The Angel Out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in Nineteenth-century England
From the Victorian Literature and Culture Series.
Was nineteenth-century British philanthropy the “truest and noblest woman’s work” and praiseworthy for having raised the nation’s moral tone, or was it a dangerous mission likely to cause the defeminisation of its practitioners as they became “public persons”? In Victorian England, women’s participation in volunteer work seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role, but like many other assumptions about gender roles, the connection between charitable and domestic work is the result of specific historical factors and cultural representations. Proponents of women as charitable workers encouraged philanthropy as being ideal work for a woman, while opponents feared the practice was destined to lead to overly ambitious and manly behaviour.
In The Angel out of the House Dorice Williams Elliott examines the ways in which novels and other texts that portrayed women performing charitable acts helped to make the inclusion of philanthropic work in the domestic sphere seem natural and obvious. And although many scholars have dismissed women’s volunteer endeavours as merely patriarchal collusion, Elliott argues that the conjunction of novelistic and philanthropic discourse in the works of women writers—among them George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell, Hannah More and Anna Jameson—was crucial to the redefinition of gender roles and class relations.
In a fascinating study of how literary works contribute to cultural and historical change, Elliott’s exploration of philanthropic discourse in nineteenth-century literature demonstrates just how essential that forum was in changing accepted definitions of women and social relations.
Dorice Williams Elliott is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Kansas
Reviews
“Informative, readable, and insightful, The Angel out of the House is an original formulation of ideas concerning philanthropy, gender, and class. Elliott draws on work done in the area of the history of philanthropy, the history of gender, the history of feminism, the history of professionalization, and analyses of separate spheres ideology.”
Deborah Gorham, author of Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life and The Victorian Girl and the Feminist Ideal
