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What is the most significant contribution which Davidoff and Halls Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 17801850 has made to the study of the middle classes in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century provincial England

Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall is widely seen by historians as a major contribution to the field of gender and class history of its period. 1 First published in 1987 with a revised edition being published in 2002, Family Fortunes has variously been described as ...a formidable work,2 ...the most influential work in British gender history. Massive in scope, rich in detail, and ambitious in its claims...a seminal achievement,3 a book that transforms our understanding of the making of the English middle class, 4 and ...a landmark in English womens history....5 Davidoff and Halls thesis in Family Fortunes is that during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the middle class sought to distinguish itself from the traditional aristocracy. Taking inspiration from evangelical Christianity and, later in the mid-nineteenth century, secular writers such as Ann Martin Taylor and Harriet Martineau, they argue, the emerging middle class created a domestic ideology emphasising separate spheres; between, on the one hand, a private sphere of the family and the home, with the
1 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2002) 2 Chris Waters, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19, 4 (1989), 677-79 (p. 677). 3 Kathryn Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes: Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary on the Publication of L. Davidoff & C. Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson), Womens History Review, 16, 5 (2007), 773-782 (pp. 773, 778). 4 Eileen Yeo, Review: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Victorian Studies, 32 (1989), 254-5 (p. 254) 5 Amanda Vickery, Historiographical Review: Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Womens History, The Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 2 (1993), 383-414 (p. 393). 1

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latter being framed as a haven of feminized morality, and the masculine public sphere of market forces. These spheres nevertheless possessed fluid boundaries and, using as their empirical focus the city of Birmingham and the rural counties of Essex and Suffolk, they present a detailed analysis of middle class culture during the period.

Nevertheless, at the time of publication and subsequently Family Fortunes has received criticism on several fronts, a state of affairs acknowledged by Davidoff and Hall themselves, who noted in the revised edition to their book that while the influence of Family Fortunes has been extensive, it remains controversial.6 This essay will examine Family Fortunes contribution to the study of the middle classes in eighteenth and nineteenth century provincial England. It will highlight three themes in particular - the contribution made by women to family businesses, the role of women in middle class political mobilisation, and the development of the gendered ideology, tracing the influence that Davidoff and Halls thesis has had on subsequent scholarship in these areas. In doing so, it will argue that Family Fortunes most important contribution lies in the theme that overlaps all three; Davidoff and Halls exploration of separate spheres and their innovative emphasis on the manner in which gender and class interact to structure social experience.

The central theme of Family Fortunes is the claim that during the period in question, two waves of domestic ideology emerged which emphasised separate spheres; between a masculine world of work in the public sphere and a privatised and feminised private sphere within the home. One consequence of this division, Davidoff and Hall argue, is that by the 1840s it became the expectation that women should not engage in outside work, but should, instead, devote their times to the home and family, there providing a bedrock of
6 Davidoff and Hall, p. xiii. See also Gleadle, p. 774. 2

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morality in an unstable and dangerous world.7 This is not to deny that women contributed to the economic endeavour; Davidoff and Hall note that the form for most businesses not only blurred the public and the private sphere - growing directly out of the family household - but involved the mans wife, children, other kin and servants.8 However, while, they argue, wives were the de facto partners in the business, under the law, she did not possess her own, separate legal personality. Thus,

[s]he could not sign Bills of Exchange, make contracts, sue or be sued, collect debts or stand surety and therefore could not act as a partner, since for all practical purposes, on marriage a woman died a kind of civil death.9

The role of the wife in the business enterprise was therefore, for Davidoff and Hall, fundamentally a limited one; a role that she fulfilled only out of necessity and for which she could risk censure. Subsequent scholarship, however, has offered a more nuanced view of the role of women in the business enterprise suggesting that the role for women in business was not only wider than suggested by Davidoff and Hall, but also that the legal sanctions against wives holding property outlined above were modified, subverted and manipulated in practice.10 In her research on Sheffield, Manchester and Leeds between 1760 and 1830, for example, Hannah Barker has shown how, rather than being restricted in their economic roles, businesswomen were central to urban society and to the operation and development of commerce in the late eighteenth century and early

7 Davidoff and Hall, p. xiv. 8 Davidoff and Hall, p. 200. 9 Davidoff and Hall, p. 200. 10 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 774. 3

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nineteenth centuries.11 Rather than being seen as an oddity or footnotes to the main narrative, such businesswomen were central characters in a story of unprecedented social and economic transformation.12 Similar claims are advanced by David Green and Alastair Owens, who, examining the period 1800-1860, argue that far from the image of middle class women as angels in the home but strangers to the world of money beyond them, such women took an active role in the economy and, indeed, that female wealth was of crucial importance to the expansion of the British state, becoming more important over the period in question. In their respective work on the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Maxine Berg and Margot Finn have also shown how the law of coveture was regularly evaded by women, often with the assistance of men.13

A second, related, contribution that Family Fortunes has made is to debates about the role placed by women in middle class political mobilisation in the period in question. As Kathryn Gleadle observes, a number of reviews of Family Fortunes criticised Davidoff and Hall for ignoring or, at best, tread[ing] but lightly upon political narratives. 14 Subsequent work has explored this perceived gap in Davidoff and Halls analysis, exploring the way in which, again, women were active in the public sphere, playing a role in middle class political mobilisation during the period. The contributors to Elizabeth Eger and her colleagues collection, Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, for example, highlight across their chapters the ways in which women played an active role alongside

11 Hannah Barker, The business of women: female enterprise and urban development in Northern England, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 2. 12 Barker, p. 3. 13 Maxine Berg, 'Womens Property and the Industrial Revolution', The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24, 2, (1993), 233-50; Margot Finn, 'Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760-1860', The Historical Journal, 39, 3 (1996), 703-22. 14 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 775. 4

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men in various aspects of the public sphere.15 Other historians, most notably Kathryn Gleadle, Sarah Richardson and their collaborators, Anne Mellor, Clare Midgley and Linda Colley have explored the role that women played in various areas within the political sphere, such as contributing to political debates, campaigning for the abolishment of slavery as well as engaging in electioneering.16 While acknowledging the impact of the idea of separate spheres in structuring womens lives in the period and that those female Britons who invested heavily in Patriotic activism remained, of course, very much the minority, Colley, for example, argues that, somewhat contradictorily, it provided women with a means to assert their important role in British society and to protect their rights such as they were.17 A similar point is taken up by Anne Mellor who, in her discussion of female political writing during the period observes that women participated fully in the same discursive public sphere as men, and that their opinions had a definable impact on the social movements, economic relationships, and state-regulated policies of the day. 18 Indeed, in her discussion of the role women played in the anti-slavery movement during he period, Midgley paints a complex picture of such women were involved in constructing, reinforcing, utilising, negotiating, subverting or more rarely challenging the distinction between the private-domestic sphere and the public-political sphere... 19 Consequently, as in the area of the business enterprise, the image is emerging within the scholarship is of women moving across the spheres, contributing in various ways to debates and campaigns within the public sphere while being rooted in the domestic sphere.
15 Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830, ed. by Elizabeth Eger and others (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 16 Kathryn Gleadle, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and the Mobilization of Tory Women in Early Victorian England, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 97-117; Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat, ed. by Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000); Anne K Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Womens Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1770-1837 (London: Vintage, 1996). 17 Colley, pp. 276, 277. 18 Mellor, p. 3. 19 Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: British Campaigns, 1780-1850 (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 5. 5

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Davidoff and Halls contribution may also be seen in the attempts by subsequent historians to trace the emergence of the domestic ideology of separate spheres to earlier in the eighteenth century. In several of the reviews of Family Fortunes, commentators critiqued Davidoff and Halls periodisation (1780-1850), and the ways in which, they alleged, they ignored the continuities between earlier periods and theirs. Amanda Vickery, an eighteenth century scholar, in particular criticised Davidoff and Hall for ignoring the continuities between the eighteenth and ninetieth centuries and emphasising the position, which she argues is increasingly challenged, that the period 1780 to 1850 saw the emergence of a modern industrialised and class-based society in England. Rather than seeing the continuities between the period in question and the early eighteenth century, she argues, Davidoff and Hall treat the latter as the sketchy before-picture, the primeval sludge out of which modern, industrial society emerges.20 A similar point is made by Ellen Jordan and Chris Waters who highlight how many aspects of the gendered middle class ideology central to Davidoff and Halls thesis were present earlier in the century. 21 Again, subsequent work has extended Davidoff and Halls periodisation, tracing the emergence of the domestic ideology to earlier in the eighteenth century. John Smail, in his analysis of Halifax between 1660-1780, and Margaret Hunt, focusing on several locations in England in a similar period (1680-1780), have traced the emergence of the domestic ideology to earlier in the eighteenth century. Indeed, Hunt argues that the blurring of the separate spheres in the business enterprise and the manner in which gender expectations were negotiated in practice noted by subsequent scholars was also a feature of public life earlier

20 Vickery, p. 397. 21 Ellen Jordan, Review: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Signs, 15, 3 (1990), 650-2. 6

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in the eighteenth century.22 In the revised introduction to Family Fortunes, Davidoff and Hall acknowledge that much of Hunts story for this earlier period is remarkably similar to the one we tell, although, as Gleadle notes they do not elaborate, however, as to how this might alter their broader arguments concerning the critical relationship between gender and middle-class identity in [their] period.23

Davidoff and Halls main contribution to the study of the middle classes in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century provincial England, this essay would argue, is however the theme that intersects these three areas of debate; their focus on gender as a fluid and relational concept that intersects with class to structure social experience. As feminist historians, Davidoff and Hall move beyond an earlier concern within womens history with compensatory history to a more nuanced focus on gender. 24 As they note in the prologue to Family Fortunes, ...gender and class always operate together...[and] consciousness of class and always takes a gendered form...[and] is never a perfect fit. 25 Whereas historians such as Amanda Vickery have criticised Davidoff and Hall for what they allege is the determinism in their use of separate spheres - between passive femininity and active masculinity - others have argued that their analysis is far more subtle than this; showing how ideas of gender, masculinity and femininity, and public and private are relational, fluid and always defined vis-a-vis the other.26 Davidoff and Halls most important contribution is, therefore, in the way that they take the already-developed notion of

22 Margaret R. Hunt, The middling sort: commerce, gender and the family in England, 1680-1780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 23 Davidoff and Hall, p. xx; Gleadle, p. 777. 24 Gerda Lerner, Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges, Feminist Studies, 3, 1/2 (1975), 514, June Purvis, Womens History Today, History Today, 54, 1 (2004), 40-2; Natalie Zemon Davis, Womens History in Transition: The European Case, Feminist Studies, 3, 3/4 (1976), 83-103. 25 Davidoff and Hall, p. 13. 26 Joan W. Scott, Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis, American Historical Review, 91, 5, 1053-75 (p. 1054). 7

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separate spheres and the public and the private and then mapping gender onto these. In doing so, they show both how ideas of masculinity and femininity were constructed vis-avis the other and the manner in which notions of masculine/public and feminine/private were neither uncontested nor static. Rather, as Davidoff has recently argued, ideas of what is public and private are constantly shifting, being made and remade. 27 Indeed, for Janet Wolff, Davidoff and Halls most important contribution in Family Fortunes is showing

that the public and the private are connected, and are, indeed, entirely dependent on one another. Men, operating in the public world of production, professionals, politics, and new urban cultural institutions, were only able to do so because of their other existence in the family.28

Davidoff and Halls contribution may, in particular, be seen in subsequent work on masculinity in the period. As Gleadle observes, for contemporary readers, it is Family Fortunes attention to masculine identity rather than its consideration of the complexities of separate spheres per se which reads as one of its ground-breaking achievements. 29 While, she acknowledges, at times their argument reads as overly simplistic...it should be remembered in 1987 the authors were treading fresh ground - this was essentially a new field of study.30 Robert Shoemaker, for example, has, while acknowledging the importance of Family Fortunes, has argued that there was more continuity than change in

27 Anna Clark, Review: The Gentlemans Daughter: Womens Lives in Georgian England. Amanda Vickery, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Reviews in History, 1998, online (no pagination) 28 Janet Wolff, Review: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Feminist Review, 27, 115-17 (p. 117). 29 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 778. 30 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 778. 8

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understandings of masculinity during the period 1650-1850, a conclusion also drawn by John Tosh in his discussion of the period 1750-1850.31

In the decades since Family Fortunes was published, it has received both support from other scholars as well as criticism. Some, such as Vickery have criticised it for what they see as the determinism of Davidoff and Halls arguments or argued that the notion of separate spheres predate the period that the authors examined. Others, have praised it for the richness of their analysis or argued that Davidoff and Halls analysis is more subtle than Vickery has argued. As this essay has shown, Family Fortunes has provided the starting point for an amount of subsequent scholarship in areas such as the role of women in the business enterprise and in middle class political mobilisation, as well as in the emergence of the domestic ideology. Nevertheless, Davidoff and Halls most important contribution in Family Fortunes to the study of the middle classes in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century provincial England is its focus on gender, particularly in Davidoff and Halls thesis that gender and class operate together to structure social experience.

31 Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850 (Harlow: Pearson, 1998); John Tosh cited in Gleadle. 9

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Bibliography
Barker, Hannah, The business of women: female enterprise and urban development in Northern England, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Berg, Maxine 'Womens Property and the Industrial Revolution', The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 24, 2, (1993), 233-50; Margot Finn, 'Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760-1860', The Historical Journal, 39, 3 (1996), 703-22.

Clark, Anna, Review: The Gentlemans Daughter: Womens Lives in Georgian England. Amanda Vickery, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Reviews in History, 1998, www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/57 (accessed 15th November 2011)

Colley, Linda, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1770-1837 (London: Vintage, 1996).

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Davis, Natalie Zemon, Womens History in Transition: The European Case, Feminist Studies, 3, 3/4 (1976), 83-103.

Eger, Elizabeth, Charlotte Grant, Cliona O Gallchoir and Penny Warburton (eds), Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

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Gleadle, Kathryn, Revisiting Family Fortunes: Reflections on the Twentieth Anniversary on the Publication of L. Davidoff & C. Hall (1987) Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson), Womens History Review, 16, 5 (2007), 773-782

Gleadle, Kathryn, Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and the Mobilization of Tory Women in Early Victorian England, Historical Journal, 50 (2007), 97-117

Gleadle, Kathryn and Sarah Richardson (eds.), Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000)

Hunt, Margaret R, The middling sort: commerce, gender and the family in England, 16801780 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

Jordan, Ellen, Review: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Signs, 15, 3 (1990), 650-2.

Lerner, Gerda, Placing Women in History: Definitions and Challenges, Feminist Studies, 3, 1/2 (1975), 5-14.

Mellor, Anne K, Mothers of the Nation: Womens Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)

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Midgley, Clare, Women Against Slavery: British Campaigns, 1780-1850 (London: Routledge, 1992)

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Vickery, Amanda, Historiographical Review: Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Womens History, The Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 2 (1993), 383-414

Waters, Chris, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 19, 4 (1989), 677-79

Wolff, Janet, Review: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Feminist Review, 27, 115-17.

Yeo, Eileen, Review: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Victorian Studies, 32 (1989), 254-5

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