ABSTRACT
Martha Vicinus’s latest book, Independent Women, resembles her earlier Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (1972) and A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (1977), in that all three expand our understanding of nineteenth-century English social history in general, with an emphasis on nineteenth-century women’s history, and all three include invaluable, exhaustive bibliographies. The two earlier books, though, are collections of essays edited by Vicinus, and consequently lack the force of sustained argument and persistent vision that Independent Women, written entirely by Vicinus, embodies. While each chapter can be read separately, together they map out a territory of English social history only now being explored, that realm of political and social action undertaken by nineteenthcentury women that resulted in expanded employment and communities for unmarried women. Appropriately, the book begins where the movement begins, with an analysis of the burgeoning population of unmarried, middle-class women, referred to as ‘redundant, ‘superfluous’ or ‘superabundant’ by sympathizers and detractors alike. These women, not only in reality but in their mythical and spectral dimensions created by the press, were responsible for, among other things, the greater occupational opportunities, increased economic alternatives and broader social definitions that single women of the middle class enjoyed in the second half of the nineteenth century.
