Discourses of Ageing in Fiction and Feminism

The Invisible Woman

J. King

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781137292278
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book explores the way older women are represented in society. Through close readings of novels by major 20th century novelists, compared with the more dominant representations of female ageing to be found in popular culture it suggests that they offer a feminist understanding of the 'invisible' woman sometimes lacking in feminism itself.

Part I

Becoming Visible

1

Crones, Viragos or Wise Women? Discourses of Female Ageing 1850–1900

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the growth of a women’s movement in which older women were active and visible. Such activities are, however, rarely reflected in the fiction of the period – and certainly not positively. The most well-known Victorian novel to deal with the suffrage movement – Henry James’s The Bostonians (1886) – not only represents the movement satirically, but in Olive Chancellor creates the kind of strident and hysterical feminist spinster who was to become a stereotype, and whose implied same-sex desire threatens the proper heterosexual development of a younger woman. Readers of Victorian fiction will also be familiar with the caricatured images of older women which populate the novels of Charles Dickens: from menacing images of sterility like Miss Havisham, the repellent 70-year-old Mrs (Cleopatra) Skewton who tries to pass herself off as much younger, and the ironically named Good Mrs Brown, to philanthropists like Mrs Jellyby who would be better occupied with her own family, and helpless, pitiful victims such as Miss Flite.¹ These caricatures were, however, merely endorsing the dominant medical and sociological discourses of the period, which laid the foundation for the ideological construction of older women as undesirable surplus, best relegated to the corners of the living room and the text. And yet the lived experience of many older women, particularly those involved in the women’s movement, constituted a powerful challenge to these negative normative discourses of life after the menopause.²

Old campaigners: older women and the women’s movement

By the 1850s what we would now call British feminism had acquired an organised form, since disparate women’s groups who had campaigned, for instance, for married women to have control over their earnings and property fought on after the defeat of their original goals to become the foundation of the women’s movement. Older women played an important part in this fight for women’s rights, including the women’s suffrage campaign, which became a clearly identified movement from the 1860s.³ Whether it was simply a matter of signing petitions for women’s suffrage, or playing a more active role, women over 50 were everywhere in evidence. Their lives were often notable for their longevity, one of the few characteristics of post-menopausal women which conformed to the theories of Victorian physicians. In this their lives challenged many modern assumptions about nineteenth-century life expectancy. While a writer like Dinah Mulock Craik takes the biblical ‘threescore years and ten’ as the allotted lifespan when she advises women over 35 how to act once they enter the later stages of their life,⁴ many of the women I have investigated lived into their eighties, and even their nineties. In spite of her ambivalence about female suffrage, Florence Nightingale’s relentless campaigning for every kind of social and medical reform until her death at the age of 90 made her the most famous older woman of the period to act as a female icon.⁵ But many more put the lie to the popular view of the post-menopausal woman as a source of misery to herself and – if she were single – a burden to others. The American suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton put into words what others merely put into practice, describing the years after 50 as the ‘heyday’ of her life, when she had the freedom to exercise her brain, and to divert the time formerly spent on her family to wider forms of philanthropy.⁶ While a more problematic future undoubtedly faced older women suffering from poverty, or forced to play subservient roles within the extended family, many older women took advantage of increasing opportunities in the public sphere, which suggests that age itself was not as powerful a constraint as financial and social considerations. These were exemplary lives which contributed to the gradual transformation of the idea of Victorian womanhood.

Participation in charitable work and involvement in pressure groups were undoubtedly an important outlet for older, as for younger, women. What is more striking, however, is the extent to which older women were actively involved in the major campaigns for women’s rights from the 1850s to the end of the century. While not all such women would have accepted the label ‘feminist’, even if it had been current at the time, they were all committed to what we would now consider a feminist demand for greater equality in the spheres of education, law and the professions. A few examples of prominent figures will serve to illustrate my general point. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917) was appointed Dean of the London School of Medicine for Women in 1883, at the age of 47, while Lady Emilie Dilke (1840–1904) took over leadership of the Women’s Trade Union and Provident League in 1886 at the age of 46. Neither was old by today’s standards, but both were in the post-menopausal zone according to Victorian medical statistics. In her fifties, after years of writing and campaigning against marital violence,⁷ Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) became a member of the executive of the Married Women’s Property Committee from 1871 to 1874. Also in her fifties, Josephine Butler (1828–1906), best known for campaigning for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts, turned her attention to child prostitution, and to raising the age of consent from 12 to 16. A married woman with children, she was nevertheless prepared to accept the risks that speaking on such a contentious subject might give rise to for her whole family, often facing hostile and even dangerous crowds (Forster, pp. 169–202).

In addition to working for the causes with which they remain associated, many older women were also involved in the suffrage movement. Garrett Anderson was a keen advocate of women’s suffrage into her seventies. Emily Davies (1830–1921), the educational reformer who founded Girton College, joined the executive of the London National Society for Women’s Suffrage at the age of 60, and marched along the Embankment with 15,000 other women at the age of 78. Also educational reformers, Dorothea Beale and Frances Buss were in their sixties and seventies during the time of their involvement in the militant suffrage campaigns. Hertha Ayrton (1854–1923), a pioneer among female physicists, joined the militant Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) in her fifties, and went on to found the People’s Suffrage Federation at the age of 56. It should not be surprising that older women took leading roles in the women’s movement, since such roles benefited from the kind of knowledge and skills usually only acquired through years of experience. In 1906, in spite of being 76, years spent on educational reform must have given Emily Davies the experience and confidence to lead a deputation of women to speak to the Prime Minister and demand the vote. Being over 50 usually also meant release from the responsibilities of childbearing and childrearing. Also in 1906, at the relatively youthful age of 59, Millicent Garret Fawcett (1847–1929) took on the leadership of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) after it split from the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) over the issue of militancy, and addressed tens of thousands at rallies and demonstrations in the years that followed.

What is perhaps more surprising is that older women were to become so prominent in militancy, transgressing every Victorian stereotype of ladylike behaviour, let alone of the elderly lady. As the WSPU campaign became increasingly militant at the beginning of the twentieth century, older women stood alongside the young when they broke the windows of famous stores such as Harrods, and took part in ‘raids’ on the House of Commons, subsequently enduring imprisonment and in some cases force-feeding. Charlotte Despard (1844–1939) is an outstanding but not unique example. Particularly committed to improving the lives of working-class women, in 1901, at the age of 56, she briefly joined the Union of Practical Suffragists, before moving on to the Adult Suffrage Society, the only suffrage group advocating the vote for all classes of women. In 1906 she joined the WSPU, replacing Sylvia Pankhurst as secretary. She was imprisoned for 21 days in 1907 for disturbing the peace. After the WSPU changed its name to the Women’s Freedom League (WFL), she toured Britain in the Women’s Freedom League caravan, on occasion being pelted with stones and earth. After a second prison term in 1909, she was elected president of the WFL, and represented the League at the Budapest Congress of the International Woman’s Suffrage Alliance. In 1908, at the age of 72, Garrett Anderson split from her sister Millicent Fawcett over the issue of militancy, taking part in a raid on the House of Commons that year. Emmeline Pankhurst (1858–1928) was younger when she led the WSPU, but remained actively militant throughout her fifties, arguing on 16 February 1911 that ‘the broken pane of glass is the most valuable argument in modern politics’. In 1913, at the age of 54, she was jailed and released 12 times. These women were inspiring figureheads for women of all ages.

Although these are clearly exceptional women, they are not unrepresentative of the interests and activities of less famous older women involved in the women’s movement. Such women are, however, not always easy to identify. While the class of women in the suffrage movement has been explored and debated, age has rarely been used as a means of classification. Nevertheless, even a random dip into Elizabeth Crawford’s invaluable guide to the movement indicates the extent of the involvement of older women.⁸ Not content with simply subscribing to the NUWSS or WSPU, they wrote articles and newspaper columns, distributed leaflets and pamphlets, chaired committees and in many cases founded local branches of the national suffrage organisation and held office as president. Some took part in deputations to the Prime Minister or to their local MPs in the House of Commons, and were ready to travel abroad, speaking at international conferences and meetings. Many were ready to be involved in militancy, in the cause either of women’s suffrage or of trade unionism. Given the attitudes towards women that prevailed at that time, taking part in such public activities as demonstrations and speaking in Hyde Park required considerable moral strength, self-confidence and commitment, such as can be seen on the faces of the older women in Figure 1.1, not to mention physical courage.⁹

Unlike its successor, second-wave feminism, the first wave of the women’s movement was therefore by no means a young woman’s affair. Marilyn Yalom has suggested that the period from 1890 to 1920 represented a ‘renaissance of the middle-aged’ for women in so far as the majority were living beyond childbearing and therefore had the opportunity to take up new activities and commitments.¹⁰ Older women in the women’s movement certainly contributed to such a renaissance. Arabella Keneally ended her 1891 article on the problem of ‘surplus’ women with a list of older women and their achievements.¹¹ These women, however, also represented a threat to the establishment which required some kind of discursive containment. Medical and social constructions of the older woman provided such containment, as did her fictional representations, even when they encompassed some questioning of the stereotypes.

Figure 1.1 Suffrage Day procession 1908 (The Women’s Library/Mary Evans)

‘Autrefois quand j’étais femme’¹²: Medical discourses of the older woman

While in the West today the menopause is experienced by women arguably still in their prime, historically it has been seen as a climactic event in a woman’s life, after which she in a sense ceases to be a woman, having lost the ability to bear children that defined her sex. Post-menopausal women can therefore be seen as standing on the brink of old age and degeneration. In a lecture on the ‘change of life’, Charles Meigs, a professor of obstetrics as influential in Britain as he was in his native America, presented the following dismal view of the menopausal woman to his students:

What has she to expect save gray hairs, wrinkles, the gradual decay of these physical and personal attractions, which heretofore have commanded the flattering image of society. [...] The pearls of the mouth are become tarnished, the hay-like odor of the breath is gone, the rose has vanished from the cheek, and the lily is no longer the vain rival of the forehead or neck. The dance is preposterous, and the throat no longer emulates the voice of the nightingale.¹³

Such comments are typical. The role of medical men in constructing images of Victorian femininity has been well documented.¹⁴ Gynaecology was an increasingly important field of medicine in the mid-nineteenth century, and identified the ‘uterine economy’ as that part of the female organism which determined not only a woman’s health (physical and mental), but her very identity. Both menarche and menopause, as marking the beginning and end of a woman’s reproductive life, received particular attention, not only in gynaecological textbooks but in popular medical guides.¹⁵ It is not easy to estimate at what age the average woman of the period experienced the menopause, although it is generally accepted that the average age of menopause rises with the affluence of society.¹⁶ In the 1850s, in one of the first full-length books on the subject, British physician Dr Edward J. Tilt set the average age at 45.7,¹⁷ basing the figure on a thousand British and French women, an estimate confirmed by more recent research. What is more important is that the menopause was taken as the marker of old age in women. As the physician Julius Althaus put it at the end of the century: ‘Old age begins, as a rule to which there are exceptions, in men about sixty years of age and in women after the change of life has been completed’.¹⁸ That is, whereas old age is chronologically determined in men, it is biologically determined in women and occurs earlier.¹⁹

Moreover, since the mean lifespan was said to be only 50 years as late as 1899,²⁰ this suggests that many women of the period would have had little post-menopausal life, although many others led vigorous and long lives. This perhaps accounts for Walter Johnson’s view of the menopause – presumably meant to comfort – as a time of quiet ‘which deepens gradually into the stillness of the grave’ (1850).²¹ It is little wonder, then, that, in medical eyes, ‘The maternal period in woman seems to form her whole destiny’.²² The medical view reinforces the ideological construction of femininity, according to which woman is designed and destined for motherhood. According to this view, the menopause was indeed ‘climacteric’. In marking the end of a woman’s reproductive life, it constituted a radical loss of function and meaning, since it was the threshold between a stage in life with an identifiable and revered purpose and another, devoid of purpose. The dangers it posed were both physical and psychological. As Thomas Lightfoot wrote, in 1857, ‘the cessation of the ovarian function is the most remarkable and the most dangerous period in woman’s life. It tests her whole constitution and the treasure of her life, her vital powers – in fact, her powers of endurance’. As evidence he cites the case of a woman of 40, ‘typical of thousands’: ‘the strength of her frame gradually declined, and she died, unequal to bear up against the revolution marking in woman the entire change of her mind and physical nature’ (p. 87). While this is an extreme view, most physicians were agreed that the ‘climacteric’ was a time of danger, and there are good reasons for some of the anxieties expressed, since then as now women were at greater risk of female cancers at or after menopause. Tilt, describing this ‘critical’ phase in life, lists 120 associated infirmities.²³ Less dramatica...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Becoming Visible
• Part II The 1960s and After
• Part III The 1990s
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index