Free Feminism by Margaret Walters Page B

women.
    She was eloquent, for example, about the situation of wives trapped in miserable marriages. ‘We are used’, she wrote, ‘to tales of drunken ruffians, stumbling home from the gin-houses’ who assault their miserable wives. But ‘who could have imagined it possible that well-born and well-educated men, in honourable professions, should be guilty of the same brutality?’ She occasionally lapsed into conventional sentimentality:
    we want [woman’s] sense of the law of love to complete man’s sense of the law of justice; we want her influence inspiring virtue by gentle promptings within, to complete man’s external legislation of morality . . . We want her genius for detail, her tenderness for age and suffering, her comprehension of the wants of childhood . . . .
    But as a well-regarded journalist, she backed the idea of university 54
    education for women and campaigned quietly for a Married Women’s Property Act. But she always insisted, rather too emphatically to be credible, that her feminism was nothing personal: ‘If I have become in mature years a ‘‘Woman’s Rights woman’’ it is not because in my own person I have been made to feel a woman’s wrongs.’
    Marriage in the novel
    Marriage remained a central and engrossing theme for 19th-century novelists, but relations between husbands and wives were rarely seen as particularly fulfilling. In Charlotte Th
    e early 19th centur
    Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), the heroine’s love affair with Mr Rochester is a more sophisticated, and haunting, version of Gothic melodrama, though she is allowed a happier ending –
    once Rochester has been left crippled and helpless. Mrs y:
    Gaskell’s heroines all want, however vaguely, something reformin
    more than convention allows them. Mary Ann Evans – who, interestingly, wrote as George Eliot – explores the often dif-g w
    ficult relations between brother and sister in o
    The Mill on the
    men
    Floss (1860). In Middlemarch (1871–2), the intelligent, ideal-istic Dorothea, seeking to devote her life to something – or someone – worthy, is soon trapped in a miserable marriage.
    Though she finally achieves happiness of a kind with another man, she feels that there was something better that she might have done. George Meredith’s The Egoist (1871) is a chilling study of a marriage in which the woman is simply a status symbol; his Diana of the Crossways (1885) offers a troubling fictional version of Caroline Norton’s disastrous marriage.
    George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893) is a sympathetic account of spinsters caring for an orphaned baby who, they hope, will grow up to become ‘a brave woman’.
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    Chapter 5
    The late 19th century:
    campaigning women
    It was not until the second half of the 19th century that anything like a true women’s ‘movement’ began to emerge in England. This movement converged particularly around Barbara Leigh Smith and the group of friends who had become known – after one of their early meeting places – as ‘the Ladies of Langham Place’. The group initiated more organized campaigns around issues that had already been clearly defined: women’s urgent need for better education and for increased possibilities of employment, as well as the improvement of the legal position of married women.
    The women came together, in part, as a reaction against what seemed to be a narrowing definition of ‘femininity’ and an increasingly conventional and constricting notion of a proper
    ‘womanly sphere’. A Victorian woman’s highest virtue seems to have been nervously, if frequently, equated with genteel passivity. A middle-class woman who had to earn her own living might be lucky enough to find a poorly paid position as a governess, even though she had probably been skimpily educated herself. Few other occupations were open to her. And there was still no way out for a woman who found herself unhappily married.
    Sadly, even women with impressive achievements of their own,