Women's work

Labour, gender, authorship, 1750–1830

Jennie Batchelor

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780719095580
  9780719082573
• eBook ISBN:
  9781847797766
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Women's work challenges influential accounts about gender and the novel by revealing the complex ways in which labour informed the lives and writing of a number of middling and genteel women authors publishing between 1750 and 1830.

This book provides a particularly rich, yet largely neglected, seam of texts for exploring the vexed relationship between gender, work and writing. The four chapters that follow contain thoroughly contextualised case studies of the treatment of manual, intellectual and domestic labour in the work and careers of Sarah Scott, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft and women applicants to the writer's charity, the Literary Fund.

By making women's work visible in our studies of female-authored fiction of the period, Batchelor reveals the crucial role that these women played in articulating debates about the gendered division of labour, the (in)compatibility of women's domestic and professional lives and the status and true value of women's work that shaped eighteenth-century culture as surely as they shape our own.

1
The ‘gift’ of work: labour, narrative and community in the novels of Sarah Scott

What I understand by society is a state of mutual confidence, reciprocal services, and correspondent affections; where numbers are thus united, there will be a free communication of sentiments, and we shall then find speech, that peculiar blessing given to man, a valuable gift indeed; but when we see it restrained by suspicion, or contaminated by detraction, we rather wonder that so dangerous a power was trusted with a race of beings, who seldom make a proper use of it.

Sarah Scott, A Description of Millenium Hall (1762)¹

In this familiar passage, Sarah Scott outlines a socioeconomic vision, and a vision for the novel, that had been many years in the making. Although Millenium Hall offers the best-known articulation of Scott’s utopian hopes for women, society and fiction, her earlier The History of Cornelia (1750) and A Journey through Every Stage of Life (1754) had imagined philanthropic schemes and ideal societies which closely foreshadow those elaborated in her more famous work. Millenium Hall’s sequel, The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), would similarly take up the themes of charitable activism and social reform explored in these earlier texts by tracing its hero’s efforts to emulate the community’s example in a series of projects of his own, a course of action which proves, through fictional dramatization of authorial intent, the power of exemplary narrative to produce social and political change. While philanthropy has been a principal focus of recent studies of Scott’s novels, often figuring as a gauge by which the radicalism (or conservatism) of their sociopolitical outlook can be assessed, the role of labour – invariably a precondition of charity for Scott – has not.² In large part because of charity’s status as the epitome of domestic virtue, an activity that speaks of and depends upon a benefactor’s leisure, but also as a consequence of Scott’s identification as a ‘bluestocking feminist’ – a political stance which, Gary Kelly asserts, upholds ‘gentry’ values³ – labour has largely fallen below the radar of Scott studies.⁴ Yet, work is central to her fiction, underpinning both her critique of female dependency and her conviction concerning the novel’s reformative potential. Labour, whether it takes the form of teaching, painting, millinery, spinning, laundry, carpet making, administering charitable and pedagogical projects or storytelling, is the means by which individuals contribute to the ideal societies Scott’s fiction imagines and through which they signal their acceptance of those societies’ rules. Within these self-sustaining economies, which position themselves ideologically (and, in the case of Millenium Hall, geographically) outside the market economy in which eighteenth-century heroines frequently suffer, work is the currency of everyday life. Carried out not merely for remuneration but for the ‘confidence’ it inspires and the ‘affections’ it generates, the labour Scott’s heroines perform finds its ultimate reward in the exchange of ‘free’ and transformative ‘speech’, bestowed by God, but commonly ‘contaminated’ by the self-interested desires characteristic of commercial society. The exchange of free ‘speech’, in turn, links the activities of Scott’s heroines – it is the end to which their employments are the means – and the literary work of their author, whose disinterested yet ‘valuable’ ‘sentiments’ are offered to her readers in the gift of fiction itself.

The critical conversation about Scott’s work, in which Millenium Hall remains the most prominent text, has been dominated by a debate about the scope and limits of the utopian models of female community her fiction imagines, a discussion which has been illuminated by considerations of the novels’ indebtedness to political economic theory and sentimental discourse, and which has been usefully complicated by accounts of the (antagonistic) relationship between Scott’s utopianism and her texts’ gender and class politics.⁵ This chapter contributes to this ongoing debate by examining the role that women’s work plays in Scott’s writing and the nature of the moral and textual economies this work supports. The first section focuses on Cornelia and ‘The History of Leonora and Louisa’, the first and longest inset narrative in A Journey, novels which moved the working woman from the periphery to the centre of the eighteenth-century novel, and which are thus highly important both in terms of the particular narrative about women and work this book documents and in terms of literary history more broadly. Through their charting of their heroines’ successful adaptations to the labour market, these novels reveal the contribution that women’s work might make to society’s moral and economic well-being if employment opportunities were to be widened and the illegitimacy of the division of labour’s gendered logic were to be acknowledged. Moreover, they articulate an implicit critique of domesticity and the structures of dependence it promoted that would be worked through more fully in Scott’s later fiction. In making these arguments about labour, gender and domesticity, Scott demonstrates herself to be a writer of her moment, a utopian, mid-century moment in which the political economists upon whose works her fiction draws were, for various reasons discussed below, placing female labour at the very heart of the nation’s money and moral economies.

These early novels, while in some ways more radical than their 1760s successors, were also the testing ground for Millenium Hall and Sir George Ellison. In these later works, Scott’s labour plots are not confined to the stories of isolated and exceptional individuals, but are more ambitiously, and in some ways more problematically, conceived as the story of whole communities, the economic and moral principles of which betray the logic of what anthropologists and cultural theorists have identified as gift economics: that is to say, the system of reciprocal exchanges and mutual obligations that has been observed to structure a number of pre- or anti-capitalist societies. An ‘economics of beneficence’, as Judith Still has suggested, underpins Scott’s argument that a community in which women of all ranks work according to principles of disinterested and mutually beneficial exchange, can best serve women’s individual needs and those of society as a whole.⁶ The logic of the gift, complex and unstable though it proves to be, structures not only the affective communities within the novels analysed here but also, and more successfully, the metatextual community that Scott imagined to exist between author and reader, both of whom, she contended, were obliged to work for the common good through their respective roles in the production and consumption of fiction. As this chapter’s final section claims, this framing device enabled Scott to construct the female author as an intellectual labourer whose productions could resist the deracinating effects of the market by dictating the terms of their reception, transmission and circulation, and whose sense of personal worth, moreover, was intimately bound up in the authorial work she gifted to the public.

Writing labour at mid-century

In most early eighteenth-century fiction, female workers are relegated to the textual margins, generally present in the form of the many anonymous or generically named servants and milliners, who come to notice only when they are enjoined to conspire in their superiors’ downfall, and who are expeditiously disregarded as soon as they have outlived their usefulness as a plot device. In those few novels, such as Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) and Roxana (1724), in which the labouring woman takes centre stage, the image of the female labourer as corrupt schemer holds fast, and the question of women’s work is largely sidelined by virtue of labour’s status as a condition from which the heroine must raise herself, by all possible means, in order to realize her genteel aspirations. Samuel Richardson’s Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (1740), despite featuring a famously virtuous labouring-class heroine, did little to challenge these assumptions or to advance the literary representation of women workers. Pamela is rarely seen at work in the novel, and when she is, such as when she embroiders her master’s waistcoat, she is engaged in activities that lie beyond the remit of her servant duties, and that prefigure the leisured employments she will undertake as B.’s wife. Richardson’s decision not to foreground Pamela’s work, when read in the context of the extraordinarily cruel and self-interested behaviour of other labouring women in the novel, most notably that of Mrs Jewkes, and in light of Pamela’s eventual removal from a life of labour which the novel presents as beneath her, confirms the heroine’s status as an exception to the rule of labouring women’s immorality and vanity in the early eighteenth-century novel. The fact that some of the reading public found Henry Fielding’s plotting Shamela and Eliza Haywood’s amorous and deliciously immoral Syrena Tricksey more credible than Richardson’s paragon indicates just how difficult it would be to dislodge such culturally embedded stereotypes. Indeed, they proved remarkably resilient in a literary culture in which women’s economic activity was almost invariably deemed suspect.⁷

The downwardly mobile gentlewoman reduced to find work was similarly vulnerable to such prejudice and felt the contempt of society at least as keenly as her lower ranking counterparts. In the words of Camilla, one of the heroines of Sarah Fielding’s The Adventures of David Simple (1744) – a novel by which Scott’s early fiction was much influenced – there is ‘no Situation so deplorable, no Condition so much to be pitied, as that of a Gentlewoman in real Poverty’, forced to prostitute her accomplishments for wages.⁸ In her attempts to find a living for herself and her ailing brother, Camilla experiences the ‘World’ as the ‘Wildest Desart’. Debarred from any kind of ‘Community’, she is resented by ‘the lower sort of People’ for taking ‘the Bread out of their Mouths’, and is exploited by the rich, particularly by those so-called ‘Gentleman’ who read her readiness to work as a sign of sexual availability, and demand ‘a Price … for any thing they could do for me’ that Camilla deems far ‘too dear to pay’.⁹ Camilla is rescued from such a desperate course by David’s intervention. Emily Markland, the impoverished clergyman’s daughter of the anonymous The Histories of Some of the Penitents in the Magdalen-House (1760), would not be so lucky. Emily’s willingness to accept the most ‘laborious work’ is read by those from whom she attempts to obtain employment as a sign of ‘bad … conduct’, leaving beggary and prostitution as the only courses of action she can take to feed her son.¹⁰ As Camilla’s and Emily’s stories demonstrate, the burden faced by the impoverished middle-ranking woman compelled to support herself through her labour was doubly onerous: such figures were the victims not simply of cultural prejudice but of the literary precedent that weighed against them.

In light of the widespread mistrust of working women evident in the early eighteenth-century novel and its readers’ responses to such characters, Scott’s preoccupation with labouring (if not labouring-class) heroines seems inexplicable, perhaps even naive. It does so, however, only if the immediate historical context out of which Scott’s novels emerged is unacknowledged. The mid-eighteenth century marked something of a watershed in the discursive construction of women’s work, a period in which a perceived crisis in female labour gave way to a momentary valorization of women’s productive labour as vital to the nation’s prosperity and moral well-being. The intensification of interest in female labour in political economic theory and philanthropic discourse of the 1750s and 1760s arose from a variety of socioeconomic and political factors, and intensified with the outbreak of the Seven Years War in 1756. The problem of how to deal with unemployed women from the labouring classes may not have been a new one at mid-century, as Deborah Valenze observes, but it was an issue that acquired a particular political urgency at a time when the female labour market was feared to be in decline, when vice and crime were said to be increasing and when political conflict was undeniably exerting pressure upon the male workforce.¹¹ According to Sir John Fielding, in his Plan for a Preservatory and Reformatory for the Benefit of Deserted Girls and Penitent Prostitutes (1758), ‘Industry’ had plunged into a state of ‘Distress’, as an unwieldy and undereducated workforce of potentially ‘useful Subjects’ sank into poverty, vice and idleness.¹²

Harnessing the labouring potential of ‘useful Subjects’, as Donna T. Andrew has argued, became a leading preoccupation of political economists and the guiding imperative of the charity movement, which flourished at mid-century with the founding of institutions including the Lock Hospital (in 1746), the Marine Society (in 1756), the Magdalen House for the Reception of Penitent Prostitutes (in 1758) and the Lambeth Asylum for orphaned girls (in 1759).¹³ In the labour debates occasioned by the establishment of these and like philanthropic institutions, the figure of the prostitute was a recurrent and inevitable point of return. Working outside the productive and reproductive economies, the paid whore was doubly illegitimate; a threat to the nation’s wealth and to its martial strength. In the brothel, Fielding observed, the ‘Journeyman’ and ‘Tradesman’ were ‘decoy’d into a Snare’, which jeopardized their ‘Property’, ‘Constitution’ and ‘Famil[ies]’, and which sapped the strength of the nation’s ‘Manufactures, Fleets [and] Armies’.¹⁴ Such arguments had, of course, long been part of the rhetoric of writings on prostitution. Bernard Mandeville’s A Modest Defence of Publick Stews (1724), for example, had earlier made a rather similar point to Fielding’s Plan in its claim that ‘Whoring’ tempted men ‘to live beyond what their Circumstances will admit of … [and disposed] the Mind to such a sort of Indolence, as is quite inconsistent with Industry, the main Support of any, especially a trading, Nation’.¹⁵ What distinguished mid-century commentary on prostitution from that of Mandeville and some of his contemporaries was a more widespread understanding of the prostitute as a symptom rather than instigator of socioeconomic problems and a willingness to perceive her body as a site of promise rather than of irreversible degeneration. Street-walkers had not caused a crisis in the labour market, a number of mid-century commentators argued, they were the victims of such a crisis.

Deflecting attention away from the effects that prostitution had upon a male workforce to the question of women’s own labour potential and the role it might play in bolstering the nation’s money and moral economies, proponents of charities such as the Magdalen House made the case that suitably repentant prostitutes might be ‘made of equal Use to their Country’ as men, provided that they were offered suitable education and training and that the labour market was itself reformed to allow women access to trades from which they were already or were becoming excluded.¹⁶ Several years before the publication of his 1758 Plan, Fielding, in his position as a London magistrate, had ‘observed that the Trades for employing Women are too few, that those which Women might execute are engrossed by Men, and that many Women have not the Opportunity of learning even those which Women do follow, on Account of the Premiums paid for learning the said Businesses’.¹⁷ Although such attacks upon the male usurpation of ‘female’ trades are more commonly associated with the 1790s feminist polemics of Mary Ann Radcliffe, Priscilla Wakefield and Mary Wollstonecraft: these concerns had played a central role in the debate about women’s work for at least sixty years before this time. Many of the arguments and much of the tone of Radcliffe’s and Wakefield’s attacks on men’s supposedly recent usurpation of women’s work within the millinery and dressmaking professions, for example, can be observed in a 1739 Gentleman’s Magazine essay, ‘By a Lady’, which asserted women’s right to claim certain employments as their own and thus to be permitted to be ‘as useful and as capable as men of maintaining themselves’.¹⁸ Jonas Hanway was one of several mid-century commentators who drew on and developed such arguments both to criticize men who were pushing women out of trades in which the latter ‘might do as well’ and to condemn a society that prevented women from entering others ‘in which their natural ingenuity would enable them to carry on much better’.¹⁹ Although Hanway stopped short of following through the radical implications of his own conclusions, his Plan none the less reveals the logic of the gendered division of labour to be not only faulty but profoundly unnatural.

By fitting women for a life of productive work through the education and training that institutions such as the Magdalen House could provide, the charity movement promised to turn the burden that was the unemployed or illegitimately employed labouring woman into ‘a great acquisition to the nation’.²⁰ As ‘great’ an ‘acquisition’ as these women’s productive labour was their reproductive work in the domestic economy, for which commentators suggested reformed female labourers were invariably destined and in which their skills would ultimately be subsumed. Turning such vicious women into virtuous workers and the ‘joyful mothers of children’ would take considerable effort on the part of charitable institutions, but made sound economic sense, Hanway concluded: it would ‘only [be] making use of a few good things of a lesser value, to acquire more good things of a much greater value’.²¹ Through such arguments, the likes of Hanway and his fellow philanthropists made the reformed prostitute an unlikely source of national pride, and, simultaneously,...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: lifting the veil of ‘Inchantment’
• 1 The ‘gift’ of work: labour, narrative and community in the novels of Sarah Scott
• 2 Somebody’s story: Charlotte Smith and the work of writing
• 3 The ‘business’ of a woman’s life and the making of the Female Philosopher: the works of Mary Wollstonecraft
• 4 Women writers, the popular press and the Literary Fund, 1790–1830
• Coda: reading labour and writing women’s literary history
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index