102
DIANA DIZEREGA WALL
Examining Gender, Class, and
Ethnicity in Nineteenth-Century
New York City
ABSTRACT
Ceramic vessels are used in a first step for comparing how
working- and middle-class women constructed domesticity in
19th-century New York City. In addition to exploring some
of the interpretive problems encountered in studying workingclass families who lived in tenements, the analysis indicates
that the women of the working class apparently did not emulate
middle-class women when it came to choosing the dishes they
used to set their tables.
Introduction
One of the issues that historical archaeologists
have become increasingly interested in exploring
is how to use material culture to study the construction of class. Many archaeologists would
agree with Bourdieu (1984:48) that “[a] class is
defined as much by its being perceived as by its
being, as by its consumption-which need not be
conspicuous in order to be symbolic-as much as
by its position in the relations of production
(even if it is true that the latter governs the
former)” (emphasis in the original). Therefore
they expect to be able to see differences among
classes expressed in the material culture which
the members of these classes left behind.
As archaeological data on many different
socio-economic groups accumulate throughout the
country, archaeologists are now in a position
where they can begin to explore the construction
of class. Those studying New York City are
particularly fortunate in this regard. Due to the
vagaries of modern development and environmental regulations, archaeologists working in New
York over most of the past two decades accumulated a number of assemblages that originated in
middle-class and elite households (Geismar 1983,
1989; Rockman et al. 1983; Grossman 1985;
Berger and Associates 1987, 1991; Rothschild,
Historical Archaeology, 1999, 33(1):102-117.
Permission to reprint required.
Wall, and Boesch 1987; Rothschild and Pickman
1990;; Salwen and Yamin 1990). More recently,
they have begun to acquire assemblages from
poorer neighborhoods, such as the Five Points
(Yamin 1997) and Kleindeutschland (Grossman
1995), as well. The addition of the information
from these working-class assemblages to New
York‘s research data base will soon allow archaeologists to make extensive comparisons between
working- and middle-class households during the
process of class formation in the 19th century.
As an anthropologist enamored of the comparative approach (or historic ethnology[Schuyler
1988]), the author is particularly interested in
using the material culture of domesticity to compare the construction of gender and women’s
roles-and particularly the meanings of domestic
life-between the women of the working class
and those of the middle class. More specifically,
the interest is in exploring the extents to which
class and ethnicity, respectively, structured the
construction of gender in the 19th-century metropolis.
This preliminary study attempts to show some
of the approaches that archaeologists might use
to study class, ethnicity, and gender in an urban
setting. It begins by introducing the outlines of
what is known about the lives of women of the
middle and working classes in New York at the
middle of the 19th century. Then, it explores an
admittedly very small sample of assemblages by
examining, first, the 19th-century neighborhoods
where the assemblages were found. Next, the
study examines the contexts of the families who
lived on the sites where the assemblages were
found and who presumably used the artifacts that
make up the assemblages. Finally, using one
medium of the material culture recovered from
the archaeological excavations-the china dishes
used in presenting meals-it examines some of
the interpretive problems that archaeologists are
beginning to encounter in studying the lives of
working-class people in the 19th-century tenements, and points out some possible differences
in the meanings of domestic life for the women
in these households. In examining two of the
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNlClTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
three middle-class homes, the author uses data
analyzed for other, earlier studies (Wall 1991,
1994); the data from the middle-class 12th Street
site and from the tenement are presented here for
the first time.
Class and Gender in 19th-Century New York
The 19th century saw the beginnings of the
formation of the American class system that exists today (Blumin 1989; Wilentz 1984). After
the mid-19th century, the middle class in New
York was made up for the most part of Protestants who had been born in the United States
(Stott 1990:242). At that time, The New York
Times described this group as including “professional men, clergymen, artists, college professors,
shopkeepers, and upper mechanics” (Blumin
1989:247). The latter, who had been master
craftsmen under the old artisan system of production, had become managers who supervised the
work of their employees but who did not work
with their hands. In fact, one historian has used
this dichotomy between manual and non-manual
labor as crucial in distinguishing the working
class from the middle class in urban America
after the Civil War (Blumin 1989).
Middle-class wives and daughters did not work
outside the home; instead, as can be learned from
both historical accounts and the contemporary
prescriptive literature, their roles were predicated
on the two interrelated ideals of “true womanhood” and refined gentility. Middle-class women
perceived themselves and were perceived by others of their class as the moral guardians of society, a role they exercised both within their
homes (among both family members and the
live-in domestics whose work they supervised)
and in society at large (particularly among the
working classes). They were also, however, responsible for projecting the image of their families’ gentility, an important issue for negotiating
the family’s position in the city’s class structure.
The latter role was particularly critical in social
reproduction: in order to provide access to the
middle class for their children, parents needed
103
friends to help provide suitable places in business
for their sons and fitting husbands for their
daughters (Stansell 1986; Blumin 1989). During
the 19th century, the middle-class ideology of
morality, respectability, and gentility coalesced
into the dominant world view in American culture, a position that middle-class ideology continues to hold to this day.
The first half of the 19th century also saw the
formation of the working class. As the artisan
system of production broke down, most of the
journeymen who had been able to look forward
to becoming master craftsmen in their own right
in the 18th century had become, along with the
semi-skilled, part of a permanent wage-earning
working class by the middle of the 19th century.
Their children, who would earlier have been apprentices, now made up a pool of child labor.
These wage earners and piece workers lived in
working-class neighborhoods and either worked
in their employers’ shops or at home as part of
the outwork system.
New York City’s working class had invented
itself twice by the middle of the 19th century
(Gutman and Berlin 1987). The first working
class had formed before the 1840s. It consisted
of a heterogeneous group of predominately native-born people who worked with their hands
and who had inherited the republican artisan ideology of the Revolutionary War (Wilentz 1984).
This class did not reproduce itself to become the
working class of mid-century, however. Instead,
its identity was swamped by the waves of immigrants who began arriving in New York in the
1840s. Between 1840 and 1855, the city’s population doubled and immigration played an important role in its growth: in 1855 over half of its
population of almost 630,000 was foreign-born
(Rosenwaike 1972:16, 42). Most of these immigrants were manual workers. It has been estimated that in 1855 approximately 84% of the
city’s manual work force had been born overseas
(Stott 1990:72). It was these immigrants and
their children who transformed the city’s working
class by drawing on ideological and cultural roots
developed in Europe. Immigrants have continued
104
to dominate the workforce and hence to shape
the city’s working class off and on throughout
much of its history, from the 19th century until
today.
At the middle of the 19th century, the Irish
and the Germans were the most numerous of the
immigrants who had settled in New York. Furthermore, there were almost twice as many Irish
men and women in the city as their German
counterparts (Rosenwaike 1972:42). Many Irish
men worked as laborers, bricklayers, and stonecutters, while German men tended to work at
cabinetmaking, cigarmaking, shoemaking, tailoring, and baking (Stott 1990:92). Various studies
have shown that a workingman’s wage was usually not enough to support a family in the 19th
century (Wilentz 1984; Stansell 1986). Therefore
at least in part for this reason, the women of the
working class, unlike middle-class women, helped
make ends meet by using various economic strategies that they performed both inside and outside
their homes. Like the work of working-class
men, the work of working-class women was
structured in part by their ethnicity. Many young
unmarried Irish women (most of whom had immigrated on their own) worked as servants, living in the homes of the middle- and upper-class
women who were their employers. In fact, census records indicate that more women in New
York worked in domestic service than in any
other sphere: in 1855, there were over 31,000
women employed as servants in the city (Stansell
1986:72). Many women, both married and
single, produced goods or performed services for
market in their homes. Some, particularly Irish
women, worked as seamstresses or laundresses,
while others, particularly German women, worked
alongside their husbands and children in familyorganized shops in the tailoring and other trades.
The working roles of many of these workingclass women are hidden in the census records.
Most women who worked in their homes as part
of the family economy were listed with no occupation in the census returns and are therefore
usually interpreted as having been housewives,
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33( 1)
who by definition do not contribute economically
to their household by producing goods or services for market. Furthermore, the women of
many ethnic groups who were listed without occupations in the records provided accommodations for boarders, who were often recent arrivals from the householder’s native land (Stansell
1986; Griggs 1996:9).
Although scholars are learning more about the
experience of the women of the working class in
the 19th-century city, they know relatively little
about their visions of domestic life. In contrast,
contemporary sources provide ample data on the
19th-century middle-class (and on middle-class
women in particular). Scholars have described
the culture of the middle-class as a whole as
“feminine,” a culture of domesticity, and it is
therefore closely identified with middle-class
women (Douglas 1977; Stott 1990:270). This is
the culture described in the novels that middleclass women read and the literature that prescribed how they should live.
The culture of working-class women, on the
other hand, differs greatly from that of middleclass women in this regard. Several scholars
have noted that urban working-class culture was
perceived in the 19th century as a “masculine”
culture (Stansell 1986:lOO; Stott 1990:270). This
suggests that although contemporary sources
might be used to reconstruct the culture of working-class men, the lives of their mothers, sisters,
wives, and daughters remain invisible. As historian Christine Stansell (1986:xiii) points out, “it
is easy to imagine these women . . . as either
feminine versions of working-class men or working-class versions of middle-class women.” In
order to delineate the lives of working-class
women in their own right, scholars cannot turn to
the novels they read or to the advice books that
prescribed how they should live, because neither
literature exists. Even if this literature did exist,
working-class women, assuming they knew English and could read at all, would have rarely
had the leisure time to read. So instead of being able to consult contemporary literature, schol-
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNICITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURYNEW YORK CITY
ars have to turn to material culture to answer
many questions about the lives of working-class
women.
Such questions might include:
Did working-class women, following the dominant ideology thesis (Hodder 1986; Leone 1988;
Beaudry et al. 1991) emulate the middle class
and aspire to gain entry to the bourgeoisie so
that either they or their children could partake of
its power? (It must be remembered in this context that many working-class women certainly
knew a great deal about middle-class domestic
life from their years in domestic service, when
they lived in middle-class homes, before they
were married.)
Or did working-class women (along with their
men) take pride in their own, distinctive workingclass subculture? One historian notes that at
least some workers who were not poor did not
aspire to the bourgeoisie; he quotes a British
visitor to the city who says that “[t]he miserable
ambition to be accounted ‘genteel’ . . . [is] not
among the national characteristics” (Stott
1990:189).
Or did the women of the immigrant communities that made up the second working class
choose to by-pass class identity and instead to
mobilize ethnic identity and construct a form of
domestic life that was specific to their ethnic
group?
Or, finally, did some working-class women
follow one strategy and others, others?
These are some of the questions about the construction of domestic life that archaeological data
might help to address by allowing the comparison of, for example, the different styles of ceramic vessels used for presenting meals among
the working class as opposed to among the
middle class.
Four Middle-class and Working-class Families
in Mid-19th Century New York
The domestic assemblages considered here
were found in backyard features (privies and cis-
105
terns) on four separate archaeological sites: 50
Washington Square South (the upper deposit of
Feature 9; Salwen and Yamin 1990; Wall 1991,
1994), 25 Barrow Street (Wall 1991; Bodie
1992), 153 West 12th Street (Brighton in press),
and 365 East 8th Street (Grossman 1995). All
four sites are located in a part of New York City
that is broadly known as “the Village” today, but
that was made up of many different neighborhoods in the 19th century. During the colonial
period, this area consisted of hamlets, farms, and
country estates that were then located about a
mile north of the city; the commercial hub of the
area was the village of Greenwich, which was
located on the Hudson River. The village and
its environs were linked to the city by river boats
and by “the road to Greenwich,” today’s Greenwich Street, as well as by Broadway and the
Bowery, located further to the east. In the early
19th century, however, the city approached the
village in its growth northward, and real estate
speculators began to look on the area as ripe for
development.
50 Washington Square South
During the 1820s, some village developers
were successful in petitioning the city to have the
old Potters’ Field to the west of Broadway converted into the parade ground that later became
known as Washington Square Park. This park
soon became the focus of the rows of brick Federal and Greek Revival houses that were home to
many of the wealthier members of the middle
class in what was becoming one of the city’s
first residential suburbs. The men from these
families commuted to their downtown offices in
horse-drawn omnibuses; these conveyances were
introduced in the 1830s to meet their commuting
needs. In his novel Washington Square, Henry
James (1982 [1880]) described this neighborhood
as embodying in 1835 “the ideal of quiet and
genteel retirement,” with an air “of established
repose which is not of frequent occurrence in
other quarters of the long, shrill city.”
106
The Federal house at 50 Washington Square
South was built in 1826 as part of this development. The southern side of the square was
somewhat less expensive than its northern counterpart because of its proximity to the poorer
neighborhoods (including an African-American
community) that were developing immediately to
its south. In 1841, Eliza Robson moved into the
house with her husband Benjamin, a physician,
and her brother, James Bool. Before they had
moved to Washington Square, the Robsons had
lived downtown on East Broadway, where the
couple had raised their three children and where
Benjamin had conducted his practice out of the
family home. After they moved, the doctor continued to run his practice from his old downtown
office. The Robsons presumably chose the house
on Washington Square South because it was
close to their grown daughter, Mary Sage and
their grandchildren, who lived next door. Mary’s
husband Francis Sage was a flour merchant who
commuted to his countinghouse on downtown
Front Street. The Robsons continued to live on
the property until Benjamin’s death almost four
decades later.
The Robsons were clearly among the wealthier
families of the middle class. They lived in the
relatively exclusive enclave of Washington
Square in a three-and-a-half story single-family
home they owned themselves. They had live-in
domestic help (consisting of two Irish women)
and even kept a carriage driven by an AfricanAmerican coachman for part of the period that
they lived there; the doctor presumably used the
carriage to commute back and forth from his
office downtown (Wall 1991, 1994).
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33(1)
opers (many of whom were builders by trade)
began to line the streets with small, single-family Federal and Greek Revival houses. These
buildings were designed as homes for the poorer
members of the city’s middle-class: the city’s
artisans and shopkeepers who for the most part
worked nearby. By the middle of the 19th century, many of these small but respectable middleclass houses had been converted into multi-family homes to help supply the city’s ever-growing
housing needs.
Like many of its neighbors, the house at 25
Barrow Street was originally built as a two-anda-half-story, single-family Federal house in 1826
but by mid-century it had become home to two
separate families. In 1858, Emeline Hirst and
her husband Samuel, a baker, and their six children moved into the house. Although Samuel
died two years later, his family stayed on in the
house for over a decade. They supported themselves through the earnings of Emeline (who
worked first as a nurse and then ran a boardinghouse) and the older children. Other tenants who
lived in the house during the Hirsts’ tenure included David Sinclair, a Scottish locksmith, his
wife, Selina (who was born in New York), and
their two children, who lived there for only a
few years, from 1858 until 1862. Sinclair had
his shop on nearby Bleecker Street. The
Sinclairs were probably succeeded in the house
by other families or boarders taken in by the
widowed Emeline Hirst, but their identity has not
been documented.
These families too were members of the city’s
middle class: the male heads of the households
had small businesses, while one of their sons
described himself as a “clerk,” the quintessential
middle-class occupation of the late 19th century.
25 Barrow Street
Data suggest, however, that these families beAt the same time that some developers were longed near the bottom of the middle class spectransforming the old Potters’ Field into the elite trum: First of all, they rented, rather than
suburb of Washington Square, others were focus- owned, their homes, and their homes were aparting on the crooked streets to the west of Sixth ments, and not single-family houses. Secondly,
Avenue and to the south of Greenwich Avenue none of the families enjoyed the services of livein today’s West Village. Here, small-scale devel- in domestic help, a luxury which was fairly com-
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNlClTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
mon among middle-class New Yorkers at midcentury. Finally, when Emeline Hirst was widowed, she and her family seem to have made a
change in economic strategy from the family
consumer economy (commonly used by the
middle-class) to the family wage economy,
whereby the wages of family members are
pooled for the good of the family as a whole, a
strategy that the working poor commonly used
(Tilly and Scott 1978; Wall 1991, 1994).
153 West 12th Street
In the 1840s, almost two decades after the
development of the Washington Square area, developers began to build up the northern part of
today’s West Village with Greek Revival brick
and brownstone single-family homes designed for
the solid middle-class. Most of these houses
continued to be single-family homes until well
after the Civil War. The three-story Greek Revival house at 153 West 12th Street was built as
a single-family home ca. 1841. In 1855, 29year-old Henrietta Raymer and her 37-year-old
husband Henry moved into the house as tenants;
they continued to live there for a decade. Henry
Raymer was an importer of groceries and commuted downtown to his business on Front Street
in the lower city. In 1860, the household included the New York-born Raymers, their two
young children, George and Maria (who were
then aged two and four, respectively, and who
were born while the family lived in the house),
as well as two domestics, Catherine Henn and
Anne Hines, who had emigrated from Germany
and Ireland, respectively (Bureau of the Censusl860). By 1865, Henry Raymer had died; his
widow and young children moved out of the
house soon thereafter.
The 12th Street Raymers were definitely members of the middle class. They lived in a singlefamily home and enjoyed the services of live-in
domestic help. The young family did not own
their own home, however, suggesting they were
not at the upper end of the middle-class spectrum.
107
365 East Eighth Street
In the early 19th century, developers built up
the area to the east of Tompkins Square Park in
today’s “East Village” with single-family homes
to house the predominately native-born workers
who worked in the shipyards that were located
nearby, in and adjacent to the East River. The
city’s shipbuilding industry soon became one of
the largest in the world. After the Civil War,
however, the high costs of both labor and real
estate forced most of the yards to move away
from New York. Even before the decline of the
shipbuilding industry, the residential component
of the neighborhood had begun to change. During the 1840s, large numbers of Germans began
to move into New York, which by 1855 had
become the city with the third largest German
population in the world (Nadel 1990:viv). In this
same year, over half of the population of the
11th Ward, where the shipyards were located,
had been born in Germany and the neighborhood
was known as Kleindeutschland, or Little Germany. This ward was also the site of other industries, such as slaughterhouses, breweries, and
coal- and lumberyards, that, like the shipyards,
required large tracts of land (Nadel 1990:29, 32).
Samuel Gompers, the founding president of the
American Federation of Labor, lived in this
neighborhood and worked alongside his father as
a cigarmaker when he was a young teenager in
the mid-1860s. His memoirs (Nadel 1990:35)
provide a vivid impression of what it was like to
live in Kleindeutschland then:
Father began making cigars at home and I helped him.
The house was just opposite a slaughterhouse. All day
long we could see the animals being driven into the
slaughter pens and could hear the turmoil and the cries
of the animals. The neighborhood was filled with the
penetrating, sickening odor. The suffering of the animals and the nauseating odor made it physically impossible for me to eat meat for many months after we had
moved into another neighborhood. Back of our house
was a brewery which was in continuous operation, and
this necessitated the practice of living-in for the workers. Conditions were dreadful in the breweries of those
108
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33(1)
TABLE 1
THE BUILDINGS LOCATED ON THE SITES IN 1860
No. Housing
Units
Value
of Bldg.
No. Floors
in Bldg.
No. Floors/
Housing
Mean
Value/
Unit
Housing Unit
8th Street
Barrow Street
12th Street
Washington Sq.
4
2 112
3
3 112
$4200
2600
5000
10200
8
2
1
1
1
3
3
$525
1300
5000
10200
NOTE: Based on data from the New York City tax records (City of New York 1860).
days and I became familiar with them from our back
door.
tailoring trades and several of their sons worked
as cigarmakers. The tailors may have worked at
The four-story tenement at 365 East 8th Street home in family shops alongside their wives and
was built ca. 1852 in the neighborhood that was children because in the 1850s, piece rates were
quickly becoming Kleindeutschland. In 1864, so low that many tailors could not expect to
Joseph Sonnek, a German-born tailor, bought the make a living on their own but had to pool their
tenement from Meyer and Mina Goldsmith and a labor with that of their family members. This
few years later he and his family moved into the way of life was well-expressed by the German
building. In 1870, a total of eight families (in- maxim, “A tailor is nothing without a wife, and
cluding the Sonneks and their three children) very often a child” (Stansell 1986:117). Some of
lived in the building. Almost all of the adults in the tailor-tenants may have worked for their landthese families were foreign-born, immigrants lord, who by 1880 had built a tailor shop behind
whose countries of origin were divided almost the tenement (Trow 1880). Their Irish neighbors
equally between Ireland and Germany. Both and the latter’s sons worked as riggers and boiler
Sonnek and his wife Julia had been born in makers in the shipyards that remained nearby,
while Irish daughters worked as dressmakers and
Dressen (Grossman 1995).
Most of the residents of the 8th Street tene- “operators” in factories (Grossman 1995).
Tables 1 and 2 summarize the information on
ment worked at skilled occupations: in 1870, all
of the German heads of household worked in the the four houses and the people who lived in
TABLE 2
THE TERMINUS POST QUEM DATES FOR THE DEPOSITS AND THE PEOPLE LIVING IN THE
BUILDINGS AROUND THE TIME THE DEPOSITS WERE FORMED
8th Street
Barrow Street
12th Street
Washington Sq.
T.P.Q.
Year
No.
Families
No.
Indiv.
No. Domestics/
Housing Unit
1867
1863
1864
1857
1870
1860
1860
1860
8
2
1
1
42
12
6
4
0
0
2
2
NOTE: The sources for the terminuspost quem dates are: Grossman (1995) for 8th Street, Bodie (1992) for Barrow Street, Nancy
J. Brighton (1997 pers. comm.) for 12th Street, and Salwen and Yamin (1990) for Washington Square. The data on the people are
based on information from the census records for the closest census year United States Bureau of the Census 1860,1870).
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNlClTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
109
TABLE 3
IRONSTONE AND WHITEWARE TABLE VESSELS BY DECORATIVE TYPE
WORKING
CLASS
MIDDLE CLASS
8th
Street
Barrow
Street
n
PLAIN
EDGED
PRINTED-WILLOWPRINTED-OTHER
%
1
8
1
8
MOLDED WHITE-ON-WHITE
GOTHIC
2
OTHER
8
%
n
5
1
1
17
61
12th
Street
6
38
8
8
46
OTHER
TOTALS
12
100
13
them. They show that these middle-class and
working-class families encountered a great range
of experience in terms of their living conditions.
The three people who made up the wealthy
middle-class Robson family of Washington
Square lived in a three-and-a-half story singlefamily home and enjoyed the services of several
domestic servants. Their home was assessed at
over $10,000. The forty people who occupied
100
n
Washington
Square
n
%
%
4
1
29
7
4
5
12
15
3
21
5
15
5
36
19
58
1
7
14
100
33
100
the four-story Eighth Street tenement lived in
eight apartments with an average of five tenants
each. Each tenement family had to settle for a
half a floor of living space, which was assessed
at only $525, a mere 1/19th of the value of the
Robson family’s living space. They enjoyed no
domestic help other than that of family members.
Many had to haul water for household use up
several flights of stairs and then to haul slops
TABLE 4
PORCELAIN PLATES FROM THE FOUR ASSEMBLAGES
WORKING
CLASS
MIDDLE CLASS
8th
Street
Barrow
Street
plain
molded-paneled
gilt painted
TOTAL
12th
Street
Washington
Square
18
4
4
I
0
1
3
22
NOTE: All of the porcelain plates in the assemblages are small, either muffins or twifflers.
7
110
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33(1)
FIGURE 2. Ironstone teacup in the paneled Gothic pattern.
(Courtesy of the South Street Seaport Museum.)
FIGURE 1. Ironstone plate in the Gothic pattern. (Courtesy
of the South Street Seaport Museum )
same phenomenon in a middle-class community
in Brooklyn, which was an independent city until the 1890s when it became part of the City of
New York. Table 4 shows that all of the
middle-class families also had porcelain plates;
these plates, which were all relatively small (they
would be described as twifflers or muffins in the
ceramics literature), are discussed below.
down again. These bare statistics, however, do
not allow modern-day scholars to grasp the nuances of the experience of those who lived in
these homes. To begin to do that, they must
turn to material culture.
The Ceramics Used by Middle-class Women
Table 3 shows the different kinds of ironstone
and whiteware plates that the middle-class
women used to set their tables. The most prominent feature of the assemblages is the popularity
of the 12-sided Gothic ironstone plates in all
three households (Figure 1). This consistent
preference for ironstone plates in the Gothic style
in both wealthier and poorer middle-class homes
is the most striking phenomenon that archaeologists find in examining assemblages from middleclass mid- 19th-century New York. This style
was
preferred by the residents Of Some
Other American cities as
Fitts (Fitts and
Yamin 1996; Fitts this volume) discovered the
FIGURE 3. European porcelain teacup with gilt decoration
in the ltalianate style. (Courtesy of the South Street Seaport
Museum.)
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNlClTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
As Table 5 shows, in buying teawares, all the
middle-class women chose at least some cups
and saucers with molded panels in the Gothic
pattern (Figure 2), presumably to go with their
Gothic plates, for drinking coffee or tea with
their meals. In addition to their Gothic-style
cups and saucers, the wealthier middle-class
women-Eliza Robson and Harriet Raymer-also
chose dishes in other, fancier Italianate styles (included in the categories of painted and applied
porcelains in Table 5; Figure 3). The poorer
middle-class women of Barrow Street, however,
did not opt for the fancier teawares; instead, they
apparently usually used their plain or Gothic-
111
styled teacups and saucers whenever they served
tea.
The Ceramics Used by Working-class Women
The ironstone and whiteware plates from the
tenement (Table 3) are superficially quite similar
to those from the middle-class homes-the preferred patterns are all generally in molded whiteon-white ironstone designs. When examined
more closely, however, it becomes apparent that
the styles are really quite different. Instead of
showing a consistent preference for dinner plates
in the 12-sided Gothic pattern as all three
TABLE 5
TEAWARE VESSELS BY DECORATIVE TYPE
PLAIN
cc
ironstone
porcelain
PAINTED
calico
WORKING
CLASS
MIDDLE CLASS
8th
Street
Barrow
Street
12th
Street
Washington
Square
%
n
%
6
3
38
0
n
%
n
%
(3)
0
0
0
14
0
0
0
5
MOLDED PANELS
cc
ironstone
porcelain
50
3
38
45
MOLDED OTHER
ironstone
39
2
(2)
25
0
PAINTED PORC.
6
0
0
7
9
16
36
APPLIED PORC.
0
0
0
14
19
0
0
101
8
101
74
99
44
100
PRINTED
cc
TOTALS
(3)
112
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33(1)
Discussion
among the assemblages. The Washington Square
middle-class assemblage dates to the 1850s, almost a decade before the other three assemblages
(two of which are middle class and one of which
is working class; Table 2 lists the terminus post
quem dates for each of the assemblages). The
ceramics in the two later middle-class assemblages (Barrow Street and 12th Street) are much
more similar to the Washington Square assemblage than they are to the working-class Eighth
Street assemblage, which they are much closer to
in time. For example, the remarkable preference
for Gothic ironstone plates expressed in all of the
middle-class assemblages (even though they date
to two different decades) was not evident in the
working-class assemblage, which was roughly
contemporary with two of the middle-class assemblages. Therefore, the variability among the
Before attempting to explain the differences
between the assemblages in cultural terms, a brief
discussion of the dates of the assemblages is
warranted to see if the variability among the assemblages might be most economically explained
by time. Ceramic specialists and writers of the
prescriptive literature agree that the British potteries first introduced sets of all-white ironstone
dishes to the American market in the early 1840s
(Wetherbee 1996:vi) and that by 1850, “china
ware of entire white [seemed] . . . to have superseded all others . . .” (Leslie 1850:290). Although these dishes continued to be popular until the end of the century, there was evidently a
sea change in the kinds of patterns of ironstone
dishes that were preferred in the United States
during this long period: prior to around 1870
(and during the period discussed here), the vessels that made up these sets tended to be sharply
angled or molded with great detail, while the
styles became much simpler, “emphasizing
plainer rounded and square shapes,” in the 1870s
(Wetherbee 1996:10).
Although the assemblages from the four backyard features analyzed here date to different decades of the 19th century, time does not seem to
be the variable that can explain the differences
FIGURE 4 Ironstone plate in the Bowknot pattern. (Courtesy of the South Street Seaport Museum.)
middle-class families did, most of the plates are
round in cross-section and show a whole array of
molded patterns, including the Bowknot, Huron,
Dallas, and Sydenham designs (Wetherbee 1996;
Figure 4). These designs are completely absent
from the middle-class assemblages.
In choosing teacups (Table 5), the Eighth
Street women, like their counterparts among the
lower middle-class on Barrow Street, preferred
paneled cups in the Gothic pattern, although they
used ironstone cups in other patterns (including
the Full Ribbed, Dallas, and Ceres designs
[Wetherbee 19961) as well. The Eighth Street
women eschewed for the most part the fancier
porcelain cups and plates used by the wealthier
middle-class women (Tables 4, 5).
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNlClTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
assemblages is better explained by differences in
class, rather than by differences in time.
Archaeologists have devoted a great deal of
thought to deciphering “the language of dishes”
and trying to understand the meanings of the
different kinds of ceramic sherds that are so
ubiquitous at their sites (Wall 1991, 1994;
Shackel 1996). Elsewhere this author (Wall
1991, 1994) has argued that the middle-class
preference for setting the table for family meals
with dishes in the Gothic style (which also became the popular architectural style for building
churches in the 1840s) was related to the importance of one of the roles of middle-class women
at mid-century: that of the guardian of society’s
morals. The use of this ecclesiastical style for
dishes used in a dining room that the authors of
the prescriptive literature urged be furnished in
that same style underlined the importance of
morality and of women’s role as moral guardian
of the family members who gathered for the
meal.
The Gothic style for tablewares contrasted with
the Italianate style that characterized the porcelain
teacups and saucers that were used alongside
small porcelain plates for entertaining at evening
parties among the wealthier members of the
middle class. The city’s architects also used the
Italianate style for building the middle-class
rowhouses that by mid-centuy were making definite statements about class (Lockwood 1972).
Advice writers urged women to furnish their parlors, where they held the evening parties that
were their vehicles for entertaining, in this same
Italianate style (Downing 1850:23-24). Middleclass women used these entertainments (and the
Italianate style in which the parties’ accoutrements were executed) to exercise their other important role, that of projecting the image of their
families’ gentility and negotiating the families’
position in the class structure. As noted above,
however, not all middle-class women apparently
exercised this role, as no fancy porcelain cups
were found in the Barrow Street assemblage.
Perhaps the poorer middle-class women of Bar-
113
row Street perceived that dazzling their friends
with sumptuous ceramics was not necessarily a
productive strategy in an environment where they
might need the help of their peers to maintain
their precarious position at the lower end of the
middle class (Wall 1991).
The working-class assemblage allows some inferences to be made about the working-class
women of Eighth Street. The diversity in the
patterns of the ironstone plates indicates that at
least some of the women who lived in the tenement were not emulating their middle-class contemporaries by choosing plates that were uniformly in the Gothic pattern. This suggests that
they therefore also were not emulating middleclass women in the latter’s role as the moral
guardian of the home.
At least some of the women of Eighth Street,
however, did choose teawares in the paneled
Gothic pattern. Perhaps this style had a completely different meaning for working-class
women than it had for their middle-class contemporaries. Or perhaps these poorer women, like
the women of the middle-class, chose to mobilize
a “sacred” meaning for this style so that they
could elicit the “sacred” ties of morality and
community when a friend stopped by for tea, ties
that served to soften the blows of poverty.
The ubiquity of the Gothic pattern among the
middle-class assemblages also underscores another
characteristic of family meals in middle-class
homes in the 19th century which still typifies
middle-class meals today: the use of matched
dishes. If differences in style express social
boundaries (Wobst 1977), then the unity of style
expressed by the use of a set of matched dishes
should emphasize the community of a group
rather than the differences among its individual
members. The matched set of dishes allows the
communal aspect of the meal to be stressed even
in the face of the use of individualized plates
and place settings.
Although using matched sets of dishes in family meals is what middle-class Americans do today and what they seem to expect, correctly, of
114
their 19th-century counterparts, tables can theoretically be set in other appropriate ways as well
and in fact they apparently were in the United
States in the 19th-century. For example, archaeologists have long noted the fact that they do not
find matching sets of dishes in some AfricanAmerican and African-Caribbean assemblages
(Armstrong 1990:135-136, Mullins 1995); instead,
they find arrays of dishes in patterns that do not
match each other. Some archaeologists have
explained this phenomenon by making the perhaps ethnocentric interpretation that these households aspired to emulate the dominant culture in
using matched sets of dishes but failed in that
attempt (Mullins 1995; Orser and Fagan
1995:213, 215).
It seems apparent, however, that at least some
groups of people of African descent who lived in
the Americas had a different ideology of domestic life than many of their middle-class counterparts of European descent and that they expressed that ideology when they set the table.
Instead of using sets of matching plates to mark
the corporate unity of the household as a unit,
each individual family member had his or her
own individual dishes that he or she used at
daily meals. If the goal is for each household
member to use his or her own individual dishes,
the plates used by the household cannot match,
or family members would not be able to tell
which plates belonged to whom. This custom of
using personal dishes (along with the use of personal silverware and chairs) seems to have been
prevalent among many African-American and
African-Caribbean families in the 19th and 20th
centuries and perhaps earlier as well (BaldwinJones 1995). Baldwin-Jones offers a possible
explanation for this phenomenon: “In the face of
slavery where people of various cultures were
brought together as property and [were] treated
as less than human, [one was forced] to create
an identity for oneself. . . [a] sense of individuality that would lead to using unmatched dishes,
and other personal items to create such an autonomy” (Baldwin-Jones 1995:3-4). Perhaps the
importance of individual improvisation in jazz,
HISTORICAL ARCHAEOLOGY 33(1)
the quintessential African-American art form, is
also an expression of this phenomenon.
One must remember the different languages
that plates can speak in trying to interpret the
meaning of the ceramics from the working-class
tenement on Eighth Street. There, the diversity
in the white-on-white patterns on the ironstone
dishes shows that there is something very different going on in regard to the ideology of domestic life in the working-class tenement than was
seen in the middle-class homes, where ironstone
plates were almost exclusively in the Gothic pattern. Unfortunately given the multi-family nature
of tenement life and the economic and ethnic
heterogeneity of the people who lived in the tenement building, there is much that is not known
about the cultural context of the assemblage. For
example, it is not known if the assemblage originated in one household or in several households.
It also is not known whether it was used in one
or more Irish households, one or more German
households, or households of both ethnic groups.
Furthermore, it is not known if the assemblage
were used in the home of the Sonneks, who
owned the tenement as well as the later tailor
shop in the rear of the yard and who therefore
were not true members of the working class; or
in the homes of one or more of their tenants,
who were probably wage laborers or piece workers with little or no capital; or if part of the assemblage were used in the Sonneks’ home and
part in the home(s) of their tenants.
If there were no problems of cultural context,
the analysis of the assemblage would be much
more clear-cut. If the variables of the wealth
and ethnicity of the household(s) that the dishes
came from could be controlled, and if it were
known that each plate pattern came from the
household of a different ethnic group, it could be
inferred that the women of the Eighth Street tenement used plate patterns to help mark the ethnic identity of their families: the women from
the Irish families preferred china in one molded
style while those from the German families preferred china in another pattern. Or if it were
known that the assemblage came from several
EXAMINING GENDER, CLASS, AND ETHNlClTY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY NEW YORK CITY
households that belonged to only one ethnic
group, it could be supposed that each housewife
exercised her individual preference for a particular style of dishes within the white-on-white
molded style, and that the particular pattern that
she chose had no meaning in terms of class or
ethnic identity. Or if it were known that all of
the unmatched dishes came from a single household, it could be inferred that that housewife may
have spoken the same language of plates as that
of the Americans of African descent described
above: perhaps since each individual family
member had his or her own individual dishes
that he or she used at meals, each person had to
have his or her own personal plate in a unique
pattern, so that the dishes belonging to one person could be differentiated from those belonging
to another.
Unfortunately with the problems of provenience
there is not enough information available at this
point for archaeologists to be able to tell what
the diversity of style among the tenement plates
means. Presumably, as more assemblages from
working-class homes are added to our data base,
patterns of consumption on the part of the working-class women of various socio-economic levels and various ethnic groups will become clear.
It is hoped that archaeologists will learn to read
and understand the patterns of consumption that
people in the 19th-century city were using to
define their position in the class structure.
115
East Eighth Street site. I also thank Diane Dallal of the
South Street Seaport Museum for her undeviating
hospitality in making the Sullivan Street and Eighth
Street collections accessible to scholars. Finally, I
thank Robert Fitts, Randall McGuire, and Nan
Rothschild for reading and commenting on earlier drafts
of this paper. Unfortunately, however, all errors of fact
or interpretation are my own.
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