Behind the Book with Pauline A. Phipps

Pauline A. Phipps talks about her recent UTP title, Constance Maynard’s Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849-1935

Constance Maynard's Passions: Religion, Sexuality, and an English Educational Pioneer, 1849-1935How did you become involved in your area of research?

My work as a conceptual artist in the early 1990’s led me to explore the nuances of femininity and female sexuality that stemmed from metanarratives about “appropriate” female behaviour. My fascination with how we interpret images of female-female intimacy through heteronormativity shaped my work as an historian of women, leading me down an exciting path of discovery. I was intrigued by late-Victorians view of passion between sisters, friends, and mother and daughter as a preparation for domestic roles and heterosexual marriage. These same-sex bonds, which seemed vastly different from present-day friendships, became stigmatized after sexologists in the late 1800s classified “normal” (heterosexuality) in opposition to “abnormal” (all other sexuality). The term lesbian was coined in the 1920s. With a focus on late-Victorian England, I explored how women who questioned domesticity described same-sex passion before the advent of sexology.

What inspired you to write this book?

In 1995 I became particularly interested in the emotional life of Constance Louisa Maynard (1849-1935), who is a relatively unknown first-generation English educational pioneer. Maynard’s life had been touched upon by Martha Vicinus who, writing in the mid-1980s, examined close friendships among college women who sought independence from domesticity through higher education. Maynard’s wealth of records at Queen Mary University of London Archives – parallel diaries, an autobiography, numerous journals, letters, and published works – had been virtually unexplored. I took several trips to QMUL archives over a decade, and in the meantime, spent two years examining and transcribing passages from Maynard’s diaries and autobiography on micro-film.

I discovered a story about a pious woman, who, as the founder of Westfield College at the University of London in 1882, championed middle-class women’s access to university degrees. Westfield stood distinct in that women at Oxbridge did not gain a degree until the 1940s. Indeed, when Maynard retired from Westfield in 1913, after thirty-one years as first principal, Westfield graduates had pioneered such fields as teaching, medicine, and missionary work. Higher education for women also paved the way for key political reforms like female suffrage.

What did you find most interesting about your area of research?

Maynard’s emotional life fascinated me because she lived before, during, and after changes in ideas about sexuality. Her voluminous records reveal the nuanced, innovative ways that she intersected language(s) of her ascetic faith with secularist discourses to carve a distinct, same-sex sexual self-consciousness during an era of prescribed domesticity for women. Maynard largely understood her ambitions and passions within the context of Atonement theology: God rewards us with human love, but we must resist such worldly desire for salvation.

At its core, Constance Maynard’s Passions reveals a powerful leader and a tormented soul. Faith not only helped Maynard to succeed as an educational pioneer. Faith justified what we might term her masochistic-like behaviour with students in whom she had gained trust. Even in later life, when she encountered the new psychoanalytical theories on sex, Maynard still claimed her “only wrong” was choosing human love over divine love.

What do you wish other people to know about your area of research?

I wrote the book with the intention of providing more insight into late-Victorian sexuality and femininity. Maynard’s records challenge the range of activities normally attributed to late-Victorian female friendship and gendered power relations. Indeed, in general, hierarchical eroticism between two women has mostly been excluded from studies on female sexuality because of its connotations of sexual abuse.

Constance Maynard’s Passions is not simply a fascinating story about a life that confounds the usual categories of faith, gender, and sexuality. I think Maynard knew that the eloquent account of her lifelong struggle, which found her caught between desire and resistance, not only raised new questions about gender and sexuality for her own era, but also for subsequent ones. My book attempts to let Maynard’s voice provide insight into these historical moments.

What was the hardest part about writing your book?  

The most difficult part of writing this book was dealing with Maynard’s despair over her “failure” as a leader and her “weakness with love.” Her records are a disquieting read at the best of times. She threatened to commit suicide twice. There were no set rules of conduct in the newly established women’s colleges in the early 1880s; thus Maynard—who was forced to remain single as an educational pioneer—struggled to navigate love and leadership under the same roof. Her position of power and her ideas about love caused feelings of torment, bitterness, and confusion for both Maynard and the young college women who fell under her sway.

Listening to Maynard reflect on her sexual past was perhaps the most heartbreaking read. It was when she was in her late seventies (1926) that she first became aware of the psychoanalytically-based term, the “thwarted sex instinct,” which classified all same-sex intimacy as deviant. This idea was a marked departure from a Victorian culture that had condoned passion between women. But while noting that the idea of deviance was “abhorrent” to her, and claiming that her love for college women was faith-based, Maynard wrote sad “confessions” about her past “excitations” with students whose emotions she admitted to her control.

What did you learn from writing your book?

Patience was a strategy I learned when sifting through and analyzing Maynard’s archives to excavate her oftentimes obscure languages of love; however, rom the adolescent-themed “electric sparks” she uses to describe her relationships with female friends to the power-based Hellenistic-Christian discourses that emerged when she was an educational leader (the “minotaur” who devoured “the maiden”) the reward was the privilege I felt in reading about an experience that was quite different to my own. Nonetheless, a queer-sex-gender-faith framework proved crucial to my examination of and writing about Maynard’s life. For example, understanding Maynard’s behaviour as a part of Victorian femininity, and yet distinct to her pioneering role and her faith, seemed more historically accurate than classifying her as an emotionally abusive lesbian through a presentist lens.

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