Giving Women

What Giving Women does best is to provide us with a wealth of detail on the ways in which Victorian women use the models of exchange associated with gift and sacrifice to authorize a range of social, political, and literary interventions. * Victorian Studies *
Teasing out the implications of women's gift-exchanges in fiction and poetry, and in philanthropy and activism, and even in reading practices, Rappoport's study offers both a pleasingly rich account of middle-class women's culture in the nineteenth-century and a nuanced challenge to the idea that a Victorian woman's generosity was a dangerous capitulation to misogynist gender norms....Because of its broad sweep and because of the depth of detail it has to offer about the Victorian community of women, Giving Women will join Sharon Marcus's Between Women (2007) as one of the most compelling works on Victorian culture and women in the past decade. * Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies *
Giving Women is an important examination of the Victorian ideology of self-sacrifice. Rappoport demonstrates how closely entwined were acts of benevolence and female power. Her fresh readings of canonical authors delineate the ambivalence felt towards saintly women. Chapters on Salvation Army workers, pro-maternity eugenicists and hunger-striking suffragists document the complicated pleasures of personal sacrifice, whether to the needy, the nation or the Cause. * Martha Vicinus, author of Intimate Friends: Women Who Loved Women, 1778-1928 *
Beware the humble gift, for as Jill Rappoport cleverly demonstrates, generosity, for the Victorians, was never simply beneficial. Gifts could forge close ties or poison relations; they could bolster female community as well as individual autonomy. An astute analysis of key Victorian notions of sacrifice, community and duty, Rappoport's Giving Women is a very welcome present to the field. * Deborah A. Cohen, author of Household Gods: The British and their Possessions *
Giving Women is scrupulously researched, with abundant use of archival materials, cogently argued, and beautifully written. Its impressive breadth and range will make it essential reading among literary, historical, and feminist scholars of the period. * Mary Jean Corbett, author of Family Likeness: Sex, Marriage, and Incest from Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf *