Showing papers in "Journal of Social History in 1990"

The Power of Desire and the Danger of Pleasure: Victorian Sexuality Reconsidered

Abstract: In the early decades of the twentieth century, liberal reformers, political radicals, and sex rebels developed a construction of the repressed Victorian. This stereotype was adopted by scholars and by the 1960s became a kind of orthodoxy.' According to this view, the Victorians denied that women possess sexual feelings; they sought to purge sex of its sensual aspects and restrict its role to a procreative one; Victorian marriage was, finally, described as characteristically cold as the relations between husband and wife were emotionally distant and formal. The Victorians, in other words, were thought to be responsible for creating the sexnegative culture that twentieth century "modems" have rebelled against. This view of the repressed Victorian has been challenged in the last decade or so. In particular, several historians, most notably Carl Degler, Peter Gay and Ellen Rothman have offered major re-interpretations of American Victorian intimate culture.2 With respect to the American white middle-class, they have highlighted the role of personal choice in mate selection and the informal nature of courting among Victorians. They describe Victorian marriage as a consensual arrangement based on love. Husbands and wives sought and frequently found companionship and personal happiness in marriage. Sexual expression was accepted as an integral part of love and marriage. Sex was not, moreover, restricted to a procreative function but was accepted as a sign of love and as a domain of sensual pleasure. Finally, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg has argued, same-sex intimacy and love were often viewed as compatible with heterosexual love and marriage.3 These revisionist accounts provide a much needed corrective in our view of Victorian sexuality. Unfortunately, corrective exercises all too often produce their own simplifications. These revisionist accounts have, I believe, replaced the popular stereotype of the repressed Victorian with an overly sanguine, modem image. Consider Carl Degler's important challenge to the notion that Victorians viewed women as lacking sexual feelings or as passionless. Degler criticizes this stereotype by citing a range of nineteenth century popular medical advice literature and personal documents that acknowledge and affirm the presence of female sexual feelings. Degler is not mistaken but his analysis misses the central focus and complexity of the Victorian debate over female sexuality. To be sure, virtually no advice text denied that women have sexual feelings. Degler cites William Acton's statement that "the majority of women...are not very troubled with sexual feelings of any kind."4 Yet, Acton's consistent position is that female sexual feelings are "very moderate compared to that of the male" and motivated by "the desire for maternity."5 Orson Fowler held that "women's

The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-Century England

Abstract: Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just when they seem engaged in revolutionising themselves and things, in creating something that has never yet existed, precisely in such periods of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits ofthe past to their service and borrow from them names, battle cries and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language...In like manner a beginner who has learnt a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he has assimilated the spirit ofthe new language and can freely express himself in it only when he finds his way in it without recalling the old and forgets his native tongue in the use ofthe

Boy Labour in Late Victorian and Edwardian England and the Remaking of the Working Class

Abstract: The question of skill among the English labour force in the years 1870-1914 has received a good deal of attention during the past decade. It is central to a vigorous and continuing debate about the extent of structural change in the working class, which in turn has important ramifications for the interpretation of the rise of "New Unionism" and class politics. The older view that these years witnessed the creation of a more homogeneous and less stratified working class has been challenged by scholars who posit instead a continuation of the fragmented, hierarchical and occupationAally distinct nature of the Victorian workforce into the prewar period.1 This paper will examine the youth labour force in these years and will attempt to link changes occurring within this group to the wider debate about structural change in the workforce. It will be argued that there was indeed a gradual but widespread extension of skill among the working class, and a relative decline in the position of the artisan elites of the earlier period. This process largely took place through changes in both apprenticeship and boy labour, which had as their overall effect a greater access to skill among unindentured boy labourers and a gradual devaluation of the technical expertise acquired through apprenticeship. These trends in part explain the emergence of a large body of semi-skilled workers, a group which grew out of the growing predominance of new types of boy labour, and around which a less stratified working class could crystallize. The working-class adolescent of late Victorian and Edwardian England was, for at least one third of his time, an actual worker, employed in a multitude of functions among the nations' industries and services. With one exception, however, the phenomenon of boy work has not been the subject of any sustained historical analysis in recent years.2 This is a surprising gap, since a perusal of the literature on social issues during the period would show that it was a major topic of debate. Trade unionists cited the growing use of boys for non-vocational labour as a major source of journeyman unemployment, while middle class observers of the youth scene bemoaned the disappearance of apprenticeship, the progressive loss of control over the youth's life that this involved, and the dangerous amounts of money to be found in the boy labourer's pocket. It was generally feared that industrial developments were tending to create a mass of unskilled or low skilled adult workers with little craft pride or industrial discipline from a growing army of boy labourers unbound by any system of trade teaching and unmotivated by any incentive to develop job skills. These fears disguise the true nature of the processes at work, but they do reveal an awareness among contemporary observers of the dynamic element involved in teenage labour, and the effects that changes in the

The Making of a Police Labour Force

Abstract: Pressured by the labour market, thousands of tall and healthy young men who had attained a certain level of literacy and good references joined the expanding ranks of the Metropolitan Police of London during the course of the nineteenth century. However, a large proportion of them soon found themselves outside the force. The early days, in particular, were marked by a fluid movement in and out of the service. Of the 3400 men who entered the force when it was first established in 1829-1830 only 862 remained in service four years later, some leaving two or three days after they joined.1 A few decades later wastage was still high, though decreasing. The average length of service around 1860 was four years but nearly a quarter of the new recruits had left by the end of their first year of service:2 The problem of high turnover was not unique to the Metropolitan Police but was experienced by other public services, such as the army, railway companies and provincial police forces which emerged in the three decades following the formation of the Metropolitan Police.3 In all these establishments the heavy loss of employees caused great concern. During the latter part of the nineteenth century the police, like other government agencies, became a more permanent place of employment for a growing number of people. To be a policeman became a recognised profession and the police increasingly became a focus of identification for men in uniform. While there was a steady growth in the strength of the Metropolitan Police, the rate of turnover showed an almost constant decline from the mid-1870s.4 From 13.3% in 1860 the annual rate of turnover dropped to a single digit percentage after 1876, maintaining an average rate of 5.7% during the last two decades of the century and declining further to an average rate of 4.7% in the decade before the First World War.5 Increasingly the rate of turnover was explained by natural wastage. From the mid-1870s this became the predominant cause of removals. From 1886 and onwards it consistently exceeded the 50% mark and reached a maximum of 79% in 1909.6 This was the result of a considerable increase in the percentage of men receiving a pension, rising more than fourfold from 1860 to 1913. The police authorities, for their part, relaxed their response to misconduct. Consequently the rate of dismissals declined from an average of 28.9% in the 1880s to 6.1% in 1913, the lowest figure recorded in the period. The rate of voluntary resignations also declined substantially and it was cut by half during the last four decades of the century. Figure 1 shows the distribution of the three major determinants of separation: voluntary resignation, police explusion and natural wastage.

“So Much Sin”: The Decline of Religious Discipline and The “Tidal Wave of Crime”

Abstract: Historians agree that churches played an important role in policing society in colonial America. Church discipline fell into disuse at different times in different regions. In their studies of Massachusetts, David Konig and William E. Nelson found that law replaced religion before the Revolution. Randolph Roth documented the survival of church discipline in Vermont well into the nineteenth century. In the South church discipline hung on even longer. As Edward Ayers wrote, "The churches maintained their role as police and courts of first resort throughout the nineteenth century."1 An examination of criminal prosecutions in churches as well as secular courts in Trigg County, Kentucky, and the surrounding agricultural region known as the Black Patch (for the dark type of tobacco grown there) indicates that the prosecution of crime in the late 1800s intensified because prosecutions shifted from church courts to secular courts, as the old church-based system of keeping order broke down. For a society used to religious discipline, civil courts seemed inadequate. Not long after religious discipline declined in the Black Patch vigilantism broke out. Church discipline survived in the South longer than in the North in part because of the nature of southern crime. David Konig attributed the decline of religious discipline in Puritan Massachusetts to an influx of commercial activity. However, the nature of crime is not just a function of urbanization. Even in cities like New Orleans and Charleston southerners resorted to personal assault more often than northerners.2 In his study of law and lawlessness in Massachusetts and South Carolina, Michael Hindus argued that South Carolinians committed crimes of violence while Massachusetts criminals preferred to commit crimes against property.3 Southern crime grew out of personal relationships and emo? tional lapses; in the North, crime was less personal. Churches could more effectively counsel and police a wayward member of the community than a professional criminal.4 As historian Randolph Roth has noted, deciphering why church discipline fell into disuse when it did is a difficult task. No one advocated ending discipline. The public's mood shifted. Changes in something so nebulous as the "national mood" are almost impossible to document.5 However, several historians have written that a rise of "sentimentalism," replacing the harshly judgmental Calvinism previously dominant, flourished at least by the 1850s.6 Popular literature (including Uncle Tom's Cabin) promoted sentimentalism, which was also a reaction against urban anomie.7 Sentimentalists exposed middle-class readers to the poor and degraded the same people Calvinists had condemned as unworthy of sympathy. One sentimental novelist wrote, "My purpose is to bring to the view of my

The Family Ideology of the Rural Entrepreneurs in Nineteenth Century Japan

Abstract: Rural entrepreneurs occupied an anomolous position in premodern Japanese society. They appeared late in the Tokugawa period (1600-1868), a product and producer of the economic changes that complicated the social and political system of their time. Their address in the countryside suggested peasant origins, but they appeared only where the spread of farm by-employments and access to transportation networks permitted a mixed bag of agriculturai and commercial enterprises including money lending, cloth jobbing, and shipping. They played a crucial role in developing and disseminating technological advances in farming and handicraft industries ? improved designs for specialized tools and more reliable methods for raising silkworms being among their achievements. Without them, it is doubtful that Japan would have become transformed into an industrialized society in the nineteenth century.1 Rural entrepreneurs also dominated local politics and practiced the tea ceremony, poetry writing, painting, and the martial arts. In some areas, they supported samurai dissidents whose assassinations and rebellions preceded the centralization of government under the Meiji emperor in 1868.2 Despite their importance, however, their definition as a class remains amorphous. One approach to the problem of how to define the rural entrepreneurs is to analyze how they defined themselves. This they did in early nineteenth-century family histories and diaries created deliberately, I argue, to establish a "house style" (Jca/u), comprising the household history, its culture, and occupation.3 The term kafu also includes a specific and conscious effort to impose certain sets of values and standards of behavior on family members. It therefore carries ideologi? cal overtones. In this study, the emphasis is not on the ideological hegemony of the ruling class, but on the ideological hegemony created within the household itself. As this process went on, the system of representations inspired by the interests of the family head was given a totalizing comprehensiveness and applicability to all other family members not its originators. Nevertheless, the set of values stemming from the life experiences of disadvantaged members, espe? cially the women, permeated this ideology sufficiently to offer them benefits, material and emotional, to weigh against its constraints on action and position.4 The notion ofkafu had a definite class bias, and it was also bounded by time. No family histories or diaries for rural entrepreneurs were created or preserved before the latter part of the Tokugawa period. As Martine Segalen has pointed out for French peasant families, only families with a hereditary claim to land and position had the wherewithal to become the bearers ofa family ideology,5 and in Tokugawa Japan, few but the wealthy had the means and inclination to define the character of their house and expect it to endure over time.

Peasant Morality and Pre-Marital Relations in Late 19th Century Russia

Abstract: At the close of the nineteenth century, peasant morality in most of rural Russia strictly forbid sexual intercourse outside of marriage, and harshly punished the woman when sexual transgression occured. When others learned that a couple was engaging in pre-marital intercourse, only the woman became subject to ritual shaming, and she was far the more likely to have her chances at marriage severely reduced. In the sense that it was male-dominated and operated according to a double standard, village morality, like village life, was patriarchal. But village life was patriarchal in an older sense as well. In the multi-generational peasant household, the decisions of the bol'shak (its male head) were absolute according to law and custom, so that sons were subordinated to fathers as well as women to men. The father had the authority to dispose of the sexuality of sons as well as daughters, because he held final say as to whom his children would marry. But within this patriarchal context, the behavior of the young appears to have been changing. In the decades following the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, rates of peasant literacy slowly rose, and items representing urban material life and culture, such as samovars and factory-made clothing, could increasingly be seen in peasant cottages. More and more peasants migrated elsewhere in search of wages, or found jobs nearby, in factories that dotted the landscape of rural Russia.' External influences brought new ideas, while wages earned outside the household encouraged youthful self-assertiveness, especially the assertiveness of sons, and sometimes prompted young men and women to contest the authority of their parents in order to claim greater say over their sexual lives. According to the accounts of their contemporaries, the young were particularly likely to do this in the Central Industrial Region (CIR), the most heavily industrialized region of Russia. There, children might insist upon marrying whom they chose, and sons working elsewhere might even dispense with parental permission altogether.2 The young were also more prepared to flout village moral strictures. Attributing the change to wages earned outside the village, and to the erosion of village insularity, a resident of rural Riazan wrote: "Earlier, it was more common to meet young people who were virgins; now it is hard to find a chaste young man, and even such girls are rare."3 According to C. Ia Derunov, a peasant from Poshekhon'e, Iaroslavl', as a result of outmigration to the city, "People who keep their virginity until marriage are growing increasingly rare among the girls as well as the boys."4 In the factory districts of Shuia, Vladimir, where a substantial minority of unmarried women worked year-round in nearby textile mills, the local peasants believed that "Only one or two girls out of a dozen are chaste when they marry."5 Historians of Russia have begun to study peasant sexual morality and behavior, but they have looked at them from the perspective of continuity rather than

Gendered Behavior in Subsistence Riots: The French Flour War of 1775

Abstract: The special significance of women's participation in pre-industrial subsistence riots has generated increased attention in recent years. But we still have little precise information on what forms women's participation took; moreover, we still know next to nothing about either the relation of women's roles and motives to those of men, or the implications of gender-specific forms of protest for the riots themselves. Knowing these points would contribute to our understanding of the dynamic of early-modem society in general and of popular protest specifically, for although historians have sometimes ignored or minimized the significance of gender roles in pre-industrial popular movements, the rioters and authorities themselves emphatically did not. This paper, therefore, constructs a collective profile of female and male rioters and analyzes gender-specific forms of participation and theaters of action for a series of riots known as the guerre des farines or Flour War that erupted in the Parisian basin in the Spring of 1775. It compares female and male behavior to assess the logic that underpinned their roles. This analysis of gender-specific behavior generates evidence, otherwise obscured, to support the hypothesis that the Flour War, while taking the traditional form of the subsistence riot and focusing on traditional issues, also manifested behavior and encompassed grievances that were propelled by profound changes underway in French society, changes accelerating uneven economic and social development, renegotiating local political relations, and reshaping constructions of gender.' The Flour War incorporated an unprecedented degree of violence in the countryside, in addition to the predictable upheaval in market towns and cities. Within this expanded crucible, reactions intensified as men appeared in significant numbers, sometimes constituting a large majority. This unexpected development excited an intense reaction among victims and authorities alike,2 for prior to the Flour War, subsistence riots were predominantly female terrain.3 That so many men swelled the protesting ranks in 1775 and played prominent roles suggests a changing outlook, and indeed the explanation for this male behavior lies in a deteriorating male status4 among the menu peuple that subjected them to concerns similar to those of their wives, sisters, mothers and daughters. Men were prepared to face massive repression from authorities who saw them as politically more dangerous than women even as their precarious material and social conditions drove them to embrace traditional female responses to a subsistence crisis. When they acted in great numbers and in specific spheres, however, men further charged the movement with political significance in the eyes of the Ancien Regime state.