Women's handiwork: Dress culture, literacy, and social activism in British women's fiction, 1883--1900

Throughout the Victorian period, British women of all classes were expected to know how to "work"---that is, to sew, knit, embroider, or do needlework of some kind. With the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, and 1891, the privilege of instruction in print literary was extended to more and more of the populace. Despite the changes this legislation initiated, Victorian women of all classes continued to receive instruction in dress culture, what I define as the interrelated skills of constructing and interpreting clothing. How they experienced the acts of sewing and reading clothing, not to mention what kind of sewing they did, varied widely, but all Victorian women were presumed to demonstrate some level of literacy in both print and dress culture. This dual literacy, I argue, created modes of communication that linked women writers and their readers in an imagined community.;At the fin de siecle, however, the definition of "women's work" was under intense scrutiny. New Woman novelists, in particular, struggled to broaden women's opportunities in the public sphere and to modify the domestic, realistic novel. Given these radical aims, it seems probable that the traditionally private, unpaid, domestic labor of dress culture would have provided little inspiration. This study aims to prove that, on the contrary, dress culture offered New Woman writers a richly textured language for addressing an imagined community of female readers. Anticipating, and indeed relying on, women's dual literary, these writers used that literacy to expose, complicate, and redefine women's class differences, social activism, and literary tradition, as well as the limits of imagined community itself. Women's Handiwork considers the material history of Victorian women's dress culture along with fiction by Olive Schreiner, Ella Hepworth Dixon, Sarah Grand, Gertrude Dix, and Margaret Oliphant. Rather than rejecting women's dress culture as tedious drudgery or brainless frippery, the late-Victorian writers I consider instead used dual literacy to valorize women's dress culture as an artistic, nurturing, and community-building activity closely tied to the work of literary composition.