Gender in Eighteenth-Century England

Roles, Representations and Responsibilities

Hannah Barker, Elaine Chalus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317889120
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

A new collection of essays which challenges many existing assumptions, particularly the conventional models of separate spheres and economic change. All the essays are specifically written for a student market, making detailed research accessible to a wide readership and the opening chapter provides a comprehensive overview of the subject describing the development of gender history as a whole and the study of eighteenth-century England. This is an exciting collection which is a major revision of the subject.

CHAPTER ONE

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Introduction

HANNAH BARKER AND ELAINE CHALUS

The Sexes have now little other apparent Distinction, beyond that of Person and Dress: Their peculiar and characteristic Manners are confounded and lost: The one Sex having advanced into Boldness, as the other have sunk into Effeminacy.¹

(John Brown, 1757)

Women must be understood … in terms of relationship – with other women, and with men….²

(Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, 1980)

For John Brown, England’s dismal performance at the beginning of the Seven Years’ War was the result of a deterioration in national character that he attributed, at least in part, to changes in manner and behaviour that blurred and diminished the differences between the sexes. Like other eighteenth-century moralists and conduct-book writers who attempted to coax, cajole or chastise their readers into complying with idealized notions of masculinity and femininity, he believed that clearly defined gender roles were central to the stability of English society, and by extension, to England’s status as a world power.

In general, eighteenth-century prescriptive texts argued that men and women were ‘naturally’ different, and that these differences not only shaped their characters but suited each sex to specific activities and roles in society. Authors mustered powerful religious, philosophical and scientific arguments to explain, rationalize and legitimize implicit and explicit inequalities between the sexes. While men and masculinity were occasionally the subjects of such texts, the overwhelming majority of this literature was aimed at women, who were, by nature, considered to be in need of closer supervision. With untiring regularity and varying degrees of polemic, authors reminded women of their subordinate status and attempted to mould them into a static image of an idealized femininity – modest, chaste, pious, and passively domestic.

In assuming that these ideals were not merely prescriptive, but actually descriptive, historians have often confused rhetoric with reality. Most research has accepted as a fundamental and self-evident truth that eighteenth-century men’s and women’s lives were defined by starkly contrasting and increasingly rigid gender roles, most specifically exemplified by an increasing confinement of women to a private, separate, domestic sphere. These beliefs have been reinforced by women’s historians’ early tendency to rely heavily on a straightforward reading of didactic literature and a relatively narrow range of printed primary sources. As a result, not enough attention has yet been paid to the underlying implications of ostensibly prescriptive arguments like John Brown’s, or to those presented in the other extensive and varied sources that survive for the period. These suggest that contemporaries saw gender in a more complex, pluralistic and even idiosyncratic way than has been assumed previously.

Until recently, the history of gender in eighteenth-century England had fared worse than the history of the period as a whole. Sandwiched between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, both of which have been extensively researched, the eighteenth century has often been considered either as an afterthought or a precursor – a period of consolidation that followed sixteenth- and seventeenth-century developments, or one of transition between the pre-industrial world and the triumphs of nineteenth-century industrialization and modernization. The eighteenth century has lately experienced something of a renaissance, however, as the wide-ranging works of historians such as John Brewer, J.G.D. Clark, Linda Colley and Paul Langford have revitalized interest in the period.³ These new and more sophisticated interpretations are varied and sometimes contradictory; yet, what is lost in universality is more than gained in detail. Arguments for a monolithic Anglican and aristocratic ancien régime co-exist uneasily with others that celebrate pluralism, the growth of an influential and commercial middle class, widespread politicization, the development of an increasingly powerful centralized state, and an incipient and increasingly unified national culture.

It is in the light of such reassessments, and with the needs of students and scholars in mind, that this collection was envisaged. By examining the relationships between and among eighteenth-century men and women through a wide assortment of subjects and sources, these essays are intended to introduce specialists and non-specialists alike to new research in what is still an under-researched field; moreover, by exploring gender through contemporaries’ understandings of themselves – specifically in regard to roles, representations and responsibilities – the essays reveal the complexity and multiplicity of gender roles in a society where the boundaries between ‘public’ and ‘private’, or ‘social’ and ‘political’, were blurred and permeable. As such, they not only argue against any simplistic application of the notion of separate spheres to the period, but also add further weight to the claims of feminist revisionist historians who question the utility of the model as an over-arching explanatory concept.⁴ Finally, the collection as a whole continues the process of historical retrieval that was begun under the aegis of women’s history. It points towards a more integrated understanding of the eighteenth century by placing gender into the wider historical context.

Gender history

Gender history is an offshoot of women’s history, but both are relatively new fields of study. Women’s history has grown swiftly since its re-emergence in conjunction with the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In the struggle for women’s liberation, ‘second wave’ feminists appropriated history as a political tool, a means of explaining women’s oppression and tracing their path towards liberation and equality. In writing ‘herstory’,⁵ they posed a radical challenge to the discipline of history itself. While it would be a vast over-simplification to assume that feminist historians approached the past with a common agenda, they did, however, share some concerns. Most specifically, they questioned the validity of interpretations which denied women historical agency or dismissed women’s activities and experiences as ahistorical. Too much history failed to take women into account and consequently presented a one-sided, ‘male’ view of the past. In order to redress this imbalance, they argued that women’s experiences had to be given equal weight, and that the challenge of accommodating women’s different historical experience – beginning with the application of standard periodization – needed to be carefully reconsidered.

As women’s history developed, powerful conceptual arguments emerged to explain women’s (shared) historical experiences.⁶ Central to these was a belief that differences between the sexes – whether these differences were biologically determined or socially constructed – resulted in men and women inhabiting mutually exclusive and asymmetrical worlds. Modern women’s subordinate status was deemed the consequence of continuous historical oppression that stemmed from, and was replicated by, the personalized and institutionalized domination of men over women in patriarchal society.⁷ Thus, women’s historians often emphasized the commonalty rather than the diversity of women’s historical experiences. For Marxist and socialist historians, however, this shared experience was sometimes subordinated to class. In spite of these differences, women’s history was considered ‘indispensable and essential to the emancipation of women’.⁸ A whiggish paradigm evolved that viewed the modern struggle for women’s liberation in terms of a long but steadily progressive campaign for rights lost after the collapse of a pre-patriarchal Eden of sexual equality. Sally Alexander’s justification of the existence of feminist history in 1976 is representative of the way that these beliefs were amalgamated:

Men and women do inhabit different worlds, with boundaries which have been defined (and from time to time re-arranged) for them by the capitalist mode of production as it has made use of and strengthened the sexual division of labour and patriarchal authority.⁹

While debates over the relative importance of these initial pre-suppositions are still continuing,¹⁰ their acceptance as universally applicable explanations for women’s historical experiences has become increasingly challenged by the publication of more sophisticated and academically rigorous research.¹¹ The discipline’s link with a modern political agenda has also come under scrutiny. Concerns have been raised repeatedly, by gender historians among others, about the tendency to read the past anachronistically, as a result of projecting current women’s issues backwards.¹²

The appearance of concerns like these marks the higher standards and increasing professionalism of women’s history, but it also reflects the impact of postmodernism and the associated development of gender history. At its best, the adoption of poststructuralist thought has resulted in more sensitivity to context, plurality, nuance and contradiction, and less willingness to see the past linearly or to accept grand, sweeping generalizations. Increased recognition and acceptance of discontinuity, divergence and difference have given women’s history more complexity and depth; however, they have simultaneously undermined many basic premises, including the supposed universality of women’s experiences and oppression, and the fundamental belief in progress.

It is in fostering the use of gender as a primary category of analysis and the subsequent development of gender history, as distinct from women’s history, that postmodernism has made the most significant contribution to scholarship. The study of gender in its own right developed in the 1980s, as women’s historians began to appropriate ideas about the construction of meanings and identities put forward by French poststructuralists, especially Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan.¹³ As women’s historians began to incorporate these ideas, they focused attention on gender as an alternative explanation for historical inequalities. Instead of seeing sexual differences between men and women as a reflection of purely natural, biological differences, they accepted the notion that these distinctions were socially constructed and, therefore, varied with time, place, culture, class and ethnicity. Thus, the concepts of masculinity and femininity are not fixed, but are rather continuously redefined.¹⁴ Although women’s historians had already been using gender as a less overtly political synonym for woman, and as a concept that facilitated the study of things pertaining to women, it was reformulated under the influence of postmodernist thought to serve as a comprehensive category of analysis that examined both ‘the social organization of sexual difference’ and the deep structure of relationships of power.¹⁵

Since constructions of femininity and masculinity take place in relation to one another, gender widened the historical focus to include examinations of the male as well as the female experience. By integrating the sexes, gender history has encouraged a more organic understanding of past societies and shed new light on intra-as well as inter-sexual relationships.¹⁶ Its interest in, and toleration of, difference – in experiences, interests and beliefs – has revealed that neither women nor men can be assumed to constitute uniformly homogenous groups. Not only has this enriched the study of women in relation to men and each other, but it has also led to the development of an entirely new field of study: a gendered history of men. In the last few years, a small number of gender historians have begun to challenge the traditional association between women and gender and to address the question of men’s history. Although relatively little has been published thus far, interest in the field is growing rapidly, as men’s historians begin to analyse the historical construction of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ and its variants.¹⁷

Unsurprisingly, these developments have met with mixed reactions. Historians like Gisela Bock have welcomed gender history as a way to end the marginalization of women’s history; others are disconcerted by the change. Joan Hoff, for instance, argues that a shift to gender history can only ‘sever’ women’s history from its political roots and ‘reduce the experiences of women, struggling to define themselves and better their lives in particular historical contexts, to mere subjective stories’.¹⁸ While this rift is partially generational, it also reflects ideological and methodological differences. Much of gender history challenges the connection between women’s h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of plates
• List of abbreviations
• List of Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• PART ONE: Social reputations
• PART TWO: Work and poverty
• PART THREE: Politics and the political élite
• PART FOUR: Periodicals and the punted image
• Further reading
• Index