"The Gendering of the British Working Class,"

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Gender & History ISSN 0953–5233Theodore Koditschek, ‘The Gendering of the British Working Class’Gender & History, Vol.9 No.2 August 1997, pp. 333–363.

The Gendering of the British Working Class THEODORE KODITSCHEK

In 1988, the feminist historian, Joan Scott, published a critique of E. P.Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class.1 For two-and-a-halfdecades since its initial publication, Thompson’s classic had been slowlybut surely revolutionizing the way social historians did their work. Bycreatively mining new evidence and deploying familiar sources in new ways,Thompson had reanimated the lives and experience of early industrialEngland’s working people, successfully rescuing them ‘from the enormouscondescension of posterity’. He had demonstrated conclusively that theywere not merely the passive victims of impersonal historical processes but also living subjects and active agents who had participated, howevertragically and incompletely, in shaping their world.2 In constructing aconvincing narrative along these lines, however, Thompson had made aneven more original and momentous contribution to the field. For he hadshown, more persuasively than anyone before him, how the general marx-ist model of capitalist development could satisfactorily be reconciled withthe actual pattern of real-world historical events. Following in his footsteps,an entire generation of British (and many non-British) social historians wasemboldened to place the marxist problematic of class formation and classstruggle at the very center of their concrete empirical accounts of what anearlier generation of scholars had depicted so inadequately as industrial-ization, urbanization, or modernization, in the abstract.3

In her critique, Scott acknowledged the significance of Thompson’s con-tribution, but drew attention to the problematic status of working-classwomen in his book. His very success in rescuing his subjects from the con-descension of posterity, she argued, only drew sharper attention to thoseworking people whose lives and experiences could not be adequatelyapprehended within the conceptual limits of his marxian theoretical frame.It was not so much that women were absent from Thompson’s narrative butthat they could figure only marginally and awkwardly within the analyticalcategories he employed.4 Thompson’s understanding of class as an inter-pretive concept was, indeed, profoundly (if unconsciously) gendered, shecontended, since class formation is, ‘in its origin and its expression, con-structed as a masculine identity even when not all the actors are male’. By

failing to make these gendered assumptions explicit, Thompson (withoutever openly acknowledging the fact) had told his story of English working-class formation in a way that was inherently dismissive of the domestic andlabor experiences of working-class women, while implicitly privileging thepolitical and productive experiences characteristic of working-class men.5

Scott was by no means the first to note this deficiency in Thompson’swork. Indeed, the question of industrial capitalism’s impact on women’swork had been raised as early as 1919, when Alice Clark had shown how therise of capitalism during the seventeenth century had undermined workingwomen’s roles in the traditional household economy and relegated them totheir ‘modern’, subordinated place. In 1930, Ivy Pinchbeck exhaustivelydocumented employment trends for women during the late eighteenth andearly nineteenth centuries in a book which Thompson invoked, perhaps tojustify his own neglect of the topic.6 For the next few decades, however, thestudy of women’s history fell into desuetude. It was only with the second-wave feminist movement of the late 1960s and 1970s that a new genera-tion of feminist scholars, many of them initially influenced and inspired byThompson’s project, sought to reinsert the experience of women and theanalysis of gender back into the mainstream of social history, particularlyinto the marxist-inspired social history that Thompson had pioneered.7

In the US the first stirrings of this new wave of feminist history took placeduring the 1970s, when an innovative cohort of activist intellectuals beganto explore the roots of women’s agency and the origins of contemporarysexual politics. While the first steps towards women’s emancipation hadalso been taken during Thompson’s early industrial period, these historiansdiscovered that the primary initiative came not from the working-classradicals whom he celebrated but from middle-class women (often initiallyquite conservative) who grounded their claims in the new and distinctivelyfeminine consciousness—a product of the separation of domesticity fromproduction for the market which the new capitalist system of separategender spheres had wrought.8 In Britain, where the intellectual left wasmore influenced by marxism and the question of class conflict remained acentral problematic for social history in general, this new women’s historytended to develop more slowly under the umbrella (arguably somewhat inthe shadow) of Thompson’s classic book.9

In 1973, Sheila Rowbotham’s Hidden From History offered a bold,preliminary survey of this yet uncharted field. Though she cited Thompsonas a major formative influence, Rowbotham well understood that if womenwere satisfactorily to be integrated into his narrative, it would be necessaryto go outside the parameters of his book. The dynamics of capitalist exploit-ation which Marx had theorized, and the working-class resistance whichThompson had historicized, needed to be supplemented with an entirelynew analysis of ‘patriarchy, the power of men as a sex to dispose of women’scapacity to labour, especially in the family’. Only from such an analysiswould the feminist historian be in a position to trace ‘the forms of

334 Gender and History

© Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1997.

opposition’ (not necessarily political) ‘that women generated in response tothe oppressions of both class and sex’.10 Although Rowbotham was unableto pursue these matters in much more depth and detail, other feministscholars began to take them up. Sally Alexander examined women’s workin early nineteenth-century London, and Judith Walkowitz explored the re-lationship among prostitution, patriarchy, middle-class women’s movementsfor social reform, and the transformation of the Victorian state. Finally, in1979, Barbara Taylor published Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism andFeminism in the Nineteenth Century, which re-examined Thompson’s one-dimensional story of class formation in a two-dimensional, gendered frame.Taylor’s premise, like Rowbotham’s, was that British working-class womenduring the early nineteenth century experienced the class exploitation ofcapitalism in a manner that was fundamentally refracted through the gen-dered oppressions of patriarchy. The men, she concluded, were often asbad as the masters, and the opposition movements which came closest to ad-dressing the combined tyrannies of class and gender were not the masculin-ist constitutional radicals whom Thompson tended to glorify but the OweniteSocialists whom he (along with Marx and Engels) had been inclined to dismissas a dead-end utopian sect.11

One of the great strengths of these early forays into British women’s his-tory was their active engagement (far more active than in the case of theirUS counterparts) with the various theories of socialist feminism, which weresimultaneously emerging to provide a conceptual framework in which thedynamics of capitalism and patriarchy could be dialectically understood.12

The socialist-feminist hybrid had its origins in a series of debates about therelationship between wage labor and domestic housework. For all that thesedebates proved momentarily useful and clarifying, they were conducted ina too narrowly constricted marxist frame.13 While fully recognizing the im-portance of women’s labor (both paid and unpaid) as a locus of exploita-tion and as a measure of their condition, most feminists also insisted that theroot source of their oppression as women lay elsewhere. At bottom, it waspatriarchy, even more than capitalism, which had kept women subord-inated both before and after the industrial revolution, albeit in different ways.14

In order to make sense of the relationship between capitalism and patri-archy, it was necessary to begin by first disentangling them analytically,through the recognition that patriarchal political and/or psycho-sexualdominance constituted a distinctive source of women’s gender oppression,quite apart from the logic of capitalist exploitation which governed class re-lations in the socio-economic sphere. Not surprisingly, therefore, the mostpowerful and ambitious feminist theorists of this period, Juliet Mitchell,Shulamith Firestone, Gayle Rubin, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and NancyChodorow, all recognized that it was not the concept of capitalism but ofpatriarchy which was most seriously under-theorized.15 To develop an ade-quate theory which could stand comparison with the work of Marx, eachconcluded, albeit for different reasons, that the primary target of their

The Gendering of the British Working Class 335


critical energies should not be marxism or liberal political economy but the psycho-sexual theories of Sigmund Freud. Where Marx had grasped the‘true’ structures and relations of capitalist production by standing the‘ideological’ doctrines of Hegel and the political economists on their head,feminists could comprehend the ‘true’ structures and relations of patriarchyby performing a comparable operation on mainstream Freudian theory.Then, after this critical, theoretical operation was complete, the new fem-inist critique of patriarchy could be reinserted back alongside the marxistcritique of capitalism to provide a ‘dual systems’ analysis of the ways inwhich, under the reign of capitalist patriarchy, class exploitation andgender oppression interactively operated.16

The chief difficulty with this dual systems approach was exactly how toformulate it in substantive and empirical terms. Much of the early feministtheorizing on patriarchy tended to portray it (under the influence of Freud)as a vast, transhistorical monolith, which had subsisted throughout the agesto oppress women of all types in more or less the same way. Clearly, sucha concept needed to be concretized and historicized. Different patriarchaltypes and/or developmental stages needed to be distinguished from oneanother through some heuristic device such as a ‘mode of reproduction’ or‘sex-gender system’ (in Gayle Rubin’s phrase). More specifically, it wasnecessary to zero in on the distinctive relationship between capitalism andthe uniquely modern version of patriarchy that co-existed with it in waysthat were at once both contradictory and mutually reinforcing.17

During the mid-to-late 1970s a series of pioneering efforts were launchedto clarify these matters, from a variety of different perspectives, by ChristineDelphy, Eli Zaretsky, Ann Ferguson, Zillah Eisenstein, Annette Kuhn, MaryO’Brien, Heidi Hartmann, Michèle Barrett, and others, not all of whom ac-cepted the dual systems label.18 Needless to say, much of this work was stillvery preliminary and schematic, but the foundation for subsequent, moresystematic effort was effectively laid. Perhaps the most promising sign wasthe increasing willingness of empirical historians to explore the dual sys-tems interrelationship. One especially significant illustration that the basicapproach need not be reductively mechanical or crudely ahistorical wasprovided in 1978 by Louise Tilly and Joan Scott’s path-breaking synthesis,Women, Work and Family.19 Although Tilly and Scott eschewed explicitreference to dual systems or any other version of marxist feminism, theirbook represented a bold, if perhaps excessively functionalist, attempt toexplore the double-edged impact of industrialization on both work and the family, through a careful, comparative examination of the situation inBritain and France. Tilly and Scott organized their vast pool of data into athree-stage model in which a traditional preindustrial household economywas successively replaced, first by a family wage economy during the form-ative era of proletarianization, and then by a family consumer economy asindustrial capitalism matured. This model was not without its problems orlimitations, but it provided a potential starting point for conducting



theoretically informed historical enquiries from a dual systems or othermarxist-feminist point of view.20

In the event, this promising line of analysis was not adequately sustainedor developed. How far this development ceased because, as the critics con-tended, marxist feminism could not survive the rigors of an empirical test, isstill difficult to gauge dispassionately, even in retrospect. At all events, rela-tions between marxists and feminists became increasingly tense and prob-lematic by the end of the 1970s. By the early eighties, the theoretical synthesisitself appeared to implode.21 Heidi Hartmann stated the problem from a fem-inist perspective: ‘The marriage of marxism and feminism has been like themarriage of husband and wife depicted in English common Law: marxismand feminism are one and that one is marxism. Either we need a healthiermarriage’, she continued, ‘or we need a divorce’.22 While Hartmann opted for‘a more progressive union’, Michèle Barrett, surveying ‘the marxist/feministencounter’ with a good deal more skepticism, concluded that it had yet toproduce any viable synthesis. Nine years later, when she reissued her study,Barrett declared the unhappy marriage dissolved. ‘In spite of our efforts atmarriage counselling’, the marxists had never accepted the idea of a truepartnership, hence ‘the two world views [had] gone their separate ways’.23

During the decade or so since marxism and feminism have been separ-ated, the fortunes of these two theoretical traditions have substantiallydiverged. It is now something of a commonplace that since 1980 marxism,as a theory of socio-historical development, has lost a good deal of itsintellectual authority and political clout. The decline of western social-democratic and labor movements during the 1980s seemed to raise ques-tions about its relevance and, in any case, diminished its appeal. With thecollapse of eastern communism in 1990, the gathering tide of anti-marxistcriticism has swelled into a veritable ideological rout. No longer is onlydogmatic or ‘vulgar’ marxism dismissed as irrelevant. Even the more flex-ible, historicizing Thompsonian class analysis is now frequently taken totask for its residual attachment to an untenable theory which can onlyobfuscate understanding and falsify the facts.24

Since 1980, feminist theory and women’s history have fared rather betterthan marxism and class analysis, but the situation was by no means entirelyrosy in the gender studies camp. As Barrett noted, white feminists were nosooner released from the marxist charge of having neglected class divisionsamong women than they found themselves criticized for their insensitivityto differences and antagonisms of race. Perhaps more to our point, the verysuccess of feminist scholarship in the academy seemed to have blunted thegenre’s political, if not critical, intellectual edge. ‘Oppression’, too, looksrather crude in terms of current feminist work: does sexual difference nec-essarily mean oppression?25 Haunted by their own incompletely exorcisedspecters of biological determinism, and increasingly eager to avoid becomingmarked with the neo-marxist taint, more and more feminist scholars be-gan to abandon the entire tradition of historical materialism, embracing



the newly fashionable and ‘post-modern’ theories of poststructuralism thatwere borrowed from literary theory and French philosophy. By contrastwith the marxist-feminist legacy that they were abandoning, such theoriesdenied the possibility of any truly determinative social reality, insisting thatall social categories, including race, class, and gender, are merely discurs-ive constructions, created through cultural and linguistic oppositions which‘naturalize’ as essential some set of qualities and experiences which mightequally well be deconstructed in the terms of some alternative (but equallycontingent) cultural/linguistic frame.26

It is in this context that we must understand the remarkable prestige andauthority which has accumulated around Joan Scott’s critique of themarxist history of working-class formation as it has been practiced in theThompsonian vein. Because Scott herself was one of the most promisingmaterialist-feminist scholars of the late 1970s, her ‘conversion’ to post-structuralism had a contagious effect. In a series of essays gathered togetherin 1988, she reformulated the older feminist objections to orthodox marx-ism from her new vantage of ‘deconstruction’, which rejected any kind ofmaterialist, structural, or even systemic analysis.27 The implications of this areevident not only in her criticisms of Thompson but also in her ambivalentresponse to the man who first deconstructed British labor history, himselfa former marxist, Gareth Stedman Jones.28 On the one hand, Scott tookStedman Jones to task for perpetuating Thompson’s error through his con-tinued neglect of gender as a serious analytical category. On the other hand,she commended him for his post-Thompsonian reading of the British (male)workers’ languages of class. So far from being a monolithic, objective forcewithin history, or even the cultural expression of working people as an in-creasingly unified collective group, class, according to Jones, was a labile,limited, and inherently contingent construction which provided subjectswith linguistic grids for conceptually ordering their experience and, there-fore, reconstituting it in discursive terms.29

Gender, Scott insisted, had to be added to this equation, but she agreedthat it ought to be interpreted in a parallel way: not as an objective, determ-inative product of some underlying materialist (or psycho-sexual) process,but as a linguistic/cultural expression which needed to be deconstructed asa text. As with class, gender in this new poststructuralist reading constitutedno single uniform consciousness but a multitude of partial identities, whichmight as often mark the difference between one group of women and an-other as it could fuel a shared antagonism towards the common sex enemy,men. As with class, gender constructs could change over time and varyconsiderably from one society to the next. According to Scott, this historicaldiversity and indeterminacy did not constitute a problem which requiredrecourse to some objective structural model (either single or dual system)to ‘explain’ the facts. Rather, it offered a site for reconceiving historicalstudies as an interpretive exercise in decoding through which the historiancould gain a critical distance on the values and beliefs of those he or she



studies without violating their own integrity or uniqueness as humansubjects.30

There is no gainsaying the fact that Scott’s anti-determinist, poststruct-uralist approach to the history of class and gender is admirably suited to theintellectual temper of our day. In an age of conservative ascendancy, whenprogressive movements have been demobilized and familiar road maps forunderstanding no longer seem to work, it is important to be intellectuallyopen, tolerant of uncertainty and ambiguity, and to resist any temptation tocling to threadbare master narratives based on pseudo-universalisticcategories that can only collapse under their own dead-weight. Moreover,in an age of extreme intellectual specialization, when critical thought hasbeen confined to the compartmentalized halls of academe, it is fitting thatinterdisciplinary enquiry should proceed sotto voce, in a manner that doesnot make ambitious claims for the totalization of knowledge, does notharbor grandiose hopes for the fusion of theory with practice, and packagesits insights in acceptably diffident, conditional, and relativistic frames.31

It is, indeed, striking that the rise of this poststructuralist-feminist theorysince the late 1980s has been accompanied, in the field of British women’shistory (as in several other areas) by an extraordinary efflorescence ofinnovative scholarship. Amidst the deepening shadow of wider politicalrout and epistemological crisis, British women’s history has flourished inthe post-modern university, with a proliferating cascade of important,specialized studies. The floodgates were opened in 1987 with the appear-ance of Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes. Men andWomen of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850.32 This book representedthe first full-scale examination of the role played by separate spheres andwomen’s domestic culture in the making of a distinctively middle-classculture and consciousness in nineteenth-century Britain. Originally writingwithin the broad paradigm of socialist feminism, Davidoff and Hall foundthemselves traveling some distance towards a postfoundational perspectiveby the time their book appeared.

In their efforts to show ‘that class and gender always operate together,that consciousness of class always takes a gendered form’, they began toconclude, quite apart from the influence of poststructuralism, that the sub-stantive content and meaning of these categories ‘are not fixed in essencebut are constantly changing as they are contested and reworked’.33 In theirempiricist project of concretely specifying these substantive meanings andof tracing the way they change over time, Davidoff and Hall had to operateat some remove from any general theory or explanatory scheme. Amongworking historians their book became influential precisely because it pro-vided a practical model of how to deploy detailed local evidence to addressthe big questions posed by feminist analysis, and of how to comprehendlarge-scale transformative processes without losing sight of the way theywere experienced on an individual, personal plane. Through their pioneer-ing example, Davidoff and Hall illustrated how a gendered analysis could



shed new light on questions of culture, politics, and class formation, whichhad hitherto been regarded as the province of the history of (and by) men.34

Of the many excellent recent monographs that have been inspired byDavidoff and Hall’s book, I focus on four which explicitly revisit the territ-ory that Rowbotham, Taylor, Tilly and Scott pioneered during the 1970sand which respond to the call that Scott has issued more recently for afeminist historiography which goes beyond the Thompsonian tradition totreat the role gender played in the making of the British working class.35 Toa considerable extent, these books complement one another, both chrono-logically and thematically. Deborah Valenze’s The First Industrial Womanfocuses on the eighteenth century and considers the impact of early indus-trialization on women, while Anna Clark’s The Struggle for the Breeches:Gender and the Making of the British Working Class treats the first half of the nineteenth century, explicitly revisiting much of E. P. Thompson’sempirical ground. Sonya Rose’s Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class inNineteenth Century England looks beyond Thompson’s period to considerthe relationship between class and gender during the mid-Victorian ‘age ofequipoise’. Finally, Ellen Ross’s Love and Toil: Motherhood in OutcastLondon focuses on a critical time and place which Stedman Jones hadearlier portrayed as the prototypical location in which a post-Thompsonianre-making of England’s maturing industrial working class commenced.36

As valuable and impressive as each of these books is individually, takentogether they constitute something more than the sum of their parts.Retracing Thompson’s ground to explore the interrelation of class and gen-der and then looking beyond to offer a parallel re-examination of StedmanJones’s themes, these new books can provide us with a very concrete andcomprehensive answer to the question which Joan Scott so recently posed:‘How did gender “naturalize” particular meanings of class’ for Britishworking people? ‘How in turn did visions of class as a set of relationshipsnaturally following from economic conditions set in place certain notions ofgender?’37 No less significantly, the appearance of these books provides animportant test of the theoretical choice that Scott asks us all to make. Howfar do they share in her poststructuralist assumption that both class andgender are discursive categories, untethered from any determinative mat-erial foundations and subject to wide variations in their content and tomultiple permutations in their interrelationship? Insofar as they reflect thistheoretical turn, what are the consequences for historiographical develop-ment, and what are the prospects that such postfoundational abandonmentof familiar master narratives will satisfactorily take us beyond the dualsystems or socialist/feminist impasse?38

Of these four authors, Deborah Valenze makes the most explicit and self-conscious effort to operate within the Thompsonian tradition ofworking-class history and to retain some elements of the older socialist-feminist framework of analysis. She begins her account of the impact of



early industrialization on British working women with a fine Thompsoniancritique of ‘the “Whig history” of industrialization’, in which ‘human agencyhas taken the form of “great men in history,” in this instance entrepreneursand inventors’. Historians of class, she notes, ‘have pointed out that beneaththe Faustian heroes of invention, were many nameless hard workers who,in unseemly circumstances, for low rates of pay, produced all kinds of com-modities’.39 Nevertheless, this devaluation and degradation of workingpeople’s role in the industrializing process is not, as Valenze points out,simply a question of class, but also of gender, since it was women in par-ticular whose labor was most devalued and degraded by the onward andupward march of modernization. While at least some male workers wereeventually restored to a position of economic quasi-independence duringthe nineteenth century by the creation of new, industrial forms of abstractlabor and by the creation of new male trade-union organization and newmale skills, women’s work, so central in traditional preindustrial society, wasrelegated in principle to the invisibility of domestic housework or, evenworse, to a unique sub-proletarian purgatory of domestic service whichbrought those who experienced it the worst of both worlds.40

During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Valenze acknow-ledges, women remained subsumed within the traditional household eco-nomy and were largely excluded from the public sphere. Nevertheless, they‘could work within the interstices’ of the paternalism that enclosed thembecause of the universal recognition that their labor played an indispensableeconomic role.41 During the late eighteenth century, however, this traditionalgender/productive order was battered by a devastating, multi-pronged attack.As enclosure spread through the agricultural sector and the traditionalstructure of live-in service declined, ‘improvements’ in technique under-mined the viability of small-scale household production, farmers were forcedby market pressures to rationalize their operations, and a whole host of pop-ular rights and customary practices (such as gleaning and wood gathering)were subjected to legal attack. While the rural poor of both sexes sufferedfrom this experience of agricultural proletarianization, rural women in par-ticular bore the brunt of the assault. Enclosure drove women out of fieldlabor and even marginalized their role at harvest time.42 Most devastating,however, as Valenze demonstrates, was the transformation of dairying, anoccupation whose masculinization was particularly dramatic and debilitat-ing since it had habitually been regarded as a mainstay of women’s work.Market pressures, combined with the propaganda of agricultural improvers,began to cause the ‘Taylorization’ and masculinization of dairying, as orallore handed down by generations of women was written down, codified,rationalized, and deployed by larger farmers on specialized, male-run andmale-staffed operations devoted to the mass production of milk and cheese.43

This degradation of women’s traditional labor in agriculture was rend-ered doubly devastating because it was accompanied by the transformationthat industrialization and craft deskilling brought in the industrial sphere.



The mechanization of spinning in particular, and its eventual concentrationin textile factories, deprived both rural women and women in the manu-facturing districts of a modest, but indispensable source of income.44 It is in this context, Valenze contends, that the vexed question of the femalefactory worker must be placed. While agreeing that working women wereexploited by the intensification of sweated labor in cottage manufacturing,Valenze takes issue with those who believe that factory employment (whichwas available only to a minority in any case) opened up new possibilities forhigher wages and independence for female laborers. As in other areas ofemployment, the factories offered women only dead-end jobs at wages below their economic value, a situation which was the inevitable result ofthe ideological devaluation of women’s labor combined with the presenceof a vast surplus army of female job-seekers created by the foreclosure ofother and more varied types of women’s work.45

As Valenze recognizes, this massive and multi-pronged degradation ofwomen’s work in early industrializing Britain was accompanied by the riseof the new, middle-class ideology of separate gender spheres. By the earlynineteenth century, she argues, efforts were under way to extend the newvalues of privatized domesticity to the working-class family.46 Of course,given the realities of workers’ actual situation, especially working-classfamilies’ continued dependence on the supplementary income of womenand children, this translation of middle-class separate spheres into a working-class setting was doomed to failure from the outset. The result, however,was not greater equality and opportunity for working-class women but anambivalent, inherently unsatisfactory position at the very bottom of theclass/gender hierarchy.47

If Valenze’s book seeks to gender one strand of Thompson’s classicargument, the degradation of labor under early industrial capitalism, AnnaClark’s The Struggle for the Breeches takes the other major strand, the riseof working-class consciousness, class organization, and political radical-ism, so as to gender it in a parallel way.48 For both authors (as for Scott) thisinvolves a double-sided process. On the one hand, both begin by rescuingtheir working-class female subjects from the condescension of liberal mod-ernizationists and Marxist Thompsonians alike. In this manner, women’sexperiences—feminized proletarianization in the case of Valenze, and class/gender consciousness in the case of Clark—are fully integrated for the firsttime into the historiographical mainstream. But why did these particularexperiences become gendered in the first place? This leads the two authorsto a second set of questions: why were women excluded from certain types ofeconomic roles and occupations? Why did class organization and classconsciousness become increasingly cast in a masculinist frame? How didthe entire process of proletarianization crystallize along gender’s faultlines?

While this second set of questions concerns both authors, it figures morecentrally in Clark’s account. Gender, she recognizes, impacted on classformation, not only in the way that it constituted divisions of labor, but also



by providing working people with a subjective framework for constructingtheir sense of self. In Clark’s account, therefore, gender is not a thing, buta relationship which necessarily affects our understanding of men’s behav-ior as well as that of women. Where Thompson ‘portrayed working-classactivists as rational heroes who forged a working-class consciousness by1832’, his efforts to do so, Clark contends, involved him in an unacknow-ledged bias which ‘caused him to neglect the connections between familyand political life’.49 Behind the making of the English working class, accord-ing to Clark, lay a ‘struggle for the breeches’ which profoundly affected theworking class that was made: a class that became neither the revolutionaryproletariat which Marx anticipated nor even the radical apotheosis whichThompson proclaimed, but a relatively quiescent, complacent, demobilizedpopulace that increasingly sought to accommodate itself to the dominantliberal, individualist values of the mid-Victorian age.50

Clark’s account begins in the late eighteenth century at just about thepoint where Valenze’s main analysis winds down. The economic marginal-ization of working women, whose structural and ideological origins Valenzeexamined, resulted in what Clark characterizes as the late eighteenth-century sexual crisis between working-class women and men. Separatedfrom close, day-to-day interaction with wives and children by the removalof production from the household, but fearful of the potential for cheapfemale labor to undercut their economic privileges and skills, male artisansbegan to cultivate a new, profoundly misogynist, homosocial male culturewhich, according to Clark, substantially colored the type of class conscious-ness that they acquired.51 Following Taylor, Clark envisions this process ofmasculinist class formation proceeding through three distinct phases. Be-tween 1790 and 1816, the new artisanal misogyny took shape amidst thepolitical and economic dislocations of revolution, counter-revolution, infla-tion, and war.52 During the 1820s, however, efforts were made to mount amore ecumenical movement involving not only artisans but also handloomweavers and factory workers, which was premised on a greater equalitybetween the sexes, and which sought to promote a more universalistic andtruly radical conception of class.53 This egalitarian trend, however, wasundercut during the 1830s by the rise of a new kind of masculinistworking-class politics under the umbrella of Chartism which repudiatedboth sexual egalitarianism and the older artisanal misogyny, and optedinstead for the new ideal of separate spheres domesticity, grounded in theChartist ideal of male citizenship and the trade-unionist program of a malebreadwinner wage.54

Following Thompson, Clark stresses the emancipatory impact on working-class radicalism of the new strain of libertarian rationalism which Paineintroduced. Unlike Thompson, however, she insists that this ideologicalmaturation could not take practical effect until the followers of MaryWollstonecraft had broadened the rights of man to include the rights ofwoman. Where the high point of Thompson’s early radical phase had been



the Luddite explosions of 1811–12 and the mass political protests of 1819,Clark sees these events as saturated with masculinist misogyny, and looksto the Queen Caroline episode of 1820–21, which Thompson dismissed asa diversion from ‘real’ radicalism, as the high-water mark of early working-class formation, the point when radicals finally broke out of their cocoonof sectarian isolation, put themselves at the head of a genuine mass move-ment, and addressed women’s issues, fully embracing the feminine per-spective for the first time.55

Like Thompson, Clark attaches great importance to the Owenite socialistexperiments of the 1820s and early 1830s that followed in Peterloo’s andCaroline’s wake. However, by centering her analysis on the question of whythis radical move towards class and gender equality was ultimately rejectedby most British workers during the late 1830s and 1840s in favor of the moreconservative ideal of separate spheres domesticity based on the reformedpatriarchalist strategy of the male breadwinner wage, Clark goes beyondher predecessors’ work.56 In Chartism she sees the most tragic embodimentof these contradictory strains: on the one hand, the rise of a mass move-ment dedicated to expanding the concept of citizenship beyond the narrowpatriarchal, political confines in which it had originally been framed; on theother hand, the adoption of an increasingly defensive strategy of domesticprotection which offered the subordination of women and the adoption ofmiddle-class values of respectability as the price for the partial empower-ment and social integration of working-class men.57 In her short, but incisive,conclusion, Clark brings all the strands of her argument together and makesa powerful case for her overall interpretive strategy of standing Thompson’sclassic ‘master narrative’ on its head. It is only by infusing a genderedanalysis into the very heart of his story of heroic class formation that its truedimensions as a great historical misfortune can finally emerge.

The narrative of this book has become, by the end, a tragedy rather than themelodrama of E. P. Thompson’s story.… His stirring tale of compromisingvillains, soul crushing political economists, and heroic radical artisans tri-umphing in the working-class movement of 1832, is richly textured, nuanced,and theoretically inspiring. But adding gender to the story casts a more sor-rowful light. There was no golden age of family happiness; rather, there waschronic sexual crisis.… Although artisan culture transformed itself from drunkenmisogyny to respectable patriarchy, its exclusivism persisted. The fatal flawsof misogyny and patriarchy ultimately muted the radicalism of the Britishworking class.58

Clark correctly lays emphasis on the shifts of the 1840s, which convertedmost working-class leaders from a more radical (if often ambiguous) notionof universalistic citizenship to the ideal of separate gender spheres and themale breadwinner wage. By embracing notions of citizenship and sexualdifference that highlighted the links between middle-class men and re-spectable workers, this new, reformist working class played a critical role



in underwriting the stabilization of mid-Victorian British society and inforeclosing the earlier radical alternatives to liberal individualist capitalismwhich the Thompsonian archaeology had so vividly disclosed.59

Nevertheless, the reformist alliance which Clark foreshadows was notinstantly consummated during the mid-Victorian age of equipoise, and wasnever fully secured until the twentieth century. There were several reasonsfor this delay. In the first place, middle- and upper-class elites were slow togrant even the most respectable male workers the equality of formal political(i.e., electoral) rights that the notion of citizenship entailed.60 Moreover,few working-class men, however skilled or ‘aristocratic’, could be assuredof the regular income of 30–40s. which would have been necessary to sup-port a family in relative comfort. The number of skilled workers who couldaspire to such incomes grew, but only gradually during these years. Moresignificant was the ‘second industrial revolution’ in iron, steel, coal, rail-roads, chemicals, and machine tools which, especially in the last quarterof the nineteenth century, created a whole raft of new semi-skilled manu-facturing jobs at pay rates just below this level, which were (in contrast tothe textile work of the early industrial revolution) generally reserved formen. Nevertheless, few of these new male industrial workers were effectivelyorganized or protected from the devastating impact of cyclical downturns,periodic unemployment, and wage reductions. Hence, most working-classfamilies continued to rely on supplementary income from female and/orchild labor for at least some portion of the family and/or trade cycles. Thedeath, debility, illness, or unemployment of the male breadwinner couldrapidly plunge even the most secure family down below the poverty line.61

It is in this context that Sonya Rose’s study of working-class genderdemarcations must be placed. Rose’s premise is the proposition (also enun-ciated by the other writers) that the prevailing sexual division of labor withinany society, so often taken for granted as a ‘natural’ fact, is, in actuality, theoutcome of a distinctive historical process and becomes, therefore, aproper subject for historical enquiry. Notwithstanding the apparent fixitiesof Victorian sexual conventions, Rose sees mid-nineteenth-century Britainas a society in considerable gender flux. The masculinization of paid laborwhich Valenze delineated may have been, in broad outlines, already com-pleted by this time. Nevertheless, so long as the ideal of the male breadwinnerremained incomplete and elusive, the gendering of work was necessarily aproblematic and contested terrain. In particular, so long as there were limitson raising working men’s wages, much of the impetus towards implement-ing separate spheres in the working-class family had to be focused onpurely negative attempts to exclude women from remunerative work.62

Rose brackets the emergence of this campaign against women’s paidemployment alongside the chronology of Victorian state regulation, Poor Law,and factory reform. Needless to say, these official regulations did not elim-inate women’s paid employment. Insofar as they actually limited workingwomen’s opportunities in the factories, they rarely had the desired effect of



turning women into full-time housewives. On the contrary, such women weresimply forced into even lower paid, more exploitative, ‘sweated’ homeworkwhich they could perform in their tenements or cottages as a ‘double load’above and beyond their domestic family responsibilities.63 What gave thisnew arrangement force, however, was not so much formal legislation but thefact that it was actively desired and spontaneously implemented through atacit alliance between male employers and organized working men. It ishere that Rose makes her most important and original contribution. Thatmale trade unionists used their factory reform campaigns as a way of lim-iting competition from women workers was an argument which already fig-ured centrally in Taylor’s account. Rose further demonstrates that Victorianworking men’s aspiration to eliminate female competition was more thansimply a strategic move to defend privileges and protect skills. From the1840s onward, it constituted a central component of working men’s genderidentity, a psychological benefit and status marker on which their sense ofmasculinity increasingly depended. Moreover, as the ideal of respectabilitybegan to spread throughout the mid- and late Victorian period, replacingClark’s older misogynist artisanal ideal, successful manhood increasingly de-pended on men’s ability to support a wife and children and, therefore, ontheir ability to prevent women (or others like them) from competing for work.64

Considered as a whole, Rose’s account reinforces our image of thesecond half of the nineteenth century as a transitional stage. If the highlypaid male industrial worker remained an unrealized ideal for the future, theexclusion of women (especially married women) from remunerative em-ployment made it possible to implement a scaled-down variant of the malebreadwinner wage, albeit at the cost of tight working-class budgets, low liv-ing standards, attenuated mass consumption, and the burdening of womenwith the heroic task of domestic management under straightened econo-mic circumstances, often combined with sweated labor to supplement ahusband’s or father’s meager pay.

This uneasy compromise in late Victorian class-gender relations be-tween an old family economy which was no longer viable and a new malebreadwinner system which remained attenuated and incomplete is illus-trated by Ellen Ross’s beautifully crafted and exhaustively researched casestudy of the experience of motherhood in outcast London between 1870and 1918.65 Encountering one another across the barrier of these disparatefamily functions, where men’s role was to bring home the income that itwas their wives’ job to spend, working men and women, as Ross depictsthem, were engaged in a complex set of distant, tense, and often antagonisticinteractions that involved cooperation, negotiation, accommodation, andopen conflict by turns. With low-paying, erratic jobs, and little integrationinto the daily life of the household, working men were psychologicallyremoved from their families, and continued to identify with the olderhomosocial patterns of workplace leisure which motivated them to divert asubstantial portion of their earnings to the personal luxuries of tobacco and



drink.66 By contrast, wives, who were responsible for keeping the familygoing, often on incomes that were entirely inadequate for the task, soughtto wheedle as much money as possible from their husbands. It was theirunenviable task to implement the extraordinary economies which kept thefamily alive in a manner that did not unduly inconvenience their husbands.In the end, the man’s compliance usually had to be ‘bought’ through symbolicacknowledgments of his authority, such as extra food portions (especiallymeats) and comforts which other family members were denied.67

This ethnography of gender relations in outcast London constitutes onlya small and ultimately marginal part of Ross’s purpose in this book. Her pri-mary interest is in reconstructing the experience of working-class mother-hood. Ross focuses on motherhood because, quite apart from the subject’sappeal as historiographical terra incognita, she sees it as absolutely centralto working-class women’s experience of life as a whole.68 As Ross remindsus, in this era just before the trend towards declining fertility reached Brit-ain’s laboring class, it is scarcely possible to exaggerate the extent to whichworking-class women’s lives were dominated by the physical realities ofchildbearing and child care. With an average of eight to ten pregnancies,seven or eight live births, and five or six children reaching the age of five,the typical working-class wife could expect to spend virtually her entire adultlife either pregnant or with several young children in tow. Lacking the mach-inery and amenities of the twentieth-century housewife or the domesticservants of her nineteenth-century middle-class counterpart, the working-class wife experienced motherhood first and foremost as a bone-wearyingburden of unremitting physical labor from which it was scarcely possible togain even momentary respite.69 This overwhelmingly physical dimension ofmaternal responsibility accounts, according to Ross, for what many middle-class (and modern) observers perceived as working-class women’s psy-chological remoteness from their children, as well as their understandableresistance to well meaning, reformist efforts to ‘improve’ their maternalpractices and childrearing techniques.70

By the beginning of the twentieth century, it was clear to all parties thatimportant changes were under way. Prepared foods and mass entertain-ments were beginning to affect working-class patterns of consumption.Fertility rates were beginning to decline, even among the poor. Finally, thestate was set to embark on a massive new wave of public intervention intoeducation, juvenile delinquency, old age pensions, national health, economicregulation, and public welfare. Although elements of the patterns whichRoss reports persisted into the 1950s, it was already clear by the end (if notby the beginning) of World War I that industrial capitalist society in Britainwas approaching ‘maturity’ and that class-gender relations were on theverge of entering a new phase.71

These four books present significant original research, mark out innovative newdirections, and synthesize the work of predecessors in a compelling way.



With their appearance, it is safe to say that the terrain of British social historyhas been permanently transformed. The problems and questions introducedby feminist intellectuals, hitherto subsisting on the disciplinary margins,have been shifted to the very center of historiographical discourse. Buildingon the pioneering work of Rowbotham, Taylor, Tilly and Scott, together withthat of Walkowitz, Davidoff and Hall, these four authors have brought thesocial history of British women and gender to an entirely new level of accom-plishment and maturity. Taken together, these feminist works have done asmuch to revolutionize our understanding of British industrialization andworking-class formation as Thompson’s book did three decades ago.

On the bare-bones tripartite schema of Tilly and Scott, these scholarshave erected a dense foliage of historical concreteness and exemplarypersonification, providing multiple points of entry for human agency andcontingency into what had hitherto been portrayed as an impersonal,developmental process in the abstract. In her initial efforts to introducesubjective experience into this story, Barbara Taylor had limited herself to the agency of those few exceptional women (and men) who were as-sociated with the marginal Owenite sects. Within the current works thissubjectivist focus is vastly expanded. With their appearance, it may now be said that, in the field of British working-class women’s history, theThompsonian concern for human agency and cultural expression has fullycome into its own.72

Up to a point, this is a function of the greater opportunities afforded bya specialized quasi-monographic study for tracking down new types ofevidence, for supporting its arguments with greater concreteness anddetail, for adding illustrative texture and color, and for linking the highwayof analytical synthesis with the byways of historical particularity. Beyondthis, each author has made a self-conscious commitment to ‘Thompson-izing’ our understanding of the gendering of the working class. By rescuingpreindustrial dairymaids from the condescension of political economy, byretrieving Queen Caroline demonstrators or unorganized female carpetweavers from the disparagement of nineteenth-century radicals and mod-ern marxist historians, Valenze, Clark, and Rose, respectively, have appliedthe Thompsonian method to groups and individuals that were so com-pletely silenced and subordinated as to have been largely ignored or dis-missed by Thompson himself. Ross’s tender reconstruction of the world ofworking-class motherhood in nineteenth-century outcast London is themost spectacular and most successful example of this kind of excavativeethnographic work.

How far then, have these efforts at historical reclamation which seek tomake the invisible visible, to redeem the defeated, to bring the downtrod-den back to life, involved these authors in the new poststructuraliststrategies of linguistic deconstruction and in a rejection of the historicalmaterialism associated with the names of Thompson and Marx? Like manyempirical historians who tend to be wary of unnecessary theoretical



entanglements and to eschew philosophical questions not directly impli-cated in their work, all of these scholars tend to be somewhat uncertain oreven evasive about identifying unequivocally with any particular theo-retical stance. All find some merit in Scott’s admonitions, but also expressmisgivings about abandoning materialism tout court.73 In fact, a good casecan be made that, notwithstanding their gestures of alignment with the cur-rently fashionable poststructuralism, all these writers have cast their sub-stantive historical accounts squarely within the classical Thompsonianmold. In this regard, it is important to recall (a point which is all too oftenforgotten) that the turn towards language was originally taken not by thepoststructuralists of the 1980s but by Thompson in 1963. It was, after all,he who first repudiated economic reductionism, focused on workers’ cul-tural expressions, and showed us how to use poems and placards as histor-ical sources and read riots and rituals as though they were texts. Indeed, inhis time, marxists were the first to insist that language and culture be takenseriously in a discipline that was still largely mired in a naively positivistorthodoxy. Thompson’s pioneering insight that language and culture werenot mere epiphenomenal reflections of objective, material forces first em-erged within marxism. He contended that they constituted meaning-saturatedframeworks through which people apprehended their external reality andformulated volitional, subjective, and intersubjective responses.74

Like Thompson and his marxist followers, the authors of these fourrecent gender studies are all concerned to explore the language, values,culture, ideology, and behavior of their subjects, relating these (withoutreducing them) to the material experiences which these men and womenencountered both in public and in private, both when they were at homeand when they were at work. With its vivid and nuanced reconstitution ofthe experience of motherhood in late nineteenth-century London, Love andToil represents, perhaps, the most obvious embodiment of this kind of his-torical materialist work. Nevertheless, with their emphases on the gendereddimension of trades unionism, working-class politics, and the labor process,the contributions of Rose, Clark, and Valenze, respectively, all represent aclear continuation rather than a repudiation of the Thompsonian materialistproject.

Nevertheless, these continuities with the historiographical tradition ofThompsonian materialism should not lead us simply to assume that theycan be assimilated unproblematically to the more explicitly determinist,socialist-feminist paradigms which were current during the 1970s. Thepostfoundationalism which Scott advocates has been embraced by all fourauthors to the extent that it authorizes them to interrogate specific class andgender identities in their diversity and concreteness, taking it for grantedthat these are particularistic social constructions whose substantive contentmight well vary depending on local circumstances of time and place, andwhich cannot be presumed to interact with one another in any theoreticallypredetermined way. It is clear, moreover, that this postfoundational



approach to the categories of class, gender, and their mutual intersectionhas had an enormously liberating and beneficial effect on each of theseauthor’s ability to pursue her project in new and innovative ways.

Authorized thus to deconstruct the category of class, they have finally suc-ceeded, really for the first time, in bringing gender to the explanatory fore-front, in endowing it with a genuine conceptual equality and integrity whichassures that it will henceforth never recede back into the shadows as amere additive or complicating factor in the marxist (or neo-marxist) classanalysis. In the aftermath of these books, we may with reasonable certaintyanticipate that the entire field of British working-class history will never againbe the same. Labor historians of every school and stripe will have to takeas their starting point the fundamental conclusion that these books so pain-stakingly and so compellingly reach, that the dynamics of class formationand transformation must always be examined in gendered terms.75

Nevertheless, if the autonomy and uni-causality of class have been for-ever deconstructed, the category of gender as it emerges from these post-foundational, empirical studies is also no longer what it once might haveseemed. Just as class has been shorn of its universal, determinate, theoret-ical underpinnings, so too gender appears in these books as a labile, con-tingent, and provisional identity whose content not only varies accordingto the particularities of historical circumstances but also depends on thosedimensions of the gendered experience and identity which the historianconsiders it most profitable and illuminating to emphasize. Thus, for Valenze,the conceptual core of gender is the sexual division of labor, whereas forClark, it is sexuality itself and the sexual conflict for power and autonomy,‘the struggle for the breeches’, between working women and working men.For Rose, the significance of gender seems to lie in the pervasiveness of ahegemonic, masculinist identity that transcends class lines and divides theworking class between men whose gender privileges mitigate the effects ofcapitalist exploitation and women who are simultaneously oppressed onboth fronts. Finally, Ross locates the core of gender in the experience ofmothering, which itself is portrayed as historically variable, dependent onthe social resources available to sustain it as well as the economic andcultural environment in which it is enmeshed.76

The multivalence of gender and the disjuncture of its meaning amongthese four works is, itself, one source of their richness and vitality, allowingeach author to focus on those aspects of the gendered experience whichbest illuminate the particular problem or historical trajectory of her choice.There is, however, a real danger in this reluctance to nail down gender theo-retically, to discuss explicitly the relationship between its different dimen-sions and definitions, or to seek the common thread which connects itsvarious meanings over the range of the entire field.77 This danger is all themore serious in the case of these recent studies, which each treat the mu-tual interrelationship between gender and class. For class, even after it hasbeen detotalized and deconstructed, still carries (if only by implication) a



considerable residual conceptual heft. Invisibly bolstered by the ghost ofmarxist theory and by the inherited weight of the corpus of traditional laborhistory, the category ‘class’ conjures up a set of coherent, taken-for-grantedconceptual and empirical associations that do not necessarily attach to the newer, less systematically theorized, and more widely contested term‘gender’.78

It was, of course, precisely to provide such a systematic theoretical and foundational counterweight to the over-theorized marxian analysis ofcapitalist development that the radical and socialist feminists of the 1970sdeveloped their contradistinctive foundational theories of patriarchy. Atthat time, the interpellation of this feminist theory of patriarchy with themarxist theory of capitalist development under the ‘dual systems’ umbrellaproved to be too schematic, too reductive, too additive and, ultimately, tooahistorical to be of much value in concrete empirical research.79 There is,however, no reason in principle why patriarchy could not be retheorized ina more historically nuanced, conceptually dialectical way. To be sure, suchretheorization will not be an easy task. As Sylvia Walby has pointed out inher excellent survey of the literature, ‘one of the major problems of existingmodels of patriarchy is that they either tend to treat patriarchy as a mono-lithic unity, and underestimate the significance of the relative autonomy ofdifferent sets of patriarchal relations, or they tend to include so many differ-ent aspects in an ad hoc way, that they degenerate into mere description.’80

It seems to me that any attempt to surmount this problem in the futurewill have to reconceive patriarchy as a loosely connected constellation ofrelated social systems, all based on the underlying principle of patriarchal(the father’s) rule. Above and beyond this single common denominator,these systems will vary greatly in substantive content between differentsettings and historic periods. Under all circumstances, patriarchy (like anysocial system, no matter how oppressive) must be understood not as anabstract set of rules but as a negotiated relationship between inherentlyunequal groups and individuals facing one another across a divide ofantagonistic interconnection that harbors enough elements of contingencyand fluidity to leave room for some modicum of active agency on bothsides. Moreover, in the modern context, patriarchy must always be under-stood as developing in tandem with capitalism, through a double-edgedprocess in which the former is perpetually constituting the latter and beingconstituted by it in turn.81

Obviously, this essay is not the place to pursue this kind of dialecticalanalysis. But we may reasonably ask if it is not likely that some kind ofanalysis of this type will provide the connecting thread and secure thetheoretical foundations (at once both firm and flexible) which the books wehave been considering seem to require. Given the reluctance of these authorsto engage explicitly with matters of theory, any such capitalism/patriarchydialectic will have to be teased out obliquely from the evidence and argu-ments which the books themselves contain. It is, indeed, striking that while



the term ‘capitalism’ (or at least ‘industrialism’) figures centrally in three ofthese books, ‘patriarchy’ is relatively conspicuous by its absence.82 Accord-ing to Judith Bennett, this reluctance to speak openly of ‘patriarchy’, muchless to develop it as a theoretical concept, is characteristic of much currentacademic work in women’s and gender history. Yet without this term andthe concept behind it, she contends, historians of women risk losing sightof ‘this fundamental question: why and how has the oppression of womenendured for so long and in so many different settings?’83

This is, indeed, a question implicitly asked by all four of these authors,even as they eschew the formal, theoretical apparatus which would insurethat they would all be answering it in the same coherent, systematic, andmutually commensurable way. While this silence may partly be motivatedby deliberate, poststructuralist philosophical reticence, it is more likely theconsequence of an unconscious replication of one of the most problem-atic features of the Thompsonian historiographical legacy. The problem liesin Thompson’s persistent ambiguity (which occasionally borders on self-contradiction) as to the exact relationship between cultural or ideologicalexpressions, which he rightly treats as partly autonomous, and the under-lying social structures and developmental trajectories which, he insists,stand behind these expressions in some loosely causal but not reductivelydeterminate way. ‘Consciousness of class arises in the same way in differenttimes and places, but never in just the same way.’84

This ambiguity, which is the Thompsonian tradition’s greatest theoreticalweakness and greatest practical strength, often seems to have been trans-posed in these current writings onto the class/gender interface, with equallyambivalent consequences. Thus, for example, Valenze’s effort to explainthe transformations of women’s work as a consequence, on the one hand,of the new technologies of capitalist industrialization and, on the otherhand, of ‘new discourses about female labor’ often seems like an evasiveattempt to have it both ways.85 Clark, by contrast, is admirably forthright inopting for the discursive, culturalist foundation of the mid-Victorian malebreadwinner wage.

The main reason domesticity prevailed over egalitarianism [as a trades-unionstrategy] was its rhetorical power.… Trades unionists cleverly exploited thecontradictions between bourgeois morality and theories of political economy.They drew on domesticity to demand the breadwinner wage for themselves,claiming that they needed higher wages and the legislative exclusion ofwomen and children in order to protect their families from the immorality offactories and workshops.86

This explanation has the advantage of intellectual clarity and lucidity,but it also illustrates the dangers of entirely abandoning the marxist-feminist quest for material determination in favor of either a soft neo-Thompsonian culturalism or the harder-edged poststructuralist language ofself-generating discourse. For, as Clark herself recognizes at other points in



her argument, these rhetorical tropes were not suspended in some purediscursive vacuum but were inextricably connected to concrete socialpractices, social structures, and struggles which loaded the dice in favor of(and against) certain cultural or ideological outcomes, insuring that certainvisions and rhetorical constructions would rise to dominance and becomehegemonic while others became attenuated, foreshortened, and foreclosed.87

It is, indeed, no accident that the rhetorical triumph of the domestic ideo-logy which Clark examines among trades unionists during the 1830s andChartists in the 1840s came (as she usually recognizes) in the aftermath ofsignificant political defeats, when more fundamental critiques of liberalindividualism were shut down, industrial capitalism assumed an increasingair of inevitability, and the interests of male labor had to be advanced inmore partial and limited ways, increasingly at the expense of women. Suchrhetorical strategies would, therefore, have been a good deal less effectiveand desirable if working men had enjoyed less access to the benefits ofpatriarchal privilege, and/or if their earlier efforts to supplant competitivecapitalism had not been so decisively crushed.88

On an even deeper level, it is possible to detect the longer-term, subter-ranean socio-economic trends and psycho-sexual structures which under-wrote the broad developments that all four authors, one way or another,articulate. The beneficial effects of social reform, trades unionism, factoryregulation, the improvement of housing, the provision of mass education,and the intervention of public authorities in regulating sanitation and pub-lic health, as well as the growth of respectable popular amusements andthe extension of leisure time, all improved the living and working condi-tions of late nineteenth-century industrial workers. As a result, greater andgreater space was gradually opened up for a more self-contained, comfort-able, and sustainable domestic, family life. By the end of the century, theshift from labor- to capital-intensive forms of industrial production tended,in those sectors where it operated, to replace low-waged women and chil-dren with more regularly employed and better remunerated adult men.Finally, by the early twentieth century, the gradual decline in proletarianfertility and the gradual extension of the male breadwinner wage to moreand more sectors of Britain’s industrial workforce eventually made theVictorian ideal of separate spheres domesticity a reality for most workingpeople, at least in a modified, attenuated form.89

Of course, as Rose’s work very effectively demonstrates, these changesin gender roles and domestic work arrangements were not merely the in-evitable byproducts of social reforms and socio-economic transforma-tions, but were also the consequence of equally fundamental changes inpsycho-sexual structures (and probably, therefore, in child-rearing practices)which were gradually creating new forms of masculine and feminine identity.Thus, in the late nineteenth-century Lancaster and Kidderminster weavingtrades that she studied, where few of these socio-economic improvementswere much in evidence, Rose found the new ideals of masculinist



respectability emerging triumphant, creating pockets of male privilege andexclusivity in employment and relegating women to the most degraded andlowest paid work. When male political leaders, capitalists, and organizedtrades unionists tacitly conspired to transcend their class antagonisms inorder to defend their common gender privileges, their actions may or maynot have altered the prevailing profit rate. What is certain is that suchgestures of cross-class gender solidarity constituted defining moments inthe construction of new understandings of what it meant to be a man.90

It is this long-term transformation in understandings of what it meant to be a man and to be a woman, partly induced by structural changes inthe economy and political system, partly shaped by new cultural values,psycho-sexual identities, and gender roles, that gets us to the heart of theunderlying argument which implicitly stands as a foundation behind allfour of these books. Each may be seen, in its own way, as adding a distinctcumulative chapter to the larger story of the very slow and gradual replace-ment of one mode of capitalist patriarchy in Britain by the next. The olderversion of capitalist patriarchy, which had its heyday in the seventeenthcentury, had originally been based on preindustrial technologies, whereproduction was generally contained within the flexibly expanding andcontracting household economy. Here, male dominance was grounded dir-ectly and politically, in a set of widely consensual, but ultimately coercive,patriarchal legal structures which limited citizenship and economic auto-nomy to adult male propertyholders who subsumed the lives and labor oftheir women, children, and other dependents (e.g., servants and apprent-ices) under their patriarchal authority as household heads.91 What madethis mode of patriarchy more than simply a mechanism for structuring fam-ilies, kin relations, and the household economy was the way it was articu-lated as an ideological model for the organization of the national polityand for the conduct of class relations between prospectively deferentialplebeians and presumptively paternalist elites.92

With the advent of proletarianization, the triumph of market capitalism,and the onset of early industrialization, this established patriarchal systembegan to break down. As the traditional sexual division of labor disin-tegrated, gender relations between working men and women were newlyproblematized and, increasingly, polarized. This led, on the one hand, tothe hyper-exploitation of working women that Valenze adroitly traces and,on the other hand, to the class and gender conflicts that Clark astutelydescribes. The working men who found themselves caught up in this vastjuggernaut of capitalist development struggled valiantly but often vainly topreserve their economic and psychological autonomy. Insofar, however, asthey were defeated in their struggles with capital, they could always take it out on the women of their class who were even more powerless than themselves. Working women were thus shunted into an ever moremarginalized, exploitative position, half in the proletarian household andhalf in the workforce, where they came to constitute a vast pool of



cheap, unorganized labor for capital to draw on in its quest for maximumprofits.93

In the final section of Clark’s book, a new model of capitalist patriarchyannounces its appearance, initially in the form of a still unrealizable ideal.94

Unlike its predecessor, which was based on the formal, legal privileges ofproprietorial male household heads and was ultimately buttressed by thethreat of violence (especially among the lowest class of men whose legalprivileges were weak), this new version of capitalist patriarchy was groundedin a more routinized, psychologically internalized, ‘respectable’ image ofwhat it meant to be a man.95 For the working class, the coherence of thisnew model depended almost entirely on the possibility of extending to thewage-earning population an appropriate version of the system of separatespheres domesticity which had spontaneously originated during the earlynineteenth century among the ranks of Britain’s middle class. As the booksby Rose and Ross abundantly demonstrate, however, these new arrange-ments of separate spheres domesticity which seemed so natural in middle-class circles proved notoriously difficult to universalize among the variousstrata of Britain’s workers, most of whom long continued to lack the mater-ial and in some cases the cultural resources necessary to make this systemof separate spheres domesticity work.96

Unable to earn the wage packets that could sustain such a domesticlifestyle, permitting them to keep their women and children in relativecomfort at home, most working men found it difficult to recover, in theirnew capacity as consumers or as providers for their families, that sense ofdignity and autonomy which their predecessors had formerly found in theirrelationship to the world of work. Women, who were now excluded frommost well paid employments, remained nevertheless a source of cheapreserve labor. This left them ‘double loaded’ by a harsh mix of hyper-ex-ploitation in segregated and often sweated workplaces combined with therigors of full responsibility for childrearing, cooking, cleaning, marketing,and domestic provision, on the basis of economic resources that wereinsufficient to make ends meet.97 Only in the twentieth century, with therise in male wages, the decline in working-class fertility, the continued ex-clusion of women from full economic opportunity, and the redistributiveincomes policies of the bureaucratic welfare state, did this new and morestable mode of domesticated capitalist patriarchy become the dominantnorm for a substantial proportion of Britain’s working class.98 In so doing,however, it had evolved into patriarchy of a different sort, broadly articu-lated throughout the ‘public’ realms of employment, the market, con-sumerism, and the state, rather than being narrowly focused on the ‘private’realm of the family and household. As such, it required a wholesalereconfiguration of the relationship between public and private, betweeneconomic management and market competition, and between civil societyand the state. In gendered terms, it was no less inherently masculinist thanits preindustrial or early industrial predecessor, but it tended to empower



men not so much individually as property-owning household heads butcollectively, as privileged members of society’s dominant gender group.

Historians are beginning to tell this story of class/gender relations in thetransition between two modes of capitalist patriarchy at the very momentwhen capitalist patriarchy is again undergoing a fundamental change. Inour current circumstances, when the further destabilization of patriarchyseems to be combined with capitalism’s unconditional ascendancy andtriumph, it is becoming obvious that class is inherently gendered and thatgender is intrinsically classed. It is the merit of these books, produced inthe shadow of this contemporary insight, to have demonstrated beyond allrefutation that this was always the case.

For far too long, the largely male club of marxists and labor historianshas had a monopoly on the grand narratives of working-class formation,which they have portrayed as valiant, emancipatory struggles against cap-ital whose final consummation had unaccountably become derailed or atleast delayed. Now, thanks to studies such as these, we are in a better posi-tion to understand why this derailment was probably inevitable from thestart. The organized working-class movement against capitalist exploitationand for the rights of labor has always been to a considerable extent (al-though never entirely) a movement of masculinist privilege. All too often,it has advanced the interests of working men (frequently only white,European, or skilled working men) by excluding women and minoritiesfrom its benefits and its ranks. Correspondingly, for all its periodic momentsof revolutionary militance, it has proven all too willing, over the long run,to enter into strategic alliances with its structural antagonist, capital, so asto stabilize the new system of capitalist patriarchy at the expense of thoseworking people whose experiences, interests, and identities were neverseriously meant to be encompassed within its emancipatory project.

No doubt, there will be some (including, perhaps, some of the authorsof these fine monographs) who will express unease at any attempt to extractsuch large, sweeping conclusions from any number of concrete, empirical,reconstructive historical works. No doubt, from a strict poststructuralist per-spective, such a procedure would have to be condemned as simply replacingone flawed master narrative with another, flawed in different ways. Never-theless, if we do not carry our deconstruction to quite this self-destructivepoint, we will see that such replacement of demonstrably inadequate andone-dimensional interpretive frameworks with others that are more accurateand inclusive (even if only incrementally and provisionally so) is the sinequa non of intellectual progress. At all events, the question is not merelyacademic, since it has practical consequences whose significance we wouldbe foolish to underestimate. If we are, in the future, to create new popularmovements of mass emancipation and labor consciousness that are gen-uinely inclusive and universal in ways that their predecessors were not, wewill need to recognize that capitalism (at least up till now) has always beenpowerfully buttressed by patriarchy. Consequently, without an adequate



grasp of the operations and complications of gender, we cannot possiblyhope to comprehend the true dynamics and possibilities of class.

Notes

I would like to thank Keith McClelland, Linda Nicholson, Grey Osterud, LeeAnnWhites, and Nancy Fraser, whose comments assisted me in revising this essay.

1. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (Columbia University Press, New York, 1988), pp. 68–90.

2. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Random House, New York, 1963); Harvey J. Kaye and Keith McClelland (eds) E. P. Thompson, CriticalPerspectives (Polity, Oxford, 1990).

3. For an elaboration of this analysis see Theodore Koditschek, ‘The Marxist Inter-pretation of British History: From Engels, to Thompson, to Deconstruction and Beyond’,in History, Economic History, and the Future of Marxism, ed. Terry Brotherstone andGeoff Pilling (Porcupine, London, 1996), pp. 103–47.

4. ‘Despite their presence, women are marginal in the book; they serve to underlineand point up the overwhelming association of class with the politics of male workers.’Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, p. 72.

5. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, pp. 68–74.6. Alice Clark, Working Women in the Seventeenth Century (Routledge, London,

1919); Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workers and the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850(Virago, London, 1930). For a survey of the literature, see Janet Thomas, ‘Women andCapitalism, Oppression or Emancipation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History,30 (1988), pp. 534–49.

7. For the development of women’s history see Scott, Gender and the Politics ofHistory, pp. 15–27, 178–98.

8. Kathryn K. Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (Yale Uni-versity Press, New Haven, 1973); Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: ‘Woman’sSphere’ in New England, 1700–1835 (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1977); MaryP. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York,1790–1865 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1981).

9. On the development of women’s history in Britain, see ‘Editor’s Introduction’, in Sex and Class in Women’s History, ed. Judith L. Newton, Mary Ryan, and JudithWalkowitz (Routledge, London, 1983), pp. 1–16, and Catherine Hall, White, Male, andMiddle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Routledge, New York, 1992), pp. 1–40. For more extensive bibliography, see Amanda Vickery, ‘Golden Age toSeparate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’sHistory’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 383–414.

10. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden From History. Rediscovering Women in History fromthe Seventeenth Century to the Present (Pantheon, New York, 1973). Eight years later,however, Rowbotham rejected the term ‘patriarchy’ as too crude and biologistic forfeminist historical analysis; Sheila Rowbotham, ‘The Trouble with “Patriarchy”’, inPeople’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Raphael Samuel (Routledge, London, 1981),pp. 364–9.

11. Sally Alexander, Women’s Work in Nineteenth Century London, A Study of theYears 1820–50 (Journeyman, London, 1976, 1983); Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and



Victorian Society: Women, Class, and the State (Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1980); Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminismin the Nineteenth Century (Pantheon, New York, 1983).

12. For a socialist-feminist study which anticipates many of the themes and argu-ments reviewed in this essay, see LeeAnn Whites, ‘Southern Ladies and Millhands: The Domestic Economy and Class Politics, Augusta, Georgia’ (Ph.D. diss., University ofCalifornia, Irvine, 1982). See also Ava Baron (ed.) Work Engendered: Toward a NewHistory of American Labor (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1991).

13. For the housework debate, see: Margaret Benston, ‘The Political Economy ofWomen’s Liberation’, Monthly Review, 21 (1969), pp. 12–27; Selma James andMariarosa dalla Costa, The Power of Women and the Subversion of the Community(Falling Wall Press, London, 1972); Wally Seccombe, ‘The Housewife and Her Labourunder Capitalism’, New Left Review, 83 (1973), pp. 3–25; Jean Gardiner, ‘Women’sDomestic Labour’, New Left Review, 93 (1975), pp. 47–57; Margaret Coulson, BrankaMagas, and Hilary Wainwright, ‘The Housewife and Her Labour under Capitalism’,New Left Review, 93 (1975), pp. 59–71; and Wally Seccombe, ‘Reply to Critics’, NewLeft Review, 94 (1975), pp. 85–96.

14. Christine Delphy, Close to Home. A Materialist Analysis of Women’s Oppression(Hutchinson, London, 1974; University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1984), pp. 57–77;Maxine Molyneux, ‘Beyond the Housework Debate’, New Left Review, 116 (1979), pp. 3–27.

15. Juliet Mitchell, Women, The Longest Revolution (Virago, London, 1984), pp. 17–54; Juliet Mitchell, Psycho-analysis and Feminism (Random House, New York,1974); Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectics of Sex (Morrow, New York, 1970); GayleRubin, ‘The Traffic in Women: Notes on the “Political Economy” of Sex’, in Towards anAnthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1975),pp. 157–210; Dorothy Dinnerstein, The Mermaid and the Minotaur: Sexual Arrange-ments and the Human Malaise (Harper, New York, 1976); Nancy Chodorow, TheReproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley, 1978).

16. Heidi Hartmann, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Marxism and Feminism: Towards aMore Progressive Union’, in Women and Revolution, ed. Lydia Sargent (South EndPress, Boston, 1981), pp. 1–41, and the other essays in this volume, which proposecritical emendations of and extensions to Hartmann’s argument.

17. See Rubin, ‘Traffic in Women’, p. 159; and other essays in Anthropology ofWomen, ed. Reiter, and Elise Boulding, The Underside of History: A View of Womenthrough Time (Westview Press, Boulder, 1976). For a more recent effort to historicizepatriarchy, see Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (Oxford University Press, NewYork, 1986), and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness: From the Middle Ages toEighteen-Seventy (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993).

18. Christine Delphy, Close to Home; Eli Zaretsky, Capitalism, The Family andPersonal Life (Harper, New York, 1976, 1986); Zillah Eisenstein (ed.) CapitalistPatriarchy and the Case for Socialist Feminism (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978);Annette Kuhn and Ann Marie Wolpe (eds) Feminism and Materialism (Routledge,Boston, 1978); Michèle Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, The Marxist/FeministEncounter (Verso, London, 1980, 1988); Mary O’Brien, The Politics of Reproduction(Routledge, London, 1981); Hartmann, ‘Unhappy Marriage’, pp. 1–41; and Ann Fergusonand Nancy Folbre, ‘The Unhappy Marriage of Patriarchy and Capitalism’, in Women andRevolution, ed. Sargent, pp. 313–38.



19. Louise A. Tilly and Joan W. Scott, Women, Work, and Family (Methuen, New York, 1978, 1987).

20. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work and Family, pp. 227–232. 21. Lydia Sargent, ‘New Left and Men: The Honeymoon is Over’, in Women and

Revolution, ed. Sargent, pp. xi–xxxi; Alice Echols, Daring to be Bad: Radical Feminismin America, 1967–1975 (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989).

22. Hartmann, ‘Unhappy Marriage’, p. 2. 23. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, p. v. For a marxist-feminist critique of

Barrett, see Johana Brenner and Maria Ramas, ‘Rethinking Women’s Oppression’, NewLeft Review, 144 (1984), pp. 33–71, and Barrett’s reply, New Left Review, 146 (1984),pp. 123–7. For significant attempts to revive the marxist-feminist project in the con-text of the 1980s, see Nancy Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint: Developing theGround for a Specifically Feminist Historical Materialism’, in Discovering Reality, ed.Sandra Harding and Merrill B. Hintikka (D. Reidel, n.p, 1983), pp. 283–310, and SylviaWalby, Patriarchy at Work: Patriarchal and Capitalist Relations in Employment(University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1986). For an effort to historicize theissues raised by the marxist-feminist tradition, see Linda Nicholson, Gender andHistory: The Limits of Social Theory in the Age of the Family (Columbia UniversityPress, New York, 1986).

24. Eric Hobsbawm, The Forward March of Labour Halted (New Left Books, London,1981), pp. 1–99, 167–82; Andre Gorsz, Farewell to the Working Class (Pluto, London,1982); Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (Verso,London, 1985); Robin Blackburn (ed.) After the Fall. The Failure of Communism and theFuture of Socialism (Verso, London, 1991). For critiques of the Thompsonian tradition,see Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1983), and Lenard R. Berlanstein, Rethinking Labour History (University of IllinoisPress, Champaign-Urbana, 1993).

25. Barrett, Women’s Oppression Today, p. v. See also Judith Bennett, ‘Feminism andHistory’, Gender & History, 1 (1989), pp. 250–72.

26. For some of the leading feminist poststructuralists, see: Jane Flax, ThinkingFragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary West(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1990); Denise Riley, “Am I That Name?”Feminism and the Category of Women in History (University of Minnesota Press,Minneapolis, 1988); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion ofIdentity (Routledge, New York, 1990); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women:The Reinvention of Nature (Routledge, New York, 1991); and Chris Weedon, Feministand Poststructuralist Theory (Oxford, Blackwell Publishers, 1987).

27. See Joan Scott, The Glassworkers of Carmaux (Harvard University Press,Cambridge, 1974); and Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family.

28. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class, pp. 90–178. 29. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, pp. 53–67. 30. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, pp. 28–50. 31. Mariann Valverde, ‘Poststructuralist Gender Historians: Are We Those Names?’,

Labour/Le Travail, 25 (1990), pp. 227–36; Catherine Hall, ‘Politics, Post-structuralism,and Feminist History’, Gender & History, 3 (1991), pp. 204–10; Leora Auslander,‘Feminist Theory and Social History: Explorations in the Politics of Identity’, RadicalHistory Review, 54 (1992), pp. 158–76; Kathleen Canning, ‘Feminist History after theLinguistic Turn: Historicizing Discourse and Experience’, Signs, 19 (1994), pp. 368–404. For forcefully argued feminist-materialist critiques of Scott’s work, see Bennett,



‘Feminism and History’; Claudia Koonz, ‘Postscripts’, Women’s Review of Books, 6(January 1989), pp. 19–20; and Laura Lee Downs, ‘If “Woman” is just an empty category,then why am I afraid to walk alone at night? Identity Politics Meets the PostmodernSubject’, together with Scott’s reply and Downs’s rebuttal, Contemporary Studies inSociety and History, 35 (1993), pp. 414–51.

32. Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of theEnglish Middle Class, 1750–1850 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1987).

33. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, p. 13; Hall, White, Male, and Middle Class,p. 13.

34. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 13–15; for my own assessment, seeTheodore Koditschek, ‘The Triumph of Domesticity and the Making of Middle-ClassCulture’, Contemporary Sociology, 18 (1989), pp. 178–82.

35. Other books published on this and related subjects during this period which arenot explicitly considered in this essay, partly for reasons of space, include: Bridget Hill,Women, Work, and Sexual Politics in Eighteenth Century England (BlackwellPublishers, Oxford, 1989); Judy Lown, Women and Industrialization: Gender at Workin Nineteenth Century England (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1990);Judith Bennett, Women in the Medieval English Countryside. Gender and Household inBrigstock before the Plague (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1987); and JudithWalkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-VictorianLondon (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1992).

36. Deborah Valenze, The First Industrial Woman (Oxford University Press, NewYork, 1995); Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of theBritish Working Class (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1995); Sonya O. Rose,Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England (University ofCalifornia Press, Berkeley, 1992); and Ellen Ross, Love and Toil. Motherhood in OutcastLondon, 1870–1918 (Oxford University Press, New York, 1993).

37. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, p. 88. 38. On the problems and the advantages of the postmodernist turn for feminist

scholars, see Nancy Fraser and Linda Nicholson, ‘Social Criticism without Philosophy:An Encounter between Feminism and Postmodernism’, in Feminism/Postmodernism,ed. Linda Nicholson (Routledge, New York, 1990), and Linda Nicholson, ‘InterpretingGender’, Signs, 20 (1994), pp. 79–105.

39. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, p. 7. 40. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 3–12. 41. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 13–28. See also E. P. Thompson, ‘The

Moral Economy of the Crowd’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 77–136, and FriederichEngels, The Condition of the Working Class in England (Panther, London, 1962), pp. 37–41.

42. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 29–47. 43. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 48–67. 44. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 68–84; Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufact-

ures. Industry, Innovation, and Work in Britain, 1700–1820 (Fontana, London, 1985);and Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Work, Mechanization and the Early Phase ofIndustrialization in England’, in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987).

45. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 85–127; see also Lown, Women andIndustrialization.

46. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 128–54.



47. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 181–6. 48. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 1–9. 49. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 1. 50. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 264–71. 51. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 11–88, 141–57. 52. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 11–157. 53. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 158–219. 54. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 220–63. 55. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 141–74. Thompson’s analysis of the Queen

Caroline Affair (in Making of the English Working Class, pp. 708–10) has been criticallyexamined by Thomas Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reignof George IV’, Journal of Modern History, 54 (1984), pp. 417–66, and by Davidoff andHall, Family Fortunes, pp. 150–2; Clark’s reinterpretation builds on these works. Seealso Anna Clark, ‘Queen Caroline and the Sexual Politics of Popular Culture in London,1820’, Representations, 31 (1990), pp. 47–68.

56. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 19–261; Clark, Struggle for the Breeches,pp. 177–96.

57. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 220–72. 58. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 271. 59. On this mid-century stabilization, see Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern

English Society, 1780–1880 (Routledge, London, 1969), pp. 271–407; Trygve Tholfsen,Mid-Victorian Radicalism (Croom Helm, London, 1976); John Foster, Class Struggle andthe Industrial Revolution. Early English Capitalism in Three Towns (WeidenfieldNicholson, London, 1974); Brian Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom: Stability and Changein Modern Britain (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1982); Neville Kirk, The Growth ofWorking Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (University of Illinois Press,Urbana, 1985); Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society,Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990).

60. Royden Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (Routledge, London, 1965); Tholfsen, Mid-Victorian Radicalism, pp. 307–27.

61. David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus (Cambridge University Press,Cambridge, 1969), pp. 231–358; Peter Mathias, The First Industrial Revolution. AnEconomic History of Britain, 1700–1914 (Routledge, London, 1983); E. J. Hobsbawm,Labouring Men (Weidenfield and Nicholson, London, 1964), pp. 272–370.

62. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, pp. 7–17.63. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, pp. 50–101. For a succinct general discussion of mid-

Victorian state regulation, see Derek Fraser, The Evolution of the British Welfare State(Macmillan, London, 1973).

64. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, pp. 126–53. 65. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 3–26. 66. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 56–90. 67. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 27–55. 68. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 91–127. 69. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 91–194. 70. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 15–26. 71. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 195–224. 72. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work, and Family; Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem.73. Ellen Ross professes to have ‘written under the diffuse influence of several

schools of feminist literary theory with their stress on texts as the way we learn about



reality’, but she is unwilling to jettison some underlying notion of ‘mothers’ experi-ence’, which broadly conditioned how her subjects acted and what they believed. Herproject, therefore, ‘combines older with newer ideas about the discipline of history …and is simultaneously a traditional study in the political economy of the family … andan examination of the meanings of working-class culture’. Ross, Love and Toil, pp. 9–10. Valenze and Clark try to strike a similar compromise. For Valenze, historicalchange is simultaneously the consequence both of altered discourses and of alteredrealities. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 8–9, 128–9. According to Clark, ‘it isimportant to study both the words and the organizing practices of working-classmovements. By combining the study of people’s experience with the analysis of radicalrhetoric, this book goes beyond the sterile debate about whether it is economics orlanguage that determines class consciousness.’ Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 4.Even Rose, who identified herself most explicitly with Scott’s ‘cultural or symbolic ap-proach to gender [which] … examines how gender difference was represented in langu-age, ritual, and other social practices’, shares some of the fears articulated by Scott’scritics ‘that symbolic analysis of texts in particular wallow[s] in relativism, and ignore[s]the material realities that affect people’s lives’. Her book, then, seeks to ‘unite social andcultural approaches in the study of gender and economic relations’. Rose, LimitedLivelihoods, pp. 7–17.

74. Koditschek, ‘Marxism and Historiography’, pp. 120–1. 75. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, especially pp. 1–14 and 53–163,

makes a cogent case for the significance of gender in destabilizing the entrenched classparadigm of labor history.

76. For the multivalence and potential ambiguity in the definition of gender, seeNicholson, ‘Interpreting Gender’, pp. 79–105.

77. The most important recent contributions to feminist theory exemplify a morepragmatic approach to the problem of definition, attempting to go beyond the steriledebates between poststructuralism and foundationalism of the 1980s. See, for example:Nancy Fraser, Unruly Practices: Power, Discourse, and Gender in Contemporary SocialTheory (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1989); Nancy Fraser, JusticeInterruptus: Critical Reflections on the ‘Post-Socialist’ Condition (Routledge, New York,1997); Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1993); and Linda Nicholson, TheoreticalStrategies: Modernism, Postmodernism, and Feminism (forthcoming).

78. Scott herself acknowledges this problem in Gender and the Politics of History, p. 30.

79. For an early debate among feminist historians over the value of the term‘patriarchy’, see the exchange among Sheila Rowbotham, Sally Alexander, and BarbaraTaylor in People’s History and Socialist Theory, ed. Samuel, pp. 364–73.

80. Walby, Patriarchy at Work, p. 2. 81. Bennett, ‘Feminism and History’, pp. 259–67. Sylvia Walby’s Patriarchy at Work

provides a sophisticated theoretical treatment of capitalist patriarchy, including a surveyof the literature. Studies of the plantation slave society of the US South have also em-ployed the term; see Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese,Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Univer-sity of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, 1988); and LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as aCrisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860–1890 (University of Georgia Press, Athens,1995).



82. Only Clark’s book lists ‘patriarchy’ and ‘patriarchal authority’ in the index. Theterm ‘paternalism’ appears in the books of Valenze and Rose, as do ‘capitalism’ and‘industrialization’.

83. Bennett, ‘Feminism and History’, p. 259. 84. Thompson, Making of the English Working Class, pp. 9–10. For a discussion of

how far Thompson’s approach may legitimately be called ‘culturalist’ and how far it remains securely within the Marxist, materialist tradition, see E. P. Thompson, ThePoverty of Theory and Other Essays (Monthly Review Press, New York, 1978), togetherwith the critiques in Perry Anderson, Arguments within English Marxism (Verso,London, 1980), and Richard Johnson, ‘Thompson, Genovese, and Socialist-HumanistHistory’, History Workshop Journal, 6 (1978), pp. 79–100, as well as the exchangebetween Thompson and Raphael Samuel, Stuart Hall, and Richard Johnson in People’sHistory and Socialist Theory, pp. 379–408. See also Kaye and McClelland (eds) E. P. Thompson.

85. Valenze, First Industrial Woman, pp. 128–9. 86. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, p. 218. 87. See Nancy Fraser, ‘Pragmatism, Feminism, and the Linguistic Turn’, in Feminist

Contentions: A Philosophical Exchange, ed. Selya Benhabib, Judith Butler, DrucillaCornell, and Nancy Fraser (Routledge, London, 1994), pp. 157–72.

88. Dorothy Thompson, The Chartists (Random House, New York, 1984), empha-sizes this dimension.

89. Wally Seccombe, Weathering the Storm: Working-Class Families from theIndustrial Revolution to the Fertility Decline (Verso, London, 1993); Koditschek, ClassFormation and Urban Industrial Society, pp. 517–84; Richard Soloway, Birth Controland the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (University of North CarolinaPress, Chapel Hill, 1982); Neil J. Smelser, Social Paralysis and Social Change: BritishWorking-Class Education in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press,Berkeley, 1991); Anthony Wohl, Endangered Lives: Public Health in Victorian Britain(Dent, London, 1983); John Burnett, A Social History of Housing, 1814–1985 (David andCharles, London, 1978); and Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England. RationalRecreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (Routledge, London, 1978).

90. Rose, Limited Livelihoods, pp. 102–53. 91. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (Harper,

New York, 1977), pp. 123–218; Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost: England beforethe Industrial Revolution (Scribners, New York, 1984), pp. 1–80; Tilly and Scott,Women, Work and Family, pp. 10–60; David Levine, Reproducing Families (CambridgeUniversity Press, Cambridge, 1987); Wally Seccombe, A Millennium of Family Change:Feudalism to Capitalism in Northwestern Europe (Verso, London, 1992).

92. Laslett, World We Have Lost, pp. 22–52; John Locke, Two Treatises on Govern-ment (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1960); Robert Filmer, Patriarcha andOther Writings (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1991); Gordon J. Schochet,Patriarchalism in Political Thought (Basic, New York, 1975).

93. Valenze, First Industrial Woman; Clark, Struggle for the Breeches. 94. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 179–271. 95. See Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class, and Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes. 96. Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Rose, Limited Livelihoods; Ross, Love and Toil. 97. Rose, Limited Livelihoods; Ross, Love and Toil; Seccombe, Weathering the Storm,

pp. 1–80. 98. Seccombe, Weathering the Storm, pp. 81–245.



"The Gendering of the British Working Class,"

Documents

Transcript of "The Gendering of the British Working Class,"