‘Fit work for women’: working-class women and paid work in the mid-nineteenth century

2007 ◽  
pp. 28-47
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Working Class Women

Detective Fictions: The ‘baby-farming detective’ in Britain, 1867–97

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jim Hinks
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Narrative Technique ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
Term Baby ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Stylistic Device

Abstract This article examines a series of investigations into the activities of women engaged in the provision of paid childcare and collectively labelled with the term ‘baby-farmer’. This paper looks at the practice of writers representing themselves as ‘baby-farming detectives’. Along with exploring the use of the detective investigation as a stylistic device, it will contend that the strictures it imposed informed the relationship these writers have with paid child-carers. The article also explores how the notion of ‘detectives’ and ‘suspects’ spoke of an assumed right to subject working-class women to inspection. It concludes that these detective fantasies were ultimately unsuccessful as they were unable to solve either the cases they encountered, or the symbolic problem of baby-farming, leaving these narratives curiously unresolved and their writers impotent. This article not only seeks to explain how and why the link between pecuniary childcare and infant murder was forged and maintained but asserts that this narrative technique has wider implications for scholars of nineteenth-century culture.

The Hopscotch of Life

2019 ◽  
pp. 77-98
Author(s):  
Ashwin Desai ◽  
Goolam Vahed
Keyword(s):  
Working Class ◽  
Family Life ◽  
Textile Industry ◽  
Upward Mobility ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Home Life ◽  
Indian Family ◽  
Extended Families ◽  
Working Class Women ◽  
The 1960S

In this chapter, we delve into the lives of working class women, many of whom obtained jobs in the clothing and textile industry from the 1960s, and whose incomes were crucial for upward mobility. It reveals how they negotiate life in an environment of extended families and patriarchal relations and how paid work offered them freedoms from the strictures of home life. Of particular relevance is showing how post 1990 the opening of the economy to cheap imports affected the lives of working class women and in turn, what consequences this had for Indian family life.

scholarly journals The Politics of Literature and Literacy: Popular Song Writing and Proletarian Poetry in Post-Revolutionary France

2008 ◽  
pp. 13-36
Author(s):  
Steven E. Rowe
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Popular Song ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Symbolic Forms ◽  
Politics Of Literature ◽  
Laissez Faire ◽  
Song Writing ◽  
Working Class Women

This essay examines the politics of song writing and singing in working-class singing societies in Paris, known as "goguettes," in the early nineteenth century. The practices of writing and singing songs in these societies defined the relationships among participants by equality and good feelings, resisting the hierarchy and domination of the laissez-faire social order. At the same time, these song-writing and singing practices also produced symbolic forms of masculine authority and domination – placing working-class women in positions of subordination. By analyzing this complex politics of writing in this particular case of the "goguettes," this essay argues for recovering working-class writings as significant sources for historians of literacy and for examining the historically specific social and political contexts for the production of specific forms of writing and reading as a way of studying the historical meanings of literacy.

‘The problem of leisure/what to do for pleasure’: women and leisure time in A City Girl (1887) and In Darkest London (1891)

2019 ◽  
pp. 74-90
Author(s):  
Eliza Cubitt
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Leisure Time ◽  
Leisure Activities ◽  
Working Women ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Cultural Anxieties ◽  
Working Class Women

This chapter places the leisure pursuits of female characters in Harkness’s fiction in a broader context of gendered cultural anxieties about working-class leisure activities in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on two of Harkness’s novels, A City Girl and In Darkest London, it argues that, for working women in Harkness’s fiction, leisure may be difficult to access and often becomes another form of work. Comparing Harkness’s characters to women in other contemporary texts such as Liza of Lambeth, it shows how leisure pursuits often reflect and reproduce social dangers and structures of oppression for unmarried working-class women.

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