The Marriage Debate, Mona Caird and Her Feminist Radicalism

Abstract

New Woman scholarship presents Mona Caird as a radical marriage reformer and emphasises how she challenged the patriarchal structure of Victorian marriage norms. However, this paper demonstrates Caird’s radicalness was not a challenge to marriage norms, but an attack on legal, cultural, and religious restrictions on womanhood. Caird developed her radical arguments through her interaction with her mentor John Stuart Mill, the New Woman novelist Sarah Grand, and the influential Victorian anti-feminist writer Elizabeth Lynn Linton. This paper explores her relationship with these three writers regarding their thoughts on marriage, based on the study of her novels The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and The Wing of Azrael (1889), and the collection of her journalistic articles The Morality of Marriage (1897). Caird differed from these three writers by arguing for a more liberal and equal gender relationship, resisting eugenic theory, and challenging anti-feminist arguments. Caird was an undisciplined New Woman writer not only in the sense of her feminist stance but also her critical engagement with the patriarchal discourses of gender and class relationship.