Late Nineteenth-century Women Research Articles

‘Life built herself a myriad forms’: epics of gestation and co-operation in late nineteenth-century women’s poetry

ABSTRACT This article argues for a specifically female appropriation and reshaping of the epic tradition in the wake of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Based on an analysis of Mathilde Blind’s The Ascent of Man and Louisa Sarah Bevington’s ‘Unto this Present’, it will show how this ‘female evolutionary epic’ responds to and counteracts Social Darwinist narratives of competition and struggle by emphasizing forces of (maternal) gestation, co-operation and sympathy in the development of life on earth. In doing so, these poems anticipate Peter Kropotkin’s notion of ‘mutual aid’ as the primary factor in evolution.

Behind The Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett

Reviewed by: Behind The Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts by Mary Jean Corbett Jane de Gay BEHIND THE TIMES: VIRGINIA WOOLF IN LATE-VICTORIAN CONTEXTS, by Mary Jean Corbett. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020. 312 pp. $48.95 hardback; $23.99 ebook. Virginia Woolf's relationship with the Victorians has long attracted interest, as critics have questioned her claims that "on or about December 1910, human character changed" to show that she had a complex, ambivalent attitude towards an era she never fully laid to rest.1 In Behind the Times: Virginia Woolf in Late-Victorian Contexts, Mary Jean Corbett makes a nuanced contribution to the discussion by showing that Woolf's relationship with the Victorians was not a matter of periodicity but one of generation, attitude, and temperament. Corbett shows that late Victorians and modernists coexisted in the same time and occupied the same spaces: Woolf was born and brought up in the late-Victorian era, an era of progress and radical thinking that saw the New Woman, increasing frankness around sexuality, and an acceleration in the suffrage movement. Yet Woolf denied the existence of this radical previous generation, instead taking mid-Victorians like Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot both as foils and points of reference in order to present the Victorians as passé and highlight the innovations of her own generation. Building on the work of Alison Booth, who showed that Woolf deliberately underplayed past women writers, and Marion Dell's analysis of Woolf's ambivalence towards her mother and aunts, this book fleshes out the picture of the generation that Woolf ignored.2 Concentrating on Woolf's nonfiction, including diaries, memoirs, essays, and journalism, but also with discussions of The Voyage Out (1915), Night and Day (1919), and The Years (1937), Corbett explores Woolf's reaction to women writers and activists who remained active into the modernist era but whom she pushed into the past. These include the novelist Anne Thackeray Ritchie (1837-1919), who was her aunt; prolific novelists Lucy [End Page 406] Lane Clifford (1846-1929) and Mary Augusta (Mrs. Humphry) Ward (1851-1920); and the feminist New Woman writer Sarah Grand (1854–1943), who outlived Woolf by two years. Corbett also sets these women within their interconnecting circles, so the book encompasses a wide range of writers, including Alice Meynell, Vernon Lee, Clementina Black, and Elizabeth Robins. This elegantly structured book has five substantive chapters bridged by short interludes highlighting particular concepts. The introduction critiques the distinction that Woolf attempted to draw between the antiquated world of her upbringing in South Kensington and the experimental world of Bloomsbury, showing that Woolf lived alongside radicals in the former and that in moving to Bloomsbury, she and her siblings were not blazing a trail but entering a space where earlier generations had experimented in art and life. Ritchie, the author of Old Kensington (1873), was one such figure, so chapter one, "Gender, Greatness, and the 'Third Generation,'" explores Woolf's complex relationship with this popular writer whom she wanted to relegate to the past. In a reading of Night and Day, Corbett shows how Woolf's rejection of Ritchie by representing her as the comical Mrs. Hilbery goes alongside a turning-away from late nineteenth-century women writers who had "grappled with the representation and the regulation of sexuality" (p. 63). An interlude on Grand highlights the politics of the New Woman to lead into a chapter on Woolf's engagement with debates on social purity in The Voyage Out. Corbett sets this novel, with its story of sexual ignorance and experience and its guarded references to prostitution, in relation to the work of Grand and her precursor Josephine Butler. This discussion fills an important gap in Woolf's work, though it would have been useful to provide some touchstones with more familiar material, for example by exploring how this relates to Woolf's discussion of shame and its connection with her Puritan heritage in her memoir essay "A Sketch of the Past" (1939). Woolf's moral qualms do come to the fore, however, in chapter three, "'Ashamed of the Inkpot': Woolf and the Literary Marketplace," where Corbett explores Woolf's discomfort with the...

Women's words, women's bodies: late nineteenth century English feminisms in the ‘Interview’ column of the Women's Penny Paper/Woman's Herald (Oct. 27, 1888–Apr. 23, 1892)

ABSTRACT Historians have written extensively on early twentieth-century British women’s suffrage, and late nineteenth century feminisms. Nevertheless, there is still an insufficiency in studies that attend to the textual and visual contents of late nineteenth century feminist periodicals. Non-mainstream periodicals produced by women for women allow us to explore distinctive hybrid modes of gender. They also offer us exclusive access into the everyday experiences, and individual thoughts of actual late nineteenth century women. This article focuses on women’s interviews and portraits published in the Women’s Penny Paper/Women’s Herald, demonstrating that they often combined traditional with more radical emergent signifiers of womanhood in written and pictorial form. This is a journey into the verbal and non-verbal messages communicated through women’s words and bodies, expanding our collective archaeological project of reinterpreting the past from women’s point of view, and the manner in which New Women utilised their choice of words and appearance to gain power.

Retrieving Fin-de-Siècle Women Poets: The Transformative Myths, Fragments and Voices of Webster, Blind and Levy

The critical recuperation of late nineteenth-century women poets is due significantly to the renewed interest in and study of the poetical works of Augusta Webster, Mathilde Blind and Amy Levy (1860-90) by postmodern readers. A major reason for this ‘salvage’ may be that they represent and embody the profound and extraordinary changes that characterize the British Fin de Siècle, in which the transition from the Victorians to the Moderns implied the transformation or reconfiguration of certain myths or (hi)stories and the critical re-use or ‘recycling’ of major literary forms. This essay seeks to demonstrate that while Webster's poetry is firmly grounded in social activism and the exploration and dramatization of the nature of female experience, Blind's epic and dramatic verse creates new myths of human destiny, reclaiming the Poet's role as the singer of the age's scientific deeds, while Levy's lyrics signal the New Woman poet's role as victim of the pressures of emancipation. Through these hybrid and fragmentary forms, Webster, Blind and Levy literally give voice to unspeakable feelings and situations, in which the anomalous and the marginal are made central.

Nők a közgondolkodásban – a kisdedóvónő, mint lehetséges „karrierút” a XIX. század végi pedagógiai szakfolyóiratok tükrében

A szerző jelen tanulmányban a XIX. század végi pedagógiai folyóiratok nőkről való gondolkodásának vizsgálatát végezte el, kiemelt hangsúlyt helyezve a korszak egy lehetséges női hivatására, a kisdedóvói pályára. A századra jellemző általános nőneveléssel kapcsolatos gondolataival indul az írás, amit a folyóiratok tartalmának mélyebb elemzése követ. A nők közgondolkodásban való megjelenésének tanulmányozása három fő témacsoport mentén történik, így az akkori társadalomban betöltött szerepük, lányok nevelésének tartalmi és gyakorlati kérdései és lehetséges hivatásai, valamint a kor szerzői szerinti hiányosságaik. Külön fejezetrészben kerül bemutatásra a korszak egy lehetséges női „karrierútja”, így a nők kisdedóvó pályára történő bekerülése, képzésük lehetőségei és a velük szemben támasztott elvárások mibenléte. A téma a Nemzeti Nőnevelés, Kisdednevelés és a Kisdedóvók és gyermekkertésznők lapjának 1880–1885 között megjelent számai alapján került vizsgálatra.

“Trying to Bail the Ocean with a Sieve”: Grace Harte’s 1941 Alternative Equal Rights Amendment

“Trying to Bail the Ocean with a Sieve”Grace Harte’s 1941 Alternative Equal Rights Amendment Gwen Jordan (bio) In 1941 Grace Harte, an Illinois attorney, drafted an amendment to the United States Constitution, modeled after England’s 1919 Sex Discrimination Removal Act, to secure women’s right to work, serve on juries, and hold public office. These were rights still restricted for women, especially married women, in many states. Harte’s draft was intended to serve as an alternative to Alice Paul’s proposed Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which was based on an ideology of formal sex equality and was meant to apply broadly to all legal rights. Harte’s amendment, in contrast, offered a narrowly tailored approach, grounded in women’s rights as citizens that would give all women equal civil and political rights “without depriving them of their ‘social and economic rights.’”1 Paul had introduced her ERA in 1923 (and it had then been reintroduced every four years after that for almost half a century). The strategy of Paul’s amendment was to introduce a set of sweeping changes to gender-based legislation that would take effect concurrently with the passage of the amendment itself.2 Harte’s amendment followed the strategy Illinois women lawyers had pursued from the eve of the Civil War, to secure women’s equality through a series of incremental and specific items of legislation.3 This incremental approach had generated positive results. Women lawyers in Illinois had, in fact, secured all the rights in Harte’s amendment in their own state, most recently the right to serve on juries.4 But these lawyers understood that state or federal laws could be repealed. To effect lasting change, they needed a constitutional amendment.5 Women’s rights activists split over which amendment to support. The Women’s Bar Association of Illinois (WBAI), of which Harte was a prominent member, quickly endorsed Harte’s amendment over Paul’s.6 Women labor activists who opposed Alice Paul’s ERA, because of the fear that it would allow men to undo their hard-won protective labor legislation for women, joined with Harte, although she did not share the labor activists’ argument that [End Page 81] women needed special legal protections because of the differences between men and women.7 Harte’s real opposition to Paul’s amendment was that its breadth rendered it legally meaningless.8 The WBAI—with Harte, of course, in the vanguard—sought the endorsement of this more specific amendment from its parent organization, the National Association of Women Lawyers (NAWL), of which Harte was also a prominent member.9 The NAWL, which had previously endorsed Paul’s amendment, submitted the question to its members, who hotly debated the issue. Opponents to Harte’s amendment rejected its incremental strategy and narrow focus. They argued it was like “trying to bail the ocean with a sieve.”10 The NAWL membership remained divided in their support between the amendments throughout most of the decade. This article explores that debate among women lawyers over the two amendments. Both sides shared the goal of securing women’s position as full and equal citizens and believed that a constitutional amendment was a critical means of achieving that goal. They were both part of the social movement to advance women’s equality. Where they differed was over the content, strategy, and underlying ideology of the amendment. Their debates provide insights into changing notions of gender and legal professionalism, equality, and legal strategies in the decades leading up to what used to be called the second wave of the feminist movement.11 Women studied in law had fought their way into the male-dominated legal profession in the later half of the nineteenth century; however, their rise within the profession was “continuously incremental in a miniscule way through the first half of the [twentieth] century.”12 In 1940, when Harte drafted her amendment, women comprised just 3.5 percent of the legal profession although women had been admitted to practice law for seventy-one years.13 Since the late nineteenth century women lawyers had debated among themselves whether their identity as lawyers should be gendered and what their role should...

GIOVANNI VERGA'S NEW WOMAN IN <em>LA LUPA</em>: FROM PAGE TO STAGE

This article analyses the differences between Verga's novella ‘La Lupa’ (1880) and its transformation into a play in 1896. While the femme fatale, Gna Pina, is a silent figure in the narrative, consumed by the desire to seduce her son-in-law, in the play she becomes an articulate character. The use of dialogue in the theatrical adaptation enables Gna Pina to break away from her traditional identification and to voice the concerns and aspirations of socially committed late nineteenth-century women in Italy—becoming one of the first New Women to appear on the Italian stage at the turn of the century.

AESTHETICISM, THE MATERNAL AND “THAT EXTREMITY OF LOVE”: WOMEN'S POETIC REPRESENTATIONS OF PREGNANCY, CHILDBIRTH AND MOTHERING IN A SOCIETY IN TRANSITION

Late nineteenth-century women poets retrace established patterns of representation of the pregnant woman, no longer emphasizing the fragility of the child and the dangers associated with childbirth. Rather, they present an empowering vindication of womanhood in the act of expelling new life from the depths of woman's body—precisely where post-coital conception and development take place. The “maternal”, then, as an aestheticist term, includes not only gestation, delivery of the child and mothering, but also the sexual act and physiological process of conception. This expansive and connotative sense of the maternal is increasingly evident in nineteenth-century poetry that redefines aesthetic “beauty” and resituates the parameters of the ideal during the course of the century, thereby contributing to the discourse of aestheticism concerned with the socio-political and cultural implications of the pregnant woman as a symbol of human continuity. Therefore, it is not surprising that in depicting the maternal as a series of aestheticist moments of specifically female human experience, women poets depict women weaving themselves into the fabric of an altered society.

Contesting the Norm: Women and Professional Sports in Late Nineteenth-Century America

Athletic opportunities for females have reached an extent that few women living in the nineteenth century might ever have imagined. For more than two decades the women's 10,000-metre run has been part of the Olympics. Women's wrestling was added at Athens in 2004 and women's boxing competitions will begin at the 2012 London Games. Changing cultural norms, especially those brought forth by ‘women's movements’ of the 1960s as well as the ensuing amazingly successful athletic performances that women attained, have been of the utmost importance. In the United States, as the ‘New Woman” of the late 1800s began to engage in a modest game of golf or tennis, or take a leisurely bicycle ride, the then dominant theme – strenuous physical activity is inimical to a female's health – that had been articulated in books like Edward Clarke's Sex in Education, Or a Fair Chance for Girls (1873) began to be challenged. Few late nineteenth-century women offered a greater challenge than did ‘professional sportswomen’ like pedestriennes Ada Anderson and Exilda La Chapelle, competitive cyclist Louise Armiando, and the boxer Hattie Stewart. Whereas their feats were ignored by more elevated publications like Scribner's Magazine and Outing daily newspapers sometimes could be quite complimentary. The coverage given by Sporting Life (considered by many to be the major sports journal of the times) was somewhat mixed. When it came to baseball (the game that ‘made men men’) Sporting Life was vehemently opposed to any woman engaging in America's ‘national pastime’. So was Albert Spalding, co-founder of the lucrative A.G. Spalding Sporting Goods Company. This article sheds new light upon these and other still too little known matters regarding women who ‘contested the norm’ in late nineteenth-century America.

Charlotte Riddell's a struggle for fame: myths of authorship, facts of the market

Critical analyses of Charlotte Riddell's kunstlerroman, A Struggle for Fame (1883), have traditionally focused on the market conditions that either aided or impeded Riddell's career. In terms of Pierre Bourdieu's opposition between the “sub-field of large-scale production” and the “sub-field of restricted production” – fields differentiated by economic factors versus symbolic criteria of lasting value – Riddell and her heroine, Glenarva Westley, seem to fall into the former, both producing popular fiction to make money but achieving no lasting reputation. While acknowledging that the novel details conditions of the marketplace, the author also argues that Riddell reinscribes myths of female authorship made famous in Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Brontë as a counterweight: myths of genius and vocation, of solitude and loneliness, of domesticity and inspiration. She does so to lay claim to the symbolic capital such Romantic myths accrue. In the first two volumes of A Struggle Glenarva Westley's career repeats key features of Brontë's life, including the “parallel currents” model made famous by Gaskell – “her life as Currer Bell, the author,” and “her life as Charlotte Brontë, the woman.” In the final volume, however, Riddell tests the limits of Gaskell's model for late nineteenth-century women authors and writes beyond the ending of Brontë's life as Glenarva turns down an offer of marriage and also turns her back on Gaskell's myth.

Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist

Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-- Century American Feminist. By Leila R. Brammer. (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2000. Pp. xvii, 136. $58.00.) History has often been written by winners, but Leila R. Brammer's Excluded from Suffrage History: Matilda Joslyn Gage, Nineteenth-Century American Feminist reveals that not all victors find a place in historical record. Some are sidelined by historians in search of clear, uncomplicated narratives. Moreover, experience of Matilda Joslyn Gage demonstrates that suffragists themselves sometimes obscured contributions of their own colleagues. Gage herself frequently tackled problem of women's invisibility in historical record. She argued vehemently that male historians suppressed evidence of what women had accomplished in past times. Brammer sees a painful irony in fact that Gage appears to have suffered a similar fate, not just at hands of her contemporaries, but, until fairly recently, at those of feminist historians as well. Brammer asks why, given extent of Matilda Joslyn Gage's contributions to suffrage movement, do we not know more about her? She concludes that radicalism of Joslyn Gage's thought, especially her attacks on the patriarchate (81) of Christian church, led nineteenth-century female activists to distance themselves from her opinions. Brammer maintains that this suppression has continued through twentieth century because, until recently, historians have been unwilling to confront negative behavior on part of suffrage icons such as Stanton and Anthony. In principle, Brammer is right. She clearly documents marginalization that Gage experienced in 1890s. Leaders of newly united National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), fearing that Gage's radical views on organized religion would destabilize their fragile coalition, refused to endorse her view that Christian orthodoxy lay at heart of women's oppression. However, an unfortunate air of conspiracy permeates Brammer's discussion. Brammer's analysis seems to be predicated on assumption that every aspect of Gage's critique of organized religion was and remains beyond dispute. Therefore, Brammer indicates, fair-minded women's rights supporters ought to have championed Gage; instead, they turned their backs on her. Gage's views, however, were highly contentious. Even among those who might have shared them privately, her views posed a clear liability to a struggling movement. Suffrage leaders responded to reality that not all of their supporters were sympathetic to Gage's positions, while to general public, they were anathema. For no small number of suffrage supporters, especially those who came to suffrage by way of temperance movement, religious convictions underlay their activism. Gage's assertion that state functioned as willing minion of clerical tyrants may be palatable to some late twentieth-- century feminists, but it deeply offended many late nineteenth-century women and did nothing to encourage them to work for vote. Yet Brammer's analysis seems to suggest that suffrage leaders knew that Gage was right but that they ostracized her and excised her contributions from their history for sake of expediency. The difficulty Gage faced-and one that troubles Brammer's analysis as well-was/is conviction that woman suffrage organizations should have been all-encompassing movements for women's rights. …

Women, romance, and the nation: The reception of Catherine Martin'san Australian girl

Women, Romance and the Nation This essay looks at the production and reception of Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl in the 1890s as an exemplary case of the attempt to contain the reformist interests of late nineteenth century women’s writing within prescriptive social ideologies and the established conventions of the romance form. It predates Rosemary Campbell’s work on Catherine Martin and is the only essay omitted from her academy edition of Martin’s work.

Frances Willard and the Feminism of Fear

tury. She was able to attract and keep members in the WCTU, and her crowning achievement was the transformation of a national, mass base of these women from full political exclusion to active participation as a powerful organized interest. Although Willarda creature of her time-made middle-class white women her primary audience, she was one of the few reformers who employed special efforts to mobilize Black women and children. The size of WCTU membership, compared with other women's organizations of the period, demonstrated Willard's ability to attract members to the WCTU and keep them. Late nineteenth-century women opted for Willard's temperance reform over suffrage or alternative membership organizations. According to Ruth Bordin, there were 150,000 dues-paying adult members in the WCTU in 1890 compared with 13,000 in the National American Woman Suffrage Association.1 Including membership in its juvenile societies, the WCTU grew under Willard's leadership in the 1880s from 27,000 to nearly 200,000 members.2 Although Willard's massive political mobilization of women has been acknowledged, there has not yet been an adequate explanation of how she succeeded.3 Political mobilization is the process of activating formerly passive or excluded individuals so that they will participate for an extended period of time in a form of collective action-usually a political organization-that aims to create change.4 Successful political mobilization tends to depend upon a reform leader's design of arguments and rhetoric-usually termed political ideology-that persuade audiences to follow the

"Of no use without health": late nineteenth century medical prescriptions for female exercise through the life span.

In the rapidly changing society of the late nineteenth century, American medical theory and practice functioned as a social force to shape and limit the ways in which females viewed their physical potential. This paper analyzes the social and physical expectations which were elaborated for and experienced by middle-class urban females throughout their life span, identifies the kinds of exercise prescriptions which were promoted by doctors to assist women in fulfilling these expectations at different life stages and points out the underlying significance of these prescriptions in defining and perpetuating notions of females' limited physical capabilities. For late nineteenth century women, two significant influences upon their body behavior were: the physical realities of sickness and early death which modified, or curtailed female energy and physical capacity; and the discursive practices of medical experts and scientists concerning the identification and etiology of female ill-health and disease and their agreed upon therapies for assisting women to maintain, or regain their health. An understanding of the disease model which informed medical prescriptions for exercise explains, in part, why physicians concentrated their efforts upon women's reproductive capacity and lifestyle habits-rather than upon the widespread and devastating diseases that took such a toll upon women before the turn of the twentieth century.

“We think we are of the oppressed”: Gender, white collar work, and grievances of late nineteenth-century women

“We think we are of the oppressed”: Gender, white collar work, and grievances of late nineteenth-century women