Bachelor Girl_ The Secret History of Single Women in the Twentieth Century - Betsy Israel [139]
Sheila Jeffries, The Spinster and Her Enemies 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985), is the best work published on 1920s-era sexology and its long-term detrimental effect on single women. Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, Liberty, a Better Husband: Single Women in America, the Generations of 1780–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984) stands as the pioneering and intensive work on early single revolutionaries dubbed “the Singly Blessed”; Susan Leslie Katz, “Singleness of Heart: Spinsterhood in Victorian Culture” (Ph.D. thesis, Columbia University, 1990).
Dorothy Yost Deegan, The Stereotype of the Single Woman in American Literature: A Social Study with Implications for the Education of Women (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1951), is the seminal work on the spinster in novels. The book received much popular attention because of what I’ll call its news peg: There were, or so it seemed, a large number of single women in the population, and one had to study them in historical context and, with an unavoidable 1950s bias, determine what they might do to “adjust” to their status. The author concluded there was much a spinster might do in modern society, as opposed to most of the sad women she wrote about. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 2d ed. (1980; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000); Susan Koppelman, Old Maids: Short Stories by Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women Writers (London: Pandora, 1984); Laura L. Doan, Old Maids to Radical Spinsters: Unmarried Women in the Twentieth-Century Novel, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991); Mary Russo, “Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory,” in Teresa de Lauretis, ed., Journal of Feminist Studies/Critical Studies Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).
On Florence Nightingale:
I. B. O’Malley, Florence Nightingale, 1820–1856: A Study of Her Life Down to the End of the Crimean War (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1931); Nightingale had the distinction of being the lone woman included in Lytton Strachey’s Eminent Victorians (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1918) and the far more unfortunate distinction of being viewed in it as a repressed sexual hysteric. Florence Nightingale to Her Nurses: A Selection from Miss Nightingale’s Addresses to Probationers and Nurses of the Nightingale School at St. Thomas’s Hospital (London: Macmillan, 1914). There is an excellent discussion of Florence Nightingale in Nina Auerbach’s Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Sir Edward Cook, The Life of Florence Nightingale, 2 vols. (London: Macmillan, 1913); Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale (New York: Atheneum, 1983). Myra Stark, ed., Cassandra (Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979).
On Louisa May Alcott:
Ednah D. Cheney, ed., Louisa May Alcott: Her Life, Letters, and Journals (Boston: Robert Brothers, 1890); Sarah Elbert, ed., Louisa May Alcott: On Race, Sex, and Slavery Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1997).
On Clara Barton:
Elizabeth Brown Pryor, Clara Barton: Professional Angel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987); William E. Barton, The Life of Clara Barton, Founder of the American Red Cross, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1969).
Conduct books and nasty warnings:
Ann Judith Penny, The Afternoon of Unmarried Life (London: Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1858); Mrs. Ellis (Sarah Stickney), The Daughters of England, Their Position in Society, Character and Responsibilities (New York: D. Appleton and Co., 1842); Myrtle Reed, The Spinster Book (New York and London: G. P. Putnam/Knickerbocker Press, 1905); Susan C. Dunning Power, The Ugly Girl Papers, or, Hints for the Toilet (New York: Harper Brothers, 1875); Robert Tomes, The Bazar Book of Decorum (New York: Harper Brothers, 1877); Eliza Leslie, The Behaviour