Nancy Christie

Strangers in the Family: Work, Gender, and the Origins of Old Age Homes:

Through an examination of nineteenth-century familial correspondence and the records of various Protestant charitable organizations in Quebec City and Montreal, this article explores the changing culture of family care during illness and old age. It posits a new interpretation for the foundation of asylums for women that emphasizes changing perceptions of the family, especially the attitudes regarding the care of servants within the household. Furthermore, it argues that the treatment of servants as both caregivers and those in need of medical care is an important yardstick by which to measure the waning of the patriarchal household and the emergence of more explicitly contractual relations between the classes.

Women, the Public Sphere, and Middle-Class Culture

C to the long pedigree in British and American historiography of the working classes, our historical understanding of what constituted middle–class identity remains underdeveloped. Despite several landmark monographs and collections of essays that have addressed the question of how a common core of middle–class values was constructed, these studies remain focused largely upon the political and economic realms of middle–class discourse and behavior.1 As a result the emergence of the middle classes has been seen generally as a masculinist process and one linked inevitably to the emergence of a liberal public sphere. This male–centered metanarrative has been greatly revised both by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, and by Anna Clark, who critically altered the historiography of social structures (in Britain) by inscribing notions of gender into the analysis of class formation.2 Their work was pathbreaking in so far as they transformed the categories of class history both by integrating women into its broad outlines and by focusing upon the domestic realm of the family as a formative site of class identity. As important as these monographs have been in reinterpreting the periodization and loci of working– and middle–class values, and in placing notions of masculinity and femininity at the center of definitions of class, their work has nevertheless reaffirmed

Phallic Thumbs: Conceiving a New Eden

While studying at Oxford, Harry was often invited to the home of Sir James Murray, the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, along with other Rhodes scholars. There he was introduced to the three youngest daughters, each of whom vied for his attentions. During this period, the exuberance of the Murray household at Sunnyside was a diversion from the strains of preparing for his final exams, and also offered a venue for exploring friendships with women which allowed him an escape from the confines of the strident homosociality of Oxford culture. When he fell in love with Gwyneth, he was in turn forced to reevaluate conventional Christian ethics which interpreted sex as sin as he began to pursue his erotic desires.

The Carnal Brother Body: Emotion, Interiority and the Epistolary “Talking Cure”

Viewing themselves as young moderns, just prior to Harry’s departure for Vancouver, Gwyneth and Harry became secretly engaged. Thus began a lengthy, long-distance epistolary betrothal in which their first taste of sensual pleasure was kept alive by interminable discussions of romantic love. However, the couple soon found themselves at odds over the vexed question of what role sex would play in their marriage, with Gwyneth firmly defending an equilibrium between spiritual and sexual comradeship and Harry equally determined to defend new notions of the primacy of sex. However, the difficulties that the couple of faced in evolving an explicit language of sexual desire provoked further conflicts, leading to Harry’s nervous breakdown and eventually to his complete rejection of a career as a clergyman.

Introduction: Making Love Sexual in the Edwardian Age

This chapter introduces the reader to the extraordinary correspondence of our couple, Harry Logan and Gwyneth Murray, and places their discussions of the interrelationship between sex, love and marriage in the context of British culture in the Edwardian period. Further, we discuss the historical scholarship pertaining to gender history, the history of modernities, and the history of sexuality, indicating how first-person accounts of courtship and marriage revise this established historiography. It suggests ways as to how ordinary middle-class people who kept their faith nevertheless negotiated the transition from Victorian to modern, which included a greater value placed on sexual freedom, personal relationships, psychological introspection, and greater emotional expressiveness.

The Maternal Body: Pregnancy, Child-Rearing and Birth Control

This chapter focuses upon Gwyneth’s experience of pregnancy and childbirth, to show how she continued to view herself, and later her child, in distinctly sexualized terms, indicating a conversance with the ideas of Sigmund Freud. She invoked modern techniques of child-rearing as a distinct strategy to distinguish her ideas from the old-fashioned and less scientific ones propounded by her mother. Besides examining the way in which Harry and Gwyneth adopted modern ideas regarding birth control and parenthood, we demonstrate an increasing gulf between the generations, which revises existing notions of the lost generation in wartime Britain.

The Emotional Body: Religion and Male Friendship at Oxford

This chapter explores the transformative role played by Oxford in Harry’s life, when this aspiring clergyman took up his Rhodes Scholarship in the years just prior to World War I. It shows how this moralistic and priggish young man was introduced to new ideas from the fields of psychology, the psychology of religion and Hellenism, which drastically reshaped his sense of values. By exposing him to new concepts of interiority, the value of emotions and the importance of personal friendships, his studies together with his participation in the Student Christian Movement pushed him to question orthodox Christianity and to embrace new concepts of masculinity which challenged dominant notions of military and imperial manhood.

The Gendered Body: Marriage and “A Home of My Own”

This chapter explores the effect that Girton College had upon Gwyneth’s changing views regarding the need for reforming gender relations within British society. Although a committed suffragist, Gwyneth shared the perspective of many of her contemporaries that gender equality could also be achieved within marriage, especially as female sexuality was increasingly valorized as an expression of feminism. The confidence that Gwyneth acquired after achieving a First in the Cambridge Maths Tripos, however, played havoc in their relationship, igniting a storm of gender conflict which eventually resulted in a gender reversal, in which Harry perceived himself to be the “feminine” partner as Gwyneth increasingly inhabited the “masculine” role.

Purring Vaginas and Waggling Penises: Sexting World War I

This chapter analyses the role played by the distinctly explicit language of sexual love that made up their correspondence after their marriage in 1916 when Harry began to serve on the Western Front in the Canadian Machine Gun Corps. As this chapter argues, in order to evade the censors, Harry and Gwyneth adopted the personae of Dardanella and Peter, writing as their vagina and penis, in a playful performance of erotic desire which served as a prophylactic against fear and anxiety during the war, and as a means to advance their relationship. It also highlights the way in which sex was deployed as part of their ongoing contest for gender power in their marriage.

“Are the Thumbs Still Wagging?”: Gwyneth, Harry and the Psyche of an Age

In this epilogue/conclusion we demonstrate how, by the mid-1920s, sex no longer served as the obvious glue of Gwyneth’s and Harry’s marriage, when motherhood and Harry’s continued desire for male friendships produced new conflicts. In a wider sense, we use select episodes of marital breakdown to conclude that the Edwardian ideal of sexual love as a primal element of both conjugal happiness and social progress did not necessarily lead in a linear fashion to the sexual revolution of the 1960s. We suggest that the hyper-individualism of the Edwardians was replaced during the 1930s with a new priority upon the collective and at the same time romantic love was redefined as chaste and spiritual.