Women of Letters: Who Were They and What Did They Stand For? by Ashley Anderson

Cain's Discussion Points

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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?

The Woman Question

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What is the nature of women?

Frances Power Cobbe

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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).

The Rise of the Woman of Letters

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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.

Women's Journals and Publications

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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).

What Did the "Woman Question" Include?

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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

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).

Who Was Speaking Out?

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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)

The Opposition

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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

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).

What Did the Woman of Letters Do?

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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).

Who Were the Women of Letters?

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

*Harriet Martineau

*Francis Power Cobbe

Harriet Martineau

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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).

Martineau's Brief Biography

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Cobbe's Brief Biography

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Interesting Article About Harriet Martineau & Kate Middleton

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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).

Works Cited and Picture Credits

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