Since the 1850s a lively debate had flourished on the subject of work opportunities for women. The pragmatic argument for educational change was the need of ‘odd’ or ‘unpaired’ women to be self-supporting. Naturally in the carefully costed world of Gissing’s narrative it is vocational training that Mary and Rhoda offer. Such a school as theirs had been founded by Bessie Rayner Parkes as early as 1859, as part of the work of the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. By the 1870s secondary schools for girls developed on the model of the North London Collegiate School (1850) and Cheltenham (1853). This was gradually followed by permission for women to sit as candidates for the Tripos examination at Cambridge in 1870; in Honour Schools at Oxford in 1872; and in degree examinations at Manchester and London in 1880.

So by the 1890s the debate involved wider issues than job training for the unmarried. Already some women argued for a wider education. In 1869 Mary Somerville wrote: ‘Hitherto usefulness and duty to men have been thought to be the only objects worth caring for in relation to women; it would at least be generous to take the individual happiness of the sex into consideration in the scheme of education.’11 But it was by no means commonplace to argue that women shared men’s need and capacity to develop an informed mind, to be trained to think logically and to judge intelligently and dispassionately on large as well as small issues. Some few men, as well as many women, saw the merits of an education for women similar to that of men but did so only through the magnifying glass of self-interest. This view is voiced in an extreme form by Gissing himself in a letter of 1893, two years into his disastrous second marriage with a working-class woman:

My demand for female ‘equality’ simply means that I am concerned there will be no social peace until women are intellectually trained very much as men are. More than half the misery of life is due to the ignorance & childishness of women. The average woman pretty closely resembles in all intellectual considerations, the average male idiot… That state of things is traceable to lack of education, in all senses of the word… I am driven frantic by the crass imbecility of the typical woman. That type must disappear,—or at all events become altogether subordinate. And I believe that the only way of effecting this is to go through a period of what many people will call sexual anarchy.12

The unwillingness or inability to confront the traditional construction of femininity in a radical way is in part explained by the fact that it would involve a similar consideration of masculinity. Instead, from the 1860s the ‘new’ construct ‘manliness’ developed. Like many such terms, its significance is often implied by the use of its opposite, ‘unmanliness’. Indeed it is the negative form that is most frequently used since its function is defensive. What is being defended is the traditional interpretation of masculinity which was felt to be under attack by suggestions such as those in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854), that some supposedly feminine qualities could be profitably cultivated by men. As an argument for discrediting all forms of ‘effeminacy’ (including homosexuality), masculinity was put into fancy dress as ‘manliness’. Everard, with his decisive way with ex-mistresses, is not unmanly but Bevis, who refuses to run away with a willing married woman, is. When the chance arises he turns to ‘dolorous sentimentality’, trembles and blushes ‘like a young girl’, and ‘his accents’ fall at last ‘into melodious whining’ (p. 254). Monica recognizes this inferior type of man: ‘The unmanliness of his tone was so dreadful a disillusion. She had expected something so entirely different,—swift, virile passion, eagerness even to anticipate her desire of flight, a strength, a courage to which she could abandon herself, body and soul’ (p. 256). In Monica’s imagination the virile, dominating cave-man of the social evolutionists reappears, masquerading as something new in the way of masculinity. Unlike Barfoot, Bevis does not take what is offered by a woman. This possibly signals Everard’s manliness in doing so. Yet Barfoot’s status remains ambiguous, leaving open the question ‘at what point does manliness become callous brutality?’ It is still difficult to see Everard Barfoot as Gissing’s alter ego even though some of their attitudes coincide.

The impression that every subject at issue in The Odd Women ends in an impasse is because of the fact that none of them is shown to be discrete, whether it is sexuality, gender, or class. Instead, readers are confronted by a maze.