Shirley and the Odd Women

Overall, I did not think it was a very good book, but it did have some interesting bits. The best bit was some feminism in chapter 22, Two Lives. This is supposedly one of the heroines, Carolina Hellstone, thinking, but clearly it is Charlotte Brontë herself:

Nobody,' she went on – 'nobody in particular is to blame, that I can see, for the state in which things are; and I cannot tell, however much I puzzle over it, how they are to be altered for the better; but I feel there is something wrong somewhere. I believe single women should have something more to do – better chances of interesting and profitable occupation than they possess now. And when I speak thus, I have no impression that I displease God by my words, that I am either impious or impatient, irreligious or sacrilegious. My consolation is, indeed, that God hears many a groan, and compassionates much grief which man stops his ears against, or frowns on with impotent contempt. I say impotent, for that I observe that to such grievances as society cannot readily cure, it usually forbids utterance, on pain of its scorn: this scorn being only a tinselled cloak to its deformed weakness. People here have to be reminded of ills they are unable or unwilling to remedy: such reminder, in forcing on them a sense of their own incapacity, or a more painful sense of obligation to make some unpleasant effort, troubles their ease and shakes their self-complacency. Old maids, like the houseless and unemployed poor, should not ask for a place and an occupation in the world: the demand disturbs the happy and rich: it disturbs parents. Look at the numerous families of girls in this neighbourhood: the Armitages, the Birtwhistles, the Sykes. The brothers of these girls are every one in business or in professions: they have something to do: their sisters have no earthly employment, but household work and sewing; no earthly pleasure, but an unprofitable visiting, and no hope in their life to come, of anything better. This stagnant state of things makes them decline in health: they are never well; and their minds and views shrink to wondrous narrowness. The great wish – the sole aim of every one of them is to be married, but the majority will never marry: they will die as they now live. They scheme, they plot, they dress to ensnare husbands. The gentlemen turn them into ridicule: they don't want them; they hold them cheap: they say – I have heard them say it with sneering laughs many a time – the matrimonial market is overstocked. Fathers say so likewise, and are angry with their daughters when they observe their manoeuvres: they order them to stay at home. What do they expect them to do at home? If you ask, they would answer, sew and cook. They expect them to do this, and this only, contentedly, regularly, uncomplainingly, all their lives long, as if they had no germs of faculties for anything else: a doctrine as reasonable to hold, as it would be that the fathers have no faculties but for eating what their daughters cook, or for wearing what they sew...

When I read it, I was reminded of George Gissing's book, The Odd Women written about forty years later, when things were beginning to change for women. Working class women always had to work, but for middle class women, there was a new career option: secretarial work. George Gissing also commented on the excess number of women who could not be paired off with husbands (not that they all wanted to be). I wondered where the excess came from, but maybe it was the result of emigration or the dangerous nature of many men's jobs.

I was also reminded of Gissing when Louis Moore teases Shirley about his plan to marry a poor, young, working class woman and cultivate her into a suitable companion. This is what Gissing tried with his second wife, and the plan went disastrously wrong. Think of those mad scientist creates sexbot films. It went that sort of wrong.