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Conclusion: What Happened to Victorian Women of Letters?

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Conclusion: What Happened to Victorian Women of Letters?

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"It was not until the 1920s that feminists began explicitly to argue that their main task, once the vote was won, was that of changing the ways in which women were discussed and represented in literature and culture - but in their own individual ways, many nineteenth-century women used journalism and their access to the periodical press to shift the framework of discussion about women and to make women's voices a significant part of public culture" (Caine 115).

*College degrees and professional credentials became a prerequisite to being known as a person of letters, and until women gained access to these credentials, they were edged out.

*Despite the importance of their writings, it is becoming increasingly difficult to teach the writings of noncanonical Victorian women.

"To teach outside the canon means precisely to teach those works which have not gained wide acceptance and therefore are not in print. For the Victorianist, the problem of canonicity has an additional special urgency. The majority of Victorian women's novels not only do not exist in modern editions but were printed on acid paper which is rapidly disintegrating. The texts one wants to teach in a course on
noncanonical Victorian women writers are not available in bookstores, are in limited numbers of library collections, and are crumbling to dust even as one composes one's syllabus" Carol Poster, "Canonicity and the Campus Bookstore" (1).

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Interesting Article About Harriet Martineau & Kate Middleton

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Interesting Article About Harriet Martineau & Kate Middleton

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There for the moment - until the nation is allowed further access to Kate's well-camouflaged personality - the similarities end. But it's enough for the Martineau Society, with their libertarian, rationalist membership, to see this as a useful connection. Indeed, it cuts both ways - it might benefit our future princess to publicly align herself with such an illustrious forbear, not least to silence the naysayers who claim the House of Windsor is anti-intellectual.

Harriet Martineau, to whom Kate bears more than a passing resemblance, is today a largely forgotten figure, yet during the Victorian era she was a powerhouse, a towering intellect who braved male prejudice to carve out a unique career in the world of letters. She is generally acknowledged as the first woman sociologist.

Born the daughter of a Norwich textile manufacturer, she grew up in a household dominated by Unitarianism and underpinned by a progressive attitude towards the education of girls. By the time she was 21 she had published her first article: perhaps unsurprisingly, "On Female Education".

She moved to London and soon came her first book, Devotional Exercises for the Use of Young Persons in 1826 - but this was merely a warm-up: her big plan was to write books on politics and economics for the ordinary reader. Illustrations of Political Economy, which followed, was an instant success and brought her financial independence at a stroke.

Into her orbit swung the Darwin brothers, Charles and Erasmus. Charles was attracted to her intellect but her looks were not to his taste: "I was astonished to find how ugly she is". Erasmus advised his brother to overlook his prejudices. "One ought not to look on her as a woman," he jokingly reproached. She never married.

Her circle included Thomas Malthus, George Eliot, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Charlotte Brontë and Wordsworth. These people, the heralds of change, thought they could improve the world and, to a greater or lesser extent, did so. Buoyed up by their vision of the new, Harriet yearned to experience nascent cultures for herself, and at a time when few of her age or class undertook such solo trips, she sailed to the United States in 1835.

The reality of that still-developing nation did not altogether square with her ideal. On her return, she wrote Society in America (1837), which accused the burgeoning ruling class of not living up to its democratic principles. Slavery was a hot topic for her, and she was also concerned about the treatment of women, crisply titling one chapter of her treatise "The Political Non-Existence of Women".

America took it on the chin. Today, Harriet Martineau is a bigger name there than she is back home - a pin-up for philosophers, novelists and undergraduates across the nation. Yet how easily she was forgotten in her native land.

The Martineaus came out of France: Huguenots, they fled religious persecution in the 17th century. Harriet and Kate's ancestor, Gaston Martineau, a surgeon, left his home and livelihood in Bergerac in 1685 in an exodus which saw 200,000 Protestants erased from the population. At the age of 31 Gaston set up home in the relative tranquility of Norwich, but that whiff of nonconformity never left him, or his descendants.

Quite how much of that rebellious streak still resides in the sleek Miss Middleton's DNA is hard to judge, for the various biographers who have so far attempted to chronicle her life have universally failed to capture her personality. Though a billion people will watch her nuptials on television in a few weeks' time, we do not yet know her. But it does raise the question: is there a Harriet lurking inside Miss Middleton ready to burst forth?

Much as they would relish it, for the moment it's sufficient for the Martineau Society that they have discovered this happy link. Its distinguished secretary is keen on the idea of Kate becoming a royal patron, simply for the added interest such a move would bring to their forgotten 19th-century heroine.

But make no mistake, this is no star-struck grouping happy to have found a stray royal connection. "One member suggested sending a wedding present," snips Professor Wiener, "but we're not that kind of society - we're very serious people. I don't think we're terribly monarchist. Harriet went to Queen Victoria's Coronation and wrote about her sandwiches. She's a hard act for Kate to follow."

Maybe so. But the Martineaus themselves - still plentiful on the ground four centuries after their arrival in Britain - are pleased at the attention the Kate connection brings to their name. "I very much welcome this," says Richard Martineau, who descends from Harriet's grandfather, "a Martineau joining the Royal family. Though I'd rather you said the Royal family is joining the Martineaus."

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The benefits of a feminist in the family

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There for the moment - until the nation is allowed further access to Kate's well-camouflaged personality - the similarities end. But it's enough for the Martineau Society, with their libertarian, rationalist membership, to see this as a useful connection.

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"Martineau deserves considerable attention in any investigation of nineteenth-century women writers.  Both the volume and range of her writing is remarkable and she was unquestionably one of the best-known and most successful writers of the early nineteenth century" (Caine 105).

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Caine discusses two key women of letters from 19th century England:

*Harriet Martineau

*Francis Power Cobbe

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*Published in a wide range of forms, including pamphlets, tracts, books, literary reviews, and essays

*Created something "problematic [to] the general category of the woman writer" (Caine 99).

*Who is the woman writer?

*Women began to differentiate between various genres of their writing: "Feminist writings in the nineteenth century tend to be seen as part of feminist campaigns - rather than to fit within the broader framerwork of women's writing" (Caine 99).

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A Note on Authorship and Signing Articles

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A Note on Authorship and Signing Articles

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"Conspiracy of silence surrounding feminist campaigns" (Butler qtd. in Caine 102).

"Anonymity often fuctioned as a reference to the corporate authority of the periodical that authorized the article.  The use of the pronoun 'we,' along with the absence of signature, was understood to signify the unified, collective, or 'corporate' voice of the periodical.  Individual writers of periodical articles thus sacrificed signature in order to produce the illusion of an omniscient corporate authority" Rachel Sagner Buurma, "Anonymity, Corporate Authority, and the Archive" (20).

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Not all women agreed with allowing women as a whole to have more freedom and equality.

*Eliza Lynn Linton's article "The Girl of the Period" - pure and dignified vs. fast and immoral

*"The Ladies Appeal Against Suffrage"

*Mrs. Oliphant, Mrs. Humphrey Ward, Frederick Harrison

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Older women were voicing their opinions on the "woman question"

Caroline Norton's "English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century" (1854)

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Discussing the "Woman Question" In the Public Sphere

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Discussing the "Woman Question" In the Public Sphere

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*Early to mid-19th century: women wrote under pseudonyms

*Mid- to late 19th century: women wrote under given names

"In the mid-century, women writers became more and more visible as they published under their own names and thus brought an explicitly female voice to bear on these various debates" (Caine 102).

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Feminist writers discussing the "woman question" covered a wide range of topics (Caine 102):

*appropriate activities for women

*women's work

*political and legal rights

*marriage law reform

*education reform, especially for girls

*domestic violence

*female celibacy

*the sexual double standard

*prostitution

*women's independence

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"English Women's Review"

"Victoria Magazine"

"Englishwomen's Review of Social and Industrial Questions"

"Women's Suffrage Journal"

"English Woman's Journal"

"'I should say, the more business you can get into the journal - the more statements of philanthropic movements and social facts, and the less literature, the better.  Not because I like philanthropy and hate literature, but because I want to know  about philanthropy and don't care for second-rate literature" George Eliot to Bessie Parks, 1857 (Caine 101).

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"The extensive involvement of women writers in public debate throughout the nineteenth century has rarely been recognized, despite the fact that they addressed almost every imaginable social and political subject" (Caine 99).

The rise of the periodical press

Journalism becomes an acceptable occupation for middle class workers.

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"By the mid century, the subjects which were most important and of most general concern were not economics, but rather questions about sciene and religion, and it was here that Frances Cobbe, the best-known and most successful woman of letters in the second half of the nineteenth century, made her mark" (Caine 110).

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What is the nature of women?

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1.  The "woman question" enters public debate.

2.  The rise of the woman of letters.

3. Who were the women of letters and what were their causes?