Sex and Class in Women's History

Essays from Feminist Studies

Judith L. Newton, Mary P. Ryan, Judith R. Walkowitz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136239748
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The essays collected in this volume reflect the upsurge of interest in the research and writing of feminist history in the 1970s/80s and illustrate the developments which have taken place – in the types of questions asked, the methodologies employed, and the scope and sophistication of the analytical approaches which have been adopted.

Focusing on women in nineteenth-century Britain and America, this book includes work by scholars in both countries and takes its place in a long history of Anglo-American debate. The collection adopts 'the doubled vision of feminist theory', the view that it is the simultaneous operation of relations of class and of sex/gender that perpetuate both patriarchy and capitalism. This view informs a wide variety of contributions from 'Class and Gender in Victorian England', to 'Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy', 'Free Black Women', 'The Power of Women's Networks', and 'Socialism, Feminism and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade'. Both the vigour and the urgency of scholarship infused with social aims can be clearly felt in the essays collected here.

1 Class and Gender in Victorian England

Leonore Davidoff

DOI: 10.4324/9780203102404-2

Her strong, bare, sinewy arms and rugged hands

Blacken’d with labour; and her peasant dress

Rude, coarse in texture, yet most picturesque,

And suited to her station and her ways;

All these, transfigured by that sentiment

of lowly contrast to the man she served,

Grew dignified with beauty and herself

A noble working woman, not ashamed

Of what her work had made her

A grace, a glow of quick intelligence

And ardour, such as only Nature gives

And only gives through Man. . . .

Ann Morgan’s Love: A Pedestrian Poem A. J. Munby, 1896

SYMBOLISM AND REALITY: The Creation of a World View

In investigating the connections between class, gender, and sexuality a detailed study of one case can be a useful check on either prescriptive literature or listings of household and family structure.¹ This paper attempts to show how the themes of fantasy and the manipulation of symbols in one such study can throw light on the dynamics of a whole society. But first it is necessary to look at the meaning of class and gender divisions at a more general level and at the mechanisms by which they were created.²

The nineteenth century was the time when traditional social boundaries were being eclipsed by the rapid development of a market economy and the creation of a “class” society. All social relationships including gender divisions were affected by these changes. During this period, class designations came to carry gender overtones. The status characteristics associated with gentility, for example, differed for men and women; and the concepts manhood and womanhood which are peculiar to the nineteenth century have very different resonances. (It was on the basis of claims to manhood that the independent respectable workingman petitioned for both a living wage and the right of entry to full citizenship through the franchise.)

What makes the analysis of the interaction of class and gender so difficult, however, is that the same forces which produced a world view dividing the society between masculine and feminine, working class and middle (upper) class, urban and rural, also separated physicality, e.g., bodily functions in general and sexuality in particular, from the public gaze. This is an example of the privatization we have come to associate with the development of industrial capitalism and was part of a changing view of men’s and women’s positions in the cosmos and of their relation to Nature.

The world view of Victorian society which has been handed down to us was mostly the creation of those persons in positions of power who had the resources as well as the need to propagate their central position. Within this world view, those categories of people who are furthest away from the centers of decision making are ranked accordingly; and they are also visualized in images that emphasize their powerlessness and degradation as well as their potentially threatening and polluting effects on those persons closer to the center who exploit their labor and their persons. Middle-class Victorians, as middle-class persons in many other societies, expressed this powerlessness by associating peripheral groups with physiological origins.³ This association was then used in a circular fashion to lock such people into menial positions for life.

The unskilled, uncreative occupations whose incumbents order very little, handle brute matter as brute matter, express little that is vital and do not penetrate intellectually into the nature of anything, rank very low. The occupations whose incumbents handle only the detritus of man’s existence and do so only by manipulating it directly come lowest.⁴

It should be remembered, however, that it is not the tasks themselves that degrade; it is the power of the dominant groups which defines what tasks are to be considered degrading and then forces the incumbents of socially constructed categories to perform these tasks.⁵

The degradation of peripheral groups was also expressed in body images, for Victorian social commentators, including early sociologists like Herbert Spencer, often used a body metaphor in an effort to stress the organic nature of their society. This image was set in explicit contrast to both the mechanistic visions of the eighteenth century and the conflict models put forward by early Victorian radicals. According to the organic view, society was able to operate as a system because of its hierarchically ordered but interdependent parts. The adult middle-class (or aristocratic) man, representing the governing or ruling group, was seen as the Head of the social system as well as the Head of his household which was in turn a society in miniature. The Hands were the unthinking, unfeeling “doers,” without characteristics of sex, age, or other identity. (The implication of the word “Hands” for workers is mercilessly castigated by Dickens in his novel Hard Times.) Because work was central to Victorian society, the implication was that middle-class men did brain work while the hands did menial work. Middle-class women represented the emotions, the Heart, or sometimes the Soul, seat of morality and tenderness. Women performed these functions as keepers of the Hearth in the Home, and here we find a body/house connection which figured widely in the Victorian world view.

The final section of this mental map was not as often or as openly expressed, for middle-class Victorians shrank from naming their own bodily functions. Still, Victorians visualized the “Nether Regions” of society which, by their definition, were inhabited by the criminal classes, paupers, beggars and the work-shy as “stagnant pools of moral filth” comprised of the “effluvia of our wretched cities.” Historians, in fact, have recently drawn attention to the disturbing equations made by commentators, such as Mayhew, between the sanitary and the human condition, to “the cloacal imagery of the social investigators [who] pursued the social ‘offal’ and ‘moral refuse.’ ”⁶ Prostitutes, who were seen as the potential source of both physical and moral contagion for middle-class men, were also cast into this region. Defenders of prostitution saw it as a necessary institution which acted as a giant sewer, drawing away the distasteful but inevitable waste products of male lustfulness, leaving the middle-class household and middle-class ladies pure and unsullied. None of the inhabitants of this twilight zone could ever aspire to be included in the “body politic” but had to be hidden and controlled whenever possible. Indeed, by the third quarter of the nineteenth century, there were drives to segregate certain groups by sexual designations as well as by class labels. The separating out of a criminal class was followed by the creation of a homosexual subculture and a hardening of the lines between professional and casual prostitution.⁷

In keeping with this body imagery, certain groups were seen to be closer to nature than the rational adult middle-class man who dominated educated opinion. These groups included not only women, children, servants, and many other elements in the working class, but also natives in the colonies and by extension all nonwhites. Their supposed affinity with nature also helps to explain the animal analogies which were often applied to them in literary writing as well as popular sayings. The position of animals, of course, had changed during the growth of industrial capitalism. From being the central source of energy and production, the “first circle of mediation between man and nature,” the relationship between man and animal became much more metaphoric; and in this latter stage two themes were always stressed: what animals and man had in common and what differentiated them.⁸ (“Man” is here put forward as a generic term but quite clearly the implication is that it really referred to adult men, preferably middle-class educated men.) The belief in an organic hierarchy, finally, provided the basis for scientific theories about biological divisions which were refurbished within a Darwinian evolutionary framework.⁹

Within this framework, sexuality–particularly male sexuality–became the focus of a more generalized fear of disorder and of a continuing battle to tame natural forces.¹⁰ The social as well as psychic importance of this focus is clear in Max Weber’s analysis, which considers sexuality as a non-social, even antisocial force: “. . . the drive that most firmly binds man to the animal level. . . . Rational ascetic, alertness, self-control and methodical planning of life are threatened the most by the peculiar irrationality of the sexual act which is ultimately and uniquely unsusceptible to rational organization . . . the more rationalized the rest of society becomes, the more eroticized sexuality becomes.”¹¹ The effort of adult middle-class men to maintain their positions of power within the society as a whole and the “little kingdoms” of their own households, as well as in regard to their own sexuality, seems to have created a kind of “psychological backlash” within their own personalities. They combined excessive fears of pollution, disloyalty, and disorder from subordinates with a desperate search for a moral order which would help to control all three, as well as the immoral forces of the market. Indeed, with the help of religion, the restraint of male sexuality came to be seen as a great feat of self-control, one of the hallmarks of middle-class gentility. But this was a gentility reserved for middle-class men. The working class and native blacks supposedly allowed their sexuality to spill out over their total lives, diverting them from the goal of achievement through work, wasting their energies and draining their vital forces. In Victorian language they displayed a lack of self-control resulting in incontinence.¹²

One well-documented solution to the problem of controlling middle-class male sexuality had been to see middle-class women (ladies), particularly within marriage (the golden chain that binds society together), as agents of salvation,¹³ and with the crisis in religious faith, the image of a desexualized Madonna took on increasing saliency.¹⁴ Madonnas, however, imply Magadalenes; and Victorian culture and social institutions provided both. A dual vision of women was already available, of course, as a legacy from classical culture, a culture inculcated through the curriculum of the grammar and public school, which emphasized hierarchical and misogynist interpretations of society.¹⁵ The dualistic view of women was also a keystone of Christian theology, which justified the subordination of female to male on the grounds of woman’s potential “carnality.” Since femaleness was equated with the body, so the female must be subordinated to the male “as the flesh must be subject to spirit in the right ordering of nature.”¹⁶ Victorian women, therefore, were not only divided between working class and middle class, they were divided between “ladies” and “women,” categories which signified as much gender as economic and social meaning. In viewing Victorian women it is as if we are looking at a picture through a double exposure.

Indeed, the dual vision of women, as woman and lady, becomes mixed with other polarities such as those between white and black, familiar and foreign, home and empire. In a perceptive discussion of these polarities, as expressed in literature, Cleo McNelly cites the following:

. . . [in] the binary opposition between here and there, home and abroad . . . home represents civilization, but also order, constraint, sterility, pain and ennui, while native culture, the far pole of the myth, represents nature, chaos, fecundity, power and joy. The home culture is, moreover, associated always with the ability to understand by seeing, abstractly, while the other culture is associated with black, with the sense of touch, the ability to know by feeling, from within. The far pole of the tropical journey is indeed the heart of darkness.

At either end of this journey stand two figures, each of which has a profound mythological past: the white woman at home and her polar opposite, the black woman abroad. These figures come from a long and well-entrenched tradition in the West. The first of them, the white woman, is not only Beatrice, she is Rowena and even Mrs. Ramsay as well. At her best she is “a star to every wand’ring bark,” gentle, courteous and endowed with the immortality of the gods. At her worst she is Virginia Woolfs “angel in the house,” the angel of death and sterility. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table Of Contents
• Foreword
• Editors’ Introduction
• 1 Class and Gender in Victorian England
• 2 Freud’s Dora, Dora’s Hysteria
• 3 Servants, Sexual Relations and the Risks of Illegitimacy in London, 1801-1900
• 4 Free Black Women and the Question of Matriarchy
• 5 The Power of Women’s Networks
• 6 “The Men Are as Bad as Their Masters ...”: Socialism, Feminism and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade in the 1830s
• 7 One Hand Tied Behind Us: A Review Essay
• 8 Examining Family History
• 9 The Doubled Vision of Feminist Theory