Becoming Visible: Women’s Presence in Late Nineteenth-Century America (review)

“[T]he later decades of the nineteenth century in America . . . were a time of critical change in the cultural visibility of women,” the editors of Becoming Visible: Women’s Presence in Late Nineteenth-Century America assert. Thus their collection of essays “asks how, when and where [women] became more culturally visible (as opposed to merely present)” (1). Yet even as the authors of the essays in this book analyze the transformation of women’s cultural visibility, they challenge a historical narrative wherein women in the nineteenth-century United States moved from a private to a public sphere as the century progressed. Throughout this volume, the authors situate “women’s presence . . . in terms other than the traditional polarities of inside/outside and private/public, since these dichotomizing frames simply do not fit the complexities of what was happening” (2). The editors are also careful to point out that changes in visibility do not translate automatically into liberation. Rather, “[m]uch hinged on who saw whom or who surveyed whom” (4). Thus, the authors of the essays pay detailed attention to how class, ethnicity, and race influenced the political and personal implications of visibility.

Becoming Visible has its roots in a 2005 colloquium at King’s College in London organized by the British branch of the Society for the Study of American Women Writers, and the editors bring together the work of respected scholars in history and literature. The book is divided into three sections, with the first two containing the majority of the essays. Anne M. Boylan’s “Claiming Visibility: Women in Public/Public Women in the United States, 1865–1910” opens the first section, titled “The Changing Geography of Public and Private.” Boylan’s essay is positioned nicely to elaborate on the editors’ introduction and to provide context for the remaining essays. She argues that scholars’ outdated definitions of what it means to be public—coupled with their assumption that the ideology of separate spheres developed prior to women’s associations, rather than simultaneously with them—results in their inability to account for the many “women in public” in the nineteenth-century United States (17). Boylan demonstrates that the definitions of public and private, and the boundaries between those spheres, were constantly shifting. The authors of the rest of the essays in this section, historians and literary critics, expand upon this claim. For example, Margaret Walsh demonstrates how ineffective terms such as public and private are to define the space wherein women textile workers labored in her “Visible Women in the Needle Trades: Revisiting the Clothing Industry in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.” In a related essay, “Women’s Employment in the Public and Private Spheres, 1880–1920,” S. J. Kleinberg draws upon labor statistics to show how race influenced the visibility of women’s labor. “Women of color,” Kleinberg notes, “continued to work largely in agriculture and in service jobs and were thus hidden from the wider public gaze during their working lives,” making it possible for progressive reformers to ignore them (88).

The authors (mostly literary critics) whose work is included in the second section, “Stepping Out: Bodies, Spaces and the Cultural Representation of Visibility,” investigate “the individual experience of visibility” in relation to identity, power, and corporeality (9). They focus in a more sustained manner on representation and analyze the works of a diverse selection of authors—from the often studied Henry James and Louisa May Alcott to the less frequently examined Narcissa Owen and Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins. Whether the critical ground is familiar or relatively unexplored, the thematic focus on visibility yields innovative interpretations. Peter Rawlings, in “The Painful Production of Verena Tarrant: John Locke and The Bostonians,” examines James’s novel in relation to An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, arguing that the struggle “between [the characters] Olive and Ransom for Verena is largely one about who shall control her visibility” (223).

Many writers in...