1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996247907603316

Autore

Clark Anna

Titolo

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

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Berkeley, : University of California Press, c1995

ISBN

0-520-91905-X

0-585-33963-5

Edizione

[1st pbk. printing 1997.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (xv, 416 p. ) : ill. ;

Collana

Studies on the history of society and culture ; ; 23

Disciplina

305.5/62/0941

Soggetti

Working class - Great Britain - History

Sex role - Great Britain - History

History

Great Britain Social conditions 19th century

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references (p. 377-401) and index.

Nota di contenuto

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.

Sommario/riassunto

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.