Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-dsjbd Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-20T07:33:36.674Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

SELF-TEACHING: MARY CARPENTER, PUBLIC SPEECH, AND THE DISCIPLINE OF DELINQUENCY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 March 2008

Janice Schroeder
Janice Schroeder*
Affiliation:
Carleton University
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

With the growth of the organized feminist movement in England at the end of the 1850s, women began to mount public lecture platforms in increasing numbers. By claiming a space in public assembly rooms through the simple use of their voices, women reformers such as Bessie Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon challenged the male privilege of public address, and changed the visual, oral, and aural culture of Victorian reform movements. Women's public speech in the 1850s and 60s was never linked with the kind of riotous responses provoked later by Josephine Butler or the women's suffrage movement. But even public speakers associated with a more moderate or “polite” tone, such as Parkes and Frances Power Cobbe, routinely received a mixture of moral censure and ridicule, causing them to question the value of publicity – both print and platform – for the feminist cause. However, one of the most prolific female public speakers of mid nineteenth-century England, Mary Carpenter (1807–77), seems to have escaped all such criticism and was repeatedly held up as a shining example, by both feminists and non-feminists, of appropriate womanly behavior in official public settings. Commentators on Carpenter's work and her public reputation were nearly unanimous in their approval of not only the content of her public speech but also its flawless delivery. What can Carpenter's apparently unique public persona tell us about shifts in the gendered dimensions of public utterance in the 1850s and 60s, when she was most active? More broadly, what does the history of women's platform speech have to do with a seemingly unrelated narrative: that is, the theorization of juvenile delinquency as a specific problem in nineteenth-century England?

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , March 2008 , pp. 149 - 161
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2008

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

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1987.Google Scholar
Beetham, Margaret. A Magazine of Her Own? Domesticity and Desire in the Woman's Magazine, 1800–1914. New York: Routledge, 1996.Google Scholar
Burton, Antoinette. Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1994.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Joseph Estlin. Life and Work of Mary Carpenter. 2nd ed. London: Macmillan, 1881.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Mary. Reformatory Schools for the Children of the Perishing and Dangerous Classes and for Juvenile Offenders. 1851. New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Mary. Voices of the Spirit and Spirit Pictures. Bristol: I. Arrowsmith, Printer, 1877.Google Scholar
Carpenter, Mary. “Women's Work in the Reformatory Movement.” English Woman's Journal 1 (1858): 289–95.Google Scholar
Cobbe, Frances Power. “Fitness of Women for the Ministry.” Theological Review 13 (1876): 239–73.Google Scholar
Cunningham, Hugh. The Children of the Poor in England: Representations of Childhood Since the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.Google Scholar
Fawcett, Millicent Garrett (Mrs. Henry). Some Eminent Women of Our Times: Short Biographical Sketches. London: Macmillan, 1889.Google Scholar
“The Fifteenth Social Science Congress.” Englishwoman's Review January (1872): 18–28.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Sheridan, Alan. New York: Vintage, 1977.Google Scholar
Goldman, Lawrence. Science, Reform and Politics in Victorian Britain: The Social Science Association, 1857–1886. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2002.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Goodlad, Lauren. Victorian Literature and the Victorian State: Character and Governance in a Liberal Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2003.Google Scholar
Krueger, Christine L. “Legal Uses of Victorian Fiction: Infant Felons to Juvenile Delinquents.” Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present Time. Ed. Krueger, Christine L.. Athens: Ohio UP, 2002. 115–33.Google Scholar
“The Ladies at Guildhall.” Saturday Review 14 June 1862: 680–81.Google Scholar
“The Ladies’ Evidence–Poor Relief.” English Woman's Journal 7 (1861): 405–10.Google Scholar
Levin, David Michael. The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change and the Closure of Metaphysics. London: Routledge, 1989.Google Scholar
Manton, Jo. Mary Carpenter and the Children of the Streets. London: Heinemann, 1976.Google Scholar
“Mary Carpenter.” Englishwoman's Review 14 July 1877: 295–99.Google Scholar
May, Margaret. “Innocence and Experience: The Evolution of the Concept of Juvenile Delinquency in the Mid-Nineteenth Century.” Victorian Studies 17 (1973): 7–29.Google Scholar
McCrone, Kathleen E. “The National Association for the Promotion of Social Science and the Advancement of Victorian Women.” Atlantis 8 (1982): 44–66.Google Scholar
Mort, Frank. Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987.Google Scholar
Ong, Walter. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Routledge, 1982.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Poovey, Mary. Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1830–1864. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.Google Scholar
Ross, Ellen. Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London 1870–1918. New York: Oxford UP, 1993.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schroeder, Janice. “Speaking Volumes: Victorian Feminism and the Appeal of Public Discussion.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts 25 (2003): 97–117.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Selleck, R. J. W.“Mary Carpenter: A Confident and Contradictory Reformer.” History of Education 14 (1985): 101–15.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Simcox, Edith. “Ideals of Feminine Usefulness.” Fortnightly Review 33 (1880): 656–71.Google Scholar
Steedman, Carolyn. Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1780–1930. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1995.Google Scholar
Yeo, Eileen. The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class. London: Rivers Oram, 1996.Google Scholar