Alice Clark’s Critique of Capitalism

Stretton, Tim

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_3

Tim Stretton³

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Abstract

Alice Clark’s The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (1919) continues to influence economic, gender, labor, cultural, and social historians a century after its publication. Decades of intensive research (much of it inspired by Clark) have led scholars to question her methodology, chronology, assumptions, and conclusions, yet the boldness of her thesis still shines bright. This essay investigates why she chose to write her book, despite having no formal training or university qualifications, and why she focused on the seventeenth century. It finds the answers in her curious biography as a Quaker industrialist active in the suffrage movement and suggests that, despite its faults, her critique of gender and capitalism continues to warrant attention.

The author would like to thank Sandra Holton, Amy Erickson, Tim Crumplin, Eric Franklin, Hilda Smith, Melinda Zook, and the helpful staff at the Friends House Library and the London School of Economics. He would also like to thank the Alfred Gillett Trust and the Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek for permission to use their collections.

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Notes

1.
Alfred Gillett Trust, Street, Somerset (hereafter AGT) MIL/91/1 diary entry 20 February 1893; Sandra Stanley Holton, Quaker Women: Personal Life, Memory and Radicalism in the Lives of Women Friends, 1780–1930 (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 165, 196, 199.
2.
Mark Palmer, Clarks: Made to Last: The Story of Britain’s Best-Known Shoe Firm (London: Profile Books, 2013), 123–128.
3.
Times Literary Supplement, 4 December 1919; Manchester Guardian, 12 January 1920; The Common Cause, 19 December 1919, 473–474.
4.
The Friend, new series, 60, 30 January 1920, 63–64.
5.
Gerry Black, Frank’s Way: Frank Cass and Fifty Years of Publishing (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2008).
6.
Alice Clare Carter, review of Working Life, Economic History Review, new series, 22:1 (1969), 159.
7.
Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Miranda Chaytor and Jane Lewis (London and New York: Routledge, 1984) [hereafter Working Life], Introduction, xxi–xxxviii, xli–xlii.
8.
Peter Earle, “The Female Labour Market in London in the Late Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries,” Economic History Review, 42:3 (1989), 328–353; Amanda Vickery, “From Golden Age To Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,” Historical Journal, 36 (1993), 383–414; Judith Bennett, Ale, Beer and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
9.
For counter views, and defenses of Clark, see Amy Louise Erickson’s introduction to Working Life of Women (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), vii–xlii; Bridget Hill, “Women’s History: A Study in Change, Continuity or Standing Still?” Women’s History Review, 2:1 (1993), 5–22.
10.
Carter, review of Working Life, 159.
11.
See, for example, Vickery, “Separate Spheres,” 401–414.
12.
Earle, “Female Labour Market,” 42–53; Hilda L. Smith, “The Legacy of Alice Clark,” Early Modern Women, 10:1 (2015), 94–104.
13.
Judith Bennett, “Theoretical Issues: Confronting Continuity,” Journal of Women’s History, 9:3 (1997), 73–94.
14.
Bennett , “Confronting Continuity,” 84; Sara Horrell and Jane Humphries, “Women’s Labour Force Participation and the Transition to the Male-Breadwinner Family, 1790–1865,” Economic History Review, 48:1 (1995), 89–117.
15.
AGT HC/7/38 Alice Clark to Hilda Clark, 15 May 1915, verso.
16.
Laura Gowing, “Girls on Forms: Apprenticing Young Women in Seventeenth-Century London,” Journal of British Studies, 55 (2016), 447–473, 450 n. 9, 452; Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, & the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 214–231, 261–274.
17.
Holton, Quaker Women, 164–180, 200–221.
18.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 16 July 1889; Sandra Holton and Margaret Allen, “Offices and Services: Women’s Pursuit of Sexual Equality Within the Society of Friends, 1873–1907,” Quaker Studies, 2:1 (1997), 1–29, 15.
19.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 1 May 1890.
20.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 9 December 1895 (written after reading “Signals From Our Watchtower,” Woman’s Signal, 4:101 [5 December 1895], 360–362).
21.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 27 April 1900.
22.
Sandra Stanley Holton, “To Live ‘Through One’s Own Powers’: British Medicine, Tuberculosis and ‘Invalidism’ in the Life of Alice Clark (1874–1934),” Journal of Women’s History, 11:1 (1999), 75–96.
23.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entries 22 February–7 July 1890.
24.
Sandra Stanley Holton, “From Anti-Slavery to Suffrage Militancy: The Bright Circle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the British Women’s Movement,” in Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan, eds., Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1994), 213–233, 230 n. 7; Sandra Stanley Holton, “‘To Educate Women into Rebellion’: Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Creation of a Transatlantic Network of Radical Suffragists,” American Historical Review, 99:4 (1994), 1112–1136; AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 15 July 1887; Sandra Stanley Holton, “Segregation, Racism and White Women Reformer: A Transnational Analysis, 1840–1912,” Women’s History Review, 10 (2001), 5–25; Holton, Quaker Women, 201.
25.
AGT MIL/91/1 pages inserted at end of 1895 diary.
26.
Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), 161–182; AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 24 October 1893.
27.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 19 July 1895.
28.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 21 July 1895.
29.
Holton, Quaker Women, 202.
30.
Bristol Mercury and Daily Post, 17 February 1900, reporting on 13 February meeting.
31.
Royal Cornwall Gazette, 7 March 1907, 3; Tribune, 1 March 1907; AGT MIL/90/3 Letter from Slack, Monro & Atkinson to the Tax Office, 18 June 1907; The Times, 20 October 1908, 8.
32.
AGT MIL/87/1/AC1 (f) no. 3 Alice Clark to Helen Priestman Bright Clark, 24 November 1911; AGT HC/7/38 Alice Clark to Priestman aunts, 27 and 30 July 1914.
33.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 22 August 1897; Holton, “To Live”; AGT BC-200/06, [M. C. Gillett], Alice Clark of C. and J. Clark Ltd. (c.1934).
34.
Holton, Quaker Women, 210–212; AGT BC-837/d Record of A.C.’s Activities in the Factory, 1909–1922, 26 May 1934.
35.
[Gillett], Alice Clark, 6–7; Alice Clark, “The Way to Baghdad,” Friends’ Quarterly Examiner 47 (1913) 482–492.
36.
LSE GB/106/2/NWS/A1/15 Minutes of Executive Meeting 31 July; and see 18 September, 2 and 15 October, 3 November (Special Executive Meeting), 20 November, 4 and 16 December, 1913.
37.
Schleswig-Holsteinische Landesbibliothek, Germany (hereafter S-HL) Cb54.56.190 (11) Ferdinand Tönnies, to Alice Clark, 9 June 1913.
38.
AGT MIL/87/1 AC/1f no. 6 Alice Clark to Helen Priestman Bright Clark, 26 November 1913.
39.
On the LSE culture that made such a thing possible see Berg, “First Women Economic Historians,” 319; Gianna Pomata, “Rejoinder to Pygmalion: The Origins of Women’s History at the London School of Economics,” Storia della Storiografia, 46:4 (2004), 79–104; Maxine Berg, A Woman in History: Eileen Power 1889–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 67–68.
40.
LSE 7MGF/A/3/04 Secretary to Charlotte Shaw, 17 December 1913.
41.
LSE 7MGC/A/3/04 Charlotte Shaw to secretary, 22 July 1015; LSE Calendar 1914–15, 275.
42.
LSE 7MGC/A/3/04 Report 20 November 1915, fol. 2.
43.
AGT HC/7/38 Lilian Knowles to Alice Clark, 1 December [1919]; Working Life, viii; M. Dorothy George, London Life in the Eighteenth Century (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1925), vi.
44.
AGT HC/7/38 Letter from Lilian Knowles to Alice Clark, 1 December [1919].
45.
S-HL Cb54.56.190 (11) Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 9 June 1913 (and see 15 September).
46.
[Gillett], Alice Clark, 9–10.
47.
LSE 7MGF/A/3/04 Secretary to Charlotte Shaw, 22 October 1914; Charlotte Shaw to secretary, 23 October 1914.
48.
Friends House Library, Euston, London (hereafter FHL) YM/MfS/FEWVRC/MISSIONS/1/3/2/1 ‘Bessie’ to Hilda Clark, 4 May 1915; The Friend, new series 55, 22 October 1915, 828; 29 October 1915, 44.
49.
FHL TEMP MSS 301/COR/1 Alice to Hilda Clark, November 1915; AGT MIL/2 Letter Copy Book 1915–16, fols. 40–50.
50.
LSE 7MGC/A/3/04 Charlotte Shaw to the Secretary, 22 July 1915.
51.
LSE 7MGC/A/3/04 Secretary to Charlotte Shaw, 15 December 1915.
52.
AGT MIL/2 Letter Copy Book 1915–1916, fol. 19 letter Alice Clark to Hilda Clark; Y.M. The British Empire YMCA Weekly, 1:36, 17 September 1915, 847–848. I would like to thank Vicky Clubb, Special Collections’ Searchroom Supervisor at the Cadbury Research Library in Birmingham, for her generosity in locating this article.
53.
AGT HC/7/38 Alice Clark to Hilda Clark, 18 December 1914.
54.
LSE 7MGC/A/3/04 Alice Clark’s Report, 20 November 1915; Secretary to Charlotte Shaw, 24 November 1915; and see Smuts to M. C. Gillett in W. K. Hancock and Jean Van Der Poel, eds., Selections from the Smuts Papers, 7 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966–73), vol. 3, 335.
55.
AGT MIL/2 Letter Copy Book 1916–23, fols 11, 15, Alice Clark to Hilda, 21 and 25 May 1916.
56.
AGT 14 MIL/87/1 AC1f nos. 16e–21 (14 October–19 December 1916).
57.
AGT HC/7/25 Lilian Knowles to Alice Clark, 10 September 1916.
58.
AGT HC/7/25 Lilian Knowles to Alice Clark, 8 June 1917.
59.
AGT HC/7/38 Lilian Knowles to Alice Clark, 22 November [1919].
60.
AGT HC/7/25 Charlotte Shaw to Alice Clark, 2 December 1919; Working Life, viii.
61.
Hancock and Der Poel, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, 37.
62.
Sandra Stanley Holton, entry for “Alice Clark” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
63.
Her changing spiritual outlook may also have influenced her decision; Sandra Holton, “Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul: Christian Science in the Life of Alice Clark,” Australian Feminist Studies, 13 (1998), 281–293, 289.
64.
Cail Malmgreen, “Anne Knight and the Radical Subculture,” Quaker History, 71:2 (1982), 100–113; The Friend, new series, 46 (Dec. 1906), 338.
65.
The Friend, new series, 50, 1910, 210, 225–226; 242–243; 330; 362; 393; 410–411; 443–444; 480; 712; 743–744; 760–761; 777–778; 794; 850; 883; new series, 51, 1911, 80; 111–112; 128; 144–146; 161; 175–176; 177; 194; 226; 258–259; 276; 293; 311; 312; 379.
66.
The Friend, new series, 50, 1 July 1910, 443–4.
67.
The Friend, new series, 50, 10 June 1910, 393.
68.
The Friend, new series, 50, 25 November 1910, 794; new series, 52, 15 November 1912, 747; Elizabeth Crawford, The Women’s Suffrage Movement: A Reference Guide 1866–1928 (London: UCL Press, 1999), 116, 566; AGT MIL/8/8 AC9(k) HPB Clark to Alice Clark [1 June 1914].
69.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry for 22 August 1894.
70.
FHL LIB/1988/5 8 December 1912; Journal of the Friends Historical Society, 10 (1913), 32.
71.
Annual Meeting notes, Journal of Friends Historical Society, 12 (1, 2, and 3), 1915.
72.
Norman Penney, ed., The Household Account Book of Sarah Fell of Swarthmoor Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), xxviii–xxxii.
73.
FHL LIB/1988/5 January 1908, 1–3 April 1912, 9 June 1914. Clark may also have crossed paths with Mabel Brailsford who was also working on early Quaker women; 9 January, 12 February, 10–13 November 1913; 15 April–17 May 1915.
74.
The Friend, new series, 50, 25 November 1910, 794; new series, 52, 15 November 1912, 747; Crawford, Women’s Suffrage Movement, 116, 566; AGT MIL/8/8 AC9(k) HPB Clark to Alice Clark [1 June 1914].
75.
The Friend, new series, 53, 7 November 1913, 736–737.
76.
AGT MIL/2 Letter Copy Book 1915–16, fol. 24 Alice Clark to Hilda Clark, 29 October 1915. Mary Fisher’s story features in Mabel Brailsford’s Quaker Women, 1650–1690 (London: Duckworth and Co, 1915).
77.
Holton, Suffrage Days, 166–168.
78.
Working Life, 17, 32–33, 44–46, 51–52, 63, 67, 114, 125, 153–154, 168, 190, 198–199, 240, 252, 255, 280.
79.
Working Life, 44.
80.
Clark also felt that literary depictions of women confirmed this erosion of female independence; Working Life, 3, 28, 37–38, 158–159, 240, 254, 257, 304, 306; (in announcing the results of her final exams at school, her sister Margaret had informed her “thou hast come out top of all England in English - boys & girls”; AGT MIL/90/1 Exam results and cover letter from Margaret Gillett Clark).
81.
Holton, Feminism and Democracy, 76–83, 107, 111, 113; Holton, Suffrage Days, 163–166; LSE 7MGF/A/3/04 Alice Clark to Aneurin Williams, 7 January 1914.
82.
LSE Correspondence 2LSW/E/11, Box FL294; The Common Cause, 7:324 (25 June 1915), 161.
83.
Holton, “Feminism, History and Movements of the Soul,” 281–293; Holton, Suffrage Days, 233.
84.
Hancock and Van Der Poel, Smuts Papers, vol. 5, 33; Shula Marks, “White Masculinity: Jan Smuts, Race and the South African War,” Proceedings of the British Academy, 111 (2001), 199–233, 206–208.
85.
Working Life, viii; Holton, Quaker Women, 214. Clark and Schreiner knew each other, perhaps through Schreiner’s niece Lyndall who had visited the Clarks in Street, and corresponded; AGT MIL/90/1 Olive Schreiner to Alice Clark, 1912.
86.
Chaytor and Humphries, Introduction to Working Life, xvi–xx.
87.
Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of Social Research 1923–1950 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 8–9.
88.
LSE WALLAS/1/50 and 52, Kurt Gerlach to Graham Wallas, 13 October 1912 and 24 November 1913.
89.
S-HL Cb54.56.190 (8), Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 16 October 1912; Working Life, viii.
90.
AGT HC/7/38 Alice Clark to Helen Priestman Bright Clark, 9 August 1914.
91.
AGT HC/7/25 Tönnies to Alice Clark, Christmas 1912.
92.
S-HL, Cb54.56.190 (12) Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 29 September 1913.
93.
S-HL Cb54.56.190 (13), Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 15 September 1913.
94.
Hancock and Van Der Poel, Smuts Papers, vol. 4, 69–70.
95.
AGT MIL/91/1 diary entry 9 December 1895 (and see 12 September); see also Holton, “To Live,” 84–85, 95.
96.
Working Life, 240, 300, 302.
97.
Working Life, 197, 302.
98.
S-HL Cb54.56.190 (13), Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 15 September 1913.
99.
Working Life, 4, 5, 11, 12, 13, 69, 139, 159–160, 183, 242, 304, 305.
100.
[Gillett], Alice Clark, 6.
101.
The New Statesman, 21 February 1914, 2; LSE GB/106/2/NWS/C4/2 24; Working Life, 4.
102.
AGT HC/7/25 Lilian Knowles to Alice Clark, 10 September 1916.
103.
FHL TEMP MSS 301/COR/4/1 Hilda Clark to Alice Clark from Chalons, 4 December 1914.
104.
AGT HC/7/38 Alice Clark to Hilda Clark, 7 April 1915.
105.
FHL TEMP MSS 301/COR/3 Edith Pye to Alice Clark from Chalons, 1 November 1915.
106.
S-HL Cb54.56.190 (13), Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 15 September 1913.
107.
Working Life, 242.
108.
Working Life, 306.
109.
[Gillett], Alice Clark, 15–17; Holton, Suffrage Days, 235–236; Palmer, Clarks, 124–128.
110.
S-HL Cb54/56/190/(11) and (13), Alice Clark to Ferdinand Tönnies, 9 June and 15 September 1913; Working Life, 100.

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Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, Canada
Tim Stretton

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University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, OH, USA
Hilda L. Smith
Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
Melinda S. Zook

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Stretton, T. (2018). Alice Clark’s Critique of Capitalism. In: Smith, H., Zook, M. (eds) Generations of Women Historians. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_3

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77568-5_3
Published: 12 July 2018
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