From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, by Arlene Young

Abstract

Reviewed by: From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England by Arlene Young Lise Shapiro Sanders (bio) From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, by Arlene Young; pp. x + 217. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019, $110.00, $29.95 paper. Arlene Young’s scholarship has been influential in shaping research on women, work, and Victorian culture for over two decades: in addition to editing two novels for Broadview Press (Tom Gallon’s The Girl Behind the Keys [1903] and George Gissing’s The Odd Women [1893]), she is the author of the monograph Culture, Class and Gender in the Victorian Novel: Gentlemen, Gents and Working Women (1999). In her most recent book, From Spinster to Career Woman: Middle-Class Women and Work in Victorian England, Young extends her scope to include historical and literary perspectives on middle-class women’s struggles to gain entry into two key professions in the nineteenth century: nursing and typewriting. Young approaches her subject with an interdisciplinary methodology based in close attention to Victorian newspapers and periodicals, revealing the heated debates about the transformations wrought in both fields. This is an engaging book that will be of interest to scholars in literary studies, history, and periodical studies, and to readers invested in exploring the relationship between gender and class in discourses around women’s work in the Victorian era. As Young notes in her introduction, “At the beginning of the Victorian period, to be a middle-class woman was to be a dependent—a daughter, a sister, a wife, a mother. . . . By the end of the century, middle-class women . . . could choose not to be dependent, not to be limited to a domestic life. . . . This change was little short of revolutionary” (3). To explore the cultural significance of this societal shift, Young addresses Victorian debates over the “Woman Question” in her first chapter, examining depictions of several types including “the Strong-Minded Woman, the Glorified Spinster, and the New Woman” (12–13). The latter type has been much studied, but Young usefully reorients our attention to the first two figures and to their agency and cultural roles. Florence Nightingale, the iconic “Strong-Minded Woman” in George Whyte-Melville’s 1863 essay on the topic, evokes the power associated with the intelligence, judiciousness, and attention to duty associated with this figure, one who also, Young notes, “retains essential characteristics of the ideal Victorian woman” (37). The “Glorified Spinster,” by contrast, recasts the figure of the “Old Maid” as (in the words of Frances Martin, whose 1888 essay in Macmillan’s Magazine [1859–1907] coined the term) not “a woman minus something,” but “a woman plus something” (36), and importantly, a woman defined neither by marriage nor even her career, but by “what work allows her to do and to be” (37). In subsequent chapters, Young examines the two types of employment that structure her study. The nurse and the typewriter (which was the period’s term for the woman worker herself, not solely the machine she worked on) represent for Young two distinct aspects of middle-class women’s employment: a traditionally feminine field (nursing), redefined through debates over female agency, authority, and caregiving, and a newly modern occupation (typewriting) waiting to be defined by the women workers who would come to be associated with technological capability and modern innovation. In paired chapters on the historical context and literary representations of Victorian nursing, Young debunks the myth of Nightingale as the gentle Lady of the Lamp, recontextualizing her and other influential figures as assertive and authoritative in period disputes over hospital reform. Young then analyzes a wide range of fictional narratives [End Page 447] that critique and reimagine Charles Dickens’s caricature of Sairey Gamp, the drunken and disreputable nurse in Martin Chuzzlewit (1842–44). In texts ranging from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth (1853) to fictionalized memoirs and sketches published in periodicals like Fraser’s Magazine (1830–82), Work and Leisure (1880–93), and the Girl’s Own Paper (1880– 1956), to little-known novels like Elisabeth J. Lysaght’s A Long Madness (1877) and George Manville Fenn’s Nurse Elisia...