Award Date

May 2025

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Arts (MA)

Department

History

First Committee Member

Michelle Tusan

Second Committee Member

Gregory S. Brown

Third Committee Member

Elizabeth Nelson

Fourth Committee Member

Peter Wiens

Number of Pages

98

Abstract

This thesis explores the lives of three Victorian women – Caroline Norton, Annie Besant, and Clementina Black – and their campaigns to improve the status of women in the Victorian Era. Each engaged in the condition of women debate writing in distinctive genres- letter writing, social and political commentary and fiction, respectively. In an era of rising literacy, these middle and upper-class women used the power of the pen to shape how Victorians understood the Woman Question. The first chapter shares Norton’s fight to challenge principles of coverture. Using her writing to reach her high connections, she set the stage for campaigns in support of equal divorce laws and the Married Women’s Property Acts. My next case study follows Besant’s campaigns to allow women to control their own bodies in England and India. Besant faced frequent legal prosecution for publishing pamphlets and works using population theories and birth control. She then turned her attention to women in India, oppressed by the colonial laws held by the British Raj. Finally, this thesis ends with the fight of Clementina Black, who advocated in her writings the benefits of socialism by highlighting the abuses, mistreatments and pay of women in the workplace. Her fiction mirrored depictions of conditions for women in Victorian England and resulted in the expansion of trade unions for women workers. This case study approach considers the lives, campaigns and writing strategies of these three very different women in order to show how changes to women's role in marriage, control over their bodies and status in the workplace took place in the arena of an emergent extra-parliamentary political culture. These campaigns were spearheaded by the women who had the most to lose in an industrial capitalist system that made gender inequality a central feature of Victorian ideology and values.

Disciplines

European History

Degree Grantor

University of Nevada, Las Vegas

Language

English

Rights

IN COPYRIGHT. For more information about this rights statement, please visit http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

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