Writing Socialist Feminism: Women Activists and the Novel, 1887-1908

我的论文将研究两位活动家克莱门蒂娜·布莱克和伊莎贝拉·福特的写作，他们是19世纪晚期激进政治复苏期间劳工和女权运动的领军人物。中产阶级妇女的活动跨越了选举权斗争和阶级斗争，但她们并不完全符合这两种历史，她们的工作没有得到应有的考虑。这些政治女性的小说很少受到适当的审查——我的研究将解决这一学术差距。我将考虑布莱克和福特的理论、新闻和个人作品与他们的小说的关系，从而探索这一时期社会主义女权主义思想与小说形式之间更广泛的关系。我的研究将通过三个主要阶段进行：首先，我将利用档案和数字资源挖掘布莱克和福特的政治活动和写作。在此之后，我将研究他们的小说，探索他们的意识形态承诺向小说的转变。要想对布莱克和福特的小说进行有效的分析，我必须考虑他们同时代的小说，以及随后对19世纪叙事形式的文学批评，以便理解他们的影响和创新。最后，我将把我关于他们的工作和写作的结论置于对这一时期更广泛的欧洲激进项目的理解之中。虽然他们同时代的革命者和随后的马克思主义历史学家都认为，往好了说，他们太温和了，往坏了说，他们是反资产阶级的，但我认为，他们的计划比学术界先前承认的更接近国际主义社会主义社区。

My thesis will examine the writing of two activists, Clementina Black and Isabella Ford, leading figures in the labour and feminist movements during the resurgence of radical politics in the late nineteenth century. Middle-class women whose activism spanned across the suffrage fight and that of class struggle, but who do not fit neatly into either history, have not been given the consideration that their work merits. Even less frequently has the fiction of such political women been subject to proper examination - my research will address this gap in the scholarship. I will consider Black and Ford's theoretical, journalistic and personal writings in relation to their novels, thereby exploring the wider relationship between socialist feminist thinking and fictional forms in this period. My research will progress through three main stages: firstly, I will use archival and digital sources to excavate the political activities and writings of Black and Ford. Following this, I will study their novels, exploring the transformation of their ideological commitments into fiction. Effective analysis of Black and Ford's novels will necessitate that I consider the fiction of their contemporaries, as well as subsequent literary criticism on nineteenth-century narrative forms, in order to understand their influences and their innovations. Finally, I will contextualise my conclusions regarding their work and writing within an understanding of a broader European radical project in this period. While both their revolutionary contemporaries and the Marxist historians that followed dismissed them as, at best, too moderate, and at worst, adversely bourgeois, I contend that their project was far closer to the internationalist socialist community than the scholarship has previously recognised.