Women, Education and the Self: A Foucauldian Perspective

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Women, Education and the Self A Foucauldian Perspective

Maria Tamboukou

Women, Education and the Self

Also by Maria Tamboukou DANGEROUS ENCOUNTERS: Genealogy and Ethnography (editor with Stephen J. Ball)

Women, Education and the Self A Foucauldian Perspective Maria Tamboukou Centre for Narrative Research in the Social Sciences University of East London

© Maria Tamboukou 2003 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2003 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin’s Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, the United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 1–4039–0123–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tamboukou, Maria, 1958– Women, education, and the self : a Foucauldian perspective / Maria Tamboukou. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–4039–0123–6 (cloth) 1. Feminism and education—Great Britain—History—19th century. 2. Critical pedagogy—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Sex role— Great Britain—History—19th century. I. Title. LC197.T36 2003 370⬘.82⬘0941—dc21 2003051423 10 12

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

To my mother Nikoletta Gravari-Tamboukou

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Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgements

xi

Introduction: Situated Histories of the Female Self

1

1 Feminist Genealogies in the Writing of the Self

6

Tracing genealogies Dangerous liaisons: genealogies and critical feminisms Histories of the self: the autobiographical encounter Mapping the genealogical domain

2 Spacing the Female Self: Tracing Heterotopias On spaces, places and genders A room of one’s own Travellers Of other spaces

7 22 29 37

52 54 62 67 75

3 Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard? Recovering the Silence of Bodies Women teachers: ‘the other Victorians’ Passions Rewriting the script: technologies of the female self

4 What is Our Present Today? Genealogies as Histories of the Present The female self in education: reversing the discourses Juggling with time restrictions Going out, going up, going beyond

vii

103 105 122 129

134 136 141 148

viii Contents

5

Technologies of the Female Self

154

Living in transition: know thyself/know yourselves Beyond dilemmas and fears: letter-writing as a technology of the self In way of revision: ethics and aesthetics in the care of the self

158 166 174

Notes

179

Bibliography

184

Index of Names

195

Index of Subjects

197


1 Emily Davies, founder of Girton College (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

42

2 1869, the five Girton pioneers (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

44

3 Constance Maynard (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

45

4 Student’s sitting room (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

63

5 The College, Benslow House, Hitchin (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

77

6 Tennis court (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

88

7 Hockey team 1894–95 (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

89

8 Swimming pool (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

91

9 E. M. Allen’s album (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge) Technologies of Space/Technologies of Resistance 10 The Dining Hall (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge) ix

93

97

x


11 Newnham College, Sidwick Hall 1891 (Reproduced courtesy of the Principal and Fellows, Newnham College, Cambridge)

99

12 Students lying in long grass (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

161

13 Laboratory, 1902 (Reproduced courtesy of the Mistress and Fellows, Girton College, Cambridge)

163

Acknowledgements This book is based in large part on my PhD thesis, received from King’s College London in 1999. I owe a huge debt of thanks to Stephen J. Ball, who supervised my thesis and has continued to offer advice, criticism and encouragement throughout. Morwenna Griffiths and Gwyn Edwards examined the thesis and made a number of useful suggestions for which I am thankful. Finally, the people at Palgrave embraced the project with great enthusiasm and it is thanks to their support that the book is now appearing. I thank them all and particularly Heather Gibson, the anonymous reviewer, Jennifer Nelson, Briar Towers and Nick Brock. ‘Holding On’ was a group of women teachers that was formed at the end of an MA in Urban Education course at King’s College. The group kept us together for almost two years, 1992–94. During this period we had personal and theoretical discussions, we exchanged ideas about our readings and had sessions of collective writings. ‘Holding On’ was a real evidence of the strong political base of feminist theories and of the inevitable interweaving of theory and praxis in feminism. Without this essential intellectual exchange I would never have experienced the necessary testing of my initial ideas about the contradictions and paradoxes in the relationship of women with teaching. My very special thanks to Meg Maguire, Marilyn Cohen and Amanda Hayes. I am grateful to the people who responded to my requests for information. My thanks to the Queen’s Mary and Westfield College Archives where I was enabled to read the unpublished autobiography and diaries of Constance Maynard and the Modern Records Centre at the University of Warwick for giving me permission to read the unpublished diary of Clara Collet. My special thanks to Jane Miller for a most enlightening discussion we had at the Institute of Education about her great aunt Clara Collet. Versions of parts of this work have previously appeared as: ‘Spacing Herself’, Gender and Education, June 1999; ‘Writing Genealogies’, Discourse, December 1999; ‘Of Other Spaces’, Gender Place and Culture, September 2000; ‘The Paradox of Being a Woman Teacher’, Gender and Education, December 2000; ‘Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard’, Australian Feminist Studies, July 2002; and ‘Writing Feminist Genealogies’, Journal of Gender Studies, March 2003. The editors and anonymous reviewers of these journals have offered insightful comments and suggestions that xi

xii Acknowledgements

have helped me clarify issues and dig deeper into my work. I am grateful to all of them. During the final stage of preparing the book for publication I benefited from the help of Kate Perris, the archivist at Girton College, Cambridge and Anne Thomson, the archivist at Newnham College, Cambridge. With their help, guidance and support I was able to locate a number of extremely interesting and rare photographs that are now included in the book. Briar Towers, my editor at Palgrave, was enthusiastically supportive about their inclusion and carefully looked at the practicalities necessary for their publication. I thank them all. Writing a doctoral thesis and later on a book inevitably becomes a very important part of daily life in ways that are mostly difficult and complicated. For bearing with all my personal crises and helping me surpass them, I want to thank my daughter Ariagne, my sister Anna and my partner Mihalis. My special thanks to my mother Nikoletta who has always encouraged me to keep unsettling myself. This book is dedicated to her.

Introduction: Situated Histories of the Female Self

My interest in Foucault coincided with a critical period in my life, when, dislocating myself from familiar spaces and places, I had felt the need to experiment with new modes of thinking and perhaps with new modes of being. It was the early 1990s and I had come to London to make a new start. In following Foucault, I think that I had become passionately interested in a wider shift in the European intellectual landscape: the return of ethics as a primary issue in the philosophical agenda. It is through my particular interest in ethics that I have attempted to excavate the ways people, and particularly women, have acted upon themselves so as to create a stylistics of life, become ethical subjects, become what they are. It was in the Foucauldian framework that the initial question of a doctoral research project was formulated: What is the present of women in education today? How have we become what we are and what are the possibilities of becoming other? Drawing on trails of the Foucauldian genealogy, I have turned to the past, so that I could trace the practices which have formed women teachers’ present. I have looked at technologies of the female self in education, through a genealogical exploration of their auto/biographical texts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Rosi Braidotti has argued: ‘we are historically condemned to rethink the basis of our relationship to the values that we have inherited, especially from the nineteenth century’ (1994, p. 134). In focusing on the context of the fin-de-siècle era, I have attempted an analysis of the specification of the female subject in a nexus of signifying genealogical events which have constituted her public persona, but have also dissolved the frontiers between the public/political and the private/personal. In following Braidotti’s suggestion, the female self has been taken first as a theoretical or working hypothesis, a basis for analysing the process of specification and problematization of women in discourse; and second as a political hypothesis, a platform supporting women’s real and multiple struggles (1991, p. 132). 1

2


‘Employing Foucault’ has been a difficult task to undertake, since there is no such thing as a unified Foucauldian theory, let alone methodology. Rather, Foucault has interrogated the boundaries of certain disciplines, and especially the social sciences or, in his terminology, the ‘disciplines of the man’, and he has problematized the borders around their methods and methodologies, leaving them open to change. As an alternative to a closed methodology, the genealogical approach is taken as a tool for exploring the female subject in education. What I have suggested is that the use of genealogy as a tool of analysis has shown me a path out of theoretical impasses that inevitably appear as a result of a wholesale adoption of general theories and/or critiques. The search for the female subject has attracted me as a ‘traditional’ philosophical theme, as well as in relation to personal concerns and experiences. It is widely accepted that the tradition of Western philosophical thought has been dominated by the image of the unified, reasonable subject of Enlightenment. However, this concept of the coherent, rational subject has been highly problematic in the philosophical discourses of our postmodern era. Paradoxically, the emergence of feminist theory and practice and the search for the female self have occurred at the point of crisis of rationality and the shattering of the unity of the subject. Through this paradox of gaps, contradictions and juxtapositions, feminist theorists have attempted to cross deserts and open up unexplored territories in the theorization of subjectivity. In my analysis I have drawn on feminist analyses that have theorized the female subject as a multiple collective entity in the process of becoming.1 The multiple is whatever is not attached to any principle of identity and unity, anything that knows how to put into play the differences that constitute the affirmative powers of the bodily subject and through a game of differences, produces meaning. The multiple is what expresses difference in its eternal becoming, in its multiplicity of meaning. (Braidotti, 1991, p. 111) Since there is no woman, but women and moreover many ‘selves’ within each woman (and man), genealogy has shown me how to trace ‘real women’ and, therefore, how theoretical work on the female subject becomes relevant to the very process of analysis within a particular historical and cultural context. Thus, instead of scanning the chaotic space of female subjectivity in general, I have preferred to draw a particular cartography, that of the female self in education, having rooted my inquiries in the fin-de-siècle British landscape. This period has

Introduction 3

already been of particular interest for the historians of women’s education. It is the period that signalled major changes in the education of women. The establishment of a state system for mass elementary schooling made necessary women’s participation in the teaching profession, while the so-called movement for the higher education of women prepared for women’s entrance in the public spheres of life. I have thus followed lines of life narratives of the first women who attempted to navigate the difficult ways of forming a new self in the various new educational institutions, both as students and teachers. Those women teachers who opened up new life paths were faced with the urgent need to reinvent themselves. I have thus asked: ‘Who, or better what, were they? Having turned their backs on traditional sources of gendered identity such as wifehood and motherhood, how were they attempting to fashion a new self?’ They were the forerunners of the women teachers of today, women whose lives have changed so much, but in many ways, paradoxically, remain trapped between unresolved dilemmas, existential contradictions and binary oppositions. But how have I come to ‘know’ these women, whose common experience in the educational institutions constituted them as a distinct group? The genealogical journey has followed the evidence they left behind them in diaries, letters, autobiographies and literary works. Through these traces of their self-representation, the tensions and contradictions in the reshaping of their lives have been glimpsed. In my attempt to situate my inquiries in the problems of the present, fragments of contemporary autobiographical writings of women teachers have also been read. The task is a difficult one, since our present seems always to evade. Therefore to write ‘a history of the present’, as Foucault suggests, it is necessary to distance ourselves from this present of ours, to look off into the past. My particular interest in exploring the technologies of the self of women teachers relates to my own experience as a woman teacher, but it goes beyond the ‘personal sphere’. Education has been a site of power where freedom has been historically denied to women. It has therefore been a significant locus of resistance. Jana Sawicki (1991) has pointed out that genealogy as resistance opens the way for a ‘historical knowledge of struggles’, since it uses history to give voice to the marginal and submerged subjects which lie ‘hidden from history’ and focuses attention on specific situations, thus leading to more concrete analyses of particular struggles. What I have suggested in the writing of this genealogy is that women fighting for freedom through and within education have attempted not only to transform themselves, but also to transcend

4


hierarchical structures and recreate pedagogy as a passionate process, a process that motivates and inspires the subjects that are involved in it to live a better life. Since I am drawing on Foucault’s work, Chapter 1 maps Foucault’s inquiries in the contemporary intellectual landscape and attempts to scrutinize and review/revise the Foucauldian suggestion of ‘writing genealogies’ as a ‘task’ for those who are interested in his work. Despite Foucault’s insistence on the corporeality of subjectivity, it has been widely argued, even by feminists who have drawn heavily on his work, that his lack of concern for sexual difference or his gender blindness has rendered his work at least insufficient for the theorization of the female subject. In thus isolating points of convergence between feminist theories and the Foucauldian genealogical project, I have considered the critical role of autobiographies in the writing of a genealogy of women in education and have discerned a twofold operation of women’s autobiographical writings: first as a source for genealogical research and second as a technology of the female self per se. Chapter 2 explores spatial dimensions in the formation of the female self. The genealogical analysis has traced a set of technologies of space, as I have called them, that women in education have used to negotiate places of their own, and survive the continuous hovering between multidimensional, shifting and contingent spaces of their life. Women teachers’ textual narratives have also revealed how, by entering the first university-associated colleges, these women lived within the limits of their society, but also beyond them, in yet unrecognized ‘different social spaces’, that Foucault (1998) has described as heterotopias. Within the space of these contested sites, ridden by contradictions and uncertainties, the technologies women used to map their existence would be a nexus of resistance and accommodation practices, inextricably interwoven. It was through these technologies of resistance, I have argued, that women began to fashion new forms of subjectivity. Chapter 3 explores certain images and perceptions that women teachers used to position themselves in the newly emerging fin-de-siècle discourses of sexuality. A point that has been highlighted in the discussion of this chapter is that one of the most powerful images has been that of the asexual woman teacher. However, the autobiographical writings of ‘real’ women teachers have revealed women who were deeply concerned with making sense of their sexualities. Although they did not escape the discursive restraints of wifehood and motherhood, they resisted the gendered structure of power relations within them and sought to recreate them by finding some other spaces and different vocabularies through

Introduction 5

which to express their sexuality. Far from being the key to unlock the secret of her existence, sexuality has become a passage for the female self to work upon herself. Chapter 4 turns mainly towards the present, although there are again certain references to the history of this present. What I have attempted to do is to construct the dispositif of my genealogy; trace the different heterogeneous elements, discourses and practices that synthesize women’s position in education today. I have used the feminist perspective of paradoxes2 to theorize education as a nexus of created paradoxical spaces where the female self has attempted to surpass closed boundaries and to question the dichotomy of the feminized private and/or the masculine public. Apart from space, in this chapter I have reconsidered the importance of time restrictions upon women’s lives and have paid attention to the multifarious ways these lives are highly structured by specific space/time regulations. The cartography I have drawn depicts various positions where the female self as a nomad has created parodic unities and temporary coalitions. The technologies of the female self in education as they emerge from women teachers’ autobiographical writings, have been revisited in Chapter 5 in which there is a more general discussion of ethics and aesthetics in the deployment of the female self in education, informed by Foucault’s latest work on the subject. The discussion of the chapter develops towards the documentation of the significant inflection of the technologies of the self in the case of women. Placed in a wider matrix of complexities, the female self emerges as fluid and nomadic. In the process of her becoming, she strives for an aesthetics of existence and dreams the improbable dream of making her life a work of art. In writing this genealogy of women in education, I do not think that I have really articulated a closed answer, or reached a final conclusion in response to my initial question. The Foucauldian toolbox of genealogy has given me the means to pursue my explorations of technologies of the female self, but has also acted as a source of continuous uncertainty about what I thought had been my ‘results’ or conclusions. Instead of finding answers, I have rather found new questions which I hope will continue to shake up our perceptions of ‘what we are’ and ‘what this present of ours is’.

1 Feminist Genealogies in the Writing of the Self

Whenever I have tried to carry out a piece of theoretical work it has been on the basis of my own experience, always in relation to processes that I saw taking place around me. It is because I thought I could recognize in the things I saw, in the institutions with which I dealt, in my relations with others, cracks, silent shocks, malfunctionings . . . that I undertook a particular piece of work, a few fragments of autobiography. (Foucault, 1988d, p. 156) To assert that the social representation of gender affects its subjective construction and that vice versa, the subjective representation of gender – or self-representation – affects its social construction, leaves open a possibility of agency and self-determination at the subjective and even individual level of micropolitical and everyday practices. (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 9) Autobiography provides a stage where women writers, born again in the act of writing, may experiment with reconstructing the various discourses – of representation, of ideology – in which their subjectivity has been formed. Thus the subject of autobiography is not a single entity but a network of differences within which the subject is inscribed. The subject is already multiple, heterogeneous, even conflicted, and these contradictions expose the technologies of autobiography. (Gilmore, 1994, p. 85) In 1966, Foucault surprised everybody by suggesting that man did not exist before the end of the eighteenth century, that [he] was ‘a recent creature [ . . . ] fabricated with its own hands’ (1970, p. 308) and that it was quite possible that [he] could again ‘be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea’ (1970, p. 384). Two years later, Roland 6

Feminist Genealogies in the Writing of the Self 7

Barthes would announce ‘the death of the author’ as a source of meaning behind the text. If we were then facing the disappearance of man and the death of the author, would this mean that ‘we were also witnessing the death of autobiography?’ Linda Anderson has eloquently asked (2001, p. 14). At the same time that these terrible deaths and disappearances were being announced, Foucault was writing lovely narratives, some of them perhaps too good or too bad to be true. Foucault was an exceptional storyteller. Anybody could disagree with what he was suggesting, but nobody could deny that his narratives have always been seducing and compelling. It is well known that his books soon moved beyond academic circles and reached a wider audience. Moreover many of the stories Foucault wrote were partly autobiographical, as the above quote indicates. This chapter is therefore concerned with the encounter of Foucauldian genealogies, critical feminisms, and autobiographical writings. In the context of this discursive analytical triangle I will consider [man’s] disappearance as an immensely thrilling and exciting theme that has been radically reworked in the narratives revolving around the construction of female subjectivities. These autobiographical narratives, I will argue, have constructed a space ‘in the margins of hegemonic discourses’ (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 18) for the female self in education to emerge rather than disappear. This emergence, however, has not constituted a unitary core self, but rather a matrix of subject positions for women ‘writing themselves’ to inhabit, not in a permanent way, but rather temporarily, as points of departure for going elsewhere, becoming other. As Teresa de Lauretis has argued, ‘[being] inscribed in micropolitical practices, the terms of a different construction of gender exist, [ . . . ] and their effects are rather at the “local” level of resistance, in subjectivity and selfrepresentation’ (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 18). But let us look more closely at the analytical triangle, particularly focusing on each of its three theoretical planes, namely Foucauldian genealogies, critical feminisms, autobiographical writings and let us start raising a series of questions; first of all: what is genealogy?

Tracing genealogies As already pointed out, Foucault has written lovely histories. Although tempting, however, Foucauldian histories are far from being recognized as valid or indisputable. Foucault himself has written:

8


I am well aware that I have never written anything but fictions. I do not mean to say, however, that truth is therefore absent. It seems to me that the possibility exists for fiction to function in truth, for a fictional discourse to induce effects of truth, and for bringing it about that a true discourse engenders or ‘manufactures’ something that does not as yet exist, that is, ‘fictions’ it. One ‘fictions’ history on the basis of a political reality that makes it true, one ‘fictions’ a politics not yet in existence on the basis of a historical truth. (Foucault, 1980c, p. 193) Against what are seen as traditional types of history, Foucault has proposed the Nietzschean theme of genealogy. This is what he calls the form of his reflection on the nature and development of modern power. A key Nietzschean insight for Foucault is that truth cannot be separated from the procedures of its production. The philosopher’s task is therefore to criticize, diagnose and demythologize ‘truth phenomena’. Consequently genealogy is concerned with the processes, procedures and apparatuses, whereby truth and knowledge are produced, in what Foucault calls the discursive regime of the modern era. Instead of asking in which kinds of discourse we are entitled to believe, Foucault’s genealogies pose the question of which kinds of practices, linked to which kinds of external conditions, determine the different knowledges in which we ourselves figure. Drawing on the Enlightenment suggestion of ‘emancipation from selfimposed immaturity’ (Rajchman, 1985, p. 56), the Foucauldian genealogy writes the history of the present. It starts asking Kantian questions: ‘What is my present? What is the meaning of this present? And what am I doing when I speak of this present’ (Foucault, 1988b, p. 89). According to Foucault, these questions of the ‘Auflarung,’ or of reason, have been a central theme of philosophy from Kant to our own day. Like Kant, Foucault sees the present as a process that embodies thought, knowledge and philosophy. In reframing the Kantian questions, however, Foucault follows different trails to explore them. In examining the very Kantian concept of the present, Foucault introduces scepticism about universalistic dogmas of truth, objectivity and pure scientific reason, and interrogates the supposed interconnections between reason, knowledge, progress, freedom and ethical action. Within this problematic, Foucault also attempts to see the role of the thinking subject differently, primarily by recognizing the historical dimension of all human reality. In elaborating new answers to Kantian questions, Foucault moves to an analysis of the different discursive and non-discursive ways in which


the subject emerges in history. Genealogy conceives human reality as an effect of the interweaving of certain historical and cultural practices, which it sets out to trace and explore. What is significant in the Foucauldian method is exactly this conceptualization of human reality as practices or technologies which are to be analysed and deconstructed from within. Instead of seeing history as a continuous development of an ideal schema, genealogy is oriented to discontinuities. Throughout the genealogical exploration there are frequent disruptions, uneven and haphazard processes of dispersion, that call into question the supposed linear evolution of history. In this context of reversal, our present is not theorized as the result of a meaningful development, but rather as an episode, a result of struggle and relations of force and domination. Genealogy is the history of such fights, their deep strategies, and the ways that interconnect them. Foucault (1991c) has argued that within relations of power, individuals and groups can find space to resist domination, exercise freedom and pursue their interests. He has thus drawn a significant line of distinction between relations of power as fields of games where freedom can be exercised and relations of domination which needs resisting. While this distinction overturns arguments that his theorization of power leaves no possibility of freedom, it is, however, a blurring distinction that has created certain tensions in genealogical research that seek to trace specific ‘drawings’ of this line. As has been suggested: ‘where do the various medical, psychiatric and carceral systems of surveillance and discipline, detailed in Discipline and Punish and elsewhere, stand in relation to that distinction?’ (Magill, 1997, p. 66). In response I will argue, later in this chapter, that such theoretical questions and philosophical aporias, raised by the use of genealogy, are more effectively worked out in the actual ‘writing’ of specific genealogies. Whether they are ‘solved’ or surpassed becomes a task and a challenge for the genealogist. While, however, genealogy focuses on the war of discourses and power relations, it does not stop there. By revealing discontinuities in the supposed continuous development of history, Foucault’s genealogical project also implies a discontinuity in the present social formations. Genealogy is attempting to go further, by tracing possible ways of thinking differently instead of accepting and legitimating what are already the ‘truths’ of our world. The aim is to provide a counter-memory that will help subjects to recreate the historical and practical conditions of their present existence. This is the future to which genealogies aspire: opening possibilities for life, by separating us from ‘the contingency

10 Women, Education and the Self

that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer being, doing or thinking what we are, do, or think’ (Mahon, 1992, p. 122). There is today a vast literature related to the genealogical method as well as various readings of it which, although not always outright contradictory, unfold the Foucauldian method in various dimensions.1 The bulk of literature that deals with the Foucauldian historiography primarily draws on the 1971 essay ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, in which Foucault elaborates the notion of genealogy. In this essay, Foucault depicts genealogy as grey, meticulous and patiently documentary (1986a, p. 76). According to Mahon, it is the colour of the bulk of documents, the ‘cyclopean monuments’ in Nietzsche’s words, that give Nietzschean genealogy its greyness (1982, p. 87). As opposed to grand historical events, the genealogical search renders itself attentive to details, many of them having remained unnoticed and unrecorded in the narratives of mainstream history. By rejecting the teleological view of history, genealogy celebrates the philosophy of the event. The ‘way things are’ is just an event, a random result of the interweaving of relations of power and domination. Genealogy as a method of analysis searches in the maze of dispersed events to trace discontinuities, recurrences and play where traditional historiography sees continuous development, progress and seriousness. Therefore, Foucault sees genealogy as an ‘eventalization’, a method that can attribute different dimensions to the ways traditional historians have dealt with the notion of the event. Eventalization begins with the interrogation of certain evidences in our culture of how things should be: ‘making visible a singularity at places where there is a temptation to invoke a historical constant, an immediate anthropological trait, or an obviousness which imposes itself uniformly on all’ (Foucault, 1991b, p. 76). This breach of self-evidences also requires a rethinking of the various power relations that at a certain historical moment decisively influenced the way things were socially and historically established. As Foucault notes, this rethinking reveals ‘a sort of multiplication or pluralization of causes’ (p. 76). This means that the genealogist does not regard singularity as simply an isolated piece of data to be added to his/her documents. The event under scrutiny is to be analysed within the matrix of discursive and non-discursive practices that have given rise to its existence. McNay (1992, p. 142) has commented that, for Foucault, genealogical historiography avoids the errors of hermeneuticism that are inherent in mainstream forms of historical analysis. As I have already pointed out, one starting point of genealogy is that historically there are no final


‘truths’ about our nature or the norms our reason dictates to us and therefore there is no essential, natural, or inevitable way of grouping or classifying people. In this line of analysis, the genealogist does not look beyond or behind historical practices to find a simple unity of meaning or function, or a changeless significance of ourselves and the world around us. The aim is rather to look more closely at the workings of those practices in which moral norms and truths about ourselves have been constructed. Instead of going deep, looking for origins and hidden meanings, the analyst is working on the surface, constructing ‘a polygon or rather a polyhedron’ (Foucault, 1991b, p. 77) of various minor processes that surround the emergence of the event. What is to be remembered is the fact that the more the analysis breaks down practices, the easier it becomes to find out more about their interrelation, while this process can never have a final end. Genealogy introduces the problem of how, by becoming constituted as subjects, we come to be subjected within particular configurations. Therefore, what one should excavate in history are the anonymous ‘deep’ configurations that determine the ways we are classified and grouped, the genealogy of the constitution of our ‘politics’. ‘Genealogy, consequently, requires patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material’ (Foucault, 1986a, p. 76). Clearly, the objects of these rigorous analyses are sociohistorical phenomena, as Foucault has pointed out in the above essay (p. 77). What remains unclear is the fundamental nature of the documents under scrutiny. The majority of them rest on the shelves of the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir where, according to his biographers, Foucault, a real ‘archive-addict’, spent a great deal of his life.2 However, there is something more vivid than pure archive material that animates Foucault’s writings. It is accepted that since the very beginning, Foucault’s work attracted audiences much wider than the purely academic. For James Miller (1993), it is the philosophical life of the thinker, his active involvement in what he was actually searching and reflecting upon, that accounts for the freshness and timeliness of his themes and ideas. Foucault’s ‘documents’ were also to be found in the asylums, within the political demonstrations occurring outside prisons, or in the baths of San Francisco. Artaud’s theatrical plays, the literary work of Battaille, Blanchot’s novels, a famous work of art such as ‘Las Meninas’ or an object such as a pipe could turn out to be objects of his inquiries.3 This polymorphous and diverse map of documents and sources leaves future genealogists with an important legacy: that of continually ‘inventing’ new sources and areas of research, not yet


thought of by the so-called ‘human sciences’, which allow us to rethink and call into question the given truths of our world. Foucault conceives of genealogy as an analysis of descent and emergence and devotes a great deal of reflection to these two terms, tracing their various uses and connotations in the Nietzschean texts. Descent records the true objective of genealogy and is opposed to a pretended unification of the self. Instead of implying a search for origins, the analysis of descent traces the numberless beginnings not easily captured by the historian’s eye. As Paul Veyne has lucidly expressed this point: Foucault has only one thing to say to historians: ‘You may continue to explain history as you have always done. But be careful: if you look very closely, if you peel away the banalities, you will notice that there is more to explain than you thought; there are crooked contours that you haven’t spotted. (Veyne, 1997, p. 156) A genealogical analysis of descent does not attempt to reconstruct the past, nor does it trace the effects of past events in the present. In the analysis of descent, the genealogist makes the effort to look directly at what people do, without taking anything for granted, without presupposing the existence of any goal, material cause or ideology. The aim is to strip away the veils that cover people’s practices, by simply showing how they are, and where they come from, describing their complicated forms and exploring their countless historical transformations. As Veyne has seen it, practice in Foucault’s thought ‘is not some mysterious agency, some substratum of history, some hidden engine; it is what people do (the word says just what it means)’ (1997, p. 153). Thus, the analysis of descent disturbs previous immobile statements, fragments of unified truths and exposes the heterogeneity of previous consistencies. In the search for descent it turns out that ‘truth or being does not lie at the root of what we know and what we are’ (Foucault, 1986a, p. 81). This conception is important in establishing the role of genealogy as critique. Finally, the analysis of descent reveals the total inscription of history on the body and everything that touches and surrounds the body. As Foucault notes: ‘Genealogy, as an analysis of descent, is thus situated within the articulation of the body and history. Its task is to expose a body totally imprinted by history and the process of history’s destruction of the body’ (p. 83). Both French and English-speaking theorists have drawn our attention to the crucial role played by the body in the genealogical method4. However, it is in the feminist strand of Foucault scholarship that the


importance attributed to the body in his thought is particularly underlined and discussed in detail.5 The analysis of emergence must delineate the deployment of various processes and power relations in various systems of subjection within which things appeared as events on the stage of history. Emergence is attempting to grasp the very ‘moment of arising’, in Foucault’s words (1986a, p. 83), being aware that this is only an accidental moment, an episode, and not the ultimate point of a historical evolution. ‘Emergence is thus the entry of forces’ (p. 84), the charting of the battle of forces that resulted in a certain state of affairs. Since anything can just happen in such a battle, ‘no one is responsible for an emergence, no one can glory in it, since it always occurs in the interstice’ (p. 85). Genealogy, then, is the analysis of descent and emergence in the sense that these two notions are found in the work of Nietzsche and discussed in Foucault’s influential essay. In the genealogist’s journey back to history a series of methodological questions emerges: when and how can history be effective? A history renders itself effective when it develops the ability to distinguish singularities, acknowledge differences, decentre [man] as the subject of historical becoming and shatter the certainties of our very existence. Effective history deals with events, ‘shortens its vision to those things nearest to it [ . . . ] studies what is closest, but so as to seize it at a distance’ (Mahon, 1992, p. 89). In such a light, Foucault has seen his project as ‘ontology of the present’ (Dean, 1994, p. 50), revealing questions of enlightenment as its bedrock. A history of the present is, however, more interested in the future. Calling into question self-evidences of the present by exposing the various ways they were constructed in the past, such histories shatter certain stabilities and help us detach ourselves from our ‘truths’ and seek alternative ways of existence. Rajchman (1985) has further suggested that by using history to problematize the subject, Foucault has raised the question of freedom, not as a normative category, but as a ‘real’ situation of being, our possibility of questioning ourselves and modifying the politics of our existence: Our real freedom does not consist either in telling our true stories and finding our place within some tradition or ethical code, in completely determining our actions in accordance with universal principles, or in accepting our existential limitations in authentic self relation. We are on the contrary ‘really’ free because we can question and modify those systems which make (only) particular kinds of


action possible, and because there is no ‘authentic’ self-relation we must conform to. (Rajchman, 1985, p. 122) What I have tried to do so far is not a systematization of genealogy. Such an attempt would be at odds with Foucault’s own problematization of theoretical and epistemological classifications. Moreover, it is widely acknowledged that in mainstream social and political theory, Foucault’s work has been criticized for failing to employ recognizable methodologies. Throughout his life and his work, Foucault persistently resisted being labelled. As a result he has provoked an extraordinary collection of contradictory comments, ‘a non-historical historian, an anti-humanist human scientist, a counter-structuralist structuralist’ (Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982, p. xiv) and he himself occasionally made statements that have been quoted over and over again to illustrate the void Foucault created in any philosophical, historical or sociological dictionary of his time and afterwards: I don’t feel it is necessary to know exactly what I am. The main interest in life is to become someone else you were not in the beginning. If you knew when you began a book what you would say at the end, do you think you would have the courage to write it? (Foucault in Martin, 1988, p. 9) What I have, then, tried to do is to focus on the emergence of genealogy as a set of methodological strategies for research. In doing this, I have come to the conclusion that there is no way of truly understanding what genealogy is about, other than by concentrating on a genealogy per se, analysing it in its minor details, reaching the most remote points of its network, revealing the hidden micro-mechanisms of its operation, grasping the most delicate aspects of its theorization. This is the first stage that inevitably leads to the adventure of writing one’s own genealogy. It is through the intermingling of these processes, understanding theory and practising theory that I have come to realize the importance of an incident Jana Sawicki remembers from her 1983 meeting with Foucault at a seminar on technologies of the self at the University of Vermont: I told him that I had just finished writing a dissertation on his critique of humanism. Not surprisingly, he responded with some embarassment and much seriousness. He suggested that I not spend energy talking about him and, instead, do what he was doing, namely, write genealogies. (Sawicki, 1991, p. 15)


Therefore, let us now move on to the question of ‘how to do a genealogy’ and examine how Foucault’s work of the ‘meta-discursive’6 period, can serve as an open paradigm of how a genealogy operates. Doing genealogy: how? Three domains of genealogy are possible. First, a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to truth through which we constitute ourselves as subjects of knowledge; second a historical ontology of ourselves in relation to a field of power through which we constitute ourselves as subjects acting on others; third, a historical ontology in relation to ethics through which we constitute ourselves as moral agents. (Foucault, 1986b, p. 351) In sketching out the structure of his project Foucault has delineated the triangle of truth–power–ethics in which his research is applied and his genealogies are deployed. These three genealogical domains often meet, inform, overlap and sometimes juxtapose or even contradict each other. In tracing ‘the different ways in our culture that humans develop knowledge about themselves’, Foucault tried to unmask certain ‘truth games’ and relate them to specific practices, ‘technologies that human beings used to understand themselves’ (1988a, pp. 17, 18). As a real cartographer, according to Deleuze (1992b), Foucault again maps out four domains of such technologies: first the technologies of production, which ‘permit us to produce, transform, or manipulate things’ (1988a, p. 18); second the technologies of sign systems, ‘which permit us to use signs, meanings, symbols, or significations’ (p. 18); third the technologies of power ‘which determine the conduct of individuals and submit them to certain ends or domination, an objectivizing of the subject’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 18) and fourth the technologies of the self, which permit individuals to effect, by their own means or with the help of others a certain number of operations on their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality. (Foucault, 1988a, p. 18) Governing oneself and governing others are interwoven in the problematics that arise from the exploration of the last two sets of technologies, the technologies of power and the technologies of the self. Such an intermingling is particularly evident when pedagogy provides the space and time of their actual operation.


Foucault’s four sets of technologies are therefore placed in the three genealogical domains he has structured for his historical inquiries. The technologies of production and the technologies of sign system are analysed in their relation to truth, which in Foucault is not taken as an absolute notion of transcendental and universal value, but is conceptualized as a genealogy of the multiple truths, or ‘regimes of truth’ or ‘games of truth’ of our world. The technologies of power are analysed in the domain of the genealogy of the modern individual as object. Such a genealogy focuses on the processes of objectification of human beings as a result of the exercise of power upon themselves, on both their souls and their bodies. However, it is the analysis of the technologies of the self that reveals the mechanisms through which human beings ‘act upon themselves’ at the very time of their objectification. The technologies of the self focus on the subjectification of the subject and map the path of the third genealogical territory, that of ethics. In his discussion of the structure of genealogical interpretation, Foucault (1986b, p. 352) points out the importance of the kind of relationship one has with oneself, which he defines as ethics. As Foucault sees it, there are four aspects of this relationship to oneself. The first is described as ‘the ethical substance’, the particular domain of the self which is concerned with moral conduct. The way in which people are

TRUTH

technologies of 1. PRODUCTION 2. SIGN SYSTEMS

POWER

technologies of

technologies of

3. POWER

4. THE SELF

ETHICS


invited to recognize their moral obligation, ‘the mode of subjection’ in Foucault’s words, constitutes the second aspect. The techniques of selfformation, the means by which subjects act on themselves in order to behave ethically, what Foucault calls ‘asceticism’, is the third aspect of ethics, while the ‘telos’, the kind of being to which the ethical conducts aims, is the fourth. These four aspects have had different applications in historical periods ranging from antiquity to the modern era. ‘Asceticism’, the third Foucauldian aspect of ethics, is therefore the area within which technologies of the self, in other words, practices people have used to constitute themselves as ethical subjects, are deployed. An exploration of those techniques cannot, however, be independent from the other three ethical aspects. ethical substance Self mode of subjection

Ethics

asceticism

technologies of the self

telos

The Use of Pleasure and The Care of the Self are Foucault’s only studies about the technologies of the self that were published as books. It is well known that these two books appeared shortly before his death, in 1984, and after Foucault had passed through a long period of contemplation and recollection, which followed the publication of the first volume of his History of Sexuality, in 1976. It was a period during which Foucault’s ‘passing’ to genealogy was theoretically established. It was moreover a period that, as Braidotti has commented, brought forward a new epistemological category: the technology of the subject, ‘according to which power produces the real through the processes of normalisation that it adopts and the regions of truth it institutes’ (1991, p. 86). It has thus signalled a critical turning point in Foucault’s genealogies of the modern subject, by bringing together most rigorously and exemplary, the three genealogical axes of truth, power and ethics, that traverse the whole body of Foucault’s analyses. Dews (1989) has seen this period as Foucault’s ‘late return to the subject’. However, other thinkers speak of


a redefinition of the subject in Foucault, through a rejection of certain humanist assumptions about its existence (Simons, 1995, p. 78). What feminist analysts have identified as most problematic about the technologies of subjectivity, however, is that the ‘self’ Foucault theorizes appears as a desexualized and general ‘human subject’ where gender difference is simply insignificant. Foucault’s most ‘mature’ and elaborated ideas about the writing of genealogies of the subject are dispersed in various essays, lecture transcripts, interviews and course notes. Technologies of the Self (Martin et al., 1988) is a collection of essays, based on the lectures and discussions of the Vermont seminar. Foucault (1988a, p. 16) began his first lecture on technologies of the self at the Vermont seminar by clearly defining sexuality as his dispositif. But, and this is the third question that we now move to: What is a dispositif? Foucault has written that a starting point for ‘doing genealogies’ should be to focus on a particular problem and then to try to see it in its historical dimension; examining how this problem turned out to be the way we perceive it today: ‘I set out from a problem expressed in the terms current today and I try to work out its genealogy. Genealogy means that I begin my analysis from a question posed in the present’ (Foucault, 1988c, p. 262). Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982) point out that in searching for the problem the analyst should identify some socially shared ‘discomfort’ about how things are going. Of course, there is always the problem that not all social groups can have shared concerns. The perspective of the analyst is decisive in focusing on a particular problem, and this should be admitted and used by the analyst in an attempt to deconstruct possible arbitrary personal feelings and stances with regard to his/her project. In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’ Foucault wrote that genealogy is effective history understood as the ‘affirmation of knowledge as perspective’. As Simons has commented, ‘the perspective affirmed is that of those who resist’ (1995, p. 91). Following the first step of isolating the problem, the analyst is tracing the current practices that could relate to the diagnosed ‘problem’ and finally s/he is trying to formulate the network of relations between the practices and the problem. Situating the problem in a system of relations that can account for the socially shared discomfort is a turning point for ‘doing genealogy’ and is immediately related to the Foucauldian methodological concept of dispositif, a term that has been translated in


English as apparatus and which was first used by Foucault in Discipline and Punish, but was mostly elaborated in the History of Sexuality.7 As Foucault sees it, a dispositif is a system of relations that can be established between heterogeneous elements, discursive and non-discursive practices, ‘the said as well as the unsaid’ (1980a, p. 194). A dispositif can include ‘discourses, institutions, architectural arrangements, regulations, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophic propositions, morality, philanthropy, etc.’ (p. 194). There is always ‘an urgent need’ (p. 195) to which the functioning of the dispositif responds: ‘the dispositif is essentially of a strategic nature, which means assuming that it is a matter of a certain manipulation of relations of forces, either developing in a particular direction, blocking them, stabilising them, utilising them, etc.’ (p. 196). Being inscribed in a play of power, the dispositif also relates to certain types of knowledge which derive from it, but also condition it. In Foucault’s view, therefore, the analyst has a dispositif when s/he has succeeded in isolating a cluster of power relations sustaining, and being sustained by, certain types of knowledge (p. 196). Following the ‘announcement’ of his dispositif, Foucault puts together the different elements ‘discursive and non-discursive’, that concerned him in sketching out the diagram of his inquiries to conclude that: ‘I asked myself: How had the subject been compelled to decipher himself in regard to what was forbidden? It is a question of the relation between asceticism and truth’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 17). It is significant that a genealogy should start with a major interrogation of what has been accepted as the ‘truth’, any truth concerning the ways individuals understand themselves as subjects of this world. The genealogy thus starts by shattering any certainties, without this questioning being a rhetorical one, asking so as to present pre-existent answers. In posing genealogical questions one can never be sure that s/he could ultimately find any ‘satisfactory answers’. This is the risk, the adventure and the fascination of the exercise. As is well known, Foucault himself never finished his genealogical work or came to any conclusion or overall theory about the technologies of the self that he was researching during the final decade of his life. In Foucault’s analyses there are two basic themes that traverse the nexus of the technologies of the self: governmentality and aesthetics. These two themes saturate Foucault’s reflections upon the cultivation of the self and reveal the problem of truth, ‘the truth concerning what one is, what one does and what one is capable of doing’ (Schmid, 1994, p. 68), as the kernel of the problematizations around the formation of the ethical subject.


Foucault has used the term governmentality to refer to the ‘contact between the technologies of domination of others and those of the self’ (1988a, p. 17). The analysis of governmentality is deployed along two Foucauldian genealogical axes, power and ethics. Governmentality is therefore considered as a relationship between the ability of individuals to control themselves and their ability to control others. The concept of aesthetics derives from antiquity, but Foucault has largely adopted Nietzsche’s elaboration in his approach. His conception of an aesthetics of existence is largely influenced by the demands of creating a style for one’s life, making claims for the empowering and transgressive possibilities of art and resisting the very present of existence: What strikes me is the fact that in our society, art has become something which is related only to objects and not to individuals or to life. That art is something which is specialised or which is done by experts who are artists. But couldn’t everyone’s life become a work of art? Why should the lamp or the house be an art object, but not our life? (Foucault, 1986b, pp. 350–1) Foucault’s urge for the need to create a form, a style for one’s life has provoked intense objections about its supposed utopian and elitistic character. Thacker (1993) has argued that human beings and ‘real life’ is not at all like the lamp Foucault mentions in his notorious saying. McNay has also problematized Foucault’s discussion of aesthetics in relation to Baudelaire’s account of the dandy who becomes ‘modern’ simply because he refuses to compromise with the constraints of his era, the nineteenth century, and dares to invent and construct a ‘new’ self (1994, p. 149). But does Foucault have in mind a certain aesthetic model, a notion of a beautiful subjectivity that resembles a work of art like the famous lamp or the heroic Baudelarian dandy? Simons (1995, p. 76) has discerned three central themes in the Foucauldian aesthetics of the self. First in his list come the demands of style which Simons conceives as a never-ending struggle for transgressing the limits that constrain but at the same time define the very existence of human beings, since death appears to be the only experience without limits. The demands of style are directly related to the second theme, that of the artistic practice as a source of empowerment. This theme further elaborates the Foucauldian approach to a transgression of limits through the possibilities created by art.8 The art of living is therefore founded on the decisive role of the individual in both interrogating one’s present, working upon one’s life and acting politically for the enhancement of this

Feminist Genealogies in the Writing of the Self 21 demands of style

Aesthetics of the self

artistic practice

working with present conditions and limits

very life. This conception underlines the necessity of self-government as the kernel of an aesthetics of existence and leads to the third theme Simons has defined as working with present conditions and limits. These three themes, the demands of style, the artistic practice as a form of empowerment and working with present conditions and limits rest upon the Enlightenment roots of Foucault’s work: Considering the ways in which Foucault has questioned and problematized themes around the organization of existence, it is difficult to deny that ethics are founded on aesthetics. I will agree with Schmid that the question seems quite capable of being reversed: if not on aesthetics then on what can we found ethics? What are the possibilities of becoming ‘other’? A deployment of Foucault’s techniques and practices can never be exhaustive or final. Foucault’s originality lies in his strategic use of different discourses and approaches in the writing of his genealogies. Each reading of these genealogies reveals hidden layers of attentive and detailed research of an immense variety of data. Rather than following methodological principles, Foucault’s genealogies create a methodological rhythm of their own, weaving around a set of crucial questions, already introduced at the beginning of this chapter: What is happening now? What is this present of ours? How have we become what we are and what are the possibilities of becoming ‘other’? Such questions create unexplored and even unthought-of areas of investigation. Foucault’s genealogies do not offer methodological ‘certainties’. They persistently evade classification, but they do inspire the writing of new genealogies to interrogate the truths of our world. As a genealogical endeavour pursuing Foucault’s intellectual adventures, this chapter is inevitably led to consider a crucial question: what


about those human beings under scrutiny? What happens if they stop being ‘neutral’? Instead of joining those critics that point to the explicitly unsexed, but implicitly male human beings of Foucault’s genealogies, I would rather direct my inquiries towards ‘sexing the self’ of the technologies. In her project of ‘sexing the self’, Elspeth Probyn stresses the necessity for contemporary feminist theory to develop an attitude, ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality’ (1993, p. 109), at the same time that it opens up genealogical inquiries that will lead to the deployment of subjectivities that are historically and culturally specific. Although she acknowledges the difficulties arising for feminists meeting Foucault, she cites Weeks and the possibility he points out ‘for inflecting dominant codes’ (p. 166) without being obliged to accept all of Foucault’s positions. Contemplating the various procedures involved in the creation of the self, Probyn focuses on the way Foucault understands the technologies of the self as ‘an order of levels of different types of events’ and the possibilities opened up for an active intervention. Here she draws on Deleuze’s idea about the folding and unfolding of a self realized as a form to be moulded (p. 126). Since Deleuze’s major political proposition has been on how to make connections and open up new planes of thinking (Rajchman, 2000), the focus of this chapter has already moved to the second plane of the initial analytical triangle – namely, critical feminisms.

Dangerous liaisons: genealogies and critical feminisms But it must be said first off, and hence the title of this essay, [The Technology of Gender] that to think of gender as the product and the process of a number of social technologies, of technosocial or bio-medical apparati, is to have already gone beyond Foucault, for his critical understanding of the technology of sex did not take into account its differential solicitation of male and female subjects, and by ignoring the conflicting investments of men and women in the discourses and practices of sexuality, Foucault’s theory in fact, excludes, though it does not preclude, the consideration of gender. (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 3) As the above quote clearly illustrates, feminist theorists have critically interrogated Foucault’s work as unconcerned with gender issues. There is no doubt that a careful reading of his work fully justifies these feminist arguments. Foucault has made very few direct references to women’s issues. In the ‘Afterword’ of Dreyfus and Rabinow’s influential


study Beyond Structuralism and Hermenenutics, Foucault (1982a, p. 211) refers to the ‘opposition to the power of men over women’ as an example of a series of ‘antiauthority struggles’ which he sets out to examine in detail. Better known has been his attentiveness to the ‘hysterization of women’s bodies’ in the first volume of his History of Sexuality and the way in which he presents women’s bodies colonized by the medicoscientific discourses of the era in a ‘threefold process’ whereby they were sexualized, pathologized and incarcerated within the disciplinary institution of the family (Foucault, 1990a, p. 104). Foucault’s blindness to the specificity of gender issues rests upon his not taking an essentialist position with regard to the formation of any subjectivity. In ‘The Confession of the Flesh’, Foucault notes that ‘the real strength of the women’s movement is not that of having laid claim to the specificity of their sexuality and the rights pertaining to it, but that they have actually departed from the discourse conducted within the apparatuses of sexuality’ (1980a, p. 211). What he finds ‘creative and interesting’ about the women’s movement, is what he describes as ‘a veritable moment of desexualization’ (p. 212). This is the process whereby the women’s movement, departing from its initial focus on sexual difference – which was historically specific and bound to the necessity to mark their presence on the political map – moved on to challenge discourses, power relations and social practices sustaining the sex/gender system within which they were unequally positioned. We could argue here, of course, that this process of going beyond the constraints of the dispositif of sexuality has been an ongoing and difficult one. The feminist movement that, in Foucault’s perception, has so gloriously eliminated of the sexualization of its claims has also always been caught in a paradox. As Joan Scott has argued: ‘in order to protest women’s exclusion, [feminists] had to act on behalf of women, and so invoked the very difference, they sought to deny’ (1996, p. x). Foucault has also been criticized for taking direct anti-feminist positions. His arguments about the punishment of rape as a crime against humanity, a power crime and not a specifically sexual one, have certainly formed the political core of the attacks his work has received from feminists.9 Against this background, why did I choose to draw on Foucault’s work in my explorations of the female self? Foucault’s writings have been an arena for conflicting interpretations. It is certainly the case that his work cannot be taken as a totalizing theory. As has been suggested, ‘it is difficult to talk about Foucault in the singular’ (Mills, 1993, p. 7). A secondary reading of his work reveals a number of themes that have


been picked up by feminists who have discovered mutual points of problematization as well as common areas of concern with Foucault. First in the list of such crossing points comes the ‘old’ feminist position that ‘the personal is political’, which in the micro-political analysis that the genealogical research proposes, finds strong grounds to be deployed as both a stance and a methodology. As I have already mentioned in this chapter, Foucault’s focus on bio-politics and his problematization of everything about and around the body have opened large areas of research and interest concerning the various ways the female body has been moulded, constructed and exploited in human history. There is, in fact, a considerable and growing amount of feminist literature either dealing directly with Foucault or drawing on his work.10 In keeping to the genealogical project of drawing maps, I will therefore use this theoretical field to frame a cartography of critical feminisms, those feminist positions which, according to Braidotti (1991), have attempted to express the female self as incomplete, plural, fragmented and yet rooted in her bodily reality. Therefore it is to the stage of feminist critical theory that the lights are now falling. Diamond and Quinby (1988) have seen Foucault’s work as a ‘hand of help’ in the political defence of feminism and have talked about the possibility of a friendship grounded in political and ethical commitment, creating positions open to critical dialogues. They have underlined Foucault’s discourse-theory and his focus on the body as two of four points of convergence between Foucault and feminism, the other two being his methodological suggestion for micro-analysis, attending to everything that is local, intimate or personal, and finally his questioning of universalisms, especially in the way they privilege the Western white masculine elite. In their analyses, resistance is the point where these four themes converge. In relation to the Foucauldian approach to the body, however, interesting feminist challenges have also arisen. Judith Butler sees contradictions in Foucault’s conceptualization of the body and the role of history in connection with the body (1990, p. 133). Chris Weedon (1987) has considered Foucault’s theorization of the subject as the most interesting area of his work, for feminists. As Weedon points out, the subject in Foucault’s thought is socially constructed in discursive practices, but, at the same time, able to reflect upon these very discursive relations that constitute it, capable of resistance and able to choose from the options produced out of the clash between contradictory subject positions and practices. Gendering the subject debate, Teresa de Lauretis (1987) draws on Foucault’s conceptualization of sex as a technology, but criticizes his


lack of interest in the different implications such a technology can have on male and female subjects. She proposes that gender as a form of representation and self-representation is constructed by various social technologies, power relations, discourses, epistemologies, as well as everyday practices (p. 2). But, as the above quote from her influential essay ‘Technologies of Gender’ indicates, de Lauretis points to the fact that Foucault’s notion of sex cannot account for the complex processes within which gender is constituted as a technology. This is the project she undertakes, making four propositions for the analysis of gender as a technology: first that gender is a representation, second that it is actually constructed through representation, third that the construction of gender is a historical process that goes on to the present and finally that gender is even constructed through the very practices of its deconstruction (p. 3). In de Lauretis’ view, gender is a representation not of an individual, but of a social relation, actually constructing the very relation it represents. This construction is placed within the conceptual structures of what Gayle Rubin (1975) has defined as the sex/gender system.11 Within this semiotic system of social positions carrying differential meanings, de Lauretis finally argues that ‘the construction of gender is both the product and the process of its representation’ (1987, p. 5). De Lauretis draws on Althusser’s notion of ideology to elaborate her argument of gender as a representation and to argue that ‘gender [ideology in Althusser] represents not the system of the real relations which govern the existence of individuals, but the imaginary relations of those individuals to the real relations in which they live and which govern their existence’ (1987, p. 6). She goes on to explore how the ideology of gender evolves in feminist theory, particularly focusing on ‘Althusser’s formulation of the subjective working of ideology’, the fact ‘that ideology, needs a subject to work on’ (p. 9). This, according to de Lauretis, is critically important in suggesting that: ‘the construction of gender is the product and the process of both representation and selfrepresentation’ (p. 9) [my emphasis]. As will further be discussed in this chapter, adding self-representation to the cartography of the construction of gender has been a crucial theoretical offering for feminist theorizations of women’s autobiographical practices as technologies. De Lauretis is further concerned with Althusser’s notion of interpellation, ‘the process whereby a social representation is accepted and absorbed by an individual as her (or his) own representation, and so becomes, for that individual, real, even though it is in fact imaginary’ (p. 12). So the question de Lauretis poses is ‘not only how the representation of gender is constructed, by the given technology, but also how it becomes absorbed


subjectively by each individual whom that technology addresses’ (p. 13). In exploring this question de Lauretis draws on feminist film theory, borrowing the concept of spectatorship to show how the spectator’s engagement with a film has always been highly driven by her gender. The critical analyses of female spectatorship, according to de Lauretis, further highlight how the supposedly gender-neutral historical construction of sexuality in Foucault’s analyses fails to address the question of why male and female subjects have had different investments in the dominant discursive positions of the (hetero)sexuality apparatus, not only between themselves, but also, and most importantly, amongst themselves. Here, de Lauretis points to Hollway’s (1984) reworking of the Foucauldian productive power as the motor driving ‘individuals’ investments in discursive positions’ (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 14). This reconceptualization of power allows for an agentic subject to emerge and this is the line de Lauretis takes to put forward the path-breaking notion of the female feminist subject, or ‘subject of feminism’, which, in contrast to the Althusserian subject, which is always caught within ideology, can move in and out of the gender circuit, ‘at once within and without representation’ (1987, p. 10). She further argues that a feminist theory of gender should conceive this subject as multiple, contradicted and heteronomous in relation to the social and cultural conditions that tend to define, control and dominate its very existence: The construction of gender goes on today through the various technologies of gender (e.g. cinema) and institutional discourses (e.g. theory) with power to control the field of social meaning and thus produce, promote, and ‘implant’ representations of gender. But the terms of a different construction of gender also exist, in the margins of hegemonic discourses. Posed from outside the heterosexual social contract, and inscribed in micropolitical practices, these terms can also have a part in the construction of gender, and their effects are rather at the ‘local’ level of resistances, in subjectivity and selfrepresentation [my emphasis]. (de Lauretis, 1987, p. 18) As will be discussed further, it is at the ‘margins of hegemonic discourses’ that women’s practices of self-representation have emerged, therefore creating ruptures in the tradition of writing the self, and offering instances of ‘becoming other’. It is on the ‘local’ level of resistances in subjectivity and self-representation that feminist theorists have further problematized the subject within a Foucauldian framework. Judith Butler (1990) has interrogated the naturalness of being female and she has


looked into the ways gender is constituted through discursive and performative acts. She has further critically theorized how subjection functions as a paradoxical form of power in the constitution of the subject (Butler, 1997). Butler argues that feminist politics need not be grounded on a notion of primary identity, in order to become radical and subversive. In the same vein, Donna Haraway (1990, 1991) considers women as sets of fractured identities, which seem ‘contradictory, partial and strategic’, and stresses the lack of any essential criterion for identifying women as an entity. In her analysis of new technologies and feminist politics, she draws on the specificity of the situation of women of colour to interrogate the collective subject, the ‘we’ of feminism: ‘Who counts as “us” in my own rhetoric? Which identities are available to ground such a potent political myth called “us”, and what could motivate enlistment in this collectivity?’ (1990, p. 197). She points to the fact that the fiction of the unitary female self, instead of being liberatory, has rather functioned as a pretence to reproduce hierarchies and inequalities among women. Keeping the tension between the celebration of differences and the political necessity of unity, critical feminists acknowledge, however, the possibility of forming coalitions, affinities rather than identities, in response to specific historical moments of resistance. In response to these tensions and aporias, Haraway has developed an epistemological project which rejects the validity of global theorizations and suggests the perspectival standpoint of ‘situated knowledges’: We seek not the knowledges ruled by phallogocentrism (nostalgia for the presence of the one true Word) and disembodied vision, but those ruled by partial sight and limited voice. We do not seek partiality for its own sake, but for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular. (1991, p. 196) Tracing paths of feminists encountering Foucault has not been easy. Sometimes it has proved painful in terms of the theoretical and political dilemmas it has actually raised. Haraway’s suggestion for the possibility of forming coalitions has been helpful in this respect, and it is at this point that Rosi Braidotti’s work (1991, 1994) has opened up theoretical grounds for such political and theoretical coalitions to be constructed. Braidotti attempts to bridge the gap between the critical notions of ‘sexual difference’ and ‘gender’ and the long-standing debate they have introduced in the feminist theorizations of subjectivity. Drawing on


de Lauretis’ (1987, p. 2) critique of the problematic status of sexual difference in terms of the constraints it imposes on the conceptualization of differences within women and the theorization of the subject as multiple and contradicted, Braidotti (1994, pp. 159–69) maps difference on three interdependent levels; first, differences between men and women; second, differences among women; and third, differences within each woman. This three-level analysis of difference seems to be in line with what de Lauretis has suggested feminist theory is about: Feminist theory is all about an essential difference, an irreducible difference, though not a difference between man and woman, nor a difference inherent in ‘woman’s nature’ (in woman as nature), but a difference in the feminist conception of woman, women and the world. (de Lauretis, 1991, p. 209) This three-layer difference further becomes, for Braidotti, the basis for the development of Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) notion of nomadism as a project to encompass multiple, female, embodied subjects in the process of becoming, but I will further consider the implication of nomadic subjects in the deployment of the technologies of the female self, in the last chapter of this book. Diving to the deep blue sea of various feminist readings and interpretations of Foucault, this study has particularly been concerned with those works of feminists who have theorized the female subject as multiple, collective and in a process of becoming. Here, I think the theoretical standpoints of Teresa de Lauretis, Elspeth Probyn, Judith Butler, Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti have been particularly influential and I will draw on them, in the exploration of the technologies of the female self. As Braidotti (1991) has suggested, these feminist positions, despite their theoretical variations, belong to the already mentioned forum of what she has called feminist critical theory. Braidotti has used this term to refer to the feminist analysts who have worked towards redefining the female subjectivity on both an epistemological and a political level: The focus on subjectivity results in the definition of feminism as an epistemological struggle as well as a struggle of political nature. In this framework epistemology means the political process of comprehending and redefining the woman as a subject of knowledge, and of inscribing these changes into a new social and historical reality for women. (Braidotti, 1991, p. 210)


So far, then, I have looked closer at Foucauldian genealogies and critical feminisms and have elaborated the idea of having them ‘translated’ to technologies of the self and technologies of gender respectively. However, how are they both linked to the autobiographical project? Although some links have already been traced, the discussion of this chapter now follows connecting lines on the third plane of the discursive analytical triangle: women’s practices of self-representation.

Histories of the self: the autobiographical encounter Autobiography demonstrates that we can never recover the past, only represent it; yet it encodes the possibility of recovery as desire and the possibility of representation as its mode of production. The autobiographical I is at home in both history and narrative because it is produced by the action that draws those fields together. (Gilmore, 1994, p. 86) In moving to the third plane of the analytical triangle, what I want to explore in this section is how Foucault’s genealogies of the modern subject and feminist analyses of women’s autobiographical practices can be put on a map of rhizomatic formations12 for the deployment of the genealogical project: reflecting on the present, problematizing its historicity, imagining different futures. Rhizomatic formations in Deleuze and Guattari’s influential work are analytical systems or rather machinic assemblages,13 which are not rigidly defined and closed; they are rather open planes, where thought is on the move, always making connections with new planes of thinking. I have found Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of rhizomatic formations very useful in terms of sustaining the triangular theoretical proposition that I have put forward in this study: using women’s autobiographical practices for the writing of feminist genealogies. I have seen this triangle as an open assemblage of different lines of thinking, which, instead of being static, always keep moving, waiting for ‘the unknown knocking at the door’ (Deleuze, 1992b, p. 165), being attentive to ‘the thought from the outside’ (Foucault, 1987b). In this state of moving lines, the genealogical turn in the study of subjectivities is making connections with the feminist project of rewriting the female self into history: ‘a sense of that which is lost, never to be recovered completely, has been one of the most powerful rhetorical devices of modern women’s history’ (Steedman, 1989, p. 104). Indeed, reflecting on women’s history has been a primary concern of feminist theories and has highlighted contemporary problematics around the


speaking subjects of history: ‘to see where autobiography is placed is to begin to see, indeed, who speaks for History’ (Swindells, 1989, p. 28). It further seems that women’s history has a particular investment in autobiography ‘as a previously unacknowledged mode of making visible formerly invisible subjects’ (Smith and Watson, 1998, p. 5). Carolyn Steedman (1989, 1992) has looked into women’s autobiographical writings, to trace the deployment of the female self in its historical dimension. Her own autobiographical testament, Landscape for a Good Woman: a Story of Two Lives (1986), has become a canonical reference for a range of feminist theories problematizing what can and/or cannot be represented through autobiography (Probyn, 1993; Gillmore, 1994, Smith and Watson, 1998, 2001; Cosslett et al., 2000; Anderson, 2001). What I want to suggest here is that women’s autobiographical practices have opened up a field for a genealogical analysis of the conditions of possibility for the female self to emerge in history. As already indicated in this chapter, one of the key processes in genealogy is its focusing on insignificant details, on what has been sidelined or kept silent. Seen, therefore, from a genealogical perspective, women’s self-writings emerge from the grey spheres of history to give voice to experiences long unattended and discredited. However, the feminist project of rewriting women’s experiences into history has been critically interrogated in light of the problematization of the very notion of experience and its supposed privileged explanatory capacity. Joan Scott has argued that women’s experiences should be considered as discursive constructs, rather than undisputable points of reference for feminist historians. Scott’s influential work has opened up new directions in the use of ‘experience’ in the writing of history: Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straightforward; it is always contested, and always therefore political. (Scott, 1991, p. 797) What is mostly highlighted in Scott’s essay is the theoretical and political need for experience to be deconstructed and for the analyst to be situated. In the light of these problematics, women’s practices of self-representation, be they autobiographies, memoirs, diaries, journals, or letters, cannot be taken as indisputable historical documents, but rather as discursively constructed texts, which, however, have recorded and revealed various and significant processes in the construction of the female self. In this way, these autobiographical texts can provide a vital


entry point for exploring the historical dimension of women’s present condition, the genealogy of their becoming. I therefore suggest that the female textual selves, fragmented and incoherent as they are, can give the analyst lines towards genealogizing women. Studying women’s autobiographical writings either unpublished or long-out-of-print, can be an ongoing genealogical exercise, towards a re-evaluation and reorganization of the historicity of women’s actuality. Clearly, giving women a genealogical history does not claim to reconstruct their past ‘as it really was’. It is rather an attempt to reveal the temporality and contingency of contemporary ‘truths’ by tracing how they were constructed in certain historical periods. It is the Foucauldian idea of a history starting from the present and attaining to the future that has driven my will to write genealogies of the female self. Perceiving the contingency of discourses and practices that construct contemporary ‘realities’, seems a useful way of distancing ourselves from certain self-models socially imposed and highly restrictive today. Having charted lines connecting women’s autobiographies with genealogical and feminist histories, I will now turn to a plane of analysis, where genealogies and feminist theorizations of subjectivities form rhizomes with the autobiographical tradition of writing the self. In the genealogical framework of technologies of the self, writing is considered as vitally important. ‘The self is something to write about, a theme or object (subject) of writing activity’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 27). Writing, truth and power are forcefully interwoven in the matrix of self-technologies: searching the ‘truth’ for the self through writing, recording these truths as a reservoir for an ongoing process of acting upon the self and of acting upon others. Writing the self is therefore a practice within a wider set of technologies through which the genealogical axes of truth, power and the self converge. Writing is a technology of the self, albeit not an unproblematic one. As Leigh Gillmore has suggested, it is an area constructed out of conflicts and ‘eruptions’ that seem to come to the fore more forcefully when gender ‘interrupts’ the tradition of writing the self (1994, p. 45). As a technology of the self, writing has been a crucial theme in feminist explorations of the subject. Indeed, over the past twenty years a wide range of feminist work has theorized women’s practices of selfrepresentation, recovering their position in the literary autobiographical genre. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (1998) have mapped this field of feminist theories of women’s autobiographies, tracing three significant stages in its deployment: ‘building the archive of women’s writings, claiming models of heroic identity and revising dominant theories of


autobiography’ (1998, p. 5). It is within the third stage, revising dominant theories of autobiography, that the feminist analyses my study draws on, are situated. As already indicated, what has emerged as an area of theoretical consideration par excellence within this field, is the problem of experience and representation, the discussion and problematization of ‘the assumption that “experience” is unproblematically “real” and “readable” and can be captured transparently in language expressing the truth of experience’ (Smith and Watson, 1988, p. 9). The genealogy of feminist theorizations of autobiography carries the marks of this transition from the celebration to the problematization of women’s experiences. Estelle Jelinek’s Women’s Autobiography: Essays in Criticism (1980), which was significant in the opening of this critical field, theorized autobiographical texts as unproblematically referential. Seven years later, however, in The Female Autograph (1987) Domna Stanton excised bio, that is life, from autobiography, foregrounding the problematic relationship between lived experiences and their textual representation and opening up a line of feminist theorization of the autographical subject (Gillmore, 1994; Perrault, 1995). Within the discursive regime of the second wave feminism, Jelinek mapped women’s and men’s autobiographies as two contrasting territories, highlighting and rather overemphasizing sexual difference in the way they are constituted. She therefore identified certain quasi-universal characteristics and differences between them: women’s writings of the self appear discontinuous, incoherent, irregular and full of personal concerns as opposed to the linear, chronological and coherent male writings, which deal dynamically with personal achievements within the public sphere. This fragmented, incoherent, open self represented in women’s autobiographical practices is further differentiated from the monadic and universal self of the male autobiographical tradition; the latter appears to evolve in the text in a procedure that looks natural to himself as well as to the others, a man as ‘a representative of the time, a mirror of his era’ (Brodzki and Shenk, 1988, p. 2). In contrast, the female self is constituted in its relation to others, it is a dependent social self, differentiated from the independent, self-contented paradigm of the male tradition; there are always conflicts with everything that relates to the unfolding of this female self, starting with the very act of writing. There is no doubt that there are indeed differences and variations in the autobiographical tradition and these differences have been marked by gender, but not only; ‘race’ and ethnicity, class, and sexual orientation, to name but the obvious, are important sources for the construction of differences. These differences, however, although not totally ignored, have been downplayed in the initial stages


of feminists’ revisioning of the autobiographical tradition (see Smith and Watson, 1998). In this light, and while keeping the importance of the different ways of writing the self within her theoretical project, Stanton attempted not to use difference as a way of essentializing the binarism between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ ways of writing the self; she rather used it as a lens to look at the historical and cultural specificity of women’s writings. She thus focused her interest on differences within women’s writings, arguing that in terms of its referentiality women’s autobiographies, or ‘autogynographies’, should be considered as an un-ended, fragmentary, and heterogeneous mixture of discourses and histories. Smith and Watson have stressed the importance of keeping complexities open by considering simultaneously how multileveled differences of sex, gender, ‘race’ and ethnicity are interwoven in the constitution of the autobiographical subject (1998). Their work is therefore in line with the feminist project of the three-level theorization of difference – differences between women and men, among women but also within each woman – which we have seen elaborated in de Lauretis’ and Braidotti’s work, earlier on in this chapter. To return to the project of writing as a technology of the self, what I think has been particularly interesting in Stanton’s argument is that the female subject constitutes herself through writing. In rewriting her life, the author of the female self does not produce an autobiography but a female autograph.14 The construction of the autograph, independent from its referentiality to the bio/life of the subject is, I suggest, critical in the genealogical analysis of the discursive conditions that made this constitution possible; it is therefore an important line making rhizomatic connections between genealogies, critical feminisms and autobiographies. Having made full circle to the discursive analytical triangle I have initially offered as a theoretical field for making connections, I now want to look more closely at Gilmore’s (1994) theorization of autobiographics, her analysis of the technologies of autobiography. Following Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self and de Lauretis’ (1987) proposition of gender as a representation, as technologies of gender, Leigh Gilmore (1994) has seen autobiography – or rather in the term she has coined autobiographics – as a discursive regime, a matrix where narratives of truth and experience are knitted together, further theorizing women’s practices of self-representation as technologies of autobiography: I offer the term autobiographics to describe those elements of selfrepresentation, which are not bound by a philosophical definition of


the self derived from Augustine, not content with the literary history of autobiography, those elements that instead mark a location in a text, where self-invention, self-discovery, and self-representation emerge within the technologies of autobiography- namely, those legalistic, literary, social and ecclesiastical discourses of truth and identity through which the subject of autobiography is produced. Autobiographics as a description of self-representation and as a reading practice, is concerned with interruptions and eruptions, with resistance and contradiction as strategies of self-representation. (Gilmore, 1994, p. 42) In the same line that gender is a representation (de Lauretis, 1987), Gilmore argues that ‘the autobiographical subject is a representation and its representation is its construction [ . . . ] it is produced not by experience but by autobiography’ (1994, p. 25). It would therefore seem here that Gillmore’s suggestion is in line with Stanton’s proposition of the autographical subject, who constitutes herself through writing (1987). However, what the genealogical analysis highlights in the constitution of the textual self, is the importance of ‘the material consequences of being interpellated as “woman” or as a member of the category “women” by discursive and juridical systems’ (Gillmore, 1994, p. xiii). Moving within, but also beyond the textual realm, genealogy places the autobiographical practices of writing the self in a cartography of polyvalent and multifarious historical transformations, depicting the conditions of possibility for the ‘figure’ of the woman to emerge (Foucault, 1990a). This self is a discursive formation, neither purely textual, as in Stanton’s theorization, nor unproblematically real and readable, as in Jelinek (1980). It is rather the self that de Lauretis (1987) has seen as emerging from the interstices and margins of hegemonic discourses, in what can be represented, but also in what is left without or beyond representation. As Gilmore explains, this movement beyond representation is not something that becomes a possibility for the female subject as a result of ‘some privileged relation to nature or the supernatural’ (1994, p. 12). It is rather an effect of what Foucault has described as the arising of reverse discourses, the ‘complex and unstable process whereby discourse can be both an instrument and an effect of power, but also a hindrance, a stumbling-block, a point of resistance and a starting point for an opposing strategy’ (1990a, p. 101). Autobiography is indeed a discursive regime creating the conditions of possibility for counter-discourses to arise and unruly subjects to emerge. These unruly subjects follow routes of estrangement from master narratives becoming ‘vectors of deterritorialization’


for Deleuze or resisting figures for Foucault. As Gilmore asserts, ‘even in the narrowest and most ambivalent sense, writing an autobiography can be a political act because it asserts a right to speak rather than to be spoken for’ (1994, p. 40). In Cavarero’s (2000) philosophical conceptualization of the narratable self, narration, both biographical and autobiographical, is a political act in its capacity to expose the fragile uniqueness of the self in its constitutive relation with others. Making connections The feminist project of recovering women’s presence in history seems to be in line with the genealogical interest in peripheral histories and subjugated knowledges. Women’s marginalized and forgotten autobiographical texts constitute a set of extremely rich genealogical data, the dusty and grey documents of the meticulous archival research, the genealogical field par excellence. Moreover the role of autobiography in the constitution of the female subject seems to resonate with Foucault’s analyses of the role of writing in the technologies of the self. However, as already noted, this happy encounter has been decisively shaken by the problematic relationship between experience and the autobiographical subject. Women’s experiences, and indeed any experience recorded in autobiographical narratives, or elsewhere, already include processes of selection, through which some moments have been remembered, while others have been forgotten. The act of remembering or forgetting is active rather than passive, creating meanings through various interpretations of past experiences.15 As has been suggested, memory is indeed a complex and problematic area amongst ‘the constitutive processes of autobiographical subjectivity’ (Smith and Watson, 2001, p. 15). Smith and Watson have offered a multilevelled study of memory, interrogating its status as ‘both source and authenticator of autobiographical acts’ (p. 16). In this context of problematizations weaving around memory, experience and agency in the constitution of autobiographical subjectivities, I argue that the genealogical project of deconstructing rather than reconstructing the past becomes extremely relevant as a plane of analysis for feminist theorizations of the female subject. In this project of deconstruction, I have highlighted the catalytic role of gender in experimenting with how the technologies of the self can be bended (Probyn, 1993) and the technologies of autobiography can be interrupted (Gilmore, 1994). This privileging of gender is not a natural or psychological trait of some inherent essentialist dynamic; it is, rather, an effect of an active interaction between and amongst technologies of the self, technologies of gender and technologies of autobiography, which have


allowed for new discursive regimes and planes of thinking to emerge. As Gilmore explains, ‘interruption is a discursive effect of gender politics and self-representation and evidences the possibilities of and limitations on women’s self-representation’ (1994, p. 49). In making my argument about the role of women’s self-writings, as technologies of the female self, I have drawn on influential feminist analyses of women’s strategies for writing the self. These analyses have explored the historical devaluation of women’s writings that have both constrained their writing practices and have excluded them from the canon of traditional autobiographical texts. These analyses have further shown how, moving beyond silence, women began making sense of dispersed moments of their existence, and through writing they attempted to describe those moments and articulate them in a narrative system. I have been particularly interested in Stanton’s (1987) theorization of women’s autobiographies, memoirs, letters and diaries as practices of self-formation, the argument that the female self constitutes herself through writing. What has been particularly fascinating in the investigation of women’s strategies for writing the self is that the female writers/practitioners of self-technologies interrogate their own authorship in a playful manner within a wider context of ambivalence surrounding their existence and self-assertion as authors of their own lives. Playfulness here is very much in line with Maria Lugones’ theorization of play as an activity surrounded by uncertainty and open to surprise, ‘to selfconstruction or reconstruction and to construction or reconstruction of the “worlds” we inhabit playfully’ (Lugones, 1990, p. 401). Entering the male world of higher education and the newly opened professions, the women teachers of this study can indeed be seen as ‘world travellers’ as they travel across different worlds, adopting playful strategies that help them to survive the multifarious ways in which they are reconstituted as subjects. From this perspective of playfulness women writers ‘are not done’ with the author issue. They cannot be declared dead; they are ‘alive’, but they seem always to evade. The selves that are inscribed in their autobiographical texts lack the sense of organic integrity and question the principle of authorial intention that characterizes the male canon of the genre. It is this elusive condition of their textual existence that renders female autobiographical texts a challenging archive for the genealogist of technologies of the female self. In this context, I have identified Foucault’s work as carrying out a twofold functioning: first, his genealogies as alternative methods for social and historical research have opened paths that could lead to those selves hidden in ‘little dramas, unimportant events, unpromising places’


(Hacking, 1991, p. 28), the female selves, and second, his technologies of the self have sketched lines of analysis that, as Probyn has suggested, can be bent towards sexed/female selves: ‘I think that in taking up Foucault’s turn to the technologies of self we may find other perspectives on theoretical levels at which we can sex the self’ (1993, p. 116). In rethinking the discursive analytical triangle delineated by the technologies of the self (Foucault, 1988a), technologies of gender (de Lauretis, 1987) and technologies of autobiography (Gilmore, 1994), what has been highlighted is the catalytic role of gender in decisively bending the Foucauldian technologies of the self (Probyn, 1993) and as radically interrupting the technologies of autobiography. This ‘unruliness’ of gender has not been attributed to some inherent essentialist force; it has emerged as an effect of an intense battle that has been staged on the discursive regime that these three sets of technologies have opened up. Seen as a discursive regime for the construction of the self, women’s auto/biographical writings open up an interesting field for genealogical explorations. However, writing feminist genealogies which draw on women’s autobiographical practices is an area relatively unexplored in research. It is to mapping this quasi-desert area that I will now turn.

Mapping the genealogical domain while the historical self may be the autobiographer’s explicit subject – the story of her life with self-development as the structure of the text – this subject is distributed across the historical self and the textual self, both of which are versions of the self who writes. (Gilmore, 1994, p. 85) Following the Foucauldian line, my analysis is set in a specific historical and cultural context; otherwise it would run the danger of the totalizations of the ‘grand narratives’ it is supposed to challenge. I therefore open up historical inquiries by reading various ‘self-writings’ by women teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the era of the mass involvement of women in education. Being a period of crises and significant changes in the education of women not only in the UK, but also in Europe, America and Australia, I thought that the end of the nineteenth century perfectly constituted what Foucault has defined as emergence in the genealogical analysis. The turn of the nineteenth century as the moment of women’s mass involvement in education has, of course, been the object of numerous and important historical studies, that have often attempted to find a place for it in a supposedly


linear historical development of women’s liberation.16 However, in the genealogical analysis, this linear development towards progress has been interrogated and problematized. In paying attention to the ‘minor’ pathways and processes surrounding the historical highway that has supposedly led women to the public sphere, different story-lines were able to emerge, while dissonances have often disrupted the melody of history. In focusing on the context of the fin-de-siècle era, I did not try to recover the woman teacher as a heroic figure of social history. I attempted an analysis of the specification of her emergence in a nexus of signifying genealogical events. I have already indicated that my particular focus on genealogizing the female self in education relates to my own autobiography, my lived experiences as a woman teacher, but it certainly goes beyond the limits of the personal. I have seen education as a hot area of genealogical research, an arena of antagonistic discourses, a site of power from which women have been traditionally excluded. A whole web of discourses, special knowledges, analyses, legal and institutional arrangements, have settled upon this historical exclusion. Education, however, has been also the locus where counter-discourses and counter-practices emerged, to oppose the truth regimes and social structures that had legitimated and perpetuated women’s exclusion. In the History of Sexuality, Foucault defines power as dependent on resistance: ‘Where there is power, there is a resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority, in relation to power’ (1990a, p. 95). I have therefore started from the recognition that women in education, striving for freedom, real-and-imagined, formulate a grid of analysis for genealogical research, a genealogical dispositif in Foucault’s terms. Deleuze has described the dispositif as ‘a tangle, a multilinear ensemble’ (1992b, p. 159), composed of lines and zones that are difficult to determine and localize. These lines are usually deployed in unforeseen directions, while it is amidst crises that new lines are created, and new directions open (1992b, p. 160). Education can therefore be charted as a crisis-shaken area, par excellence, a ‘multilinear ensemble’ on the grounds of which ‘unknown landscapes’ emerge, while thinking evolves along moving lines. The dispositif of education, in particular, has indeed created regimes of exemplary visibility as well as regimes of shadow and darkness. What I suggest is that women seeking freedom through and within education have decisively shaken the order of visibility; they have been actively engaged in a continuous process of reinventing themselves and have dared to ask for more than ‘the promise of a dream’ (Rowbotham, 2000).


What is particularly significant for a genealogy, as ‘the history of the present’, is the complexity of women’s positioning in education today. Thus, in an attempt to formulate an attitude, ‘a mode of relating to contemporary reality’ (Foucault in Probyn, 1993, p. 109), I have also looked into contemporary autobiographical texts of women in education. It seems that as we have already passed the threshold of the millennium, women feel trapped in their ‘conquests’: ‘I didn’t know what was happening to me. My body died during those years . . . I was very tired, bone-achingly tired all the time . . . Children make you retreat behind the glass . . .’ (Steedman, 1992, p. 61). Education is a site where juxtaposing discourses are framing women’s lives, but still a theatre of local struggles and resistance, a transitional space in these lives. I have argued that contemporary problematics in the living and working experiences of women educators give the analyst a grid of analysis for genealogical research. But how does this relate to self-explorations? Educating others involves contemplating techniques of self-formation, technologies of the self. As Foucault puts it, ‘they [techniques of the self] are frequently linked to the techniques for the direction of others. For example, if we take educational institutions, we realize that one is managing others and teaching them to manage themselves’ (1986b, pp. 369–70). Following Foucauldian and Deleuzian lines, what I therefore suggest is that education can be seen as a site for self-transformation, opening up opportunities for the recreation of pedagogy as a process that motivates and inspires the subjects that are involved in it to live a better life. Through their involvement in education women have been empowered to ‘speak of themselves’ and encouraged to explore other ‘modes of being a woman’. In their attempt to ‘fashion a self’ they have often ‘tried out’ a plurality of selfhoods, which have sometimes left traces behind them. In the process of my inquiries, I have often wondered where I should look for those traces, those ‘grey meticulous details’, the forgotten documents that genealogy is after. My explorations took me to the archives: reading forgotten women’s diaries, letters, autobiographies and memoirs has offered me invaluable experience of genealogical research. Through my readings of women’s autobiographical writings I have begun to make sense of how ‘through autobiographical writing the self is written out of and into its historical context’ (Steedman, 1992, p. 14) and how this very practice of writing is interwoven in a critical technology of the self. Using women’s autobiographical texts to deploy my genealogical analysis has been a methodological decision that came to me almost naturally. This ‘naturalness’, however, was not created out of the blue.


It is related both to the Foucauldian frame of my work as well as to recent feminist theorization of autobiographies not only as a literary genre, but most importantly in connection to the impact of the use of autobiographies in historical and sociological analyses of the female subjectivity. As the first quotation of this chapter indicates, Foucault was quite explicit about the autobiographical elements of his theoretical work. In addressing epistemological problems related to the validity of knowledge that derives from personal experience and/or life stories, Morwenna Griffiths argues that ‘autobiographical material is a good source of knowledge’ (1995, p. 13). Thus, drawing on a range of theoretical and political discussions about the uses of autobiographical material, I have explored women teachers’ self-writings first as an area of genealogical research and second as a set of technologies of the self. Textual selves of grey documents Following genealogical trails, I have worked with fragmented and scattered autobiographical pieces, being attentive to a system of moments, rather than coherent narratives of ‘complete lives’. As Quinby (1991, p. 137) has argued, these moments of being17 reveal ‘the incoherences, confusions, contradictions and gaps constituting any selfhood’. In specifying the historical and social conditions within which the female selves unfolded, I then worked to situate my fragmented ‘findings’ within a landscape, a cinema plateau that can serve as ‘a view from somewhere’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 196). It was like shooting a film of different happenings with a common theme. In the case of women teachers’ selfwritings, it was slightly more complicated, since there were several themes intertwined together. What I was trying to do was to ‘deal with a rhythm in a system of moments’ (Humm, 1989, p. 45). In working simultaneously with multilevelled differences, I have tried to experiment with a sort of ‘rhythm analysis’,18 since, as Henri Lefevre has put it: ‘what we live are rhythms – rhythms experienced subjectively’ (1991, p. 206). Exploring such systems of moments, my genealogical inquiries look into autobiographical writings of women teachers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and particularly from 1860 to 1914. This period has already proved of particular interest for the historians of women’s education. It is a period that signalled major changes in the education of women. As Purvis (1991), has noted, there were various reasons for these changes, particularly the evolution of a state system of mass elementary schooling, which resulted in women’s participation in the teaching profession. According to Pendersen (1991), it was also a period that created a new category of female teacher, the public school


headmistress. Distancing themselves from a tradition that educated the girls of the middle classes for a private, leisured role, the public school headmistresses valued academic achievement and aspired to educate middle-class girls for a public role. Feminist scholars have produced influential socio-historical analyses relating to these developments.19 Pedersen, however, has argued that there is a need for further investigation into the ways that the reforms made in women’s secondary education and the movement for the higher education of women influenced women’s entry into public life and encouraged them to attempt roles beyond the private sphere (1991, p. 56). Alison Prentice and Marjorie Theobald have further posed the problem of the need for the rewriting of the history/ies of women teachers. They have pointed out unexplored paths for future feminist research, in particular, stressing the need for further analysis of the personal lives of women teachers, as well as of their practices of resistance (1991, p. 25). Prentice and Theobald (1991, p. 14) have also underlined historians’ recent interest in personal narratives, which can create a different ‘history’, drawing on the diversity of experiences of women teachers themselves. In the context of such problematics, I suggest that British women teachers’ autobiographical writings of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, have recorded a whole series of micro events as well as micro discourses, dealing with diverse ideological, political and personal issues. Drawing on a variety of autobiographical and biographical sources, I have focused on the textual lives of female teachers in a range of social and cultural contexts, at the turn of the nineteenth century. College women, first as students and later as teachers, were amongst the first I have examined and this was the case of the Girtonians Louisa Lumsden and Constance Maynard and the Newnhamite Anne Jemima Clough. The writings of these three women reflect aspects of the self-technologies developed by women teachers who studied and/or taught in the colleges associated to the University of Cambridge and became influential figures in the evolution of university colleges for women. Their lifewritings also represent typical cases from the above mentioned movement for the higher education for women, a movement directly associated with the education of women of the middle classes. Middle-class women striving for better educational opportunities, had to fight against a whole set of institutions, practices, discourses and curricula that aimed at turning girls into housewives. They also had to fight against all sorts of restrictions that prevented women from having access to any level or type of higher education, a necessary


condition to enter the professions or simply develop a creative mind and enhance themselves through knowledge. The establishment of university-associated women’s colleges, a movement initiated in 1869 with the opening of a college at Hitchin which was later to move nearer Cambridge and become Girton College, was a major step towards the

Illustration 1 Emily Davies, founder of Girton College


opening of universities to women (see Illustration 1). It was very soon followed by the founding of Newnham College. The existence of two women’s colleges in Cambridge institutionalized the already existing differences with regard to the higher education for women. Since the movement for the higher education of women was a very strong counter-discourse of the era, it is not surprising that it provoked opposing and contradictory ideas and arguments, concerning its practical applications. As is known and has been widely analysed, there were two main ideological directions with regard to the best way of leading women to higher education, ‘the uncompromising and the separatists’ as Sara Delamont calls them (1978a, p. 154). The former claimed that women’s colleges should follow exactly the same procedures and regulations with the traditional university colleges for men, while the latter argued that the particularity of being a woman and having a background of a differently oriented education, should allow for certain exceptions and more lenient regulations. What both directions and their followers shared, however, was their being bound to what has also been described by Delamont (1978a, p. 160) as ‘double conformity’, that is a preoccupation with the standards of lady-like behaviour on the one hand and the aims and values of the male educational system on the other.20 Louisa Lumsden (1840–1935) came from Scotland and was one of the five Girton pioneers (see Illustration 2). She went for the classic tripos and later became a tutor at Girton, then at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and finally headmistress of St Leonard’s Public School for Girls. While at Girton, Louisa Lumsden met Constance Maynard (1849–1935), who came to the College in 1871, and they became friends. Constance came from a strict Evangelical family and had to overcome many difficulties, before she was allowed to sit the examinations for entering the college. She later founded Westfield College. She was a prolific writer and produced volumes of diaries, an autobiography and books drawing on autobiographical aspects of her life, the most well-known being ‘Between College Terms’. Her writings remain unpublished in the archives of the library of Queen Mary and Westfield College (see Illustration 3). Anne Jemima Clough (1820–92) came from a previous generation. From her youth, she had had to work as a teacher to compensate for the loss of the family fortune after her father’s death. As a secretary of the North of England Council, she put forward the argument that women needed a different type of examination as a result of their separate and different education and secured the admission of women to Manchester and Newcastle colleges. In 1871 she took charge of what was to become Newnham College in Cambridge, and it was from


Illustration 2 1869, the five Girton pioneers from the left: I. F. V. Townshend, S. Woodhead, E. C. Gibson, L. Lumsden, sitting on the right, R. S. Cook in the middle

that position that she developed her own strategies with regard to the higher education of women. Girton and Newnham had various institutional and organizational problems, but they were prestigious compared to the sometimes dreadful


Illustration 3 Constance Maynard. A heroic pioneer or a grey figure?

conditions of the teacher training colleges.21 It was in this light that I have read autobiographical writings of Winifred Mercier (1878–1934). She spent some of the best years of her life looking after her ill mother. While working as a teacher, she also studied for her external London


degree. Mercier became a pioneer in the reform of teacher training colleges and later in her life a Girton College don. Her correspondence with her friend and fellow teacher, Jean Borland, offers a view of suffocated feelings and a longing for new intellectual and bodily experiences. Excavating technologies of the self cultivated in spaces where women lived, worked and were educated collectively, I have further considered the self-writings of women who became known for their contribution to the development of girls’ secondary education, a sector that was developed either in girls’ public boarding schools or in daily high schools for girls.22 I refer in particular to Dorothea Beale (1831–1906), headmistress of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, and Mary Frances Buss (1827–94), founder and first head of North London Collegiate School and Camden High School for girls. As principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, Beale founded St Hilda’s College, Cheltenham, as the first English training college for women and she also sponsored St Hilda’s Hall in Oxford for women teachers. As has been commented, Buss managed to bridge the gap between the mentality of the private schoolmistress and the newly emerged persona of the public headmistress; she was actually the first woman to call herself a headmistress (Pedersen, 1991, p. 45). ‘Miss Beale’ and ‘Miss Buss’ were among the few women teachers who achieved renown as individuals and they have, consequently, been the subjects of several biographies.23 However, retelling well-known stories in order to destabilize their myths has been a crucial point of revision in the history of feminist thought and it is from this perspective that I have reread the stories of ‘Miss Beale’ and ‘Miss Buss’. Although girls’ secondary education was to some extent influenced by the divisions between the ‘separatists’ and the ‘uncompromising’, there is also a striking continuity in the way women organized their life and work in the newly established educational institutions. What women’s auto/biographical writings convey most strongly is a matrix of ethical concerns, aesthetic orientations and social attitudes which links them to the new emerging female culture of the university colleges. Such links were most of the time ‘real’ and practical rather than ideological, since the majority of the colleges’ graduates would become teachers of secondary schools, while the pupils of the secondary schools would become students of the colleges.24 In the history of women’s education there is also the case of assistant schoolmistresses, women teachers who worked in the secondary sector, after having themselves completed a type of secondary education available for the daughters of the middle class. This is the case of the diary of Clara Collet, ‘The diary of a Young Assistant Mistress’. Clara Collet


(1860–1948) was a student at the North London Collegiate School. At the age of 17 she left London to become an assistant schoolmistress in a girls’ high school in Leicester. While teaching there, she studied for both an external London BA and a teaching qualification. She later left teaching to study for an MA in Moral and Political Philosophy at University College London and became a social researcher. As has been commented elsewhere, like their male colleagues, many women teachers used teaching ‘as a stepping stone to more powerful professional or political roles’ (Prentice and Theobald, 1991, p. 15). Collet’s seven-year diary (1878 to 1885) clearly reflects the beliefs, hopes and aspirations of those women who used teaching as a lever to other professions. It is a diary which does not reflect the culture of college life. Its context is the real world of teaching, where women were developing techniques of themselves within a professional life, a situation about which they felt most uncertain, and which created contradictory feelings and attitudes.25 Since issues of gender always ride on issues of class, my readings have included auto/biographical writings of women teachers of the lower strata, teachers very often living on the edges of poverty. This is the case, for example, with the autobiography of Molly Hughes, born in 1866. She came from a family from the lower middle class, attended the North London Collegiate School and trained as a teacher in Cambridge. Molly’s autobiography follows her adventures in several educational institutions both as a pupil and teacher. Her autobiography reflects her admiration for ‘real colleges’, like Girton, as well as her joy at her life in the training college, where she could be on her own for the first time. More difficult in terms of financial and social possibilities was, however, the case of Helen Corke (1882–1978) from South London. She was a friend of D. H. Lawrence and came into teaching through the pupilteacher system.26 Although these self-writings emerged from working experiences in the hard and cruel world of elementary schools, they reflect personal wishes and aspirations in common with the women teachers of the upper strata as well. While going out and around London, Corke resents her poverty as well as ‘the happiness’ of her married cousin and dreams of a spiritual life and freedom ‘that must be followed’ (1975, p. 148). As Prentice and Theobald have suggested, ‘women teaching in domestic settings and those who owned their own schools have been the least visible in the historiography of education’ (1991, p. 9). Attempting to throw light onto this dark side of female teachers’ history, I finally refer to Mary Smith, the only case of a working-class teacher whose life is read in this study. Mary Smith (1822–89) came from Oxfordshire.


As Mary Smith declares at the very beginning of her autobiography, ‘I was born in an English nonconformist household, of simple country habits, of the order of common people, without any pretension whatever to wealth or rank’ (1892, p. 1). When she was about 18, she left her father’s home and went to the north of the country, following the Osborns, a family with whom she developed a strange love/hate relationship. It was in the north that she became a self-taught teacher, sometimes working on her own and at other times with the Osborns or as a governess. She finally established her own school in Carlisle, where she lived till the end of her life. She was also involved in journalism and wrote poetry. Her poems have been published as the second volume of her autobiography, Miscellaneous Poems of Mary Smith (1892). Her autobiography documents the harshness of life and work of rural schoolteachers, but in a remarkable way it depicts her passion for an intellectual life, beyond conformist patterns of behaviour and rigid class constraints. Although the self-writings I have referred to were produced within distinct social, financial and cultural conditions, this study will not focus on the traditional division between working-class and middleclass women teachers. I think that feminist historians have already both explored and problematized the impact of social class on the education of women.27 Instead, my inquiries look specifically into variations emerging from the social and personal spaces within which women teachers’ lives unfolded. A decisive – but not exclusive – factor for these autobiographical writings is the space/s of their production, an idea that will be further expanded in the following chapter. Yet what they reveal as a whole is an extraordinary common area of ideas, feelings and attitudes that seem to transgress social boundaries in their attempt to open up new directions in women’s lives. What about ‘this present of ours’, however? How has it been ‘documented’? I have already referred to the difficulties of facing the present, to stabilize what is continually moving and changing and reflect upon it. Thus, rather than ‘document our present’, what I have tried to do was to freeze some fragmented ‘moments of being’ and in Virginia’s Woolf’s idea, build some narratives from fragments of meaning in order to understand other narrative fragments of meaning (Erben, 1993, p. 18). In this I have certainly made certain choices. I have listened to some voices, while being aware of the epistemological problems such a selection, inevitably, raises. As Griffiths has clearly put it: ‘which few others do I choose from the very large number I could listen to, since it is plainly impossible to undertake such a serious project with every human


being. That is, who should I listen to?’ (1995, p. 45). In agreement with Griffiths that this is indeed a difficult question, I have drawn again on the Foucauldian framework of my genealogy to make clear that the voices I have chosen to listen to are voices of dissonance. They tell stories of women teachers who feel uncomfortable about their life, who do not hesitate to confess their dilemmas and reveal the dark side of their self. They are women who have interrogated their way of being in the world, without having any alternative life pattern to follow. Perhaps their insistence on change is the only line that keeps them within the cartography of female subjectivity, this genealogy has attempted to draw. This is how I have read their/our stories. Carolyn Steedman (1992) hated her life as a teacher. Perhaps because she loved it too much in the first place and couldn’t protect herself from ‘burning’. She has told fascinating stories of how it feels to be a teacher who can no longer bear the children she once loved and became passionately attached to. Her voice from within the ‘prisonhouses’ has broken the silence, the taboo of speaking out women’s discontent of being with children, either as mother, or teacher or both. In reading Valerie Walkerdine’s (1990) stories, I have recognized my own schoolgirl fictions that have constrained my becoming an adult of this world. She has depicted shocking pictures of women teachers struggling with unresolved dilemmas and incompatible contradictions. Unlike her great aunt, Clara Collet, Jane Miller (1996) never stopped loving teaching, perhaps because ‘her children’ were somewhat older and she did not have to ‘mother’ them so much. She tells stories of those women teachers – and they are many – who have seen teaching as a way to change the world, or at least do something about it. ‘Holding On’ was a group of women teachers that was formed at the end of an MA in Urban Education course. We came from different sectors of education, had different life patterns, different stories and even countries behind us. The group kept us together for almost two years, 1992–94. During this period we had meetings, followed by social outings, discussed our readings of books and papers, wrote a paper in collaboration, which we presented at a St Hilda’s conference in 1993, and we kept a diary for the same day and then for the same week, to share our experiences, ‘all the horrors, joys and pains of working/living/ just coping’ (Holding On, 1993). Some of the themes of our discussions, readings and writings addressed the ways in which our autobiographies informed our theoretical concerns and our research projects, the experience of collective feminist writing, older women in education, friendships and communities of choice.


I have read many stories, and I have even written my own part of a story. As Foucault sees it, genealogy involves searching meticulously in the most unpromising places, reading and re-reading dusty documents, paying attention to unimportant details, trying to discern unheard voices. In reading these stories, however, I have come to admit that women’s auto/biographical writings, in spite of their spontaneity, already include processes of selection, through which some moments ‘have been remembered’ and written about and some others have not. Reflecting on Virginia Woolf’s moments of being, Liz Stanley (1992) has theorized the relationship between the present and the past self, the present and the past being conceptualized as two ‘platforms’ on which the auto/ biographer28 is trying to locate the self. When it comes to the exploration of the past Stanley suggests that memory acts selectively and it is therefore very probable that a ‘lie’ or an untold truth can hold more truth than the presented ‘truth’. Stanley argues that there is no ‘knowledgeable past’. The ‘facts’ are a product of their time, place, author as well as of their reader. In this context, she sees auto/biographies as ideological products rather than representations of an objective truth, which in itself is considered as an ideological product. Thus, the genealogical exploration of female teachers’ fragmented documents of lives has created a secondary layer of moments, already taken out of different primary selections made by the authors. My task as a genealogist has been to recognize my ‘perspectival seeing’ and replace the quest for ‘objectivity’ with ‘a view from somewhere’. This strategy of situating the ‘findings’ within a context of certain political, cultural and historical practices draws, as we have seen, on Haraway’s postmodern feminist project, which calls into question the ideal of epistemic purity and its supposed independence from politics: ‘I would like a doctrine of embodied objectivity that accommodates paradoxical and critical feminist science projects: feminist objectivity means quite simply situated knowledges’ (Haraway, 1991, p. 188). In this context women’s autobiographical writings, while emerging from the dark sphere of humanity and speaking from the underground terrain of subjugated knowledges, are not exempt from critical re-reading and deconstruction. Like Scott, Haraway does not assign any sort of epistemic privilege to the subjugated standpoints of women and/or excluded ‘others’. However, Haraway has suggested, that a postmodern feminist project can include the possibility of partial views being joined into collective subject positionings that promise a living within and beyond limits, shaping transitional spaces for the accommodation of the contradictions and juxtapositions in women’s lives. It is, then, more than a theoretical reference that makes


me end this chapter with the words of Donna Haraway, who has enabled me to see through, but at the same time beyond, partial and subjective histories: The science question in feminism is about objectivity as positioned rationality. Its images are not the product of escape and transcendence of limits, i.e., the view from above, but the joining of partial views and halting voices into a collective subject position that promises a vision of the means of ongoing finite embodiment, of living within limits and contradictions. (Haraway, 1991, p. 196)

2 Spacing the Female Self: Tracing Heterotopias

When I left school I wanted to go out, to go to London, to leave home. I wanted to be a teacher because I was afraid. I went to Goldsmith’s because my teacher told me that it was the best training college in the country. It was also in London. To leave home for London when everyone in my family had always been local, got married and had children. To get out yes [emphasis added]. (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 83) This autobiographical extract from Walkerdine’s influential book Schoolgirl Fictions starts from ‘our present’, as all genealogies should do, and gives us a sense of a surprising continuity. Genealogy is not only about discontinuities, but also about unexpected continuities. Nonetheless, this powerful description of Walkerdine’s desire to get away from a familiar local environment and come to the ‘big city’ to become a teacher was not something I had expected to read from a woman educator towards the turning of the millennium. I had thought these were mainly concerns of the nineteenth-century ‘pioneers’, who were attempting to get away from the enclosed space of home, as recounted in the following autobiographical extracts: Next Saturday I am going to Leicester; I am not sure whether I shall like it; but I do know I shall like it better than being at home. (Collet, unpublished, p. 2) My mother ran away from home to become a teacher because she was tired of being kept in and made to do tapestry work by her mother [ . . . ] My mother was an ardent and active suffragette [ . . . ] she was of course one of the first members of NUWT. (Kean, 1990, p. 4) 52

Spacing the Female Self 53

Always I have loved to be out [ . . . ] I wanted independence, I pined to spread my wing . . . and this year I got liberty, got it as exceedingly, got it in full measure. (Maynard, unpublished chapter 1, p. 13, chapter 9, p. 237) What do I want? Freedom, opportunity, education, varied experience [ . . . ] I have glimpsed the possibility of spiritual adventure [ . . . ] there is a fugitive radiance that must be followed; there are thoughts to be captured. (Corke, 1975, pp. 96, 148) After nearly ten years’ absence, I began in a few weeks to feel very much out of my element at home [ . . . ] I grew sadder every day as I grew poorer [ . . . . ] In vain my father talked of patience and rest. I was determined to fight for my own living, and be a burden to no one. (Smith, 1892, pp. 170, 179) In this chapter I shall explore personal and social spaces as represented in women teachers’ self-writings at the turn of the nineteenth century. What I want to do is to make a move towards the writing of a history of their ‘real-and-imagined geographies’1, a genealogy of their being inscribed in space. This is a difficult area to tread on. However, the strength and intensity of the various ways, discursive and nondiscursive, through which women have expressed their longing for space, leaves me no alternative. This is literally a space travel, dangerous as all space travels are supposed to be, full of adventures, and unknown destinations. The Foucauldian genealogical approach with its attentiveness to the ‘spatialization of power’ (Soja, 1989, p. 21) is, I think, an enthralling way of working upon the thematics of space. As Foucault pointed out in his 1967 Berlin lectures, ‘The anxiety of our era has to do fundamentally with space, no doubt a great deal more than with time’ (cited in Massey, 1994, p. 249). He has therefore pointed out that ‘a whole history remains to be written of spaces – which would at the same time be the history of powers (both these terms in the plural)’ (Foucault, 1980d, p. 149) [emphasis in the text]. Dick Hebdige (1990) has pointed to the influence of Foucault’s thought in the theoretical configuration of spatial themes of contemporary social and cultural studies and has suggested that Foucault’s genealogical histories have rescued space from ‘the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile’ (Foucault, 1980e, p. 70). There is indeed today a growing interest in spatializing Foucault, unravelling his multifarious ways of engaging with spatial analyses.2 A critical theme that seems to be emerging from the relevant literature


is Foucault’s contribution in highlighting how spaces and places are crucial factors in the deployment of historical studies.

On spaces, places and genders Looking at the nexus of meanings and connotations weaving around the terms of space and place, Doreen Massey defines space as a global dimension creating images of ‘the chaos of simultaneity and multiplicity’ (1994, p. 1). As Henri Lefevre has put it: ‘we are thus confronted by an indefinite multitude of spaces, each one piled upon, or perhaps contained within, the next: geographical, economic, demographic, sociological, ecological, political, commercial, national, continental, global’ (1991, p. 8). At the same time, however, space is not taken as some static absolute, devoid of effects or implications; ‘it has now become something more than the theatre, the disinterested stage or setting, of action [ . . . ] its role is less and less neutral, more and more active, both as instrument and as goal, as means and as end’ (Lefevre, 1991, pp. 410–11). Lefevre (1991) has most influentially theorized that space is constructed out of social relations which themselves are saturated with an integral dynamism: the study of space offers an answer according to which the social relations of production have a social existence to the extent that they have a spatial existence; they project themselves into a space, becoming inscribed there, and in the process producing the space itself’ (1991, p. 129). As Massey comments, thinking of space not as some absolute independent dimension, but as ‘an inherently dynamic simultaneity’, forcefully brings in time intrinsically interwoven with space (1994, p. 3). In theorizing space in relation to time, Massey draws on the arguments of physical sciences which advocate the conceptualization of both space/ time as processes in a unity.3 According to Edward Soja, it is Foucault’s specific way of looking at the interweaving of the relations between space and time that make his contribution so important in the theorization of ‘the spatial and historical imaginations’ (1996, p. 15). Since space is conceptualized in terms of the interrelation of certain social forces, place is theorized as an articulation of certain social relations of the spatial at a particular moment. As Linda McDowell has put it, we should think of place as ‘the grounded intersections of a whole variety of flows and interactions that operate over a range of spatial scales’ (1999, p. 6). In the same vein, Gillian Rose has argued that ‘places differ one from another in that each is a specific set of interrelationships between environmental, economic, social, political and


cultural processes’ (1993, p. 41). Such theorizations stand against the view of place as a permanent concept, something that has been somewhere for a long time, creating the sense of belonging and of ownership, of a site of authenticity and nostalgia, a shelter, to which ultimately, one returns. The discourses of stability surrounding the notion of place are opposed by counter-discourses, designating the notion of place as a kernel point provoking tendencies of mobility and agility around it. In Massey’s analysis, if space is not viewed as stasis, then neither can place be theorized as permanent, ‘authentic’ or bounded (1994, p. 5). Therefore, McDowell notes, ‘places are contested, fluid and uncertain’ and their ever shifting boundaries are effects of strong power relations at play (1999, p. 4). Calling into question the conceptualization of place in terms of stability and uniqueness has thus shattered certain ideological structures that have been used to enclose particular places, render them bounded and relate them with certain identities. Moreover, since, as Lefevre (1991) has critically shown, the social relations of space are lived, experienced and interpreted differently by those inhabiting different positions in the multiplicity of its levels, rather than conceptualizing place as a monadic homogeneous entity, we can see how different ‘mental’ and ‘lived’ spaces can be produced, within the same geographical place4. Consider, for example, the city centre during the day and the ‘same place’ after nine o’ clock at night. The place is geographically the same. However, it is not the same in terms of those who live it or experience it. There are clearly different spaces for different people. As Rose has shown, humanist geographers have indeed been attentive to how places are filled with human interpretation and significance and have been heavily invested with strong emotions (1993, pp. 42–3). Thus, ‘night places’, for example, are not particularly ‘women friendly’. In the same way a ‘house in the country’ can be a place of freedom and fun for kids, a paradise of relaxation and rest, to look forward to, for the hardworking commuter husband and a madhouse for the hard-working mother who stays behind. The geographical place is the same. What about its spaces, however? In the above examples, places and spaces are interwoven in a complex matrix wherein various spaces can include and be included in various places and vice versa. What is particularly interesting in this matrix is the way gendered power relations intervene in the ways lived experiences of spaces and places are structured. Commenting on the notion of place, Soja (1996, p. 40) points to the fact that place is rarely used in Lefevre’s work, since his notion of ‘lived spaces’ seems to encompass ‘the rich meanings’ of place. As Soja explains, Lefevre thinks that the separation/distinction of space and


place is both unnecessary and misleading, reducing ‘the meaningfulness of both space and place’ (1996, p. 40). Perhaps Lefevre’s refusal to distinguish between space and place can be a point of reference for those feminist analyses that have strongly criticized the feminization of the notion of place, seeing it as a discursive effect of the space/place dualism (Rose, 1993; Massey, 1994). However, Stuart Elden highlights Heidegger’s suggestion ‘that space can be rethought through its relation to place’, underlining ‘the human’s relations to places and through places to spaces’ (2001, pp. 85, 86). Finally, Anthony Giddens has seen the separation of space from place as one of the consequences of modernity (cited in Massey, 1994, p. 5), while David Harvey (2001) has used ‘the space/place dialectic’, as he has called it, to consider the global capitalist development. Clearly there are different perspectives from which to see and theorize the notions of space and place. As Rose, however, pithily notes ‘what both place and space have in common, is the exclusion of women (among others)’ (1993, p. 62), highlighting exclusion as a critical technology of power defining spatial and platial notions, practices and boundaries. In Geographical Imaginations, Derek Gregory (1994) has mapped the intellectual landscape within which space and palace discussions in the humanities and social sciences can be contextualized5, while Soja has charted his own map of theorists in his Thirdspace.6 In light of this multiplicity I would agree with Massey, arguing that any discussion around space cannot and should not be either exhaustive or incompatible with all others (1994, p. 5). I would also suggest that instead of seeking to reach to generalized or universal theorizations of space and/or place, the genealogical project urges for specific analyses within which spatial and/or platial notions should evolve. As Foucault has put it: ‘There is indeed a task to be done of making the space in question precise, saying where a certain process stops, what are the limits beyond which something happens’ (1980b, p. 68). This is actually what this chapter is ultimately attaining to, mostly drawing on the Foucauldian/feminist field of inquiries, which, according to Soja, ‘increase the openness of Thirdspace’ (1996, p. 13). Therefore, my concern in this chapter is to offer a genealogical approach in the discussions interrogating space/time, space/place, and place/gender dualistic configurations, particularly as they apply to the formation of gendered subjectivities. As Massey has argued, the time/ space and space/place binarisms can be added to the list of dualistic oppositions, inherent in the Cartesian line of thought and they certainly relate to the way gender is conceptualized in terms of the masculine/ feminine dichotomy: ‘time is typically coded masculine and space, being


absence or lack as feminine’ (1994, p. 6). In the same line of thinking place has been associated with the feminine, since women are expected to be more attached to places, both socially and psychologically. In light of these confining legacies in the history of Western thought, it is no surprise that revisioning the polarization of time/space and space/place can act as catalysts in the deployment of gendered identities and gender relations. This has indeed happened in complex and multifarious ways that have invited various research and theorization.7 There is, indeed, a growing theoretical field of feminist spatial analyses. Taking the city as an exemplary site for the social production of gendered spaces, particularly oppressive and confining for women, critical spatial feminisms have further explored space and gender in their interrelation, pointing to ‘the prolific multiplicity of spaces that difference makes’ (Soja, 1996, p. 110). As Rose has most forcefully put it: ‘I want to explore the possibility of a space which does not replicate the exclusions of the Same and the Other. I examine a spatiality imagined by some feminists which can acknowledge the difference of others’ (1993, p. 137). These feminist spatial explorations take place within what Lefevre (1991) has called the ‘lived spaces of representation’ and Soja (1996) has described as ‘Thirdspace’. As Rose explains, this focus on specific spatial practices of the everyday life is in line with the epistemological priorities of feminism, which ‘through its awareness of the politics of the everyday, has always had a very keen awareness of the intersection of space and power – and knowledge’ (1993, p. 142). In therefore focusing on the ways space, but also place, cut through private as well as public arrangements in women’s lives, I attempt to throw light onto the multifarious ways in which women have concerned themselves with both material spaces and/or spatial images. In taking the genealogical turn, I want to dig into what Neil Smith (1990) has described as ‘deep space’, exploring ‘the existential significance of place, space and landscape’ (Gregory, 1994, p. 4). Rose has pointed to the ways that both Marxist and feminist geographers have theorized the processes through which material spaces have been shaped by uneven social relations (1993, p. 118). Soja has further considered the insights of humanistic cultural geographers, who ‘seek to root the material patternings of space in the imprint of cultural beliefs and commitments and the free play of human nature’ (1996, p. 77). What has been identified as a gap in the theorization of space, however, is exploring ‘how material geographies and spatial practices shape and affect subjectivity, consciousness, rationality, historicality and sociality’ (Soja, 1996, p. 77) Within this theoretical void, spatial images, in Benjamin’s thought, ‘the


images of our perceptions and ideas, and the metaphors with which we are surrounded’ (Weigel, 1996, p. x) surpass the imposed closures of material spaces and create ‘other spaces’, beyond the limits of masculinist discourse, or, as Teresa de Lauretis has described them: ‘spaces in the margins of hegemonic discourses, social spaces carved in the interstices of institutions and in the chinks and cracks of the powerknowledge apparati’ (1986, p. 14). It is, therefore, in the intersection of space/knowledge/power that women teachers’ spatial subjectivities will be deployed. From the excavation of ‘unimportant’ moments as reflected in their narratives, what emerges is an account of their resisting the space restrictions imposed upon their lives, claiming space of their own, sometimes creating new space boundaries for themselves, but also imagining different spaces beyond masculinist geographical closures. Women teachers’ ‘moments of being’ disregard distinctions between real and metaphorical spaces (see Rose, 1993, p. 155), and seem to ‘creatively combine spatial metaphors and spatial materiality in an assertively spatial praxis’ (Soja, 1996, p. 99). Thus, spaces are made meaningful through certain practices which they strategically use to act upon themselves. What I am seeking to do is to rethink these practices or technologies of the self, considering, in particular, the significance of spatial concepts like place, location, locality, landscape, environment, home, city, region, territory and geography, which, according to Soja, ‘compose and comprise the inherent spatiality of human life’ (1996, p. 1). I therefore focus on these very practices, the technologies women in education have used to negotiate places of their own, ‘remap [their] many real-and-imagined worlds’ (Soja, 1996, p. 99) and survive the continuous hovering between multidimensional, shifting and contingent spaces of these worlds. Drawing on the intersection of space, power and knowledge in the constitution of technologies of the female self, I suggest that the autobiographical writings of women in education reveal two interesting spatial themes, weaving around women’s need for privacy, a ‘room of one’s own’ and their desire to map themselves on different dimensions, to travel. These points of reference concentrate the dynamism and complexity of space and place. I now turn to the unravelling of threads around these two themes. Explorations in women’s spaces: experiences of confinement Go out, get out, be out, spread my wing, run away, leave. These are some of the verbs that can be frequently traced in women teachers’ autobiographical writings and out as a participle, often accompanies these verbs


of movement. Thus, women’s self-writings present selves on the move, always attempting to go beyond the boundaries of their family, their locality, their town or city and, in some cases, their country. Women tend to move, they experience great difficulties in remaining in certain spaces. They feel confined and oppressed. In Young’s view, ‘a space surrounds us in imagination that we are not free to move beyond’ (1990, p. 146). As Rose has noted, confinement emerges as a highly frustrating theme in women’s accounts of their lives and has been used in feminist theory to describe oppression (1993, p. 144). Women teachers’ feelings of entrapment within oppressive spaces are harshly articulated in desires of discursive, imaginary and sometimes physical escape. Resisting space restrictions is therefore associated with a strong will to move, to depart and to cross imposed spatial boundaries, both real and metaphorical. This getaway tendency is definitely more positive than what has been identified in feminist theory as women’s desire to eliminate their existence from space, ‘to make ourselves absent . . . participate in our erasure’ (Rose, 1993, p. 143). Emerging, as has been pointed out, from diverse social and cultural contexts, women teachers’ self-writings focus upon feelings of suffocation and estrangement: ‘they [women] grew restless, they were like caged birds, with their strong passions intensified by the want of action’ (Clough, 1897, p. 96). The metaphor of the ‘caged bird’ very much underlines their lack of space in sharp contrast to their deep, inward wish for freedom. However, the picture of the cage is only a ‘light’ characterization if compared to the idea of prison, that home and family life represents in the same self-writings: ‘Gazy8 [ . . . ] there was no scope at home for more than half her powers and also she was four years older than I and so her captivity [emphasis added] lasted longer’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 4, p. 60b). However, while middle-class women have difficulties in identifying the causes of their ‘unbearable lightness of being’,9 in the case of teachers from the lower social strata, there are very obvious explanations for the unfairness of life. Social inequalities appear to be the determining factor for life being dull, without scope and without choice: ‘Home life is by contrast wearyingly dull. I can see no future, have no plans [ . . . ] A sense of isolation grows. Apparently there is no place [emphasis added] for me [ . . . ] Life might be good if we were not poor, but in poverty is no freedom, no choice’ (Corke, 1975, p. 96). The spatial images, inscribed in the above quotations and recounted incidents, constitute an inimical territory for women, something to get away from. Women’s sense of alienation from the everyday spaces of


their lives is related to a fear, that they are always watched and evaluated. As has been argued, this threat of being the object of the other’s gaze is of critical importance in the objectification of the female self (Rose, 1993, p. 146). Life within the physical, institutional and ideological boundaries of the nineteenth-century social spaces is a theme that has been explored in historical and sociological studies. It has also been addressed from a range of quite different perspectives, including influential feminist problematics focusing on the implication of gender issues.10 Home as a place to leave? Place has been directly associated with the configuration of boundaries and the enclosure of subjects, bearing specific and closed identities usually counterpoised with the ‘Other beyond the boundaries’ (Massey, 1994, p. 169). Nationalist discourses are the first example of such categorizations, relating territory boundaries with identities and investing them with certain beliefs and attitudes. In terms of the formation of ‘gender-closed’ identities, home and the surrounding locality has been recognized as a woman’s place par excellence, creating both a physical and sentimental sheltering and security, somewhere to refer to and ultimately to return to. Working in areas as diverse as literature, sociology, geography, psychoanalysis, cultural studies, visual arts, drama and cinema, feminists have interrogated the naturalness and common sense of such conceptualizations of a ‘place called home’11 and have presented these as artefacts of masculine discourses (Massey, 1994). As has been pointed out, there is indeed a feminist literary tradition, ‘equating the loss of place with the acquisition of identity’ (Henley, 1992, p. 82). It has to be noted here, however, that home has also been theorized as a site of resistance. As bell hooks eloquently writes: Throughout our history, African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist aggression [ . . . ] domestic space has been a crucial site for organizing, for forming political solidarity. Homeplace has been a site of resistance. (hooks, 1990, p. 47) An interesting theme emerging from hooks’ theorization is the idea that homeplace has the possibility to produce ‘different spaces’ contesting the hegemony of a single dominant social space. In this light, home is becoming a kind of sanctuary, and a site of resistance. I will


come back to a more detailed discussion of these ‘other spaces’, which Foucault (1967) has theorized as heterotopias, later on in this chapter. However, either seen as a place to leave, or as a place to resist, home is still an open place, a contested site full of uncertainties and conflicts. As Rose has commented, feminist spatial literature ‘has been able to suggest that there are spaces and landscapes beyond the attempted masculinist closures of geography’ (1993, p. 137). Moreover the private and the public, as well as the boundary between them, have historically and culturally been sites carrying different and often contradictory meanings for those who inhabit them. Thus, while for white feminism home has been a burden, most often a place to leave, for black feminism it has been a resource, a shelter, a place to dream of and long for (see Rose, 1993, p. 126). It therefore seems that the place/gender discursive formation should include race if it is to become a useful tool for analysing space/knowledge/power relations. Drawing on the presentation of place as a nexus of certain social relations interacting at a particular location, Massey argues against any closure in the conception of place and the constitution of any ‘identity of place’. Since place is conceived as a process rather than a static condition, it can never be either stable or unchanged, and consequently the identities of places, rather than having been frozen at a particular moment/location in space-time, are themselves flux, unfixed and open to change and influences from the ‘Other’ (1994, p. 5). In theorizing socio-spatial relations, McDowell has used the term of global localism to describe the openness of place and has suggested that: ‘For all people . . . whether geographically stable or mobile, most social relations take place locally, in a place, but a place which is open to ideas and messages, to visitors and migrants, to tastes, foods, goods and experiences to a previously unprecedented extent’ (1996, p. 38). In the light of such theorizations, the self-writings of women teachers reveal how female subjects strive to cross their space boundaries and thus recreate themselves, drawing on experiences and aspirations that are opposed to what is generally considered ‘proper’ and ‘natural’. For the majority of them, the first step towards a new life is always bound to distancing themselves from familiar locales, leaving their home, dreaming ‘of elsewhere’ (de Lauretis, 1987, pp. 25–6). Finding themselves outside the enclosed circle of their home, women mapped themselves within new spaces. Thus, women teachers’ autobiographical writings in the nineteenth century, weaving around their private space, ‘a room of their own’, reveal new dimensions in the deployment of their space/ time.


A room of one’s own The great point of Grant12 was that for the first time in my life I had a room to myself . . . With snow actually drifting in and lying on the floor and with intolerable smoke from the chimney, my little room suffered much, but I was strong and did not mind it. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 4, p. 78) It seems that well before Virginia Woolf’s influential lectures at Girton and Newnham in 1928, where she related women’s writing to economic independence and ‘a room of one’s own’ (Woolf, 1945), women teachers had been seriously preoccupied with the deep necessity of acquiring a space where they could think of and for themselves, articulate their intellectual worries, ultimately ‘write themselves’. It is this creative need that drove Dorothea Beale, first principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, to take her books and papers to a room at the top of the house, where she could work undisturbed, away from the family living rooms. So strong was her need for a room of her own, that ‘she would not allow the servants to carry scuttles of coal to her attic, but worked through the winter without a fire, knowing that her chilly isolation would keep her intruding sisters in the warmth below’ (Kamm, 1958, p. 38). ‘A room of their own’ appears critical in the fashioning of women’s life in colleges: ‘Each student will have a small sitting-room to herself, where she will be free to study undisturbed, and to enjoy at her discretion the companionship of friends of her own choice’ (Stephen, 1927, p. 176). This is Emily Davies writing during the preparations for the opening of Girton College (see Illustration 4). She goes on to comment that ‘This great boon – the power of being alone is perhaps the most precious distinctive feature of College life, as compared with that of an ordinary family’ (Stephen, 1927, p. 311). As Vicinus (1985, p. 142) has pointed out, for the first time in their life college women had a small place that they could completely control. This sense of controlling their own space is powerfully expressed in their autobiographical writings: ‘The main charm was our power to shut the door, or even lock it, and put up the notice “engaged” on it’ (Hughes, 1946, p. 123). ‘The power to shut the door’ is definitely boundarycentred. Setting the boundaries of their space, and taking full control of it, is certainly important in women’s perceptions of independence. Although they lived collectively – and fully enjoyed doing so – women in the colleges kept their rights to privacy and their room was the territory


Illustration 4 Student’s sitting room ‘This great boon, the power of being alone is perhaps the most precious distinctive feature of College life, as compared with that of an ordinary family’

par excellence where these rights were ‘exercised’. While living with their families, these women may have had a room (though in most cases they shared it with one or more sisters), but this room was only for sleep; it was not a room to keep them creatively busy or even to offer them moments of relaxation and reflection, even less a room to serve as their space to see their friends in privacy. Stephen (1927, p. 312) has noted that the fact that the students at Girton had both a sitting-room and a bedroom of their own struck them as something ‘unusual’. It is this ‘unusual’ idea of a sitting-room that enthralled Molly Hughes, a student having just arrived in Cambridge to attend a new teacher training college: I had always had a bedroom of my own at home, but that had been almost entirely occupied by a big double-bed, a washing stand, and a chest of drawers. But here was a real sitting room (for the bed looked like a couch) such a one as Dym must have had, a room in College. (Hughes, 1946, p. 120)


Given these reactions, it seems that Davies’ insistence on privacy was largely an expression of her desire for freedom (Stephen, 1927, p. 176) and that ‘privacy was the only luxury which Miss Davies desired for her students; and in her eyes it was not a luxury – she despised luxuries – but a necessity’ (p. 312). The right to privacy is bound to the right to freedom. What is interesting to note here is the paradox that, although confined in the private sphere, the home, these women longed for privacy. This is another paradox to be added to the list of incompatible dualities, in terms of the existential impasse of being public within the private. So great was the enthusiasm of the women students in colleges for the idea of a ‘room of their own’, that they would personalize it and make it a place to express themselves: I had a notion to give my room a name, and the other students followed suit. I called mine ‘The Growlery’ after a room in Bleak House intimating thereby that anyone wanting to growl could come in and laugh it off. This proved as time went on, no empty invitation, and I had many visitors for the purpose. (Hughes, 1946, p. 121) Humanist geographers have theorized the emotional attachment to places and, as Rose notes, Tuan has coined the term topophilia to describe this affection ‘as pleasure, delight and joy’ (1993, p. 47). Apart from being invested with emotions and feelings, women’s rooms would also become the locale to mirror their interests, their taste and their intellectual concerns: ‘One of our number was an aesthete, and hung up a portrait of George Eliot, whom she resembled. She dressed in dark green velvet and was a free thinker’ (Hughes, 1946, p. 47). Even within the restrictions of the training colleges women teachers’ reminiscences depict their enthusiasm of having their own cubicles to live in and Mrs Cox, a teacher in Copelman’s study (1996, p. 147), ‘remembered that she decorated it with postcards from the National Gallery’. Therefore, the decoration would often create an image out of necessity. What is striking, however, is that the fashioning of one’s room is actually reflecting the fashioning of one’s self. The vocabularies of space women have used in writing about their rooms reveal their room as a space of imagining themselves differently. Here is Hughes again: With the new curtains the Growlery had a gay aspect, even in the dreariest weather. This was as well, for otherwise the room looked very bare. While the others had been buying little ornaments and framed views of the colleges, my limited pocket-money kept me to


the barest necessities. So I made a bold move by adopting the role of a hermit, and telling everyone that I preferred my room to be severely plain, that this indeed was the latest fashion among people who really counted. Pictures I maintained distracted thought, an ornament merely for the sake of ornaments was démodé. On a piece of cardboard I illuminated the words ‘Thou shall think’, and hung it over my mantelpiece. That would set the tone and prevent any tiresome remarks. (Hughes, 1946, p. 123) In their autobiographies, women describe their rooms in meticulous and enthusiastic detail. In filling their narratives with spatial drawings, women make their room an object of topoanalysis, Bachelard’s notion of ‘the systematic psychological study of the sites of our intimate lives’ (1994, p. 8). Here is Hughes’ cartography of her room: When my trunk was landed, I was shown my room. This was some twelve feet square on the ground-floor, with one small window flush with the pavement, a narrow bed, a scrap of carpet, a basket chair, one upright chair and a bureau. A fire crackled in the hearth. ‘Is this mine?’ cried I in ecstasy. [emphasis in the text] (Hughes, 1946, p. 120) The position of ‘the room’ was also reflected in the intimate feelings and attitudes of the residents. Describing one’s room is as essential as giving the main features of one’s character: ‘her room in Astell House had the repose of open space, and of plain, cool colouring that allowed the eye to rest undisturbed on her own possessions – few in number – but beautiful in themselves, and beautifully placed’ writes Steadman (1931, p. 164), about the room of Lilian Councell, a teacher she admired deeply. In the same way we learn that Jemima Clough’s room at Newnham ‘had the sunset view which was her special delight’ (Steadman, 1931, p. 205). Their room was identified with their solitude, became the place where they could retreat when unhappy: ‘I needed my Growlery [after the failure of a lesson she had given] and retired to lick my sores there’ (Hughes, 1946, p. 133). This is perhaps one of the reasons why the roomfire is a detail that enthrals them and receives much attention, discussion and admiration: ‘Miss Clough once said she thought the reason the girls liked being at Newnham was that they had fires in their rooms’ (Clough, 1897, p. 205). Women met there to share their fears, disappointments, worries and problems: Hughes recalls how a fellow student ‘burst into the Growlery, without even stopping to knock, collapsed to the floor and exclaimed in tones of real heart-break, “I am ruined” ’


(1946, p. 134). However, it was also in their room that women would enjoy themselves, and ‘see one another and give tea-parties and cocoaparties among themselves freely’ (Clough, 1897, p. 205). Dreams of elsewhere Space is fundamental to any exercise of power. It is especially vital when structuring gender relations. Yet, while there are a large number of analyses related to women’s exclusion from public spaces, little attention has been paid to the ways women experience lack of space – sometimes no space at all – in their own houses, locales traditionally bound to the ‘female sphere’. I am very often surprised to find that in many [middleclass] houses there is a playroom for the children or a study for the husband but no room of a woman’s own.13 Consider, for example, how Marilyn Frye draws a simple cartography of anger, portraying a young woman, living with her husband and contemplating on the spatial domains of her anger: ‘the pattern was very simple and clear. It went with the floor plan. She could get angry quite freely in the kitchen and somewhat less freely. . . in the living room. She could not get angry in the bedroom’ (Frye, 1983, p. 94). This lack of personal space within the private sphere is most significant when viewed from the perspective of ‘bio-power’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 140), the Foucauldian notion of an order of power which is characterized by the relations that have been established between power and life. In Foucault’s view, these power relations have been enshrined in a whole set of techniques that aim at the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations. Feminine bodies enclosed in restricted spaces, and at the same time, being ‘public’ within their private space, seems to be even worse than simply being confined to the private. Home seems to operate as the notorious ‘panopticon’, Bentham’s architectural device, which, for Foucault (1991a, pp. 195–228), represents the triumph of disciplinary technology. In such conditions of permanent visibility, women seem to be always watched, to the smallest detail of their activities. Home is therefore turned into a locale where, even if there are discontinuities and dispersion in the gaze of the other, women’s integral surveillance is being carried on. Drawing on the intersection of space, power and knowledge, feminism has been particularly attentive to this disciplinary deployment of spatial relations in the micropolitics of the everyday lives of women. There is indeed a range of theoretical discussions relating women’s estrangement from their surrounding space, with a deep self-awareness that they are continuously being watched and judged.14


Home is also, however, at the same time a locale where interaction occurs, where power games are being played and, as already discussed, home has been theorized as a site of resistance in black feminism (hooks, 1990). For women the negotiation of a private space within the house goes beyond – or perhaps beneath – expectations of domination. It is bound to urgent existential needs. A room of a woman’s own may be a space of dreams, imagination and creative interests. It is definitely related to any attempt at female self-assertion. In Susan Griffin’s narrative, women’s spatial fear can be transformed in a dream of elsewhere: ‘[ . . . ] we have spoken; space has changed; we are living in a matrix of our own sounds; [ . . . ] by our echoes we chart a new geography; [ . . . ] by what we hear we are moved again and again to speak’ (2000, p. 195). Women ‘charting a new geography’ are, however, women moving in space, changing places. It is to this movement beyond spatial boundaries that the discussion of this chapter will now turn.

Travellers Women teachers’ autobiographical texts present their authors, deeply involved in a ‘war’ of and for space outside of their domestic circle, somewhere both in and out of the wide/wild world. In such a search, women’s profound desire for privacy, ‘a room of their own’, somewhere to retreat, to assert control and choice is bound to another important life-search: towards somewhere where ‘there is more room’, somewhere beyond control and beyond surveillance. Donald, wouldn’t you like to go to America, Canada or the great wide west? Where perhaps there might be more chance of finding out what manner of being you were? – where there is more room, more freedom, and one is not so hide-bound by conventions – where you could get nearer the soil, and as I said before not be stifled by artificialities and habits and conventions, your own and other people’s. Oh wouldn’t you like it, wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t you? (Grier, 1937, p. 34) This extract comes from a letter written by Winifred Mercier, a woman teacher who later became a leader in the reform of teacher training colleges, to her friend and fellow teacher Jean Borland,15 in August 1902. While on school holidays, studying for her external London degree and looking after her sick mother, Winifred finds consolation in writing


to her beloved friend. Her passionate desire for travel brings together a cluster of practices that are interwoven in the fashioning of women teachers’ lifestyle. Travel is a means of getting away from the ‘artificialities and habits and conventions’ that are imposed both internally and externally, ‘your own and other people’s’, travel to ‘where there is more room, more freedom’, in order to seek ‘the manner of being you were’. Winifred is clearly writing here about journeys to imagined places. How can we, however, draw the line between real and imagined places? Winifred’s writings extend the spatial imagination, making explorations in the realm of Thirdspace, which, according to Soja, ‘can be described and inscribed in journeys to “real-and-imagined” (or perhaps “realandimagined”?) places’ (1996, p. 11). It seems that women have always been dreaming of getting away, of travelling, of striving for an unconventional life. However, this desire cannot be addressed as a transcendental one. It has to be set in a specific historical and cultural context, so as to be understood and at the same time deconstructed in the process of its interpretation. Women teachers’ deep love of travelling is clearly discernible in autobiographical writings of the nineteenth century. Sara Mills notes ‘the sheer volume of writing’ she encountered when she first started studying the genre (Mills, 1993, p. 1). This is doubly significant given the prevailing assumption that ‘very few women broke out of the domestic circle in the nineteenth century to venture into the wider world of self-acknowledged travellers’ (Worley in Mills, 1993, p. 1). Women teachers’ travel writing in the late nineteenth century tends to contradict this assumption in a very marked way. Constance Maynard has left a whole set of unpublished travel diaries, currently in Westfield College archives, while her book, Between College Terms, is entirely about ‘those happily recurring gaps we call Vacations’ (Maynard, 1910, p. x). Luisa Lumsden writes frequently about her travels in her autobiography, Yellow Leaves. She travelled extensively in Europe and America. Stephen, Davies’ biographer, also recounts how much ‘Miss Davies’ enjoyed travelling (1927, p. 354). Travel writings of women teachers from the upper strata are obviously framed by specific relations to privilege, choice and, often, time. Women teachers of the lower classes, however, are also thrilled by the idea of travelling. Exploring the lives of elementary school teachers at the turn of the century, Copelman describes how ‘the issues of the Board Teacher which preceded the summer break, abounded with travel suggestions, ranging from frugal British holidays to complicated Continental and even American itineraries’ (1985, p. 214).


Teaching in the elementary schools of South London, Helen Corke was always planning her holiday travels in the company of her friend and fellow teacher Agnes Mason. In Corke’s view, ‘the freedom, leisure and opportunity they [holidays] afford is the unique advantage of the teaching profession’ (1975, p. 168). Travel choices depend, however, on the economic position and family commitments of women teachers. Corke comments on the practical difficulties, mainly financial, teachers face in taking holidays, stressing in particular that ‘school holidays out of England are still the exception’ (1975, p. 168). Writing from an even more disadvantaged social position, Mary Smith recounts the great difficulties of travelling: ‘My experience of riding on the top of a coach over Stainmore, in the early part of February, was never forgotten’ (1892, p. 77). Despite the difficulties, however, she decides to leave home and travel to the north, in search of the unknown, and it takes her ten years to return to her homeland, after her initial departure at the age of twenty: ‘It was the first time I had been on the sea and consequently I was very sick . . . we found it a very trying voyage and I mentally vowed, I would never take another voyage on the sea’ (1892, p. 167). In Bartkowski’s theorization of travel writing, the impossible journey narrated by Smith is perhaps ‘a representation of earlier journeys into subjectivity’ (1995, p. xviii), an articulation of her fear of a new displacement, this time back to the home she had left. Later on in life, when she has established herself as a teacher in the north of England, she would often travel to the south during her holidays. However, Mary Smith will never return home. Her dislocation has constructed new relations between herself and the world. Hers was a one-way journey. Either cherished or hated, the theme of travel occupies women teachers’ minds and becomes a strong motif in their autobiographical narratives, filling them with spatial images. Their travel writings have been read from different perspectives. There is actually a growing interest in travelling and its connection to the formation of subjectivities. In this growing literature, there have appeared certain critiques that have problematized the use of travel metaphors in contemporary social and cultural studies and in feminist theories in particular (Kaplan, 1996; Wolff, 1995). I suggest, however, that travelling, either as metaphor or as real experience, can be used, albeit not unproblematically, to stress women’s experiences of existential fluidity in real and/or imagined spaces. As has been argued, ‘the notion of feminine identity as relational, fluid, without clear boundaries seems more congruent with the perpetual mobility of travel than is the presumed solidity and objectivity of masculine identity’


(Wolff, 1995, p. 124). On the other hand, in using travel metaphors to explore aspects of female subjectivity, I am aware of Kaplan’s (1996) critical comment that the imaginary discourses of travel have been associated with the existential expansion of the white bourgeois Western man. Developing this line of criticism, Meaghan Morris has argued that: there is a very powerful cultural link- one particularly dear to a masculinist tradition inscribing ‘home’ as the site both of frustrating containment (home as dull) and of truth to be rediscovered (home as real). The stifling home is the place from which the voyage begins and to which, in the end, it returns [ . . . ] The tourist leaving and returning to the blank space of the domus is, and will remain, a sexually in-different ‘him’. (1988, p. 12) Despite these criticisms, I will come back to the suggestion that women’s long insistence on travelling, despite all sorts of difficulties and restrictions, has created interstices and ruptures in the colonial practices and ideologies of actual travel. As McDowell has put it, ‘travel, even the idea of travelling challenges the spatial association between home and women that has been so important in structuring the social construction of femininity’ (1999, p. 206). Taking it further, Chicana feminists have explored the multiple meanings and effects of crossing borders and transgressing boundaries (Anzaldúa, 1987). As already pointed out in Chapter 1, Maria Lugones (1990) has coined the term of ‘world’ travelling, relating it to playfulness and love, offering it as a medium, or a practice for ‘outsiders’ to ultimately ‘feel at home’: ‘I recommend this wilful exercise which I call “world” travelling and I also recommend that the wilful exercise be animated by a playful attitude’ (1990, p. 390). Lugones points to the multiplicity of worlds that surround us, but she focuses on the experiences of the ‘outsiders’. Instead of pathologizing this experience, however, she highlights a particular feature of it: ‘the acquired flexibility in shifting from the mainstream construction of life to other constructions of life, where she is more or less at home’ (1990, p. 390). What is particularly interesting in this suggestion is that Lugones does not restrict the possibility for such experience to ‘outsiders’ only. What she suggests is that ‘world’ travelling ‘can also be wilfully exercised, by those who are at ease in the mainstream’ (1990, p. 390). Travelling is therefore constructing not along the lines of colonialism and conquest, but as a playful exercise, enabling its practitioners ‘to have the distinct experience of being different in “different” worlds and ourselves in them’ (1990, p. 396). As she eloquently puts it:


‘The shift from being one person to being a different person is what I call travel’ (1990, p. 396). I think that Lugones’ suggestion of travelling as a playful practice, enabling travellers to survive the contradictions of different worlds both real and imagined, runs parallel to a genealogical approach to travelling as an interesting set of technologies of the self. More importantly, ‘world’ travelling, emerging from the tradition of feminists of colour, is one of the many examples of how discourses, heavily invested by notions of patriarchy and colonialism, as indeed is the case with travelling, can be appropriated, bended, reversed, ultimately become what Foucault has theorized as ‘counter-discourses’ (1990a, p. 101). Having made this connection, I will therefore return to my initial argument that, although not unproblematic, travel can be used to rethink concepts of gender, space and subjectivities in a specific social, historical and cultural context. In my analysis, women teachers’ travelling experiences are taken as fragmented moments in their lives. Instead of being theorized ‘wholesale’ either as true or as distorted representations of the female self, I suggest that women’s travel writings may be read as part of a genealogical search for dispersed moments, for the tracing of those selftechniques which their authors have developed and used to negotiate space for themselves within the rigid social structures that define their living and working conditions. As Bartkowski has noted: ‘The demands placed upon the subject in situations of unfamiliarity and dislocation produce a scene in which the struggle for identity comes more clearly into view as both necessary and also mistaken’ (1995, p. xix). Within the specific context of the turn of the nineteenth century, female travellers have often been portrayed as ‘women of independent means and without domestic ties’ (Morris, 1994, p. xx). Women teacher travellers, however, do not quite fit into this category. Of course, they were of independent means, but since some at least were educated working women, these ‘means’ were not the result of an income from a family on which they would be dependent. ‘Domestic ties’ of some type also existed, but these did not necessarily include looking after a husband and children. An elderly mother and/or siblings might occasionally be left behind, for a short while of course, without much social criticism of such behaviour. After all, hard work during the school term made holidays necessary. It is a necessity set against daily responsibilities and the rigid disciplinary order of their schools or colleges. It is an occasion for the free floating of the mind. Women teachers’ holiday journeys are of an ephemeral character, a joyous break into freedom, away from the constraints of work and home, a set of happily fragmented


moments. Running away from their daily routine, women teachers enjoy themselves collectively, and write about their journeys, with wit, intelligence and humour. Occasionally, however, and contrary to their expectations that they can escape from all limitations and conventions, they are confronted by the bodily risks of being alone and unprotected. In their writings they express their concerns and disappointment about the restrictions on mobility they faced as a consequence of their sex: That first visit to Florence was far more interesting than any later one. Though I fretted at restrictions on liberty, for a girl could not go out alone, the old city, [ . . . ] with its many churches and convents (San Marco was still forbidden ground to women) [ . . . ] was fascinating. (Lumsden, 1933, p. 34) Women teachers are always interested in the arts, so their journeys must include visits to exhibitions, museums and monuments: ‘above all, the wonderful picture galleries, a revelation of the beauty of Italian art’ (Lumsden, 1933, p. 34). Apart from the ‘care’ of themselves, however, female travel writings reveal passion and empathy for the lives of others. This is how Clough advises her students: I would say if possible try to get a knowledge of at least one foreign country, of one foreign language by living among the people and learning something of their thoughts and ways [ . . . ] It would be worth while taking a situation as a governess in a family to gain such knowledge, or to take a post in some institution where help was wanted. Surely this is better than merely travelling and sight-seeing. We then belong to the life, we see people in their ordinary ways, in their undress [ . . . ] For ourselves will remain many impressions; many mental photographs will be taken, and what a pleasure in after times to review them again and again and recall them. (Clough, 1897, p. 249) What is missing from women teachers’ writings, however, is the mentality of ‘beat’ travelling, the sense of simply wandering and doing nothing as Jack Kerouac (1991) describes it ‘On the Road’, although there have been some rare occasions as with Miss Lilla B. Strong, a teacher at Cheltenham, who ‘with her violin, a pianist, and five singers, made a five week’s tour [ . . . ] They went in an ox-cart that carried a case of church music, and a case of secular music, besides tent, bedding, personal luggage and camp necessaries’ (Steadman, 1931,


p. 89). These travels were obviously an exception. Women teachers’ travels are orderly and purposeful, in the Victorian tradition of travelogue. The female self is strictly striving to put up structures and accommodate herself within them. Some women teachers would also travel, to further their education or for the purpose of work; often combining further education and work. This tendency can be traced back to the very beginning of the nineteenth century. In her biography of Charlotte Brontë, Gaskell recounts the difficulties Charlotte would face in travelling alone. She refers in particular to a certain occasion, when Charlotte, arriving unusually late in London, decides to spend the night on the ship which was to sail the next morning. As Gaskell recounts: ‘she described to me [ . . . ] her sense of loneliness, and yet her strange pleasure in the excitement of the situation, as in the dead of that winter’s night she went swiftly over the dark river to the black hull’s side’ (Gaskell, 1987, p. 250). Far from being ‘of independent means’, some women were brave enough to set off with only the barest of necessities. However, even then, one senses that they were thrilled by the experience of finding themselves striving alone in the wild world. Their strong desire for departure, together with the risks and dangers it entailed, seem to have posed a threat to the patriarchal structures of a society, in which home was constructed as the woman’s ‘natural’ place. What, then, these travel writings reveal, is an attempt to transgress the female boundaries of place and identity and to try for new and improbable conditions of existence. Either chosen or forced, or chosen and forced at the same time, travelling gave women the chance to distance themselves from daily entanglements, and to think about themselves and the world around them in a different way. In the process of their continuous struggle to reconcile conflicts between their inner and outer reality, travelling gave shape to their transitional space.16 Thus, travels bridged the gap between the inner and the outer world of the subject, giving pleasure, a sense of aliveness and continuity, and ultimately creating possibilities for self-reflection and for change. Technologies of the self/ technologies of space In the first chapter I referred to Foucault’s theoretical analyses of the technologies of the self. According to Foucault (1990b, p. 45), these selftechnologies were integrated with various types of attitudes, rendered difficult to recognize and set apart from everyday experiences. In terms of everyday experience, then, having a room of their own gave women the private space they needed to retreat, think about themselves,


articulate their thoughts and conduct, find a way to voice their desires, ultimately put together fragments and pieces of their identity. Their college room was the place to avoid surveillance, destroy the mirrors through which distorted self-images were being projected, and map their existence in different dimensions. At the opposite pole of the space/ time process, travelling offered them possibilities of escaping their prescribed places and roles, of feeling free and trying ‘new modes of being’. Finding themselves in different places, far away from their home, women underwent rare experiences, acquired knowledges that had the possibility of transforming their whole lives, and constructed quite novel personal relations to the new and unknown world. Therefore, going out to meet the world, women travellers also learnt how to stand on their own feet. Both space practices were mutually affected and we should see them ‘working upon’ the female self in their interaction. Both were important in women’s experimentation with multiple and differential selfhoods. Finally education was the locus par excellence where, amidst other interests, women could both be private, within the space arrangements of college life, and travel by means of the economical and intellectual independence derived from their opportunity to work within education and because of it. From a genealogical perspective, it has been accepted that the ways by which people attempt to decipher their relationship to themselves, varies according to their historical and cultural environments. The eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries celebrate the era of rationalism, when the Cartesian subject/man is driven to knowledge, a demystification of his existence and the creation of a new relationship to himself. In such a historical and cultural context, the techniques women adopted were consequently influenced by the principles of rationalism and scientific explanation of the world. Knowledge of their self, ‘the manner of being you are’, was bound up with getting away from the confining domestic circle, ‘the golden cage’, towards more space, ‘room for themselves’. This ‘room’ became their place of hiding where, disengaged from the social, they would cultivate their mind, and develop modes and techniques of self-knowledge. Travelling, on the other hand, was a direct way of social engagement, an opportunity for the female self to try a different way of life, although new conventions, limitations and restraints would emerge to be confronted. In such a transitional space, the female self would fight but, at the same time, ‘take refuge’ without the immediate risks of being utterly excluded from the social structures which she was trying to challenge. The interaction of the microcosm of the ‘room’ and the macrocosm of travelling seems to have opened paths for


self-exploration/revelation. What I have found stimulating in tracing technologies of the female self is the ways women have tried to work upon themselves in rearranging their space, and giving different dimensions to the unfolding of their lives. Indeed, I would argue that technologies of the female self are historically associated with what I want to call technologies of space. What was particularly interesting in these technologies of space was tracing the ways in which women teachers rewrote the private/public distinction, moving beyond its ambivalent and often-blurring boundaries. In Rajchman’s way of theorizing, I have seen women teachers moving to a ‘neutralization’ of the private/public binarism; this neutralization, I have argued, did not erase the private or the public, but instead moved beyond their dichotomy, creating ‘multiplicities’ and ‘new points of connection’, opening ‘the possibility of a disjunctive synthesis, where the disjuncts are disparate rather than ‘distinct’ and the synthesis ‘inclusive’ rather than ‘exclusive’ (Rajchman, 2000, p. 56). So far in this chapter I have attempted to make a cartography, where private and public spaces can be put together in a way that demonstrates how their supposed demarcated gendered boundaries melt into the air. What I have suggested is that the private/public dichotomy is a discursive construct that does not seem to work in the ways women teachers have dealt with spatial issues in refashioning their lives at the end of the nineteenth century. In the first section of this chapter I mostly focused on personal spatial practices as they were developed in a plane of analysis where ‘getting away’, ‘a room of her own’, ‘dreams of elsewhere’ and ‘travelling’ made connections. What I want to do now is to move to an analysis of social spatial practices, particularly those developed within women’s colleges of higher education at the end of the nineteenth century. My argument is that Foucault’s concept of heterotopia is a useful tool to theorize how power and resistance are intricably interwoven in the deployment of women’s technologies of space.

Of other spaces 1 You’re tired, I talk too long; we’ll go Dine at the ‘Sun’, then take the train For Cambridge – this way, by the lane We’ve two hours still to spare or so -


2 Then on to Girton. But for me, My memories cling to Hitchin still, To yon red house upon the hill, To every field, to every tree, 3 ’Twas here I mused, ’twas here I read, here learned the worth of friendship, here Felt the world widen round, saw clear Horizons stretch, and overhead 4 A bluer sky. For here I came Sick to the soul for the larger scope. Glad labour, self-expression, hope, All the girl’s life denied of aim 5 And new life granted. Can I tell My gain? Ah, here, one moment, wait – We catch a glimpse still. No, too late, Old College, from us both, farewell! (Lumsden, 1933, p. 189) (see Illustration 5) Last night I dreamt I was at Girton College.17 Virginia Woolf was with me.18 There was a cocoa party and the girls were having fun. I wanted to ask them, what it is like: being a woman student at a girls’ college in the heart of Cambridge, the fortress of male knowledge and power. . . My aim here is not to retell the story of Girton, the first women’s college in Cambridge, or of those that followed it. This has been done in numerous historical and sociological studies, and it is a common theme of many autobiographical texts of the nineteenth century.19 In re-reading the stories of the first university-associated women’s colleges, I am digging deeper into the formation of discourses and practices revolving around the private/public bipole, a gendered distinction ‘deeply rooted in political philosophy, law, popular discourses and

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Illustration 5 The College, Benslow House, Hitchin But for me, My memories cling to Hitchin still, To yon red house upon the hill, To every field, to every tree


recurrent spatial structuring practices’ (Duncan, 1996, p. 127). Women’s colleges have been searched and analysed, either as public spaces, in terms of their contribution to the higher education for women, or as private spaces, in terms of their role in the development of a female culture and a new way of life for single women.20 What I want to do here is to trace how the textual as well as the social practices of women interrogate the traditional separation between private and public spheres in the space of women’s colleges. I want to show how their personal choices and intellectual endeavours, seen within the theoretical framework of the Foucauldian technologies of the self, have undermined boundaries between public and private spheres and have destabilized the coherence of this binary opposition. I also want to explore how women students of colleges have both opened up their private space and remapped their existence in the public sphere, and how the latter has been redefined through the involvement of women. Here, my genealogical work on female autobiographical texts involves the identification of the complex, interwoven, sometimes contradicting and antagonistic discourses at play within the colleges. This discursive struggle over space underlines the fact that women’s colleges at the turn of the century were indeed contested, multiple, and highly unstable places. I will try to explore the space of the college as a heterotopia, a term used by Foucault to describe ‘. . . other spaces’. As early as 1967, in his paper ‘Des espaces autres’ which was published in 1984, Foucault elaborated the notion of heterotopia, which he had first introduced in The Order of Things (1970, p. xviii). Drawing on the poetic reflections of Bachelard (1994) on internal places of day-dreaming and intimacy, Foucault set out to explore external spaces. Given his interest in the catalytic role of space for the formation of ways in which knowledge emerges, what mostly intrigues Foucault, is not the analysis of the internal space, ‘the space of our first perception, that of our reveries, that of our passion’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 177), but the outer space, ‘the space in which we are living, by which we are drawn outside ourselves, in which, as a matter of fact, the erosion of our life, our time and our history takes place’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 177). In deciphering the complicated and often contradictory structure of various relational emplacements that constitute the outer space of our living experiences, Foucault turns his attention to ‘different spaces’, those emplacements ‘that have the curious property of being connected to all the other emplacements, but in such a way that they suspend, neutralize, or reverse the set of relations that are designated, reflected, or represented by them’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 177). Foucault designates two types of ‘different spaces’: utopias, and


heterotopias. Utopias are unreal, while heterotopias are actually real places, but ‘utterly different from all the emplacements that they reflect or refer to’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 178). In being different, heterotopias interrogate discourses and practices of the hegemonic space within which they are localizable – they are ‘a kind of contestation both mythical and real of the space in which we live’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 179). Foucault (1998) has elaborated a detailed description of various types of heterotopias and has meticulously pointed out their heterogeneous elements and diverse functions. He has thus identified six principles in the description and analysis of heterotopias. I will therefore follow this rather unusual didactic framework and try to make connections with the organizational structures of the first university-associated women’s colleges as well as with the real lived experiences of the first women students, as represented in their autobiographical texts. In Foucault’s analysis, first comes the recognition that heterotopias exist in every culture and society, but in very diverse forms (p. 179). In light of this principle, women’s colleges were not an unprecedented social formation. Although women’s education has always been in the margins of society, historically there had been various educational institutions for women. A second descriptive feature of heterotopias is that they function in relation to a specific cultural, social and historical context (p. 180). Seen in the specific context of the turn of the nineteenth century, the first university-associated women’s colleges disrupted previously held assumptions about the role of girls’ education. They were indeed innovative as educational spaces for women, particularly in terms of their pioneering role in opening the way to the higher education for women and their consequent entry into the public sphere. In this way they were exemplary in demonstrating how heterotopias can be made to function in different ways. Third is the ability of the heterotopia ‘to juxtapose in a single real place several emplacements (p. 181). This juxtaposition of ‘incompatible emplacements’ to the totalizing reality of the ‘single space’ is a very critical side in the development of heterotopias, since it concentrates their possibility to open up sites for resistance. We have seen, for example, in the analysis of home as ‘a place to leave’, but also ‘as a place to resist’, how a place, any place can be open to the creation of many different spaces, challenging the hegemony of the ‘single, real space’. Heterotopias can therefore be found in the multitude of different spaces that surround and contest the centrality of the ‘single space’. In this line, women’s colleges created several emplacements that were juxtaposed to the ‘single real educational space’ of men’s colleges in Cambridge and Oxford. As will be demonstrated later on in this chapter,


the ‘other’ spaces they created were often contradictory and incompatible with the principle of freedom they were drawing on. A fourth principle is that heterotopias are further connected with temporal discontinuities, and they begin ‘to function fully when [men] are in a kind of absolute break with their traditional time (Foucault, 1998, p. 182). In examining this connection, a quite interesting phenomenon could be traced: women’s presence in the university colleges depended upon their decision to disrupt critically the temporal cycle of their life, since higher education unavoidably involved intervening in their ‘biological clock’, thus delaying, and at some times cancelling, their fate of reproduction. According to the fifth principle, heterotopias are not spaces to which everyone has access. Sometimes the entrance is constrained, while at other times there are certain rules one has to follow in order to be accepted. Women’s colleges followed this model of operation. There were first of all the financial restrictions that mainly permitted middle-class girls to have access to colleges, although there were certain grants that allowed exceptions for some very bright girls from the lower classes.21 Then were the entrance examinations, which really enthralled women taking them. Writing about her examinations for Girton College, Maynard noted: ‘On 27th came the splendid word “passed”. The barrier was actually leaped and freedom was before me’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 10, p. 303). Once women were accepted there followed a whole series of space, time, curricular and behaviour restrictions which will be further discussed. Finally, heterotopias are theorized as transitory spaces that ‘denounce all real space’ (p. 184). What emerges particularly important for the analysis of women’s colleges, is what Foucault has described as crisis heterotopias, privileged, or sacred or forbidden places reserved for individuals who are in a state of crisis with respect to society and the human milieu in which they live’ (Foucault, 1998, p. 179). In this light, I suggest, women’s colleges may be seen as ‘crisis heterotopias’, spaces of transition and tension, emplacements that gave refuge to women in crisis. They are sites within (patriarchal) society, but at a distance from it, both real and metaphorical. What is particularly intriguing in Foucault’s analyses of ‘other spaces’ is the way he sees the interrelation of utopias, and heterotopias and their impact on the formation of subjectivities. Another interesting point is the fact that Foucault is deeply concerned with the simultaneity and heterogeneity of the elements within the system of heterotopias; he is interested in a form of description ‘which will both avoid the recognition of universals and allow for the indication of that which is new in thought’ (Marks, 1995, p. 71). As already indicated, the ideas about the


higher education of women were interwoven with principles of the male philosophical legacy, the egalitarian rationales of the Western liberal tradition and the progressive educational reform movements of the era. Added to these, there were also dominant perceptions surrounding women’s role in society and the sacred roles of wifehood and motherhood. Following the genealogical trail of drawing maps, what I therefore attempt to do in this section, is to reveal the complex network of power relations and trace the meeting points and the juxtapositions of the discursive and non-discursive formations that were produced, or reproduced, then faded away or recurred in the context of everyday life in the newly-established institutions, the women’s colleges. In such an endeavour, questions of how different that new life of theirs was will certainly arise. Drawing on Homerton’s life, Elizabeth Edwards (1990, 2001) has focused her study on the reproduction of extended family models in women’s colleges. There is no doubt that the college was the cell where new directions for life were being developed. These new directions, however, coexisted with several old ones. I do not believe that one can really discern clear and definitive boundaries between the old and the new. Women’s attempts to form a new self were thus in a state of flux, and it was within this flux that women created a history, a culture, and even a subculture of their own that has been seen from quite different perspectives. While here, I mainly focus on colleges of higher education, it is, I believe, interesting to consider how the organization of these colleges influenced other teacher training colleges, as well as several academic schools.22 In addition, since the majority of university college graduates would enter the teaching profession, they would transmit the new ideas they had adopted as students of colleges, and sometimes develop them further. As Widdowson (1980) has argued, these changes were happening in the context of a general social change in the profession of elementary teaching, which, from a being working-class occupation, was gradually becoming a middle-class one. However, what is common in all these new life directions was a deep wish for change, a wish that inspired contradictory aspirations, poetic creations and, certainly, intense feelings. This inventing of new modes of lifestyle and shaping of their lives produced a great deal of enthusiasm and excitement and intensified women’s already increased mobility, as has already been discussed earlier on in this chapter. I therefore want to suggest that these technologies of the self, cultivated within women’s colleges, created a ‘new wave of existence’ that many women followed even after they had left colleges. In transgressing the boundaries of their families and


their localities, those first women students of colleges also transgressed the boundaries of their identities and challenged the dominant discourses of womanhood. If they did not create new models of existence, they certainly shook up the existing ones. Such changes occurred in a process that was not always linear or fast-moving. There were discontinuities, recurrences, abrupt advances, but also unexpected backlashes. It is upon these irregular historical moments that the genealogical inquiries of this chapter are now focused. Mapping the heterotopias of women’s colleges As already discussed, the establishment of the first women’s university colleges in Cambridge came as a result of the movement for the higher education of women. Like every progressive step in history, the establishment of women’s colleges was not easily achieved. There were first of all the ideological barriers of the Victorian era, concerning dominant perceptions about the female nature and role that had to be surpassed and reconstructed, but there were also the material and practical procedures which had to be gone through to bring ideas and beliefs to fruition. Emily Davies wrote to Anna Richardson about some of these practical difficulties: The Committee have arrived at the discovery that we have not been definite enough in our statements about the College life. People do not see it, and they hesitate about giving money to a thing about which they feel so much in the dark. Mr. Robbu suggested that in the papers to be read at Birmingham, I should give a sketch of the daily life of a student. The idea seems to me a good one, but rather difficult to carry out, as we do not know yet exactly what the life will be, and one has to steer clear between the temptation to make it look very pleasant, so as to attract students, and the risk of exciting the jealousy of parents. (Stephen, 1927, p. 174) As is clear from the above extract, the technicalities of establishing a college were not merely ‘practical’. These ‘practical difficulties’ involved dealing with issues relating to an overall social hostility towards the education of women. From the very moment of their emergence, colleges were conceptualized as threatening the traditional spatial division between the public and private spheres as well as women’s position in them. Women left the private domain of their families to join the colleges and create a new space for themselves. Although enclosed, the space of the college was in a way ‘outside’ and far away from the private


domain, or what was socially accepted as a ‘woman’s place’. Women would go there either to delay their socialization in the traditional roles of a wife and a mother, or to avoid these roles and prepare themselves for the public spheres of life, the world of work. In either case, the first ‘enemy’ women had to fight against was their own ‘beloved’ families from whom they should be separated. However, as it was the same families that had to provide permission as well as the money for the separation, it is clear where the seeds of the first compromises would lie. As Davies was writing again: ‘how is it possible to describe College life without showing how infinitely pleasanter it will be than home? [ . . . ] I do not believe that our utmost efforts to poison the students’ lives at College will make them half so miserable as they are at home’ (Stephen, 1927, p. 124). A lot has been written about Emily Davies and Girton College, or Anne Jemima Clough and Newnham College,23 and the ideological controversies with regard to the higher education of women.24 What is striking in relation to the task of the cartographer, however, is that the women students of the colleges interacted with multifarious ways in these controversial cases. The ways they had negotiated their personal existence within the new world they had suddenly found themselves in, created a whole range of self-techniques, practices and life directions that are now under scrutiny. O happy days! a grasp we laid At least upon the varied keys Of knowledge; Ah, such days as these Are worth regret, when all is said. (Lumsden in Maynard, 1910, p. 184) There are intense feelings of joy and happiness which spring out of women’s self-writings. This joy is found in many aspects of their new life in the college. Their gatherings to discuss and know each other better are full of happiness and laughter: ‘Then indoors we had music and charades and readings [ . . . ] Ah yes! in spite of struggles of many sorts, it was a pleasant time, that time at Hitchin’ (Lumsden, 1933, p. 51). In their autobiographical writings, women describe how those meetings were taking them in new spiritual as well as existential directions. As they clearly state, it was not only time that seemed to be disappearing, but also this new, unexplored personal space was providing them with fresh and quite unexpected experiences:


Our indoor recreations were for the most part confined to the period between ten o’ clock and bed-time, when we paid visits to one another for a good-night chat. Quite untrammelled by having read any philosophical works, we brought fresh minds to the deepest problems, and found no trouble in deciding the origin of Evil and little points like that. We had a shock of delight on discovering that there is no such a thing as Time . . . (Hughes, 1946, p. 145)

There were also occasions of just having a good time, which was the case in their cocoa-parties: ‘Every Saturday night we made a point of going entirely silly. It was customary for one of us to give a “cocoa” in her room to all the rest’ (Hughes, 1946, p. 147). It is interesting to note, however, that these light evenings were not always welcome. Coming from a strict Evangelical background, Maynard writes that in the beginning of her college days she would despise the time of the evenings when the girls would meet to simply enjoy themselves: ‘the latter end of the evening from 8 to 10 always seemed to me to be a waste of time, with its cocoa-parties, its political discussion, its analysis of some new word, or looking at sketches’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 11, p. 345). However, she notes that these ‘happy gatherings’ would be sometimes engaged in political discussions. She particularly refers to a meeting where the students were invited to discuss ‘Three evils which afflict the College (1) Want of society (2) Narrowness of interest (3) want of amusement, both physical and mental’. The outcome of this was ‘the establishment of a Debating Society and a Shakespeare Reading’ (p. 392). It is therefore exciting to trace how women, taking responsibility for their lives in the colleges and organizing their time in there, would begin to give form to the abstract relation of the personal to the political, a practice that has been central to women’s struggles for both self-assertion and political involvement. In his well-known novel, The Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco (1994) weaves the plot of a lost, or rather well-hidden, work of Aristotle on laughter, posing the philosophical question of the importance of lightness and joy in life. In a Nietzschean way Foucault was also interested in the joys we take in life, in terms of the more global issue of the aestheticization of our daily experiences. However, women teachers’ joy was rather down to earth and was immediately bound to the new life occasions that were evolved in the microcosm of their colleges. Paradoxical as it may seem, hard work was among the reasons for their happiness:


For my part I used to wake every morning in my first term or two with a sort of sting of delight, and think ‘Here is a whole day more at College!’ and plunge into the work with such eagerness that time gave out long before my desires had been satisfied over the new employments. (Maynard, 1910, p. 182) The joy bound to the hard work involved in studying was definitely an outcome of the creativity that was unearthed and mobilized for the women students of the colleges. Their life did not involve mere learning, it also inspired them to reflect upon themselves, cultivate their minds and souls, ultimately develop techniques of the self. Thus the study of mathematics becomes an exercise of self-control for young Anne Jemima Clough: This month I want to do over one book to Euclid, as far as the 80th page in the Greek Grammar, translate book ii of Virgil from the German, read 2nd and 3rd volumes of Milman’s History of the Jews, Milton over again and the second volume of Wordsworth. Working hard at these things may perhaps be of no particular use to me so far as knowing these things goes, but I may at least hope to acquire industrious habits and strength of mind, which I lack terribly. I am very much wanting in the power of expressing myself clearly about anything. I might improve myself, perhaps in this particular by telling the children stories and writing definitions of words. (Clough, 1897, p. 23) Studying the classics, a traditional male subject at Oxford and Cambridge, was a proof that women did have the ability to study and understand and even produce or recreate philosophy. Plenty of women were also taking mathematics, showins that it as a ‘ordinary’ girls could cope with abstract figures and concepts. In both cases women were proving that they were able to control and discipline themselves and their minds, towards concrete and difficult targets: ‘I want deep, steady study, particularly in Euclid’ (Clough, 1897, p. 32). What is also significant is that women would understand themselves and academic work in ways that at times broke with the tradition of gloomy college students and boring scholar work: ‘I remember being amused at finding R. S. Cook lying flat on her floor “dressed like an acrobat” and reading Plato as if it were only French’, records Maynard in her autobiography (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 11, p. 345).


Women’s success in dealing with difficult subjects did not emerge all of a sudden. In their autobiographical writings women have recorded long periods of struggling to cope with everything that was utterly new to them, from the idea of living collectively and complying to rules and regulations, to the idea of structuring their time and ultimately their mental abilities: ‘I am beginning to find myself much less clever than I once considered myself. I find I know very little and what I do know I don’t make enough use of’ (Clough, 1897, p. 26). This struggle would involve meticulous everyday activities organized by the timetable of college life: ‘I worked about eight hours a day, and worked like a tiger [ . . . ] Such was the kind of life, hard work and hard play [ . . . ] My work was now almost overwhelming’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 11, pp. 345, 346, 386). In addition to their struggles to surpass the flaws of their previous education women had to cope with practical difficulties. Lectures would be given at strange hours of the day by lecturers who only came for the lesson, and who would not be there all the time for advice and guidance in the completion of assignments: ‘Our lectures were all in the afternoon between three and six o’ clock, as our lecturers were too busy in Cambridge to come to us earlier in the day’ (Maynard, 1910, p. 192). However, the result of their attempts was rewarding not only in terms of the new knowledge they were acquiring, but also in terms of their personal expansion and development: ‘I always find when I study Euclid my mind is much stronger and better and I am not troubled with so many idle thoughts and wandering fancies’ (Clough, 1897, p. 26). What Clough stresses here as an achievement, is her ability to control her mind and thoughts and, indeed, herself through the study of mathematics. This ability for self-control dominates women teachers’ techniques of the self, and will be further discussed in Chapter 5. Expanding their space Beyond the boundaries of their rooms, women teachers’ attention to space is further reflected in their detailed descriptions of the college buildings and their surroundings. They are always thrilled by beautiful scenery and the garden is often a major feature and theme of their descriptions: ‘Hitchin, thirty miles from Cambridge, in a house rented [ . . . ] a house loved at the time for its beautiful garden, well-grown trees and wide meadows and remembered with affection by us afterwards as the cradle of a great and successful experiment’ (Maynard, 1910, p. 178). Their obsession with their surrounding space is further reflected in the ways they comment on the colour-scheme of their premises. Their love for colours sometimes offers poetic descriptions and this time create


a colourful topoanalysis of real and/or imaginary sites of their lives, expanding the cartography of their room: [...] But for me, My memories cling to Hitchin still, To yon red house upon the hill, To every field, to every tree, (Lumsden, 1933) Ah, how changed the house we mark . . . Dull red upon the grey hillside; ’Tis there, I know, and crimson-dyed It’s westward-fronting windows burn (Lumsden in Maynard, 1910, p. 178) In terms of their special relationship to the space of their colleges, it is also interesting to note that these first women, ‘the pioneers’, also witnessed the actual building of their colleges and shared the concerns and worries that any building procedure carries. As Lumsden was writing: ‘Our first setting at Girton in October of 1873 was a test of courage [ . . . ] there was no front door, the windows of the hall were unfinished and heaps of shavings lay about in odd corners, near to which of an evening candles flared and guttered in the draughts (1933, p. 55). It seems here that the building of a new life was coinciding with the actual building of the material spaces which would contain, nurture and cultivate this new life.25 College rooms and college buildings were critical spaces for the deployment of specific self-practices and new life directions for women. What is also significant, however, is how women’s bodies were being remapped within the newly opened educational spaces. As has been suggested, ‘bodies in space raise all sorts of questions about the space and place they occupy’ (McDowell, 1999, p. 40). Women’s autobiographical writings carry numerous descriptions of bodily exercises they would undertake as part of their education in the colleges. Their need for ‘body space’ seems to have arisen out of the frustration produced by the strict space constraints of a long tradition that had kept them enclosed and immobile. Maynard describes how as a child she was so fat that she would not be allowed to walk alone, but always with the support of a stick and the company of a nun she would walk some metres around the gate of her house (unpublished, chapter 1, p. 34).


College activities were offering women opportunities to work with their bodies. However, these new activities were not unproblematic: Actual games were few. Cricket was tried, but we all bowled so badly that we used to call it ‘the game of begging pardons’ on account of its salient feature. Tennis was not as yet invented, or rather it came in during my College years, first in the form of Badminton and then as genius lawn tennis, but there was no ground properly laid out for it for a long while at Girton, and none at all at Hitchin. There was a fine swimming-bath down in the little town below us which was a pleasure for at least a few weeks in the year, but the joy that lasted all the year round was that of taking walks in the beautiful country of the neighbourhood. (Maynard, 1910, p. 193) The actual games described by Maynard were not only few, but also prohibited at times (see Illustration 6). Delamont has pointed out that

Illustration 6 Tennis court Tennis came first in the form of badminton and then as geniune lawn tennis, but there was no ground properly laid out for it for a long while at Girton, and none at all at Hitchin


despite the efforts of college education to instruct women how to maintain a healthy mind within a healthy body, Davies stopped the Girton pioneers playing football on the lawn fearing that this might be a shock for society (Delamont, 1978a, p. 149). The ‘shock’ women would cause in exercising their bodies relates to the image that women are subject to their bodies. The idea that women should be able to work upon their bodies, explore their potentials or, even worse, control their bodily functions, seems to unsettle dominant gender ideologies (see Illustration 7). Since the facilities of the newly-established colleges were not always adequate for regular gymnastics or games, women would search in the country surrounding their colleges for chances for both bodily exercise and actual recreation. As Cecily Steadman recounted for Cheltenham Ladies’ College: ‘Boating on the Avon was a very favourite occupation for Saturday afternoons [ . . . ] I had never had an oar in my hand before,

Illustration 7 Hockey team 1894–95 The idea that women should be able to work upon their bodies, explore their potentials or, even worse, control their bodily functions, seems to unsettle dominant gender ideologies


but I went to the river twice with a junior teacher and after that, when and with whom I felt inclined’ (1931, p. 91). There was also the possibility of other bodily activities like swimming, outside the college, that gave them great excitement: ‘I must refer to the delights of the Swimming Bath, down in the town [ . . . ] but all the rest needed help and we used to take hands in a line and jump in all at once with a sounding splash’ (Maynard, 1910, p. 419). Women’s bodies would sometimes become a site for experiments, both mental and physical, as adventures and risks of all kinds would emerge. Thus, the following description of a swimming pool experience recounted by Lumsden does not sound so enthusiastic as the previous one by Maynard (see Illustration 8): There was a big open air swimming-bath at Hitchin free on one day of the week to ladies, and we students, of course, took advantage of this. None of us could swim, but some, I among them, tried to learn. One end of the bath was, I think, at least six feet deep, and one day I boldly and foolishly dived, and on rising to the surface lost nerve and began to sink. Two of my companions saved my life. Miss Gibson plunged in, and with a warning ‘Don’t grab me’ came to my rescue, while Miss Woodhead, holding on to the edge of the bath, reached out a long arm and drew us both in. But for Miss Gibson’s brave venture I should certainly have been drowned. (Lumsden, 1933, p. 56) Women would also enjoy themselves in their outings, their excursions and their country walks: ‘Our everyday relaxations were really more enjoyable than those carefully planned for us. In all kinds of weather we would be out between lunch and tea’ (Hughes, 1946, p. 143). Beyond the premises of their colleges and in relation to their body-space, women would experience the joy of ‘expanding’ themselves physically and exercising both their mind and body: ‘Well, Hertfordshire is a charming county, and we had delightful country walks [ . . . ] rambles to the park and on to Wain Wood, or farther afield to Lillyhoo and the Dykes where in Spring the fields and woods were blue with wild hyacinths’ (Lumsden, 1933, p. 51). College women’s references to nature and especially flowers, as in the above extract, may seem to reproduce dominant gender stereotypes and the equivalent distinction between Nature/Woman and Culture/ Man. As Rose has commented, the consideration of these dualisms is important in capturing the meaning of being human in the West (Rose, 1993, p. 68). These references could also be read as an effect of the discursive constraints within which the authors were attempting to

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Illustration 8 Swimming pool ‘None of us could swim, but some, I among them, tried to learn’


present educated women in a favourable ‘feminine’ light. Without denying that these readings are possible, I suggest that college women, in constructing their own version of femininity, were also attempting to discover the dynamic role of nature in helping the subjects recreate their relation to themselves: ‘I had always loved solitude and sometimes an hour among the cowslips or beside a bean-field bringing almost overwhelming sweetness in every breath I drew, brought me all the solace that dear Mother Nature knows how to give’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 16, p. 571). Even before their college life most of these women reveal their love and attentiveness to nature and they have already invented ways of keeping in touch with such a source of life: ‘every leaf has a charm that it is impossible to ignore and their rustle on the hard pavement or their image stamped on the wet clay, seems like a pathetic good-bye’ (Maynard, 1910, p. 174). The college, however, is the site where such tendencies that would perhaps stay hidden and unconfessed while living with their families, are now valued, given importance and exercised on a regular basis: ‘Looking back thus over more than five and thirty years, it seems to me that the circling seasons made more impression on me at College than they had ever done before [ . . . ] The prodigality of all Nature was bewildering’ (Maynard, 1910, p. 193). Students’ country walks also turned out to be occasions for selfreflection, ways of knowing each other better, moments of recreation and joy (see Illustration 9): On Friday I walked into Cambridge with Miss Lumsden and as we returned in the chill red sunset she spoke more and more sadly; first of how lonely and mournful beauty always seemed to her, and then of the want of harmony between man and nature and the crosspurpose of which everything worked, and then of the weakness and misery there was in the world and how one only lived by ignorance and was not that a wretched and unworthy life; (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 14, p. 494) Perhaps the above extracts, mainly from Maynard’s unpublished autobiography, might seem to represent focal middle-class-oriented worries and concerns. However, writings from women teachers of the lower strata, teachers that came to the profession through the system of pupilteacher or in any way without having attended any college, also reveal deep feelings of love for nature, sometimes metaphorically interpreted in the ways they see themselves in the world. For them, there was the

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Illustration 9 E. M. Allen’s album Students’ country walks also turned out to be occasions for self-reflection, ways of knowing each other better, moments of recreation and joy


additional reason that an excursion or a walk in the country would cost nothing or very little and could offer opportunities of recreation and escape from the daily routine of hard work. Although the focus of this chapter is upon the technologies of the self that were developed within the space-time of colleges, the following extract is interesting in revealing similarities that override class in the discussion of technologies of the female self: When during March, we hear that Woe Water is rising, Agnes and I plan our next Saturday walk to start from Purley, and to follow its course upstream [ . . . ] The day is one of intermitted bright sunshine, with horizons of azure blue and silver beyond bare, windswept downs and plumed fir-groves on hill crests. It is fascinating to trace the streak of gurgling water [ . . . ] My Saturday is one of detached content. I feel free of all bondage, all obligations, – happy to be like Woe Water, without known source, without set channel, inconsequent, indifferent to anything human. (Corke, 1975, p. 144) Helen Corke’s conclusion as a longing for existential flowing and indifference to ‘anything human’, also brings up a further dimension of the new lives of women teachers, that is the widely expressed desire for solitude: ‘On Sunday there was a storm, but I had a good long time on the seashore and now again today I have spent the whole afternoon in solitude among the great fallen blocks under the East Cliff. I wonder whether it is right that I get so extremely ‘subjective’ when alone’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 12, p. 474). Solitude is a necessary condition giving subjects space and time for self-reflection, self-examination and analysis, so that a relationship with oneself can be unfolded, but again, solitude as a technology of the female self, will further be discussed in Chapter 5. Technologies of the self/technologies of resistance In my discussion of the self-techniques that were developed in the context of women’s lives within the newly established colleges of higher education, I have isolated two major themes: first, the relations between joy and work; second, the relations between work and education. A number of technologies of the self were seen as interwoven in the meeting points of those relations. It was first of all the interrelation of the ability for self-control with success in attaining difficult educational targets, the need for solitude and retreat to the self, as a path for selfanalysis and self-examination, further leading to deeper self-awareness


and self-enhancement. Second, the reciprocation of the exercise of the mind, to the exercise of the body, a striking relation that is perfectly realized in the female subjects’ contact with nature seen as a vital source of energy and gaiety. These technologies were found in a detailed examination of women’s writings about their daily activities in the colleges, activities that were always related to the educational opportunities the colleges offered to them. In the beginning of this chapter I have discussed how college rooms were offering women real space to be alone, and to be reflective. The spatial aspect of self-assertion was further expanded to the whole college premises, as well as the surrounding countryside. Nature was considered to help subjects ‘get in contact with themselves’ and in the daily schedule of college life, women had many opportunities to indulge in the pleasures of nature through some mental and physical activities. These were aspects of a different life that was emerging, a life that would bear the signs of the old and would be characterized by a continuous struggle to surpass the present and aspire to a future that would inevitably carry certain items from the baggage of the past. What is more, this struggle was not a simple one. There were, of course, the old-fashioned discourses about women’s exclusive position within the private, which would be at the centre of criticism. However, controversies also existed amidst the bearers of the ‘new’. The ‘separatists and the uncompromising’ was not the only antithesis of the time. I have already noted that women students seem preoccupied with the physical dimensions and architectural elements of their colleges, perhaps because such details reflect social relations and categories with which they are not always willing to comply. Thus, the spatial arrangement of their dining-room did initiate disputes and in a Foucauldian sense seems to have created points of resistance: The Mistress’s sitting-room and the library, where lectures were given and which was also our common room, were on the ground floor, and the dining-room was in the basement, a bare ugly room with two tables, at one of which we students sat, while the Mistress and her friends sat at the ‘High table’ alongside. It was at first expected that we should sit in a formal row down one side of our table, lest we should be guilty of the discourtesy of turning our backs upon the ‘High’. But this was too much and we rebelled, quietly ignored rule and insisted upon comfortably facing each other. So academically formal was the order imposed from the first at Hitchin, small as our numbers were. (Lumsden, 1933, p. 47)


The arrangement of their tables is an example of a disciplinary process functioning in what Foucault has described as the ‘art of rank’ (1991a, p. 144). It is interesting to note that this disciplinary rule is masked as courtesy and women students are asked to comply with it for the sake of gentle, lady-like behaviour. From a Foucauldian perspective, the disciplinary institutions must survey and control their space by carefully distributing their inmates in particular positions, but they also have to make sure that the divided areas can be useful and able to function effectively (see Illustration 10). It is what Foucault calls ‘the rule of functional sites’ (p. 144). However, college women object to this particular rule of seating and ignore it altogether. Again their revolt is masked as a need for comfort. The disciplinary arrangement of their seating turns out not to be ‘functional’ and this is perhaps a thread they use to deploy strategies of resistance. The power games that are played around women’s seating are not intentional, nor accidental. As Lumsden perceives it, they derive from the academic formalities that Hitchin, later Girton College, had to adopt in order to become a real academic institution. It was the academic institution that dictated methods and imposed restrictions. The interesting paradox that emerges here is that college women would interrogate the rules and revolt against the academic institutions they had so strongly fought to enter. Resisting the order of the dining-room can also create humorous comments. Life, after all, cannot always be ‘unbearably heavy’. Here is how Lumsden is presenting the conditions of their dining-room: ‘But the bareness and formality of the dining-room mattered little; what did matter was that we shared it with black beetles, gruesome crawling creatures, by no means pleasant table companions’ (Lumsden, 1933, p. 47). The discursive ways in which college women deal with the drawbacks and difficulties of the new collective living in a way reflect their positive disposition towards their new life, as well as their willingness to surpass ‘material’ difficulties given the compensation of new interests and possibilities. Lumsden’s description of the ‘tin house’ further illustrates this tendency: We had outgrown the house, and an iron building had been put up, to which some of us migrated, I among the number, to my regret when I discovered that life in the ‘tin house’, as we called it, was a misery. If it rained the rattle on the roof was maddening, if the sun shone we were baked as in an oven, and the rooms were so small that Miss Woodhead, a tall, athletic young woman, declared that in her doll’s house sitting-room, without rising from her chair, by merely reaching out a long arm could either poke the fire or open the door. Glad was


Illustration 10 The Dining Hall The arrangement of their tables is an example of a disciplinary process functioning in what Foucault has described as the ‘art of rank’

I on Miss Lloyd’s departure to return to the house and to inherit her delightful room, much as I, as well as everybody else, regretted the loss of Miss Lloyd herself from our little society. (1933, pp. 50–1) The need for space in relation to the abolition of space restrictions for the women students was also a major point of debate for the founders of the first colleges in Cambridge and resulted in contradictory decisions


and arrangements. It was decided that Newnham would be housed in the centre of the town of Cambridge, in order to enable the students to have easy access to the colleges in terms of tuition and libraries (see Illustration 11). However, ‘Newnhamites’ would always be chaperoned on their outings and would be required to live and move circumspectly, since they were under the constant, strict gaze of a society which would not spare any bitter criticism of ‘college women’. Clough records how different gossip about the girls’ unconventional behaviour would reach her ears every day: ‘Many difficulties constantly arising about society matters and the conduct of the students, but I was for the most part silent, and did not either speak or write about these matters; so they passed over’ (Clough, 1897, p. 203). However, in response to the same social problem, Hitchin and later Girton were placed far from Cambridge, in the middle of the countryside. For the founders, and especially Davies, the idea was to give the students more chance to move around and at the same time to protect them from social surveillance and criticism. This did not mean that there were no rules and regulations regarding students’ mobility at Girton. The latter, however, were of a different kind: [ . . . ] and how we waited on the path that overlooked the red and green lights of the station to see the 10 o’clock express from London to Edinburgh go roaring by. We often did this [ . . . ] and as the College door was locked punctually at 10, we once or twice found ourselves shut out, though we scampered back in utmost haste. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 12, p. 394) What we read here is women resisting the time restrictions of their college. The regulation of time constitutes a dominant set of disciplinary procedures, especially when it is combined with disciplinary practices of space control. College women staying out late knew that they would probably have to face some sort of temporary exclusion from the premises of their college. Things could be even worse, if we only remember the case of the student who, according to Copelman (1996, p. 143), stayed out all night and was finally expelled. However, college women would take the risk of staying out late, simply to watch a train pass by. Strangely as it seems, ‘trainspotting’ would become a symbolic action of resisting the control of their space and the regulation of their time. Women’s autobiographical texts have further recorded other moments of tension within the life of colleges. Stephen, for example, recounts an occasion of rebellion at Hitchin over a play that students were not

99

Illustration 11 Newnham College, Sidwick Hall 1891 Newnham it was decided would be housed in the centre of the town of Cambridge, so as to enable the students to have easy access to the colleges in terms of tuition and libraries


allowed to perform dressed in men’s attire. Protesting against this, the students’ main concern was their right to participate in decisions regarding the structuring of college life. As Davies wrote to Mr Thomkinson, consulting him and other members of the Committee about whether the students might be allowed to act in male attire anywhere in the college: They seem to have been irritated by my references to undergraduate discipline, and some of them have made out to Mrs. Austin that before they came I held out expectations that the first students would have more share in the moulding of the College life than we are now willing to give them [ . . . ] Mrs. Austin thinks the students look upon her and me as Evangelical and narrow and unartistic, and therefore unfit to judge in such a case as this. (Stephen, 1927, p. 242) The tension went much deeper, to touch issues of freedom of choice and even to raise questions about the aims of college education: Apart from the question whether acting in itself was objectionable, the students felt strongly that they ought to be free to choose their own amusements, and that the question involved the principle of independence and responsibility which they felt to be one of the most valuable and necessary elements in the training given by the College. (Stephen, 1927, p. 243) Mrs Bodichon26 was urgently invited to talk to the students at Hitchin since, as an artist and a theatre-goer herself, she was thought more likely to be listened to. She reported that ‘in all her experience she had never met such a spirit of revolt and such self-confidence’ (p. 243). This was not the only moment of tension at Hitchin. A whole debate was also developed about the timetable and the preparation time for the Cambridge examinations. In her autobiography, Maynard records how: A. Bulley came back wild ‘on a strike for more time’ [ . . . ] she held a College meeting in her room [ . . . ] stating two main things: 1) more than 3 years is required for the Tripos and an extra year should be granted on application; 2) certificates on single subjects or groups of subjects should be given without passing the Preliminary Examinations [ . . . ] We all welcomed these suggestions [ . . . ] presented them to Miss Davies [ . . . ] ‘Cambridge degrees or nothing’ was the verdict. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 12, p. 385)


College life was not, therefore, simply a world of new unconstrained freedoms. Sara Delamont has shown how the new colleges of higher education were being bound by traditional and conservative ties, in spite of the innovations they were trying to bring forward in relation to women’s position in society. Delamont’s analysis of the ‘double conformity’ in ladies’ education has been influential. However, I think that she has failed to give enough credit to the reaction provoked by these ties to conformity and the ways these were resisted. In theorizing colleges as heterotopias, the genealogist considers of major importance the interplay of power relations within them as well as the paradoxes that were created. Therefore, in the case of the two colleges in Cambridge, while Newnham is situated within society, it creates restrictive spaces for its students, and limits their mobility. Women students have access to the public sphere, but they cannot ‘live’ in it. Girton, on the other hand, being outside the disciplinary gaze of society, allows its students considerable freedom of mobility, as long as they do not surpass restrictive boundaries of both space and time. Within the space of the heterotopias, students experience the paradox of finding opportunities to enjoy themselves and live ‘lightly’ at the same time that they struggle to be selfcontrolled, silent and even able to carry out political and philosophical discussions instead of chattering or gossiping. In forging a new self within their private realm, college women are also preparing themselves for the public sphere. Given new life chances, they are encouraged to participate in decision-making procedures and they seem determined to negotiate the conditions of both their lives and studies within the colleges. In resisting certain disciplinary arrangements of their educational institutions, college women also learn how to play power games, how to win or compromise, ultimately how to mould their public persona. In a way that Milan Kundera (1984) has described most influentially, women seem to have been sliding between the poles of ‘the unbearable heaviness and lightness of being’. This literal metaphor of ‘the unbearable lightness of being’ has been used by Jon Simons (1995) to describe Foucault’s attempt of reflecting upon the subject’s attempts to fashion a life ‘between constraining limitations’, and ‘limitless freedom’, in a sense, a life bearably heavy or bearably light. In this light, women in colleges on the one hand lived within a ‘constraining reality’, the social boundaries of accepted womanhood and on the other hand they were dreaming of a ‘limitless freedom’, the kind of freedom, education, economic independence and ‘a room of their own’ could offer them. In the heterotopia of the college, heterogeneous and sometimes radical


discourses coexisted with fears of breaking social taboos, as well as with traditional practices of educational discipline and control. Conformities of all types did exist and were in the process of being created. However, these conventions were not uniformly accepted, and indeed were sometimes rejected by the students in their new-found confidence. Since the ideologies and discourses of the new institutions were in the process of being formed, women students were in a position not only to be aware of these changes, but also to intervene in their formation. In such a context of controversy, where for the first time women realized that the situation was multifarious and the struggle multilevelled, the techniques women used to map their existence would be in a form of continuous resistance against everything and sometimes against everyone. It is this aspect of resistance, I believe, that continued to mobilize women towards shaking up existing social and philosophical structures, even though they did not have a clear image of where they were going, or any certainty about what they kept and what they rejected. Simons has pointed out how, in Foucault’s analyses, subjects are ‘subjected’ to certain systems of power, but at the same time they have the capacity to act and resist the power relations imposed upon them. However, as Simons comments, resisting power always includes the danger of reinstalling it on another plane. In the case of colleges while women were resisting patriarchal domination by claiming their right to education and to the public sphere, they replaced it with a patriarchal structure (albeit with a matriarchal name and body) in the organization of college life, with its strict Stoic emphasis on obedience to authority and control. Yet what is of more importance in the analysis of the colleges as Foucauldian heterotopias is not so much the effects of power, but the subjective capacities that were being developed in the attempt to resist the power that had made women what they were. It is through these technologies of resistance, as I want to call them, that women began to fashion new forms of subjectivity always oscillating between the unbearable lightness and heaviness of being, by adopting unstable positions between them.

3 Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard? Recovering the Silence of Bodies

Shortly before her suicide, and in moments of existential despair, Sylvia Plath was wondering whether it would be possible or worthwhile for her to live her life ‘chastely as a schoolteacher’ (Malcolm, 1994, p. 94). The life of a woman teacher was for her synonymous with the renunciation of desires and sexual life. Women teachers have often been portrayed as puzzling and highly contradictory, particularly in connection with their sexuality. Sometimes, they may appear sexless and, in Walkerdine’s view, trapped in situations of ‘pathological nurturance’ (cited in Weber and Mitchell, 1995, p. 113). More often, however, they are depicted as sexually inviting, perverse and even dangerous, like Blanche, Tennessee William’s sex maniac heroine. How far – or how close – do these images of female teachers seem to be from the perceptions of the Victorians? In this chapter I am looking at certain images and perceptions that weave around women teachers’ ambiguous sexualities at the end of the nineteenth century. Bracketing, however, the ‘gaze of the other’, I am focusing on the teacher’s gaze upon herself. In this light, what did women teachers, those ‘other Victorians’, think about sexuality? Did they recognize themselves as desiring subjects? What did love, sex, and marriage mean to them? Did they imagine themselves in loving and/or sexual relationships? Where and how did they position themselves in the newly emerging discourses of sexuality? These are some of the questions I want to address in this chapter, looking closer into matters of sex in the deployment of technologies of the female self in education. Sex matters, and because it matters so much in the construction of subjectivities it has created, as Foucault has pointed out, an epistemology of its own, a science of sex, and has woven its own web of discourses 103


and practices, a technology of sex. The historical deployment of a ‘scientia sexualis’ subverts what Foucault has defined as the ‘repressive hypothesis’, the assumption that sex was repressed and silenced from the seventeenth century onwards and that sexual liberation has been one of the emancipatory tasks of modernism. For a long time, as the story of the repressive hypothesis goes, the veil of silence that had fallen upon sexuality has kept two prominent places for the woman of the household: that of the wife and/or mother. There was no other respectable place available to them either inside the household or outside it. Wifehood and motherhood constituted two interlocking subject positions that set the boundaries of female sexuality. Research on the Victorian ideas and concepts of sexuality, however, has shown that things were much more complicated than the confinement of sexuality into the social space of the conjugal couple and the dual sexual role of wife and mother that was kept for women (see Matus, 1995). The Victorian era was saturated by a multiplicity of discourses, many times juxtaposing or contradicting each other. It was amidst this war of discourses that the female self sought to forge a place for herself, to negotiate subject positions, make life investments, create new patterns of existence. My point is that the discursive transformations and the specific technologies of power that constructed the sexual models of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have left their inscriptions on the female bodies of today. Thus, the historical and cultural voyage that began in the late nineteenth century and has led women to the new millennium still encumbers them with a baggage of dilemmas. They continue to juggle with conjugal variations of their sexuality, sometimes appearing unable to succeed in loving, having desires and being free (see Mackinnon, 1997). Sex matters in the construction of subjectivities, it is considered to be the core of self, the locus that motivates existential forces, the site par excellence of the individual’s truth and ‘it is up to sex to tell us our truth, since sex is what holds it in darkness’ (Stanton, 1992, p. 3). This assumption and the will to reverse it was, indeed, the initial project of Foucault’s History of Sexuality. However, feminists have criticized Foucault for not considering sexual difference in his history of sexuality. It is true that he did not. It is also true that he never finished his History of Sexuality. In fact he hardly started it. After the first volume of that notorious history, he spent a long time struggling to open up new ways of conceptualizing the subject, of thinking and writing the genealogy of the subject. His interest in the history of sexuality led him towards a genealogy of the subject; it motivated him to excavate technologies of

Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard? 105

the self. Foucault did not have the time to write very much. He died, but even if he had not died so early, would he have written much about women? Wasn’t it in contrast with what he believed about the right of the intellectual to speak of everything and on behalf of everyone? Could he have written about women from the position of the specific intellectual? What he did, however, was to continually urge researchers and analysts – women among them – to write genealogies: the genealogies of their becoming subjects.

Women teachers: the ‘other Victorians’ ‘For a long time, [ . . . ] we supported a Victorian regime, and we continue to be dominated by it even today. Thus the image of the imperial prude is emblazoned on our restrained, mute, and hypocritical sexuality’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 3). Foucault is painting the picture of the imperial prude that persists in our contemporary images, in the opening sentence of his History of Sexuality. This Victorian prudery has created a whole web of discourses about sexuality that have been read, interpreted and contested from quite contradictory perspectives. A critical debate has been woven around the question of whether this condition of sexual puritanism ever existed and of what really happened with the so-called ‘sexual revolution’ of the twentieth century that is supposed to have waved away puritanism and sexual hypocrisy. Within the discursive area of this debate, Sheila Jeffreys (1985) has argued that traditional historians have distorted the struggles of the first wave of feminism. Victorian feminists were presented as prudish, frigid and passionless in relation to their positions about sexuality. Seen from a Foucauldian perspective, women’s ‘frigidity’ and ‘passionlessness’, framed by the discursive context of the imperial prude, were characteristics that were invented, named and categorized by the medical experts, the sexologists of the turn of the last century, in what Foucault has identified as the medicalization of sexuality, wherein ‘the sexual conduct of the population was taken both as an object of analysis and a target of intervention’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 26). Influential socio-historical analyses of the late Victorian era have pointed to the discourses of medical experts in the context of a general social concern, against the decline of the empire and the widespread concerns about the ‘efficiency’ of the nation (Dyhouse, 1977, 1978). Educated women, inhabiting subject positions other than those of wives and/or mothers, were particularly attacked with an extended range of vocabularies and arguments; they would be identified as strange,


unnatural and/or perverse and would be brought under close supervision (Dyhouse, 1978, p. 302). These ‘attacks’ were obviously reverberating discourses, already circulating in the United States, England and other countries of the Continent.1 Although these reactionary discourses had been strenuously fought against by feminists,2 women’s appearance in the public spheres of life, education and/or work, had been established as ‘a problem’. Within such procedures of normalization, unmarried women teachers became female types of what Foucault has described as peripheral sexualities. According to Foucault, the function of power upon those types of peripheral sexualities was not so much to repress their activities and impose interdictions, although in some cases repression was also exerted, as it was later the case with the marriage bars. The aim of power was rather to control their activities, through a meticulous examination, which was really an invention of their specific features, characteristics, and activities, through which they became ‘a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form and a morphology’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 43). So strong and influential were the discourses against the spinster teachers that they came to be taken as common sense, while their echo reaches our days. What is also striking is that ‘the spinster discourses’ did not only circulate among men or conservative sectors of society, but they were also adopted by women themselves. As Lucy Bland has shown, there was a certain trend of ‘moralist feminism’ in the beginning of the twentieth century wherein women ‘appeared able to claim their right to be sexual through distancing from – even condemning – that which they were not, the “sexless” spinster’ (1995b, p. 18). Such feminist attacks upon spinsters again reveal the polyvalent and contradictory character of the discourses surrounding sexuality and make a forceful example of what Foucault has described as the circulation of power. Moreover it shows that the discourses of peripheral sexualities were not restricted in space, ideologies and/or institutional settings. In order to function they were omnipresent in various spaces, wherever peripheral sexualities could be traced: ‘These attractions, these evasions, these circular incitements have traced around bodies and sexes, not boundaries to be crossed, but perpetual spirals of power and pleasure’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 45). But let us return to the repressive hypothesis story and ‘the monotonous nights of the Victorian bourgeoisie’, when ‘sexuality was carefully confined’ and ‘moved into the home’ where ‘the conjugal family took custody of it and absorbed it into the serious function of reproduction’ and ‘on the subject of sex, silence became the rule’ (1990a, p. 3). Sex


became a matter for the conjugal family and the boundaries closed around ‘the parents’ bedroom’ and ‘the serious function of reproduction’. What was happening outside the bedroom? Nobody knew. . . Darkness and silence fell upon anything that was not ‘ordered in terms of generation’, end of story. But ‘was the nineteenth-century family really a monogamic and conjugal cell?’ asks Foucault (1990a, p. 3). Then what about those voices coming from the brothel? They were there to remind that the ‘silenced’ and ‘unspoken’ had been transferred somewhere else, into another ‘order of things’. The silent bedroom and the noisy brothel were interwoven in a ‘network of pleasures and powers linked together at multiple points and according to transformable relationships’ (1990a, p. 46). It was the regime of silence, though, that the strike against the bedroom emerged from: ‘In the hearts of many women today is rising a cry [ . . . ] I will know no man and bear no child until his apathy be broken through – these wrongs be righted [ . . . ] It is the “silent strike” and it is going on all over the world’ wrote Lucy Re-Bartlett (as cited in Mackinnon, 1997, p. 95), who along with other feminist writers of the period was reversing the discourses of sexuality, urging women to deny their roles as wives and mothers. It is also true, however, that at that particular historical moment feminists were divided. On the one hand, there were the ‘separatists’, the celibate spinsters who made a positive choice not to submit themselves to what they saw as the humiliating slavery of married life: ‘this dependence of the woman in marriage is unspeakably distasteful’ (cited in Mackinnon, 1997, p. 96), but on the other hand there were also the followers of ‘free love’ (Bland 1995a, 1995b; Greenway 2002), who strove to claim their right to have desires, express their passions and become subjects and not objects of sexual relationships: ‘abolish marriage, establish free union in which each sex would have an equal voice, and make love the only law regulating the relationship of sexes’ (as cited in Jeffreys, 1985, p. 43). It was therefore against the hypocrisy of the brothel that the silence surrounding sex broke and women spoke, either as silent strikers, or as followers of ‘free love’. One focus for women’s speaking and thinking was the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s that allowed the compulsory examination of women suspected of working as prostitutes in garrison towns and ports. There are two critical stages of the Contagious Diseases legislation that I want to highlight in the light of the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics and these refer to the planning and passing of such an oppressive legislation on the one hand, and to the theoretical and political tools that feminists used to oppose it on the other.


Matus (1995) has argued that the discourses underpinning the planning of the Contagious Diseases Acts go back to the 1850s and have evolved around the doctrine of essential female passionlessness, the natural phenomenon of the lack of any sexual desire in women, and the strategic question of discerning the difference between the prostitute and the respectable woman and keeping them apart. Since it is obvious that the lack of female desire in all women made such a distinction impossible, the only means to rank women in sexual categories was to inspect, and register all those known or even suspected to be prostitutes. The compulsory examination of the Contagious Diseases legislation provided the means of such regulation. Women suspected of prostitution underwent abusive medical examination, were registered as prostitutes and were kept under close and continuous examination. In the Foucauldian realm of biopolitics, ‘such a power has to qualify, measure, appraise and hierarchize, rather than display itself in its murderous splendour’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 144). The strategic aim of the Contagious Diseases legislation was to check the spread of diseases among the population. However, what it really did in the short term, according to the ‘prudes’, was to protect men, encourage their ‘unchastity’, and legitimate prostitution: ‘biological existence was reflected in political existence’ (1990a, p. 142). These were, however, partial strategic objectives in the wider biopolitics of the state, aiming in the long term to control female sexuality, constrain it in its reproductive role and perpetuate its subordination. There are two poles, operating in the Foucauldian bio-power; one is ‘centred on the body as a machine’ (1990a, p. 139), the body of the woman/prostitute which should be ‘kept healthy’; the other focuses ‘on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of life and serving as the basis of the biological processes’ (1990a, p. 139), the bodies of all, women and men, the bodies of the population. Thus, in a Foucauldian context of analysis, the planning and passing of the Contagious Diseases Acts should be seen as a manifestation of bio-power, ‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations’ (1990a, p. 140). Since there is no power without resistance, the campaign for the abolition of the Contagious Diseases Acts concentrated critical feminist standpoints evolving around the economical and sexual exploitation of women. Compulsory examination was, according to the feminist campaigners, an infringement on women’s civil rights, since practically any woman could be rendered suspect and forced to undergo examination: ‘Any woman can be dragged into court, and require to prove that


she is not a common prostitute’ (Maynard, 1989, p. 233). The campaign insisted on the humiliation of the female body under examination, and saw it as an ‘instrumental rape’ (1989, p. 233), a continuation of the abuse of women’s bodies by men: It is men, men, only men, from the first to the last [ . . . ] To please a man I did wrong at first, then I was flung about from man to man. Men police lay hand on us. By men we are examined, handled, doctored [ . . . ] In the hospitals it is a man again who makes prayers and reads the Bible for us. We are had up before the magistrates who are men, and we never get out of the hands of men till we die. (cited in Maynard, 1989, p. 241) In reversing the discourse of female passionlessness, women presented themselves as victims of the male lust, in dire need of protection: ‘Perverted men, feminists argued, spread syphilis and infected women, who were then subjected to registration, surveillance and the degradation of inspection’ (Matus, 1995, p. 131). What some of them suggested was chastity for men and women equally, so that women could be protected from sexual abuse. It was this reaction that was bitterly criticized, as I have already noted, and gave rise to the discourses of prudery. Yet, Jeffreys argues, some women’s decisions to downplay or even ‘write off’ sex and sexuality should not have been read as puritanism and/or prudery, but in the light of their determination to evade their submission to unequal (hetero)sexual relationships. As has been commented, the feminist arguments against the Contagious Diseases legislation are ‘a well-known Victorian example of the appropriation of existing vocabularies or representations’ (Matus, 1995, p. 11). Thus, the debate around Victorian puritanism in relation to the politics of female passionlessness constitutes a vital paradigm of what Foucault, in his History of Sexuality, had defined as the possibility of reverse discourse (1990a, p. 101). In the context of the wider agitation of the era, this reverse of discourses has also created the paradox of women advocating the need for protection, at the same time that they claimed autonomy and freedom. The excavation of paradoxes is inherent in the deployment of this genealogical analysis. Moreover feminist analysts have shown that ‘behind the call for female protection lay a positive view of womanhood and the image of women’s bodies as under attack’ (Maynard, 1989, p. 234). Feminist criticisms of the double standard of sexual morality underpinning the Contagious Diseases Acts legislation also drew attention to the interrelation of economical and sexual exploitation of women.


In their writings, they put forward the argument that, in view of their economic dependence on men, women exchanged their bodies for subsistence and it made no difference whether they were making it as wives, mistresses or prostitutes. It was also pointed out that prostitution was an effect of poverty, and destitution: The building up of a false social system on the basis of class (for be it remembered, it is practically only poor women whom this wicked system assails) and sex injustice is the endeavour, here openly avowed, of the men who deny to women the right to help govern themselves (cited in Jeffreys, 1985, p. 34). This is how Wolstenholme Elmy accused the supporters of the Contagious Diseases Acts in a campaign for women’s rights that had begun in 1861 when she had formed the Association of Schoolmistresses and the Society for Furthering the Higher Education of Women. Thus, by focusing on the thought of a feminist opposing the Contagious Diseases legislation, who was, at the same time, a foremost campaigner for women’s rights in education, in a way the story has come full circle back to the focal point of this chapter: women in education as speaking subjects of ‘a sexuality of their own’. Wolstenholme Elmy was not the only feminist writer who began her struggle from the movement for the higher education of women. Recounting the activities of The Men’s and Women’s Club, Bland refers to the correspondence between Isabella Clemes, ‘a spinster mathematics teacher’ and Karl Pearson, ‘a bachelor professor’ and founder of the club. Thus, in November 1885, Isabella was wondering: Men seem to say: by long descent, by unparalleled power, by race necessity, physical instincts must be obeyed [ . . . ] Women [ . . . ] say: we must have the precious things of life; love and sympathy are a thousand times more valuable than the gratification of physical instinct [ . . . ] How must we work towards harmony? (cited in Bland, 1995a, p. 3) The Men’s and Women’s Club was formed in 1885 and held meetings and discussions for four years. Its members were ‘radicals, socialists and feminists of both sexes’ who wanted to have discussions and communication on ‘all matters connected with the mutual position and relation of men and women’ (cited in Bland, 1995a, p. 3). Isabella Clemes was not the only woman teacher participating in the club. Bland notes


that many of the women members ‘were economically independent as teachers, writers or journalists’ and all were feminists actively involved in various reform movements and organizations of their era, the London School Board included (1995a, p. 6). Bland refers, in particular, to the Girtonian Henrietta Muller, the only university-educated female club member, who gave a paper on morality in October 1885. The discussion on morality continued in January 1886, with two women teachers’ papers, one by the already mentioned Isabella Clemes and the other by Annie Eastry, ‘an unmarried, free-thinking schoolmistress from Bermondsey’ (1995a, p. 22). Women teachers discussing gender relations and being concerned with issues of sexual morality were, of course, well beyond the boundaries of The Men and Women’s Club. Cicely Hamilton, an active feminist and author of Marriage as a Trade, started her career as a teacher, although she left it soon afterwards, to become an actress and an author. Marriage as a Trade, however, became an influential book in the literature of the first wave of feminism and articulated what Hamilton thought to be the political necessity of spinsters to the women’s revolution. Sex and marriage are inextricably linked in Hamilton’s theorization, in the sense that marriage has provided women with the means and locus to exchange their bodies for subsistence: Sex is only one of the ingredients of the natural woman – an ingredient which has assumed undue and exaggerated proportions in her life owing to the fact that it has for many generations furnished her with the means of her livelihood. In sexual matters it would appear that the whole trend and tendency of man’s relations to woman has been to make refusal impossible and to cut off every avenue of escape from the gratification of his desire. (cited in Jeffreys, 1985, p. 47) In downplaying the importance of sex in the female nature, Hamilton stresses the inequality of (hetero)sexual relationships and the crude sexual exploitation of women. She also attempts to show women that they can survive in ways other than turning their sex into a commodity. Hamilton’s perceptions of marriage reflect a wider discomfort among educated women towards what appeared to be the inevitable fate of their life as women: getting married and bearing children. For women, the glimpse of freedom through education and work faded away in the subservience of marriage and motherhood.


The trade of marriage As it turned out, such radical stances promoted by Hamilton and other feminists became deeply influential for the life decisions and choices of women teachers, as their personal narratives often reveal. We therefore read in Mary Smith’s autobiography: I was not thirty at this time; and a lady, with whom I was well acquainted, was extremely anxious that I should marry her brother. He had a profitable business in the city, of which she was continually telling me, with much praise, but with no success. At last I received a formal offer of marriage from him. This simply amused me . . . It was a pure business transaction [emphasis added] that was proposed. It was known I was poor. I never took any pains to conceal it, and a good business was of itself thought a fair prize for an intellectual woman who was struggling with poverty. What an alliance! What presumption! (Smith, 1892, p. 196) The trade of marriage does not seem to interest Smith who, at the time she was receiving proposals for marriage, was struggling to survive and was really living on the brink of poverty: And yet I was surprised to learn [ . . . ] that Mr. J---, from Westmoreland [ . . . ] was coming to see me [ . . . ] we talked very quietly [ . . . ] Riches were the reverse of attention to me. I had too independent a mind to allow anyone to say that they had made me rich. (1892, p. 195) For Smith, the prospect of marriage was offering her an opportunity to escape from poverty, but she would reject it outright as she considered it despicable to get married for ‘earthly advantages’ (1892, p. 136). In the mentality of the work ethic of her era, she was persuaded that it was through work that she should go on living in the world: ‘I did not want matrimony; it was congenial labour I wanted. For this I prayed and waited, and suffered’ (p. 123), she writes, trying to articulate a response to continuous criticisms she was receiving from her friends, in view of her strange attitude towards marriage: Mr. Osborn used to rally me and say [ . . . ] that I was like none of the other young females – that I set my cap at none of the young men, nor cared for anybody whatever – which I felt was perfectly true, though a secret to myself alone. (p. 123)


Mary Smith felt that her poverty was in a way protecting her from meaningless relationships as well as the danger of following her fate as a woman: getting married and having children: ‘Had I been a Duke’s daughter, I could not have been more careful of keeping clear of any matrimonial liaison than I was. I often thought that my plainness and poverty were my best safe-guard’ (p. 123). Plainness and poverty are two ‘safe-guard’ themes against marriage for a working-class woman teacher. I want to look more closely first at the theme of poverty, but I keep plainness for discussion later. In women teachers’ view, poverty and marriage are interrelated in a paradoxical fashion. However, there are differences in the ways women teachers perceive the relation between marriage and poverty, and these differences are deployed along class lines. For the working-class teacher Smith, poverty prevents her from being considered ‘marriageable’, since she is too poor to get married in dignity. Paradoxically, as it might seem, poverty leaves her space for professional and personal development. However, things are differently perceived by Helen Corke, a London elementary teacher, from a lower-middle-class background. What characterizes the life aspirations of women teachers of the lower urban strata is to ‘go up into the next class’3 and they see this social climbing happening through their work, through retaining their economic independence. In the view of these women teachers, marriage perpetuates poverty and destroys any hope or expectation for change: ‘Girls expect to be married, says my mother. Do they? Who could choose conditions of married life such as hers? [ . . . ] Poverty is a prison, but its doors can open unless marriage locks them’ (Corke, 1975, p. 96). For Corke, this applies not only to women, but to men as well. She despises poverty and refers to her violin teacher and future romantic lover whose ‘art and thought, I soon discover, are both subordinate to the business of earning a living’ (1975, p. 148). Many of Corke’s contemporaries, and especially women, faced the same dilemma: marriage and children on the one hand and personal extension and economic independence on the other. For Smith, what appears as unbearable is the thought of turning herself into a commodity in what she considered to be a crude trade of human relationships. In this light, poverty for her is a kind of sanctuary. Corke cannot bear the compulsory intimacy of lives and the subjection of her thoughts to ‘the business of earning a living’, that marriage in poverty can bring. Marriage for her is a threat to success, to her being able to establish the sort of unconventional, free relationships she dreams of:


I know that if David [Lawrence] and I were locked within the inescapable intimacy that characterizes the married state of the poor, we should kill in each other the very essential of creative living – we should become like dry sticks compelled by friction to smoulder until reduced to ash. (Corke, 1975, p. 204) However, there are certain points of convergence in the perceptions of both women. In rejecting marriage, they are defending their right to live in dignity and to be themselves: ‘I thought then, as I have taught ever since, that a woman can be a lady without money, and that parents and teachers should prompt her to be this truly in the interest of morality and virtue’ (Smith, 1892, p. 56). Marriage, which for the ethics of the era represented for women one of the few – nearly the only – verbal means to talk about their sexuality, would be rejected, on grounds of human dignity, as a collective revolt to the commercialization of women’s bodies and souls, as a condition of bodily and spiritual slavery: ‘women, in reality, being bought and sold in the marriage market as in any other’ (1892, p. 100). The unbearable heaviness of intimacy is, however, a concern for women teachers of the middle classes and in their case is not connected to poverty. It emerges as an unavoidable consequence of marriage as a human relationship. In their autobiographical writings, there appears the problem of having to sacrifice one’s need for retreat and solitary contemplation. It is the need for privacy, that women teachers have long yearned for, that they see as being annihilated by marriage and the burdens of family life. As Clough has put it: Surely married life too often becomes dull and hard. People enter into close intercourse too suddenly. We all know well enough that we are too often disgusted with ourselves and in this light must appear to others; therefore it is a great relief sometimes to hide ourselves so that we may wash off the stains and again look bright, that we may think over our weaknesses, and try to strengthen ourselves. (Clough, 1897, p. 75) This disgust about intimacies cut cross class lines. Coming from the lower social strata, Corke defends her right to be independent-minded: Perhaps I claim a single-mindedness that marriage would preclude. I have glimpsed the possibility of spiritual adventure [ . . . ] there are thoughts to capture. Thoughts which should be exchanged with those of H. B. M. (Corke, 1975, p. 148)


Smith has also referred to her ‘plainness’ as a stumbling block to a respectable marriage. In the discourses of the nineteenth century the beauty of the female body can become a channel leading to marriage and it is so important that it can even compensate for the lack of some fortune: Not that it is a crime to marry, or a crime to wish to be married; but it is an imbecility, which I reject with contempt, for women, who have neither fortune nor beauty, to make marriage the principal object of their wishes and hopes, and the aim of all their actions; not to be able to convince themselves that they are unattractive, and that they had better be quiet, and think of other things than wedlock. (cited in Gaskell, 1987, p. 254) In April 1843, this is how Charlotte Brontë, in a letter from Brussels, where she had returned for a second time to work as a teacher and study French, rejects some rumours about ‘the future epouse of Mademoiselle Brontë’ who is reported to be ‘on the Continent’ (Gaskell, 1987, p. 254). Plainness, however, does not relate only to the beauty of the body. It also restricts feelings and emotions and dictates certain behavioural styles and attitudes that plain and poor women have to keep, if they do not want to make a fool of themselves and appear as attempting to ‘trap a husband’ (p. 254). This was expressed by Charlotte Brontë in a letter to a friend, dated April 1845: I know that if women wish to escape the stigma of husband-seeking, they must act and look like marble or clay-cold, [emphasis added] expressionless, bloodless; for every appearance of feeling, of joy, sorrow, friendliness, antipathy, admiration, disgust, are alike construed by the world into the attempt to hook a husband. (cited in Gaskell, 1987, p. 277) What we have here is an open suggestion for women to discipline their bodies, to ‘act and look like marble’, so as to hide and even erase any trace of passionate feelings or sexual desire, making their bodies plain, unattractive, lifeless, asexual, ‘clay-cold’. Plainness imposes restrictions on the expression of female sexuality. In Foucault’s notion of biopower, sex was used as a means to discipline bodies and ‘sexuality was sought out in the smallest details of individual existencies; it was tracked down in behaviour [ . . . ] it became the stamp of individuality’ (Foucault, 1990a, p. 146). One has to note, however, that discourses and


practices are imposed, at the same time that they are interrogated, resisted and even subverted. It is therefore interesting to read how Brontë’s letter continues: Never mind! Well-meaning women have their own consciences to comfort them after all. Do not, therefore, be too much afraid of showing yourself as you are, affectionate and good-hearted; do not too harshly repress sentiments and feelings excellent in themselves, because you fear that some puppy may fancy that you are letting them come out to fascinate him; do not condemn yourself to live only by halves, because if you showed too much animation some pragmatical thing in breeches might take it into his pate to imagine that you designed to dedicate your life to his inanity. Still, a composed, decent, equable deportment is a capital treasure to a woman, and that you possess. (cited in Gaskell, 1987, p. 278) There is, amongst other things, much irony expressed in this letter. Women teachers would often make ironical remarks to express their feelings towards marriage. This is how an old pupil of Cheltenham Ladies’ College remembers her ‘delightful’ parting from ‘Miss Beale’: ‘Be sure you read, my child, not the kind of book where they marry and live happy ever afterwards, because, you know, (with such a twinkle) they never do’ (Steadman, 1931, p. 103). Although the threat of poverty would not apply to the women teachers of the middle classes, marriage was also regarded as a trade for them, but for different reasons. What women of the middle classes ‘bought’ in marriage was a respectful social status, a safety from the degradation and social failure of spinsterhood. Radical minds would therefore have their own reasons to deny conventional marriage. This is how Clara Collet responds to a persistent marriage proposal: ‘20-10-1884: E. W. asked me to marry him; I had to refuse him twice and practically to do it a third time’ (Collet, unpublished, p. 81). Her reasons for rejecting him were that since love is lacking, she cannot see any point in getting married, simply in order to be looked after by a man. She is also afraid of getting bored and of losing her independence and her right to change her mind and/or partner. The option to marry for security was rejected by many well-educated women, but this was obviously a brave decision and they had to fight to stick to it: 10-5-1885: E. W. The little momentary weakness I had for him was the result of much thinking and has died out completely. [ . . . ] It is


just because I often meet men for whom I have a strong attraction that makes me like them in spite of faults that I feel sure that if in a moment of depression, I imagined I liked him because he was worthy of being loved for his virtues and married him, I should grow to hate him and perhaps fall wildly in love with someone else, or feel that I liked a dozen other men better than I did him. It is much better to live an old maid and get a little honey from the short real friendships I can have with men for whom I care myself than to be bound for life to a man just because he thinks he cares for me. (Collet, unpublished, p. 81) At the time Clara Collet was writing about marriage, she had already been let down by a man she really liked: ‘25-2-1882: I danced with S. G.; I liked him better that night than I had ever done before [ . . . ] I like him very much [ . . . ] and prefer him to A. H. though I have quite a sisterly regard for him too’ (p. 19). Clara was able to see the difference between liking somebody and ‘imagining’ that she liked him. She also seemed able to discern subtle emotional variations between having a strong attraction, liking and/or loving somebody. The theme of romantic love seems to be extremely important, almost the only reason women teachers would find strong enough to make them marry: ‘I have thought I must say, a good deal of love and marriage [ . . . ] I feel indeed that I could love most intensely, most fervently and never will I marry unless I do’ (Clough, 1897, p. 37), writes Clough, as a young girl in her diary, long before she became the first principal of Newnham College. Love and marriage are themes that had concerned and troubled her: ‘I sometimes think about marriage. I don’t know how I should like it’ (p. 25), and later on, ‘My heart felt quite soft. That it would be pleasant to be in love and marrying and all that sort of thing came into my head and unsteadied me’ (p. 30). Such thoughts and possibilities were obviously a threat to the sense of self as an intellect that some women had anticipated for themselves. Love was, according to Emily Davies, the only natural path leading to marriage (Mackinnon, 1997). Romantic love is not, however, only a concern of the women of middle classes. Love seems to cut through social classes and, in a spirit of utopian egalitarianism, it is sometimes thought to surpass or even dissolve them: I was back at my school on the morrow after this event, a little graver and more commanding, as well as more absolute. The thought of having been loved, always gives a woman new strength. This little


episode in my dull life at Brough, if it did nothing else, made it somewhat pleasanter. It showed possibilities – such possibilities being that I might not remain a second Cinderella always. I was now spoken to as an equal, and in some degree allowed to take the liberties of one. The rude hints I had often had to bear, from that time ceased. (Smith, 1892, p. 104) What is conveyed in the above autobiographical narrative is that you do not have to be rich, privileged or special to be loved and fulfil passionate fantasies of the self. However strong the discourse of love might have been, it was also suspect to interrogation. Women teachers have commented on the strange phenomenon of ‘the little intuitive “spring-forward” element that makes a girl so rash as to give herself away to a half-known, a quarter-known man’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 33, p. 301). ‘Giving themselves to an unknown person’, however, would often cause love disappointment, often leading them to reject marriage for good. Beale was fifty years old, when she rejected the last of several proposals of marriage she had received. According to her biographer, ‘Dorothea Beale knew what it was to be admired, loved’ (Kamm, 1958, p. 35). However, in her youth, she had an unhappy engagement, which was ended by her, most probably, because she lost confidence in her fiancé. She is reported saying at times that she regarded that one of the greatest disappointments in life was to be let down by someone you thought you loved and respected: ‘no sorrow could be greater than the discovery that someone we loved was unworthy’ (p. 35). In terms of personal expansion, however, even such disappointments would strengthen the sense of self for women teachers and teach them to use any sense of personal loss in a creative way. Marriage, after all, was utterly idealized in the minds of these Victorian women, and they were prepared to take no less than what they thought should be a spiritual and loving relationship, ‘the union first of soul with soul, each dying to self and rising to a nobler life’ (Beale cited in Kamm, 1958, p. 36). Here, marriage seems to be rendered into intellectual terms, almost an extension of intellectual terms. As Jeffreys (1985) has argued, some feminists of the late Victorian period promoted the notion of psychic love and saw it is as a replacement of sexual intercourse in their relationships with men. In the minds of the first wave feminists, sexual intercourse was regarded as a threat to the female body, carrying dangerous diseases or causing unwanted pregnancies, as well as undermining their independence and self-respect, limiting their possibilities and exposing them


to abuse. Psychic love, on the other hand, was invested with spiritual and almost mystical images. Being framed by tenderness and affection, it offered women spiritual satisfaction, by elevating them beyond ‘fleshly concerns’ and providing them with dignity and self-respect in their relationships with men.4 The notion of psychic love was therefore related to the need for intellectual communication which is often transcribed in women teachers’ autobiographical writings. In her autobiography, Smith makes frequent references to the ideal type of heterosexual relationship, which for her is framed both by deep, real love and/or intellectual communication. In this context, this is how she describes her experience with Mr So-and So, The Osborn’s landlord, a ‘well-to-do tradesman and widower’: Judge then of my surprise, on my next visit, when Mrs. Osborn told me that Mr. So-and So had fallen in love with me. He had asked her to have him to tea with me, so that he might have an opportunity of making me an offer. I once exclaimed: ‘No, it’s no use. I cannot do that.’ I could see all my intellectual castles falling with a crash, to rise no more [ . . . ] I still said [ . . . ] ‘No, it’s impossible! He’s not intellectual. What is marriage without happiness! The bare idea of it is dreadful to contemplate’ [ . . . ] I always respected him, but never regretted my action. Thus are romance and hard facts interwoven with our lives. (Smith, 1892, pp. 136, 137) Smith’s deep wish for intellectual intercourse is also reflected in the way she chose her relationships with other men, always on the grounds of intellectual communication: ‘One or two poet friends – working men – who occasionally called to see me on a Sunday; religion and poetry being the subject of their talk, or the last new books, or the reviews’ (Smith, 1892, p. 202). In the context of the importance women gave to the existence of intellectual communication in their relationships with men, it is perhaps interesting to note that while recounting the lives of the first 35 Girton graduates, Constance Maynard recorded 16 marriages, only seven with children, and among the professions of the husbands, there is a Guardian editor, a literary critic and an academic (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 25, p. 770). Family commitments are another factor affecting some women teachers’ rejection of marriage. The same patriarchal structures that led women to marriage, would also keep some of them within their roles, as dutiful daughters, looking after their families in need. Spinsterhood


was, in that case, not a choice, but a necessity or, in some cases, perhaps both. As their autobiographical writings reveal, it was also, however, a situation that could cause great pain and suffering. In the context of such practical difficulties, and dilemmas beyond their control, Kamm has noted that Mary Buss, founder and headmistress for life of the North London Collegiate Girls’ School, rejected more than one offer of marriage, following the example of many other Victorian daughters, who remained unmarried, in order to look after their parents and siblings (usually brothers). This is how Buss expressed her feelings about choosing to remain single in writing: ‘I have had real heart-ache, such as at intervals in earlier life I had to bear: when I put aside marriage’ (Kamm, 1958, p. 34). The care of their families was actually putting a considerable burden on the souls of women teachers who were struggling to make sense of the responsibilities they owed to their families. Clough, who looked after her mother patiently, throughout the best years of her life, had many discussions with her beloved brother, the renowned poet Arthur Hugh Clough about: ‘the duties that single women owe to their families’ (Clough, 1897, p. 60), ‘about the necessity or rather great benefit of women finding work, and considering it a duty to do so, and also whether they are at liberty to choose their own paths in some cases (I mean single women) without reference to their families’ (p. 62). She would insistently talk these matters over with her brother as well as with his wife, since the duties seem to appeal only to the daughters of the families: Had various discussions about married and single life and one long talk with Jane Claude about working. Told her some of my notions about its being right in certain cases to quit even one’s father and mother and family for work as well as for a husband (p. 63). In their struggle to make sense of their sex, acknowledge their desires and make life choices, women teachers sought to imagine themselves as equal partners in (hetero)sexual relationships framed by the institution of marriage. Although the majority of them did not interrogate the very essence and necessity of marriage as a social institution, they did react to the gendered structure of power relations within marriage, and sought to recreate their sexual role. There were, of course, women, teachers amongst them, who openly rejected marriage both as an institution and as an improper state interference in their psychic and emotional life. In her important research on anarchism, gender and sexuality in the UK from the 1880s onwards, Judy Greenway (1995, 1997, 2002) has shown


that free love debates in late nineteenth century related to ideas about wider social transformations. Certainly there were few women teachers who would propagate free love ideas, but perhaps the most famous has been Dora Marsden, who started her career as a teacher, then turned to journalism, and later in life devoted herself to philosophical thinking and writing. As the editor of Freewoman 5 (1911–1912), Marsden was amongst those women who, through their writings, claimed the right to be sexual. As Bland has noted, ‘this was indeed a radical development, given that for most of the Victorian period a sexual identity for a woman meant an identity as a prostitute’ (1995b, p. 6). In Bland’s analysis, this important perceptual shift was an effect of interlocking legal and economic changes as well as of cultural transformations with regard to the nineteenth century’s erupting discourses of sexuality. Marriage was thus criticized on many levels and by different perspectives: as a crude commercialization of women’s bodies, as a pretext to a double-standard sexual morality and therefore immoral, as an institution constraining nature, but also intellectual independence and freedom; even the idealized image of marriage in a romantic love context was problematized as a human relationship inevitably leading to emotional stagnancy and boredom. As Bland has pointed out, feminists campaigning around marriage in this period, pointed to the injustices of the institution, while constructing a new ideal based upon the liberal principles of freedom, liberty and bodily autonomy (1995a, pp. 124, 125, 129). In this context, women teachers did not only hold totally negative positions towards marriage. Their idealized image of marriage and (hetero)sexual relationships was framed by love and intellectual communication and they seemed to be ready to accept their personal commitment to such cherished relationships. However, they were also determined to accept no less than at least one of these conditions, love and/or spiritual unity, and in many cases they strove against rigid social conventions, in their attempt to retain their right to human dignity and/or happiness. Escaping from the discourses of sexual subjection through marriage, these Victorian women teachers opened themselves to other discourses, those of love, care, and personal sacrifice to sometimes unreal, idealized, spiritual relationships, raising walls between bodily and spiritual needs, and thus perpetuating the constraining mind/body dichotomy. Circulating among the polyvalent discourses of marriage, love and sexuality, what those women teachers attempted to do, was to negate their fate and try to imagine a different sexuality. This imagination of the new or improbable is, I suggest, the radical point of their revolt.


Was it only through marriage, however, that women teachers spoke of their sexuality? The genealogy of their auto/biographical writings has traced other trails, which I now want to follow.

Passions 1 His stay was a brief and a swift one, And he scarcely said a word; But he left me a wandering spirit, And a heart by a new life stirred And every day at noontide – The hours when he first dropped in There’s a flutter of footsteps and voices 2 Yet he comes not; oh! he comes not! And my heart I chide and scold, For letting the thoughts perplex it, Of a stranger grave and cold; And I try to be gay and cheerful, And to keep a smile in my eye; But my heart within is tearful, And I know the reason why. 3 My aching heart within. Yet like a star unfading, Though clouds its light inure, Hope still my fears upbraiding Above them all both burn 4 Hence smiles with sighs commingle like sunshine with the rain, For I know this gentle stranger Must yet return again The Stranger is a poem written by Smith (1892), depicting her feelings for an unfulfilled love, that is also recounted in the prose of her


autobiography. What has really struck me in the reading of the textual lives of women teachers is the fact that I have encountered intense passionate moments, usually revolving around unfulfilled love-relationships and mostly unspoken desires, often with men but also, as in Maynard’s case, with women. Almost all of these passionate relationships had a particularly intellectual influence on the lives of those women teachers. I have referred to passions and desires, being aware of the multiplicity and sometimes impossibility of contrasting meanings interwoven in these notions. ‘What was meant by passion’? asks Bland (1995a, p. 273), simultaneously acknowledging the difficulties in ‘defining’ passion even today. How is passion and desire connected? my question comes, and, moreover, how do they both relate to power and the construction of the desiring subject? In exploring these questions, the historical context of reference becomes critically important. At the end of the nineteenth century, passion and desire are not included in the vocabularies and conceptual notions available to women. Even when words existed there was disagreement over meanings. As Nora Kiernen was writing in Freewoman: ‘We need to discuss [ . . . ] questions that we, as men and women, are as yet at variance, such as, for instance, the questions of love, passion and sex, which so many of us women do not conceive of in the same sense as men do’ (cited in Bland, 1995a, p. 274). As Bland further notes, while passion commonly reads as ‘sexual desire’ today, that was not the case in the nineteenth century. Passion was largely a spiritual experience and nineteenth-century feminists would strive hard to draw boundaries between sensuality as the force ‘degrading humanity’ and pertaining to the body and passion as a force ‘elevating humanity’ and pertaining to the mind and soul (1995a, p. 276). Although the mind/body division holds well in the matrix of definitions around passion, this fluidity of notions allowed nineteenth-century women to navigate their storms of desires and experiment with their selves and sexualities, at times leaving behind them rich and sometimes unexpected narrative accounts of ‘the dark side of the moon’, their sexual selves. For Constance Maynard it was her cousin, Lewis Campbell, that had signalled the alarm of an ‘electric spark’. He is the one who encouraged her to enter Girton and later to work as a teacher at St Leonard’s School. He and his wife Fanny are omnipresent figures in Constance’s life, often causing her contradictory love/hate feelings. In the beginning she is struggling against her feelings and college life seems to help her to surpass her love for him: ‘Any responsive affection I had felt for him [Campbell] was swamped and overborne and carried away by the flood of interests brought in by College life’ (Maynard, unpublished,


chapter 12, p. 387). However, she still feels uncomfortable and embarrassed, when, for example, she has to meet them during the college holidays: ‘On 23rd July among the stream of visitors came two who I had a little bit dreaded, Lewis and Fanny Campbell [ . . . ] I knew of course that he would want me to talk about Hitchin and felt shy’ (p. 454). This strange relationship, however, will utterly disappoint her in the end and Maynard will move beyond its influence. Later on in her life, Maynard would become passionately attached to women friends and companions and in her autobiography she has recorded moments of passion, which sometimes had driven her in despair: The one I loved with the element of undisguised passion, failed me; the good, steady friend who might have robbed the loss of half its terrors by receiving and bestowing confidence, transferred her affection to others, for my prolonged grief became to her wholly uninteresting (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 44, p. 4) Corke fell in love with her violin teacher, H. B. Macartney, with whom she had a merely intellectual relationship in the beginning: ‘Presently H. B. M is writing me brief letters – letters that are simple postscripts to our too short talks after my lessons . . . we exchange books and I am introduced to Emerson and Thoreau’ (Corke, 1975, pp. 147, 148). This relationship is ‘fitted into the pattern’ of her life and creates feelings of contentment and stability. These are illusionary, however, since ‘before this year [1905] is over, H. B. M.’s feelings for me begin to move urgently to the physical plane [ . . . ] we are entering another phase of intimacy’ (p. 149). Helen struggles against this situation, ‘mind must control bodily instincts, or human beings sink to animal level’ (p. 150). At times she also appears determined to resist getting more closely involved, ‘It is not for me to be either wife or mistress-and for H. B. M. to become my lover would be a denial and repudiation of H. B. M. as I have imagined him’ (p. 150). Despite all these, however, they do spend five days together in the Isle of Wight, where Corke refuses to come to sexual intercourse with him. At the end of this joint holiday and on his returning to London, H. B. M. ‘dies by his own hand’ (p. 170). In her attempt to fashion her own lifestyle, Helen Corke obviously had great difficulties in acknowledging her desires and deciding upon her relationships with men. Her will to go beyond conventions was seriously hampered by strict moral codes, perhaps fears of being socially rejected or even degraded, deeply rooted sexual attitudes, and/or idealized perceptions of (hetero)sexual relationships.


For Smith it was her ‘fatal’ relationship with Mr Osborn and his family. She leaves her father’s home in southern England, to follow them through very difficult conditions in the north of England, she looks after their children, she teaches at their school for pennies, she lends them her savings. Later, she leaves a comfortable governess position to help them run a new school, from which she is sent away in a most cruel manner. Difficult as it is to believe, she goes back and serves them again, when asked to do so. According to the editor of her autobiography, this is an incredible story, which shows, perhaps, Smith’s ‘unceasing craving for intellectual intercourse’ (1892, p. 301). What the above fragmented autobiographical writings tell is a different story about women teachers’ ‘asexuality’. Strangely enough, these stories follow literary paradigms of influential intellectual relationships interwoven with unspoken passions, in which Charlotte Brontë’s spiritual and emotional attachment to her teacher, Monsieur Heger in Brussels, seems to be a hallmark. As Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (1989) have pointed out, women novelists in the early nineteenth century wrote about sexuality in spite of the rigid social conventions and their limited knowledge and experience in ‘matters of sex’. They particularly refer to the theme of female passion in Brontë’s Villette, where Lucy oscillates between reason and feeling, grappling with ‘what was wild and intense, dangerous, sudden and flaming’ (Mendus and Rendall, 1989, p. 14). However marginalized they might have been, some women teachers’ experiences of passionate relationships, both real and/or fictional, can serve as anti-paradigms of the discourses of frigidity and passionlessness, constructed by the sexologists in the context of medicalization of sexuality and the hysterization of the female body, as described and analysed by Foucault. Silenced bodies? Women teachers often present themselves as having naïve attitudes in relation to love, eros and their sexuality, which they rarely address directly. Sometimes they try to explain their ignorance and give some sound reasons for their embarrassment and lack of confidence in matters ‘related to love’. Lack of education or any type of formal or informal information is particularly pointed out. Thus Maynard interrogates the silence her strict Evangelical family had been keeping, upon sexual life: ‘but surely Love and Marriage were great things, must they be for ever hidden away and never touched on by speech or writing? (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 6, p. 128). Maynard had recounted that while at home, living with her family, she was not allowed to read anything


other than strictly religious books, with the exception of poetry: ‘As for me, the quite ordinary tutelage in the approaches of love that is given by novels was absent and I was left in a whirl of ignorance and even resentment. I did not understand my own instincts’ (p. 175). Younger than Maynard, from the lower social strata and without the strict Evangelical principles of the former, Corke still deplores her lack of knowledge about sex. Although she does not write openly about sex, she talks, of ‘passion’, extending thus the concepts of ‘Love and Marriage’ to ‘bodily functions’: Physical passion [ . . . ] had never been starkly presented to me [ . . . ] My early religious training had divided soul and body, and presented the body as the inferior, rightly subordinate to the soul. The literary patterns of the period mostly enhanced the teaching. They tended to exhibit physical passion as a gross manifestation, linking [man] with the animal, but, in the case of [man], properly controlled by the reason and the will. Love was either divine or human. Religion imposed no prohibition against spiritual intimacy, for which it claimed complete essential detachment from bodily functions. (Corke, 1975, pp. 162–3) Corke simply and clearly describes the body/mind split, a discursive separation that constitutes the bedrock of her ‘sex education’. In such a context of ignorance and prudery, it seems a little odd to find aspects of homoerotic love appearing in women teachers’ writings set against the misery of the lack of love in heterosexual relationships. In 1879, this is how the strict Evangelical Maynard lets her body speak, while she compares her feelings for a man she has just rejected, with Louisa Lumsden, her old fellow student at Girton, who was at the time Headmistress at St Leonard’s, the school in which Maynard worked for three years, at the beginning of her career in education: Louisa caught me one day by the shoulders and said half in play, but shaking her head safely, ‘I wish I were that poor man for an hour! I believe I could win you yet’. Win me? Of course she could and long before the hour had run out too! [ . . . ] Oh dear, let him speak with the musical voice she does, let him look at me with her eyes, let his manner be compact of noble confidence and the most endearing, reverent attention as hers at times can be and every possible disadvantage is outweighed and I am his forever. Yet who am I that should


let not the feeling, but nearly the expression of it, thus turn the scale? I can only suppose that the want of the electric spark on my side is the symptom of some real hindrance to unity, however fine and firm the spiritual foundations of such unity may be. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 33, p. 308) In Maynard’s view, ‘the want of the electric spark’ can even overcome ‘the fine and firm spiritual foundations of a unity’. Maynard’s reference to the need to feel the electric spark in her body is a rare verbal reference to bodily needs and feelings and it is persistent in her writings about love and eros: I really wished I could love him, but that would have been a mockery. My hands I remember were lying on my knees and when he spoke of the honour and deference and faithful affection that awaited me, if only I could trust myself to his keeping, he very gently laid one of his hands over mine. I drew mine hastily away and put them both behind my back. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 33, p. 299) Hands moving, even if they do so to touch or avoid contact, paint rare pictures of body language in women teachers’ auto/biographical writings. Bodies are usually absent from the classrooms as well as from women’s lives, ‘erased from the blackboard’. It is only through relevant, but not directly ‘bodily’ occasions, that woman teachers refer to their bodies. This happens, for example, when they describe dances, some rare occasions they had to get dressed, make themselves attractive and involve themselves in ‘bodily intercourse’ with men through dancing. Angela McRobbie (1982) has commented that dance retains a special place in the female memory, and this can sometimes mean remembering precisely minute details of dress and appearance: Dr. Clarke, looking exceedingly handsome in evening dress, came to ask me for the first Quadrille, but of course I refused, said I had never learnt and should enjoy looking on [ . . . ] Then the very pleasant but plain young Mr. Hallow Tennyson came to ask for the Lancers and when he received the same reply, insisted on ‘sitting out’ with me. I remember that Prof. Clarke and Miss Minturn made a splendid tall couple and that Dr. Cartmell (the Master of Christ’s College) a most impressive looking man, quite young for his snow-white hair, danced with Miss Lumsden, who was in her thick soft white silk. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 20, p. 489)


Maynard gives here detailed descriptions of embodied people, both men and women. Their dresses, their hairstyle, their movements, all are important in the erotic climate of the dance that is clearly depicted in this autobiographical extract. As McRobbie has noted, dance has always offered girls and women channels for bodily self-expression and has been a source of pleasure and sensuality, although it has constantly been taking on various cultural meanings, in relation to the social and historical context within which it is examined (1982, p. 132). Thus, Maynard is absolutely enthralled by this new experience of dancing, an excitement that is clearly transcribed in her autobiography. Dance as memory becomes a theme of contemplation: About ten days after the great Girton party, I made a long reflection on it [ . . . ] dancing was suddenly proposed [ . . . ] I could not help being flattered in private when the two nicest people in the whole room [ . . . ] sought for me first of all. Brought up as we have been, to me it was an absolute new pleasure to find myself [ . . . ] an evident object of attraction and I seemed to expand in a kind of glow of giving and receiving admiration. Life seemed fuller, happier, far less stern and exciting than usual and by no effort at all, but just by existing I seemed to give people pleasure. I suppose it is vain to care for such things but I certainly did just then and next morning I took a scrap of paper and tried to write an analysis of the pleasant tide of feeling that swept over me. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 20, p. 507) McRobbie (1982, p. 132) has described dance as a set of images, imbricated with sexual desires, feelings and drives. In McRobbie’s view, dance has created for women a kind of utopian space, where they feel or at least dream that they feel away from forces of domination and control. In this view, Maynard’s autobiographical narrative lies here inside and at the same time beyond dominant cultural norms surrounding dance. On the one hand, there is the strand which directs women teachers towards dance as a conformist, lady-like form of leisure, linked with being pretty, graceful and an object of admiration. However, on the other hand, such social conventions which define and monitor women’s bodily expressions are resisted by the sexual fantasies carried by dance. Continually conscious of how they should look, feel and behave, women find in dance an escape: ‘Dance evokes fantasy because it sets in motion a dual relationship projecting both internally towards the self and externally towards the “other” ’ (McRobbie, 1982, p. 144). In Maynard’s narrative, the body is sharply in focus. It is through the


body that dance is related to female sexuality and thus Maynard’s descriptions of bodies, bodily gestures and bodily appearances destabilize the image of the frigid, passionless, hysteric and asexual spinsters. Other autobiographical narratives of women teachers offer a series of perfect examples of passionate female sexuality. Collet often refers to the exciting times she had in Leicester, in relation to the dances she would go to in the company of other men and women (unpublished, p. 19). Lumsden recounts the joyful nights and the many dances of her life in Aberdeen (1933, p. 28). ‘The Furies amuse themselves’ is the title of a whole chapter of her autobiography, that Hughes has dedicated to their dances and outdoors entertainment, while she was a student at a teachers’ training college at Cambridge: ‘It was the apparently straitlaced Miss Buss who took the boldest step in giving us a chance to meet men in a social way. She gave a real ball’ (Hughes, 1946, p. 140). Women teachers’ silence in bodily matters has been occasionally broken, as the dance narratives have revealed. However, silence itself is of considerable importance in the genealogical analysis and can sometimes reveal more ‘truths’ than certain distorted voices. A system of silent moments makes its own contribution to women’s attempts at rewriting the script of their lives.

Rewriting the script: technologies of the female self So far, I have presented some of the tensions women teachers experienced in their struggle to fashion a new self, the New woman at the turn of a new century. These tensions and conflicts sprang from their difficulties in defining their sexuality and compromising their existence in the private sphere set against the constraints of the two interlocking themes of female sexuality: wifehood and motherhood. In this context, some women teachers turned away from the narrow constraints and, slipping through discourses, attempted to rewrite love relationships and create new meanings and languages in the scripts of their lives. The marginality of such personal stories reveals the network of power relations that established the centrality of some others and makes them exceptionally important for the genealogical move of this study. As I have already pointed out, Copelman has shown that some 25 per cent of the women teachers in London’s late Victorian and Edwardian state schools were married, attempting at that time to construct alternative types of heterosexual relationships, ‘a new comradeship between men and women’ (1986, p. 175). Unmarried women teachers also found other types of relationships that nurtured, strengthened, supported and


comforted them when the fate of being alone in the world was becoming too heavy to bear.6 Woman’s educational communities created space for the development of the female self and undermined the notion that life is nothing for a woman without a man. In such communities a sense of ‘woman-centredness’ flourished. Friendships begun at university colleges between women were often life-long. Beyond the colleges, girls’ schools often provided networks for women to find employment for their equally qualified friends and to live in female-oriented environments. Some women chose to live with other women, whether in relationships of companionship, or homoerotic love. I do not think it is necessary to form categories of sexual relationships, and find a place to accommodate women who were different and chose for themselves patterns of life, outside the limits of wifehood and motherhood. Nor is it necessary to romanticize and idealize women’s relationships. They had their problems, which were sometimes as devastating for their lives, as the problems of heterosexual relationships. We have already seen how Maynard has frozen such moments of despair: 1882–1886, good years, though bearing wrong excitements within, and then came eleven years of deep depression I cannot bear to look upon [ . . . ] I kept my daily duties and presented a cheerful face at meals [ . . . ] But at night there were floods of tears for I seemed really starving to death, and no one in heaven or on earth really cared whether I lived or died [ . . . ] I went quite steadily through with all my duties; whether lecturing, secretarial work, or intercourse with my students and no one seemed to discover there was anything wrong. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 44, pp. 3, 4) Education and economic independence created a space of women’s culture. However, women working together entered the conflicts, oppositions and controversies of work. In many cases they experienced authoritarian behaviour from their own peers and companions, resisted hierarchical arrangements, were involved in the micropolitics of their schools, and had serious ruptures and arguments with their old collegemates and friends. Such conflicts, contradictions and rivalries within the newly emerging women’s professions, often shattered, and sometimes ended, life-long friendships and exposed the crude reality of the world of paid work. Maynard recounts her difficulties in working at St Leonard’s School, under the headship of Lumsden, her once beloved fellow student at Girton. She particularly refers to a mistake she had made in ordering some books, which caused Lumsden to speak to her ‘sharply as


though I was inefficient; then Frances looked at me with her brown eyes, [ . . . ] and I saw real compassion in them as she bade me go away and rest’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 32, p. 255). Despite their flaws and problems, however, women-centred groups provided a focus for the emotional, social and intellectual life of those who defined their lives outside traditional heterosexual relationships and the bonds of marriage and family. Rewriting the script: a passion for friends ‘What is friendship?’ Foucault (1989) wonders in an interview. Contemplating the ontology of friendship, he comes to the conclusion that although friendship is still ‘formless’, it is something that has to be invented and worked upon, so as to become ‘the sum of everything through which [people] can give each other pleasure’ (1989, p. 205). There are a number of interesting issues that are touched upon, if not thoroughly discussed in the interview. First of all, how did Foucault come to be interested in friendship in the first place? As he pointed out, in a later interview (1997a), it was through his studying the history of sex that he came to realize the importance of the history of friendship. As Foucault sees it, friendship has been historically ‘a very important kind of social relation: a social relation within which people had a certain freedom, certain kind of choice (limited of course), as well as very intense emotional relations’ (Foucault, 1997a, p. 170). The people Foucault refers to are, of course, men, and he particularly speaks about men, male homosexuality and male friendship. This is something he made quite clear in both interviews and in other writings (Foucault, 1986b). For Foucault, friendship depends on reciprocity, ‘friendship is reciprocal and sexual relations are not reciprocal’ he had commented about the ethics of classical antiquity (p. 345). In that way he had avoided the issue of why women and slaves, in their social subjection, were excluded from his idea of friendship. In tracing the genealogy of friendship, however, Foucault has made an important distinction between men and women, arguing that while for men, friendship disappeared from the sixteenth century onwards, as a culturally accepted relation, things evolved differently for women. Drawing on Lillian Faderman’s (1980) influential book, Surpassing the Love of Men, Foucault points to the evolution of a female culture and the intensity of emotions in female friendships, stressing in particular the involvement of female bodies in such friendships, bodily relationships, which had become absolutely impossible for men: ‘women do each other’s hair, help each other with make-up, dress each other [ . . . ]


they put their arms around each other, kiss each other’ (Foucault, 1989, p. 208). Foucault had identified social institutions, and especially schools, as disciplinary places which played a drastic and decisive role in the disappearance of male friendships (Foucault, 1997a, p. 170). This assumption is quite interesting, especially in relation to the fact that, for women, colleges and schools played such a vital role in making possible all the strengthening of intense female relationships. Thus, for Foucault the disappearance of male friendship coincided with the emergence of the discourses of sexuality and the ‘declaration of homosexuality as a social/political/medical problem’ (p. 171). However, this genealogical emergence has also been a turning point for the deployment of female friendship. Indeed, it was in the context of the newly emerging discourses of sexuality at the turn of the nineteenth century that friendships between women were declared pathological. The figure of the hysteric wife/mother was complemented by her double, the sexually frustrated and socially isolated spinster. However, women’s friendships have historically turned out to be the means by which women developed social relationships, which nurtured and sustained them through difficult times. Women have been each other’s best friends, life companions, emotional and economic supporters and, sometimes, faithful lovers. Not surprisingly, this tradition of female friendship has remained largely unnoticed and unexplored, at least by mainstream historiography (see Raymond, 1991). What I am suggesting here is that women teachers’ extensive social networks, and the passionate and life-long friendships they created, have not been merely an event to be added in the genealogy of female friendship, but also a significant point to be considered in the cultivation of the technologies of the female self. That is, without being idealized, female friendships created positive conditions for the development and expansion of the female self. Drawing on Foucault, if reciprocity, as a fundamental element in the constitution of friendship, is so important in the cultivation of the male self, it becomes even more so in the case of women. This happens because the female self has emerged from the interstices of highly hierarchical relationships and it has been more difficult for her to become socially engaged, without being socially and/or emotionally subjugated. If nothing else, female friendships, as networks of social and emotional support, have removed a lot of tension surrounding the activities and life-decisions of women who chose to live outside conventions. Viewed in this way they can be seen to have sustained and supported alternative


lifestyles and nurtured different selves, the selves of the New women at the end of the nineteenth century. Aristotle maintained that ‘the friend is another self’, in Sappho’s verse, ‘whatever one loves, is’, while in Cavarero’s philosophy, ‘feminine friendship consists in a reciprocal narrative exchange [ . . . ] of our own life-stories’ (2000, p. 58). Indeed, in contemporary feminist debates on ethics, friendship is discussed in relation to the ethics of care and the development of a social self, outside the conventions of the family circle and beyond essentialist assumptions of femininity. With regard to friendship, the point of convergence in the Foucauldian and feminist discussion of ethics is first the point of reciprocity, and second the argument that sexuality can be used by both men and women, to arrive at a multiplicity of relations, and invent new modes of being one’s self and of being together. The care of the self, and the care of others, is thus interrelated in the making of the self a continuous creative and social experience. Sexuality as a passage to the self A point that has been highlighted in the course of this chapter is that sexuality has created an arena of conflicting and often contradictory discourses that have influenced past and contemporary perceptions related to the persona of the woman teacher. One of the most powerful images has been that of the frigid, asexual woman teacher, which has continued to the present day. However, the autobiographical writings of the women teachers at the end of the nineteenth century have spoken differently. They have revealed women who were deeply concerned with defining their sexuality, but who, in doing so, were seriously hindered by the discursive and institutional restraints of wifehood and motherhood, the only recognizable female sexual roles of their era. However, in their attempt to find some other spaces and different vocabularies to express their sexuality what some women teachers actually did was to challenge those restraining sexual roles. Although they did not create some sort of fixed alternative sexual roles, they refused to submit to their sexual exploitation and, by choosing to ‘live it rough’, they used the ‘battle of sex’ to work upon new and often improbable identities. Far from being the key to unlock the secret of their existence, sexuality became a passage to explore themselves and it is from this basis that the explorations of this chapter contribute to our understandings of the technologies of the female self.

4 What is Our Present Today? Genealogies as Histories of the Present

I was a teacher. I never wanted to be, and now that I’ve stopped, I never will be again, but for several years it took my heart. I entered a place of darkness, a long tunnel of days: retreat from the world. I want to explain, to tell what it is I know. Teaching young children must always be, in some way or other, a retreat from general social life and from fully adult relationships, a way of becoming Lucy Snowe’s dormouse, rolled up in the prisonhouse, the schoolroom. (Steedman, 1992, p. 52) The staffroom is full of women eating cottage cheese or grapefruit. Each of them knows about diet and eating and sexuality. They are willing and happy to talk about these, caught inside what they are: the unique combination of worker and woman, dependent and independent, free and trapped. (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 28) At the end of August in 1987 I sat on the floor in my bedroom and I cried. I had spent the whole summer finishing my dissertation and had left myself only four days in which to get ready for the examinations which were to follow. And I didn’t know a thing. I couldn’t remember anything I had ever read . . . At the end of August I had been teaching for seventeen years and I had been a college lecturer for the last three of these years. I already had an MA . . . And yet here I was sitting on the floor and crying . . . One year after the MA I was suffering from withdrawal symptoms. I honestly believe that you are a better teacher if you are also a student at the same time . . . So I registered for a Ph.D. exactly one year later and I am going to finish this year. I will never do another course again, I have really had enough this time. Or have I? (Holding On, 1994) 134

What is Our Present Today? Genealogies as Histories of the Present 135

There are a number of interesting dualities in the above extracts: ‘worker and woman’, ‘mother and teacher’, ‘teacher and student’, ‘dependent and independent’, ‘free and trapped’, which are interwoven in the construction of the problematic status of the female educator today. In considering these dualities, we can pose Foucauldian questions: what are the different heterogeneous elements, discursive and non-discursive practices, institutions, regulations, laws, administrative practices philosophic propositions and scientific statements (Foucault, 1980b, p. 195) that configure women’s position in education today? The starting point of this chapter has therefore been the construction of a dispositif: women’s polymorphous positions in education and the exploration of the power/knowledge relations that both condition this construction and derive from it. In attempting to construct a Foucauldian dispositif, the primary and most critical stage of writing a genealogy, I am re-reading theoretical and empirical works related to the female subject in education, aiming to explore the institutional settings, as well as the discursive formations that constitute women teachers’ reality today and which create, as I want to show, shared feelings of discomfort about how things are. I am particularly interested in throwing light upon the life conditions and possibilities of ‘exceptional cases’; women teachers who refuse to be described as the average type; women who have come to dispute their own communities and have attempted to be different. My attempt to follow genealogical trails has invoked my special interest in ‘difference’, in some women teachers’ insistence not to comply with what is common or normal, their sensitivity to what ‘out there’ is intolerable. I have seen these ‘different’ women not in terms of their relation to the community of their profession and/or social status, but in terms of their relation to what Rajchman has theorized as a critical community, ‘a community of struggle with its own historically constituted identity [ . . . ] the community of those who depart from it, taking their identities or forms of experience in new directions outside its compass’ (1991, p. 107). It is through their relation to the critical community that the different women I am focusing on, resist given conditions of existence, problematize their identity and thus make of their ‘subjectivity’ an open and endless question, at once individual and collective. In the process of ‘mapping’ women teachers within a certain system of social relations, practices and discourses, past, present and future ‘tenses’ of the female self in education emerge and intermingle. Theoretical questions that initiated this study come again to the fore: what are we? What is this present of ours and how do we conceive ourselves


within this present? How have we become what we are and what are the possibilities of becoming ‘other’?

The female self in education: reversing the discourses Teresa de Lauretis has defined subjectivity as ‘patterns by which experiential and emotional contents, feelings, images and memories are organized to form one’s self-image, one’s sense of self and others, and of our possibilities of existence’ (de Lauretis, 1986, p. 5). Today, conventional patterns of subjectivity have been disrupted. Women teachers feel the urgent need to reorganize their feelings, images and memories and rework their sense of self, in the context of massive changes that have transformed social institutions, where women have managed to forge a place for themselves: So in terms of the systems that have been set up, in terms of the general management [ . . . ] I suppose I am thinking more logistical and financial, yes, [ . . . ] In terms of the personal and how it’s making you, the teacher, feel in what you are doing [ . . . ] that’s perhaps where I have the problem [ . . . ] how you are personally feeling, I don’t know. I’m gabbling, aren’t I? I’m really gabbling. (Ball, 1997, p. 327) This is a young woman teacher of today, struggling to articulate feelings of losing herself, while being interviewed about the use of Total Quality Management (TQM) in education. Five years earlier Steedman was depicting herself as ‘retreating from the world, entering a tunnel of darkness’, in the quotation that initiates this chapter. Since the late nineteenth century, women have been striving to create a new self, crossing the boundaries of the private and claiming their rights to be out in the world, to play their part in the public spheres of life. However, in the dawn of the twenty-first century, some women appear to be losing themselves in the public arena. They are out but they are lost. What is happening? In their attempts to invent new patterns of existence in education, women experience critical contradictions and dilemmas, weaving around the very paradox of being a woman: ‘the paradox of a being that is at once captive and absent in discourse, [ . . . ] a being whose existence and specificity are simultaneously asserted and denied, negated and controlled’ (de Lauretis, 1990, p. 115). Although the ‘paradox of being a woman’ is one of the major issues raised by feminism in the 1970s, it is still very much in the foreground of feminist theorizations of the


subject. De Lauretis refers to the instability of the existence and specificity of women, their ‘nonbeing’ (p. 115). It is to the specificity of women’s various subject positions in education that the discussion of this chapter now turns: the paradox of being a woman in the world of teaching.

The woman in the classroom: living through the private/ public split The paradoxical status of women in education has not emerged in a void. It is poised on a critical dichotomy that has left women oscillating between two worlds: the private and the public. In the previous chapters, it has been widely discussed how teaching was constructed as a career appropriate for women, a communication channel, joining the private and public spheres of life. Dave Jones (1990) has traced discontinuities and juxtapositions in the making of the image of the schoolteacher. In his genealogy of the urban schoolteacher, the figure of the female teacher emerges at the point when love came to constitute a disciplinary technology of schooling and the persona of the teacher became a model parent in a school representing the emotional unity of the family. This representation of school as a model family is, I think, a crucial point in the analysis of the specificity of women’s position in the public spheres of life and work. In the disciplinary space arrangements of the school, the classroom became a private place of silence and isolation, where women once more found themselves enclosed within boundaries, acting as both carers and surveyors of children. In depicting schools as prisonhouses, Carolyn Steedman (1992) has shown how the enclosed space of the primary school classroom still continues to frustrate women and impose real or ideological restrictions on their lives and choices. Love is not so much ‘used’ as a disciplinary technology in contemporary pedagogical practices, yet there is an increasing belief in the psychological effectiveness of love and, even in the secondary sector, women teachers continue to be considered ideal as caring and love-giving educators and to represent themselves as such. The private space of the classroom is a locale which has promoted the cultivation and expression of women’s ‘natural’ inclinations: being with children and caring for others. Such notions of constructed naturalness, is of particular concern for the genealogical inquiries of this study. As Rajchman comments: ‘The critical side of Foucault’s thought was rather directed to the “naturalness” through which “systems of thought” maintain their hold over us’ (1991, p. 101).


The woman who loves: deconstructing the natural The contemporary image of the woman teacher seems strongly bound to her ‘natural’ maternal qualities. Steedman has argued that this externally imposed motherhood might be the source of much of the frustration women teachers experience today: ‘Simone de Beauvoir calls the having of children the swiftest route to a woman’s slavery. I know that you do not need to bear children in order to have them. As in most primary school classrooms, they rarely left me’ (1992, p. 53). In the arena of power games the mother/teacher construct has several times turned the tables on the players. As a nineteenth-century discourse, it was used for the mass recruitment of cheap and submissive teachers, a need that became urgent with the expansion of state schooling after 1870. Women, on the other hand, saw teaching as an acceptable way to become ‘other’ than wives and mothers, or to evade poverty and ‘go up into the next class’. In considering women’s involvement in education, Madeline Grumet (1988) has stressed the pervasive impact of patriarchy on the discourses and practices that led to the ‘feminization of teaching’. Grumet, however, has seen women teachers’ experiences as positive sites of power and creativity that not only influenced their teaching practices, but geared their existential and professional mobility. In this light, the deployment of the mother/teacher relationship has a genealogy of conflicting episodes and discontinuities that make up a quite extraordinary and problematic puzzle. As Steedman (1985, 1992) has commented, the pedagogical model of mothering which has become a dominant discourse particularly within primary schooling, is a relatively recent cultural artefact and has been created in the classrooms by women who were not natural mothers. Steedman has noted that the real Victorian middle-class mother would devote very little time to her children who were otherwise looked after by other women, paid to do so, while Miller has commented that the working-class mother of the same period, would have so much to do that it was practically impossible to attend to her children: ‘So the teacher was not only an idealised mother but a compensatory mother, a mother designed to make up for the pretty serious shortcomings of most real mothers’ (Miller 1996, p. 102). At the end of the nineteenth century, it was considered quite natural that unmarried women would perform their maternal teaching roles unproblematically. Soon, however, single women became a ‘problem’ and a social threat, things changed and unmarried teachers faced an increasing social hostility. While, however, unmarried teachers were seen as a threat to family values and their female pupils, marriage bars in education were introduced between 1921 and 1923. The marriage bar


was used in discourses aiming to protect family values: married women teachers were presented as neglecting their own families for the sake of their work. Whether married or unmarried, women teachers were threatening well-established patriarchal structures. In the Foucauldian notion of bio-politics, the body of women, their nature, became the site upon which state policies wishing to control the workforce women teachers represented, were implemented and discourses rationalizing and sustaining such state interventions were formed. The pieces of woman, wife, mother, teacher have never really ‘fitted’ together and their combination continues to be unstable and risky. The controversial discussions, different stances and structural arrangements regarding women teachers, marriage and mothering provide a strong paradigm of what Foucault has described as the polyvalence of discourses. As Foucault sees it, in a certain system of a ‘political economy’ of truth, discourses are often in opposition to each other and events are located in a whole lot of different levels, producing different effects (Foucault, 1980b, p. 114). It would, therefore, be interesting to take a closer look at the politics of truth around the compatibility of women teachers and marriage, along the five traits Foucault has sketched in his analyses. First, ‘truth is centred on the form of scientific discourse and the institutions which produce it’ (p. 131). The scientific form of the discourses woven around women’s ‘compatibility’ with teaching were around the naturalness of the maternal instincts of women, which turned them into the ‘angel of the house’ or ‘the angel of the classroom’. Second, ‘it is subject to constant economic and political incitement’ notes Foucault (p. 131), which, in the case of women’s involvement in teaching, applies to the already referred to economic, political and social conditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which first created the need for the mass recruitment of women in teaching, but later sought ways to solve the problem of unemployment by getting rid of them. Third ‘it is the object, under diverse forms, of immense diffusion and consumption’ and fourth ‘it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic apparatuses (university, army, writing, media)’ (p. 131). As already discussed in Chapter 3, ideas and discourses about women, teaching, family and domesticity circulated around a number of apparatuses, became prominent themes of journalistic articles and/or literary writing, and informed everyday sayings, ideas, conceptions and practices. Finally ‘it is the issue of a whole political debate and social confrontation


(“ideological” struggles)’, concludes Foucault (p. 132). This is an important issue to be considered, since it enlightens the stage of the war of discourses, the site where the previous four strategic traits in the ‘politics of truth’ are contested, disputed and resisted, but also recur, and are re-established perhaps on different levels and in different configurations. In relation to women teachers and marriage, it is the case that women were used as a cheap labour force to reform and educate the children of the people, but it is also the case that some women used teaching to cross the boundaries of the private domestic circle and avoid the fate/curse of getting married and bearing children. Hovering between the public and the private, women frequently found themselves trapped in their ‘conquered territory’ of teaching. Whichever the case, however, they fought against reactionary structures and ideologies, adopted strategies that reversed the restrictive situations that were being imposed upon them and negotiated their place in the world. The discourses which turned out to be dominant at times were not simply dictated by some powerful apparatuses. They were also the result of endless ideological struggles and resistance. Since discourses never cease to confront with and fight against each other, the dangerous ‘liaison’ of maternal nature and teaching has been relatively recently reworked by feminist theorists, attempting to intervene in the discursive formation of the conditions of women’s existence in education today. Feminist theories that deal with the female self in education have been trying to transcend a dichotomy that women teachers experience in their everyday life: combining patterns of a social, but at the same time autonomous self. In such a context, and drawing on Gilligan’s (1982) influential care debate, Nel Noddings (1994) has focused her interest on the ethic of caring and its implications for teaching. Drawing on Ruddick’s (1990) elaboration of ‘maternal thinking’ Noddings’ suggestion is that ‘caring as a rational moral orientation and maternal thinking [ . . . ] are richly applicable to teaching’ (1994, p. 175). There are two binding concepts that appear highly problematic in the above statement: ‘caring’ and ‘maternal thinking’. As has been argued, women’s acts of care-giving, far from being freely chosen moral commitments, have been historically developed within patriarchal structures which they have served to sustain and perpetuate. Moreover, ‘stressing the values of empathy and nurturance or care and contextual thinking as distinctly female [ . . . ] is potentially dangerous to the feminist cause (Scaltsas, 1992, p. 23). However, the teacher who cares offers an anti-paradigm of the model of the teacher who is subject to the managerial prerogative in a world in


which education is compelled to submit to the rigid laws of the market. It is the case that currently in the UK there is an attempt to render the teachers into a ‘bundle of competencies’ – discrete skills which constitute the teacher as a ‘competent technician’. In this light the pattern of caring pedagogy appears to resist the ‘technicalization’ of education. Again, however, care and love need not be associated with some special features of femininity. Avoiding essentialism, but still retaining the privilege of being emotionally involved in the lives of others is a difficult and risky project, but I address these problematics towards the end of the chapter, where I explore strategies of resistance being adopted by feminist educators.1

Juggling with time restrictions I have argued that in their moving out into the world, women carried their ‘natural tasks’ in their baggage and in the historical and cultural context of the nineteenth century accommodated themselves to semipublic spheres of life, ‘rolling’ themselves into new types of enclosures, the school classroom. Dorothy Richardson has most forcefully painted the suffocation of the school enclosure, in her path-breaking novel Pilgrimage: The sunlight in this little schoolroom was telling her of other sunlights, vast and unbroken, somewhere – coming, her own sunlights, when she should have wrenched herself away [ . . . ] The girls did not know where she belonged. They were holding her. But she would go away, to some huge open space. (Richardson, 1995, pp. 287–8) I have further argued that in the public sphere of school, the classroom has functioned as a private zone within which the woman teacher is in a position of power, which however she cannot exercise, since this power is ‘informal, fragile and constrained’ (Edwards, 1993, p. 18), an assimilation of the power women have as mothers of families. The issue of powerlessness in teaching is, of course, more complicated than simply defined by gendered inequalities, and has historically involved both male and female teachers (Lortie, 1975). This historical powerlessness of teachers is, however, further reproduced and perpetuated within schools, where power relations define the different and sometimes contradictory positions teachers inhabit, according to the subject they teach and, furthermore, along ‘traditional’


discrimination lines, like age, race and gender. In focusing, however, on gender-related ‘space problems’ within a wider network of power relations within schools, it seems that in their passage to the twentyfirst century, women are still oscillating between public and private, two spheres that remain separated, while they interact and impinge upon each other, creating crises, conflicts and dilemmas in women’s lives. In the light of this problematic, it has been suggested that women ‘are trapped between subordination in the private sphere and subordination in the public sphere’ (Pascall in Edwards, 1993, p. 18). In addition, sociological work and writing on women and teaching has documented a series of discourses and practices that configure women’s controversial status in education, in terms of career opportunities and working conditions (Acker, 1989, 1994). What I believe is dispersed in such discourses, ideologies and practices is the difficulty women face in attempting to fashion a self that transcends the restrictions and limitations of both the private and the public spheres. Thus, the ambivalent persona of the female educator is invested by the accumulation of a series of layers that emerge from the gaps, ruptures and interstices women have slipped into, as they have been trying to avoid being positioned in the social structuring of a world that recognizes them only as belonging subjects, usually wives, mothers, daughters or sisters of enclosed spaces, like those of their families. Here is a page from the diary of a woman teacher, holding a senior position in adult education (Holding On, 1994): 7.15: My husband gets up and drives to Canterbury where he teaches part time. Breakfast and organizing children for school. 10.00: Go to my office and try to catch up on projects. 12.30: Go to another branch where I have senior arrangement responsibility. Pick up some art materials for my class on the way. Talk issues over with the branch secretary while I eat a sandwich. Check everything is functioning as it should be. 1.20: Set up my class, (life drawing). Class goes well, [ . . . ] I give them feedback that the borough inspectors were impressed by their recent visit to the college . . . 4.30: Talk to a colleague about the collapse of the adult education service in another Borough on the way to the tube. Go home feeling guilty at leaving early.


5.30: Arrive home and cook the children’s supper and discuss the events of their day. 6.40: Go to the doctor with all the children in tow...My husband meets me at the surgery and we all go home. The above autobiographical extracts mostly give voice to everyday frustrations which, however problematic in terms of their referentiality, mediate the life experiences of ‘real’ women teachers of today. ‘Real’ women can work in the adult education sector, and have a nuclear family with a husband and children and everything. In an almost magical way they can combine housework, child-care and the responsibilities of a senior position in adult education. In the time and space of a workday they continually move in and out personal and public boundaries. Women have been described as ‘time-poor’ (Edwards, 1993, p. 64). Everything seems to be a result of good organization of time. The question of the expenditure of time is not simply quantitative: it is strictly structured by the time requirements of others’ lives (p. 64). Sometimes women will even feel ‘guilty’, when they have managed not to be utterly exhausted. Women are reported to feel guilty about how they decide to allocate their time, about the responsibility of time combinations and above all, about having time to themselves. Women can also be primary teachers, single mothers and part-time students in higher education. In juggling themselves between so many roles they have to succeed in what Foucault has described as the exhaustive use of time, ‘extracting from time even more available moments, even more useful forces’ (Foucault 1991a, p. 154). School again, but Monday is the good day. I only teach for four hours. However I had to apply for a day’s leave on Friday, the day of my college presentation and the headmaster was far from understanding. Since I had an hour off I rushed to the supermarket and then to a stationer’s to buy some transparencies for my presentation. School again, – the exhaustive use of time. Back home, I left my daughter with my brother’s girlfriend and rushed to the College. I had to collect an interlibrary loan. Back home I had to help my daughter with her maths. After she had gone to bed, I went on working for my presentation. My partner did not turn up or call, I think it is better if we have some time to ourselves. I went to bed rather early and read a little before I slept: ‘The Passion of Michel Foucault’. (Holding On, 1994)


As I have already argued, the arrangement of time is exceptionally important in lives that run in between work obligations, child-care and personal expansion. The student role adds more conflict to the already tense wife/partner and mother private roles of women. Although I am exploring the paradoxical issue of women teachers/students in higher education, later on in this chapter, what I want to stress here is how radically women’s lives are affected by their decision to return to study. For women and the ‘others’ around them, taking time to study, means taking time for themselves. From a Foucauldian perspective, power games create moments and points of resistance. In striving to negotiate time and space for themselves women often come into conflict with their partners who feel neglected. In her research on the lives of mature women students, Edwards (1993) has found that the various threats men feel about their female partners returning to education have often ended relationships. However, conflicts in women’s lives do not occur in a social void. Individuals struggle to cope within certain limits of freedom and choice. These limits may be negotiable, but not always on an individual level. Facing the rigid behaviour of the headmaster/headmistress, or coping with the rejection of your partner, requires more than good time management. It is more an issue of collective reaction, of resisting socially and politically imposed structures and limitations on individual lives. It provides a good example of the personal becoming political and vice versa. Sometimes ‘real’ women can work in further education and have grown-up ‘children’: ‘Get home to find my eighteen year old daughter frying sausages whilst simultaneously talking on the phone. Grease everywhere! Spend half an hour cleaning up the mess before sorting out some edible food to eat’ (Holding On, 1994). Is it again about the problematic relationship between mothers and daughters? Isn’t there any exception in the case of feminist women teachers at least? Unfortunately, it seems that there isn’t. The tension of teaching affects women’s social relations with others, the way they are outside the ‘greedy’ educational institutions, their everyday attitudes and behaviour. Steedman has most powerfully recounted how women teachers find difficulty in switching off and on, when they move between home and school and how school devours their whole existence: ‘I loved my children and worked hard for them, lay awake at night worrying about them, spent my Sundays making workcards [ . . . ] My back ached as I pinned their paintings [ . . . ] We laughed a lot, cried a lot’ (1992, p. 53).


The textual selves that are inscribed in the above autobiographical writings seem to be selves in a continuous interaction with ‘others’. Of course, social interaction does not apply only to women. What is significantly different for the female social self, however, is the ways these ‘others’ are involved in the place women occupy in the world, how they intervene in the ways they ‘negotiate themselves’ and take decisions regarding their lives and careers. Thus, what seems to emerge as a ‘truth effect’ is that, however ‘independent’ women have come to be, they have never stopped caring for others. The tasks of care seem to be the source of much of the frustration women teachers feel today and which is expressed as ‘tiredness’: Teach first thing, sort out fairly boring admin. My Faculty Co-ordinator asks to see me for a meeting [ . . . ] Early evening: attend union branch committee meeting [ . . . ] leave meeting feeling exhausted [ . . . ] Evening: feel sick with tiredness, can hardly speak, shuffle around the house, eat some food, go to bed, still feeling very stressed out. (Holding On, 1994) Tiredness is, of course, a general characteristic of mental work in high modern society. It is, furthermore, a phenomenon directly and historically associated with the teaching profession. As Collet was commenting: The result is that we see girls following the stream and entering the teaching profession; after a few years, growing weary and sick of it, tired of training intellects, and doubtful about the practical value of the training, or altogether careless of it; discontented with a life for which they are naturally unsuited, and seeing no other career before them. (1902, p. 104) Tiredness is also associated to the gradual loss of youth and feelings of disillusionment about life and chances and opportunities. As Collet was again noting about the assistant mistresses: ‘In the majority of cases they are devoted to their profession, for the first few years at least; and they only weary of it when they feel that they are beginning to lose some of their youthful vitality, and have no means of refreshing mind and body’ (1902, p. 57). Lortie (1957, p. 88) has described teaching as ‘career-less’ in terms of the very few opportunities it offers for the movement upward. He notes that the majority of young teachers enter teaching with the intention of making a decisive career move at a certain point and abandoning the


classroom, adding, however, that men and women have different prospects in thinking about their future in teaching. Moving into the twenty-first century and confronting the increasing demands and pressures of teaching, this inability to ‘refresh’ oneself, to use Collet’s expression, can become uncontrollable and go beyond limits. It is not very difficult for the self to be crushed under the overdemanding pressures of greedy educational institutions: This could be a pleasant/tense day. I have arranged to have lunch with two friends, both of whom are in the field of ‘Early Years’ Education. One is a Head Teacher of a large Nursery School outside London, the other [ . . . ] is unfortunately at the moment on ‘indefinite stress leave’. This is all very difficult. I feel sympathy because I know only too well how easy it is to be ‘victimised’ in a work situation. The things people loathe most in the ‘caring’ work arena are those people who are perceived to ‘rock the boat’. (Holding On, 1994) Twice already, I have referred to the term ‘greedy’. Education and family have been described as ‘greedy institutions’ in the sense of demanding ‘exclusive and undivided loyalty’ (Edwards, 1993, p. 62). In the analysis of the discourses and practices that constitute the reality of disciplinary institutions, Foucault has stressed the importance of space and time arrangements in the organization of such institutions. Space/ time is, indeed, of vital importance in the structuring of individual lives and collective attitudes. The organization of time in schools affects the way individuals, and especially women, structure both their private and public lives. As has been commented, ‘the emergence of time as a regulator of activities in school may provide a basic socialisation into subordination to time in other institutional contexts’ (Ball et al., 1984). Women feel obliged to conform to specific time arrangements, since time does not belong to them. They are expected to offer time rather than ‘have’ it. The giving of time relates the female self to others’ lives. It is a symbol of caring. Changing selves in a changing world? Clearly while there have been significant reforms in texts, practices and ideas in education, these have not really led to essential changes in social relationships. Women teachers continue to experience the constraints of the various forms of power that work together in a complex and mutually reinforcing process. School, family and work form a repressive triangle within which women teachers feel more and more suffocated.


Moreover, although historical, political and social events at both global and local levels have altered the professional conditions and the institutional settings in which teachers work, it is still very much the case that teachers find difficulty in defining themselves as workers or professionals and it is indeed quite complicated to separate out what particular tasks and/or working obligations teaching does or should include. Miller (1996) has pointed out that there is nowadays an endless list of non-teaching obligations that form part of a teacher’s work. In Du Gay’s notion of the ‘post-entrepreneurial revolution’ teachers are expected to wholly devote themselves to the service of their school (Ball, 1997, p. 325), such a devotion being necessary for the security of their employment and the prosperity of their institution (Willmot in Ball, 1997, p. 325). Thus, it is considered quite normal that non-teaching tasks are ‘part of the job’ and this situation is blurring even more common perceptions of what sort of a job teaching is. Within such a confusion of notions, discourses and false expectations, it is almost taken for granted that women teachers are the right persons to carry the burden of caring responsibilities, much more than men (Measor and Sikes, 1992, p. 117). In terms of career opportunities within teaching, it is also the case that although women represent the vast majority of teachers, they may be stuck at the base of the hierarchical pyramid. Acker (1989, 1994) has shown that the career chances for each sex in education are quite unequal. Paradoxically, the ‘commonly accepted’ model of the graceful woman teacher, through which women have found a passage to slip into public life, turns out to be a major impediment to a career in education. In dominant discourses of school management, although women are admitted to be ‘in power’ deriving from their institutional positions, they are not considered efficient in exercising power. It is through their position as women and not as teachers that power evades them in such discourses. As Walkerdine has noted, ‘relations of power are not invested in unitary individuals in any way which is solely one essentially derived from their material and institutional position’ (1990, p. 16). It should perhaps be noted here, that modern discourses of management have recently constructed the image of the female executive who relies upon the graceful and delicate characteristics of her female nature and turns out to steer employees more effectively than the old disciplinarian male manager. These patterns of management, however, are no less oppressive for women, since the latter are expected to draw on essentialist characteristics of their sex, perform their femininity, so as to be effective and successful.2


The problem of establishing power, or reiterating it in modern configurations, is not the only flaw inherent in the persona of the woman teacher. Miller (1996, p. 100) has pointed out the ‘common sense’ that the female teacher fails to transmit serious knowledge and occupies a very low position in terms of academic competency. As has been commented, even when some women teachers happen to be disciplinarian they are again accused of losing their femininity, of being cold and of leading themselves to isolation and unhappiness (Cunnison, 1989, p. 159). Miller has further noted that the term of ‘career woman’ has turned out to implicate negative qualities for the person it describes (1996, p. 106). The way women teachers make sense of themselves is lost in a consequence of paradoxes and negations, notions and patterns of existence that keep being revoked – what Teresa de Lauretis (1990) has described as the ‘nonbeing’ of women.

Going out, going up, going beyond Miller (1996) has noted that in living and working within contradictions and paradoxes, many women who went into teaching have found different versions of what teachers are, of what teaching is and of what this work can ultimately offer both to the teachers and their pupils or students. These teachers have long occupied themselves with building bridges and trying to unfold different dimensions of pedagogy. This search and experimentation remains, however, at a highly personal level. Nowadays more and more women teachers feel ambivalent about their job, and it is often the case that active women, like Steedman at the beginning of this chapter, tend to abandon teaching for good. This tendency to get away as a result of intense discontent with their job can be traced back as for as the very beginning of women’s working lives as teachers: Sun. 28th September 1879: Again comes that ‘Tomorrow I go’; which for seven years now has been the chief feature in my life and I go out again into loneliness, conflict and silent work [ . . . ] This third year at St. Andrews was to me even more strangling and choking than before. I wanted to tear it right in half and get out, out into air and freedom and to be myself. All through my life I have been an artist manqué and there was a lion within that raged and roared at times [emphasis added]. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 35, p. 386)


This is how powerfully Constance Maynard expresses her drive to get away from St Andrews, where she worked for three years as a teacher after her graduation from Girton College. The enthusiastic Girtonian pioneer needed only four years of teaching work to feel again trapped and suffocated within the educational institutions that, only seven years before, were representing for her, a heaven of freedom and creativity. What she was really looking forward to, after only four years of teaching, was to fulfil her life’s ambition, to cultivate her passion for art. And that is what she actually did: she left teaching for almost two years and attended the famous Slade School in London: So I toiled through the loneliness of Cheltenham and the extreme tension and trial of the three years at St. Andrews, which left me with a pervading sense of failure. I had tried my very best and had failed. Then came the sudden bursting of bonds, the leaving my miseries behind in the orange-coloured sunset sky that glowed and the plunge into the entire freedom and happiness of my two Sessions at the School of Art. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 44, pp. 2–3) Despite the initial difficulties and disappointments, Maynard loved teaching. She saw the two years at Slade School as a pleasant break that gave her new strength to go on with teaching, which she did by founding Westfield College. Other women teachers, however, would leave teaching for good. As it turned out, from the very beginning, women would use teaching as a path to higher education, as well as to other professions and careers. This was the case for Clara Collet, who took a teaching post in Leicester, while preparing herself for a degree in higher education: ‘I should only have 80 pounds a year to begin with but [ . . . ] the headmistress would give me every facility for preparing myself for the Intermediate Arts examination in July 1879 and the Final BA in October 1880’ (Collet, unpublished, p. 6). It is through this very route of teaching and studying that she is finally led to the decision to leave teaching: My diary makes no reference to my decision to [ . . . ] study at University College and take my MA degree in Moral and Political Philosophy [ . . . ] nor does it mention that I told Miss Leicester I was giving up my post in July 1885 (Collet, unpublished, p. 75) Studying in higher education was not only a privilege of teachers from the middle classes. As Copelman has noted (1996, p. 171), many


London elementary teachers pursued advanced degrees through the University of London, at the end of the nineteenth century. From a perspective of change, women teachers have, from their very early stages, sought to change themselves through education. Educating others, they have come to feel a strong need to further educate themselves as well. This drive has created another paradox dualism, that of being a teacher and a student at the same time. Currently women from different occupations, teachers among them, are returning to further and higher education in significant numbers (see Edwards, 1993, p. 6). Recounting the approaches she uses to encourage academic writing among teachers who pursue master’s or doctoral studies, Miller notes that ‘almost all of them are women working in primary or secondary schools, or in further or higher education’ (1996, p. 258). What has caused this wave of returnees to education? Is it their desire to become better professionals? Is it their ambition to climb the hierarchical pyramid of education, by gathering more qualifications? Is it their feeling exhausted and used up in the classrooms? Is it what Walkerdine (1990) has defined as the schoolgirl’s fiction, this performative part of femininity that always leaves women with a sense of incompetence and unfulfilled goals in life? Or is it a sign that women seeking to reinvent themselves find in education the transitional space that is essential for reflection upon themselves and their lives? I think that all these possibilities are valid in some ways. Although none of them can give a full account for women teachers’ tendency to return to education, they highlight the Foucauldian ‘care of the self’ as a major theme for women’s ‘will to knowledge’. The idea of education as a transitional space that offers women the opportunity to imagine themselves differently, has not occurred to me only through various empirical and theoretical readings. It has emerged from my own experience of becoming a mature post-graduate student, as well as my involvement in ‘Holding On’, a group of women teachers that was formed at the end of an MA in Urban Education course when some women teachers – there were only two men in the group, anyway – decided to keep meeting, writing, reading and talking about the way we perceived ourselves and the worlds of work and families around us. ‘Holding On’ was a support group that emerged from the good times we had during the two years of our MA course, which we wanted to sustain and prolong. We wanted in a way to keep a space for reflection in our lives and we saw that place in relation to our return to higher education and staying there longer than the structures of a post-graduate degree allowed.


Apparently, ‘Holding On’ created fragmented moments of transitional experience, and it offers partial and limited aspects of women teachers’ experiments with the self. However, as I have already argued in Chapter 1, disparate and ‘improbable events’ are of significant importance for the methodological strategy of eventalization, which is a central theme of the genealogical analysis. In this view, the isolated ‘event’ of the ‘Holding On’ experience can be an important ‘detail’ in the cartography of women teachers’ lives and in the exploration of the ‘myriads’ of relations which are interwoven in the genealogical ‘dispositif’, the apparatus of women’s position in education, that this study is attempting to construct. Surpassing the mind/body split Since education has indisputably disrupted the unequal structure of gendered relationships, and has affected women’s position in the public world, it is not surprising that it is to education that women turn to remap their position in the public spheres of life. Education has historically been a field of struggles for women, an arena where feminism has evolved at both political and theoretical levels. In the area of higher education, feminists are gradually constructing new models of teachers, students and educational values. As Miller has noted, ‘most of the innovative pedagogic experiments of recent years have been conducted by feminist teachers in marginalised or alternative areas of further and higher education’ (1996, p. 53). Earlier on in this chapter, I have referred to the discourses of ‘caring pedagogy’ and the possible risks deriving from the adoption of essentialist stances. In the context of such problematization, feminist research in ‘outcast’ areas has shown that there exists, a sort or a part of the female self in education that wants to defend her right and choice to be a teacher, but without being obliged either to mother, or to be distant, authoritative, disciplinary or even a ‘post-modern’ caring manager. In a combination of the notions of Foucault’s specific intellectual and Gramsci’s engaged intellectual (Giroux, 1991, p. 57), this ‘other’ female educator seeks to contest the hegemonic discourses of the educational institutions and attempts to be joyful, passionate, erotic. In the search for an anti-authoritarian, but non-mothering pedagogy, feminist educators have reclaimed the ‘ars erotica’ of the pedagogical relationship, distinct from the tradition of male education in the classical antiquity. In bell hooks’ view, feminist teachers enter their classrooms as embodied subjects, adopting a pedagogy that dares to surpass the distinction between private and public and connects teaching practices to the world of emotions and feelings. As bell hooks sees it, recovering the


place of eros and eroticism in the classroom relates to ‘one of the central tenets of feminist critical pedagogy, the subversion of the mind/body split’ (hooks, 1994, p. 193). Eros is viewed not only in its relation to the sexual, but in a wider context as a force motivating people to seek knowledge so as to become critical and imaginative about their lives and the world around them. In Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks emphasizes the pleasure of teaching as both an act of resistance and performance, ‘countering the overwhelming boredom, uninterest and apathy [ . . . ] of the classroom experience [ . . . ] offering space for change, invention, spontaneous shifts’ (1994, pp. 10–11). In such a context, and returning to the debate I have addressed previously in this chapter, caring goes beyond women’s ‘natural inclinations’, becomes love, pathos, ecstasy and constitutes a basis for communication of differences and social solidarity: When I think about my life as a student, I can remember vividly the faces, gestures, habits of being of all the individual teachers who nurtured and guided me, who offered me an opportunity to experience joy in learning, who made the classroom a space of critical thinking, who made the exchange of information and ideas a kind of ecstasy. (hooks, 1994, p. 202) Surpassing the mind/body split is perhaps a path for women teachers to disentangle themselves from the constructed binary oppositions and paradoxes that dominate their lives and work, a path towards what Morwenna Griffiths has defined as the personal and public autonomy of the self (1995, p. 142). The paradoxical spaces of education I have already referred to the importance of education as a field for technologies of the self to be developed and to flourish. In his famous seminar on ‘Technologies of the Self’ at the University of Vermont in 1982, Foucault had located the roots of the development of selftechnologies in the pedagogical relationship and in describing himself he had stated: ‘I am not a writer, a philosopher, a great figure of intellectual life: I am a teacher’ (Martin, 1988, p. 9). The teacher/Foucault as a specific intellectual explores technologies of the self starting from Socrates’ pedagogical dialogue with Alkibiades, and thereby places his inquiries in the centre of traditional texts of classical antiquity on education. Thus, education has been, according to Foucault, the site par excellence, where technologies of the self emerged


and developed. While, however, women have followed the male tradition of working upon the self, they have decisively bent its lines. It is from the intersection of those different paths and crossroads, that dispersed images of women teachers as mothers, scholars, students, workers have emerged, to produce finally ‘the unique combination’ of the female persona as ‘dependent and independent, free and trapped’, the paradox of being a woman ‘at once captive and absent in discourse’. In this view, education has created paradoxical spaces, where the female self has attempted to surpass closed boundaries and to question the dichotomy of the feminized private and/or the masculine public. In exploring the paradoxical spaces of education, I have sketched out a cartography of various subject positions that the female self inhabits, not in a permanent manner, but rather moving around them, in a way I have edited a logbook of travels of the female subject. I have argued that, in travelling around unstable, ambivalent and contradictory subject positions, women have been trying to recreate patterns of their existence and imagine new gendered relations, where ‘women are neither the same as men, nor men’s opposite, nor the same as each other’ (Rose, 1993, p. 136). This is what I want to further theorize in the final chapter: technologies that the female self in education has developed in her passionate search of the Deleuzian quest of becoming ‘other’.

5 Technologies of the Female Self

In the previous chapters I have looked at various sets of discourses and practices within which women teachers at the turn of the nineteenth century cultivated technologies of the self. Following Probyn’s suggestion of ‘sexing the self’ (1993), it is now time to review how gender has bended the male tradition of the technologies of the self. In Foucault’s thought, the cultivation of the self is rooted in the Hellenistic and Roman world (1990b, p. 41). In this philosophical male tradition, the cultivation of the self was related to two important interrelated themes, the knowledge of the self and the care of the self. Knowledge of the self and care of the self did not always sit together unproblematically: In the Greek and Roman texts, it was assumed that the need to take care of oneself created the need to know yourself; in Foucault’s analysis, there was a subordination of knowledge to care. However, this relationship of care with knowledge has been reversed: ‘In the modern world, knowledge of oneself constitutes the fundamental principle’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 22). The relationship between care of the self and pedagogy is also problematical. In classical antiquity, care of the self was considered essential for the preparation of young men to enter the public life, to their becoming citizens. However, in the Hellenistic and Roman world, the necessity of the care of the self was expanded throughout the whole life span (Foucault, 1988a, p. 26). Foucault’s discussion has also revealed one more problematic relationship, that ‘between the care of self and philosophical love, or the relation to a master’ (1988a, p. 26). This relation to a ‘master’ was complicated, since it was not simply spiritual, but it most often involved sexual intercourse and in that light it was arranged upon highly hierarchical structures of power between the active and passive agents of these 154

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relationships. Being passive was not a problem for a boy, but to become a man, it was necessary that one should become active and this reversion had its own implications upon the development of the spiritual relation to the master, and the ultimate relation to knowledge and truth (Foucault, 1987a, p. 242). These four issues that have arisen in Foucault’s analysis from the problematic relation between care of the self, on the one side, and knowledge of the self, pedagogy, political activity and philosophical love, on the other side, will be critical points of reference in the deployment of what I have called the technologies of the female self. As already demonstrated in the discussion of the previous chapters, in Foucault’s analysis, the care of the self is not an abstract principle. It is an extensive activity that is diffused into various practices, types of attitudes, modes of behaviour and ways of living. The technologies, revolving around the theme of the care of the self, constitute an art, the art of living, while their common goal is conversion to self, and consequently relation to self, through an ethics of control. This relation to the self is conceived first in juridical and political terms, ‘one is his own master’ (Foucault, 1990b, p. 65) and second as a concrete relationship invoking pleasure: ‘Learn how to feel joy’ (p. 66). In such a theoretical configuration ethics and aesthetics are closely interrelated in the cultivation of the technologies of the self. Writing the genealogy of the subject, Foucault has placed the relationship one establishes with oneself, at the very heart of ethico/aesthetical quests, always in relation, however, to the way power intervenes most intimately onto the life of the individual. Foucault isolated two major aspects to the technologies of the self: first, the practices related to the technology of self-examination and second, the practices related to the technology of self-creation, speaking and writing about oneself. This second group of practices is also aimed at communication with others, the intensification of social relations, thus forming a set of social practices of care. As Foucault has noted, ‘these practices are nevertheless not something that the individual invents by himself. They are patterns that he finds in his culture and which are proposed, suggested and imposed on him by his culture, his society and his social group’ (Foucault, 1991c, p. 11). The examination of the self took various forms and was related to the reclusion of the self, a practice that allowed time and space for reflection. Studying and reading were activities that supported inner-directed examination and retrospection: ‘It was generally acknowledged that it was good to be reflective’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 27). ‘Writing was also important in the culture of taking care of oneself’, notes Foucault and


he traces various activities related to the writing of the self, including ‘taking notes on oneself to be reread, writing treatises and letters to friends to help them, and keeping notebooks in order ‘to reactivate for oneself the truths one needed’ (1988a, p. 27). Writing has also been a crucial theme in feminist explorations of the subject. As has been shown in Chapter 1, various feminist theorists have argued that selfwriting is an act par excellence, through which women have negotiated space and invented the vocabularies to constitute themselves. In this brief consideration of Foucault’s theoretical elaboration of the care of the self, I have adumbrated a set of notions and themes that will be critical in the discussion in this chapter. They relate to the necessity of the knowledge/care of the self in the education and the creation of the public persona of the subject, the critical role of self-examination and writing in the technologies of the self and, finally, the importance of the social practices of care. However, also of importance in the analysis of technologies of the self, are the different trends that were introduced in the culture of the self, when the practitioners of such technologies turned out to be women. I have already pointed out that women initially followed the legacy of the male philosophical tradition. However, the routes to the self often took different directions. There were good reasons for such diversions. The analysis of the previous chapters has shown that women often shaped their own self-techniques in conditions that did not encourage recollection and self-composure, but rather in the context of both external and internal conflicts, ruptures and contradictions. Emerging from a background of oppositions and controversies, the female practitioner of self-technologies envisioned herself not as a coherent, self-contained subject, but rather as a texture of various selves and threads of interweaving subjectivities. Fissures of female subjectivities, discontinuous fragments or ‘moments of being’ have therefore been ‘primal evidence’ in this genealogical study. Sometimes acute existential conflicts were traced when, in writing themselves, women attempted to integrate the multiplicity of fragmented experiences into a meaningful whole. Such conflicts, paradoxes and contradictions have been at the heart of feminist theorizations of the subject. Feminism as a critical philosophy has challenged the notion of the ‘universal subject of knowledge’. However, a theoretical and political paradox has appeared here; the crisis of the subject in the postmodern world contradicts with the need for feminists to find a subject position from where to speak, and this is a critical condition that postmodern feminist thought has to live with and go beyond.


Therefore, feminist philosophy has criticized power in/as discourse and has explored alternative forms of subjectivity. In the deployment of my genealogical analysis of the self of women teachers, I have already referred to Butler’s performative and parodic subjectivities (1990), to de Lauretis’ ‘eccentric subjects’, the paradox of being a woman (1990) and to Haraway’s notion of situated knowledges (1991). However differentiated these postmodern feminist approaches may be, particularly in the ways in which they deal with the critical notion of sexual difference, they all retain a corporeal basis from which to make their theoretical configurations of the female subject.1 Drawing on the influential work of Deleuze and Guattari (1983, 1988), Braidotti (1994, 2002) has suggested the notion of nomadism as a tool to theorize contemporary subjectivities, but also as a position that allows for different theorizations of female subjectivity and that opens up space for feminist politics to cohabit with other political and/or theoretical stances. Nomadism becomes a matter of bonding, of coalitions and interconnections and this, I think, is an interesting point of convergence for the theoretical explorations of this final chapter.2 In Braidotti’s reconfiguration, nomadic subjects are subjects in transition. They are not characterized by homelessness, but by their ability to recreate their homes everywhere. The nomad is not unified, but neither is it completely devoid of unity. The nomad passes through, connects, circulates, moves on; she makes connections and keeps coming back. The nomadic subjects cannot be integrated into established social structures, and react critically to the discourses and practices that have set the conditions of their existence in this world. ‘Nomadic consciousness is a form of political resistance to hegemonic and exclusionary views of subjectivity’, notes Braidotti (1994, p. 23) and relates it to the Foucauldian notion of counter-memory that has the possibility of ‘enacting a rebellion of subjugated knowledges’ (p. 25). Travelling is not essential in the condition of the nomad. ‘It is the subversion of set conventions that defines the nomadic state, not the literal act of travelling’, notes Braidotti (1994, p. 5). Nomadism is not a situation of being, but of becoming, in Deleuzian thought: ‘nomadic shifts designate therefore a creative sort of becoming; a performative metaphor that allows for otherwise unlikely encounters and unsuspected sources of interaction of experience and of knowledge’ (p. 6). Therefore, the female self, as a nomad, passes through different subject positions and, as a performative figure, is enabled to weave together different patterns of her experiences. This is a point where the discussion of feminist theorizations of the subject has come full circle to address


again the difficulties experienced by women teachers in putting together in writing, moments, fragments and pieces of themselves. In addressing these difficulties I now want to follow patterns of dissonance (Braidotti, 1991) in the technologies of the female self.

Living in transition: know thyself/know yourselves My being is becoming divided and at strife. On the one side stand the heart, the conscience and all the aims and aspirations supported by any education and on the other stands the intellect and power to reason, strong in its own clear and trenchant force. I can find a few points where they agree [ . . . ] For the most part the two sides are in deadly opposition and as they tug at my soul, I feel as though I should die under the strain. This is no use [ . . . ] Well, which I would rather be like? [ . . . ] the difference is like that between sand and rock. Let me follow the best I know. My heart cannot wait or it will starve to death; my reason can and must wait. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 20, p. 473) This is how Constance Maynard expresses mixed feelings of ‘hopes and hesitation’, in relation to the new directions her life has taken. Her will to know thyself interferes with her feelings. ‘Heart’ on the one hand and the ‘power to reason’ on the other seem to be incompatible in Maynard’s self-understanding. She feels disconcerted. She conceptualizes her being as ‘divided’ and at ‘strife’ between feelings and reason. Her passionate quest for knowledge and the ability to reason runs the risk of leading her to a life of emotional sterility. Feminist theorists have argued extensively that within a cultural system where masculine values dominate, a very firm dichotomy has been established between the feminine and the notion of rationality. This binary opposition has endured tenaciously until the end of the nineteenth century and has become a topos in Western political and moral thought. In this context, however, it is interesting to see how Maynard, slipping in between discourses, ultimately leaves this dilemma open. Although she decides to ‘follow her heart’, this is a decision that relates to the urgency of balancing herself, so as to be able to go on coping. The uncertainty fits into the patterns of her life and becomes a source of continuous self-interrogation and discontent. The imperative of know thyself initiates a voyage into the contradictions and ambiguities of her inner self. Know thyself is rendered into know yourselves – and


learn to live with all of them. But how can that be possible? Here are some thoughts written on her thirtieth birthday: Thus life is slipping, slipping away from me and while most people have settled prospects by thirty, I cannot believe that life can form in all its fullness but seems to be waiting, ever waiting for some new ‘dawn’ and to feel this is only a transition, only one stage in my slow and uncertain growth. (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 35, pp. 19, 24) Living in transition is how Maynard conceives and expresses her experience of living with multiple selves. It is a time when she has accomplished many of her life aspirations; she has graduated from Girton College and has worked as a teacher for three years. However, she still cannot compose a coherent picture of herself. She is waiting for ‘a new dawn’. She wants to change again. A feeling of living in existential transit is a theme that often recurs in women teachers’ autobiographical writings. Braidotti has expressed her special attachment to ‘places of transit, [ . . . ] in between zones, where all ties are suspended and time stretched to a sort of continuous present’ and has further defined them as ‘oases of nonbelonging, spaces of detachment, no (wo)man’s lands’ (1994, pp. 18–19). Although Braidotti refers here to real places of transit, like stations and airport lounges, which she associates with sources of artistic creation for women, I think that the metaphor of transit can be used to stress women’s experiences of existential fluidity in real and/or imagined spaces. This is Collet in transition, at a critical point in her life as a teacher, where she is very close to abandoning teaching for good: I think I am leaving off being a girl; the future does not look very bright and that is a pretty sure sign with me that I am losing the power of building castles in the air which has been my chief delight until now. I am almost coming to a turning point in life I think and how I shall turn out I don’t know. I have no particular ambition have no special power and neither my religious nor social views suggest my clear aim is to be followed. I don’t feel exactly unhappy while I am writing this; I only feel emotionless. Tomorrow I shall enjoy life as much as ever and laugh at what I have written; (Collet, unpublished, pp. 70, 71)


Collet understands the transitional stage in her life through a loss. For her, ‘losing the power of building castles in the air’ is bound to the fact of losing youth; she admits that dreaming the impossible has been ‘her chief delight’. Griffiths has stressed the importance of dreaming impossible dreams in the process of self-creation: ‘To change oneself personally and collectively, requires a leap of the imagination, from the current assumptions and patterns into new forms of identity’ (1995, p. 191). As she grows older, Collet sees the joy of imagining a different self fading. Her image of a grown-up self should be more serious and more down-to-earth. However, she has no clear ideas about what her future self should be like. She identifies the ‘negative’ points of her self – no ambition, no special power, no strong social or religious beliefs. She feels that she lacks all the characteristics that would constitute a coherent, determined (male) identity. In addition she cannot discern emotions. Female gifts have flown away as well. What is this creature then? Where can she find a place for herself? Since she cannot find visible answers, she prefers to try and forget about them. Her future is uncertain and makes her feel anxious and agitated. She thus prefers to enjoy her present, by contemplating the good moments of her past. Foucault has noted that the refusal of a mental attitude turned to the future and the positive value given to the past, is a general theme in the practices of the self in the Stoic and Epicurean philosophy (Foucault, 1997b, p. 212). Thus, when her ‘tomorrow’ will have become a thing of the past, Clara will be able to enjoy life and laugh at herself. In distancing herself from her gloomy thoughts, she attempts to slide towards the light side of being. Life can be both unbearably heavy and/or unbearably light, Milan Kundera reminds us. Feminism liberates in women amongst other things, a desire for lightness, notes Braidotti (see Illustration 12) and she points to the merry spirit of the first wave of feminism, ‘when it was clear that joy and laughter were profound political emotions and statements’ (1994, p. 167). In Chapter 2, I had traced such joie de vivre in women’s lives within the educational institutions they had entered as teachers and/or students. Passions were also discerned in Chapter 3, in the ways women used their sexuality to open channels for self-creation. Drawing on the Deleuzian idea of the possitivity of passions, Braidotti has theorized feminist subjectivity as an object of desire for women, creating intense passions in their lives (1994, p. 167). It is therefore striking to come across occasions when early women teachers, in distancing themselves from the miseries of their lives, invent humorous ways to create parodic exits from the maze they sometimes find themselves in.

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Illustration 12 Students lying in long grass Feminism liberates in women amongst other things, a desire for lightness


As I have pointed out at the beginning of this chapter, the practices related to self-examination constitute one of the two major interrelated groups in the sets of technologies of the self, the other being the practices of self-creation. In Chapter 2, self-control, retreat to the self, contemplation, and silence were frequently traced in women’s self-writings. I now want to revisit these sets of self-technologies and see how they have indeed diverted from the male tradition Foucault has been drawing upon. In her essay the ‘Five Levels of Life’, Maynard refers to the ‘third level of life’ as the ‘Self-controlled Life’ (1910, p. 25). She further describes the self-controlled character as ‘so firm that it expands in solitude, is unshaken in misfortune and can be happy unlooked at, unthanked, unappreciated’ (p. 26). Contemplating the ways in which she should work upon herself, Clough was writing: ‘I must work hard to get myself steady again. I must not let my thoughts have too much liberty to run on their own course. I still want quickness in all I do, and constant mental exertion’ (Clough, 1897, p. 24). As already discussed in Chapter 2, for both Maynard and Clough the ability for self-control is bound to the ability of working hard and being productive and successful (see Illustration 13). However, it does not stop there, it goes beyond that, it is a way of building a strong character that can survive the difficulties and miseries of life. In terms of the male tradition of the technologies of the self, self-control is not given by nature, it is an ability that is cultivated by hard work upon oneself and needs continuous care so as not to fade or disappear. Drawing on this legacy, Clough records how this idea of self-control was of concern to her since early childhood. She recalls in particular a stormy sea voyage from America to England when, during the long days which they spent in a cabin, the old nurse who was with them whiled away the time ‘with a variety of horrible stories, some about our relations and people that we knew [ . . . ] that showed they had great want of self-control and sense’ (p. 9). She definitely points out that these things ‘made a great impression on me, and sowed the first seeds of my great desire to learn to rule myself and manage my mind and get something to occupy me’ (p. 9). Beale’s biographers recount several stories about her objection to fainting, which she directly related to a lack of self-control. Raikes records how ‘Miss Beale’ had a way of stopping just as one began to droop and saying sharply, “Miss Jones! Control yourself and stand properly” (1910, p. 70). Another of the pioneers, Frances Mary Buss, who ‘could herself be so uncontrolled’ according to her biographer (Kamm, 1958), thought that self-control was ‘the prerequisite of a proper sense of duty, the watchword of every human being’s life’ (p. 228). As Buss declared in her

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Illustration 13 Laboratory, 1902 Science, mathematics, philosophy: women were proving that they were able to discipline themselves towards concrete and difficult targents


weekly homilies to her pupils, ‘Self-control will help you to shape your life right in every direction. It will keep you from hurtful indulgence in mere pleasure in food, in dissipation of time, and social enjoyments. It will make you put away pleasure at the call of duty’ (p. 228). According to her biographer, for Buss ‘genuine self-control over thought and speech’ was ‘one of the greatest and most important aims of life’ (p. 228). It is no wonder that the technique of self-control which was founded in Stoicism would be so influential in shaping women teachers’ ideals and perceptions. Mythology, history and literature are all full of foolish women leading frivolous lives and who are ultimately responsible for all sorts of calamities and disasters. As a consequence, or perhaps reaction, the counter-discourses of such ideas and perceptions about female nature would be founded upon the construction of a self-controlled, ‘prudent’ female character. Related to self-control, comes the theme of silence. According to Beale’s biographer: When Dorothea first came to Cambray she found already in existence a silence rule, under which no girl might speak to another during school hours without permission. The rule was not being observed; but believing as she did that ‘obedience to rule’ was essential, she decided to enforce it. Unlimited permission to talk, she considered, would merely lead to the making of undesirable friendships, would encourage gossips and betrayal of confidences; whereas long periods of silence, which might only be broken when really necessary, would inculcate habits of self-control. (Kamm, 1958, p. 60) From a Foucauldian perspective this rule of silence might appear as an exemplary way of repression. Within the disciplinary space of the college human beings are openly prevented from expressing themselves freely and communicating with each other. However, this undoubtedly disciplinary rule is a response to the possibilities of gossip, a phenomenon that has been historically and culturally attributed to the female nature. For a pioneer of women’s education, silence was a way for women to keep themselves together, put their thoughts in a logical order, think more, think deeper and think better. What is interesting to consider here is how those pioneers used to think in terms of bipoles and pairs of contradictions. For them it would have to be either silence or gossip and they would see no space where alternative forms of verbal communication could occur.3 It was therefore for the women students of those colleges to undertake the burden of inventing other modes of talking with each other seriously or in a light way that would entertain them


without involving them in gossip. As already discussed in Chapter 2, women students of colleges did find ways of holding discussion groups as part of their evening gatherings to amuse themselves. In their autobiographical writings, however, women ‘confess’ that they are often reflective and silent, not as a result of choice, but, rather, of necessity. Therefore, in strictly examining herself, Clough admits that: ‘I am still a great coward in speaking out my opinions, indeed in speaking at all’ (Clough, 1897, p. 64) and she explains that ‘I have been so accustomed to conceal my thoughts, or veil them that it has become a habit and I have almost ceased to give an opinion’ (1897, p. 76). Although she resents her compulsory silence, later on in her life, she will advise her students to practice self-reclusion: ‘Two or three hours a day you can get to yourselves’ (p. 247). This is presumably because her experience of solitude has not always been negative. She discerns differences between being socially and spiritually solitary and ultimately believes in the necessity of solitary moments in one’s life: ‘I am not desolate or solitary in my family by any means quite the contrary, yet in many of my thoughts and feelings especially about religion, I am solitary. I do not talk about them to anyone. But everyone must have a solitary place in his heart’ (p. 42). In Chapter 2, I have already referred to solitude as a practice women teachers followed in their college life and beyond. As Foucault has pointed out, in Stoic philosophy it was necessary to ‘retire into the self and stay there’ (Foucault, 1988a, p. 27). Retreat into oneself became a practice for the actual care of the self which was the ultimate goal of the technologies of the self. It was this tradition of attentiveness to oneself that women had the opportunity to follow in the context of their lives in the colleges, and would later carry with them when they left college and lead their lives as teachers. As Emily Davies wrote at the time she was working for the first women’s college: ‘Of all the attractions offered by the college life, probably the opportunity for a certain amount of solitude, so necessary an agent in the formation of character, will be the one most welcomed by the real student’ (Stephen, 1927, p. 176). Again, however, there are contradictions and dilemmas in women’s writings depicting their uncertainty in adopting male practices that had for so long oppressed them. Clough oscillates between solitude and sociability and attempts to find a balance in her life between the two. Smith describes herself as a mystic since very early in her life, and resents the sorrows this has caused her: ‘A decided mystic as I have been all my life, I at this time doubtless was passing through some of its inexpressible phases, and found deeps within deeps of what seemed


to me inextinguishable sorrow’ (1892, p. 62). However, her loneliness is counterbalanced by the satisfaction she takes from being alone and from the cultivation of her mind. This is how she paints her hard-working, solitary and miserable life with the Osborns, the family she had chosen to live with, because of their intellectual influence upon her: ‘They knew nothing of my sad reflections. But the spiritual discipline I gained from it was great [ . . . ] I felt myself continually growing calmer and stronger under it’ (p. 92). Later on in her life, solitude motivates Smith’s creative forces in writing poetry: ‘It was while at this house that I began regularly those long walks, along the Brampton road [ . . . ] to have a contemplative sit there [ . . . ] Many a line have I composed there “far from the madding crowd” ’ (p. 217). Silence is therefore experienced positively when it leads to self-development. This is how vividly Maynard depicts the silence of the room, while she was sitting for her entrance examinations to Girton College: ‘The complete silence of that inner room, the intent figures the scratching of pens, the urging forward of my mind to its best place, the splendid “now or never” of the crisis of life all was fascinating and inspiring’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 10, p. 299). Thus, in women teachers’ autobiographical texts, retreat, solitude and self-examination always revolve around binary oppositions and contradictions. In unfolding their lives, there is always the dark side of the moon, where they enter, being aware of the sorrows and sadness they are about to experience. Although they do not reveal their fears readily, they do not surpass them either. Writing about their fears is perhaps a way of exorcising them and it is to these writing activities that the discussion now turns.

Beyond dilemmas and fears: letter-writing as a technology of the self Long years of both bodily and mental confinement have left their shadows upon women’s experience of solitude and reclusion, in ways that are often transcribed in their autobiographical writings. Women experience the paradoxical coexistence of feelings of complacency and frustration in solitude and strive to interweave contradictory and inconsistent experiences and memories into the making of a new self. In such moments of crisis, writing letters to each other turned out to be a significant practice in the set of technologies of self-creation. Writing to her friend, Jeanne Borland, in August 1902, Winifred Mercier expressed her feelings in the following terms: ‘does not the terrible silence of things oppress you sometimes? [ . . . ] We are surrounded by such myriad life,


so many worlds; I am frightened in their presence’ (Grier, 1937, p. 37). This is from a letter about existential fears of silence that Mercier wants to share with Borland. Far from being stuck in gloomy thoughts, however, Mercier and Borland develop a close relationship through their correspondence, and their self becomes obviously a theme to work upon, and to be transformed through specific daily practices of care. Exchanging ideas about their reading designates a major level of their communication: What do you mean by reading Keats ‘at the dead of the night’? Villain! Villain!! Villain!!! I am so moved that I am forced to use exclamation marks. I don’t know, I have never found Keats cloying. I had better try him here. (p. 31) Reading sustains the practices of the self, notes Foucault, and he cites Seneca’s point that ‘one could not draw everything from one’s own stock or arm’ (Foucault, 1997b, p. 211). In writing to her friend and former pupil, Arnold, in August 1890, Beale surveys the books she is currently reading: ‘I have already begun a good read; all Lotze’s books on religion, [ . . . ] a good deal of Green’s philosophical works, [ . . . ] and endless magazines’ (Kamm, 1958, p. 384). In the middle of an argument with another old pupil of hers, who has become a writer of philosophy and poetry, Beale refers to a reading list: ‘Have you read Martineau’s Types of Ethical History? If not, do. Also Green’s Prolegomena to Ethics. Last summer I read Lotze’s Microcosmus, but I should recommend the two others rather’ (p. 389). Access to books is not always easy, however. This is how Mary Smith describes her love of books and reading: Whenever I had done what work I was set to do, my chief pleasure was to slip away unobserved into some quiet spot, where all unseen I could read till the last glimmer of day was lost in the lonely night. Often and often on wet evenings, or on Saturday afternoons, when released from household work, I would creep quietly up to the attic where the books were kept which was entered by a trap door. (Smith, 1892, p. 40) It is fascinating how Mary Smith uses so many verbs, adverbs and adjectives of secrecy – ‘slip away unobserved’, ‘quiet spot’, ‘creep quietly up’, ‘trap door’ – to describe her relationship with books and reading. It seems that her difficult access to reading is in a way mirroring her difficult access to herself. However, reading is also closely interrelated with writing in the practices of the self, ‘as a way of gathering in the


reading that was done and of collecting one’s thoughts about it’ (Foucault, 1997b, p. 211). Women teachers’ correspondence about their reading is not only a way to exchange thoughts about literary creation, but also a way to reflect upon themselves, through a critical reading of the ethics and morality of the textual characters. This is Winifred Mercier writing again to her beloved friend: ‘I have just finished “Harry Richmond”. Great book! I was absorbed. Don’t you like it? I find the father very painful, [ . . . ] Courage is the half of all virtues, I believe, because all the other fall to pieces without it’ (Grier, 1937, p. 31). Sometimes Mercier’s intellectual communication with her friend goes into great depths, touching subtle variations of female gender performance as it is represented in male literature. The intent is to capture what has been written and to transmit what they have managed to read, in the process of shaping themselves: You must read some more Hardy, Lamb. I believe I know now why I admire him so much [ . . . ] All his women are the tools of destiny [ . . . ] They can only stand by and be played upon. They do not shape their own lives, but are the rough from which Life hews out what will fit in with other lives and this from no fault of theirs. They are overpowered [ . . . ] Man ‘may be man and master of his fate’, but it is certain that woman is not, except in rare instances and then more by happy, accidental circumstances of birth which coincide with certain types of character. (Grier, 1937, pp. 36–7) However, it is not only reading that preoccupies their communication through letter-writing. ‘The letter is a way of presenting oneself to one’s correspondent in the unfolding of everyday life’ (Foucault, 1997b, p. 218). In reviewing their daily activities, they highlight the importance of a rhythm of life in stabilizing themselves, rather than the exceptional character of their activities. In this kind of epistolary practice, their body is an important site of concern and it is interesting to see how meticulously they deal with it. Here is an indication of Mercier’s daily activities: I do a little Greek every day. Programme: Greek after breakfast till about 10.30, do a little cooking, etc.: mend, and sit with mother. Dinner. Read, Mend, Tea. Turn with Mother or little walk with the boys. Mend, Read, Supper. Bed, which usually comes as early as 9.15. So I have not much to chronicle. (Grier, 1937, p. 31)


This daily programme is followed by a list of interrogations about Borland’s physical condition. Through her letter, Mercier makes herself dynamically present within Borland’s life and urges her to open up herself to the gaze of her friend. ‘To write is thus to “show oneself,” to project oneself into view, to make one’s own face appear in the other’s presence’ (Foucault, 1997b, p. 216). Health reports are included in this tradition of correspondence, and intend both to examine and to advise. The body in its relation to the care of the self is again particularly focused: Tell me when you write, exactly how you are. In case you don’t write to my satisfaction, I perpend a list of questions for your answers. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Do you sleep well? Do you feel hungry? Has anyone remarked on your looks, if so, what did they say? Are you any fatter? Have you any black rings? How would you like to climb the Merrick tomorrow?

Now on your pencil answer true. (Grier, 1937, p. 32) Thus, letter-writing turned out to be a critical technology of the female self. As Kamm has noted, Beale was a voluminous correspondent and she enjoyed both receiving and writing letters. Her papers include a very large number of drafts and copies of letters which she sent, because if she was to write an important letter, she would keep it for a time, to rethink about it or even rewrite it, if necessary. Writing letters was, according to her biographer, her first morning activity, even before school (Kamm, 1958, p. 382). It seems that through her letters, Beale shapes herself through the advice and opinion she gives to her addressees. Foucault has noted that ‘the letter one writes, acts through the very action of writing upon the one who addresses it, just as it acts through reading on the one who receives it’ (1997b, p. 214). Beale’s letters touch an immense variety of topics and themes. She usually advises former students, who now work as teachers all over the country, about their work, their reading and the good maintenance of themselves. She points out, however, that ‘I can do nothing in a letter but suggest lines of thought and lines of reading’ (Kamm, 1958, p. 390). Here is a letter to Arnold, in June 1881:


I am so vexed to hear about this chronic headache. Remember it is one of your duties to God, who has given you work, to keep yourself fit, so you must use every means . . . do not put too great a spiritual strain upon your soul; the body is to have rest and not too great excitement [ . . . ] I believe you ought to do less in the holidays. (Kamm, 1958, p. 282) It is obvious that Beale interested is not only in the cultivation of the mind, but also in the good care of the body of her students. Her correspondence is life-long and continues, even if her students have left teaching to get married. This is a letter to Arnold again, shortly after her marriage, urging her not to give up her mental activities: you were much in my mind [ . . . ] it seemed to me that it must be your energies were to be used to the full, and yet your married life, to which you have now been called, does in some degree restrain you [ . . . ] Today it seemed to me as if you should still speak, but in writing; you have the power of writing well [ . . . ] Now see if speaking is not to be your work whether writing is. How I feel I need solitude, and can’t write for want of it; but you have solitude enough to enable you to write [ . . . ] I think the solitude of the cycle will help you too [ . . . ] (Kamm, 1958, pp. 388–9) Letter-writing is also an opportunity to exchange philosophical ideas, or even to have arguments with her former students. Here is another letter to her old pupil, the writer of philosophy and poetry, in July 1898: I am glad to hear you have come to a satisfactory agreement with Blackwood. It is an advantage to have a leading publisher. Now as regards the sonnet. I don’t feel as if anything could make the Eros of later Greek religion pure [ . . . ] I know there is behind the myth the thought of love, of one who is the offspring of truth and purity, of perfect beauty. But love associated with Eros as we know him, is not love. (Kamm, 1958, p. 394) Letter-writing is not only confined to a bilateral relation. It establishes and sustains a network of communication among intellectual women, through which they are mutually helped and guided. Beale, writing again to the above writer of philosophy and poetry, in November 1895: ‘I am sending you a little book on Psychology by a young teacher and


writer [ . . . ] If you feel inclined to look at it, and give her a few written criticisms I should be glad. We want so much common language in all these subjects, words are used so differently;’ (Kamm, 1958, p. 392). Through the exchange of letters, the moral and ethical principles of women’s education, freedom, justice, order, independence and responsibility, are brought up again. Although these principles draw on the male pedagogical and philosophical tradition, they interrogate the gendered power structures that have sustained this same tradition: ‘women have plenty of practice in submitting to little rules. We want to give them discipline of deciding for themselves and acting upon their own responsibility’, commented Emily Davies in one of her letters (cited in Stephen, 1927, p. 252). As a result of this direction in women’s education, in relation to the practices of self-formation, Maynard realizes that: ‘There comes a moment when the passive receptive state of mind comes to an end and one begins to look round on one’s circumstances as an agent possessing choice’ (Maynard, unpublished, chapter 1, p. 20).

Care of the self revisited Among the problematic relationships that have historically intertwined around the theme of the care of the self, Foucault has highlighted the reversion of the priority between taking care of yourself and knowing yourself in the male ethical and philosophical tradition. In women teachers’ letters the care of the self takes its primary position, as a condition of freedom, in the tradition of the cultivation of the self and overshadows the theme of knowledge, which also appears, but as a result of care. However, there is a critical inflection in the conceptualization of both care and the self. What come in the foreground of this genealogical cartography are the social, relational self and the social practices of care. These themes had already been pointed out in Foucault’s analysis, but they were somewhat to the periphery of his discussions and were rather related to the ethics of governing yourself and others: ‘care for self renders one competent to occupy a place in the city, in the community, or in interindividual relationships, which are proper – whether it be to exercise a magistracy or to have friendly relationships’ (Foucault, 1991c, p. 7). What I suggest is that, in the case of women teachers, the social practices of care surpass the ethics of government and become mainlines in the deployment of the technologies of the female self. The care of the female self is not considered as ethically and/or ontologically prior to the care for others and neither is it subordinated to the care for


others. It is destabilized and subject to specific strategies. In such a context of hierarchical reversion and inflection of the technologies of the self, the philosophical love, the special relationship to ‘the master’, is also unfolded in different directions. This is how Steadman describes her teacher, Miss Lilian Sophia Counsell, and her relationship to her students, at Cheltenham Ladies’ College: The intensity of her interest in her fellows made her the recipient of many a confidence, and she would gladly give up hours of her leisure to help one find a way out of a difficulty [ . . . ] She was extremely sensitive to mental pain, [ . . . ] the same sensitiveness caused her to meet those coming to her in distress with a strong, sustaining sympathy that can only be appreciated by those who have found her beside them on their way through the valley of desolation. She had a deep affection for all children, and especially for girls just entering womanhood [ . . . ] She set out to make them think, and to this end she questioned, she puzzled, she baffled, she stirred, till co-operation and interest were aroused, and then only did she point the way to the clue by which a solution might be found. If necessary she chastised with point and thoroughness. The bubbles of conceit she pricked ruthlessly; her praise and encouragement were worn like medals, as tokens of a prowess of which one did not speak [ . . . ] Though she cut very short any attempt at sentimentality, many of those whom she taught became her life-long friends, and when they left College she followed their fortunes, knew of their doings, and cared for their happiness. She conducted most of her correspondence with them. (Steadman, 1931, p. 162) Steadman paints the portrait of a teacher who guides her students in the world of knowledge, but also attends to their difficulties and cares about them beyond the space and time of school life. In writing about her former teacher, Steadman highlights deeply reciprocal feelings and attitudes. The teacher’s care inspires her students to reflect upon themselves and ultimately get to know themselves for, as Steadman comments: there was a limpid quality in her goodness, as unconscious as it was sincere, that impelled them to silent reconsideration of their private standards, while her readiness to share with them her vision helped them towards the attainment of their own. (1931, p. 161)


Steadman’s admiration, her love for her teacher, is also depicted in the way she describes their appearance. Loving relationships between women teachers and girls are not only intellectual and/or spiritual. They have a direct reference to the body and are built upon a corporeal and materialistic aesthetic basis. This is how Steadman writes about Elizabeth Sturge: She was now about thirty-eight years of age, tall and of a fine presence. She was one of the first at College to show in her dress the effects of the artistic movement at the end of the nineteenth century [ . . . ] she wore [ . . . ] soft hues and delicate textures [ . . . ] and she knotted her shining mass of honey-coloured hair loosely at the back, instead of drawing it tightly up into a heap on the top of the crown. (Steadman, 1931, p. 79) Martha Vicinus has particularly referred to the loving relationships between teachers and girls at the boarding schools of the period, stressing as well, the social hostility that was aroused against these special student–teacher relations, which were stigmatized as abnormal (1985, pp. 206–10). The sublime philosophical love for ‘the master’ of classical antiquity could not apply to women. The powerless positions of the subjects of such loving relationships and the lack of rigid hierarchical structures between girls and women teachers would create different discourses. However distorted by the dominant discourses and the ‘common sense’ of their era, those relationships created strong emotional and intellectual bonds among women and were later evolved into life-long friendships. In contrast to the inequality of the pedagogical eros of classical antiquity, the schoolgirl–teacher friendship drew on reciprocity, rather than submission and steadily supported women’s self-formation. Of course, as I have already suggested in Chapter 3, friendships between women were not altogether devoid of power and/or domination. What I am indicating here, however, is the difference in the structuring of power relations between the male and female erotic pedagogical relationship, as well as the discourses and ideologies that were woven around them. Therefore, while in the male pedagogical eros there is a situation of both mental and bodily domination which remains more or less blocked and frozen, I suggest that the interplay of power relations in the case of women allow the female subjects to adopt strategies modifying, rather than stabilizing them.


In way of revision: ethics and aesthetics in the care of the self In Foucault’s genealogies of the subject, the philosophical tradition of the care of the self has its roots in classical antiquity, but was extended, inflected and enriched in the Hellenistic and Roman world which was a critical period in the cultivation of the self. In the platonic dialogue of Alkibiades, care of the self was a precondition of freedom, a necessary stage in a young man’s life to prepare him for his entrance into the public spheres of life, for his becoming a free citizen. This close interrelatedness of the theme of care to the formation of the public persona of the subject is, I have argued, crucial in the conceptualization of the importance of the late nineteenth century, as a critical period in the deployment of the technologies of the female self. As already indicated in previous chapters, the movement for the improvement of girls’ education and the abolition of all restrictions upon the higher education of women were at the heart of the claims and demands of the first wave of feminism. This movement has thus constituted a major genealogical event in the analytical framework of eventalization. The genealogical explorations of this study have traced dispersed critical events in the cultivation of the female self. Now, let us return to the four problematic relations that Foucault has traced between care of the self on the one hand, and knowledge of the self, pedagogy, political activity and philosophical love on the other and see how they have been rewritten in the cultivation of the female self. I have already suggested that in women’s self-writings care recaptures its initial prior position in relation to knowledge but the subject who was the recipient of care is decentred. Care for the self and care for others alternate in the process of self-formation, in ways that are not always unproblematic, but which, however, keep working upon multiple selves, as well as upon fragments of the self and manage to find points of exit from impasses and blind alleys. In this framework, the practices of care retain their importance in moulding the female subject as a political being. This political dimension of the female subject, however, is not only about governing others. Although this aspect of a political subject does exist in the case of women, it is of minor importance. What has been identified as a critical genealogical event in the deployment of the technologies of the female self, is the creation of the public persona of the female subject, the woman who enters the outer world and stands up for her rights. Here again, however, the dichotomy between private and public is seriously


challenged, on both a theoretical and a political level. The subversion of this dichotomy has been most dynamically expressed in the theory and praxis of feminism, its motto being the long-lasting significance of ‘the personal is political’. Finally, the pedagogical relation plays a critical role in the cultivation of the female self. Without totally excluding the play of power, it is however reformulated along lines of reciprocity, rather than domination, allowing space of resistance for the female subject and inspiring dreams of freedom. In the historical and cultural context of the late nineteenth century, the female self has been constituted along lines which significantly deflect from the male tradition and has sometimes opened up new directions. The cultivation of care of the female self has created new sets of practices, what this genealogical analysis has identified as technologies of space and technologies of resistance. But where do these ‘revised’ technologies take the female self to? As I have already noted, for Foucault, the technologies of the self constitute the art of living, the organization of existence, concrete choices as well as the orientation of the individual’s attitude. This approach throws a different light to the problems of existence and it is to this that I now want to turn: Making their lives a work of art The only remarkable events of this winter were my going to the theatre twice. (Clough, 1897, p. 63) The great wave of aestheticism was certainly felt at Girton, but the effect was transient, affectations could hardly live in so honest an atmosphere, and life as a whole was fresh and strong and full of wholesome ambitions. (Maynard, 1910, pp. 194–5) We went to the Tate [ . . . ] spent an ecstatic time in the Watts room [ . . . ] ‘Love and Life’ in colouring is just perfect, it seems a creation indeed, not a ‘work of art’, an inspiration in the flesh as it were – not a painting. (Grier 1937, p. 32) Agneses’s passion for music draws me also into the West Croydon Choral Society [ . . . ] Our evenings of reading English and German continue; the good local library supplies us with recent publications – poetry, philosophy and fiction. (Corke 1957, pp. 107, 184) Women’s attachment to art is a theme very frequently traced in their self-writings. What intrigued me most in reading them is that their passionate interest in art is not simply a matter of the passive admiration


of artistic objects, but is related back to ways of living and concentration on the development of the self. The strong emotions they feel for the works of arts in the galleries, the theatrical plays, the concerts, and the literary creation, stir their passion to live a beautiful life and influence their choices, beliefs and attitudes. Women teachers’ lives are under the spell of the various artistic movements at the turn of the nineteenth century, which cut across class and economic boundaries. Copelman has noted that although elementary women teachers in London did not have the means to take full advantage of London’s cultural events, they did enjoy a greater choice of activities and ‘participated in the culture – the places, spaces, events and services – that was being created to cater to New Women’ (1996, p. 167). Molly Hughes is excited at the idea of taking the omnibus to go to the theatre herself, instead of ‘being taken,’ and does not mind having to wait in queues for a good seat in the gallery, or having to bear bad lighting and inadequate ventilation, since ‘all the discomforts were forgotten as soon as the curtain went up’ (as cited in Copelman, 1996, p. 169). It therefore seems to me that, in writing about their love and interest in the arts, women teachers have in some way responded to what Foucault has very rhetorically suggested: ‘From the idea that the self is not given to us, I think that there is only one practical consequence: we have to create ourselves as a work of art’ (1986b, p. 350). Foucault’s provocative suggestion does not refer to a supposed ‘model’ or art object that one’s life orientation is striving to attain. In Chapter 1, I looked into Foucault’s elaboration of ethics as a problem of the organization of existence and its relation to aesthetics and I referred to Wilhelm Schmid’s (1994) argument about the vital role of the individual’s capacity for choice. In this context, an aesthetics of existence is seen as a sensibility towards what is happening around us, a sort of an aesthetic rationality, founded on a capacity to perceive, through an openness to experience. This sensibility is not limited to the private sphere. It extends to the public, what is out there that one cannot stand, a sensibility to what is intolerable and unacceptable. Such an aesthetics of existence also implies the development of an ability to judge, having the flexibility to change and have various options and criteria, for reconstructing oneself. In its relation to aesthetics, ethics is conceived as the reflexive form of freedom: ‘what is ethics if not the practice of freedom, the conscious practice of freedom?’ (Foucault, 1991c, p. 4). However, within this process of reflection upon freedom, an ethics of control, which for Foucault is crucial in the establishment of a relation to the self, is not enough in


the case of women. As this genealogical analysis has shown, in their capacity to choose, women’s aesthetics of existence is also bound to an ethics of care and solidarity. There is another controversial issue in relation to aesthetics that I want to address in reading women’s self-writings. In Chapter 1, I pointed out that Foucault’s aesthetics have been criticized as implying a hedonistic sense of existence, the art of simply living joyfully and happily.4 As I have already argued, women’s self-writings reflect aspects of joyfulness, a drive towards a life which allows us to ‘float above all seriousness and fixity of truth’ (Nietzsche in Vasseleu, 1993, p. 77). Should this drive, then, be interpreted as a hedonistic approach to the art of living? In agreement with Schmid, I want to suggest that the concept of an aesthetics of existence in Foucault does not try to make life seem beautiful and is not a synonym for beauty. It is not related to an ethics of a good and happy life. We have seen, for example, the joyfulness of women teachers, derived from the new, improbable conditions of their lives. Women rejoiced in the situation of being able to work, think and be creative. These new conditions of freedom inspired them to imagine themselves differently and to try to give a different form to their lives. Anyway, Foucault reminds us that the subject is not a substance, but a form, which can be constituted in different ways (1991c, p. 10) and, as has been noted, behind the problem of design, there is always the form we can give to the objects of existence and sometimes to existence itself (Schmid, 1994). Therefore, instead of denying the importance of the form, we should invent multiple forms so as to minimize the power of the dominant form. In this light, the aestheticization of the self should be conceived as a configuration of the different forms we can give to our existence. What is important in this analysis is a concept of aesthetics that appears to play with existence and resists the turning of aesthetics, the art of living into a theoretical system. As Schmid (1994) has suggested, we cannot talk of an economy of existence. The question is whether we should try to impose a certain system of concepts upon our experiences of life, or we should see the concepts deriving from the richness of our experiences, denying in this way any attempt of totalization. Giving priority to the problems of the style of living does not mean that one abandons completely the moral domain and certain norms without which individuals could not live together for long. But so as to accept certain norms of living one sees them in relation to the needs of the individuals in connection with their capacity to choose. Adopting different perspectives, the feminist theories I have drawn on in this final chapter have highlighted the sense of a multifaceted,


‘bodily’ female subject, who works upon herself amidst differences within herself and between herself and the ‘others’, both men and women. Grappling with the fragmentations of her experience, she uses, among other strategies and practices, the technologies of the self to weave together different patterns of her existence and form temporary unities, and parodic coalitions. In contrast to what Foucault has suggested for the male tradition, the practices the female self uses are not always models that she finds in her culture. They can also be techniques that criticize, oppose and resist the legacy of her culture, technologies of resistance. The self she creates is fluid and nomadic. It is a self in a non-stop process of becoming. In this process, an aesthetics of existence which is based on an ethics of control, but also on an ethics of care and solidarity, helps her to navigate the difficult and improbable routes of her life. What is our present today? How did we come to be the way we are and perceive ourselves in this present of ours? These were the initial critical questions addressed by this genealogy. The exploration of these questions has opened up paths leading to the elusive selves of postmodernity, but has also created new questions: How can this female subject in becoming, intervene in the current politics of women’s lives in education? How can the problematic of the care of the self contribute to the formation of new ways of thinking about ourselves, and ‘others’, about our lives, about ‘the personal and the political’?

Notes

Introduction 1. The subject in becoming is a Deleuzian notion. See Braidotti, 1991, especially the chapter ‘The Becoming-Woman of Philosophy’. 2. Feminist theorists have drawn extensively on the concept of paradox. See de Lauretis, 1990, Rose, 1993, especially the chapter, ‘The Politics of Paradoxical Space’, pp. 137–60, and Scott, 1996.

1

Feminist Genealogies in the Writing of the Self

1. See Armstrong, 1992; Bernauer and Rasmussen, 1991; Burchell et al., 1991; Chambon et al., 1999; Davidson, 1997; Dean, 1994; Deleuze, 1992a, 1992b; Dews, 1989; Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1982; Gordon, 1980; Kritzman, 1988; Lloyd and Thacker, 1997; Mahon, 1992; Marks, 1995; Martin et al., 1988; May, 1993; Prado, 2000; Rabinow, 1986, 1997; Rajchman, 1985, 1986, 1991; Schmid, 1994; Simons, 1995; Thacker, 1993. 2. See Eribon, 1989; Macey, 1993; James Miller, 1993. 3. See Foucault, 1982b, This is not a pipe. 4. See Mahon, 1992, p. 9; Sheridan, 1980. 5. I discuss these theories later on in this chapter. 6. Without abandoning archaeology, Foucault moved beyond the limitations of discourse analysis and became more attentive to that which conditions, limits and institutionalizes discursive formations, namely genealogy. 7. Dispositif has been translated in English as ‘apparatus’ but, according to Dreyfus and Rabinow, the term remains excessively vague. With some preoccupations, they instead suggest ‘grid of intelligibility’. See Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982, p. 120). 8. Foucault had first discerned transgressive possibilities in the literal work of avant-garde authors such as Sade, Bataille, Blanchot, Becket and Nietzsche. His biographers have also extensively referred to Foucault’s close relation to a group of experimental musicians, and particularly with Jean Barraque. See Eribon, 1986, pp. 65–8 and James Miller, 1993, pp. 79–91. 9. See Braidotti, 1991, particularly the chapter ‘Bodies, Texts and Powers’ (pp. 93–5). 10. See Braidotti, 1991, 1994; Brooks, 1997; Butler, 1990, 1997; de Lauretis, 1987; Diamond and Quinby, 1988; Flax, 1990, 1993; Hekman, 1996; Lloyd, 1997; McNay, 1992, 1994; Mirza, 1997; Nicholson, 1990; Probyn, 1993; Ramazanoglou, 1993; Sawicki, 1991; Stoler, 1995; Weedon, 1987. 11. According to Rubin (1975), every known society has a sex/gender system, that is ‘a set of arrangements by which the biological raw material of human sex and procreation is shaped by human, social intervention and satisfied in 179

180 Notes

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

a conventional manner, no matter how bizarre some of the conventions may be’ (Glover and Kaplan, 2000, p. 165). Rhizomes is a theoretical concept deriving from Deleuze and Guattari’s influential work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia. See, in particular, vol. 1, A Thousand Plateaus (1988, pp. 21–5). As Colebrook explains, the concept of the machine in Deleuze is used as a basis for the formation of ethics (2002, p. 56). The excision of the bio has been problematized in feminism, and particularly in the work of Brodski and Schenk (1988). For a comprehensive discussion of memory and its relation to autobiography, see Smith and Watson, 2001, pp. 15–24. For an overview of these analyses, see below, particularly note 19. Virginia Woolf used the phrase ‘moments of being’ in her late autobiography. See Lee, 1997, p. 539 and Schulkind, 1985. For a discussion of rhythm, see Tamboukou, 2003a. See Delamont, 1978a, 1978b; Dyhouse, 1977, 1978, 1981, 1995; Vicinus, 1985; Kean, 1990; Copelman, 1985, 1996; Hilton and Hirsch, 2000. The controversies between the ‘separatists’ and the ‘uncompromising’ were also transferred to the women’s colleges of Oxford, Lady Margaret Hall and Somerville College respectively, which opened in 1879, one year after London University became the first to admit women to full degrees. It was soon followed by other prestigious universities all over the country, a procedure that lasted until 1947, the year in which Cambridge University admitted women to full degrees, 27 years later than Oxford. For the conditions of the teacher training colleges, see, amongst others, Widdowson, 1980; Copelman, 1985, 1996 and Edwards, 2001. In the secondary sector, girls were first officially admitted to the Cambridge Local Examinations in 1865 and to those of Oxford in 1870. By 1894 there were over two hundred public schools for girls, and the majority of them were established or reformed after 1870. See Pedersen (1991, p. 45). The biographies include Kamm, 1958; Ridley, 1895; Raikes, 1910; Steadman, 1931. As Purvis (1991, p. 78) notes, the pupils of North Collegiate School were the first to sit the public examination of Cambridge and Oxford which opened to girls after the successful campaign of Emily Davies in 1860. By 1879, 12 old NCL students were at Girton. Louisa Lumsden and Frances Dove, both old Girtonians, taught at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and became headmistresses of another prestigious public boarding school, St Leonard’s. Pedersen has further noted that over half of the early Oxbridge women students became teachers, sometimes inspired to take up teaching as a career for the love of it. According to Pedersen, ‘this suggests the influence of the colleges in altering the idea of teaching from that of the last resort of the destitute gentlewoman to that of a desirable profession meriting, finally demanding advanced academic training’ (1991, p. 50). For further discussion of Clara Collet’s diary and persona, see Jane Miller, 1990 (particularly the chapter ‘An Odd Woman’), 1996, 2000. This system was created by the mid-1840s and offered a five-year, grantaided pupil-teacher apprenticeship to both male and female pupils who had completed a satisfactory elementary schooling.

Notes 181 27. See Dyhouse, 1977, 1981; Delamont and Duffin, 1978; Purvis, 1991. 28. By introducing the slash in the term of auto/biography Stanley (1992) is trying to reject generic distinctions between autobiographies and biographies, suggesting that they are forms of life-writing which may be distinct, but whose distinctions are not generic.

2

Spacing the Female Self: Tracing Heterotopias

1. Real-and-imagined geographies is a combination of Soja’s notion of real-andimagined places (1996) and Gregory’s notion of ‘geographical imaginations’ (1994). I chose the option of real-and-imagined geographies, since in this chapter I make a deployment of women teachers’ spatial practices, as they revolve around places of intimacy, but also transgress their real-and-imagined places through travelling. 2. See amongst others: Dumm, 1996; Elden, 2001; Gregory, 1994; Marks, 1995; Massey, 1994; Philo, 2000; Rose, 1993; Soja, 1989, 1996. 3. Massey cites Maen-wan Ho in biology, and Minkowski in physics (1994, p. 3). 4. Lefevre (1991) has theorized three different kinds of spaces: the perceived space, the conceived space and the lived space. See also Soja, 1996, for a discussion of Lefevre’s spaces, particularly chapters 1 and 2. 5. Gregory has highlighted Heidegger and Foucault in philosophy, Jameson and Lefevre in historical materialism, hooks and Haraway in feminism and poststructuralism and Said and Spivac in cultural studies and post-colonialism (1994, p. 4). 6. For Soja, Lefevre’s notion of lived spaces is the theoretical bedrock of ‘Thirdspace’, within which he includes the spatial feminist critique and the post-colonial critique. See Soja, 1996, particularly chapters 3 and 4. 7. See, amongst others, Anzaldúa, 1987, 1990; Duncan, 1996; hooks, 1990, Kaplan, 1996; Lugones, 1990; McDowell, 1999; Massey, 1994; Probyn, 1990, 1993; Rose, 1993; Spivak, 1988, 1990; Wilson, 1991; Wolff, 1995. 8. Maynard refers here to her sister. 9. ‘The unbearable lightness of being’ is the title of Milan Kundera’s well-known novel. 10. See Rowbotham, 1977; Delamont and Duffin, 1978; Widdowson, 1980; Dyhouse, 1981; Vicinus, 1985; Swindells, 1985; Kean, 1990; Shires, 1992. 11. See, in particular, the chapter ‘A Place Called Home?’ in Massey, 1994. 12. Grant is the place where Maynard’s family were spending their holidays. 13. Personal space is often an unattainable luxury for both working-class men and women. However, this lack of personal space is experienced differently along gender lines, given that the private sphere of home has traditionally been a workplace only for the women of the working classes. However, the intersection of class and space goes beyond the scope of this chapter. 14. See amongst others: Braidotti, 1991, particularly the section ‘Revisiting the Void’, pp. 132–46; Rose, 1993, particularly the section ‘Some Feminists Talking about Oppressive Spaces’ pp. 143–50; Massey, 1994, particularly the chapter ‘Space, Place and Gender’, pp. 177–90; Dunkan, 1996, particularly the chapter ‘Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Public and Private Spaces’, pp. 127–45; and McDowell, 1999, particularly the section ‘Home as haven and/or prison, pp. 88–9.

182 Notes 15. Donald was Borland’s nickname. 16. In Winnicott’s theory the transitional space bridges the gaps between self and other, inner and outer reality. See Flax 1990, pp. 116, 119. 17. The contextuality refers here to Rebecca (du Maurier, 1992, p. 5). 18. A Room of One’s Own grew out of a lecture Virginia Woolf had been invited to give at Girton College, Cambridge in 1928. 19. See Burstyn, 1977. 20. See Clough, 1897; Stephen, 1927; Hamilton, 1936; Delamont and Duffin, 1978; Philips, 1979; Dyhouse, 1981, 1995; Vicinus, 1985; Vickery, 2000. 21. As Vicinus has noted, Mary Buss of the North Collegiate School encouraged her ablest students to go to Girton, lending them money and coaching them for the scholarship examination (1985, p. 140). 22. Widdowson (1980) records the significant changes that occurred in the development of training colleges between the years 1870–1914, not only in terms of curricula, but also in terms of the organization of life and regulations within them (1980, pp. 47–53). 23. See Clough, 1897; Maynard, 1910; Stephen, 1927; Hamilton, 1936; Lumsden, 1933; Sutherland, 2000. 24. See Delamont and Duffin, 1978; Dyhouse, 1981. 25. In her study Buildings for Bluestockings, Margaret Birney Vickery (2000) has looked at the social implications of the architecture of the early university colleges for women in the UK. 26. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon was an influential figure of her time and a central figure in the establishment of Girton College. Her life has informed a number of biographies. For an overview of her persona, see Hirsch, 2000, pp. 84–100.

3 Erasing Sexuality from the Blackboard? Recovering the Silence of Bodies 1. See Mackinnon, 1997, especially the chapter ‘The Selfishness of Women: Moral Panic and the Declining Birthrate’. 2. Dyhouse refers, for example, to the angry responses of the Fabian Society Women’s Group (1997, p. 27). 3. See Widdowson, 1980 and Copelman, 1985, 1996. 4. See Sheila Jeffreys, 1985, especially the chapter ‘Continence and Psychic Love’. 5. For a full account of this fascinating journal, see Bland, 1995a, 1995b. 6. See Vicinus, 1985; Kean, 1990; Copelman, 1996; Dyhouse, 1995.

4 What is Our Present Today? Genealogies as Histories of the Present 1. For a discussion of an ethics of care and feminist problematizations in theorizing contemporary women’s lives, see Hughes, 2002, particularly the chapter, ‘Women are Caring’, pp. 72–93. 2. See Hall, 1996 and Reay and Ball, 2000.

Notes 183

5

Technologies of the Female Self

1. See Braidotti, 1994, 2002, especially the chapters on Sexual Difference. 2. For further discussion of the nomad as a concept to theorize contemporary female subjectivities, see Tamboukou and Ball, 2002. 3. It has to be noted here that gossip has invited a range of controvessies in its discussions and theorization. See, amongst others, Gluckman as discussed, in Ball, 1987; Goodman and Ben-Ze’ev, 2000; Rogoff, 1996. 4. See McNay, 1994, especially the chapter ‘Aesthetics as Ethics’, pp. 133–63.

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Index of Names Acker, Sandra, 142, 147 Althusser, Louis, 25, 26 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 181 Anderson, Linda, 7, 30 Ball, Stephen J., 136, 146, 147, 182, 183 Bachelard, Gaston, 65, 78 Bartkowski, Frances, 69, 71 Beale, Dorothea, 46, 62, 162, 164, 167, 169, 170 Bland, Lucy, 106, 107, 110, 111, 121, 123 Borland, Jean, 46, 67, 182 Braidotti, Rosi, 1, 2, 17, 24, 27, 28, 33, 157, 158, 159, 160, 179, 181, 183 Brodzki, Bella, 32 Brontë, Charlotte, 73, 115, 116, 125 Burstyn, Joan, 182 Buss, Mary Frances, 46, 120, 129, 162, 164, 182 Butler, Judith, 24, 26, 27, 28, 157, 179

Deleuze, Gilles, 15, 22, 28, 29, 35, 38, 157, 179, 180 Diamond, Irene, 24, 179 Dove, Frances, 131, 180 Dreyfus, Hubert L., 14, 18, 22, 179 Dumm, Thomas, L., 181 Duncan, Nancy, 78, 181 Dyhouse, Carol, 19, 105, 106, 180, 181, 182 Flax, Jane, 179, 182 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 73, 115, 116 Gilmore, Leigh, 6, 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37 Greenway, Judy, 107, 120 Gregory, Derek, 56, 57, 181 Grier, Linda, 67, 167, 168, 169, 175 Griffiths, Morwenna, 40, 48, 49, 152, 160 Grumet, Madeline, 138 Guattari, Felix, 28, 29, 157, 180

Cavarero, Adrianna, 35, 133 Collet, Clara, 46, 47, 49, 52, 116, 117, 129, 145, 146, 149, 159, 160, 180 Corke, Helen, 47, 53, 59, 69, 94, 113, 114, 124, 126, 175 Clough, Anne Jemima, 41, 43, 59, 65, 66, 72, 83, 85, 86, 98, 114, 117, 120, 162, 165, 175, 182 Colebrook, Claire, 180 Copelman, Dina, 64, 68, 98, 129, 149, 176, 180

Hamilton, Cicely, 111, 112, 182 Haraway, Donna, 27, 28, 40, 50, 51, 157, 181 Holding On, 49, 134, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146, 150, 151 hooks, bell, 60, 67, 151, 152, 181 Hughes, Christina, 182 Hughes, Molly, 47, 62, 63, 64, 65, 84, 90, 129, 176

Davies, Emily, 42, 62, 64, 68, 82, 83, 89, 98, 100, 117, 165, 171, 180 De Lauretis, Teresa, 6, 7, 22, 24, 25, 26, 28, 33, 34, 37, 58, 61, 136, 137, 148, 157, 179 Dean, Mitchell, 13, 179 Delamont, Sara, 43, 89, 101, 180, 181, 182

Kamm, Josephine, 62, 118, 120, 162, 164, 167, 169, 170, 171, 180 Kant, Emmanuel, 8 Kaplan, Caren, 69, 70, 181 Kaplan, Cora, 180 Kean, Hilda, 52, 180, 182 Kritzman, Lawrence D., 179 Kundera, Milan, 101, 160, 181

Jelinek, Estelle, 32, 34

195

196 Index of Names Lawrence, David H., 47, 114 Lefevre, Henri, 40, 54, 55, 56, 57, 181 Lloyd, Moya, 179 Lugones, Maria, 36, 70, 71, 181 Lumsden, Louisa, 41, 43, 44, 68, 72, 76, 83, 87, 90, 92, 95, 96, 126, 127, 129, 130, 180, 182 McDowell, Linda, 54, 55, 61, 70, 87, 181 McNay, Lois, 10, 20, 179, 183 McRobbie, Angela, 127, 128 Mackinnon, Alice, 104, 107, 117, 182 Mahon, Michael, 10, 13, 179 Marsden, Dora, 121 Massey, Doreen, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 181 May, Todd, 179 Maynard, Constance, 41, 43, 53, 59, 62, 68, 80, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 90, 92, 94, 98, 100, 118, 119, 123, 124, 125, 126, 127, 128, 129, 130, 131, 148, 149, 158, 162, 166, 171, 175, 181, 182 Maynard, Mary, 109 Mendus Susan, 125 Mercier, Winifred, 45, 46, 67, 166, 167, 168, 169 Miller, James, 11, 179 Miller, Jane, 49, 138, 147, 148, 150, 151, 180 Mills, Sara, 23, 68 Morris, Meaghan, 70 Nicholson, Linda, 179 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 8, 10, 12, 13, 18, 84, 177, 179 Pedersen, Joyce S., 41, 46, 180 Perrault, Jean, 32 Plath, Sylvia, 103 Prentice, Alison, 41, 47 Probyn, Elspeth, 22, 28, 30, 35, 37, 39, 154, 179, 181 Purvis, June, 40, 180, 181 Quinby, Lee, 24, 40, 179 Rabinow, Peter, 14, 18, 22, 179 Raikes, Elizabeth, 180

Rajchman, John, 8, 13, 14, 22, 75, 135, 137, 179 Ramazanoglou, Caroline, 179 Rasmussen, David, 179 Rendall, Jane, 125 Richardson, Dorothy, 141 Rose, Gillian, 54, 55, 56, 57, 59, 60, 61, 64, 90, 181, 153 Rowbotham, Sheila, 38, 181 Rubin, Gayle, 25, 179 Sawicki, Jana, 3, 14, 179 Schenk, Celeste, 32 Schmid, Wilhelm, 19, 21, 176, 177, 179 Scott, Joan, 23, 30, 50, 179 Simons, Jon, 18, 20, 101, 102, 179 Smith, Mary, 47, 48, 53, 69, 112, 113, 114, 115, 118, 119, 122, 125, 166, 167 Smith, Sidonie, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 180 Soja, Edward, 53, 54, 55, 56, 57, 58, 68, 181 Stanley, Liz, 50, 181 Stanton, Donna, 32, 33, 34, 36, 104 Steadman, Cecily, 65, 72, 89, 116, 172, 173, 180 Steedman, Carolyn, 29, 30, 39, 49, 134, 136, 137, 138, 144 Stephen, Barbara, 62, 63, 64, 68, 82, 83, 98, 100, 165, 171, 182 Tamboukou, Maria, 180, 183 Thacker, Andrew, 20, 179 Theobald, Marjorie, 41, 47 Veyne, Paul, 12 Vicinus Martha, 62, 173, 180, 181, 182 Walkerdine, Valerie, 49, 52, 103, 134, 147, 150 Watson, Julia, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 180 Weedon, Chris, 24, 179 Widdowson, Frances, 81, 180, 181, 182 Wolff, Janet, 69, 70, 181 Woolf, Virginia, 48, 50, 62, 76, 180, 182 Young, Iris Marion, 59

Index of Subjects aesthetics, 19–21, 155, 174, 176–8 agency, 6, 12, 35 archaeology, 179 archive, 11, 31, 36, 39, 43, 68 asceticism, 17, 19 asylum, 11 attitude, 22, 39, 46–8, 60, 65, 70, 73, 112, 115, 124–5, 144, 146, 155, 160, 172, 175–6 autobiographics, 33–4 autobiography, 1, 3–7, 25, 29–41, 43, 45–50, 52, 58, 61–2, 65, 67–9, 76, 78–9, 83, 85–7, 92, 98, 100, 112, 114, 118, 119, 123–5, 128–9, 133, 143, 145, 159, 165–6 auto/biography, 1, 37, 46–7, 50, 122 auto/biographical, 1, 29 autograph, 33 autography, 32–3 autographical subject, 33–4 autogynographies, 33 becoming, 1, 2, 5, 7, 13, 21, 26, 28, 31, 105, 136, 153, 157, 178 binarism, 33, 56, 75 bio-politics, 24, 107–8, 139 bio-power, 66, 108 carceral systems, 9 cartography, 2, 5, 24, 25, 34, 49, 65, 66, 75, 87, 151, 153, 171 classification, 14, 21 conditions of possibility, 30, 34 conduct, 15–17, 74, 98, 105 confession, 23 confinement, 58–9, 104, 166 demands of style, 20–1 desire, 29, 52, 58, 59, 64, 67, 68, 73, 74, 85, 94, 103, 104, 107, 108, 111, 115, 120, 123–4, 128, 150, 160, 162 deterritorialization, 34

diagram, 19 diaries, 3, 30, 36, 39, 43, 46–7, 49, 68, 117, 142, 149 discipline, 9, 19, 85, 100, 102, 115, 166, 171 discontinuities, 9, 10, 52, 66, 80, 82, 137, 138 discourses, 1, 4, 5, 8, 19, 21, 25, 31, 33–4, 38, 41, 55, 57, 60, 71, 79, 95, 102, 103, 115, 129, 132, 135–6, 138–40, 142, 146–7, 153–4, 157, 158 antagonistic discourses, 38, 78, 140 contradictory discourses, 133, 139 counter discourses, 34, 38, 43, 55, 71, 164, 173 fictional discourses, 8 hegemonic discourses, 7, 26, 34, 58, 151 institutional discourses, 26 juxtaposing discourses, 39, 104 medico-scientific discourses, 23, 105, 106 micro discourses, 41 nationalist discourses, 60 popular discourses, 76 radical discourses, 101 reverse discourses, 34, 107, 109, 136 scientific discourses, 139 spinster discourses, 106 war of discourses, 9, 104, 140 discourses of care, 121, 151 discourses of frigidity and passionlessness, 25 discourses of love, 118 discourses of marriage, 121 discourses of prudery, 109 discourses of representation, 6 discourses of school management, 147 discourses of sexuality, 2, 22, 23, 103, 105, 106, 108, 121 discourses of travel, 70 discourses of womanhood, 82 197

198 Index of Names discourse theory, 24 discursive acts, 27 discursive areas, 105 discursive conditions, 33 discursive constraints, 90, 133 discursive constructs, 30, 75 discursive context, 105 discursive effect, 36, 56 discursive escape, 59 discursive formations, 34, 61, 81, 104, 135, 140 discursive positions, 25, 26 discursive practices, 8, 10, 24, 135 discursive regime, 8, 32, 34, 36, 37 discursive relations, 24 discursive separation, 126 discursive struggle, 78 discursive systems, 34 discursive texts, 30 discursive triangle, 7, 29, 33, 37 discursive ways, 53, 96 dispositif, 5, 18–19, 38–9, 135, 151 enlightenment, 2, 8, 13, 17 entrapment, 59 episode, 9, 13, 138 epistemological 14, 17, 25, 27, 28, 40, 48, 50, 57, 103 escape, 4, 51, 59, 72, 94, 111–12, 115, 128 estrangement, 34, 59, 66 ethical substance, 16–17 ethics, 1, 5, 15–17, 20–1, 114, 131, 133, 155, 167–8, 171, 174, 176–8, 182 eventalization, 10, 151, 174 experience, 2–3, 6, 20, 30, 32–5, 38–41, 46–7, 49, 53, 55, 58–9, 61, 66, 69–71, 73–4, 78–9, 83–4, 90, 100–1, 119, 123, 125, 128–30, 133, 135–6, 138, 140, 143, 146, 150–2, 156–9, 165–6, 176–8 feminism, 7, 23–4, 27–8, 32, 104–12, 118, 121, 123, 136, 140–1, 144, 151, 156, 160, 174–5 critical feminisms, 7, 22, 24, 27, 29, 33, 50, 108 moralist feminism, 106

feminist critical pedagogy, 152 feminist film theory, 26 feminist genealogies, 6, 29, 37 feminist geographers, 57 feminist histories, 31, 48 feminist politics, 27, 157 feminist spatial analyses, 57, 61, 67, 69–71 feminist subject, 26, 160 feminist theory, 2, 4, 5, 6, 12, 18, 22, 24–5, 27–33, 35–6, 40–1, 46, 50–1, 56–7, 59–60, 133, 136, 140, 151, 156–8, 177 freedom, 3, 8, 9, 13, 38, 47, 53, 55, 59, 64, 67–9, 71, 80, 100–1, 109, 111, 121, 131, 144, 148–9, 171, 174–7 friendship, 24, 49, 76, 117, 130–3, 164, 173 genealogy, 1–5, 7–22, 24, 29–32, 34–7, 104–5, 131–2, 137–8, 155, 174, 178–9 genealogy and counter-memory, 9 genealogy and self-writing, 40, 48, 50, 76, 122 as critique, 12 as effective history, 13 as grey, 10 as history of the present, 8, 39, 134–5 as ontology of the present, 13 as resistance, 3 as the analysis of descent and emergence, 12–13, 132 as the philosophy of the event, 9, 10, 13, 138, 151, 174 genealogical axes, 17, 31 see also feminist genealogies genealogical historiography, 10–11 genealogical strategies, 2, 4, 9–10, 14–19, 29–31, 34, 36–7, 39, 48–50, 53, 56–7, 71, 74, 81–2, 101, 109, 129, 135, 137–8, 151, 156–7, 171, 174–5, 177 gender, 22–3, 56, 60, 76, 90, 142 construction of, 7, 25–7 ideology of, 25, 89

Index of Subjects 199 and class, 47 and place, 54, 61 and race, 142 and space, 57, 71, 142 and sexual difference, 27 and self-writing, 31–6 and technologies of the self, 154 as self-representation, 6, 25–6 as social representation, 6, 25–6 gender blindness, 4 gender difference, 18 gendered identity, 3, 57, 60 gender performativity, 27, 168 gender politics, 36 gendered power relations, 4, 55–6, 120, 171 gender relations, 57, 66, 111, 141, 151, 153 gendered spaces, 57 gendered subjectivities, 56 governmentality, 19 hermeneuticism, 10 heterotopias, 4, 52, 61, 75, 78–82, 101–2 human sciences, 12 humanism, 14 humanist geographers, 55, 57, 64 identity, 2, 27, 31, 34, 60–1, 69, 71, 73–4, 121, 135, 160 ideology, 6, 12, 25–6, 70, 102, 106, 140, 142, 173 individual, 6, 9, 25–6, 46, 80, 104, 135, 144, 146–7, 152 as object, 15, 16, 115 as subject, 15, 19, 20, 155, 175, 176, 177 institutions, 3, 6, 19, 23, 38, 39, 41, 43–4, 46–7, 58, 60, 72, 79, 81, 96, 101–2, 106, 135, 136, 144, 147, 149, 151, 160 and discipline, 96, 132, 146 and truth, 139 as greedy, 146 of marriage, 120–1 institutional restraints, 133 interpretation, 16, 23, 28, 30, 35, 55, 68

knowledge, 8, 15, 38, 40, 42, 72, 74, 83, 86, 125, 126, 148, 152, 157, 158, 171, 172, 174 situated knowledges, 27, 50, 157 subjects of, 15, 28, 156 subjugated knowledges, 35, 50, 157 types of, 19 validity of, 40 will to knowledge, 150 knowledge and power, 57, 58, 66, 76, 78, 135 and truth, 8, 155 as perspective, 18 of details, 11 of struggles, 4 of the self, 74, 154, 155–6, 174 letters, 3, 30, 36, 39, 67, 115–16, 124, 156, 166, 169–71 map, 4, 11, 15, 16, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 32, 37, 56, 58, 61, 74, 78, 81, 82, 87, 102, 135, 151 memoirs, 30, 36, 39 memory, 35, 50, 127, 128 see also genealogy and counter-memory micropolitical, 6, 7, 26 mode of subjection, 17 moments of being, 40, 48, 50, 58, 156 moral agents, 15 codes, 124 commitments, 140 conduct, 17 domain, 177 norms, 11 obligation, 17 orientation, 140 principles, 171 thought, 158 morality, 111, 114, 168 see also sexual morality multiplicity, 2, 54–7, 70, 75, 104, 123, 133, 156 narratives, 3, 7, 10, 29, 40, 48, 58, 65, 67, 123, 128 autobiographical, 7, 35, 69, 118, 128, 129

200 Index of Subjects narratives – continued dance, 129 grand, 37 master, 35 of truth and experience, 33 personal, 41, 112 textual, 4 narrative exchange, 133 narrative system, 36 nexus, 1, 4, 5, 19, 38, 54, 61 nomads, 5, 157, 178, 183 nomadic consciousness, 157 nomadic shifts, 157 nomadic subjects, 28, 157 nomadism, 28, 157 norms, 11, 177 cultural, 128 normative category, 13 normalization, 17, 106 objectification, 16, 60 paradox, 2, 5, 23, 64, 96, 101, 109, 113, 156, 166 paradox of being a woman teacher, 136–7, 145, 147, 148, 150–3, 153, 157 passions, 48, 59, 72, 78, 107, 115, 118, 122, 123–6, 129, 131–2, 149, 151, 153, 158, 160, 175–6 pedagogy, 4, 15, 39, 148, 151 caring, 141, 151 see also feminist critical pedagogy personal/political, 1, 24, 84, 144, 152, 175, 178 perspective, 5, 18, 30, 36–7, 46, 56, 60, 66, 69, 74, 81, 96, 105, 121, 144, 150, 164, 177 phallogocentrism, 27 place, 1, 4, 10, 14, 36, 37, 50, 54–9, 67, 70, 74, 79, 83, 104, 127, 130, 134, 136, 137, 140, 145, 150, 152, 160, 165, 166, 171, 176 imagined, 68 of transit, 159 place and discipline, 132 and ‘a room of one’s own’, 62, 64–5, 74, 78 and home, 60–1, 80

and identity, 61 and space, 56–8, 80 and space/bodies, 87 and space/gender, 54 see also gender positioned rationality, 51 power, 9, 16, 23, 26, 59, 62, 85, 103, 106, 110, 141, 146, 147, 148, 154, 155, 158–60, 170, 177 affirmative, 2 bio-power, 66, 108, 115 circulation of, 106 effects of, 34, 103 field of, 15 history of, 53 modern, 8 play of, 19, 175 sites of, 3, 38, 120, 138 spatialization of, 53 spirals/networks of power and pleasure, 106, 107 power and desire, 123 and domination, 10, 173 and space/knowledge, 57, 58, 61, 66 and subjection, 27, 102 and truth/ethics, 15, 17, 20 and truth/self/writing, 31 as/in discourse, 157 as fields of game, 9 as productive, 17, 26 power games, 67, 96, 101, 138, 144 power relations, 9, 10, 13, 19, 20, 25, 55, 66, 81, 101, 103, 129, 141–2, 147, 173 see also knowledge and resistance prisonhouses, 49, 134, 137 private/public, 1, 143 real-and-imagined geographies, 53, 181 reciprocity, 131, 132, 133, 172, 173, 175 relations of forces, 19 repressive hypothesis, 104, 106 resistance, 3, 7, 24, 26, 27, 34, 38–9, 41, 58–61, 67, 75, 79, 95–6, 98, 101–2, 108, 116, 124, 128, 130, 135, 140–1, 144, 152, 157, 177–8

Index of Subjects 201 reversal, 9 rhizomes, 29, 31, 33 rhythm, 21, 40, 168, 180 scepticism, 8 self, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 18–20, 22–4, 27, 29–39, 49–50, 52, 58, 60, 64, 71, 73–5, 78, 81, 94, 101, 103–4, 117–18, 128–30, 132–3, 135–6, 140, 142, 146, 151–4, 156–7, 160, 165–7, 169, 171, 174–7 aesthetics of, 21 care of, 17, 133, 150, 154–6, 169, 171–2, 174 historical self, 37 narratable self, 35 relational self, 171 social self, 145 self-control, 85, 86, 94, 101, 162, 164 self-examination, 94, 155–6, 162, 166 self-practices, 87, 167 self-reflection, 92, 94 self-representation, 3, 6, 25–6, 29, 30, 31–4, 36 self-writing, 6, 26, 31, 32–4, 36–7, 39, 40, 46, 47, 48, 53, 59, 61, 83, 155–6, 162, 174, 175, 177 sex/gender system, 23, 120 sexologists, 105, 125 sexuality, 4–5, 18, 22, 103–10, 114–15, 121–3, 125, 129, 132–3, 134, 160 construction of, 26 dispositif of, 23 heterosexuality, 26, 119, 126, 129, 130, 131 history of, 17, 19, 23, 38, 104–5, 109 peripheral sexualities, 106 scientia sexualis, 104 see also gender and discourses of sexuality sexuality and gender, 120 and Eros, 152 and love, 121 sexual abuse, 109, 129, 132, 133 sexual attitudes, 124 sexual categories, 108 sexual conduct, 105

sexual desire, 108, 115, 123, 128 sexual difference, 4, 23, 27–8, 32, 104, 157 sexual exploitation, 108, 109, 111, 133 sexual fantasies, 128 sexual hypocrisy, 10 sexual identity, 121 sexual intercourse, 118, 124, 154 sexual life, 125 sexual models, 104 sexual morality, 109, 110, 111, 121 sexual puritanism, 105, 109 sexual relationships, 107, 119, 124, 130, 131 sexual revolution, 105 sexual roles, 104, 120, 133 sexual subjection, 121 asexual woman, 4, 116, 125 silence, 36, 49, 103, 104, 106, 107, 125, 129, 137, 162, 164–7 solitude, 65, 92, 94, 162, 165, 166, 170 soul, 15, 16, 76, 85, 114, 118, 120, 123, 124, 158, 170 spaces, 1, 4, 5, 46, 48, 53–83, 86–7, 94, 96–8, 101, 106, 113, 130, 133, 141, 142, 152, 156, 157, 164, 176 conjugal, 104 control of, 98 different, 4, 55, 58, 60, 78, 79 disciplinary, 137, 164 domestic, 60 dominant, 60 enclosed, 52, 59, 66, 82, 137, 142 hegemonic, 79 history of, 53 lived, 55 material, 57, 87 mental, 55 mythical and real, 79 of resistance, 9, 59, 175 of subjectivity, 2 other, 58, 60, 75, 78, 80 paradoxical, 4, 152, 153 perceived private, 60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 73, 75, 78, 137 public, 66, 75, 78

202 Index of Subjects spaces – continued real and imagined, 69, 159 real and metaphorical, 58 reflexive, 155 representational, 57 technologies of, 4, 73, 75, 175 thirdspace, 56, 57, 68 transitional, 39, 50, 73, 74, 80, 150, 157 utopian, 128 see also gender, knowledge, place, power space and bodies, 87, 90 and landscapes, 61 and social relations, 54 space/time, 5, 15, 54, 56, 57, 61, 74, 94, 101, 143, 144, 146, 172 spaces in the margins, 7, 58 spatial images, 57, 59 spatial practices, 57 structuralism, 23 subjects, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 15, 17–19, 24, 25, 27, 29–31, 33, 36–7, 39, 46, 60, 71, 73–4, 92, 94, 95, 101–2, 104–5, 107, 110, 137, 142, 156–7, 173–4, 177 agentic, 26 autographical, 32, 34 desiring, 103, 123 eccentric, 157 embodied, 2, 28, 151, 178 ethical, 1, 17, 19 female, 1, 2, 4, 22, 25, 26, 33, 34, 35, 61, 95, 135, 153, 157, 173, 174, 175, 178 genealogies of, 15, 17, 18, 104, 155, 174 marginal and submerged, 3 nomadic, 157 objectification of, 16 political, 174 subjectification of, 16, 17 technology of, 17 unruly, 34 subjects as contradicted, 28 as heterogeneous, 6

as heteronomous, 26 as multiple, 6, 26, 28 in the process of becoming, 28, 178 of autobiography, 6, 33–5 of Enlightenment, 2 of history, 30 see also feminism, gender, knowledge, nomadism subject positions, 7, 24, 51, 104, 105, 153, 156 subjectivities, 6, 2, 18, 20, 23, 26–8, 35, 40, 49, 56–7, 69–71, 80, 102–4, 135–6, 156–7, 160 surveillance, 9, 66–7, 74, 98, 109 technologies of autobiography, 33, 34, 35, 37 of gender, 22, 25–6, 29, 35 of power, 15, 16, 56, 104 of production, 15, 16 of resistance, 94, 175, 178 of sign systems, 15, 16 of space, 4, 73, 75, 175 of the self, 1, 3, 5, 14–19, 28–9, 31, 33, 35–9, 41, 46, 71, 73, 75, 81, 85–6, 94, 105, 129, 133, 152, 154–6, 158, 162, 165–6, 172, 174–5 telos, 17 topoanalysis, 65, 86 topophilia, 64 transgression, 20 truth, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 15–16, 17, 19, 20–1, 31, 50, 70, 104, 129, 156, 170, 177 effects of, 8, 145 games of, 15, 16 genealogy of multiple truths, 16 politics of, 139, 140 regimes of, 16, 38 truth and asceticism, 19 and experience, 32, 33 and identity, 34 see also knowledge, power

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