Almost since its inception, fiction has focused on social problems, including the rights of women. By its nature, art reflects its era, and much fiction proved to be political, supporting the rights of women and other marginalized groups, either overtly or more covertly through suggested themes. From the 18th century onward, written fiction and nonfiction by both women and men began to examine social causes.

By the mid-19th century, the suffrage movement focused on gaining various rights for women and gathered strength in both the United States and in England; its aims naturally incorporated into the literature of both countries. The suffrage movement focused not only on gaining women the vote so they might have a right to help shape their own destinies through law, it also supported votes for African Americans in the United States, a woman’s right to custody of her children, a woman’s right to own property, and also temperance, as male alcoholism contributed to the abuse and the annual murders of hundreds of women and children.

Mary Wollstonecraft, mother of novelist Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, was one of the earliest women writers to protest the legal restrictions placed on women in her seminal nonfiction treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792). In the first justification of women’s rights, Wollstonecraft constructed an elaborate critique of 18th-century misogyny, claiming that men projected a view of women as weak creatures in order to control them politically, economically, and socially. Other publications, including Catharine Macaulay’s Letters on Education (1790), had argued for certain rights for women, but A Vindication represented the first claim that existing legal “protection” of women in fact transformed them into an inferior class.

Not only did she lambaste writers such as John Milton, Alexander Pope, and Jacques Rousseau for promoting imagery of weak women, she took female readers to task for their fondness for romance, a genre that continued to depict women as passive, ignorant beings. Wollstonecraft’s novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), an autobiographical account of the horrendous struggle for survival thrust upon a woman protagonist, countered those images. She also began shortly before her death following childbirth a fictionalized version of A Vindication titled The Wrongs of Woman: Or, Maria, demonstrating a man’s power to commit his wife to an insane asylum with no real proof of insanity—a theme that would become an enduring one in women’s literature and of special importance to feminist critics.

Wollstonecraft’s contemporaries, Hannah More and Fanny Burney, also wrote in support of women’s rights. They battled 17th-century beliefs that a woman’s womb would wander about her body when she was emotionally upset, and that reading and learning would cause a woman’s womb to shrink, thereby endangering her capacity to give birth to male heirs. Wollstonecraft affected a new generation of writers, including George Eliot, with her visionary ideas.

By 1800, despite the American and French Revolutions’ bid for human rights, women remained as confined to what became known as the domestic sphere than ever. While few authors focused overtly on women’s rights in their fiction, feminist critics later offered a feminist reading of the enduring Frankenstein (1818), a novel by Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley. Some critics consider the monster as representing women, marginalized and controlled by the book’s male protagonist. His developing intellectual and physical independence as he moves outside the restrictions of law suggests the fate of nonconformist women. Even Frankenstein’s monstrous form reflects a male vision of women who fail to bend to the wishes of men, becoming monstrous anomalies.

Another early-19th-century writer, Jane Austen, fashioned a number of novels in which she emphasized women’s lack of rights to inherit property, which would become a major focus of the suffrage movement.

Movements to gain rights for workers, most famously the Chartist revolutions, included many working women, and in 1831, the Westminster Review included an anonymous article supporting suffrage for females, support that would spread to the Parliament as early as 1832. Chartist causes would later become a topic for several popular socially conscious novels, including Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1850).

By 1839, Parliament supported Lady Caroline Norton’s famous bid to regain custody of her children lost in divorce, causing her to publish several pamphlets, such as The Natural Right of a Mother to the Custody of Her Child (1837), leading to the Custody Act of 1839.

In America, anti-slavery efforts would later become part of the suffrage movement, spurred on by London’s 1840 World Anti-Slavery Convention. From that meeting grew a strong suffrage push in America, led by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, later to be joined by Lucy Stone and Susan B. Anthony. In England, comparable figures arose, including Barbara Leigh Smith (later Barbara Bodichon), whose 1855 petition supporting a Married Women’s Property Act brought her to the forefront of the movement. She helped found a feminist newspaper in 1857 called The Englishwoman’s Journal, later becoming a leader in women’s suffrage and helping to form England’s first Women’s Suffrage Committee.

Among writers supporting the cause was Harriet Taylor, who reported for the Westminster Review about the first Worcester Women’s Rights convention held in 1851 in Massachusetts, the United States. She would later marry philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose 1869 The Subjection of Women was informed by his wife’s vision and became seminal in advancing rights for women the world over. When he was elected to the House of Commons, he helped bring about the first debate on women’s suffrage in Parliament. While English women would not gain the vote until after World War I, the movement never weakened until their vision was achieved. The process leading to that achievement is mirrored in British fiction of the 19th century.

An ideology of conforming women prompted an early vision of a weak being prone to hysteria (from the Greek word hyster for “womb”), still present in Victorian times. Acceptable female stock characters in literature included the whore, the angel of the house, and the invalid. Ironically, some women writers promoted such imagery in conduct books, designed to educate young women in proper behavior. Mrs. Sarah Ellis in 1844 suggested in her conduct book that women’s very existence, or self-identity, depended on their serving others. In such an atmosphere of the feminine ideal, the concept of women voting for their own rights amused many. Some believed that civic activity would bring on fainting, emotionally overpowering hysteria-prone women. They were expected to appear fragile, prompting many women to engage in ridiculous fads, including drinking vinegar to bring on a frail complexion.

William Makepeace Thackeray created an independent, active woman in the heroine of Vanity Fair (1848), Becky Sharp, depicted as an immoral, improvident, manipulating shrew. He contrasted her with Amelia Smedley, an angelic, impossibly good heroine. While Thackeray satirized both these women as caricatures, they were based on an awful truth of the Victorian perception of women.

Novelists began to counter female stereotypes in the 1840s thesis novels, designed to emphasize the mistreatment of marginalized groups, such as factory workers, including women. Examples included Benjamin Disraeli’s Sybil, or The Two Nations (1845) and Mrs. Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), as well as many of Charles Dickens’s novels. In Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1838), he had protested the treatment of working-class children and also included Nancy, a prostitute cast in an unusually heroic light. Even such attempts to improve visions of women sometimes promoted stereotypes, as did Nancy in her representation of the one-dimensional and totally unrealistic “whore with a heart of gold” that would continue to appear in popular literature.

Already victimized by a patriarchal society, Nancy’s goodness leads her to brutal murder by a man, in a scene representing the large amount of violence enacted on women in popular literature. Later critics suggested that some readers would see Nancy’s murder as justice for her scandalous lifestyle, rather than as the culmination of the social injustice that forced women into self-support through the use of sex.

Gaskell departed from her early socially conscious novels in Cranford (1853), largely proclaimed her best work, which promotes a distinctly feminine point of view. She features a community of women forced to practice what she euphemistically refers to as “elegant economy” in the absence of supportive males. It skillfully depicts the lifestyle of a vanishing group, marginalized by the encroaching mechanization and dehumanization of British culture.

Women writers attempting to make statements against the disempowerment of women sometimes instead advanced the cause for control with double messages in their literature. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), celebrated for emphasizing the deplorable treatment of female governesses, was autobiographical, based on the author’s own poor treatment in that condition. Hers was a timely topic; in 1840 the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution had been founded to help “ladies in temporary distress” and was immediately overwhelmed by the application for aid. The founders of that group hosted a series of lectures, which evolved into Queens College for women in 1848.

As pertinent to women’s needs as Brontë’s novel proved, it also contained a monstrous woman in the character of Bertha Mason Rochester, the madwoman contained by her husband in the attic without any legal recourse. Similarly, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, in her verse novel, Aurora Leigh (1857), celebrated the artistic nature of her noble protagonist but pitted her against an independent-minded and monstrous Lady Waldemar. Both those works had the intention of advancing women’s freedoms, yet worked against their own efforts by including romanticized stereotypical female images.

Other authors, such as George Eliot, transformed ideas about women and their problems into fiction, although she did not write specifically for that purpose. In Adam Bede (1859), she highlighted cruel attitudes toward women pregnant out of wedlock that led to infanticide, while her later Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (1871–72 and 1874–76) focused on a bright female protagonist who, guided by her culture, chooses to subjugate her own intellectual needs to those of her husband. In her final novel, Daniel Deronda (1876), she suggests that women lead lives limited by the goodwill of male relatives. Like the Brontë sisters, Eliot adopted a male pseudonym in order to publish; Jane Austen had published anonymously, in order to avoid resistance to the female voice in literature.

For decades, those women would remain among the few acceptable in the English language canon for reading within educational institutions. Only in the mid-20th century would women find their voice in popular literature with the onset of the feminist movement. Due to the interests of new historicism, Marxist criticism, and especially feminist criticism, women writers would take their rightful place in the canon, and newly distinguished representatives of color would also appear. All would agree with Browning’s character Aurora Leigh that “every creature, female as the male, / Stands single in responsible act and thought.”

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Contribution to Feminism

Bibliography
Eustance, Claire, Joan Ryan, and Laura Ugolini, eds. Charting Directions in British Suffrage History. New York: Leicester University Press, 2000.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar, eds. The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women: Traditions in English. 2nd ed. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996.
Holton, Sandra Stanley. Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement. New York: Routledge, 1996.
Perkin, J. Russell. A Reception-History of George Eliot’s Fiction. Rochester, N.Y.: University of Rochester Press, 1990.
Tillotson, Kathleen. Novels of the Eighteen-Forties. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954.
Todd, Janet. Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.

Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis

Tags: 19th century women writers, Charlotte Brontë Jane Eyre feminism, Chartist movement women, conduct books Victorian women, early feminist writers, early women's education, Elizabeth Barrett Browning Aurora Leigh, female authors and pseudonyms, feminist canonical literature, Feminist literary criticism, feminist literature history, feminist readings of frankenstein, feminist themes in fiction, George Eliot Middlemarch feminism, history of women’s literature canon, Jane Austen women's rights, legal rights of women 18th century, literature and the women’s vote, Marxist feminist literary analysis, Mary Shelley Frankenstein feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft A Vindication, Nancy Oliver Twist feminist critique, New Historicism feminist reading, Romantic and Victorian feminist fiction, stereotypes of women in literature, suffrage in British novels, suffrage movement, Victorian women’s roles, women and hysteria in literature, women and property rights, women in British fiction, women in the domestic sphere, women writers and social reform, women's legal history UK, women's suffrage literature, women’s intellectual freedom in fiction, women’s rights in literature