Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women’s Writing, 1880-1914, by S. Brooke Cameron

Abstract

Reviewed by: Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women's Writing, 1880–1914 by S. Brooke Cameron Michelle Tusan (bio) Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women's Writing, 1880–1914, by S. Brooke Cameron; pp. vii + 297. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2020, $74.00. Critical Alliances: Economics and Feminism in English Women's Writing, 1880–1914 revisits one of the most relevant issues of the Victorian feminist movement: the relationship between gender and labor. Focusing on late-Victorian women writers who engage this problematic in their work, S. Brooke Cameron successfully makes the case for the importance of collaborative literary efforts in fostering the eventual entry of women into the workforce. The dialogue between novelists Olive Schreiner, Amy Levy, and George Egerton—who rewrite the domestic plot around the possibility of women's education and economic independence—and Michael Field and Virginia Woolf creates new possibilities, Cameron argues, for imagining women as producers and consumers. Reading these writings together adds up to a redefinition of gender roles in relation to the workplace, which has important implications for early twentieth-century feminist critiques of economic inequality. Each of the women writers discussed by Cameron attempt to rewrite understandings of gender and labor by redefining "the relationship between women and the modern workforce" (5). Chapter 1, "Educating New Women for Feminist Futures," resists the move to treat the New Woman as a type. Instead, it focuses on Schreiner's feminist pushback against gendered education. This sets the stage for subsequent resistances by other feminist writers against prescribed gender roles in the realm of remunerative employment. Here the critical alliances of the title find expression as Schreiner represents an important foremother of those late-Victorian feminists who respond to earlier efforts to engage the issue of middle-class women's work. Of course, these efforts date back much further, as Cameron acknowledges. Actual alliances among feminists regarding the question of women and employment predate the New Woman novel. This is especially true in the case of the employment question, where cooperative alliances between the women who formed organizations like the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women raised key questions about labor and gender. The dialogue about women and work in [End Page 524] publications like the English Woman's Journal (1858–64) offers an important prequel to the later efforts of New Woman novelists to rewrite the script on women's employment. Levy "follows in the footsteps of Schreiner" (67) by rewriting the domestic plot and imagining a place for "women's paid work in support of the home" (68). Chapter 2, "Sisterly Kinship and the Modern Sexual Contract," reads Levy's The Romance of a Shop (1888) in order to understand female-centered kinship systems as empowering women. It shows a new model of womanhood forged by a literal sisterhood that supports economic independence as well as personal pleasure. Chapter 3, "Cosmopolitan Communities of Female Professionals," makes the case for Egerton's work on women's collaborative independence in the space of the city. By the late nineteenth century, urban landscapes could be imagined as gendered spaces where women steadily claimed access through occupying new professions and living in women-only boarding houses. Employment opportunity is what allowed this new access. Rather than see a labor market that suddenly opened up to women because it needed new workers, Cameron convincingly argues that it was the claiming of urban space in the literary sphere that contributed to the ability to imagine middle-class women as independent wage earners (outside of the role of governess) in this moment. In this way, collaboration among a new professional class of women in the city made it possible for more women to occupy these spaces and to claim them as their own. Chapter 4 explores women's claim to authority in the realm of aesthetics using Field's Sight and Song (1892). "Women's Artistic Connoisseurship and the Pleasures of a Lesbian Aesthetic" argues that "Field's effort to stake out for women a role within the modern gendered marketplace as respected connoisseurs" relied on collaboration between readers and writers, which challenges the gendered gaze while affirming "women's artistic authority" (167...