Phebe Gibbes - Social Protests

Social Protests

Several contemporary issues surface multiple times in Gibbes’ writing: child neglect, lack of female education, acquisitiveness, gambling, and personal vanity. Many of her heroines, particularly Sophia ‘Goldborne’ – a somewhat onomastic name – are stark contrasts to the materialistic, indulgent culture of the time, as discussed above; and yet at the same time, appear to relish female materialism. One can see in this scene in which Gibbes creates a vivid picture of extravagance, this slightly awe-filled distaste at both the foolishness and the power involved in materialism,

“The Europe shops, as you will naturally conclude, are those ware-houses where all the British finery imported is displayed and purchased; and such is the spirit of many ladies upon visiting them, that there have been :instances of their spending 30 or 40,000 rupees in one morning, for the decoration of their persons; on which account many husbands are observed to turn pale as ashes, on the bare mention of their wives :being seen to enter them: but controul is not a matrimonial rule at Calcutta; and the men are obliged to make the best of their conjugal mortifications.”

One can conclude that these scenes serve to express her distaste for the ‘materialistic’ nature of some English women; and yet, Gibbes finds a power in this ability for women to ‘control’ their spouses or fathers through expenditure.

Gibbes is especially known for her protests against the lack of early education for girls. Gibbes was particularly inspired by the comparatively free lifestyle for women in America, and in fact was sometimes construed as a Republican. In Her Friendship in a Nunnery; or, The American Fugitive, the narrator, a fourteen-year-old American girl, is so well-spoken and eloquent that the Critical Review reviled the novel, writing, “what may not be expected from the old men and sages of, when its maidens, its babes and sucklings talk, write, and reason thus!” William Enfield, a well-regarded Unitarian minister and writer, however, applauded her novel as having,

“so much truth… that it merits attention in an age, in which it is become too fashionable for females to receive the last finishing of their education in a convent.”

One must also note as particularly feministic, the accidentally bigamous marriage of Elfrida, in the eponymous novel Elfrida, and the incredible death of Hannah, the household servant in Mr. Francis Clive, who suffers a painful and protracted demise after imbibing a faulty abortifacient (abortion-inducing poultice) from an apothecary when she becomes pregnant with Clive’s child. These kinds of outrageous, yet plausible, situations left Gibbes’ novels as somewhat polemic in the time period; and, clearly, it is hardly precocious to call her an early feminist.

The social protestation of these types of double-standards for males and females amazingly pre-dates those reactionary works of the later feminist writers, such as Mary Hays and Mary Wollstonecraft, by nearly forty years. It is unquestionable that the later feminists of the late 18th and early 19th century, particularly Wollstonecraft who reviewed Gibbes’ work with delight, were inspired in part by this prodigal 18th century author.