Anna K Clark

Wild Workhouse Girls and the Liberal Imperial State in Mid-Nineteenth Century Ireland

This article is about an 1860 riot in a South Dublin workhouse, when sixteen-year-old girls assaulted workhouse officials so violently they could only be pacified by the police. When a Roman Catholic chaplain was fired for defending the girls, he became a cause celebre for the Catholic church. The church, together with lady reformers such as Louisa Twining, attacked the cold machinery of the British state and envisioned new ways of bringing up children. This incident reveals the tensions within nineteenth-century liberal governmentality, to use Foucaults term, between an idea of the individual as a subject of an institution, and an individual as a self-governing subject. The state also relied on religious and female philanthropists to supplement its disciplinary institutions, but these agents could also use their participation to challenge the state. This tension was particularly acute in Ireland, symptomatic of the problems of colonial modernity.

The Past and Present of European Women's and Gender History: A Transatlantic Conversation

Ida Blom, Mineke Bosch, Antoinette Burton a.o., Facilitated and edited by Birgitte Soland and Mary Jo Maynes,

Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (review)

new transnational light, the analysis rests on an explicit and necessary acceptance that they differed significantly from the great majority of Irish-Americans. To demonstrate how the Irish fared in California or Minnesota, and how their lives resembled those of Irish-Australians, tells us little about the Irish in Boston or New York—including the cultural legacies with which they arrived in America. The great majority of Irish-Americans lived in the towns and cities of the Northeast and Midwest, endured considerable poverty for several generations, faced prejudice and even discrimination, and built a powerful ethnic identity in response. In this respect they seem to have differed markedly from the Irish in the rest of the diaspora, including the western United States as well as the antipodes; the Irish in Britain may have resembled them most. To find out why this was so, the nationally distinctive aspects of American history, nicely sketched in Campbell’s opening chapters, require sustained attention. No meaningful judgments can be made about national histories without cross-national comparison—and that form of comparison, as Campbell’s early articles demonstrate, works exceptionally well at a highly specific trans-regional level.

The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain by Sarah Richardson (review)

Sarah Richardson begins The Political Worlds of Women with a bold statement: nineteenthcentury women were not excluded from politics, they “were able to participate in politics at many levels—from the intensely domestic to the wider international sphere.” Focusing primarily on middle-class women, and especially writers, she identifies many fascinating examples of women who “were able to exercise their own opinion and authority on issues that mattered to them” (1). She is able to accomplish as much by widening the definition of the political to include extra-parliamentary agitation, nonfiction writing, informal networks, and the home. Richardson begins from the assumption, now accepted as a framework but still productive as a practice, that the public and private—the worlds of politics and home—were not as separate as we have assumed. For instance, she finds that some dissenting and radical families encouraged their children—both sons and daughters—to have political opinions. Historians have acknowledged how Hannah and Margaret supported their brother Thomas Babington Macaulay’s intellectual work, but Richardson highlights the sisters’ independent political opinions. Of course, however, there were also many sisters who lacked the educational opportunities of their brothers. Richardson also contributes to the growing literature on the relationship of domesticity to politics by examining cookbooks for evidence of national identity. She finds that British women writers of cookbooks still focused on an English rather than wider Scottish or Welsh identity. Domestic economy could, moreover, be broadened out to political economy. Richardson highlights relatively well known women who wrote influential works explaining political economy, such as Harriet Martineau and Jane Marcet; she also introduces lesser known figures such as Margracia Loudon and Harriet Grote. Martineau, Marcet, and Grote opposed what they saw as the indiscriminate granting of charity that characterized the traditional figure of Lady Bountiful. Loudon, in contrast, called for a thoroughgoing reform of government grants of land to the poor so that they might become self-sufficient. Richardson reveals that Elizabeth Heyrick, a Quaker best known for her work against slavery, also advocated for legislative protection for the poor. From the radical Tory perspective, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna spoke out against the factory system, arguing that women should stay home rather than work for wages. Richardson points out that Tonna was trying to walk a fine line between advocating as a woman in public politics and repudiating the role of more activist working-class women in the factory movement. She shows that Tory periodicals savaged Martineau for daring to publish on political economy. In the face of this climate, Tonna was more careful. Richardson also explores the realm of formal politics. She finds that in the 1830s women were eligible to serve as sextons and even overseers. But how many did so? Women such as Louisa Twining were very active as philanthropists and tried to visit workhouses, but their guardians often opposed what they saw as female interference. Richardson also studies the petitions presented by individual women and groups of women to Parliament; she mentions the many petitions that women signed along with men. She provides several elaborate charts of the number and cost of parliamentary petitions, but her chart on the numbers and types of female petitions does not indicate what percentage they constituted

Irish Orphans and the Politics of Domestic Authority

The plight of poor English orphans is familiar to us from Dickens, with Oliver Twist pitifully bleating, Please sir, can I have some more?’ But the plight of poor Irish orphans is less well known and even more pitiable. For instance, in the Cork workhouse, 18 per cent of the child inmates, many of whom were orphans, died each year. This was not surprising since they were fed watery, bug-ridden vegetable soup and inedible bread. They were forced to labour for many hours a day, clothed in rags and shod in heavy clogs, and when they were let out to exercise, they had to splash in sewage, which pooled in the courtyards where they were confined. Scrofula afflicted many of them, eating away their skin as it infected their necks with tuberculosis. Ophthalmia almost blinded others.1 Clearly, Irish workhouse children, especially orphans, had little chance of growing up to be healthy adults.