I’ve identified four examples of education in The Odd Women that I think are worth mentioning.

However, his vocalization in favor of women’s education, although problematic, helps advocate for women’s opportunities outside the home. On the other, I don’t think women need to be educated for the benefit of men, which is what he seems to be concerned with. On the one hand, Gissing has a point that education would help elevate women’s minds (as it would anyone’s). And I believe that the only way of effecting this is to go through a period of what many people will call sexual anarchy. That type must disappear, - or at all events become altogether subordinate. The average woman pretty closely resembles in all intellectual considerations, the average male idiot …That state of things is traceable to lack of education, in all senses of the word… I am driven frantic by the crass imbecility of the typical woman. More than half the misery of life is due to the ignorance & childishness of women. My demand for female ‘equality’ simply means that I am concerned there will be no social peace until women are intellectually trained very much as men are. Gissing explicitly believed that women needed to be educated. The term ‘odd women’ is coined in the novel by character Rhoda Nunn, who’s describing women who are unmatched, unpaired - not necessarily peculiar, or unnatural.Īlthough the book sets up provocative questions about the relevance of marriage in late 19th century Britain, I’m interested in the novel’s depiction of a woman’s education - and who, specifically, is permitted access. If a woman couldn’t be a wife and mother, then what could she be?Īnd, more practically, how might she make money?

Photo by Birmingham Museums Trust on UnsplashĪ woman’s education is reserved solely for the middle classes.Īt least, that is according George Gissing’s 1893 novel The Odd Women.īy the late 19th century, Britain was populated by more women than men, which made the concept ‘a woman’s role is in the home’ a tad redundant.

The Odd Women by George Gissing