White, Male and Middle Class

Explorations in Feminism and History

Catherine Hall

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780745609560
  9780745609379
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9780745666822
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Discrimination & Race Relations
• Index: Social Sciences

What are the relations between feminism and history, feminist politics and historical practice? What are the connections between gender and class? What part have racial identities and ethnic difference played in the construction of Englishness?

Through a series of provocative and richly detailed essays, Catherine Hall explores these questions. She argues that feminism has opened up vital new questions for history and transformed familiar historical narratives. Class can no longer be understood outside of gender, or gender outside of class.

But English identities have also been rooted in imperial power. White, Male and Middle Class explores the ways in which middle-class masculinities were rooted in conceptions of power over dependants - whether black or female.

1 Feminism and Feminist History

As a feminist historian writing in the 1990s I cannot be naïve either about memory, which feminist historians and theorists have done so much to explore, or about telling stories, which post-structuralism has helped us to think about when reading or writing history. My narrative, which concerns the ways in which I have engaged with feminism and history over the last twenty years, and the ways in which the essays in this book reflect the historical specificity of certain moments in that process, is necessarily partial, full of absences and silences, marked by its attempt to tell a coherent story, to make sense of tensions and contradictions which cannot in life be so neatly resolved. This, with all its particularities, is my story.

Historians construct stories, stories which necessarily have a narrative shape but in which the tensions between the teller, the tropes of the discourse (the beginning, the middle, the end), and what are understood to have been the events, are consciously worked on. But history, for me, is not just another fiction. Historical research is always premissed on a relation between past and present, is always about investigating the past through the concerns of the present, and always to do with interpretation. Historians attempt to interpret past realities and the meanings which they were given through language (for there is never only one real meaning, or one set of meanings), realities which can only be reached through forms of representation, which can only be read textually (in the widest sense of the term), which can never be grasped in an unmediated way. The stories which they construct, from laborious archival work ordered by conceptual frameworks, are grounded through an attempted comprehensiveness in relation to evidence, a commitment to look at countervailing accounts, an effort to test interpretations against others, the practices of good scholarship.

Some of this I learned as a student, some of it through feminism, some through working in cultural studies. The meaning of being an historian over the last twenty years, of trying to do certain kinds of historical work, has significantly changed. Feminism has made an important contribution to these changes. This introduction and the essays which follow are part of the story of that dynamic relation between feminism and history.

I have always loved history. I loved, as a child, being taken to places on family outings, whether castles, abbeys, battlefields, or royal palaces, walking round the walls of York, climbing on Hadrian’s Wall, going down the shaft in Leeds City Museum’s reconstructed coal-mine, having days out – outings that are intimately connected in my memory with those rare occasions when we were allowed to have fish and chips. Such trips were much encouraged by my mother, a first-generation grammar school girl who made it to Oxford to read history and had her budding historical career cut short by marrying a minister and becoming a minister’s wife.

I loved reading historical novels too – especially by Rosemary Sutcliff – imaginatively living in another world. In my adolescence, I turned to those which combined exciting hints of sexual adventure with their historical drama: the many volumes of Jean Plaidy collected weekly from the local library, and Katharine, about the mistress of John of Gaunt, which we owned and I must have read at least a dozen times. I can still remember reading the exciting bits of Gone With the Wind (impervious to its racism), tucked behind the sofa in the house of family friends in Lancashire. Those memories of Gone With the Wind are mixed up with the sherry trifle which was a feature of those visits, a forbidden treat since alcohol was unknown in our temperance household, and over which there was a conspiracy of silence, combined with suppressed giggles when my father commented on how good the trifle was!

History lessons at my school, Leeds Girls’ High School, were the only classes which I really enjoyed and which inspired me to try and find out things for myself. What a disappointment, having promised the class a radical reinterpretation of Sulamein the Magnificent, which would prove that he was not nearly as bad as had always been made out, that I could find no evidence in our school library to support this claim and had to rely entirely on vigorous assertion in defence of my claim! My favourite history teacher, Miss Braddy as she was then, is fixed in my memory as she was when we were doing A-levels, the Tudors and Stuarts, and she introduced us to Christopher Hill’s The Century of Revolution, just published, as our set text. An unlikely choice in a very conventional girls’ grammar school but one that set me off on a long love-affair with the British Marxist historians.

It wasn’t surprising, then, that I too ended up reading history at university. History always seemed the only choice, and that seemed to lead straight on to research, although on an unlikely topic – the English medieval aristocracy. That was because of Rodney Hilton’s teaching at Birmingham, which opened up to me a whole new and exciting world, a different and imagined feudal world, in which men made their own history and it was therefore vital for historians to grasp ‘the political and social consciousness of the various classes’.¹ Hilton had been a member of the Communist Party Historians’ Group, that group which had decided to challenge British historiography and construct a new body of Marxist history that would both connect with popular politics and engage with the academic establishment. Rodney Hilton, Christopher Hill, Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm, together with the other members of the group, called for a major reassessment of English cultural and political history and a communism which would combine elements of Marxism with popular radical English traditions.²

By the early 1960s, when I went to university, a substantial body of that work had already appeared and the Cold War freeze-out which had marginalized much of what had been done in the 1940s and 1950s was beginning to melt. The medieval England to which Hilton introduced me was theorized in ways that made sense to me – class struggle, popular resistance, a whole social formation; these were concepts at the heart of his writing and teaching. For a young woman bred on radical nonconformity and the New Statesman, growing up in Leeds as a Young Socialist and an activist in YCND, connected to the tail-end of the New Left as it entered popular politics through the peace movement in the early 1960s, this was a heady brew. My marriage in 1964 to a Jamaican intellectual active in New Left politics, whom I had first encountered on an Aldermaston march, strengthened this nexus of political and personal connections and gave me confidence to pursue my own project.

Hilton’s radical political agenda, twinned with his deep love for the activity of historical research, was an inspiring combination and one which led me to think that I could overcome the practical difficulties associated with my bad Latin – and even worse palaeographic skills – and become a medieval historian. Being a research student, however, turned out to be an alienating and disappointing life. The excitement of intensive teaching was over, now I was expected to get on with it alone and sustain my own project; weeks in the Public Record Office with undecipherable manuscripts, visits to dusty episcopal archives – what was this to do with class struggle and popular resistance? The model of the lone researcher seemed to be the only available paradigm, despite the collective discussions of the Communist Party historians.

Then came 1968 – which signified for me not only the months of student activism, the demands for a new curriculum, the insistence that the history syllabus should include discussion of theory and historiography (totally neglected in the majority of courses), but also the familiar discomfort, not yet recognized for what it was, of being a woman active in left politics. This was much intensified by the fact that I was by now many months pregnant with my first child and while other students revelled in the excitement of occupying the Great Hall at Birmingham University I found it too uncomfortable to sleep on the floor and had to go home – hardly a properly revolutionary experience! In December 1968 my baby was born and I soon found that the life of a mother did not fit well with that of a researcher. The printed Pipe Rolls were difficult to focus on in the few hours that Becky slept; questions which had seemed fascinating, such as the construction of aristocratic hegemony in the West Midlands, lost their edge for me in the midst of a totally new life dominated by the unfamiliar demands of a baby – by milk, nappies and a twenty-four-hour day. Gradually it became clear that finding a new way to survive was the most pressing issue – and a women’s group seemed to provide the answer.

The first Women’s Liberation Group met in Birmingham in February 1970. Many of us were young mothers with children who had started talking informally about the things that felt wrong with our lives, especially our isolation. We set up what became a consciousness-raising group, though I don’t think we thought of it as such at the time, and began to talk about what it meant to be a woman. Most of us had some kind of history in left politics, and a university education. Some of us attended the first women’s movement conference at the end of February 1970. We read Juliet Mitchell’s The Longest Revolution and Sheila Rowbotham’s ‘Women’s Liberation and the New Politics’, thought about why we wanted to exclude men from our group, and began to wonder about organizing campaigns on women’s issues in Birmingham. Being active in a women’s group, which rapidly evolved into other groups, and starting to organize collective childcare, seemed much more satisfying and immediate than doing historical research. In 1971 my second child was born and motherhood seemed to combine more comfortably with political activism than the Public Record Office.

I can distinctly remember one of my first encounters with feminist history, though some of the details may be wrong as I can no longer find the evidence. It was through reading an article by three American feminists who offered a reinterpretation of Victorian womanhood. The article was an eye-opener and I remember presenting a version of it to a women’s study group I was in. When our children were a little older and we had organized a more effective system of childcare, I began to think again about doing historical work, but this time focused on women. My fascination with what it had meant for me to become a housewife and mother, and the ways in which I and my sisters had developed a politics from that perspective, informed my first experiments in this new area of historical research. The politics of housework which we had begun to elaborate questioned the division of labour in the home, challenged the ways in which hidden reproductive work was being done by women, and demanded a different future for them. ‘The History of the Housewife’ – chapter 2 of this book – first given as a paper to a Ruskin History Workshop in London and later published in a shortened version in Spare Rib, reflected the combination of those new concerns with the older agenda inherited from the Marxist historians.

Feminist history as first conceptualized in the early 1970s was about the recovery of women’s history. We needed to fill out the enormous gaps in our historical knowledge which were a direct result of the male domination of historical work. How had women lived in the past, what had they experienced, what kinds of work had they done, in what patterns of family life had they been involved, what records had they made? How could we find out? Thus, in that first crucial text for British feminist history Hidden from History (1973), Sheila Rowbotham wrote in her preface that, while working on her book, she kept asking herself:

In what conditions have women produced and reproduced their lives, both through their labour and through procreation; how has the free expression of this activity been distorted and blocked by the circumstances of society?³

A year earlier Anna Davin had written in her essay ‘Women and History’ that feminists had to reject what had passed for history and begin anew. ‘In a class society,’ she argued, ‘history has meant the history of the rulers, and in a male dominated society the history of men.’⁴ The socialist and utopian rhetoric of such writing was characteristic of this first generation of feminist historians. Our socialism was heavily infused with humanism, redolent with the conviction that we too could make history, albeit not in conditions of our own making. We were convinced of the possibility of a socialist feminist politics and a socialist feminist history. We might not have wanted a marriage between Marxism and feminism, given the elaboration of our critique of marriage, but we certainly wanted a working partnership.

‘The History of the Housewife’, the first version of which was written in 1973, has the hallmarks of this early attempt to link the new language of feminism with a reworked Marxism. It was concerned to recover a lost history and give value and meaning to the activities of women which had not been legitimated in traditional historical writing. Implicitly it challenged the grand narratives of Marxism (long before post-modernism emerged on the scene), which told the story of the transition from feudalism to capitalism and from manufacture to modern industry without any reference to women. That challenge could in part be met by recovering older traditions of feminist history-writing – such as Alice Clark’s investigation of the impact of the transition from feudalism to capitalism on women’s work (an aspect of the transition never mentioned in the many discussions about it amongst men that I had heard over the years), and Ivy Pinchbeck’s study of women’s work and the Industrial Revolution.⁵

The working concepts I made use of included the sexual division of labour (a reworking of the Marxist emphasis on the social division of labour); the insistence on the family as a site for the provision of the social relations of production (connected to the Althusserian concept of ideological state apparatuses, or ISAs); the stress on housework as the invisible support for the generation of surplus value (the beginnings of the debate over whether housework was, or was not, productive which eventually ground to a halt as the inadequacy of an attempted application of Marxism to a different set of problems became apparent); and the notion of a ‘dominant ideology’ which oppressed women. Other concerns of this essay are the separation of home from work and the break that this represented for women, and the family as a unit of consumption. The Althusse...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Feminism and Feminist History
• Part I The Beginnings
• Part II Gender and Class
• Part III Race, Ethnicity and Difference
• Index