New Woman Ecologies: From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond

New Woman Ecologies

Under the Sign of Nature: Explorations in Ecocriticism

Serenella Iovino, Kate Rigby, and John Tallmadge, Editors

Michael P. Branch and SueEllen Campbell, Senior Advisory Editors

New Woman Ecologies

From Arts and Crafts to the Great War and Beyond

Alicia Carroll

University of Virginia Press

Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2019

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Carroll, Alicia, 1960– author.

Title: New woman ecologies : from arts and crafts to the Great War and beyond / Alicia Carroll.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2019. | Series: Under the sign of nature | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2018054024 (print) | LCCN 2018058047 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813942834 (ebook) | ISBN 9780813942810 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780813942827 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Ecofeminism—Great Britain—History. | Ecofeminism in literature—History. | Women and the environment—Great Britain—History.

Classification: LCC HQ1194 (ebook) | LCC HQ 1194 .C37 2019 (print) | DDC 304.2082—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018054024

Cover photo: Members of the Women’s Land Army thistle hoeing. (Military History Collection/Alamy Stock Photo)

For Valera Carroll

Ideas survive those who give them birth.

—Helen Georgiana Nussey, London Gardens of the Past

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

1. Elemental Ecologies

Arts and Crafts Women and Early Green Thought

2. We Are Two Women

Alternative Agriculture, the New Woman, and Rural Modernity

3. The New Life and the New Woman

Utopian Ecologies in New Woman Writing

4. God Speed the Plough and the Woman Who Drives It

Ecologies of the Great War

5. Working Relationships

Ecological Futurity and the Herbal Revival

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Figure 1. Intensive Culture for Flat-Dwellers, Punch, 1917

Figure 2. Oiketicus townsendi, Olive J. Cockerell, The Entomologist, 1913

Figure 3. The Seeds of Love, from Mary De Morgan’s On a Pincushion, 1877

Figure 4. The Pool and the Tree, Olive Cockerell, from Mary De Morgan’s The Windfairies, 1900

Figure 5. The Rain Maiden, Olive Cockerell, from Mary De Morgan’s The Windfairies, 1900

Figure 6. We are two women, from Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey’s A French Garden in England, 1909

Figure 7. Planting seedlings, from Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey’s A French Garden in England, 1909

Figure 8. Mending bell glasses with white lead, from Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey’s A French Garden in England, 1909

Figure 9. Bacteria Thrown Out of Work, from Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey’s A French Garden in England, 1909

Figure 10. Women’s Land Army recruitment poster, 1917

Figure 11. Rosemary, from Lady Rosalind Northcote’s The Book of Herbs, 1903

Figure 12. Herbstrewer’s outfit

Acknowledgments

This book was enabled by the richness of new approaches to ecocriticism and the depth of the subject. My biggest expression of gratitude must be given to those whose work made up the latter. As I came to know these impressive and complicated women, I realized I had to live up to them, and, since it was often shaped under duress, their work became more and more relevant to our own ecological crisis. While undertaking the project, I called upon and was answered by the goodwill of my family, students, administrators, archivists, colleagues, and most especially Auburn University’s outstanding librarians, named below. Many of the latter even shared my excitement at locating yet another book, image, or article that built a case for New Woman ecologies.

Without the help of such people the book would not have been written. I’m grateful for my family’s support. My husband Rob and daughter Alex have provided love and understanding each and every day. My siblings, Elizabeth and John Carroll, cheerfully acted as my personal art historians and consultants. My earliest mentors, Tom Lewis at Skidmore College and Fred Kaplan at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), have been strong supporters and friends. Friends and colleagues such as Claire Wilson, Jon Bolton, Paula Backscheider, Anton di Sclafani, Rajiv Mohabir, Sunny Stalter-Pace, Erich Nunn, Peter Logan, Penny Ingram, Chris Keirstead, and Marilyn Pemberton generously shared my excitement for this project. My students Caitlyn Anderson, Taylor Bowman, Brooke Bullman, Annie Gilbertson, Justin Paxson, Bryan Williams, and Robyn Miller have provided an ecocritical community for which I am extremely grateful. My chair at Auburn University, Jeremy Downes, assisted in locating travel funds, which made archival work and conferencing possible.

I’m grateful to my CUNY colleague Talia Schaffer for connecting me to Elissa Meyers, who helped with archival work at the Berg Collection in New York. Likewise, I’m grateful to Craig Bertolet for connecting me to Selina Dukes and Erika Roberts, who helped with archival work at the City of Westminster, in London. Auburn librarians Nancy Noe, Jaena Alabi, and Kara R. Van Abel at University of Alabama at Birmingham have been essential to this book and I am extremely grateful for their help.

Both the US and UK-I Associations for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE) conferences have provided me with a forum for my work. It was at ASLE in the United States that I met Lowell Duckert, who very generously shared his introduction to Elemental Ecocriticism with me. Likewise, I’m very grateful to Dennis Denisoff for his editing of my article on Mary De Morgan for the Victorian Review. That became the seed of this project. Near the end, I received extremely helpful feedback from Samantha Walton, editor, with John Parham, of ASLE UKI’s Green Letters on my article on Agatha Christie and medicinal plants, which is revised here as part of the final chapter. The British Women Writers Association, especially Roxanne Eberle, has also provided a community for my work and wonderful feedback.

At the University of Virginia Press, I am most grateful to acquisitions editor Boyd Zenner, who waited patiently for this manuscript and moved swiftly to bring it to press. I thank those who worked closely on the manuscript—Morgan Myers, Emily Shelton, Ellen Satrom, and the art department—for their help. I am also grateful to the editors of the series Under the Sign of Nature and my two readers, who provided insightful comments and excellent advice.

Finally, I’m especially grateful to my friend, gardening mentor, and mother, Valera Carroll. Her rescuing of local plants from construction zones was an early influence. That, and her love for art and textiles of all sorts, surely appears in these pages. The mistakes, on the other hand, are entirely my own.

Portions of chapter 1 were first published as The Greening of Mary De Morgan: The Cultivating Woman and the Ecological Imaginary in The Seeds of Love," in Victorian Review 36, no. 2, Natural Environments (Fall 2010): 104–17. Copyright © Victorian Studies of Western Canada. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press. Portions of chapter 5 were first published as ‘Leaves and Berries’: Agatha Christie and the Herbal Revival, in Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 22, no. 1 (2018). © Association for the Study of Literature and the Environmental (ASLE UK-1). Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis, Ltd., on behalf of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environmental (ASLE UK-I).

Chronology

1879 Grain prices collapse, and the English agricultural depression begins

1891 Swanley Horticultural College admits women

1894 Sarah Grand publishes The New Aspect of the Woman Question

1898 Whiteway Colony established

1898 Lady Warwick Hostel for women’s agricultural training opens

1902 Swanley Horticultural College closes to men

1903 Studley College founded by Lady Warwick

1903 Lady Northcote publishes The Book of Herbs in the Practical Gardening Series published by John Lane at the Bodley Head

1910 Lady Warwick presents A French Garden in England to King Edward VII

1913 Olive Hockin sentenced to four months imprisonment for suffrage-related arson attack on the Roehampton Golf Club

1914 The Pankhursts suspend suffrage activism and urge women to support the war effort

1914 The Whins Medicinal and Commercial Herb School and Farm founded by Maud Grieve

1916 Women’s Land Army formed

1919 First herb garden exhibited at the Chelsea Flower Show

1931 Publication of Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal

1939 End of the agricultural depression

1941 Passage of the Pharmacy and Medicines Bill

New Woman Ecologies

Introduction

In November 1906, Octavia Hill (1838–1912) took a break from the greening of London to write to her goddaughter, Olive Juliet Cockerell (1869–1910). Hill was deeply worried about Cockerell, an illustrator trained in the Arts and Crafts school. In what seemed to be a complete reversal of occupation, the young woman was moving to the country.¹ There she would train to become a market gardener, eventually growing and selling fresh local fruit and vegetables in partnership with another woman, former hospital almoner Helen Nussey (1875–1965). Cockerell and Nussey meant to see if two women like ourselves could make a living in a ‘small holding,’ practicing the French tradition of intensive culture with no labor but our own.² The illustrated book they left behind, A French Garden in England: A Record of the Successes and Failures of a First Year of Intensive Culture (1909), suggests they succeeded. Nonetheless, Octavia Hill, the champion of the urban open space movement, was nearly inconsolable over her goddaughter’s shift to country work, pleading with her to pray beware of potato digging & over fatigue!³ While Hill could well understand and encourage her niece to participate in the lifting of dirt from the London slums, she could not support the lifting of soil by a lady for the purpose of growing and selling food. Nor could she understand what she saw as the mystifying, self-imposed exile of two such vital young women from London. They would be sorely missed, she said, in the metropolis.⁴ For Cockerell, however, her garden future seemed bright. Living out the elemental ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement from the ground up, her hands would cultivate the earth itself. She would fulfill the now often forgotten principle of early green socialism: England should feed her own people.⁵

This book reclaims the intersection of such initiatives with the literature and culture of the New Woman. From the Arts and Crafts period to before, during, and after the Great War, the discursive image of the latter informed historical women’s responses to the keen environmental debates and crises of their day. These include familiar concerns about air and water quality, as well as now less familiar critiques of Victorian floral ecologies, extinction narratives, land use, local food shortages, and food importation. Indeed, as importation squeezed traditional British farm crops and labor practices under laissez-faire economics, the great agricultural depression began, arcing over the period of the New Woman, from 1879 to 1939. This crisis created opportunities for women seeking to remake both the land and themselves for the future. It accelerated the third wave of alternative agriculture in British history manifested in Cockerell and Nussey’s small, local market garden.⁶ The Land Question, a hotly debated social interrogative contemporary with the Woman Question, emerged during this period as more conventional monoculture farms went bankrupt. The crisis concerned early greens and progressives, as well as conservatives. The former, in particular, challenged both the economic losses to farmers and the appalling spectre of the staple trade of humanity, the production of food, in a state of threatened dissolution in England.⁷ As the government had taken no action except to gaze upon the disquieting spectre and bear the spectacle with apparent equanimity, many argued the benefits of going back to the land themselves.⁸ For women, speaking from the land became a way, as militant feminist turned war-time landworker Olive Hockin wrote, of proving women could do any mortal thing they wished with their minds and bodies.⁹ Such a claim extended New Woman polemicist Mona Caird’s 1888 demand for the "acknowledgement of the obvious right of the woman to possess herself body and soul" in marriage to an urgent new context.¹⁰ Testing this New Woman discourse on autonomy, historical women like Cockerell, Nussey, Hockin, and many more made, or represented, material contact with a vibrant, more-than-human world. Both marking and marked by the latter, they experienced and imagined immanence entirely apart from heteronormative reproduction.

Now rarely discussed in the same breath, the Land and the Woman Questions converged in a variety of new contact zones in which women conceptualized an early green modernity. Women involved in or influenced by the culture of the Arts and Crafts movement, for example, contrasted earlier land-use practices to those of their own time by reading early modern texts such as Gerard’s Herball or General Historie of Plants (1597). Led by the example of William Morris, they sought to regain intimacy with the land through their deliberately archaic use of plants and the elements in their themes, materials, and practices.¹¹ Others, among the first middle-class women to go on the land by entering agricultural programs, utopian New Life agricultural communities, or the Women’s Land Army, saw that the current economic crisis was also what we would now term an ecological one. They understood that, as farmland went fallow and weeds encroached on large farms designed to support monoculture, local places lost a full spectrum of edible and medicinal plants as well as the once thriving culture of plant literacy that supported them. Women herbalists after the Great War saw no reason why biodiverse culture should not be revived to profit women and the land in England.¹² Many took advantage of Olive Schreiner’s mandate to the New Woman: Take all labor for our province!—including "the non-sexual fields of intellectual or physical toil.¹³ The result was the formation of ecologies, situated systems of knowledge born out of women’s often self-interested, vocational interventions into what we now call the Anthropocene. These naturalized both an ecological modernity and the New Woman’s privilege to access the same. A way had been paved, in fact, by New Woman literature and visual culture that interrogated and reinvented a deeply entrenched, gendered topos of Nature inherited from earlier generations. The majority of the women studied in this book challenged the latter with fresh alternatives, fostering now recognizably ecological models avant la lettre. As they greened the sexual anarchy of the New Woman, they gendered early environmentalism.

Inevitably, studies of the New Woman lead to questions about the term itself. The New Woman, writes Regenia Gagnier, was the term applied to self-consciously modern women at the fin de siècle.¹⁴ In their case, modernity meant claiming the pursuit of material well-being and economic independence, scientific knowledge, and political emancipation.¹⁵ Such claims, Elaine Showalter notes, historically allied the New Woman with a threatening sexual anarchy as she sought new opportunities for education, work, and mobility as well as alternatives to marriage.¹⁶ Talia Schaffer specifies that this dangerous ‘New Woman’ was a middle-class woman agitating for such ‘dynamite’ ideas as the right to walk without a chaperone, to hold a job, to live alone in a flat, to go to college, and to wear sensible clothing.¹⁷ But each of these critics counters that the term New Woman was always contested, not least by women themselves.¹⁸ As early as 1999 and as recently as 2013, Sally Ledger and Talia Schaffer have noted that contemporary critics continue to find the question of how to define the New Woman vexed.¹⁹ Ledger notes that even as the New Woman was named pejoratively in Victorian print culture, her image opened a discursive space that was quickly filled by feminist textual productions sympathetic toward demands made by Victorian feminists.²⁰ Even so, from Mona Caird to Sarah Grand, historical women’s definitions of the New Woman and the futures they envisioned for her, as well as the ideological standpoints from which such futures were imagined, vary widely. There must be some core values through which we can identify the New Woman, Schaffer writes, and perhaps as well a particular way of writing that characterizes her.²¹

My hope is that both those core values and way of writing are represented here. My subjects share what Gagnier describes as the essential feature of New Woman literature—the search for autonomy: What New Women wanted, collectively, was freedom, autonomy, not ‘power over,’ but ‘power to,’ empowerment.²² I argue that this gendered project intersects with early green socialism and historical events such as the agricultural depression and the formation of the Women’s Land Army during the Great War. Gagnier contends that what clearly emerges in New Woman literature is the difference between independence or separateness and autonomous individuals in relation.²³ In their book, then, Olive Cockerell and Helen Nussey negotiate their freedom as two women. They manage their distance from, and relation to, the city and the local village, their home and work, their partnership and their concerned families. However, in their garden, other relations and actants besides human ones also challenge their ideal of autonomy. My study extends the New Woman’s engagement of the latter to her quite specific historical and material encounters with an agentic, more-than-human world. The writing, material culture, gardens, and art that result share, if not one way of writing, painting, gardening, or crafting, then one self-consciously modern, frankly experimental ethos. From A French Garden in England (1909) to Maud Grieve’s A Modern Herbal (1931), the resulting work explores how new professions for women shaped ecologies in the shadow of war, economic crisis, and environmental degradation. It also records how women, seeking to prove their autonomy from the ground up, uncovered powerful ecological systems and actants that challenged human exceptionalism itself.

Studying the New Woman’s participation in the ecological story of her time reveals a new perspective on familiar subjects like Sarah Grand (1854–1943) and her infrequently read novel on intensive culture, Adnam’s Orchard (1912), or on George Egerton’s tale of a rural women’s utopian craft community, The Regeneration of Two. It also introduces a host of new subjects often unnoticed by New Woman scholars and ecocritics. These women have rarely been considered English nature writers, nor are they included in anthologies of the same. But they are nonetheless a rich source of ecological thought. They include utilitarian gardeners like Maud Grieve (1858–1941) and Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (1881–1950); Arts and Crafts writer Mary De Morgan (1850–1907); Great War–era landworker and poet, Rose Macaulay (1881–1958); crime-fiction writer Agatha Christie (1890–1976); founder of Studley College, Frances Evelyn Greville, Countess of Warwick (1861–1938); Newnham College historian of botany Agnes Arber (1879–1960); artists like Cockerell, May Morris (1862–1938), and Olive Hockin (1881–1936); and New Life communitarians Nellie Shaw (1877–1939) and Edith Ellis (1861–1916), who wrote under her married name, Mrs. Havelock Ellis. They are joined by named and anonymous members of the Women’s Land Army of the Great War who left records of their encounters with the land in their own journal, the Landswoman.

Their contribution is timely, addressing issues such as food justice and importation, equitable land use, environmental toxins, biodiversity, and the agency of the material world itself. To read their work, I draw on recent insights from feminist new materialisms, as well as from queer and elemental approaches to ecocriticism. The first of these elucidates the central irony of this project: that as historical women test the New Woman discourse of absolute bodily autonomy—by going on the land, for example—they position themselves to encounter a wide range of vibrant, more-than-human bodies.²⁴ Stacy Alaimo’s theory of trans-corporeality, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, and Cohen and Duckert’s Elemental Ecocriticism act as lenses through which to read plants, soil, the elements, and women’s sometimes exhilarating, sometimes disturbing new knowledge of the same. Such perspectives illuminate unexpected alliances and even unwelcome traffic between bodies as middle-class women record or imagine their historic female firsts on the land, in the elements, and amid more-than-human nature.²⁵ Valuable and underappreciated as texts such as Olive Hockin’s memoir Two Girls on the Land: War-Time on a Dartmoor Farm (1918) may be, they benefit from readings that apply pressure to the triumphant readings of the New Woman in second-wave feminism.²⁶ Reading materially allows a close analysis of the ways in which women’s discourses, even of autonomy, may be implicated in an unsustainable human exceptionalism and class privilege. New materialist critiques of the human value of transcendence over immanence inform my readings of women’s explorations of hierarchies that, once thought vertical, are found to be horizontal. As the linguistic and constructionist turn of feminist theory produced powerful readings of the New Woman as a discursive figure, so does a materialist reading of the intersections of discourse and matter produce important insights into New Woman literature. Reading the wind or rain in Mary De Morgan’s tales or Rose Macaulay’s poetry reveals that such elements challenge the very idea of boundaries between bodies and between nations. Reading plant life in women’s herbal texts of the early twentieth century makes quite clear that what has been assumed in modernity to be inert retains its potency.²⁷

This is certainly the case in Cockerell and Nussey’s small-space, raised-bed garden, the vitality of which defies its small acreage as well as gendered and national boundaries. The material dimensions of the garden itself with its practice of dense companion planting reveal what Nancy Tuana calls the rich interactions between things rather than the meetings of stable essences.²⁸ In such a garden, it becomes clear that subjects are constituted out of relationality and that their process of becoming may occur through engagements of bodies of all sorts.²⁹ This book will explore how middle-class women form rural communities and single-sex partnerships that mesh with the exuberant pleasures of thinking with, and feeling with, an abundantly, uncontainably queer world.³⁰ Women’s observations of plants that reproduce aided by other species, for example, both challenge widely accepted competitive Darwinian narratives of the struggle for existence and queer the ontological boundaries placed between living things. Freshly exposed to this exuberance in biodiversity, women’s love for other women seems suddenly . . . natural. As the science of ecology develops alongside new readings of Darwin, it leads to foundational critiques of the latter in women’s literature and practices. These intersect with early green interests in, for example, the idea of mutualism over competition as the basis of evolutionary life.³¹ In their engagement with the discussion of mutualism and equality for women, New Life followers Nellie Shaw and Edith Ellis, for example, were compelled to conduct their own experiments in collective or cooperative living. Involved, respectively, with the communities of the Fellowship of the New Life and the anarcho-communist Whiteway Colony, both pursued rural social experiments that found collective agriculture the basis of all constructive work.³² They sought to construct the future in the present. Work that came out of such cooperative social experiments, such as Ellis’s neopastoral The Lover’s Calendar, may deploy utopian practices to disrupt what José Esteban Muñoz theorizes as straight time, seeking to replace it with a queer ecological futurity.³³ Following such perspectives, this book works with new ecocritical approaches to rematerialize the social and take seriously the agency of the natural, reading both the discursive work of the image of the New Woman and the material encounters of historical women. The dynamic and interactive nature of both, diffusely enacted in complex networks of relations, is of course clear in all literature, but it is particularly at work here, given the convergence of the New Woman discourse on autonomy with the ecological issues and historical events of the time.³⁴

The intersection of New Woman culture with the latter, I stress, can produce disturbing results. It is clear that most of the women studied here object to the outsourcing of food based on personal or national self-interest rather than in concern for the impact of food production on other lands and peoples. Agricultural historian Nicola Verdon cites Edith Bradley of Lady Warwick’s historic agricultural training program for women as evidence of the latter. She urged, ‘get the women on the land to rear the necessary poultry and eggs, and so let them have the benefit of at least some of the money now enjoyed by the foreigner.’ ³⁵ Moreover, the role of fitness endemic to the discussion of mobility and bodily autonomy in New Woman literature and culture often finds its source in the pseudo-science of eugenics, an ideology popular with writers Edith Ellis, George Egerton, and Sarah Grand, as well as suffragette Olive Hockin. As women claimed the land for the people, they often exerted their privilege over others, leading us to ask, Which land was intended for which people, and who decides? Likely influential in the earliest forms of environmentalism, preservation and conservation in England, women exerted their ideas of heritage to varying degrees, seeking to shape the role of the land in the future as they saw fit. These aspirations are clearly stated through what Gail Cunningham identifies as New Woman principles of plain speaking and rigorous self-analysis and deployed through visual and print culture to make women’s voices heard.³⁶

Indeed, even as the icon of the mainly urban New Woman emerged in print culture during this period, it constructed and reflected mainly middle-class women’s rethinking of an abstract Nature and their potential new privilege to enter traditionally masculine spaces. The latter include laboratories, studios, commercial and collective gardens, print culture, and literal fields, such as the one in which the horrified Octavia Hill imagined her goddaughter digging potatoes. Such interests became fodder for Punch, appearing in cartoons such as Intensive Culture for Flat Dwellers, where a New Woman figure in breeches and bobbed hair spreads early mustard and cress seeds on a doffed petticoat in her parlor (see fig. 1). Glass cloches cover the tables and a pig peeps out of a china cabinet. A bemused gentleman lurks slightly off to the side, meekly watering what the woman plants. This type of cartoon clearly expresses the anxiety elite men felt about New Woman ecologies, their disruption of formerly stable gendered binaries like nature and culture, city and country, inside and outside, production and reproduction, working and ruling classes. These eroded the solid ground of the patriarchy; in the cartoon we witness the material transformation of human underwear into food-growing soil. Clearly, the New Woman grower presents the arrival of a disturbing green modernity.

While such images were meant to mock the idea of women’s entry into male spaces or professions, historical women "acknowledged and even embraced the body Punch concocted for [them] as an epitome of liberation. By its relentless caricature of woman as athlete, for example, the characteristics that would later be recognized as ‘New Woman qualities,’ coalesced."³⁷ Intensive Culture for Flat Dwellers similarly represents an appealing, highly mobile, transformative Nature and an elegant urban woman’s intimacy with the same, quite apart from reproduction. The doffed petticoat is serving a better purpose, replaced by a stylish and comfortable outfit. This image of the gardening woman is in fact not far off from the illustrations of A French Garden in England, with one important difference: those authors exclude men nearly entirely. Their illustrations carefully highlight their partnership, showing them digging, plunging their hands into the soil, planting seeds, and handling substantial cloches and glass windows over raised beds. They represent themselves as perfectly natural, always in motion, laboring together in jaunty ties and hats. The figure of the New Woman, although existing mainly in the foolscap and ink of print culture, was potentially useful to such historical women seeking to enter masculine space and to those who desired other women to do the same.³⁸ Lady Warwick, for example, the patron of the women’s horticultural and agricultural program that Cockerell and Nussey attended, wrote in glowing terms of joining the New Women and Old Acres in the college’s journal, the Women’s Agricultural Times.³⁹ The Women’s Land Army during the Great War used the image and vocational discourse of the New Woman as a recruiting tool, as did advocates of women’s herbalism during and after the war. As historical women engaged the keen environmental crises of their day, they constructed ecologies that intersected with the figure of the New Woman, a paradoxically nonessentialized figure influencing systems of knowledge they developed and the gendered opportunities women created on land perceived as widely neglected during the agricultural depression.⁴⁰

Figure 1. Intensive Culture for Flat-Dwellers. Sowing Early Mustard and Cress on Winter Underclothing. Punch, or the London Charivari, vol. 152, 30 May 1917. (Courtesy of the Mervyn H. Sterne Library, University of Alabama at Birmingham)

Such women may have been smaller in number than the teachers, welfare workers, and secretaries studied in groundbreaking studies such as Martha Vicinus’s Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 or Gillian Sutherland’s In Search of the New Woman; however, the literature and culture they produced is substantial and timely, including an interrogation of practices like floral gardening, large-scale industrialized farming, and monoculture. Examples of women’s agricultural partnerships are only now being brought to light and interesting perspectives on statistics are emerging. The number of women farmers in England, for example, held steady from 24,338 in 1851 to 21,548 in 1901, despite the overall decline in farmers due to the agricultural depression.⁴¹ As growing and farming came to be seen as a viable occupation for middle-class women in England before the Great War, never married or single women formed 27 and 29 percent of all women farmers by 1931.⁴² This suggests that as women sought new opportunities in horticultural or agricultural training during what is traditionally considered the age of the New Woman (roughly 1870 to 1914), they reaped longterm benefits. Often, learning forms of alternative agriculture such as intensive culture seems to have served women well, even as traditional monocultural crops continued to struggle to get a good price.

Indeed, although now recognized by ecocritics and activists like Vandana Shiva as anathema to biodiversity and as the chief polluter of all industries, as early as 1914, industrialized farming and monoculture struck some women—such as poet-turned-landworker Rose Macaulay—as a counter to biodiversity that came with a high social and ecological cost. Initially, women’s rethinking of such institutions was often inspired by their schooling or the early green simplification practices of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stemming, as in Cockerell’s case, from green Victorians like John Ruskin and William Morris.⁴³ To this influence, however, they added their own, often scientific, interest in soil, intensive culture, and herbal medicine. Open to technology such as the raised bed and glass, their work may be understood through Shiva’s biodiversity paradigm as a biodiversity-based productivity framework rejecting the failing triad of beef, wheat, and dairy and replacing it with a growing strategy that reflect[s] the health of nature’s economy and people’s economy.⁴⁴ Their work, therefore, is relevant even now, displacing both destructive agricultural practices and what Shiva terms a mental monoculture blind to "the ecological functions arising from