George Gissing and Women's Work: Contextualizing the Female Professional

George Gissing and Women's Work: Contextualizing the Female Professional David Kramer Fiorello H. LaGuardia Community College City University of New York CRITICS HAVE BEEN SHARPLY DIVIDED over George Gissing's attitudes towards and depiction of women, especially in terms of his portrayal of the pursuit of new employment opportunities beginning to become available in the 1880s and 1890s. The division of critical camps is rather unusual: apparently principally male critics, such as John HaIperin , Pierre Coustillas, and Lloyd Fernando, find Gissing and his texts misogynistic, while female critics, such as Nina Auerbach and Marcia R. Fox, find him a champion of women's rights; his harshest female critic is Jenni Calder, who finds him at worst contradictory but notes that he "clearly condemns commercial marriages: he also condemns victim-wife marriages."1 Most critics who level accusations of gender bias tend to find that Gissing promotes the Victorian tradition of gendered separate spheres. Coustillas, for example, writes, "A Victorian in spite of himself, Gissing implies by repetition that he would have woman be the mistress as well as the ornament of the house."2 Halperin writes, "The Odd Women makes no plea for women's rights" since Rhoda allows for some women, those who are best suited, to remain at home and work there.3 Others note that Gissing sets different occupational goals for women and men. For instance, in The Odd Women, Edmund Widdowson finds a "clerk's life—a life of office without any hope of rising—a hideous fate,"4 while Mary Barfoot trains women for this very life. Robert Selig, for one, takes issue with this "incongruity."5 But the historical context of Gissing's most important novels shows that his portrayals are based on the complex reality of a changing work world for English women at the end of the nineteenth century. Not only were women just breaking into many professions during this time, but their work within these fields was limited to the least responsible and worst remunerated of positions. 316 KRAMER : GISSING Studying the historical counterparts to his female working characters from novels such as New Grub Street (1891), Born in Exile (1892), The Odd Women (1893), and In the Year of Jubilee (1894) reveals Gissing's profound, almost revolutionary support for women's pursuit of new employment opportunities as they attempted at the end of the nineteenth century to break down the mainstream Victorian assumptions about divisions of labor. The most important problem relating to female employment in this period concerned single women, since the vast majority of marrieds did not work.6 As the oft-quoted journalist W. R. Greg noted, in 1862, "There are hundreds of thousands of women... scattered throughout all ranks, but proportionately most numerous in the middle and upper ranks—who have to earn their own living, instead of spending and husbanding the earnings of men ... who are compelled to lead an independent and incomplete existence of their own."7 In a society in which women's financial support by men was a moral imperative (an economic structure that Greg seems to support), the need of single women to find work could be desperate. And this was a problem that remained throughout the decade: according to the census, there were 882,000 "excess " (unmarried) women in England and Wales in 1891, and this number, both as a percentage of all women and as a head count, continued to rise steadily into the twentieth century.8 Moreover, most were from the middle classes and therefore needed to earn income.9 John Goode claims that The Odd Women "seems to involve itself with what is almost a side issue" because Monica has no opportunity to marry for love, seeing Widdowson almost wholly as financial salvation, and asks "What happens to the polemic when there are more men than women?"10 But these complaints are ahistorical and therefore ignore Gissing's point; the novel is not hypothetical, but an examination of the reality of English life. A large, ever-growing number of women needed a viable form of self-support. An important part of Gissing's discussion of women's labor addresses how traditional female occupations such as governesses...