Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gbm5v Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-22T14:01:22.741Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Social and Political Position Of Woman in Ancient Egypt

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Amelia Blandford Edwards
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

When James Russell Lowell, John Greenleaf Whittier, Oliver Wen-Dell Holmes, and two hundred other prominent American Literary and intellectual figures joined efforts to bring Amelia Edwards to the United States for a public lecture tour in 1889-90, they were acknowledging her importance as a writer and educator. The author of novels, short stories, popular histories, and works of travel literature, Edwards had established a second career as an advocate for the new science of Egyptology. As cofounder of and secretary for the Egypt Exploration Fund (EEF) in 1882, Edwards wrote extensively for the Morning Post and the Academy in England and Harper's in the United States. By 1887, she had established a strong working relationship with William Copley Winslow of the Boston Museum and received honorary degrees from Smith College and Columbia College for her literary and scholarly achievements. By the time of her tour, Edwards had succeeded in fostering a new understanding of a culture more ancient and exotic than those of Greece and Rome. Audiences for her lectures in both England and America were thus prepared for her to illuminate the Egyptian past, but listeners to this lecture on the social and political position of women in ancient Egypt may have been somewhat startled to find shadows from that past cast on their own present.

Type
Little-Known Documents
Information
PMLA , Volume 120 , Issue 3 , May 2005 , pp. 843 - 857
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Boisseau, Tracey Jean. White Queen: May French-Sheldon and the Imperial Origins of American Feminist Identity. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2004.Google Scholar
Cobbe, Frances Power. Letter to Amelia Blandford Edwards. Dec. 1887. Edwards Papers. Somerville Coll., Oxford.Google Scholar
Frawley, Maria H. A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England. Cranbury: Associated UP, 1994.Google Scholar
Harrison, Brian. Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women's Suffrage in Britain. London: Croom, 1978.Google Scholar
Melman, Billie. Women's Orients: English Women and the Middle East, 1718-1918. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1992.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Middleton, Dorothy. Victorian Lady Travellers. New York: Dutton, 1965.Google Scholar
Newman, Louise Michele. Men's Ideas / Women's Realities: Popular Science, 1870-1915. New York: Pergamon, 1985.Google Scholar
O'Neill, Patricia. “Amelia Edwards.” British Travel Writers, 1876-1909. Columbia: Bruccoli, 1997. Vol. 174 of Dictionary of Literary Biogaphy.Google Scholar
Rees, Joan. Amelia Edwards: Traveller, Novelist, Egyptologist. London: Rubicon, 1998.Google Scholar
Simcox, Edith. Primitive Civilizations or Outlines of the History of Ownership in Archaic Communities. London: Swan Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1894.Google Scholar
Villiers Stuart, Henry Windsor. Egypt after the War. London: Murray, 1883.Google Scholar
Winslow, William Copley. “The Queen of Egyptology.” American Antiquarian and Oriental Journal 14 (1892): 305–15.Google Scholar