LHMP #327 Nord 1990 Neither Pairs nor Odd

Nord takes a deep dive into the lives of three single women who made lives for themselves in 1880s London outside of conventional family structures, but also apart from organized women’s communities and institutions. Nor were these women in unrecognized female partnerships. All three intersected the field of social work in some way, but without approaching it as a female-coded vocation. And all three were loosely connected to each other (as well as to other single women) socially, but in a somewhat loose fashion that did not assume mutual support.

These women occupied a somewhat ambiguous and contradictory position. They chose to marginalize themselves in society by stepping outside the conventional structures of middle class life, but often found their vocations in promoting and encouraging those conventional structures for other women, as in the administration of settlement houses (structured housing for the poor). They fell in an intermediate temporal position between earlier Victorian female homosocial communities who operated within traditional domestic structures, and the independent 20th century “new women” who deliberately embraced singlehood and female community as a political position.

The women in this study did not specifically reject marriage, though they might set it aside for a time. And they pursued individual emancipation from the restrictions of female roles, but did not necessarily embrace feminist politics in general. But choosing to spend some portion of their lives single, in professional pursuits, enabled them to envision new roles for women in society.

Three women who are the focus of this article. Beatrice Potter Webb developed an interest in sociological research via working as a rent-collector and administrator of a slum tenement. From her observations of the lives and struggles of the residents she wrote a number of studies of working class dynamics and the causes of poverty. Webb’s cousin Margaret Harkness was also involved with the tenement that Webb administered but converted her observations and experiences into novels criticizing various social conditions. The third woman in the study is poet and novelist Amy Levy, who brought a particular focus to the Jewish community in London.

This loose network of women dissolved at the end of the 1880s, due to personal conflicts, death, or emigration. Nord suggests that the lack of an accepted social niche for single middle-class women in this transitional era was a driving cause of this social fragmentation (though I wonder if she’s generalizing too much from a specific set of women). And yet, though rejecting the idea of participating in a formal female community, they were able to produce their best work specifically because of the support of that informal community.