Citation

Colpus E. Past Present 2018; 238(1): 197-232.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2018, Past and Present Society, Publisher Oxford University Press)

DOI

10.1093/pastj/gtx053

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Lytton Strachey's biographical essay on Florence Nightingale in Eminent Victorians (1918) is perhaps the most infamous critique of Victorian notions of women's service. Decrying the 'popular conception of … the saintly, self-sacrificing woman, the delicate maiden of high degree who threw aside the pleasures of a life of ease to succour the afflicted', Strachey described instead a woman, who, from girlhood in a 'well-to-do' family, 'would think of nothing but how to satisfy that singular craving of hers to be doing something', achieving the seemingly impossible in the Scutari hospitals by 'fix[ing the] determination of an indomitable will'.1 Strachey's exploration of the coexistence of 'self-abnegation' and self-interest in the biographies in Eminent Victorians caught a contemporary mood and has been much debated since. His portrait of Florence Nightingale, however, albeit deliberately provocative, was only one of many characterizations between the wars of the interrelationship between women's service, social privilege and self-expression. Others put the focus rather differently. In 1926, the writer Winifred Holtby discussed the role of feminism in challenging the 'line of sex differentiation' and argued that the social and economic inequalities which checked the development of a woman's personality also 'prevent[ed] her from making that contribution to the common good which is the privilege and the obligation of every human being'.2 In 1934, the writer and agony aunt Christine Jope-Slade linked privilege, service and self in another combination when she advised business and professional women to cast aside the social constraints faced by 'leisured' women of previous generations and 'give because you want to give, to render service because it is a pleasure to you personally [which] is a bigger thing than to render it to the exigencies of the moment, or in obedience to the necessity enforced relentlessly by others'.3

I argue here that by concentrating on the self, historians have diminished the continued importance of service within constructions of women's identities in the inter-war years, just as they have overlooked how concepts of service were changing in this period...

Language: en