Feminine Sentences E-Book

Janet Wolff

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 277

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

This new book integrates material drawn from a variety of sources - feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology and art history - in an original discussion of women's relationship to modern and post-modern culture.

The essays in the book challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and enquiry. They address critically the question of women's writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their identities in a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing. They also present a cogent defence of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body.

Leseprobe

Feminine Sentences

Essays on Women and Culture

Janet Wolff

Polity Press

Copyright © Janet Wolff 1990

First published 1990 by Polity Press in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd Reprinted 1995, 2005, 2007

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For Veronica and Eleanor, my sisters

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

1 Prospects and Problems for a Postmodern Feminism: An Introduction

2 The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life

3 The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity

4 Feminism and Modernism

5 Women’s Knowledge and Women’s Art

6 Postmodern Theory and Feminist Art Practice

7 Texts and Institutions: Problems of Feminist Criticism

8 Reinstating Corporeality: Feminism and Body Politics

Index

Acknowledgements

‘The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public Life’ was originally published in Janet Wolff and John Seed (eds.), The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and the Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1988).

‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’ was originally published in Theory, Culture & Society, 2, 3 (1985).

‘Feminism and Modernism’ was originally published in Andrew Milner and Chris Worth (eds.), Discourse and Difference: Post-Structuralism, Feminism and the Moment of History (Centre for General and Comparative Literature, Monash University, Australia, 1990).

‘Women’s Knowledge and Women’s Art’ was originally published as an Occasional Paper by the Institute for Cultural Policy Studies, Griffith University, Brisbane, Australia, 1989.

‘Postmodern Theory and Feminist Art Practice’ was originally published in Roy Boyne and Ali Rattansi (eds.), Postmodernism and Society (London, Macmillan, 1990).

‘Texts and Institutions: Problems of Feminist Criticism’ was originally published in French in Recherches Sociologiques, 19, 2–3 (1988): special issue on Sociologie de l’Art.

Some of the essays included in the present volume have been slightly edited and amended, but they are all substantially the same as in their original place of publication.

List of Illustrations

1 Work, Ford Madox Brown, 1852–62 (Manchester City Art Galleries).

2 Past and Present I, Augustus Leopold Egg, 1858 (Tate Gallery, London).

3 Strasse mit roter Kokotte, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, 1914–25 (Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland).

4 Café, George Grosz, 1915, oil on canvas 24” × 16” (Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution. Gift of Joseph H. Hirshhorn Foundation, 1966. © DACS 1990).

5 Hutladen, August Macke, 1913 (Städt. Galerie im Lenbachhaus, München).

6 Corner of the Artist’s Room in Paris, Gwen John, 1907–10 (Sheffield City Art Galleries).

7 Susan on the Balcony Holding a Dog, Mary Stevenson Cassatt, 1883 (In the Collection of The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund).

8 Girl in an Interior, Eduoard Vuillard, c. 1910 (Tate Gallery, London, © DACS 1990).

9 Protest at Sandycove Bay, Dublin (Guardian, July 1989).

1

Prospects and Problems for a Postmodern Feminism: An Introduction

Three persistent concerns structure the essays in this book. The first is the commitment to the reinstatement of women in the sociology and the literature of modernity; related to this is the project of exploring women’s relationship to modern and postmodern culture. The second is the defence of feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. And the third is a mission to challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (including feminist) theory and enquiry.

The essays are founded on two major assumptions, nowhere spelled out or defended, but implicit throughout. In the first place, I have taken it as given that culture is central to gender formation. Art, literature, and film do not simply represent given gender identities, or reproduce already existing ideologies of femininity. Rather they participate in the very construction of those identities. Second (and consequently), culture is a crucial arena for the contestation of the social arrangements of gender. Cultural politics, then, is not an optional extra – a respectable engagement in one of the more pleasant sectors of political action. It is a vital enterprise, located at the heart of the complex order which (re)produces sexual divisions in society.

Some of the essays in this collection originally appeared as the statutory feminist contribution to a volume of essays on another theme. (Essays 3, 6 and 7 were published in this form). An important part of the rationale of publication of these essays now alongside one another is to offer resistance to what we might call the ‘women and …’ syndrome, whereby sympathetic and dutiful editors ensure that someone is invited to address the question of gender. This is the perennial problem of feminism (and of other oppositional and critical movements), of whether to intervene with the one-off lecture, the individual chapter or essay, the optional course in a traditional degree programme, thus risking dilution, incorporation, and the too-easy appeasement of others’ consciences; or whether to work, teach, and publish separately, aiming for the comprehensive feminist text or women’s studies programme. Marginalization or ghettoization. I take the rather pragmatic view that both are worth doing (and that each has its problems). In the present case, I have felt that there was a good deal to be gained by extracting each piece from its original context, and facilitating a reading which follows through these issues of gender and culture without interruption. In the next section I will discuss the rationale of the book, before going on to consider some of the main themes and problems dealt with in the essays which follow.

Modernity, Modernism, Postmodernism

I do not propose to add to the voluminous and constantly expanding literature on definition, characterization and periodization which addresses the terms modernity, modernism and postmodernism. In several of the essays in this collection I discuss and analyse some of the ways in which they have been employed, and identify my own usage. (See particularly ‘Feminism and Modernism’ and ‘Postmodern Theory and Feminist Art Practice’.) Here I want to stress the importance of considering the categories in relation to one another. My discussion of postmodernism and feminism, for example, is approached by way of consideration of the earlier promise, and apparent failure, of modernism. Moreover, I attempt in my essay on postmodernism to suggest the continuities between the best postmodern practice and the project of modernism itself. This is one reason why the essays are arranged chronologically, in order of period under discussion, rather than in order of writing or publication. Thus I begin with questions of gender and culture in the mid-nineteenth century, go on in the next essay to discuss women and modernity at the turn of the century, and then, in the following essays, consider women in relation to the history of modernism during this century, and in relation to the postmodern world and culture of the late twentieth century.

More important, the relationship between modernity and modernism is too often ignored (or sometimes assumed). As I argue in essays 3 and 4, these are not the same thing. Nor can we take it for granted that modernism in art is the representation of modernity (that is, the experience of the modern world). Raymond Williams has provided a tentative outline for examining the possible connections between these phenomena – between a mode of expression and a social experience – and this is discussed in essay 4.1 And as I also show in that essay, women’s apparent exclusion from modernism has been related by some commentators to their social exclusion from key experiences in the modern world, which have been taken to be central to the modernist canon (city life, the First World War, and so on). Whether or not this is so (and here I have agreed with those who have rejected the narrower definition of ‘modernism’ which automatically excludes women’s work), the point is that what women write or paint is clearly related to their experiences. Those experiences, in the nineteenth century, early twentieth century and now, have been very different from those of men. The work of women modernists in art and literature, which is now being rediscovered and re-evaluated, is just as much an expression of and response to the ‘modern’ experience as the officially acclaimed work of male modernists.

The two essays which follow this introduction are thus concerned with the situation of women in society, first in mid-nineteenth-century England during the development and consolidation of the culture and ideology of ‘separate spheres’ (though, as I also point out, this process was far from uniform or complete), and secondly in the modern city, from the mid-nineteenth century (when Baudelaire first addressed the question of city life) to the early twentieth century. The confinement of women to the domestic sphere, the problematic nature of their appearance in the public arena, and the consequent irrelevance of most of the literature of modernity (sociological as well as literary) to women’s experience need to be spelled out before we can go on to consider contemporary forms of cultural expression and their relationship to social experience. The discussion of women’s art in the following essay (essay 4) can then be better understood, in relation to a different conception of what constitutes ‘the modern’. It is not, to emphasize this point again, that the art of the modern period is necessarily modernist; this is a matter of formal innovation, as well as of content. But we can begin to see that women innovators (that is, modernists) were also producing important work, whose invisibility in the history of the arts is explained by a male-centred definition of the features of the modern.

Textual, Sexual, Social Critique

The tendency to separate questions of modernity from questions of modernism (or – another version of the same mistake – to assume their identity) is part of the more general limitation of much work in cultural analysis, including feminist analysis. This is the third of my concerns listed at the beginning of this introduction, namely the separation of sociological from textual analysis. This issue is spelled out in detail in the penultimate essay (‘Texts and Institutions: Problems of Feminist Criticism’), but the inhibiting dichotomy it attacks underlies many of the obstacles confronted by feminists, which are identified in the other essays. As I have argued, the exclusion of women and their experience from accounts of life in the modern city, discussed in the essay ‘The Invisible Flâneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity’, is largely the product of an extremely partial sociology of modern life, which perceives and describes the world of men, while ignoring totally the real social and experiential situation of women at the turn of the century. But it is equally true that we cannot resolve questions of women’s relation to modernism purely at the level of representation. In ‘Feminism and Modernism’ I consider the paintings of Mary Cassatt and Gwen John, for example, suggesting ways in which these might be read as expressions of women’s specific experience of the modern world. An adequate exploration of this issue, however, would need to be based on a social-historical exploration of women’s actual participation in the social arrangements, institutions, and processes of city life, matters which are only touched on in the context of that essay.

The fact is that a good deal of feminist cultural analysis is essentially textual analysis. Novels and other texts are reread by feminists as the complex expression of women’s lives (or, if they are by men, of men’s distortions of those lives). Artistic practices and cultural works by women artists and writers are assessed for their subversive, critical, or mobilizing potential, but this assessment is in purely textual terms. The assumption appears to be that the identification of politically correct features of a work would be enough to guarantee its effectivity (whether the features proposed are celebratory, critical, or deconstructive – see essays 6 and 8 for a discussion of these alternatives). We may certainly point out the potential advantages, limitations, or dangers of such textual politics, but in the end we cannot legislate about effectivity without reference to the specific circumstances of readers and viewers.2 Annette Kuhn, contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of feminist work on film melodrama and feminist analysis of television soap operas, concludes by urging the combination of the textual analysis characteristic of the former with the sociological study of viewers of the latter.3 Whatever the potential readings of a text and the implied readers or spectators detected in the work, only a sociology of audiences, readers, and viewers will tell us what a work will actually mean at its reception. (And only a social-historical approach to production will enable us to develop an account of the possible or probable meanings of a work in relation to its moment of origin.) Again, in those essays in which I deal with cultural politics (mainly essays 6 and 8), this dimension is so far inadequately examined. A systematic exploration of feminist art practice and of body politics would necessarily involve a serious attempt to relate textual strategies to practices of reading and viewing, and to the contexts and institutions of reception.

A similar argument about the ultimate failure of a feminist aesthetics based solely on textual analysis has been made in a recent book by Rita Felski. With regard to literature, and to feminist literary theory, she demonstrates the misguided nature of any attempts to define a feminist aesthetic or feminist cultural politics in abstract, general, or textual terms, arguing that ‘the political value of literary texts from the standpoint of feminism can be determined only by an investigation of their social functions and effects in relation to the interests of women in a particular historical context’.4 In other words, sexual and textual politics cannot be separated from social analysis. The central topic of the later essays in this collection – cultural politics – should be addressed, just as much as the earlier concerns of women and modernity/modernism, in terms of sociological as well as textual categories.

Questions of Cultural Politics

It is with this caution in mind that we should approach the issue of feminist cultural politics. Varieties of cultural practice have been claimed as appropriate for women’s voice and for a feminist intervention in culture, modernism and postmodernism amongst them. As the essays in this book attempt to show, the promise for women of new forms of expression has invariably appeared to be cancelled out by the inevitable exclusion of women from what becomes a predominantly male canon. Thus women are more or less invisible in mainstream histories of modernism. Already the prominent names in postmodern art and literature are mainly those of men. The institutions of cultural production (including the practices of criticism and of academic disciplines) continue their age-old habit of writing women out of the account. Despite this, some feminists have insisted on the availability, and potential, for women of both modernist and postmodern strategies, and I have endorsed particular versions of this claim in the essays that follow.

In essays 6 and 8, I review some of the issues involved in the confrontation between celebratory (humanist) cultural politics and postmodern (deconstructive) strategies, identifying the problems involved in the uncritical presentation of images (albeit positive ones) of women on the one hand and the limitations of an abstruse textual practice on the other. Although I have argued in favour of the destabilizing and critical methods of certain postmodern techniques, my acknowledgement there of the strategic value of celebratory art, which works to create new and positive images of women, should be seen in relation to the insistence on the link between the textual and the social. It is a matter of audience and of potential readings, and not solely a matter of aesthetic orthodoxy. In other words, although it is only those critical and deconstructive practices which can expose the logic of patriarchal systems of representation in order to clear a space for a feminist politics of culture, it may well be that the more direct approach of a celebratory aesthetic engages with particular viewers or readers in specific situations and at specific moments. Such strategies of representation leave untouched the problematic category of ‘woman’ and avoid the task of analysing its construction (in social relations, ideology, and in representation itself), thereby taking the risk of subscribing to the essentialism of belief in the inherently ‘female’ or ‘feminine’. But they may have their own logic of dislocation, enabling a particular kind of alienation effect which is the result of substituting new and unfamiliar images for those available in the dominant culture. As more direct aids to the mobilization of consciousness, too, clearly this cultural politics is often most effective. Again, the sociology of reception makes absolutely clear the illegitimacy of insisting on a ‘correct’ textual practice for feminism.

The politics of the body, discussed in the final essay in this collection, raises very directly many of the issues at stake in the question of feminist cultural politics. In that essay I consider the dangers for feminism of engaging in a simple celebration of the female body – dangers of appropriation, misreading, and essentialism. With particular reference to transformations in dance, from the classical ballet through modern to postmodern dance, I suggest that the most effective body politics is one which incorporates its own acknowledgement of the materiality of the body, and whose project, amongst other things, is to address and deconstruct the (idea of the) body in contemporary culture. In this particular area postmodern practices manifest a greater degree of this self-reflexivity than modern dance. But, as I say in my essay on postmodernism, it often strikes me that the characteristics of modernism can sound almost identical to those of postmodernism: self-reflexivity, irony, juxtaposition, alienation effects, laying bare the device (making clear the nature of the medium and of representation itself). Inasmuch as the key difference is sometimes said to consist in postmodernism’s rejection of theory, or ‘grand narratives’, then this raises problems, not least for feminism.

The Problem of Theory and the Problem of ‘Women’

Feminism has an important investment in the critique of theory. The exposure of theory and philosophy as the limited vision of white, western, middle-class male thought (discussed in essays 5 and 6) renders it a priority for feminists, and other excluded groups, to challenge this discourse. This is why post-structuralist theory, deconstructionism, and postmodernism have been thought to be so valuable for feminist politics. They enable the destabilization of patriarchal thought, and the political critique of idelogies of science and ‘objectivity’. But the total abandonment of theory poses problems for feminism. In general, the commitment to radical relativism is necessarily disingenuous – there can be no View from nowhere’.5 And for feminists, the refusal of a theoretical position or a fundamental model of analysis (such as the structures of gender inequality in society) would obviously undercut our project and our politics.

The desire to deconstruct is not just the product of the critique of androcentric thought. It has also emerged from the important recognition that feminism itself has been a partial, and excluding, discourse, representing the experience of white, middle-class, heterosexual women. Some women have therefore argued that differences among women can only be acknowledged by a feminism which refuses to ‘totalize’, and which eschews the stable categories of theory in favour of the ceaseless play of signifiers. But here the same problems arise. Susan Bordo argues that such radical deconstructive strategies have the ironic effect of colluding with patriarchy, since a feminist politics requires the positing of, and commitment to, a unified feminist consciousness. As she shows, the search for an adequate account of the diversities among women is an impossible one (since such diversities are potentially infinite). Recognition of the limits of specific theories and analyses does not entail abandoning these, and insistence on the commonalities of women’s experience (and oppression) is both valid and crucial for feminist critique.6

What this means is that we have to retain a commitment to theory, while recognizing its provisional nature. Other feminists have opted for the more fragmentary methods of a postmodernism which has broken any lingering attachments to the rational project of modernism.7 Others attempt to find a middle way, retaining the ambivalence of developing theory while, as Sandra Harding puts it, ‘embracing the instability of the analytic categories’.8 While the debate about feminism and postmodernism continues in numerous journals and collections of essays, here I reiterate my own position, spelled out in relation to the visual arts in essay 6 – namely that an entirely dispersed and fragmented politics is both misconceived and impossible, and that any postmodernism of value inherits both the rational project and the critical self-reflexivity of the best of modernist thought.

The question of ‘woman’ is related to the problem of theory, for post-structuralist theories have exposed the essentialism of humanist thought. This critique applies equally to humanist feminism. The subject (including the female subject) is constructed in discourse and representation and is thus not a stable, unified category. This has led some feminists (often in connection with the debates about theory just reviewed) to reject the category ‘woman’ and the collectivity ‘women’, in favour of a textual fluidity in which the subject is constantly deferred. Susan Bordo’s comments are equally pertinent here, as are the conclusions drawn by Denise Riley and Mary Poovey. Riley’s argument is that though ‘women’ are historically and discursively constructed, differently at different moments and in different situations, and that ‘women’ is therefore an unstable category, nevertheless it is a category we must continue to employ. As she says, ‘it is compatible to suggest that “women” don’t exist – while maintaining a politics of “as if they existed” – since the world behaves as if they unambiguously did.’9 Mary Poovey makes much the same point, when she argues that we need to work out ‘some way to think both women and “women” ‘, since real historical women do exist, despite the theoretical recognition that the subject must be de-centred.10

Feminine Sentences

Virginia Woolf believed that modernism offered the opportunity to women of writing their own experience, employing the ‘sentence of the feminine gender’ (see ‘Feminism and Modernism’). In the essays that follow I explore the possibility of feminine writing (or painting), and discuss many of the difficulties contained in such a notion. As Rita Felski has pointed out, there is nothing inherently feminist in experimental (or, for that matter, any other kind of) writing.11 And, as I have argued here, we cannot assess texts in purely intrinsic terms if we hope to discover their critical or liberatory potential, for this is a matter of situated readings and viewings. Nevertheless it seems reasonable to suppose that new forms of cultural expression, by virtue of the fact that their very existence challenges and dislocates dominant narratives and discourses, provide the space for different voices to speak and for hitherto silenced subjects to articulate their experience. This is why both modernism and postmodernism have offered such an opportunity to women. To demonstrate the ultimate failure of modernism, the incorporation of each into the establishment, the speedy domination of both by men, is not to deny their initial, and even continuing, potential. If we distinguish between modernism as institution and modernism as cultural and political strategy, as Griselda Pollock has suggested we do (see essay 6), we need not conclude that the legitimation of the former entails the neutralization of the latter.

But the title Feminine Sentences is not intended just to refer to Virginia Woolf and the debate about modernism. In part, I wanted to signal by it the secondary meaning of the word ‘sentence’, indicating an exploration of the constraints and restrictions experienced by women in a patriarchal culture. Women, in this sense, are sentenced to containment and silence. More important, this collection is intended as a contribution to the overthrow of that ‘sentence’, and to the process whereby women find ways to intervene in an excluding culture, and to articulate their own experience. Feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women’s own voice.

NOTES

1   Raymond Williams, ‘The Metropolis and the Emergence of Modernism’, in Edward Timms and David Kelley (eds), Unreal City: Urban Experience in Modern European Literature and Art, (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1985).

2   See Fred Pfeil, ‘Postmodernism and our Discontent’, Socialist Review, 87/88 (1986).

3   Annette Kuhn, ‘Women’s genres’, Screen, 25, 1 (1984).

4   Rita Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 2.

5   Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986).

6   Susan Bordo, ‘Feminism, Postmodernism and Gender-Scepticism’, in Linda Nicholson (ed.), Feminism/Postmodernism (New York and London, Routledge, 1990).

7   For example Jane Flax, ‘Postmodernism and Gender Relations in Feminist Theory’, Signs, 12, 4 (Summer 1987). See also Donna Haraway, ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s’, Socialist Review, 80 (1983).

8   Sandra Harding, ‘The Instability of the Analytic Categories of Feminist Theory’, Signs, 11, 4 (Summer 1986).

9   Denise Riley, ‘Am I That Name?’ Feminism and the Category of ‘Women in History (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

10   Mary Poovey, ‘Feminism and Deconstruction’, Feminist Studies, 14, 1 (Spring 1988), p. 53.

11   Felski, Beyond Feminist Aesthetics, p. 5.

2

The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life

Writing in 1851, J.W. Hudson describes the ‘liberal and comprehensive scheme of female education’ introduced at the Manchester Mechanics’ Institute in 1841: ‘For less than thirty shillings per quarter, a young lady may receive the elements of what is termed an English education, and be taught the accomplishments now considered necessary to her position, including the French language, drawing, vocal and instrumental music, dancing, modelling, with the useful arts of millinery and dress-making.’1 The intention of the directors of the Institute was explicitly that of teaching women ‘what would make them better wives, sisters, mothers’ as well as better ‘members of society’.2 It would be inappropriate and misleading to consider this a simple case of sex discrimination, for we also find that in the girls’ school opened there in 1835 the subjects taught were more or less the same as those taught at the boys’ school, namely reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, and grammar. The boys also learned algebra and geometry, and the girls sewing and knitting.3 The access of girls and women to culture and to knowledge in the first half of the nineteenth century in England was complex and often contradictory. Nevertheless my main argument in this essay will be that the continuing process of the ‘separation of spheres’ of male and female, public and private, was on the whole reinforced and maintained by cultural ideologies, practices, and institutions. This applies both to women’s place in cultural production (as artists, authors, patrons, and members of cultural institutions) and to the dominant modes of cultural representation, particularly in literature and the visual arts, and their construction of notions of gender. Interwoven with both of these is that nineteenth-century morality that determined which books or paintings would be publicly available (I shall consider a few examples of such extra-aesthetic influence later on), and which spheres of activity were appropriate for men and women. But although my starting point is the separation of spheres, it is important to stress that any implication of a simple determinism must be rejected. The particular focus of this essay on the role of culture does not presuppose either a ready-formed or static ‘middle class’, or a straightforward economic and ideological ‘separation of spheres’. Indeed this separation was constantly and multiply produced (and counteracted) in a variety of sites, including culture and the arts. So, for example, women’s exclusion from various areas of productive work did not entail their exclusion from painting; rather, the latter was the product of the specific ideologies and practices of art and of ‘the artist’.4 My argument that cultural institutions and ideologies contributed to the separation of spheres should not, therefore, be read as either an idealist account (culture as producing social divisions) or a reductionist one (culture as epiphenomenal, merely reflecting existing divisions).

The Separation of Public and Private Life

Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have documented the ‘separation of spheres’ into the public world of work and politics and the private world of the home, as well as the concomitant development of the domestic ideology that relegated middle-class women to the private sphere.5 The material separation of work and home, which was the result of both the Industrial Revolution and the growth of suburbs, was clearly the precondition of the general process, though, as Catherine Hall has pointed out, for many families and many occupations this separation did not always occur (for example, in the case of doctors’ practices).6 Working-class women, of course, continued to work. The cult of domesticity was strong among the middle class by the 1830s, emphasizing the sanctity and purity of family life, and the moral task of women as mothers and wives. Women who did continue to work outside the home were increasingly restricted to particular kinds of occupation – servicing rather than productive, and ‘women’s trades’ of teaching, dressmaking, and retail – and excluded from the new financial institutions associated with business.7 At the same time the ‘public world’ expanded, providing for men a multitude of additional activities and institutions – banks, political organizations, voluntary societies, and cultural institutions. Women’s involvement in these organizations, where it existed at all, was indirect or informal – for example, as visitors, but not officers, of philanthropic societies.8

Physically, the separation of spheres was marked, as well as constructed, by both geography and architecture. From the 1830s the more prosperous members of the middle class in the major manufacturing cities began to move out of the town centre, and to build houses in the suburbs. The development of Victoria Park, Manchester, illustrates this move well.

During the early and middle 1830s, the out-of-town villa residence was just beginning to become fashionable. There remain, even today, many examples of this type of property that were put up between about 1835 and 1850. The broad band of country from Greenheys, Chorlton-on-Medlock, the northern parts of Rusholme (i.e. Victoria Park), Plymouth Grove and parts of Longsight and Ardwick contain examples of late Georgian terraces and villa residences. These houses were all occupied by the emerging mercantile class of the city.9

Thirty-five such large houses were constructed in Victoria Park between 1837 and 1845.10 Maurice Spiers describes James Kershaw, one of the earliest residents of Victoria Park (he lived there from 1838 to 1859) as typical of those setting up their homes there. He was a partner in the calico-painting firm of Leese, Callender and Co., having started life as a warehouse lad. He was a member of the Council of the League, an Alderman from 1838 to 1850, Mayor in 1842–3, and MP for Stockport from 1847 to 1859. Interestingly, Spiers also notes that before moving out of the centre of Manchester, Kershaw had lived in Great Ancoats Street, where his wife carried on a business as a linen draper.11 He does not record whether she was able to continue her occupation after the move to the suburbs, but she certainly did not do so from the new address, and it is most unlikely that she travelled into town. Although the extent of suburbanization should not be overestimated (many middle-class families remained in the more central urban areas), where it did occur, the move to the suburbs entailed a clear separation of home and work, and a firm basis for the domestic ideology of the home as haven, and of women as identified with this private sphere. Davidoff and Hall trace the similar development of Birmingham in this period, in the growth of the suburb of Edgbaston.12

The design of the new houses themselves usually accorded well with the ideology of separate spheres. With regard to the middle-class elite, Mark Girouard argues that agreement by 1850 about what a ‘gentleman’s house’ should be like included the requirements that ‘it should provide decent quarters for servants. It should protect the womanliness of women and encourage the manliness of men.’13