Duval and the Woman Employee

Abstract

This Chapter will examine aspects of the life and work of Duval as both exemplary of and, in some aspects in contradiction to, conceptions of the emerging roles of professional women in the journals and literature of the later nineteenth century. Utilising both Duval’s drawings and her historic place in the remediation culture of new serialised papers, the novel and popular theatre productions in the 1870s and 80s, the chapter will extrapolate and examine shared characteristics in the fictional women newspaper journalists Henrietta Stackpole (in James’ The Portrait of a Lady, 1881) and Elsie Bengough (in Onions’ The Beckoning Fair One, 1911). Considering the impact of class on nineteenth century gendering of professional work, first in Patmore’s iteration of the “separate spheres” of agency of men and women in The Angel in the House (1854, derived from de Toqueville’s 1840 Democracy in America), and then in Sarah Grand’s antithetical The New Aspect of the Woman Question (1894), in which the term “new woman” first appeared, the chapter will chart the transformation of women’s domestic work into new types of professional occupations––particularly the new, equivocally gendered, professions that arose with the advent of serial journals, including Judy, or The London Serio-Comic Journal. The Chapter will argue for more diverse conceptions of the lives of urban professional women in the later nineteenth century, touching on recent critiques of masculine constructions of ‘journalistic’ observation and public commentary.