Abstract
This chapter looks at Bodichon’s take on the question of employment opportunities for women. I start the chapter by examining Bodichon’s most relevant work on this theme. I next analyse Bodichon’s feminist viewpoint on women’s training and access to the job market as she expressed it in her letters. Putting into play Bildung’s notion of intersubjective creative mimesis, I explore the way in which Bodichon’s letters to and about provided a propitious platform for the kind of dialogical and transformative interaction Bildung requires. I next analyse Bodichon’s letters from. I incorporate Bildung’s ‘tool’—autonomy—and I tease out Bodichon’s epistolary working out of her self-determination in her own epistolary narratives. I do so by drawing the attention of the pivotal axis feelings of friendship and affection among Bodichon and her female friends played in providing her with an epistolary forum for learning and self-discovery, where she justified women’s work in terms of creativity and self-fulfilment.
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Notes
- 1.
Bodichon to Parkes, [1847], Cambridge University, Girton College Archives, Girton College Personal Papers (GCPP) Parkes 5/165.
- 2.
See, for example, Diana T. Meyers (ed.), Feminists Rethink the Self (Boulder and Oxford: Westview, 1997), especially Marilyn Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships. Rethinking the Feminist Critique’, in Meyers (ed.), Feminists Rethink the Self, 40–61; Alison M. Jagger and Iris M. Young (eds.), A Companion to Feminist Philosophy (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar (eds.), Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency, and the Social Self (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Miranda Fricker and Jenifer Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), especially Marilyn Friedman, ‘Feminism in Ethics. Conceptions of Autonomy’, in Fricker and Hornsby (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Feminism in Philosophy; Deborah Orr et al (eds.), Feminist Politics: Identity, Difference and Agency (Lanham and Plymouth: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007); Allison Stone, An Introduction to Feminist Philosophy (Cambridge and Malden: Polity, 2007); Andrea Veltman and Mark Piper Autonomy (eds.), Autonomy, Oppression, and Gender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 3.
See, for example, Lorraine Code, What Can She Know? Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); Catriona Mackenzie and Natalie Stoljar, ‘Introduction: Autonomy Refigured’, in Mackenzie and Stoljar (eds.), Relational Autonomy.
- 4.
Diana T. Meyers, Self, Society and Personal Choice (New York and Oxford: Columbia University Press, 1989), 19.
- 5.
Meyers, Self, Society and Personal Choice, 20.
- 6.
Ibid., 20.
- 7.
Ibid., 19.
- 8.
Ibid., 26.
- 9.
Ibid., 26–7.
- 10.
Ibid., 46.
- 11.
Ibid., 50–1.
- 12.
Meyers’ notion of ‘divided self’, Diana T. Meyers, ‘Decentralizing Autonomy: Five Faces of Selfhood’, in Autonomy and the Challenges of Liberalism: New Essays, ed. by John Christman and John Anderson, 27–55.
- 13.
Meyers, Self, Society and Personal Choice, 48.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid.
- 16.
Meyers, Self, Society and Personal Choice, 49.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘An Attempt to Define the Legal Limits of Government’ (1792), 111–29, quoted in Humanist Without Portfolio: An Anthology of the Writings of Wilhelm von Humboldt, ed. by Marianne Cowan, 45, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1963.
- 19.
Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships’, 208–9, 220.
- 20.
Ibid., 208–9, 212; Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships’, 42; Chris Weedon, ‘Subjects’, in A Concise Companion to Feminist Theory, ed. by Mary Eagleton, 119–20, Oxford: Blackwell, 2003.
- 21.
Friedman, ‘Autonomy and Social Relationships’, 213, 217; Mackenzie and Stoljar, ‘Introduction’, 22.
- 22.
Mackenzie and Stoljar, ‘Introduction’, 4, 8.
- 23.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Women and Work (London: John Chapman, 1857), reprinted in Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group, ed. by Candida A. Lacey, 41, New York and London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.
- 24.
Bodichon, Women and Work, 38.
- 25.
Ibid., 40.
- 26.
Ibid., 41.
- 27.
Ibid.
- 28.
Ibid.
- 29.
Ibid., 38.
- 30.
Ibid., 39.
- 31.
Ibid., 45.
- 32.
Unsigned, ‘Female Education in the Middle Classes’, The English Woman’s Journal 1/4 (June 1858): 217–27 (218).
- 33.
Bodichon, Women and Work, 39.
- 34.
Esculapius, ‘The Education of Women’, 28 July 1848, The Hastings and St Leonards’ News, Number 13, 4.
- 35.
Bodichon, Women and Work, 41.
- 36.
Ibid., 40.
- 37.
Ibid., 63–4.
- 38.
Parkes to Kate Jevons, London, 15 May 1846, GCPP Parkes 6/49.
- 39.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘The Basques: Observations Made during a Trip through the Spanish and French Basque Country in the Spring of 1801’ (1801), 10, in Cowan (ed.), Humanist Without Portfolio, 71.
- 40.
Janet G. Altman, Epistolarity: Approaches to a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1982), 93, 111.
- 41.
Parkes to Bodichon, Staffordshire, 24 August 1849, GCPP Parkes 5/35.
- 42.
I develop further this idea in Meritxell Simon-Martin, ‘Barbara Bodichon’s Travel Writing: Her Epistolary Articulation of Bildung’, History of Education 45/3 (2016): 285–303.
- 43.
Parkes to Bodichon, 30 May 1850, GCPP Parkes 5/48.
- 44.
Lisa M. Gring-Pemble, ‘Writing themselves into consciousness: Creating a rhetorical bridge between the public and private spheres, Quarterly Journal of Speech 84/1 (1998): 41–61.
- 45.
Parkes to Bodichon, [Wimpole Street]. 21 August [late 1840s-early 1850], GCP’P Bodichon 5/158.
- 46.
Parkes to Bodichon, Cradley, 13 February 1847, GCPP Parkes 5/6.
- 47.
Parkes to Bodichon, Hampstead. 29 July 1847, GCPP Parkes 5/11.
- 48.
In Paul Smith’s conceptual vocabulary, there is an ideological ‘I’ in each autobiographical act that occupies, contests and revises a range of subject positions, Paul Smith, Discerning the Subject (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), explained in Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives, ed. by Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson’, 63, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001.
- 49.
Bodichon, Women and Work, 41.
- 50.
Ibid., 45.
- 51.
David A. Gerber, ‘Acts of Deceiving and Withholding in Immigrant Letters: Personal Identity and Self- Presentation in Personal Correspondence’, Journal of Social History 39/2 (2005): 315–30.
- 52.
Frank K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), 5.
- 53.
Bodichon to Parkes, [n.d.] GCPP Parkes 5/168.
- 54.
In Chap. 3 we saw how Bodichon negotiated her episodic self-direction (how she revised her life plan according to life’s contingencies and her evolving sense of self) when she justified to Allingham her decision to shut her infant school.
- 55.
Wilhelm von Humboldt, ‘The Eighteenth Century’ (1796–1997), 12–3, in Cowan (ed.), Humanist Without Portfolio, 68.
- 56.
Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy, 2.
- 57.
Ibid., 11.
- 58.
Ibid., 40–1, 58–60, 74–5, 93, 102–3, 115–6, 124–5, 135–6, 155–8.
- 59.
Deborah Cherry, Painting Women: Victorian Women Artists (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), 53–5.
- 60.
Clarissa C. Orr, Women in the Victorian Art World (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995), 6.
- 61.
Cherry, Painting Women, 53–5.
- 62.
Pam Hirsch, Barbara Bodichon: Feminist, Artist and Rebel (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), 129, 303.
- 63.
Bodichon to Parkes, [late 1840s], GCPP Parkes 5/165.
- 64.
Parkes to Bodichon, [late 1840s], GCPP Parkes 5/2.
- 65.
Kathleen Wallace, The Network Self: Relation, Process and Personal Identity (New York: Routledge, 2019), 120.
- 66.
Ibid., 137.
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Simon-Martin, M. (2020). ‘To Be Happy Is to Work, Work – Work – Work’: Affection, Creativity and Self-Fulfilment. In: Barbara Bodichon’s Epistolary Education. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-41441-2_4
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