58 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–1920
the time, strength and independence to access it away from working and fam-
ily responsibilities, was far from evenly distributed. Subsequent attention to the
meaning of accessing and enjoying natural sites and scenery in Crossriggs and
‘Th e Pictures’ will demonstrate how disparities in women’s freedom to move and
retreat can be seen in light of a nexus of inequalities in class and status, economic
responsibilities and cultural location, which will help me to unpack the intersec-
tional complexities of women’s engagements with ‘modernity’ in rural Scotland.
Th e sense of a need to retreat and be private is crucial in these texts, but
this was only made possible by the increasing mobility which many women were
demanding and coming to enjoy in the modern era. In her recent monograph
- appropriately subtitled ‘Women Moving Dangerously’ – Parkins examines
representations of women walking or moving by means of train, bicycle, car
and plane between 1850 and 1930. Women’s movement has had, she notes, a
complex and controversial history: mobility was a concern in the mid-Victorian
suff rage debates, for example, when the threat of women, married or unmarried,
‘gadding about’ was raised as a dangerous possible outcome of their new free-
doms, and a sign that the times were changing for the worse.^10 To Parliamentary
defenders of the status quo, ‘a woman with freedom of movement signifi ed a
potentially unfettered female agency, which might pose a danger to the stability
of social and familial order’.^11 Accordingly, Parkins addresses the ways in which
women’s mobility was tethered to questions of agency, social transformation and
disruption throughout the long nineteenth century and into the interwar years.
Agency, in Parkins’s analysis, is defi ned as both the ‘individual’s capacity to act
meaningfully in the world’ and (to requote Lois McNay), to act in ‘unantici-
pated or innovative ways which may hinder, reinforce or catalyse social change’,
and I see little cause to disagree with her defi nition within the scope of this chap-
ter.^12 Undoubtedly, movement acquires diff erent meanings within each of these
works, with the meaning that women attribute to their own movement oft en
considerably at variance with how their movement is read. What characters like
Alex in Crossriggs want, or Katie in ‘Th e Pictures’ need, is not only to be seen to
be moving in autonomous and self-directed ways that test or resist social conven-
tions, but to achieve invisibility and privacy in order to better understand the
meaning of agency and autonomy within their own lives.
In this respect, the depopulated rural has certain advantages, and indeed nat-
ural and rural spaces are presented in works by the Findlaters as an occasional
antidote to domestic and urban spaces. Th e rural provides privacy for retreat and
refl ection, specifi cally because women needed these spaces, and because they were
becoming more mobile, more concerned with directing their own movement and
changing their location to refl ect emotional and psychological, as well as intel-
lectual and fi nancial, needs. Although, as Parkins states, in much modern fi ction,