What does "practiced just as radical a form of sublimation" mean in this text?

I don’t understand the part in italics. I’d appreciate an explanation. What does "practicing sublimation" refer to?

Many of these heroes are extremely aggressive in bourgeois economic terms. They are successful; they live out the fairy tale of Victorian upward mobility with the single-minded energy that characterized their female creators. John Halifax, for example, the hero of Dinah Craik’s 1856 bestseller, John Halifax, Gentleman, begins as a beggar, but works hard, subdues fires, riots, and floods (Mrs. Craik’s awestricken metaphors for male sexual temptation, which she imagined as titanic) marries an heiress, and buys property. Near the end of his life he has a family estate, a family firm, and a chance to run for Parliament. He might just as well have been called John Bull or Dick Whittington. Such respectability, security, and performance—the fruits of patriarchy—eluded women writers, who practiced
just as radical a form of sublimation, but with much more limited rewards.

A literature of their own, Elaine Showalter