Gender Roles in Georgian Britain
Sarah Richardson
Outline
• How fixed were gender roles in Georgian
Britain?
• Rise of separate spheres ideology
• Feminist challenge
• Reformation of manners.
Cross-dressing women
• Women’s presence in the military well documented:
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‘Many women were found among the slain… as is common in the
camp, the camp followers wore male attire, with nearly as martial a
bearing as the soldiers, and some were even mounted and rode
astride.’
For contemporaries these women often hailed as heroines
By the mid nineteenth-century were written out of the historical
record or portrayed as freaks of nature
Theme originates with legend of Amazons
Indicative of fluid and evolving concepts of gender
Female soldiers such as Christian Davies, Susanna Cope, Hannah
Snell and Mary Ann Talbot were generally from the lower echelons
of society and thus were transgressing class and social as well as
gender boundaries
The life, and surprising
adventures, of blue-eyed
Patty, the valiant female
soldier; who was the
daughter of Mr. Samuel
Freelove, an eminent
grazier, in Essex; ...
Wolverhampton, [1800?].
Hannah Snell, 17931792
Hannah Snell
• Born one of nine children born to a hosier in
Worcester.
• She enlisted under the name James Gray as a
marine and was involved in battles with the
French in the 1740s.
• She was injured and returned to England
• Her story was publicised Robert Walker in a
biography entitled The Female Soldier
Christian Davies/Kit Cavenaugh/Christopher
or Richard Welsh/Mother Ross
• Born in Dublin. She inherited a Dublin pub
married Richard Welsh and gave birth to two
sons.
• After her husband disappeared she searched for
him, enlisting as a foot soldier
• In 1712 she returned to England where she was
awarded a pension.
• In 1740 a first-person account, The Life and
Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies, was
published in London, purportedly ‘taken from her
own Mouth’.
Christian Davies, 1667-1739
Changing views
• These women’s biographies pose a challenge to the
historian.
• They are often retold and are contradictory.
• Life stories were written and rewritten for subsequent
generations.
• By the nineteenth century concepts of gender and class
were more firmly entrenched.
• In later literature women represented as simpletons or
patriots.
• Cross-dressing women became an abomination of
nature and a challenge to entrenched sexual
stereotypes.
Libertines and Fops
• Libertines have long history with antecedents in the
sodomites of the Renaissance
• During eighteenth century tradition was embodied by
men such as John Wilkes and Francis Dashwood.
• Not necessarily homosexuals, the Earl of Rochester for
example is the exemplary rake—a man who engages in
sex with boys or women.
• Trumbach has argued that by about 1750 effeminacy
had become linked to same-sex desire.
• Over time, the fop merged with other male
characters—the molly and the queen—for whom
effeminacy was a marker of their desire for other men
Libertines and Fops
• Trumbach argues this had significance for gender roles
• The effeminate sodomite or molly emerged as the
character against whom heterosexual men were
defined
• Dominant, hegemonic man is defined by the fact that
he desires and has sex only with women
• Philip Carter has argued in contrast that the fop was a
social type quite distinct from the sexual category of
molly: a fop was a vain, self-obsessed character who
failed to live up to the integrity of the polite gentleman
An elderly fop peers
through a lorgnette at
a prostitute with a
Madam who lures him
into a house labelled
'Kind and Tender
Usage'. 24 March 1773
A thin tall actor walks mincingly
on the tips of his toes, his arms
folded behind his back. He is
fashionably dressed, wearing a
cut-away coat with high collar
and shirt frill. 1 March 1790
A butcher in front of
his shop slices off the
tail of hair of a passing
Macaroni. 19 January
1773
Broadside satire on homosexuality, 1762
“Ye Reversers of Nature, each dear little
Creature,
Of soft and effeminate sight,
See above whar your fate is, and ’ere it too
late is,
Oh, learn to be – all in the Right.
Tol de Rol”
Separate Spheres
• The term describes the accentuation of gender difference among
the middle classes which took place in the 18th and early 19th
centuries stimulated by the evangelical revival
• Public life increasingly seen as an exclusively male domain,
domesticity came to be the sphere of activity in which women’s
moral virtues could and should most fully be developed.
• Originally expressed in England by Clapham Sect
• Catherine Hall argues (‘The early formation of Victorian domestic
ideology’ in White, Male and Middle Class) that they were so suited
to the values of the emerging middle class that they became central
to the bourgeois identity of the 19th century, absorbed by
government policy makers and social commentators alike.
Challenges
• Use of ‘separate spheres’ to characterise gender relations in this
period has been challenged by historians such as Linda Kerber
(Journal of American History, 1988) and Amanda Vickery (Historical
Journal, 1992) who have argued that ‘separate spheres’ in the 19th
century was neither new nor restricted to a single social class
• The separation of responsibilities were continually negotiated
• In certain fields, notably, philanthropy, the public/private dichotomy
blurred Historians have continued to debate the use of the
language of separate spheres.
• Kathryn Gleadle has argued that ‘several spheres’ is a more
adequate term to describe the ways in which middle class women
interpreted their public and political identity
Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-97)
• From the urban middling classes. In 1783 MW had to support herself
eventually managed to establish herself in London as a woman of letters
• She lived among a small group of intellectuals eg the historian Catherine
Macaulay and Thomas Holcroft
• Published her first political work Vindication of the Rights of Man in 1790
• Vindication of the Rights of Woman was published in 1792
• MW visited France and as with the Terror came felt less optimistic about
the possibilities of radical political transformation
• She had an affair, lived with the American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay and
gave birth to her first daughter, Fanny.
• Her last work was Maria or the Wrongs of Woman
• She died in childbirth. Her husband, William Godwin’s Memoirs of the
Author of the Rights of Women published in 1798 associated her name
indelibly with sexual freedom and notoriety
Mary Wollstonecraft
by John Opie, c.1797
Education
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Majority of Vindication of Rights of Woman focuses on education of women.
MW attacked a number of earlier writers, in particular Rousseau, who had written
on the education of girls suggesting that their interests be subordinated to boys
and suggested that girls were unable to attain the same levels of virtue.
Rousseau concludes that men are strong and active, evincing power and will, while
women are weak and passive, lacking resistance.
Classic account of the modest female was provided by Rousseau in his description
of the young Sophie, bride to be of the exemplary boy-citizen, Emile:
Her dress is extremely modest in appearance, and yet very coquettish in fact: she
does not make a display of her charms, she conceals them; but in concealing them,
she knows how to affect your imagination. Everyone who sees her will say, There is
a modest and discreet girl; but while you are near her, your eyes and affections
wander all over her person, so that you cannot withdraw them; and you would
conclude, that every part of her dress, simple as it seems, was only put in its
proper order to be taken to pieces by the imagination.
Sophie embraces Emile from a 1837
edition
Association of Ideas
• MW argued females are made women when they are mere
children:
Everything they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth
emotions and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the
mind… this cruel association of ideas which everything conspires to
twist all their habits of thinking, or to speak with more precision, of
feeling, receives new force when they begin to act a little for
themselves; for then they perceive that it is only through their
address to excite emotions in men, that pleasure and power are to
be obtained.
• MW was equally critical of women. She planned a new system of
national education, in which all, rich and poor, girls and boys, would
be educated together until the age of 9.
Rights
• Vindication combined natural rights arguments with utilitarian claims
concerning the social benefits of sexual equality.
• Women should be accorded civil and even political rights. She argues
I still insist that not only the virtue but the knowledge of the two sexes
should be the same in nature, if not in degree, and that women,
considered not only as moral but as rational creatures, ought to
endeavour to acquire human virtues (or perfections) by the same means
as men, instead of being educated like a fanciful kind of half being - one of
Rousseau's wild chimeras.
• Women's liberation would benefit men:
• Make women rational creatures and free citizens and they will quickly
become good wives and mothers.
• 18th century womanhood was an artificial construct crafted by a male
culture with erroneous ideas of the natural woman
Reformation of Manners
• ‘Revolution in female manners' would help to transform the
political and moral world for all and not only for women.
• Tentatively MW suggested the possibility of a political role
for women.
• This concentration on female manners was part of more
general debate taking place around the time of the French
revolution.
• The Unsex'd Females, by Richard Polwhele depicted MW
and Hannah More as polar opposites
• But female educators such as More, Sarah Trimmer, Mary
Hays, Catherine Macaulay, Laetitia Barbauld and Maria
Edgeworth all sought to give woman's role more
competence, dignity and consequence.
Reformation of Manners
• MW calls middle class women to become 'more observant
daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives,
more reasonable mothers - in a word better citizens'.
• Her manifesto remains middle class motherhood in a
radical framework of economic independence, legal
equality and freer access to jobs and professions.
• Hannah More like MW puts her faith in women of middle
rank. She attests to women's potency to undermine or save
their country. Women bear special civil and social
responsibilities.
• Women ‘by labouring to reform themselves reform the
world'.
Men and the Reformation of Manners
• Focus on manners and who should be incorporated into the
state as citizens also focused attention on men.
• Only virtuous and free individuals should be entrusted with
political responsibility.
• Gender roles were central to the ways in which political life
was defined
• The polite gentleman came from the middling sort, not the
aristocracy; politeness and commerce went hand in hand.
• Philip Carter has concluded, ‘The prevailing eighteenthcentury concept was of masculinity not just as a social but a
sociable category in which gender identity was conferred,
or denied, by men’s capacity for gentlemanly social
performance.’
The Triumph of Independence over Majesterial Influence and
Corruption, 1805 [disputed election of Sir Francis Burdett]
Conclusion – the triumph of
domesticity?
• It has been argued that by 1832 women had lost their ‘freedom’ to
operate in political and public spheres.
• James Vernon asserted that ‘for women, but also for many men,
the 1832 Reform Act represented a retreat, one which had given
them less of a chance to be included within the official political
nation than the unreformed electoral system.’
• Historians such as Linda Colley argue that the vehemence of the
literature surrounding the place of women in public illustrates the
fact that the boundaries supposedly separating men and women
were in fact, unstable and becoming more so.
• What changed were the strategies used by women to participate in
the public sphere.
Conclusion – the triumph of male
civility?
• History of masculinity tends to trace a move from a
rough-and-ready seventeenth-century manhood to a
polite and civil eighteenth-century masculinity.
• Karen Harvey has argued that this progression may be
too simplistic.
• Instead there is a cyclical pattern. The later eighteenth
century seems to have brought a revival of older
modes of manhood, suggesting that the dominance of
politeness was relatively short-lived, sandwiched
between early modern and nineteenth-century ideals
that had much in common.