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What denotes Oliphant’s comments as a particularly revealing point of access to narratives of Victorian antifeminism, in fact, is that the main target is Linton’s Ourselves: A Series of Essays on Women (1869). Its very title comes under attack as Oliphant undermines one of its central premises with pointed irony: “If any man were to write a book called ‘Ourselves,’ and intended to point out the special vices and weaknesses of his ‘brothers,’ with what a storm of amazed derision would the publication be received” (174). Linton, like Oliphant, has long and repeatedly been labelled an antifeminist Victorian woman writer. Both have become equally notorious for their attacks on protofeminist agendas of the time. Their nonfictional writing shows them critical (and often severely so) of changing approaches to womanhood, femininity, and specifically modern women, while their often intensely controversial treatment of prevalent discourses marks them out as active participants in the public sphere. In posing contrasting approaches to women’s representation against each other, Oliphant’s comments on Linton bring to the fore the various intricacies and incongruities in the shifting conceptualisations of both feminism and antifeminism.
Victorian antifeminism as a conceptual creation prompts us to rethink the complexities of the initial reception and further critical discussion of writing by women. In her groundbreaking study of domestic women writers, Valerie Sanders stresses that we need to draw the formation of such categories, including the terminology of antifeminism and its interrelation with feminism, into question, reminding us that the “definition of antifeminism naturally hinges on how we perceive feminism” (Eve’s 3). Both constitute retrospectively coined terms with changing connotations. Highlighting the often-neglected “wide grey area between feminism and antifeminism, where women who are indifferent to the whole controversy would place themselves ideologically” (Eve’s 5), Sanders thus importantly extends the meaning of the term beyond the OED’s definition of an antifeminist as a person hostile to specific items in women’s rights campaigns.2