Uneven developments : the ideological work of gender in mid-Victorian England / Mary Poovey.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Poovey, Mary.

Series:

Women in culture and society.

Women in culture and society

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Sex role--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Sex role.

Anesthesia in obstetrics--History--19th century.

Anesthesia in obstetrics.

Divorce--Great Britain--History--19th century.

Divorce.

Women authors, British--Social conditions.

Women authors, British.

Governesses--Great Britain--Social conditions.

Governesses.

Nurses--Great Britain--Social conditions.

Nurses.

Sex role in literature.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xi, 282 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, c1988.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions-medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850's of a genuine oppositional voice: the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement. Drawing on a wide range of sources-parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity-Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

Contents:

Front matter

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

CHAPTER ONE. The Ideological Work of Gender

CHAPTER TWO. Scenes of an Indelicate Character: The Medical Treatment of Victorian Women

CHAPTER THREE. Covered but Not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act

CHAPTER FOUR. The Man-of-Letters Hero David Copperfield and the Professional Writer

CHAPTER FIVE. The Anathematized Race: The Governess and Jane Eyre

CHAPTER SIX. A Housewifely Woman: The Social Construction of Florence Nightingale

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612070112

9781282070110

1282070118

9780226675312

0226675319

OCLC:

367863022