Abstract
The second half of the nineteenth century has been portrayed as a time when the working classes, now benefiting from a rise in real wages, became assimilated and reconciled to the society of industrial capitalism. Gareth Stedman Jones has argued that working-class culture became increasingly conservative and ‘respectable’. The majority of working-class marriages were now legal unions; and, as traditions of artisan radicalism began to decline, so too did the heavy drinking which had characterised earlier plebeian life. Such pastimes as cockfighting and bearbaiting began to die out as working-class leisure interests centred upon sports like football, and upon institutions such as the music hall. A new consumerism began to seepinto the lives of the working-class, as they began to enjoy fish and chips, seaside excursions and cheap, imported foodstuffs from the colonies. According to Stedman Jones, the focus of working-class culture switched from the workplace to the home, a process which was facilitated by the advent of shorter working days (typically nine-hour days, and a half day’s holiday on Saturday).1
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Notes
Gareth Stedman Jones, ‘Working-Class Culture and Working-Class Politics in London, 1870–1900: Notes on the Remaking of a Working Class’, in Gareth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History 1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 179–238.
David Levine, ‘Industrialization and the Proletarian Family in England’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), p. 181.
Nancy Tomes, ‘“A’Torrent of Abuse”: Crimes of Violence Between Working-Class Men and Women in London, 1840–1875’, Journal of Social History, 11 (1978), pp. 328–45.
Ann Oakley, Housewife (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), p. 43.
John Burnett (ed.), Useful Toil: Autobiographies of Working People from the 1820s to the 1920s (London: Allen Lane, 1976), p. 75.
Pamela Horn, Victorian Countrywomen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 131.
Linda Mahood, The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 70–1.
Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood In Outcast London, 1870–1918 (Oxford: OUP, 1993), p. 67;
David R. Green and Alan G. Parton, ‘Slums and Slum Life: Victorian England: London and Birmingham at Mid-Century’, in Martin Gaskell (ed.), Slums (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), p. 28;
Rita M. Rhodes, Women and the Family in Post-Famine Ireland: Status and Opportunity in a Patriarchal Society (London: Garland, 1992), p. 272.
Jose Harris, Private Lives, Public Spirit: Britain 1870–1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993), p. 69;
Maria Luddy (ed.), Women in Ireland 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 22–5; 27–30.
Joanna Bourke, Husbandry to Housewifery: Women, Economic Change and Housework in Ireland, 1890–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 273.
Iris Minor, ‘Working-Class Women and Matrimonial Law Reform, 18901914’, in D. E. Martin and D. Rubinstein (eds), Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (London: Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 113–14.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 84–6.
Cited in Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Maternity: Letters from Working Women Collected by the Women’s Co-operative Guild (London: Virago, 1978, first published 1915), p. 89.
Harold Benenson, ‘The “Family Wage” and Working Women’s Consciousness in Britain, 1880–1914’, Politics and Society, 19 (1991), p. 79.
Quoted in Margaret Llewelyn Davies (ed.), Life as We Have Known It By Cooperative Working Women (London and New York: W. W. Norton, 1975, first published 1931), p. 38.
For further discussion, see Margot Finn, ‘Working-Class Women and the Context for Consumer Control in Victorian Country Courts’, Past and Present, 161 (1998), pp. 116–54.
Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), p. 34; Ross, Love and Toil pp. 81–4.
Ross, Love and Toil pp. 37–9; Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman’s Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890–1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), p. 29.
Richard Whipp, ‘Kinship, Labour and Enterprise in the Staffordshire Pottery Industry, 1890–1920’, in Pat Hudson and W. R. Lee (eds), Women’s Work and the Family Economy in Historical Perspective (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), p. 196. See also the case of Dundee jute workers:
Michael Savage, The Dynamics of Working-Class Politics: The Labour Movement in Preston, 1880–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 54–5.
Pat Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop Journal, 6 (1978), pp. 24–5.
Quoted in Davies, Maternity, p. 23. See also Laura Oren, ‘The Welfare of Women in Laboring Families in England, 1860–1950’, in Mary S. Hartman and Lois Banner (eds), Clio’s Consciousness Raised: New Perspectives on the History of Women (London: Harper and Row, 1974), pp. 226–44.
Lynn Jamieson, ‘Limited Resources and Limiting Conventions. Working- Class Mothers and Daughters in Urban Scotland, c. 1890–1925’, in Jane Lewis (ed.), Labour and Love: Women’s Experience of Home and Family, 1950–1940 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 49–69.
Green and Parton, ‘Slums and Slum Life’, pp. 51–2; Alan O’Day, ‘Varieties of Anti-Irish Behaviour in Britain, 1846–1922’, in Panikos Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), pp. 26–43.
Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870–1914 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), pp. 29–38.
Cited in Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family p. 135. See also the sad case of Mrs O cited in Maud Pember Reeves, Round About a Pound a Week (London: Virago, 1979, first published 1913), pp. 161–4.
Rickie Burman, ’“She Looketh Well to the Ways of Her Household”: The Changing Role of Jewish Women in Religious Life, c. 1880–1930’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1930 (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 234–59.
P. E. Malcolmson, ‘Laundresses and the Laundry Trade in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 24 (1981), p. 460; Benenson, ‘The Family Wage’, p. 78.
Eleanor Gordon, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 164–5.
Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: Lyceum, 1989), section II, especially p. 131.
Peter Bailey, ‘Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up? Towards a Role Analysis of Mid-Victorian Working-Class Respectability’, Journal of Social History 12 (1979), pp. 36–53; Davin, Growing Up Poor p. 70.
An interesting discussion of marital conflict may be found in Joanna Bourke, ‘Housewifery in Working-Class England 1860–1914’, Past and Present, 43 (1994), pp. 188–96.
Shani D’Cruze, Crimes of Outrage: Sex, Violence and Victorian Working Women (London: UCL, 1998), p. 68.
Iris Minor, ‘Working-Class Women and Matrimonial Law Reform, 1890–1914’, in D. E. Martin and D. Rubinstein (eds), Ideology and the Labour Movement: Essays Presented to John Saville (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 106; Tomes, ‘A Torrent of Abuse’, p. 340.
Gail Savage, ’“The Wilful Communication of a Loathsome Disease”: Marital Conflict and Venereal Disease in Victorian England’, Victorian Studies, 34 (1990), pp. 44–5;
Carol Dyhouse, Feminism and the Family in England 18801939 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), p. 152.
Eve Hostettler, ’“Making Do”: Domestic Life Among East Anglian Labourers, 1890–1910’, in Leonore Davidoff and Belinda Westover (eds), Our Work, Our Lives, Our Worlds: Women’s History and Women’s Work (Basingstoke: Macmillan–now Palgrave, 1986), pp. 37–8.
Angus McLaren, Birth Control in Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1978), p. 219.
J. A. Banks, Prosperity and Parenthood: A Study of Family Planning among the Victorian Middle Classes (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954).
For an overview of these approaches, see R. I. Woods, ‘Approaches to the Fertility Transition in Victorian England’, Population Studies, 41, (1987), pp. 283–311.
See, for example, Karl Ittman, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1995).
Similar conclusions have been drawn for the period 1900–39. Diana Gittins, for example, in Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure, 1900–1939 (London: Hutchinson, 1982) notes that women’s relationship to the socio-economic system was a critical factor in birth control decisions.
Ann Oakley, ‘Wisewoman and Medicine Man: Changes in the Management of Childbirth’, in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), pp. 42–4.
The classic account of this movement is Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, 5 (1978), pp. 9–65.
Lara V. Marks, Model Mothers: Jewish Mothers and Maternity Provision in East London, 1870–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994).
Linda Mahood, ‘Family Ties: Lady Child-Savers and Girls of the Street 1850–1925’, in Esther Breitenbach and Eleanor Gordon (eds), Out of Bounds: Women in Scottish Society 1800–1945 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992), p. 55.
Carol Dyhouse, ‘Working-Class Mothers and Infant Mortality in England, 1895–1914’, (1979) reprinted in C. Webster (ed.), Biology, Medicine and Society 1840–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 83–4, 92–3.
Jane Lewis, The Politics of Motherhood. Child and Maternal Welfare in England 1900–1939 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), ch. 2.
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© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (2001). Families, Relationships and Home Life. In: British Women in the Nineteenth Century. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_10
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