Making Respectable Women

Changing Moralities, Changing Times

Mary Evans

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030606480
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030606497
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: Social Sciences

This book studies the ways in which the assessment of being or not being 'respectable' has been applied to women in the UK in the past one hundred and fifty years. Mary Evans shows how the term 'respectable' has changed and how, most importantly, the basis of the ways in which the respectability of women has been judged has shifted from a location in women's personal, domestic and sexual behaviour to that of how women engage in contemporary forms of  citizenship, not the least of which is paid work. This shift has important social and political implications that have seldom been explored: amongst these are the growing marginalisation of the validation of the traditional care work of women, the assumption that paid work is implicitly and inevitably empowering and the complex ways in which respectability and conformity to highly sexualised conventions about female appearance have been normalised.

Making Respectable Women makes use of archive material to show how the changing definition of a moral and social concept can have an impact on both the behaviour and the choices of individuals and the operations of institutional power. It will be of interest to students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. 

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020

M. EvansMaking Respectable Womenhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7_1

Begin Abstract

Chapter 1: The Context

Mary Evans¹

(1)

London School of Economics, LSE Gender Institute, UK, London, UK

Mary Evans

Email: [email protected]

Keywords

AusterityNeo-liberalismAutonomyClassDiscriminationIndividualism

End Abstract

At the time of writing, the UK government and others across the globe, have embraced a form of political economy most generally known as neo-liberalism. The impact of that economic ideology, and its core beliefs in a small state, low taxation and limited forms of financial regulation, is generally associated with the last decades of the twentieth century but as Daniel Stedman Jones has shown in his study of the history of neo-liberalism its origins go back much further, in fact to the years between the first and second world wars.¹ Forms of economic theory which initially originated in the universities of both Britain and the United States were to take hold of policy makers in the 1970s, bringing to the national politics of the UK aspirations towards de-regulation, free markets and a ‘small’ state. These political aspirations were to form central pillars of UK politics in the 1970s and 1980s. But what Stedman Jones also showed was that there was a person, a gendered person, at the centre of these ideas, a person who was both the object and the instigator of the policies. It is this person who is so important here, not just because this person, autonomous and essentially ‘care-free’ was (and is) male but because of the impact which this ideal had on expectations about women: namely that women should also conform to these characteristics. Any viewer of the Anglo-American television show The Apprentice will immediately see this convergence of expectations: the women use (and are expected to use) the same determined, even aggressive, language of commerce as men; not to do so would be a departure from what are presented as the norms of the active, entrepreneurial citizen.

From the principles of neo-liberalism has arisen an articulation of concepts about the ‘citizen’ which both reject and yet collude with previous assumptions about women. The form that the collusion has taken, and still remains is, in all senses, a profitable collusion, and has been twofold: first, a validation of the idea of the feminine as distinct from the masculine. Second, the ongoing assumption of the engagement of women with various forms of care. What has been produced in this situation, and will be explored in the following chapters, is one in which paid work for women has been normalised whilst definitions of the ‘feminine’ have continued to support the identification of women with unpaid care work. State sanctions have enforced the expectation that all adults, regardless of their responsibilities to others, will be in paid work.² At the same time little or nothing has been put in place to take on that unpaid care work largely performed by women. Decades ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote of the ‘double shift’ of women in paid work. Her protest was against the unequal division of domestic labour together with the state’s failure (in her case the United States) to provide effective form of assistance for care work. That situation is no different in the twenty-first century but what has changed—and what will be suggested here—is that a new form of the ‘respectable ‘woman has emerged. In this women are assumed to be ‘care free’ (in the same way as their male counterparts) but also subject to two new forms of constraint. The first is that paid work is the only form of work recognised for all citizens, a moral duty and responsibility over-riding others. Second, that the demands of being ‘feminine’ and ‘doing femininity’ have become ever more demanding. Judith Butler and Michel Foucault have both written about disciplinary discourses; the multiple forms which discipline now takes in terms of the female body and the self will be the subject of later chapters.³

The contemporary discussion of women and the feminine, it also has to said, has been further complicated by increasingly heated debate about who can both be called and call themselves a woman. These questions of what a woman should ‘be’, and how a ‘woman’ is made are questions that have occupied and continue to occupy both individuals and institutions. In the twenty-first century, populist and authoritarian regimes are re-asserting, through pro-natalist policies, forms of definitions of what women should ‘be’ which many people had assumed to have disappeared.⁴ Many of those definitions rely on highly essentialist constructions of a woman. It is the contention of this essay that in the UK there has been a complex (and contested) shift from this biological essentialism towards its rejection at the same time as anger that previous certainties about the term ‘woman’ can no longer be taken for granted. Amongst those now less than secure certainties is the normative authority, and generalised recognition, of what it means to be a ‘respectable’ woman.

It is in this context of the conflicting politics of the early decades of the twenty-first century, that we encounter new ideas about what women should ‘be’. There is a considerable literature about the ‘making’ of women in the UK in the past one hundred and fifty years and much of that literature has been seeped in assumptions, both contemporary and otherwise, that ‘new dawns’ for women are about to arrive and that the history of women can record the abandonment of the old ways and the arrival of the new. At the same time each burst of confident literature about the ‘emancipation’ of women has been accompanied by concerns about ‘emancipation’ going ‘too far’ and disturbing the ‘natural’ gender order. It is in that context that web sites such as that for ‘trad.wives’ asserts the need to replicate the happily domesticated, and domestically confined wife; a woman notable for her visual identification with the 1950s.⁵ This form of resistance to the possible appearance of ‘new’ women has fascinated and appalled male writers (and some women) for centuries, whilst very few writers, male or female, have until recently engaged with the idea of ‘new’ men. Thus thinking about the ‘respectability’ or otherwise of women is implicitly about defining the ways in which women have been ‘made’ over the past one hundred and fifty years. That ‘making’ of women, as Simone de Beauvoir famously pointed out in 1949 is an essentially social process, shaped by, and shaping, the acceptable forms of womanhood. As another famous woman, Emmeline Pankhurst also remarked, in 1914 , ‘Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs’. Nor , as Mrs Pankhurst might have added, were women allowed, in the established Anglican Church to take any part in the implementation or ordering of this moral code.⁶ Despite the many differences between these two women, what they are expressing is an idea, central to many in subsequent decades, that the extent of the impact of the ‘natural’ on any human person is often much less than that of the world outside ourselves.

So this study is essentially concerned with the ways in which that ‘world outside’ ourselves has shifted its ideas about what women should, and should not, be. This should not be taken to imply that there has ever been a single view of the ‘respectable’ woman, nor that there has been, in the UK, that same degree of the authoritarian control of women’s everyday lives that remains apparent in parts of the world today. A reading of biography and social history demonstrates the multiplicity of ways in which for some women it has been possible to ignore or reject the ideals of women’s respectability. In that same reading of history what we meet are those many instances where women claim, in the name of emancipation or ‘progress’, rights which once contested have now become close to compulsory. Such a right is that to paid work. Always essential for millions of women, it was nevertheless long deemed undesirable for mothers. Today however, the adult citizen, male or female, regardless of care responsibilities, is expected to be in paid work for much of their adult life. A desire and need for paid work (in all its many motives) has shifted to a normative assumption about its desirability for male and female citizens. So what presents itself to us about women in the second decade of the twenty-first century is this: that social expectations about male and female people have moved closer together (the assumption of similar aspirations, similar responsibilities to be economically independent) whilst at the same time the traditional expectation of women—that they care for others—has not diminished. This change has occurred at the same time as the meaning and the impact of ideals of the ‘feminine’ and ‘femininity’ have remained as invasive and formative as ever, but have become increasingly policed (through new forms of the media) and commercialised. An aspect of this energetic commercial exploitation of fantasised versions of women as home makers has become evident on Instagram. Core elements of the fantasy are rural life, youth, wealth, white people and heterosexuality. In web sites such as that for ‘the darling academy’, for fashion brands such as Son de Flor, young, white women are pictured smiling happily in largely rural settings, photographs which are interspersed with snapshots of weddings, home cooked food and clothes from the 1950s (Fig. 1.1). This is about aspirations of a highly specific kind; aspirations which are represented through an aesthetic of apparent innocence, lived out in a world far from urban demands.⁷

Fig. 1.1

Son de Flor: Romantic nostalgia. (Source: @sondeflor Instagram, reused with permission)

The emergence of new and public forms o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Chapter 1: The Context
• Chapter 2: Victorian Values
• Chapter 3: Making the ‘Modern’ Woman
• Chapter 4: The Right Body
• Chapter 5: Judging Women
• Back Matter