The Gentleman's Daughter (2 page)

Some have built on the tale of woman's divorce from useful labour to assert that the early eighteenth century saw the ‘new domestic woman’ step forward to take the hand of the new economic man:

Scholars of English literature have tried to chart the construction of
domesticated femininity, although there is a certain confusion as to whether the new domestic woman was the epitome of bourgeois personality, or was an ornament shared by the middling ranks and the landed. Whatever her social background, it is agreed that the sweet domesticate was created ‘in and by print’. The most impressive study of early eighteenth-century periodicals concludes that ‘during the eighteenth century, as upper and middle-class Englishwomen increasingly began to participate in the public realm of print culture, the representational practices of that print culture were steadily enclosing them within the private sphere of the home’.
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Another influential body of writing on women's history assumes that it was the years 1780–1850 that saw the rise of ‘separate spheres’; years, it is argued, during which the everyday worlds of men and women were definitively separated, as a result of industrial capitalism and the emergence of a class society. Propertied men came to exult in the public sphere of business and affairs, safe in the knowledge that domestic femininity kept the home fires aflame. Meanwhile, privileged women abandoned all enterprise, estate management and productive housekeeping to their servants in order to devote themselves to decorative display. Thus, Mrs Average led a sheltered life drained of economic purpose and public responsibility. Cramped by custom, corset and crinoline, she was often a delicate creature, who was, at best, conspicuously in need of masculine protection, and, at worst, prey to invalidism and hysteria. And yet she abjured self-indulgence, being ever attentive and subservient to the needs of her family. Only in her matronly virtue and radiant Christianity did she exercise a mild authority over her immediate circle. She was immured in the private sphere and would not escape until feminism released her.
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As a story of change, this saga could be undermined at many points,
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but possibly the most damaging weakness is the fact that all these accounts, irrespective of the period they pin-point as the key moment of change, rest unquestioningly on the assumption that a thundering commercial or industrial revolution created a new gender order, indeed
the
modern gender system, in the very era under consideration. So, if the literature is read as a whole, it is hard to avoid the impression that the spheres definitively separated and the new domestic woman was born in virtually every century since the end of the Middle Ages. Like the insidious rise of capitalism, the collapse of community, the nascent consumer society and the ever-emerging middle class, the unprecedented marginalization of wealthier women can be found in almost any century we care to look. When confronted with the numerous precedents, nineteenth-century historians of this phenomenon may claim that early modern developments represent
only the germ of what was to come on a grand scale for the Victorian middle class. But the obvious problems of periodization which result cannot be brushed aside with the explanatory catch-all of ‘uneven development’. The problem is exemplified if we try to reconcile arguments about early modern Norfolk with assertions about nineteenth-century Suffolk.
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Are we to believe that women were driven out of a public sphere of production and power in one district in the seventeenth century, while just over the county border the same development was delayed by well over a hundred years? Surely uneven development of this magnitude would have raised some contemporary comment, or at the very least female migration? The determination of authors to claim that the single turning point in gender history conveniently occurred in the period of their own book means that chronological inconsistencies continue to abound. They will persist until the quest for
the
instant when modernity began is acknowledged to be fruitless.

In any case, the apocalyptic economic revolution so often invoked as the deep cause of the trouble, does not look quite so earth-shattering in the light of new research. Startling, all-consuming transformation may live on in the textbooks and the imagination, but a convincingly revised economic history has stressed the distinctively gradual growth of commerce and manufacturing in Britain since at least the fifteenth century. Furthermore, a closer look at the operation of early modern businesses raises doubts about the conviction that female enterprise decayed substantially between 1700 and 1850. First, it is clear that the explanatory power given to the notion of the separation of the home and workplace is unwarranted. If industrial change had involved a simple linear transition from family workshop to factory then certainly this process could have been devastating, but, as D.C. Coleman remarked in another context, there were many key early modern enterprises which simply could not be performed in a cottage by husband, wife and children. In mining, ship-building, iron smelting, pottery firing, glass blowing, paper making, soap boiling, fulling wool and so on, the place of work was of necessity divorced from bed and board from the very inception of the industry. Moreover, the factory was far from being the normal unit of production in the mid-nineteenth century.
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Economic change followed many roads and did not arrive at a single destination. Second, when we consider those businesses that women pursued in their own right, continuity is again more apparent than change. Studies of fifteenth-century York and seventeenth-century London reveal a picture not so different from the 1851 census, with urban women already clustered in the so-called feminine trades: petty retail, food and drink, and textiles. One would search long
and hard for significant numbers of female goldsmiths, blacksmiths, cabinet-makers, curriers and so on at any point in British history. Interestingly, single women were prominent amongst rentiers, investors and money lenders, suggesting that wealthier women had long found trade an unappetizing option.
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But if female withdrawal from active involvement in a business was a likely consequence of increasing family wealth then any study of an expanding business, be it in fourteenth-century Norwich, seventeenth-century London or nineteenth-century Birmingham, would be likely to show a reduction over three generations in the
formal
participation of female members of the owning family. Of course, only genuine comparative research will substantiate this suggestion, but it is already clear that a lost golden age of prestigious, highly profitable and wide-ranging female work is a chimera.
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A second area of critical weakness for the domesticity thesis concerns the interpretation of contemporary commentary. Much weight has been placed upon an apparent increase in texts grumbling about unemployed womanhood, a muttering which grew to a clamour from the 1690s. A flashy villainess swanked across the pages of plays, commentaries and complaining sermons: the London woman who scorned productive labour for the sake of consumerism and indulgence. However, the redundant woman of the Augustan period, languishing on her sofa, may not have been as novel a creature as the indictments suggest. More likely, it was her flamboyant habits that were new and public, rather than her actual lack of gainful occupation. It could even be argued that such criticism was merely another symptom of the general moral panic of the late seventeenth century about the decline of Spartan virtue and the rise of luxurious corruption, rather than evidence of any new social group or practice. After all, in their fears about the vicious consequences of wealth, writers fell back upon stereotypical images of devouring, unreasonable womanhood, images that were as old as Eve herself – something which suggests we might better view such accusations as testimony to the persistence of male anxieties, rather than a simple guide to female behaviour.
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Of course, scholars of print might also suggest that the rising tide of complaint and conduct literature owes far more to the relaxation of censorship after the failure to renew the Licensing Act in 1695 than it does to the outbreak of a new disease called female parasitism.

If this flowering of public discussion was not necessarily a simple reaction to the mass female abandonment of active enterprise, was it subsequently responsible for the creation of an entirely new model of feminine behaviour? Did the
grande peur
about female ostentation and publicity lead to the inscription of a new pattern of virtuous, domesticated
womanhood? To be sure, many scholars have detected a growing emphasis on women's innate moral superiority and a declining preoccupation with uncontrollable female sexuality in Augustan literature. Backed by an authoritative survey of advice literature written between 1670 and 1750, Fenela Childs argues that cloying idealization set in from 1700, although she stresses the obvious but important point that visions of female nature had for centuries oscillated between impossibly pure and irredeemably depraved.
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Similarly, Marlene Legates suggests that we should not overestimate the novelty of eighteenth-century views of women. She argues that chastity and obedience were ancient prerequisites of the ideal woman, that a belief in woman as redeemer was as old as courtly love, that positive views of marriage had co-existed with explicit misogyny in classical and humanist thought, and that even the sentimental themes of love, marriage and virtue under siege had a long pedigree. Legates concludes that the eighteenth century saw not so much a dramatic break with past assumptions about the good woman, as a compelling dramatization of her traditional predicament.
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Indubitably, eighteenth-century literature contains much that nineteenth-century historians might identify as ‘domestic ideology’, yet these themes were far from revolutionary. The dialectical polarity between home and world is an ancient trope of western writing; the notion that women were uniquely fashioned for the private realm is at least as old as Aristotle.

It is important to remember that periodicals, novels, sermons and conduct books contained many other ideological messages. Jean Hunter's examination of the
Gentleman's Magazine
(the most widely read and successful of all eighteenth-century journals) reveals much less celebration than one might expect of the joys of life within the narrow confines of domestic office. As she concludes, ‘if three out of every four writers who touched on the woman question bemoaned the plight of women and suggested concrete reform measures, perhaps the traditional, conservative ideal of woman had less widespread support and more opposition in the eighteenth century than has been thought’.
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Even the prevailing didactic lectures and venomous attacks were probably subject to multiple or selective readings. Who can say how the female reader received the exaggerated complaints in the
Gentleman's Magazine
of July 1732 ‘that women were seeking to supplant men in some of their prerogatives. They were wearing breeches, riding astride, shaking hands, ordering men to get the coffee rather than serving them as they should, carrying pistols, and even taking the initiative in love affairs.’
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Can we assume that all readers recoiled with fastidious horror at such an excitingly Amazonian prospect? Furthermore, sermons and satires were hardly the only publications on the market,
and female taste might be just as eclectic as male. The female reader could study sermons preaching domesticity in one mood and philosophies praising active citizenship in another. Take the example of Mary Chorley. In 1776 in Lancaster this ten year old admired the
Life of William Penn
, as one might expect of a Quaker, but she also thrilled to the rigorous public spirit of Plutarch's heroes – ‘Publicola was the most virtuous citizen and greatest general Rome ever had. He was tried at the expense of the public’ By thirteen she was gasping at the goodness of Richardson's
Sir Charles Grandison
(1754) – ‘Oh what a noble man Sir Charles Grandison is I do think …’ – and laughing at the drolleries of
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
(1771).
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We should not presume without evidence that women (or men) mindlessly absorbed a single didactic lesson like so many pieces of unresisting blotting-paper. Nor should we see the promulgation of domesticity as cast-iron proof that women were domesticated. Viewed from another perspective, the increased harping on the proper female sphere might just as easily demonstrate a concern that more women were seen to be active outside the home rather than proof that they were so confined. In fact, the broadcasting of the language of separate spheres was almost certainly a shrill response to an expansion in the opportunities, ambitions and experience of Georgian and Victorian women – a cry from an embattled status quo, rather than the leading edge of change.

Is ‘separate spheres’ useful as description of women's lives? Did the wives and daughters of eighteenth-century elites resemble domestic angels, confined to a private sphere? Certainly it is incontrovertible that the majority of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century ladies were primarily associated with home and children, while gentlemen controlled the majority of public institutions. Indeed in no century before the twentieth did women enjoy the privileges that nineteenth-century feminists sought – the full rights of citizenship. Public life for Georgian gentlemen invariably assumed the taking of office, but there was no formal place for their wives in the machinery of local government. However, this rough division between private and public could be applied to almost any century or any culture – a fact which robs the distinction of its analytical purchase.
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If ‘separate spheres’ boils down to the observation that women are obliged to spend more time at home with children while men appropriate greater institutional recognition and reward, then separate spheres is an ancient phenomenon, which is certainly still with us. These deep-seated and enduring inequalities are to be deplored, but they do not capture the specificities of gender relations in a particular social group, country or century.