Proto-industrialization, sharecropping, and outmigration in nineteenth-century rural Westphalia

This article examines proto-industrialization and the social relations of production in a rural parish in eastern Westphalia that experienced large-scale outmigration to the American Midwest in the mid-nineteenth century. Relying on local and individual-level Prussian tax and emigration records, the study identifies and analyses the socio-economic background of the migrant cohort in terms of proto-industrial activity and peasant economy. Preceded by the downfall of domestic textile industries due to British industrial competition, outmigration was highly selective, drawing individuals from specific socio-economic niches. Landless sharecroppers - linked by debt and labour obligations to better-off peasants and landlords - were underrepresented in the migration, while smallholding peasants and day-labourers - 'free' to commodify their labour power through the sale of home-produced textile products or seasonal migratory labour - were overrepresented. The findings of the study have implications for an understanding of the localized nature of the relations of production in proto-industrial regions, the historical nature of German emigrations, and the dynamics of the German transition to industrial capitalism in the nineteenth century.     

Schools,discipline and community: diary-writing and schoolgirl culture in late nineteenth-century France

Abstract

This article uses the case-study of one French boarding school in the nineteenth century to explore the characteristics of schoolgirl culture. Beginning with an analysis of the multiple effects of constant discipline within the school, the author argues for the existence of rules that sought to develop a sense of moral community among students. The teachers used the ideal of community to transmit feminine but not necessarily domestic values, particularly the virtues of obedience, selflessness and interdependence. But students did not passively absorb these institutional messages. The existence of a student diary, written from 1875 to 1881, allows the author to explore how students absorbed, transformed and challenged both the implicit and explicit messages within schools. The very act of writing her daily life allowed the diary writer, Eugénie Servant, to structure her sense of feminine identity. While Eugénie posed no radical challenge to the prevailing domestic ideology communicated within her school, through her writing, she reworked cultural messages to highlight her own special gifts. This case-study offers an insight, then, into how individuals could refashion the parameters of school life, allowing forms of autonomy that raise questions about the realities of French bourgeois domestic life     

Feminism, suffrage and the nineteenth-century English women's movement

The nineteenth-century English women's movement has usually been studied in terms of its attempts to increase the access of women to the public and political spheres. This approach to the movement ignores the immense concern amongst its members with the private and domestic lives of women. Within the movement there were widely differing views as to how reform in the private sphere and in the public sphere should be integrated.This concern is most clearly evident in the many discussions of marriage which accompanied not only the campaign to reform the legal status of married women, but all the educational, suffrage and employment campaigns as well. These differences came to the fore in the early 1870s in the controversy aroused by the Contagious Diseases Acts. The split within the suffrage movement over this issue reflected differing views as to whether political rights or sexual and moral questions ought to be the primary concern of the movement.     

Lavinia seabrooke,gender and state formation in late nineteenth-century South Australia

The strained relations between feminist organisations and the labour movement have often been attributed to the male dominance of the labour movement rather than the influence of class and political loyalties. This article questions that approach. Using the minutes of the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society, labour movement organisations, and Glasgow City Council and newspaper accounts, it examines relations between the Independent Labour Party in the west of Scotland and the Glasgow and West of Scotland Suffrage Society. These highlight how the class and political loyalties of feminists from this organisation were as destructive to any potential feminist and non-feminist alliances which would improve the lives of working-class women as the ‘male dominance’ of the Independent Labour Party.     

Woman's brain,man's brain: feminism and anthropology in late nineteenth-century France[1]

This article deals with the tangled web of late nineteenth-century French arguments for the biological inferiority of women and of non-whites. These arguments were largely based on an anthropological paradigm: the brain was materialist in its function and brain size was therefore linked to intelligence. The article demonstrates that these arguments were linked to progressive, anticlerical, masculinist Republican views by analysing the anthropological work of a woman anthropologist, feminist and socialist, Dr Madeleine Pelletier, work in which she struggled to subvert the paradigm in its application to women.     

Becoming a Woman: self-fashioning and emotion in a nineteenth-century family correspondence

This article explores the self-fashioning of a bourgeois woman in nineteenth-century France by analysing Geneviève Laurent-Pichat's letters to her father. Geneviève's illegitimacy compounded the emotional difficulties of her path to womanhood, but it also illuminates the processes by which bourgeois girls learned emotional self-management and shaped a self that fitted their assigned social position. Geneviève's letters also enable a reassessment of the role of letter-writing in women's self-fashioning. Engaging in family correspondence was central to the upbringing of middle-class girls, but its protocols reinforced the norms of conventional femininity. Family correspondence thus directed opportunities to explore and constitute the self into acceptable channels, creating a paradoxical feminine self whose fulfilment lay in self-denial.     

‘First wave’ feminism in nineteenth-century France: Class, family and religion

The history of ‘first wave’ feminism in France raises several questions of relevance to the contemporary women's movement. Organized French feminism began during the struggle to replace a Catholic monarchy with a rationalistic, republican form of government. Because of the allegiance of most Frenchwomen to the church, however, even the republican and socialist supporters of feminist reform in educational institutions and in civil rights opposed political participation by women. Feminists, who themselves emphasized reforms in family law and economic opportunities, formed numerous organizations, published journals and held national and international meetings, but remained less a movement than a mosaic of leaders and groups divided by class, religion and personal rivalry. More importantly, they were estranged from the majority of Frenchwomen by questions pertaining to the relationship of women to the traditional patriarchal family, which continued to play a dominant role in the religious, economic and social life of the country. Internal conflict developed over protective legislation and women's ‘right to work’, while external opposition centered about the politically reactionary potential of religious women, and the alleged ‘anti-patriotic’ individualism of those who rejected motherhood as the ‘natural vocation’ and only career of women. By pitting feminism against a particular form of the family, antifeminists obscured the reality of women's oppression and succeeded in alienating the potential support for feminism of most Frenchwomen.     

The role of debt,death and dispossession in world-ecological transformations: swidden commons and tar capitalism in nineteenth-century Finland

ABSTRACT

This article theorises about the ways in which commodity frontiers replace forest commons. New insights are offered into the role of debt, enclosures, the death of human and extra-human natures, and the role of the state in historical processes through an analysis of historical material and recent scholarship on eastern Finland's role in global capitalist expansion in the nineteenth century. The article contributes to the general study of commons and the expansion of capitalist world-ecology. We discuss how swidden commons were more sustainable than generally assumed. The article provides an original theoretical framework for studying world-ecological transformations. We argue that a study of debt, death and dispossession – which we call the three work-horses of tar capitalism – can shed new light on the expansion of commodity frontiers.     

Family law,family law politics and family politics

The analysis of state institutions where the state is geared towards the patriarchal family shows that it aims—in the case of the Federal Republic of Germany, at least—at abandoning women to a civic freedom where they lack protection and real rights. Women are ‘emancipated’ in the true sense of the word by the liberalisation of divorce laws, which is accompanied by drastically reducing maintenance claims of divorced women.This development which—at first glance—seems to be in men's interests only, at the same time assists in the development of conditions where women, historically placed in the position of object, can gain the position of subject and lead a fight for equal changes in a society that guarantees to them (though only on paper) legal equality. These conditions will make women fight to gain effective equality.Every effort is made through family politics and the application of patriarchal family ideology to force women to retire rather than fight. However, all these legal and ideological efforts will finally be in vain, because a family ideology that pretends protection and security, while the law systematically cuts down this protection, cannot be sufficiently strong to fool the female half of the population.     

Women's employment and industrial organisation: commercial lace embroidery in early nineteenth-century Ireland and England

Abstract

The early nineteenth century saw expanding work opportunities for women in commercial lace embroidery in Britain. This article traces the connection between the development of commercial lace embroidery in several locations – Nottingham, Essex and Limerick. Despite the fame of the Irish industry, it has received almost no academic attention. The differing structures of the Irish and English industries are examined. Aspects of lace manufacture highlight the increasing emphasis on cleanliness and the respectability of women's work in the nineteenth century. The authors suggest that to appreciate fully the impact of the Industrial Revolution on women's employment opportunities, we must look to the periphery of the national economy, as well as the centre.