The Medical Woman as Amateur Detective in Anna Kingsford’s ‘A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor.’

Anna Kingsford’s “A Cast for a Fortune: The Holiday Adventures of a Lady Doctor” (1877) depicts a medical woman who becomes entangled in a murder plot whilst on vacation. Assuming the mantle of amateur detective, Dr Mary Thornton intervenes to prevent Dr George Pomeroy poisoning his sister-in-law, a wealthy widow. This little-known short story appeared at a critical time in the medical-woman movement in Britain. In contemporary medical writing and popular culture, the woman doctor was often represented as unfeminine and even as morbid or morally degenerate. Conversely, Kingsford portrays a healthy woman doctor who upholds professional ethics and criminal justice, while the story’s medical man is an unscrupulous villain. By exposing and denouncing Dr Pomeroy, Dr Thornton restores medicine’s reputation. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across literary studies and the history of medicine, this article positions Kingsford’s story at the advent and nexus of three emerging sub-genres: female detective fiction, the medical mystery, and medical woman fiction. I argue that, through the depiction of its heroine, “A Cast for a Fortune” constructs the amateur female sleuth and early woman doctor not as an outsider, but as the guardian of medico-morality.

Engendering New Motherhood: Tactile Exchange in George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) and Flies in Amber (1905)

George Egerton’s Keynotes (1893) is a seminal text of the New Woman movement at the fin de siècle and has garnered significant critical attention over the last four decades. Egerton went on to publish four more volumes of short fiction, with decreasing popularity, the last being Flies in Amber (1905). This article addresses the shortage of scholarship on Egerton’s later writing by assessing the consistency with which she invokes moments of touch and object exchange as a means to radicalise motherhood in two popular and well-known early stories, “A Cross Line” and “The Spell of the White Elf” (Keynotes), and a less-known later story “Mammy” (Flies in Amber). Through tactile exchange, Egerton’s female protagonists establish a maternal network that challenges patriarchal hypocrisy and preserves their New Womanhood. By understanding Egerton’s valorisation of maternity as a “New Motherhood,” this article challenges claims of essentialism and accusations of conventionality in Egerton’s writing while reinstating the cultural value of her later publications.

POLITIK DAN KAUM FEMINIS

Feminist theory attempted to analyze the various conditions that shape the lives of womenand explore diverse cultural understanding about women. Feminist theory was originallydirected to the political objective of the Woman Movement. The feminist rejected the viewthat the inequality between men and women are naturally. Thinking as a feminist involvesattempts to challenge many of the things that are considered as “knowledge”. Historically,live in a society dominated by men, women are more often made into objects rather than thecreator of knowledge. As the result, many things are passed down as an objective knowledgeabout the world is actually produced by men (white skin, middle class and heterogeneous).Women are in a variety of different positions in local and global contexts and displayeddifferently in art, literature and other media; the different in terms of nationality, ethnicity,education, language, class, family, work, ability or disability and sexuality is crucial.Keywords: Politics, Feminism, Feminist

Practical Idealism: The Musical Patronage of Phoebe Apperson Hearst

Phoebe Apperson Hearst, called “California's greatest woman” at her death in 1919, was very rich—and very philanthropic. Despite attending school in rural Missouri only a year or so past the eighth grade, Hearst directed her most influential benefactions toward education, particularly for women. She became a prime mover in the kindergarten movement and PTA, established women's scholarships at UC Berkeley, and was UC's first female regent.This article, drawing on Hearst's extensive archive, describes music's role in her philanthropy. She supported individual artists and ensembles, staged elaborate musicales at her various homes, funded music performing spaces, patronized renowned singers and instrumentalists, provided musical performances for college students and the general public, and encouraged the formation of an opera school.As a female patron championing women's education, Hearst was caught between the conservative ideology of male–female “spheres” and the New Woman movement of the early twentieth century. Her wealth allowed her to transcend old models; yet she was also conditioned by them, as shown in her attitudes toward women's suffrage and “proper” female behaviors. By bolstering the traditional view of women as the culture-bearers in U.S. society, Hearst's philanthropy functioned as both retrospective reinforcement and progressive idealism.

Introduction to Jessie Taft, “The Woman Movement from the Point of View of Social Consciousness”

This essay introduces Jessie Taft's pragmatist feminist dissertation, which was written under the guidance of George Herbert Mead at the University of Chicago in 1913 and published in 1915. It gives a brief biography of Taft and summarizes the four chapters of her dissertation, the second of which is reprinted below.