Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction

2003 ◽  
Vol 57 (1) ◽  
pp. 98
Author(s):  
Michael Kramp ◽  
Patricia E. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Working Class Women

Hidden Hands: Working-Class Women and Victorian Social-Problem Fiction

2002 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 668
Author(s):  
Christine L. Krueger ◽  
Patricia E. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Working Class Women

scholarly journals Three (Working-class) Girls: Social Realism, the ‘At-risk’ Girl and Alternative Classed Subjectivities

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-90
Author(s):  
Helen Wood
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Problem ◽  
Social Realism ◽  
Public Discussion ◽  
The Poor ◽  
The Social ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Set Up ◽  
The Town

This article focuses on the BBC1 three-part drama Three Girls, broadcast in July 2017, which dramatised the Rochdale child sex-grooming gang scandal of 2011 and won five BAFTAs in 2018. While many of the dominant press narratives focused on the ethnicity of the perpetrators, few accounts of the scandal spoke to the need for a sustained public discussion of the class location of the victims. This article considers how the process of recognising the social problem of sex-grooming is set up for the audience through a particular mode of address. In many ways the drama rendered visible the structural conditions that provided the context for this abuse by drawing on the expanded repertoires of television social realism: the representation of the town as abuser; the championing of heroic working-class women; and the power of working-class vernacular. However, ultimately, the narrative marginalises the type of girl most likely to be the victim of this form of sexual abuse. By focusing on the recognisable journey of the girl ‘who can be saved’ this renders the impoverished girl as already constitutive of the social problem. The analysis draws attention to the difficulties of recognising alternative classed subjectivities on television because of the way that boundary-markers are placed between the working class and the poor and suggests that the consequence of these representations is to reify ideas about the victims of poverty and exploitation.

White Working-Class Women and the Race Question

1998 ◽  
Vol 54 ◽  
pp. 80-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dana Frank
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
White Men ◽  
The Other ◽  
White Trash ◽  
White Writers ◽  
White Working Class ◽  
Working Class Women

In Towards the Abolition of Whiteness David Roediger tells the story of Covington Hall, the editor of a newsletter published by the Brotherhood of Timber Workers in Louisiana in 1913 and 1914. Roediger deftly analyzes efforts by Hall and other white writers in the brotherhood to construct cross-racial unity within an otherwise racially torn working class. He shows how Hall redrew the lines of solidarity: On one side were the degraded, of any race.On the other were enlightened workers who eschewed racial divisions, racist language, and stereotypes. “There are white men, Negro men, and Mexican men in this union, but no niggers, greasers or white trash,” proclaimed Ed Lehman, a soapbox speaker for the Brotherhood. A headline in the newsletter similarly asked readers to choose, “SLAVES OR MEN, WHICH?” Still more graphically, a cartoon commanded, “Let all white MEN and Negro MEN get on the same side of this rotten log.”

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