The rebel, the lady and the ‘anti’: Femininity, anti-feminism, and the Victorian woman writer

Heilmann, Ann; Sanders, Valerie

doi:10.1016/j.wsif.2006.04.008

Cited by 8 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The political equality of women was far from clear as a settled moral fact for the zeitgeist, and there were internal disagreements even among those who later organized themselves as the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League (1908)(1909)(1910). Further, much antisuffragist sentiment was left unexpressed in the public sphere, not only partly as a "logical extension of their reluctance to take to the stage of parliamentary politics" but also because of "their positive commitment to a paradigm of womanhood characterized by altruistic femininity, devotion to family duties, and inconspicuous public service in the extended domestic setting of local communities" (Bush 2007, 3; see also Heilmann and Sanders 2006;Crozier-De Rosa 2018).…”

Section: The Rationality Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Indeed, a significant number of anti-suffragists did not see their opposition to suffrage as a maintenance of a patriarchal status quo, but rather as directing women's progress out of the household towards more appropriate social, yet non-political, roles befitting of their gender, e.g. education and healthcare (see, e.g., Delap 2005, Heilmann and Sanders 2006). 8 My approach here is not inconsistent with these important observations, which deserve careful attention in their own right, but my interests are nonetheless primarily philosophical.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Antisuffragists

Wilson

2021

Hypatia

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Social philosophers often invoke the concept of false consciousness in their analyses, referring to a set of evidence-resistant, ignorant attitudes held by otherwise sound epistemic agents, systematically occurring in virtue of, and motivating them to perpetuate, structural oppression. But there is a worry that appealing to the notion in questions of responsibility for the harm suffered by members of oppressed groups is victim-blaming. Individuals under false consciousness allegedly systematically fail the relevant rationality and epistemic conditions due to structural distortions of reasoning or knowledge practices, undermining their status as responsible moral agents. But attending to the constitutive mechanisms and heterogeneity of false consciousness enables us to see how having it does not in itself render someone an inappropriate target of blame. I focus here on the 1889 antisuffragist manifesto “An Appeal against Female Suffrage,” arguing that its signatories, despite false consciousness, satisfy both conditions for ordinary blameworthiness. I consider three prominent signatories, observing that the irrationality characterization is unsustainable beyond group-level diagnoses, and that their capacity to respond appropriately to reasons was not compromised. Following recent work on epistemic injustice, I also argue that culpable mechanisms constituted their false consciousness, rendering them blameworthy for the Appeal.

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Section: The Rationality Conditionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Antisuffragists

Wilson

2021

Hypatia

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“…26 Thus, rather than situating Roscoe within the older dichotomy of "feminist"-recognizably radical or innovative-and "antifeminist" that Thompson (idem. : 70) and Ann Heilmann and Valerie Sanders (2006) have called into question, we can read her work not simply in terms of what she claims to represent-the piety and virtue of her subject-but also what she actually doescenter a woman in theological debate and engage in theological history herself. We must read across Roscoe's two fundamental exercises regarding Colonna: presenting a traditionally virtuous biographical subject but foregrounding that subject as integral to a wider history that is not solely domestic.…”

Section: Afterlivesmentioning

confidence: 99%

‘A beautiful and living picture’: translation, biography, reception, and feminism in Maria Roscoe’sVittoria Colonna: her life and poems(1868)

Strowe

2018

The Translator

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] "A Beautiful and Living Picture": Translation, Biography, Reception, and Feminism in Maria Roscoe's Vittoria Colonna: her life and poems (1868) "... it is only fair to add that whatever merits her poetry does possess, Mrs. Roscoe has done her best to annihilate." (The Saturday Review 1868: 530) "... as a literary production, it is impossible to praise Mrs. Roscoe's book." (The Saturday Review 1868: 531) It is, perhaps, not too much of an overstatement to say that the reviewer for the Saturday Review was unimpressed with Maria Roscoe's 1868 biography of Renaissance poet Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), which included a number of translations from Colonna's poems. Articulating a horror of translating poetry into prose, the reviewer also notes that Roscoe's Italian is not particularly good, suggesting snidely that "perhaps she will try her hand at Sanskrit in her next volume" (The Saturday Review 1868: 530). The review points out a historical quibble with one of Roscoe's less defensible assertions, that Colonna was the first sacred poet of Italy, before finally settling on the structure of the biography itself, which the reviewer sees as an "elaborately inconsecutive" product of an "authoress" with a "truly feminine fondness for going off at a tangent into speculations very remotely connected with her subject, and neither novel nor striking in themselves" (ibid.). The reviewer is right on many counts. Roscoe's Italian is demonstrably insufficient at times, her translations are often tone-deaf and unpoetic, her grasp of literary history occasionally dubious, and her book a curious amalgam of biography and theological history. The femininity of tangents aside, Roscoe's work frequently departs from the titular subject of her book, Vittoria Colonna, to discuss the development of reformist thought in Italy and abroad. Yet there is something singular about Roscoe's work, both in the translations and in the biography, that deserves a closer look. Taking an approach to the text informed by translation studies, cultural studies, book history, and feminist literary historical revision, this article explores how, inaccurate as the translations may be and irrelevant as the tangents might seem, Roscoe's book insists both on its own author's right to her topics, both central and tangential, and on the value of its female subject's life and experiences. The analysis that follows traces the complex interaction between biography and translation, examining how the biography can be used as a key for investigating Roscoe's translations at the same time as the translations are presented as factual evidence for the biography. By treating the translations and biography as complementary forms of rewriting (see Lefevere 1992b), we can see how the two forms coincide to produce a unified work. As parallel forms of representation the biography and the translations each contribute to a complex picture of both Roscoe's subject and of Roscoe's own project, presenting an important translational corollary to observations about the contradictions of ...

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“…4. Heilmann and Sanders (2006) argued that among the many things that British feminist and antifeminist writers of the Victorian period share is most prominently their preoccupation with "questions of femininity, each side laying claim to 'authentic' as opposed to the other camp's 'artificial', flawed, corrupted or unsexed femininity" (p. 289). They also provide evidence of the fluidity of the boundary between feminist and antifeminist positions-some Victorian woman writers invoked the woman rebel while distancing themselves from political demands while dedicated feminist writers at times embraced antifeminist positions.…”

Section: Thiemementioning

confidence: 99%

Constitutive Rhetoric as an Aspect of Audience Design: The Public Texts of Canadian Suffragists

Thieme

2009

Written Communication

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This article offers a way of using the theory of audience design-how speakers position different audience groups as main addressees, overhearers, or bystanders-for written discourse. It focuses on main addressees, that is, those audience members who are expected to participate in and respond to a speaker's utterances. The text samples are articles, letters, and editorials on women's suffrage that were published between 1909 and 1912 in Canadian periodicals. In particular, the author analyzes noun phrases with which suffrageskeptical women are addressed, relying on the theory of constitutive rhetoric to highlight the interpellative force with which the audience design of this public political debate operates.

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The rebel, the lady and the ‘anti’: Femininity, anti-feminism, and the Victorian woman writer

Cited by 8 publications

References 1 publication

Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Antisuffragists

Does False Consciousness Necessarily Preclude Moral Blameworthiness?: The Refusal of the Women Antisuffragists

‘A beautiful and living picture’: translation, biography, reception, and feminism in Maria Roscoe’sVittoria Colonna: her life and poems(1868)

Constitutive Rhetoric as an Aspect of Audience Design: The Public Texts of Canadian Suffragists

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