Gender Domesticity And Sexual Politics Revision Notes

‘Gender, Domesticity and Sexual Politics’ Revision

Jane Howarth, Gender, domesticity and sexual politics, ed. H.G.C. Matthew The Nineteenth Century.

• Political, economic, religious factors led to a rise in debates about gender and sexuality.

  • The French Revolution and Industrialisation have their effects.

    • French Revolution, with its view to eradicating decadent aristocracies ‘made the upper classes tremble’¹: ‘Every man felt the necessity for putting his house in order’.²

    • Link made between citizenship, respectability and sexual virtue e.g. artisans of Francis Place’s circle.

    • “Rights of Man”, 1791, denied women equal citizenship.

      • Women are obviously angry at this. But in opposition to feminism was Hannah More

        • In her Coelebs in Search of Wife (1808), Hannah More argued women were dependent upon men and complementary in their feminine duties and virtues.

• Origins of Victorian domestic ideology

  • Patriarchal family values are legally enshrined.

    • A wife could own no property, unless she had the protection of a marriage settlement.

    • Lord Hardwicke Act, 1754 an attempt at making stricter the procedure of getting marriage (parental consent – a necessity).

    • The husband has absolute right to custody of children.

  • But there is a greater sensitivity to women’s domestic influence emerging.

    • The Clapham Sect advocate something like this from 1800s onwards.

  • Malthusianism

    • Encouraged self-restraint in marital sex (even saying women don’t enjoy it.)

    • Reform of the Poor Laws, to discourage reproduction among the growing poor.

      • Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 abolished right to outdoor relief and made wives of destitute men follow them into the workhouse [to emphasis it was the husband’s responsibility, not the state’s to look after the wife].

  • Marriage Act (1836)

    • Made easier for the poor to legalise their unions: Nonconformist ministers could now perform the marriage ceremony.

  • Such policies were successful in promoting a norm of married respectability in the lower orders.

    • By 1890s, illegitimacy rates fell from 20% to 4% in England + Wales [though did this lead to many cases of infanticide].

• Separate spheres and domesticity

  • Widely diffused but impact not easily traced.

  • Appears a universal tenet in all the churches in the UK.

    • Church of Ireland sermon:

      • ‘The great and weighty business of life devolves on men, but important business belongs to women…Society does best when each sex performs the duties for which it is especially ordained’, Dublin 1856, Church of Ireland sermon.

    • Roman Catholic nuns

    • Nonconformists like Birmingham’s John Angell James

    • But, Quakers and Unitarians do retain more sexually egalitarian values.

  • It’s in magazines:

    • Charles Dickens, Household Words

    • Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Monthly Packet

  • ‘Separate Spheres’ is not just an aristocratic ideal.

    • Middle class couples, who had built up businesses together would move to a house away from the workplace and the ability to support wife and family marked a gain in status.

  • Fashion

    • Men wore sober, functional uniform of dark trousers and jacket, while women wore clothes that accentuated their disabilities [tight-lacing, petticoats, skirts and blouses in the 1890s]

  • Though don’t underestimate the woman’s domestic role she played an enormous role the local community, keeping up appearances, charitable and philanthropic work.

    • See the ‘factory paternalism’ in the south Wales ironmasters’ wives Lady Charlotte Guest and Rose Mary Crawshay.

• Male-breadwinner family and women’s employment

• The domestic ideal percolates into the working classes too.

  • Previously, in lower orders, there was no division of labour (they couldn’t afford to).

  • But the shift from agriculture to factory industry led to a separation of labour

    • Though don’t overstate Wives’ contribution to domestic budgets show sig increase from 1815 – 1835.

• Men were portrayed as breadwinners and actively protected this role from women.

  • Factory Acts (1830s) restrict women’s working hours.

• But in many workforces in the industrial sphere, women were very active.

  • There was also a five-fold increase by the end of the century in secular professional work.

• Were women trespassing across customary gender boundaries?

• Gender and politics

• From 1815 – 1820, yes indeed.

  • June 1819, a Blackburn meeting of the town’s Female Reform Society saw the presentation of an ‘ornate cap of liberty’.

  • Esp after:

    • Peterloo Massacre

      • At least 100/400 wounded were women.

    • Caroline Affair

      • 17,600 ‘married women’ of London signed support addresses.

  • Women took part in food riot regularly.

  • Middle-class women took part in the British Anti-Slavery Society, formed in 1823.

    • There were over 400,000 female signatures to petitions for the abolition of slavery in 1833.

    • Quaker, Elizabeth Heyrick’s Immediate, not Gradual Abolition (1824) was published anonymously but sold over 200,000 copies.

• Was women’s encroachment significant?

• FUCK YOU.

• Family Law

• The law enforces notions of male chivalry coming to the relief of women’s hardships and grievances.

• There is legal reform, but it brings the law up to date with modern sensibilities without purging its patriarchal basis.

  • Married Women’s Property Acts (1870) (1882) gave wives recognition for their ‘separate property’ in capital, possessions, and earnings.

  • 1873 – Court of Chancery allowed women custody of children up the age of 16, even if she had committed adultery.

  • Divorce until 1857, divorce was only for the rich, and there was a double standard men had to show women were adulterous once to grant a divorce, while women had to show men were adulterous along with another offence.

  • By the 1870s Frances Power Cobbe got the courts to enforce adequate maintenance orders on behalf of separated wives.

Leonore Davidoff & Cathernie Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and women of the English middle class 1780 – 1850 (Routledge, 1997).

• Gender and class have always operated together. Consciousness of class takes a gendered form.

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