Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England

'On the Town'

Rosemary Sweet, Penelope Lane

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780754607304
• eBook ISBN: 9781351872119
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern History
• Index: History

Despite the considerable volume of research into various aspects of the social and economic, cultural and political history of eighteenth-century British towns, remarkably little has focused upon, or even reflected upon the distinctive experience of women in the urban context. Much of what research there is has explored the experience of laboring or impoverished women, or women of the social elite; by contrast, the essays in this collection take up the study of the participation of middling women in urban life. This volume brings into sharper focus the relationship between changes consequent upon urban development and shifts in the pattern of gender relations in the 18th century. The contributors address such themes as the extent to which to what extent urban change accelerated a redefinition of gender relations; the connections between urban growth, changing definitions of citizenship, and the emergence of the male gendered political subject; the role of women in a literate, consumer and industrializing society; the place of women's networks in the economic, political and social life of the town and the distinctive role played by women in areas such as philanthropy and business; and how the development of urban society in turn inflected contemporary conceputalizations of gender.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Rosemary Sweet

As an area of historical research the eighteenth-century town has been attracting considerable attention: in the past two years, no less than three studies have been published in addition to the monumental Cambridge Urban History of Britain.¹ Urban history has become the focus of considerable attention, not least because it was within the urban framework that some of the most significant changes of society in the eighteenth century are commonly held to have taken place. Between 1700 and 1800 the proportion of the English population living in towns and cities (over 2,500) had increased from 18.7 per cent to 30.6 per cent; in per capita terms there was an increase from approximately 970,000 to 2,725,000 urban inhabitants. The number of towns is estimated to have increased from 68 to 188.² Such rapid population growth was both a response and a stimulus to economic expansion and diversification. Towns became the loci of new trends in consumption and leisure; the public sphere was largely the product of urban space, and the process of class formation occurred against the backdrop of urban society.³

However, the contribution of women to urban society and the urban construction of gender and gender roles is hardly mainstream in any of the recent publications. Even in The Cambridge Urban History, which represents an exhaustive overview of research in eighteenth-century urban history, discussion of women’s work and women’s experience is largely peripheral. The structure of the volume embodies the tendency in much urban history to award a higher priority to those aspects of urban history which were predominantly masculine, or at the very least to discuss the issues from a masculine perspective. Economic growth, urban politics and urban government, are represented as the product of largely masculine agency. Women, where they feature at all, appear as the purveyors of culture and sociability, the recipients of poor relief or the victims of sexual exploitation. Eighteenth-century associations between urban life and the definitively feminine vices of vanity, luxury and unruly sexuality have exercised a pervasive and insidious influence upon subsequent conceptualisations of the position of women in urban society. It is an overstatement, but not a complete distortion, to suggest that much of the literature on women in eighteenth-century towns has been conceived in terms of the polarities of, on the one hand, the sociable, extravagant girl about town, the stuff of which patriarchal moralists’ nightmares were made of, who found in the greater freedom and anonymity of urban life opportunities to engage in sexual liaisons or to run up enormous bills, and on the other, the Hogarthian gin soaked harridan, with breasts hanging out and baby spilling from her arms, embodying a life of sexual exploitation, immiseration and degradation.⁴

In the recent historiography of the eighteenth century there has been no shortage of studies informed by the history of gender, but historians of gender seem to be as reluctant to address the urban variable as the urban historians are to deploy gender as a category of historical analysis. There is a much greater willingness to examine class formation, which is generally presented as the defining feature of urbanised society. Most studies which analyse the emergence of class in the urban context do so with at best implicit recognition of its gendered aspects and the role of women in the process. Class formation as described in the context of Leeds, Bradford or Halifax, for example, is an almost wholly masculine experience.⁵ There are exceptions, however: the ground breaking study in this area was Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes, published in 1986. Although not framed as a specifically urban study, the volume’s emphasis on the formation of the middle class gave it a strong urban dimension. The period covered, from 1780-1850 included a considerable part of the ‘long’ eighteenth century with which this volume is concerned. However, the trajectory of the argument and much of the research was heavily weighted towards the latter end of the period. Their interest in the eighteenth century went only so far as it was necessary to trace back the processes by which the model of feminised, bourgeois domesticity, with which they identified middle class culture of the mid nineteenth century, had emerged. Just under ten years later, Margaret R. Hunt’s monograph examined similar questions starting at the other end of the eighteenth century: The Middling Sort. Commerce, Gender and the Family 1680-1780. Hunt’s analysis, like that of Davidoff and Hall, makes the family central to the construction of a middling identity and therefore enhances the visibility of women and allows them a more active and creative role. Her findings demonstrated the manifold disadvantages under which women operated in the eighteenth-century urban economy, but also uncovered far more extensive participation by women than reliance of the prescriptive and descriptive sources (largely generated by men) would imply. In general, the tendency of nineteenth-century historians to search the eighteenth century for the origins of class formation has encouraged an approach which has concentrated on the construction of class identities than gender identities in urban society. Women have generally been treated as passive objects in the process of urbanisation: manipulated, exploited and excluded, rather than being allowed the capacity for influence and active participation in urban economy and society.⁶

Although not directly concerned with specifically urban history, advances in our understanding of the legal position of women have considerable bearing upon the urban fortunes of early modern women. Susan Staves’s recent publications on married women’s property and women investors in chartered companies, have been very suggestive of the possibilities available for women to operate within a world of business and finance, which was nominally male and closed to them, whilst work by Amy Erikson has alerted historians to the opportunities which existed for early modern women to circumvent the restrictions of common law and exercise greater economic and legal autonomy than had previously been thought possible.⁷ Erikson’s study concluded in 1720, by which time, she suggests, some of the legal loopholes were already being closed off, as a falling age of marriage left women with fewer years of autonomy, and a decline in the relative value of marriage portions and the elevation of romantic love and surrender within the marriage undermined the position of women within marriage.⁸ Research by Margot Finn suggests that Erikson’s rather pessimistic prognostications were not necessarily justified. Finn argues that the difficulties inherent in a system which excluded so many of the adult population in a time of rapid economic expansion meant that the law of coverture was often ignored in practice. Married women were able to exploit the law of necessaries, which allowed them to make contracts pledging their husbands’ credit to purchase ‘necessary’ household goods, in order to trade, do business and even as a means to secure independence when locked into a failed marriage. In the rapidly expanding commercial world the urban court of requests became an essential institution for settling small debts: amongst the most frequent litigants were women, using the courts to contest debts, even if the husband was ultimately liable.⁹ In Whitehaven Christine Churches has found that customary law allowed women not only to hold and bequeath property but to exert a tangible influence upon the economic development of the town.¹⁰ It is becoming increasingly apparent that the trend towards economic withdrawal and marginalisation, which Erikson’s conclusion indicates and which forms a basic premise of the argument put forward by Davidoff and Hall, needs to be modified, if not substantially revised.¹¹

If legal restrictions were becoming more prohibitive in some areas, in others the eighteenth century represented unique opportunities in that the restrictive regulations of guilds and companies had been greatly weakened (enabling women to participate in framework knitting and tailoring, for example), whilst the advent of more rigorously gendered notions of what constituted suitable employment for women had yet to be fully developed in a number of areas, whether in the professions or in manufactures, commerce or industry. Evidence of female solicitors in early eighteenth-century London has recently been uncovered, for example, challenging the common assumption that the legal professions were invariably barred to women and raising the question at what stage the professions were definitively closed off to women. Similarly, Penelope Lane has demonstrated the active involvement of women in the economies of Leicestershire towns and their environs. She illustrates how women aided by industrial development broadened their range of wealth creating and income generating activities which included the letting of knitting frames, money lending, owning real estate and running businesses.¹² A recent study of women and work in eighteenth-century Edinburgh has highlighted the wide range of occupations in which women across the social strata were engaged and has emphasised their capacity for independent action. Edinburgh women were more likely to retain the use of their maiden name even after marriage than their English counterparts, and the official records are more informative as to their occupations. There was clearly a culture in Edinburgh which was more accepting of female employment, particularly amongst the married middling sort, than in many English towns, but it would appear improbable that such local customs represented a radical divergence from those south of the border: it certainly does not appear to have been a matter upon which contemporary visitors saw fit to comment.¹³ Thus the emerging consensus tends to corroborate the view of Ellis that the urban world offered opportunities in the interstices of society, which women could exploit and develop to their own advantage.¹⁴

The relative shortage of material dealing specifically with women in urban society is explicable partly by the opacity and paucity of the records, but is somewhat surprising given the readily acknowledged preponderance of women in eighteenth-century towns. It has become something of a truism that the only town not to show a majority of female inhabitants in the 1801 census was Oxford, with its high number of unmarried college fellows and single undergraduates. Tellingly, the most extended consideration given to the experience of women and issues of gender in the recent Cambridge Urban History comes in Pamela Sharpe’s analysis of migrati...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Women and Civic Life in Eighteenth-Century England
• 3 The Rag Plot: The Politics of Influence in Oxford, 1754
• 4 Women as Objects and Agents of Charity in Eighteenth-Century Birmingham
• 5 Urban Businesswomen in Eighteenth-Century England
• 6 Women Entrepreneurs and Urban Expansion: Manchester, 1760-1820
• 7 Prudent Luxury: The Metropolitan Tastes of Judith Baker, Durham Gentlewoman
• 8 Women in Towns as Keepers of the Word: The Example of Warwickshire During the 1780s and 1830s
• 9 Mary Chandler’s Description of Bath (1733): A Tradeswoman Poet of the Georgian Urban Renaissance
• Bibliography
• Index