Jane Lewis. Women in England, 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Joan Perkin. Victorian Women. London: John Murray, 1993.
Judith Walkowitz. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, class, and the state. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.
Part I: Clark and Walkowitz
The inclusion of those who have typically been excluded has been a common theme in the historiography of British social history since E.P. Thompson. Yet, while Thompson has done a wonderful job in reconstructing the past of artisan politics and culture in his classic The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage Books, 1966), he has come under under serious criticism over the last twenty years for omitting women and gender from his study. Historians such as Anna Clark, Jane Lewis, Joan Perkin and Judith Walkowitz, among countless others, have sought to fill this void. All four argue that women played a pivotal role in Victorian class formation, but disagree on the nature and the effect(s) of these roles. Paralleling Thompson's study, Anna Clark sees sexual conflict among working class men and women as key in the forming of that class identity. In many cases, the victimization of females paralleled the perceived "victimization" shared by many working-class males. While sexual struggle and misogyny is also evident in Judith Walkowitz' work, Walkowitz--Clark's dissertation supervisor--argues, on the other hand, that common views of prostitutes as victims is mostly mistaken. Rather, there was much negotiation and bargaining between prostitute and customer and between prostitutes and broader society. While both Clark and Walkowitz focus mainly on the working class, Jane Lewis and Joan Perkin incorporate other classes into their studies. But while Lewis argues that there were many nuances in the power structures of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Britain, Perkin maintains that Victorian Britain was strictly a patriarchal society, one with much misogyny and discrimination against women.
Clark begins by critiquing E.P. Thompson for offering a melodramatic account of the making of the working class, of the artisan political activists as "rational heroes." [1] In reality, Clark argues, these artisans were anything but rational, and the narrative was fundamentally tragic. Instead of being a struggle against Pitt [the Younger, the Prime Minister from 1783-1801], the struggle was one "for the breeches," fought as much between members of the same class as against other ones. This struggle was fought in all aspects of working-class culture and life. Since both wife and husband in a working-class househole were usually needed to work to make ends meet, marriage was often a business partnership. [2] Herein lay the problem though, as the ideal of patriarchy permeated through artisan and working-class culture. The conflict between the idea and the reality, Clark suggests, aggravated spousal violence. [3] This was the ugly face of the "struggle for the breeches."
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