Making Respectable Women: Changing Moralities, Changing Times [1st ed.] 9783030606480, 9783030606497

Table of contents :
Front Matter ....Pages i-xiv
Chapter 1: The Context (Mary Evans)....Pages 1-16
Chapter 2: Victorian Values (Mary Evans)....Pages 17-39
Chapter 3: Making the ‘Modern’ Woman (Mary Evans)....Pages 41-69
Chapter 4: The Right Body (Mary Evans)....Pages 71-89
Chapter 5: Judging Women (Mary Evans)....Pages 91-97
Back Matter ....Pages 99-108

Citation preview

Making Respectable Women Changing Moralities, Changing Times Mary Evans

Making Respectable Women

Mary Evans

Making Respectable Women Changing Moralities, Changing Times

With Contributions by Kimberley Beach

Mary Evans London School of Economics LSE Gender Institute, UK London, UK

ISBN 978-3-030-60648-0    ISBN 978-3-030-60649-7 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Pattern © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgements

As the title pages of this book suggest, it is a work which has benefited in important ways from the work of Kimberley Beach, who did a great deal of work on the research in archive material from print journalism. She has also contributed in equally significant ways to discussions about the overall thesis of the book and the various ways in which people from different generations interpret aspects of social change. I would also like to thank Imogen Tyler and Beverley Skeggs, who invited me to talk in a seminar at the University of Lancaster; it was an afternoon and evening of richly informed discussion and debate. On another continent my thanks go to Balaganapathi Devarakonda and Tariq Islam—respectively—of the Universities of Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University in India, who organised seminars and lectures at which colleagues from across the world discussed ideas about changing ideas about respectability. All these events made it clear that the ‘respectability’ of women is an endlessly contested and manipulated construct. I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust, whose award of an Emeritus Fellowship made possible the work of this research. Whilst I was working on the project I was also fortunate in the support of the Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics; the endless intellectual vitality of the Department makes it an outstanding location for academic work. The staff of the Women’s Library at the London School of Economics were endlessly helpful, in particular the librarians Indy Bhular, Heather Dawson and Gillian Murphy. An anonymous reviewer spent time reading a draft of this book, and I am extremely grateful to them for their helpful comments. v

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are other individuals who have helped me in various ways whilst I was working on this project; amongst those many people I would particularly like to thank are Elizabeth Cocks, Elizabeth Cowie, Diane Cunningham, Rod Edmond, Martin Hammer, John Jervis, Hazel Johnstone, Sonia Kruks, Diane Lindsay, Jan Lindsay, Christina Lodder, Pat Macpherson, Linda McDowell, Steven Pollock, Susan Rudy, Janet Sayers, Maggie Schaedel, Karen Shook, Jenny Uglow, Clare Ungerson and Anna Whitham. Tom, Cadence, Jamie and Christy were all invaluable.

Contents

1 The Context  1 2 Victorian Values 17 3 Making the ‘Modern’ Woman 41 4 The Right Body 71 5 Judging Women 91 Bibliography99 Index107

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List of Figures

Fig. 1.1 Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2

Son de Flor: Romantic nostalgia. (Source: @sondeflor Instagram, reused with permission) Surplus women: The ‘problem’ of surplus women. (Source: Home Notes, 7 May 1896) Madame: Body work. (Source: The Tatler, 4th June, 1930, (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library; reprinted with permission) Freedom corsetry: The forms of ‘freedom’. (Source: Modern Woman, Vol. XV, March 1935) A youthful necessity: the rewards of youth. (Source: The Tatler, 4 June 1930 (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library; reprinted with permission) Elizabeth Arden: Retaining youth. (Source: The Tatler, 21 June 1939 (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library; reprinted with permission)

5 33 56 64 74 75

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Introduction

This essay is about the ways in which women are judged, and how and why those judgments have changed. The particular judgement at issue is of ‘respectability’ and being ‘respectable’. A central theme is that this judgment is not static; it has changed as new forms of the ‘respectable’ emerge, just as others become redundant. Those changes say much about the gendered implications of shifts in the moral economy of the UK in the historical period from the late nineteenth century to the present day. What is proposed here is that the meaning and the implications of the word ‘respectability’ have altered dramatically in the past one hundred and fifty years, in ways which for some people suggest a greater ‘freedom’, ‘emancipation’ or ‘liberation’. In some obvious and visible ways that much is obvious since it is clear from any glance at the public visual history of women that expectations about the expectations of behaviour and dress of women have shifted. Issues about personal appearance, the making of the self are all, as Beverley Skeggs and Annie Ernaux have pointed out, the ingredients which are central to the moral order of gender.1 But that order changes constantly. To assume that there is a single, hegemonic definition of the ‘respectable’ is questioned here, as is the assumption that moral judgments about women are necessarily always those which are chosen and initiated by women. Women are still being judged, and judged in ways which are often both negative and punitive. The concept of the ‘respectable’ is central to those judgments; it has, as Imogen Tyler has argued in another context, ‘material force’.2

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It should therefore be apparent that this essay does not accept those ‘progress ‘narratives which see only emancipation in the history of women in the UK in the past decades. On the contrary, what is suggested here is that the changing constructions of the ‘respectable’ woman have both enlarged and restricted the possibilities open to women. Thus on the one hand women have been accorded a civic status which is similar to that of men at the same time as institutional contexts have become accessible to both women and men. On the other hand, the expectations about women, in terms of demands about their appearance, the persistence of assumptions about their responsibility for various forms of care and their participation in paid work have become increasingly present as have the levels of media abuse and physical violence. These changes matter because they are central to discussions about a number of questions: how women are judged in a variety of social contexts, what should constitute a feminist agenda, what ‘empowers’ women, in whose interests ideas about women change and what has been lost and/or gained by and for women in that historical arc from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. But above all else two issues dominate the discussion that follows. First, the central theme of ‘what a woman should be’; a definition that is of crucial importance because it is related to legal, political and moral judgments about women and the various forms of social possibilities, definitions and expectations that are derived from them. This is the point where it also has to be acknowledged that an issue confronting everyone, not least those writing about gender, is that of who can define themselves as a ‘woman’. The public discussion about ‘trans’ gender and gender transitions, has opened up debates which have become divisive. Here, the category of ‘woman’ is used inclusively. Second, views about women are part of the fantasies and fears about ourselves and others which inform politics and human agency. The expression ‘zeitgeist’ is widely used to indicate the content of the culture in which we all live. In that culture, gender relations play a central part, a part which is constitutive of more general social relations and foundational to the workings of power and politics.3 That there are connections between authoritarian gender regimes and equally controlling forms of politics is without doubt: of interest here is the more subtle ways in which apparently more liberal societies control and define women and what a woman can be. It should

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also be said here that those same liberal societies often endorse narratives about the ‘empowerment’ of women which serve some groups of women much more than others. Equally, the refusal to see the many social and political connections between men and women assumes a model of the social world which may fail to understand the persistence of policies and behaviour hostile to women.4 In order to trace the continuity of the norm of the ‘respectable’ as defined for women this essay will consider material from historically consecutive periods, in which aspects of the ‘respectability’ of women were made. The ideas that informed this judgement are in some cases transhistorical, in others they are specific to time and place. But in all cases, what we see is the over-arching assumption that distinctions can, and indeed should, be made between those women who are ‘respectable’ and those who are not. There is not one definition of ‘respectability’, but there is a consistent tradition of its existence as a word which is used to judge women. The word may operate as an indication of social division and its work as such has been central to the work of authors such as Lynsey Hanley.5 But the argument here is that it can be used with coercive force across lines of social division to represent more general expectations about women which are neither static nor primarily about distinctions between women. On the contrary, the argument here is that the force of the terms ‘respectable’ and ‘respectability’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been to produce a homogenous model of the ideal woman which can unite rather than divide women, creating a human subject whose other characteristics of class, race, sexuality and age become marginal. The following chapters suggest ways in which ‘respectability’ has been defined for women, but seldom in their interests. The context of this discussion is set out in the Chap. 1, whilst subsequent chapters deal with particular historical instances of ways in which the concept was articulated and enforced, in explicit and implicit ways, on women. The Chapter 2 deals with the work of nineteenth and twentieth emigration societies for women; Chaps. 3 and 4 with the twentieth century making of various ideas about the ‘modern’ woman; Chap. 5 concludes with a discussion of the ways in which the concept of ‘respectability’ has lost many of its previous associations whilst acquiring a new energy.

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Introduction

Central to the discussion are three themes: that ‘paid work’ is assumed to be both empowering for women and constitutive of ‘respectability’; that care work in both the private and public spheres has been marginalised and that coercive and commercialised conventions about the ‘respectable’ appearance of women have emerged. In this, changes in the concept of what constitutes ‘respectability’ have radically transformed expectations, both institutional and individual, about women.

Notes 1. Beverley Skeggs, Formations of Class and Gender: Becoming Respectable (London, Sage, 1997) and ‘The Making of Class and Gender through Visualising Moral Subject Formation’ Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 5, 2006, pp.  965–982; Annie Ernaux, The Years (London, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2008). 2. Imogen Tyler, Sigma: The Machinery of Inequality (London, Zed, Books, 2020). 3. Laeticia Sabsay, The Political Imaginary of Sexual Freedom: Subjectivity and Power in the New Sexual Democratic Turn (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). 4. Lorna Finlayson, ‘Travelling in the Wrong Direction’, London Review of Books, 4 July 2019, pp. 7–10. 5. Lynsey Hanley, Respectable: The Experience of Class (London, Allen Lane, 2016).

CHAPTER 1

The Context

At the time of writing, the UK government and others across the globe, have embraced a form of political economy most generally known as neo-­ liberalism. The impact of that economic ideology, and its core beliefs in a small state, low taxation and limited forms of financial regulation, is generally associated with the last decades of the twentieth century but as Daniel Stedman Jones has shown in his study of the history of neo-liberalism its origins go back much further, in fact to the years between the first and second world wars.1 Forms of economic theory which initially originated in the universities of both Britain and the United States were to take hold of policy makers in the 1970s, bringing to the national politics of the UK aspirations towards de-regulation, free markets and a ‘small’ state. These political aspirations were to form central pillars of UK politics in the 1970s and 1980s. But what Stedman Jones also showed was that there was a person, a gendered person, at the centre of these ideas, a person who was both the object and the instigator of the policies. It is this person who is so important here, not just because this person, autonomous and essentially ‘care-free’ was (and is) male but because of the impact which this ideal had on expectations about women: namely that women should also conform to these characteristics. Any viewer of the Anglo-American television show The Apprentice will immediately see this convergence of expectations: the women use (and are expected to use) the same determined, even aggressive, language of commerce as men; not to do so would be a © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Evans, Making Respectable Women, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7_1

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departure from what are presented as the norms of the active, entrepreneurial citizen. From the principles of neo-liberalism has arisen an articulation of concepts about the ‘citizen’ which both reject and yet collude with previous assumptions about women. The form that the collusion has taken, and still remains is, in all senses, a profitable collusion, and has been twofold: first, a validation of the idea of the feminine as distinct from the masculine. Second, the ongoing assumption of the engagement of women with various forms of care. What has been produced in this situation, and will be explored in the following chapters, is one in which paid work for women has been normalised whilst definitions of the ‘feminine’ have continued to support the identification of women with unpaid care work. State sanctions have enforced the expectation that all adults, regardless of their responsibilities to others, will be in paid work.2 At the same time little or nothing has been put in place to take on that unpaid care work largely performed by women. Decades ago, the sociologist Arlie Hochschild wrote of the ‘double shift’ of women in paid work. Her protest was against the unequal division of domestic labour together with the state’s failure (in her case the United States) to provide effective form of assistance for care work. That situation is no different in the twenty-first century but what has changed—and what will be suggested here—is that a new form of the ‘respectable ‘woman has emerged. In this women are assumed to be ‘care free’ (in the same way as their male counterparts) but also subject to two new forms of constraint. The first is that paid work is the only form of work recognised for all citizens, a moral duty and responsibility over-­ riding others. Second, that the demands of being ‘feminine’ and ‘doing femininity’ have become ever more demanding. Judith Butler and Michel Foucault have both written about disciplinary discourses; the multiple forms which discipline now takes in terms of the female body and the self will be the subject of later chapters.3 The contemporary discussion of women and the feminine, it also has to said, has been further complicated by increasingly heated debate about who can both be called and call themselves a woman. These questions of what a woman should ‘be’, and how a ‘woman’ is made are questions that have occupied and continue to occupy both individuals and institutions. In the twenty-first century, populist and authoritarian regimes are re-­ asserting, through pro-natalist policies, forms of definitions of what women should ‘be’ which many people had assumed to have disappeared.4 Many of those definitions rely on highly essentialist constructions of a

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woman. It is the contention of this essay that in the UK there has been a complex (and contested) shift from this biological essentialism towards its rejection at the same time as anger that previous certainties about the term ‘woman’ can no longer be taken for granted. Amongst those now less than secure certainties is the normative authority, and generalised recognition, of what it means to be a ‘respectable’ woman. It is in this context of the conflicting politics of the early decades of the twenty-first century, that we encounter new ideas about what women should ‘be’. There is a considerable literature about the ‘making’ of women in the UK in the past one hundred and fifty years and much of that literature has been seeped in assumptions, both contemporary and otherwise, that ‘new dawns’ for women are about to arrive and that the history of women can record the abandonment of the old ways and the arrival of the new. At the same time each burst of confident literature about the ‘emancipation’ of women has been accompanied by concerns about ‘emancipation’ going ‘too far’ and disturbing the ‘natural’ gender order. It is in that context that web sites such as that for ‘trad.wives’ asserts the need to replicate the happily domesticated, and domestically confined wife; a woman notable for her visual identification with the 1950s.5 This form of resistance to the possible appearance of ‘new’ women has fascinated and appalled male writers (and some women) for centuries, whilst very few writers, male or female, have until recently engaged with the idea of ‘new’ men. Thus thinking about the ‘respectability’ or otherwise of women is implicitly about defining the ways in which women have been ‘made’ over the past one hundred and fifty years. That ‘making’ of women, as Simone de Beauvoir famously pointed out in 1949 is an essentially social process, shaped by, and shaping, the acceptable forms of womanhood. As another famous woman, Emmeline Pankhurst also remarked, in 1914, ‘Men make the moral code and they expect women to accept it. They have decided that it is entirely right and proper for men to fight for their liberties and their rights, but that it is not right and proper for women to fight for theirs’. Nor, as Mrs Pankhurst might have added, were women allowed, in the established Anglican Church to take any part in the implementation or ordering of this moral code.6 Despite the many differences between these two women, what they are expressing is an idea, central to many in subsequent decades, that the extent of the impact of the ‘natural’ on any human person is often much less than that of the world outside ourselves. So this study is essentially concerned with the ways in which that ‘world outside’ ourselves has shifted its ideas about what women should, and

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should not, be. This should not be taken to imply that there has ever been a single view of the ‘respectable’ woman, nor that there has been, in the UK, that same degree of the authoritarian control of women’s everyday lives that remains apparent in parts of the world today. A reading of biography and social history demonstrates the multiplicity of ways in which for some women it has been possible to ignore or reject the ideals of women’s respectability. In that same reading of history what we meet are those many instances where women claim, in the name of emancipation or ‘progress’, rights which once contested have now become close to compulsory. Such a right is that to paid work. Always essential for millions of women, it was nevertheless long deemed undesirable for mothers. Today however, the adult citizen, male or female, regardless of care responsibilities, is expected to be in paid work for much of their adult life. A desire and need for paid work (in all its many motives) has shifted to a normative assumption about its desirability for male and female citizens. So what presents itself to us about women in the second decade of the twenty-first century is this: that social expectations about male and female people have moved closer together (the assumption of similar aspirations, similar responsibilities to be economically independent) whilst at the same time the traditional expectation of women—that they care for others—has not diminished. This change has occurred at the same time as the meaning and the impact of ideals of the ‘feminine’ and ‘femininity’ have remained as invasive and formative as ever, but have become increasingly policed (through new forms of the media) and commercialised. An aspect of this energetic commercial exploitation of fantasised versions of women as home makers has become evident on Instagram. Core elements of the fantasy are rural life, youth, wealth, white people and heterosexuality. In web sites such as that for ‘the darling academy’, for fashion brands such as Son de Flor, young, white women are pictured smiling happily in largely rural settings, photographs which are interspersed with snapshots of weddings, home cooked food and clothes from the 1950s (Fig. 1.1). This is about aspirations of a highly specific kind; aspirations which are represented through an aesthetic of apparent innocence, lived out in a world far from urban demands.7 The emergence of new and public forms of the possible diversity of womanhood might suggest that the concept of ‘respectability’ for women is no longer solely one that should, in the early twenty-first century trouble us. This is not the view of this study. As the following chapters will suggest there is little doubt that the way in which ‘respectability’ is defined

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Fig. 1.1  Son de Flor: Romantic nostalgia. (Source: @sondeflor Instagram, reused with permission)

for women has changed. But what has not changed is that women remain subject to many expectations and assumptions that differ from those of men. Moreover, although we often assume that those ancient ideals of womanhood (‘angels in the house’ and ‘whores and Madonnas’ for example) are no longer part of the culture of the UK, we have to consider two arguments against this. The first is that although the specifics and the forms of these ideals might have changed, their residual power persists. The second is that new forms of the ‘respectable’ have emerged. These are no longer derived from the contexts of domestic and sexual behaviour but are part of evolving constructions of the citizen in decades increasingly subject to neo-liberal, highly masculinised expectations of the individual subject. As more women have entered the UK work force, it has been widely assumed that this demonstrates a form of social progress which constitutes one of the building blocks of what is regarded as a ‘modern’ society. What is less seldom noted is that those nineteenth century angels

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in the house have become angels in the care homes and the service sector of the UK; expectations of female compassion and domestic competence are no less active today than in the past, if employed in different contexts. Compassion, domestic competence and sexual continence do not themselves of course indicate all that has to be said, then and now, about ‘respectability’. But the keeping of the ‘good home’, the subject of classic texts on housekeeping in 1804 by Maria Rundell and Isabella Beeton in 1861, was as saturated with ideas of energetic engagement with domestic management and improvement as any of its modern counterparts. It is the cluster of these ideas, the ingredients of the making of the idea of the ‘modern’ that has been so influential in directing definitions of the ‘respectable’ woman.8 Central to these ideas about the ‘respectable’ woman and manager of a household is a validation of usefully spent time and, in the case of the text by Maria Rundell, the recognition that not all women had either servants or consistently sufficient means to support their families. Whatever their ‘station’ in life, the duty of women was to ‘make the home a happy refuge’ an assumption which assumes that women are in some sense distant from motives—such as ambition or material greed—which are accepted as normal or even desirable in men. In this division of the moral universe the lot of women has been to represent values identified with the private sphere, most specifically and consistently the care for others. This assumption has often informed social judgments about women: that they are less motivated by political engagements, they are gentler, less inclined to be combative. The idea that there are ‘feminine’ values of altruism and a greater capacity for emotional engagement with others is a longstanding tradition within western, and other, cultures. At the same time, that view has also validated the judgement that women who do engage in politics or public life are in some sense hungry for power in different, and perverted ways, from those of men. Thus what has emerged in the UK in the early twenty-first century is an often contradictory set of expectations about women. On the one hand is the persistence of traditional expectations about women and on the other the more explicitly, and often self-conscious, set of ideas about what ‘modern’ women should be. In this, the culture in which we live has demonstrably both changed and retained its perceptions of women, leaving writers of various contexts considering the issue, put so bluntly by Caitlin Moran in her best selling How To Be a Woman.9 What Moran so perceptively recorded was this confusion: that the making of women remains not just a theoretically complex problem but also one that can be

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uncomfortable and a source of misery for women themselves. Academic work has been no less concerned with the question of how the human should ‘be’: from the making of ‘sensibility’ (in the works of Keith Thomas and Norbert Elias on the eighteenth century), to the part played by women in the making of middle class domestic life in the nineteenth century (in the work of Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff).10 Crucially for the purposes of this study Beverley Skeggs has identified the divisions of the ‘respectable’ and the ‘unrespectable’ articulated through class divisions. But in doing this she also quotes from Michel Foucault’s suggestion that a key element of what constitutes ‘respectability’ comes from the dictates of sexual morality. Skeggs quotes Foucault thus: The middle-class thus defined itself as different from the aristocracy and the working-classes who spent, sexually and economically, without moderation…It differed by virtue of its sexual restraint, its monogamyand its economic restraint or thrift.11

Skeggs goes on in this discussion to suggest some of the ways in which ‘good’ and ‘respectable’ sexuality was formed. But she is also rejecting the implicit view, expressed in the quotation from Foucault, that somehow the working class is not ‘respectable’ in the way that can be taken for granted in the case of the middle class. In doing this and identifying a late nineteenth-­century British literature on ideas about the ‘primitive’, she also alludes to the element of racism in ideas about ‘respectable’. Crucially, the ‘respectable’ are those who are able to exercise control over their bodies; the implication being that those who cannot are most likely to come from those communities who are deemed most similar to the ‘primitive’. The many crude and insulting assertions about families with large numbers of children have always included statements about ‘breeding like rabbits’; the implicit assertion being the identification of people with animals. Women who have written biographical accounts of their own experience of moving between social classes, or being brought up outside ‘normal’ two parent families, have spoken of the emotional toil of assuming, knowing and and attempting to live within the expectations of ‘respectability’. These writers, such as Lynsey Hanley and Carolyn Steedman, writing of their own childhoods and adolescence in the 1950s and 1960s might be deemed as writers of a vanished past. Nevertheless they remain vivid and passionate accounts of the impact of ideas and often unspoken assumptions on individual lives. More recent studies by writers such as Wendy

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Hollway, Beverley Skeggs, Imogen Tyler and Emma Casey are amongst those who have identified the continuation of the social and the collective impact of judgments about the ‘respectability’ of women and very specifically working class women. For example, Wendy Hollway, writing in 1984 remarked that ‘Respectable femininity has formed the cornerstone of normative femininity in western capitalist societies for many centuries’.12 In all these writers, including Caitlin Moran, there is an acknowledgment of the confused, confusing but immensely powerful project of that ‘making’ of women to which de Beauvoir referred. In the work of all these writers there is an explicit and determined challenge to the idea of working class sexual fecklessness, expressed in those pejorative political slogans about ‘welfare mothers’ or ‘benefit cheats’. What Owen Jones has described as the ‘demonisation’ of the white working class in the UK has been a part of this exercise.13 But what those who accept the thesis of working class general degeneracy which Skeggs and others are so powerfully resisting is a consistent sense of nostalgia for a past in which the line between the ‘respectable’ and the ‘unrespectable’ across class lines was possible to enforce. What has occurred, at this point in the twenty-first century, is a social and political paradox in which those who are most outspoken about the lack of both social and sexual virtue on the part of large swathes of the population are also often closely associated with those behaviours in the social world which embody the least moderation. The increasingly ruthless legitimation of the making and keeping of great amounts of wealth, although hardly novel in the course of history, has arguably acquired a positive face: being ‘filthy rich’ is normalised.14 Crucially, the capacity to be ‘filthy rich’ is no longer assumed to be a consequence of birth but of person, a view which implicitly assumes that the reverse—to be without wealth—is similarly a personal and not a structural characteristic. How this issue impacts upon constructions of the ‘respectability’ of women is through two aspects of core contemporary narratives. One is that of the complex validation of the concept of ‘modernisation’, accompanied as it is by a residual nostalgia for the past. That nostalgia is manifested in all kinds of ways—in which dress and the validation of the ‘traditional wife’ are but two—but most particularly in a profound mourning and regret for the passing of a past which is seen as a place of tranquillity, order and the authority of the British Empire. As ever in conservative accounts of the British past, the figure and rhetoric of Winston Churchill plays a central part. In this, the British resistance to Nazi Germany in 1940

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is suggested as the ideal stance for Britain in the twenty-first century, in which Britain will once again assert its power and authority. What this narrative wishes to recover is a place in which the British Empire gave the UK a central place in world politics and where the social order of domestic and public daily life did not include same sex marriage, immigrant populations or the absence of deference to figures of authority. Crucial to many of these narratives is the place of women in them. In the main, women are largely hidden, both as subjects and objects. There are few women in the current politics of the UK amongst those clamoring for a return to the past, one of the many indications which might suggest that nostalgia for the past is a male, rather than a female, habit. Women seldom voice slogans such as ‘take back control’ even though evidence certainly suggests that women, especially older women, sometimes vote with those who express these ideas. This might indicate that for a majority of women the world of the early twenty-first century is a much better place than it was for us in the first half of the twentieth century. Which takes us to a second contemporary narrative which is central to any discussion of changing ideas about women: that of the assumption that there has been ‘progress’ in gender relations in much of the global north, a progress defined by what is construed as the ‘emancipation’ of women. Quite how this is measured differs across theoretical perspectives. The Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has gone so far as saying that the major social change in the west in the twentieth century has been that of the emancipation of women through a greater rate of participation in paid work. As Martin Pugh noted, for Hobsbawm ‘women only count in so far as they are part of the labour force, preferably the organised labour force’.15 Access to voting, to equal rights in marriage and citizenship, improved technologies of contraception, the availability of abortion and the dissolution of prohibitions about the forms of paid work acceptable to women and equal access to higher education are offered by others as evidence for the support of the assertion of emancipation. But just as those changes are part, if not always in their entirety, of all industrialised societies, so other evidence, of various forms of powerful misogyny is a parallel narrative. The following chapters will explore some of the ways in which the ‘respectability’ of women is being made in the context of these past and present narratives and the force of the concept as a source of social legitimacy. Being or not being ‘respectable’, whilst able to make and break lives, can also, and less dramatically, form and curtail aspirations and

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define what is socially acceptable for women. In short, the concept has agency and many authors have spoken and written about the wish—or often the compulsion—to become ‘respectable’ and the ways in which their lives have been directed (or often, as they see it, mis-directed) by the demands of being ‘respectable’. The definition of the concept has changed over time but it has consistently acted as a way in which women have been judged and policed. Moreover, it is a concept which has remained remarkably consistent in terms of the social imperative to define the moral status of women, much more so than men. Thus a second part to this thesis is that definitions and ideals of women are far more porous, far more socially variable than those for men. The importance of recognising this is that it helps us to understand the ways in which various forms of misogyny persist. The very instability of aspects of the moral definition of womanhood, places women, their behaviour and their appearance, in a situation of constant change in which the ordering of women remains problematic and vulnerable to highly politicised and commercialised forms. The period discussed here includes two world wars and the transformation of British society from one that was largely agricultural to one which is predominantly urban. Seismic events and changes have seen the emergence of new forms of employment alongside the disappearance of old industries; industrial forms of production have enabled the appearance of new products and with those products new aspirations and expectations. In short— and the list of changes in the twentieth century could include many more—much of the world known to our grandmothers and great-grandmothers has changed radically. Yet one characteristic persists: the search for the ‘respectable’ woman. From the eighteenth century onwards we can note, as Nicola Lacey has pointed out, a general concern with what constitutes a ‘respectable’ woman.16 Lacey’s concern is with the legal definition of this term within the English legal and criminal justice system, but the point she makes is pertinent across institutional and temporal boundaries. Just as English law, as many of its critics have pointed out, has persisted in raising questions about the moral standing of a woman, so other traditions and agencies have their own definitions of the ‘good’ as opposed to the ‘bad’ woman. It is the central argument of this book that the moral character of woman remains central to definitions of her civic status. But—and it is a crucial but—what has become central to positive identifications of woman

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and women is her—and their—engagement in paid employment. Those definitions of good moral standing in women which once took as their central premise the behaviour of women in the private sphere of the home and domestic life have now come not just to incorporate but on occasions to dominate the ways in which women are defined. The following chapters will explore this shift and its implications, considering not just the evidence for—and against—this argument but also the ways in which the supposed ‘emancipation’ of women, when only seen in terms of entry into paid work obscures aspects of both the past and the present. The concept of a relatively recent entry of women into the paid labour market overlooks the paid work women have been doing for centuries; so-called ‘pit women’, working in mines, were recorded in 1641.17 There is a long history, as many historians have pointed out, of women working for money, both in social and private spaces and campaigning actively for better conditions in paid work.18 The women who were amongst the first factory workers of the English industrial revolution were just one aspect of the paid work that women had always performed in various forms of trade and production, the latter often performed within the home. Taking in washing, various forms of piece work, the care of others, these were all forms of work for which women were paid and through which they contributed to the household income. For millions of English women, a male partner who could support a female partner in an exclusive concern with a home and children was never a reality. It is a fantasy that women were generally supported by that ‘male breadwinner’ of politics and policy. Of course that relationship existed; the point is that it was, for a majority of the female population, never a reliable reality, all too often interrupted by the absence or the death of a male partner. The past is not, at least as far as English history is concerned, a place in which most of the population was well fed and housed or financially secure. Until the minimal steps towards comprehensive welfare policies of the Lloyd George ‘People’s’ Budget of 1909 there was little provision to alleviate poverty. What assistance that existed was provided through charities of various kinds and locally funded assistance. For all of the nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries many in the population of the United Kingdom had to live a very few steps away from the threat of scarcity and impoverishment. This point is important not just in terms of challenging those narratives of nostalgia which posit a generally prosperous past but in defining the context in which we discuss the question of the ways in which expectations about women have changed. What women shared with men

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were material conditions of insecurity; conditions which, then and now, have been richly complicated by ideologies and social expectations about the ways in which women and men should live out their lives. Finally here, two related comments need to be made. The first is that this discussion fully recognises that women—again then and now—have never been the passive recipients of what women ‘should’ be. The long history of feminism is just one instance in which we can see that being ‘respectable’ has both been claimed by women (the women, for example, who campaigned with Millicent Fawcett for the vote under the banner of ‘the respectable suffragettes’) and those (for example in feminist campaigns of the late twentieth century) who rejected any such definition. So being ‘respectable’ has not just been imposed, it has also been claimed and rejected. The issue for exploration is how and why that claim has been made, by whom and for what reason. The agency of women is not inevitably associated with feminism; equally feminism is far from a single campaign. It is complicated. The second point is again an issue of complication and complexity. It is the fundamental question of why the question of gender and gendered work so seldom occurs in accounts of social and economic structure. There are numerous particular accounts of the paid and unpaid work which women do today (or did in the past) but that essential question, named by feminists in the 1970s, of social reproduction, has been largely marginalised as a central contribution in theoretical accounts of contemporary capitalism. Again, to emphasise, it is emphatically not that material on the paid and unpaid work of women does not exist but it is that this work—from such eminent sources as the Women’s Budget Group and the Fawcett Society—seldom appear in structural accounts of the contemporary world. To read, for example, the work of such eminent and globally known economists as Thomas Piketty, in whose Capital the only named woman is Jane Austen, it would appear that we live in a gender free world and that all human beings are universally similar in terms of not just gender, but also race, class and sexual orientation. The exclusion of women from public notice, as Jill Liddington and Elizabeth Crawford have pointed out is no new thing.19 That point—of the absence of the recognition of the part that gender plays in social reproduction—is the starting point for the following chapters. But the title of this essay emphasises, as does the material to follow, the particular ways in which the term ‘respectable women’ has been constructed. It is the part that those constructions have played in the building

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of social relationships, both personal and social that is the central focus here. The material will certainly include reference to the empirical lives of women—their work, paid and otherwise, family size and circumstances of race and class—because women, just as men, do not make their history in stable and consistent conditions. As Marx remarked, ‘Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past.’20 This quotation has often been used to discuss the history of men and masculinity so it can also be used to discuss the history of women and femininity. The history of masculinity has had much to say about the identification of men with manual labour and the ability, in various ways, to exercise control over both others and the self.21 In the history of women what has remained integral to ideas about womanhood is the assumption that women care for others. An assumption, it should be noted, that has changed little over the centuries. But the other ways in which women are judged have to be seen and made apparent. The ahistorical female subject, the ‘respectable’ woman whom the law and social convention could identify and use to inform a wide range of social institutions, can no longer be sustained when it is apparent that accounts of gender identity have become more fluid. One consequence of the greater public visibility of the possibility of changing a gender identity, and the politics of transition that have become part of early twenty-first-century discussions about gender, is that discussion and debate about what exactly is implied in definitions of woman have been encouraged. One final comment here, and something for which perhaps a spoiler alert is necessary: the narrative here will not show women passively accepting ideas about how they might be ‘respectable’. On the contrary, women have often been deeply engaged in fighting for and demanding different definitions of ‘respectability’. This is not a story of the imposition of a particular view by one gender on another, not least because many of the most energetic proponents of various definitions of the ‘respectable’ have been women themselves. But what it is about is the way in which a social norm and expectation about women’s behaviour, enacted and embraced in a number of contexts, has shifted and changed. To examine this history the following chapters will investigate various instances of fervent and active engagement with the concept of the respectability of women. What it is hoped to suggest is that expectations of women, as much as expectations by women, have changed over time and do not always change through the choices or the wishes of women. In this,

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any political project, of which feminism is the most relevant example here, have to engage not with a static subject, but one changed and made by external circumstances. We are familiar with Beauvoir’s statement that women ‘are made’, not born. But in this, what is obscured is the complexity of the multiplicity of the ways in which women are ‘made’, the permeability of assumptions about women and the question of whose interests are served by changing meanings of womanhood. Not the least of these questions is the way in which women adopt, or can be persuaded to adopt, values and habits that make possible their exploitation. Those forms are varied: here the specific case is that of ‘respectability’. The following chapter sets out a history of the ways in which this concept has been used as a defining aspect of a social project, in this case the assisted emigration of women to what were the countries of the British Empire.

Notes 1. Daniel Stedman Jones, Masters of the Universe, Hayek, Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2012). 2. ‘New Welfare Reforms put Extra Pressure on Single Parents to enter Paid Work’ by Ruth Patrick, in Creative Commons, theconversation.com, March 31st 2017. 3. See for a succinct account of the views of both Butler and Foucault, ‘How Judith Butler overcame Foucault’s shortcomings’, by Seppevdpll, www. queereurope.com, 25 August 2018. 4. In February 2019 Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary unveiled what was called the ‘Family Protection Action Plan’ which gave significant tax concessions to women with more than four children. 5. See https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/tradwife 6. Emily Pankhurst, My Own Story (London, Eveleigh Nash, 1914) p. 268; on women and the Anglican Church see Rene Kollar, ‘Power and Control over Women in Victorian England: Male Opposition to Sacramental Confession in the Anglican Church’, Journal of Anglican Studies, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2005, pp. 11–31. 7. Son de Flor advertises itself as working ‘in times of rush and change with calm and silence, Nature and home’. See https://www.sondeflor.com 8. Maria Blundell, A New System of Domestic Cookery (London, John Murray, 1806) and Isabella Beeton, Book of Household Management, published by her husband Samuel Orchart Beeton in London, 1861. 9. Caitlin Moran, How to be a Woman (London, Ebury, 2011). 10. Keith Thomas, In Pursuit of Civility: Manners and Civilisation in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, Yale University Press, 2018); Norbert Elias,

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The Civilising Process, first published in 1939, subsequently Oxford, Blackwell, 2000; Catherine Hall and Leonore Davidoff, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London, Routledge, 2007). 11. Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self and Culture (London, Routledge, 2004). 12. Lynsey Hanley, Respectable; The Experience of Class (London, Allen Lane, 2016); Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (London, Virago, 1986). Emma Casey, ‘Struggle and protest or passivity and control? The Foundation of Class Identity in Two Contemporary Cultural Practices’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 13 (2), 2010, pp.  225–24; Beverley Skeggs, Class, Self, Culture; Imogen Tyler, Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (London, Zed, Books, 2020); Wendy Hollway, ‘Gender Differences and the Production of Subjectivity’, in (eds.) J.Henriques, W.Hollway, C.Urwin, C.Venn, V.Walkerdine, Changing the Subject (London, Methuen, 1984), p. 262. 13. Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonisation of the Working Class (London, Verso, 2011). 14. The then Labour Minister Peter Mandelson remarked in 1998 that he had no problem with people being ‘filthy rich’ although the actual sentence was that ‘I am intensely relaxed about people getting filthy rich as long as they their taxes’. In January 2012 he admitted that he had now changed his mind about the toleration of the accumulation of wealth. 15. Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century (London, Michael Joseph, 1995), p. 313. As Richard Evans noted in his biography of Hobsbawm, Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History (London Little Brown, 2019), p. 537. 16. Nicola Lacey, Women, Crime and Character from Moll Flanders to Tess of the D’Urbevilles’ (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2008). 17. Alan Davies, The Pit Brow Women of Wigan Coalfield (London, The History Press, 2002). 18. Mary Davis, ‘Women at Work’ www.unionhistoryinfo.tuc.2012; Edward Higgs and Amanda Wilkinson, ‘Women, Occupations and Work in the Victorian Censuses Re-visited’, History Workshop Journal, No. 81, 2016, pp. 17–38; Eileen Boris, ‘Gender at Work’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 67, No.1, 2009, pp. 233–239; June Hannam, ‘Women as Paid Organisers and Propagandists for the British Labour Party between the Wars’, International Labour and Working Class History, Vol. 77, No. 1, 2010, pp. 69–88. 19. Thomas Piketty, Capital (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 2013); Jill Liddington and Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Women do not count,

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­ either shall they be counted’, History Workshop Journal, Vol. 71, No. 1, n 2011, pp. 98–127. 20. Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (London, Lawrence and Wishart, 1958), p. 247. 21. R.W.Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, Polity, 1995).

CHAPTER 2

Victorian Values

The title of this chapter invokes the name of Britain’s reigning monarch for much of the nineteenth century because Queen Victoria has so often been associated with many of the social and institutional values that were said to have been abandoned in the twentieth century. The dramatic words of Virginia Woolf, that ‘On or about December 1910 human character changed’ epitomise the ways in which it has been customary to regard the years of the reign of Queen Victoria as a time of hegemonic mores, vanished in the modern world of the twentieth century. Those values, of course, have been endorsed, notably by Margaret Thatcher, and other members of successive governments of her party, about the apparently uniquely Victorian values of thrift, hard work and deference. But their mistake was, and is, to confuse the hopes of powerful and articulate elites about the behaviour of the rest of the population with the actual values and behaviour of the population as a whole. The absurdity of assuming that hard work or thrift were solely Victorian experiences is contradicted by studies of the history of the majority of the population, demonstrating that hard work and thrift have been universal practices, born out of scarcity quite as much as individual choice. Despite moralistic accounts of social life in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries (the literature of the moral horrors supposedly brought about by ‘affluence’) the population of the UK is now recorded as working ever longer hours and with poverty an ever present reality of many lives.1 © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Evans, Making Respectable Women, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7_2

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Nevertheless, one of the evident social changes between the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries has been that of the enlargement of the public choices that individuals can make about their lives. Virginia Woolf’s comment about the change in the human character in 1910 endorses this view: that what has emerged out of Victorian England is a place in which individuals have a greater degree of publicly apparent sexual behaviour. The death of Virginia Woolf’s father Leslie Stephen made possible Woolf’s own move from a domestic world ruled by patriarchal authority to a more independent way of life. But as she was also to write in her essay of 1938, Three Guineas, the world had not changed quite as much as expected. Indeed, her argument in that book was that of the continuity of male power. The limitations of this shift, recorded by an exceptional and privileged writer, accords with much of the history of women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: moments of apparent change, accompanied by its absence and continuities with the past. Women, by the time Woolf wrote Three Guineas, looked different from their counterparts in 1910—skirts were shorter, dress codes and some social rules had changed—but the list of what had not changed remained considerable. In particular, what remained set in social stone for women was the determination of their respectability in terms of domestic and sexual behaviour. Those accounts of history which are primarily concerned with the outstanding individuals of either sex will tell us of the extraordinary women who became successful authors or were the first women members of the British Parliament. But this account is concerned not with those figures, who can be found in various capacities in any century, but with the majority. So when this chapter begins, in the second half of the nineteenth century, what we find is that women had, by comparison with what we have come in the UK to take for granted in the twenty-first century, fewer legal and civil rights than men. They could not vote in Parliamentary elections (although some could vote in local elections), their rights once married were less than those of husbands and social expectations about the possible aspirations of women were markedly different from those of men. This statement however is of the broad contours of gendered difference. Unmarried women could make the contracts and the choices denied to married women whilst wealthy women, married or otherwise, could exist in social spaces of some freedom and autonomy. But the general picture, which is often lost in a historical focus on the exceptional, is that of the secondary social and civil status of women. The picture is, as always, different across social classes, generations and races, but a shift to what we

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now require as the ‘modern’ status of women, of legal and civil equality with men, had yet to occur. Within this picture there were—as this chapter will suggest—various ways in which social expectations of women were being re-written. This should not be taken to imply that previous expectations about women (their secondary place in patriarchy, the sexual ‘double standard’ and minimal public presence) were abandoned, rather that these ancient ideas were now being framed within new social and political circumstances. Amongst the most important of these circumstances was what was seen as the emerging ‘crisis’ in the second part of the nineteenth century of the material situation of women: in short, who was going to support them. So existing certainties about what made a woman ‘respectable’ had to be integrated into new contexts. But what remained, it has to be emphasised, were certain absolute certainties about ‘respectability’. To demonstrate this fusion of existing ideas with emergent situations, material here has been drawn from the various emigration societies which came into being in the nineteenth century for the specific reason of aiding and assisting the material circumstances of women through assisting their emigration to various colonies of the British Empire. These organisations, such as The Female Middle Class Emigration Society and the Society for the Overseas Settlement of Women, are of their time and no longer exist, although they did continue their work until well into the twentieth century.2 What can be found in the context of these societies is a certainty about the definition of what the good, the ‘respectable’ woman should be. These organisations are important not just because of their place in the cultural making of the British colonies in the nineteenth century but because of the way in which they demonstrate an uncompromising conviction about the meaning of female respectability. In all cases that meaning was an imposed meaning, in that the women who were being chosen as possible, sponsored, emigrants played no part in the construction of the term ‘respectability’; that was the prerogative of the aristocratic and upper middle class women running the various societies. What is transparent in the ways in which these societies worked is that there was little or no space for moral uncertainty or ambivalence. Despite what we might suppose— and know—about what the organising committee of wealthy and well connected ladies might allow for themselves in terms of aspects of their behaviour, there was no plurality in the expectations about the women applying for assistance in emigration. Although the societies dealt with a social range of women (some, as will be seen, specifically targeting their

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assistance on middle class women) the women were uniformly unmarried and white. Sexual identity was assumed as chaste heterosexuality. The various societies organised for the specific emigration of women were all concerned with the facilitation of emigration by women to what were seen to be the under -populated parts of what was then the British Empire. The impetus for the foundation of these societies occurred in large part to response to social panic about what became known as the ‘single woman problem.’ The 1851 census had revealed that there was a preponderance of single women in the British Isles, a point dramatised in 1861 by an article in the National Review by William Greg titled ‘Why are Women Redundant?’ But the single women of particular concern to Greg and others were middle class women.3 Working class women could (as they had always done) find forms of paid work, notably in domestic service, as is confirmed by census information apparent from 1841, the date of the first more detailed UK census.4 Middle class expectations for unmarried women did not include paid work and the options available were limited or decreasing. One example of this was that of becoming a governess, an occupation available to the heroines in the fiction of Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Anne Bronte and George Eliot, but disappearing in both fiction and reality. Hence the case being made by Maria Rye in 1861; in a pamphlet entitled ‘Emigration of Educated Women’ she attacks both the idea that women should not be in paid employment and pleads, in the face of the unavailability of work for educated women in the UK, for assistance in emigration to the colonies: Are women to perish simply because they are women? And when it was proved, as unfortunately it was proved, only too clearly, that there were thrown upon their own resources hundreds of educated women – women of unblemished character, and in many instances, women of capability and power- nine tenths of whom could literally find no employment whatever, and this in London alone…my judgment leans every day more and more to the establishment of some scheme by which educated women may with safety be introduced into the colonies…5

Maria Rye goes on to point out the astonishing numbers of women applying for various forms of paid work in mid-nineteenth-century Britain. She cites the example of 810 women applying for one office job associated with the printing works run by Emily Faithfull, herself a pioneer of women’s employment in publishing.6 It is against this background of the

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absolute scarcity of paid, and respectable, work for women that emigration, and the emigration societies to make this possible, began to appear. The disappearance of one of the most taken roads out of middle class female material precarity, that of teaching young children in private homes, might have begun to disappear in Britain but it had not disappeared in many of the overseas colonies of the British Empire. In the countries of the Empire, urban centres were few and far between and for those many people who wished to educate their children in the language and the curriculum of Great Britain the only way to do this was to employ a governess to live in their home. This was precisely the form of work for which those societies dealing with the emigration of women to the Empire were most often recruited. As Julia Bush and others have pointed out, the project of colonisation involved more than physical conquest: it also involved the establishment of specifically British forms of culture and morality.7 The disruptive and often tragic consequence of this invasion of existing cultures has now been widely documented but at the time, and in the motives of those associated with female emigration, what is visible is a set of very mixed motives: of solving what has been defined as the ‘problem’ of too many single women, the need to establish British forms of education, including an emphasis on literacy with a general, if often as vague as it was coercive, wish to ‘civilise’ the people who had become subjects of the British Empire. That work of ‘civilising’ differed from country to country. In some instances there was little or no religious impetus to supported emigration. On the other hand, in India—a country which was seldom a destination for the emigration societies—there was, in the 1840s determined and aggressive Protestant missionary work.8 Women, from the mid nineteenth century onwards, became a central part of the process of colonisation. The extent of this project has been documented by various authors, for example by Marie Ruiz in her comprehensive study of the British societies for the emigration of women.9 But the women who were to take part in this exercise had to be a certain kind of women; that ‘right sort of woman’ which Julia Bush has identified. The women chosen by the various emigration societies all had to be ‘respectable’ and it is in the workings of these societies that we can see particularly clearly the ways in which a cultural norm, that of the ‘respectable’ came to constitute a social position, possibility and meaning. It became, that form of capital (both social and cultural) which Pierre Bourdieu described for the twentieth century: essentially a form of human identity enabling and legitimating social agency.10 The strength of the definition of the term

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‘respectable’, and the determination to enforce it, is reflected in the numbers of women who wanted to emigrate through the agency of these societies yet were deemed unsuitable: in the records of the various societies it is apparent that in general only a quarter of those women who applied for supported emigration were chosen. Some applicants may well have dropped out and records do not give details of reasons for this. But the women who did meet the standards of ‘respectability’ were sent overseas, mainly to parts of Africa, Canada, New Zealand and Australia, and had to conform to strict expectations of nineteenth century womanhood. Once the women had arrived in their various destinations, many of them wrote back to the London based societies. It is these letters, meticulously collected and recorded by the various societies, that show the individual uncertainty, unhappiness and profound sense of dislocation that accompanied arrival in these distant colonies. For many women what they confronted when they arrived in these countries was both a harsh culture and climate; here the meaning and the social agency of those terms ‘respectable’, ‘middle class’ or ‘lady’ had very often little credence or traction. So the very qualifications that had enabled their assisted emigration were now without social meaning or relevance. The letters home from these women often speak of the difficulties they face. Here is one woman, Miss Jane Carey, writing from New Zealand in 1867 to explain to the Society for the Emigration of Middle Class Women, the organisation which has supported her financially, why she has not been able to repay her debt: Mine has been a life of trial and much suffering since I came to the Colony…Believe me, it is a hard struggle for a lady to succeed in this country, the lower classes as well- but it is no use for a well educated lady over thirty years of age to come out- what the Settlers like is a young, strong middle class sort of person that can be helpful to them and teach their children to read and write.11

Nor, as the writer goes to say, are her prospects of marriage good in New Zealand: the men who come out are the younger sons of poor families, many are very much addicted to drink, just as such no nice girl would marry.12

This letter from Jane Carey contains much that is revealing about the definitions and perceptions of class and gender in the latter half of the

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nineteenth century. Here a self defined ‘lady’ finds life difficult and unrewarding in New Zealand. That ‘strong, middle class sort of person’ who is more popular with the existing population is not, in the eyes of this writer the same as a ‘lady’. A cultural separation is being made here between the ‘well educated lady’ and that ‘middle class sort of person’ who can teach children to read and write. The former, we might assume has at least some familiarity with aspects of ‘high’ culture; the ‘middle class’ person on the other hand possesses skills that are more immediately functional. So in this one letter we have three ages and definitions of ‘respectable’ womanhood: the ‘girl’ who would like to marry a ‘nice’ young man, the strong young woman who is a ‘middle class sort of person’ and the older ‘lady’ for whom there is no social place. In the early twenty-first century, ‘ageism’ is often assumed to be a particularly acute issue for women but it is apparent from the letter above that definitions of age for women have a long history of negative and exclusionary possibility. To be over thirty has already defined Jane Carey as ‘old’; a double burden with that of her own perceived identity as ‘a lady’. So at work here are complex meanings and identities associated with definitions of class and specifically those of ‘a lady’ and ‘middle class’. The very title of one of the societies discussed here includes the term ‘middle class’ but the use and origin of that term may of course derive from the same social judgments replicated (with regret) by Jane Carey: that a new form of an essentially useful woman is being validated. This woman can be defined as middle class, no longer just in terms of her own personal behaviour but because she can provide socially ‘respectable’ skills. What unites the letter above with others written to the same society is an intense awareness on the part of the writers of the work necessary to maintain gradations of class. The origin of those differences is further suggested in a letter of 1862 by a Miss Gooch: Australian children are just like vegetation here for neither appear to submit to much control, pine apples, peaches and the finest fruit grow in open air without care and the children are equally wild and impetuous. You meet with very few quiet patient girls here, they like no trouble nor will they take any about anything.13

Miss Gooch is not writing here of the children of the First Nation. But what she is doing is what Beverley Skeggs has written of in the context of perceptions of the working class in the late twentieth century: that amongst

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them there are those who are seen as beyond control, decidedly not ‘respectable’.14 Yet as even as those white children were subject to the negative opinion of Miss Gooch, in much more serious ways Aboriginal children and their parents were made the subject of the brutal legislation introduced in the state of Victoria in 1869 through the Aboriginal Protection Act. This defined where, and how, the people of the First Nation should live.15 It was foundational in establishing the various practices which led to the separation of Aboriginal children from their parents and other aggressive, and genocidal, practices against First Nation people.16 It further established a separation between white settlers and Aboriginal people which eroded many of the distinctions between classes for the former, precisely the distinctions which Miss Gooch had been attempting to preserve. What this suggests is the way in which racist accounts of non-white people that have dominated relations between the global north and the global south for centuries can, in the context where racial differences are marked, create an apparent classlessness amongst groups which define themselves as racially superior. So what both the ladies and the middle class women, fighting to maintain their status in the colonies, were very well aware of was the fragility of their place, not just as women in these new worlds but as women defining themselves in terms of aspects of class made largely irrelevant by the politics of race. The implicit rejection of Miss Gooch’s standards of behaviour for women suggests an awareness of the ways in which British colonies were forming their own expectations of the behaviour of women. The letters quoted above are all taken from the early days of the Society for the Emigration of Middle Class Women and in the decade of the 1860s many of the letters concern local conditions and customs in which those self identifying definitions of ‘lady’ and ‘middle class’ might, or might not, be maintained. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries the distinction between the terms ‘a middle class woman’ and a ‘lady’ may have lost much of its meaning; for example, the feminist writer Vera Brittain had published a book in 1953 entitled Lady into Woman. However, it is apparent that to women writing in the late nineteenth century to what is clearly identified as a middle class organisation that difference was important and was a reflection of those views about the distinction between ‘lady’ and ‘woman’ that Gillian Sutherland has described as such active parts of the gender politics of the late nineteenth century.17 In part, that may have been an aspect of those complex forms of class identification in which the aristocratic ‘ladies’ running the society assumed that the women for whom

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they were responsible were ‘respectable’ but not ‘ladies’ whilst some of those same women assumed, aspired and claimed for themselves a classed allegiance to that form of female identity. Questions of the meaning of class and class identity persist in the letters of the Society for the Emigration of Middle Class Women throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. Yet by the 1870s other themes have also started to emerge. Amongst the correspondence of the same Society is a series of letters from various correspondents which speak of wider events and conditions other than those of purely local events in remote parts of the British Empire. Here for example, is a Miss Jenvey, writing from South Africa in 1877, which voices her prediction that ‘I suspect that if matters go on so the coloured people will be masters and English people servants’.18 The writer’s prediction remains unfulfilled but what it expresses so openly is that sense of living as a minority in a society of non-white people; a knife edge existence lived out with the daily need to enforce social power, in which the political legitimacy of the British Empire was being increasingly, publicly, challenged. Other letters, to the same Society and in the same period, concentrate around additional themes which articulate fears about a world in which forms of social status and definition are becoming increasingly insecure. The first is of literal danger: a danger which in the case of South Africa is the outbreak of the first Boer War in 1880. The second is the danger of changing ideas in the UK itself. For example, a Miss Hall (who is an energetic correspondent from South Africa) writes in 1880 that: ‘We are very astounded at the result of the general election in England and I am afraid that the new minister will not know the need of the colonies as well as those who have lost office.’19 The general election to which this writer was referring was that of 1880  in which William Gladstone defeated the Conservatives, gained a majority of over a hundred seats in Parliament and spoke out against policies which ‘involved the country in immoral, vainglorious and expensive external adventures, inimical to peace and to the rights of small peoples’. The project of the British Empire was no longer quite so positive, at least in the minds of some voters in the UK, as it had once been. But a further example of changing ideas concerned aspects of changing ideas by women about women. Again, Miss Hall is writing from South Africa, expressing her views about one of the women who have just arrived from England:

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Miss Jackson interests me very much but we are very different. Her great idea is to educate women that they shall be what she calls ‘emancipated’ and placed on an equality with men. That they may be thoroughly independent of them.20

But the problematic Miss Jackson is not only worrying because of her view about ‘emancipation’ (a word which has become common currency and used by suffrage societies in the UK in the 1880s) she is also part of what both Miss Hall and another correspondent, Miss Herbert, have already observed in the changing organisation and content of education. Miss Hall had written to the Society in 1879 saying that ‘the cultivation of children’s moral nature is of infinitely more importance than their intellectual culture’.21 In the same year Miss Herbert had written from New Zealand that she doubted whether ‘..concerning girls with all the ‘ologies’ really has a beneficial effect on their characters and helps to make them good wives and mothers remains to be proved’. And she goes on: ‘Girls here marry early and how much happiness and misery may depend on their being able to make home comfortable and pleasant for the husband’.22 Both Miss Hall and Miss Herbert represent a part of a generation of women for whom the various campaigns in the late nineteenth century about the need to change expectations and institutions related to the social role of women were not to be welcomed. On the contrary they represented a threat to that position of female aptitude for domestic life (with accompanying aspirations to be a ‘lady’) which, although denied to the Misses Hall and Herbert, they nevertheless supported. By 1880 the UK had seen the passing of the Matrimonial Property Act and campaigns for both the vote and the higher education of women were energetic and apparent. In the colonies from which the correspondents of the Society were writing change was also taking place as some of those countries began to develop state institutions on the patterns of those in the UK. Central to the concerns of the Society was the establishment in Canada, New Zealand and Australia of free state education for both girls and boys. As many of the correspondents of the Society remark from the mid 1870s onwards governesses are no longer wanted: since people can send their children, boys and girls, to free government provided schools there is no need for a governess. By 1880 Miss Caldwell is writing to the Society from New Zealand asking them not to send any more governesses; she points out there are very few jobs and the pay is very low.23 It is a view echoed by Miss Kemp, writing, again from New Zealand, in 1881, that

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there is no point any longer in sending out women to be governesses. As she writes:’ Schools are cheap here and many people prefer sending (their children) there to having resident governesses’.24 These changes, the disappearance of the jobs for governesses through the state provision of education and the expectations of what education should provide (all those ‘ologies ‘) made emigration for that group of women defining themselves through their status as ‘ladies’ not just less acceptable as a viable choice but also resulted in what must have been, for many, a painful shift in self-definition. Miss Herbert might have deplored, in 1879, the limited attention to needlework in the state school curriculum in New Zealand, but she was standing on thin ice; that very skill was becoming increasingly redundant.25 What can be read from these letters is the history of a vanishing group, and group identity, within a social class: the governess herself did not constitute a class but what she (and it was almost always a female governess rather than a male tutor) did represent was a set of values, drawn from all those three indices of class, race and gender. Miss Hall assumed a definition of herself as a white, female, lady, a distinct form of self hood within the broader definition of middle class. As a ‘lady’ she also had the right to expect to be segregated from those she and others might regard as social inferiors. An expectation often realised; at a meeting, for example, of the South Africa Committee of the United British Women’s Emigration Society in 1899 it was recorded that ‘The proposal of keeping Ladies and servants separate at the Lodge in Cape Town met with unanimous approval’. Ladies and servants were unequivocally separate categories, which need to be marked in all ways, including the use, or not, of capital letters. Yet whilst some of the skills of the white ‘ladies’ were becoming increasingly redundant the contribution of that larger group of middle class women to the making of the British Empire and its constituent countries remained important. In the archives of the United British Women’s Emigration Association in the period from 1899 to 1908 what is apparent is the expressed intention of ‘welding together the Empire’. It remained the case that only women ‘of good character’ are going to be supported by this society but what is creeping into the literature written by this Association is a new aspect of the possibilities of womanhood: of qualification and ‘capacity’ as well as ideas about personal happiness. Thus in 1900 when Joseph Chamberlain made a speech to the Association he spoke of the problematic lack of balance in numbers between the male and female population of the colonies, noting the way in which this ‘debarred women

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from the fullness of life which is their due’. The speech was much repeated in the various publications of the Association. The very popularity and widespread distribution of the speech suggests that although it remained the case that the interests of the Empire remain paramount there is also the beginning of a public acknowledgement that women have rights to what is being defined—albeit in highly traditional and paternalistic ways— as a ‘good life’. For a politician to say that women have a right to enjoy something now being defined as the ‘fullness of life’ marks a shift from those expectations of earlier decades in the nineteenth century in which women, and men, could only expect to serve in whatever place in the world they had been born to. Chamberlain’s speech is, of course, only one expression of new possibilities about individual lives but it is nevertheless significant in what it tacitly allows for those ideals of self-fulfilment and the rights of the individual person which are to become a powerful narrative in the twentieth century. The United British Women’s Emigration Association continued its work—like other women’s emigration societies—up to the First World War. The years between the end of the nineteenth century and 1914 had not been easy for many of the societies, not least because of the Boer Wars in South Africa, which halted all emigration to South Africa for a time. In these years Canada was a popular destination for emigrants, whilst Australia and New Zealand continue to appear in the records of all societies. In this period immediately before the First World War there is, together with a growing sense that women should be helped to emigrate in order to enjoy something approaching a ‘good life’ rather than simply material support, a recognition that applications from women for assisted emigration are now coming from women of all classes. Quite how inclusive this categorisation was would be difficult to establish and it is unlikely to include the rich and the socially privileged. But rather than disappearing from the records about potential emigrants ‘ladies’ appear in comments about the women applying for emigration. It is noted by the United British Women’s Emigration Association in 1904 that ‘many thorough gentlewomen…many gently nurtured, show the value of their good breeding in their adaptability to new colonial ways’.26 Again, in 1907, it is remarked that ‘young women of all classes’ are now applying for emigration. In the same year, the records of this Association note that the reason for this increase is that women are seeking emigration ‘from the over-crowded labour market of Great Britain’.27 This comment in itself speaks volumes since the implicit

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suggestions are that women, quite as much as men, are constitutive of the labour market and that it potentially includes women from all classes. If we put together these remarks—about the changing class background of potential emigrants, comments on women’s various capabilities and a recognition that there is such a thing as a ‘labour market’—we can see the emergence of a new kind of person in Britain in the early years of the twentieth century. This female person, whilst she may or may not choose to identify herself through that label of ‘a lady’ is nevertheless a lady who not only has to support herself financially but actually wants and is able to do so. Moreover, she has a place, if only a marginal, precarious and limited place, in what has become a ‘labour market’. But as certain aspects of the characteristics of the ideal female emigrant began to be less current in the social map of the twentieth century so other forms of womanhood began to take her place. Crucially, what starts to disappear is the expectation that the only ideal situation for a woman, lady or otherwise, is to be a wife and mother; a person who exists through the material support of a male person. What is gradually being normalised, and what we see in the annals of the various societies is, as suggested above, the idea that women might actually wish to be in paid work and that it is a reasonable, and moreover a perfectly ‘respectable’ idea. Although the First World War made the travel associated with emigration unsafe what it also did was to grant, at least for a short time, public legitimacy to the paid work of women. As many of the visual images of Britain in the First World War demonstrate women did take on not just paid work (a longstanding social characteristic) but were endorsed for doing so. A situation which was to change in 1919 when the Restoration of Pre-War Practices Act enforced the departure of women from jobs previously held by men. But a possibility about the ‘respectable’ work of women had been established. When the War ended and overseas travel again became possible aspects of the norms and expectations made possible between 1914 and 1918 began to appear in both the work and the organisation of the emigration societies. For example by 1920, the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women included in its associated groups the National Federation of General Workers and the Joint Committee of the Industrial Women’s Organisation. In the minutes of this Society for 1920 it is recorded that women of all ‘trades’ should be encouraged to emigrate to Canada. The use of this term, which is absent from the records of emigration societies of the nineteenth century, recognises the possibility that women have

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trained and acquired specific skills. But this is followed by a comment about the essential need to continue to interview possible candidates for emigration. This proposal arises out of a concern, voiced in the minutes of the Society, less about the ‘respectability’ of the potential emigrants but rather the possibility of women being influenced by people who might attempt to inculcate ‘advanced revolutionary views respecting labour and politics’.28 Thus just as it is possible to see new expectations about women emerging in the world after 1918 so concerns are also being voiced about the possible implications of the political views of these women who have entered this public world. The emergence of this ambivalence to the ‘new woman’, who had so frightened a generation of male writers in the late nineteenth century is also, it would appear, a concern expressed by women themselves. The assumption that campaigns for the enfranchisement of women were universally welcomed by women and went hand-in-hand with enthusiasm for their higher education has been questioned by both Julia Bush and Laura Schwartz. It is apparent that gender conservatism had an active part in the making of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-­ century constructions of female ‘respectability’.29 Despite these tensions around the meaning and making of ‘respectable’ women and their fitness for emigration to parts of the Empire the various emigration societies did continue their work up to the beginning of the Second World War, although in the inter-war years societies had to amalgamate and transform their organisations. For example, in 1920 an amalgamation took place of three previous societies, the The British Women’s Emigration Society (established in 1884), The South African Colonisation Society (established in 1902) and The Colonial Intelligence Society (established in 1911). These amalgamated societies were still sending about 300 women to various parts of the Empire in each year of the 1930s. At the same time, their report of 1935 noted the continuing need for ‘skilled ‘women, an indication of one form of the continuing engagement by women with the Empire which Barbara Bush has noted.30 This comment, and this description of the desirable form of a female emigrant, is a powerful indication of an important shift in perceptions of women: the identification and accreditation of a level of education as a marker of female respectability. Despite the fact that British children had at that time (and until the 1944 Butler Education Act raised the school leaving age to 15) little beyond a primary education what is being expressed here is an aspirational goal for women; a goal made plain in the figure of the ideal female emigrant as one who has acquired credentialised skills.

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Without ascribing to the women’s emigration societies a radical vision of the possibilities of womanhood, what they clearly had always recognised was the idea that women had to be supported in finding an independent place for themselves in the world. At times the definition of exactly who those women were who needed support was blurred, and differed between the various societies. The explicitly middle class identification of the Society for the Middle Class Emigration of Women differed in the focus of its support from those societies which simply used the more inclusive word ‘women’ in their titles. But across these different contexts, what was shared was a concern, and an implicit commitment, to the possibility that women could be in paid work without losing that valued status of ‘respectable’. However, that very ‘respectability’ has another key ingredient in its composition. It is that of the need for women to acquire a racial awareness, a very distinct view of the ways in which they, as white women, differ from the indigenous populations of the countries to which they are travelling. What can be discerned from the various letters home, and the various comments in the minute books of the various societies is a growing concern to define racial difference. Many of the women writing home in the late nineteenth century make little negative comment about indigenous populations, whereas, as we have seen, they have often highly critical remarks to make about the white settlers and their various ways of life. But by 1922, advice about how to behave towards non-white people has become explicit in its instruction to maintain a sense of racial difference. That sense of racial difference was to be enacted in various forms and in various countries later in the twentieth century but at this point in the early years of the twentieth century what is emerging is a sense of the absolute distinction between indigenous and immigrant populations in which distinctions of class and gender become secondary to those of race. All white women are therefore a distinct and superior category; an example of the way in which individuals, once distinguished by their marginality and inferiority, can become dominant by virtue of their race.31 Here are comments from advice given to prospective emigrants by the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women in 1922: It is also necessary to remember at all times that because the the African has a black skin it does not mean that he is impervious to sex. In fact, more care is necessary in this respect on the part of European women employing Africans as servants than in European countries where civilised ways are

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more established. In Africa, European women have a responsibility to the White Race as a whole and great circumspection in their behaviour, before and in their dealings with African servants is essential.32

This view, of the particular place of white women in the world of the British Empire is of course being applied to women emigrants. But it is worth considering the extent to which ‘respectable’ womanhood is becoming defined in terms which are not just racialised (as the quotation above suggests) but also classed through acquired credentials. Thus by 1934 we find the statement of the aims of the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women that the need for skilled women emigrants has become explicit; an instance of what Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman have described as the shift ‘from surplus woman to professional educator.’33 The same Society’s review of its work in January 1934 makes no mention of the moral or cultural characteristics of the ideal woman emigrant. Instead professional and nationally recognised qualifications are required: in these years even those women wishing to work as governesses and outside the public sector are expected to have at least either a school certificate or its Scottish equivalent. By 1938 the Society has what it called a ‘Professional Panel’, dealing with applicants who have had either a higher or professional education. In these shifts we can observe changes as well as consistencies. First, it has to be said that there is no evidence that any of the women being helped to emigrate across decades of the work of the emigration societies is anything but white and from the UK; a place to which many subsequently wish to return. Few women can afford to do this since they have been unable to save enough money to pay back the original loan for their outward journey.34 The second, and in the long term highly significant, shift is that in the increasing demand for skills we begin to see the making of more contemporary divisions between women in terms of their own, independently possessed, credentials and and subsequent place in labour hierarchies (Fig. 2.1). Those definitions of ‘middle class’ and ‘a lady’, which had credence and authority throughout much of the nineteenth century, eventually begin to lose some of their certainty and their authority. But what replaces those moralised divisions of women, made through cultural values about women and the status of husbands/fathers, are definitions which are increasingly merged with the credentials produced through evolving forms of employment, educational expectations and opportunities and divisions of race. Judgments about ‘respectability’, based on the domestic and sexual

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Fig. 2.1  Surplus women: The ‘problem’ of surplus women. (Source: Home Notes, 7 May 1896)

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behaviour of women across much of the class structure began to be complicated by the merits of formal qualifications, although the possibilities of higher education for women remained restricted and the curriculum of education for the majority of girls remained, in various ways, distinct from that of boys.35 Although these inter-war years are sometimes read as a time of the increased opportunities for women to acquire educational and professional credentials powerful antagonisms around the question of what ‘respectable’ women should be continued in both institutional and fictional terms. The ferociously anatagonistic views expressed against women scholars in Dorothy Sayers’s novel Gaudy Night were replicated in more subtle, and non-fictional, ways through the institutional marginalisation of women academics and the operation of various forms of the ‘marriage bar’.36 It was notable that the actual number of women undergraduates at English universities went down in these years.37 In all contexts of employment, a gendered pay gap was general, as were informal as well as formal restrictions on the employment of women.38 Three other comments are important here on the inter-war years which concern the domestic culture of the United Kingdom as much as its colonial engagements. The first is that although change in terms of both the expectations and the realities of women can be observed in these decades, the changes in perceptions of masculinity are both less immediately notable and have been less marked upon. Michael Roper and John Tosh have collected material about the history of masculinity which suggests the continuation of what they describe as ‘manful assertions.’39 Writing about the specific context of higher education Paul Deslandes has identified what he has described as the making of masculinity and the ‘glamour of manhood’, an identification with competition and self assertion.40 The second comment concerns public engagement by women and the distinction which a considerable number of women’s associations were to make between women campaigning as citizens and women campaigning as feminists. That association of feminism with disruption, even destruction, was apparent.41 The Second World War, like the First, put paid to much of the work of all the emigration societies. That infamous ‘reserve army of labour’ which women constituted was now needed as much at home as in any of the colonies.42 After 1945 emigration societies did continue their work but three highly significant changes were occurring. The first is that the colonies were being transformed into independent states with needs that increasingly explicitly demanded trained and highly specialised emigrants.

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The second is that by the mid 1950s the increased prosperity of the UK had made emigration a far less attractive possibility. The colonies were no longer part of the Empire, but now constituents of the Commonwealth; indigenous cultures were no longer to be the subject of ‘civilising’ missions but an increasingly self assertive and proud part of new states. Inevitably, the women’s emigration societies closed their doors: yielding not just to the new political landscape but to equally significant forms of cultural change. Foremost of these was the disappearance of the idea about protecting, choosing and defining female emigrants. Women had now become expected to choose their own paths to emigration. The third, and final change which occurred in the 1950s was a new form of migration: the explicit recruitment of women and men from parts of the Commonwealth (notably the West Indies) to come and work in the United Kingdom. This was a watershed moment: not just about the export of labour, but about its import. The needs of parts of the UK economy (the health service, London Transport, construction work) brought thousands of people to make their lives in British cities. Part of this new movement has become known as the ‘Windrush Generation’ after the ship which brought hundreds of Jamaican immigrants to Britain in the 1950s. Others came from the Republic of Ireland. Both groups were accorded not just a less than fulsome welcome at the time but forms of long term institutional prejudice. The assumption of the implicit right of sections of the British state to set the terms and conditions of migration had not changed. In the variously racist practices which met, and continue to meet, the Windrush Generation it is worth noting, finally in this chapter, the way in which, as suggested in the history of women’s emigration societies, race could become the over-riding determination of the ways in which an individual was treated and regarded. The women teachers, nurses and social workers amongst the Windrush immigrants were in similar professions to those women once welcomed by British colonies as the social currency of ‘respectability’ was replaced by demands for more formal credentials. For the women arriving from the Caribbean credentials had less meaning than that of race: a highly racialised pattern of the social currency of qualifications remained.43 Yet in one sense the emigration societies that emerged out of fears about ‘surplus’ women had contributed to the social recognition of the ‘respectability’ of women’s paid labour. Without a specifically ‘modern’ agenda they had contributed to the social legitimacy of women working independently of men to support themselves. It was no longer suggested

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through these societies that the paid work of women only had a meaning through its contribution to a household; the income to be gained through ‘respectable’ work in the colonies was work for the woman herself. This idea contributed to the arrival of an essential ingredient of twentieth- and twenty-first-century societies: that of the independent earned income of women. A crucial battle about the control of women’s property had been fought (and largely won) in the Married Women’s Property Act of 1880. Now a new competition was to emerge: a battle in which the apparently emancipatory figure of a ‘modern’ woman possessed disposal income, an income allowing both the enhancement of that self perception as well as the creation of new industries of consumption. These industries, and their contribution to the making of new forms of ‘respectability’ are the subject of the next chapter.

Notes 1. Avner Offer, The Challenge of Affluence (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2006). 2. Various emigration societies were established in the second half of the nineteenth century, all with the specific purposes of alleviating what was seen as the ‘problem’ of women for whom there was no financial support either through families or through paid work. The emphasis of these societies was consistently of help for unmarried, white, ‘respectable’, young women, with several, such as The Female Middle Class Emigration Society emphasising the ideal class origin of those associated. In most cases the travel costs for the women were paid by the societies, the money collected by subscription. Those costs then became—again in most cases—a debt which the women were expected to repay. The societies usually had a titled woman as the titular head of the organisation with the day to day work of the society performed by a salaried employee. Amongst the societies established, other than those mentioned in the text were the Female Emigration Society, the Women’s Emigration Society, The British Emigration Society and the Church Emigration Society. In 1884 the Women’s Emigration Society joined with others to become the United Englishwoman’s Emigration Association. A major focus for emigration was Australia and New Zealand but other countries of the British Empire were also included; for example, in 1901 the South African Consolidation Society was formed to deal with emigration specifically to that country. Political changes in the early part of the twentieth century resulted in considerable consolidation of societies and the establishment in 1919 of the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women. Studies of the emigration societies include: Marie Ruiz,

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Female Emigration Societies and the New World 1860–1914 (London, Palgrave, 2017); Charlotte MacDonald, A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in nineteenth century New Zealand (Auckland, Bridget Williams Books, 1990); Kerryn Goldsworthy, ‘The Space of Spinsterhood: Letters to the Female Middle Class Emigration Society’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, February 2013, pp. 123–129. 3. Kathrin Levitan, ‘Redundancy, the Surplus Woman Problem and the British Census 1851–1861’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 17, 2008, pp. 359–376. 4. The first UK census was in 1801, but it was largely a head count. More detailed information, giving occupation and gender did not begin until 1841. 5. Maria S. Rye, The Emigration of Educated Women (London, Emily Faithfull Press, 1861). 6. Emily Faithfull founded the Victoria Press in 1860 in order to encourage other women to go into the printing trade. 7. Julia Bush, ‘The Right Sort of Woman: Female Emigrants and Emigration to the British Empire, 1890–1910, Women’s History Review, Vol. 3 (3), 1994, pp. 385–409; see also by the same author Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power (Leicester, Leicester University Press, 2000), pp. 56–83 for women’s work involving emigration societies. The ‘right’ sort of woman was accompanied by equally determined views about the ‘right’ sort of man. See the studies by Richard Phillips, Mapping Men and Empire: A Geography of Adventure (London, Routledge, 1997) and R.J.Dixon, Writing the Colonial Adventure: Race, Gender and Nation in AngloAustralian Popular Fiction (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995). 8. In his The Last Mughal (London, Penguin 2007, p. 61) William Dalrymple remarked: ‘India in the 1840s and 1850s was slowly filling with pious British Evangelicals who wanted not just to rule and administer India but also to redeem and improve it’. 9. Marie Ruiz, British Female Emancipation Societies in the New World 1860–1914. 10. Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’ in (ed.) J.Richardson, Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education (New York, Greenwood, 1986) pp. 241–258. 11. Jane Carey, Letter from New Zealand to Miss Jane Lewin, the Hon. Secretary of the Society for the Emigration of Middle Class Women, 2 October 1867. 12. Jane Carey, Letter from Sydney, of 2 October 1867. 13. Gertrude Gooch, Letter from Sydney of 17 February 1862.

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14. Beverley Skeggs draws attention to the ways in which ideas of the term ‘primitive’, drawn from racialised accounts of Aboriginal populations in New South Wales were applied to white, working class women and men. Class, Self and Culture (London, Routledge, 2004) pp. 38–39. 15. The Aboriginal Protection Act was passed by the government of the state of Victoria in 1869. This Act was passed at the same time as the same state was introducing free state education and granting the franchise to all adult males. It was followed in 1886 by the Half Caste Act, imposing further restrictions on inter marriage and residence. 16. See http://theconversation.com/the-lost-children-of-the-empire-and-theattempted-aboriginal-genocide-­­93380 17. Gillian Sutherland, In Search of the New Woman: Middle Class Women and Work in Britain, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2015) pp. 58–86. 18. Miss Jenvey, Letter from South Africa of October 1877. 19. Miss S. Hall, Letter from South Africa, 14 April 1880. 20. Miss S. Hall, Letter from South Africa, 18 July 1878. 21. Miss S. Hall, Letter from South Africa, 23 November 1879. 22. Miss Herbert, Letter from New Zealand, November 1879. 23. Miss Caldwell, Letter from New Zealand, January 1880. 24. Miss C. Kemp, Letter from New Zealand, 7 October 1881. 25. Miss Herbert, Letter from New Zealand, November 1879. 26. Minutes of the United British Women’s Emigration Association, 1904, page 13. 27. Minutes of the United British Women’s Emigration Association, 1907, page 3. 28. Report of the Society for the Emigration of Middle Class Women, October 1920, page 6. 29. Fear of the ‘new woman’ and the implications of the suffrage campaign is explored in Julia Bush, Women against the Vote: Female Anti-Suffragism in Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007). 30. Report of the Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women, October 1935, p. 20; ‘Feminising Empire?’ British Women’s Activist Networks in Defending and Challenging Empire from Empire to Decolonisation’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 25, No. 4, 2016, pp. 499–519. 31. Alastair Bonnett, ‘How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic (Re) formation of Racialised Capitalism’, Journal of Historical Sociology, Vol. 11, No. 3, 1998, pp. 31–340. 32. Summary of Work, Society for the Overseas Settlement of British Women, 1922, page 4. 33. Report of the Society for Overseas Settlement of British Women, January 1934; Jane Martin and Joyce Goodman, Women and Education: 1800–1980

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(Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2004) Chapter 4, ‘From Surplus Woman to Professional Educator’, pp. 72–88. 34. This view was expressed by various women in their letters home; one of the women who did manage to return to the UK was Charlotte Bronte’s friend Mary Taylor. 35. Carol Dyhouse,’ Towards a Feminist Curriculum for English School-­girls: The Demands of Ideology’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1978, pp. 297–311. 36. Dorothy Sayers, Gaudy Night (London, Coronet Books, 1970). A woman whose husband has lost his job over a question of scholarly integrity attacks members of an Oxford women’s college. At the discovery of her identity she says to the assembled female academics ‘…its women like you who take the work away from the men and break their hearts and lives’ (p. 427). 37. Fernanda Perrone, ‘Women Academics in England, 1870–1930’, History of Universities, Vol. 12, No. 1, 1993, p. 367. 38. The average gender pay gap in 1931 has been calculated as women earning about half the male rate. For a full discussion of changes over the twentieth century see Sara Horrell, ‘The Household and the Labour Market’, in (eds.) Nicholas Croafts, Ian Gazeley and Andrew Drewell, Work and Pay in Twentieth Century Britain (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007). 39. Roper, Michael and Tosh, John (eds.) Manful Assertions: Masculinity in Britain (London, Routledge, 1991). 40. Deslandes, Paul ‘Competitive Examinations and the Culture of Masculinity’, History of Education Quarterly, Vol. 42, No. 4, 2002, pp. 544–578. 41. Catriona Beaumont, ‘Citizens not Feminists’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 9, no. 2, 2000, pp. 411–429. 42. A classic discussion of the ‘reserve army of labour’ is by Irene Breugel, Feminist Review, No. 3, 1979, pp. 12–23. 43. Amelia Gentleman, The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment (London, Faber/Guardian, 2019).

CHAPTER 3

Making the ‘Modern’ Woman

The expectations of the emigration societies about the moral and sexual virtues of the women whom they assisted in placing in work in the British colonies were an extension of those expected of women at home. But even if the emigration societies saw nothing explicitly radical in their work what they were doing was setting out a novel possibility: that women could both acquire financial autonomy for themselves and had a right to do so. For decades the idea of the individual and individualism has been constructed largely in male terms.1 Authoritative accounts of the ‘making’ of individualism are focused largely on male experience; whether the evidence is drawn from the seventeenth or the twentieth century it is men who are at the centre of this debate. Men and the masculine have long defined both the meaning of both citizenship and the norm of a paid worker. The concept of the ‘male wage’, the male ‘breadwinner’ and— more recently—the ‘master of the universe’ of neo-liberalism all demonstrate the abiding strength of the association between paid work and the masculine. When we turn to the UK in the twentieth century, and away from the project of the assisted emigration of women, we have to look to the culture of the time, and particularly the popular culture, to determine the extent of changes in perception about the social expectations about women. The crucial change in the inter-war years was that of what might be described as the increased intensity of the process of modernisation; a process defined by John Jervis as: © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Evans, Making Respectable Women, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7_3

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This can be characterised as the drive to dominate and transform the world through the procedures and assumptions of science and technology, treating the world as a measurable and divisible resource, organised according to the technical-bureaucratic division of labour and implying the priority of practical, purposeful, future-orientated activity in everyday life.2

This project, although not unknown in previous centuries in invocations, negative and positive, about ‘the modern’, brought together vocal constituencies for and against changes in the civic status of women. In these debates, as remains the case to this day, ‘nature’ plays a central role, a role actively refuted by those various views which wish to claim, for various reasons, active participation of the social in the making of human subjects. Amongst those in the early decades of the twentieth century with an interest in the latter were those associated with the growing place of various forms of consumption in the British economy; people increasingly became ‘markets’, in which the products of those markets could reflect back at the person a version of the self. That female self, as the First World War had made clear to a general public, was more than able to take on men’s jobs. Inevitably questions came to the fore about the persistence and indeed relevance of the traditional association of women with the home; questions further enhanced by the demographic balance created by the loss of prospective husbands in the conflict of 1914–18 and an increasingly public discussion about the normative authority of heterosexuality. As Jeffrey Weeks and other historians of sexuality have pointed out, for centuries many people had not lived their lives within the rigid boundaries of heterosexuality.3 In the nineteenth century the legislative energy of government more forcefully intruded on the sexual lives of its citizens. The undoing of that legislation was to be one of the great campaigns of the twentieth century. In the first decade of the twentieth century the most vociferous public campaign associated with the legal rights of women concerned the vote. But even as those campaigns were crucially important in the meaning and extent of democratic politics, the impact on the female population as a whole was limited in terms of the overall gendered changes in the participation by women in the institutional world of public politics. Much more significant for many women was a growing popular culture about the presentation of women in various forms of the media. Magazines, the cinema and other forms of the media began to offer suggestions and exhortations—often across class lines—about female behaviour and appearance.

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Women could now look to values and possibilities about their behaviour outside immediate communities; battles began to emerge, recognisable across much of the twentieth century, about new and often distant sources of aspiration and respectability. What is crucial here about these ideas about the female self to which women might now aspire is the enveloping positive theme about the intrinsic value of the ‘modern. In this, being ‘modern’ became a new form of ‘respectability’. Whilst this emergent form of an ideal of womanhood offered forms of access to education and some occupations hitherto unknown, what it brought with it was an association of modern respectability associated with, and enabled by, new forms of consumption. Publications which were aimed at a female audience began to proliferate in the late nineteenth century, although there had been magazines (such as the Ladies’ Magazine) since the eighteenth century.4 Amongst these publications were The Lady (founded in 1885) and Home Notes (founded in 1894). Both were very specifically aimed at women, yet with highly specific forms of recognition about class. Whilst the social aspirations of The Lady were higher than those of Home Notes, what unites the publications is the mix of subjects and the range of topics that are included. The Lady always carried extensive advertisements for domestic servants but its editorial pages are much concerned, like Home Notes, with the increasingly various and problematic possibilities of womanhood. In Home Notes of April 16th 1898 for example the magazine devotes attention to the experiences of ‘Famous Lady Travellers’, with emphasis on the exploits of Mary Kingsley.5 The tone, as often in women’s magazines to this day, is one of a mixture of praise and explicit acknowledgement of a woman acting independently, coupled with surprise that any woman would want to follow the same path. What emerges is a theme that continued throughout the twentieth century and arguably to this day—records of women’s remarkable achievements that are couched in comments about their extraordinary departure from the foundational concerns of home and motherhood. The details of this theme change over time, but what persists is that emphasis on the domestic lives of women. To read these periodicals, and the context from which they emerged, as a place with simple, straightforward ideas about the place of women, would do a very considerable disservice to the varied ideas about women being expressed in the years between the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the second world war. Periodicals such as Time and Tide published material about continued forms of discrimination against

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women and as historians have pointed out there was energetic post-­ suffrage work about issues of prejudice and misogyny.6 In these and publications for a wider public people, both male and female, were writing about women and were discussing and debating the general question of what women should be: how women should regard their physical selves, how their relationship with the public as well as the private world should be conducted and finally, the over-arching question of what it is acceptable for women both to want and to demand. If Sigmund Freud had found the question of ‘What do Women Want?’ too challenging to answer, many women had not found response at all difficult, particularly in the case of issues about sexuality with which Freud was concerned. Those responses were more ‘coded’ than we would expect them to be in the twenty-first century; sexuality and sexual issues were often not described with either clarity or openness. Yet sex and sexuality are very much part of the debates taking place in women’s magazines and films about women; crucially, the idea of womanhood which is finding a new vindication is that of the embrace of the ‘modern’ and ‘being modern’. In this, an essential ingredient was that of an open expectation of heterosexual sexual pleasure. Nobody writing in the print media in the 1920s or 1930s was assuming that the place for this pleasure was anything other than marriage. But the shift—if not towards the permissiveness associated with the 1960s—was towards that of the acceptability, indeed the respectability, of female sexual pleasure and desire. It is in these inter-war years that there was a gradual shift towards what can be regarded as the personal emancipation and growing independence of women. Largely constructed and enabled through a powerful narrative of modernisation a cultural place was increasingly identified for women, especially, as Selina Todd has pointed out, for young women living in urban areas who by 1931 constituted 42% of the UK’s clerical workforce.7 In part these possibilities arose from changes in the civic status of women as well as more complex changes in popular culture, in which new patterns of consumption and new forms of the media were central. All men and women over the age of 21 had been enfranchised in 1928 and the First World War had done much to shift expectations about women’s appearance and forms of participation in the public world. Large numbers of women, in terms of their dress, looked different by 1939 from women in 1914. Many were also less endlessly engaged in child birth and child rearing; the UK birth rate declined between the two world wars. In part this was due to the increased availability and institutional legitimation of

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contraception.8 But equally importantly Britain did not pursue the explicitly pro-natalist policies of both France and Germany in those years. Significantly too in terms of the homes for which women were responsible, new forms of domestic equipment became available and were rapidly embraced by the very limited group of the population able to afford them. Britain, in these inter-war years, began to know those ‘white goods’ for the home which were to become so increasingly standard in the 1950s. Whilst anything but generally accessible in this inter-war years, these household appliances nevertheless set a new standard of expectation and aspiration. As ever, new forms of consumption were for those with the income to afford them. So amongst the many narratives about women in the inter-­ war years one of the most important aspects is how classed are accounts of specifically modern forms of the ‘respectability’ of women. The discussions of social change in these years which speak of new forms of dress, travel and social experiences are often structured in a binary way which sees the lives of the materially privileged (wearing the newly relaxed clothes of designers such as Chanel, having some form of higher education, travelling extensively) contrasted with the lives of the urban and rural poor, the women with large families and excluded from emergent patterns of consumption. Reading about the dress and behaviour of women in the 1930s could be read as a seizing by women of both new and existing opportunities; autonomous bids for new kinds of lives. But what is also worth noting is the extent to which at least some of those new possibilities and opportunities were being deliberately created by economic interests. In a paper on twenty-first-century views about climate change Sally Weintrobe includes a remark made by a banker working for the Lehman Brothers in the 1930s: We must shift America from a need to a desires culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things even before the old have been entirely consumer. We must shape a new mentality in America. Man’s desires must overshadow his needs. A change has to come over our democracy. It is called consumptionism. The American citizen’s importance to his country is now no longer that of citizen but that of consumer.9

The UK in the 1930s had neither the industrial range nor the means to fulfil many of those consumer desires which were possible in the USA. But the point that is made transparent in the remarks above is the recognition

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of the ways in which that ever unstable, but always imagined, concept of ideal womanhood could be exploited for material gain, gains which could be made from all sections of the female population. The banker speaking above is not speaking of women, but as Rachel Bowlby has pointed out what was happening from the end of the nineteenth century onwards was a drawing together of culture and commerce, in which ‘making’ women played a central part.10 Clearly, only a small section of the population of either Europe or the United States could afford to buy those iconic clothes by Chanel which are often read as an indication of women’s emancipation. But these material differences between classes should not obscure the similar ways in which different kinds of politics attempted to police the appearance of women. Amongst the most famous accounts of ‘upper’ class life in the 1920s and the 1930s are those provided by the various Mitford sisters. The six Mitford sisters grew up in decades when changes in dress and social codes about the behaviour of women were shifting; their various accounts of their lives speak the persistent extent of the chaperonage, the rigid dress codes, the limitations on personal freedom of upper class women. When Nancy Mitford, following the fashions of the 1920s, had her hair cut in a short ‘shingle’ style, her father remarked that ‘no-one will want to marry you now’. This remark could be read as an indication of the idiosyncrasies of a member of the English upper class, were it not for the fact that thousands of other women voiced evidence of the same disapproval and magazines of the time include many cartoons about the ‘hair wars’ of the UK in the 1920s. In Nancy Mitford’s case the control exercised over women was that of a family patriarch. But a similar anecdote suggests the political reach of coercive norms about the appearance of all women. When Simone de Beauvoir began to re-do her lipstick in a German cloakroom in 1936 she was reprimanded and told off sharply that ‘German women do not do this’.11 In both cases what is being protected is an ideal of the woman unblemished by any cosmetic intervention, visible cosmetics being the sign of sexual availability. To involve oneself in such a process is seen as putting on a mask to cover ‘real’ womanhood. These reactions of a German woman and an English father demonstrate the assumption, explored most importantly by Joan Riviere in 1929  in her essay ‘Womanliness as Masquerade’ about the question of whether there is, or is not, actually such a thing as ‘the feminine’ or ‘femininity’.12 The essay has had a considerable impact on those writing about dress and fashion; the conclusion is that, as John Jervis writes: ‘Masquerade represents

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femininity, but femininity is representation anyway’.13 As Jervis goes on to point out, ‘fashion becomes the primary site of the masquerade’.14 But fashion can too easily be dismissed as frivolous and absurd; and so although the industries of fashioning the self of the 1920s and the 1930s gave women a new material reality of their visual possibilities that ‘mask’ of fashion evolved as a legitimate, if problematic, place of self identity with the modern and the emancipated. Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles have remarked that: ‘Style functions not as a celebration of the self overcoming the social, but rather as proof of the self’s fundamental sociality’.15 Clothes, then as now, were crucial to the placing of women in terms of different social categories. To identify oneself through clothes involved making social connections. As women authors have pointed out for some time it was hardly surprising that clothes, and how to ‘get dressed’ remained a conflicted issue for those women with the means to make considered choices.16 Vika Martina Plock has written of the relationship between clothes and women writers of the inter-war years; amongst the writers whom she considers Edith Wharton was one who saw fashion as destructive of individual expression.17 Women were, as the title of a book by Celia Marshik suggests, often literally ‘at the mercy of their clothes’.18 So when de Beauvoir and Nancy Mitford were condemned for their choices in dress they were emblematic of the tensions around dress, women and the respectable. But both could escape strictures that might have had more impact on others. They refused conventional forms of heterosexual relations and lived lives that for other, less successful and well connected women would have been impossible. So the first comment about ‘respectability’ in the inter-war period has to be that of the meeting of ‘respectability’ with class and, as Alison Light has argued, ideals of the nation.19 From this must come the recognition that there was not- as has always been the case—any single identifiable experience for women in these decades. Class dictated not just the income of women but also the extent of their education, the number of children that they had and the degree to which they could participate in the emerging world of domestic and personal consumption. This world, the world of the majority of the population and a very long way away from the worlds of Nancy Mitford and Simone de Beauvoir, was being recorded by other women, although seldom by those less privileged women themselves. The tradition of social concern for the poor had been given a new theoretical and political impetus in the late nineteenth century by institutions such as the Fabians and the London School of Economics and was increasingly becoming present

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in political discussions. One work which emerged from that context was Margery Spring Rice who published her classic study, Working Class Wives in 1939.20 In a later edition of this study Barbara Wootton spoke of ‘stripping away the indifference which concealed the hardship of millions of women’.21 This Spring Rice certainly did. Through a combination of her own text and the material from women themselves she gave an account of the lives of millions of women, for whom daily domestic drudgery is the norm. Women are, she writes ‘the slave without whose labour the whole structure of the family tends to collapse.’22 It is a statement which anticipates theoretical discussions later in the twentieth century about the part that women play in social reproduction; less theoretically the point was later to be made on a feminist postcard that ‘women hold up half the sky’. Spring Rice, and those like her who campaigned vigorously for improvements in working class health care, housing and education, were of course only part of the voices from and about women in the early decades of the twentieth century.23 But two points are important here. First, that unlike later twentieth century accounts of the domestic lives and work of women (for example by Hannah Gavron and Ann Oakley) the evidence collected and the improvements suggested by Spring Rice are overwhelmingly within a discourse of specific social reforms and improvements in the lives of heterosexual families, in which the primary wage earner is male.24 It is a set of assumptions that was to be enshrined in the Beveridge Report of 1942 and little disturbed until the final decades of the twentieth century. The second point is that elements of the cultural disturbance of this repeatedly enforced and naturalised view of family and social relationships were emerging in the same decades that Spring Rice was writing. Thus whilst Spring Rice engaged with the material reality of the lives of the majority of women there is another powerful set of ideas and aspirations developing in this period which—in the long term—was to play a crucial part in the making of ideas about women. That tradition, formed through various forms of the media, both popular and more elitist, was essentially concerned with the question of how to define the ‘new’ woman in ways which were both respectable and yet at the same time ‘modern’. The transformative cultural energy of the idea of the ‘modern’ was one which was to place women at its centre. An endless contradiction emerges. In contemporary economies consumption by women is central to the economy.But the ‘respectable’ modern women who are the subjects and objects of this consumption retain their timeless associative connection to care in all its forms, one of which is to the self.

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In the inter-war years ideas about what women could be, and how women might both imagine and create themselves to be, seldom reflected the reality of those lives. That fissure between the lived experience of millions of women and the fantasies about themselves was itself one of the great cultural innovations of the advent of the mass media. Crucial aspects of the circumstances of women are never mentioned. Thus whilst many of the popular magazines for women will refer to the domestic duties of women there is almost never any mention of abject poverty, inadequate housing or male domestic violence. So what is emerging is a spectre of the possibilities of womanhood which often transcends the implications of the differences of class. Women are shown how to ‘be’ in the periodicals specifically designed for that purpose; class may haunt the text of these publications but it often has that fleeting and elusive presence of classlessness in which the domestic life of the working class is presented as a comfortable and comforting domestic place. (The descriptions epitomised in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier).25 What we can see, therefore, is a suggestion that the presence of women at the centre of the home can mitigate some of the hardships of class. Virginia Woolf’s famous ‘angel in the house’ could apparently fly into all classes of homes. Crucially, it is that very impermanence and fluidity, that lack of social location, that makes ideals and fantasies about’ respectable’ women so vulnerable not just to consumer exploitation but also to the expectations of politics and public life. What is being argued here is that what was coming into being in the inter-war years was a category of ‘woman’ and ‘respectable’ womanhood which could allow class transcendence and to a certain extent obscured class boundaries. Crucially too, that definition of ‘respectable’ was coming to have a meaning which associated the idea of being ‘respectable’ with those concerns for the self which could be offered through consumption. What emerges is a form of ‘respectability’ which is increasingly formed by engagement with consumption. Women become, in many of the magazines of the period, a collective group, with shared interests and commitments, in which various forms of care for the self became normative pressures. This homogenisation has continued to have complex implications. In one sense it allows for the recognition of forms of discrimination and exclusion that apply to all women; in another sense it is an exercise which excludes structural differences of class and race and can, at times, position women firmly in the domestic world. For example, in the Second World War this latter ideal reached its more bizarre heights in film and

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photographs of the then Queen Elizabeth joining women to knit for the troops; the commentary to the film spoke of ‘women’ doing their bit for victory.26 ‘Good’ women, in 1940 did their bit for the country and from the beginning of the twentieth century a consistent case had been made for the national interests to be served by placing women firmly at home. Here, for example, is a complaint from a returning soldier, published in 1919 in Home Notes: English girls are not equal to French ones…Oh, they want to get married all right, and any old thing in trousers seems as if he’ll do, but they don’twant a home!27

The argument of this letter is that English girls are quite happy to live in hotels and boarding houses because this keeps them away from housekeeping; attitudes which are explicitly both ‘modern’ and a rejection of the ‘natural’ place of women. The editor of the magazine remarks that there is much in this article that is ‘well worth thinking over’. What is also worth ‘thinking over’ is not just the suggested homogeneity of women across class lines; it is the writer’s fear that these English ‘girls’ are all too keen on abandoning domestic duties. The example quoted above speaks to what can be seen as a consistent British tradition: a mourning for a fictional past. The soldier returning home to what he sees as the limited domestic bliss offered by English women is in the same tradition as Jane Austen’s character Sir Thomas Bertram in her novel Mansfield Park. Upbraiding his penniless niece Fanny Price for her refusal of an eligible and wealthy suitor, Sir Thomas condemns her as a ‘modern’ woman. In a nutshell, that remark says much about the difficulties that the idea of the ‘modern’ presented to many countries, including Britain: the economic need for the dynamic of change which is central to any capitalist economy co-existing with powerful fears about the kinds of social tensions and divisions that the ‘modern’ and ‘modernisation’ might bring. With this proviso in mind what a reading of popular print culture about women in the 1920s and the 1930s makes clear is both the range and the depth of the fantasies being constructed around ‘modern’ women alongside a continued commitment to traditional expectations about the domestic role of women. In both cases the narrative is frequently one of obligation and duty: the new imperative for women is to be conscientiously engaged with individual appearance, at all times aware of the

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negative possibilities of ageing and neglect of the self. The 1920s and 1930s avoid the explicit statement of the late twentieth century that ‘you’re worth it’ but what is being demanded is equally demanding: that a respectable woman is committed to forms of self maintenance. Nevertheless, whilst on the one hand the magazines of the 1920s and 1930s are proposing new ways of dressing, of embracing and enjoying the delights of new clothes, cosmetics and setting in motion that process of ‘re-creating’ ourselves that is so necessary to the continuation of fashion, the same journals are offering advice about various aspects of household maintenance. What we can see here are narratives that suggest a degree of the widening of the possibilities open to women whilst a determination to maintain as ‘normal’ a determined immersion in domestic life. Again, this is classed in various ways, not least through the cost of the various clothes and cosmetics. At the same time the two categories of ‘women’ and ‘respectable’ retain considerable homogeneity and authority. What is emerging is a new form of imperative about the form of engagement which the ‘respectable’ woman should have with the world outside the home: an allowed participation in public life and/or paid work is accompanied by the placing of that engagement within a securely anchored heterosexual regime of gender and the making of femininity. Various themes dominate much of the material: those about the reproductive possibilities of the body, the home and relations with husbands and questions about the part which women should play in the world outside the home. A first theme, of the body and reproduction, is one in which there are striking changes between 1918 and 1939. Women, as we have seen, begin to have fewer children in these decades and the use of contraception for married couples became slowly normalised. In part this was due to campaigners for the public discussion and availability of contraception; couched—as continued to be the case for some time—in various forms of legitimation and justification. The most famous English book on the subject in the early twentieth century was Marie Stopes’s Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties, first published in 1918.28 With its chapters ranging from ‘The Heart’s Desire’ to ‘The Glorious Unfolding’ many readers in the twenty-first century would seek in vain for advice about either the mechanics of heterosexual intercourse or advice on contraception. It is also perhaps astounding that Stopes included a message from a Roman Catholic priest, a Father Stanislaus St. John who wrote the following in part of the book’s preface:

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Let me take in illustration of my meaning the case you give of the worn out mother of twelve. The Catholic belief is that the loss of health on her part for a few years of life and the diminished vitality on the part of her later children would be a very small price to pay for an endless happiness on the part of all.29

What must now appear to many people to be a blatant and callous disregard for the health and happiness of children and mothers was consistent with the Roman Catholic condemnation of contraception, echoed by the Lambeth Conference of the Church of England in 1908 and 1920. Since those years the Church of England, along with other world religions— although not Roman Catholicism—has changed its mind about the legitimacy of the use of contraception. But what comes across in Stopes’s book is characteristic of its time and also, more contentiously, in aspects of our present: a fusion of the expectation of heterosexual intercourse with its potential for romance and a wish to curtail what Stopes, and other contributors to her book, described as ‘lower’ desires. What is being set up here is in one sense a potentially egalitarian and emancipatory change in terms of the assumptions of both men and women about heterosexual intercourse. It is being said, radically, that respectable women, as well as men, are allowed to find heterosexual intercourse enjoyable. No longer is sexual pleasure to be thought of as in some sense degrading for women; nor is it to be assumed that male sexual desire is necessarily an unstoppable force to which wives must submit regardless of their own wishes. Throughout the work of Stopes there is one theme in particular that is particularly significant in the making of ‘respectable’ women. It was Stopes’s conviction that one of the issues that made the use of contraception so important was that of the ‘weakening’ of the race. This euphemism about eugenics and racial politics was far from unknown in the early years of the twentieth century. One of the leaders of the suffrage movement, Emmeline Pankhurst, was fond of calling for the ‘best’ women in the campaign which she led; the ‘best’ women being, to Emmeline Pankhurst, white and educated.30 Thus when we look at early twentieth century ideas about the female body what we see is a highly racialised body, implicitly if not explicitly a white body. From the years just after the end of the First World War that body is also expected to be ‘healthy’ in ways which indicate a departure from nineteenth century ideas about health being more closely linked with survival. And it is that idea of the healthy body, and a female body which is increasingly expected to be an engaged and willing

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partner in heterosexual intercourse, which gradually started to become a publicly agreed norm in the years after the First World War. Like many other social changes this view of the function and the possibilities of the female body did not immediately become a general view. Words like ‘modesty’ and ‘reserve’ still litter the pages of women’s magazine in the inter-war years and powerful cases continue to be made about the differences between the expectations of men and women about the meaning and the implications of heterosexual intercourse. Heterosexual desire remains securely based in marriage and although women are increasingly allowed to exhibit heterosexual desire within that context, another expectation is to gain ground, that of women’s responsibility for the care of their bodies. Crucially, a new responsibility for women emerges: the importance of maintaining themselves as objects of male validation. So as the desiring female subject becomes more publicly explicit, that subject has to take on the task of maintaining herself as a desirable object. If we return to the end of the nineteenth century, what we can see in popular culture is an increasing validation of the legitimacy of the idea that women should care for their bodies and, crucially, use the new technologies for bodily improvement. These forms of bodily improvement took the form of new cosmetics; no longer was the wearing of make -up to be regarded as the indication of a ‘fallen’ woman. Although various kinds of creams for the face had long been available for women and regarded as perfectly acceptable, what is new about advertising copy even before the First World War is the assumption that cosmetics will be generally available and should be generally used; the use of cosmetics has shifted from the voluntary to the essential. For example, Home Notes, in its edition of 16th April 1898 contains an advertisement for ‘Creme Simon’, suggesting in the text that ‘The health of your skin is the reflection of your physical and psychological health, it simply cannot be dissociated’. This was no doubt the case in 1898 as much as in the early twenty-first century but the point is that this advertisement is making the claim, on which the cosmetics industry continues to be based, that its products can correct the effects of ageing, poverty and exhaustion. That same edition of Home Notes carries advertisements for ‘Frazers Tablets’, which will produce a ‘Lillies and Roses’ complexion, whilst ‘Shadeine’ will get rid of grey hair. Nor is this edition exceptional. In the edition of 23rd April 1898 there is a collection of advertisements for curling hair, cream to whiten the skin and machines to correct ungainly noses.31 In these advertisements what Home Notes is allowing women is an implicit permission to, if not change, then amend

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their appearance at the time when the actual use of visible cosmetics by women still carried some negative connotations. No doubt the cosmetics offered were of as little use as more contemporary products, but what is crucial here is the public expression of the idea that not only is the appearance of women inevitably unstable through the process of ageing, this does not have to be accepted. Endorsing this idea of the rejection of ‘natural’ feminine beauty took some time to achieve; in 1898 the generalised acceptance of the use by women of the kind of cosmetics that are immediately visible (lipstick, rouge) was yet to be generally achieved. But by the 1920s the narrative of the legitimate physical self-improvement by women was becoming fused with the ever increasing technological improvement in cosmetics themselves: a combination which was to be foundational to the merging of commercial interests with normative expectations about women. By 1925 we can see in mass market periodicals, the bringing together of ideas about what have become the accepted responsibilities of women to care for their physical appearance with a growing interest on how to make this aspiration democratically available.32 (Vogue magazine once ran a column called Less Cash, More Dash, a tacit recognition from a journal essentially designed for the display of ‘haute couture’ that wider access to both fashion and cosmetics might be desirable). Thus in one edition of Modern Woman in 1925, a long article on how to care for that ‘shingle’ haircut which became such an iconic indication of social changes around female appearance in the twentieth century, admits both the financial expense of the cut (‘trimming at first seems an unavoidable expense’) but then turns to the self help which is such a feature of women’s magazines throughout the twentieth century: ‘A sharp pair of scissors and clippers will help to maintain the cut, as will a nightly massage of the head.’33 In these various instructions, all of which inevitably involve time and money, we can see the basis of that increasingly coercive imperative to do work on the body and the appearance which is to become so central to the lives of women in the twentieth century. The twenty-first-century description of people (largely women) who are ‘high maintenance’ was eventually to bring together those ideas of the body as a machine which has to be regularly serviced. This perception of the body as a machine to be (literally) oiled, if not watered, informs much of the advertising of the cosmetic companies established in the 1920s and 1930s. Two of the most famous firms producing cosmetics were those headed by Elizabeth Arden and Helena

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Rubinstein; both created a culture around cosmetics which took away cultural prohibitions about their use and made the pursuit of endless youth and beauty a worthwhile, admirable and respectable enterprise. Two quotations from Elizabeth Arden suggest the central themes of this new culture: she remarked that ‘there are no ugly women, there are only lazy women’ and argued that ‘there is no excuse for tired eyes and sagging skin.’34 So a language of rights and entitlement to the use of cosmetics was accompanied by a work ethic towards the appearance of the individual self. Women are assured that they should be caring for their bodies and that it is their responsibility to do so. The many advertisements for various cosmetics in these decades were accompanied by a burgeoning presence of aids to physical well being, in which the voices of ‘experts’ (usually male doctors) were included to support the various claims of manufacturers. Central to those claims is the possibility of endless youth, as Kathy Peiss has described, in her book of the same title, as Hope in a Jar.35 A connection is being established, which is to go on to flourish in subsequent decades, of the association of being ‘modern’ and looking consistently youthful. Wrinkles, grey hair and other manifestations of growing older have no place in a culture which prides itself on its association with the ‘new’ and its ability for constant re-invention (Fig. 3.1). Here, for example, is an advertisement from a 1930 advertisement in The Tatler for the products of Helena Rubinstein, an advertisement informed by a template for cosmetic advertising evident throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst century: the need for aggressive and urgent action, the eradication of the ‘coarse’ and the validation of science: Make haste, therefore, to obliterate any ageing coarsened looks. The science and artistry of the foremost facial authority in the world, Helena Rubinstein, will quickly give you the cachet of exquisite, youthful, unmarred beauty. Then you can face the functions of the season secure in the knowledge of your beauty.36

In the same year, in the same periodical, an even more explicit and in many ways threatening advertisement appeared. In this case the advertisement was for an organisation calling itself The Hystogen Institute, founded by a gentleman named as Mr Willi. The headline of the advertisement was ‘Your Looks May be Your Livelihood’ and the text continued with an endorsement from a Captain Gilbert Frankau:

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Fig. 3.1  Madame: Body work. (Source: The Tatler, 4th June, 1930, (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library; reprinted with permission)

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I sincerely believe that Mr Willi can do real service to many thousands of middle-aged women whose happiness  – and perhaps whose very living in some Cases – may be threatened by the passing of their beauty. Mr Willi is one of the very few Real Experts In his art.37

These advertisements suggest a number of assumptions. First, the machine of the body needs ‘experts’ to maintain it. Second, that women will accept the credentials of men such as Mr Willi and a Captain Frankau with no evidence of either their competence or their honesty. Despite the capitals used for Real Expert there is nothing that might constitute any kind of professional accreditation. Third, both Mr Willi and Captain Frankau make it quite abundantly clear that women who have not attempted to disguise ageing are in danger of rejection by men. Finally and perhaps most importantly, the language used in the Helena Rubinstein advertisement is one that is rich in classed associations. Throughout the nineteenth century English fiction had used the adjective ‘coarse’ to denote the appearance of working-class people and people of colour. To be ‘coarse’ was not, however, simply a matter of physical appearance, it was also about speech and behaviour and looking like a person who did manual labour. The middle, and upper-class white women who were the readers of The Tatler are threatened with the loss of that specific, classed and racialised visual self which indicated their social standing. But these readers are not just made aware of how ‘rough’ or ‘coarse’ skin might meet social disapproval, they are also reminded that their appearance is central to the gaining of male approval. The implicit threat in the words ‘your looks are your livelihood’ is ongoing within modern societies in which an aspect of the apparent emancipation of women into new forms of the ‘respectable’ through the use of cosmetics is also a necessary condition for maintaining male approval. Modern Woman continues its mix of advice on care of the female body, and how to dress through the inter-war years. But this periodical and others such as The Tatler also explore those other two aspects of women’s lives: relationships with children and husbands and life outside the home. The key theme in much of the material that appears around these issues is that of being ‘modern’; an emphasis which implicitly places a sharp distinction between generations. We are seldom told what the demarcations of these generations are, but in reading these advertisements what is clear is that the non-modern is best represented by a generation that embraced the kinds of values, both personal and political that George V represented

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and which his son—Edward VIII—so much wished to challenge. In this new world what is striking is how much it is assumed, hoped and encouraged that women will change: it is hard to find in publications for women any hint that perhaps there might be such a person as a ‘modern’ man. Thus when the periodicals speak, as they frequently do, about the changing relationship between married couples, it is the woman who appears as the agent of change: the person who is different in important ways from her mother and her grandmother. What emerges in the vast majority of publications about, and for, women in the 1920s and the 1930s is the assumed stability of the masculine. Reading various women’s magazines in those decades there is the persistent presence of the figure called ‘the husband’, a figure with a precise set of expectations about his wife. This monolithic person does not choose to engage in emotional discussions. Home Notes in 1921 advises that a woman’s happiness in marriage is entirely in her own hands; she should never show her emotions to her husband.38 So whilst women’s magazines in the 1920s and 1930s stress that ‘modern’ women have a duty to care for their bodies and their overall appearance in a way that suggests a shift away from the validation of the ‘natural’, in another sense those same periodicals repeatedly endorse the central, defining, concerns of respectable womanhood. Little has shaken that belief which Margery Spring Rise observed in 1938 that ‘..the crown of a woman’s life is to be a wife and mother’.39 Acquiring a home, a husband and children is taken-for-granted as central to the ‘natural’ role of women, in which interests or experiences of life outside the home are fundamentally of use for maintaining a happy domestic space. In November 1925 Modern Woman published an article with the title ‘Life is sweet sister!’. The final passages of the article, written under the pseudonym ‘Jane Doe’ are worth recording: Wedded love is changing and for the better. There is not so much wretched dog-in-the-manger jealousy between married folks. There are fewer wives having their spirits broken. There is more of what I call fifty-fifty about marriage today. Independence on the part of women has accomplished this. And a girl who has been a self-supporting unit, and who knows not only how to make a good job of her work, but a good job of herself, is far more likely to make a tremendous success of her married life than the spiritless ninny who drifts into a job merely to mark time until some short- seeing young man shall rescue her from it.40

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This passage says a great about the ways in which the popular press, throughout the twentieth and twenty-first century, is content to make generalisations about the status and experiences of women with little or nothing of what might be described as evidence. Thus it remains important to set alongside these comments by Jane Doe the material and public comments made and collected in the same period by Margery Spring-­ Rice, others in the Women’s Co-operative Guild and the first woman Cabinet minister Margaret Blondfield all of whom found in their studies and—in the case of Margaret Blondfield the personal experience of working class life—a reality very far from that presented in Modern Woman and elsewhere. It is certainly the case that the 1920s and 1930s saw an explosion, in Britain and the United States of the industries providing cosmetics and clothing for women but contemporary material demonstrates very clearly the limits of access to these goods.41 It is the very negotiability of ‘womanhood’ that can be observed in women’s magazines and other material from the 1920s and the 1930s which calls into question women’s own perceptions of gender differences. At the end of the inter-war period Woolf’s Three Guineas, published in 1938 (one year before Working Class Wives) had lambasted the British establishment (the law, the universities, the church, the military) for its determined exclusion of women. This attack on the British elite might be read as a feminist argument against exclusionary institutions but it can also be read as an argument about the limited worth of what women are being excluded from. That suggestion, that challenging the exclusion of women from male locations of power is not necessarily a worthwhile or necessary goal, appears throughout writing explicitly for women in the 1920s and 1930s. What is assumed by many writers (from Modern Woman to The Tatler) is that emancipation for women has been achieved. There are repeated assertions about the ‘modern’ woman and the achievement of emancipation. But at the same time there are voices which wonder about both the extent and the gains of this ‘emancipation’. One writer who wrote on this subject throughout her life is the Irish writer Kate O’Brien. O’Brien was a prolific novelist and journalist, who became famous in 1941 with the publication of her novel The Land of Spices.42 The book was centrally concerned with questions about the meaning and the limits of female self-empowerment, a theme which had occurred throughout her previous journalism. In Good Housekeeping of 1930 the editorial introduction to an article by Kate O′ Brien read as follows ‘To such pioneer women as Mrs Pankhurst, Mrs Despard and Dame Millicent Fawcett the woman of today

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owes the inch-by-inch spadework of the emancipation which she accepts as her birthright’.43 What follows from this is O’Brien’s article in which she argues that women have ‘had to lose one moral code and find another’.44 She acknowledges the achievements of exceptional women but also goes to ask questions about exactly what has been achieved for the majority of women who have, she writes, now to ‘forsake grandmother’s timid shrinking from evil’. According to O’Brien, the problem is that women have been given responsibility; women have been divorced from a world in which: (She) had nothing to do but order dinner and have babies and say “my love” in appropriate tones at appropriate moments.45

This picture of the lives of the great majority of women in Britain in 1930 can be dismissed as a fantasy. But O’Brien was raising a question of exactly how, why, and where, women were to find a place in those worlds which had previously (and still in 1930) largely denied and refused their inclusion. The arguments put forward by Woolf, O’Brien and others did not resolve the question of ‘what is a woman to be’, let alone the question which vexed Sigmund Freud of what a woman wants. But in the inter-war years it is clear from various contexts that questions were being asked and debated about these issues. The language of the debate, particularly on questions of sexuality, maintained its refusal of the explicit and (despite decades which saw the publication of Orlando and The Well of Loneliness) the public legitimacy of any form of non binary sexual identity and/or practice. For example, when O’Brien is writing about what she describes as ‘certain virtues’ it is not immediately apparent that what she is discussing are questions of sexuality and particularly issues of sexual relations outside marriage. Instead of what she has described as ‘grandmother’s timid shrinking from evil’ the modern woman has to learn that ‘continency is valuable not because of any mysterious personal glory …but because it is a social necessity exacted by rational beings of the whole human race’.46 Not unlike cosmetic advertising moral certainty is underpinned by an invocation of the rational and defined social needs. The amount of ink that is spilt on questions about sexuality in the period between 1920 and 1940 is considerable, even if the subject was buried in obscure references and implications. As far as social historians have been able to detect about the sexual habits of the British in these

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years much of the advice and views of writers such as O’Brien was not always followed.47 Heterosexual intercourse outside marriage continued to be practised as much as it was consistently denied and condemned. Homosexual relations followed much the same pattern. In both cases, those with more money, more education and more access to the relative anonymity of urban life had a greater degree of both personal freedom and choice and much greater opportunity to make their own choices. That pattern of a degree of sexual freedom amongst those with various forms of privilege continued; biographies and autobiographies attest to the range and continuity of these relationships. Amongst those whose lives were less likely to be recorded for posterity information is more scarce. What it is difficult to find in any section of the media until the 1950s is any truly sympathetic response to women who become the mothers of what were then (and until 1969) described as ‘illegitimate’ children. To have a child outside marriage was socially unacceptable and—to judge from the popular women’s press of the 1920s and the 1930s—seldom a situation which attracted public discussion about gendered responsibility for the event or sympathy for the mother and her child. Nevertheless, support for women in this situation had been forthcoming in other contexts. The case for male responsibility had been made by Elizabeth Gaskell in her novel Ruth in 1853. Research by Samantha Williams on the period 1700–1850 and Pat Thane on the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries demonstrates that there is evidence of practical assistance to both mother and child.48 In all, what we can see in the popular publications for British women in the 1920s and the 1930s is what Charlotte Macdonald has described as ‘Body and Self: Learning to be Modern in in 1920s and 1930s Britain.’49 In it, what Macdonald explores is the question of how women were learning to ‘be’ that newly desirable ‘modern’ person. That person is complex: a ‘modern’ woman became desirable because she presented that picture of change, fashion, social improvement, which in all its elements has held the public imagination for centuries. But at the same time the boundaries of that ‘modern’ woman remained a matter for negotiation and forms of social disapproval were as fervent as any of those of endorsement. The ‘modern’ woman may have looked fashionable, been actively engaged in making herself ‘modern’ but that same woman still encountered many forms of male control and had radically dissimilar possibilities for personal autonomy than those of men. If we look back at those inter-war years the degree of control of husbands and fathers over what we might regard now as the everyday lives of women remained considerable: many financial

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transactions could only be transacted through a man as were, amongst other things, access to certain kinds of medical treatment and decisions surrounding the care of children. For married women in particular, the will of the husband remained paramount. Yet much of what was written in the publications explicitly designed for women of the 1920s and 1930s actually prepared the way for what was to become, by the mid 1950s, a growing tide of support for the re-ordering of the moral and legal order of gender relations. The ground was being prepared less by specific arguments about sexual relations than the possibilities of entitlement and agency in new forms of consumerism which, despite clear commercial motives, also contained the seeds of female economic independence. At the same time, generations of male writers (from Sinclair Lewis in the 1920s to Philip Larkin in the 1960s) condemned what they saw as the way in which the consumerism of women condemned men to its satisfaction. Consumerism, both men suggested, makes women ask men for ‘things’. Learning to ask for ‘things’ and most particularly the vaunted rewards of the modern was being taught as legitimate; a capacity which can, and did, extend its reach.50 It is this theme of the ‘making’ of need which is important here. Thus when Modern Woman, The Tatler, Home Notes write about dress and consumption for women in the inter-war years the language in all of these publications about ‘freedom’ and ‘choice’ pre-figures that of a later part of the twentieth century. What is shared is the emphasis on the importance of being modern and entitlement to consumption. To quote again one of those slogans that has persisted from the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty first the idea, expressed explicitly, that ‘you’re worth it’. In an advertisement in Modern Woman in 1935 for underwear, these garments are designed for ‘the freedom loving modern’.51 The freedom in this case is freedom from the constraint of more traditional corsetry, a literal freedom which is then given another meaning its association with the language of emancipation. Constructing that opposition, between the unwanted control of the past and the possibilities of a ‘free’ present and future is precisely what is endorsed in the 1980s in the advertisements for Virginia Slims cigarettes: the young ‘modern’ woman strides across the world whilst the woman of the past remains a drab and housebound figure. Writing in 1957 in The Uses of Literacy Richard Hoggart was to rail against the ‘candyfloss world ‘of Hollywood and the popular culture of the United States. But as Selina Todd points out in her biography of Shelagh Delaney, that attitude was richly expressive of a male expectation about the

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proper place of women being in the home, secure in their domestic responsibilities (Fig. 3.2). She writes: Richard Hoggart disapproved of young women like Shelagh, who he deemed ‘flighty, careless and inane ‘factory girls, pursuing mindless fun’ at the “Palais”, the “Mecca”, the “Locarno” rather than leading respectable lives helping their mothers.52

That ‘respectable’ life for women was becoming, as it remains, a contested space between women and men, in which expectations and aspirations on both sides are complex. Younger women, as Selina Todd argues in the case of Shelagh Delaney, were eager to seize the opportunities offered by new places to dance and to meet men. Those dance halls of which Hoggart voiced his disapproval were places which gave women a degree of social independence. Importantly too these dance halls allowed women to come into their own feminised form of urban identity—the flaneur of whom Baudelaire had written in the mid nineteenth century— in which the person and their dress could be displayed, and in which that display was regarded as ‘respectable’.53 Advertisements throughout the 1930s had begun to emphasise this new, public, social space for women. In this space, it was becoming essential that women presented to the world a groomed and well tended appearance. So by the time war broke out in 1939, the care of the self by women was firmly established in the UK as something that all women could not only do, but should do. It was that imperative which is so crucial here: looking after yourself has become a respectable responsibility. Not looking after yourself, or in the famous and often used phrase, ‘letting yourself go’ acquired a negative moral status. Women had been given not new aspirations—the desire to be thought beautiful is in no sense a creation of the twentieth century—but new tasks, new work. And this new work, for example the use of cosmetics, was an indication of what is beginning to emerge as a proper response to the world: one in which women are always positive, always looking forward. Indeed, the woman who is emerging is that ever welcoming creature whom Arlie Hochschild was to write about in her account of the emotional work which women are expected to perform in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century.54 That smiling flight attendant or hotel receptionist, enthusiastically every individual to ‘have a nice day’ are part of a culture which seeks to generalise female

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Fig. 3.2  Freedom corsetry: The forms of ‘freedom’. (Source: Modern Woman, Vol. XV, March 1935)

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warmth. In 1934 Home Notes published the following comments about a woman whose engagement to marry has just been broken: If Fenella, who had loved John very, very much, had gone about … remembering him every moment of the day…she would probably have lost her fresh, laughing look, ruined her health and put up a barrier between herself and any other young man who might have come along and made her happy.55

Fenella is exhorted to remain attractive, lest she loses her chance of appealing to other young men and losing her chance for marriage. A young woman is not expected to die of a broken heart. In this advice no man is irreplaceable: the goal is marriage, the person less important. But the advice explicitly assumes that the secret of being attractive is being ‘fresh’ and having a ‘laughing look’, one that clearly comes accompanied with the implication that this look can be both individually chosen and maintained by purchased resources. Arden’s comment about ‘fear copy’ speaks across decades of the advertising of cosmetics (and later new industries of medicalised cosmetic surgery); the commercialised terror of the physical impact of ageing and the social consequences of the loss of physical attractiveness. The war years of 1939 to 1945 did not diminish the appetite for various forms of cosmetics, or the advertising about them, but they did make them much less available, given that the resources for their production, and many of the people involved in various aspects of the industries associated with cosmetics, were diverted to the priorities of war time production. Hairdressing, the production of beauty products of all kinds, the rationing of clothes, were all much reduced due to the exigences of the war. At the same time the ‘home front’ as it was called, became a location for new definitions of womanhood. The encouraging, welcoming and ever sympathetic wife and mother did not disappear, but she was given new responsibilities to conserve fuel, clothing and food. Men who had probably never cooked a meal in their lives gave radio broadcasts about desirable ways of cooking. So in that sense the angel in the house remained in her place, with patriarchical judgement and policing still very much in force and now associated with the patriotic duty of winning the war. But in another sense women were given public and widely endorsed access to a new form of agency: that of taking a role in productive industry and forms of employment generally used by men.

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That role—and its visualisation in the famous poster from the United States of Rosie the Riveter—has become part of the accepted history of the Second World War: that the country was united as never before and that women took over many of the occupations previously reserved for men. But as the historian Angus Calder has pointed out, the war was fought by a country as divided by class and gender as much as before: women certainly did take on the jobs once the preserve of men, but those jobs were largely in unskilled employment.56 The organisation of the war economy, far more competent that it had been in the case of the First World War, named certain occupations as ‘reserved’ and ensured that the men in them remained in post. Valuable skills were not going to be lost in the military. Thus to suppose that women in any sense ‘took over’ in the Second World War is again part of the mythology of that war. The actual experience of women in the Second World War has been recorded by feminist historians as both a time of consistent hardship for many accompanied by some opportunities for new forms of work and responsibility. But there was no general mobilisation of women into either the military or paid work and if, as Ian Gazeley has pointed out, the gender pay gap declined in some industries previously dominated by men this was not a general shift. Nor, as war time propaganda about food and clothing made clear, were domestic responsibilities anything other than those of women.

Notes 1. The assumptions within the canonical literature about the rights of the male individual, and the making of the male individual subject is best represented by Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (London, Blackwell, 1978). John Jervis, Modernity Theory (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) p. 42. 2. The assumptions within the canonical literature about the rights of the male individual, and the making of the male individual subject is best represented by Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism (London, Blackwell, 1978). John Jervis, Modernity Theory (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018) p. 42. 3. The Ladies Magazine was first published in 1731. 4. Home Notes, 16 April 1898. 5. Jane Martin, ‘Beyond Suffrage: Feminism, Education and the Politics of Class in the inter-war years’, British Journal of the Sociology of Education, Vol. 29, No. 4, 2008, pp. 411–423; Time and Tide was founded in 1920 by Margaret, Lady Rhondda who supported the magazine financially.

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Until its demise in 1979 it published a wide range of fiction, moving politically from its initial support for feminism and left wing causes to more conservative sympathies. 6. Selina Todd, The People: The Rise and Fall of the Working Class (London, John Murray, 2015) p. 61. 7. C. Davey, ‘Birth Control in Britain during the Inter-War Years’, Journal of Family History, Vol. 13 (3), 1988, pp. 329–345. 8. Sally Weintrobe, ‘Climate Crisis: The Moral Dimension’, in (ed.) D. Morgan, The Unconscious in Social and Political Life (London, Phoenix, 2019) p. 237.S 9. Rachel Bowlby, Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola (London, Methuen, 1985). 10. Simone de Beauvoir, The Prime of Life (London, Penguin, 1965) p. 193. 11. Joan Riviere, ‘Womanliness as a Masquerade’, Journal of Psychoanalysis, Vol. 10, 1929, pp. 303–313. 12. John Jervis, Exploring the Modern (Oxford, Blackwell, 1998) p. 137. 13. John Jervis, Exploring the Modern, p. 137. 14. Shira Tarrant and Marjorie Jolles (eds.) Fashion Talks: Undressing the Power of Style (Stony Brook, New  York; Stony Brook University of New  York, 2012) p. 3. 15. C.Willett Cunnington, Why Women Wear Clothes (London, Faber and Faber, 1941) and The Perfect Lady (London, Parrish Press, 1948). 16. Vika Martina Plock, Modernism, Fashion and Interwar Women Writers (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017). 17. Celia Marshik, At the Mercy of their Clothes: Modernism, the Middlebrow and British Garment Culture (New York, Columbia University Press, 2017); Ilya Parkins and Elizabeth Sheehan (eds.) Cultures of Femininity in Modern Fashion (Durham, New Hampshire, University of New Hampshire Press, 2011). 18. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London, Routledge, 1991). 19. Margery Spring Rice, Working Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions (London, Virago, 1981). 20. Barbara Wootton, in Working Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions, p. iii. 21. Margery Spring Rice, Working Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions, p. 14. 22. On social research in the inter-war years see Selina Todd, The People, pp. 61–95. 23. Two major works on this subject by sociologists in the second half of the twentieth century were Hannah Gavron’s The Captive Wife (London, Pelican, 1968) and Ann Oakley’s The Sociology of Housework (London, Allen Lane, 1974).

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24. ‘In a working class home ….you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which it is not so easy to find elsewhere’, George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1962) p. 104. 25. Wartime knitting for victory, http://www.elinorflorence.com 26. ‘Wife and Helpmate,’ Home Notes, 15 November 1919. 27. Marie Stopes, Married Love: A New Contribution to the Solution of Sex Difficulties (London, Actfield, 1918). 28. Father Stanislaus, ‘A Letter to Marie Stopes’, Married Love, p. xiv. 29. The racial and eugenic politics of Emmeline Pankhurst are explored in Laura Schwartz, ‘The Politics of Remembering the Suffragettes’, Revue Francaise de la Civilisation Britannique, Vol. XX111 (1), 2018. 30. Home Notes, 16 April 1898. 31. Gilles Lipovetsky, The Empire of Fashion: Dressing Modern Democracy (Rutgers, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1994). 32. Agnes Miall, ‘The Well Groomed Shingle’, Modern Woman, Vol. 1, No. 6, 1925, p. 15. 33. Elizabeth Arden, ‘Your Beauty is at Your Fingertips’, The Tatler, No. 1490, 15 January 1930, p. iii. 34. Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America’s Beauty Culture (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, first published in 1988). The points Peiss made were extended by Naomi Klein in The Beauty Myth (London, Chatto and Windus, 1990). 35. ‘You are as Young as You Like, Madame’ The Tatler, No. 1510, 4 June 1930. 36. ‘Your Looks may be your Livelihood’, The Tatler, No. 1510, 4 June 1930. 37. Home Notes, 21 August 1926, p. 376. 38. Margery Spring Rice, Working Class Wives: Their Health and Conditions, p. 95. 39. ‘Life is Sweet, Sister’ by Jane Doe, Modern Woman, Vol. 1 No. 6, November 1925. 40. Selina Todd, The People, p. 113. 41. Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices, first published in 1941, re-printed by Virago, London, 1988. 42. Editorial, Good Housekeeping, February, 1930, p. 15. 43. Kate O′ Brien, Good Housekeeping, p. 108. 44. Kate O’Brien, Good Housekeeping, p. 110. 45. Kate O’Brien, Good Housekeeping, p. 110. 46. Stephen Brooke, ‘Bodies, Sexuality and the Modernisation of the British Working Class, 1920s–1960s’, International Labour and Working Class History, No. 69, Spring 2006, pp. 104–122. 47. Samantha Williams, Unmarried Motherhood in the Metropolis, 1700–1850 (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019); Pat Thane and Tanya Evans, Sinners?

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Scroungers? Saints? Unmarried Motherhood in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012); Pamela Cox, Gender, Justice and Welfare in Britain, 1900–1950 (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002). 48. Charlotte Macdonald, ‘Body and Self: Learning to be Modern in 1920s–1930s Britain, Women’s History Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2013, pp. 267–279. 49. Sinclair Lewis, Babbitt (New York, Harcourt, 1922); George Orwell, Coming up for Air (London, Victor Gollancz, 1939); Philip Larkin, ‘Self’s the Man’, in (ed.) A.  Thwaite, Philip Larkin, Collected Poems (London, Faber and Faber, 1988) p. 117. 50. ‘Liberty Products’, Modern Woman, Vol. XV, No. 118, March 1935. 51. Selina Todd, Tastes of Honey: The Making of Shelagh Delaney and a Cultural Revolution (London, Chatto and Windus, 2019) pp. 9–10. 52. Baudelaire’s ‘Flaneur’ has often been read as epitomising the hopes of modernity. See John Jervis, Exploring the Modern, pp. 78–79. 53. Arlie Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling (Berkeley, University of California Press), 1983. 54. Edith Arundel, ‘A Broken Engagement need not mean a Broken Heart,’ Home Notes, Vol. CX1, No. 1441, 1921. 55. Angus Calder, The People’s War (London, Jonathan Cape, 1969) pp. 332–334. 56. Ian Gazeley, ‘Women’s Pay in British Industry during the Second World War,’ Economic History Review, Vol. 61, No. 3, 2008, pp. 651–671.

CHAPTER 4

The Right Body

The work which women had been invited and cajoled to do on their faces and appearance throughout 1920s and the 1930s required, then as now, those resources of time and money which for many women were absent. But the advertising which accompanied cosmetics and fashion was largely framed through that universal person of a ‘modern’ woman who, fictitious as she was in specific terms, was nevertheless also a real, if exceptional, person. Hence there is a very good case for regarding the 1920s and 1930s as the decades which saw a rapid process of the cultural modernisation of aspects of gender in the UK, a change interrupted by the Second World War but one which was to regain some, but not all, of its momentum in the 1950s. That modernising energy was largely limited to women and a new aspirational world; there is little or no presence of arguments or suggestions about ‘new’ men in the popular culture of the inter-war years to match that of the ideal of the ‘new’ woman. For this person, the boundaries of the ‘respectable’ and ‘respectability’ were changing. One of those boundaries, the subject of this chapter, was about the appearance and social judgement of women’s bodies. It is therefore not difficult to cite various women who became well known figures in the inter-war years; some, drawn from the new media form of the cinema, particularly that of the United States, but others were from the UK. A new tradition began to emerge in which women became ‘the first’ to achieve or to participate in contexts which had hitherto been confined to men. Novelty in female achievements began to be celebrated. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Evans, Making Respectable Women, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7_4

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Thus Amy Johnson, the first woman to fly solo from the UK to Australia, Edith Morley, the first woman to be a Professor at London University, Margaret Bondfield, the first woman to be in the British Cabinet, were all cited as figures of what women could now do in the ‘modern’ world. The list was about exceptional forms of achievement and inevitably very far from the possibilities open to the majority of the population. Yet what is important, on a symbolic level, is that what these women demonstrated was the possible public agency of women. This was no longer about the sequestered woman achieving distinction from the private space, it was about a woman acquiring recognisable skills and through them achieving distinction and a physical presence within a public space. Women were, now, actually in public in the sense that few women, other than royalty or the notorious, had previously enjoyed. Just as exceptional women were to be celebrated, so too women emerged as a collective presence. The 1911–1913 suffragette street parades put women, as a collective group, onto the public stage. Women who deliberately dressed with some style (as Katarzyna Kociolek has pointed out) emerged into the public view demanding a form of emancipation as yet unknown to all women and some men.1 This emerging tradition—of the celebration of the untrodden paths now being taken by women—was made possible by a number of social changes. Amongst the most significant was the expansion of a mass media with, as John Jervis and Susan Glenn have pointed out, an endless hunger for the sensational.2 Suddenly, the activities of women could be seen, whether in newsreel or print or, for a tiny minority of the population in the late 1930s, on television. What occurred with this was a new awareness of the female body. Represented in various forms for centuries, the body of woman was now a matter for general view and comment. In high culture, we can note that the energetic diarist Virginia Woolf exhibits that awareness of bodily size which has become so much an aspect of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; in her words women become a ‘whopper’ or simply ‘so fat, so coarse’.3 What Woolf’s remarks suggest are an awareness of an idea of a ‘good’ body size as opposed to a ‘bad’ one; a classed and moralistic attitude to the body which contains, in Woolf’s case, a degree of social prejudice about those who are ‘fat’. The question of the size of the body has arrived. In slightly less culturally elevated contexts a comparison of the pictures of women in Vogue from the 1920s with pictures in the same periodical in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries show that the models in those later years are significantly thinner. Until recently it was less often remarked that the vast majority of the models, in Vogue as

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well as across the whole sector of women’s magazines, continued to be white. The public explosion of fury about the absence of different racial characteristics is only recent, although Kalpana Wilson is amongst those who had previously remarked on the forms of representation of women outside the global north which gave a priority to young, smiling, women with facial characteristics that are markedly white.4 In body size and racial characteristics we meet instances where conventions not just about the behaviour of ‘respectable’ women are being invoked, but about the appropriate, ‘respectable’ body in which that behaviour might be located. What we might also notice is that the women appearing in Vogue in the first half of the twentieth century looked as if they might have reached the post 1928 voting age of 21. Compare this with the kinds of models that begin to inhabit Vogue (and many other women’s magazine in the 1960s); the models appear to be scarcely of working, let alone voting, age. The body of the skinny child becomes the place on which to display the world of fashion. A great deal of energy has been devoted from the late twentieth century onwards to concern about the issue of the body size of models. The anorexic model, the child like waif, what has been described as ‘heroin chic’ have all been cited as instances of the ways in which images of desirable women are derived from conditions of human frailty, vulnerability or distress. We might read the emergence of these forms of the female as a indication of male fears and fantasies about acceptable forms of women in an era where women seem to be acquiring more social and political presence. Equally, it might be a coded form of hatred for more traditional forms of womanhood, the maternal, the possibly terrifying embrace of the female. However we choose to regard this there is little doubt that the ideal body of women has become thinner. Except of course, as we are told on a daily basis, the real, actual, body of women has not duplicated this trajectory (Figs. 4.1 and 4.2). Today women live longer than in previous decades but they are also often considerably larger than their mothers and grandmothers, in terms of both height and of weight. Height, longevity and body size are all, as ever, different according to class and region and those ancient comparisons between measures of health in deprived areas with expensive parts of London continue to demonstrate the impact of poor housing and diet and poverty.5 In the years before the second world war sections of both non-fiction and an expanded mass media made it plain that the United Kingdom was a place of radical divisions of wealth. Within those divisions a new language about the possible impact on the human body of poverty became

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Fig. 4.1  A youthful necessity: the rewards of youth. (Source: The Tatler, 4 June 1930 (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library; reprinted with permission)

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Fig. 4.2  Elizabeth Arden: Retaining youth. (Source: The Tatler, 21 June 1939 (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library; reprinted with permission)

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apparent in that looking old or ‘ageing’ was something that the wealthy should avoid. This assumption of the absolute necessity of staying young and youthful saturates the magazines for the wealthy and marks the beginning of those two demands for the female body in the twentieth century: being young and being thin. Thus The Tatler in June 1930 publishes an advertisement in which the headline is ‘A Youthful Appearance is a Social Necessity’.6 The advertisement continues to tell its readers that ‘Only painless plastic surgery can give it to you’. In the same issue there are advertisements for remedies for ‘Tired Eyes’ and the ‘evil’ of a ‘tired, uninteresting’ appearance. The apparent rewards that women might gain for vigilance about maintaining their youthfulness are demonstrated on the same page, in which a notice celebrates the engagement of a youthful, slim young white woman gazing at a tall and much older white man. The visual presentation of the successful achievement of the promise of marriage by that young woman is a vivid prediction of the plot of Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca, in which a ‘slight’ young girl marries an older, wealthy man. The literal reading of this novel has been questioned by various authors, but what is interesting here is the recurrence in the novel of a character similar to Alice in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.7 In Rebecca the character of Alice is appropriated for the discussion of the novel’s heroine at various points; a repeated reference to various forms of possible change on the part of women, either to invoke innocence or to suggest the threat of disruptive agency. That instability around the concept of womanhood, of what a woman should be, in terms of the conflicting demand between the possible agency of the ‘modern’ woman with the continuation of patriarchal norms, is, as Alison Light has pointed out, achieved in Rebecca. As Light writes: Rebecca is a romance about respectability in more ways than one… it supports in the end the moral superiority of the girl’s way of being, thoughtful, diffident, and conventional, over and against the decadence of Rebecca.8

In contexts outside fiction, the social tensions around women and definitions of their ‘respectability’ were to a certain extent to be diminished by public narratives in the Second World War about both the disappearance of class differences and a limited re-ordering of the gender order at a time of shared commitment to war against Germany. For those in positions of social privilege, reactions to the possibility of classlessness were mixed. On one hand, Virginia Woolf, in a talk given in 1940, predicted that class

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divisions would have to disappear and that she would happily belong to ‘that other class, the immense class to which almost all of us must belong’. On the other, Evelyn Waugh’s novel of 1945 Brideshead Revisited mourns the coming of what he saw of a new age of classlessness.9 These very different predictions about the future speak to gendered hopes and fears about social change: for women, even of privilege, it opens up possibilities. For white privileged men, it threatens loss. That did not occur, and classed and gendered divisions of education and wealth both remained and reasserted themselves in the period after 1945. What did occur for women was more complex. ‘Re-domestication’ curtailed many of women’s employment possibilities and gradually, by the mid 1950s the shift to consumer, rather military, production, together with full male employment allowed domestic life, and consumption for it, to flourish. It was in this culture, of greater disposal income for some sections of the population that the greater possibilities of ‘respectable’ women other than those of domestic life began to re-assert themselves. That problem of the ‘evil’ of a tired, ageing and uninteresting appearance mentioned in the advertisements for cosmetics in the 1930s had been dwarfed in 1939 by the larger evils of war with Germany. As the hardships of the war and the virtual curtailment of industries related to fashion and cosmetics began to recede so new expectations about who ‘respectable’ women could be began to emerge. One of the most important aspects of new perceptions about definitions of the ‘respectable’ woman which came into a more enhanced focus after 1945 was that of the physical health, and the healthy appearance, of women’s bodies. That aesthetic of the 1930s in which the ‘healthy’ female body became literally visible was one which was to dominate later decades of the twentieth century. Young, white, middle class women, whose mothers would never have thought of showing their knees in public, started to wear brief modern swimsuits and take part in dance and physical exercises designed to maintain bodily strength and vigour. The roots of this shift towards the visible emancipation and public display of the bodies of women had begun in the late nineteenth century in the work of pioneers of gymnastics for women such as Martina Bergman Osterberg, whose college for the physical training of women had been established in Dartford in 1895. Although Osterberg’s work did not have an immediate impact on the dress of women what was being established, as Jim Riordan has pointed out, was an association of the political emancipation of women with a greater freedom for women to take part in sport.10 Thus by the 1930s at

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least some form of limited participation in sport and/or gymnastics had become a standard element in the education of girls; in the Butler Education Act of 1944 it became a compulsory part of the curriculum of state schools. This emphasis on physical activity for reasons of health inevitably meant that perceptions of women’s bodies shifted: no longer associated solely with child bearing and domestic work, responsibilities imposed on the female body by convention and circumstance, women’s bodies could now be capable of individually chosen agency, competition and self assertion. A relationship with the body which had always been allowed to men, but had never been widely accepted for women. This shift towards the possible androgyny of the meaning and the experience of the body was mirrored in new forms of dress for women. The wearing of trousers for leisure had been part of the 1930s aesthetic associated with Coco Chanel and was largely a choice for wealthy women. The war economy of 1939–1945 introduced another possibility: for women, wearing trousers was an essential part of paid work and thus an identification with participation in the public world. Although for some decades a woman wearing trousers would be banned from certain enclaves where gender differences in dress were furiously defended the wider message was that women could also be active in the same ways as men. Looking like a man, therefore, did not involve the loss of respectability but on the contrary indicated an assurance of engagement with the same kind of lived experience as that of men. In the same post war decades that shifts were taking place in attitudes (and institutional strictures) about women and their bodies another theme was beginning to emerge which was part of the complexity of changes about women and respectability. That aspect was that whilst apparently emancipatory changes were becoming accepted, and institutionally enforced, so the visible presence of women’s bodies was beginning to acquire other associations. Contemporary expressions such as ‘nearly nude’ and ‘revealing’, are now part of the daily language of writing about women’s dress. No longer are these part of a critical language but accepted descriptions, implicitly evoking sexualised associations. In contrast to those judgments of canonical women writers of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in which morally admirable women are consistently praised for their ‘neatness’ and anything straying from simplicity condemned, the women writing the fashion pages (and to a certain extent the novels) of the second half of the twentieth century have accepted, in many cases, a loosening of the moral ties of dress. To walk around any urban

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space in the UK in the summer months of the twenty-first century is to see women, especially young women, dressed in what to their grandmothers would appear as their underwear. As the novelist Angela Carter remarked of the late twentieth-century fashion for footless tights teamed with a sweater or shirt, ‘It looks to me as if they (the young women) have forgotten their skirts’. But, and also in this context, what we might observe about fashions of the last decades of the twentieth century is that two other narratives have made their impact on judgments about women, dress and ‘respectability’. The first is that of the idea of the ‘fun’ of dress, of fashion as a form of personal entertainment, in which the self can be endlessly re-created, without reference to stringent norms of the respectable. The second, and contrary to this hedonistic view of dress, is the highly restrictive set of norms which relate to the appearance of women in paid work. There have been, for example, cases in which women have been required, as part of their contract of employment, to wear high heels to work.11 There are, in many cases across the service sector, a demand for women to look ‘attractive’ or ‘sexy’. Perhaps one of the most striking examples of this is the uniform required of women flight attendants on Virgin airlines. The required dress is a visual moment where the sexualisation of women meets a form of mourning for innocence.12 In this employment tight skirts are de rigueur, as are blouses with the short, puffed sleeves most often seen on the dresses of female children. This combination of a form of adult sexuality, alongside an apparent nostalgia for the clothes of the nursery and the infant school, suggest that the narrative of ‘fun’—part of the ethos of the Virgin empire—is one that is both deeply involved in commercial life and expressed through the bodies and the dress of women. Women employed by Virgin (or other employers with highly gendered dress codes) are of course, being ‘respectable’ in the sense that they are in paid employment and acting as independent beings. At the same time this very independence is significantly controlled and curtailed by expectations about the appearance of women. On the sides of some of the planes in the Virgin empire is the slogan ‘Fly a younger fleet’. This is not simply a statement about the airline’s use of up to the minute planes: it is a highly sexualised message since it is accompanied by a picture of young woman, dressed in very little, smiling happily. Here is a particularly striking image of the ways in which the female body is both commodified and at the same time presented in terms that are socially and visually restrictive; it is a young, slim white body.

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That slim, white, female body which inhabits much of the dream world of contemporary consumerism is the ‘respectable’ aspiration for millions of women. But those same women who are so widely admired are also the bearers of children; an aspect of the experience of women which is as ancient as it remains socially problematic. Here we encounter historical shifts and continuities about the meanings of the ‘respectable’ body of woman which is as considerable as any of those about changing definitions of what ‘respectable’ women are allowed and assumed to wear. In a seminal article in 1978 Anna Davin described the impact of the revelation of the ill health of young, working class males in the late nineteenth century.13 An instance of a social discovery which provoked concern about the conditions in which children, especially those male children who would be the potential soldiers for the Empire, grew up. Suddenly, mothers and their bodies, became politically and nationally important. Although subsequent investigation (in, e.g., the studies of Margaret Llewelyn Davies in 1915 Margery Spring Rice in 1938) demonstrated that little had been done to improve dramatically the conditions in which women ‘mothered’, the point had been established that mothering demanded state support.14 Just as the bodies of women were becoming the place for commercial definition and exploitation in the inter-war years so a tradition of the ‘good’ mother, the ‘respectable’ mother was emerging. In order to be this kind of ‘respectable’ mother it was assumed, until the late twentieth century, that a woman would be part of a heterosexual married couple and the major provider of day-to-day care. The importance of the physical health of mothers and children was evident in the priorities given to mothers and children during the Second World War. This treatment continued after the war, but was accompanied by the emergence of a further strand of expectations of ‘respectable’ mothering in the 1950s and 1960s, the issue of the emotional ties between parent and child discussed in the work of John Bowlby, Anna Freud and D.W. Winnicott.15 But the complications of the ties between mothers and children became, and remain, complex for two reasons. First, because the automatic assumption of the unbreakable right of biological mothers to care for their children had long been challenged (for example by Anna Freud) and second, by those new forms of intimate relationships which were extending the previous norms of parenting.16 Whilst changing mores about sexual morality had done much to diminish the legal requirement of marriage for ‘respectable’ motherhood, other social processes and expectations were enlarging and changing its very meaning. Although it took

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several decades for the work of Anna Freud,John Bowlby and others to have an impact on state policies about, for example, the care of young children in hospital what emerged in Britain throughout the 1950s was a social culture emphasising the importance of links between mothers and children. Ann Oakley has written in her autobiography of the care and attention she received as a child; ‘child centred’ became the organising principle of primary school education.17 ‘Respectable’ women were those who recognised the emotional as well as the physical needs of their children. For some women such recognition was made possible through various combinations of circumstance including material support and chosen inclination. For others, this expectation carried with it demands which seemed to diminish, certainly for a time curtail, other needs and wishes. Little wonder that amongst the four demands of the first Women’s Liberation Conference at Ruskin College, Oxford in February 1970 was that for twenty four hour nurseries.18 The other three demands, in order of their listed importance at the time, were equal pay, equal educational and job opportunities and free contraception and abortion on demand. This moment in the history of women in the United Kingdom was pivotal in bringing together demands about the public and the private spheres: women made it plain that, as the slogan was to endorse, the ‘the personal is the political’. It was a statement of the recognition of what the author Elizabeth Wilson was to call in the title of her book of the same name, the position of women being one of ‘halfway to paradise.’ Memories of those years after the Ruskin conference have been collected by Margaretta Jolly in a volume which sets out that collective sense of discrimination which inspired a generation of women.19 The women who attended the Ruskin conference, unlike previous generations, had not had to fight the same battles for access to higher education or entry to the majority of the professions. But, and it was a hugely important but, what remained as emphatically different in the expectations of that generation of women from those of men were three distinct sets of expectations, all of them, in various ways forming a cluster of the demands of ‘respectability’. First, expectations about sexual behaviour were still highly gendered and heterosexual. Women had been allowed to become ‘desiring’ subjects within normative sexuality in the 1930s but the boundaries of that norm were marriage. Divisions between what one woman writer referred to as ‘slags or drags’ were common.20 Second, those expectations of the ‘good’, respectable mother, still included their

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departure and/or exclusion from paid work. It was a taken-for-granted assumption of many interviewing panels in the 1970s that women applicants could be asked if they intended to marry or have children. This was not a formal ‘marriage bar’ in the sense that had operated in the 1920s and 1930s but the legitimacy of the question was widely accepted. Third, and finally, the state sanctioned male control of various forms of access, amongst them access to contraception and the control and use of money. A new, vital, literature about the lives of women emerged. Varied in its theoretical inspiration it shared a common purpose of making women visible; of removing the ways in which, as Sheila Rowbotham’s work claimed, women had been ‘Hidden from History’.21 Given the considerable constraints on the various civil rights of women until the 1970s it is all the more extraordinary that the 1960s has been labelled as the decade of the ‘swinging’ sixties. But that very label is an indication of the centrality of dress as a marker of social change and social judgments. The 1960s saw an explosion of what became known as ‘youth culture ‘, accompanied by changes in the dress and appearance of young people. No longer did the young have to dress, through either social constraint or the absence of any other available form of clothing, in the same ways as their elders. They could now turn to designers, such as Mary Quant, who were explicitly creating clothes for the young. The question here is the extent to which these new, ‘young’ clothes crossed class and ethnic lines and shifted assumptions of ‘respectable’ dress. Initially, some of these new forms of clothing brought with them was a degree of social outrage. The short skirts for women, the tight trousers and long hair for men, the absence of hats and gloves together with designs drawn from cultures outside the west were all met by condemnation and disgust. Such reactions had followed the changes in women’s dress around hemlines and short hair in the 1920s so it would be wrong to assume a unique sensitivity to dress in the 1960s. But in both cases what was at stake, and a matter for many people of the utmost importance, was the challenge to the very concept of being ‘respectable’. For those who had assumed (and made considerable investment in) matters of dress and general comportment, to be challenged in these areas was about the possibility of the loss of social authority and credibility. And it is through this concept, our concern with maintaining that implicitly fragile appearance that we present to the world, that the question of dress and respectability should be considered. ‘Respectable’ dress has always had the social function of being a form of armour against the world. But a demand for a greater reflexivity about

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ourselves demands that we have to consider how we choose what to wear. Dress has become, specifically for women, more various in its sources and its inspiration and has arguably created a more varied visual language. In the days when ‘respectability’ could be read as clean, tidy, hat and gloves in place, the social message was clear. Today, outside the context of enforced forms of uniform for work, we can present ourselves in many different ways. But all demand interpretation. Thus when, in November 2019, the journalist Emily Maitlis interviewed Prince Andrew wearing a jacket whose design had many features derived from military dress, together with high heeled shoes and trousers, the meaning of the ‘respectable’ public dress of women embraced those new possibilities.22 The clothes of Ms Maitlis spoke, if not truth to power, then a very visible assertion of the rights to individually chosen forms of appearance. This was not a woman dressing to re-enforce the norms of power—in which there is a given way to dress—but a vindication of the plurality of choice which is now possible, for some people in some situations, of the ways in which clothing is part of an individual’s rights. From this we might assume that our choices of our visual appearance have become more complex, and less subject to constraint, as a result of those changes which the 1960s brought to the general appearance of the British population. If a woman journalist can interview a member of the royal family (himself dressed in the standard white, alpha male, uniform of a suit and a tie) wearing what to some might look like a parody of military authority it would seem that plurality has come to be the dominant element in how we can appear. To set against the idiosyncratic dress of Maitlis we have to remember the privilege that both occupy. Once this association is made, between privilege and freedoms of dress and appearance, the assumption of a general access to diversity in dress might be more tenuous. Recent sociological and political work has made much of the idea of ‘demonisation’, an aggressive stance of disapproval towards the ways in which sections of the white working class. Both behave and present themselves to the world. ‘Respectability’ is clearly not dead in terms of the forms of highly pejorative criticism of the bodily appearance of the white working class which Owen Jones, Beverley Skeggs, Imogen Tyler and others have observed.23 This is organised around a number of themes: body size, forms of dress that are deemed ‘inappropriate’ and body enhancement such as tattooing. To illustrate this in terms of an individual, the person would be overweight, wearing sportswear as everyday wear, heavily tattooed or pierced

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and enhanced by multiple objects deemed as ‘fake’. What Owen Jones described as a ‘chav’ could be male or female; whatever their gender they could be immediately be recognised as the person who is not ‘respectable’. What this suggests is that previous forms of dress and appearance which once demonstrated poverty have disappeared and what has emerged in its place is a way of dressing, and ‘being’, that is much more complicated in terms of its challenge and its place in social hierarchies of appropriate appearance. When the social commentators and investigators spoke of the dress of those living in poverty in the 1920s and 1930s the adjectives that most often appear are those of ‘frayed’ or ‘worn out’ or ‘shabby’. These adjectives are seldom apparent in more recent descriptions of those living in poverty. But these contemporary views expressing a view of dress are as judgmental and authoritarian as any in the past, and should be read as an aspect of that social discourse highly critical of those defined as ‘scroungers’ or ‘benefit cheats’. In this, the outward appearance of those in poverty has become an aspect of their refusal of what is deemed as ‘respectable’ behaviour. These recent expectations about visual respectability are more complex than those of previous decades since they contain a number of ways in which an apparently entirely ‘respectable’ form of dress becomes unacceptable when worn in the ‘wrong’ way by a person whose general size and appearance is equally ‘wrong’. Thus if David Beckham, an embodiment of white male metropolitan chic, wears a track suit, it is ‘leisure wear’ and assessed (and viewed) as an item of fashionable dress. Worn by a differently contoured person, it is the ‘sloppy’ and careless dress of the people parodied in the television show Little Britain.24 Equally, large, ‘bling’ jewellery may have a significant part in the aesthetic of fashion designers such as Versace but again, worn by the ‘wrong’ sort of person it becomes an indication not of innovative taste, and considerable income, but of the lack of both taste and money. When Walter Benjamin wrote about the place of the work of art in a society organised and based around what he described as ‘mechanical reproduction’ he questioned the continuing importance attached to the ‘real’ work of art.25 That argument is seldom applied to dress but it is highly relevant to the social dress wars of the twenty-first century. The imitation Burberry scarf (often virtually identical to the ‘real’ thing) is read not just as a sign of poverty but as an indication of a refusal of the authentic, the ‘real’ and the ‘respectable’. These curious complications of dress in the twenty-first century are made available through the mass production of clothes, enabled through

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the exploitation of people and resources involved in their manufacture and distribution. Dress and its associated products are a major global industry, in which dressing the body is foundational to profitable investment and relationships of class, gender and race. Crucially, what has emerged is a connection between bodily size and social status. The poor in the UK, throughout the nineteenth and the early years of the twentieth, were shorter and thinner than those with more money. In the twenty-first century, height remains, although much less so, an indication of class, but it is the better off rather than the poor who are, if not thin, then of what is euphemistically called, a ‘healthy’ weight. To be not ‘thin’, or to be visibly overweight, even morbidly obese, is closely associated with poverty. Diet, the stress of forms of low paid work, the lack of time or opportunity for exercise, all produce a toxic mix in which despite the endlessly demonstrated connections between social deprivation and obesity, the visible size of human beings has become a marker of those negative personal characteristics of over indulgence, laziness and a failure to self police. Although ‘fat shaming’ has been widely criticised, and the right to different expectations about the body voiced, a powerful and negative narrative exists in sections of the media about those judged to be over-weight.26 It is thus that the body, particularly its size, has become such a source of anxiety in the twenty-first century. For young women, and to a lesser extent young men, the current rates of the illnesses of anorexia and bulimia have reached record high points.27 Even for those not subject to these conditions evidence suggests that concern and worry about body size and physical appearance are major factors in the lives not just of adolescents but also of older age groups. Cosmetic surgery has a markedly more considerable presence in medical procedures than in previous decades. All of these contemporary issues surrounding the body have been the subject of intense debate (for example, different views about the legitimacy of cosmetic surgery) but what is important here is the impact and the construction of the cultures which surround the body and the ways in which they contribute to ‘respectability.’28 If we look back at the historical period which has been the subject of the discussion here what we can see are major changes surrounding the female body. Most obviously and dramatically, the actual body, in terms of its literal visibility, has become ever more present. Nudity has appeared on the stage of mainstream theatre, the nearly naked female body is on show in every public space and—perhaps most tellingly—individual female bodies are subjected to intense media speculation and comment. The

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infamous ‘sidebar of shame’ of the Daily Mail on line, issues a daily report on the appearance of female celebrities. Weight gain, a physical condition known as ‘cellulite’ are presented as major threats to the female body, looking ‘effortlessly chic’ is endlessly repeated as praise. Readers are invited to share in what is essentially a daily report card of female conformity; celebrities are essentially marked in terms of their ability to lose’ baby weight’ or exhibit ‘well toned’ limbs. What we see in these developments, by no means confined to the UK, is the growing disquiet and dissatisfaction around aspects of women’s bodies at a time when life expectancy has been extended. But against this, endless new aspects of the body, as well as its overall size, have become problematic. So just as women in the twenty-first century now escape the terrors of childbirth, endless pregnancies and the threat of those diseases which once raged across all classes of people in the nineteenth century, women today express new forms of concern and worry about their bodies and their physical appearance. Those women whom we met at the beginning of this essay, the emigrants to the distant parts of what was once the British Empire were assessed in terms of the ‘neatness’ and the ‘respectability’ of their dress. There is little evidence that either the women themselves, or the women assessing them, manifested any concern about the overall appearance of the body. In none of the documentation of the emigration societies is there any comment, for example, about the facial or bodily appearance of a woman. So the question that Caitlin Moran and others have posed about women in the twenty-first century of what a woman is supposed to be is, in many important ways, a specifically recent question.29 The various boundaries of the social world in which women live has provided a wider context for women’s lives. But that wider world has included the commercial manipulation of ideals of womanhood. The emergence of what the media described as the ‘modern’ woman in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was always tempered by constraints and very obvious fears from some quarters that this ‘new’ woman might become too powerful or impinge too forcefully on what was regarded as male social territory. So women were, throughout the twentieth century, constrained by the paradox of the demands of the modern and the demands of tradition. This culture war about women continues to this day. On the one hand that ancient expectation about women, that they will care, conflict with expectations from various quarters about what women should be. Amongst those latter expectations is the expectation that the ‘respectable’ woman of

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the twenty-first century will be in paid employment and that there should be no automatic assumption that either the state or another individual is responsible for her support. At the same time what is becoming increasingly apparent, and has been apparent since the early twentieth century, is that the condition, the making and the meaning of the ‘respectable’ woman is endlessly available for exploitation. Within this, in all the industries related to the appearance of women, there is an inexhaustible energy for the manufacture of concern for the ‘right’ sort of woman. Naomi Wolf and others have written about what Wolf has called the ‘beauty myth’ but the myth is about more than just the appearance of women: it is also about the values and the aspirations that women are increasingly expected to have.30 To be ‘respectable’ as a woman in the twenty-first century is to be autonomous and self- reliant. In this we can see a continuity with those values which motivated the emigration societies of the later decades of the nineteenth century: it was ‘respectable’ for women to be able to support themselves and not to be dependent on others. But that integration into a wider social world other than that of the domestic was accomplished at the same time as increasingly energetic industries of individual consumption realised the potential of women as an eminently valuable location for new markets. The pursuit of the perfect body and the perfect self were made possible by that very engagement into paid work which is often regarded as emancipatory. That this is not the case, for women or for men, will be the concern of the final remarks.

Notes 1. Katarzyna Kociolek, ‘London’s Suffragettes, Votes for Women and Fashion’, Anglia. An International Journal of English Studies, Vol. 27, No. 1, 2018, pp. 81–95; John Jervis, Sensational Subjects: The Dramatization of Experience in the Modern World (London, Bloomsbury, 2015) pp.  95–122; on the same theme for the USA, see Susan Glenn, Female Spectacle: The Theatrical Roots of Modern Feminism (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 2000). 2. Virginia Woolf, Diaries, Volume 5, 1936–1941 (New York, Harcourt Brace, 1968). She speaks of an acquaintance who is ‘so fat, so coarse’ and of her niece, Judith Stephen as a ‘whopper’ pages 95 and 112. 3. Kalpana Wilson, ‘Race, Gender and Neo-liberalism in Changing Visual Representations in Development,’ Third World Quarterly, Vol. 32, Issue 2, 2011, pp. 315–331.

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4. Obesity Statistics, House of Commons Briefing Paper No. 3336, 6 August 2019, pp. 1–20. 5. The Tatler, 4 June 1930, p. xxv. 6. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, first published in 1865. 7. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (London, Victor Gollancz, 1938). 8. Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars (London, Routledge, 1991) p. 164. 9. Virginia Woolf, ‘The Leaning Tower, in Collected Essays Vol. 2 (London, Hogarth, 1966) p.  169; Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (London, Penguin, 2000) p. 7. 10. Jim Riordan, ‘The Social Emancipation of Women of Women through Sport’, International Journal of the History of Sport, Vol. 2, no. 1, 1985, pp. 53–61. 11. In 2015 a number of actors refused to comply with the requirement that they should wear high heels at the Cannes Film Festival. In 2016 a secretary at the accounting firm Portico, Nicola Thorp, refused to comply with the dress code which specified that female employees should wear high heels. A petition in her support gathered considerable support and the demand was revoked. 12. K.Danielle Egan, ‘Lost Objects: Feminism, Sexualisation and Melancholia’, in Feminist Theory, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2013, pp. 265–274. 13. Anna Davin, ‘Imperialism and Motherhood’, History Workshop Journal, No. 5, Spring 1978, pp. 9–65. 14. Margery Spring Rice, Working Class Wives and Margaret Llewelyn Davies, Maternity: Letters from Working Women (London, G.Bell, 1915). 15. John Bowlby, Maternal Care and Mental Health (Geneva, World Health Organisation, 1951); Anna Freud, The Writing of Anna Freud, Vol. 1–8 (London, Hogarth Press, 1927–1982); D.W.Winicott, Playing and Reality (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974). 16. On new forms of motherhood and mothering see: Yasmine Ergas, Jane Jenson and Sonya Michel, Reassembling Motherhood: Procreation and Care in a Globalised World (New York, Columbia University Press, 2017); E.J.Petersen, ‘Redefining the Workplace: The Professionalisation of Motherhood through Blogging’, Journal of Technical Writing and Communication, Vol. 44, No. 3, 2014, pp.  277–296; Sarah Pedersen, ‘The good, the bad, and the ‘good enough’ mother on the UK parenting forum Mumsnet’, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 59, November 2016, 2016, pp.  32–38; Sarah Pedersen and J.Smithson, ‘Mothers with Attitude ‘, Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 38, May 2013, pp. 97–106; Jai MacKenzie, Language, Gender and Parenthood Online: Negotiating Motherhood in Mumsnet Talk (London, Taylor and Francis, 2018).

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17. Ann Oakley, Father and Daughter: Patriarchy, Gender and Social Science (Bristol, Policy Press, 2014). 18. Florence Binard, ‘The British Women’s Liberation Movement in the 1970s: Redefining the Personal and the Political’, Revue Francaise de Civilisation Britannique, Vol XX11, 2017, p. 15. 19. The first Women’s Liberation Conference was held at Ruskin College in 1970; its organisers were Arielle Aberson, Sally Alexander and Sheila Rowbotham. 20. Elizabeth Wilson, Only Halfway to Paradise (London, Tavistock, 1980); Margaretta Jolly, Sisterhood and After: An Oral History of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement, 1968–2019 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2019). 21. Celia Cowie and Sue Lees, ‘Slags or Drags?’ Feminist Review, No. 9, January 1981, pp. 17–31. 22. Sheila Rowbotham, Hidden from History (London, Pluto, 1973). 23. Emily Maitlis, Interview with Prince Andrew, BBC1, 17 November 2019; Owen Jones, Chavs: The Demonization of the Working Class; Imogen Tyler, Revolting Subjects: Social Abjection and Resistance in Neoliberal Britain (London, Zed Books, 2013); Beverley Skeggs, ‘The Making of Class and Gender through Visualising Moral Subject Formation’, Sociology, Vol. 39, No. 1, 2005, pp. 965–982. 24. Little Britain was televised between 2003 and 2020. It attracted a wide audience and some criticism about its portrayal of working class and disabled people. 25. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in an Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ in his Illuminations (New York, Random House, 2007), pp. 217–253. 26. Various challenges to norms around body size include: http://www. verywellmind.com/what-is-bodypositivity-4773402 and http://www. theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2018/july23/the-rise-the-body-neutrality-movement-if-you’re-fat-you-don’t-have-to-hate-yourself 27. Statistics on eating disorders suggest that 1  in 5 young women, and increasing numbers of young men experience these problems. See www. mqmentalhealth.org 28. Kathy Davis, Reshaping the Female Body: The Dilemma of Cosmetic Surgery (London, Routledge, 1995). 29. Caitlin Moran, How To Be a Woman. 30. Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth.

CHAPTER 5

Judging Women

For much of the period covered in this book it was widely taken-for-grated that not only was the definition of a ‘woman’ secure but so was that of the ‘respectable’ woman. A ‘respectable’ adult woman lived with the confines of heterosexual marriage and cared for her home and its various members. Reviewing E.M.L Thompson’s The Rise of Respectable Society, Joel Weiner spoke of ‘respectability as the ‘cement that held society together’.1 Thompson was writing of the late nineteenth century where the social energy of the term was clearly demonstrable, for both those who lived within, and those who lived outside, the term. For those outside the ‘respectable’ social reaction took different forms; for the poor condemnation and exclusion whilst the more variously privileged enjoyed degrees of toleration. For the latter the history of the twentieth century contains evidence of the exceptional women who lived lives which departed from the ‘respectable’ but were able to do so through various forms of social status or material wealth. In what might be seen as the disappearance of the term ‘respectable’ as a concept with social agency, there is a case for suggesting that what has occurred in the past fifty years is that not being ‘respectable’, in the sense once understood, has become democratised: choices about sexuality, life style, forms of dress have been radically pluralised. As Elizabeth Wilson wrote in 2000, ‘we are all bohemians now’.2 At the beginning of the third decade of the twenty-first century even to use the word’ respectable’ in the context of a discussion of women seems to conjure up a picture of womanhood that is long gone. But the word © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Evans, Making Respectable Women, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7_5

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‘picture’ here is important since it speaks to the way in which the idea of the ‘respectable’ is so closely associated with aspects of our visual culture. In the nineteenth century the ‘look’ of respectability was crucial to the choices made about women made by emigration societies; dress continued to be contested throughout the twentieth century. As much as the clean doorsteps marking a ‘respectable’ working class home, modest dress was essential for women. The changes which have occurred in the ‘look’ of respectability may be read as a greater liberality about the appearance and the behaviour of women. But there is another possibility, that ‘respectability’ has not disappeared, but assumed more complex manifestations. The shift in expectations about the dress and demeanour of women in the twentieth century came about, as suggested in previous chapters, through war, rising disposal income for some sections of the population and the emergence of new aspirational figures in what is defined as a ‘celebrity culture’. But dress is a picture, a visual image and the assumption that changed images denote a disappearance of the expectations which once made the relationship between dress and respectability so clear is mistaken. The thesis of the sexualisation of late twentieth and early twenty-first century has been widely explored but one aspect of it needs emphasis here: that the demand to appear as a sexual subject has assisted in new definitions of the ‘respectable’. So that it is possible to suggest that what was once seen as not respectable, has now acquired the actual meaning of respectability. Over forty years ago the poet Adrienne Rich wrote a much quoted article entitled ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality’.3 Rich was challenging the assumption of normative heterosexuality in the contemporary United States, but we might today consider is the extension of, less a particular version of sexuality, but of the visible demonstration of sexuality itself in social identity. This is not about appearing as a person with a particular gender identity but as an actively sexual being. It is this form of visual expectation that enables the sale of goods and services; an endless creation of new demands and possibilities about the self. To refuse these is to be ‘left behind’, ‘out of date’, ‘old fashioned’. Just as paid work has reached new forms of intensification in terms of hours worked, so work on the self has become, if not as explicitly coercive as the demands of employment, at least as implicitly widely expected. Carol Wolkowitz has pointed out the work that we now are expected to do on our bodies; as other studies about the work of enabling this work has also demonstrated, much of the assistance in that work is done by women.4

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In the ongoing search for the ‘respectable’ self for women in the twenty-first century it is commonplace to invoke historical comparisons to demonstrate the extent of (or departure from) the emancipation of women. Amongst the most cited of those moments in the UK is the 1950s, a decade in which it is assumed that it is possible to identify a historical period with a highly restrictive view of the ‘respectable’ woman. Recent comments about the impact of the Covid 19 pandemic on gender relations have spoken of ‘the return to the 1950s’, with the forced exclusion of women from paid work and their much enhanced responsibility for domestic care.5 There is no doubt that the loss of employment in the service and public sectors has impacted particularly severely on women and that women have had to take on, in the home, the child care and schooling that was once performed by others. But even before the pandemic, the Office for National Statistics estimated that women performed 60% more unpaid labour than men.6 Not a great deal of change since the 1950s: to suggest a return to that decade is to eradicate what has not changed together with the recognition of the absence in the 1950s of the normative expectation that ‘respectable’ women would be in paid work. The cluster of new norms about respectable women has, visually, very little to do with those connotations of the word once used to describe and judge women. The growing participation of women in paid work has thus become, in the past fifty years, accepted as much a part of women’s lives as it is of men. In short, paid work for women has become generally ‘respectable’. Those various constraints which either explicitly forbade or significantly discouraged women, and particularly married women, from paid work have disappeared. At the same time little has been done in general, structural terms to assist or support that new expectation. Maternity leave has been provided as has some state assistance with the cost of child care but the long term implications, and the everyday difficulties of being a parent, have been scarcely accommodated. Equally, and for many people just as important, other forms of care other than that for children remain largely unsupported by either recognition or long term effective assistance.arrangements. Both of which collapsed during the ‘lockdown’ occasioned by the Covid 19 pandemic. The demands of the 1970 Ruskin conference on Women’s Liberation for 24 hour nurseries are still unmet, but what has emerged is the acceptance of the idea that paid work for women, married or not, mother or not, is a normal, ‘respectable’ part of adult life.

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This shift in public, and state, attitudes to the paid work of women can be read as an indication of ‘modern’ or a ‘modernising’ society, a view shared across much of the political spectrum and often associated with discourses of ‘empowerment’. Marxists as much as liberals viewed the entry of women into paid work as a step towards the emancipation and greater engagement of women into the public world. More specifically problematic, and more problematic as ideas about the respectability of women are concerned, is the view of many states across a wide political spectrum that all citizens, regardless of their commitments to others, should be in paid work. The assumption that women’s entry into paid work, whether through state compulsion or individual need, then becomes a wider force for the greater public authority and engagement of women is seldom demonstrated, as any glance at international elites will demonstrate. The highly judgmental, moralistic view of the status of paid work as opposed to unpaid care is endlessly detrimental to carers, the majority of whom are women. Many of these women are from ethnic or racial minorities which have long been the subject of racist assumptions and values. Women in these groups continue to have imposed upon them assumptions about their ‘natural’ role as carers.7 Care, paid or not, may occasionally receive rhetorical support as a social value, but it receives no adequate economic reward. The individualistic ideal of the autonomous citizen is entirely irrelevant to the majority of any population: men as much of women have ties to others. But it remains the case that the impact of those ties is largely felt by women. Throughout various contexts of paid labour, women adjust their employment to the demands of care, adjustments often made in terms of informal structures; The lives of women with caring responsibilities are now often read as lives of a ‘double shift’, the tasks of paid work and care work. But there is also an argument for a third element in these responsibilities: that of the rhetorical responsibility to endorse the moral status of paid work. This twenty-first-century view has impacted with increasing severity on women in two ways. One is the narrative of shame about those who do not ‘work’. The other is the way in which the normalisation and the increased moral authority of paid work has helped to minimise the importance, and the rewards, of the actual paid work of caring which is largely performed by women. To perform the work of care, for pay, is all too easily seen as simply performing what is still seen as ‘free’ work.; because there has been no separation between the expectation of ‘free’ care work and women, there needs to be little compensation for those women performing it for income.

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The social currency of care remains that determined by the assumption of the responsibilities of ‘respectable’ women. Amongst those responsibilities are those of the autonomous citizen, the competent and conscientious mother, the always available carer, the consuming subject and the well maintained self. ‘Respectable’ women in the twenty-first century continue to ‘care’, in both traditional and more recent ways. They are less often shamed for having children outside marriage but they continue to be shamed in terms of their competence as mothers. A traditional location of judgement continues but in addition others have appeared: the shame of not being in paid work, the shame of failing to ‘look after themselves’ and the shame of being unable to provide for their children the goods and the experiences so widely offered. The first of these forms of shame is very clearly expressed through the terms such as ‘welfare mothers’. But the second and third are more subtle: the kinds of shame about the self which are all too easily internalised in a culture in which consumption is endless encouraged and insatiable in its demands for participation. Emma Casey has written of the shame which women with low incomes experience because they cannot buy what is required for their children.8 ‘Required’ here, as Casey points out, includes not just the basic provision of food, clothing and adequate shelter but also the means to support school attendance and peer group activity. To play a ‘respectable’ part in much of the social life of the twenty-­ first century requires money; access to such everyday needs as transport and internet connection is fundamental to the making of social ties and social participation. More recently, and through much wider contexts than that of the UK, Imogen Tyler has shown how stigmatising ideas and practices have produced a mechanism for social control and exploitation.9 What these pages have suggested is not that there is a single definition of the ‘respectable’ or ‘respectability’ for women. The word does not have the same meaning as it did in 1900 or 1950. The judgment has changed, and constantly changes; for example, the social mores that constrained the sexuality of ‘respectable’ women about which Freud wrote at the beginning of the twentieth century have changed dramatically.10 What, however, is constant over the decades is that the changes are seldom in the interests of women. As women are allowed, encouraged or coerced from one set of attitudes and behaviours so others emerge. The ‘freedom’ to be in paid work, or be in a sexual relationship of personal choosing does not come without its own constraints and expectations. Indeed, assumptions

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that paid work or particular forms of sexual relationships are in themselves positive constitute new forms of normative expectations. This suggests the powerful pressure that ideas, concepts and expectations have on the lives of all of us. Accounts of the social world that fail to understand the traction of the coercive impact of unspoken values have been long attacked by writers of both fiction and non-fiction; it is a central argument of twentieth- and twenty-first-century modernity. But a further issue here is that of who benefits from those values and models of behaviour expected of women. The answer is not simply men, although they, like women themselves, certainly receive, for example, care by women. In much more complex ways, the various forms of the ‘respectability’ of women which have been reviewed here have been from benefit to social structures and institutions. ‘Surplus’ women could be persuaded to emigrate through expectations of ‘respectable’ work just as millions of women could potentially be persuaded of the possibilities of a commercially defined ‘respectable’ appearance. Through the use of the powerful concept of ‘respectability’ individuals could be persuaded to behave in ways more aligned to the interests of others rather than their own. The very word ‘respectability’ carries with it the implications of the opposite, of being not respectable and therefore excluded or defined or shamed. Those forms of social judgment might take personal forms, or they might equally be enshrined in legislation, state policies or institutional practice, circumstances in which individuals may have little or no choice about compliance. In this way we have to recognise that concepts matter, at the same time as we have to recognise resistance to them. In that equation the recognition of power is central: these pages have noted the famous and the privileged who can depart from the expectations of the ‘respectable’ but for each of these people there are millions of others for whom the boundaries of their social existence are more constrained. It is for those others, that ‘respectable’ as constructed through always uncertain and malleable meanings, retains its changing meanings as a coercive impact.

Notes 1. E.M.L Thompson, The Rise of Respectability (Cambridge, Mass; Harvard University Press, 1988); reviewed by J.Weiner, Journal of Social History, Vol. 24, No. 1, 1990, pp. 171–173. 2. Elizabeth Wilson, Bohemians, The Glamorous Outcasts (London, I.B. Tauris, 2000).

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3. Adrienne Rich, ‘Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Experience, Signs, Vol. 5, No.4, 1980, pp. 631–660. 4. Francis Green and S.McCintosh, ‘The Intensification of Work in Europe’, Labour Economics, Vol. 8, No. 2, May 2001, pp. 291–308; Claire Kelliher and Deidre Anderson, ‘Doing More for Less? Flexible Working Practices and the Intensification of Work,’ Human Relations, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2009, pp.  83–106; Carol Wolkowitz, Bodies at Work (London, Sage, 2006); Helma Lutz, The New Maids: Transnational Women and the Care Economy (London, Zed Books, 2011). 5. Hannah Summers, ‘The UK is regressing back to 1950s for many women’, The Guardian, 18 June 2020; Angela Merkel quoted in ‘Lockdown Threat to Women’s Rights in UK replicated in Mainland Europe,’ The Guardian, 29 May 2020. 6. Women perform 60% more care work than men, https://www.ons.gov. uk/employmentandlabourmarket/earningsandworkinghours/articles/ womenshouldermoreresponsibilityofunpaidwork 7. See Satyasikha Chakraborty, ‘From Bibis to Ayahs: Sexual Labour, Domestic Labour and the Moral Politics of Empire’ in (eds.) Nitin Sinha and Nitin Varma, Servants’ Pasts: Late Eighteenth Century to Twentieth Century, Vol. 2 (New Delhi, Orient Blackswan, 2019). 8. Emma Casey, ‘Struggle and Protest or Passivity and Control? The formation of class Identity in two contemporary cultural practices’, European Journal of Cultural Studies, Vol. 13, No.2, 2010, pp. 225–241. 9. Imogen Tyler, Stigma: The Machinery of Inequality (London, Zed Books, 2010). 10. Sigmund Freud, ‘Some Thoughts on Development and Regression  – Aetiology’, Lecture XXII, The Complete Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (London, Allen and Unwin, 1971) pp. 339–358.

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Index1

A Ageing, 51, 53–55, 57, 65, 76 Ambition, 6 Arden, Elizabeth, 54, 55, 65, 75 Aspirations, 1, 4, 9, 10, 18, 26, 43, 45, 48, 54, 63, 80, 87

Control, 4, 7, 13, 23, 24, 46, 61, 62, 82, 95

B Butler, Judith, 2

D Demonisation, 8, 83 Desire, 4, 44, 45, 52, 53, 63 Domestic, 2, 5–7, 9, 11, 18, 20, 26, 32, 34, 43, 45, 47–51, 58, 63, 66, 77, 78, 87

C Care, 2, 4, 6, 11, 13, 23, 31, 48, 49, 53, 54, 57, 58, 62, 63, 80, 81, 86, 93–96, 97n6 Citizenship, 9, 41 Class divisions, 7, 77 identities, 25 Consumption, 36, 42–45, 47–49, 62, 77, 87, 95

E Education, 9, 21, 26, 27, 30, 32, 34, 38n15, 43, 45, 47, 48, 61, 77, 78, 81 Emancipation, 3, 4, 9, 11, 26, 44, 46, 57, 59, 60, 62, 72, 77, 93, 94 Empire, 21, 27, 28, 30, 35, 80 Employment, 10, 11, 20, 32, 34, 65, 66, 77, 79, 87, 92–94

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 M. Evans, Making Respectable Women, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7

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INDEX

Equality, 19 Exploit/exploitation, 4, 14, 43, 49, 80, 85, 87, 95 F Fantasy/fantasies, 4, 11, 49, 50, 60, 73 Femininity, 4, 8, 13, 46, 47, 51 Feminism, 12, 14, 34, 67n5 Foucault, Michel, 2, 7 Freedom, 18, 46, 61, 62, 64, 77, 83, 95 I Identity, 13, 20, 23, 25, 27, 39n36, 47, 60, 63, 92 Independence/independent, 44, 58, 62, 63, 79 J Judgment, 6, 8, 23, 32, 78, 79, 82, 95 L Legal/law, 10, 13, 18, 19, 42, 59, 62, 80 Legislation, 9 Liberal, 94 M Masculine/masculinity, 2, 13, 34, 41, 58 Maternity, 93 Migration, 35 Modernity, 96 Modern (The), 5, 6, 17, 19, 35, 36, 41–66, 71, 72, 76, 77, 86, 94 Money, 11, 32, 36n2, 54, 61, 71, 82, 84, 85, 95

Morality, 7, 21, 80 Motherhood, 43, 80, 88n16 N Neo-liberalism, 1, 41, 87n3 P Paid work, 2, 4, 9, 11, 12, 14n2, 20, 29, 31, 36, 36n2, 41, 51, 66, 82, 85, 87, 92–96 Poverty, 11, 17, 49, 53, 73, 84, 85 R Racism, 7 Respectability/respectable, 2–10, 12–14, 18, 19, 21–25, 29–32, 34–36, 36n2, 43–45, 47–49, 51, 52, 55, 57, 58, 63, 71, 73, 76–85, 87, 91–96 Rights, 3, 4, 9, 18, 25, 27, 28, 37n7, 41, 42, 50, 55, 66n1, 66n2, 71–87 Rubinstein, Helena, 55, 57 S Sensation, 72 Sexuality definitions, 92 Shame, 94, 95 T The Tatler, 55–57, 59, 62, 74–76 W Woman/women, 1–14, 18–36, 36n2, 37n6, 37n7, 38n14, 39n34, 39n36, 39n38, 41–66, 71–73, 76–83, 85–87, 89n27, 91–96