Conclusion

2018 ◽  
pp. 210-216
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
The Law ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War ◽  
Moral Weakness ◽  
Safe Working

While historians have examined how prostitution and promiscuity were frequently conflated by social purists and philanthropists in the late Victorian period and early twentieth century, this book examines the persistence of these ideas well into the latter half of the twentieth century. The notion that the respectable, young, working-class woman could be distinguished from the supposedly disreputable and corrupting prostitute produced a highly gendered understanding of urban space. Working-class women, and especially immigrant working-class women, were monitored for signs of apparent moral weakness. Moreover, even as social purity organisations went into decline in the post-war years, their ideas persisted in legislative efforts to control prostitution. Women who worked as prostitutes were increasingly regulated and pushed out of sight into less safe working spaces. As such, it is argued here that the law increasingly mirrored the sort of social purity thinking which considered prostitution to be a form of moral contagion which needed to be eradicated.

Experts in Womanhood

2018 ◽  
pp. 14-40
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
World War ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Gender Ideals ◽  
Women Police ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The City ◽  
First World

This chapter examines the development of some of Liverpool’s most significant moral welfare organisations between the late-Victorian period and the end of the First World War. It unpacks the early historical trajectories of the House of Help, the Liverpool Vigilance Association, the Liverpool Catholic Women’s League and the Liverpool Women Police Patrols, and it argues that these organisations continued to view women’s relationship to the city through the lens of Victorian gender ideals. Moreover, the chapter examines how the pioneering and well-intended efforts of these organisations to craft a ‘respectable’ form of public womanhood during the first two decades of the twentieth century were still steeped in presumptions about the immorality of the working class, and working-class women in particular.

Save the Womanhood!

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Sex Workers ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Women Philanthropists ◽  
Local Law Enforcement ◽  
Women Police ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

Save the Womanhood examines twentieth-century anxieties about promiscuity and prostitution, and the efforts of social purists to ‘save’ working-class women from themselves. Offering an historical analysis of concerns about women’s interactions with urban space beyond London, the book notes that the pioneering work of women philanthropists and women police patrollers in Liverpool often ran counter to the ambitions and liberties of other women who travelled through the city in search of work and adventure. National debates about the efficacy of solicitation laws, fears about ‘white slavery’ and concerns about changing sexual practices and new consumer cultures gave women street patrollers in Liverpool greater opportunity to justify their own forms of ‘respectable’ public womanhood. For much of the twentieth century, these women patrollers networked with other agencies to enact a powerful form of moral surveillance on the streets. Yet the book also notes that the post-war decline of social purity organizations did not mean that their ideas about the need to monitor female morality went away. The book argues that when female-run, local organizations concerned about immorality went into decline in the post-war years, it was because official institutions and local law enforcement had increasingly taken up their cause. As such, this is a history that also speaks to contemporary debates about the criminalization of sex workers by showing how laws against solicitation have been historically intertwined with moral judgement of women’s sexual practices.

Exploring Working-Class Consciousness: A Critique of the Theory of the ‘Labour-Aristocracy’*

2010 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 3-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles Post
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Alternative Explanation ◽  
World Market ◽  
Capitalist Class ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
Leading Role ◽  
Victorian Period ◽  
The World ◽  
The Subject

AbstractThe notion of the labour-aristocracy is one of the oldest Marxian explanations of working-class conservatism and reformism. Despite its continued appeal to scholars and activists on the Left, there is no single, coherent theory of the labour-aristocracy. While all versions argue working-class conservatism and reformism reflects the politics of a privileged layer of workers who share in ‘monopoly’ super-profits, they differ on the sources of those super-profits: national dominance of the world-market in the nineteenth century (Marx and Engels), imperialist investments in the ‘colonial world’/global South (Lenin and Zinoviev), or corporate monopoly in the twentieth century (Elbaum and Seltzer). The existence of a privileged layer of workers who share monopoly super-profits with the capitalist class cannot be empirically verified. This essay presents evidence that British capital’s dominance of key-branches of global capitalist production in the Victorian period, imperialist investment and corporate market-power can not explain wage-differentials among workers globally or nationally, and that relatively well-paid workers have and continue to play a leading rôle in radical and revolutionary working-class organisations and struggles. An alternative explanation of working-class radicalism, reformism, and conservatism will be the subject of a subsequent essay.

scholarly journals Annie Kenney and the Politics of Class in the Women’s Social and Political Union

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 477-503 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyndsey Jenkins
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Women's Movement ◽  
Class Relations ◽  
Political Union ◽  
Building Relationships ◽  
Public Representation ◽  
Class Woman ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Significant Support

Abstract This article argues that an analysis of Annie Kenney’s public representation and private relationships offers a new way of evaluating how class was understood, experienced, and negotiated within the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU). Annie Kenney was a well-known suffrage activist from Lancashire, usually described as the only working-class woman to achieve prominence in the organization. This article analyses how the WSPU initially made much of Annie Kenney’s social origins, attracting significant press attention. However, it also demonstrates that their assumption that she could effectively speak for all working-class women was problematic, since it assumed a homogeneity of working-class experience. As the WSPU shifted its focus to recruiting more middle-class women, it sought instead to celebrate Annie Kenney’s commitment to the cause. Ironically, she was often more effective in building relationships with wealthier women, forming substitute families that provided significant support and benefits. Yet though the depth of these relationships was extraordinary in the context of contemporary class relations, they remained exceptional rather than typical. This article thus develops the work of scholars including Sandra Stanley Holton, Sue Thomas, and Laura Schwartz, who have analysed how class fragmented and shaped the women’s movement. It demonstrates that the significance of class within the WSPU was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static and indicates both the potential for, and barriers to, meaningful and lasting cross-class collaboration.

At the Crossroads of Empire and Nation-State: Partition, gold smuggling, and port cities in the western Indian Ocean

2019 ◽  
Vol 54 (3) ◽  
pp. 898-929
Author(s):  
NISHA MATHEW
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Indian Ocean ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Western Indian Ocean ◽  
Global Networks ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Post War ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Persian Gulf

AbstractThis article investigates gold smuggling in the twentieth-century western Indian Ocean. It illustrates how gold, condemned as a ‘barbarous relic’ by international monetary economists and central banks in the immediate post-war period, created an economy in the intermediate zone between a retreating empire and emerging nation-states in India and the Persian Gulf. Bombay and Dubai—connected by mercantile networks, trading dhows, migrants, and ‘smugglers’—were the principal constituencies and key drivers of this trans-regional economy. Partition and the concomitant flight of Indian mercantile capital into Dubai becomes the key to unlocking the many dimensions of smuggling, including its social organization and ethnic constitution. Looked at in such terms, gold smuggling reveals a transnational side to both partition and the post-colonial history of Bombay which has drawn little critical attention from historians. Consequently, it expands the analytic space necessary to explain how Dubai was able to capitalize on the arbitrage possibilities offered by import regulations in India, tap into the global networks of trade and finance, and chart its own course of development as a modern urban space throughout the latter half of the twentieth century.

Coercion and Choice

2019 ◽  
Vol 42 (3) ◽  
pp. 483-507
Author(s):  
Elisa Camiscioli
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Sex Trafficking ◽  
Sexual Exploitation ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Economic Vulnerability ◽  
Police Investigations ◽  
The Social ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Working Class Women

Abstract This article employs police investigations of the “traffic in women” between France and Argentina in the first three decades of the twentieth century to highlight the multiple narratives in play when contemporaries talked about trafficking and relayed their experiences of it. While the dominant narrative of “white slavery” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries emphasized coercion, sexual exploitation, and victimization, many young working-class women described the journey to Argentina in terms of perceived opportunity, whether for money, travel, or freedom. This is not to downplay the social and economic vulnerability of these women and the precarious lives they led in French and Argentine cities. Instead, the article emphasizes the inadequacy of many existing frameworks for discussing sex trafficking, and prostitution more generally, as they rely too heavily on a stark division between coercion and choice. Cet article repose sur une analyse d'enquêtes de police portant sur la « traite des femmes » entre la France et l'Argentine durant le premier tiers du vingtième siècle. Il met l'accent sur la multiplicité des discours évoquant la traite, et l'expérience des femmes impliquées. Si, à la fin du dix-neuvième et au début du vingtième siècle, le discours dominant à propos de la « traite des blanches » souligne la coercition, l'exploitation sexuelle et la victimisation, de nombreuses femmes appartenant à la classe ouvrière décrivent leur périple en Argentine comme une opportunité de gagner plus d'argent, de voyager, ou de saisir leur liberté. Cet article ne vise cependant à minimiser ni le rôle de la vulnérabilité économique et sociale de ces femmes, ni leur vie précaire dans les villes de France et d'Argentine. Il cherche plutôt à mettre en évidence le caractère inadapté des différents paradigmes existants pour aborder le sujet du trafic sexuel, et plus généralement de la prostitution, ainsi que la manière dont ces paradigmes reposent sur une division trop marquée entre le choix et la contrainte.

Industrial urbanization, working-class lads and slang toponyms in early twentieth-century Helsinki

Urban History ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-472 ◽  
Author(s):  
HEIKKI PAUNONEN ◽  
JANI VUOLTEENAHO ◽  
TERHI AINIALA
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Urban Space ◽  
Urban Transformation ◽  
Upper Class ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Spare Time ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The City

ABSTRACT:The article investigates the linkages between urban transformation and informal verbalizations of everyday spaces among male juveniles from Sörnäinen (a working-class district in Helsinki) in 1900–39. Sörkka lads' biographically and contextually varying uses of slang names mirrored their itineraries across the city in the search of earning and spare-time opportunities. As a simultaneously practical and stylistic street language, the uses of slang both eroded (in uniting bilingual male juvenile groups) and strengthened (as with providers and teachers, working-class girls, upper-class urbanites and rural newcomers) existing socio-spatial boundaries. Unlike in the late nineteenth century Stockholmska slang studied by Pred, openly irreverent toponymic expressions vis-à-vis the hegemonic conceptions of urban space were relatively few in early Helsinki slang.

White Slavery and Social Purists’ Authority

2018 ◽  
pp. 106-124
Author(s):  
Samantha Caslin
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Young Women ◽  
Social Order ◽  
White Slavery ◽  
Forced Prostitution ◽  
Case Work ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This chapter unpacks social purists’ commitment to the notion of ‘white slavery’ during the inter- and post-war years. Focusing on the work of the Liverpool Vigilance Association (LVA), the chapter argues that this organisation used white slavery to construct their patrolling and moral surveillance of women as necessary to the maintenance of urban social order. By working with only a vague notion of white slavery, the LVA were able to imprecisely apply this term to their case work. Young women from marginalised communities, particularly Irish and working-class women, were presented by the organisation as being vulnerable to white slavery. Despite their records showing little engagement with women involved in forced prostitution, the LVA’s continual allusions to white slavery enabled their patrollers to further their image as experts in the moral protection of women and the organisation’s references to white slavery were used to try to generate donations from LVA supporters.

Women, workplace protest and political identity in England, 196885

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Moss
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Labour Force ◽  
Labour Force Participation ◽  
Original Research ◽  
Trade Unionism ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Industrial Disputes ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Post War

This book draws upon original research into women’s workplace protest to deliver a new account of working-class women’s political identity and participation in post-war England. In doing so, the book contributes a fresh understanding of the relationship between feminism, workplace activism and trade unionism during the years 1968-1985. The study covers a period that has been identified with the ‘zenith’ of trade union militancy. The women’s liberation movement also emerged in this period, which produced a shift in public debates about gender roles and relations in the home and the workplace. Industrial disputes involving working-class women have been commonly understood as evidence of women’s growing participation in the labour movement, and as evidence of the influence of second-wave feminism upon working-class women’s political consciousness. However, the voices and experiences of female workers who engaged in workplace protest remain largely unexplored. The book addresses this space through detailed analysis of four industrial disputes that were instigated by working-class women. It shows that labour force participation was often experienced or viewed as claim to political citizenship in late modern England. A combination of oral history and written sources are used to illuminate how everyday experiences of gender and class antagonism shaped working-class women’s political identity and participation.

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