From the 1860s onwards, there had been organized campaigns in Britain directed towards gaining educational, legal and political rights for women, and at removing the restrictions that limited their employment. With or without the influence of his mother, it is more than likely that Wilde would have been aware of a number of the significant debates about women’s rights which were underway in the last few decades of the nineteenth century. No longer would a woman enter marriage ‘as a bond slave, disenfranchised of all rights over her fortune’. She regarded the passing of the 1882 Married Women’s Property Rights Act, which gave married woman a legal identity, and hence the right to enter into contracts and to buy and sell their own separate property, as the inauguration of ‘a new era in English and Irish social life’. Jane Wilde was vocal in her support for better education for women, and her hostility to the sexual double standard in all its forms. As the son of a woman long noted for her fervent and constant advocacy of women’s rights, Oscar Wilde was well acquainted with late-nineteenth-century feminist discussions and debates.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |