By Jill Rappoport
Altruism and self-assertiveness went hand in hand for
Victorian women. Gift transactions allowed them to enter into economic
negotiations of power as volatile and potentially profitable as those within
the markets that so frequently excluded or exploited them. They made presents
of holiday books and homemade jams, transformed inheritances into intimate and
aggressive bequests, and, in both prose and practice, offered up their own
bodies in sacrifice. Far more than selfless acts of charity or signs of their
suitability for marriage, such gifts radically reconstructed women’s personal
relationships and public activism in the nineteenth century. Giving Women examines the literary
expression and cultural consequences of English women’s giving from the 1820s
to the First World War. In fiction and poetry by Brontë, Barrett Browning,
Gaskell, and Rossetti , periodicals, and political pamphlets, Rappoport demonstrates
how female authors and fictional protagonists alike mobilized networks outside
of marriage and the market. Through giving, women redefined the primary
allegiances of their everyday lives, forged public coalitions, and advanced
campaigns for abolition, slum reform, eugenics, and suffrage.
Oxford University Press, 2012
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