Eleanor Gordon

The myth of the Victorian patriarchal family

Conventionally, the Victorian middle-class family has been regarded as a social and economic unit usually headed by a married man. The womans role within this unit has been associated with service and dependency. However, a study of a middle-class area of Glasgow based upon the census returns of 1851–1891 suggests that the widely held image of the Victorian middle-class family as headed by a paterfamilias may be misplaced. The high incidence of female-headed households and the range of kin, both male and female, which they contained, indicate the diversity of experience among middle-class women, the degree of their social and residential independence, and, thus, the dangers of viewing womens lives through the filter of Victorian domestic ideology.

The economic role of middle-class women in Victorian Glasgow

Abstract It has long been recognised that working-class women in the nineteenth century participated in waged labour, albeit dependent on marital status, stage in family life cycle, and locality. Middle-class womens economic role has been less fully explored, although it has been acknowledged that they played an informal, ‘hidden’ role in the economy. This article examines the extent of middle-class womens economic activity and independence by looking in detail at a residential area of Glasgow in the period 1850-1914. The authors demonstrate that women could negotiate the parameters of a gendered and limited labour market, the legal constraints on their property rights, and social constraints on their economic freedom, in order to achieve considerable economic autonomy and influence

Domestic Fathers and the Victorian Parental Role

Discourses of motherhood and domesticity played an important role in structuring middle‐class women’s lives and identities in the nineteenth century. However, it has become increasingly clear that how the idealised role of motherhood was conceived, interpreted and experienced varied enormously. Although Victorian motherhood is usually viewed as being constituted by the private realm, there was also a public dimension to this ostensibly private role. Victorian motherhood was complexly constituted and diversely interpreted and experienced. Similarly, fatherhood encompassed greater diversity than has often been supposed. Fathers of the early and mid Victorian periods conformed only in some respects to stereotypes of the stern paterfamilias: they could also be tender, caring and informal in their relations with their children. The authors take issue with a view which, while agreeing with this picture of mid‐nineteenth century fathers, sees men of the last decades of the century withdrawing from domesticity and deriving less of their identity from their paternal role.

Middle-Class Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Glasgow

This article is based on a study of a sample of middle-class households in Glasgow in the second half of the nineteenth century. The empirical findings are intended to add to the currently sketchy picture of middle-class household structure in the high Victorian period, to enable the authors to draw firmer conclusions about the incidence, composition, and explanation of middle-class coresidence patterns. On the basis of this study, and the small number of other studies of the nineteenth-century middle-class family, it seems that extended-family households were as common among the middle class as the working class. However, although the incidence of extended households was similar, the composition of these households differed in a class-specific way.

IRREGULAR MARRIAGE AND COHABITATION IN SCOTLAND, 1855–1939: OFFICIAL POLICY AND POPULAR PRACTICE

Scotland was unique in Western Europe in continuing to accord legal validity to irregular marriage until 1939 with one form of irregular marriage remaining legal until 2006. This article examines official attitudes to irregular marriage in Scotland in the period 1855–1939 as well as its incidence and popularity amongst the populace. The article argues that irregular marriage was narrowly defined by the authorities as meaning those irregular marriages that had been registered. Other forms of irregular marriage were often deemed to be cohabitation or concubinage which was regarded as morally reprehensible. However, authorities, including Poor Law officers, could also be flexible and sympathetic in their treatment of couples who lived together where the law was perceived to be rigid. Although it is impossible to quantify the numbers of couples who lived in non-registered informal unions, the evidence suggests that there were significant numbers but that in the majority of cases couples cohabited because they were unable to marry for legal, religious, or financial reasons.