TMA 1 (B6950886)

What is the most significant contribution which Davidoff and Hall’s

Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-

1850 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

women’s history...”.5 Davidoff and Hall’s 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

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

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), Women’s 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 Women’s History’, The Historical Journal, vol. 36, no. 2 (1993), 383-414 (p. 393).

1

TMA 1 (B6950886)

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 Hall’s 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 Hall’s 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

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

6 Davidoff and Hall, p. xiii. See also Gleadle, p. 774.7 Davidoff and Hall, p. xiv.

2

TMA 1 (B6950886)

household” - but involved the man’s “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

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

8 Davidoff and Hall, p. 200.9 Davidoff and Hall, p. 200.10 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 774.11 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.

3

TMA 1 (B6950886)

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 Hall’s 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

colleague’s 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

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 women’s lives in the period and that “those female

Britons who invested heavily in Patriotic activism remained, of course, very much the

13 Maxine Berg, 'Women’s 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. 775.15 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: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1770-1837 (London: Vintage, 1996).

4

TMA 1 (B6950886)

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.

Davidoff and Hall’s 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 Hall’s 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

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

TMA 1 (B6950886)

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 Hall’s thesis were present earlier in the century.21 Again,

subsequent work has extended Davidoff and Hall’s 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

in the eighteenth century.22 In the revised introduction to Family Fortunes, Davidoff and

Hall acknowledge that “much of Hunt’s 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 Hall’s 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 women’s history with

‘compensatory history’ to a more nuanced focus on gender.24 As they note in the prologue

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), 650-2.22 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), 5-14, June Purvis, ‘Women’s History Today’, History Today, 54, 1 (2004), 40-2; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘“Women’s History” in Transition: The European Case’, Feminist Studies, 3, 3/4 (1976), 83-103.

6

TMA 1 (B6950886)

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 Hall’s most important

contribution is, therefore, in the way that they take the already-developed notion of

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-a-

vis 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 Hall’s 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 Hall’s 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

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).27 Anna Clark, ‘Review: The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s 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).

7

TMA 1 (B6950886)

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

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 Hall’s 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 Hall’s 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 Hall’s 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

Hall’s thesis that gender and class operate together to structure social experience.

29 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 778.30 Gleadle, Revisiting Family Fortunes, p. 778.31 Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850 (Harlow: Pearson, 1998); John Tosh cited in Gleadle.

8

TMA 1 (B6950886)

Bibliography

Barker, Hannah, The business of women: female enterprise and urban development in

Northern England, 1760-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006)

Berg, Maxine 'Women’s 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 Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s 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).

Davidoff, Leonore and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English

Middle Class 1780-1850, rev. edn (London: Routledge, 2002)

Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘“Women’s 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).

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

9

TMA 1 (B6950886)

English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson), Women’s 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, 1680-

1780 (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: Women’s Political Writing in England, 1780-1830

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000)

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

Routledge, 1992)

Purvis, June, ‘Women’s History Today’, History Today, 54, 1 (2004), 40-2.

10

TMA 1 (B6950886)

Scott, Joan W, ‘Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis’, American Historical

Review, 91, 5, 1053-75.

Shoemaker, Robert B., Gender in English Society 1650-1850 (Harlow: Pearson, 1998)

Vickery, Amanda, ‘Historiographical Review: Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review

of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s 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

11