[In the following excerpt from her book-length study of Victorian working women's writing, Swindells explores the various literary modes adapted by nineteenth-century women autobiographers (from romance and melodrama to religious discourse), and describes these writers' interest in the advancement of women's rights through their literary pursuits.]

I have been placing the emphasis, in writing about working women autobiographers, on an experience which, though it has its individualistic and gender-specific aspects, is in important ways shared with the experience of working-class men. From now on I intend (indeed, I can do nothing else) to give more emphasis to gender differentiation. This is to say that, in my reading of the autobiographies, I am concentrating more specifically than before on the subjects and subjectivities of adulthood and that that concentration properly pulls towards a greater consideration of that which is gender-specific. This is partly to say that the accounts we have of working-class womanhood have tended to place the emphasis, whether by author, editor or collector, on childhood, girlhood, schooling, rather than adulthood. Women, it seems, have been most interesting as children (and there are other histories and symbolization processes which see women as children), sharing with men or boys those common features of oppression residing in childhood. Recently, there has been more interest than before in working women as wives and as mothers (Working-Class Wives and Maternity, Letters from Working Women being two examples¹), but, as with accounts of women which turn out to be accounts of childhood, many of these accounts, or rather the criteria of historical and editorial selection which have operated in relation to them, leave that same sense of a very limited subjectivity, bound and categorized by limited, often stereotypical or prone to the stereotypic, paradigms: childhood, the wife, the mother. A move towards a greater concentration on the gender-specific is therefore a move towards a greater concentration on subjectivity.²

This greater emphasis on gender differentiation, on female experiences, than has so far been the case in this account, is also a move towards a consideration of some of those experiences which are aggregated in the cliché, ‘women's issues’, and ultimately it will challenge that taxonomy. It is a revealing paradox that those experiences catalogued or typified as ‘women's issues’ are frequently the very matters which have been least articulated by women. ‘Women's issues’, it seems, are part of a male discourse which signals with that cliché, that containment, those subjects which the man judges too difficult for discussion in mixed-sex company. The male discourse thus signals that which it prefers to render or retain as inaudible, invisible. And since it is the male voice which has so frequently articulated, formulated in the name of the public, that discourse which misconstrues the private, the label ‘women's issues’ (its signals, its implied absence, difficulties) has not had the challenge it should from women, from women's experiences.

Initially, I therefore intend to write about that experience of ‘woman's sphere’ (man's construction of the site of ‘woman's issues’) which women have articulated so little, about which we know, in that sense, so little. This is to commit myself, too, to a belief in a materialism which is open to different constructions in discourse. ‘Women's issues’ do, in this sense, signify a material reality.³

The aspects to which I wish to give significance in my own partial account are … to do with the social group, working women, in tension with individual, autobiographical subjects, taking, initially, sexuality and feminist politics as signal female experiences, women's issues. In writing about sexuality, I give emphasis to those ideologies of marriage in the nineteenth century (located more broadly than in the institution of marriage alone), which define, for women, prospective relationships with men, actual relationships with men, and also relationships with work, although I do not give that set of relations centrality at this stage of the account. Emphasis is also given to the collapse of these ideologies at such moments as domestic violence, which has been treated, frequently, as outside public discussion—a woman's issue.

In writing about politics, the primary interest will be in that range of activities in the nineteenth century which is embraced in descriptions from ‘women's rights’ to ‘militant suffrage’, having its basis in dissatisfaction with practices and definitions of ‘woman's sphere’.

One of the characteristic features of autobiography as a genre is that the relationship between authorial subject (the ‘I’ central to the narrative and to a particular social group) and narrative movement is peculiarly direct. Frequently, this means that the autobiographer attaches to the construction or dramatization of self a notion of progress in society, which is also the narrative progression. The rise of the working man from rags to riches, stereotypical of a certain kind of autobiography, takes the form of a narrative development which is also that social progress named success, in conventional, normative terms. Autobiography has a particular investment in this idea of a unique or exceptional advance—and sometimes in the inversion of failure, the decline from fortune, which nevertheless has many of the same assumptions. Self-advancement is also a social and narrative progress.

In class-conscious autobiography, the relationship of the subject to this social and narrative progress does not comply with this obvious fit. A class-conscious autobiographer invests in furthering not only the individual, the autobiographical self, moving through the narrative and through society, but a particular social group such as the working class. This type of autobiography therefore carries the freight of a narrative direction which subsumes the autobiographical ‘I’, with its conventional association with individualism, with personal interest in the interests of a particular social group. This kind of autobiography is thus a more complicated, even contradictory, version of the genre than the more easy fit of conventional autobiography.

In reading women's experiences in autobiographical form, the formulation of self-advancement and of subjectivity, their relation to the genre, is more complicated again. And for working women, the relationship between social status and narrative structure is peculiarly problematic. For working women, particularly in the first half of the nineteenth century, the models of social advance (and of the advance of the social group, working women) barely exist, in any form, in the social formation. Neither can working women call upon a clearly defined class consciousness which unites the social group, working women. What working women autobiographers have to do therefore, given that absence of a model of material progress, given that absence of routes, is to construct subjectivities by calling on particular representations, particular genres, in which women are at least visible, though frequently in a reified, idealized form.

We could not have expected, anyway, that, having discovered working women writing about ideologies of marriage and about women's politics, the discovery would also be of a discourse suddenly liberated from the containment of ‘women's issues’ or from a history of representation which understands and creates sexual ideology (in terms not confined to texts) in particular ways.

While working-class men may frequently organize their autobiographies around particular notions of advance in waged labour—through acquiring skill or various modes of organization—working women are more likely to turn to ‘the literary’, to genres, for terms in which to express and construct the experiences central to their lives. What is significant, indeed, is the apparent inescapability of genres (of fiction, of melodrama, of romance) in the autobiographies, as if ‘the literary’ itself is the key (possibly the only) means of construction of self. When such a use of ‘the literary’ is at its most acute or most transparent, it almost invariably means that experience has moved into the most fraught areas of sexuality, of ‘women's issues’ as that category allocated to women as not public, kept from articulation. It is the tensions between genres and harnessing genres (melodrama, romance, and so on) which express female sexuality and its problems. And occasionally in the writings, there is a slippage from ‘the literary’, from intertextuality, to a more direct materialism: the glimpsed material world itself in tension with ‘the literary’.

An understanding of subjectivity in the autobiographies and of their narrative modes therefore requires a concentration upon the detail of the writing, upon textuality itself as the response to that which is unprecedented and that which is difficult in formulating experience. In order to understand this difficulty, it is necessary to take sexuality in its broadest terms, for it is not only the sex act or the interpersonal relations of the sexes which are at issue, but the whole range of female experience of the world. And it is not only, for the autobiographers, that textuality is a response to difficulty, indeed impossibility, but that areas of sexuality, particularly of domesticity, are in their gender-specific histories, somehow tainted, lacking in legitimacy as significant discourses. ‘The literary’ here enters as the moral mediator, in a sense as the compensation for those areas of experience which are tainted.

In harnessing literary genres as central in the construction of subjectivity, the autobiographers thus tend to operate within dominant sexual ideologies which are nonetheless revealing in their slippages, their fraught relations. They even utilize different versions of the feminine ideal to make good the ‘lack’ (the taint) in a given area. For instance, when Mary Smith rejects the idea of marriage (presumably not a very feminine thing to do), she is called upon to replace it with a competing ideal (a ‘higher vision’). ‘I had higher visions than matrimony: literature, poetry, and religion gleamed fair before me.’⁴ (Most of the autobiographers quoted here pursue ideals competing with matrimony, all but two being unmarried, separated, or widowed.) Similarly, in compensating for a bad marriage, Ellen Weeton idealizes motherhood, with herself as mother, through ‘the literary’:

It seems probable from present circumstances that my child will know no more of her mother than what she may learn from these pages. Nay, even these may be withheld from her by the same influence that has poisoned the comforts of my later years, should it come to the knowledge of my husband that such a writing has been produced. I therefore earnestly desire anyone who may see this History, not to betray me to him; for it is surely proper that my daughter should be acquainted with the truth, and all the truth, as regards a mother who loves her dearly, and of whom, could she but know her, she would find she would never need be ashamed.⁵

Again, as with Mary Smith, ‘the literary’ enters as the defence against moral fallibility. It is through writing this ‘History’ that Ellen Weeton can make moral good. ‘It is surely proper’, it is ‘the truth’, it is the protection against ‘shame’. The reader is requested to enter into this moral code of literary chivalry.

‘The literary’ thus carries the moral force which the life, from the perspective of the autobiographers, appears to lack, because it is working women's experience.

When Rose Allen writes about a congenial marriage and courtship, the move is directly across the genre, from autobiography to fiction. The scenario is as follows. Throughout the early part of the narrative, an arbitrary intervention occurs in the form of a friendly and handsome young man, rescuing Rose at moments of acute domestic and emotional trauma. The character has no substance except for the mystery of the romance hero: he has no history in the narrative process, no motivation from that process (except for the woman's fantasy), no momentum within it (except to realize that fantasy). In terms of the autobiography's realism, he comes from nowhere, but drops, like one of Carlyle's heroes, from the sky. In the move to fiction, though, he is all important: Rose's devotee, functioning to rescue ‘the plot’, her life. Later in the narrative, a second, analogical, intervention occurs. This time the form is a benign and considerate ‘older man’. His function is also rescue, his entry timed to alleviate intolerable material circumstances for Rose and her mother. Narrative contrivance increases, complicates, as the said older man reveals to Rose and mother that he is no other than the disguised guardian uncle of the handsome, devoted follower of Rose who is about to become her spouse (the younger man, that is). There even follows the classical year's trial, in which the intentions and affections of the younger man are put to the test. This is marriage as feminine ideal, maintained as ideal, but so transparently that it cannot transfer back from fiction to autobiography. Happy families.⁶

This whole sense of marriage as the feminine ideal of fiction, bound up so closely with constructions of self, carries over into conceptions of sexuality and of sexual encounter.

Elizabeth Ham writes:

I saw nothing more of him for many days. The next time we met, I was going for a walk with Beata Langley and some of the Joneses. There was a knot of Officers standing near the door when we came out. They immediately joined us, all but he. As he was drawing back, Beata said, ‘Won't you join us Mr Jackson?’ He said not a word, but walked on by my side. By the time we had reached that very spot where first our acquaintance had commenced, we were left alone. We walked on still in silence. To break the spell, I remarked, ‘that Beech is a very fine tree.’ ‘There is but one tree that interests me, and that Miss H—- has suffered to die from neglect,’ he replied. ‘Who told you it was dead,’ said I. ‘Yourself.’ ‘How was it that a whole day passed after your return without your coming to Ardnaree?’ ‘I was very ill in bed all that day. I had a Detachment of men under my charge, and was obliged to ride slowly in all the heavy rain. I could scarcely move the next morning.’ ‘Then I am sorry I answered you so cavalierly about the tree. It is still alive, tho' it had been in great peril.’ … But I do not know how it was, our intercourse was never again so cordial as it had been, tho' we had again our interviews in the Garden, and our tête-à-tête walks.

He was very captious too at times. One evening, as we were walking to and fro in the front of the House, my eyes happened to fall on the L. U. on the tree, which threw me into a reverie. I had not been attending to what he was saying, and answered ‘yes’ at random, to his ‘Don't you think so?’ ‘I feared as much.—I now find you are all alike,’ said he, seemingly much hurt. ‘What is the matter?’ exclaimed I, ‘I confess I was not attending to what you were saying; will you repeat it?’ ‘Since my conversation possesses such small interest for you, I will no longer intrude on your time’, said he, with an offended air, and leading the way to the door, took leave with a bow only.

The next morning he came as usual, and I asked him what he had been saying when my inattention offended him. ‘Nothing of any consequence,’ was all he would say.

One evening Mary and I went to drink Tea at the Widow Brady's to meet Margaret and Aleck Garrett. They were a fine specimen of the Irish genus. Brother and Sister to Mrs Faucett, to whom they were on a visit. We knew them well, for they spent a great deal of time at Ballina. Mrs Brady's windows commanded the Parade ground too, and as the Band was playing we had them open. Mr J. as usual, came to me to name the Music, and got invited with one or two of the others to come in and take tea. The days were now shortening, and when the candles were brought in we commenced a game of forfeits.

Mr J. had to redeem one of the first. He was to take a Candle from the Candlestick and place it in the hand of the Lady he loved best, and then kiss the Candlestick. He took the Candle with the socket and placed it in my hand, and then looked in my face with a comical expression that seemed to say ‘May I dare?’ and showed plainly that he understood the trick. I lifted the arm that held the Candle as a shield to my face. He took it in both his hands and pressed it with his lips. The grace and delicacy of the action was much admired.⁷

This is the romance genre, the construction of possible meanings from love tokens, love games, gallantry—the ‘grace and delicacy of the action’, though there are some significant inversions of the sex types of romance, following from the first person, woman narrator, observing the man. It is the man who is touchy, ‘captious’; it is the woman who takes responsibility for hurting the man (‘What is the matter?’) and for causing offence. Elizabeth Ham's representation of the relationship with Mr J. thus repeatedly displaces, through the rituals of gentility (taking tea, naming music) which are also the rituals of romance, the writing out of her reservations, problems with the man, the discovery of the terms of her own sexuality. And yet, the intense, troubled concern throughout her autobiography with the romance genre does afford us a glimpse of the shortfall, as does the occasional lapse from that genre into something more firmly grounded in materialism:

Nancy Shield kept whispering in my ear praises of the very gentlemanly young man to whom every one supposed that I was engaged. I could not but feel in the midst of these public manifestations on his part, how very slight was the tie by which I held him.⁸

(And here, again, in the life of Elizabeth Ham, it is the whole question of how to progress, how to live, which works in competition with ideals, sustained by different kinds of genre.) In contrast to Mary Smith, she retains a conception of marriage as a mode of self-advancement, but only relatively to her perception of the impossibility of financial self-support. Matrimony is the hoped-for escape from ‘the utter loneliness of being a governess’ and from ‘heart-sickness of hope continually disappointed, and the despair … of ever attaining anything like a means of self-support.’⁹ This returns us to the perception of competing ideals, in this case, marriage and satisfying labour as mutually exclusive competing ideals, competing possibilities, for women. (Working man's history under capitalism sets up a different and compatible, relationship between marriage and labour called the bread-winner.)

In her imagined solution to the problem of her future, of how to advance, Elizabeth Ham juxtaposes the pursuit of a husband with the pursuit of knowledge, as mutually constructing ideals:

The gift of sympathy, the interchange of heart thoughts, had been what I had pined for all my life …

If I could have procured books at this time, I might have improved myself, but I had no money to buy them, nor any one to recommend me what to buy if I had.¹⁰

But ‘no money’ and no one ‘to recommend’ only serves to emphasize what has already been glimpsed as an illusory promise.

In the autobiographies the dramatizing, constructing of sexuality as romance frequently slips into or culminates in a preoccupation with suicide or the death wish, a logical extension to the fate of the literary heroine who cannot find solutions to the problems of sexuality.

By this time my mother had removed from Anderston to a shop in Tradeston, and my stepfather and myself worked in West Street Factory. When one morning early, in the month of June, I absconded from their house as the fox flies from the hunters' hounds, to the Paisley Canal, into which I was about submerging myself to end my sufferings and sorrow, when I thought I heard like the voice of him I had fixed my girlish love upon. I started and paused for a few moments, and the love of young life again prevailed over that of self-destruction, and I fled from the scene as the half-past five morning factory bells were ringing, towards the house of a poor woman in Rose Street, Hutchesontown, where, after giving her my beautiful earrings to pawn, I was made welcome, and on Monday morning following got work in Brown and McNee's factory, Commercial Road.¹¹

In Ellen Johnston's autobiography, this kind of movement works against a recurrent hyperbole of success. The reconstruction of the experience is the invocation of romance fiction with strong elements of the gothic. The voice which prevents the attempt at death is significantly not the divine intervention, but the voice of the ‘divine’ lover, the romance hero, ‘the voice of him I had fixed my girlish love upon’. (Not for nothing had Ellen Johnston read Walter Scott with passion.) The memory of ‘the love of young life’, invoked at the moment of crisis, prevails over the wish to attempt suicide, the urge to self-destruction. The autobiographical subject is the heroine of the piece. The bank of the Paisley Canal is the ‘scene’ from which she had ‘fled’ as the bells (the bells, the bells) were ringing. Images from romance are in sharp (if a touch bathetic) contrast to the solid realities of canal and factory. The fox (autobiographical subject as victim) flying ‘from the hunters' hounds’, in suffering and sorrow, arrives at her Lethe, the Paisley Canal. The pawning of ‘beautiful earrings’ (the literary heroine in her class and gender terms, rich and feminine, as against the destitute daughter of destitute working people) precedes Monday morning in the factory on Commercial Road (the acme of ‘the real’).

Ellen Johnston later calls upon religious discourses, the crusading, the zealous, the martyred, to substantiate the romance intervention with the divine intervention. ‘I did not then want to die, although I had wished to do so a thousand times before, to relieve me from unmerited slander and oppression’ and ‘had it not been for the bright Star of Hope which lingered near me and encouraged me onward, beyond doubt I would have been a suicide.’ Ellen Johnston is not alone in experiencing the urge to self-destruction (itself a more dramatic term than suicide). For many of the autobiographers, the unresolved problems of self-advancement, of narrative progress, slide towards a dramatic contemplation of death, frequently in tension with fraught terms of sexuality. In Elizabeth Ham's autobiography, these take the form of moments, ‘depressing, physical and moral’, and she also recounts a contemplated suicide. In Ellen Weeton's ‘A Retrospect’ the ‘longing for death’ constitutes the central mode of the narrative.

Often and often, for years I may say, I went to bed with the idea that I should not rise again with life. I thought so much on death, I at length became inured to it; its horror disappeared, and I most earnestly wished to die—and if I had, I might have lain and grown putrid many days before anyone would have known. The idea of dying by myself would at times appear very terrible; at others, I was indifferent about it. I almost wished it; and then, thought I, my cruel unfeeling Aunt will reflect, and repent in time her treatment of me. Mrs Braithwaite would often invite me to spend my evenings there, which I did when well enough. One evening, a few months after my mother's death, whilst I was with Mrs B. I felt an unusual kind of whirling in my head, as if I shoud lose my senses. A palpitation came on. Mrs B. seemed much alarmed, and entreated I would stay there than I was better. I staid some time. At length becoming better, I came home, Mrs B. insisting that one of the servants should come with me and stay with me all night. However, when I got home I found myself so much recovered, I dismissed her; and it being then just nine o'clock, I went immediately to bed. When I got into bed, I sat awhile as I often did before I lay down, when all at once a coldness overspread my face, and I sank senseless on the bed. When I came to myself, I was unable to rise. The Church clock was just beginning to strike eleven, so that I must have lain in that state near two hours! I thought I was dying. And must I then, Oh Father, not have even one human being near to render the last assistance! not so much as the hand of a stranger to close my eyes! Thy Will be done! And yet, to die by oneself is terrible indeed! A palpitation again seized me, my terror lent me strength, and I rushed out of bed, but through weakness I fell on the floor. If I could but get to the opposite house, thought I, I should I think be better. I tried to rise and with some difficulty got down stairs, putting my feet before me, and sitting on each stair as I descended. By the help of chairs and the wall, I got to the front door, and sunk upon a chair, where I rested awhile; but hearing Mr Walmsley's door locked—‘They will be gone to bed,’ I thought, ‘and oh, what shall I do?’ I opened the door and ran across the street and knocked at the door, when I recollected I had nothing on besides my night dress and a pair of shoes. I crawled back into my own house again as fast as I could. He opened the door, and seeing no one, went in and locked the door again. ‘Oh dear! Oh dear! I never can live than morning,’ thought I, ‘and now they will indeed be gone to bed!’ I reached a red cloak which hung behind the front door, and ventured out again, but trembled so, that when I got to Mr W.'s door, in attempting to knock, I fell against it. He heard the noise, and I could hear him say—‘They are there again.’ ‘Never heed 'em,’ said his wife, ‘it is only somebody for mischief,’ and they were proceeding up stairs to bed. The sound of human voices revived me, and I had strength to knock with my hands. I was heard. Mr W. came again, but seeing no one (the night was so dark, and I sat on the steps) he was going to shut the door again. ‘Oh, Mr Walmsley,’ I said. ‘My God, Miss Weeton, what is the matter?’ ‘I am very ill’, I answered. ‘Would you have the goodness to send up to my aunt Barton's?’¹²

The term recurs—‘I thought so much on death … I most earnestly wished to die … The idea of dying … my mother's death … I thought I was dying … to die by oneself is terrible indeed … I never can live than morning’—in a dramatic inversion (through the hyperbolic and fictional), which is also a perversion, of the whole notion of self-advancement, of subjectivity, of narrative progress. The past-present relation here hardly attempts autobiographical reconstruction, hardly attempts memory. Past slides into present—‘I thought I was dying. And must I then, Oh Father, not have even one human being to render the last assistance!’ The latter is not a question (not expecting a ‘response’ from the Father) but a despairing imperative—not one human being to render the last assistance. And with the collapse of the past-present relation, the move into fiction is complete: raising Mr Walmsley, failing at the first attempt, and again at the second, and succeeding, as we know it must in such a construction of plot, at the third.

The invocations from melodrama, horror and the terrible are no mere embellishments, but the fabric of subjectivity itself, as is the narrative movement, failing to advance, falling. ‘I went to bed with the idea that I should not rise again with life … I sank senseless … I was unable to rise … I rushed out of bed … I fell on the floor … I tried to rise … and sunk upon a chair.’ This whole battery of imagery, accumulating around that process—effort interrupted by failure—is sustained by terms of sickness: ‘an unusual kind of whirling in my head … lose my senses … palpitation … a coldness overspread my face … I sank senseless’. These are the constructions of self, of subjectivity, in pathology and despair, available to Victorian women. It is only the incidental reference, the understated comment, which puts these dramatic constructions of self in question, which moves against this kind of grain. ‘No sooner did Miss W. begin to talk with me than I felt quite well … It was only the want of society out of school hours that depressed my spirits in such a manner.’ Suddenly, taking us by surprise, the problem is articulated as simply sociological: loneliness, ‘want of society’. Sickness is a symptom, not a causal factor. The dominant representations, which the account cannot avoid, are of woman as sick, womanhood as sickness, woman as the emotive, emoting victim of her own fiction.

And the representations of woman in sickness, wishing for death, are also those of sexuality, as in so much Victorian fiction. Wilkie Collins' The Woman in White is a striking example. In this account of Ellen Weeton's, the details of night-dress and red cloak assume the key importance, even where life is at stake, in negotiating the necessary social relation, raising Mr Walmsley, the hero, to rescue the heroine. It is inescapably the man, not the other available characters (wife, daughter, aunt), who alone can initiate a solution in narrative to the problem, woman.

I return, for a moment, to Ellen Johnston, because it is in her autobiography in particular that romance fiction determines subjectivity. This does not mean, though, that sexuality and love, for all their literariness, are idealized, utopian. Sexuality as problem is not explicated, but there is a veiled and recurring reference to a construction of self in which the ‘living martyr’ must defend herself against the accusation of being ‘a fallen woman’. The romantic idyll is here in tension with ‘a dark shadow … a shadow which has haunted me like a vampire, but at least for the present must remain the mystery of my life’. Her autobiography and her poetry inscribe a powerful sexual desire alongside a romanticized sexual oppression. In the following, the ‘factory poet’, woman poet, working woman, inverts the poetic convention with an encomium to the gentleman:

LINES TO A YOUNG GENTLEMAN OF SURPASSING BEAUTY

And what art thou?—An honour'd son of wealth,
          Gay fortune's diadem sits on thy brow;
Bless'd with a generous heart, with youth and health
          And beauty's self before thy shadow bow;
Yet thou may'st never know whose humble lays
In sadness sung thy dazzling beauty's praise.(13)

And the slight gaucherie of this is in that gender inversion and in that resort to ‘the literary’, to a sense of how the poets do this sort of thing. For what precedents has a working woman got for writing about an experience of sexual desire, from a woman to a man, in particular one of another class?

Women's sexuality thus steps into discourse as the melodramatic, the sinister, the spiritual, the romantic; with different genres in competition, via the moralizing code of ‘the literary’, for subjectivity. ‘Women's issues’ and the fraught area of sexuality in all its taboos are presented for contest by our reading of the autobiographers, presenting those contradictions, those contrary movements, which produce meaning from the relations between representation and experience. Descriptions of marital difficulty are understated, shadowy, but where they do exist, as in the accounts of Ellen Weeton and Mary Ashford, they are characterized by a call on the moral force of particular genres, such as that sexual ideology inscribed in melodrama.

When Ellen Weeton breaks the taboo of writing about domestic violence, she does so with that kind of force, though this is in a letter to a friend, not in the more measured autobiographical fragment, ‘A Retrospect’. The more intimate genre of letter appears to sanction a more direct entry into the ‘women's issue’, domestic violence.

Cruelty from a monster of a husband; extreme want and houseless at one time; imprisonments and bruises at another; my life daily in danger, attended with constant terror for many months, supposing each hour might be my last, and not knowing in what shape death might come—expecting at one moment to be poisoned, and therefore afraid to eat or drink anything that my husband could possibly have meddled with; obliged to be constantly on my guard against the deadly blows he would sometimes give me at the back of my ear, unprovokedly, and when I was least expecting it.¹⁴

I shall argue later about how editors intervene to mediate the monster, husband: as if Ellen Weeton's ‘word’ in this particular territory requires witnesses, attorneys. Similarly, in the courts a rape victim is frequently required to produce corroborative evidence, while the victim of a mugging is not. In ‘A Retrospect’, allusion to the monster enters again: he who has ‘poisoned … the comforts of my later years’.

Mary Ashford's account of a marriage promise employs similarly melodramatic terms (with resonances of the thriller) to carry moral force in a defence of self.

He soon proposed marriage, but at the same (time) he should wish me to remain in my place for some time afterwards. To this I did not object, as he said it was on account of his brother and parents; and as he went to London with the market-cart every week, he one time put up the banns, at Shoreditch church, and after that gave some hints that we were as good as married. But I had once heard, when waiting at tea, one of the curates of Lambeth say to a lady he was conversing with, that ‘putting up the bands’ was often made the instrument of seduction. This I had not forgot. I used, if I liked, to go out every other Sunday, and my suitor asked me to go with him to pay the ground-rent, a few miles off, which he said would be a very pleasant walk. So it was; but part of it lay through a wood, by a lonely footpath. I requested him, as evening was coming on, and it was so dismal, to come back the roadway; but he declined, saying it was a great way round.

We were kindly treated at the house we went to, and after tea set off on our return. I think it was in about the middle of the wood, when he began talking about a man who had been lately executed for an outrage on a female, and asked if I did not think it very hard, and whether I could have the heart to swear a man's life away. I became dreadfully alarmed, and, letting go of his arm, which I held, I stepped boldly in front of him, and said, ‘Ask me no questions, for I will not answer them;’ and I hurried forward, saying it was time I was at home. He seemed rather confused, and was silent for some time; and then muttered something about meaning to marry me; and I was thinking that I would never go walking again without knowing what sort of road I had to go.¹⁵

Virtue is saved via caution and common sense (‘But I had once heard … This I had not forgot … I requested him … to come back the roadway’) from the monster, man, and his plot—putting up the banns as an instrument of seduction. The concluding moral (‘I would never go walking again without knowing what sort of road I had to go’) rounds off a narrative foregrounded in Christian morality, which is also the chief informant of common sense (‘I heard one of the curates … This I had not forgot’). The heroine proceeds to take up the bold, moral stance. ‘I stepped boldly in front of him … I hurried forward’, onward, forward in virtue against the villain, characterized as such in his tactics and deceptions. ‘He said … he gave some hints … he said … he declined’ and in his response to the lady's refusal he was confused, silent, muttering.

Later in the account, the man shows ‘his cloven foot with a vengeance’ by threatening to expose her (her what? her virtue? but the precariousness of woman's reputation is enough to make the episode frightening) to her employers, and in displaying ‘an envious and covetous temper’ in a fit of ‘violent passion’ (Heathcliff without salvation).

These are the lives, irreducible, of working women. Self-advancement, subjectivity, does not have its simple reification or typification in a genre, in genres.¹⁶ The heroine, the victim, the martyr are the only means of representing an experience unprecedented in discourse (the working woman by the working woman), but they are also the signifiers of lack, of what is missing. The echoes and hints of material circumstances, finding their resonances in the discourse, will always remind one that the heroine, the victim, the martyr, is never the full subject. That resides somewhere in the realms of a knowledge that there is no simple advance, no simple route or progress, but a continuous, precarious adaptability, signified from the brink of despair.

I knew, indeed, the worse was past; and in a few years the family ship righted itself, every bill being eventually paid, and every account settled. But for myself, as is often the case with women, even the most capable and energetic, the one small event of my brother's marrying had stranded me without occupation.¹⁷

WOMEN'S RIGHTS

It is a relief to find that, because of recent feminist research in history, there is no longer the pressure there was to insist that the women's movement is more than synchronic, historically more than a phenomenon of the post-1950s.¹⁸ It has become clear that the nineteenth century had, even before the obvious suffrage action, a women's movement which shared characteristics of our own contemporary one.¹⁹

The challenge to containments such as ‘women's issues’ and ‘woman's sphere’, which might be seen as part of that movement's motivation and practice, enters into the autobiographies of working women in a variety of ways. It is in this territory of gender-conscious politics that the articulations only implied in the writing, about such taboos as female sexuality, domestic violence, marriage, begin to enter more explicitly into discourse. In other words, it is dissatisfaction with those very containments signalled in ‘women's issues’ and ‘woman's sphere’ which produces the discourse of the women's movement.

In this sense, it is possible to begin to see that the activity and language of ‘women's rights’, for instance, is a response to taboos such as those on sexuality, and therefore a response to the taboos of discourse itself, ‘women's issues’, ‘woman's sphere’.

Many working women autobiographers engage, in some way, with gender-conscious action. This is as if to say, as if to feel that such tensions as those involved in experiencing, in writing about sexuality, courtship, marriage and its ideologies, and of course, paid labour, require an additional kind of response to that experience and that writing.

One of the first signals of dissatisfaction with the containments is a turning away from the orthodox Church to different kinds of nonconformist religion. That conventional religious rhetoric most accessible to women, having an exact fit with dominant constructions of Victorian womanhood as martyred, passive, appears to be rejected at such moments in favour of a religious experience which is closer than that to different kinds of radicalism. Although this shift to nonconformism is not always articulated as an issue of gender (and indeed has its limits as an issue of gender), it is frequently precipitated or occasioned by that experience of oppression which may also instigate more obvious forms of political action.

Mary Smith does not ‘turn’ to nonconformism (she is rather born to it), but in her autobiography she does equate that inheritance with her anti-authoritarian tendencies and her struggle for rights. In illustration, she recounts episodes from childhood, such as the occasion on which her refusal to curtsy to the local vicar (vicars are ‘fox-hunting, wine-bibbers’) is approved by her nonconformist father (father, sober and self-educated, ‘Puritan in life and Calvinistic in creed’). Elizabeth Ham becomes a Dissenter in response to a ‘monotonous, not to say, miserable life’.

Conversely, a reliance on the orthodox Church is nearly always symptomatic of a failure or absence of opportunity elsewhere. Mary Barber searches for waged work, fails to find it, and decides to work for God. The orthodox Church here functions as metonymic construction of women's isolation from the social and economic sources of action, in that sense symbolic of political impotence.

Sometimes, the easiness of the fit between Victorian sexual ideology (woman to suffer and be still) and the Church's prescriptions of womanhood means that religious discourse enters into the very perception of ‘rights’.

I was discharged by the foreman without any reason assigned or notice given, in accordance with the rules of the work. Smarting under this treatment, I summoned the foreman into Court for payment of a week's wages for not receiving notice, and I gained the case. But if I was envied by my sister sex in the Verdant Works for my talent before this affair happened, they hated me with a perfect hatred after I had struggled for and gained my rights.²⁰

Ellen Johnston's account of her fight for rights at the factory combines the rhetoric of militancy (‘I was discharged by the foreman without any reason … I summoned the foreman … I … struggled for and gained my rights’) with a rhetoric which is sexually reactionary (‘I was envied by my sister sex … they hated me with a perfect hatred’), sustained in the religious discourse of the martyr (‘smarting … envied … hated’). I shall return to questions of how working women's relationships to waged work and labour relations function in relation to the construction of subjectivity.²¹

On other occasions, the struggle for various kinds of rights for families informs a developing gender consciousness, even in the midst of preoccupation with ‘women's issues’. Ostensibly, this kind of struggle might seem conventional, part of woman's role, but it is a territory in which women are brought into contact with those kinds of experience which inform a gender and class politics. In the following, Mary Ashford, who also fights for her husband's pension rights, is interviewed by a committee of gentlemen, as part of her application for special accommodation for her lying-in.

I dreamed that night, that I was going through Chelsea market, and was much annoyed and frightened by a porcupine, which lay at my feet, and its quills kept going off like squibs; and all attempts to get away from it were vain; at last, I thought it burst suddenly open, and the face of a very cross, ugly, old man came forth. I just then awoke, and a dreadful fright I was in. By twelve o'clock the next day I was to be at Brownlow Street, and it being a very hot day, I was much tired with walking there, as omnibuses had not come up then. There were several other women there, each of whom was called into the committee room separately. When it came to my turn, I went in, and at the head of the table, round which sat four or five gentlemen, there was (or, at least, I thought so) the very cross, ugly face I saw in my dream the night before. I was called forward, but all presence of mind and self-possession had forsaken me; I trembled, and was much confused. The gentleman (who, I think, they called Sir William Knatchbull, or something like it) said in a stern manner,

‘Why is this letter not signed by the Hon. Mrs Percival, but by a Mr M.?—Pray, who and what is he?’

I stammered out that he was the head doctor of the Duke of York's School, and His Royal Highness's medical attendant.

‘We don't care for the Duke of York, here, nor anybody else,’ said he; ‘the rules must be complied with. Where is Mrs Percival?’

I replied, ‘Gone to Northumberland.’

The other gentlemen looked as if they were sorry for me, and one of them said, ‘Why, I understand Mr M. paid the yearly subscription of five guineas, last week.’

Sir William then asked, in a very rude, coarse manner, when I expected to be confined.

I said, ‘The latter end of the month.’

‘Oh! plenty of time,’ said he; ‘here, take it back to Mr M., and tell him to send it into the north, and have it signed by the lady in a proper manner, and bring it back next week.’

Here another gentleman interposed, saying, that as Mr M. paid the money, and the lady was so far away, they might, without any impropriety, accept his signature. But he was inexorable, and I left Brownlow Street very much vexed.²²

The dream rehearses and foregrounds the meeting with the cross, ugly face of that porcupine with the unlikely but somehow appropriate name (‘or something like it’) of Knatchbull. These comic touches manage a predicament which is characterized by feelings of oppression—annoyance, fright, tiredness, trembling, confusion, vexation. The attempt at reference to those in high places (‘His Royal Highness's [of all people] medical attendant’), recognized as soon as it is begun (‘I stammered’) as pathetically failing to impress, draws attention to prefigured power relations. The class and gender confrontation here (five gentlemen face the woman), though not articulated as such, inscribes the conditions of oppression in gender consciousness (from all those feelings which characterize female impotence to censure of the enemy as cross, ugly, coarse, rude, and with quills which go off like squibs).

Florence White also voices a gender consciousness which gives priority to a concern with women. She takes as her particular notion of advancement the project of giving credit to domestic service as a ‘vocation’, and although this attachment can appear to be a reactionary placement (‘what fun Victorian girls and women got out of their homely housewifely tasks’), it is informed by a more convincing concern with the relationship between women and waged labour (and job opportunities in general) in late Victorian Britain. ‘One of the objects I have in writing this autobiography is to present a correct impression of a woman's opportunities for earning a living in those days.’²³ This type of interest, prefaced in that particular chapter by a quotation from Rebecca West, is part of and symptomatic of a gender consciousness in particular kinds of late Victorian discourse, my inference being that changes in the structure of labour and the development of the women's suffrage campaigns have produced and are produced by a particular gender consciousness in writing. The quotation from Rebecca West utilized by Florence White is as follows:

It is the habit of the unintelligent to talk of the achievements of women in the modern world as if they represented a sudden sport of nature, comparable to, let us say, the development of the fifth leg in the rabbit species. Such things do not happen, rabbits have four legs, and always have had. Women have the ordinary human faculties connected with the use of reason, and always have had; but the fact that they are also responsible for the human race prevents any but a small proportion of them developing these faculties to any conspicuous degree, and handicaps to which they are subjected by that responsibility prevent even that small proportion from working unhampered.

In defence of ‘splendid Victorian women’, Florence White reiterates her concern with job opportunities (‘My special interest was the employment of girls and women’), and eventually connects her project, in part, with feminism:

With some of the feminist ideas I was, and am, in full sympathy. I hated the pocket-money wage, and always have believed that it would have paid the men's unions to have admitted qualified women on the same terms as men, that is, equal wages for equal work. When it has fallen to me to employ people, I have tried conscientiously to act upon this principle. It is, I have always insisted, the work for which I have paid, not the sex of the worker. I believe that if working men had had the foresight—the vision—forty years ago to realize this, and had acted on this principle, much of our present labour and unemployment trouble would never have existed.

In this autobiography, of later date than most referred to in my account, it is thus no historical accident, no anomaly, that Florence White can parallel a narrative progress in her own social ‘progress’ through occupation (from domestic servant to employer of domestic servants), and that she makes explicit reference to feminism and feminist ideas as having contemporary currency.

The autobiographers mentioned so far in this section thus attach significance to rights and to women's rights in the spheres of family or of labour. While these do not constitute holistic political positions (attachments to the family or to the job under capitalism can produce reactionary politics), the importance of such gender consciousness for radicalism should not be underestimated.

It remains to mention those autobiographers whose commitment to feminism as political activism is more direct.

Annie Kenney identifies the history of the fight for female suffrage as largely inseparable from her personal history. Believing that that struggle is her signal autobiographical experience, she proceeds to give ‘a clear description … however brief, of certain but important parts of the Militant Movement for Women's Suffrage.’²⁴ This is how she typifies the movement in relation to the issue of independence;

No home-life, no one to say what we should do or what we should not do, no family ties, we were free and alone in a great brilliant city, scores of young women scarcely out of their teens met together in a revolutionary movement, outlaws or breakers of laws, independent of everything and everybody, fearless and self-confident.

The rhetoric of independence inscribes the necessary rejection of ‘home-life’, of ‘family’, also a rejection of that kind of self-definition. Elsewhere, the wit of the account and the wit of the suffragists and suffragettes in their campaigning strategies, is a reminder of that line of feminist wit, gender-specific, which is also glimpsed in Mary Ashford's porcupine.

Some of the meetings were really amusing. Incident after incident would happen, especially on Saturday night when money had been spent more freely than usual. At one meeting I was addressing on Clifton Downs, Bristol, with Miss Mary Gawthorpe, a most irate man, who had been doing the week-end shopping, was continually interrupting. He got furious with the speaker, who to his annoyance turned all his remarks to good account, and at last in exasperation flung the Sunday cabbage at her. She caught it neatly, with the remark, ‘I was afraid that man would lose his head before the meeting was over!’

At another meeting in Somerset, an elderly man kept repeating the same statement every few minutes: ‘If you were my wife I'd give you poison!’ Loud laughter greeted the statement each time. At last the speaker, tired of his repeated interruption, replied, ‘Yes, and were I your wife I'd take it!’

This counter-humour, though, is feminism of a particularly secure variety. Mary Smith is more typical than Annie Kenney of the working women autobiographers in arriving at feminism only after a difficult working life. She retains too some of those representations from dominant discourse which signal (in comparison, say, with Annie Kenney's account) that uneasy straddling between the particular rhetoric of late nineteenth-century feminist militancy and the dramatization of women as martyred, suffering. In her account, she increasingly generalizes from her particular experience to ‘the helplessness of women in the great battle of life’. Later, as a member of the Woman's Suffrage Society, she extends the generalization, the vision. ‘The inequality of the sexes in privilege and power, was a great cause of the dreadful hardships which women, especially in the lower classes, had to suffer.’²⁵ Her poetry also calls upon both discourses. Perhaps, for this section of my account, it should have the last word.

Woman's Claims
‘Women's Rights’ are not her's only, they are all the world's beside,
And the whole world faints and suffers, while these are scorn'd, denied.
Childhood, with its mighty questions, Manhood with its restless heart,
Life in all its varied phases, standing class from class apart,
Need the voice, the thought of woman, woman wise as she shall be,
When at last the erring ages shall in all things make her Free.(26)

Notes

1. Margery Spring Rice, Working-Class Wives, first published 1939 (London: Virago, 1981). Maternity: Letters from Working Women, edited by Margaret Llewelyn Davies, first published 1915 (London: Virago, 1978).

2. It might sound like a contradiction to argue that a move towards the gender-specific is a move towards subjectivity, but in a certain kind of gender politics it must be, which is of course to say that my account has its partialities (and will therefore operate those partialities in the understanding of subjectivity), but is prepared to articulate that partiality and to attach significance to its limitations.

3. This is to shorthand what is now a whole debate about how far ‘experience’, in reading history, is constituted in text. For different aspects of the argument, see: Raymond Williams, Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980). Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

4. Mary Smith, Schoolmistress and Nonconformist, I (of 2 volumes), Autobiography (London and Carlisle: Bemrose & Sons, 1892), p. 196.

5. Ellen Weeton, Miss Weeton's Journal of a Governess, 1969, a reprint of Miss Weeton: Journal of a Governess, first published under the title of Miss Weeton by the Oxford University Press in 1936, I, p. 3.

6. Rose Allen, The Autobiography of Rose Allen (London: Longman & Co., 1847).

7. Elizabeth Ham, Elizabeth Ham by Herself 1783-1820 (London: Faber, 1945), pp. 106-7.

8. Elizabeth Ham, p. 107.

9. Elizabeth Ham, p. 212.

10. Elizabeth Ham, p. 187 and 185.

11. Ellen Johnston, Autobiography of Ellen Johnston, ‘The Factory Girl’ (Glasgow: William Love, 1867), p. 8.

12. Ellen Weeton, I, pp. 28-30.

13. Ellen Johnston, p. 62.

14. Ellen Weeton, II (of 2 volumes), p. 140.

15. Mary Ann Ashford, Life of a Licensed Victualler's Daughter (London: Saunders & Otley, 1844), pp. 45-6.

16. ‘The literary’ used throughout to imply an accumulation of genres in a sanctioning morality (deriving from writing of ‘right’ value). My next chapter elaborates.

17. Mary Smith, p. 65.

18. Instance: Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem (London: Virago, 1983).

19. Barbara Taylor.

20. Ellen Johnston, p. 14.

21. In my next chapter about working and writing.

22. Mary Ashford, pp. 64-6.

23. Florence White, A Fire in the Kitchen: the Autobiography of a Cook (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1938), p. 92.

    Rebecca West, p. 82.

    ‘feminist ideas’, p. 244.

24. Annie Kenney, Memories of a Militant (London: E. Arnold & Co., 1924), p. v. ‘no home-life’, p. 110, ‘some of the meetings’, p. 103.

25. Mary Smith, p. 257.

26. Mary Smith, II, pp. 156-9.