Gender in Urban Europe

Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship, 1750-1900

Krista Cowman, Nina Javette Koefoed, Åsa Karlsson Sjögren

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135115203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This volume offers an integrated set of local studies exploring the gendering of political activities across a variety of sites ranging from print culture, courts, government and philanthropic bodies and public spaces, outlining how a particular activity was constituted as political and exploring how this contributed to a gendered concept of citizenship. The comparative and transnational perspectives revealed through combining such work contributes to establishing new knowledge about the relationship between gender, citizenship and the development of the modern town in Northern Europe.

Section III Citizenship, Philanthropy and Voluntary Work

Introduction to Section III

Krista Cowman

Nina Javette Koefoed

Åsa Karlsson Sjögren

Here we see how, as urbanisation increased, responsibility for meeting the needs of a growing population was subject to on-going negotiation between church, voluntary bodies and the state which expanded and thus complicated local government in our period Participating in the administration and distribution of a growing variety of social services across different locations in Europe offered urban inhabitants of both sexes the opportunity to present themselves as active citizens involved in the political life of their towns. Åsa Karlsson Sjögren shows how at the turn of the nineteenth century during the transition from an estate society to a class society in Sweden, male urban inhabitants from the middle class who were without burghership and formal political rights, used poor relief of different kinds to show and prove themselves as responsible citizens. Krista Cowman on her side shows how women used their philanthropic work in late nineteenth-century Liverpool to become involved in public political life, and discusses how philanthropic work became an act of citizenship, allowing women to constitute themselves as active and responsible citizens. Both authors thus point to a dynamic connection between social and political citizenship, where the use of responsible actions within the fields of philanthropy and different kinds of poor relief are used by both men and women, at different stages of time, to demand and prove political citizenship. The connection between political citizenship and political action within the field of poor relief is further underlined by Nina Koefoed in her study of how and why male political citizens participated in both public and private poor relief in Denmark at the end of the Nineteenth century. Philanthropy is thus shown to have been an important part of developing citizenship in connection with local policy.

Turning philanthropic involvement into a political argument could be a deliberate part of the fight for political citizenship, but as Andrew G. Newby shows, it could also reflect a feeling of social responsibility, without explicit political demands or with different kind of political aims. Even though the women in ‘The Irish Distressed Ladies Fund’ declared themselves as non-political, their help to female Irish landowners had clear conservative political implications and was political in the attempt to preserve the privileges of the Irish landed classes and in promoting local activities with national benefits in order to keep the British empire secure. The presentation of philanthropic work without political implications is also seen in Ute Chamberlin’s work on female recipients of Prussian State Decorations. She shows how the few women awarded were selected for their charitable and philanthropic work, while connections to women’s political organisation or emancipation made them unqualified for awards. The strategy of being overtly political or not, and the connection made between philanthropic work and emancipation and political citizenship also reveals the political aim behind awards as being either conservative, wanting to keep traditional gender roles and social rights, or reformist, wanting to achieve formal political participation and changes.

Newby shows how philanthropic work was not always targeted at the urban poor by focusing on help given to the Irish female gentry. His case is different, as the recipients of aid were rural, but its organisation and fund-raising were urban, showing growing political importance of the urban surroundings not only for party policy, but also political acts in civil society. Newby shows how a model of philanthropy, developed to support the urban poor, was transposed into a rural context, but still situated in and dependent on the urban environment for its organisation. In his case women’s previous social position and status underpinned their claim to aid. A similar argument is seen in Koefoed’s chapter, where the local Charity Society aimed to help those who had known better days, while the city council was more interested in helping poor families survive through the winter. Who deserved help was connected to the political position of the charity work and the political aims behind it. Some instances, discussed by Newby and Koefoed, were directed towards maintaining a certain standard of living and a wider social hierarchy through private philanthropy; others also discussed by Koefoed and by Karlsson Sjögren, hoped to develop the poor into useful and respectable citizens or to keep them as such, and to gain or prove political citizenship for the giver.

The question of how to be political also connects to the growing role of the political parties through our period. Cowman shows how women who came forward to stand as candidates for Liverpool’s Boards of Guardians presented themselves as active citizens before they had parliamentary votes and argues that a party affiliation make it easier to fight for election. Newby shows how the distressed Irish ladies were used for party political purposes by individual politicians and newspapers, even though the IDLF did not present women with a public political platform and did not connect to party politics. In this way active female citizenship also gave scope for conservative or reactionary political action, while at the same time promoting female economic activity and female participating in public acts.

Part of the purpose of this book is to consider the connection between local political acts and national politics in the development of citizenship. In different ways models of active local citizenship challenged national citizenship, and especially locally-developed models of active female citizenship were used to critique the notion of exclusively male citizenship at a national level. Through her study of Prussian awards and decorations, Ute Chamberlin investigates how women’s meritorious activities were more broadly conceived from a local perspective than a national one. Recipients had been involved in what the state considered appropriate philanthropic or charitable work. But while association with an organisation that claimed to represent the bourgeois women’s movement would not strengthen a women’s application nationally, it was accepted and appreciated locally. While the state was trying to separate feminism and philanthropy, the town could be more accommodating. This difference between local and national levels of participation returns in Koefoed’s discussion of how the consequences of public poor relief and the line between private and public help were challenged by local city councils in their use of different kind of poor relief, consequently affecting the national political level. Cowman, in her analysis of how women could access public political activity, points to the importance of the local level in defining citizenship. It is thus underlined how social politics as an important part of local politics influenced the development of formal political citizenship in northern Europe.

Again the chapters in this section show citizenship as highly socially dependent. Citizenship was not universal. Men had to lay claims for rights or prove belonging at different levels and citizenship was not just simply gendered as male, but organised around certain ideal types of masculinity. Karlsson Sjögreen shows how men identified themselves as citizens by acting politically and making poor relief to a political area. Also in Koefoed’s chapter the focus is on how action within the social field of poor relief and philanthropy became part of the masculine identity of the citizen, part of the responsibility following political citizenship, again turning social help into a political question. Cowman explores the expansion of women’s involvement in formal local politics throughout the 19^th century and how this was connected to an ongoing debate about the gendering of national citizenship.

9 Citizenship, Poor Relief and the Politics of Gender in Swedish Cities and Towns at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century

Åsa Karlsson Sjögren

DOI: 10.4324/9780203709306-9

Poverty and poor relief were historically defined in different ways. ¹ Who were considered to be in need of societal support was relative, and what support was given was also relative. The aid given to poor people had different aims—it could be a matter of relieving immediate distress, or it could be a matter of providing aid by different means over a longer term. The responsibility for maintenance and care for individuals in poverty always lay primarily with the family, but this was seldom sufficient. In the eighteenth-century various systems were introduced for certain groups in order to secure their future in case of loss of spouse, illness or old age. ² In this period Sweden was an estate society, where peasant proprietors, burghers, clergymen and nobility had seats in the Swedish Riksdag [Parliament]. At the same time great social shifts were going on. In the cities and towns this implied that those who belonged to the burghers, the domiciled inhabitants who carried on trades and crafts, paid tax and had political influence, decreased in number in relation to both a growing lower class and a middle class.

By analysing some different empirical examples of poor relief and maintenance, I will discuss in this chapter how the social conditions in towns and cities affected the changes in local politics. By this I do not mean that the poor relief policy that was introduced reflected the actual needs. The organisation of poor relief had just as much to do with institutions, ideology and different actors’ intentions as with the real poverty. In their studies of different European countries and regions Ole P. Grell et al. have found that the most marked difference was between Protestant and Catholic Europe. In Northern Europe poor relief became a concern for society as a whole, while in the Catholic countries it was chiefly a matter of ‘personal charitable giving.’ ³ In Sweden there was a unitary Lutheran national church with a firm position at local level, and it was in this institution that a great deal of the poor relief was managed via the parish meeting, particularly in the countryside. In addition, poor relief in the towns and cities also originated from traditional corporative institutions such as guilds and societies, which at least tried to take care of their own members’ needs.

The Swedish legislation was weak in this area in the eighteenth-century. At the national level there seems to have been neither the political insight, nor the ability or will to implement central solutions regarding poor relief as a whole. The responsibility lay instead with the local communities, and for this reason local measures could vary. Different groups were in need of support and help: elderly, sick and disabled people, single women with dependent children, and orphans.

This chapter considers the citizenship of both those who organised and distributed poor relief and its recipients. Hence the social and political aspects of citizenship are in the forefront. In this period Sweden underwent slow social and political changes moving from an estate society to a class society and transforming subjects into citizens. With reference to the Introduction of this book, I would like to emphasize that the citizenship that developed in the process of nation building and capitalism implied exclusions of different groups of people, as well as a sliding scale of rights, and status, and that citizenship should not be understood as some kind of introduction of an established set of rights for inhabitants.

The concept of citizenship in Swedish national politics developed during the 1760s when the Swedish Riksdag became more powerful and the burghers’ estate gained more political influence at the cost of the nobility. The first Freedom of the Press Act of 1766 enhanced the political conflicts and debate between the two parties of ‘Hats’ and ‘Caps’, not only in Stockholm but also in other cities and towns. ⁴ In these political discussions the meaning of citizenship developed in two directions. When the question was about abolishing privileges and to give civil rights to everyone, the concept was gender neutral, whereas in issues of national politics those who demanded equal rights defined themselves as ‘brothers,’ as men and as citizens. ⁵

After the coup d’etat of King Gustaf III in 1772, the Riksdag lost a lot of power. The king however used the rhetoric of citizenship in his exercise of power, and accordingly called himself the ‘prime’ citizen. During the Gustavian era especially after the assassination of Gustaf III and during the reign of his son, there was a lack of political will and ability at national level to deal with urgent social problems. Consequently political developments at the turn of the eighteenth-century are especially interesting to study at local levels. Despite different grades of censorship political debate continued in cities and towns, particularly...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• SECTION I Gendered Use of Public Space in the Development of Citizenship
• SECTION II Political Conflicts, Unruly Political Behavior and Gendered Citizenship
• SECTION III Citizenship, Philanthropy and Voluntary Work
• Contributors
• Index