Why Gender Discrimination Does Not End Even After Women Die
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, everyone
Despite her rising transatlantic fame, most major obituary columns overlooked the English novelist Charlotte Brontë’s death in 1855.
The first notice of Brontë’s passing was published a week later in The Daily News — a London paper founded by Charles Dickens — and is attributed to the journalist and writer Harriet Martineau.
In the obituary, Martineau described the author as a ‘gifted creature’ and praised her for her ‘intellectual force’ and ‘moral strength.’ So far, so good, right? Well, it gets worse. Brontë’s literary talent is then tempered by Martineau depicting her as ‘the smallest of women’, a ‘frail little creature’ who was ‘humble, ‘self-controlled’ and ‘as able at the needle as she was at the pen.’ ‘She was a perfect household image,’ Martineau writes.
And while this portrayal might sound strange to us today (imagine an obituary saying Stephen King was as good at writing as he was at mowing the lawn), it aligns with the posthumous representation of late 19th-century notable women. You can be known for your ‘silly little side gig’ — such as writing some of the greatest literary works of all time — provided you also embodied acceptable femininity.
