Morgan, Cecilia

English

Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)

166 Histoire sociale / Social Historycalculated to provoke, raise questions, and ultimately make us ponder the future ofour global society.W. P. J. MillarLondon, OntarioLeonore Davidoff  Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender andClass. New York: Routledge, 1995. Pp. x, 276.Worlds Between is a collection of feminist scholar Leonore Davidoffs essays, themajority of them published over the past 20 years in a variety of journals andanthologies. These were essays that I had first encountered during the 1980s as anundergraduate student of history and womens studies, such as Mastered for Life:Servant and Wife in Victorian and Edwardian England and Class and Gender inVictorian England: The Case of Hannah Cullwick and A. J. Munby. My firstreaction, on rereading them, was one of mild shock when I realized how much timehad passed since many of them were first published; they were generally not newwhen I encountered them, but their insights and arguments opened up fresh vantagepoints to my novice historians eyes. A decade later, I now read these essays asessential elements of nineteenth-century feminist historiography, for the richness ofDavidoffs scholarship, the complexities of her insights, and the care that has goneinto her research.Davidoff opens the collection by telling us that these are essays from themargins, concerned with previously ignored or trivialized subjects such as domes-ticity, housekeeping, dirt and disorder, and the relationships of domestic servants,landladies and lodgers, farmers wives and daughters, and siblings (p. 1). However,I would qualify this statement by adding that, while they were written in the contextof a profession that generally treated such topics with disdain, such is no longer thecase. Since these pieces were first published the margins have moved  I admit,in some cases, inched  much closer to the centre because of the work of Davidoffand her generation of feminist historians. In elaborating on these margins, Davidoffhas shown us just how important they have been. These essays contain numerousinsights, such as the importance of domesticity and the home in shaping and medi-ating class relations in nineteenth-century English society; the ways in which classcarried specifically gendered meanings and, a related point, the central place ofgender in English societys hierarchies; the importance of rituals and patterns ofconsumption; and the complexities and contradictions of these relations of subordi-nation and power.Davidoffs insistence that gender and class relations must be analysed in specifichistorical contexts runs throughout the book; her work demonstrates how bothfeminist theory and historical scholarship benefit from such an approach. First,historical research has generated important theoretical insights into gender. Second-ly, our understanding of the past has acquired many new dimensions through theefforts of scholars such as Davidoff. As well, many of these essays suggest thatComptes rendus / Book Reviews 167feminist historians look not just at women and femininity and their relation to classbut at men and masculinity, a theme that receives more and more attention as theessays progress. In her latest work, which culminated in the ground-breaking bookFamily Fortunes by Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Davidoffs interest in exploringthe relational aspect of gender and class has given us empirically grounded analysesof middle-class masculinity, which have opened up critical ways of looking at thosewho so often wielded the gaze of power themselves.The arrangement of these essays by date of publication demonstrates the pathsthat Davidoffs work has taken; if read consecutively, the articles illuminate a bodyof work and her development as a feminist scholar. Her research also reminds usof the importance of domestic service, both as the predominant form of employmentfor working-class women in nineteenth-century England and as a means of under-standing the inter-linked nature of gender and class relations. Davidoffs study ofJ. Munby and Hannah Cullwick, whose relationship of fantasy and desire wasconducted primarily (although not exclusively) through the rituals of gender andclass, is perhaps one of the best-known examples of her ability to probe the socialand cultural meanings of these relationships. While other historians have demon-strated an understandable concern with the movement of working-class women intothe world of the factory, Davidoffs insistence that we pay attention to the worldof the middle-class home, a space in which views of the socio-economic order wereforged, is an insight that helps us break down the binaries of home versus marketand private versus public (one made, it should be noted, in 1979).The collection concludes with two previously unpublished articles. Where theStranger Begins: The Question of Siblings in Historical Analysis builds uponDavidoffs work on household and family to examine a relationship that, she argues,has been central to European and British society (in various inheritance patterns,formal and informal, in migration, and in providing education and emotional sup-port) but that has also been strangely neglected, relegated to a fragmentary footnoteof the historical record (p. 206). Siblings, she tells us, also occupy the boundariesbetween familial and the non-familial, possible strangers, since their socialrelations are organized along horizontal lines ... of filiation (p. 207). This historicalterrain is not entirely new to Davidoff; readers of Family Fortunes will recall theimportance of sibling relationships to middle-class society. In this essay, Davidoffdoes not provide a case study but instead draws upon scholarship in history, sociol-ogy, and anthropology to suggest new paths for research in the fields of womensand family history. This piece points to the multiple ways in which this neglectedrelationship could help us understand the nature of the socially forged boundariesembodied by those who represent both the familiar and the strange. The last essayin this collection, On Reading Some Old Husbands Tales: Public and Private inFeminist History, draws together much of Davidoffs and other feminist historiansthinking on this concept. In the first section of this piece Davidoff acknowledgesthat she is covering contested terrain, as she reviews some of the arguments madeby European and English feminist historians; of greatest interest (besides its lucidity,which makes it extremely useful in introducing students to these concepts) is thepieces examination of the meanings of public and private in a number of areas168 Histoire sociale / Social History(politics, the economy, families and households, and voluntary societies) over thecourse of the long nineteenth century (17801914) (p. 230). Her discussionprovides historical contexts for these concepts; furthermore, it reminds the readerthat these constructs and metaphors were embedded in power relations and had veryserious implications for those, such as women, Jews, blacks, or the original inhabit-ants of British colonies, who were seen as mired in their biology and supposedlylacked the manly independence that was central to full civic participation (p. 264).If there are absences in this collection, they are predominantly ones of race andethnicity. Davidoffs work seems based in a conception of an England in whichclass and gender are the dominant relations of power  even though her concludingremarks suggest that other nineteenth-century hierarchies might have had equalmeaning and import. She points out in her final paragraph that the spread of imperi-al power across the globe during this period means that the hierarchies worked outin the English context reached beyond the borders of England (p. 264), but, as anumber of Davidoffs colleagues have demonstrated, relations of empire also camehome and left their mark on English society. Despite these concerns, WorldsBetween should be part of the collection of both present and future generations ofhistorians concerned with investigating the complex relations of gender and class.Cecilia MorganUniversity of TorontoDiane Singerman and Homa Hoodfar, eds.  Development, Change and Genderin Cairo: A View From the Household. Bloomington and Indianapolis: IndianaUniversity Press, 1996. Pp. xl, 195.Development, Change and Gender in Cairo explores the cumulative significance ofthe choices and practices of millions of individual households in Cairo for broadersocial, political, and economic change. The editors, Diane Singerman and HomaHoodfar, situate lower-income families within the context of the wider internationalpolitical economy and examine the coping strategies and struggles of Cairos mostvulnerable groups to the intended and unintended consequences of policy changesmade by the elite. In turn, they observe the impact of these groups reactions forthe success or failure of state policies. Central to their analysis is the household orfamily as the primary political and economic institution representing collectiveinterests. This bottom-up approach to politics begins with an examination of theongoing negotiation of individual roles and positions within the family undertakenby family members in response to changing circumstances both inside and outsidethe household. The premise of this edited volume is thus rooted in the understand-ing that collective behavior in Egypt is heavily influenced by the needs anddemands of the household and that the household and intrahousehold relations area crucial and central variable in development (p. xix). While the lens is undoubted-ly micro in perspective, the significance of bread and butter issues for macropolitics is clearly drawn.

Leonore Davidoff — Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class

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Leonore Davidoff — Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class

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Histoire sociale / Social History (E-Journal, York University)