Technology and the housewife in nineteenth‐century America

ALICE JAMES: A BIOGRAPHY by Jean Strouse. Boston. Houghton, Mifflin, 1980. 367 pp. ($15.00).

THE DEATH AND LETTERS OF ALICE JAMES edited by Ruth Bernard Yeazell. Berkeley. University of California Press, 1981.214pp. ($12.95)

CONVERSATIONS WITH KATHERINE ANNE PORTER by Enrique Hank Lopez. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1981). 326 pp., $14.95.     

Popular culture,symbolism and rural radicalism in nineteenth‐century France

This article explores the relationship between the modernisation of economic life, collective protest and politics and the centuries‐old pattern of popular festivals and rituals. The rise of social‐democratic republicanism among the small peasants of Mediterranean France in the mid‐nineteenth century did not occur at the expense of popular culture. The reconciliation of these two mainsprings of collective life was facilitated by the use of symbolic modes of public behaviour, investing politics and popular culture with mutually reinforcing potency. Only in later decades did socio‐economic and political developments decay this culture.     

Social change and social conflict in nineteenth‐century England: The use of the open‐closed village model

Following earlier articles on social change and conflict in rural England 1780–1850, we assert the relevance of the open‐closed model of social structure, particularly to the study of Burwash by Wells [1981]. This paper demonstrates that no parish was insulated from economic and other influences exerted in and by neighbouring parishes. More especially, although open parishes challenged the upper Establishment, they were not devoid of internal strife, since different interests were not subject to the overriding influence of the large landowners who dominated the populations of closed parishes.     

Peasants and conflict in nineteenth‐century rural England: A comment on recent articles

This note replies to two previous contributions by Mick Reed in the Journal of Peasant Studies. The author agrees with Reed on the importance of family labour to the peasantry. While recognising that subsistence was significant, he cannot, however, agree that peasants stood outside the capitalist economy, since they depended on the market for the bulk of their living. However, within the capitalist economy the distinction between the peasant and estate systems is important, making attention to the open‐closed model a necessary part of studies such as those of Roger Wells and Mick Reed. In this context, the author asserts a more limited role for the concept of ‘conflict’, by distinguishing it from ‘friction’.     

Land,kinship and identity: The cultural roots of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland

This paper seeks to uncover the underlying causes of agrarian agitation in eighteenth‐ and nineteenth‐century Ireland. It argues, in contrast to existing explanations, that rural unrest was a highly complex form of popular protest, disciplined and with clear objectives. These objectives centred on the Irish peasantry's defence of traditional rights and customs with regard to the ownership, occupation and use of the land. It is further argued that these rights and customs were in turn grounded upon a system of social norms, beliefs and obligations which governed the relationship between land, kinship and identity in Irish peasant communities.     

One History or Many Herstories? Gender politics and the history of physiotherapy's origins in the nineteenth and early twentieth century

Compared to other professional groups in the healthcare sector, physiotherapists seldom use historical references in their efforts to define or empower their profession's identity. This article shows that the gender politics of physiotherapy is central in attempting to answer why this is the case. As illustrated, the gender mechanisms of the professionalizing of physiotherapy consisted of two co-existent developments—homosocial, or professional rivalry between men of differing professional scientific backgrounds—and heterosocial, where women competed against men in order to re-legitimize their professional occupation. Focusing mainly on Sweden but with references to England for comparison, the article brings together masculinity studies with women's history in order to show how the demasculinization of physiotherapy as a profession benefitted women in certain ways while disadvantaging male physiotherapists.     

Beyond stereotypes: Mary Wilkins Freeman's radical critique of nineteenth‐century cults of femininity

MARY SHELLEY &; FRANKENSTEIN; THE FATE OF ANDROGYNY by William Veeder. (The University of Chicago Press, 1986), Cloth, $22.50

THE FEMALE MALADY: WOMEN, MADNESS, AND ENGLISH CULTURE, 1830–1980 by Elaine Showalter. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), 312 pp., 29 illustrations.

PATRIARCHAL STRUCTURES IN SHAKESPEARE'S DRAMA by Peter Erickson. (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1985) xii + 209 pp. $22.00

RECLAIMING A CONVERSATION: THE IDEAL OF THE EDUCATED WOMAN by Jane Roland Martin. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); ALMA MATER: DESIGN AND EXPERIENCE IN THE WOMEN'S COLLEGES FROM THEIR 19TH‐CENTURY BEGINNINGS TO THE 1930s by Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz. (New York: Knopf, 1984); IN THE COMPANY OF EDUCATED WOMEN: A HISTORY OF WOMEN AND HIGHER EDUCATION IN AMERICA by Barbara Miller Solomon. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).     

Clash of resource use regimes in Colonial Assam: A nineteenth‐century puzzle revisited

In the nineteenth‐century the British colonial government in Assam tried to change the land titles of Assamese peasants from annual leases to decennial leases. But Assamese peasants mostly abandoned their claim to their land after a single harvest. The peasants’ behaviour gives a clue to the impact of the colonial land settlement project whose major effect was to eliminate the access of shifting cultivators and hunter‐gatherers of the Brahmaputra Valley and the surrounding hills to most natural resources. The major beneficiary of land settlement were the tea planters. The behaviour of the Assamese peasant reflected the habits formed by the old resource use regime.     

London as text: Eighteenth‐century women writers and reading the city

Moral convention required that the eighteenth‐century English novelist express disapproval of the opportunities London afforded women for mobility, deception, and independence. Women novelists of the period, however, subverted this code by depicting urbanized heroines who gain forbidden knowledge about male and female sexuality and social roles, and are thus able to manipulate convention rather than merely following it. Examination of five novels of the period — two by men, three by women — demonstrates that male and female novelists, while allegedly working within the same moral framework, generated vastly different moral texts out of the complex semiotic of the London environment. As the novel gained in respectability, women novelists’ use of the London convention became on the surface more conventional, and their heroines’ attitudes toward urban mores more disapproving, but subversive alternative behaviors are still depicted in late eighteenth‐century novels.     

‘Equal Laws Based upon an Equal Standard’: the Garrett Sisters,the Contagious Diseases Acts,and the sexual politics of Victorian and Edwardian feminism revisited

Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836–1917), co-founder of the London School of Medicine for Women, and Dame Millicent Garrett Fawcett (1847–1929), leader of the constitutional suffrage movement, were centrally involved in the Victorian and Edwardian campaign for women's equality. Both women attempted to maintain a separation between the suffrage movement and the sexualized realm of the female body, which was subject to state intrusion during the debates over the Contagious Diseases Acts and again during the force-feeding of imprisoned suffragettes some forty years later. But the Garretts had to negotiate the intersection of gender, class, and sexual politics in order to advance the cause of feminist social reform.     

Rethinking the livret d’ouvriers: time,space and ‘free’ labor in nineteenth century France

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses the control of labor mobility through the livret d’ouvriers (1803–1890): a sort of internal passport aiming to subordinate workers’ circulation to the abidance of contract terms. The effective enforcement of livrets had a limited scope for various reasons. Nevertheless, those same difficulties offer a privileged perspective from which to analyze the shifting meanings of freedom and coercion in relation to labor poverty. The politics of identification show that it has been necessary to politically act on the spatial organization of productive processes in order to control labor through time, reacting to workers’ mobility as a specific form of collective bargaining. Through the lens of labor defection we see the emergence of a form of integration deriving from the cash nexus, the vehicle of market concurrence. Such integration calls for a form of control which cannot be subsumed within common law and that is rather axed on the modulation of market pressure – which we analyze through the 1850 debate over advance pay. From this perspective, the issues of breach of contract, police identification and debt insolvency allow to rethink the notion of coercion beyond its penal criminalization and, consequently, to frame the continuities between the police des manufactures, and the modern welfare State.     

The peasant image and agrarian change: Representations of rural society in nineteenth‐century French painting from millet to van Gogh

In the upsurge of rustic themes in French painting during the second half of the nineteenth century is articulated a range of urban responses to agrarian and industrial transformation of country and city at the time. The recreation through art of ‘peasant culture’ was rooted in preoccupations about work and production, changing social relations and forms of sociability, the idea of the nation and the growth of political consciousness. This article examines some of the processes underlying the abundant production of peasant images ‐ the role of patronage, the growing importance of contemporary art criticism in formulating and diffusing values and sensibilities — as well as the complex and, at times, contradictory strains within the iconography of rural life in nineteenth‐century French art.     

Gendering the union: imperial feminism and the ladies’ land league

The Act of Union of 1800, establishing Westminster control over Irish affairs, had important repercussions for the development of feminism within nineteenth-century Ireland, as well as contributing towards adifferentiation of Irish from British feminism. Feminism within Ireland was shaped by class, religion and racial identification: one strand followed theBritish model of Protestant philanthropy, while the other was concerned with asserting women's right to take part in nationalist political struggle. ‘Imperial’ feminists in Britain and Ireland, concerned with establishing their right to take part in the affairs of the ‘nation’, perceived those Irish who rejected British imperial rule as uncivilised, reserving sympathy for those whose economic position was threatened by the activities of those who campaigned against the landlord system. The period of the Land War of 1879–82 illustrates these conflicting discourses. The subsequent decline of imperial power in Ireland can be traced through a gradual change within Irish feminism from an initial support for the Union to a later embrace of nationalism, as young middle-class women, many from Catholic backgrounds, became involved in the movement     

Juveniles in the rural work force of sixteenth‐century castile

Peasant children in sixteenth‐century Castile helped their families with various domestic chores and agropastoral jobs. Used as unpaid workers, they enabled the typical peasant family to diversify its activities, and often to raise its standard of living. Hired juvenile workers were also quite important in Golden Age Castile. These seemingly entered the job market because their own families lacked the resources to enable them to remain at home. The experience of active participation in productive activities served all juvenile workers, whether paid or unpaid, as a sort of apprenticeship in preparation for adult membership in the peasant community.     

‘The Defection of Women’: the New Zealand Contagious Diseases Act repeal campaign and transnational feminist dialogue in the late nineteenth century

Over the past decade, historians have situated feminist reformers’ efforts to dismantle the British imperial contagious diseases apparatus at the heart of the transnational turn in women's history. New Zealand was an early emulator of British prostitution regulations, which provoked an organised repeal campaign in the 1880s, yet the colony is seldom considered in these debates. Tracing the dialogue concerning the repeal of contagious diseases legislation between British and New Zealand feminists in the 1890s, this article reaffirms the salience of political developments in the settler colonies for metropolitan reformers. A close reading of these interactions, catalysed by the Auckland Women's Liberal League's endorsement of the Act in 1895, reveals recently enfranchised New Zealand women's desire to act as model citizens for the benefit of metropolitan suffragists. Furthermore, it highlights the asymmetries that remained characteristic of the relationship between British feminists and their enfranchised Antipodean counterparts.