Was nineteenth-century British philanthropy the "truest and
noblest woman's work" and praiseworthy for having raised the
nation's moral tone, or was it a dangerous mission likely to cause
the defeminization of its practitioners as they became "public
persons"? In Victorian England, women's participation in volunteer
work seemed to be a natural extension of their domestic role, but
like many other assumptions about gender roles, the connection
between charitable and domestic work is the result of specific
historical factors and cultural representations. Proponents of
women as charitable workers encouraged philanthropy as being ideal
work for a woman, while opponents feared the practice was destined
to lead to overly ambitious and manly behavior.
In The Angel out of the House Dorice Williams Elliott examines
the ways in which novels and other texts that portrayed women
performing charitable acts helped to make the inclusion of
philanthropic work in the domestic sphere seem natural and obvious.
And although many scholars have dismissed women's volunteer
endeavors as merely patriarchal collusion, Elliott argues that the
conjunction of novelistic and philanthropic discourse in the works
of women writers--among them George Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell,
Hannah More and Anna Jameson--was crucial to the redefinition of
gender roles and class relations.
In a fascinating study of how literary works contribute to
cultural and historical change, Elliott's exploration of
philanthropic discourse in nineteenth-century literature
demonstrates just how essential that forum was in changing accepted
definitions of women and social relations.
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