Starting Over: Feminism and the Politics of Cultural Critique

"Ministers of the Interior": The Political Economy of Women's Manuals

IIMinisters of the Interior": The Political Economy of Women's Manuals In the present day we are fairly flooded with female magazines and receptacles of divers kinds.... -Woman as She Is The "Woman Question" The late 1830S and 1840S in Great Britain saw the beginning of the "woman question," a heterogeneous, often heated, debate on the role of largely middle-class women in postreform England. This "flood" of writing on middle-class women, however, to which the author of Woman as She Is refers, should be seen as part of a larger "struggle over signs," a struggle often identified with "moral" or "cultural revolution, in nineteenth-century Britain (Klancher 1987, 3; Corrigan and Sayer 1985, 106). This "revolution," "an attempted organization of consent and incorporation which culminates in a certain kind of admission ... of labor into society," involved a new machinery of government, new theories of representation, and new lines of exclusion and inclusion as well (Corrigan and Sayer 1985, 106, 115, 143). An emphasis on gender division, upon the separation of domestic and "public" spheres, was a predominant feature of these larger efforts to reconstruct a social world.1 Gender division, of course, was central to the very language of reform. The Reform Act of 1832, which enfranchised a portion of middle-class and some working-class men and which served as an emblem at least of the democratic way that lines of inclusion might be redrawn, explicitly excluded women from the vote.2 And yet, despite the starkness of the lines drawn in this central doctrine of social reconstruction, gender division, in the 1830S, did not operate 125 126 Starting Over as a simple polarity or opposition. Discourse excluding women from formal political power and relegating middle-class women to the domestic sphere was very often accompanied by a compensatory rhetoric that blurred the lines between domestic and "public," female and male. In an essay, for example, that emphasizes the necessity of excluding women from formal political power, the Edinburgh Review characterizes middle-class women as "ministers of the interior" (Empson 1833, I). The phrase insinuates as many parallels between women and men, domestic and public, as it does differences, and, as part of an argument for excluding women from formal political power, it also politicizes the domestic sphere.3 The woman question, therefore, seems more properly called the gender question, involving as it does complex negotiations in regard to gender sameness and difference; while the "gender question," in turn, seems best understood within a set of larger questions over social realignment and reform. It is in these wider contexts that the "flood" of writing on women must be read. The Political Economy of "Woman's Mission" Just as writing ostensibly devoted to questions of class or political economy was profoundly "about" gender relations among the genteel , so writing ostensibly about middle-class women was about other lines of exclusion and inclusion than those of gender. Discourse on the woman question was also about class and national identity, imperialism , the nature of "history," social relations, and value. This was the case, moreover, for women writing in what would seem to have been the most feminized of discursive worlds, that of middle-class women writing manuals for other middle-class women. Two of the most popular manuals, Sarah Lewis's Woman's Mission and Sarah Ellis's Women of England, were published in 1839 and quickly went through several editions. Although radicals and Owenite socialists had been writing articles on women's education and the political role of women in British society for several years, although Harriet Martineau's liberal feminist Society in America had been published in 1837, it was the two manuals by Ellis and Lewis that mark the beginning of what one reviewer was to describe as a "sudden inundation of tabby-bound volumes, addressed in superguilt letters to the 'Wives of England'-the 'Daughters of "Ministers of the Interior" 127 England'-the 'Grandmothers of England" (Anon. 1844, 199). The "Grandmothers of England" was a joke, but Women of England was indeed followed by Ellis's Wives of England (1843), Mothers of England (1843), and Daughters of England (1845) and by related publications such as Women's Rights and Duties (1840), Marion Reid's feminist Plea for Women (1843), Woman, Her Character and Vicissitudes (1845), and by numerous periodical articles having to do with "Woman and Her Social Position." Manuals written by middle-class...