Touring the City: Virginia Woolf’s The Years and London Essays
The previous chapter has examined female consumption as manifesting fin de siècle women’s complicated involvement in the city’s consuming spaces andcommodity culture, which is represented by Dorothy Richardson in her fictional narratives about female consumers emerging in fin de siècle London, a phenomenon historically experienced by women of the 1880s and 1890s who increasingly found London’s West End a site of consumption and female pleasure, and by the authoress herself in her “ethnographical” writings on cinema as popular pleasure appealing to a wider spectrum of mass consumers, of which women constitute a significant part who seek fantasy and entertainment in the seemingly anesthetic form of pleasure. Yet if the West End shopping and entertaining places of London provided an urban space
inhabitable by respectable women in the fin de siècle period, then East End
philanthropy provided another opportunity for the modern women to make a claim on the city’s public space.
One crucial way for middle-class British women to navigate with relative freedom and independence the open streets of London in the last years of the
nineteenth century, especially those more chaotic, dangerous and poverty-ridden parts of London, is as charity workers and philanthropists. Apart from engaging in a
religious and humanitarian service, ladies doing philanthropies were considered to occupy themselves with a respectable profession, since most charity work had been non-remunerative throughout the century.108 By the end of this century, a woman
108 See F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1980) 5-8.
from the upper- or middle-class who did not perform some kind of charitable work would have been an anomaly among her friends. In 1893 it was estimated that some twenty thousand women were maintaining themselves as paid officials in works of philanthropic usefulness in England, while at least twenty times that number, or about half a million, were occupied more or less continuously and semi-professionally in similar works.109
Women doing charitable works are considered as answering the calls for feminine nature and mission. During much of the nineteenth century there was very little employment suitable for middle-class women. Denied specialized training in an age that increasingly demanded it, they found it not easy to compete with men better qualified in trades and businesses traditionally open to them. Besides, there are ideologies about female work, which hold that it should enable women to live up to their calling and feminine traits and should be confined to the home ambience.
Charitable work becomes thus a most compelling vocation to leisured women, who are traditionally skilled in caring for the young, the sick, the elderly, and the poor.
Through performing such tasks, these women of the upper- and middle- classes exhibit also their capability as “compassionate” and “self-sacrificing” caretaker, which meets the expectation of what is deemed as duly feminine features.
The “non-invidious” nature of women charity workers enabled them to be more readily accepted into the homes of the working-class and the poor than their male
109 See Anne Summers, “A Home from Home—Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century,” Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979) 34, qtd in Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985) 211-12
counterparts.110 In addition to neighborhood charitable activities such as Sunday school teaching and mothers’ meeting, women charity workers in late-Victorian England showed their greater mobility in scheming the household visiting of slums and the visiting of institutions like workhouses, orphanages, prisons, hospitals, asylums, and refuges. Through all these frequent contacts with “the other world,”
women charity workers were able to cross class lines to travel into farther territory.111 In fact, such a mobility as practiced by female charity workers is especially associated with and ascribable to the greater freedom of public walking enjoyed by most
ordinary women in the fin de siècle period. As Octavia Hill, the founder of Charitable Organization Society (COS), thus comments:
There are comparatively few parents who do not recognize for their daughters the duty of sympathy and of rendering such service as other claims permit. With this different ideal of life, customs have altered in a marked manner; it used to be difficult for a girl to walk alone, and it was considered almost impossible for her to travel in omnibuses or third-class trains. The changes in custom with regard to such matters have opened out fresh possibilities of work. (Qtd in Vicinus 345)112
110 See Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1985) 211-46.
111 Ibid. Vicinus indicates that charitable work gave these women freedom to walk and move in areas that were previously forbidden. According to her, “[neither] teaching, nor nursing, nor even mission work permitted women so much spatial freedom. The streets of the slums, away from upper-class men’s eyes, were theirs; no matter how much they might be teased by little boys or abused by drunks, they carried a kind of immunity along the streets of the drab slums they sought to uplift” (220). For more on the mobility of Victorian female charity workers, see Anne Summers, “A Home from Home—Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century,” Fit Work for Women, ed. Sandra Burman (New York: St. Martin’s, 1979) 33-63; Jessica Gerard, “Lady Bountiful: Women of the Landed Class and Rural Philanthropy,’ Victorian Studies 30 (1987) 183-211; Seth Koven, Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2004); Ellen Ross, Slum Travelers:
Ladies and London Poverty 1860-1920 (Berkeley: California UP, 2007).
112 Octavia Hill, “A Few Words for Fresh Workers,” Nineteenth Century, 26 (1889) 454, qtd in Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850-1920 (Chicago: Chicago
The social historian Martha Vicinus also indicates that charitable work entitles women to walk and move in areas that were previously forbidden. According to her,
“[neither] teaching, nor nursing, nor even mission work permitted women so much spatial freedom. The streets of the slums, away from upper-class men’s eyes, were theirs; no matter how much they might be teased by little boys or abused by drunks, they carried a kind of immunity along the streets of the drab slums they sought to uplift” (220). Along with other female figures visible in the streets of late-Victorian London like protesting female workers, platform women, Salvation Army lasses, glamorized girls in business, women philanthropists are thus recognized as one of the new entrants to the urban scene who “produced new stories of the city that competed, intersected with, appropriated, and revised the dominant imaginative mappings of London” (Walkowitz1992: 88).
Visiting the poor undoubtedly gave the well-to-do women a purpose in life.
Philanthropic works are considered as producing a sublimiating effect upon the otherwise boring, tedious life led by most women of the middle-class. For single women such work presents itself as particularly a respectable alternative to idleness and a search of adventure, self-discovery, and meaningful work. Leading a life of independence during their service in the urban slum, many female philanthropists are aligned with the “Glorified Spinster,” one of the New Woman stereotypes caricatured
UP, 1985) 345. Looking to an army of female district visitors to carry out the tasks of social reconciliation and domestic supervision, Hill had advanced an ambitious project of female slum supervision since the 1860s. With the help of John Ruskin, Hill purchased London tenements and oversaw their improvement by the tenants, from which she collected the rents. She was also a founding member of the Charity Organization Society (COS), which was dedicated to the systematic
coordination of charity giving and assessment of individual cases in the dispensing of alms to the deserving poor. See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 54-55.
in fin de siècle periodicals for practicing voluntary spinsterhood.113 They represent a small number of self-supporting or financially independent single middle-class women, who began to practice a new urban female style of being at home in the city.
Female philanthropists might also want to put into words what they observe when visiting the poor. Through narrating their experiences with the poor, women philanthropists align themselves with a group of social investigators or novelists of the slum life, who represent a spectrum of authors seeking writing as a form of social representation. As observers of urban poverty, female philanthropists depart from their male counterparts in giving more attention to the familial or the domestic scenes whose significances are largely overlooked in contemporary male writings of the urban slum that tend to have detailed and clinical descriptions of filth, squalor, child beggars or diseased bodies in the street.114 Through narrating their personal
encounters with poverty and the poor, women help to produce new and different
“legends” about London and its people that “now would include factory girls and worn mothers, domestic interiors rather than street scenes, schoolchildren rather than child beggars” (Ross 13). Besides, while lacking the socially analytic perspective typical of male writers on slumming, these female philanthropist-observers
nevertheless are, in many cases, capable of representing the poor sympathetically as
113 An 1888 article in Macmillan Magazine addresses the “Glorified Spinster” as women marked by their unwillingness to look forward to marriage as an ultimate destiny and to acquiesce in a position of despondence and subjection, their pursuits of intellectual pleasures.
114 For a brief introduction to the striking contrast between London’s two class zones of the east and the west, see Jane Rendell, “Displaying Sexuality: Gendered Identity and the Early Nineteenth-Century Street,” Images of the Street: Planning, Identity, and Control in Public Space (London: Routledge, 1998) 77-78. See also Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: Chicago UP, 1992) 15-39, for her elaboration on London as a site of social extremes portrayed by a wide spectrum of late-Victorian writers including novelists, journalists, and social investigators.
individuals rather than as symbols of an alien otherness and dealing with women’s topics as an oblique critique of the kinds of subjects that dominate male writings on the urban slum.115
Studies of female philanthropy have long focused on how Victorian women of the upper- and middle- classes perform their feminine, domestic duties though taking care of those in need. Few have touched upon how the everyday life and space lived by these wealthy women have changed because of their commitment to such an enterprise. As is indicated, their life and perspective might be enlarged by the
cross-class and often cross-ethnic contacts their charity work brings, which would be otherwise impossible considering that these women of leisured classes are mostly
“domesticated.” A gendered difference is especially perceived in how the middle-class female philanthropist views her visit to the poor as a means of transcending the daily spatial and thus experiential limitations imposed by the gender-discriminated,
separate-sphere ideology. While the life of the working-class which the female philanthropist comes to assist and improve might represent to the socially privileged, well-to-do woman misery and poverty, it nevertheless signifies also the vitality of the working-class people and thus the freedoms of public mobility and visibility that the woman of the leisured class observes with admiring eyes.