had never been taught some of the work set, and in what they had learned nervous dread had prevented them from reaching their usual poor level.79 Rather predictably, the highest level of attainment was in “Christianity,” “for Scripture was the one subject they were thoroughly taught; even the dullest knew most of the Church Catechism by heart.”80 She did, however, remember fondly the boys’ and girls’ own stories she and her older brother memorized: As often as she could do so without being detected, she would turn over and peep between the pages of her own Royal Reader. . . . There was plenty there to enthrall any child: “The Skater Chased by Wolves”; “The Siege of Torquilstone,” from Ivanhoe; Fenimore Cooper’s Prairie on Fire; and Washington Irving’s Capture of Wild Horses. . . . Interspersed between the prose readings were poems: “The Slave’s Dream”; “Young

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Lochinvar”; “The Parting of Douglas and Marmion”; Tennyson’s “Brook” and “Ring Out, Wild Bells”; Byron’s “Shipwreck”; Hogg’s “Skylark,” and many more.81 For all her many successes in school, Thompson also had no hope of attending high school and accepted that she would begin work at thirteen. Her training did offer her access to respectable office work, however, and after marrying John Thompson, a fellow postal worker, she became a successful writer of fiction, reminiscences, nature observations, and guidebooks to her local region. An extreme case of the tenacity of “older formations” was that of Peig Sayers of Great Blasket Island, off the western tip of Ireland, whose Gaelic account of her youth in the late 1870s through 1890s, transcribed and translated by her son Michael O. Guithin, appeared in 1936.82 One of four surviving children of thirteen born to her father Tomás Sayers and mother Peig Brosnan, Sayers was born in County Kerry in 1873 where “all the land [my parents] possessed was the grass of two cows.”83 In several scenes of her narrative, she remembered her eagerness to attend school and understand what was said there. Animated by a turn for books and . . . the beautiful pictures they contained . . . I’d be delighted if I had a small book of my own—one in which I could look at the pictures any time I liked. [One day] I had a great desire to go home that night and tell my mother that I intended going to school the next day . . . . “Do you know that I’m off to school on Monday?” I said. “School, is it?” she said with a laugh. “Yes, indeed, a-girl! I’m off to school with Cait-Jim” [her friend]. “Whisha,” said she, “I’m not saying I don’t believe you, but isn’t it early you have the mind for schooling? Aren’t you too young yet to go to school?”84 She was, in fact, only four, but her mother supported her request, and in a new dress made by her older sister Maire she “went buck-jumping down the road.”85 At school the teacher asked: “And what name have they on you?”: “Peig Sayers, Master,” I said again. “I have it now,” he said and then he entered my name in the roll-book. He turned round and presented me with a little book with a red cover.

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I was as delighted as if I had been presented with a cow.86 She enjoyed her schooling, though she too noted that discipline was firm: There’s no doubt whatsoever but that Master Daly was a good man, a clever teacher and a great warrant to solve every problem. . . . He was quick and lively and young and courageous—and cross enough he was too when he failed to get anything that was right or proper into our skulls! Honest, it was often I got a clatter of the palm of the hand from him that made me see visions galore! . . . [Yet he could supply material not in the text.] I had no fault whatsoever to find with him! Even though I’m an old woman now I am very proud to have it to say that Sean Daly was my schoolteacher.87 The first obstacle was language. A fellow student offered to translate the teacher’s English for her, and when Master Daly left for further training in Dublin, the new teacher began to call out the names and, man dear, we were amazed, for if we didn’t know that it was rolls he was calling we wouldn’t have understood him! He had such a foreign accent on his speech that he could have been a big bucko of an Englishman over from the city of London! He hadn’t one tittle of Irish in his beak!88 At nine or ten, she was forced to leave her now-invalid mother to begin work as a servant, and the rest of her oral narrative focused on her employment and move to Great Blasket Island, and the deaths of her husband and six of her ten children.89 Blindness overtook her before the end (she died at eightyfive in 1958), but she had become known by that point as a teller of Gaelic folktales, and she was proud that “[a]ll my life . . . I did my . . . small share for the Irish language.”90

CONCLUSION It is hard to disagree with David Vincent’s bleak assessment in The Rise of Mass Literacy of nineteenth-century gains in working-class literacy for members of the working classes: For most boys and almost all girls, the first encounters with the written word had no perceptible relevance to their occupational futures, and as

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adults, a determined programme of reading and writing was usually an escape from, rather than an encounter with, their struggle to maintain their family economies.91 For most, yes, but not for all. For some the “escape” became, in the words of William Morris’s John Ball, their passion and their life. Incomplete as they are, these scattered testimonies reflected the uneven progress of elementary education in Britain in the last half of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, daughters of relatively skilled laborers could hope for a few years of instruction focused on religion and domestic skills before they were put to work, but children of the rural poor, especially girls, faced formidable barriers. By the end of the century, by contrast, their daughters and granddaughters could hope to defer that removal to early labor, although family heads who begrudged the loss of income or domestic service their children could bring still faced no legal sanctions. Among children of the early century, Janet Hamilton published three books and became a Glaswegian working-class hero. Janet Bathgate became a teacher in her own modest private school. Mary Smith founded and guided a more ambitious educational establishment, wrote several books, campaigned tirelessly for dissident reformist causes, and left more than 1,400 pounds to various charities at her death.92 Marianne Farningham edited a religious journal, wrote several volumes of poetry and prose, and journeyed to Europe in search of background for her stories. Elizabeth Campbell and Christian Watt struggled with poverty and ill health before they found a measure of resignation and contentment in their old age. Among the women who benefited from a few more years of schooling in the latter half of the century, of our sample one became a city councilor and two wrote novels. Peig Sayers buried four children and endured a life of poverty, presciently writing that “people will yet walk above our heads . . . but people like us will never again be there. We’ll be stretched out quietly—and the old world will have vanished.”93 Vincent’s bleak assessment, then, was largely accurate, for the prospects of full and nearly equal education for people at the margins of the market economy were deferred into the twentieth century and beyond. But the accounts I have sketched—exceptional, or we would not have them—marked the first time in British history in which large numbers of women could begin to glimpse the world of letters at the horizon of a darkling plain.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Power: Memsahibs, Manners, and Empire teresa mangum

It has been well said, “Cholera is a dirt disease, carried by dirty people to dirty places from dirty places.” —Steel and Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper1 While women across Europe and the United States only slowly gained access to official political positions in the second half of the century, serving on school boards and local governing bodies, middle- and upper-class women cannily asserted authority in the name of the very feminine qualities that disqualified them from voting. Women in New Zealand gained the vote in 1893. Otherwise, even if we focus solely on the Western Hemisphere, the vote for women was long in coming: 1915 in Denmark; 1917 in Canada; 1918 in Austria, Estonia, Germany, Hungary, Poland, and the United Kingdom (1928 in Ireland); 1919 in Belgium, the Netherlands, and Sweden; 1920 in Czechoslovakia and the United States; 1921 in Sweden; 1931 in Spain; 1944 in France; and 1948 in Italy.2 Nineteenth-century social commentators like Sarah Stickney Ellis and John Ruskin painted complex, contradictory portraits of “the feminine” that were used to justify obstacles to women’s suffrage.3 The threat of lost purity, in particular, seeps into discussions of youth, innocence, ignorance, virginity, education, and employment. Feminine purity

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also attached to more material topics like cleanliness, order, food preparation, housekeeping, and health. Small wonder that white, middle-class women sometimes founded claims to political power on their expertise as housekeepers, nurses, and teachers, given that these activities were seen as central to the act of defining, transmitting, and enforcing purity. Even women who criticized the hypocritical ways that male authorities invoked purity to exclude women from public life sometimes, paradoxically, used that same rhetoric of purity to lay claim to political power. Josephine Butler is an intriguing example. With great daring and an emphasis on society’s hypocritical insistence on purity for women but not men, Butler manipulated purity arguments to launch one of the most controversial and potentially shame-laden campaigns in history, the fight against the Contagious Diseases Acts. The acts permitted the forcible examination and quarantine of suspected prostitutes, while imposing no penalties (or humiliation) on the soldiers and other men who spread the infection.4 While this is one of the most striking examples in which women’s political activism was founded on gendered claims about purity, women’s political uses of purity can be seen across the nineteenth-century map. This chapter examines another instance of women’s deployment of purity that has left visible, textual traces of the roles European women forged in the spaces of empire, especially in India. Though Britain emerged as the dominant power in nineteenth-century India, Portuguese women populated Goan settlements on the west coast, and French women lived in Pondicherry on the east coast Bay of Bengal where the French, Dutch, and British struggled for control until the French governor Count Du Puy came into power in 1816.5 However, middle-class British women were the most successful in deploying political power, especially at the local level. No figure was more admired and reviled for uses and abuses of power than the lightening rod that came to be known as the British memsahib. The controversial figure of the memsahib offers a rich opportunity for reflection on the subtleties of gender and racial politics and the politicization of spheres of influence. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) suggests that etymologically memsahib was a late revision of the centuries-old sahib, a polite form Indians used to address some European men, but that could also be attached to an office or to titles of Indians in certain contexts. The first OED citation of mem sahib does not appear until the 1830s when it was reserved for high-status European wives in India. Gradually, memsahib was extended to include European white women generally. The memsahib became a stock figure in British writing about upperand middle-class European women in India, and the figure gained symbolic

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FIGURE 7.1: “Our Magistrate’s Wife.” Illustration from George Francklin Atkinson,

Curry & Rice (on Forty Plates); or, The Ingredients of Social Life at “Our” Station in India (London: Day and Son, 1859). Author’s personal copy.

significance as social and literary fictions obscured layered national identity, class, race, and mixed-race social dynamics in the empire. She figures prominently in memoirs, travel narratives, and fiction by and about European women in India. Pat Barr’s 1976 series of biographies, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India, painted her subjects in heroic, thoroughly imperialistic terms as the women “who loyally and stoically accepted their share of the white people’s burden and lightened the weight of it with their quiet humour, their grace, and often their youth.”6 In 1988, Margaret MacMillan offered a slightly more critical portrait in Women of the Raj: The Mothers, Wives and Daughters of the British Empire in India, but she resisted scholars who, as Margaret Stroble put it, were creating “the myth of the destructive female,” placing the blame for escalating racism in the colonies squarely on European women’s shoulders.7 More recently, feminist and postcolonial studies, such as the important work of Antoinette Burton, Nupur Chaudhuri, and Indrani Sen, have confronted the ways many white women participated in the worst kind of politics, bolstering the racism, ethnocentrism, and economic exploitation that undergirded

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imperial politics. As Sen points out, even white women who entered India on what many sarcastically referred to as fishing fleets of husband-seeking women had the potential to achieve a status they could never dream of holding in the class systems of European countries. Women who would have had few servants at home could command a retinue in India, achieving unimagined status in the complex hierarchy of civil service, military, merchants, missionaries, and mixed-race or Eurasian people who began to be called “Anglo-Indian” only very late in the century (in the nineteenth century, the term usually refers to British people living in India rather than to the children of English and Indian parents).8 Poor white women (e.g., those living in barracks housing) were forcefully excluded from these circles of middle and upper classes, but also lower-status Europeans with social ambitions.9 We can find those traces of the memsahib within that curious construction, the British military cantonment; in the less formally structured European communities across India; and even in government and mercantile outposts far from the urban centers then referred to as Delhi, Calcutta, or Bombay. In fact, by the second half of the nineteenth century, a number of British women launched power bases from rural hybridized English-Indian homes that reached deep into the lives of local communities. These European women have left us accounts of experiences in travel writing, sketches, paintings, letters, and novels.10 In recent years, scholars have focused on the many British women in India who refused to engage with India. Instead, they desperately worked to reproduce British homes and communities behind physical and social walls that formed adamantine barriers between Europeans and Indians. As a result of the racism of these most visible women, Beverly Gartrell argues, “Few women have been described so negatively as the British memsahib.”11 What these memsahibs allegedly did behind those walls further intensified criticism then and now. Sen points out that in letters, newspaper, and journals from the first half of the century, the memsahib was as likely to be reviled as romanticized for foolishly squandering her political and social capital in frivolous, selfish pastimes, an image that gave way to depictions of a “tragic exile” in the 1880s. Chaudhuri suggests that, as a result, scholars of colonial history often charge the memsahib with “intransigent ethnocentricism,” characterizing these women as “largely responsible for maintaining social distance between the rules and the ruled.”12 Literary representations of the memsahib are also often critical (and present-day critics sharply criticize sentimental literary versions of the figure that might be construed as positive).13 However, the romantic view promoted by a host of novels maintains a powerful hold on present-day popular culture.

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FIGURE 7.2: “Our Ball.” Illustration from George Francklin Atkinson, Curry & Rice (on Forty Plates); or, The Ingredients of Social Life at “Our” Station in India (London: Day and Son, 1859). Author’s personal copy.

Lagaan: Once upon a Time in India, the 2001 Indian film directed by Ashutosh Gowarikar and nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Foreign Language Film category in the United States, prominently features the British actress Rachel Shelley as a memsahib who falls in love with a heroic villager; the film realizes her desire, but only in a fantasy sequence.14 The film replays a trope that surfaced in the more risqué nineteenth-century novels as well. In novels situated in what the British called the 1857 Indian Mutiny (now referred to as the Uprising of 1857), the threat sexual transgression poses to European purity and hence to political authority is fantasized more explicitly and violently. Fiction dramatizes newspaper reports of what later proved to be largely unfounded allegations that Indian rebels raped European women during the yearlong struggle.15 The threat to European women, whether due to forced contact or female desire, kept purity at the heart of political decision making. European women in India lived in the shadow of these fears; they also astutely shifted anxieties about purity into their own imperial domain, their homes.

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Claims to imperial domestic political power resound in the advice each generation of memsahibs shared with the next. The most popular domestic advice manual written for British women in colonial India, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook: Giving the Duties of Mistress and Servants, the General Management of the House, and Practical Recipes for Cooking in All Its Branches (1888), was written by Flora Annie Steel with an added chapter by her friend Grace Gardiner.16 Steel represented herself as a powerful, authoritative, and administratively effective memsahib, and in many ways she is unique.17 (She cut her hair short, and traveled on horseback with her husband in breeches.)18 The memsahib fascinated the British reading public because the emblematic figures, including Steel, accrued power in so many politically as well as socially sensitive arenas, without holding a formal political office. Briefly, Flora Annie Webster (1847–1929) was one of eleven children of Scottish parents; her mother was the daughter and heir of a Jamaican sugar planter. Like many European women, Steel was born into a connection with empire. In 1867, just ten years after the Indian Uprising, she married Henry William Steel, an Indian civil service employee. They moved immediately to Ludhiana, in north India. Between 1868

FIGURE 7.3: “The judge’s wife watches over housekeeping.” Illustration from George

Francklin Atkinson, Curry & Rice (on Forty Plates); or, The Ingredients of Social Life at “Our” Station in India (London: Day and Son, 1859). Author’s personal copy.

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and 1889, they lived in at least fifteen different locations. Often isolated from urban European enclaves, Steel focused on the Indian women and communities around her. In her often self-promoting The Garden of Fidelity: Being the Autobiography of Flora Annie Steel, 1847–1929, she describes astonishing activity and self-assertion.19 Drawing on household medical advice books, home training, and supplies from Britain, Steel provided medical care to Indian women and children. Although proud that she was allowed to visit women living in purdah, as a woman, she was often outraged by what she saw as the wasteful, trivial lives of women there, vehemently protesting against sexual segregation.20 Steel also became involved in the Indian educational system. She began by working with young men who wanted to learn English. This led to an invitation from Indian authorities to help organize schools for girls. In 1884, she was invited by the British government to be the inspector of schools in the

FIGURE 7.4: Portrait of Flora Annie Steel. Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London.

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FIGURE 7.5: “Class in progress in girl’s school, Karachi.” This 1873 photograph by

Michie and Company was published in the Archaeological Survey of India Collections: India Office Series, vol. 46. Copyright © British Library Board Photo 1000/46(4659).

Punjab province, a position that required her to travel almost 500 miles on a regular circuit from Delhi to Peshawar.21 Between 1885 and 1888, she worked with Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Indians who had converted to Christianity. In many of these communities, families actively sought an education that would secure a position working for the British, while education for women was still seen as threatening local cultural expectations for the gender hierarchies on which those communities depended.22 Rebecca Sutcliffe describes Steel’s charge as “Inspectress”: she was expected to create an “all-female school system, complete with indigenous female teachers, head-mistresses, and inspectors,” which would also provide an alternative to missionary schools.23 In candid reports, Steel protested overcrowding and the poor preparation of teachers. She also produced a pamphlet on feminine hygiene, setting the stage for the housekeeping manual. Over her lifetime, Steel wrote prolifically about India in a variety of genres. In India, she collected and published folktales (illustrated by Rudyard Kipling’s father, John Lockwood Kipling) even as she also promoted local women’s crafts. Back in Britain, Steel gained fame as a short-story writer and novelist.

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Her short stories, many of which are gathered from a variety of magazines in Indian Scenes, Collected Stories of Flora Annie Steel (1934), can be unusually thoughtful representations of small moments of Indian life and often clearly critique the impact of colonial law and practice on the lives of Indians, and her novels combine her pleasure in Indian political history and European fictional forms.24 She is best known for her “mutiny” novel, On the Face of the Waters (1896). Steel took great pride in her claim to be one of first Europeans to gain access to Indian records of the Uprising of 1857, arguing that she had balanced British and Indian perspectives (despite present-day readers’ recognition that the novel is deeply rooted in the prejudices of imperialism).25 Her claim emphasized her ability to speak several Indian languages; her knowledge echoes through her autobiography and the volume of folktales. However, her housekeeping manual reached the largest audience and shaped the households, the associations among British employers and their servants, and the extended relationships of British women outward into Indian communities. The guide offers advice on every conceivable aspect of domestic management— from setting up a kitchen and purchasing furniture in a bazaar to diagnosing and treating human and animal diseases, learning Urdu, housing employees and guests, feeding a family or an entourage, and making, operating, and breaking camp. Most particularly, the guide details the types and duties of servants and their appropriate management and housing. It clearly situates the memsahib at the crossroads of power, politics, and domestic authority. Addressed to young British brides of sufficient standing by birth or marriage to head a household that would position them socially as memsahibs, the book is militaristic in tone and imagery. The tone suggests a vestal soldier speaking directly to new female recruits. Steel intimates that spouses are busily consolidating a political and economic empire, while women establish the domestic empires that are the subject of much feminist work on women and empire.26 Women’s domestic empire is populated by servants, open to visiting dignitaries, and set in a landscape animated by unimaginable botanical fecundity; Indians of various religions, castes, and objectives; Eurasians; and Europeans. One of the reasons this text merits attention as a field guide to nineteenth-century women’s imperial power is that it so profoundly structured the experiences of British women in India and everyone with whom they came in contact. As Rosemary Marangoly George and others have pointed out, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and many other household management guides for colonial British women heavily armor domestic labor in military rhetoric.27 Threading imperial politics through the deeply gendered form of the “Beeton” advice manual,28 Steel argues that British women’s particular knowledge

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forwards the agendas of empire when used properly. The guide advises its readers to be diplomats as well as maternal autocrats: the Indian servant, in particular, “is a child in everything save age, and should be treated as a child is, that is to say, kindly, but with the greatest firmness.”29 She shames women into language study, noting that it would be humiliating to live in a European country without comprehending servants and neighbors.30 Later in her autobiography, Steel chastises Europeans’ failures in India: “I attribute this largely to the fact that the English regiments, their officers, their wives, their families, scarcely know the language at all. So they submit to things to which they should not submit, and fail to get what they have every right to expect. Thus they seldom learn to like their servants.”31 The memsahib’s domestic objective is to replicate structures of authority of which the home is a microcosm: “We do not wish to advocate an unholy haughtiness; but an Indian household can no more be governed peacefully, without dignity and prestige, than an Indian Empire.”32 Steel implies that women must win emotional attachment through discipline and domination, a model of authority that maps mother/child relations onto the affective and practical regimes of empire. To wage a war required an enemy. By the 1880s, the gravest enemies of empire were disease, political entropy, competing imperial nations, and, increasingly, “disorderly” Indians, recognizable to us now as resisters and early independence agitators. Herself a bride of twenty when she arrived in India in 1868, Steel battled what she perceived as the threats of chaos, disease, alienated motherhood, and ennui by declaring dirt the enemy—the antagonist that gave life to her mammoth compendium of housekeeping and purpose to its female audience. This amorphous, omnipresent, often invisible enemy stood in for real and imagined material and social forces. It fortified white women in the empire yet bound them in prisons of white, feminine, European privilege. Dirt is the enemy that calls Steel and Gardiner’s domestic political power into being. Terence McLaughlin’s Dirt: A Social History as Seen through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt seeks definition through historical development rather than anthropology or social theory. McLaughlin localizes the transformation of matter into dirt and dirt into a marker of class (rather than religious belief or taste) in the British context.33 His opening chapter summarizes the associations embedded in the category dirt. Dirt is (de)valued through relative, culturally and temporally specific comparisons (manure is valuable fertilizer in some cultures). Dirt signifies imperfection, change and decay, difficulty of removal, and even repulsiveness—usually due to offensive smells or clinging tactility. Dirt threatens pollution, often as a fear of eating what has touched taboo parts of

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the body or bodily excretions.34 More specifically to the nineteenth century, the word dirt often signifies overwhelming incursions of nature, excessive excretions of humans, and material and immaterial evidence of middle-class contact with people deemed Other, whether through poverty, illness, class difference, or foreignness. For middle- and upper-class British citizens, the labor of cleaning was the primary means of disciplining dirt, whether in public urban space or the parlor. Such work was legitimized not only by conceptions of purity but also by Protestant values of thrift, order, and respectability, values defined against outsiders marked by poverty, ethnicity, color, or geography. Science and social values unite against the enemy via miasmatic theories of disease, popular well into the 1890s when germ theory prevailed. Imperial pursuit of dirt escalated after 1832, when cholera threatened Britain. Miasma theory claimed that toxic vapors produced by decaying matter—yet another form of dirt—caused disease. By the 1840s, Edwin Chadwick’s Report on the Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population (1842) offered a scientific and civic rationale for middle-class repulsion to dirt.35 The 1875 Health Act called for sewers, drains, and street cleaning. Dirt became a national enemy, and cleaning a civic responsibility. Vijay Prashad points out that European leaders blamed the 1832 cholera epidemic (and the epidemics of 1848–49 and 1853–54) on the working classes. After the first epidemic, “labour, dirt, disease: these concepts began to have interchangeable meanings.”36 Because the epidemic was believed to originate in India, members of the 1866 International Sanitary Conference at Constantinople declared India, already associated with labor, the “ ‘natural home of cholera’ ”; the disease increasingly invoked “the dirty brown bodies of the colonized natives.”37 The cholera years “inaugurated an intolerance towards dirt from which European social theorists fashioned a nonorganic theory for the management of refuse.”38 In India, the double threat of the miasmic land and unclean inhabitants “enabled colonial officials to conceptualize their place in the colony apart from the entire populace of India; the colonial enclave was to be protected from the smells and vapors of the land and therefore, from disease.”39 The 1863 Royal Commission on the Health of the Anglo-Indian Army set the tone for the Complete Housekeeper, conferring informal political power on the volume that far exceeded formal, legal powers available to European women. Collapsing dirt into disease and disease into the body of the Other follows another British-Indian exchange in the second half of the century: the Contagious Diseases Acts. As Piya Pal-Lapinski explains, in India the effects of the Contagious Diseases Act of 1868 that regulated prostitution in British military

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towns were intensified by the Cantonment Regulations of 1864, 1880, 1889, 1893, and 1897 based on fears of contagion.40 Sara Mills’s account of “colonial domestic space,” which examines both the civil lines of British homes within cantonments and the isolated British homes in outpost areas, emphasizes the prevalence of contact zones across European empires even in supposedly protected domestic spaces.41 In the outposts, memsahibs lived intimately with servants inside their homes and Indian villagers without. Some, like Steel, established schools for Indian children, regularly received and visited their Indian neighbors, studied Indian languages with native speakers, visited women living in the zenana, and dispensed medical assistance to villagers. Mills explains: “Private life was lived as if always in public, as if colonial superiority had to be on constant display, not only in conduct such as building railways and roads and enforcing the law, but also in terms of more mundane acts such as cooking, eating, and relaxing. . . . Houses were for the display of a particular type of colonial sensibility.” As crucial fixtures of this sensibility, servants formed an entrenched part of “that publicness of private space.”42 Thus, while Steel was writing a practical guide to running a household, her military rhetoric also charged Anglo-Indian housewives to address the national, imperial, gendered, class-affiliated, and racial character of dirt. These duties involved securing hygiene in the highly public domestic space of their Indian homes, countering the allegedly traditional and inherited inclinations of Indian servants to be dirty, imposing order on the disorder that devolves into dirt, and most importantly, successfully determining what was and was not dirt. The writers of The Complete Indian Housekeeper plant the flag at home. The authors insist in their opening chapter on the need for a daily “Inspection parade” of the pantry, scullery, and kitchen.43 Recasting housekeeping as empire building, Steel ennobles the frustrating demands of daily life and exalts the imposition of English household practices onto Indian culture, climate, and servants. “Life in India,” she writes, “always partakes of the nature of a campaign, where tight marching order is a great desideratum.”44 Moving house requires expert tools, culinary weapons, well-disciplined troops, and large-scale means of transportation. Never content with power or possessions, the ambitious memsahib is urged to extend her domain, conquering land and tradition alike by fortifying the home with garden, dairy, henhouse, stables, well, and drains. In the battle against dirt—the excrescence of Indian nature, the product of Indian bodies, the figure of disease, defilement, even sexual contact and contagion—servants were at once an agent of the enemy and British women’s only

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troops (like the sepoys). The home out in the empire becomes a microcosm of the dirt, drains, and embodied filth being combated by Chadwick and his troops in Britain. Once the servant troops were recruited, they had to be put through mental and physical training in preparation for a never-ending battle with the gravest enemies to domestic order in India—dirt, Indian traditional practices, and the simmering threat of revolt. The manual opens with sympathy for the British woman reader, new to India, as she launches her campaign. She finds herself lost “in the crowd of idle, unintelligible servants.”45 Explicitly referencing an infamous 1756 episode in which British soldiers died in the “black hole of Calcutta” at Fort William, Steel writes, “The kitchen is a black hole; the pantry a sink. The only servant who will condescend to tidy up is a skulking servant with a reed broom; whilst pervading all things broods the stifling, enervating atmosphere of custom, against which energy beats itself unavailingly, as against a feather bed.”46 The shared problems faced by housekeepers in the metropole, the outpost, and the colonial past bear on domestic colonial space. Commenting on British influence on prices of food in India, Steel notes that “housekeeping in India to day has a political and social as well as a domestic side.”47 Class and color differences are also implicitly collapsed in comparisons between Indian servants abroad and Cockney servants at home. In both contexts, the best strategies are “patience, good temper, and old-fashioned sense of servitude,”48 but the memsahib faces a particularly colonial challenge since Indian servants unite “their old habits with the inherited conservatism of dirt.”49 Therefore, the Indian housekeeper must establish unrelenting regimens of cleaning, supervising, rewarding, and punishing her childlike troops, activities Steel perceives as military discipline. The Complete Housekeeper is marked by balance between proto-Foucauldian deployment of the authors’ knowledge about how to control servants and mobilize them in the domestic assault on dirt, on one hand, and the often-expressed interest and pleasure in India and the Indians that Steel encounters, including servants, on the other. This tension undergirds the politics even of the more progressive memsahibs. Steel’s alleged knowledge of the particular problem the members of each religion, caste, and servant position pose in relation to dirt provokes her most cynical comments on Indian servants. Her greatest concern is reserved for the kitchen, associated with the literal consumption of India and its multivalent dirt: “Even supposing the kitchen is kept in a cleanly state, it by no means follows that the food will be cooked cleanly, and the mistress must always be on her guard against the dirty habits which are ingrained in the native cook,” such as stirring pudding with fingers or straining soup through a

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“greasy turban.”50 These concerns are also addressed directly to the cook in the final chapter, accompanied by a footnote suggesting that “this chapter might well be written out in the vernacular and given to the cook.”51 In desperation, Steel appeals to the cook with the medical authority of miasmatic theory: The doctors have found out that some of the worst kinds of fevers come from dirty milk and bad water. So, if you keep your milk close to a dirtysmelling kitchen drain and use water from a ghurra that has been standing in a dirty puddle of that drain, amongst the refuse of vegetables, chickens’ entrails, and Heaven knows what, you may poison your master or your master’s child, as surely as if you had put arsenic in their food. Cleanliness, then, is no mere fanciful fad on the sahib-logue’s part. It may be a matter of life or death. Never forget this.52 This is the most direct appeal to the servant troops and one of the few instances in which Steel attempts to translate British conceptions of dirt into argument and explanation rather than simply issuing orders. Nevertheless, the assault on dirt is undermined by all things Indian. The khitmutgar, a chief servant in the household, is seen as acclimated to dirt by training and religion. Steel complains: “Much of this is, of course, due to heredity, all Mahomedans of the lower classes being apparently blind to dirt; but more is the result of almost every table-servant beginning work as what is called a musolchi—a nameless, abject, adjunct of the scullery, who washes by the light of Nature.”53 Here abjection rather than religion invests the body of the servant with dirt; through loss of self-respect, these abjected servants come “to assimilate an incredible amount of pure griminess around their own persons.”54 Running the gamut of household servants, the manual equates dirt with imperial threats from Britain and the far reaches of empire, including overpopulation, confusing gender reversals (the servants are men rather than women), and diffuseness of disease (moral as well as physical). Dirt becomes a figure for emotions, from discomfort to disgust, the residue of physical contacts between British and Indians. Contact reminded the British of the inevitably violated real and imagined boundaries between the clean and the dirty, the pure and the polluted. Like the water that constantly threatens to turn rancid and pestilent but on which the household absolutely depends, foreign matter and foreign bodies threaten to infect rather than serve the domestic empire. Even the ayah, the only female servant in the household, though praised by both Steel and Gardiner for her loyalty and kindness, poses a threat due to her

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FIGURE 7.6: Photograph of a khitmutgar by John Edward Sache

taken between 1865 and 1882. Courtesy of Harappa.

own fears of pollution. Her refusal to sweep is treated as foolish superstition rather than a self-respecting refusal to be dirtied: “In this connection it may be remarked that the degradation which attaches to the mere act of cleansing anything in India is mainly responsible for the inconceivably filthy ways of its inhabitants.”55 Though distinctive as a female servant, the ayah stands in for all of India in its subjection to dirt, which here insinuates ignorance rather than disease. Dirt is that which cannot be secured by the British housewife’s arsenal of language, order, regimen, or observation. Filth is a way of being rather than an essence or substance that can be objectified or eliminated. Ironically, in the case of the ayah, her “filthy ways” mirror the memsahib’s own motives. She refuses to clean in order to remain pure—in her own religious, cultural, and hence

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political terms. She refuses to sweep in order to sustain the self-respect that Steel previously suggests is the heavy artillery required to keep “dirt” at bay. Witty, resourceful, and confident of their victory, the narrative voice is, finally, no more secure than the official discourse of Victorian empire. Native voices occasionally and mutinously interrupt even though their counter discourse is represented by Steel as complaint or barbarity. Only once, in the fascinating final chapter titled “To the Cook,” does the text violate its own policies of engagement and address an Indian household servant directly in a significant acknowledgement of the powerful position of this kitchen subaltern. Yet throughout the text, Steel indicates awareness that when British subjects are served by Hindus, especially of the Brahmin caste, it is they—the British and their memsahibs—who threaten their servants with pollution. To secure the might of Europeans generally and of the memsahib in particular, Steel urged several generations of British homemakers to make peace with the differences they perceived as exotic or compatible with their role as rulers in India but to fight the endless fight against any form of difference denominated dirt. Sternly insisting on the threat of dirt and contagion, in their literal and symbolic forms, Steel and Gardiner, like so many other memsahibs, constructed a powerful, long-lasting politics of purity that served empire all too well.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Artistic Representation: Travel Narrative and the Construction of Female Artistic Identity in the Nineteenth Century alexandra k. wettl aufer

In her groundbreaking study of 1859, Women Artists in All Ages and Countries, Elizabeth Fries Lummis Ellet observed that the nineteenth century had witnessed “the advancement of women as artists beyond any point reached in preceding ages” and directly attributed the contemporary woman’s artistic success to her increased education and freedom—“to her liberation from the thralldom of old-fashioned prejudices and unworthy restraints which, in former times, fettered her energies, rendered her acquisition of scientific and artistic knowledge extremely difficult, and threw obstacles in the way of her devotion to study and the exercise of her talents.”1 Ellet’s rhetoric reveals the close relationship between female artistic identity, women’s education, and the early feminist movement at midcentury, and if this “liberation” was not fully realized for many decades to come (if, indeed, ever), the radical image of the

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woman artist came to embody a progressive female subject position not only in studios, galleries, and exposition halls, but also in novels, stories, and articles devoted to this transgressive figure.2 In nineteenth-century Britain, as women entered the field of cultural production in unprecedented numbers as painters, sculptors, and watercolorists, art “became a battleground,” Deborah Cherry has shown, “for intense debates about women in contemporary society.”3 Similarly, explains Kirstin Swinth, the ranks of American female artists swelled following the Civil War, with women “flooding art schools, hanging their pictures alongside men’s, pressing for critical recognition, and competing for sales in an unpredictable market.”4 Just as Cherry and others have traced how female “artists and activists” became closely linked in Britain,5 Erica Hirshler documents the simultaneous “commitment to social activism and dedication to modern aesthetics” in the lives and works of female artists in New England.6 In the course of the century, women’s representation at the annual Royal Academy (RA) exhibition in London quadrupled, from 104 works by female artists in 1800 to 415 in 1900, while the proportion of women’s productions increased from 9.4 percent in 1800 to more than 20 percent of all the works of art at the RA exhibition of 1900.7 By the 1890 U.S. census, 48 percent of the Americans who practiced art as a profession were women.8 Yet Ellet’s optimism notwithstanding, women continued to face both ideological and practical obstacles in their struggle for professional artistic identity in nineteenth-century Britain and America. Despite the ever-increasing numbers of female artists, the normative images of the artist and the professional were consistently gendered male; indeed as male artists anxiously constructed artistic identity in the age of nineteenth-century professionalism, woman was positioned as the very antithesis of the professional, her artistic endeavors regularly and categorically assigned decorative or amateur status. The category of “genius,” so closely allied with artistic identity from the romantic period onward, further precluded women’s inclusion in the pantheon of so-called true artists. Although the qualities associated with romantic genius—sensitivity, emotion, intuition, and imagination—had long been gendered female, nineteenth-century definitions of genius, based on a rhetoric of difference, were gendered exclusively male. Christine Battersby explains: “This rhetoric praised ‘feminine’ qualities in male creators . . . but claimed females could not—or should not—create. To buttress the man/animal, civilized/savage division, the category of genius had to work by a process of exclusion.”9 By the same token, women’s artistic education remained limited at best, and the majority of art schools open to women in nineteenth-century Britain and the United States offered training in the decorative or industrial arts, preparing

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the aspiring female artist for factory work or piecework. Even as women began gaining access to more elevated academic training after 1860, they were generally excluded from the life class, in which students drew from the nude model. History painting, the most elevated of all the genres within the hierarchies of art, was predicated on an artist’s ability to depict the human form in action, which was in turn dependent on learning to draw from the live model. “To be deprived of this ultimate stage of training,” Linda Nochlin observes, “meant, in effect, to be deprived of the possibility of creating major art works,”10 and women were de facto relegated to the “minor” genres of portraiture, landscape, still life, and genre painting. Thus, even as they actively produced and exhibited art as professionals in the public sphere of nineteenth-century Britain and America, women continued to find artistic identity and legitimacy elusive. For as Lisa Tickner reminds us, “To become an artist . . . was not only a social matter of training and opportunity, it was also a question of aspiration, of imagining oneself an artist. Fact and fiction, history and biography, psychology and journalism, merged and overlapped in the mapping of an artistic ‘type’ and, hence, in the provision of raw material for new identities.”11 In response to these challenges, and in order to provide “raw material for new identities,” a significant number of British and American women turned to Continental Europe in search of artistic training, legitimacy, and cultural capital. France, Italy, and Germany offered the female artist opportunities for joining a studio and working with a master (opportunities that were limited or impossible at home), while at the same time offering them access to the “superior” artistic culture of Europe, long considered aesthetically richer and more sophisticated than the cultural “backwaters” of Britain and the United States.12 Freed from the constraints of domestic obligations and limitations, artistic women travelers claimed a coveted subject position as privileged observers of foreign cultures, enjoying an independence and mobility that many chose to reproduce not only in their art but also in travel narratives directed to readers at home. In these wide-ranging texts, British and American women painters used discourses of travel and exploration to construct an identity that challenged the romantic myths of the artist as an isolated, solitary, and suffering (male) genius whose quasi-divine powers are tied equally to inspiration and masculinity. Instead, the female artists portrayed in these journals, letters, guidebooks, and novels published between 1850 and 1900 are intrepid, industrious, practical, and above all not alone. Central to every narrative is a sense of community: women travel together; paint and sculpt together; meet, observe, and depict other women; discover women painters of the past; and, perhaps most importantly, self-consciously address and model for other female artists at home,

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actively encouraging their sisters in art to follow the same path abroad. As politically as they were aesthetically motivated, women artists’ travel narratives played an active role in constructing female artistic identity in Britain and the United States by helping both women and men “imagine” (in Tickner’s words) the figure of a woman artist, rendering “visible” what had remained socially, culturally, and aesthetically inconceivable. Just as Ellet’s Women Artists in All Ages and Countries proposes a collective identity through gender and vocation that is stronger than historical or national ties, so too do the artist-authors to be discussed subsequently forge connections between women and artists that transcend the boundaries of nation and difference for an imagined artistic community of collectivity and solidarity. In “Travel as Performed Art,” Judith Adler contends that travel “serves as a medium for bestowing meaning on the self and the social, natural, or metaphysical realities through which it moves. Performed as an art, travel becomes one means of ‘worldmaking’ and of self-fashioning.” Further, explains Adler, “Any reconstruction of the meaning that particular travel performances hold for their publics must take into account the expectations they alter as well as those they fulfill, and the expressive choices explicitly rejected in the course of their accomplishment.”13 Accordingly, the two accounts of travel penned and published by women artists that will serve as case studies here—Anna Mary Howitt’s An Art-Student in Munich (1854) and May Alcott Nieriker’s Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (1879)—are best understood within the context of contemporary narratives of travel, art, and gender of the period. Continental travel had long been associated with the acquisition of culture and the development of self.14 While the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century was the more or less exclusive purview of the aristocratic British male, the introduction of steam power and new technologies of travel, from Thomas Cook’s “tourist empire” to the proliferation of train lines, steamships, hotels, guidebooks, and itineraries, opened up European tourism to the British and American middle classes, ushering in a new era of mobility and cultural border crossing. As James Buzard and others have shown, the growth of travel as a “cultural practice” generated a binary opposition between the “traveler” and “tourist”: where the traveler was “independent,” “original,” “authentic,” and “sincere,” the tourist was a “degraded” copy, “the dupe of fashion, following blindly where authentic travelers have gone with open eyes and free spirits.”15 As women increasingly joined their family and friends on voyages abroad in the course of the nineteenth century, the positive/negative poles of traveler/tourist quickly became gendered as well, with the “legitimate” traveler

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associated with the masculine and the “illegitimate” tourist allied with the feminine. Buzard documents the birth at midcentury of the “family abroad plot,” a novelistic genre whose aim was “to characterize the tour that is directed by a woman as a misuse of the acculturating potential of ‘travel,’ usually involving an illegitimate attempt to gain status at home.” Buzard adds, “a conservative vision informs the family abroad plot, mistrustful of the female irrationality, mendacity, and unruly desires that endanger Britain’s solid, orderly, ‘masculine’ system of social relations.”16 As female travelers became increasingly common, resistance to them grew increasingly virulent. In 1848, the article “Modern Tourism” in Blackwood’s spoke of “our horror” of “the professional woman tourist” whose very existence “spoils all rational travel . . . disgusts all intelligent curiosity” and “repels the student, the philosopher, and the manly investigator.” Moreover, it is the woman tourists’ desire to write and, worse, to publish, “pouring their busy nothings on the ‘reading public,’ without compassion or conscience” that is “the crime”: the author deplores “the woman who runs abroad to forage for publication; reimports her baggage, bursting with a periodical gathering of nonsense; and with a freight of folly, at once empty as air and heavy as lead, discharges the whole at the heads of a suffering people.”17 Travel writing in general and travel narratives by women in particular proliferated from 1815 on, and the opening of Anna Jameson’s Diary of an Ennuyée (1826) reflects the personal, often romanticized, nature of these ritualized musings with a mordant mockery: What young lady, travelling for the first time on the Continent, does not write a “Diary”? No sooner have we slept on the shores of France—no sooner are we seated in the gay salon at Dessin’s, than we call, like Biddy Fudge, for “French pens and French ink,” and forth steps from case the morocco-bound diary, regularly ruled and paged, with its patent Bramah lock and key, wherein we are to record and preserve all the striking, profound, and original observations—the classical reminiscences—the thread-bare raptures—the poetical effusions—in short, all the neversufficiently-to-be-exhausted topics of sentiment and enthusiasm, which must necessarily suggest themselves while posting from Paris to Naples. Verbiage, emptiness, and affectation.18 Yet despite these dismissive clichés, women increasingly participated in the “cultural work” of national identity and imperialism in serious accounts of their travels. Maria Frawley notes the role played by boundaries—“between

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classes, sexes, and nations”—in structuring the Victorian experience of travel and maintains that “by showcasing their adventures overseas, sharing their ideas about foreign cultures, and cultivating their own authority and expertise,” female travel writers “helped to expand women’s participation in the public sphere, in essence to redraw some of the discursive boundaries of their own culture.”19

IMAGES OF SISTERHOOD: ANNA MARY HOWITT’S AN ART-STUDENT IN MUNICH For nineteenth-century female artists, travel and travel writing became means of professional self-fashioning while at the same time offering an opportunity to “redraw some of the discursive boundaries” of gender, art, and nation through performances of subjectivity and solidarity. In turning first to Anna Mary Howitt’s An Art-Student in Munich, we find the construction of female artistic identity enacted through a narrative that focuses on women’s education both in the studio and in direct contact with German culture, landscape, and traditions. Even more important, though, is the collective nature of the experience, as Howitt inscribes her feminist vision of “sisters in art” within this semifictionalized memoir. The daughter of progressive journalists William and Mary Howitt, Anna Mary’s conception of artistic sisterhood developed both from her family’s model of artistic collaboration20 and from long-term friendships devoted to communal study, artistic training, and women’s rights with Barbara Leigh Smith, Bessie Rayner Parkes, and Jane Benham. Leigh Smith (later Barbara Bodichon) was a landscape painter and feminist reformer better known today for her politics than her art. Independently wealthy, Leigh Smith spearheaded the Married Women’s Property Bill, campaigned for women’s suffrage, founded the Langham Place Group, and cofounded Girton College for women at Cambridge, one of the first of its kind.21 Bessie Parkes was a poet who was equally committed to women’s work: along with Leigh Smith, Parkes established the English Woman’s Journal in 1858 to promote “the present industrial employments of women, both manual and intellectual, the best mode of judiciously extending the sphere of such employments, and the laws affecting the property and conditions of the sex.”22 The author of a collection of Poems (1852) dedicated to Leigh Smith, with “The World of Art” inscribed to “A.M.H. and all true Artists,” Parkes also published Essays on Women’s Work (1865) and was instrumental in launching the Victoria Press in 1860. Jane Benham (later Jane Benham Hay) exhibited successfully at the RA, Liverpool, the Society of Female Artists, and the French Gallery up to 1887.

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The group painted and wrote together, traveled through Europe, and strove to establish a new model of the artist as woman. As Leigh Smith’s ink drawing, Ye Newe Generation (ca. 1850) playfully illustrates, the young women saw themselves as a united front, warriors taking on the world together, in a sisterhood that was central to their formation as artists. Portrayed against the backdrop of the mountains, suggesting at once the heights they will scale and most probably their time together in Germany, Leigh Smith, Parkes, Benham, and Howitt wield their artistic tools like weapons in comic gestures of bravado. Palette, brushes, and maulsticks doubling as alpenstocks are brandished at the bull by the three painters (Leigh Smith, Benham, and Howitt) while poet Parkes waves her notebook in the air. In an image of solidarity and forward movement, the bodies of the artists merge together clad in the loose skirts, jackets, and boots they preferred, outfits made for comfort and ease of movement rather than fashion or flattery. At the same time, their unconventional garb signals their difference from other women and their membership in an artistic sisterhood. Mirroring artistic brotherhoods of the period that announced their association with flowing beards and robes (the Primitifs and the Nazarenes) or outrageous vests, capes, and accoutrements (Les Jeunes France and Bohemians), Howitt and her friends use the language of clothes to establish

FIGURE 8.1: Barbara Leigh Smith, Ye Newe Generation, ca. 1850. Courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge.

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their collective identity as women for whom mobility, labor, and art are more important than elegance and bourgeois propriety. Their gesturing arms and open but unified stride denote an almost celebratory energy, full of freedom and a lack of restraint that is striking in a group portrait of mid-nineteenth-century women. Their adversary, the bull, stands as a symbol of aggressive masculinity as well as stubborn stupidity while implicitly invoking Britain (John Bull) itself. Leigh Smith represents their antagonist through his horns, head, and tail, eliding the body and thus the threat he poses, reducing the bull to a glowering caricature of disapproval. Behind them, a woman covers her face in horror or in tears, though it is unclear whether it is the sight of the bull or the “Newe Generation” that has traumatized her. Leigh Smith’s mock Old English orthography signals the women’s self-conscious dialogue with their medievalist brethren in art, while emphasizing their own interest in the future rather than the past. In 1850, having exhausted the limited opportunities open to female art students in Britain and committed to careers as professionals, Howitt and Benham traveled to Germany to study with the history painter Wilhelm von Kaulbach. Howitt and Benham lived together (without parents or chaperone) and painted under Kaulbach’s tutelage, pursuing art with an almost religious passion while also traveling throughout the country studying German language and culture. Before they left London, both women were commissioned to send back articles describing their experiences for a variety of periodicals: Benham for the Literary Gazette and Art Journal, and Howitt for Athenaeum, Household Words, and Henry Chorley’s Ladies’ Companion. In this sense, Howitt and Benham were ambassadors for the cause of the female artist abroad, and their widely circulated reflections on artistic life in Germany provided inspirational images for their readers. At the encouragement of her mother and Mrs. Gaskell, Howitt compiled An Art-Student in Munich from her letters and articles, publishing it in 1853 (with a second edition in 1880) to much popular acclaim. From the very first page, Howitt establishes her identity as “a woman studying Art” and the intimate address of the transcribed letters (here presented with dates but without addressee) gives her readers a sense of immediacy and inclusion in the experiences of the “Art Student,” Anna, and her friend and fellow artist, Clare. The pursuit of art and artistic training transcends mere profession for Howitt and her cohort and is described throughout the narrative as a quasi-divine calling. Denied admission as women to the Academy in Munich, the painters approach Kaulbach as “acolytes” in the hopes of being able to work in his studio. Addressing the master with “a reverence, a faith

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in him unspeakable,” Howitt tells Kaulbach “how we longed really to study; how we had long loved and revered his works,” and the master’s response— “Come and draw here; this room is entirely at your disposal . . . Every day, and as early as you like, and stay as long as there is day-light”—is related in terms that elevate him to a god-like status. Howitt reflects, “As I left the studio, I could have fallen upon my knees, and returned fervent thanks to God, so mysterious was the fulfillment of my long-cherished poetical dream.”23 Once they have gained admittance on a daily basis, the students refer to the studio as “our art-temple” and Kaulbach becomes “the high priest.” If the studio in contemporary fiction took on aspects of a temple or sanctum for the male artist as a romantic, deified figure, Howitt plays on these associations with the women’s initiation into the consecrated space and claims a place for them in the religious order of Art. Artistic identity is here performed in the process of gaining inclusion in a sacred, holy society that implicitly confers authority and legitimacy on its newest proselytes. Anna’s and Clare’s experiences in Kaulbach’s studio introduce them to new ways of seeing, feeling, and understanding the world and its representations.

FIGURE 8.2: Anna Mary Howitt, illustration of “Old Mill near Heidelberg” (1870) in

Mary Howitt, An Autobiography, 1891. Courtesy of the University of Iowa Libraries.

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In turn, the exhaustively detailed descriptions of the studio, the paintings there, and the surrounding German landscape establish the female painter’s artistic sensibility and imagination in romantic and Ruskinian terms. Where “your Englishman” would find the untamed landscape surrounding the studio “very untidy” and disparage “Kaulbach’s wild field” and his equally tumultuous canvases, Howitt’s narrator makes manifest her artistic identity by translating the German aesthetic for her nonartist English readers. She explains that Kaulbach’s paintings, too often dismissed in “hasty judgment” by the English and French, must be understood as “poems, and new subjects treated in an original manner,” reflecting and addressing “that dreamy imagination which invests all nature with a tender poetry, which gives an individual life to every bud and leaf,—that imagination which . . . has raised up an immortal band of musicians, philosophers, and artists!”24 Her apprenticeship in the master’s studio grants Howitt’s Anna membership in this “immortal band,” allowing her to perform the role of Virgil to her unenlightened audience and locating difference not in gender, but in artistic identity. Far from being a female tourist pursuing predigested sights, Howitt’s narrator represents original and authentic experience abroad and translates these experiences for her readers both in the studio and in her travels throughout the countryside. In keeping with Carlyle and Ruskin, Howitt elevates the artist to the position of a “Seer” whose work manifests a power “with such a vividness of truth that your very soul is thrilled” and the artist is “ennobled through his art, ennobling humanity.”25 The remainder of the lengthy text is in many ways a verbal transcription of these “ways of seeing,” and if Howitt does not claim the status of a “Seer” for herself, she claims authority as a conduit for the artist’s vision; an artist herself, she helps others to “see” and joins the ranks of those “ennobling humanity.” While Howitt and Benham studied in Germany, Leigh Smith and Parkes had persuaded their parents to let them travel unescorted through western Europe, and the reunion of the female travelers in Munich is a central episode in Howitt’s text. Anna recounts a visit from her friend Justina (an easily recognizable Leigh Smith) and uses the gathering of the women abroad to present her theory of “artistic sisterhood” that would be developed in her 1852 novella, “The Sisters in Art.”26 As soon as Justina arrives, her “dear art sisters” show her their studio in a scene that emphasizes both the journey and the space of artistic creation: “We passed through the bushes; we stood under the vine, we opened the heavy grey door: we were in the little room. The clock ticked as loudly as usual; there stood the two sister easels, and a sister painting-blouse hung on each: the casts, the books, the green jug with flowers, all looked so

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familiar, that to set to work at once and fancy that I had only dreamed of Justina, seemed the most natural thing.” The passage highlights both gender and collectivity, affirming that they are women who indeed have a place in the studio, where they both live and, importantly, labor. Like the implied readers of her epistolary text, Howitt’s Justina, “having now seen what we were beginning, and having taken into her memory all the features of the beloved little room” would later be able to “picture our lives when she should have again vanished.”27 Thus, the central (implied) image to be taken away from the art students in Munich is that of the pair of female students in the studio, and the women remain connected even in absence. The aspiring artists have diverse experiences of Europe: where Anna and Clare work in the studio and lead independent lives, enjoying German culture (concerts, theater, festivals) firsthand and unattended, Justina’s travels follow a more traditional path. Justina enjoys their makeshift dinner in the studio “with all the keener relish, from the contrast it made to the life she was leading— a life of the highest respectability, a life of first-class travelling, of couriers, of the grandest hotels, of English solemnity, and aristocratic propriety. She declared again and again that there never was such a delicious, free, poetical life as ours; and she was perfectly right.”28 The contrasts among the three women extend to their approaches to art: where Justina embodies a “healthy” love of nature and art represented in her landscapes, Clare possesses a “dramatic power of expression,” while Anna is “sensitive, poetical,” aspiring “after the spiritual” in her art. Howitt maintains that this fundamental divergence among the artists, sharing “the same aims in life, yet all three so different from each other,” strengthens each, rather than divides them. She rhapsodizes, “What schemes of life have not been worked out whilst we have been together! As though this, our meeting here, were to be the germ of a beautiful sisterhood in Art, of which we have all dreamed long and by which association we might be enabled to do noble things.”29 Art and sisterhood are thus essentially tied to doing “noble things,” and in keeping with the later endeavors of the Langham Place Group, Howitt links artistic and feminist sisterhoods of collective labor and solidarity. Moving from the idea of “associated homes” for working-class families (an idea frequently discussed in Howitt’s Journal and elsewhere in the 1840s), Justina proposes a single-sex associated home “at some future day, for such ‘sisters’ as had no home of their own.” She goes on to elaborate an “Outer and Inner Sisterhood,” and Justina explains: “The Inner, to consist of the Art-sisters bound together by their one object, and which she fears may never number many in their band; the Outer Sisterhood to consist of women, all workers and all

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striving after a pure moral life, but belonging to any profession, any pursuit. All should be bound to help each other in such ways as were most accordant with their natures and characters.”30 The “Art-sisters” thus serve as a model or inspiration for larger and more far-reaching cooperative societies, centered on the idea of noble and ennobling labor, the professionalization of women leading to their spiritual elevation. Here, as in “The Sisters in Art,” collective space for women’s collaboration, education, and inspiration is central to the ideal of art, labor, and sisterhood. While art provides a paradigm, women’s professionalism and collaboration are above all privileged. Howitt’s An Art-Student in Munich establishes sisterhoods of women and artists not only in the present (between Anna, Clare, and Justina) and the future (in the Inner and Outer Sisterhoods of professional women), but also in the past. Upon visiting the Leuchtenberg Gallery, the narrator is delighted to find the names of three women artists included in the catalog of French and German painting. Howitt discovers works by Elisabeth Sirani, Baroness Freiburg, and “the third, which is by far the best picture of the three, though all are very good, is by Marguerite Gérard, born in 1761. It is in fact a Madonna and Child, but of a modern treatment.”31 Connecting women artists across the ages, much like Ellet would do at the end of the decade, Howitt demonstrates a legacy or genealogy that again adds to contemporary women’s legitimacy and creates links across cultures as well as centuries, further intimating that modern women continue only to improve on their foremothers. Later in her travels, she comes across the work of Margaret Van Eyck and places her work on par with that of her brothers, considering them collectively as “masters” of Netherlandish art. Anna praises “these noble, fine Van Eycks, with their beautiful domestic attachment, their wonderful industry, their strong originality. John Van Eyck, the perfecter, if not the originator, of oil-painting; Margaret, the pupil and zealous assistant of her brothers—that steadfast woman ‘who,’ says an old chronicler, ‘declined many offers of marriage with noble gentlemen for love and devotion to her art.’ ”32 The three female artists at the center of “The Sisters in Art” would follow a similar trajectory, refusing marriage proposals to devote their energies to art and to establishing a Woman’s Art College, but unlike the Renaissance painter, they are neither “pupils” nor “zealous assistants” of men, but rather inspired and taught by one another. Finally, although Howitt confessed in the preface to donning rose-colored glasses in her memoir, a conversation with a male painter hints at the darker side of the experience. When Howitt’s Anna waxes rhapsodic on her love of Munich to a local artist, he immediately responds with a litany of all she cannot

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experience of artistic life. “There is one feature in Munich life from which you, unfortunately, as a woman, have been cut off,” he explains, “the jovial, poetical, quaint life of the artists among themselves.” He goes on to elaborate the many traditions, festivals, and “odd usages,” the “meetings at their Kneips,” and “their masked balls, where all is deliciously artistic and poetic”33 that were accessible only to the fraternity of male artists. At once part of the master’s atelier and always Other, Howitt’s Anna and Clare construct an artistic identity together as “sisters in art” that will be fully elaborated in Howitt’s novella of that name upon her return to England. Acknowledging difference, Howitt concludes An Art-Student in Munich with a meditation on art, gender, and forms of equality: I cannot but believe that all in life that is truly noble, truly good, truly desirable, God bestows upon us women in as unsparing measure as upon men. He only desires us, in His great benevolence, to stretch forth our hands and to gather for ourselves the rich joys of intellect, of nature, of study, of action, of love, and of usefulness, which He has poured forth around us . . . we shall stand in humility before God, but proudly and rejoicingly at the side of man! Different always, but not less noble, less richly endowed!34 Howitt’s optimistic vision of women’s ability to transcend social oppression through “earnestness and fixedness of purpose” reflects an idealism shared by many at midcentury, while at the same time proposing a role for the female artist not within the male brotherhood, but parallel to it, equally noble but always different.35 Through the experience of travel and painting abroad, Howitt’s protagonists construct not only individual artistic identities as painters but also collective identities as female professionals.

PRACTICAL TRAVELERS: THE ALCOTTS ABROAD Early in Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women (1868), the youngest sister, Amy, announced her artistic ambitions: “I have ever so many wishes; but the pet one is to be an artist, and to go to Rome, and do fine pictures, and be the best artist in the world.”36 Alcott’s sister, (Abigail) May Alcott Nieriker, the model and inspiration for spoiled and artistic Amy, did indeed get her wish (at least in part) by becoming an artist, going to Rome, and doing fine pictures. While she did not meet with the level of success Louisa attained through her writing, May Alcott was nonetheless an accomplished painter who studied art in

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Boston with David Claypoole Johnston and William Morris Hunt, taught art in Syracuse and Concord to help support her family, and ultimately lived and painted in Europe from 1876 until her death in 1879. Her copies of Turner’s works in the British National Gallery garnered Ruskin’s praise,37 and one of her paintings (a still life) was accepted at the Paris Salon of 1877, the only work by an American woman to be included in the exhibition. While May’s illustrations for the first edition of Little Women were widely criticized, her Concord Sketches appeared the following year with a preface by Louisa and met with more success. In 1870, Louisa and May set out for a Grand Tour of Europe with their friend Alice Bartlett, and the trip, which provided substance for May’s Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (1879), was also memorialized in Louisa’s travel narrative, Shawl-Straps (1872), drawn substantially from the sisters’ letters home.38 In reading Shawl-Straps in dialogue with Studying Art Abroad, we discover the critical role played by travel in the construction of (gendered) artistic identity for both of the Alcotts. Shawl-Straps, the second volume in the series Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag, eschews “the description of famous places” for “the personal haps and mishaps, adventures and experiences”39 of the three “wanderers”: outgoing, worldly Amanda (a thinly disguised Alice Barlett); artistic, idealistic Matilda (May); and Lavinia (Louisa), their reluctant duenna. The women determine to journey as economically as possible, rejecting “expensive and fashionable” travel for independent firsthand encounters with the peoples and cultures of France, Switzerland, Italy, and Britain. Throughout the narrative, Alcott focuses on the women they encounter—peasants, aristocrats, landladies, fiancées, mothers, and daughters—who singly and collectively support the “Argument in Favor of the Superiority of Women.” The humorous portraits highlight a sense of community and commonality among women as the American travelers recognize their own potential in their foreign counterparts. Alcott’s alter ego, Lavinia, “being much interested in Women’s Rights and Wrongs, was much impressed by the new revelations of the capabilities of her sex, and soon ceased to be surprised at any demonstration of feminine strength, skill, and independence, for everywhere the women took the lead.” Praising the peasant women of Brittany and deriding their mates, Alcott notes, “They not only kept house, reared children, and knit every imaginable garment the human frame can wear, but kept the shops and the markets, tilled the gardens, cleaned the streets, and bought and sold cattle, leaving the men free to enjoy the only pursuits they seemed inclined to follow—breaking horses, mending roads, and getting drunk. The markets seemed entirely in the hands of the women.”40

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Within Alcott’s cultural critique of French men is a larger reflection on the cultural construction of gender in general, as she highlights the skill with which French women handle tasks traditionally gendered “male” as well as the more “feminine” domestic arts. Continuing her implicit feminist commentary, she observes a group of men and women working together chopping and stacking wood. While the women are twice as fast and twice as efficient, they are paid a quarter of what their male counterparts receive. Yet, since nothing is taken out of the women’s wages for wine or tobacco, “her ten cents probably went further than their forty.” Participating in a long tradition of social critique of home through the critique of the foreign Other, Alcott points out the gender inequity of Breton compensation only to reflect on the equally unjust situation at home, where American women were consistently paid a fraction of men’s salaries as well. Later, when in London, Lavinia admires the “pioneers” of the women’s movement, who “make less noise and do more work than we Americans . . . I should not be surprised if they got suffrage before we did.” She is impressed by their collaborative efforts to support one another, most notably in meetings for mothers to discuss “the best ways of teaching and training their children.”41 The three women’s independence is further demonstrated when they decide to abandon their trunks and travel without luggage, carrying nothing but a few “necessaries” in a shawl-strap. Positing an image of serious, nimble, and intrepid female travelers, rather than frivolous and fashionable tourists, Alcott resists the gendered paradigms of traveler/tourist and demonstrates, like Howitt before her, how female voyagers could not only survive but actually thrive on their own: “No lord and master, in the shape of brother, spouse, or courier, ordered their outgoings and incomings; but liberty the most entire was theirs, and they enjoyed it heartily.”42 Again, like Howitt, Alcott takes pains to delineate the differences between the three women whose harmonious relations show how they complement one another, rather than compete for dominance. The three shawl-straps reveal their different personalities: where Amanda carries a volume of Shakespeare, a few necessary garments, and much paper “for Amanda was inspired with poetic fire at unexpected moments,” Matilda’s bundle includes “sketchbooks, a trifle of haberdashery . . . yards of blue ribbons, and a camp-stool strapped outside in company with a Japanese umbrella.” The comically reluctant traveler, Lavinia, “confined herself to a choice collection of bottles and pill-boxes, fur boots, a grey cloud, and several French novels.”43 As they journey through France, Switzerland, Italy, and finally Britain, a portrait of the artist emerges in the descriptions of Matilda at work. With

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her camp stool, umbrella, and sketchbook, May Alcott’s fictional counterpart studies the churches, architecture, museums, and landscape of Europe, withstanding the curious crowds and adverse conditions as a female artist. She brings an artist’s eye and sensibility to her visual experiences and a romantic passion to the sights, while at the same time becoming a spectacle herself when she sets up her accoutrements to begin her work. Alcott’s humorous picture of the artist underlines both her sister’s commitment to her endeavor against all odds and her anomalous presence in the landscape: “ ‘I intend to study architecture, and to sketch all the cathedrals we see,’ said the ardent art student, struggling manfully with the unruly umbrella, the unsavory odors from the gutter, and the garrulous crowd leaning over her shoulder, peering under her hat-brim, and examining all her belongings with a confiding freedom rather embarrassing.”44 While art education for women might be more readily available on the Continent, the female artist remains an object of curiosity, and the pursuit of art in Europe, as in America, is one that requires courage, hard work, and relentless determination.

FIGURE 8.3: May Alcott, “St. Malo Cathedral, near Dinan,” 1870, Autobiography, 1891. Courtesy of Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House.

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Despite experiencing “two revolutions, an earthquake, an eclipse, and a flood” during their European jaunt, the “three women, utterly unlike in every respect, had lived happily together for twelve long months, had travelled unprotected safely over land and sea,” Alcott proclaims, “and met with no loss, no mishap, no quarrel, and no disappointment worth mentioning.” Delighted by the ties that form through art and travel, Alcott ends her tale with an invitation to all American women to follow in their footsteps and head off to explore the Continent. The narrator sets out the “moral to our tale” as follows: “We would respectfully advise all timid sisters now lingering doubtfully on the shore, to strap up their bundles in light marching order, and push boldly off. They will need no protector but their own courage, no guide but their own good sense and Yankee wit, and no interpreter, if that woman’s best gift, the tongue, has a little French polish on it.”45 Encouraging a new kind of woman traveler, she counsels her American sisters to look to Europe not for treasures and souvenirs, but for enlightenment and independence: “Dear Amandas, Matildas, and Lavinias, why delay? Wait for no man, but take your little store and invest it in something far better than Paris finery, Geneva jewelry, or Roman relics. Bring home empty trunks, if you will, but heads full of new and larger ideas, hearts richer in the sympathy that makes the whole world kin, hands readier to help on the great work God gives humanity, and souls elevated by the wonders of art and the diviner miracles of Nature.” Finally, the narrator counsels, travel to the European continent will improve both American women individually and the nation at large, as they partake of “valuable experiences, memorable days, and that culture which a larger knowledge of the world, our fellow-men, and ourselves gives to the fortunate souls to whom this pleasure is permitted.”46 The travel performance in Shawl-Straps seeks to “alter expectations” (Adler) about women travelers, resisting the constructions of frivolous tourists found in contemporary fiction with images of female independence and social/ intellectual/artistic engagement. At the same time, Alcott gestures toward a collective identification between American and European women engaged both in labor and the struggles for equal rights in their respective nations. May Alcott remained in England for several months after Alice and Louisa returned to Boston in 1871, devoting her time to the study of art. In 1873, she returned to Europe with a $1,000 gift from Louisa and spent another year continuing her artistic education, followed by a final trip in 1876, never to return to the United States. In 1878, May married Ernst Nieriker in London and lived and worked in Paris until her death in 1879. That year she exhibited her most successful painting to date, La Negresse, at the Paris Salon, and published Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply before giving birth

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to a daughter, Louisa May (Lulu) Nieriker, who would be raised by her aunt following her mother’s death of childbed fever. May’s slim volume of travel advice for aspiring painters was based on her own experiences abroad, both with Alice and Louisa and on her own, and, while less humorous than Louisa’s account of their adventures, shares some of the same concerns. From the outset, Alcott Nieriker establishes her authority as an artist who has worked in Europe and is addressing those who wish to follow in her footsteps. Unlike the myriad correspondents who “keep America en courant [sic] with European painters, pictures, and gossip,” she claims her aim is to help others—“especially if women”—in the pursuit of artistic training, addressing the practical side of artistic travel: “the actual cost of living, instruction, or rent of studio abroad” and the “modus operandi of settling in a foreign city.”47 Acknowledging that “there is no longer the same necessity for crossing the Atlantic for an education that existed some years ago,” Alcott Nieriker nonetheless maintains “that there is no art world like Paris, no painters like the French, and no incentive to good work equal to that found in a Parisian atelier.” Thus, despite the progress made in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, with “their Fine Art Museums and life classes,”48 Europe retains both cachet and cultural capital that Alcott Nieriker seeks at once to claim for her own and to share with her (female) readers. Where Howitt’s narrative of women traveling abroad was a fictionalized memoir of “art sisters” and Louisa Alcott’s Shawl-Straps related a fictionalized account of “real” sisters abroad, May Alcott Nieriker’s Studying Art Abroad foregoes fiction for the resolutely practical, falling more into the category of guidebook or how-to pamphlet. Thus the narrative “I” is Alcott Nieriker, and her implied reader is a woman like herself. Like her sister, she establishes a distance between the female tourist and her own experiences as a traveler; likewise, she imagines the audience of her book to be “an artist” and not to be a “gay tourist, doing Europe according to guide-books, with perhaps a few lessons, here and there, taken only for the name of having been the pupil of some distinguished master.” Rather, her reader will be “a thoroughly earnest worker, a lady, and poor, like so many of the profession, wishing to make the most of all opportunities, and the little bag of gold last as long as possible.”49 Professional identity, then, is central to both the author and her reader, while money is foregrounded as a primary concern to the artistic traveler. Alcott Nieriker includes very specific instructions on what kind of trunk her reader should purchase, what to pack, and how to dress: she counsels the female artist to bring “old underclothes” rather than fine ones, because the London grime and Parisian blanchisseuses will ruin anything delicate, and once worn

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thin, the undergarments “become invaluable as paint-rags (which artists so often have to buy).”50 This highly personalized advice, relevant specifically to a female artist of limited means, implicitly defines an imagined community of women, unknown perhaps to each other, who share similar concerns, budgets, and ambitions. Alcott Nieriker sets forth an initial itinerary for the artist’s Grand Tour: after sailing from America to the United Kingdom and traveling from Liverpool to London, she details where to stay and even what to sketch on the journey. Announcing her feminocentric orientation, she urges the traveler en route to London to visit Stratford to see Anne Hathaway’s cottage, while her husband (Shakespeare) is referred to exclusively as “the poet.” A trip to Warwick includes a visit to Leicester Hospital, “an interesting charity, founded by the renowned earl, for twelve old men,” and, echoing the feminist musing of Louisa in Shawl-Straps, Alcott Nieriker wonders “why the present earl did not found a like comfortable home for twelve old women.”51 Her instructions to the artistic traveler, once settled in London, encourage her to walk from her rooms in Bloomsbury to the National Gallery, not only because it is healthful and economical exercise (“to save doctor’s bills and cab fares”), but also because she can catch “glimpses of life” on foot that would not be available to someone riding in a hansom cab or omnibus. She explains that two days a week the National Gallery is open exclusively for copyists, in both cases making it clear that her reader is a woman in search of artistic education rather than leisurely tourism, a professional rather than a wealthy dilettante. Counseling the aspiring artist to spend as much time as possible with Turner’s Liber Studiorum watercolors, Alcott Nieriker further notes that at the National Gallery “a visitor can study the progress of painting from Cimabue to Rosa Bonheur.”52 If Cimabue may be considered the father of the early modern art of the Renaissance, Alcott Nieriker makes it clear that the pinnacle of modern art—indeed, perhaps, its mother—is the female painter, Rosa Bonheur. Just as Howitt did before her, Alcott Nieriker establishes connections between herself, her readers, and successful female artists in museum collections. Focusing on the traveler’s professional development in London, Alcott Nieriker sets forth suggestions for art teachers there, recommending schools that accept women, and sights that the aspiring artist should visit and draw. Moreover, she advises her readers to submit some of their work to a gallery, for “beginning early to expose one’s work, and taking success or failure in the right spirit, seems the surest road to improvement. Beside, no money seems so entirely one’s own, or to last as long as any thus earned.” She analyzes the British art market and encourages women to try Liverpool, Birmingham,

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and Manchester as “the best places for selling amateur work,” explaining that the best patrons are not noblemen but “the rich manufacturers and tradespeople who buy pictures freely, and pay most generously for them.”53 Here and throughout Studying Art Abroad, Alcott Nieriker foregrounds money as a chief concern for her traveler, and at the end of the third chapter of this practical guidebook, she appends two pages of lists detailing the names, addresses, and prices of “Teachers of Water-Colors,” “Boarding and Lodging Houses,” and “Shops,” vetted for affordability and accessibility to the female artistic traveler. These same lists are repeated after her chapters on Paris, highlighting both the practical aims of this volume and its author’s firsthand experience in each city. The focus of the following chapters devoted to Paris shifts to studio training in oils. The French capital “is one vast studio” filled with artists and students, and Alcott Nieriker dedicates a lengthy section to ateliers and classes open to women. Of primary concern are the “life class” and “the much-discussed question of the propriety of women’s studying from the nude.” Where the studio of Monsieur Krug is singled out for the way this fraught issue is “settled in a delicate and proper manner by the gentlemanly director,” the famous Académie Julian is criticized for no longer allowing women to “paint from the living nude models of both sexes, side by side with Frenchmen.” The author intones that “This is a sad conclusion to arrive at, when one remembers the brave efforts made by a band of American ladies some years ago, who supported one another with such dignity and modesty, in a steadfast purpose under this ordeal,”54 thus insisting that American women were more than able to withstand the rigors of a mixed life class. Refuting those “who commonly represent the indiscreet, husband-hunting, title-seeking butterfly as the typical American girl abroad,” Alcott Nieriker takes pains to depict the women in Paris as serious and devoted artists, but, going further, much as her sister Louisa had done, points out the inequities of gender in France. Moving beyond the anecdotal Shawl-Straps, however, May proposes potential solutions for the American artist abroad and, by extension, for women at home as well. Faced with their exclusion from certain studios and the “injustice of prices charged by Parisian masters for art instruction to women,” Alcott Nieriker contends that women need to band together and form their own alternative life class, using their numbers to exert financial pressure on the art school marketplace. This plan, she explains, needs only “the co-operation of a sufficient number of earnest female students to form a club, hire a studio, choose a critic, and engage models, to secure the same advantages now enjoyed only by men, at the same exceedingly low rates.”

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This American spirit of can-do in the face of adversity is predicated on collective or collaborative action by women artists, coming together to support one another and working cooperatively to attain a comparable artistic training to that offered to men. She adds, “American women, particularly, are beginning to lead in this direction, so there should be no pains spared to remove all obstacles in the most direct path to a thorough education for them, by bringing the best in every branch within their (too often) limited means.”55 Positing her own version of Louisa’s “Argument in Favor of the Superiority of Women,” Alcott Nieriker insists that “an unprejudiced judge of pictures, in Paris, making the tour through the studios of Americans of both sexes, and carefully examining the work found there and at the Salon consecutive seasons, cannot but admit that in many instances that of the women is far superior and, what is somewhat surprising, far stronger in style than most of that done by the men.” With the exception of John Singer Sargent, whom she singles out for praise, Alcott Nieriker maintains that the best artists in Paris cannot compare with “the splendid coloring always found in the work of Miss Cassatte [sic], from Philadelphia, or the strength and vigor of Miss Dodson’s Deborah, particularly remarked in this year’s Salon.” Among the French, Rosa Bonheur, Nellie Jacquemart, Louise Abbéma, and Sarah Bernhardt have “distinguished themselves in art,” and Bonheur is lauded not only for her “bold, almost masculine use of the brush” but also for the art school she established, offering artistic training “free of all cost, to the aspiring young French girl.”56 The contemporary art world is characterized not only by the strength of women painters from both France and the United States, but also by the support they offer one another. Alcott Nieriker’s final chapter on studying in Italy signals that Rome “is the place for a student of sculpture, rather than of painting,” and she confesses to having spent only one winter there. If Rome had long been an artistic mecca for male artists, for women, she indicates, it is less than ideal. The few Italian painters who accept female pupils offer their classes at night, when it remains unsafe to walk home alone. In a wry passage, she evokes the smoky chaos of an evening class in the Roman studio: They were a lively set, smoking or singing as they painted, in a bold, dashing style, from the pretty or interesting model posed under the brilliant reflectors of the raised platform. And even in this artificial light their touch was certain and effective, so much so that it would have been instructive to watch them work, if the smoke of numerous cigarettes and increased confusion, as it grew late, had not prevented this, as well as the

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possibility of painting with any comfort one’s self. Beside, any lady, seeking instruction here, even seated modestly behind the principal group, might, if perfectly familiar with the Italian tongue, occasionally find the conversation of the students becoming slightly embarrassing, when they freely discussed not only her ability with color, but her personal appearance and manners.57 Notwithstanding the success of the American women sculptors working in Rome at the time—Harriet Hosmer, Edmonia Lewis, Anne Whitney, and Emma Stebbins, referred to by Henry James as the “White Marmorean Flock”—Alcott Nieriker finds Italy “a struggle” for the aspiring painter, though one that is made worthwhile by the surrounding landscape. As she closes her guidebook, the female artist and author suggests that the Roman traveler purchase a copy of Hawthorne’s Marble Faun (1860), a tale of American women artists in Rome. This dark romance, with its ambivalent portraits of the painters Miriam and Hilda, would strike an odd note in this pragmatic volume, but for the fact that Hawthorne was a family friend and neighbor in Concord. Moreover, Alcott Nieriker urges her reader not simply to buy the book, but to tailor it to reflect her own experiences. She advises the reader to insert “vignette photographs of the places described mounted on fresh pages, binding the whole in the lovely Roman vellum,”58 thus in a sense reclaiming the male-authored tale of women artists in Rome as their own, more personal creation under a new cover. Studying Art Abroad ends with “the painter and sculptor” at the Trevi Fountain toasting their return to Rome in a final image of female communion. Like Howitt, Alcott Nieriker establishes female artistic identity not only on an individual level but also in terms of a community of women—both those already in Europe and those American women who will follow her lead and advice and strike out for the Continent in pursuit of professional identity.

CONCLUSION This pair of case studies represents just two of the many voices of British and American women artists constructing collective artistic identity through their travel abroad during the second half of the nineteenth century. The politics of female education, professionalism, and tourism were inscribed in these narratives in which, as Susan Casteras notes, travel “became a metaphor for life and art, inscribed with meaning about what [the female artists] experienced and chose to remember and record.” At the same time, Casteras adds, “Travel also fulfilled a yearning for change that many women undoubtedly harbored,”59

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and women’s travel narratives ultimately worked to redefine the image of the feminine as “active, strong, working, and self-determined.”60 As groups of women traveled together, painted together, exhibited together, and wrote to and for each other, networks were formed to promote professional identity; as American painter Elizabeth Bartol declared late in the century, “Women are helping women.”61 Perhaps most remarkable were the connections created by women across national boundaries, highlighting commonalities and shared identities rather than cultural differences. While it is impossible to deny the dynamics of nationalism and imperialism at play in much women’s travel writing of the period, some of these accounts penned by artists consciously strove to transcend the politics of national difference for an idealized imagined community of women united by artistic ambition, a community made possible through collective imaginings circulated through print culture.62 The artistic self-fashioning in Howitt’s An Art-Student in Munich, Alcott Nieriker’s Studying Art Abroad, and myriad other travel accounts, from letters home to full-blown novels and biographies, functioned dialogically to include not only the traveling subjects but also their readers in a larger quest for new ways of representing women’s social and cultural mobility.

notes

Introduction 1. Of course, it is impossible to provide even a sketch of the critical changes that so powerfully affected women in the period. Fortunately, there are a number of fine general introductions that attempt to capture the contours of changes affecting women, especially in the United States and Europe. As a starting point, see Gisela Bock, Women in European History, trans. Allison Brown (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001/translated 2002); Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, eds., Becoming Visible: Women in European History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987); Linda Clark, Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Ellen Carol Dubois and Lynn Dumenil, Through Women’s Eyes: An American History with Documents (Bedford: St. Martin’s, 2005); and Martha S. Jones, All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). For Latin American women’s history, see Francesca Miller, Latin American Women and the Search for Social Justice (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 1991). 2. The book Strong Minded Women & Other Lost Voices from 19th-Century England (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), edited by Janet Horowitz Murray, is an excellent collection of these women’s voices, from prostitutes to Queen Victoria. 3. Karen Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, p. 339. 4. Ibid. 5. For an excellent short introduction to transnational feminism with accompanying documents, see the web page “From Wollstonecraft to Mill: What British and European Ideas and Social Movements Influenced the Emergence of Feminism in

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7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

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the Atlantic World, 1792–1869?” http://womhist.alexanderstreet.com/awrm/intro. htm#eighteen (accessed January 5, 2012). Among the crucial early “recovery” works, see Elaine Showalter, A Literature of Their Own: From Charlotte Bronte to Doris Lessing (London: Virago Press, 1977); Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination: A Literary and Psychological Investigation of Women’s Writing (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1976); and Nina Baym, Women’s Fiction: A Guide to Novels by and about Women in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978/1993). For a more recent work, see Baym’s Women Writers of the American West, 1833–1927 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2011). The Digital Schomburg African American Women Writers of the 19th Century has become a crucial source for recovered texts by nineteenth-century African American women writers (http://digital.nypl.org/schomburg/writers_aa19/ toc.html). Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 10. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), p. 2 Priya Joshi, In Another Country: Colonialism, Culture, and the English Novel in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 4, provides a study of the “emergence of the novel in India from its introduction under the aegis of nineteenthcentury British colonialism through the 1980s.” Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ed. Deidre Lynch, Norton Critical Editions (Ann Arbor: W. W. Norton, 1792/2009), p. 22. Susan Thorne, “Missionary-Imperial Feminism,” in Gendered Missions: Women and Men in Missionary Discourse and Practice, ed. Mary Taylor Huber and Nancy C. Lutkehaus (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), pp. 41–42. Catherine Hall and Sonya O. Rose, eds, At Home with the Empire: Metropolitan Culture and the Imperial World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 109. Rita S. Kranadis, The Victorian Spinster and Colonial Emigration: Contested Subjects (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), pp. 20–21. Gisela Bock provides comparative discussion of the laws affecting women in marriage in Women in European History, pp. 63–66 and 193–96. For a detailed discussion of British marriage law, see Mary Shanley, Feminism, Marriage, and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993). Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (New York: Oxford University Press, 1848/1998), p. 344. Bock, Women in European History, p. 61–62. George Sand, Indiana, trans. Sylvia Raphael, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1832/2001); Lélia, trans. Maria Espinosa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1836/1978). Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” p. 345.

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19. Jeanne Deroin and Pauline Roland, “Letter to the Convention of the Women of America,” June 15, 1851, in History of Woman Suffrage, vol. 1, 1848–1861, ed. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Joslyn Gage (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1881), pp. 234–37. Reprinted in Women, the Family, and Freedom: The Debate in Documents, vol. 1, 1750–1880, ed. Susan Groag Bell and Karen M. Offen (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1983), pp. 287–90. 20. Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” pp. 346–47. She notes connections between claims of motherhood and the birthday of nations all across northern, southern, western, and eastern Europe. 21. Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” p. 350. 22. Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre: An Autobiography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1847/2001). 23. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth Century Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), pp. 336–71. 24. Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England, Their Social Duties, and Domestic Habits (London: Fisher, Son, & Co., 1839). 25. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 475. 26. Kathryn Hughes, The Victorian Governess (London: Hambledon Continuum, 2003). For an excellent analysis that brings history to bear on Jane Eyre, see Mary Poovey, “The Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre,” in Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 126–63. 27. Brontë, Jane Eyre, p. 152. 28. Ibid., p. 229. 29. The subject of the title and a chapter of Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic. 30. Gayatri Spivak, “Three Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism,” Critical Inquiry 12.1 (Autumn 1985), pp. 243–61. A feminist novel offers one of the most powerful postcolonial critiques: Jean Rhys, The Wide Sargasso Sea, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1966/1998). 31. Rachel G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 49–58. 32. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (London: Penguin, 1848/1996). 33. Both women are discussed on the website Chartists.net hosted by Mark Craill at http://www.chartists.net/Walker-and-Inge.htm (accessed January 5, 2012). 34. Gaskell, Mary Barton, p. 125. 35. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Penguin Books, 1851–62/1985). 36. Flora Tristan, Walks around London (London: W. Jeffs, 1840), pp. 109–29. 37. Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (London: Penguin, 1855/1995); and Charles Dickens, Hard Times (New York: Oxford University Press, 1854/2008).

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38. Fredrika Bremer, Hertha; or, The Story of a Soul, trans. Mary Howitt (New York: Putnam, 1855). 39. Clark, Women and Achievement in Nineteenth-Century Europe, p. 61. 40. See Eleanor Flexner, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States (New York: Athenaeum, 1971). 41. Kathyrn Kish Sklar and James Brewer Stewart’s edited collection Women’s Rights and Transatlantic Slavery in the Era of Emancipation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007) provides a powerful overview of not only the American but transnational connections between struggles for women’s rights and an end to slavery. 42. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly, ed. Elizabeth Ammons, Norton Critical Editions (New York: W. W. Norton, 1852/2010). 43. Quoted in Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life, ed. Joan D. Hedrick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 208. 44. Harriet Beecher Stowe in a letter to Eliza Cabot Follen, written December 16, 1852, and quoted in Stowe in Her Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of Her Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates, ed. Susan Belasco (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2005), pp. 67–70. 45. The poem and background can be found on The Norton Anthology of English Literature Norton Topics Online website: http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/ nael/victorian/topic_1/children.htm (accessed January 5, 2012). 46. The Complete Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ed. Charlotte Porter and Helen A. Clarke, 6 vols. (New York: Crowell, 1900; rpt. AMS Press, 1973). 47. R. A. Barrett, The Barretts of Jamaica: The Family of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Winfield, Kansas: Wedgstone Press, 2000). 48. This highly contested argument was made by Julia Marcus, Dared and Done: The Marriage of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning (London: Trafalgar Square, 1995), p. 106. Many mixed-race people did live in Britain in the nineteenth century; their stories are only just beginning to be told in recent decades. 49. Aurora Leigh, ed. Margaret Reynolds (New York: W.W. Norton, 1856/1995). 50. Nina Auerbach, Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). See also Elsie Michie, Outside the Pale: Cultural Exclusion, Gender Difference, and the Victorian Woman Writer (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 51. Elizabeth Gaskell, Ruth, ed. Tim Dolin, Oxford World’s Classics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1853/2011). 52. Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” p. 353. 53. For details of Braddon’s fascinating life, see Jennifer Carnell, The Literary Lives of M. E. Braddon: A Study of Her Life and Work (Hastings, England: Sensation Press, 2000). 54. Lyn Pykett, The “Improper” Feminine: The Women’s Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (New York: Routledge, 1992). For a full study of Braddon’s fascinating biography, see Robert Lee Woolf, Sensational Victorian: The Life and Fiction of Mary Elizabeth Braddon (New York: Garland, 1979). Marlene Tromp offers a detailed analysis of the relationship between sensation fiction and the law

NOTES

55.

56. 57.

58. 59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64.

65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

71.

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in The Private Rod: Marital Violence, Sensation, and the Law in Victorian Britain (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). Quoted in Chris Willis, Braddon, M.E. (Mary Elizabeth), 1837–1915. Literature Online Biography (Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 2000), http://lion.chadwyck. com/searchFulltext.do?id=BIO002593&divLevel=0&trailId=138B5B22FD8& area=ref&forward=critref_ft (accessed January 5, 2012). Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Lady Audley’s Secret, Oxford World’s Classics (Cambridge: Oxford University Press, 1862/2008). The introduction in Jenny Bourne Taylor’s In the Secret Theatre of Home: Wilkie Collins, Sensation Narrative, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (New York: Routledge, 1988) provides an excellent overview of the connections between nineteenthcentury psychology and the moral management of women. Shelley Streeby, American Sensations: Class, Empire, and the Production of Popular Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 34. Ian Tyrrell, The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), p. 20. Karen Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” p. 336. In a footnote, Offen notes the specific dates when the term appeared in Spanish (1896), in Russian (1898), and in German (1902), p. 362. Henrik Ibsen, A Doll’s House: A New Version by Frank McGuinness (London: Faber and Faber, 1879/1997). Mona Caird, “Marriage,” Westminster Review 130.2 (August 1888), pp. 186–201. Rachel Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe, pp. 58–62. Ann Ardis’s New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990) provides an excellent overview; and Sally Ledger’s The New Woman: Fiction and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Manchester University Press, 1997) suggests the diversity of perspectives on marriage, motherhood, and sexuality in this field of novels. Sarah Grand, The Heavenly Twins, 3 vols. (London: Heinemann, 1893) and The Beth Book: Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius (London: Virago, 1897/1980). See also my own book, Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998). Mona Caird, Daughters of Danaus (London: Bliss, Sands, and Foster, 1894). Sibilla Aleramo, A Woman (Stanford: University of California Press, 1906/1983). Votes for Women! was directed by Harley Granville Barker at the Court Theatre in 1907. The novel version is The Convert (London: Feminist Press, 1907/1980). Olive Schreiner, The Story of an African Farm (New York: Oxford University Press, 1883/1993). Iveta Jusová, The New Woman and the Empire (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2005); and LeeAnne M. Richardson, New Woman and Colonial Adventure Fiction in Victorian Britain: Gender, Genre, and Em pire (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006). Sukanya Banerjee, Becoming Imperial Citizens: Indians in the Late-Victorian Empire (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 116–49.

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NOTES

72. Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), p. 17. 73. Offen, “The Theory and Practice of Feminism in Nineteenth-Century Europe,” p. 337.

Chapter 1 1. Pat Thane, Old Age in English History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 479. 2. Michael Anderson, “The Social Implications of Demographic Change,” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain, 1750–1850, ed. F.M.L. Thompson, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 18–19. 3. C. Haber and B. Gratton, Old Age and the Search for Security: An American Social History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994). Edgar-Andre Montigny, Foisted upon the Government? State Responsibility, Family Obligation and the Care of the Dependent Aged in Late Nineteenth-Century Ontario (Toronto: McGill-Queens University Press, 1997), pp. 40–41. 4. Tom Kirkwood, Time of Our Lives (London: Phoenix, 1999), pp.184–95. 5. Maud Pember Reeves, Round about a Pound a Week (London: Virago, 1913/1979), pp. 46–47. 6. Lori Williamson, Frances Power Cobbe and Victorian Society: Power and Protest (London: Rivers Oram, 2005), p. 10. 7. Suttee was the Hindu practice of requiring a widow to follow her husband to death by burning on a funeral pyre. Indian feminists campaigned for its abolition. 8. Williamson, Cobbe, p. 91. 9. Pamela Horn, Children’s Work and Welfare, 1780–1880s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 23. 10. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (New York: Dover, 1861– 62/1968), vol. 2, pp. 151–52. 11. Gillian Sutherland, “Education,” in Cambridge Social History, vol. 3, p. 122. 12. Williamson, Cobbe, p. 11. 13. Jo Manton, Mary Carpenter and the Children of the Streets (London: Heinemann, 1976). 14. Martha Vicinus and Bea Nergaard, Ever Yours, Florence Nightingale: Selected Letters (London: Virago, 1989). 15. Carol Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870–1939 (London: UCL Press, 1995). 16. Dorothy Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London: Virago, 1990). 17. Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 144–45. 18. Anderson, “Demographic Change,” in Cambridge Social History, vol. 2, pp. 40–41. 19. Margaret Llewelyn Davies, ed., Maternity: Letters from Working Women (1915/ London: Virago, 1978), pp. 18–19. 20. Davies, Maternity, pp. 159–85.

NOTES

207

21. E. Garrett, A. Reid, K. Schurer, and S. Szreter, Changing Family Size in England and Wales: Place, Class and Demography, 1891–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 22. Kate Fisher and Simon Szreter, “ ‘They Prefer Withdrawal’: The Choice of Birth Control in Britain, 1918–1950,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 34 (2003), pp. 263–91. 23. Davies, Maternity, pp. 73–74. 24. Joan Perkin, Victorian Women (London: John Murray, 1991), pp. 114–15. 25. Pat Thane, “What Difference Did the Vote Make?” in Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics 1750 to the Present, ed. A. Vickery (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), pp. 253–88. 26. Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740– 1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27. Perkin, Victorian Women, p. 89. 28. Pam Hirsch, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827–1891: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998). 29. Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery (London: Routledge, 1992). 30. F. Trentmann, Free Trade Nation: Consumption, Civil Society and Commerce in Modern Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 31. Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government, 1865–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 32. Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1978). 33. John Sutherland, “Mary Augusta Ward (1851–1920),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 34. Theresa Deane, “Late Nineteenth-Century Philanthropy: The Case of Louisa Twining,” in Gender, Health and Welfare, ed. A. Digby and J. Stewart (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 122–42. 35. F. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). 36. Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), p. 96. 37. Reeves, Round about a Pound, pp. 35–37. 38. Mark Freeman, Social Investigation in Rural England, 1870–1914 (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer/Royal Historical Society, 2003). 39. Mayhew, London Labour, quoted in Perkin, Victorian Women, pp. 140–41. 40. Anderson, “Demographic Change,” in Cambridge Social History, vol. 2, p. 31. 41. Ibid., pp. 30–31. 42. Ginger Frost, Living in Sin: Cohabiting as Husband and Wife in NineteenthCentury England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 43. Liz Stanley, “Arthur Joseph Munby (1828–1910),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). 44. Frost, Living in Sin, pp. 172–74. 45. Ibid., p. 99. 46. B. R. Mitchell, Abstract of British Historical Statistics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 6.

208

NOTES

47. 48. 49. 50.

C. Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (Edinburgh: Constable, 1950), p. 77. Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, pp. 282–84. Quoted in Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, p. 258. A. J. Hammerton, Emigrant Gentlewomen: Genteel Poverty and Female Emigration, 1830–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 177. Ibid., pp. 62–63. Ibid. Lynn Botelho and Pat Thane, eds, introduction to Women and Ageing in British Society (London: Longmans, 2001), pp. 1–12. B. S. Rowntree, Poverty: A Study of Town Life (London: Nelson, 1902). J. Roebuck and J. Slaughter, “Ladies and Pensioners: Stereotypes and Public Policy Affecting Old Women in England, 1880–1914,” Journal of Social History 13 (1979), pp. 105–14. Mayhew, London Labour, quoted in Thane, Old Age, p. 271. Clementina Black, Married Women’s Work (London: Virago, 1915/1983). Devoney Looser, Women Writers and Old Age in Britain, 1750–1850 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. 22–23. Looser, Women Writers, p. 98.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

Chapter 2 1. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). 2. Class is a notoriously complex category of analyses in nineteenth-century Britain, including factors such as parentage, income (and source of income), employment, education, and behavior. The boundaries between class categories were shifting and uncertain. Therefore, this categorization should be taken as a general, rather loose rubric. My use of the term elite, which denotes social status and, in general, enough economic privilege to make paid employment unnecessary, includes the middle and upper-middle classes, including the landed gentry, without much attention to the hereditary aristocracy, whose sexual attitudes were more permissive but whose public face was somewhat more discreet than it had been in the eighteenth century. The next section, focusing on women of the working classes, includes women who might have been considered lower-middle class because of family income and station. The women discussed here are non-elite, come from largely propertyless families, and often work for a living. To complicate matters further, at this level of society, marriage, separation, and fluctuations in wages could dramatically alter a woman’s status over the course of her life. 3. Roy Porter, English Society in the Eighteenth Century (London: Penguin, 1991), p. 260. 4. Thomas Laqueur, “Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology,” in The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century, ed. Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), pp. 1–41.

NOTES

209

5. Coventry Patmore, “The Angel in the House,” in Poems (London: Parker, 1854/1862). 6. James Eli Adams, Dandies and Desert Saints: Styles of Victorian Masculinity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), p. 2. 7. Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 44. 8. For critiques of these formulas, see Carol Levine, “Strategic Formalism: Toward a New Method in Cultural Studies,” Victorian Studies 48 (Summer 2006), pp. 625–58; and Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 1–11. 9. For a discussion of the history of the companionate marriage, see Joan Perkins, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1989). 10. Elizabeth Sewell, Principles of Education, Drawn from Nature and Revelation, and Applied to Female Education in the Upper Classes (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1865), vol. 2, p. 80. 11. A Lady, “Flirts and Flirtation,” Chambers’s Journal 798 (April 12, 1879), p. 572. 12. H. Lawrenny, “Custom and Sex,” Fortnightly Review, (n.s.) 17 (March 1, 1872), p. 314. 13. Eliza Lynn Linton, “Flirting,” in The Girl of the Period and Other Social Essays (London: Bentley, 1883), vol. 1, p. 289. 14. For discussions of women’s sexual pleasure within marriage, see Roy Porter and Leslie Hall, The Facts of Life: The Creation of Sexual Knowledge in Britain, 1650– 1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 143; Janet Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves: Doctors, Patients, and Depression in Victorian England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 165; and John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 58. 15. M. Jeanne Peterson, Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 74. 16. For discussions of medical opinions about women’s sexuality, see Oppenheim, Shattered Nerves, pp. 203–4; and Pamela Gilbert’s chapter in this volume. 17. Peter Gay, The Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud, vol. 1, The Education of the Senses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 282. Drawing on Marie Stope’s Married Love (1918), Helena Michie concludes that many Victorian women were barred from knowledge about sex and suffered the consequences in marriage, though men do not seem to have been much better educated; Helena Michie, Victorian Honeymoons: Journeys to the Conjugal (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 112–14. See also Tosh, A Man’s Place, p. 58. 18. In fact, these thrilling representations are in part responsible for the continual moral attacks on the genre throughout the period. It was considered especially dangerous for women, whose susceptibility to seduction was understood to extend to print culture. See Kelly Mays, “The Disease of Reading and Victorian Periodicals,” in Literature and the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century British Publishing and Reading Practices, ed. John O. Jordan and Robert Patten (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 165–94. We might consider novel reading itself an erotic experience.

210

NOTES

19. Anthony Trollope, Can You Forgive Her? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 383. 20. For a discussion of public treatment of female sexuality and divorce, see Barbara Leckie, Culture and Adultery: The Novel, the Newspapers, and the Law, 1857– 1914 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). 21. For an account of anxieties about male sexuality, see Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (Cornell: Cornell University Press, 2003), pp. 16–49. 22. Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets, and Images in NineteenthCentury London (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 66. Nead’s work complicates a long literary and scholarly tradition emphasizing the power of the male flâneur over women in the city, anchored by the poems of French poet Charles Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s foundational study Charles Baudelaire: A Lyric Poet in the Era of High Capitalism, trans. Harry Zohn (London: New Left Books, 1973); and The Arcades Project, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (New York: Belknap Press, 2002). For a further discussion of complications of the flâneur model, as well as the limitations of the male gaze, see Rosenman, Unauthorized Pleasures, pp. 50–86. 23. Linton, “Girl of the Period,” Girl of the Period, vol. 1, p. 7. 24. Ibid. 25. Tracy Davis, Actresses as Working Women: Their Social Identity in Victorian Culture (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 71. Davis points out that these women were more likely to be sexual victims, vulnerable to sexual harassment by would-be drama coaches and overzealous fans. 26. For an account of the sexualization of women writers, see Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 27. See Gilbert’s chapter in this volume for a more complete discussion of the Contagious Diseases Acts. 28. Josephine Butler, Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade (London: Horace Marshall and Son, 1896), p. 16. Butler all but accepts this symbolic association by identifying prostitutes as her “sisters,” and, radically, questioning the distinction between respectable women and streetwalkers, saying, “there is no point where an exact distinction can be drawn, but . . . there is every degree of shade between the absolutely virtuous woman and the most degraded and evident harlot”; Butler, The Constitution Violated (Edinburgh: Edmondston and Douglas, 1871), pp. 36–37. 29. For an account of the sexual attacks, verbal and physical, experienced by suffrage workers, as well as the sexual agendas that were part of the movement, see Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987). 30. The 1851 census first noticed this imbalance, which W. R. Greg made a matter of public concern in his famous essay “Why Are Women Redundant?” National Review 14 (April 1862), pp. 434–60. Because of the inaccuracy of nineteenth-century census procedures, it is difficult to know what the figures really were.

NOTES

211

31. For example, see Dr. Fearon, “Girls’ Grammar Schools,” Contemporary Review 11 (June 1869), p. 335; “Women as They Are, and Might Be,” Ladies Companion and Monthly Magazine (January 1857), p. 240. 32. Caroline Cornwallis, “Capabilities and Disabilities of Women,” Westminster Review 11 (January 1857), p. 65. 33. Richard Dellamora, ed., Victorian Sexual Dissidence (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (New York: Virago, 1992). 34. These changes involved the male role as well. The periodical press was full of articles and cartoons bemoaning male effeminacy, while the new visibility of male homosexuality, most notably in the Oscar Wilde trial, undermined belief in traditional forms of masculinity. Femininity and masculinity were equally under siege, and in interrelated ways. 35. Ellen Jordan, “The Christening of the New Woman,” Victorian Newsletter 63 (Spring 1983), pp. 19–21. 36. For a discussion of these contraception debates, see Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978). 37. “The Woman’s Question: An Interview Conducted with Madame Sarah Grand,” Humanitarian 8 (March 1896), p. 169. 38. Mona Caird, “The Emancipation of the Family,” in The Morality of Marriage and Other Essays on the Status and Destiny of Woman (London: George Redway, 1897), p. 54. 39. Mona Caird, “Marriage,” Westminster Review 130 (August 1888), p. 197. In this claim, she echoes Josephine Butler’s radical pronouncement about women’s self-ownership. 40. Martha Vicinus, Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778–1928 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), p. xix. 41. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), p. 200. 42. Edith Simcox, Autobiography of a Shirtmaker, ed. Constance Fulmer and Margaret E. Barfield (New York: Garland, 1998), p. 97. 43. Marcus, Between Women, p. 202. 44. Vicinus, Intimate Friends, p. 18. 45. Havelock Ellis, Studies in the Psychology of Sex, vol. 2, Sexual Inversion (London: Wilson and Macmillan, 1897). 46. Havelock Ellis, “Sexual Inversion in Women,” Alienist and Neurologist 16 (1895), p. 152. Ellis was not the only one who attempted to theorize homosexuality at the end of the century. Edward Carpenter’s less influential formulation posited an “intermediate sex” that, combining features of men and women, was more complete and advanced; see The Intermediate Sex: A Study of Some Transitional Types of Men and Women (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1921). 47. For a discussion of this circle, see Vicinus, Intimate Friends, pp. 175–201. 48. Yopi Prins, “Greek Maenads, Victorian Spinsters,” in Victorian Sexual Dissidence, ed. Dellamora, p. 71.

212

NOTES

49. Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (London: Charles Griffin, 1865), vol. 4, p. 485. 50. Ginger Frost, Promises Broken: Courtship, Class, and Gender in Victorian England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1995), p. 116. 51. Anna Clark, The Struggle for Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 48. 52. Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 101. 53. For a study of applicants’ testimonies to the London Foundling Hospital, see Françoise Barret-Ducrocq, Love in the Time of Victoria: Sexuality and Desire among Working-Class Men and Women in Nineteenth-Century London, trans. John Howe (London: Penguin, 1992), especially pp. 39–50. 54. The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 5, ed. Graham Storey and Kenneth Fielding (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 698. 55. Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in LateVictorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 97. 56. Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 4, p. 232. 57. Alain Corbin, Women for Hire: Prostitution and Sexuality in France after 1850, trans. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), pp. 6–7. 58. Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 47. 59. Walkowitz, Prostitution, p. 25. 60. Mason, Making of Victorian Sexuality, pp. 83–84. 61. Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), p. 2. 62. Ibid., p. 48. 63. Ibid., p. 2. 64. Ibid., p. 59. 65. The rape of native women by white men was more of a reality, though the historical record is limited; see Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, pp. 180–83. 66. Nancy L. Paxton, Writing under the Raj: Gender, Race, and Rape in the British Colonial Imagination, 1830–1947 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999). 67. George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, A Romaunt (London: J. Murray, 1868), canto I, line 603. 68. Inderpal Grewal, Home and Harem: Nation, Gender, Empire, and the Cultures of Travel (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996), p. 50. 69. The films The Life and Times of Sara Baartman (Icarus Films, 1998) and The Return of Sara Baartman (Icarus Films, 2003) explore Baartman’s life, the subsequent circulation of images of black womanhood throughout the West, and the eventual return of her remains to South Africa in 2002.

Chapter 3 1. Theodor Herzl, The Diaries of Theodor Herzl, trans. Marvin Lowenthal (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1956), p. 80.

NOTES

213

2. George Eliot, Daniel Deronda (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 695. 3. Eitan Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land in English Culture 1799–1917 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 225. 4. Gordon S. Haight, ed., The George Eliot Letters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), vol. 6, p. 290. 5. For recent treatments of the history of Jews in Britain, see Todd Endelman, Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History, 1656–1945 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990); and David Feldman, Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture, 1840–1914 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994). 6. The 1828 repeal of the Test Acts removed disabilities for Christians who were not members of the established Anglican Church. For the role of the Anglican clergy in Victorian life, see Christine L. Krueger, “Clerical,” in A Companion to Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Herbert F. Tucker (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999), pp. 142–54. 7. Jonathan Freedman, The Temple of Culture: Assimilation and Anti-Semitism in Literary Anglo-America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 23. 8. For extended treatment of conversion societies in nineteenth-century British culture, see Michael Ragussis, Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995); and Nadia Valman, The Jewess in Nineteenth-Century British Literary Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 9. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 192. 10. Ibid., p. 396. 11. Aguilar’s Works was published by Groombridge and Sons in London in 1869. Although there is no mention of Aguilar in George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks, there are references to Eliot consulting collections of books on Judaism, such as David Mocatta’s library; given the popularity of Aguilar’s books, it seems likely Eliot would have encountered them. See Jane Irwin, ed., George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xxxi. 12. Michael Galchinksy, “Non-Fiction Prose,” in Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, ed. Michael Galchinksy (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2003), p. 213. This original publication (solicited by Robert Chambers, the journal’s editor) coincided with the first election of Rothschild to Parliament. 13. Grace Aguilar, “History of the Jews in England,” in Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, ed. Galchinsky, pp. 313, 329. 14. Aguilar, “History of the Jews,” p. 332. 15. Aguilar, “History of the Jews,” p. 353. 16. Valman, The Jewess, p. 110. 17. Grace Aguilar, “The Women of Israel,” in Grace Aguilar: Selected Writings, ed. Galchinksy, p. 274. 18. After her exposure to intellectual inquiry in her early twenties through Charles Bray and his circle and to the German higher criticism, which viewed biblical texts as a medley of fact and fiction, Eliot refrained from religious observance.

214

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40.

NOTES

In addition to this bold step, her elopement with G. H. Lewes, a legally married man, further placed Eliot in a dubious social position for which she was ostracized. For an encapsulated version of this biography, see Nancy Henry, The Cambridge Introduction to George Eliot (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), pp. 1–13. Barbara Tuchman, Bible and Sword: England and Palestine from the Bronze Age to Balfour (New York: Ballantine, 1984). Quoted in Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land, p. 10. Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land, p. 13. Ibid., p. 192. I use Christian and Hebrew to distinguish biblical scriptures in order to avoid the inherent Christian bias of Old and New Testaments, which presumes a typological assessment of Hebrew scripture as incomplete and contingent on the fulfillment of events narrated in Christian scripture. The historical designations of b.c.e. (“before Common Era”) and c.e. (Common Era) attempt to redress the Christian-centric historical divisions of b.c. and a.d. Valman, The Jewess, p. 60. In 1838, Montefiore negotiated with Ottoman leaders for the right to purchase land and establish Jewish colonies in Palestine. See Carol A. Martin, “Contemporary Critics and Judaism in Daniel Deronda,” Victorian Periodicals Review 91 (1988), pp. 90–91. For an account of Christian Zionism in Britain and Palestine’s strategic importance to British imperial interests, see Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land, pp. 182–202. See Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land, pp. 202–10; and Feldman, Englishmen and Jews, p. 97. On Disraeli and the Eastern Question, see Ragussis, Figures of Conversion, pp. 200–11. Goldwin Smith, “Can Jews Be Patriots?” Nineteenth Century (May 1878), pp. 875–87. Hermann Adler, “Recent Phases of Judeophobia,” Nineteenth Century (December 1881), pp. 813–29. Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land, p. 205. Ibid., pp. 212–13. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 454. Ibid., p. 455. “Notes on Travel,” Academy 103 (April 25, 1874), p. 460. Eliot’s transcription of this article is included in Irwin, George Eliot’s “Daniel Deronda” Notebooks, p. 288. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 688. Ibid., p. 459. Gillian Beer, George Eliot (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 227. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 18. Ibid., p. 569. Cynthia Scheinberg, “ ‘The Beloved Ideas Made Flesh’: Daniel Deronda and Jewish Poetics,” English Literary History 77.3 (2010), pp. 813–39.

NOTES

41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61.

215

Eliot, Daniel Deronda, pp. 179, 317. Ibid., p. 306. Ibid., p. 695. Ibid., p. 640. For a discussion of this passage in relation to the larger politics of gender and confession in the novel, see Susan David Bernstein, Confessional Subjects (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), pp. 127–35. See Martin, “Contemporary Critics,” for an assortment of reviews at the time of the novel’s serial publication. Henry James, “ ‘Daniel Deronda’: A Conversation,” Atlantic Monthly 38 (December 1876), p. 684. Anna Clay Beecher, Gwendolen; or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to “Daniel Deronda” by George Eliot (Boston: Ira Bradley, 1878), p. 311. Graham Handley, “Reclaimed,” George Eliot Fellowship Review 20 (1989), pp. 38–40. John Picker, “George Eliot and the Sequel Question,” New Literary History 37 (2006), p. 363. Beecher, Gwendolen, p. 6. Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity, and Representation (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 203. Bar-Yosef, The Holy Land, p. 220. James Picciotto, “Deronda the Jew,” Gentleman’s Magazine 241 (November 1876), p. 603. “Daniel Deronda,” Spectator (September 9, 1876), pp. 1131–33. Edward Said’s criticism of the ending of Daniel Deronda interprets these ambiguities as a form of political erasure, “the total absence of any thought about the actual inhabitants of the East, Palestine in particular” in The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 62. Eliot’s notebook (see note 34) indicates that she had read articles about Palestine’s diverse inhabitants, and some of this awareness seeps into the Philosophers Club discussion of chapter 42. Said’s objection doesn’t take into account that Jewish Zionism was at best a fringe discourse subjugated to Christian, millenarian Zionism until Herzl’s movement took hold in the 1890s. For the quotation from The Jewish Chronicle obituary of Magnus, first published in March 1924, see Sharman Kadish, “Magnus [née Emanuel], Katie, Lady Magnus,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com (accessed February 11, 2010). The West London Synagogue of British Jews, established in 1841, was the first congregation in Britain to bring together Ashkenazim, Jews whose ancestors came from Eastern Europe, and Sephardim, those descended from Jews of the Iberian Peninsula. The reformed practices of this synagogue included a shortened prayer book, sermons in English, and worship times more compatible with secular timetables. Kadish, “Magnus.” Katie Magnus, Jewish Portraits (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1888), p. 36. Magnus, Jewish Portraits, p. 142.

216

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62. See Isobel Armstrong and Joseph Bristow with Cath Sharrock, eds, NineteenthCentury Women Poets (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 651. 63. Richard Garnett, “Blind, Mathilde,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com (accessed June 19, 2005). 64. Amy Levy, “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day,” reprinted in Reuben Sachs, ed. Susan David Bernstein (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2006), p. 180. 65. Mathilde Blind, Birds of Passage (London: Chatto & Windus, 1896), n.p. 66. George Cotterell, Review of Birds of Passage by Mathilde Blind, Academy 1223 (new issue; October 12, 1895), pp. 288–89. 67. Blind, Birds of Passage, p. 8. 68. (Phoebe) Sarah [Hertha] Marks (1854–1923) was the first Jewish student at Girton College, Cambridge, from 1877 to 1881. She may have served as the model for Mirah in Daniel Deronda. See Joan Mason, “Ayrton [née Marks] Phoebe Sarah [Hertha]” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb. com (accessed February 11, 2010). 69. For background on Levy, including her minority status at Cambridge, see Susan David Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Reuben Sachs, ed. Bernstein, pp. 13–20. 70. Joseph Jacobs, “Mordecai: A Protest against the Critics,” Macmillan’s Magazine 36 (1877), p. 110. Jacobs was one of the first Jewish students at Cambridge, and, like Levy, pursued a writing career in London. Unlike Levy, he embraced without ambivalence the subjects of Jews and Judaism, and he compiled the catalog for the Anglo-Jewish Exhibition in London in 1887, the first major show of AngloJewish artifacts from antiquity. For additional background on Levy and Jacobs, see Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Reuben Sachs, ed. Bernstein, pp. 25–27. 71. Eliot, Daniel Deronda, p. 688. 72. Magnus, Jewish Portraits, p. 85. 73. Ibid., p. 86. 74. Ibid., pp. 90–91. 75. Ibid., pp. 92–93. 76. Ibid., p. 93. 77. Ibid., p. 153. 78. Ibid., p. 157. 79. Frontispiece by Harry Furniss. Magnus, Jewish Portraits, n.p. 80. Mathilde Blind, George Eliot (London: W. H. Allen, 1883), p. 257. 81. Ibid., p. 259. 82. Ibid., p. 258. 83. Ibid., p. 260. 84. Ibid., p. 259. 85. Ibid. 86. Rahel Levin Varnhagen (1771–1833) held one of the most influential intellectual salons in nineteenth-century Berlin. Born Jewish and close friends with the daughters of Moses Mendelssohn, she converted to Christianity just before marrying Karl August Varnhagen in 1814. See Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001).

NOTES

217

87. Blind, George Eliot, p. 260. 88. Amy Levy, “The Jew in Fiction,” reprinted in Reuben Sachs, ed. Bernstein, p. 176. (For both quotations.) 89. Amy Levy, “Jewish Women and ‘Women’s Rights,’ ” reprinted in Reuben Sachs, ed. Bernstein, p. 175. 90. Levy, “Jewish Women,” p. 173. 91. Levy, “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-Day,” p. 178. 92. Ibid., p. 179. 93. Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 228. 94. Levy, “Captivity,” reprinted in Reuben Sachs, ed. Bernstein, pp. 190–91. 95. Levy, Reuben Sachs, ed. Bernstein, p. 100. 96. Ibid., p. 154.

Chapter 4 1. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, “Santa Filomena,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Longfellow, ed. Horace Elisha Scudder (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922), p. 197. 2. Oscar Wilde, “Impression du Matin,” in The Writings of Oscar Wilde: Poems Including Ravenna, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, The Sphinx Etc. (London: A. R. Keller, 1907), p. 123. 3. Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (London: T. F. Unwin, 1891). 4. In 1859, Florence Nightingale published Notes on Nursing: What It Is and Is Not (London: Harrison and Sons). This book is largely recognized to have been the beginning of a professional ethos for nursing. By the end of the century, this understanding of nursing as a respectable profession was widespread. 5. In 1869, Josephine Butler formed the Ladies National Association in part to fight the Contagious Diseases Acts passed in 1864, 1867, and 1869. These laws allowed the arrest of women suspected of prostitution, and their forced detention and treatment if they were found to be diseased. See Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 1980). 6. Isabella Beeton, The Book of Household Management (London: S. O. Beeton, 1861), p. 1017. 7. Catherine Judd, Bedside Seductions: Nursing and the Victorian Imagination, 1830–1880 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998). 8. Ibid., pp. 2–3. 9. Ibid., p. 23. 10. Ibid., p. 132. 11. Mary Seacole, Wonderful Adventures of Mrs. Seacole in Many Lands (London: James Blackwood Paternoster Row, 1857). 12. Judd, Bedside Seductions, p. 37.

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13. Ibid., p. 128. 14. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, in The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman & A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (New York: Macmillan, 1900), vol. 1, p. 89. 15. Jeanne Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men (Chichester: Phillimore, 1999), p. 21. 16. Sterne, Tristram Shandy, p. 100. 17. Ibid., p. 157. 18. Anne Digby, Making a Medical Living: Doctors and Patients in the English Market for Medicine, 1720–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 19. Ibid., p. 257. 20. Ibid., p. 258. 21. Ibid., p. 257. 22. Ibid. 23. Sophia Jex-Blake, Medical Women: A Thesis and a History (Edinburgh: Oliphant, Anderson and Ferrier, 1886). 24. Ibid., pp. 196–97. 25. Donnison, Midwives and Medical Men, p. 47. 26. Jex-Blake, Medical Women, pp. 9–10. 27. Ibid., p. 16. 28. Beatrice S. Levin, Women and Medicine (Metuchen: Scarecrow Press, 1980), p. 76. 29. Jo Manton, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 58. 30. Esther Pohl Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World (New York: Macmillan, 1957), p. 130. 31. Alison Bashford, “Medicine, Gender and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. 121. 32. Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World, p. 130. 33. Levin, Women and Medicine, p. 88. 34. Jex-Blake, Medical Women, pp. 95–98. 35. Ibid., p. 103. 36. Ibid., p. 112. 37. Ibid., p. 57. 38. Ibid., p. 73. 39. Margaret Oliphant, “Sensational Novels,” Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine 102 (May 1867), p. 275. 40. Jex-Blake, Medical Women, pp. 191–92. 41. Ibid. 42. Charles Reade, A Woman Hater (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1877). 43. Wilkie Collins, “Fie! Fie! Or, The Fair Physician,” in The Dream Woman and Other Stories, ed. Peter Miles (London: Phoenix, 1998), pp. 216–38. 44. Kristine Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). 45. “Newest of Spring Novels,” New York Times (May 28, 1893), p. 19. 46. Jex-Blake, Medical Women, p. 44. 47. Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World, p. 222.

NOTES

219

48. Florence Nightingale, quoted in Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World, p. 222. 49. Bashford, “Medicine, Gender and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Levine, pp. 114–15. 50. Ibid., p. 118. 51. Lovejoy, Women Doctors of the World, p. 226. 52. Bashford, “Medicine, Gender and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Levine, p. 122. 53. Kumari Jayawardena, The White Women’s Other Burden: Western Women and South Asia during British Rule (London: Routledge, 1995), p. 78. 54. Ibid., pp. 82–83. 55. Antoinette M. Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 56. Digby, Making a Medical Living, p. 275. 57. Ibid. 58. George Meredith, Various Readings and Bibliography: The Works of George Meredith Memorial Edition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1911), vol. 27, pp. 81–82. 59. George Man Burrows, Commentaries on Insanity (London: Underwood, 1828), p. 146. 60. Andrew Mangham, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (London: Palgrave, 2007), pp. 20–21. 61. Burrows, Commentaries on Insanity, pp. 147–48. 62. See Andrew Wynter, The Borderlands of Insanity (London: Robert Hardwicke, 1875), p. 52. See Sybilla Roe, “Situating Menopause within the Strategies of Power: A Genealogy,” in Reinterpreting Menopause: Culture and Philosophical Issues, ed. Paul Komesaroff, Philipa Rothfield, and Jeanne Daly (New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 200–24, for a lively discussion of the history of menopause treatments from early times through the twentieth century. 63. Thomas Hood, “The Bridge of Sighs,” in Poetical Works of Thomas Hood with Some Account of the Author (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871), vol. 1, pp. 188–93. 64. Philippa Levine, “Sexuality, Gender, and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Levine, pp. 134–55. 65. Ibid., p. 136. 66. Charles Edward Lester, The Glory and the Shame of England (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845), pp. 68–69. 67. Levine, “Sexuality,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Levine, p. 140. 68. Ibid., p. 144. 69. Mary Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease (New York: New York University Press, 1997), p. 67. 70. Ibid., p. 34. 71. Ibid., p. 45. 72. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England Since 1830 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 79. 73. Spongberg, Feminizing Venereal Disease, p. 66.

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74. Swenson, Medical Women and Victorian Fiction, p. 154. 75. Bashford, “Medicine, Gender and Empire,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Levine, p. 131. 76. Ibid. 77. Elizabeth W. Andrew and Katherine C. Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters in India (London: Morgan and Scott, 1899), p. 16. 78. Ibid., pp. 15–16. 79. Ibid., pp. 17–18. 80. Ibid., p. 77. 81. Philippa Levine, Prostitution, Race and Politics (London: Routledge, 2003), p. 8. 82. Ibid., p. 8 83. Ibid., p. 93. 84. Ibid., p. 221. 85. Joseph Chamberlain, letter no. 20, “Mr. CHAMBERLAIN to Governor Sir C. B. H. MITCHELL (straits Settlements) and the OFFICER ADMINISTERING THE GOVERNMENT OF HONG KONG,” in Parliamentary Papers, vol. 58 (1898), pp. 48–49. 86. Andrew and Bushnell, The Queen’s Daughters in India, p. 107. 87. Ibid., p. 103.

Chapter 5 1. The phrase is Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s in the opening paragraph of her Personal Recollections (New York: John S. Taylor, 1842), p. 13. The title page notes that this American printing is “from the London edition.” 2. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 359. 3. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 398. 4. Sarah Lewis, Woman’s Mission (New York: Wiley & Putnam, 1840), pp. 45, 51, 65. The book first appeared in England in 1839. 5. The phrase derives from Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets, and William Veeder, “Defining Voices,” in The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), vol. 1, p. 5. 6. “The Princess,” in Tennyson’s Poetry, 2nd ed., ed. Robert W. Hill, Jr. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), lines 435–41. 7. Mrs. Anna Jameson, Sisters of Charity, Catholic and Protestant and the Communion of Labour (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1857), pp. 26–27. These were two lectures delivered in 1855. 8. Ellen Jordan, “ ‘Women’s Work in the World’: The Birth of a Discourse, London, 1857,” Nineteenth-Century Feminisms 1 (Fall/Winter 1999), pp. 24–25. 9. See Linda Peterson, “The Feminist Origins of Ruskin’s ‘Of Queens’ Gardens,’ ” in Ruskin and Gender, ed. Dinah Birch and Francis O’Gorman (London: Palgrave Press, 2002), pp. 86–106, for a discussion of the influence of Jameson and her circle on Ruskin’s thinking.

NOTES

221

10. John Ruskin, “Of Queens’ Gardens,” in Sesame and Lilies (London: Smith, Elder, 1865), p. 71. 11. Ibid., p. 77. 12. Lady Ann Fanshawe, Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe, ed. E. Harris Nicolas (London: Henry Colburn, 1829), pp. 45, 91–93, 116–17. 13. Janet Bathgate, “Preface,” Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow in the Beginning of the Century (Selkirk: George Lewis, 1894), p. iii. 14. Frances Oke Alford, Reminiscences of a Clergyman’s Wife, ed. Dean of Canterbury (London: Rivingtons, 1860). Alford married her cousin Henry, who in 1835 became vicar of Wymeswold, Leicestershire; in 1853, he moved to London to become minister of Quebec Chapel, Portman Square, and in 1857 was appointed dean of Canterbury. Alford’s first chapters reflect these clerical appointments: “The London Poor” (pp. 1–43) and “The Country Poor” (pp. 44–71, 72–119). 15. Elizabeth Johnston, The Lotus and the Rose; or, Home in England and Home in India (London: Bell and Daldy, 1859), pp. 218–19. Johnston identifies herself as “the wife of a Bengal Civilian” on the title page and states that the “incidents in Home in India are facts” (p. vi), whereas “Home in England” is fictitious. 16. Margaret Oliphant, “Autobiography,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 129 (May 1881), pp. 617–39. 17. Mary Howitt, “The Child’s Corner,” Howitt’s Journal 1 (1847), p. 303. 18. Mary Howitt, The Children’s Year (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1847), p. 9. 19. Mary Howitt, “Reminiscences of My Later Life,” Good Words 27 (1886), p. 57. 20. Quoted by Michael A. Peterman, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Catherine Parr Traill, The Backwoods of Canada, ed. Peterman (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1997), p. xxiii. Traill’s memoir was originally published by the London publisher Charles Knight in 1836. 21. Traill, Backwoods of Canada, pp. 1, 3. 22. Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush, ed. Carl Ballstadt (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1988), p. 8. Roughing It was originally published by the London publisher Richard Bentley in 1852. 23. See Françoise Le Jeune, “Introduction” and “British Female Emigrants’ Contribution to Colonial British Columbia,” in Legacy and Contribution to Canada of European Female Emigrants (New York: Peter Lang, 2003), pp. 11–25, 175–203. 24. Moodie, Roughing It, p. 166. 25. Carl Klinck, ed., introduction to Susanna Moodie, Roughing It in the Bush (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1962), p. xiv. 26. Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838– 1839 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1863), p. 23. 27. Fanny Kemble to Harriet St. Leger, letter of October 26, 1840, included in Fanny Kemble, Records of Later Life, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley, 1882), vol. 2, pp. 39–40; qtd. in John A. Scott, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, 1838–1839 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p. xliv, n.70.

222

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28. Scott, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation, p. xlix. 29. Tonna, Personal Recollections, p. 13. 30. Tonna, Personal Recollections, p. 13; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (London: Smith, Elder, 1877); in this chapter, I cite the modern edition, ed. Linda H. Peterson (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2007), p. 34. 31. Dorothy Mermin, Godiva’s Ride: Women of Letters in England, 1830–1880 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). Mermin adapts the phrase from a letter written by Harriet Martineau and quoted in the “Memorials” of the Autobiography, ed. Maria Chapman (London: Smith, Elder, 1877), vol. 3, p. 401. 32. Lewis, Woman’s Mission, p. 61. 33. Ibid., p. 89. 34. Tonna, Personal Recollections, pp. 25–26. 35. Tonna, Personal Recollections, p. 27. Child beating is not openly discussed in women’s auto/biographies, though it is quietly mentioned by those who oppose it. In The Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1895), Frances Power Cobbe praises her mother thus: “She never once spoke angrily or harshly to me in all her life, much less struck or punished me” (vol. 1, p. 29). Even Martineau, who criticizes the practice of verbal abuse, never refers to physical punishment. 36. Martineau, Autobiography, p. 49. 37. Ibid., p. 47. 38. Margaret Oliphant, “Harriet Martineau,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 121 (April 1877), pp. 472–96. Oliphant acknowledges that children commonly “disapprove of the principles on which they were brought up” but takes offense at Martineau’s lack of “tender piety and loyalty to the home”: “When it [autobiographical reflection] leads to the desecration of that home, and the holding up of the chief figure in it to deliberate blame and insult, what can any one say?” (p. 476). 39. Martineau, Autobiography, p. 93. 40. Lewis, Woman’s Mission, p. 63. 41. Martineau, Autobiography, p. 88. 42. Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 166. 43. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 289. 44. Tonna, Personal Recollections, p. 24. 45. Tonna, Personal Recollections, pp. 32–33. 46. Cobbe, Life, vol. 1, p. 56. 47. Ibid., pp. 58–60. 48. Ibid., p. 61. 49. Ibid., p. 63. 50. The chapter “Religion,” in Life, vol. 1, pp. 70–95, traces Cobbe’s theological development from orthodoxy to theism and is followed by “My First Book,” pp. 96–122, a chapter about writing her religious treatise The Intuitive Theory of Morals (1855).

NOTES

223

51. Cobbe, Life, vol. 1, p. 65. 52. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 59. 53. Cobbe, Life, vol. 1, p. 2. Cobbe writes these sentences in the context of imagining her father’s “shock” at seeing his daughter pursue a writerly career, not only because she is female but also because neither parent had any literary ability. 54. Martineau, Autobiography, p. 76. 55. See Anna Mary Howitt, An Art-Student in Munich (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1853), as well as the account of her mother, Mary Howitt, of her daughter’s art education in The Autobiography of Mary Howitt (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1889). 56. Elizabeth Gaskell, The Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Elisabeth Jay (1857; London: Penguin Books, 1997), pp. 167, 174. 57. Tonna, Personal Recollections, pp. 145–46. 58. Ibid., p. 21. 59. Mary Poovey, The Proper Lady and Woman Writer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 41. 60. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, pp. 258–59. 61. For treatments of the woman actress and woman painter, see respectively Mary Jean Corbett, Representing Femininity: Middle-Class Subjectivity in Victorian and Edwardian Women’s Autobiography (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Julie Codell, The Victorian Artist: Artists’ Lifewritings in Britain, ca. 1870– 1910 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Both emphasize the importance of projecting an exemplary domesticity as a means advancing one’s career and profession. 62. Harriet Mary Browne Owen, Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Hemans: By Her Sister (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1840), p. 1. 63. Maria Vernon Graham Havergal, Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal (New York: Anson D. F. Randolph, 1880), p. 2. 64. Emma Roberts, “Memoir of L. E. L.,” in The Zenana and Minor Poems of L.E. L. (London: Fisher, 1839). 65. Laetitia Elizabeth Landon, “A History of the Lyre,” in Selected Writings, ed. Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess (Toronto: Broadview Press, 1997), p. 127, lines 430–45. 66. Geraldine Jewsbury, The Half Sisters, ed. Joanne Wilkes, Oxford World’s Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), chap. 27, pp. 390–91. 67. Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, p. 259. This statement appears in vol. 2, chap. 2, where Gaskell adds: “I put into words what Charlotte Brontë put into action.” 68. These phrases from Brontë’s letters are quoted by Gaskell in Life of Charlotte Brontë, pp. 115, 122, 128. 69. Robert Southey to Charlotte Brontë, March 12, 1837, and Charlotte Brontë to Robert Southey, March 16, 1837, in The Letters of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), vol. 1, pp. 165–67, 167–68. 70. Margaret Oliphant, Autobiography, ed. Mrs. Harry Coghill (Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons, 1899), p. 16.

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71. Ibid., pp. 16–17. 72. Oliphant, Autobiography, p. 24. On Oliphant’s conception of authorship as a family business, see Linda H. Peterson, “Margaret Oliphant’s Autobiography as Professional Artist’s Life,” Women’s Writing 6 (1999), pp. 261–77. 73. Oliphant, Autobiography, p. 75. 74. Martineau, Autobiography, pp. 111–12. 75. Cobbe, Life, vol. 1, pp. 98–100. 76. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 68–69. 77. Martineau, Autobiography, p. 485. 78. Ibid., p. 51. 79. Deborah Logan, The Hour and the Woman (De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). Two examples of Martineau’s needlework are reproduced on the back cover. 80. See Ana Parejo Vadillo, “Alice Meynell: An Impressionist in Kensington,” in Women Poets and Urban Aestheticism: Passengers of Modernity (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), pp. 78–116, for a discussion of Meynell’s use of her Kensington houses, the last at Palace Court designed and owned by the Meynells, to advance her career. 81. Mrs. Roscoe Mullins, Sylvia’s Journal, (n.s.) 1 (October 1893), p. 550. 82. The portrait of Mary Russell Mitford appeared in Fraser’s Magazine 3 (May 1832), p. 410. 83. Martineau’s portrait appeared in Fraser’s Magazine 8 (November 1833), p. 576, at the height of her fame. 84. Punch’s Fancy Portraits, no. 45. The caption reads, “O fie! ’tis an unweeded garden” (Hamlet, act 1, scene 2). 85. Mrs. J. H. Riddell, A Struggle for Fame, 3 vols. (London: Richard Bentley and Son, 1883), vol. 1, p. 103. 86. Quoted in J. Badeni, A Slender Tree: A Life of Alice Meynell (Padstow, Cornwall: Tabb House, 1981), p. 100. 87. J. E. Hodder Williams, “The Reader: Mary Cholmondeley,” Bookman 18 (May 1900), p. 41. 88. Harriet Martineau, Society in America (London: Sanders & Otley, 1837), vol. 1, p. 153.

Chapter 6 1. Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (New York: Cornell University Press, 1981); chap. 1, “On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act,” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, ed. Vincent Leitch (New York: Norton, 2001), pp. 1954–55. 2. David Vincent, The Rise of Mass Literacy: Reading and Writing in Modern Europe (Oxford: Polity, 2000), pp. 9–10. He notes that “children educated in the 1830s and 1840s were on average twenty points more literate than their parents’ generation when they came to be married in early adulthood, and in turn lagged behind their own children by a similar amount a quarter of a century later” (p. 14).

NOTES

225

3. John Hurt, Elementary Schooling and the Working Classes, 1860–1918 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), p. 5. 4. Ibid., p. 4. 5. Josephine Kamm, Hope Deferred: Girls’ Education in English History (London: Methuen, 1965), p. 158. 6. Hurt, Elementary Schooling, p. 9. 7. Ibid., p. 36. 8. June Purvis, Hard Lessons: The Lives and Education of Working-Class Women in Victorian England (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 76, 88. Purvis notes that infants and girls were often crowded together, as reported by a Church of England inspector in 1870: “The chief defect I have to regret in the organization of school is, that schools for boys and girls are too much crowded with infants. This is especially the case in some girls’ schools, and the evil is rather on the increase I fear” (p. 89). 9. Purvis, Hard Lessons, p. 89. She notes that inspectors of the 1840s and 1850s advocated teaching girls domestic tasks; “arithmetic, it was argued, could be taught by adding up shopping bills and calculating the amount of material necessary for dressmaking.” Moreover, the educational standard seems to have been lower for girls’ schools; the Rev. Allington reported that in the Church of England schools he inspected in Suffolk, the failure rate for girls was much higher. 10. Kamm, Hope Deferred, p. 59. 11. Phil Gardner, The Lost Elementary Schools of Victorian England (London: Croom Helm, 1984). 12. Hurt, Elementary Schooling, p. 54. Hurt reports that R. Webb estimates that at least two-thirds of the working classes could read, though Hurt adds, “one may legitimately wonder just what they could read and with what fluency” (p. 22). 13. Hurt, Elementary Schooling, pp. 16–17, 22. 14. Hurt, Elementary Schooling, p. 188. “The Education Act of [1918] finally closed a series of loopholes that had allowed roughly half the children in elementary schools to leave between the ages of 12 and 14 in the years just before the First World War” (p. 188). 15. Hurt, Elementary Schooling, p. 161. 16. Ibid., p. 188. 17. Ibid., p. 161. 18. Hurt, Elementary Schooling, pp. 114–16, 122–24, 143–52. Hygiene was also a problem, as unbathed children brought lice into the schools (pp. 102–3). 19. Purvis, Hard Lessons, p. 93. This practice ended in 1890. 20. David Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture: England 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 90. 21. Vincent, Literacy and Popular Culture, p. 90. Fewer than 1 child in 600 attempted the newly introduced seventh standard. And despite the fact that additional subjects such as geography, grammar, history, and plain needlework were added to the topics that could be examined, “the three Rs examination, combined with average attendances, formed the main basis of state grants” (Purvis, Hard Lessons, p. 93).

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22. Vincent, Rise of Mass Literacy, p. 80. He notes that at the time of the Fisher Act of 1918, 95 percent of pupils in state elementary schools were able to advance to some form of secondary education. 23. Janet Bathgate, Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces: Recollections of Humble Life in Yarrow in the Beginning of the Century (Selkirk: George Lewis and Sons, 1894). This went through three editions and was followed by a sequel by an admirer, George Lewis’s The Life Story of Aunt Janet (Selkirk: James Lewis, 1902). 24. Bathgate, Aunt Janet’s Legacy, p. 53. 25. Ibid., p. 55. 26. Ibid., p. 106. 27. Ibid., p. 109. 28. Ibid., pp. 113–14. 29. Ibid., p. 123. 30. Ibid., p. 124. 31. Ibid. 32. According to George Lewis, she conducted a school for young children in Dalkeith, Scotland, from 1836 to 1838, then moved to take charge of a school for the children of millworkers in Kirkhill, Scotland (p. 10). 33. Mary Smith, The Autobiography of Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist: A Fragment of a Life (London/Carlisle: Bemrose and Sons/Wordsworth Press, 1892), pp. 26, 17. All quotations are from this edition. 34. Ibid., p. 24. 35. Ibid., p. 25. 36. Ibid., p. 26. 37. Ibid., p. 25. 38. Smith does not mention the school’s denomination, merely that it was taught by two ladies “at the Cropredy wharf”; the fact that it was Methodist is cited in Kathryn Gleadle, “Mary Smith,” in New Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), vol. 51, p. 250, col. 2. 39. Smith, Autobiography, p. 30. 40. Ibid., p. 38. 41. Ibid., p. 39. 42. Christian World, London, 1857–present; also, Christian World Annual, London, 1875–96, and Literary World: A Monthly Supplement (1868–1919), Waterloo Directory of Victorian Periodicals (Waterloo: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 2004). 43. Marianne Farningham, A Working Woman’s Life: An Autobiography (London: James Clarke, 1907). Quotations are from this edition. 44. Farningham, Working Woman’s Life, p. 17. 45. Ibid., p. 23. 46. Ibid., p. 26. 47. Ibid., pp. 27, 28. 48. Ibid., pp. 45–46. 49. Farningham, Working Woman’s Life, p. 29: “Much of the religious teaching of the day was far more somber than it should have been, and I rejoice to think that only the happier side of Christian life and theology is presented to the children of to-day.”

NOTES

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

67. 68.

69. 70. 71. 72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

227

Farningham, Working Woman’s Life, p. 44. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid., p. 46. The Christian Watt Papers, ed. David Fraser (Edinburgh: Paul Harris, 1983); Elizabeth Campbell, Songs of My Pilgrimage (Edinburgh: Elliot, 1875). Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up: The Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel, ed. George Mitchell (London: Virago, 1977). She became a militant suffragette (1905–18), an ILP Manchester city councilor (1924–35), and Manchester magistrate (1926–46). Mitchell, Hard Way, p. 39. Ibid., p. 43. Ibid. The Miss Pringles had lent Bathgate John Galt’s The Annals of the Poor and Legh Richmond’s The Young Cottager. Her family’s library had included Thomas Boston’s Works, Pilgrim’s Progress, Baxter’s Saint’s Rest, Robinson Crusoe, “Jack o’ the Beanstalk,” and a few ballads (Bathgate, Legacy, p. 48). Mitchell, Hard Way, pp. 48–49. Ibid., p. 49. Ibid. Ibid., p. 50. Ibid., pp. 52–53. Ibid., p. 62. Mitchell, Hard Way, p. 64. She adds, “In my desire for education I was both determined and ruthless, rating my own intelligence probably much higher than it really was” (p. 63). Margaret Penn, Manchester Fourteen Miles (Seaford, Sussex: Caliban Books, 1947/1979). Quotations are from the 1979 edition. Penn, Fourteen Miles, p. 7. When her mother had become pregnant by someone described as a “gentleman,” she married George Huntley, and when she died in Hannah’s infancy, George had departed for Canada. Penn, Fourteen Miles, p. 119. Ibid., p. 128. John Burnett, introduction to Penn, Fourteen Miles, p. xxv. Penn, Fourteen Miles, p. 190. She includes her mother’s response to the vicar: “‘What dost want to got and give t’Co-op tuppence a week for wi’ all them prizes in’t’house?’ she asked resentfully. ‘It ud be different if you got a divi on it—but to go and give tuppence every week just for the lend of a book seems downright idleness, and no good’ll come of it’” (p. 191). Penn, Fourteen Miles, p. 194. Ibid., p. 196. Penn, Fourteen Miles, pp. 229–30. She gives a sad account of her failed attempt to teach her parents to read. Among Thompson’s other publications were Still Glides the Stream (1948), Heatherley (1998), and The Peverel Papers (1986). The school was in Cottisford, Oxfordshire (http://www.johnowensmith.co.uk/flora/history.htm, accessed January 20, 2012).

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77. Flora Thompson, Lark Rise to Candleford (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1939), pp. 172–74. All quotations are from this edition. 78. Thompson, Lark Rise, p. 176. 79. Ibid., p. 185. 80. Ibid., p. 186. 81. Thompson, Lark Rise, pp. 174–75. She goes on: “But long before their schooldays were over they knew every piece in the books by heart and it was one of their greatest pleasures in life to recite them to each other. . . . The selection in the Royal Readers, then, was an education in itself for those who took to it kindly; but the majority of the children would have none of it; saying that the prose was ‘dry old stuff’ and that they hated ‘portry’ ” (p. 175). 82. Peig Sayers, Peig: The Autobiography of Peig Sayers of the Great Blasket Island (Dublin: Criterion Press Printing for the Government of Ireland, 1936/1944). Her folklore and other stories were gathered on Ediphone by Dr. Robin Flower, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, and twenty years later by Seosamh O. Dalaigh. Sayers’s tales are recorded in Machnamh Seanmhna/An Old Woman’s Reflections, trans. Séamus Ennis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). 83. Sayers, Peig, p. 13. 84. Ibid., p. 15. 85. Ibid., p. 18. 86. Ibid., p. 20. 87. Ibid., pp. 27–28. 88. Ibid., p. 29. 89. For the deaths of her children, see Sayers, Peig, pp. 173, 176, 210. 90. Sayers, Peig, p. 210. 91. Vincent, Rise of Mass Literacy, p. 147. 92. Smith’s estate was probated on March 6, 1889, at a value of 1,463 pounds, 19 shilllings (Gleadle, “Mary Smith,” p. 252). 93. Sayers, Peig, p. 212.

Chapter 7 1. Flora Annie Steel and Grace Gardiner, The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1888/2010), p. 195. 2. The International Woman Suffrage Timeline continues this tracking today: http:// womenshistory.about.com/od/suffrage/a/intl_timeline.htm (accessed January 5, 2012). 3. One of the key essays on nineteenth-century femininity is Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” American Quarterly 18.2, pt. 1 (1966), pp. 151–74. 4. For a history of Butler’s work and the Contagious Diseases Acts in Britain, see Judith Walkowitz’s Prostitution and Victorian Society (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980); on India, see Philippa Levine’s Prostitution, Race and Politics (London: Routledge, 2003). For a fascinating analysis of Butler’s political rhetoric, see Elaine Hadley’s Melodramatic Tactics (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

NOTES

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5. Finding English-language studies that include the history of women in these colonies is challenging. Traces appear in Michael N. Pearson’s The Portuguese in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) and Animesh Rai’s The Legacy of French Rule in India, 1674–1954 (New York: French Institute of Pondicherry, 2008). 6. Pat Barr, The Memsahibs (London: Secker & Warburg, 1976), p. 4. 7. See Margaret Macmillan’s Women of the Raj (New York: Random House, 2007), especially the introduction, and Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 1–15. 8. Indrani Sen, “Between Power and ‘Purdah’: The White Woman in British India, 1858–1900,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 34.3 (1997), pp. 358–60. 9. Macmillan, Women of the Raj, p. 52. 10. Selected writings by memsahibs are collected in Indira Ghose’s Memsahibs Abroad (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998). 11. Beverly Gartrell, “Colonial Wives: Villians or Victims?” in Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 165. 12. Nupur Chaudhuri, “Shawls, Jewelry, Curry, and Rice in Victorian Britain,” in Western Women and Imperialism, ed. Chaudhuri and Strobel, p. 232. 13. In particular, see Jenny Sharpe, Allegories of Empire: The Figure of Woman in the Colonial Text (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pp. 85–110; and Paxton, “Mobilizing Chivalry,” pp. 333–46. 14. Lagaan: Once Upon a Time in India (2001) was nominated for awards across Europe, as well as in the United States and India. 15. See detailed discussions of fictional and journalistic claims about rape during the Uprising of 1857 in Alison Blunt’s “Embodying War: British Women and Domestic Defilement in the Indian ‘Mutiny’, 1857–8,” Journal of Historical Geography, 26.3 (2000); Nancy Paxton’s Writing under the Raj (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1999), pp. 109–36; and Sharpe’s Allegories of Empire, especially p. 86. 16. Authorship of the guide is fuzzy. Because most accounts agree that Steel wrote the majority of the text, I follow the convention of referring to Steel alone when quoting chapters other than the one Gardiner added. Steel discusses her extensive research for the manual in her The Garden of Fidelity, Being the Autobiography of Flora Annie Steel, 1847–1929 (London: Macmillan, 1930), pp. 187–89. Twelve editions of the manual appeared in Steel’s lifetime. The 2010 Oxford University Press edition arrived after I completed this chapter. The introduction by editors Ralph Crane and Anna Johnston is outstanding (pp. ix–xxvii). 17. In my brief account of Steel’s life, I rely on Steel’s autobiography and the following excellent biographical studies: Violet Powell, Flora Annie Steel: Novelist of Indi (London: Heinemann, 1981); Daya Patwardhan, A Star of India: Flora Annie Steel, Her Work and Times (Bombay: A. V. Griha Prakashan, 1963); Benita Parry,

230

18.

19.

20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

NOTES

Delusions and Discoveries: Studies on India in the British Imagination, 1880–1930 (London: Verso, 1972/1998); Rosemary Cargill Raza, “Steel [née Webster], Flora Annie (1847–1929),” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/36262 (accessed October 4, 2005); and Julie English Early, “Flora Annie Steel (April 1847–12 April 1929),” Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 156, British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Romantic Tradition, ed. William F. Naufftus (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), pp. 321–29. Rebecca Sutliffe, “Flora Annie Steel,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography, vol. 153, Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists, First Series, ed. George M. Johnson (Detroit: Gale Research, 1995), p. 290. Steel’s autobiography, The Garden of Fidelity, was near completion when she died in 1929. Her daughter finished the manuscript, and it was published by Macmillan that year. For example, see Steel, Garden of Fidelity, p. 265. Steel, Garden of Fidelity, pp. 160 ff. H. R. Mehta provides broad historical context for Steel’s experience in A History of the Growth and Development of Western Education in the Punjab, 1846–1884, Monograph No. 5 (Patiala: Punjab Government Record Office, 1929). Rebecca Sutliffe, “Feminizing the Professional: The Government Reports of Flora Annie Steel,” Technical Communication Quarterly 7.2 (1998), p. 162. For example, see Steel’s series of novels about the Moghul empire in India, beginning with A Prince of Dreamers (London: Heinemann, 1908). Steel, Garden of Fidelity, pp. 201–11. By Antoinette Burton, “The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and the Indian Woman, 1865–1915,” Women’s Studies International Forum 13.4 (1990), pp. 295–308; Rebecca Saunders, “Flora Annie Steel and Sara Jeannette Duncan in India,” in Women’s Writing in Exile, ed. Mary Lynn Broe and Angela Ingram (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), pp. 303–24; Indrani Sen, Woman and Empire: Representations in the Writings of British India, 1858–1900 (Delhi: Orient Longman, 2002); among many others. Rosemary Marangoly George, in The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), discusses colonial British women’s widespread use of military rhetoric, pp. 35–64. Mrs. Beeton’s famous guide for British housewives and her influence are thoroughly discussed in Hughes’s biography, The Short Life and Long Times of Mrs. Beeton (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). Steel and Gardiner, Complete Indian Housekeeper, p. 3. Ibid., p. 2. Steel, The Garden of Fidelity, p. 133. Steel and Gardiner, Complete Indian Housekeeper, p. 9. Terence McLaughlin, Dirt: A Social History as Seen through the Uses and Abuses of Dirt (New York: Stein and Day, 1971), pp. 1–33. McLaughlin, Dirt, pp. 1–4. For a detailed history of Chadwick and the rise of public sanitation, see Christopher Hamlin, Public Health and Social Justice in the Age of Chadwick: Britain, 1800–1854 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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36. Vijay Prashad, “Native Dirt/Imperial Ordure: The Cholera of 1832 and the Morbid Resolutions of Modernity,” Journal of Historical Sociology 7.3 (1994), p. 243. 37. Ibid., p. 254. 38. Ibid., p. 243. 39. Ibid., p. 252. 40. Piya Pal-Lapinski, “Infection as Resistance: Medical Discourse, Indian Courtesans, and Flawed Memsahibs in Flora Steel’s Colonial Fiction,” ARIEL: A Review of International English Literature 30.3 (1999), pp. 141–49. 41. Sara Mills, Gender and Colonial Space (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 115–20. 42. Ibid., p. 55. 43. Steel and Gardiner, Complete Indian Housekeeper, p. 32. 44. Ibid., p. 21. 45. Ibid., p. vii. 46. Ibid. 47. Ibid., p. ix. 48. Ibid., p. x. 49. Ibid., p. 2. 50. Ibid., pp. 69–70. 51. Ibid., p. 238. 52. Ibid., pp. 238–39. 53. Ibid., p. 73. 54. Ibid., p. 80. 55. Ibid., p. 93.

Chapter 8 1. Elizabeth Ellet, Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1859), pp. 234–35. 2. For discussion of the figure of the female artist in nineteenth-century fiction, see Antonia Losano, The Woman Painter in Victorian Literature (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2008); and Alexandra K. Wettlaufer, Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011). 3. Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain 1850– 1900 (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 2. 4. Kirstin Swinth, Painting Professionals: Women Artists and the Development of Modern American Art, 1870–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), p. 1. 5. Cherry, Beyond the Frame, p. 11. 6. Erica Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston, 1870–1940 (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2001), p. 16. 7. See table 1 in Charlotte Yeldham, Women Artists in Nineteenth-Century France and England, vol. 1 (New York: Garland, 1984), p. 199. Since many women exhibited their work under pseudonyms, Yeldham notes that these numbers and percentages might have been even higher.

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8. Swinth, Painting Professionals, p. 3. 9. Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), p. 3. 10. Linda Nochlin, “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?” in Women, Art, and Power (New York: Harper & Row, 1988), pp. 159–60. 11. Lisa Tickner, “Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism,” in Visual Culture: Images and Interpretations, ed. Norman Bryson, Michael Ann Holly, and Keith Moxey (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), p. 47. 12. The continent was a central part of British and American male artists’ education as well. As Hirshler notes, “The widespread belief that Europe was a superior place for aspiring artists held sway throughout the nineteenth century”; A Studio of Her Own, p. 7. 13. Judith Adler, “Travel as Performed Art,” American Journal of Sociology 94 (1989), pp. 1368, 1374. 14. For discussion, see James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to “Culture” 1800–1918 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 15. Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 1. 16. Ibid., pp. 140, 144. 17. Anonymous, “Modern Tourism,” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 64.394 (August 1848), p. 185. 18. Anna Jameson, Diary of an Ennuyée (London: Henry Colburn, 1826), p. 1. 19. Maria Frawley, “Borders and Boundaries, Perspectives and Place: Victorian Women’s Travel Writing,” in Intrepid Women: Victorian Artists Travel, ed. Jordana Pomeroy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), p. 27. 20. See Linda Peterson, “Working Collaboratively: Mary Howitt and Anna Mary Howitt as Women of Letters,” in Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 96–130. 21. I will use the name Leigh Smith rather than Bodichon here, as Barbara’s marriage in 1857 and her removal to Algeria marks an unofficial end to the sisterhood. 22. Anonymous, “Domestic Life,” The English Woman’s Journal 2 (October 1858), p. 75. 23. Anna Mary Howitt, An Art Student in Munich (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1854), pp. 4–6. 24. Ibid., pp. 21–22. 25. Ibid., pp. 22, 37. 26. Although An Art Student in Munich was published in 1854, after the appearance of “The Sisters in Art,” in Illustrated Exhibitor and Magazine of Art 2 (1852), it was in fact written during 1850–51 and so predates the composition of the novella. 27. Howitt, Munich, p. 92. 28. Ibid., p. 94. 29. Ibid., pp. 94–95. 30. Ibid., p. 95.

NOTES

31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62.

233

Ibid., p. 209. Ibid., p. 349. Ibid., p. 241. Ibid., p. 454. Ironically, Howitt abandoned her career as an artist by the end of the decade, after Ruskin criticized her painting of Boadicea in such a way as to provoke a nervous breakdown. After destroying most of her work, Howitt turned her energies to spiritualism. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women (London: Penguin, 1989), p. 143. See Caroline Ticknor, May Alcott: A Memoir (Boston: Little Brown, 1928), p. 109. See Daniel Shealy, ed., Little Women Abroad: The Alcott Sisters’ Letters from Europe, 1870–1871 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2008). Louisa May Alcott, preface to Shawl-Straps (London: Sampson Low, 1873), n.p. Alcott, Shawl-Straps, pp. 32–33. Ibid., pp. 284, 291. Ibid., p. 99. Ibid., pp. 97–98. Ibid., pp. 100–101. Ibid., pp. 306–7. Ibid., pp. 306–8. May Alcott Nieriker, Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1879), p. 5. Ibid., p. 6. Ibid., pp. 6–7. Ibid., p. 9. Ibid., p. 15–16. Ibid., p. 24. Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., pp. 43–48. Ibid., pp. 49–50. Ibid., pp. 50–53. Ibid., pp. 77–79. Ibid., p. 85. Susan P. Casteras, “With Palettes, Pencils, and Parasols: Victorian Women Traverse the Empire,” in Intrepid Women, ed. Pomeroy, p. 24. Ibid., p. 3. Quoted in Hirshler, A Studio of Her Own, p. 28. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1991) for further discussion.

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contributors

Susan David Bernstein, Professor of English, Gender and Women’s Studies, and Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is the author of Confessional Subjects: Revelations of Gender and Power in Victorian Literature and Culture (1997) and the editor of two novels by Amy Levy, The Romance of a Shop and Reuben Sachs (2006), as well as the co-editor with Elsie B. Michie of Victorian Vulgarity: Taste in Verbal and Visual Culture (2009). She has just published Roomscape: Women Readers in the British Museum from George Eliot to Virginia Woolf (2013). Florence S. Boos, Professor of English and Collegiate Fellow at the University of Iowa, has published monographs on the poetry of Dante G. Rossetti and William Morris and is the general editor of the Morris Online Edition (http://morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu). She is the author of numerous articles on Victorian working-class women poets and the editor of Working-Class Women Poets of Victorian Britain: An Anthology (2008). Pamela K. Gilbert is Albert Brick Professor of English at the University of Florida. She has published widely in the areas of Victorian literature, cultural studies, and the history of medicine. Her books are Disease, Desire and the Body in Victorian Women’s Popular Novels (1997); Mapping the Victorian Social Body (2004); The Citizen’s Body (2007); and Cholera and Nation (2008). She is the editor of Imagined Londons (2002); Companion to Sensation Fiction (2012); an edition of Rhoda Broughton’s novel, Cometh Up as a Flower (2010); and co-editor of Beyond Sensation: Mary Elizabeth Braddon in Context (1999, with Marlene Tromp and Aeron Haynie).

256

CONTRIBUTORS

Teresa Mangum is a professor at the University of Iowa in English and Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies and Director of the Obermann Center for Advanced Studies. Her work on aging, human and animal relationships, and women’s literature and culture in nineteenth-century Britain includes essays in Victorians Institute Journal, Pedagogy, Teaching Nineteenth-Century Fiction (2010), Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and A Cultural History of Animals in the Age of Empire, 1800–1920 (Berg, 2009). She is the author of Married, Middlebrow, and Militant: Sarah Grand and the New Woman Novel (1998) and co-editor of the University of Iowa book series Humanities in Public Life. Linda H. Peterson is the Niel Gray, Jr., Professor of English at Yale University. She is the author of Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship, Facts of the Market (2009); Traditions of Victorian Women’s Autobiography: The Poetics and Politics of Life Writing (1999, 2001); and Victorian Autobiography: The Tradition of Self-Interpretation (1986). She is also coauthor with Susan P. Casteras of A Struggle for Fame: Victorian Women Artists and Authors (1994). Her edited volumes include Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (2007), The Life of Charlotte Bronte by Elizabeth Gaskell (2006), and The Autobiography and Letters of Margaret Oliphant (2012). Ellen Bayuk Rosenman is the Provost’s Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Kentucky. Her books include Unauthorized Pleasures: Accounts of Victorian Erotic Experience (2003); A Room of One’s Own: A Reader’s Companion (1995); and The Invisible Presence: Virginia Woolf and the Mother-Daughter Relationship (1986). She co-edited Other Mothers: Beyond the Maternal Ideal with Claudia Klaver (2003). She is currently co-editing a reader, Transnational History of Feminist Thought, with Susan Bordo and Cristina Alcalde, and writing a book on penny fiction and radical politics. Pat Thane is Research Professor in Contemporary History at Kings College, London. Her publications include Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of the European Welfare States, 1880s–1950s, edited with Gisela Bock (1991); Old Age in English History: Past Experiences, Present Issues (2000); Women and Ageing in Britain since 1500, co-edited with Lynn Botelho (2001); Unequal Britain: Equalities in Britain since 1945 (2010); Women and Citizenship in Britain and Ireland in the Twentieth Century: What Difference did the Vote Make? co-edited with Esther Breitenbach (2010); and Sinners? Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in Twentieth Century England with Tanya Evans (2012).

CONTRIBUTORS

257

Alexandra K. Wettlaufer is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Texas at Austin, where she is also a faculty affiliate in Women’s and Gender Studies. A specialist in nineteenth-century literature and the visual arts, her most recent work includes Portraits of the Artist as a Young Woman: Painting and the Novel in France and Britain, 1800–1860 (2011), as well as essays in Nineteenth-Century Studies, Victorian Review, Romanic Review, and Romance Studies.

index

Italic page numbers refer to illustrations. abolition of slavery, 11 – 13, 12 Academy, 74 actresses, 54, 210n25 Adler, Judith, 180 adultery novels, 52 Aguilar, Grace, 70 – 1, 83, 213n11 Albert, Prince, 30 – 1, 38 Alcott, Louisa May, 16, 189, 190 – 3 Alford, Frances Oke, 119, 120, 221n14 anatomy, morbid, 106 Anderson, Elizabeth Garrett, 100 Andrew, Elizabeth W., 111, 113 “angel in the house” image, 49 – 50, 51, 53, 56, 137 artistic education, 178 – 9 “artistic sisterhood,” 186 – 8 artists, 177 – 8 Art-Student in Munich, An (Howitt), 182, 184 – 9, 232n26 Atkinson, George Francklin, 163, 165, 166 Aunt Janet’s Legacy to Her Nieces (Bathgate), 119, 120, 145 – 6 Aurora Leigh (Barrett Browning), 13–14 auto/biography, 115 – 40

about, 115 – 16 domestic and literary spheres, compatibility of, 131 – 2, 133 domestic and literary spheres, integral relationship between, 133 – 4 domestic and literary spheres, separation of, 134 – 7 domesticity, emphasizing, 132 – 3 education, 127 – 31 homes of authors, 135 – 7, 136, 137, 140 moral maternity, 125 – 7 privacy, loss of, 138 separate spheres concept, 116 – 19 Autobiography (Martineau), 126–7, 134, 135 – 6 Autobiography (Oliphant), 133 – 4 ayah (servant), 174 – 6 Baartman, Saartjie, 64, 64 – 5 Backwoods of Canada, The (Traill), 121 Barney, Natalie, 58 Barr, Pat, 163 Barrett Browning, Elizabeth, 13 – 14

260

Barry, James, 98 Bath Ball or Virtue in Danger, A (Cruickshank), 48 Bathgate, Janet, 119, 120, 145 – 6, 160, 226n32, 227n59 Beecher, Anna Clay, 76 – 7 Beeton, Isabella, 93 – 4 Belgravia (magazine), 15 Benham, Jane, 182 – 4, 183 Beth Book, The (Grand), 18 – 19 bicycle riding, 55, 55 – 6 biography see auto/biography Birds of Passage (Blind), 80, 85, 86 birthrate, 32 Blackwell, Elizabeth, 98, 100 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 120, 127, 181, 222n38 Blind, Mathilde, 78, 79 – 80, 81, 84 – 6, 88 – 9 board schools, 144 bodies and sexuality see sexuality Bonheur, Rosa, 57 – 8, 195, 197 Bookman, The, 138 – 9, 140 Book of Household Management, The (Beeton), 93 – 4 Braddon, Elizabeth, 15 – 16 “Bridge of Sighs” (Hood), 107 – 8 British and Foreign School Society, 142, 143 Brontë, Anne, 6 Brontë, Charlotte, 7 – 8, 130, 131 – 2, 133, 136, 136 brothels see prostitutes and prostitution Burdett-Coutts, Angela, 59 Burrows, George Man, 105 Bushnell, Katherine C., 111, 113 Butler, Josephine, 54, 162, 210n28, 217n5 Buzard, James, 180 – 1 Caird, Mona, 19, 56 Canada, 121 – 3, 123 “Canada” (Moodie), 121 – 2 Can You Forgive Her? (Trollope), 51 – 2 “Captivity” (Levy), 87, 88

INDEX

caregivers, women as medical, 93 – 104 abroad, 102 – 4, 112 – 13 doctors and surgeons, 98, 101 – 4, 103, 112 – 13 history, 97 – 8 at home, 93 – 4 India, 102 – 3, 103 medical schools, 98 – 101 midwifery, 95 – 7, 103 novels about women in medicine, 101 – 2 nursing, 94 – 5, 217n4 social class and, 100 Carlisle, Anthony, 97 Carpenter, Mary, 28 Casteras, Susan, 198 – 9 Cecil, Maud, 29 Chamberlain, Joseph, 113 Chartist agitation, 9 – 10 Chaudhuri, Nupur, 163 – 4 childbirth, 30 – 2 child employment, 25, 25 – 6, 27 childrearing, 125 – 7 “Children’s Corner, The” (Howitt), 120 Children’s Year, The (Howitt), 120 – 1 cholera, 161, 171 Cholmondeley, Mary, 138 – 9, 140 Christian Melville (Oliphant), 134 Christian scripture, as term, 214n22 Christian Zionism, 71 – 2, 73 see also Jews, wandering civil liberties, for Jewish citizens in Britain, 68 – 9 coal mine work, 25 Cobbe, Frances Power as activist, 34, 46 article on, 24 childhood, 23 education, 27 Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself, The, 128 – 9, 130, 134 – 5, 222n35, 223n53 parents, caring for, 42 cohabitation, 40 – 1 College of Surgeons, 96 – 7

INDEX

colonies domestic space, 172, 173 domestic values, transmitting to, 121 – 5, 123 lock hospitals, 110, 111, 112 – 13 medical caregivers, women as, 102 – 4, 103, 112 – 13 native women, 61 – 5, 63, 64, 212n65 unmarried women as emigrants to, 42 – 3 see also specific colonies “common prostitute,” 60 – 1 Communion of Labour, The (Jameson), 118 Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, The (Steel and Gardiner) authorship, 166, 229n16 cholera, 161 contents, 169 dirt as enemy, 161, 170, 172 – 6 kitchen, 173 – 4 military rhetoric, 169 – 70, 172 – 3 popularity of, 166, 169 servants, 172 – 6, 175 concubines, 62 condition-of-England social problem fiction, 8 – 11 Condover Hall, 138, 140 Contagious Diseases Acts Butler, Josephine, 162 India, effects in, 171 – 2 lock hospitals, 111 opposition to, 54, 217n5 prostitution and, 110, 217n5 support for, 113 continental travel, 180 – 2, 232n12 conversion projects, 69 Convert, The (Robins), 19 cooks, Indian, 173 – 4, 176 Corinne (Staël), 132 corporal punishment, 126, 222n35 corsets, 23 courtship, 50 – 1 Crimean War, 94 – 5 Cruickshank, George, 48

261

Cullwick, Hannah, 40, 59 curriculum Education Act of 1870, after, 155 – 7, 226n49 Education Act of 1870, before, 143, 147, 225n9, 225n21 needlework, 143, 147 religious instruction, 157, 226n49 see also education Curry & Rice (on Forty Plates) (Atkinson), 163, 165, 166 Daly, Sean, 159 Dame schools, 143, 147 – 8 Daniel Deronda (Eliot) exodus, return, and closure in, 73 – 8 Levy, Amy, on, 86, 88 Magnus, Katie, on, 82 – 3 Palestine in, 74 – 5 as revisionist conversion novel, 69 sequels to, 76 – 7, 77 see also Blind, Mathilde; Levy, Amy; Magnus, Katie “Daniel Deronda” (image), 77, 77 “Daniel Deronda and His Jewish Critics” (Magnus), 82 – 3 Daughters of Danaus (Caird), 19 Davidoff, Leonore, 116 – 17 demographics, 8, 54, 210n30 Deroin, Jeanne, 6, 7, 8 Diary of an Ennuyée (Jameson), 181 Dickens, Charles, 60 Digby, Anne, 96, 104 dirt disease and, 171 – 2, 174 as enemy, 161, 170, 171, 172 – 6 as imperial threat, 174 purity and, 175 – 6 social history of, 170 – 1 Dirt (McLaughlin), 170 – 1 discipline, in education, 147 – 8, 149, 154 – 5, 157, 159 disease see medicine and disease; specific diseases Disraeli, Benjamin, 72, 73, 73, 77

262

dissection of dead bodies for training, 106 divorce, 33 – 4, 39 – 40, 49 doctors and surgeons, 98, 101 – 4, 103, 112 – 13 domesticity, emphasizing exemplary, 132 – 3 domestic memoirs, 119 – 25, 123 domestic violence, 33 – 4 double standard, 49, 52 drowned young women, as staple image, 106 – 8 Du Port, H. M., 143 Eastern Question, 71 – 2, 73 education, 141 – 60 about, 11, 141 – 5 artistic, 178 – 9 auto/biography, 127 – 31 Education Act of 1870, after, 151 – 9 curriculum, 155 – 7, 226n49 inspections, school, 154, 157, 225n8, 225n9 instruction, failures of, 157 Mitchell, Hannah, 151 – 4 Penn, Margaret, 154 – 5 punishment/discipline, 154 – 5, 157, 159 religious instruction, 157, 226n49 Thompson, Flora Timms, 155 – 8 Education Act of 1870, before, 145 – 51 Bathgate, Janet, 145 – 6, 160, 226n32, 227n59 curriculum, 143, 147, 225n9, 225n21 Farningham, Marianne, 148 – 51, 150, 160, 226n49 inspections, school, 143, 144 – 5 needlework, 143, 147 punishment/discipline, 147 – 8, 149 Smith, Mary, 146 – 8, 160 India, 20, 167 – 8, 168 infancy, childhood, girlhood, 26 – 9 instruction, 142 – 3, 157 legislative history, 142 – 5

INDEX

literacy, 26, 142, 159 – 60, 224n2 medical, 98 – 101 for professions, 130 religious, 128 – 9, 130, 157, 226n49 secondary, 28 sex, 51, 209n17 university, 28 – 9 Education Act of 1870, 142, 144, 157 see also education Education Act of 1880, 144 Education Act of 1902, 145 Education Act of 1918, 225n14 Eliot, George, 41, 57, 80, 84 – 6 elite, defined, 208n2 elite women, sexuality of, 48 – 59 about, 48, 48 – 50 courtship, 50 – 1 elite, defined, 208n2 erotic play, 52 – 3 marriage, 50, 51 – 2 New Women, 56 – 7 prostitution, 53 – 4 rhetorical uses of sex, 53 – 4 same-sex relationships, 57 – 9, 211n46 sexual dissidence/anarchy, 54 – 6 Ellet, Elizabeth, 177, 180 Ellis, Havelock, 58 empire, novels of, 19 – 20 employment see work erotic play, 52 – 3 erotic plot, 51 – 2, 209n18 European travel, 180 – 2, 232n12 Eve (biblical figure), 5 factory work, 25 fallen woman narrative, 14, 59 – 60 Family Fortunes (Davidoff and Hall), 116 – 17 family size, 32 – 3 Fanshawe, Ann, 119 farmwork, 26 Farningham, Marianne, 148, 148 – 51, 150, 160, 226n49 Fawcett, Millicent Garrett, 34, 38 female to male ratio, 41, 54, 210n30

INDEX

flâneur, 53, 210n22 flirtation, 50 – 1 forceps, 96 Fordlow National School, 155 – 8 Fornicator’s Court, 59 France, 6 – 7, 196 – 7 Fraser’s Magazine, 138, 224n83 Frawley, Maria, 181 – 2 Furniss, Harry, 85 Garden of Fidelity, The (Steel), 167, 230n19 Gardiner, Grace, 166, 174, 229n16 see also Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, The (Steel and Gardiner) Gaskell, Elizabeth Life of Charlotte Brontë, The, 130, 131 – 2, 133, 136 Mary Barton, 9, 10, 11 North and South, 10 – 11 Ruth, 14 gender and sexuality, 55, 211n34 George Eliot (Blind), 80, 84 – 6 George Eliot and Judaism (Kaufmann), 82 – 3 Georgia, 124, 125 “Girl of the Period” (Linton), 53 Gladstone, Helen, 42 Gladstone, William Ewart, 31, 42 Gladstone family, 30 governesses, 7, 9 Grand, Sarah, 17 – 19, 18, 56 Gwendolen; or, Reclaimed: A Sequel to Daniel Deronda by George Eliot (Beecher), 76 – 7 Half Sisters, The (Jewsbury), 133 Hall, Catherine, 116 – 17 Hall, Radclyffe, 58 Hard Way Up, The (Mitchell), 151 – 4, 152 harems, 62 – 3 Havergal, Maria, 132 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 198

263

Heavenly Twins, The (Grand), 17 – 18 Hebrew scripture, as term, 214n22 Heger, Paul, 130 Heine, Heinrich, 69, 79, 81, 83, 86 Hemans, Felicia, 132 Herzl, Theodor, 67, 215n56 “History of the Jews in England” (Aguilar), 70 home, medical caregiving at, 93 – 4 homosexuality, 57 – 9, 211n46 Hong Kong, 112, 113 Hood, Thomas, 107 – 8 houses and housing, 37, 116 – 17, 135 – 7, 136, 137, 140 Howitt, Anna Mary artist, end of career as, 233n33 Art-Student in Munich, An, 182, 184 – 9, 232n26 ink drawing of, 183, 183 – 4 “Old Mill near Heidelberg,” 185 “Sisters in Art, The,” 186, 188, 232n26 Howitt, Mary, 120 – 1 Howitt’s Journal, 120 Illustrated London News, 81 “Impression du Matin” (Wilde), 92 India Contagious Diseases Acts, effects of, 171 – 2 cooks, 173 – 4, 176 education, 20, 167 – 8, 168 kitchens, 173 – 4 medical caregivers, women as, 102 – 3, 103 servants, 172 – 6, 175 sexuality, policing women’s, 108 – 9, 111, 113 Steel, Flora Annie, on, 168 – 9 suffragettes from, 19 industrial novels, 8 – 11 infancy, childhood, girlhood, 22 – 3, 25, 25 – 9, 27, 39 infant mortality, 21, 22 – 3 Ingres, Jean Auguste-Dominique, 63, 63

264

insanity, 105 – 6 inspections, school Education Act of 1870, after, 154, 157, 225n8, 225n9 Education Act of 1870, before, 143, 144 – 5 instruction see education Jacobs, Joseph, 216n70 Jameson, Anna, 118, 181 Jameson, Frederic, 141 Jane Eyre (Brontë), 7 – 8 “Jew in Fiction, The” (Levy), 82, 86 Jewish Chronicle, 79 – 80, 86 – 7 Jewish Portraits (Magnus), 79, 81 – 4, 85, 85 Jews, wandering, 67 – 89 about, 67 – 8 Blind, Mathilde, on, 78, 79 – 80, 81, 84 – 6, 88 – 9 Christian Zionism and idea of Palestine, 71 – 2, 73 exodus, return, and closure in Daniel Deronda, 73 – 8 historical and cultural framework, 68 – 71 Levy, Amy, on, 78, 79 – 82, 86 – 9, 216n70 Magnus, Katie, on, 78 – 9, 81 – 4, 85, 86, 87, 88 – 9 see also Daniel Deronda (Eliot) Jewsbury, Geraldine, 133 Jex-Blake, Sophia, 96 – 7, 99, 100, 100 – 1, 102 Johnston, Elizabeth, 119 – 20, 221n15 Joshee, Anandibai, 102 – 3 Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838 – 1839 (Kemble), 123 – 5 Judd, Catherine, 94, 95 “Judge’s wife watches over housekeeping, The” (Atkinson), 166 Kaufmann, David, 82 – 3 Kaulbach, Wilhelm von, 184 – 5, 186

INDEX

Kemble, Fanny, 123 – 5 khitmutgar (servant), 174, 175 kitchens, Indian, 173 – 4 Knoll (home), 135 – 6 labor see work Lady Audley’s Secret (Braddon), 15 – 16 Lagaan (film), 165 Landon, Laetitia, 132 – 3 Lark Rise to Candleford (Thompson), 155 – 8 Leigh Smith, Barbara, 182, 183, 183 – 4, 186 lesbians, 57 – 9, 211n46 Lester, Charles Edward, 108 – 9 Levy, Amy, 78, 79 – 82, 86 – 9, 216n70 Lewes, George Henry, 41, 214n18 Lewis, Sarah, 117, 125, 127 life class (art), 179 life cycle, 21 – 46 childrearing, 125 – 7 cohabitation, 40 – 1 divorce, 33 – 4, 39 – 40, 49 employment, 36 – 7 employment, child, 25, 25 – 6, 27 housing conditions, 37 infancy, childhood, girlhood, 22 – 3, 25, 25 – 9, 27, 39 life expectancy, 21, 22 marriage childbirth, 30 – 2 divorce, 33 – 4, 39 – 40, 49 domestic violence, 33 – 4 elite women, 50, 51 – 2 family size, 32 – 3 laws, 6, 17, 34 – 5 novels rejecting, 6 – 7 as prostitution, 54 separation, 40 weddings, 29 old age, 43 – 6 unmarried women, 41 – 3 widowhood, 38 – 9 see also education life expectancy, 21, 22

INDEX

Life in the Clearings (Moodie), 121, 122 Life of Charlotte Brontë, The (Gaskell), 130, 131 – 2, 133, 136 Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself, The (Cobbe), 128 – 9, 130, 134 – 5, 222n35, 223n53 Linton, Eliza Lynn, 50 – 1, 53 literacy, 26, 142, 159 – 60, 224n2 Little Women (Alcott), 16, 189, 190 lock hospitals, 110, 111, 112 – 13 London, 195 London Labour and the London Poor (Mayhew), 59, 60 – 1 London School of Medicine for Women, 101, 102 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 92, 93 Lotus and the Rose, The (Johnston), 119 – 20, 221n15 Love and Beauty—Sartjee Hottentot Venus (William), 64, 65 McLaughlin, Terence, 170 – 1 MacMillan, Margaret, 163 Magnus, Katie, 78 – 9, 81 – 4, 85, 86, 87, 88 – 9 Manchester Fourteen Miles (Penn), 154 – 5 Mangham, Andrew, 105 Mangum, Teresa, man-midwives, 95, 95 – 6 Marble Faun (Hawthorne), 198 Marcus, Sharon, 57 Marks, (Phoebe) Sarah, 216n68 marriage childbirth, 30 – 2 divorce, 33 – 4, 39 – 40, 49 domestic violence, 33 – 4 elite women, 50, 51 – 2 family size, 32 – 3 laws, 6, 17, 34 – 5 novels rejecting, 6 – 7 as prostitution, 54 separation, 40 weddings, 29

265

Martineau, Harriet, 126 – 7, 130, 134, 135 – 6, 139 – 40, 222n35 Mary Barton (Gaskell), 9, 10, 11 maternal death during childbirth, 32 maternity, moral, 125 – 7 Mayhew, Henry, 26, 38 – 9, 45, 59, 60 – 1 medical schools, 98 – 101 medicine, professionalization of, 92 – 3, 95, 97 – 8, 217n4 medicine and disease, 91 – 114 about, 91 – 3 caregivers, women as medical, 93 – 104 abroad, 102 – 4, 112 – 13 doctors and surgeons, 98, 101 – 4, 103, 112 – 13 history, 97 – 8 at home, 93 – 4 India, 102 – 3, 103 medical schools, 98 – 101 midwifery, 95 – 7, 103 novels about women in medicine, 101 – 2 nursing, 94 – 5, 217n4 social class and, 100 disease, dirt and, 171 – 2, 174 medicine, professionalization of, 92 – 3, 95, 97 – 8, 217n4 pathologization of women’s bodies, 93, 104 patients, women as, 104 – 8 sexuality, policing women’s, 108 – 14, 110 see also specific diseases Memoir of the Life and Writings of Mrs. Hemans (Owen), 132 memoirs, domestic, 119 – 25, 123 Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (Fanshawe), 119 Memorials of Frances Ridley Havergal (Havergal), 132 memsahibs feminist and postcolonial studies of, 163 – 4 illustrations, 163, 165, 166 literary representations, 164 – 5

266

private life, 172 servants and, 172 – 6, 175 as stock figure in British writing, 162 – 3 as term, 162 see also Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, The (Steel and Gardiner); India; Steel, Flora Annie Memsahibs, The (Barr), 163 men as midwives, 95, 95 – 6 menopause, 105 menstruation, 104 – 5 Meredith, George, 104 Meynell, Alice, 136 – 7, 137, 138 miasma theory, 171, 174 Michie, Elsie, 204n50 Michie, Helena, 209n17 “Middle-Class Jewish Women of To-day” (Levy), 79 – 80, 87 midwifery, 95, 95 – 7, 103 Mills, Sara, 172 Milton, John, 5 missionaries, 5 Mitchell, Hannah, 151 – 4, 152 “Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!, The” (Blind), 85 – 6 “Modern Tourism,” 181 Mona Maclean, Medical Student (Todd), 101 – 2 Montefiore, Moses, 71, 214n24 Moodie, Susanna, 121 – 2, 122 – 3, 123 moral maternity, 125 – 7 morbid anatomy, 106 More, Hannah, 46 mortality, infant, 21, 22 – 3 Munby, Arthur, 25, 40, 59 National Gallery (Great Britain), 195 National Society for Promoting Education of the Poor in the Principles of the Church of England, 142, 143 needlework, 143, 147

INDEX

“Neutrality under Difficulties” (cartoon), 72, 73 Newcastle Commission Report of 1862, 142 – 3, 144 New Woman fiction, 17 – 20, 56 – 7, 110 Nieriker, May Alcott, 189 – 90, 192, 193 – 8 Nightingale, Florence Crimean War service, 94 – 5 education and career, 28 India, women doctors in, 102 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, on, 91, 92 nursing book, 217n4 as unmarried woman, 28, 41 North and South (Gaskell), 10 – 11 Norton, Caroline, 33, 34, 39 Norton, George, 33, 34 Notes on Nursing (Nightingale), 217n4 novels adultery, 52 of empire, 19 – 20 fallen woman, 14 industrial, 8 – 11 marriage, rejecting, 6 – 7 medicine, women in, 101 – 2 revisionist conversion, 69 sensation, 15 – 16 see also specific novels nursing, 94 – 5, 217n4 Obstetrical Society, 97 Offen, Karen, 2 – 3, 6 – 7, 17, 20, 203n20 “Of Queens’ Gardens” (Ruskin), 118 – 19 old age, 43 – 6 “Old Jewish Woman of Cairo,” 81 “Old Mill near Heidelberg” (Howitt), 185 Oliphant, Margaret, 99 – 100, 120, 127, 133 – 4, 222n35 Ordeal of Richard Feverel, The (Meredith), 104 Orientalist fantasies, 62 – 5, 63, 64 “Ouida” (cartoon), 138, 139

INDEX

“Our Ball” (Atkinson), 165 “Our Magistrate’s Wife” (Atkinson), 163 Oxford English Dictionary (OED), 162 Palestine, 71 – 2, 73, 74 – 5 see also Jews, wandering parents, caring for, 42 Paris, 196 – 7 Parkes, Bessie Rayner, 182, 183, 183 – 4, 186 pathologization of women’s bodies, 93, 104 patients, women as, 104 – 8 Pechey, Edith, 99, 103 Penn, Margaret, 154 – 5 pensions, state, 44 – 5 Personal Recollections (Tonna), 125 – 6, 128, 131 philanthropic work, 36 Piozzi, Hester, 46 political activity, 35 – 6 see also suffrage for women Political Unconscious (Jameson), 141 Potter, Beatrice, 42 poverty infancy, childhood, girlhood, 23, 25 – 6, 27, 27 old age, 43 – 5 widowhood, 38 – 9 power see memsahibs “Prelude” (Blind), 80 Princess, The (Tennyson), 117 – 18 privacy, loss of, 138 professions, education for, 130 property law, 17, 34 – 5 prostitutes and prostitution “common prostitute,” 60 – 1 elite women, 53 – 4 “Impression du Matin” (Wilde), 92 marriage as legalized, 54 sexuality, policing women’s, 109 – 10, 111 – 12, 113 working class women, 60 – 1

267

Punch, 55, 72, 73, 138, 139 Punch’s Pocket Book, 77 punishment corporal, 126, 222n35 in education, 147 – 8, 149, 154 – 5, 157, 159 purity, 53 – 4, 161 – 2, 175 – 6 see also memsahibs rape, 62, 212n65 realism, 3 Reeves, Maud Pember, 37 religion see Jews, wandering religious arguments, 5 – 6 religious education, 128 – 9, 130, 157, 226n49 Reminiscences of a Clergyman’s Wife (Alford), 119, 120, 221n14 Reuben Sachs (Levy), 82, 87, 88, 89 revisionist conversion novels, 69 rhetorical uses of sex, 53 – 4 Riddell, Charlotte, 138 Rise of Mass Literacy, The (Vincent), 142, 159 – 60 Robins, Elizabeth, 19 Rome, 197 – 8 Rothschild, Lionel de, 69, 213n12 Roughing It in the Bush (Moodie), 121 – 2, 122 – 3 “Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point, The” (Barrett Browning), 13 Ruskin, John, 118 – 19, 186, 233n35 Ruth (Gaskell), 14 Sache, John Edward, 175 Said, Edward, 215n56 “St. Malo Cathedral, near Dinan, 1870” (Alcott), 192 same-sex relationships, 57 – 9, 211n46 “Santa Filomena” (Longfellow), 91, 92 Sarah (biblical figure), 70 – 1 Sayers, Peig, 158 – 9, 160 “Schariway Cycling Costume, The,” 55 school inspections

268

Education Act of 1870, after, 154, 157, 225n8, 225n9 Education Act of 1870, before, 143, 144 – 5 Schreiner, Olive, 19 – 20 Seacole, Mary, 94 – 5 secondary education, 28 Selborne, Lord, 29 Sen, Indrani, 163 – 4 sensation novels, 15 – 16 separate spheres concept, 49, 50, 116 – 19 see also auto/biography separation, 40 servants, Indian, 172 – 6, 175 sex education, 51, 209n17 sexual dissidence/anarchy, 54 – 6 Sexual Inversion (Havelock), 58 sexuality, 47 – 65 about, 47 – 8 colonized women, 61 – 5, 63, 64, 212n65 divorce and, 49 double standard, 49, 52 elite women, 48 – 59 about, 48, 48 – 50 courtship, 50 – 1 elite, defined, 208n2 erotic play, 52 – 3 marriage, 50, 51 – 2 New Women, 56 – 7 rhetorical uses of sex, 53 – 4 same-sex relationships, 57 – 9, 211n46 sexual dissidence/anarchy, 54 – 6 fallen woman narratives, 14, 59 – 60 gender and, 55, 211n34 Hong Kong, 112, 113 India, 108 – 9, 111, 113 policing, 108 – 14, 110 same-sex relationships, 57 – 9, 211n46 separate spheres and, 49, 50 venereal disease, 109 – 10, 110 woman question and, 65 working class women, 59 – 61, 208n2 Shawl-Straps (Alcott), 190 – 3

INDEX

“Sisters in Art, The” (Howitt), 186, 188, 232n26 “Sketches in Cairo,” 81 slavery, 11 – 13, 12, 124, 125 Smith, Mary, 146 – 8, 160, 228n92 Society in America (Martineau), 139 – 40 Sorabji, Cornelia, 20 southern United States, 124, 125 Spongberg, Mary, 109 Staël, Madame de, 132 Stead, W. T., 59 Steel, Flora Annie about, 166 – 9 Garden of Fidelity, The, 167, 179, 230n19 India, writings about, 168 – 9 Indian educational system, involvement in, 167 – 8 portrait, 167 see also Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, The (Steel and Gardiner) Sterne, Laurence, 95 – 6 Stoler, Ann Laura, 62 Story of an African Farm, The (Schreiner), 19 – 20 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11 – 13 Struggle for Fame, A (Riddell), 138 Studying Art Abroad and How to Do It Cheaply (Alcott Nieriker), 190, 194 – 8 suffrage for women, 4, 16 – 17, 19, 20, 35 – 6, 161 surgeons and doctors, 98, 101 – 4, 103, 112 – 13 suttee, 206n7 Sweated Industries’ Exhibition, 10, 11 Sylvia’s Journal, 137, 138 “Syphilis,” 110 Tenant of Wildfell Hall, The (Brontë), 6 Tennyson, Alfred, 117 – 18 Test Acts, 213n6 Thompson, Flora Timms, 155 – 8, 156 Tickner, Lisa, 179

INDEX

tipping points, 141 Todd, Margaret, 101 – 2 Tonna, Charlotte Elizabeth, 125 – 6, 128, 131 tourists versus travelers, 180 – 1 Traill, Catherine Parr, 121 “Travel as Performed Art” (Adler), 180 travelers versus tourists, 180 – 1 Tristram Shandy (Sterne), 95 – 6 Trollope, Anthony, 51 – 2 Trollope, Frances, 46 tuberculosis, 22 Turkish Bath, The (Ingres), 63 two-nations theme, 10 – 11 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 11 – 12, 12 United States, 21, 123 – 5 university education, 28 – 9 University of Edinburgh medical school, 99, 100 – 1 unmarried women, 41 – 3 Uprising of 1857, 165, 169 Urania House, 60 Van Eyck, Margaret, 188 Varnhagen, Rahel Levin, 86, 216n86 venereal disease, 109 – 10, 110 Victoria, Queen, 30 – 1, 38 Vincent, David, 142, 159 – 60 Vindication of the Rights of Women, A (Wollstonecraft), 5 voluntary philanthropic work, 36 Votes for Women! (Robins), 19 voting rights, 4, 16 – 17, 19, 20, 35 – 6, 161 Walkowitz, Judith, 60, 61 Ward, Mary, 35 – 6 wealth, 23 weddings, 29 West London Synagogue of British Jews, 79, 215n58 widowhood, 38 – 9 Wilde, Oscar, 92 William, Charles, 64, 65

269

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 5, 41 “woman question,” 17, 56, 65, 71 Woman’s Mission (Lewis), 117, 125 Women Artists in All Ages and Countries (Ellet), 177, 180 “Women in Israel” (Magnus), 83 – 4 “Women of Israel, The” (Aguilar), 70 – 1, 83 Women of the Raj (MacMillan), 163 Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), 16, 19 Women Writers’ Suffrage League, 4 Wood, Andrew, 97, 100 work about, 36 – 7 children, 25, 25 – 6, 27 coal mine, 25 Education Act of 1870, after, 153 Education Act of 1870, before, 145 – 6 factory, 25 farm, 26 philanthropic, 36 World War I, 37 workhouses, 44 working class childbirth, 31 – 2 defined, 208n2 domestic values, transmitting to, 120 – 1 fallen woman narratives, 14, 59 – 60 literacy, 159 – 60 prostitutes, 60 – 1 Working Woman’s Life, A (Farningham), 148, 148 – 51, 150 World War I, employment during, 37 WSPU (Women’s Social and Political Union), 16, 19 “Ye Newe Generation” (Leigh Smith), 183, 183 – 4 “Young Jewish Woman of Cairo,” 81 Zion see Jews, wandering