The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class Volume 23

Building upon E.P. Thompson's definition of the "Working Class" in Britain, Anna Clark has developed a definitive study of the role that gender played in the development of this class during the era of the Industrial Revolution. Her primary argument is that gender played a "profound" role in the development of the Working Class (p. 264), which is a significant enhancement to Thompson's work. To determine whether or not gender did help to define the British Working Class, she evaluated social forces such as marital relationships, sexual morality, and labor. She has further branched out to include an assessment of political radicalization and Chartism in an effort to fully define the effect of gender on the formation of the British Working Class during the Industrial Revolution. The authors' evaluation of marital relationships and sexual morality showed a challenging environment often permeated with husbands violently beating their wives because of their "nagging". Popular literature, such as the tale of "The Bold Cobbler" (p. 71) shows that people widely accepted the concept of male domination in this particular "class" of society, thus demonstrating the importance of gender within the family structure, and, because of the occupation of "cobbler", the link to the working class. Sexual morality differed greatly between the working class and the middle class, but the economics of the working class mandated this difference; almost to the point of promiscuity in some working class women. Clark explains this point well when she evaluates the "cock-and-hen" clubs on p. 58. Sexuality was the ticket to continued subsistence for some of these women. As the title of the book suggests, the author devotes significant attention to the concept of the struggle within the family and society for the economic right to "wear the breeches". Clark explains that artisans and textile workers developed different strategies to address the influx of women into the work force, but both were facing the loss of male "pride" by allowing women to take their higher paying jobs and earn economic mastery within the household (p.119, p. 122). With the invocation of temperance Chartism, however, the plights of women that had long endured beatings administered by their husbands led to a political solution (p. 224). This focus on politics further defined the working class, but seems to have made them more akin to the middle class, when politics was a standard fare within daily life. In my opinion, the author has demonstrated very well that it was an economic battle between men and women within the working class. She has also done a very good job of defining how the working class was significantly different from the middle class during the I.R. in Britain.