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Golden age to separate spheres? A review of the categories and chronology of English women's history*

Part of: Historiographical Reviews

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2009

Amanda Vickery
Amanda Vickery
Affiliation:
Royal Holloway, London University
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Abstract

Two very powerful stories structure the history of the changing roles of English women. The tale of the nineteenth-century separation of the spheres of public power and private domesticity relates principally to the experience of middle-class women. The other story, emerging from early modern scholarship, recounts the social and economic marginalization of propertied women and the degradation of working women as a consequence of capitalism. Both narratives echo each other in important ways, although strangely the capacity of women's history to repeat itself is rarely openly discussed. This paper critically reviews the two historiographies in order to open debate on the basic categories and chronologies we employ in discussing the experience, power and identity of women in past time.

Type
Historiographical Review
Information
The Historical Journal , Volume 36 , Issue 2 , June 1993 , pp. 383 - 414
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1993

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References

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15 The argument has its analogue for working-class women in the debates around the rise of the male breadwinner and the family wage, however for reasons of space this material has not been discussed. A summary of the debate can be found in Roberts, E., Women's work, 1840–1940 (Basingstoke, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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23 The problems such portraits present to historians are glimpsed in a telling comparison by Carol Dyhouse. She observes that Vera Brittain's retrospective autobiography written in 1933 attributes much more pent-up frustration to her younger self growing up in Edwardian Buxton, than was ever expressed in the diary written at the time, which in fact conveys ‘an image of a thoughtful but very exuberant young girl, much involved in dancing parties and pretty clothes’: Dyhouse, C., ‘Mothers and daughters in the middle-class home, c. 1870–1914’, in Lewis, J. (ed.), Labour and love: women's experiences of home and family, 1850–1940 (Oxford, 1986), p. 42Google Scholar. For a cautionary note about over-reliance on those writings shaped by the fashion for looking back in anger, see Tosh, J., ‘Domesticity and manliness in the Victorian middle-class’, in Roper, M. and Tosh, J. (eds), Manful assertions: masculinities in Britain since 1800 (1991), pp. 60–1Google Scholar.

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29 See Jalland, P., Women, marriage and politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford, 1986)Google Scholar; Caine, B., Destined to be wives: the sisters of Beatrice Webb (Oxford, 1988)Google Scholar; Peterson, , Family, love and work in the lives of Victorian gentlewomen (Bloomington, Indiana, 1989)Google Scholar. And despite the authors' assumptions, the following contain copious evidence of female diversity Rose, P., Parallel lives: five Victorian marriages (New York, 1983)Google Scholar, and Horowitz, Strong-minded women.

30 Tosh, , ‘Domesticity and manliness’, pp. 50–1Google Scholar.

31 Pugh, M., The tories and the people, 1880–1935 (Oxford, 1985), p. 48Google Scholar. He concludes that ‘the stereotyped view of men who go boldly out into the world and women who love to stay at home disintegrates upon close examination of several late Victorian marriages’.

32 Trollope, A., The Belton estate (1865; Oxford, 1991), p. 132Google Scholar.

33 This conclusion is expressed most forcibly by Larminie, , ‘Marriage and the family’, p. 18Google Scholar.

34 Consider, Smith, F. B., ‘Sexuality in Britain, 1800–1900: some suggested revisions’, in Vicinus, M. (ed.), A widening sphere: changing roles of Victorian women (Bloomington, Indiana, 1977), pp. 182–98Google Scholar.

35 Vicinus, M., ‘Introduction’, in Vicinus, M. (ed.), A widening sphere, p. xixGoogle Scholar.

36 Peterson, , ‘No angels’, p. 708Google Scholar.

37 Pugh, , Tories and the people, p. 47Google Scholar.

38 See Guest, R. and John, A., Lady Charlotte: a biography of the nineteenth century (1989)Google Scholar. This study reproduces some of the very few instances I have ever seen of a woman actually debating with herself over domestic duty. Charlotte Guest sometimes claimed to be ‘quite careless of all but matters of domestic solicitude’ or recorded that ‘to remain in quiet and undisturbed pursuance of my duties is now my only wish’ (p. 33). However, as the authors shrewdly point out, these pious statements ‘almost invariably followed a particularly active period of literary or business activity and were at the same time one way of adjusting to the fact that she was about to produce yet another child.’ Perhaps, therefore, it will be focused studies like this which will help us assess the interaction of conventional lip-service and ‘unconventional’ behaviour in the future.

39 See Florence Nightingale, Cassandra, republished in Ray Strachey, The cause.

40 Rendall, J., ‘Friendship and politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–91) and Bessie Rayner Parkes (1829–1925)’, in Mendus, S. and Rendall, J. (eds), Sexuality and subordination: interdisciplinary studies of gender in the nineteenth century (1989), pp. 136–70Google Scholar. See also the response by Rendall, and Mendus, to Peterson's, ‘No angels’, pp. 131–5Google Scholar.

41 The importance of the radical political heritage in the world view of Parkes and Leigh Smith is elaborated in Rendall, J., ‘A moral engine? feminism, liberalism and the English woman's journal’, in Rendall, J. (ed.), Equal or different: women's politics, 1800–1914 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 112–38Google Scholar. The argument that radical reform constituted the cradle of mid-Victorian liberal feminism is made most forcibly by Harrison, B., ‘A genealogy of reform in modern Britain’, in Bolt, C. & Drescher, S. (eds), Anti-slavery, religion and reform: essays in honour of Roger Anstey (Connecticut, 1980)Google Scholar. But the contribution of a radical family background is also raised by Banks, O., Becoming a feminist: the social origins of the first wave of feminism (1986), p. 33Google Scholar, and discussed with some sensitivity in Levine, P., Feminist lives in Victorian England: private roles and public commitment (Oxford, 1990), pp. 15–41Google Scholar.

42 In a similar vein, Sally Alexander has reflected that ‘the emergence of mass female politics is often attributed to the effects of the industrial revolution and the ideological hegemony of the bourgeoisie. The former by separating work and home, the latter by instilling ideas of domesticity among the working classes, allocated women to the private and public domains respectively. But we come closer to the terrain of feminist grievance and capture a decisive moment in its political temporality if we examine the forms of working-class politics themselves in the 1830s and 40s, and their language of demand and aspiration.’ See Alexander, S., ‘Women, class and sexual differences in the 1830s and 40s: some reflections on the writing of a feminist history’, History Workshop Journal, XVIII (1984), 130Google Scholar.

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44 The locus classicus is Brewer, J., Party, ideology and popular politics at the accession of George III (Cambridge, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For more on the theory of the public sphere of politics, see Habermas, J., ‘The public sphere’, New German Critique, III (1974), 45–55Google Scholar and Eley, G., ‘Rethinking the political: social history and political culture in eighteenth and nineteenth-century Britain’, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, XXI (1981), 427–57Google Scholar. For an enlightening review of the burgeoning literature, see Goodman, D., ‘Public sphere and private life: towards a synthesis of current historiographical approaches to the old regime’, History and Theory, XXXI (1992), 1–20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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48 The modern historical vision of class making through the interaction of radical politics and economic transformation was set forth by Thompson, E. P., The making of the English working class, (1963)Google Scholar, and held sway for almost 20 years. However, many historians have been doubtful about the relationship between the sociology of class and the language of politics: a scepticism which has been particularly pronounced since the publication of G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking chartism’; in idem, Languages of class: studies in English working class history, 1832–1982 (Cambridge, 1983), pp. 90–178. Attempts to defend the conventional class project include, Kirk, N., ‘In defence of class: a critique of recent writing on the nineteenth-century English working class’, International Review of Social History, XXXII (1987), 2–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Gray, R., ‘The languages of factory reform in Britain, c. 1830–60’, in Joyce, P. (ed.), The historical meanings of work (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 143–79Google Scholar.

49 For a readable synthesis of recent scholarship, consult Thompson, F. M. L., The rise of respectable society: a social history of Britain, 1830–1900 (1988)Google Scholar.

50 A wealth of data on the early modern middling sort is in Earle, P., The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London, 1660–1730 (1989)Google Scholar. On the domestic preoccupations and associational lives of commercial families before 1800, see especially Hunt, M., ‘English urban families in trade, 1600–1800: the social relations of early modern capitalism’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, New York University, 1986)Google Scholar. While Hunt's thesis was conceived within the framework bequeathed by nineteenth-century historians – an emergent middle class is linked to a novel separation of the public and private spheres, c. 1600–1800, Hunt marshalls much evidence which undermines the claim that nineteenth-century middle-class culture was the result of evangelicalism, the French revolution and the factory. Moreover, Hunt has since modified her earlier view of increasing female marginalization over the eighteenth century, see Hunt, ‘Women and trade in eighteenth-century England (unpublished conference paper, Eighth Berkshire Conference on the History of Women, June 1990). Despite the authors’ assumptions about separating spheres, further useful information on commercial families before Victoria can be found in D'Cruz, S., The middling sort in provincial England: politics and social relations in Colchester, 1730–1800’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Essex, 1990)Google Scholar and Smail, J., ‘From the middling to the middle: class formation in Halifax, Yorkshire in the century before the industrial revolution’ (unpublished D.Phil, Stanford University, 1988)Google Scholar.

51 Davidoff and Hall drew heavily on the then unpublished work of R. J. Morris. This has since appeared as Morris, R. J., Class, sect and party: the making of the British middle class, Leeds 1820–50 (Manchester, 1990)Google Scholar, which stresses the role of voluntary associations, while underestimating their significance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

52 Cannon, J., Aristocratic century: the peerage of eighteenth-century England (Cambridge, 1984), p. 15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

53 In ignoring the gentry, Davidoff and Hall are not alone. One of the only historians to address the ambivalent position of the gentry is E. P. Thompson on the ‘agrarian bourgeoisie’, see idem, ‘Eighteenth-century England society: class struggle without class?’, Social History, III (1978), 162.

54 Vickery, A.J., ‘Women of the local elite in Lancashire, 1750–1825’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of London, 1991)Google Scholar.

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56 Perhaps manufacturers became progressively frozen out of land-based polite society. Indeed, it is Wilson's contention that while the Yorkshire elite could easily absorb greater merchants in the eighteenth century, it drew the line at manufacturers in the nineteenth. Certainly, a literary distinction between genteel merchants and vulgar manufacturers had popular currency throughout the period. The commentator and cleric Josiah Tucker, for example, distinguished in 1757 between ‘farmers, freeholders, tradesmen and manufacturers in middling life and… wholesale dealers, merchants and all persons of landed estates…in genteel life’, Tucker, , Instructions for travellers (1757), p. 26Google Scholar. Meanwhile, novelists sympathetic to trade made heroes of merchants at the expense of new manufacturers: Raven, J., ‘English popular literature and the image of business, 1760–90’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University, 1985)Google Scholar. See especially the case study of Mrs Gomershull of Leeds, pp. 281–317. Nevertheless, the experience of the Preston cotton manufacturers John and Samuel Horrocks, whose children married into clerical and Domesday families, suggests the continued inclusiveness of Lancashire high society, a feature which has been remarked by other studies of the county: Joyce, P., Work, society and politics: the culture of the factory in later Victorian England (1980), pp. 1–50Google Scholar.

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66 Davidoff, , ‘The separation of home and work? Landladies and lodgers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, in Burman, (ed.), Fit work, pp. 64–97Google Scholar. This study serves as a reminder ‘that there is no natural or fixed separation between a private and public sphere’ (at p. 93).

67 Davidoff, and Hall, , Family fortunes, pp. 107–48Google Scholar.

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72 Consider the contemporary arguments relayed in Lewis, J. (ed.), Before the vote was won: arguments for and against women's suffrage (1987)Google Scholar and Harrison, B., Separate spheres: the opposition to women's suffrage in Britain (1978)Google Scholar.

73 See Engels, F., Origin of the family, private property and the state (1972)Google Scholar, passim, and the introduction by M. Chaytor and J. Lewis to the 1982 Routledge edition of Clark, A., Working life of women in the seventeenth century, pp. ix–xliiiGoogle Scholar.

74 For a summary of orthodox views on this topic, see Hill, B., Women, work and sexual politics in the eighteenth century (Oxford, 1990), pp. 24–68Google Scholar. The saga of decline and fall in the corn belt has been most recently articulated by Snell, K., Annals of the labouring poor: social change and agrarian England, 1660–1900 (New York, 1978)Google Scholar, especially in idem, ‘Agricultural seasonal unemployment, the standard of living, and women's work in the South and East, 1690–1860’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXXIV (1981), 407–37. Consider also Roberts, M., ‘Sickles and scythes: women's work and men's work at harvest time’, History Workshop Journal, VII (1979), 3–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The authority on the impact of new technology on women's industrial work remains Pinchbeck, , Women workers, pp. 111–239Google Scholar.

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77 Smith, Hassell, ‘Labourers’, p. 377Google Scholar. See also Bennett, , Women in the medieval English countryside: gender and household in Brigstock before the plague (Oxford, 1987)Google Scholar.

78 The vast majority of the worsted handspinners of Yorkshire and the lacemakers of Devon were not married to men in textile-related trades. For the Devon findings, see Sharpe, P., ‘Literally spinsters: a new interpretation of local economy and demography in Colyton in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXXXIV (1991), 46–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The Yorkshire findings are those of John Styles based on an examination of Yorkshire convictions for the false reeling of worsted, see W.Y.R.O. QE15/1–13 (1777–81), QE 15/39 (1795) and QE 15/40 (1797). For the vast majority of married spinners who were convicted, husbands' occupations are also given. From this information it was calculated that well over two-thirds of convicted wives were married to men outside the textile trades. Since there is no reason to believe that convicts were not broadly representative of worsted spinners as a whole, this data must cast doubt on the automatic assumption of widespread family production units before the factory. (Personal communication.)

79 Cautions against reading hard work as a simple index of power and status are in Faragher, J. M., ‘History from the insight out: writing the history of women in rural America’, American Quarterly, XXXIII (1981), 548Google Scholar, and Bennett, J., ‘Medieval women, modern women: across the great divide’, in Aers, D., Culture and History, 1350–1600: essays on English communities, identities and writing (1992), p. 169Google Scholar.

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82 Nor should the particular marginalization of the late eighteenth century be seen as a unique cataclysm, the moment when capitalism tossed labouring women aside. Rather, there were several moments in the last millenium when women were drawn into the formal economy in enormous numbers only to be dispensed with when demographic conditions or technological innovations rendered their contribution less vital. A fluctuating pattern of mass female engagement in different areas of the formal economy is suggested by the work of Shelaigh Ogilvie on early modern Germany and Jeremy Goldberg on later medieval England: Ogilvie, S. C., ‘Women and proto-industrialisation in a corporate society: Wurtenberg woollen weaving, 1590–1760’, in Hudson, P. and Lee, W. R. (eds), Women's work and the family economy in historical perspective (Manchester, 1990), pp. 76–103Google Scholar, and Goldberg, J., ‘‘For fairer or laither’: marriage and economic opportunity for women in later medieval Yorkshire’ (unpublished seminar paper, Women's History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, London University, 11, 1991)Google Scholar.

83 See , Clark, ‘Working life’, pp. 14, 41, 296Google Scholar. Interestingly, Clark included the aristocracy and nouveau riche businessmen in her category of ‘capitalists’ since the two groups approximated to each other in manners, see pp. 14–41.

84 Consider Amussen, S., An ordered society: gender and class in early modem England (Oxford, 1988), 187Google Scholar; C. Hall, ‘The history of the housewife’, in idem, White, male and middle class, pp. 43–71; George, M., Women in the first capitalist society: experiences in seventeenth-century England (Brighton, 1988), pp. 1–10Google Scholar; , Hill, Women, work and sexual politics, pp. 49–52, 78–80, 126–9, 245–9Google Scholar. On ‘the restriction of women's professional and business activities at the end of the eighteenth century’, see , Pinchbeck, Women's work, pp. 303–5Google Scholar. And on the ambition of the wealthier farmer's wife to achieve ‘gentility’ by having ‘nothing to do’, see pp. 33–40.

85 Stone, L., The family, sex and marriage in England, 1500–1800 (1977), p. 396Google Scholar.

86 George, M., ‘From goodwife to mistress: the transformation of the female in bourgeois culture’, Science and Society, XXXVII (1973), 6Google Scholar.

87 Shevelow, K., Women and print culture: the construction of femininity in the early periodical (1989), pp. 5 and 1Google Scholar.

88 N. Armstrong, ‘The rise of the domestic woman’, in idem, Desire and domestic fiction: a political history of the novel (Oxford, 1987), pp. 59–95; Jones, V. (ed.), Women in the eighteenth century: constructions of femininity (1990), pp. 10–11Google Scholar; R. Ballaster, M. Beetham, E. Frazer and S. Hebron, ‘Eighteenth-century women's magazines’, in idem, Women's worlds: ideology, femininity and the women's magazine (Basingstoke, 1991), pp. 43–74; , Shevelow, Women and print culture, pp. 53–7Google Scholar.

89 , Clark, ‘Working life’, pp. 35–41Google Scholar.

90 On English traditions, consult Amy Erickson, ‘Common law versus common practice: the use of marriage settlements in early modern England’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XLIII (1990), 21–39Google Scholar. For a thoughtful analysis of the different considerations which could be at work when a male testator drew up a will, read Main, Gloria, ‘Widows in rural Massachusetts on the eve of therevolution’, in Hoffman, R. and Albert, P. J. (eds), Women in the age of American revolution (Charlottesville, Virginia, 1989), pp. 67–90Google Scholar.

91 Defoe, D., The complete English tradesman (1726), p. 348Google Scholar. On the ‘displeasing spectacle of idle womanhood’, see also Earle, P., The world of Defoe (1976), pp. 244–5Google Scholar, and , George, ‘Good wife to mistress’, pp. 157–9Google Scholar. Much useful material is in Nussbaum, F., The brink of all we hate: satires on women, 1660–1750 (Lexington, Kentucky, 1984)Google Scholar.

92 For an introduction to the debate on Luxury, see Sekora, J., Luxury: the concept in western thought, Eden to Smollett (Baltimore, 1977)Google Scholar.

93 Childs, F., ‘Prescriptions for manners in English courtesy literature, 1690–1760, and their social implications’ (unpublished D.Phil, thesis, Oxford University, 1984), pp. 285–7Google Scholar. Margaret Hunt also argues that interest in women's moral influence was increasing over the eighteenth century, Hunt, M., ‘Thesis’, pp. 240–55Google Scholar, but sees in this the triumph of Puritan-bourgeois expectations.

94 Legates, M., ‘The cult of womanhood in eighteenth-century thought’, Eighteenth-Century Studies, I (1976), 21–39CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

95 A salutary development in this context is the attempt to recover the history of thereader herself. Two essays which contest the conventional image of the leisured reader passively ingesting eighteenth-century texts in private are N. Tadmor, ‘Household reading and eighteenth-century novels’, and J. Brewer, ‘Anna Larpent: representing thereader’, both in J. Raven, N. Tadmor and H. Small (eds), The practice and representation of reading in Britain: essays in history and literature (forthcoming). An important study of the modern reader is Radway, J. A., ‘Women read theromance: the interaction of text and context’, Feminist Studies, LX (1983), 53–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

96 Coleman, D. C., ‘Proto-industrialization: a concept too many’, Economic History Review, 2nd ser., XXXVI (1983), 435–48CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Samuel, R., ‘Workshop of the world: steam power and hand technology in mid-Victorian Britain’, History Workshop Journal, III (1977), 6–72CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

97 See Earle, ‘Female labour market’ and Goldberg, ‘Marriage and economic opportunity’. Earle, however, assumes that there was a time when women were numerous in masculine trades. He also takes the ‘no smoke without fire’ attitude to the plethora of pamphlets complaining about wealthy, unemployed womanhood. Dubious circumstantial evidence is found in the growth of the silk industry; but a woman need not be idle all day to wear a silk dress all evening.

98 on the generation of income, see Earle, P., The making of the English middle class: business, society and family life in London, 1660–1730 (1989), pp. 158–74Google Scholar, and Holderness, B. A., ‘Credit in a rural community, 1660–1800’, Midland History, III (1975), 94–115CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The difficulties faced by active businesswomen are richly elaborated in Hunt, ‘Women in trade’.

99 Vickery, , ‘Thesis’, pp. 175–219Google Scholar. In fact, the female contribution is remarkably similar to those female activities described by Davidoff, and Hall, as the ‘hidden investment’ in nineteenth-century enterprises: Family fortunes, pp. 272–320Google Scholar.

100 on women's work as housekeepers and consumers, see Vickery, , ‘Thesis’, pp. 175–219Google Scholar, and idem, ‘Women and the world of goods: a Lancashire consumer and her possessions, 1751–81’, in Brewer, J. and Porter, R. (eds), Consumption and the world of goods: consumption and society in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (London, 1993), pp. 274–301Google Scholar.

101 See , Vickery, Thesis, pp. 131–74, 278–331Google Scholar.

102 Lancashire Record Office, DDB/72/175 (26.2.1763), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse to E. Parker, Alkincoats. For a gloss on this letter and others like it, see Vickery, , ‘Thesis’, pp. 110–13, 172–3Google Scholar.

103 L.R.O., DDB/72/23 6 (1770), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

104 L.R.O., DDB/72/75 (30.7.n.y.), B. Ramsden, Charterhouse to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

105 L.R.O., DDB/72/224, 242, 265, (1769–73), W. Ramsden, Charterhouse to E. Shackleton, Alkincoats.

106 Witness a summary of the woman's day in an exalted professional family, from the pen of a London diarist: Huntington Library, HM 31201, Diary of Anna Margaretta Larpent, vol. 1, 1790–5, unfoliated. See entry for 1 Jan. 1790:’ In the course of this day I read about two hours… I spent about an hour in the morning in household arrangements and family accounts. About two more in teaching my two boys… I walked for an hour. In the evening I worked part of a neck cloth for Mr Larpent, and play'd two rubbers at whist. I saw no company today.’ H.L., HM 31201, vol. 1, 1790–5, entry for 13 Jan. 1790: ‘I pray'd morning and evening. I heard Seymour read for about an hour in Voltaire's Histoire de Pierre Le Grand. I was employed an hour in settling ye weeks bills: and busy therest of the morning in looking over my linen and clothes, selecting the bad, giving some to mend & c. I walked out for an hour – the evening I worked at the chair; & play'd a rubber at whist. I saw no company.’ (I am grateful to John Brewer who first drew my attention to the existence of this source.)

107 Goodwill, Jasper, The Ladies Magazine or Universal Entertainer (London, 1750)Google Scholar, no. 1 for Saturday 18 Nov. 1749, vol. 1, preface.

108 Huntington Library, HM 31207, Methodized Journal of Anna Margaretta Larpent, unfoliated. See entries for 1773.

109 Here I am indebted to Tim Wales, who first pointed out this discrepancy to me.

110 See Rosaldo, M. Z., ‘The use and abuse of anthropology: reflections on feminism and cross-cultural understanding’, Signs, V (1980), 389–417CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Kerber, , ‘Rhetoric of women's history’, pp. 18–19Google Scholar.

111 It goes without saying that we can only try to assess the ‘realities’ of women's lives through texts. No one would deny that a manuscript diary, deposition, account book or will is as ‘constructed’ a document as is a published conduct book or novel. Nevertheless, in my opinion, it is crucial for women's historians to retain a sense of the important differences between texts; not least because some are more useful than others for particular projects. For instance, an unpublished account book kept by a woman in eighteenth-century Lancashire surely tells us more about the language, preoccupations and activities of Lancashire women than does a published diatribe written by a male author living in London. Indeed it is particularly vital for feminists to cast their nets wider than the over-used didactic sources if they are to approach a history of women's lives, not simply to reproduce a catalogue of male anxieties. Ideally, a historian would use as many different sources as possible, for it is often in the discrepancies between different accounts that interesting conclusions are drawn. Of course, some scholars informed by the new literary criticism may read this statement as proof of my naive belief in a phantom of ‘real’ history living in the Lancashire Record Office, yet even those who assert that nothing exists outside language usually have non-linguistic phenomena and convenient supporting ‘facts’ lurking in their footnotes – most popular in my experience being capitalism, the Industrial Revolution, the consumer society, international trade, the rising middle class, the companionate marriage, rural poverty and ruling class hegemony.