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BOOK REVIEW

Jill Rappoport, Giving Women: Alliance and Exchange in Victorian Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

Reviewed by Jennifer Redmond.

Giving Women is a fascinating journey through literature and the social landscape of the nineteenth-century world of gift giving in its multifarious forms. Rappoport’s book offers readers an insight into the cultural and material practices of women, often thought of as constrained by the societal mores and strictures of the period in their ability to bequeath or give. Yet, as Rappoport suggests, in both literary examples and in the real world, women navigated this world of exchange skilfully, often employing what means of power they could muster to be beneficent, while also, at times, utilizing all their means to resist gifts that would compromise their sense of integrity, independence or identity. As Rappoport’s work on Aurora Leigh outlines, gifts are narrated and viewed in literature as complex, relational transactions that are rarely unilateral–a gift is not a gift without a giver and a receiver. In the historical examples she draws upon, women’s gifts are not merely material, but involve their labour, energies and, in certain circumstances, their bodies.

The book moves from an analysis of literary gift giving, both the gifting of special books and fictional accounts of gifting, to a thematic analysis of gift practices in specific well-known novels, Jane Eyre and Cranford, as well as the work of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rosetti. Rappoport further gives the reader both a textual analysis of the stories and moral essays contained in women’s literary magazines, journals and popular literature, and a broader analysis of the exchange practices among women in the nineteenth century. This offers depth in two ways: excavating the latent gift and giving nuances in literary fictions that might otherwise have been overlooked; and an exposition of the reciprocal and non-reciprocal relations engendered by the gifting of money, clothes, books or other material benefits. The gendered nature of this giving is not only evident in the title of this book, but also in Rappoport’s examination of the gendered legal landscape that disempowered women from certain forms of giving and receiving under the strictures of legal inheritance, ownership and will-making. The analysis of gift giving, receiving and withholding in Jane Eyre in this book is something that strikes me as an innovative and fresh approach to this much studied text, and has certainly inspired me to read that book again with a different eye. As Rappoport notes, Jane Eyre recognises that caution is needed in accepting, negotiating and managing gifts in a world where women’s social, legal and political rights were curtailed by patriarchal practices.

Rappoport highlights not only the gendered, but also racial and economic/class aspects of gifting practices by analysing the material exchange of cultural artifacts as well as money that formed an important part of social relations in the nineteenth century in many parts of the world.  In the latter chapters of the book, Rappoport analyses the concept of sacrifice in relation to giving by women involved in philanthropy in the slums of late-Victorian London. The explicit and gruesome accounts of poverty, vice and petty crime that filled the pages of the Victorian popular press served as a titillating peep-hole into the life of the London under-class of the slums, but Rappoport argues that the Salvation Army, which allowed women as part of its ranks, gave women the opportunity to serve as “angels, saviours, lassies or sisters of the slums” (107), a role that she argues served both themselves and the community. The illustrations of the “Slum Sisters” and their work, some of which are clearly propaganda, are among the more intriguing of the illustrative material in the book. Rappoport’s analysis of their writings also gives direct voice to the women’s work, something she argues has been ignored in histories of women’s activism and philanthropy that have often stressed the secular and political aspects of women’s involvement in social issues.

The discussion of eugenics in chapter six takes the book on a different turn, examining the biological emphasis of social reformers at the end of the nineteenth century. Rappoport argues that the area of eugenics allowed women to subsume their gift-giving desires into rhetorical discourses of national aims and needs. This wider stage of directed energies could be an outlet for women’s views, energies and efforts to reform the public sphere. As Rappoport states: “Eugenic discourses, mapped onto nineteenth-century traditions of women’s giving, amplified the scale and social significance of their gifts; they redirected women’s intimate, private exchanges toward frankly national ends” (139). Rappoport’s analysis offers us another lens with which to view what many see as a dark part of the recent past–the social and racial discourses that sought to dictate who should and should not contribute to the making of a nation. Women who embraced the ethos of eugenics, according to Rappoport, redefined the traditional sphere of motherhood in radical, feminist ways: “Feminist eugenics, promising to unite racially ‘fit’ women through their common maternal sacrifices, sanctified women’s gifts and reinforced a gendered economy in the early women’s movement” (157). This interpretation is in itself radical, reframing what many have viewed as prejudicial and elitist attitudes as a far-reaching effort to provide another space for women to re-interpret their role in the home and the public sphere.  The idea of sacrifice is extended in this chapter to examine the movement to secure suffrage, arguing that the bodily sacrifices of women were fully understood by radical activists to be crucial to the achievement of their aims. Rappoport argues that the granting of the vote was “shaped by women’s gifts as well as women’s rights” (173). In this way, she outlines a system of exchange and reciprocity not often considered in books examining the suffrage movement, or other movements for women’s rights.

There is much to commend in this book to the specialist, the general reader and the student interested in exploring more. The rich footnotes provided for each chapter are themselves an impressive resource for scholars interested in pursuing further research on this topic. Rappoport’s ambitious text serves as a new model of scholarship on the rich array of subjects she analyses.

Jennifer Redmond has held academic roles at Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin , NUI Maynooth and Bryn Mawr College, where she is currently Director of The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women's Education. She completed her doctoral dissertation in 2008 on the history of Irish women's emigration to England. Her research focuses primarily on Irish emigration to Britain, the Irish diaspora, and the history of women's education.