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

我的论文将考察两位活动家克莱门蒂娜·布莱克和伊莎贝拉·福特的作品，他们是19世纪末激进政治复兴期间劳工和女权主义运动的领军人物。中产阶级女性的激进主义贯穿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，她们的工作价值没有得到考虑。这样的政治女性小说受到适当审查的情况就更少了--我的研究将填补学术上的这一空白。我将考察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和小说形式之间的更广泛的关系。我的研究将经历三个主要阶段：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著作。接下来，我将对他们的小说进行研究，探索他们的思想承诺如何转化为小说。要有效地分析布莱克和福特的小说，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，以了解他们的影响和创新。最后，我将在理解这一时期更广泛的欧洲激进项目的情况下，将我对他们的工作和写作的结论与背景联系起来。尽管他们的革命同代人和随后的马克思主义历史学家都认为，往好了说，他们过于温和，往坏了说，他们是不利的资产阶级，但我认为，他们的计划比学术界之前认识到的更接近国际主义的社会主义社区。

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.