Victorian Feminist Research Articles

Colonialism and Contagious Diseases

Colonialism and Contagious Diseases Alison Bashford This is a book that matters. At the dual levels of information and interpretation — equally important — we learn much from Levine in Prostitution, Race and Politics. And in methodological terms, this book will stand for many years unsurpassed: it is a model for a fresh kind of comparative history. Ambitiously tackling not just the classic comparative ‘two’ cases, but four distinct colonies of the British Empire – Hong Kong, the Straits Settlements, Queensland and India – Levine traces carefully the regulation of prostitution for the prevention of the spread of venereal diseases and, most significantly, the debate and practice around colonial Contagious Diseases Acts. Levine’s major intervention is to demonstrate and illustrate how crucial the regulation of sexuality was to every level of governance in the colonial domain: from Westminster, to the Colonial Office, to colonial governors, local administrators and experts. She reminds her readers continually that if historians have overlooked sex-as-high-politics, historical players certainly did not. Levine’s well-known work on constitutional crisis and the colonial recrudescence of Contagious Diseases Acts in the 1890s is now fully contextualized as the most extreme moment in a much longer history, where sex continually disrupted and challenged the public world. Part of a broad shift in British feminist historiography, Levine has complicated and enriched her earlier work on politics and Victorian feminism, with considerations of race, colonialism and Empire. Several decades of feminist history about the relatedness of the private, including sexual conduct, and the public political world, is the scholarly antecedent which makes this intervention possible. In the tradition of Davidoff and Hall’s 1987 Family Fortunes, Prostitution, Race and Politics is a landmark book in the feminist historiography of modern Britain: it inherits and dramatically extends the feminist theorisation and the historicisation of the gendered constitution of the public, by the private. And like Catherine Hall’s own research move from Birmingham of Family Fortunes to the Midlands-Jamaica relations of Civilizing Subjects, Levine adds so many rich sites and lines of enquiry by incorporating the colonial project into study of the ‘Contagious Diseases Acts’, as to lift the complexity of the issue to another plane altogether. This is both a fine example of, and may well mark a high point in, the dovetailing of feminist and colonial studies. Levine’s basic research question is brilliantly straightforward: if the controversy around the domestic Contagious Diseases Acts crystallized classic Victorian liberal concerns about the state, commercial sex and regulation of private conduct, how was this all connected to, shaped by, and/or different from equivalent (but as we learn never identical) colonial acts? Exactly what difference did colonial contexts and questions of race make to the manifold issues pressed into public debate by the CD Acts, venereal diseases and the regulation of prostitution? The research question begs a comparative method which is the strength of the book. The next methodological question then becomes: which colonies to select, and why? Levine states that CD legislation operated in almost all colonies in the period, implying a representativeness of these cases, but at the same time showing clearly how different were local practicalities of rule. Yet, at least in the Australian colonies, CD Acts were more unusual than usual. Queensland and Tasmania had CD legislation comparable to the British Acts of the 1860s, but New South Wales did not (apart from a slightly different Prisoners’ Detention Act of 1909). One wants to know a little more about how and why these particular colonies were selected and not possible others. Would the same arguments stand if, for example, the selection were Victoria, Fiji, Cape Colony and Jamaica? Perhaps future scholarship will take up further comparisons. Levine is doing something quite unusual in interrogating these colonies in one study. We see the distinct difference between the colony of white ‘settlement’— Queensland – and the others. On the one hand, historians of the Empire are well schooled in this, sometimes problematically, sometimes critically. But rarely do we have the evidence so carefully laid out before us. It mattered constantly that the Contagious Diseases Act in Queensland was aimed in the first instance at regulating white women, while in India...

Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in 'The Dynasts' by G. Glen Wickens (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 757 Coleridge's work on symbol and allegory and through a specifically female response to the repressions of patriarchal religion that deny the validity of women's experience and bodies. Rossetti develops an active theology that insists on its accessibility and relevance to the detail of women's everyday life. Furthermore?and this the book's most significant achievement?this argument challenges the dominant view that Ros? setti's religion was based on renunciation and repression, initiated in accounts by William Michael Rossetti of his sister as 'a fountain sealed'. Rossetti's theology is, on the contrary, nothing short of a radical feminist theology, and Palazzo makes nu? merous parallels to the contemporary feminist theologians such as Mary Daly who, she argues, were prefigured by Rossetti. Such interconnections are, unfortunately, left hanging as associations and similarities rather than historical and intellectual trajectories (rather surprising in a study otherwise sensitive to the complexities of analogy). Furthermore, the contradictory attitude of Rossetti to Victorian feminism, exemplified by her famous letters to Augusta Webster refusing to support her petition for women's suffrage, is not sufficientlyunravelled. Although a strong and eloquent case is made for Rossetti's woman-centred subversions of masculinist theology, the claim that it is modern and radically feminist is not wholly convincing. The analysis of Rossetti's prose is at its best when mapping connections to contem? porary theology and culture, in particular her relationship with the Revds Dodsworth, Burrows, and Littledale, the Langham Place Circle, and her challenges and revisions to Tractarianism. The study begins with two chapters that are mostly concerned with Rossetti's poetry prior to her firstreligious prose volume, and attempts to read her emerging theology through some paradigmatic texts such as 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and Maude. The following chapters are exclusively devoted to a chronological and detailed study of the devotional prose. Although Palazzo at times suggests a relationship between Rossetti's aesthetics and religion, and notes her poetic reading of Scripture, the sense of Rossetti's development into a Victorian sage writer does too often lose sight of her status as a woman poet, thus sidestepping a key issue for many other commentators on Rossetti, from Virginia Woolf to Angela Leighton, who question the tensions between poetic vocation and religion. There is a missed opportunity here to develop the excellent iftruncated discussion of Rossetti's analysis of language and symbol (in Chapters 4 and 5) into a wider account of her poetic writing and especially her theological poetics. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in cThe Dynasts '. By G. Glen Wickens. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xix + 255pp. $60; ?40. ISBN 0-8020-4864-1. G. Glen Wickens's aim in writing this book is 'not to restore the "great" reputation of The Dynasts, but rather to bring it up close enough to be read and appreciated within the carnival tradition' (p. xix). Bakhtin and Hardy are placed in a mutually beneficial relationship here although the benefits Hardy's last 'major' work gains from Bakhtin are fargreater than the other way around. While Wickens suggests that Bakhtin functions as an 'antidote' to previous and predominantly pessimistic read? ings of The Dynasts, Hardy's 'longest novel' challenges and supplements Bakhtin's apparent disregard forthe dangers of carnivalistic violence. Wickens's argument rests on recasting The Dynasts as 'a novel in the carnival and menippean tradition' rather than 'a failed epic or drama' (p. 217) and relocating it in the 'serio-comical' rather than the pessimistic tradition (p. xi). In addition he seeks to locate The Dynasts in the context of the monistic debate which forms the 'dialogizing background of the 758 Reviews Overworld' (p. xii). The contributions of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Huxley, Spencer, and Carlyle to the controversy surrounding 'the one and the many' join with those of lesser and previously disregarded minor luminaries such as Armitage, Ward, Tyndall, Fiske, and Drummond in such a way as to foreground the debate without effacing its controversies and contradictions. For Wickens, Bakhtin and Hardy are linked by their interest in the relationship between elite culture...

Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman (review)

Reviewed by: Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman Ann L. Ardis (bio) Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman, by Angelique Richardson; pp. xvii + 250. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, £45.00, $70.00. Angelique Richardson first established herself as an important contributor to the study of the figure of the New Woman through her work as editor, with Chris Willis, of The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de-Siècle Feminisms (2001) and Women Who Did: Stories by Men and Women, 1890-1914 (2002), and her occasional essays on Sarah Grand, Thomas Hardy, and issues of fitness and health in New Woman fiction. Love and Eugenics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Rational Reproduction and the New Woman both consolidates and further enhances her stature in the field, while also giving her a bigger canvas on which to paint her careful historical documentation of "the intimate relations" between late Victorian feminism and eugenics (xvii). As Richardson reminds us at the outset of her study, although the atrocities of Nazism have "encouraged a perception of eugenics as a product and practice of the Third Reich," the earliest manifestation of eugenics as a theory of rational reproduction was a late-nineteenth-century "class-based application" of post-Darwinian evolutionary discourse (3). Scholarship on the New Woman written in the 1990s, Richardson suggests, tends to emphasize Victorian feminists' challenges to "essentialist thinking about class, genetics, maternal instinct, and sexual determinism" (7). By contrast, Love and Eugenics insists upon recognition of the other feminist agendas at the turn of the century: the conservative feminist endorsements and reworkings of the ideology of separate spheres, for example; and the feminist constructions of biology as destiny that were proffered as a bulwark against the degeneration of British culture and empire. "Eugenic love was the politics of the state mapped onto bodies," Richardson argues: the "rational selection of a reproductive partner" replaces romance in an attempt better "to serve the state through breeding" (9). And the novels and short stories of three of the most influential New Woman writers, Grand, George Egerton, and Mona Caird, were an important vehicle for the expression and dissemination of these eugenic arguments. Indeed, insofar as early British eugenics was "primarily a matter of rhetoric and representation" rather than legislative action and public policy, their fiction provided "the most sustained expressions of eugenic ideas" in the Victorian fin de siècle (xvii). The strengths of this study are twofold. The broad historical contextualizations offered in the first four chapters illuminate these New Woman writers' deep engagements with eugenic theory. Richardson's thorough survey of pre- and post-Darwinian theories of cultural and biological evolution, together with her documentation of the proliferation of professional societies, philanthropic initiatives, and social purity organizations enabling the dissemination of eugenic ideas at the turn of the century, situates their work in a tradition of popular science writing that includes Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Darwin as well as Francis Galton and Havelock Ellis. The close readings of novels and short stories that Richardson provides in the final four chapters work as well as they do because of this larger, extraliterary contextualization. The chapters on Grand are particularly strong. Although most of the scholarship on Grand to date focuses on the runaway bestsellers of the 1890s, Richardson's study invites more careful consideration of Grand's last two novels, Adnam's Orchard (1912) and The Winged Victory (1916). Positioning them in relation to Patrick Geddes's environmental reformism and the Garden City Movement [End Page 706] provides insights both into Grand's "residual romantic attachment to aristocracy" and her sympathies with a socialism that "was compatible with eugenics" (154). If there is a weakness here, I would suggest it lies in Richardson's rather casual documentation of the history of recent scholarship on the New Woman, not in her historical recovery work. Is it in fact true that "the oppressive ideas that coexisted with the emancipatory theories of some New Women...remain largely unexamined," and that the focus of scholarship to date in this field "remains on her more progressive...

Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in 'The Dynasts' by G. Glen Wickens (review)

MLR, 99.3, 2004 757 Coleridge's work on symbol and allegory and through a specifically female response to the repressions of patriarchal religion that deny the validity of women's experience and bodies. Rossetti develops an active theology that insists on its accessibility and relevance to the detail of women's everyday life. Furthermore?and this the book's most significant achievement?this argument challenges the dominant view that Ros? setti's religion was based on renunciation and repression, initiated in accounts by William Michael Rossetti of his sister as 'a fountain sealed'. Rossetti's theology is, on the contrary, nothing short of a radical feminist theology, and Palazzo makes nu? merous parallels to the contemporary feminist theologians such as Mary Daly who, she argues, were prefigured by Rossetti. Such interconnections are, unfortunately, left hanging as associations and similarities rather than historical and intellectual trajectories (rather surprising in a study otherwise sensitive to the complexities of analogy). Furthermore, the contradictory attitude of Rossetti to Victorian feminism, exemplified by her famous letters to Augusta Webster refusing to support her petition for women's suffrage, is not sufficientlyunravelled. Although a strong and eloquent case is made for Rossetti's woman-centred subversions of masculinist theology, the claim that it is modern and radically feminist is not wholly convincing. The analysis of Rossetti's prose is at its best when mapping connections to contem? porary theology and culture, in particular her relationship with the Revds Dodsworth, Burrows, and Littledale, the Langham Place Circle, and her challenges and revisions to Tractarianism. The study begins with two chapters that are mostly concerned with Rossetti's poetry prior to her firstreligious prose volume, and attempts to read her emerging theology through some paradigmatic texts such as 'Goblin Market', 'The Prince's Progress', and Maude. The following chapters are exclusively devoted to a chronological and detailed study of the devotional prose. Although Palazzo at times suggests a relationship between Rossetti's aesthetics and religion, and notes her poetic reading of Scripture, the sense of Rossetti's development into a Victorian sage writer does too often lose sight of her status as a woman poet, thus sidestepping a key issue for many other commentators on Rossetti, from Virginia Woolf to Angela Leighton, who question the tensions between poetic vocation and religion. There is a missed opportunity here to develop the excellent iftruncated discussion of Rossetti's analysis of language and symbol (in Chapters 4 and 5) into a wider account of her poetic writing and especially her theological poetics. University of Glasgow Alison Chapman Thomas Hardy, Monism, and the Carnival Tradition: The One and Many in cThe Dynasts '. By G. Glen Wickens. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2002. xix + 255pp. $60; ?40. ISBN 0-8020-4864-1. G. Glen Wickens's aim in writing this book is 'not to restore the "great" reputation of The Dynasts, but rather to bring it up close enough to be read and appreciated within the carnival tradition' (p. xix). Bakhtin and Hardy are placed in a mutually beneficial relationship here although the benefits Hardy's last 'major' work gains from Bakhtin are fargreater than the other way around. While Wickens suggests that Bakhtin functions as an 'antidote' to previous and predominantly pessimistic read? ings of The Dynasts, Hardy's 'longest novel' challenges and supplements Bakhtin's apparent disregard forthe dangers of carnivalistic violence. Wickens's argument rests on recasting The Dynasts as 'a novel in the carnival and menippean tradition' rather than 'a failed epic or drama' (p. 217) and relocating it in the 'serio-comical' rather than the pessimistic tradition (p. xi). In addition he seeks to locate The Dynasts in the context of the monistic debate which forms the 'dialogizing background of the 758 Reviews Overworld' (p. xii). The contributions of Schopenhauer, Hartmann, Huxley, Spencer, and Carlyle to the controversy surrounding 'the one and the many' join with those of lesser and previously disregarded minor luminaries such as Armitage, Ward, Tyndall, Fiske, and Drummond in such a way as to foreground the debate without effacing its controversies and contradictions. For Wickens, Bakhtin and Hardy are linked by their interest in the relationship between elite culture...

Speaking volumes: victorian feminism and the appeal of public discussion

Speaking volumes: victorian feminism and the appeal of public discussion

“CONVENT THOUGHTS”: AUGUSTA WEBSTER AND THE BODY POLITICS OF THE VICTORIAN CLOISTER

I N AN ESSAY SHE ORIGINALLY published in the Examiner and later reissued in the collection A Housewife's Opinions , the Victorian feminist poet Augusta Webster imaginatively fuses two female figures: the medieval cloistered saint and the saintly, cloistered wife of her own age. Her “Saint Opportune” is a parody, the life of a most “unobtrusive saint,” whose name (taken from a street in Poitiers) is “the epitome of her virtues, her charter of beatification” (“Opportune” 203). “In all things always acceptable,” Saint Opportune “was, of course, not a martyr,” because “in her day anybody could have been that, and her grace was an exceptional one” (203–04). Rather, she led “an existence of honourable safety” (204), being a child so trouble-free that her clothes always fitted just right, and “she neither lagged behind her teachers' hopes nor prematurely outshot their skill” (206), “a girl about whom it was remarkable that she never was remarked” (208), eventually becoming medieval version of the Victorian domestic saint: St. Opportune's career as a wife was the perfect accomplishment of the highest auguries of her youth. No matter at what moment of unpunctuality her husband came in bent upon his dinner, whether a quarter of an hour before time or three-quarters of an hour behind, the soup was steaming ready in the tureen, the boiled fish firm and flaky or the fried fish at the evanescent perfect phase of crispness, the joint done to a turn as he liked it, the entrees at their harmonious prime, nothing soddened, nothing hurried, all ready and right with no too much and no too little, according to the variable standard of the tastes of the master of the house. (210) Capping her career of “inspired unobtrusiveness” (208), Saint Opportune withdraws to a convent when her first wrinkle appears (so her husband can be remarried to “a damsel of pleasing aspect who reminded him of her in her fairer days” [211]), only to die soon afterwards so as to oblige her order: She did not live long in the cloister. A neighbouring convent lost a nun of great sanctity, who on her burial began working miracles. St. Opportune's convent, till then the leading one in those parts, was much mortified but saw no remedy. St. Opportune at once died and instantly worked a miracle. What that miracle was this investigator has failed to discover; but it restored the convent to its former supremacy and proved to all after ages the right of St. Opportune to beatification. (212)

Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator (review)

Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator (review)

Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England (review)

Reviewed by: Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England Elizabeth E. Prevost Divine Feminine: Theosophy and Feminism in England. By Joy Dixon. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001. Historians of modern Britain have typically shied away from critical investigations of religion and spirituality, particularly in feminist studies where women’s political activity is deemed incompatible with anything but purely secular motivations. Joy Dixon confronts this trend by highlighting the centrality of women’s spirituality, and particularly feminist theosophy, in understanding the formation of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century political culture in England. Meticulously researched and drawing on an impressive range of sources and contemporary perspectives, Dixon’s exposition takes on the spiritual as a category of analysis, revealing the inextricability of feminist thought from occultism and detailing the creation of a new sphere of political discourse based on theosophical constructions of gendered authority. While at face value Divine Feminine reads as a primarily metropolitan-based account, Dixon clearly draws on the tradition of Antoinette Burton, Mrinalini Sinha, Judith Walkowitz and others in locating sexual politics in the complex colonial dialectic that produced systems of inequality even while simultaneously creating malleable idioms of gendered, racialized, and class-based hierarchy that women and subalterns appropriated in a variety of contexts. More specifically, Dixon rounds out the work of historians like Alex Owen, Janet Oppenheim, and most recently Alison Winter, who have re-oriented scholarly interest in the occult away from “crank studies” and into mainstream historical analysis (an ironic revearsal of the challenges theosophists themselves negotiated in Dixon’s narrative) by establishing the importance of female spiritist movements for understanding Victorian feminist culture. Dixon takes this a step further by subtly criticizing the historiography of British feminism during this period for its tendency to essentialize women’s political agenda into dichotomies of public/private activity, masculine emulation versus feminine idealization, and sacred and temporal worldviews. Divine Feminine advances a more nuanced connection between feminism and spirituality, positing the spiritual as a dynamic cultural process and the occult as a volatile site of competing truth-claims about metaphysical and political states of being. Dixon historicizes such truth-claims on their own terms—rather than reducing their illustrative language to a hidden political agenda, she considers the political valence that theosophists actually ascribed to spiritual power and vice versa. Divine Feminine is divided into two parts: a gendered periodization of theosophy as it was institutionalized in the Theosophical Society (TS) and its offshoots, and an exploration of theosophy’s broader implications for feminist spirituality and “political theology” both within and outside the formal bounds of the TS. The first section, “Domesticating the Occult,” traces the TS’s function as voluntary association and spiritual community, uncovering a series of tensions in consolidating authority over theosophy in both its organizational and discursive capacities. The history of the TS is clearly inseparable from the characters that move in and out of an international narrative ridden with public controversy and internal dissent. Madame Helena P. Blavatsky, who along with Frederick Olcott founded the Society in 1875 and whose Mahatmas set the tone for the modified orientalism that would inform a crucial strain of the Society’s esoteric character; Annie Besant, Blavatsky’s disciple and president of the TS from 1907; Charles Leadbeater, the central figure in a series of sex scandals that divided the theosophical community; Jiddu Krishnamurti, the purported World Teacher of the New Age—the many players involved in this drama all worked to define theosophy’s boundaries of spiritual jurisdiction. Moreover, the contradictions that emerged in the TS’s formative years affirm the continually precarious nature of its mission: the Society’s inclusive objects against its elitist membership, its fluctuating purposes of mystical esotericism and gentlemanly “clubism,” and the veneration of European versus Indian spiritual paradigms signal the instability of gender and racial hierarchical discourse. Dixon is careful not to take for granted the connection between the eventual prominence of women in theosophical circles and the concurrent “feminization” of its principles, but one of the most significant developments of this tumultuous period was the emergence of both female and feminine legitimacy under Besant’s leadership that ultimately dominated masculine versions of occultist authority. The...

BOOK REVIEW: Marion Diamond.EMIGRATION AND EMPIRE: THE LIFE OF MARIA S. RYE. New York: Garland, 1999.

Maria Rye is one of those elusive figures who makes an occasional appearance in histories of Victorian feminism and emigration, only to fade from view prematurely in deference to more mainstream actors. The basic reference and starting point has been Edwin A. Pratt's short hagiography, Pioneer Women in Victoria's Reign (1897), together with assorted papers at the Fawcett Library. From this a succession of historians since the 1960s, myself included, have constructed the standard picture of a relatively conservative lesser figure among the "Ladies of Langham Place" who fought to breach the barriers against gainful employment for middle-class women. Rye's special contribution in that campaign was to turn to the outlet of emigration in the face of intractable problems in Britain. Embroiled in debates about careers or husband-hunting for middle-class women in various colonies, Rye embarked on a long journey to Australia and New Zealand, where she ultimately and reluctantly recognized the limited scope for educated governesses in the colonies and pursued emigration opportunities predominantly for domestic servants. By the late 1860s she had moved on to an interest in child migration to Canada—"waifs and strays" in the standard terminology—and at that point in most histories of feminism she disappears from sight.

Book Review: Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot

Book Review: Our Lady of Victorian Feminism: The Madonna in the Work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot

Rosemary T. VanArsdel. Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator. (The Nineteenth Century.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. 2001. Pp. xvi, 249. $74.95. ISBN 0-7546-0331-8.

Rosemary T. VanArsdel. Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist, and Educator. (The Nineteenth Century.) Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate. 2001. Pp. xvi, 249. $74.95. ISBN 0-7546-0331-8. - Volume 34 Issue 4

Our Lady of Victorian feminism: the Madonna in the work of Anna Jameson, Margaret Fuller, and George Eliot

Our Lady of Victorian Feminism is about three 19th-century women, Protestants by background and feminists by conviction, who are curiously and crucially linked by their extensive use of the Madonna in arguments designed to empower women. In the field of Victorian studies, few scholars have looked beyond the customary identification of the Christian Madonna with the Victorian feminine ideal - the domestic Madonna or the Angel in the House. Kimberly VanEsveld Adams shows, however, that these three Victorian writers made extensive use of the Madonna in feminist arguments. They were able to see this figure in new ways, freely appropriating the images of independent, powerful and wise Virgin Mothers. In addition to contributions in the fields of literary criticism, art history and religious studies, Our Lady of Victorian Feminism places a needed emphasis on the connections between the intellectuals and the activists of the 19th-century women's movement. It also draws attention to an often neglected strain of feminist thought, essentialist feminism, which proclaimed sexual equality as well as difference, enabling the three writers to make one of their most radical arguments - that women and men are made in the image of the Virgin Mother and the Son, the two faces of the divine.

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence, and the Language of Imperialism

Writing in 1878 on the question of what she termed ‘Wife Torture in England,’ Frances Power Cobbe stated that ‘the whole relation between the sexes in the class we are considering is very little better than one of master and slave’.1 Through her invocation of the master and slave analogy for women’s position in marriage, Cobbe draws upon a thirty-year history of Victorian feminist critique in which the representation of marriage as a form of slavery was a central rhetorical and conceptual framework. Yet though she has this history immediately available to her as an authorising source, Cobbe is very careful to distance herself from it: I have always abjured the use of this familiar comparison in speaking generally of English husbands and wives, because as regard the upper orders of society it is ridiculously overstrained and untrue. But in the ‘kicking districts,’ among the lowest laboring classes, Legree himself might find a dozen prototypes, and the condition of the women be most accurately matched by that of the negroes on a Southern plantation before the war struck off their fetters. (137)

The Evangelical Spirituality of a Victorian Feminist: Josephine Butler, 1828–1906

Josephine Butler waged an unremitting campaign against the ‘state regulation of prostitution’, both in Britain and on the continent, from 1869 until her death. She was a convinced feminist, appalled by the double standard inherent in state regulation, and also, as this article demonstrates, a devout Anglican Evangelical whose spiritual experiences inspired her work. She argued for the right of ‘inspired’ Christian women to preach and teach and developed a radical feminist theology, claming that Christ had treated women as of equal importance to men and had ‘liberated’ them. Her belief in her individual mission enabled her to assume the leadership of a notoriously contentious and emotionally draining campaign.

Ouch!

Trafficking in women’ has, in recent years, been the subject of intense feminist debate. This article analyses the position of the Coalition Against Trafficking in Women (CATW) and the writings of its founder, Kathleen Barry. It suggests that CATW's construction of ‘third world prostitutes’ is part of a wider western feminist impulse to construct a damaged ‘other’ as justification for its own interventionist impulses. The central argument of this article is that the ‘injured body’ of the ‘third world trafficking victim’ in international feminist debates around trafficking in women serves as a powerful metaphor for advancing certain feminist interests, which cannot be assumed to be those of third world sex workers themselves. This argument is advanced through a comparison of Victorian feminist campaigns against prostitution in India with contemporary feminist campaigns against trafficking. The term ‘injured identity’ is drawn from Wendy Brown's (1995) States of Injury, Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Brown argues that certain groups have configured their claims to inclusion in the liberal state in terms of ‘historical ‘injuries’. Antoinette Burton (1998) extends Brown's analysis to look at Victorian feminists’ relationship to Empire, arguing that the ‘injured identities’ of colonial ‘others’ were central to feminist efforts to mark out their own role in Empire. This paper builds on Burton's analysis, asking what role the ‘injured identities’ of third world sex workers play in the construction of certain contemporary feminist identities. The notion of ‘injured identities’ offers a provocative way to begin to examine how CATW feminists position the ‘trafficking victim’ in their discourse. If ‘injured identity’ is a constituent element of late modern subject formation, this may help explain why CATW and Barry rely so heavily on the ‘suffering’ of ‘third world trafficking victims’ in their discourses of women's subjugation. It also raises questions about the possible repressive consequences of CATW's efforts to combat ‘trafficking in women’ through ‘protective’ legislation.

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence, and the Language of Imperialism

Making History with Frances Power Cobbe: Victorian Feminism, Domestic Violence, and the Language of Imperialism

Becoming part of History: Retrieving the Lives of Emily Davies and Victorian Feminists

The biographer's craft is analogous to that of the mosaicist, who creates a picture out of tiny fragments of coloured enamel. In this story the letters to and from and about Barbara Bodichon are the most brilliantly coloured fragments. Census material, documents from public record offices and legal documents . . . are the pieces with less lustre, though still necessary . . . Sometimes fragments are missing altogether; if so, I have tried not to replace them with pasteboard, but simply to allow the cement ground of the narrative to remain exposed in an undecorated state (Hirsch )

Negotiating Victorian Feminism: Anne Thackeray Ritchie's Short Fiction

This essay helps correct the neglect of Anne Thackeray Ritchie’s nonfictional and fictional representations of women in favor of her introductions to books by her father, William Makepeace Thackeray, and her short lives of male writers. Ritchie never openly embraced a feminist identity, but this essay analyzes Ritchie’s cautious critiques of and attempts to erode Victorian ideologies of marriage and domesticity in her short fiction of the 1860s and 1880s. Ritchie explores alternatives to traditional Victorian realism so as to diffuse her indictment of Victorian ideologies of marriage and thus avoid the appearance of strong opposition. Interestingly, this essay uncovers in Ritchie some anticipatory modernist methods that enable precisely the indirection essential for Ritchie to negotiate her dual position within Victorian culture. Focusing on how Ritchie uses her short fiction of the 1880s to revisit situations and themes in her stories of the 1860s, this article claims that Ritchie systematically chose subtler critiques that allowed her to negotiate between a strong feminist stance and the Victorian gender ideologies to which she was expected to conform.

BOOK REVIEW: Annmarie Adams.ARCHITECTURE IN THE FAMILY WAY: DOCTORS, HOUSES, AND WOMEN, 1870-1900. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996.

That the history of Victorian feminism embraces a number of insoluble paradoxes probably will not surprise the readers of Annmarie Adams's Architecture in the Family Way; but they will certainly be delighted at the author's deft handling of the complexities of women's relationships to the medical and architectural professions during the last part of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of her study, Adams reiterates a theme that has been implicit throughout her investigation of the Victorian woman's "shifting relationship to the built environment" (3): "The turn of the century [. . .] marked the end rather than the beginning of a period when women enjoyed considerable control over the domestic spaces they inhabited" (162). Despite having effectively used their influence over interior decoration and the new field of domestic sanitation to promote feminist causes, "women returned to motherhood" (162) while architects and doctors regained control over domestic spaces and women's bodies.

Architecture in the Family Way: Doctors, Houses, and Women, 1870-1900 (review)

That the history of Victorian feminism embraces a number of insoluble paradoxes probably will not surprise the readers of Annmarie Adams's Architecture in the Family Way; but they will certainly be delighted at the author's deft handling of the complexities of women's relationships to the medical and architectural professions during the last part of the nineteenth century. Toward the end of her study, Adams reiterates a theme that has been implicit throughout her investigation of the Victorian woman's "shifting relationship to the built environment" (3): "The turn of the century [. . .] marked the end rather than the beginning of a period when women enjoyed considerable control over the domestic spaces they inhabited" (162). Despite having effectively used their influence over interior decoration and the new field of domestic sanitation to promote feminist causes, "women returned to motherhood" (162) while architects and doctors regained control over domestic spaces and women's bodies.