Origins of the Victorian Women's Movement
Week 2. Origins of the Women’s Movement
Questions to ponder whilst you read…
- What were the main intellectual/ political impetuses behind the post-1850 women’s movement?
- What role did respectability play in the Victorian women’s movement?
- Why was education a feminist cause?
- Assess the class politics of the Victorian women’s movement.
Core Reading
Emily Davies, The Higher Education of Women (1866) [chapters 3-4 available as ebook in Library]
J. Rendall, ‘“A Moral Engine”: Feminism, Liberalism and The Englishwoman’s Journal’ in J. Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800-1914 (1987), 112-38 digitised
Further Reading
* B. Caine, English Feminism, 1780-1980 (1995) [Read chapters 1-3 to orientate yourself in the movement’s origins]
B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1983) [chapters 1-3 – a really amazing book]
Catherine Barmby, ‘The Demand for the Emancipation of Woman’, reproduced in B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (1983), pp.386-392 [digitised]
C. Dyhouse, No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939 (1995) [Introduction and chapter 1]
L. Schwartz, A Serious Endeavour: Gender, Education and Community at St Hugh’s 1886-2011 (2011) [Introduction and chapter 1]
B. Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Feminist Imagination (2003) [chapter 8 ‘The Female Citizen’]
L. Schwartz, Infidel Feminism: Secularism, Religion and Women’s Emancipation, England 1830-1914 (2013) [pp.154-160]