The opposition of the ‘womanly woman’ and her rebellious or improperly formed ‘other’ is the site upon which the Girl of the Period, and her successors, the Wild Women, Revolting Daughters and (later) the Shrieking Sisterhood are constructed. ‘Womanliness’, as Penny Boumelha (1982) has argued, is a ‘socially constructed concept’, ‘an ideal or aspiration’ rather than an ‘inherent disposition’ (74). Linton’s ‘Girl of the Period’ articles, which enjoyed a new currency in the 1880s and 1890s (following their publication in volume form in 1883), were based on the assumption that it was, regrettably (at least as far as Linton was concerned), perfectly possible for any particular woman to be unwomanly. Certainly, most of the feminist writers of the 1880s and 1890s openly rejected the concept of womanliness. Their fiction is full of restless, searching women who have either deliberately rejected this socially constructed womanliness, or who have been imperfectly socialised. The rejection of womanliness is sometimes figured in a female character’s rejection of her mother. Imperfect socialisation (i.e. social feminisation) is also attributed to inadequate mothering, sometimes by a woman disabled by her immersion in the self-effacing, self-sacrificial role of the proper feminine ideal, and sometimes by a woman disabled by her failure to conform to this ideal.

In the late nineteenth century the rejected womanliness was replaced by ‘Womanhood’ or ‘True Womanhood’, terms which denoted ‘an immanent natural disposition, originating in a pre-determining physiological sexual differentiation’ (Boumelha 1982:86). In some 1890s writers (Egerton, for example) True Womanhood is distinguished from, and opposed to, the tra-

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