Miss Temple looking at Jane Eyre (many many films have this icon)
Friends,
My first book for the new year:
A virago re-publication — keeping the book in print
Vicinus’s study remains as important and relevant today as when it was written 50 years ago, about crucial failures 50 years before that. Her title tells us the matter of her book, the details of her story line; she only slowly reveals that this is a study which explains why now nearly 100 years ago when women began to vote as a group, they have not achieved needed power for themselves as a group and as individuals when they comprise one-half of the human race.
Where real power resides that effectively can change the structures and conditions of our lives is in society’s central agencies and institutions and she studies those institutions women were allowed to join and try to rise to top shaping positions in, or were allowed to make institutions of their own. She shows that repeatedly women were thwarted from taking shaping power (church, military, high gov’t, medicine), within the lower echelons how class and the psychologies of their own natures interfered with creating successfully run places, because it was demanded of them that they behave like capitalist men, and their needs as women (to run families, to have friends) were disciplined out of existence; how the institution was allowed only to be an interlude (women’s colleges); or what they won was nullified (the vote).
Thus women failed to influence the organizations of industry, military, schools, gov’t to bend to respond to women’s issues, needs, and help women (crucially needed) to counter male sexual and familial tyrannies. Where women have had gains is where they have mitigated the impact of a male-dominated society upon the friendless and vulnerable, where it met an immediate need of the woman herself (intermittent child care, freedom from beating) and her children (school meals — still contested in the US, humane treatment of elderly). The age of indecent assault was moved from 13 to 16, a pension scheme for widows ….
This is the whole of the cover photograph: Westfield College — for women, June 1889
The book begins (Chapter one) with her talking of how women at first tried for general power outside rich and well-connected family groups. She has to omit the working class woman because she could not try; she also omits widows. The first work for powerful people and only achieved power after 1930 when they formed their first women’s union (garment workers); they were excluded from men’s unions until very recently. Widows are a special case and just don’t fit (!) into her story unless they drop this identity. The problem Woolf saw in 1928 (A Room of Your Own) was to explain how the vote seemed to have made little difference. Yes, you could have custody of your children, couldn’t be legally beaten, could get a separation, could not be legally forced to return to a husband, but how minimal these protections and rights, how unaccompanied by anything else.
She then discusses the importance of the norm which denied any rightness or value to the life of an unmarried women. Your life was not useful or respected unless you married and had children, and that immediately put women into the power of compulsory heterosexuality of marriage. So Vicinus begins with the campaign against “redundant” women in the 19th century. Her argument is that unmarried or single women were not an anomaly, not a rarity or uncommon at all. Given death, sterile women whom men abandoned or simply disliked and discarded, unmarried woman forced to care for aged parents, seen as not attractive, quiet lesbians were noticed only to be stigmatized and punished by denying them any ability to make a living which would give them independent or a dignified life. As soon as the punishments became less — because of the increase of industrialization, capitalism, the substitution of money as the basis for society rather than male violence, and so the life of a single woman became more viable and thus more visible, they were to be fiercely denied and erased and worried about, deported (to colonies to find husbands).
So this made-up category of redundant women didn’t go away, instead gradually a world of institutions from which women could exercise the needed power to change norms, make real money, and create spaces in which single women could live independently and freely in safety for the first time began to emerge — all the while society remained hostile to unmarried women and women given power. She turns women attempting to run prestigious institutions while keeping socially acceptable behavior. Gregg who wrote the famous essay introducing this concept wrote that women unattached to men or not in households run by men must be forced back into male control. His scheme was to deport the redundant women, which did not include servants or anyone not middle class and above.
One of the most telling parts of the book is about the ferocious and physical assaults wreaked on women demanding the vote. This reaction apparently astonished the suffragettes at first, then dismayed and horrified them. They were seeing for the first time the men and society they had thought still fundamentally on their side, were not, would dispense with them all as individuals until those “making trouble” were dead or crippled.
Christchurch hospital nurses
So how under this assault can we discover where women can find power, were managing to find it for the first time in the UK and ended up still controlled by men.
How did upper class women become important members of come to almost look for truly high positions of authority in religious organizations and prestigious hospitals comprise Chapters two and three. Religious belief and a place in churches were important parts of women’s lives outside the family and in public space, and then taking care of, nursing people were accepted areas of women’s activities in the public world. Gaining change had to be done first by strong-willed well connected very upper class women in socially acceptable ways and the first positions filled by upper class women — and it’s not a matter of education so much as status, and respect they got and expected. Only such women would be obeyed by others and gained primary respect. Thus some women reached medium and relatively high positions who were not truly qualified in medicine. You had to be a type who obeyed, who conformed because very quickly men and other women who could asserted control.
She describes in detail areas of life and work where women could for the first time in groups enter public life and find or create power and she shows how in effect they failed. For religion, they were never respected enough, nor did they respect themselves enough. They turned to men as the figures who must have these positions, and churches decreed and supported this. When it came to the nursing profession, the women building the profession wanted upper class women to be in positions of authority and chose women based on status and rank not abilities. Then in the context what happened is they demanded of the women they hired absolute obedience and didn’t pay them well and gave them hard tasks. Some women stayed and took the punishment — as escape from home, or something worse — or just did. The women who couldn’t stand this went to work in less prestigious hospitals; as a group they also failed to enforce education standards so anyone could be a nurse.
At the same time they themselves never gained power — as in religious institutions — men remained in charge. They ddidn’t think well enough of themselves no matter how high their position, finally they buy into their inferiority. Else why take on the drudgery and the way they cannot conceive having an institution where women are in charge, women the administrators and doctors. I am bothered by how Vicinus accepts the class and rank status as necessary to being in charge, to managing and just concedes it must be there to be successful. Maybe only such women have the self-esteem and training or attitude of mind from their family backgrounds. She tells the stories of individual women who bucked the system and how they came to grief. They tried to go too high or they succeeded for a while, and then were attacked and marginalized by male hegemonic values of various sorts and attacks on them as women.
There was an almost insane emphasis on discipline (far more than cleanliness) in hospital work, which made it so awful to do, so much like a prison camp, and made nursing a profession like being a governesses had been – who’d want to submit to that. This was partly an attempt to throw off the disrespect and unwillingness to believe women can have another sort of discipline to rise high, to have clean bodies (not sexy – I remember when to rise in academia it was de rigueur to dress dowdy). How can women become powerful on their own behalf in such an atmosphere. These impossibly long days, are in service to male doctors. I’ve known women who worked hard to be nurse and when it came to enduring the profession left; some of nurses’ tyranny over women patients (like breast-feeding) is these are areas where they have handles to be the important person.
Somerville College Boat Club — where the caption says how proud the college is of a tradition of ambition and competition
Chapter Four, Women’s Colleges. Vicinus moves to women wanting an independent intellectual life. This means going to university, ultimately getting the right to have a degree, so you can go out for professional work. But she is also — let’s hear a rousing hand — interested in women who come for this education and intellectual life where the prime motive is not a job but the intellectual life.
She argues that status or rank does not always play the abysmally awful part it did in nursing and religious communities. It’s not that it’s not there (think of Sayers’s Gaudy Night) but it’s not a fault-line for who stays on after the first year or so. These are usually unmarried women. This third institution offered as none other did an “unparalleled” opportunity for a women to have “private space” to herself, to find “shared interests” with others no where else to be found, the use of “public amenities” no where else. There was no time for such things in nursing, no raison d’etre for them but religious belief in church type institutions. And one of the barriers parents resisted most was not so much the degree or job eventuality, but they didn’t want the girl to live there: they lost control of her space and her body and who she could mingle with. They feared not being able to choose her partner through control of who she met and who supported her emotionally.
She discusses more individuals here, and the complications of university life which both allowed it to be place where women could know freedom, seek what their talents were good at, lead an independent life to some extent while they were there. Outside the college remained a strong disdain and dismissal of this intellectual life for women, distrust of it as dangerous or silly. In the details of relationships norms for women coming out different from norms for men which prevent women from gaining power in institutions. Women’s friendships and mentorships work differently, are more emotional she says. They had to develop different appropriate rituals — imitate family roles, like sisterhood. What emerged in many women’s colleges was the life there was an pleasant interlude instead of seeing what you did there as something to bring back into society.
A sketch from nature (Punch, 1884)
The fifth chapter is boarding schools and I wondered why that was a separate area until I realized she was determined to uncover the nature of emotional women’s friendships and mentorships as central glue to women combining in groups outside structures. This too is a basic source of power — the old girls’ network.
She first uncovers an emotional bath of coy adoration and cloying interdependence in the language (relationships called “raves”), and the kind of thing that later critics use to find lesbianism. But she neither seems to care if this kind of thing can become lesbianism or is superficial or just deep emotion — she rejects Carol Smith-Rosenberg’s famous article about female ritual staying ritual; Lilian Faderman’s equally famous insistence lesbian friendships did not include open sex and more recently Lisa Moore’s idea they all fucked as best they could.
No what’s important is this bonding and that it was a secret way of subverting the established order; she has lots of evidence on how the headmistresses’ disciplinary techniques were there to deal precisely with this — to stop secrets between girls, to stop secret friendship because there things like masturbation, and all sort of rebellions took place. At the same time the headmistresses and women in charge themselves saw this was a way of rewarding some girls, punishing others, picking favorites — and gaining power and authority over the girls who obey. Vicinus concedes this sort of thing was very unfair and victims (ostracized girls were also often lower class), but she sees it as important bonding. She talks of the rituals of these places including the headmistress kissing each girl before she goes to bed at night. Example after example from these schools.
Her idea is power came from this kind of exploitation of a level of women’s emotion, which was frustrated and stifled so they could not express it heterosexually going after boys. When they went home, there were chaperons. As such women grew older, they learned to have a severe demeanor or manners with outsiders and kept up their respectability. All this is a basis for power, and when it was student and teacher who went in for this kind of relationship — and it often was and allowed as mentoring — then the result could be a career of public service. Mutual religious belief was brought in to make all moral. I am seeing Miss Temple and Jane in a whole new light.
Bad side-effects was some girls ended up deranged, would have breakdowns in these places because they enforced long hours of work. For some girls this was a remembered paradise, for many more a kind of hell they got through. Vicinus does remark that too much was expected of a single relationship by naive or powerless girls and when they were dropped or it didn’t work out, there would be great hurt or anger. “Pent-up ambition, frustrated ambitions, and constrained sexuality” was behind all this. She is right that something subversive could happening beyond an individual pair of girls rebelling say politically can be seen by how — as she records — so much hostility to this pairing emerged too. Parents took home daughters. They wanted them to marry. I saw some of this in Sweet Briar: the girls were assigned older sisters among girls already there or younger ones and an attempt was made to encourage this kind of bonding to start. Any ostracizing or bullying or victimizing of a particular girl was noticed and put a stop to.
Vicinus seems to me too complacent about what she is showing. I suppose the price of bonding between boys in public schools is similarly ambiguous. What can happen is heterosexual boys are taken over by homosexual ones — and vice versa, for sex does enter into it there in the ugly ugly fagging system. There was no fagging system in the girls’ schools.
Vicinus then analyzes what are clearly lesbian relationships even if she never uses the word. The women lay in one another’s arms, call one another husband or wife, the strong insists on kissing others. These girls and women called their relationships marriages. With Freudianism and new psychoanalyses marginalized these relationships once again.
Eventually and today single sex institutions began to disappear; the claim is they are not needed or wanted. She says it began to be seen as strange by many who began to take notice that a poorly paid apparently celibate woman should have any power. A woman’s career should not be seen as something separate it’s claimed. Vocations don’t support the woman, and we are almost back to where we started.
Women outside a Settlement House (Blackfriars) — turn of the century — settlement houses were run by and often for women
Settlement houses: Chapter 6: community ideal for the poor
Another group of institutions that emerged that women tried to gain power from were settlement houses built among the poor and meant to help them find shelter, medical care, education, employment, what they needed: women’s names are remembered here: Mary Carpenter, Louisa Twinning, Octavia Hill (given money by John Ruskin to start houses he had ideas for), Jane Adams, Dorothy Day. Amid the horrors of industrialization, factories &c philanthropic organizations grew too – women were allowed to cross class lines for such purposes 211 armies of volunteers as middle class people’s income soared in the gilded age ….In the US such settlement houses partly political were run by women; in the UK often by men and were stepping stones to a career.
But problems arose. I am startled to have to say Vicinus is for means tests! She is for the Charity Organization Society which was against giving any help until people investigated and then if any other relative can help well then help is denied. Then it’s fine to interfere. There were women who joined who were socialists or pacifists but more Christian millennialism – working with children for the future. Now instead of military metaphors found in nursing we find language of colonialism: cleanliness, middle class deportment, cooking sewing – do-it-yourself self-respecting well doing &c&c. Some working class people found this appalling, but submitted to obtain help.
One ironic result the middle class suddenly can walk where she pleases alone but the working class is now spatially confined – put them in clubs, in service, &&c. Women did this work and lived in such places to be public leaders and have professional work, saw how fellowship and association gave them place and power. Women’s colleges got involved – they did help some people, disabled children for example. All made a point of linking with some other recognized institution (school, college church, political ones). Had long-time women running them as wardens, and they enabled women to keep up relationships with one another and make new relationships. You had privacy as a resident; indirect access to shaping of laws. They moved into places like school boards.
There was a problem of finding reliable volunteers – what brought people: curiosity, religious commitment, idealism, boredom, desire for adventure, self-education. You paid to be a resident and the working girls couldn’t understand what you were doing or why. Leaders of women’s settlements wanted to turn these into a paid profession. Then part-time volunteers outnumbers residents two to one – money needed for drains for upkeep of houses …. Small sums out of these women’s reach; only after WW! And take over by gov’t were social workers regularly paid.
So then we have women choosing settlement not based on which school connection but what the settlement’s speciality in caring was; class condescension can be replaced by “professional expertise” – communities divide all sorts of ways into committed and un committed. Some very devoted and high minded hard working women but mocked too.
What was benefit for working people: very small staffs, volunteers, huge numbers of people to service. Clubs for working girls were popular – emphasis on pleasure so most had dancing. One successful one moved into instruction too – skills and trade unionism. Baby care, housewifery and other skills to older women who were presumed to be mothers. A great disconnect between them and who they were serving. Resident teachers were most successful with young children in new formations of schools. Men against them – paradoxically most were unmarried women advising all these married women – week after week the real problems of women and children at home incapable of being addressed. What do you do about low self-image?
And then when their function was taken over by the state, the women were given subordinate jobs. They were not enfranchised …. A failure to cement connections between different kinds of settlement houses … Eleanor Rathbone a rare individual with larger social vision did move into parliament.
Chapter 7: Male space and women’s bodies: the suffragette movement.
I was again surprised – much – when she treated the suffragette movement not as economically based but as a spiritual one. She kept using that word “spirituality” whose meaning I have yet to make precise or understand fully because as far as I can see I have no “spirituality.” I gather she does not mean religious belief attached to a church but some undefined set of emotional needs somehow connected to religions. Her argument, which I think she does demonstrate, is that the suffragettes got as far as they did because they were actuated by motives akin to religious belief that can overturn an old religious order and replace it with a new. She also thinks religious motivations are at the heart of women’s way of bonding – as well as unformulated erotic ones – let’s call them loosely indirect.
She makes a good case for her insights again and again and in this chapter as she goes through the familiar trajectory of being lied to, disappointed, ignored and then seeing that they must break the law and be utterly disruptive if they are to get anywhere, that they must be regarded seriously as a political force with the _right_ to work effectively in public political space, she again and again has recourse to “spirituality” as an actuating motive clinching the women’s behavior. Certainly at the beginning most women could not see what votes would get them. A failure of imagination is at the heart of this. Women did see some movement – no beating, custody of children, but not enough in their daily lives. Men did see the deep subversion of what these women were asking and the one thing they held out against was recognizing they were political prisoners for example. Churchill treated them like naughty children who needed to be treated more softly.
She agrees with others the movement was engendered by upper class women, and typical are sentences like this: “the fierce loyalty and strength of the movement sprang from a spiritual self-confidence that unleashed enormous energies not only for the vote, but also for a total reconsideration of the role of women.” Consider that the wretchedness of poor life was not a motive for these women, it was genuinely a desire to have liberty of choice in life for themselves and thus power. It is no coincidence that Bell (tomorrow we’ll have a loose schedule) and Cobbe came from very wealthy people; Florence Nightingale and filled with self-esteem.
She quotes Mary Gordon (a Catholic writer) that “such spiritual upheavals are always irrational and irrational human types are swept into them as high priests.” So the women’s movement for the vote is like the Protestant reformation.
The WSPU was extreme in its behavior out of desperation, and this is important: it frightened some women away but it got attention. Gradually more women saw also getting the vote was not asking a lot new and doing it was easy. That’s important. I’ll never canvass anyone but I can vote – and through votes you can perhaps get many different kinds of things. For others militancy was putting off “the slave spirit” – so it was like abolition. Women were beat and told they were to obey. The call was “Rise up Women!”
Then they were horrified at the men’s reaction, stunned at the cruelty derision, hatred. That taught something important. And when they didn’t fill the roles they were supposed to and then considered fair predatory game they learned something else.
And then the beast comes out from behind the screen publicly: hitherto men beat women in private with impunity now they were willing to do it publicly, with the aid of subordinate women (nurses ironically).
Vicinus reveals how viciously the suffragettes were treated, not just indifferently badly but compare the treatment to the way white racists have treated black people — out right ugly humiliating attacks and bodily injury she would not recover from, both in the streets and prisons, but especially the prison. Force feeding was intended to maim the woman and it did and hundreds were subjected to this. Those in power were intensely enraged because they did see the demand for a vote as an attack direct on their masculinity and whole way of life. They detested the demand to use public space as an authority. What surprised me was the horror of the women — they did not expect this and Vicinus’s own attitude towards the hunger strikes. And many were physically and/or emotionally maimed for life. She says hunger strikes — or suicide as in Emily Davies just gets rid of pro-active effective women — and ultimately is liked by the powerful. They’re glad of it or indifferent. Given that she sees the suffragette movement as driven by an emotional “spirituality” these sacrifices bound women but also were so self-defeating. I know these hunger strikes reverse the age-old way of punishment of subversion: put the person in a hunger tower to starve but most writers are chary to say how useless – because it attracts attention. Vicinus doesn’t think attention per se is enough.
At the end of the chapter she says that when the movement was over some suffragettes felt they had won something – the right to be recognized or recognition, the idea they wanted liberty which desire even had been denied them. But Vicinus shows how the newspapers went against them, how other women betrayed them, and says what they are saying they achieved doesn’t click because the basic structures of society in 1920 remain the same. The vote has ameliorated conditions. Today many of ties that bound women today are as strongly in place and the vote does not come near these.
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I’ve already told the conclusion. This last coda is interesting for the examples she brings forth to once again make her argument, and how various norms thought to protect women were used against them; at the same time, some liberties women sought and thought they had gained from at first were seen only to favor men more when put into practice.
All women’s communities declined during and after WW1. One of most persuasive chapters is the short appendix where she shows men’s clubs continue to be supportive of them and fill needs all their lives; women’s clubs are an interlude just like women’s colleges. Women’s clubs interfere with her family obligations and she drops them. Women communities were successfully attacked for new reasons but one glimpses old ideas: they are restrictive psychologically and emotionally, silly places with old-fashioned dangerous behavior (ties to other women mocked. Paradoxically these communities often class bound become unsympathetic unfriendly places for many women.
Jobs were taken right back after WW1 and WW2. Men refused to work for women and refused to allow the workplace to reflect women’s ways.
As the idea women are not morally superior and pure were dropped because that was used to restrict them, they lost out again — not respected. She sees uses for those older ideas as they can empower men if transformed into valuing chastity, non marriage, friendships. But women ill prepared for Freud — who, Vicinus doesn’t say, is so misogynist so they rejected Freudian psychology and were left with what? A new kind of psychology emerged slowly in the 1970s first. What did the new sexual freedom of the 1970s finally achieve? ultimately gave men greater access to women and vulnerable men on their own terms. Women still do not do well when they report and go to court to punish men for raping them.
Then women fought within their own groups. There were those who wanted protective legislation (often turns out for families, for the breadwinner’s packet of money or state support should go to her and children not him as if he were the family) — these were contested bitterly but there were wins in welfare, but these seen as socialist, humanitarian. Those who wanted liberty to fulfill the demands of their own nature got nowhere; independent women accused of sex hatred, preferring women. She shows instances where the word “women” is removed; no this is a fund for citizens. It reminds me of the women’s review of books wanted to use the word “gender” and how “gender studies” replaces women. Far from identifying as a group they run from the group name is implied. Women didn’t or couldn’t invent a different language and set of terms to see themselves by –I think that was attempted in the 1970s to 1990s myself. – and they still haven’t.
The professions she goes over where power bases could have developed remain single-sex ghettos or when men come in, they take over. There had been an attempt at a richly nurturing subculture and the university is one place (all women’s college this can sometimes be seen), but once you leave you are outside the aggressively married heterosexual world.
She ends on a paragraph by Winifred Holtby where Holtby says we know where the aggressively male outlook leads women — to slave markets of all sorts, including marriage. Holtby is arguing that individual ability rather than social conditions should determine a woman’s fate – but Vicinus has shown that without institutions which provide a basis for power (certificates say, incomes) by refusing to change the class bias or sexual terms on which recognition is given out renders such demands moot.
Of course Vicinus is talking about women in general, the large majority not what particular individual women may luck into or be able to access by denying themselves some of the rewards of obeying successfully aggressive heterosexual male hegemonies (i.e., marrying). Many of the women writers I study are women who had talent enough to secure a living somewhere or other in the society and at least for a while and maybe much of their lives managed to escape this thwarting.
Vicinus book is written more softly and in academic style prose than I have and so the impact of what she is saying only slowly dawns on the reader, but once she does, her book has enormous explanatory power. My frontispiece for this blog suggests Vicinus’s whole new ironic and sad take on the stories of Miss Temple and Jane Eyre, how they ended up ….
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
Sounds interesting. Have you read anything else by this author, Martha Vicinus?
Yes, two fascinating essays. One on the roots of lesbianism as seen in public — a social identity which is still often hidden. The second an examination of a divorce case, which I’ll summarize and comment on here: “Lesbian Perversity and Victorian marriage: The 1864 Codrington divorce trial, The Journal of British Studies, 36:1 (1997):70-98.
Vicinus’s essay is the clearest exposition I’ve ever read of how a lesbian woman who was determined to live out her sexuality and also obtain some power in a hegemonic male heterosexual society might and did act. She goes over the case of Emily Faithfull who got involved in a divorce case between an Admiral Codrington who sued his wife, Helen, for adultery with a heterosexual man, David Anderson. Helen countered (she was suing what she was allowed to sue for, for you’d think she’d want to escape this tyrannical man) that the Admiral was not doing his duty (having sex with her), was indifferent. She also accused the Admiral of raping her friend, Emily Faithfull who seems to move in and out of Helen’s bed frequently. Emily betrayed Helen by saying that what she had sworn on oath — the admiral came in, threatened, then got into bed with Helen and Emily and raped Emily. Emily denied this ever occurred after swearing to it in a deposition.
For the first time I understand Terry Castle’s phrase: Apparitional lesbian: I never read the book because I dreaded some jargon ridden text where I was expected to hunt out what wasn’t in the text for real — I knew Emma Donoghue could be trusted not to write this way: her evidence is solid letters, a pattern of behavior among spinsters. Castle means lesbians understood to be present everywhere but never openly acknowledged.
Vicinus suggests that Emily was having an affair with Helen, not Anderson who was a kind of public pretense. What was the result: eventually Emily was seen as this innocent person exploited by an amoral heterosexual woman, Helen. The admiral’s case was not quite believed because he had to pay some costs, but Anderson had to pay more. The admiral was awful and Helen wanted to have some fun out of life in aristocratic circles in Italy and other places. This was not acceptable since the Admiral didn’t accept it and women were to be chaste, obedient, &c. But it seems the truth is more that both Helen and Emily led part lesbian lives.
Now apparently (apparitional) the denial served Emily and enabled her supporters to stay publicly with her. Otherwise the attacks on her as a lesbian would have ratcheted very high indeed. So despite being dropped by some people and her magazine floundering for a bit, Faithfull’s career survived and in the end of her life she was living with some other women to whom she left all her money and in her will insisted her family had agreed to this. It was Helen who was punished: Lost her children, paid almost nothing, despised and disappears from the records.
What interests me is the same pattern of cruel hard behavior on the part of one lesbian (Emily) to her supposed female friends who were depending on her. Two biographies I’ve read of Vita Sackville-West, by Victoria Glendenning, and of Katherine Mansfield, by Claire Tomalin, respectively. Perverse disloyalty often male (that’s Helen and Emily) is similarly found in the behavior of Vita Sackville-West to a number of the women she was involved with and one man especially Geoffrey Scott – he lost everything that meant anything to him by openly loving & supporting her. We see these patterns repeated in the behavior of Katherine Mansfield to Ida, to Murray and a whole group of men and other women too. I had seen KM as possibly a lesbian, but more likely (given who she lived off and seemed to have sex with) bisexual and promiscuous, who at the same time was irresponsible, disloyal, and thought she had the right to do anything her genius required. I did not see such behavior as connected to or coming from her lesbianism as society deformed it.
Woolf was an exception because of her married status and her self-protection but she also had breakdowns periodically S-W and Mansfield knew how much prestige Woolf had and S-W didn’t care be as aggressive or use Woolf in the way she did others and Mansfield did not dare approach Woolf sexually.
I am also interested in how Helen was thrown away. Vicinus says treated with even worse hostility than a woman living alone, independently was a woman seen as amorally flirtatious and heterosexual — this includes Becky Sharp by the way. But according to her evidence, Helen just as likely made a marriage of convenience (the admiral was so much older, known to be narrow bully) and because her friend did not stand by her had no one to turn to at all. Ruthless behavior by Faithfull — who was admired and not dropped because she had this terrific organizing ability and it was seen knew how to garner power.
Like the chapter on boarding schools, Vicinus has opened before me a whole new paradigm which is I have to admit ugly, as ugly as some of the different kinds of paradigms Henry James explores. She uses Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men to talk of the paradigm of two men vying for the same woman or two women vying for the same men is ubiquitous and deeply male heterosexual with men getting cuckolded — and in murder mysteries murdering the woman who is his wife or who sues him or blackmails him (this Winston Graham and much film noir.
This other pattern of two women who want to be partners is rarely found, and when it is often portrayed as either cloying in behavior, as ruthless apparently cold woman who uses other women and men and then deserts them in order to have sex and keep power — I can see some of this in Henry James. Or as we have seen in the derisory repulsive obscene The Favourite. There is a disgusting scene in the film where after marrying Masham for his title and wealth, Abigail is seen jerking him off while very bored while he takes this treatment passively, merely looking appalled.
The idea here is see how lesbian women misuse this unfortunate heterosexual men. Well that is how Helen was seen by some who understood — see how she betrayed and humiliated the Admiral; no wonder he didn’t want to have sex with her after having children by her.
Vicinus seems to have written several books that sound rather intriguing, on the Victorians. Have you read any of her other books?
No I’ve not read any other books. I haven’t got that much time and am choosing to read other studies by other scholars of single women across the eras: most of those writing books (maybe all) are women. In type Vicinus reminds me of Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction
https://ellenandjim.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/victorian-web-martha-stannard-holmess-fictions-of-affliction/
A thorough general point of view moves across all their works.
As one reading this book silently alongside Ellen (I have not yet read the conclusion or compiled my notes–I meant to last night but got exhausted and read LWoolf instead) — the Codrington piece and the Hill book (which I find more stunning in certains ways), I agree with much of what is said–and, Ellen, it is well said.
My overarching take on all this is that woman’s equality is a step by step process and women had to and have to work from where they are and build and build–as you rightly note there is opposition every step of the way: women, I would say, can’t just climb the mountain, arduous enough in and of itself, but also must hike around men or push stubbornly blocking men out of the way. Being able to leave a husband or establishing a legal precedent against wife beating are in a way small steps–but also massive steps. I should look up my notes but I heard a talk a few years ago on a Supreme Court case in the 1970s (US of course) about which feminists were very excited because they thought surely, the abuse being so egregious, it would set a precedent for disallowing spousal assault. Well, the judges decided it was simply being “sentimental” to allow the details of this particular case to allow setting of a precedent–of course men had to have to freedom to control their households and this needed to include the right to strike their wives if need be.
We see similar things today over corporal punishment of children. The situation is frustrating: women get to some new plateau and another obstacle is placed against them: something is thrown into their faces. Emma Goldman was, wrongly, against woman’s suffragism–I have just been reading some of her essays vis-a-vis all this–but she did rightly note that women could easily be co-opted to vote the way men wanted–she saw clearly the vote wasn’t the end all and be all–that by itself it would not be a magic bullet. I already knew of the truly horrific treatment meted out to the suffragettes. I don’t for a minute believe that a right should be rejected because it isn’t magic: everything is something: men understand that.
The greatest threat now is that “feminism” is being turned into making women into highly sexualized versions of “strong, kick-ass” men, as willing as a certain kind of man is to wield a gun or karate chop an opponent, as if this destructive, idiotic behavior is what women should to aspire to! We do need new paradigms–and it is a struggle every step of the way.
I hope what I wrote didn’t imply that the vote was not a massive step – I suppose there is that implication in the very idea that the vote has not gained what was hoped and a long book devoted to ways of power for women individually and as a group. The vote is not power in the same way. But we can see the violence with which men reacted and of course the real gains were important. It needed to built upon, and it did not give any way of changing the structures within which voting and choice of candidates, and the development of issues occurred.
Did you mean 1970 or 1870?
I couldn’t agree more that this idea that violence in a woman is the equivalent of her having power. That she asserts herself is not enough — how does she assert herself, on what grounds, what does she ask for?
A friend: “in the 1850s Midlands, one of the themes I have discovered in my material (and my interpretation of it) is how clever women, especially poor clever women, managed to occupy their minds as well as support themselves and likely also their families.
My reply: “Vicinus is very eye-opening: she identifies with middle class women and (if you have time to read it) takes sometimes conservative positions. Your comment makes me remember Gaskell’s female characters in her industrial novels set up north.”
I did mean the 1870s–as for the vote, I didn’t mean to imply you said it was unimportant, only Emma Goldman–and she was right on one level, as it didn’t solve all problems, but yet an important achievement. It wouldn’t have been so viciously fought if it didn’t have some power attached.
Oh yes the intensity of the violence and pushback shows how important the vote was even if everything was done to keep its extent limited. First the men and society (and public media) worked to make sure no representative was a woman. Unthinkable for a women to run for public office … In a way Vicinus wrote her book to answer Virginia Woolf’s question: why has the vote had so little effect when it should have had so much more. Probably the institutions Vicinus focuses on is not enough. That opening chapters about attitudes is important. Also she omits working class women! They matter as nowadays the world having so shrunk the knowledged “western” women or people have that a substantial percentage of the human race, women, live in imprisoned conditions, hide themselves and their bodies in burkas as if they were shameful is important, influential somehow
Bob Lapides:
Thanks for this report, Ellen. I was sorry that Vicinus didn’t deal with widows in the 19C, as they were an illuminating contrast. They were often landladies of inns or of private rooms to let, which meant they had more agency than was usual for women. As previously married, they able to express interest in men and/or sex more than other women could.
it was good to be reminded of the hostility to the suffragettes. I’m reminded of the attacks today on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes, as well as on strong older women politicians.
My reply:
Bob, I think Vicinus omissions a real lacunae and shows a flaw in Vicinus book, but I must admit widows are omitted group from feminist and other studies of women living alone repeatedly. Studies of them as a group apart, but not with others. Also that she doesn’t study working class women. She is clearly interested in power and identifies with the middle class women – as a tenured professor herself. And cards on the table, if you read her essays you find she identifies with lesbian women, and in her repeated finding of “spirituality” as an actuating motive equal to others and the way she puts the importance of religion, I suspect she is religious too. That’s fine but it skews some of her arguments a bit too much – especially about boarding school bonding. I found some of what she accepted troubling: she comes near to agreeing with Trollope that only an upper class person can run an organization. She does not say this is ontological but she does not emphasize sufficiently how such women are what they are from their class background from the time they are tots.
A companion blog: Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller: Liberty A Better Husband, 178001840, around the same time, a portrait of women of the same class in the US.