Routledge Revivals: Language, Gender and Childhood (1985)

Carolyn Steedman, Cathy Urwin, Valerie Walkerdine

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315446387
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

First published in 1985, this book brings together recent work on women and children from the nineteenth-century to the present. The contributors explore in different ways, and from different points of view, the way in which issues of language have been — and are still — central to the history of women and their relation to domestic and educational practices. A crucial issue is the contrast between what it spoken about girls and women, and what girls and women can speak about. The contributors relate this theme specifically to women's position as mothers and the education of girls and women.

1

Introduction

This collection of essays is concerned with the way in which modern women and children have been historically constructed. As a collection, it examines both speaking and silence, what could be spoken, where and when; and how words, language and texts were formative in producing takenfor-granted conceptions of childhood, femininity and motherhood. In seeking to understand these formations, it looks particularly at people interacting with written language, as one way of exploring the complex relations between social regulation, the circumscription of action, and subjective experience in both past and present.

The theme of speaking and silence, of finding a voice, has been an important one in the recent history of feminism.¹ The theme has been foreshadowed, perhaps, by the concern of social historians with the language and experience of working people and minority groups, and with making the formerly invisible visible. Until recently however, women and children have been comparatively neglected by this process of rescue. Grand histories and grand theories chart the struggle of ‘the people’, and any social practice in which women or children dominate, like schooling or nursing, or work situations associated with the provision of care, has been treated as marginal or of extremely low status. This neglect of women and children is not of course confined to history. Within sociology, for instance, children only seem to become interesting at adolescence when, if masculine, they can display the magic quality of resistance.² Women and children are denied resistance and we seem to have nothing very interesting to say about the positions they occupy.

But since the late 1970s the study of women and children, the places they occupy and their power to speak from those positions, has received new impetus. The imperative now is to move beyond an uncovering of fragmented sites of resistance.³ This approach requires a form of analysis which does not simply point to the existence of either alternative forms of language or lacunae of silence as expressions of social inequality. Rather, it demands that we understand the possibilities for change by examining how forms of speaking and forms of truth have been produced, and how these regulate or circumscribe what can be said about what, when and where. In this process, we are also forced to re-analyse what constitutes subversion and resistance, and how the subjective and the political intersect.⁴

The aim, then, is not simply to put the study of women and children on the map as objects whose existence can be taken for granted, but rather to uncover how modern conceptions of women and children have been produced. This enterprise results in a reading of the past in which the current concerns of feminists are centrally implicated, and which offers a challenge to the categories of power and resistance, change and fixity. Women and children are not fixed and unchanging entities, but change in status and position through personal and historical time. Beyond this, the collection is intended to demonstrate the value to historians of discovering new subjects for historical analysis and to show particularly how, over a specific historical period, an analysis of the position of children and women is central to understanding it.

These essays cover a period from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Crucial to this period are not only the historical typicalities it usually presents – the consequences of industrialisation, the birth of the modern nation state, imperial expansion and colonialism – but also certain shifts in regulation and government and in the structure and distribution of power. Overt regulation, exerted through coercion, shifted towards forms of covert regulation through the production of particular social apparatuses and technologies. These themselves depended on the development of scientific knowledge, in particular on the control over the body through medicine, and the development of the scientific study of populations, in which Malthusian economics and social Darwinism were central. These apparatuses incorporating the notion of the norm (evidenced most obviously in the modern idea of the intelligence quotient) supported the practices which produced, and continue to produce, the individual who is the target for social regulation. This individual is universal, natural or pathological, and the social practices which regulate it have brought with them particular conceptualisations of women and children. For example, as women, particularly bourgeois women, were systematically excluded from the public sphere of politics and administration and confined to the private world of the home, their confinement was supported by the emergence of discourses particularly associated with medicine and education, which stressed the ‘naturalness’ of this position, and constructed the feminine as irrational, emotional, and psychologically formed for the bearing and rearing of children. Over the same period, working-class women, having to engage in paid employment, surrendered their children to family surrogates of the correct form, who, through the practices of schooling, would produce them in a normal image. At the same time, class differences were submerged as the category ‘child’ was produced – a child whose development was defined in relation to a universal norm.

An understanding of the regulatory apparatuses of nineteenth-century society is thus integral to understanding how women have been defined primarily in terms of their capacities for bearing and rearing children. This definition not only curtails their opportunities for finding an alternative language, but permeates their desires: women want to be what they have been made to be.

We sometimes forget, in the animosity of our contentions, that differ as we will, we are still of the same kind and of the same country, kith and kin of one another, united by one common bond of mutual dependence and mutual interest. We often forget this. Woman’s gentle nature never forgets it. She knows no hatred, nor will let us know any, if we but appeal to her … whose province and whose dearest task it is to soften, to bless and to purify our imperfect nature.…

Catherine Hall quotes here (page 25) from the speech made by the Mayor of Birmingham when the town was granted the status of a borough in 1839. Although women’s help was solicited in political activities in the period 1780–1850, Hall stresses that the constitution of masculinity and femininity by the idea of nature produced characteristics that were in radical opposition to each other. Women’s natures fitted them for caring; passivity and gentleness were the private qualities that maintained the domestic sphere. The exclusion of bourgeois women from the public realm meant that they were excluded from the very practices that produced the bourgeois individual. Because they were private, they were not someone, and had therefore no claim to the individuality which might give them a public place. Catherine Hall’s chapter indicates one aspect of the practice by which the modern individual is claimed as universal – a gender- and class-neutral category – and yet one which contains within it a series of systematic exclusions.

Within the spaces provided by such exclusion, the mid-nineteenth century witnessed the dramatic eruption of women’s voices against a set of public practices that systematically denied them a hearing. In her examination of nineteenth-century spiritualism, Alex Owen demonstrates the way in which those characteristics forbidden to women – active sexuality, political positions, the assertion of public rights were voiced by women as mediums. Through their demonstration of an ultimate passivity, women as a vehicle for another, they were able to be all the things that were systematically denied, bringing forward to stand on the platform the shade of another self. At the same time, the medical professions consistently attempted to understand spiritualists as insane – and fraudulent – exposing in particular the fragility of the ‘innocence’ that supported the preference for very young, or child mediums, especially within domestic spiritualism.

For the middle-class woman of nineteenth-century Britain the private realm was inhabited by children. In Karen Clarke’s chapter these children come into sharper focus. By examining the early infant school movement, ‘Public and private children’ shows how there was a systematic shift away from understanding a parent and teacher to be a man, to an understanding of both these positions being filled by a woman. But there was also a clear social class split in recommended practice towards children. Middle-class women were to educate their children at home, systematically mothering individuals with special gifts and unique personalities. Working-class women, on the other hand, had to engage in paid employment and their children were inculcated with habits of obedience in the public classroom, through a pedagogy that emphasised character rather than intellect.

Writing about the period immediately before and after the First World War, Jacqueline Rose takes issues of nineteenth-century pedagogy further. By this time the construction of the unitary and universal child, the ‘commonsense’ starting point of modern pedagogy, was almost complete. She shows this child to be a fiction by considering the case of one text, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and how the idea of the child was created to be the recipient of specifically modified literature like this. School editions of Peter Pan from this period use a language pruned of literary allusion, a simplified ‘plain English’ for use by children in school. This socially produced language, from which all differences of rhetoric were extracted, later served as the data base for various linguistic theories in which universais of this ‘natural’ language were understood to have their origin in the brain. ‘Plain English’, and English designed for working-class children, was naturalised in this way, but ‘there is no natural language, least of all for children.…’ (page 100).

The legacy of this kind of practice that the re-writing of Peter Pan represents is a set of modern understandings in which a particular kind of language is taken to be both natural and normal. Its absence is seen as a kind of pathology, an object for intervention programmes. Aimed in the first instance at compensating for the inadequacies of a home environment that gave rise to abnormal language use, the language of intervention itself played an important role in creating the image of the good mother. Conflating natural language with domestic nurture the Bullock Report (which Jacqueline Rose considers in her chapter) told mothers: ‘when you give your child a bath, bathe him in language’ (page 93).

But the effect of this construction on the child cannot be understood only in terms of coercion, or the child’s passivity. What the next chapters do is explore the relationship between the social practices that produced particular texts, and the experience of children using them. Gill Frith considers the boarding school fiction that is read by some adolescent girls and the systems of regulation that it embodies. Boarding school fiction is embarrassing because it celebrates the very institution of power and the transmission of privilege in a class society. But Gill Frith shows that modern working-class girls enjoy this fiction not because it is understood to portray boarding school life as it really is, nor because they do not realise that it embodies class contempt and xenophobia. Rather, she argues, it appeals because it allows them to engage with powerful fantasies of a world in which girls can be active, adventurous, resistant to the enforced passivity of adolescent femininity, and set free by the imagined institution from the confines of the family.

Private lives, private histories, marginalised and secret stories … Carolyn Steedman examines one example of modern pedagogic practice which turns difference (the difference of being an Asian child in mid-twentieth-century, white, racist England) into a kind of deficiency. By looking at the way in which a young Punjabi girl made a song out of her reading of books, Carolyn Steedman shows how the child moved between two representations of herself, the one she knew from her own experience and the one that fiction offered her. This 9-year-old girl’s manipulation of meaning at the intersection of two cultures is one example of a child’s move into historical time, bringing with her the hidden interpretive devices of an experience that is given no place in the educational theories that have been formulated to ‘explain’ children like her.

Fictions of the normal – of normal child development, of normal mothering – are inscribed in institutional practices concerned with the regulation of child care in the modern state, and also in modern child care manuals. In her analysis of such practices and manuals, Cathy Urwin shows the powerful effects that these normalisations have on the day-to-day lives of young mothers. In all of them, ‘normal’ development is heralded as at once natural, and yet also the responsibility of the mother, who might be doing something wrong, but can never be quite sure. The interviews she bases her chapter on show how the reassurance offered by professionals could feel empty, so that the mothers were caught between two impossible and limited alternatives, either to be the mother of a ‘normal’ or of a ‘problem’ family; neither of these addressed the material and emotional problems of being a young woman at home with children.⁵

In the final chapter of this book, Valerie Walkerdine considers other aspects of the modern pedagogic practices which define and produce the normal child. She looks specifically at the occurrence of ‘normal’ and ‘natural’ reasoning in children. By examining the regulation of speaking and silence in contemporary schooling she reveals the avoidance of conflict which underpins current practices in their assumption of a natural and active masculinity nurtured by a complementary and passive femininity. Existing practices, aiming to produce coherent and autonomous individuals, freed from overt regulation through its internalisation inside themselves, assure a family and more particularly a mother who provides a facilitating environment to prepare an active and talking learner. But such practices also provide traps and boundaries for those very children they aim to liberate. She explores the possibility of an approach to the production of subjectivity using the couplet power and desire to understand the painful silencing experienced by many children.

Most of the chapters that have just been summarised originated in History Workshop 14, 1980, ‘Language and history’. HW13, ‘People’s history and socialist theory’, the last History Workshop to be held in Oxford, was a dividing place for more than the Workshop itself. It brought a tradition of people’s history and workers’ writing into direct confrontation with new sources of socialism from Europe, and there was a dramatic enactment of this confrontation in the darkness of a deconsecrated church in Walton Street, where titanic figures of the left boomed the struggle in imperious male voices; and the only woman on the platform stood up to say that, excluded from the form and rhetoric of the debate, she could only stay silent.

In some ways, the idea of HW14 was thought of as a healing device, with ‘language’ as representative of a set of problems that all historians would recognise, that might unite the disparate forces that revealed themselves in November 1979. At the same time, certain aspects of this new topic hearkened back to much earlier Workshops (the debate of the early 1970s, for instance, on restricted and elaborated codes), and to a continuing concern with problems of representation.

The ‘Language in history’ collective met in a spirit of amicable conciliation throughout 1980. But the silent woman on the platform remained a problem, though we did not always realise that her shade was there. Straightforward attempts were made to redress the balance of the previous year when so often the proceedings had demonstrated the form and rhetoric of a man. Two convenors of subplenaries, for example, decided that they would make sure that half, or more than than half, of their contributors were women. Fewer than half those making up the collective were women though.

We recruited no sociolinguist to the collective; but rather brought back warnings from those we spoke to about the dangers of treating the discipline of linguistics as a kind of tool kit that would help us reconstruct our own. The sub-plenary ‘Language and learning’ necessarily recruited contributors from fields other than history, notably from those of psychology, education and literary theory. It is still talked of as an odd Workshop, because those who turned up in Brighton were not the traditional attenders. Some of them, perhaps a majority of the audience for this particular sub-plenary, were not historians. Often this mix was felt as deeply unsatisfactory. But such encounters stake out a new place.

We looked so consistently at women and children within the sub-plenary not simply so that the silent figure on the platform might be given space to speak, but so that women and children – those who dwell outside the conventional devices of historical inquiry – might make revelations about the political and social structures from which they appear to have been excluded. Looking at those other disciplines revealed that, far from being excluded, women and children were the central target of theories and practices aimed at the prescription and regulation of public and private life. More generally the investigation showed how the historical study of gender and chi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Private persons versus public someones: class, gender and politics in England, 1780-18 50 10
• 3 The other voice: women, children and nineteenth-century spiritualism
• 4 Public and private children: infant education in the 1820s and 1830s
• 5 State and language: Peter Pan as written for the child
• 6 ‘The time of your life’: the meaning of the school story
• 7 ‘Listen, how the caged bird sings’: Amarjit’s song
• 8 Constructing motherhood: the persuasion of normal development
• 9 On the regulation of speaking and silence: subjectivity, class and gender in contemporary schooling
• Bibliography
• Name index
• Subject Index