Philippa Levine. Victorian Feminism: 1850-1900.
Hall, Donald E.
Philippa Levine. Victorian Feminism: 1850-1900. Tallahassee:
Florida State UP, 1987.
Jane Purvis. Hard Lessons: The Lives and Educations of
Working-class Women in Nineteenth-century England. Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota P, 1989.
At least since Zillah Eisenstein published Capitalist Patriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism in 1979, certain feminists have been
working diligently to bring an explicit class consciousness to their
work and to find productive common ground between feminist and Marxist
perspectives on the dynamics of social oppression. While fine points of
theory remain irreconcilable, there is a growing body of feminist work
that sensitively examines the various ways class and gender both reflect
and reinforce each other. At their best, studies doing such "double
duty" help account for the wide range of women' s lived
experiences under patriarchy and capitalism. At the other extreme,
however, one occasionally finds feminist works that purport to examine
class issues but that come dangerously close to excusing women's
own participation in class oppression. The two books that I am reviewing
here reflect both of these extremes, for while Purvis's insightful
Hard Lessons is a comprehensive and sensitive examination of
nineteenth-century working-class women's lives, Levine's
Victorian Feminism is finally a thin and ill-supported defense of
oppressive women from the Victorian middle and upper classes.
Victorian Feminism sets out to accomplish two distinct goals:
"This study is partly an exercise in resurrection and partly a long
overdue corrective to the many inaccuracies and assumptions which have
dogged the history of pre-suffragette feminism" (11). As a work of
"resurrection," Victorian Feminism is designed as an overview
of fifty years of feminist agitation and theorizing. As a
"corrective," Levine's study seeks to explore and explain
the class biases within nineteenth-century women's movements. To do
so successfully would certainly require more than the approximately 130
pages of actual text that Levine has produced. The potential reader
should know that Victorian Feminism is not a comprehensive study of mid-
and late-nineteenth-century women's movements. Levine's
chapters seem more like haphazard musings on issues surrounding
Victorian feminism than systematic and scholarly examinations of topics
such as marriage, education, and employment. For instance, Levine
devotes a full chapter to the right for women's property rights in
the 1850s but never mentions Caroline Norton and the divorce trial that
galvanized the press and spurred the efforts of the property rights
movement. Similarly, in a work that declares itself interested in
"historical contexts" (11), Levine ignores all influences of
nineteenth-century American and French feminism and speaks of Victorian
feminism after 1850 as if it had no debt to earlier movements. For those
readers who are looking for an overview of nineteenth-century
women's movements, Olive Banks's Faces of Feminism and Jane
Rendall' s The Origins of Modern Feminism are much more useful.
When Levine turns her attention to class issues within Victorian
women's movements she does produce some original and interesting
commentary, demonstrating convincingly that "one of the major
handicaps to really thorough feminist organization" was the fact
that "different classes in Victorian society occupied separate
worlds" (106). But even as she recognizes this, Levine is primarily
interested in apologizing for elitist Victorian feminists. She argues
that conservative political stands gave privileged Victorian women
"a remarkable freedom and power" (151), but never adequately
explores the brutal oppression upon which such privilege depended.
Levine completely ignores those women who worked as servants in the
households of "conservative feminists," and while she asserts
that these feminists subversively attempted to broaden "the notion
of sisterhood beyond ... the parameters of class" (122-24), Levine
makes only sketchy references to times when "feminist organizations
voiced directly the stated needs of working-class women"(123). In
fact, Levine speaks of Victorian "feminism" as if it were a
single, unified entity that somehow transcended class. Particularly
ill-considered is her use of the term "feminist" (94) to
describe all women's educational institutions of the period, even
ones that obviously promoted male and upper-class interests. Such
overgeneralizations undercut Levine's declarations of her
sensitivity to diversity and render suspect her stated desire to show
how "women, in effect, offered an alternative morality inherently
critical of the ideology in which they claimed belief" (151).
Happily, such problems do not plague Jane Purvis's wonderful
study Hard Lessons; in fact, Purvis's intent is the opposite of
Levine's. While the latter argues that "the problems facing
working-class women in industrial England were.., not ... far removed
from the needs of their middle-class sisters" (105), Purvis focuses
on the enormous differences in the daily lives of women from different
backgrounds and classes. She first provides a clear rationale for her
study by demonstrating the classism fundamental to previous examinations
of Victorian women's experiences, even as she argues that "the
diversity of women's lives, income and opportunity is such as to
make one cautious of applying social class labels" at all (17).
Purvis's sensitivity is repeatedly shown in her attention to the
diverse problems of both married and single working-class women, and in
her examination of the daily lives of women whose occupations ranged
from factory work to schoolteaching. She argues convincingly that
working-class women were in many ways the scapegoats of Victorian
society, not only considered lazy and dishonest workers, but also
"blamed for a host of social problems among the working classes,
such as alcoholism, crime, prostitution, spread of disease, a high
infant mortality rate, poor educational effort among children and lack
of worldly success" (66). Purvis's Foucauldian study looks at
the numerous mechanisms through which oppressive ideologies were
deployed. Unlike Levine, Purvis carefully delineates those educational
institutions that might be termed "feminist" for their
sensitivity to women's issues and needs, and those that were simply
vehicles for the further marginalization of women in general and
working-class women in particular.
Purvis devotes the second half of her book to women's
experiences at Mechanics Institutes and in Working Men's and
Women's Colleges; she returns often to the issue of
"access," showing that even when women were allowed into
schools, they were often denied the privilege of using libraries and
reading rooms, and were often barred from attending lectures on subjects
that were deemed male "domains." In tracing changes over the
century, Purvis charts the rise of women's participation in
educational administration and its most immediate result: the opening up
of curricula and the integration of female speakers into lecture series.
Nevertheless, Purvis recognizes that some women were themselves active
in class oppression; in particular, she takes to task those individuals
whom Levine wishes to celebrate, middle- and upper-class feminists who
in trying to "expand sisterhood" also effectively silenced
working-class individuals whose labor they depended upon and whose lives
they could not understand.
Purvis argues effectively for "the importance of integrating a
class and gender analysis" (224) and proves herself successful at
negotiating the tricky problems arising in such studies. She achieves
her goals through constant attention to lived experience and careful and
detailed analysis of data. Hard Lessons is an invaluable source of
statistics, rosters and case histories, which will make it of great
interest to scholars working in nineteenth-century social history and
women's studies. Purvis's twenty-page bibliography alone is
worth the price of her book, but it is her overall sensitivity in
handling difficult issues that makes this a work for others to emulate.
Donald E. Hall
University of Maryland
