Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England

Women in Culture and Society

by Mary Poovey

Mary Poovey's The Proper Lady and the Woman Writer has become a standard text in feminist literary discourse. In Uneven Developments Poovey turns to broader historical concerns in an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology.

Asserting that the organization of sexual difference is a social, not natural, phenomenon, Poovey shows how representations of gender took the form of a binary opposition in mid-Victorian culture. She then reveals the role of this opposition in various discourses and institutions—medical, legal, moral, and literary. The resulting oppositions, partly because they depended on the subordination of one term to another, were always unstable. Poovey contends that this instability helps explain why various institutional versions of binary logic developed unevenly. This unevenness, in turn, helped to account for the emergence in the 1850s of a genuine oppositional the voice of an organized, politicized feminist movement.

Drawing on a wide range of sources—parliamentary debates, novels, medical lectures, feminist analyses of work, middle-class periodicals on demesticity—Poovey examines various controversies that provide glimpses of the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously constructed, deployed, and contested. These include debates about the use of chloroform in childbirth, the first divorce law, the professional status of writers, the plight of governesses, and the nature of the nursing corps. Uneven Developments is a contribution to the feminist analysis of culture and ideology that challenges the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.

Genres: History, Literary Criticism, Victorian, Feminism, Nonfiction, Theory, Womens

289 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

Reviews

[Erica]

Poovey sets out to explain the location and organization of difference in mid Victorian England, and by doing so to deconstruct the culture's self representation and reveal its distribution of power. Cliff notes: Victorians conceptualize gender difference as a binary opposition in which women are invested with maintaining the moral rectitude of society through their "natural" maternal instinct,nyet are simultaneously feared for their possibly aggressive and unregulated sexuality.

[Catherine Siemann]

A landmark work in my field. I'd read parts of the book before, but not the whole thing. It's an excellent book and has done so much to define the field that much of it now seems unsurprising.

[Jessica]

Much like Desire and Domestic Fiction, this is a great look at how the historical novel creates and reflects women's roles in 19th century England.

[Avigail]

If I didn't have to discuss this in seminar tomorrow, I wouldn't finish it.

[Anne]

I only was able to read specific chapters for a course, but Poovey is accessible and her interpretation and historicization of the work of gender upon motherhood is a must-read for feminists.