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ABSTRACT
Wilkie Collins’s Man and Wife (1870) and Jezebel’s Daughter (1880) portray female business owners who run their own enterprises independently. The concept of “female entrepreneurs” went against the social ethos of Victorian domestic ideologies. This essay argues that the novels suggested not only women’s place beyond domestic spheres but also the possibility of their economic participation in Victorian society. Collins’s Man and Wife and Jezebel’s Daughter were published when women’s property and economic participation were important Victorian political agendas. This essay argues that Collins’s Man and Wife and Jezebel’s Daughter supported Victorian women’s entitlement to be independent economic agents as well as their contribution to the British economy through their participation in public businesses, thus foreshadowing the “New Woman” discourse on women’s professional and financial independence.
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Notes
1 During the Victorian era, most female business owners were lower-middle class or working class. However, Collins’s female entrepreneurs are middle-class women who keep servants, a marker of middle-classness.
2 According to Robert Bennett et al., prior to the 1882 Married Women’s Property Act, a British court confirmed in 1877 “married women’s business independence … as a ‘pure personality’, establishing trade earnings as separate property”. Robert Bennett et al., The Age of Entrepreneurship, 193.
3 Kay, Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship, 6.
4 See Pinchbeck, 287–90.
5 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 272. In contrast, Robert Shoemaker argues that the influence of separate spheres ideology was not decisive: “there are far more continuities in gender roles … [and] the changes [that] did occur were less restrictive for women than is suggested by the term ‘separate spheres’”. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society, 10. Similarly, Mary Poovey argues that “the boundary between the private … and the public … was permeable … in a way that did not exactly correspond to the permeability of the boundary between the social and the political domains”. Mary Poovey, Making a Social Body, 12–3.
6 Ibid., 307.
7 Aston, Female Entrepreneurship, 29
8 Ibid., 29.
9 Kay, Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship, 8.
10 Ibid., 9. In the aftermath of the anti-revolutionary French Wars (1790-1815), English society was concerned about political and economic troubles.
11 Ibid., 127.
12 Green et al., “Men, Women, and Money”, 2.
13 Best, Mid-Victorian Britain, 21.
14 Peterson, “The Victorian Governess”, 23.
15 Ibid., 9.
16 Ibid., 9.
17 Ellis, The Prose Works, 104.
18 Hughes, The Victorian Governess, 25.
19 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 315.
20 Wakefield, ‘Reflections’, 109.
21 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 288.
22 Phillips, Women in Business, 1.
23 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 304.
24 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 273, 277. The legal status implied married women’s deprivation of legal existence under the husband because of coverture, which was banned by the Married Women’s Property Act in 1870 and 1882 that enabled women to make independent economic transactions and to access household resources, entitling them to become financial agents.
25 To name excellent works in this field, Hanna Barker’s The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England 1760–1830 and Alison Kay’s The Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship: Enterprise, Home and Household in London c. 1800-1970.
26 See Aston and Martino, 846.
27 See Aston and Martino, 840.
28 The number of women exceeded that of men by more than one million in the 1911 census.
29 Nightingale, Cassandra, 33.
30 Peterson, “The Victorian Governess”, 10.
31 Kay, Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship, 133.
32 Aston and Martino, “Risk, Success, and Failure”, 849.
33 Nenadic, “The Social Shaping”, 626.
34 Aston and Martino, “Risk, Success, and Failure”, 847. Aston and Martino do not specify the precise ranks of the businesswomen. Considering most Victorian businesswomen’s strata, their results imply that they were lower-middle-class to working-class women. However, the ambiguous demarcation also suggests that the Victorian ideal of the leisured lady who did not work did not reflect reality.
35 Kay, Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship, 122.
36 Lieshout et al., “Female Entrepreneurship”, 307.
37 Collins, Man and Wife, 116, emphasis original.
38 Ibid., 114.
39 Ibid., 113.
40 Ibid., 29.
41 Ibid., 473.
42 Ibid., 241. According to Davidoff and Hall, a governess was “the only occupation in which middle-class women could preserve something of their status”, allowing them to work without endangering their middle-class status. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 293.
43 Kay, Foundations of Female Entrepreneurship, 16.
44 Trodd, Domestic Crime, 50.
45 History scholars point out that an aversion to domestic service existed among Victorian working classes. Due to their subordination and lack of freedom, working people abhorred domestic service, and “factory work became more attractive”. Nash, Servants and Paternalism, 23.
46 Nash, Servants and Paternalism, 20.
47 Collins, Man and Wife, 475.
48 Purvis, Women’s History, 91.
49 Bennett et al., The Age of Entrepreneurship, 202.
50 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 299, 301.
51 Lieshout et al., “Female Entrepreneurship”, 310.
52 Wright, “Of Public Houses”, Australian Historical Studies 32 (2001): 59.
53 For instance, Elizabeth Gaskell’s short story “The Manchester Marriage” (1858) portrays a middle-class woman, Alice Wilson, who takes in lodgers with her dead husband’s stepmother to support her deformed daughter Ailsie Wilson and themselves. The story shows that lodging was an easy option to earn an income for women when they were economically strained. Ellen Wood’s Mrs Halliburton's Troubles (1863) also portrays a widow engaged in the lodging business to support her children. In contrast, Charles Dickenson’s “Mrs. Lirriper’s Lodgings” (1863) portrays a widowed landlady as cruel and meddlesome.
54 Phillips, Women in Business, 2.
55 Collins, Man and Wife, 113, 585.
56 Ibid., 583.
57 Ibid., 583.
58 Ibid., 590.
59 Ibid., 589.
60 Nelson, “Orphans, Money and Marriage”, 261.
61 Collins, Man and Wife, 113, 586.
62 Ibid., 586.
63 Ibid., 588.
64 Moon, Domestic Violence, 5.
65 Ibid., 7.
66 Surridge, “Unspeakable Histories”, 105. Prior to her husband’s death, she begins to have trouble in speaking after being severely beaten by him. After his death, she only uses her speaking in prayer.
67 Collins, Man and Wife, 113.
68 Ibid., 240, 271, 114.
69 Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, 6.
70 Ibid., 6.
71 Barker, The Business of Women, 106.
72 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 287.
73 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, 287; Aston, Female Entrepreneurship, 40.
74 Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, 8.
75 Ibid., 8.
76 Kay, The Foundations, 15.
77 Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, 8.
78 Kay, The Foundations, 15.
79 Harris, Jose. Private Lives, 26.
80 Collins, Jezebel’s Daughter, 8.
81 Ibid., 8–9.
82 Ibid., 9.
83 Ibid., 9.
84 Ibid., 9.
85 Ibid., 9.
86 Ibid., 129.
87 Ibid., 188.
88 Ibid., 188.
89 Ibid., 189.
90 Ibid., 187.
91 Aston, Female Entrepreneurship, 132.