It seems to imply Everard’s inborn right to privilege, or even to a right to behave in a dismissive fashion over his affair with the working-class girl, Amy Drake, and its ‘awkward results’ of an illegitimate child. Barfoot explains his own conduct as natural: he exploited a lower-class woman who hoped to marry him. In his account she made her willingness clear and he says ‘It was too much to expect that I should rebuke the young woman and preach her a sermon’ (p. 108). In any case he paid her an allowance for 18 months—until ‘her’ child died. As his friend Micklethwaite points out, ‘every one knows there are detestable women to be found’ (p. 108). None the less, the narrator never moves to outright condemnation of Barfoot.

Signs of distaste for working-class individuals in The Odd Women are muted, or rather, casual. They do not match the vehemence of the depiction of Slimy in The Unclassed. They now take a marginal and feminized form, appearing as Everard’s victim, Amy Drake; Mrs Smallbrook’s fallen protégée; the shop-girl turned prostitute, Miss Eade, and the others who shock Monica with their ‘scandalous’ and ‘Rabelaisian’ talk. In the 1890s the female equivalent of Slimy was still, as for decades before, the sexual deviant. The ‘fallen woman’ was not seen as the economic victim she usually was, as Josephine Butler’s battle against the Contagious Diseases Act (1844), designed for hygienic supervision of prostitutes, shows. Instead, she was construed as an aberration in nature from the true femininity of the pure middle-class woman. As critics have frequently pointed out, ‘The definition of a female sexuality across an axis of class made it easier to construct a coherent image of respectable femininity’.9 This at once divided the classes and shored up the justification of separate spheres for middle-class men and women. The latter needed to be restricted to a domestic life protected from the contamination of the outside world. Mary and Rhoda make explicit the connection between working-class women and sexual deviance. Mary is less of a ideologue than Rhoda but for all her wish to educate women to make them self-supporting, her views on female sexuality are conventional: ‘The odious fault of working-class girls, in town and country alike, is that they are absorbed in preoccupation with their animal nature. We, thanks to our education and the tone of our society, manage to keep that in the background’ (p. 71).

The interlocking of class and gender that inhabits Gissing’s text constricts the view of the new women that it presents. This is something that Gissing explicitly recognizes in a letter of 1893 written shortly after publication of The Odd Women, in which he speaks of the limited education offered to women: ‘Of course the whole question is vastly complicated: for instance the democratic question cannot be separated from it.’ He is hamstrung by a desire to change the prospects of improvement for women without furthering ‘democracy’, a pejorative term for rule by the mob: ‘I believe that, relatively speaking, there must always be the same social distinctions as now exist. All classes will be elevated, but between higher & lower the distinction will remain. I should be content to see all working-class women about as reasonable as the present bourgeoisie.’10

Traces of the Ruskinian ideal of middle-class femininity also persist. The narrator’s comment on Mary is revealing. Startlingly for the time he says she ‘could have filled a place on a board of directors, have taken an active part in municipal government—nay, perchance in national’. Yet this is followed by an instant retreat to a safely conventional position defensively asserting that she still conforms to the old standard. He insists that her outstanding abilities are, of course, accompanied by ‘many traits of character… strongly feminine… She did not seek to become known as the leader of a “movement,” yet her quiet work was probably more effectual than the public career of women who propagandize for female emancipation’ (p. 63). Mary Barfoot could run a company or a council or a country—but remains quiet, self-effacing, and feminine—which is better. This contradiction is the result of a period of transition in ideologies of gender and class when it becomes difficult to be sure where outmoded constructs begin and end. Precisely, it is difficult even in the late nineteenth century to regard self-effacement, self-sacrifice, and silence in a woman as undesirable.

Central to these contradictions in the language of gender and class is the subject of women’s education with which Mary and Rhoda are involved.