Martha Vicinus

Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment.

Preface: configuring feminism historically. Part 1 Private lives: family, faith and politics reappropriating adulthood understanding the empty places - love, friendship, and womens networks. Part 2 Public commitment: disrupting the dark continent breaking the male monopoly - politics, law and feminism invading the public sphere - employment, education and the middle class women nurturing the sickly plants - women, labour and unionism. Conclusion: organizing principles - re-reading the political geneaology of feminism.

Lesbian Perversity and Victorian Marriage: The 1864 Codrington Divorce Trial

How and when did society first recognize womens homoerotic bonds? Were these romantic friendships fully accepted, or were they seen as problematic? Did the women involved see themselves as lesbians? These and other questions have been raised over the past twenty years by historians of lesbian sexuality. When Lillian Faderman in her pioneering survey of European and American lesbians declared the nineteenth century as the golden age of unproblematic romantic friendships, historians quickly responded with evidence to the contrary. Much of this debate has been focused on whether or not women could be considered “lesbian” before they claimed (or had forced on them) a publicly acknowledged identity. But the modern lesbian did not appear one day fully formed in the case studies of the fin-de-siecle sexologists; rather she was already a recognizable, if shadowy, subject for gossip among the sophisticated by at least the 1840s and 1850s. By examining closely a single divorce trial, I hope to show that literary and legal elites acknowledged lesbian sexuality in a variety of complex ways. Their uneasy disapproval encompassed both a self-conscious silence in the face of evidence and a desire to control information, lest it corrupt the innocent. Yet who can define the line between the ignorant and the informed? The very public discussion of the Codrington divorce, and most especially the role of the feminist, Emily Faithfull, in alienating Helen Codringtons affections from her husband, demonstrate the recognition of female homosexual behavior.

Henry and Mary Ponsonby: Life at the Court of Queen Victoria (review)

VICTORIAN STUDIES marriage, gender, and sexuality. Covert’s treatment of the Creightons’ Oxford years makes no use of scholarship on the gendered culture of Oxford in the 1860s and 1870s and, indeed, dismisses any consideration of male homoeroticism (collapsed into “homosexuality”) as improbable because of Mandell Creighton’s “high moral stance” (44). The treatment of Louise Creighton’s involvement with social purity organizations is inadequate to the extent that it is sometimes unclear if Covert really understands that he is discussing sex. The National Vigilance Association is an organization which “sought to raise the level of morality among women and children [. . .] [through] preventative tactics” (190); the rescue movement has something to do with “moral and physical intervention and the rehabilitation of wayward individuals, especially women” (234); and Louise came to “focus more diligently on what she called ‘the purity question’” in the 1890s, but Covert scarcely gestures toward the by now immense literature on debates about sex, danger, prostitution, and disease in the 1880s and 1890s, and it has no impact on his analysis. Nor does he explicate the context of Louise Creighton’s response to Christabel Pankhurst’s The Great Scourge and How to End It (1913), instead constructing an underinformed contrast between Creighton as “religious and moral” and other feminists as “secular” and “political” (304–05). The complex class politics of Louise’s reform activity are similarly unexplored and her sincerity is asserted as if it alone were the historical issue; Mandell’s participation in debates about labor is intriguing but is also proffered mainly to prove his moral superiority. Throughout the book vague and cliched gestures at context stand in for analysis, and dubious claims are offhandedly offered as fact. For example, Covert claims that the “critical problem” of the late nineteenth century was “the growing number of parents who were professing no religious beliefs at all” (259). A Victorian Marriage will be useful to scholars who, having already encountered the Creightons, wish for details and information on parts of the subjects’ lives they may not already know; it will certainly also serve as a source of chronological and institutional clarifications and a very rich source of bibliographic information which should lead to more detailed readings of both Creightons’ many works. Covert’s interest in Mandell Creighton’s historical scholarship and views on ecclesiastical questions should rightly draw more attention to these subjects, and his presentation of Louise’s later writings—she wrote thirteen books after Mandell’s death—is tantalizing as well. If Covert’s work is most valuable as a reference and a provocation, rather than a work of historical analysis, we should nonetheless be grateful for the labors he has completed and those he now will help make possible. Kali Israel University of Michigan

Educate, Agitate, Organize: 100 Years of Fabian Socialism

1. Foundation and Basis 2. Practical Work and Propoganda 3. Suburbs and the Provinces 4. Planning the Campaign for Labour 5. The Hutchinson Trust 6. Labour Representation 7. Extending the Horizon 8. Mr Wells and Reform 9. The Nursery and the Groups 10. The Woman Question 11. The Fabian Holiday 12. The Fabian Research Department 13. Evolution Not Revolution 14. Sectional Activities Between the Wars 15. Fabians and Government 16. The SSIP and the Socialist League 17. The Research Bureau and the Society 18. The Colonial and International Bureaux 19. The Home Front 20. Third Time Lucky 21. Opposition Again 22. Friendly Critics 23. One Hundred Years Old Appendix Officers of the Fabian Society

A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women

Introduction: New Trends in the Study of the Victorian Women Martha Vicinus 1. Victorian Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Womens Property Law, 1857-1882 Lee Holcombe 2. The Forgotten woman of the Period: Penny Weekly Family Magazines of the 1840s and 1850s Sally Mitchell 3. Feminism and Female Emigration, 1861-1886 A. James Hammerton 4. The Making of an Outcast Group: Prostitutes and Working Women in Nineteenth-Century Plymouth and Southampton Judith Walkowitz 5. Image and Reality: The Actress and Society Christopher Kent 6. Women and Degrees at Cambridge University, 1862-1897 Rita McWilliams-Tullberg 7. Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House Carol Christ 8. Sex and Death in Victorian England: An Examination of Age- and Sex-Specific Death Rates, 1840-1910 Sheila Ryan Johansson 9. Sexuality in Britain, 1800-1900: Some Suggested Revisions F. Barry Smith 10. The Women of England in a Centry of Social Change, 1815-1914: A Selected Bibliography, Part II Barbara Kanner Notes Index