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

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.

Beliefs

This chapter explains why these women wanted the vote through a case study of Annie Kenney’s political beliefs. Annie Kenney’s autobiography, Memories of a Militant, is largely a justification of militancy activity: an explanation of how women sought to gain the vote, rather than an explanation of why she wanted it herself. Yet to understand why she and her sisters devoted their efforts to the cause, it is important to examine what they believed it signified. Annie Kenney tended to emphasize three main principles in her claims for the vote. First, that working-class women would benefit from enfranchisement because it would help them achieve better living and working conditions. Second, that all women, regardless of class, would benefit from joining the campaign, which she saw in moral and spiritual terms as transformative for women. Finally, she argued that women had both the desire and the duty to contribute to national life, framing her claims in terms of women’s potential and responsibility to serve the race, nation, and Empire. While these ideas will be familiar to scholars of suffrage, this chapter suggests they had the potential to cut across class. While focused on Annie Kenney, the chapter indicates possible reasons why working-class women were drawn not only to the suffrage cause but to the WSPU in particular. This chapter not only highlights the range and significance of the concerns which motivated Annie Kenney, but also identifies the limitations and consequences of her political vision.

Conclusion

This chapter summarizes some of the key themes which emerge from this study of the Kenneys’ lives. It emphasizes the importance of focusing on working-class women’s political agency, as well as studying them in the context of their family and friendship networks. The Kenneys’ lives offer a way of understanding what the suffrage campaign meant to working-class women, who saw it as a transformative measure rather than a symbolic goal or utilitarian tool. The chapter argues for the importance of understanding the practical and emotional factors which enabled these women to pursue their politics. It considers some of the implications for contemporary activism, identifies remaining questions which need to be answered, and indicates new lines of enquiry for suffrage research.

Class

This chapter shows that Annie Kenney’s suffragette career offers fresh insight into the way that class was represented, understood, and experienced within the WSPU. While WSPU activists frequently claimed that theirs was a classless organization, historians have often been sceptical as to whether this was reflected in their policies and attitudes. Class remained a significant source of tension in the organization even as women attempted to pursue a common goal. This chapter traces how Annie Kenney was first positioned as a representative of, and advocate for, working-class women, and later celebrated for her outstanding commitment to the cause, indicating that the meaning of class was fluid and shifting rather than fixed and static. The chapter raises ideas about the role and representation of working-class women within the WSPU, and demonstrates how women themselves attempted to navigate the complicated terrain of class hierarchies and gendered inequality.

Sisters and Sisterhood

This is a book about the possibilities for, and experiences of, working-class women in the militant suffrage movement. It uses the Kenney family as a case study through which to understand who these women were, what they wanted, and what the vote meant to them. It identifies why they became politically active, their experiences as activists, and the benefits they gained from their political work. It stresses the need to see working-class women as significant actors and autonomous agents in the suffrage campaign. It shows why and how some women became politicized, why they prioritized the vote above all else, and how this campaign came to dominate their lives. It also places the suffrage campaign within the broader trajectory of their lives in order to stress how far the personal and political were intertwined for these women. It addresses questions of class and gender, politics and activism, and agency and identity in the early twentieth century, engaging with recent historiographical research around politicization, networks, and transnationalism. It is a history of education, faith, and social mobility as well of suffrage, and of teachers, theosophists, political activists, social reforms, friends and sisters, as well as suffragettes.

A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts or in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capitals at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Further, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, this article explains the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

A Patchwork of Femininities: Working-Class Women’s Fluctuating Gender Performances in a Pakistani Market

Scholars have studied multiple femininities across different spaces by attributing variation to cultural/spatial contexts. They have studied multiple femininities in the same space by attributing variation to class/race positions. However, we do not yet know how women from the same cultural, class, and race locations may enact multiple femininities in the same context. Drawing on observations and interviews in a women-only bazaar in Pakistan, I show that multiple femininities can exist within the same space and be enacted by the same individual. Working-class women workers in Meena Bazaar switched between performances of “pariah femininity” and “hegemonic femininity,” patching together contradictory femininities to secure different types of capital at the organizational and personal levels. Pariah femininities enabled access to economic capital but typically decreased women’s symbolic capital, whereas hegemonic femininities generated symbolic capital but could block or enable access to economic capital. The concept of a patchwork performance of femininity explains how and why working-class women simultaneously embody idealized and stigmatized forms of femininity. Furthermore, it captures how managerial regimes and personal struggles for class distinction interact to produce contradictory gender performances. By examining gender performances in the context of social stratification, I explain the structural underpinnings of working-class women’s gendered struggles for respectability and work.

Age is Nothing but a Number: Ben 10s, Sugar Mummies, and the South African Gender Order in the Daily Sun’s Facebook Page

Stories about “Ben10” relationships between older women and their younger male lovers appear regularly in the Daily Sun, South Africa’s most popular tabloid newspaper. Daily Sun readers, who are typically township residents, engage vociferously over the rights and wrongs of such relationships on the tabloid’s Facebook page, and alternatively berate or support the older, working class women who feature in them. These women could be understood as “postfeminist” insofar as they are financially independent and sexually autonomous. Their actions echo those of the independent township women in the mid 20th century who, resisting patriarchal apartheid social engineering, brewed beer and rented rooms in order to assert their financial and sexual independence. In both cases, these women’s bold actions confront local hetero-patriarchal norms and call into question an ideal local patriarchal gender order. However, the meanings that are made by the readers of such women in Ben10 relationships today also reflect a social context characterised by a contestation over the meaning of rights, high rates of unemployment, gender-based violence and HIV, factors that curtail a premature diagnosis of postfeminist identity. Drawing on a textual analysis of several articles and their Facebook comments, we argue that any assessment of postfeminism in southern spaces must account for how historical and contextual factors such as these constrain the reach of global postfeminism.

It’s a rich man’s world: How class and glass ceilings intersect for UK parliamentary candidates

Why is politics dominated by wealthy men, and how do gendered and class barriers to running for office intersect? This article addresses these questions using the UK as a case study. Drawing on interview data, I highlight the formal and informal institutions that shape the class and glass ceilings in electoral politics. I identify how the high personal costs of running for office, especially in relation to candidates’ time, present a barrier to those without significant financial resources. These costs are gendered, as women typically have less time and money than men. These resource barriers are compounded by additional gendered obstacles including discrimination, abuse and gendered family roles. I find that the intersection of the class and glass ceilings creates cumulative barriers that are particularly prohibitive for working-class women. The findings extend our understanding of class and gender gaps within politics and, crucially, the intersection between them.

Resilience is a feminist issue: A response to Angela McRobbie’s Feminism and the Politics of Resilience in the context of Britain during the coronavirus pandemic

This article responds to Angela McRobbie’s latest book Feminism and the Politics of Resilience: Essays on Gender, Media and the End of Welfare (2020) which is a characteristically feminist, state-of-the-nation account of intersections of gender, media and culture in neoliberal Britain. It first situates the book in the context of McRobbie’s larger body of work in the field of feminist media and cultural studies, before then going on to address some of the issues that arise from essays themselves, thinking in particular about the notion of ‘resilience’ in relation to our year (and counting) spent living through the Covid-19 pandemic, and how some of the issues McRobbie deals with have taken on new levels of urgency in the context of the coronavirus crisis. The principal focus of my response is McRobbie’s interrogation of the extent to which and the ways in which working class women (especially those of colour) have been deleteriously impacted by the logic of neoliberalism that continues to operate under the ideologically disingenuous banner of ‘resilience.’