Abstract

CHI, Haonan. The Marriage Debate, Mona Caird and Her Feminist Radicalism. JLS [online]. 2024, vol.40, n.1, pp.1-16. ISSN 1753-5387.  https://doi.org/10.25159/1753-5387/17561.

New Woman scholarship presents the English novelist and essayist, Mona Caird, as a radical marriage reformer and emphasises how she challenged the patriarchal structure of Victorian marriage norms. However, this article aims to demonstrate that Caird's radicalness was not merely a challenge to marriage norms, but an attack on legal, cultural and religious restrictions on womanhood. Caird developed her radical arguments through her interaction with her mentor, John Stuart Mill, the New Woman novelist, Sarah Grand, and the influential Victorian anti-feminist writer, Elizabeth Lynn Linton. The article explores Caird's engagement with these three writers regarding their thoughts on marriage, based on the study of her novels The Daughters of Danaus (1894) and The Wing of Azrael (1889), and the collection of her journalistic articles The Morality of Marriage (1897). Caird differed from these three writers by arguing for a more liberal and equal gender relationship, resisting eugenic theory, and challenging anti-feminist arguments.

Keywords : liberalism; essentialism; the New Woman; motherhood; marriage.

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