<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><p> Female workers represent a fundamental component of the workforce to the extent that it is true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a huge debt. However, despite the unfair exploitation of many women in factories in which conditions resembled manslaughter, they have been often neglected and reduced to liminal characters by Victorian novelists. An interesting exception in the early Victorian period is represented by the writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose fiction works as a medium of social criticism. Her semi-fictional The Wrongs of Woman is a reform novel which sheds a controversial light on female working conditions. On the one hand she indeed deplores the inhuman treatment of female labourers, but on the other hand she also argues that female employment provokes a consequent increase in male unemployment! My paper aims to investigate the role of Tonna’s text and her attempt to alleviate working-class suffering.</p></abstract>

Female workers represent a fundamental component of the workforce to the extent that it is true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a huge debt. However, despite the unfair exploitation of many women in factories in which conditions resembled manslaughter, they have been often neglected and reduced to liminal characters by Victorian novelists. An interesting exception in the early Victorian period is represented by the writer Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, whose fiction works as a medium of social criticism. Her semi-fictional The Wrongs of Woman is a reform novel which sheds a controversial light on female working conditions. On the one hand she indeed deplores the inhuman treatment of female labourers, but on the other hand she also argues that female employment provokes a consequent increase in male unemployment! My paper aims to investigate the role of Tonna’s text and her attempt to alleviate working-class suffering.

Female Factory Workers in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Quest

University of Macerata Le Scalette, 8, 62100 Macerata MC,

Gender Studies

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

{"article-title":"Female Factory Workers in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna\u2019s Quest"}

Female workers represent a fundamental component of the workforce to the extent that it is true that the Industrial Revolution owes them a huge debt. However,...

Female Factory Workers in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Quest

Published Online: Mar 14, 2017

Page range: 13 - 26

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/genst-2017-0002

Keywords
class struggle, disparity, factory work, female discrimination, hegemony

© by Carla Fusco

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Female Factory Workers in Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna’s Quest

Published Online: Mar 14, 2017

Page range: 13 - 26

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/genst-2017-0002

Keywordsclass struggle, disparity, factory work, female discrimination, hegemony

© by Carla Fusco

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.

Keywords
class struggle, disparity, factory work, female discrimination, hegemony