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The struggle for the breeches : gender and the making of the British working class / Anna Clark

Author
Clark, Anna
Published
Berkeley : University of California Press, [1995]
Copyright Date
©1995
Physical Description
1 online resource (xv, 416 pages) : illustrations
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Contents
1. Introduction -- pt. 1. Women and Men in Plebeian Culture. 2. Setting the Stage: Work and Family, 1780-1825. 3. Men and Women Together and Apart: Plebeian Culture and Communities. 4. Plebeian Sexual Morality, 1780-1820. 5. The Struggle for the Breeches: Conflict in Plebeian Marriage -- pt. 2. The Search for Solutions. 6. Sin and Salvation: Men, Women, and Faith. 7. The Struggle over the Gender Division of Labor, 1780-1826. 8. Manhood and Citizenship: Radical Politics, 1767-1816. 9. A Wider Vision of Community, 1815-1820 -- pt. 3. Domesticity and the Making of the Working Class, 1820-1850. 10. Sexual Radicalism and the Pressure of Politics. 11. Equality or Domesticity: the Dilemma for Labor. 12. Chartism: Domesticity and Politics. 13. Chartism and the Problem of Women Workers. 14. A Difficult Ideal: Domesticity in Popular Culture and Practice -- 15. Conclusion -- Appendix on 1841 Glasgow Census Sample.
Summary
Linking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a "struggle for the breeches." The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed significant changes in notions of masculinity and femininity, the sexual division of labor, and sexual mores, changes that were intimately intertwined with class politics. By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history. Going beyond the sterile debate about whether economics or language determines class consciousness, Clark integrates working people's experience with an analysis of radical rhetoric. Focusing on Lancashire, Glasgow, and London, she contrasts the experience of artisans and textile workers, demonstrating how each created distinctively gendered communities and political strategies. Workers faced a "sexual crisis," Clark claims, as men and women competed for jobs and struggled over love and power in the family. While some radicals espoused respectability, others might be homophobes, wife-beaters, and tyrants at home a radical's love of liberty could be coupled with lust for the life of a libertine. Clark shows that in trying to create a working class these radicals closed off the movement to women, instead adopting a conservative rhetoric of domesticity and narrowing their notion of the working class
Subject(s)
Genre(s)
ISBN
9780520919051 (electronic bk.)
052091905X (electronic bk.)
0520086244 (alk. paper)
9780520086241 (alk. paper)
0585339635
9780585339634
0520208838
9780520208834
Bibliography Note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 377-401) and index.
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