Nurturing Professionals: De Facto Maternal Roles in British New Woman Novels, 1880–1900

Abstract

Abstract This article situates the modern ideals of female motherhood and professionalism in the fin de siècle creation of the professional New Woman in Britain, and posits that future feminist discourses would find value in identifying similar strands of commonality with underrated historical feminist movements. Presenting snapshots of nineteenth-century British novelistic plots, this article shows how altered settings and character types in early, mid, and late Victorian novels do not diminish the Western investment in marriage and procreation as the future of culture, civilization, and hegemony. The article then analyzes how late Victorian narratives reconceptualize maternity as civic duty. Consequently, the physicality of biological motherhood and the complex Victorian epistemologies about sex and sexuality are relegated to animality with distinctly classist and racist connotations. Unwanted birth, along with its discomfiting relationship with infanticide in Victorian society, is subtly pushed into the sexualized realm of the lower classes or foreign, other races. Finally, this article explores the figure of the maternal professional woman, de facto non-biological mothers to childlike figures in the interest of civic duty that emerged, fairly clearly, from the discursive construction of the proto-professional New Woman in the fin de siècle. In this way, this article argues that the ideal of the New Woman gave rise to the modern notion of female professionalism that is nurturing and maternal, and involved the rearing of both biological and non-biological children.