Radical Women and Gendered Environmental Inequality in the Novels of 1846-8

By first developing and then drawing on an ‘ecojustice feminism’ – an innovative approach that combines feminist ecocriticism with environmental justice scholarship –– this book explores the way in which Victorian literature responded to women’s experience of gendered environmental inequality in both slums and suburbs.

This book aims to re-evaluate the Victorian literary response to forms of environmental injustice directly linked to the gendered identity of women. As ground-breaking feminist writers such as Elaine Showalter argued in the 1970s, the experience of many Victorian women was dominated by an ideology that constructed them as inferior members of society, even as it valorised them as ‘Angels’. Heteronormative and patriarchal, this domestic ideology dictated the ‘natural’ roles of women as wives and mothers, and ascribed the home and hearth to them as their ‘natural’ environment; it decided the uses to which they could put their bodies, and the spaces they could occupy. As such, and as the author argue in this book, this ideological construct constituted a form of gendered environmental inequality, a structural, spatial, and bodily injustice that affected women of all classes.