What are the relations between feminism and history, feminist
politics and historical practice? What are the connections between
gender and class? What part have racial identities and ethnic
difference played in the construction of Englishness?
Through a series of provocative and richly detailed essays,
Catherine Hall explores these questions. She argues that feminism
has opened up vital new questions for history and transformed
familiar historical narratives. Class can no longer be understood
outside of gender, or gender outside of class.
But English identities have also been rooted in imperial power.
White, Male and Middle Class explores the ways in which
middle-class masculinities were rooted in conceptions of power over
dependants – whether black or female.
Table des matières
Acknowledgements vii
1 Feminism and Feminist History 1
Part I The Beginnings
2 The History of the Housewife 43
Part II Gender and Class
3 The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology 75
4 Gender Divisions and Class Formation in the Birmingham Middle
Class, 1780-1850 94
5 The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-maker: the shop and
the family in the Industrial Revolution 108
6 The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: gender and working-class
culture in early-nineteenth-century
England 124
7 Private Persons versus Public Someones: class, gender and
politics in England, 1780-1850 151
8 Strains in the ‘Firm of Wife, Children and
Friends’: middle-class women and employment in
early-nineteenth-century England 172
Part III Race, Ethnicity and Difference
9 Missionary Stories: gender and ethnicity in England in the
1830s and 1840s 205
10 Competing Masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and
the case of Governor Eyre 255
Index 296
A propos de l’auteur
Catherine Hall is the author (with Leonore Davidoff) of Family Fortunes: Men and Women in the English Middle Class 1780-1850.