Alice mona caird biography
- Alice Mona Caird was.
- Alice Mona Alison Caird (née Alison; – 4 February 1932) was an English novelist and essayist known for feminist writings, which were controversial.
- Alice Mona Alison Caird was an English novelist and essayist known for feminist writings, which were controversial when they were published.
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Mona Caird became involved in various activities supporting women’s rights, and contributing articles to a number of influential magazines, including the radical quarterly Westminster Review and the Fortnightly Review. The 1888 article ‘Marriage’, criticising marriage for limiting and subordinating women, brought her widespread recognition and propelled the ‘New Woman’ into the public consciousness. The Daily Telegraph, which initiated an open correspondence, received 27000 letters in response. Caird’s article called for equality between partners, as well as identifying patriarchy as historically contingent rather than God-ordained. Like her contemporary, Zona Vallance, she saw patriarchal attitudes towards women and marriage as outdated remnants of an earlier time, ripe for reconsideration in the light of new understandings. Going further than many other women activists of the time, Caird also challenged the Victorian ideal of self-sacrificing motherhood, viewing this too as a tool of oppression.
Caird challenged contemporary eugenicists, defended women’s right
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Mona Caird
English novelist and essayist (1854–1932)
Mona Caird | |
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1894 engraving based on a photograph by H. S. Mendelssohn | |
| Born | Alice Mona Alison (1854-05-24)24 May 1854 Ryde, Isle of Wight, England |
| Died | 4 February 1932(1932-02-04) (aged 77) Hampstead, London, England |
| Pen name | G. Noel Hatton |
| Occupation | Essayist, novelist, social reformer |
| Subjects | Feminism, civil liberties, animal rights |
| Literary movement | New Woman |
| Years active | 1883–1931 |
| Spouse | James Alexander Henryson (m. ; died 1921) |
| Children | 1 |
Alice Mona Alison Caird[1] (née Alison; 24 May 1854[note 1] – 4 February 1932) was an English novelist and essayist known for feminist writings, which were controversial when they were published.[2] She also advocated for animal rights and civil liberties, and contributed to advancing the interests of the New Woman in the public sphere.[3]
Biography
Caird was born in Ryde, Isle of Wight, the elder daughter of John Al
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That Mrs Caird sympathises with the Nihilists goes without saying; she is the priestess of revolt, and sympathises with revolters everywhere. — William Thomas Stead (519).
Mona Caird (née Alice Mona Alison), who was also known as Alice Mona Henryson Caird, 1854–1932, was an important New Woman essayist and novelist, social commentator, and campaigner against vivisection and eugenics. Her radical views on undesired marital sex, birth control, single motherhood, mother-daughter relationship, and free relationships after marital breakdown, expressed in her polemical essays and novels, prompted the emergence of the vivid marriage debate in the last decade of the Victorian era and in the early twentieth century.
Little is known about Mona Caird’s life because she left no autobiography or a journal, and biographical information is very sketchy and incomplete. She was born as Alice Mona Alison on 24 May 1854 in Ryde on the Isle of Wight as the only child of the 19-year-old Matilda Ann Jane Alison née Hector, from a well-to-do family in Schleswig-Holstein (then part of Denmark, now
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