How Is the “Woman Question” Reflected in Middle March?
How is the “Woman Question” reflected in Middle March?
The Woman Question is a phrase usually used in connection with a social change in the latter half of the nineteenth century which questioned the fundamental roles of women in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, and Russia. Issues of women's suffrage, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, property rights, legal rights, medical rights and marriage dominated cultural discussions in newspapers and intellectual circles. While many women were supportive of these changing roles, they did not agree unanimously. Often issues of marriage and sexual freedom were most divisive.
By the way, The works of women are symbolical, We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir To put on when you’re weary… Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean And sleep, and dream of something we are not But would be for your sake. Alas, Alas!
(Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
In 1855 she wrote a sympathetic essay ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ that anticipates the concerns she takes up in ‘Middlemarch’: women’s natures, their need for work, men’s presumption of superiority and its destructive consequences. Eliot says of Fuller, “some of the best things she says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman's nature and absolute demarcations of woman's mission”. She quotes Fuller: “I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers” if they are to avoid “the ennui that haunts grown women.”
George Eliot sets her novel nearly 40 years before the period in which it is written. This period in which she grew to adulthood was one that saw an increasing number of studies of the condition of women, some of which had outcome in action. The state of legislation, about property rights and about divorce, held women in a state of dependency. This was completed by their lack
The Woman Question is a phrase usually used in connection with a social change in the latter half of the nineteenth century which questioned the fundamental roles of women in countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, and Russia. Issues of women's suffrage, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, property rights, legal rights, medical rights and marriage dominated cultural discussions in newspapers and intellectual circles. While many women were supportive of these changing roles, they did not agree unanimously. Often issues of marriage and sexual freedom were most divisive.
By the way, The works of women are symbolical, We sew, sew, prick our fingers, dull our sight, Producing what? A pair of slippers, sir To put on when you’re weary… Or else at best, a cushion, where you lean And sleep, and dream of something we are not But would be for your sake. Alas, Alas!
(Aurora Leigh: Elizabeth Barrett Browning)
In 1855 she wrote a sympathetic essay ‘Margaret Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft’ that anticipates the concerns she takes up in ‘Middlemarch’: women’s natures, their need for work, men’s presumption of superiority and its destructive consequences. Eliot says of Fuller, “some of the best things she says are on the folly of absolute definitions of woman's nature and absolute demarcations of woman's mission”. She quotes Fuller: “I think women need, especially at this juncture, a much greater range of occupation than they have, to rouse their latent powers” if they are to avoid “the ennui that haunts grown women.”
George Eliot sets her novel nearly 40 years before the period in which it is written. This period in which she grew to adulthood was one that saw an increasing number of studies of the condition of women, some of which had outcome in action. The state of legislation, about property rights and about divorce, held women in a state of dependency. This was completed by their lack