Presentation (6 April 2015)

Presentation at Postgraduate Forum 

Title : Changes in the social and cultural place of women in Britain during the nineteenth century and changes in our understanding of this over the last 50 years

Date : 6 April 2015  17:15 -  

Place : Room 1.10 in St Katharine's Lodge, University of St Andrews       

Speaker : Min Bae  ( first year research student in Modern History ) 

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My presentation title today is about the social and cultural place of women in 19th century Britain, and changes of our understanding of it over the last 50 years. 

Discussion on the social and cultural place that women took in history has been intense.

The place of women has not always been the same.

During the rapidly changing period of nineteenth century Britain, women’s social and cultural place have been affected strongly by social changes.

For a more specific discussion, the object of today's discussion has been focused on middle-class women of the time.

 

Let me briefly overview what I want to do today.

First, I'll be reviewing about the social and cultural place of middle-class women in the early nineteenth century. 

Then the change throughout the nineteenth century will be reviewed.

Both reviews are based on researchers’ studies in the last 50 years.

At the end, I'll be talking about how women’s historians’ understanding on this subject has changed over the past 50 years.

 

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1. The social and cultural place of women was not in a stable state in the early nineteenth century.

 

In this topic, the relationship between the place of women and the changes of their economic conditions is the main issue.

This issue can be summarised in two different questions.

One question is whether the place of women changed rapidly or continued without much change during the period, to put it simply, the debate as to change or continuity

The other question is whether to view the resultant place of women as improved or declined.

This can be seen in a famous debate between Hill and Bennett.

Hill held the view that there happened important changes due to capitalist development

and saw the changes as undesirable to women who were living in a golden age until then.

On the other hand, Bennett argues that the economic change did not cause rapid changes in the place of women.

Rather than that, she saw the place of women as continuously confined in a patriarchal relationship, which placed women in an oppressed state

 

So given All these different views,  the place of women at the beginning of the nineteenth century can be fairly hard to determine whether it was in the declining or improving state, or in a changing or continuing state.

  

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2. Changes of middle class women's place during the 19th century

 

When a focus is placed on the middle class in the second half of the nineteenth century, it can be said that the social and cultural place of Victorian women gradually changed in the direction that gave them more opportunities

A majority of historians agree with this.

At least until now, the concept that has been deliberated most profoundly is about the ideology of domesticity

 

Among historians of Victorian middle class women, there are two different perspectives :

The first one is what tends to put more weight on conflicting aspects that result from the undeniable presence of the ideology of domesticity and the separate spheres.

Oakley stated that the Victorian period was the very time in which the image of housewife was established for the first time.

On the other hand, the optimistic perspective tends to interpret the nineteenth century as a period in which middle class women could gradually enlarge their territories and achieve goals in social and cultural areas more than any other past generations of women were able to do.

Richardson says that the 19th century was “a period of reform and innovation for women's engagement in public life.”  She regards the nineteenth century as the time of opportunity for middle class women providing them with a new environment that progressive women could exploit as they wished.

This dual nature that was suggested by the historians in the 1970s, such as Vicinus, is thought to be the basic start line to understand the place of women during the period, late nineteenth century.

And this is still an important basis for many of present studies in this area.

 

One thing strikingly clear, though, when we discuss nineteenth century middle class women is that, despite the existence of idealised images of women, whether it had been present already from the earlier centuries or emerged from the revolutionary changes,

increasingly more women tried to seek their own identities in new challenging areas that had not been allowed to them before.

 

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3. Changes in our understanding of the women's place over the last 50 years

 

Historians’ understanding of middle class women’s social and cultural place has been changing continuously up to the present.

It can be said that there were also a series of trends in which those changes could be described over the course of time.

Those trends may be divided into three stages.

 

1) In the first stage, which is from the 70s to the 80s

This corresponds to the popularity of women’s history research which started from a decade before.

The works during this period can be represented by Davidoff and Hall's Family Fortune. 

Their works attempt to understand women’s place by means of their own narrative structure, such as golden age and separate spheres, within the established chronology of the middle-class formation.

In this period the issue was properly placing women in the historical context of social and economic changes.

 

2) In the second phase, the 1990s

 

A new trend was introduced.

The historians at the time probably and ultimately wanted to reposition women’s place that was previously too deeply associated with social changes.

Representatively, Vickery opposed the main framework that Davidoff and Hall had built.

She emphasised the continuity of women's place between that of the nineteenth century and the preceding centuries.

As a result, the issue of “continuity and change” became a very popular issue for historical debates and research during this period.

 

3) Lastly, the third stage of this historiography

 

This phase includes the most recent works, represents the current trend.

They show various and extensive women’s activities that are beyond the confined boundary of separate spheres, or the debates about continuity and change.

Many recent historians in this area show that the social and cultural place of middle class women kept changing throughout 'the long nineteenth century.'

Importantly, such changes were largely driven by women’s intentions and motivations, and were the processes that aimed at finding out their identities under the circumstances of social constrains like the ideology of domesticity.

 

Thank you.