Fit Work for Women

Sandra Burman, Sandra Burman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136248450
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This book presents a collection of papers which discuss the origins of the domestic ideal and its effects on activities usually undertaken by women: not only on women's wage work, but also on activities either not defined as work or accorded an ambiguous status. It discusses the formation of the ideology of domesticity, philanthropy and its effects on official policy and on women, landladies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, working-class radical suffragists, and Labour Party and trade union attitudes to feminists.

Modern society of 1979, when the book was first published, is analysed in a discussion of militancy and acquiescence among women wage workers, a look at how and why the legal system reinforces activity specialisation according to gender, and an examination of why both pre-pre-war capitalism and the modern Welfare State have been unable to meet the needs of dependents. This collection reflects the increasing recognition that in order to understand women's roles today, it is necessary to examine not only their current manifestations, but also their origins and early development.

1 THE EARLY FORMATION OF VICTORIAN DOMESTIC IDEOLOGY

DOI: 10.4324/9780203104163-3

Catherine Hall

The Victorian middle-class ideal of womanhood is one that is well documented – the ‘angel in the house’, the ‘relative creature’ who maintained the home as a haven, is familiar from novels, manuals and even government reports. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that by the 1830s and 1840s the definition of women as primarily relating to home and family was well established. But what were the origins of this ideal? 1780-1830 has been called the period of the making of the industrial bourgeoisie. That class defined itself not only in opposition to the new proletariat, but also to the classes of landed capitalism – the gentry and the aristocracy. Their class definition was built not only at the level of the political and the economic – the historic confrontations of 1832 and 1846 – but also at the level of culture and ideology. The new bourgeois way of life involved a recodification of ideas about women. Central to those new ideas was an emphasis on women as domestic beings, as primarily wives and mothers. Evangelicalism provided one crucial influence on this definition of home and family. Between 1780 and 1820, in the Evangelical struggle over anti-slavery and over the reform of manners and morals, a new view of the nation, of political power and of family life was forged. This view was to become a dominant one in the 1830s and 1840s. The Evangelical emphasis on the creation of a new life-style, a new ethic, provided the framework for the emergence of the Victorian bourgeoisie.

It has been argued that Evangelical morality was probably the single most widespread influence in Victorian England.¹ Evangelicals were staunch members of the Church of England who believed in reform from within rather than in following the example of John Wesley, who in the 1780s had in effect seceded from the established Church to form the Methodist sect. The crucially important position of the Clapham Sect, as leaders of the Evangelicals, and their influence on nineteenth-century England has long been recognised. They occupy a position of distinction in Whig history, but have been less revered by radicals.² The Whig interpretation sees the sect as having played a vital role, not only in establishing the great nineteenth-century tradition of extra-Parliamentary agitation, but also as a group marked by moral superiority and freedom from self-interest. The origins of the group lay in Henry Thornton's house at Clapham and the focus which that provided for a number of prominent Evangelicals at the end of the eighteenth century. The Thornton family were prosperous bankers and John Thornton, Henry's father, was an influential Evangelical. Clapham became a centre for a number of families who were united in their interests and interconnected by marriage. The major figures were Henry Thornton, William Wilberforce, Zachary Macaulay (who was editor of the Evangelical Christian Observer and did much of the research and writing on the slavery issue), James Stephen (a barrister) and Lord Teignmouth (who was Governor General of India for five years). All of them lived in Clapham for long periods, where an Evangelical, John Venn, held the living. In addition, there were other people who were very closely associated and paid frequent visits — Thomas Gisborne, for example, a country gentleman, cleric and author; Hannah More, the celebrated author; and Charles Simeon, who was the Evangelical leader in Cambridge. The sect's work was primarily devoted to the furtherance of Evangelical principles in various political and social fields. They are best known for their contributory effort to the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery, their missionary activities both within and beyond England, and their influence on the foundation of Sunday schools and many other philanthropic and reforming institutions. In a much quoted entry in his diary in 1787, Wilberforce wrote that his mission was to abolish the slave trade and reform the manners and morals of the nation; virtually all the activities of the Clapham Sect sprang from these two commitments.

The Reform of Manners and Morals

The Sect's second campaign—the attempt to transform national morality – had less clear legislative goals than the anti-slavery movement. Its concern was to redefine the available cultural norms and to encourage a new seriousness and respectability in life. The Clapham Sect aimed to provide a new model that would displace the licentiousness and immorality which they saw around them. This modus vivendi would be widely propagated by means of pamphlets, manuals, sermons and as many other media as could be utilised. At the same time it would be reinforced institutionally by getting legislation passed on such issues as public amusements, Sabbatarianism and obscene publications. The onslaught on morality was a highly organised campaign, and although it did not fire the national imagination in the same way that the anti-slavery issue had, it nevertheless had an important impact on manners at the beginning of the nineteenth century.³

The Evangelical concern with national morality had, as its premise, their belief that religion should be a daily rule of life rather than a question of doctrinal purity, like the Methodists, they emphasised the importance of a well-ordered daily routine. Their overwhelming sense of sin necessitated the formulation of rules for daily life, in an attempt to reduce the possibilities of collapse into the natural condition. Hannah More and Wilberforce wrote journals which give us considerable insight into the practices of Evangelical living. Both of them see self-examination as absolutely central in their attempt to live according to God. Passivity and obedience were demanded in relation to God's word. A vital distinction was made between nominal and real Christianity: the nominal Christian accepts only the forms. The eighteenth-century religious revival was concerned with an attempt to get beneath the forms, to transform the meaning of religion from within. The Evangelical decision to stay inside the established Church meant that pressure for internal reconstruction was perhaps even stronger on them than on the Methodists – since the latter were creating new external forms of religious organisation as well. Wilberforce's immensely influential Practical Christianity gives us one of the clearest statements of Evangelical views. He insisted on the distinction between real and nominal belief. Christianity, he argued, ‘is a state into which we are not born, but into which we must be translated; a nature which we do not inherit, but into which we are to be created anew…. This is a matter of labour and difficulty, requiring continual watchfulness, and unceasing effort, and unwearied patience’.⁴ Life is a journey towards salvation and the image of the pilgrim is constantly there. Wilberforce and Hannah More both experienced conversion in adulthood and, as a result, reconstructed their lives. Wilberforce aimed to live by rule and to subject his life to constant scrutiny in an attempt to be of the greatest productive use to others. He believed that an individual's only strength sprang from a deep and abiding sense of his own weakness and inadequacy -hence the constant need for self-criticism and self-examination. Criticism, moreover, should be not just an individual practice but a mutual practice amongst the believers. Self-discipline was therefore a sine qua non in the Evangelicals’ philosophy. Their letters and diaries bear constant witness to the difficulties of achieving it. It is important not to read back into this early phase of Evangelicalism the critique of its aspects in Victorian England with which we are familiar from Dickens, Thackeray or Butler. Between 1790 and 1820 the movement was in struggle, constantly on the attack against the evils it saw surrounding it, and attempting to transform English life. After 1820 Evangelicalism increasingly established itself as a part of the dominant culture. It lost its early purity and could justly be accused of priggishness, conventionality, hypocrisy and conservatism. But the first generation of the Clapham Sect were unceasingly diligent in their efforts to behave properly, to live as real Christians should, and to change their way of life.

In the 1780s the Evangelicals were convinced of the necessity for a national reform of manners. They wanted to attack the aristocracy's laxness and impose a new rule of life. In current political weakness they saw a reflection of moral depravity. It seemed clear that moral reform was impossible without the support of the ruling class and the established Church – and those were their initial constituencies. If — as they believed – Wesley's attempt at it had been doomed from the start by his reliance on preaching the word, then they instead would exploit any political channels open to them. Society was seen to be in need of effective leadership and guidance. The growth of the middle class made this particularly urgent because it was in danger of adopting the lax principles of those of higher rank; furthermore, the commercial spirit did not appear naturally favourable to the maintenance of religious principles.

The attack on manners and morals was initially organised mainly around producing propaganda aimed at the upper classes.⁵ It took the French Revolution to transform a modest campaign into a major national force. In the dangerous years of the 1790s a simple, repressive policy was not enough; an active regeneration was also necessary in support of England. As Lady Shelley wrote in her diary, ‘The awakening of the labouring classes after the first shocks of the French Revolution, made the upper classes tremble. Every man felt the necessity for putting his house in order.’ E.P. Thompson has added to this – ‘To be more accurate, most men and women of property felt the necessity for putting the houses of the poor in order.’⁶ But to put the houses of the poor in order was only one part of the Evangelical campaign. They believed in self-regeneration as well as the proper instruction of the poor, and it was this duality which gave their movement such power. Their position cannot be equated with Toryism — they were subject to vitriolic attacks from sections of the ruling class as well as from radicals. The Evangelicals only ever had a limited amount of support from aristocratic and landed circles. Their major support, despite the intentions of the Clapham Sect, came from the middle ranks.

Between 1780 and 1832 England was in a period of transition — from an aristocratic and mercantile capitalist society, where land was still the major source of power, to an industrial capitalist society with a large and influential bourgeoisie. The Evangelicals were able to play a mediating role in this transition. They neither unquestioningly supported the old society nor uncritically welcomed the new. Their religious position drew on some of the same criticisms of established religious forms as had the Methodists, yet they remained staunch Anglicans; and unlike the Methodists, they never developed a popular base amongst the labouring classes. They insisted on the possibility of reform from within rather than by creating new structures. Similarly, in political terms, they advocated transformation from within, rather than a direct change in the distribution of political power. They believed in the traditional power of the aristocracy and appealed to the old ruling groups, yet their desire for particular kinds of change drove them to seek support from the expanding middle class. In order to achieve the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery, for example, they needed pressure group organisation on a massive scale — yet they still believed in the absolute power of an unreformed House of Commons to make legislative decisions. The success of the anti-slavery campaign marked an important transitional moment on the way to a full demand for recognition of middle-class power.⁷

The religious base of the Evangelicals allowed them to insist that the issues they took up were moral, not political. Anti-slavery came to be seen as ‘above politics’. Their solution to the political problems facing England in the wake of the French Revolution was declared to be a religious solution — not a political one. It was the religious consciousness of England, they argued, which determined her political condition.

To the decline of Religion and morality our national difficulties must both indirectly and directly be chiefly ascribed … My only solid hopes for the well-being of my country depend not so much on her fleets and armies, not so much on the wisdom of her rulers, or the spirit of her people, as on the persuasion that she still contains many, who in a degenerate age, love and obey the Gospel of Christ; on the humble trust that the intercession of these may still be prevalent, that for the sake of these Heaven may still look upon us with an eye of favour.⁸

Real Christianity must be cultivated to arrest the progress of political decay.

The Clapham Sect members were neither old style aristocrats nor new style manufacturers. Yet they came to be seen as representing the interests of England and of sections of the middle classes. The major interests of the Sect were in financial and mercantile capital. The Wilberforce family money came from the Baltic trade and by the 1770s had been partly invested in land. The Thorntons were well-established bankers. Macaulay's money derived from African trade. There were remarkably few manufacturers involved. The Evangelicals always looked for wealthy and aristocratic support; they believed in the importance of influencing the great, and rejoiced in titled and royal backing. Wilberforce was one of Pitt's closest friends and mixed regularly with the governing elite. Nevertheless, this group was associated from its early days with the new middle-class culture of industrial England. The Clapham Sect came to articulate and represent the needs...