Laura Levine Frader

Ladies of the leisure class : the bourgeoises of northern France in the nineteenth century

In a social and cultural study of nineteenth-century bourgeois women in northern France, Bonnie Smith shows how the advent of industrialization removed women from the productive activity of the middle class and confined them to a largely reproductive experience. Out of this, she suggests, they created their own world, centered on domesticity, family, and religion. To understand these women, the author argues, it is necessary to examine their world on its own terms as a coherent whole. Professor Smith draws on demographic, psychoanalytic, anthropological, linguistic, as well as historical insights and uses a variety of evidence that includes personal interviews, photographs, letters, genealogical records, and traditional archival sources. Part One outlines the transition from mercantile to industrial manufacturing that terminated the relationship between home and business and that separated the sexes according to their respective functions. Part Two concentrates on the lives of the women following their acceptance of an exclusively reproductive function and shows how the interdependence and fusion of household chores, religious values, and social conscience fostered a unified cultural system. Part Three, then, explores the propagation of this domesticity by the convent, as the primary educational system, and by the sentimental novel, as the vehicle most suited for an ideological expression of domestic life.

Bringing Political Economy Back In

As other contributors to this roundtable suggest, the practices of social and labor history as we have known them have been in methodological and epistemological turmoil for some time. The dominant paradigms that guided much of the work of social historians in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s have been thrown into question by poststructuralism and by the emergence of new analytical perspectives on gender, race, and ethnicities. Attention to culture and to the meanings that historical subjects imposed on the habits of everyday life, as well as to the constitutive power of language and cultural practices, have now become a central aspect of much historical work that has sought to analyze the operations of gender, race, and ethnicities as the subjects of social history and the history of working people in particular.

International Institutions and Domestic Reform: Equal Pay and British Membership in the European Economic Community

Despite having been overlooked in the standard histories of the UK and the European Community, gender politics and gender policies played a significant role in Britains applications for membership in the EEC in the 1960s. Joining the European Community required that Britain comply with Article 119 on equal pay for equal work. A combination of domestic feminist and labour movement activism, the commitment of unions and parties, and the internationalization of formal commitments to womens rights constituted internal and external pressures for the passage of an Equal Pay Act in 1970. The article argues that the formal legislative commitment to gender pay equality, changing public attitudes towards womens employment, and European membership impacted further domestic social policy reform and slowly began to shift government attitudes towards gender equality.

Afterword to Gender, Labour, War and Empire

History is a field that has had an ambivalent relationship to theory and/or methodological consciousness; historically, historians’ claims to operate “scientifically” have more often meant rigorous empirical investigation than conceptual or theoretical innovations or contributions.1 Indeed, even within the field of “social science history”, which took off in the 1970s in both North America and Europe, and included monumental studies of the family, labour, urban life, local and micro-studies of rural life and slavery, among other topics, with few exceptions, “social science” signified data mining and statistical analysis rather than the organization of findings according to theoretical or conceptual frameworks.2 At the same time, within the emerging field of social history, often heavily influenced by Marxist theory, historians turned their attention to the history of under-represented groups, notably the working class, chronicling the process of class formation, organization and labour conflicts. These were in themselves tremendously important contributions that in some cases transformed understandings of the field and opened up new avenues of investigation, but they tended to assume rather than make problems for investigating the very categories of analysis that underpinned the studies themselves: categories such as class, gender, race and sexuality.