Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience 9781138815940, 9781315276236

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The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience

Challenging current perspectives of urbanisation, The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience explores how our towns and cities have shaped and been shaped by cultural, spatial and gendered influences. This volume discusses gender in an urban context in European, North American and colonial towns from the fourteenth to the twentieth century, casting new light on the development of medieval and modern settlements across the globe. Organised into six thematic parts covering economy, space, civic identity, material culture, emotions and the colonial world, this book comprises 36 chapters by key scholars in the field. It covers a wide range of topics, from women and citizenship in medieval York to gender and tradition in nineteenth- and twentieth-century South African cities, reframing our understanding of the role of gender in constructing the spaces and places that form our urban environment. Interdisciplinary and transnational in scope, this volume analyses the individual dynamics of each case study while also examining the complex relationships and exchanges between urban cultures. It is a valuable resource for all researchers and students interested in gender, urban history and their intersection and interaction throughout the past five centuries. Deborah Simonton is associate professor, emerita, at the University of Southern Denmark and author of Women in European Culture and Society: Gender, Skill and Identity from 1700 (2011) and a co-editor of Female Agency in the European Town (2013, with Anne Montenach) and Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700-1914 (2014, with Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach). She leads the international network Gender in the European Town.

The Routledge History Handbooks

The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates Edited by Cyrus Schayegh and Andrew Arsan The Routledge Handbook of the History of Race and the American Military Edited by Geoffrey W. Jensen The Routledge Handbook of the History of Settler Colonialism Edited by Edward Cavanagh and Lorenzo Veracini The Routledge Handbook of Material Culture in Early Modern Europe Edited by Catherine Richardson,Tara Hamling and David Gaimster The Routledge History Handbook of Medieval Revolt Edited by Justine Firnhaber-Baker with Dirk Schoenaers The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600 Edited by Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience Edited by Deborah Simonton

The Routledge History Handbook of Gender and the Urban Experience

Edited by Deborah Simonton

Section Editors ANNE MONTENACH, ELAINE CHALUS, NINA JAVETTE KOEFOED MARJO KAARTINEN, KATIE BARCLAY, NIGEL WORDEN

First published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Deborah Simonton, Anne Montenach, Elaine Chalus, Nina Javette Koefoed, Marjo Kaartinen, Katie Barclay and Nigel Worden for selection and editorial matter; individual contributors for their chapters. The right of Deborah Simonton, Anne Montenach, Elaine Chalus, Nina Javette Koefoed, Marjo Kaartinen, Katie Barclay and Nigel Worden to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or ­registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-81594-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-27623-6 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Eve, in affection, friendship and scholarship

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Contents

List of Figures xii List of Tables xiv Notes on Contributors xv Preface xxiv Acknowledgements xxvi Gender and the Urban Experience – Introduction

1

Part I

Economy, Circulations and Exchanges – Introduction Anne Montenach

7

  1 Patterns of Transmission and Urban Experience – When Gender Matters Anna Bellavitis

11

  2 Women, Gender and ­Credit in Early Modern Western European Towns Cathryn Spence

21

  3 Toleration, Liberty and Privileges – Gender and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century European Towns Deborah Simonton   4 Gender and Business ­during the Industrial Revolution Hannah Barker   5 Poverty, Family Economies and Survival Strategies in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries – A Gender Approach Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller vii

33 47

58

Contents

  6 Gendered Experiences of Work and Migration in Western Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Manuela Martini

71

Part II

Space, Place and Environment – Introduction Elaine Chalus

85

  7 Male Servants, Identity and Urban Space in Eighteenth-Century England Amanda Flather

91

  8 Mapping the Spaces of ­Seduction – Morality, Gender and the City in Early ­Nineteenth-Century Britain Katie Barclay

103

  9 Painting the Town – Portrayals of Change in Urban Riversides, London and the Thames, a Case Study Kemille S. Moore

116

10 Modernity and Madrid – The Gendered Urban Geography of Carmen de Burgos’ La rampa Rebecca M. Bender

130

11 Home, Urban Space and Gendered Practices in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Turku Riitta Laitinen

142

12 The Gendered Geography of Violence in Bologna, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota

153

Part III

Civic Identity and Political Culture – Introduction Nina Javette Koefoed

165

13 Women and Citizenship in Later Medieval York Sarah Rees Jones

169

14 Civic Identity, ‘Juvenile’ Status and Gender in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century Italian Towns Eleonora Canepari

viii

182

Contents

15 ‘We Had a Row on the P ­ olitics of the Day’ – Gender and Political Sociability of the Elites in Stockholm, c. 1770–1800 My Hellsing 16 Gender, Philanthropy and Civic Identities in Edinburgh, 1795–1830 Jane Rendall

195 209

17 Negotiating Respectable Citizenship – Homosexual Emancipation Struggles in Early Twentieth-Century Copenhagen Niels Nyegaard

221

18 Voting as an Act of Estate or Voting as an Act of Class? – Voting Women in Swedish Towns, c. 1720–1920 Åsa Karlsson Sjögren

233

Part IV

Material Culture in Gendered Urban Settings – Introduction Marjo Kaartinen

245

19 Gender, Material Culture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Rome Renata Ago

249

20 The Changing Objects of Civic Devotion – Gender, Politics and Votive Commissions in a Late Medieval Dalmatian Confraternity Ana Marinković

259

21 Caring and Healing – Women, Bodies and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century French Cities Anne Carol

271

22 Architectural Language and Mistranslations – A Comparative Global Approach to Women’s Urban Spaces Despina Stratigakos

283

23 Shoes and the City – Shoes and Their Sphere of Influence in Early America, 1740–1789 Kimberly Alexander

296

24 Gendering the Automobile – Men, Women and the Car in Helsinki, 1900–1930 309 Teija Försti

ix

Contents Part V

Intimacy and Emotion – Introduction Katie Barclay

321

25 Shaping London Merchant Identities – Emotions, Reputation and Power in the Court of Chancery Merridee L. Bailey

327

26 Love Thy Neighbour? – The Gendered, Emotional and Spatial Production of Charity and Poverty in Sixteenth-Century France Susan Broomhall

338

27 The Emotional Life of Boys in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City Sonya Lipsett-Rivera 28 Emotions, Gender and the Body – The Case of Nineteenth-Century German  Spa Towns Heikki Lempa 29 Feeling Modern on the Russian Street – From Desire to Despair Mark D. Steinberg 30 Risk! Pleasure! Affirmation! – Navigating Queer Urban Spaces in Twentieth-Century Scotland Jeff Meek

351

362 374

385

Part VI

The Colonial Town – Introduction Nigel Worden

397

31 A Gendered History of Colonial Spanish-American Cities and Towns, 1500s–1800 401 Leo J. Garofalo 32 Gender in Batavia – Asian City, European Company Town Jean Gelman Taylor 33 Cities at Sea – Gender and Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century British Colonial City: Philadelphia, Kingston, Madras and Calcutta Clare A. Lyons 34 Gender, Race and the Spatiality of the Colonial Town in India Mary Hancock x

415

427 441

Contents

35 Gender and Urban Experience in Nineteenth-Century Australasian Towns Penny Russell 36 South African Cities, Gender and Inventions of Tradition in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Vivian Bickford-Smith

453

464

Further Reading 477 Index 484

xi

Figures

  3.1 Vleeshuis (Butchers’ Guildhall), Antwerp   3.2 Regulations on Widows, Reglemens et statuts des maistres tailleurs d’habits, marchands drapiers et chaussetiers de la ville de La Rochelle, 1753, Article XX   3.3 Guild trade signs, Odense, Denmark   4.1 John Ralston, Market Street, lithograph, 1823   6.1 A wet-nurse placement bureau in Paris around 1909   8.1 Samuel Neele, A plan of the city of Dublin as surveyed for the use of the divisional Justices (London: W. Faden, c. 1808–20)   8.2 Detail of Samuel Neele, A plan of the city of Dublin as surveyed for the use of the divisional Justices (London: W. Faden, c. 1808–20)   9.1 John O’Connor, The Embankment, oil on canvas, 1874   9.2 James McNeill Whistler, Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea, oil on canvas, 1872   9.3 Atkinson Grimshaw, Reflection on the Thames – Westminster, oil on canvas, 1880   9.4 Fred Brown, An Impromptu Dance – A Scene along the Chelsea Embankment, oil on canvas, 1883 13.1 All Women Admitted to the Franchise of the City of York 15.1 Johan Fredrik Martin, Norrmalm Square in Stockholm with view of the Castle, coloured etching c. 1797 15.2 Johan Tobias Sergel, Foreign Diplomats at Stockholm’s Opera, sketch, early 1790s 22.1 Lyceum clubhouse at 128 Piccadilly, London, postcard from c. 1905 22.2 Lyceum clubhouse at 118b Potsdamer Strasse, Berlin, 1905. From ‘Die Lyzeumklub’, Die Frau 12, no. 12 (1905): 752 22.3 Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz, drawing, 1914

xii

35 40 41 48 74 108 110 121 123 124 125 172 197 200 285 287 288

Figures

22.4 Lyceum clubhouse at Lützowplatz 8, Berlin, as redesigned by Emilie Winkelmann. From Jarno Jessen, ‘Der Deutsche Lyzeumklub und seine bildenden Künstlerinnen’, Westermanns Monatshefte 120, no. 716 (1916): 165 289 23.1 Woman’s silk shoes, England, c. 1700–1715. Silver lace, metal sequins, silk satin, leather 296 23.2 Woman’s shoes, silk satin with wood heel, possibly worn by Patty Rogers, c. 1780s. Maker, Chamberlain and Sons, Cheapside, London 301 23.3 Woman’s shoes, detail of paper label affixed to footbed, ‘Chamberlain & Sons Shoemakers in Cheapside London’. Silk satin with wood heel, possibly worn by Patty Rogers, c. 1780s 302 23.4 Advertisement for London sale goods in the shop of George House, Chestnut Street, 1741. From The American Weekly Mercury [Philadelphia, PA], 19 November 1741, 4 305 24.1 A taxi driver, Helsinki, 1910s 314 24.2 Miss Terna Åkerman and her Singer car, 1928. Photo © Olof Sundström. 316 27.1 Plate 48: L’enjambée des Géans. Jeu Mexicain. From Claudio Linati, Costumes Civils, Militaires, et Religieux du Mexique (Bruxelles: Ch Satta Nino, 1828) 357 28.1 Baden-Baden Health Spa, wood engraving, c. 1865 364 31.1 Drawing c. 1615 by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, The city of Cuzco, principal city and royal court of the twelve Inka kings of this realm and bishopric of the church 402 31.2 Drawing c. 1615 by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Qhapaq apu mama, Wives of Powerful Lords: Poma Valca and Juana Curi Ocllo, quya, Principal Wife and Queen of Peru 407 32.1 Batavia Castle seen from the west side of the Kali Besar [Grand River], Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, sketch, c. 1656 419 32.2 Jan Brandes, Jan Brandes, Son Jantje and Slave Companion Roosje, sketch, c. 1782–3 422 33.1 Agostino Brunias, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two Other Free Women of Color, oil on canvas, 1769 432 35.1 Henry Curzon Allport, George Street, Sydney – Looking South, watercolour, 1842 455

xiii

Tables

  5.1 Welfare Agents in Southern Europe in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries 13.1 Admission of Women to the Franchise of York, 1272–1510 13.2 York Freemen’s Register: Admissions of New Freemen 1300–1500, showing female entrants as a percentage 13.3 All recorded occupations of female entrants to the franchise of the City of York 14.1 ‘Boys’ associations in seventeenth-century Rome 26. 1 Comparison of the nature of alms support by parish and gender. Nantes, March 1536 to ­September 1539 26.2 Comparison of number and nature of the households and tax amounts raised in the four main quartiers of Troyes, 1553 26.3 Comparison by gender and quartier of those receiving alms. Troyes, 1553

xiv

65 171 174 177 187 343 344 344

Contributors

Renata Ago is professor of Early Modern History at Sapienza Università di Roma. Her main fields of interest are social and economic history, with special attention to gender history. She is currently working on the uses of space in early modern cities and on the material culture of early modern Rome. She is the author of many books, collections and essays, which include Carriere e clientele nella Roma barocca (1990), La feudalità in età moderna (1994), Economia barocca. Mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del ‘600 (1998), Il gusto delle cose. Una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del ‘600 (2006), ‘Five industrious cities’ in Painting for Profit. The Economic Lives of the SeventeenthCentury Italian Painters, ed. Ph. Sohm and R. Spear (2010), Gusto for Things. A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome (2013), Tanti modi per promuoversi. Artisti, dottori, scienziati nella Roma del ‘600 (2014). Kimberly Alexander is an academic and museum professional specializing in eighteenth-­ century costume, art and architectural history. She has produced innovative exhibits in these areas for a wide variety of institutions. Currently, she teaches museum studies and material culture to graduate and undergraduate students at the University of New Hampshire and Salem State University. She earned her PhD in Art History with a specialization in Architectural History from Boston University. She has held positions as curator of Architecture and Design at the MIT Museum; curator of Architecture and Design at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA; and chief curator of Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, NH. Her book Georgian Shoe Stories from Early America (2016) traces the history of early Anglo-American footwear from the 1740s through the 1790s. Merridee L. Bailey is a senior research fellow with the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions at the University of Adelaide. To date, her work has been on the history of book culture and issues of socialisation and morality in late medieval and early modern England. She has previously published on ideas about virtue and courtesy in fifteenth and sixteenthcentury England and more recently has begun working on morality and emotions in merchant practices in London, c. 1400–1650. She has recently published a book on childhood in late medieval and early modern England, Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England c. 1400–1600 (2012). She is co-editor of Women and Work in Premodern Europe: Experiences, Relationships and Cultural Representation (forthcoming). xv

Contributors

Katie Barclay is an ARC DECRA Fellow in the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions and Department of History at the University of Adelaide. She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (2011) winner of both the Women’s History Network Book Prize and the Senior Hume Brown Prize in Scottish History. She is the author of a number of articles in the field of emotion and family life and has a particular interest in how space – including urban and rural – shapes gendered experience. Her current research explores the intimate lives of the Scottish lower orders in a long eighteenth century. Hannah Barker is professor of British History, University of Manchester. She is a historian of industrial revolution England and the north of England in particular. Her recent research has concentrated on issues of gender and work in towns, where she has assessed the impact of industrialisation on women’s employment and, specifically, the degree to which the advent of modern capitalism marginalised women workers. Her current research project builds upon this work and examines the concept of ‘family strategy’ in terms of small family businesses, as well as exploring the emotional life of families and their use of domestic space. She has just finished a book on this project for Oxford University Press. Hannah is chair of Manchester Histories, a charity that works to transform lives in Greater Manchester through histories and heritage; and a historical advisor for the National Trust at Quarry Bank Mill, where she is working on an exciting expansion project. Anna Bellavitis is professor of Early Modern History, University of Rouen-Normandy and senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France. She received her PhD from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris (1996) and her Habilitation à diriger des recherches from the University of Lyon 2 (2007). Her research concerns the social history of Venice, women’s and gender history and labour history, and she is working on a comparative research project about women’s roles and property rights in early modern European economies. She is author of Identité, mariage, mobilité sociale. Citoyennes et citoyens à Venise au XVIe siècle (2001), Famille, genre, transmission à Venise au XVIe siècle (2008) and Il lavoro delle donne nelle città dell’Europa moderna (2016). She is collaborating on two international research projects, Garzoni. Apprenticeship, Work, Society (funded by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche – France and the Fond National Suisse de la Recherche) and Producing Change. Gender and Work in Early Modern Europe (funded by the Leverhulme Trust). Rebecca M. Bender is assistant professor of Spanish at Kansas State University. She specializes in Spanish literature of the nineteenth through the twenty-first centuries, and her current book project examines maternal issues within Spain’s early women’s movement. She has published on narrative portrayals of ‘hybrid feminism’ and Madrid’s maternity ward. Vivian Bickford-Smith is emeritus professor in the Department of Historical Studies at the University of Cape Town and extraordinary professor, University of Stellenbosch. His research interests are in urban history, ‘film and history’ and ethnicity and racial identity. Publications include Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (2003), Cape Town in the Twentieth Century (1999) and The Emergence of the South African Metropolis: Cities and Identities in the Twentieth Century (2016). Susan Broomhall is professor of Early Modern History at The University of Western Australia. She was a Foundation Chief Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions and now holds an Australian Research Council Future xvi

Contributors

Fellowship. Her research has focused on women and gender in early modern Europe, and she is author of numerous works, including most recently, (with David G. Barrie) Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland.  Volume 1: Magistrates, Media and the Masses; Volume 2: Boundaries, Behaviours, Bodies (2014) and (with Jacqueline Van Gent) Gender, Power and Identity in the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau (2016) and Dynastic Colonialism: Gender, Materiality and the Early Modern House of Orange-Nassau (2016) as well as a series of edited collections on women’s communities, masculinity and emotions. She has published a number of essays on urban poor relief and pauper experiences in early modern France and England. Eleonora Canepari obtained her PhD in History at the University of Turin (2006) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris, 2012). Her research focuses on the history of migration and mobility and on social insertion in the city (Rome, seventeenth century). She has been Marie Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Centre Maurice Halbwachs (CNRS, Paris), Gerda Henkel fellow at the University of Oxford (Italian Studies at Oxford) and a member of the Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies (University of Toronto). At present she holds a ‘Rising Star’ packaged chair from the Fondation A*Midex (Aix-Marseille Université) at the research unit Telemme UMR 7303, where she is PI of the project Settling in Motion. Mobility and the Making of the Urban Space (16th–18th c). The project aims to study the role played by mobility in the making of the urban space in four Mediterranean cities during the Ancient Regime: Marseille, Tunis, Rome, Naples. Among her recent publications: ‘ “In my home town I have...”. Migrant women and multi-local ties (Rome, seventeenth-eighteenth centuries),’ Genesis 13 (2014); ‘Cohabitations, household structures and gender identities in XVIIth-century Rome,’ Villa I Tatti Studies 17 (2014); ‘Porteurs, mendiants, gentilshommes. La construction sociale du pouvoir politique (Rome, 1550–1650),’ Annales HSS 68, no. 3 (2013). Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller is senior lecturer, Department of Economic History, University of Barcelona. She works on economic and social history, with a special focus on late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century Spain. Her main research areas are history of poverty, poor relief and welfare, women, gender and the family and historical demography and microfinance. Her current research explores family, households, intergenerational relationships and poor relief; microfinances and gender; and towns between resilience and precariousness. Her published research investigated the process of transformation between moral economie to market economy in Barcelona and how ordinary people used the possibilities at their disposal in order to survive: Sovreviure a Barcelona. Dones, pobresa i assistència al segle XVIII,Vic: 1997; ‘Using microcredit and restructuring households: Two complementary survival strategies in late eighteenthcentury Barcelona,’ International Review of Social History 45 (2000); ‘Montes de Piedad and savings banks as microfinance institutions in the periphery of the financial system of mid-nineteenthcentury Barcelona,’ Business History 45 (2012). Anne Carol is professor of History at Aix-Marseille University. She specializes both in the cultural and social history of medicine and in the history of the body, dead or alive, female or male, in nineteenth and early twentieth-century France. Her publications include Les médecins et la mort France XIXe siècle (2004), Physiologie de la Veuve. Une histoire médicale de la guillotine (2012) and L’embaumement. Une passion romantique (2014). She is currently writing on the sensitive experience of the death penalty.  Elaine Chalus, FRHS, is professor of British History and head of the Department of History at the University of Liverpool. An expert on gender and political culture, Elaine’s numerous xvii

Contributors

p­ublications, particularly her monograph Elite Women in English Political Life c.1754–1790 (2005), have helped to reconfigure historians’ understanding of women and political culture prior to enfranchisement. In her recent work, ‘Gender, place and power: Controverted elections in late Georgian England,’ in Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800, ed. James Daybell and Svante Norrhem (2016), and ‘Spaces of sociability in fashionable society: A female household in Brighton and Nice, c.1825–35,’ in Gendering Spaces in European Towns, c.1500–1900, ed. Elaine Chalus and Marjo Kaartinen (2016), she has turned her attention to the operation and meaning of the gendering of space and place in politics and sociability. A founding member of the Gender in the European Town Network, she headed the Space, Place and Environment strand. She has wide editing experience and currently serves on the editorial boards for Women’s History Review, Parliamentary History Journal and the History of Parliament Trust, where she is section editor for the House of Lords, 1660–1832. Amanda Flather is lecturer in History at the University of Essex. Her research focuses principally on pre-modern gender relations, with particular emphasis on the history of the organisation of social space in England. She is the author of Gender and Space in Early Modern England and a number of articles and essays on the influence of gender on the organisation and use of social and sacred space. Teija Försti is a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Turku. She specializes in the cultural history of technology and especially in early automobile history in Finland. Her research interests have focused on the history of traffic, transport and mobility, material culture, humour studies, urban history and spatiality. In 2010−2011 she was editor-in-chief of Tekniikan Waiheita, the Finnish quarterly for the Finnish Society for the History of Technology. Her published doctoral thesis Vauhtikausi. Autoilun sukupuoli 1920–luvun Suomessa (2013) analysed connections between automobility and gender in Finland in the 1920s. She co-authored the history of the Feminist Association Unioni Suffragettien sisaret (2006). Currently, she is writing a book on early female car-drivers in Finland. Leo J. Garofalo is associate professor of History and Director of the Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity at Connecticut College and author of books and articles on market and ritual activities in multi-ethnic Andean cities and the seafaring and soldiering of black Europeans from Iberia.To treat these themes, he co-edited Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire (2010), Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550– 1812 (2009) and Mas allá de la dominación y la resistencia (2006). Currently, he is writing a book on black sailors, soldier and traders from Iberia and enslaved Asians in the early Atlantic world. Mary Hancock, a professor in the Departments of Anthropology and History at University of California, Santa Barbara, is the author of Womanhood in the Making: Domestic Ritual and Public Culture in Urban South India (1999), The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai (2008) and numerous articles. Her current research deals with the nineteenth and twentieth-century networks of religion, mass media and travel that linked India and the United States. My Hellsing holds a post-doctoral position at the Department of History at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her current research project analyses the political sociability of the elites in Stockholm c. 1770–1830, focusing on the interceptions of ’court’ and ’town’ and the impact of the Age of Revolution. My Hellsing is the main editor of the journal Sjuttonhundratal: Nordic Yearbook for Eighteenth-Century Studies. xviii

Contributors

Marjo Kaartinen is professor of Cultural History at the University of Turku. She specializes in early modern cultural history but has a keen interest in cultural history across periods. She has received several major research grants from the Academy of Finland and currently leads one on digital history, Profiling Premodern Authors, focusing on Latin texts and their authorship. In 2006, she won the Scholar of the Year award in Finland, and in 2007, an award for her work against racism. Her publications include Religious Life and English Culture in the Reformation (2002) and Breast Cancer in the Eighteenth Century (2013). Åsa Karlsson Sjögren is professor of History at Umeå University. Her primary research interests lie in women and gender history from different perspectives: legal, political and social. Her monographs are in Swedish, but she has also published in English; for example, ‘Women’s voices in Swedish town and cities at the turn of the twentieth century. Municipal franchise, polling, eligibility and strategies for universal suffrage,’ Women’s History Review 3 (2012); ‘Gender and urban land in Swedish towns,’ in Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830, ed. Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (2013) and ‘Citizenship, poor relief and the politics of gender in Swedish cities and towns at the turn of the nineteenth century,’ in Gender in Urban Europe. Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship, ed. Krista Cowman, Nina Javette Koefoed and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (2014). Her latest publication is ‘Negotiating charity. Emotions, gender, and poor relief in Sweden at the turn of the 19th century,’ Scandinavian Journal of History (2016). Nina Javette Koefoed is associate professor of History at Aarhus University. Her research interest covers marriage, households and parenthood in eighteenth-century Denmark and suffrage, citizenship and philanthropy in nineteenth-century Denmark. Most of her publications are in Danish. Amongst her publications in English are ‘Performing male political citizenship: Local philanthropy as an arena for practicing and negotiating citizenship in late nineteenthcentury Denmark,’ in Gender in Urban Europe. Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship, ed. Krista Cowman, Nina Javette Koefoed and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (2014). Riitta Laitinen (PhD) works in the Department of Cultural history in the University of Turku and studies early modern urban history. She has edited, with Thomas V. Cohen, Cultural History of Early Modern Streets ( 2009) as well as books in Finnish dealing with spatiality and material culture. In addition to articles on urban history, she has written on church space during the long Reformation. Her interests lie in everyday life and people’s relationship with the material environment. She wrote her dissertation on Navajo Indian spatial identity in the nineteenth century, and she continues to have an interest in indigenous historiography. Her new book, Order and Disorder in Early Modern Urban Space. Community and the Material Environment in the Kingdom of Sweden, is to be published by Amsterdam University Press. She has just started a new project on thieves, material environment and belonging in early modern Swedish urban communities. Heikki Lempa is a professor of German and Modern European History at Moravian College, Pennsylvania. He completed undergraduate work at the University of Turku, Finland and a PhD at the University of Chicago. He teaches courses on the history of emotions, the history of the body, the Holocaust and the history of masculinity in modern Europe. His first book, Bildung der Triebe. Der deutsche Philanthropismus (1768–1788) (1993), explores the everyday foundations of German education in the late eighteenth century. His second book, Beyond the Gymnasium. Educating the Middle-Class Bodies in Classical Germany (2007), is a work on the history of the body. Recent articles have focused on the history of emotions, gender and p­ atriarchalism and xix

Contributors

the ­history of education. He is finishing a book-length manuscript titled ‘Spaces of r­ ecognition. Honor and civil society in classical Germany, 1700–1914’. Lempa is a co-director of the Network on Emotion Studies of the German Studies Association. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera is professor of History at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. She is the author of To Defend Our Water with the Blood of our Veins:The Struggle for Resources in Colonial Puebla and Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Mexico, 1750–1856 and the co-editor of The Faces of Honor: Sex, Shame, and Violence in Colonial Latin America and Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico. She has written numerous articles and chapters, is the recipient of the Tibesar Award and is the 2015 Marston Lafrance Research Fellow. Clare A. Lyons is associate professor of history at the University of Maryland. She is author of Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (2006) and ‘Mapping an Atlantic sexual culture: Homoeroticism in eighteenth-­ century Philadelphia,’ winner of the Broussard Prize and winner of the William and Mary Quarterly Capon Prize. She is currently writing a trans-regional study of colonial sexualities, provisionally entitled Sex in the Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Oceanic World: Global Transit, Enslaving Sexuality & Inventing the Sexual Self. Ana Marinković is a research associate at the Department of Art History, University of Zagreb. Her research interests cover topics from the fields of hagiography, church and urban history in the Middle Ages and the early modern period. She specializes in history of the Eastern Adriatic cities and their relations with the Italian centres and is currently focusing on networks of Observant reform. She is the president of the Croatian Hagiography Society Hagiotheca. Her recent publications include ‘The cults of local reformist bishops in Dalmatia: Success and failure’ in Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe, ed. M. Räsänen, G. Hartmann and E. J. Richards (2016) and Cuius Patrocinio Tota Gaudet Regio. Saints’ Cults and the Dynamics of Regional Cohesion (edited with S.Kuzmová and T.Vedriš, 2014). Manuela Martini is professor of Modern History, University Lumière Lyon 2; and member of the LARHRA-UMR 5190 research unit. Her research lies at the intersection between migration studies, the history of labour and family and gender relationships. She has recently published several articles and books on gender and labour issues, including ‘When unpaid workers need a legal status: Family workers and reforms to labour rights in twentieth-century France,’ International Review of Social History 59, no. 2 (2014); and she has co-edited Genre et travail migrant. Mondes atlantiques (2009) and a special issue of ‘The History of the Family,’ in Households, Family Workshops and Unpaid Market Work in Europe from the 16th Century to the Present, 19 (2014). Jeff Meek is a social and cultural historian based at the University of Glasgow, and he has ­published on the impacts of World War One on Scottish society and on the interactions between religion, the law and sexuality. His monograph Queer Voices in Post-War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015. Anne Montenach is professor of Early Modern History, Aix-Marseille University, CNRS, UMR 7303 TELEMME (13094 Aix-en-Provence, France). Dr Montenach defended her PhD at the European University Institute in Florence and published it as L’économie du quotidien. Espaces et pratiques du commerce alimentaire à Lyon au XVIIe siècle (2009). Following research on the early modern urban economy with a special emphasis on informal circulations and exchange, xx

Contributors

she has turned to working on female economic territories in early m ­ odern Europe and is identifying how women were pivotal to urban economies, both illicit and legitimate. She completed her Habilitation à diriger des recherches on salt and calico smuggling in eighteenth-­century France and has published several articles in various European journals. She has co-edited with Deborah Simonton two collections of essays, Gender in the European Town: Female Agency in the Urban Economy, 1640–1830 (2013) and Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914 (with Marjo Kaartinen, 2014), and she is working with her as series editor on the Bloomsbury Cultural History of Work (2018). Kemille S. Moore is associate professor of Art History at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. Her teaching and research interests lie in late nineteenth-century European art history, primarily British printmaking and photography. Her current research projects include an examination of the print market during the late Victorian London and the role of women in the etching revival in England and America. She recently published ‘Feminisation and the luxury of visual art in London’s West End, 1860–1890’ in Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914, ed. Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach (2015). Sanne Muurling is a PhD Candidate at Leiden University where she is working on a doctoral thesis on crime and gender in early modern Bologna, Italy. She specializes in the social history of everyday life. Niels Nyegaard is a PhD student at the Department of History, Aarhus University, Denmark. In his PhD project, he examines the social construction of male homosexuality in early twentieth-century Copenhagen. By exploring the city’s public configurations of male homosexuality, he seeks to map out the ways in which homosexuality became aligned with social stigmatization and abjection at the turn of the century. In continuation hereof, his projects aim to contribute to a genealogical mapping of the historical instalment of homophobia and hetero-normativity in modern Denmark. Marion Pluskota is a postdoctoral researcher in Gender and Crime in nineteenth-century Europe at Leiden University, the Netherlands. She has published on the history of prostitution, Prostitution and Social Control in Eighteenth-Century Ports (2015), and co-offending and prosecution patterns under the penal code. Sarah Rees Jones (FRHS, FSA) is a professor of Medieval History at the University of York. She works on medieval urban history, with special interests in the history of citizenship and town planning. She is the author of York, the Making of a City, 1068–1350 (2013). Other recent publications address the processes through which collective bonds were formed in medieval towns, whether through the shaping of the lived environment, through faith or through the development of skills and bureaucratic processes. Jane Rendall is an honorary fellow of the History Department and the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of York. She has published extensively on the history of the Enlightenment, especially in Scotland, and on the history of Western feminism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; she is currently working on women’s associations in early nineteenth-century Scotland. She is also one of the four editors currently preparing a new edition of the Biographical Dictionary of Scottish Women, first published in 2006, for Edinburgh University Press. xxi

Contributors

Penny Russell is Bicentennial Professor of Australian History at the University of Sydney. Her publications include Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (2010), This Errant Lady: Jane Franklin’s Journey to Port Phillip and Sydney, 1839 (2002) and A Wish of Distinction: Colonial Gentility and Femininity (1994), as well as numerous edited volumes and articles on aspects of Australian and British social history in the nineteenth century. Her most recent book is Honourable Intentions? Violence and Virtue in Australian and Cape Colonies, c. 1750 to 1850 (2016), co-edited with Nigel Worden. Deborah Simonton, FRHS, is associate professor, emerita, University of Southern Denmark and visiting professor, University of Turku. She leads the Gender in the European Town Network. She studies the gendered and power relations articulated in the shifting economic structures of corporate towns in the context of commercial and polite culture. She has published A History of European Women’s Work in Europe since 1700 (1998) and Women in European Culture and Society, Gender, Skill and Identity since 1700 (2010) with a companion sourcebook, in addition to articles and chapters. She has extensive editing experience, including the Routledge History of Women in Europe (2006); with Anne Montenach, Female Agency in the Urban Economy (2013); and with Anne Montenach and Marjo Kaartinen, Luxury and Gender in the Modern Urban Economy (2014). She is general editor of The Routledge History Handbook on Gender and the Urban Experience (2017) and The Cultural History of Work (2017), with Anne Montenach. Cathryn Spence is professor of History,Vancouver Island University, British Columbia, Canada. Since receiving her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 2010, she has held teaching positions at the universities of Dalhousie, Keele and New Brunswick (Saint John) as well as a twoyear Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Guelph. She is the author of Women, Credit, and Debt in Early Modern Scottish Towns (2016) and co-editor of the Edinburgh Housemaills Taxation Book, 1634–6 (2014). She has written several chapters and articles that explore the intersecting topics of Scottish women, credit and debt work. Her research interests include urban and economic history and the impact of gender and socio-economic status when navigating economic relationships in early modern Western Europe. Mark D. Steinberg, a professor of History at the University of Illinois, specializes in the ­cultural, intellectual and social history of Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. His research and writing have focused on labour relations, working-class literary creativity, revolution, emotions, religion, violence and the modern city. The author of many books, edited collections articles, his more recent books include Proletarian Imagination: Self, Modernity, and the Sacred in Russia, 1910–1925 (2002); A History of Russia, with Nicholas Riasanovsky (8th edition, 2010); Petersburg Fin-de-Siècle (2011); and Interpreting Emotions in Russia and Eastern Europe, edited with Valeria Sobol (2011); and the Russian Revolution, 1905–1921 (2017). Despina Stratigakos is a historian and writer interested in the intersections of architecture and power. She is the author of Where Are the Women Architects? (2016), Hitler at Home (2015) and A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (2008). Stratigakos has served as a director of the Society of Architectural Historians, an advisor of the International Archive of Women in Architecture at Virginia Tech, a trustee of the Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation and deputy director of the Gender Institute at the University at Buffalo. She received her PhD from Bryn Mawr College and taught at Harvard University and the University of Michigan before joining the Department of Architecture at the University at Buffalo, where she serves as interim chair. xxii

Contributors

Jean Gelman Taylor taught Indonesian history at the University of New South Wales between 1992 and 2011. Her research focuses on the engagement of the Dutch East Indies Company in Indonesia and South Africa and on the social history of colonialism. Books include The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Colonial Indonesia (2009, 1st ed. 1983) and Indonesia: Peoples and Histories (2003). Nigel Worden is King George V Professor of History at the University of Cape Town and studies the social and cultural history of early colonial Cape Town. He is especially interested in Cape slavery and the ways in which Cape Town was linked into demographic, trading and cultural networks of the Indian Ocean world in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Key publications in this field include Slavery in Dutch South Africa (1985, reprinted 2012), Cape Town: The Making of a City (with E. Van Heyningen and V. Bickford-Smith, 1998) and Cape Town between East and West: Social Identities in a Dutch Colonial Town (2012). He is also co-editor with Penny Russell of Honourable Intentions?:Violence and Virtue in Australian and Cape Colonies, c. 1750 to 1850 (2016).

xxiii

Preface

This Handbook emerged from a research network, ‘Gender in the European Town: the making of the modern town’. In Europe today, most of the population lives in towns, and women still, as in the past, constitute the majority of urban inhabitants; thus the relationships between men and women and an understanding of masculinity and femininity are central to the idea of the city. As places that fostered and disseminated key social, economic, political and cultural developments, towns were central to the creation of gendered identities, the transmission of ideas across space and place and the fluidity and fixing of local, national and transnational boundaries. An appreciation of the intersection of gender and the urban is key to both understanding the past and the present. The network’s goal was to interject gender into urban historiography and therefore alter perspectives on urban identity and development. The idea of the city is central to contemporary practices of living, which draw on ideas and imagined spaces of the past. Concentrating on the 300-year period between c.1650 and c.1950, which saw the emergence, diversification and developing hegemony of the town in the history of Europe, it interrogates the operation of gender in three distinct, but interrelated, areas of urban study: the economic, the political and the spatial. In doing so, the network examines the influence of gender on the shape of towns and on urban spaces and as a force for urban change through comparative studies. It explores the subtle and changing nature and operation of power, patriarchy and privilege through the lens of the urban, alert to the ways that these factors shaped and were shaped by gender, class, race and space. Asking new questions and exploring a range of towns, the network contributes to a wider understanding of the spaces, places and dynamics that shape the contemporary urban European world. The scope and scale of this project ultimately tells us a great deal more about the formation of urban identities and cultures and helps us to understand the European inflection of these developments over an important formative period. It broadens our ideas about the development and legacy of towns in this period and helps us to understand the contribution of gender to the culture of towns over time. In putting together the Handbook, the editors wished both to draw on this European network of historians and to enlarge its boundaries, chronologically, geographically and ­thematically.

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Preface

The  Handbook expands the network’s interest backwards into the late medieval period and ­forward to the twentieth century; it looks not only across Europe but outwards to the European empire, and it expands the focus on the political, economic and spatial to include the emotional and material worlds of towns. In doing so, it develops the project of the network to reflect new methodological approaches and to incorporate a wider scholarship on the gendering of urban experiences.

xxv

Acknowledgements

This volume has its genesis in the discussions and deliberations of the Gender in the European Town Network, and in many respects it represents a significant marker in a collaboration involving some 30-plus participants over eight years, as well as numerous additional authors in our previous anthologies and the conference held in Odense in May 2013. Without their enthusiasm, we would never have come this far. In particular, the small steering group represented by the editors of this Handbook, nicknamed an ‘urban gang’ by Nigel, have been a continual source of support. I would like to thank them for their friendship, good humour and inspiration. Thanks, gang. This volume has 36 authors who acutely and perceptively develop the relationship between towns and gender, a relationship that they ably show as symbiotic. We would like to thank them for their hard work and enthusiasm, as well as the many individuals who gave feedback, strengthening our ideas and arguments and making this a stronger and more coherent piece of work. We also wish to acknowledge the significant support from Det Frie Forskningsråd: Forskningsrådet for Kultur og Kommunikation of the Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation; and the Rektor’s Fund of the University of Southern Denmark for substantial financial support for our networking activities. Many of our institutions also contributed important financial support and venues for meetings and travel to enable the research, writing and collaboration involved. We thank them for this vote of confidence in the project. Similarly, we recognize the support and assistance we have had from libraries, archives and galleries, which were central to the development of the chapters. We would like to thank the editorial team at Routledge for their support and encouragement in bringing this project to its final published form, especially Eve Setch, who was part of the original team conceiving and developing this book. This is for her. This book has been hard on many of us as we juggled new jobs, existing jobs, qualifications and other publications and responsibilities, not to mention family life. We would like to thank family, friends and colleagues for their support, which often went ‘above and beyond’. The authors and publisher would like to thank the following for permission to reproduce images in this book: Bonhams, International Auctioneers and Valuers; Bridgeman Images; Chetham’s Library Manchester; Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington,

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Acknowledgements

D.C.; Helsinki City Museum; Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery) the United ­Kingdom; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales; Museum of London; National Library of Ireland; Nationalmuseum, Stockholm; Portsmouth Historical Society; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; The Royal Library, Copenhagen; Uppsala University Library;Yale Center for British Art.

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Gender and the Urban Experience Introduction Deborah Simonton

Some of our earliest markers of human civilization are found in the traces of urban residents. Throughout time, people have gathered together, forming villages, towns, cities and great metropolises; they came together for trade, sustenance, protection and sociability. Patterns of urbanization were erratic, and disease, abandonment, disorder, warfare and sieges as well as economic developments in trade, industry and migration, among other factors, marked ebbs and flows in urban change. However, the majority of the worlds’ population has lived in cities only since 2006.1 Expansion was also uneven geographically. For example, Rosemary Sweet argues that ‘The period 1680–1840 arguably saw the English town undergo greater changes than in any preceding period, all of which were essentially the result of similarly unprecedented urban growth’.2 Indeed, by 1840, England was almost 50 per cent urban in contrast to France, which remained at about 20 per cent.3 Urban experience is not only about numbers but also reflects cultural, political and economic factors. It is about how people live in urban spaces and interact with them, how they express themselves and how they feel about these spaces. For some, they are ‘home towns’; for others, a piece in a migratory experience. People work, play, relax, eat, drink, sleep, argue, love in towns. They are where most of us live. Gender is fundamental to the ways many towns shaped themselves. Gender tensions, over trade and political rights, for example, influenced the formal and informal economy and polity. However, urban historians have tended to turn a blind eye to the gendered character of towns. In 2003, Rosemary Sweet pointed out this lacuna arguing that although urban history has become the focus of considerable attention…the contribution of women to urban society and the urban construction of gender and gender roles is hardly mainstream in any of the recent publications.…[which depicted towns as] the product of largely masculine agency…[treating women] as passive objects in the process of urbanisation…[denying them, more or less consciously] the capacity for ­influence and active participation in urban economy and society.4 Indeed, several historiographies construct urban spaces and places as quintessentially masculine. Civic identity, until very recently, has been construed as male, as has the world of business, commerce and artisanal work. Technologies of work were regularly interpreted as the property of men, and moves to streamline production – and add women – are uniformly defined as 1

Deborah Simonton

‘­deskilling’. Many standard mainstream histories were written by men about men, and not only were they, in our term, gender-blind, but also such an approach was not even questioned. Both the discourse and the language were male. The feminists of the 1970s talked about ‘consciousness-raising’, and this is precisely what urban history has needed: an awareness of the simple fact that there might be another way to look at the past, that reading the sources with ‘gendered spectacles’ could reveal a different ‘truth’. Although newer research has paid growing attention to women (and men) in towns, detailing their activities and exploring issues of gender and the urban experience, nevertheless, most research has tended not to articulate the relationship between gender and towns. However, increasingly, a number of recent publications have begun to examine these questions. Publications from the Gender in the European Town Network, of which this is one, have focused on issues of economy, political identities and space and place whilst interrogating the relationship between gender and towns.5 Researchers in the Netherlands also have added significantly to our understanding of the relationship of women to towns, with individual studies such as Danielle Van den Heuvel’s research on Dutch women, and the collection Single Life and the City; while for Britain, Rosemary Sweet’s collection Women in Towns still stands as an important landmark publication.6 Gender history grew initially out of women’s history in an acknowledgement that, in order to understand femininity, we had to think about men and understand masculinity. The work of scholars like John Tosh, Michael Roper and Michèle Cohen, among others, has thus opened and refined our understandings of masculinity and the larger questions of gender.7 Far from referring only to men and women, gender constructions give meaning to many other fields of history and even everyday life. Gender has thus become more than the study and understandings of femininity and masculinity as it examines the kaleidoscope of ways in which men and women operate in the multi-layered relationships between men, women and society. Others, many of them contributors to this volume, have similarly helped breach the walls. This Handbook explores the influence of gender on the shape of towns, the gendering of townscapes and gender as a force for urban change. It takes the view that gender is fundamental to the ways in which many towns shaped themselves, and that the effects of urban development and responses to them are not gender neutral. The gendered dimension of history and the study of urban development both have long individual pedigrees. This collection reflects our interest in the way that each informs the other and brings the two together in order to illuminate the symbiotic relationship between towns and gender, and the ways that people experience their urban worlds. The authors address how gender was implicated in our urban worlds and the cultural corollaries that embrace them, and how gendered practices have been negotiated in shaping urban experience. They ask, in what ways did gender operate to shape, reflect or facilitate the actual or imaginary experience of the town for individuals, households or groups? Thus, a key objective is to bring together issues of urban development, gendered identities and the ­relationship between these and human experience. This volume is centred on the fourteenth through twentieth centuries, a period in which corporate and individual identities were shifting, in which nation building and the process of urbanisation surged forward and in which cultural processes reworked notions of gender. Urban cultures were part of the building blocks of the nation-state, while they also had identities of their own. But instead of studying towns as single entities, this volume has as a central concern to study urban development as an exchange of ideas and inspirations, to understand what towns shared and how transference led to developments across urban culture. National boundaries may have had less influence in the ways the processes of gender operated in townscapes, and the meanings ascribed to relations in urban culture while cultural transfer also had a central role. Migration and trade, for example, were routes of transmission of culture and ideas 2

Gender and the Urban Experience

between towns. Thus, this volume moves away from specialist analysis towards interdisciplinary and transnational synthesis, exploring the complexity of interplay between ‘nation’, region and the colonial and urban context. Towns are of a range and variety with overlapping roles and position within political ­economic structures and within their ‘national’ urban systems. Reflecting changes in economic and political institutions, the urban landscape shifted in terms of how towns operated and were perceived, in what activities were seen as important and who should carry them out. Their selfidentity was significant because it shaped how towns developed physically, often leading to continual rebuilding and construction of urban spaces.These transitions had important implications for gender – for the construction of masculinity and femininity. Gender relations are played out through the structures, systems and fabric of the city, in space, time and experience. At the same time, masculinities and femininities contributed to shaping urban culture and its developmental directions. Urban history reminds us that the relationship between actions and the urban environment is not a one-way process. Cities have long been associated with masculine qualities of rationality and perceived as spaces where ideals of the mind could be expressed literally and figuratively. In contrast, rural space, intrinsically linked to the natural and the organic, had female connotations.8 Towns have been central to creating ideas about both the male and the female. Women were often the majority in towns, which had particular implications for how they inserted themselves in and contributed to shaping the character and identity of towns. Indeed, the nineteenth-century ideology of separate spheres encompassing the public sphere of work, commerce and politics and the private sphere of home and family had deep roots in the emergence of the urban middle classes. Its legacy has had a noticeable influence on the ways in which women and men are situated within the historical narrative. This universal framework was seen to underpin not just the activities of men and women in the past; it also supported ‘a general identification of women with domestic life and of men with public life’.9 It also contributed to regular discrimination against women in terms of rights of citizenship, of property ownership and in access to work. Importantly, however, gender is not only about women. Towns are situated in national cultures, so that local and national regulations, legal practices and religious differences contribute to the ways towns developed and to the ways that gender was understood.Yet norms were not rigid, and representations of both masculinity and femininity were fluid. For example, during the period of this book, re-codification of law, changes in commercial and capitalist culture and ideologies associated with the Enlightenment and individualism increasingly broke down much of the corporate protection that men had felt, replacing the meanings attributed to ‘brotherhood’ with individual identity, business and professionalism. From the middle of the seventeenth century, corporatism elided with new concepts of business to shape a revised idea of what the urban man should be: polite, urbane, civil. This applied to personal as well as to economic and political interests. So also, the re-conception of towns contributed to shaping a new idea of woman, which situated her in the ‘domestic’ realm and contributed to redefining her in a role of consumer rather than as producer or businesswoman. These ideologies thus also shaped what was appropriate behaviour in towns and how the space of towns was developed and used. Ideology, however, did not explain the reality of urban experience, and competing tensions in the towns of Europe meant that a complex and variable pattern of urban identities for both men and women developed. These competing tensions combined with new stresses drawn from industrialisation, which took place at different times and in different ways across Europe and the colonial and post-colonial worlds. The political culture of towns was central to how men and women could and did interact with their urban culture as well as their ability to transcend the local to have an impact on national culture. In this context, masculinity 3

Deborah Simonton

and femininity became areas for dispute and renegotiation. Thus, another important factor relates to gender norms and how a given society considered what was and was not acceptable for men and women to do. Ideas about femininity could therefore constrain women, either covertly or overtly, while a conception of men in charge could empower men. Importantly, not all men are equal, and hierarchies also operated to influence how people experienced urban life. While for most practical purposes, law empowered men over women, status could grant some women power over some men. Thus, elite, middling and working women would experience city living differently, as would elite, middling and working men. Being master/ mistress, slave, owner, employee, nobility, and so on granted different levels of access to what cities had to offer as well as different opportunities for self-realization. Thinking about gender as discourse – as socially constructed, not immutable – also means considering the ways in which ideas about gendered attributes and roles were constructed and experienced by both men and women in different urban contexts. It means thinking more deeply about the male experience and accepting that men as much as women lived their lives within a framework of ideals and injunctions about proper modes of behaviour that might be no less constraining than those imposed on women.10 The volume is constructed around six broad, and overlapping, themes in light of both gender and urbanisation: economy, circulations and exchanges; space, place and environment; civic identity and political culture; objects, artefacts and material culture; intimacy and emotion; and the colonial town. These central themes speak directly to newer ideas of exploring the dynamics of culture – both as definition and as practice. Urban economic culture is embedded in the meanings attributed to expertise, skill and ‘brotherhood’. However, commercial and capitalist culture increasingly shifted from an artisanal urban nexus to one where individual identity, class and status were often as important. Thus, chapters interrogate the ways in which men and women could become active agents in the urban economy and illuminate the symbiotic relationship between gender, town and the economy. The way power was legitimated and understood was important in creating a space for women and for a gendered political culture, which was not always contest and tension, but often collaboration and collusion. Perpetuation of a sexual division of politics has justified the marginalisation of most women from the exercise of real power, yet at the level of informal politics and within civil society, women have a much longer history of participation. By expanding the boundaries of politics, they created a more inclusive space to change the polity and act out citizenship. Civic self-identity was significant to how towns developed physically, often leading to continual reconstruction of urban spaces. The volume also examines the ways spaces were defined, and redefined, noting the ­complexities and shifting character of urban worlds. Ultimately, ‘space and place’ are central to understanding the cultural dynamics of towns. The kinds of spaces that developed, the places that people could and did use and the people who constructed them are all significant. Physical spaces operate as landmarks, as memory sites and as places of congregation and social intercourse. There is no doubt that in the process of creating urban identities and urban spaces, these were gendered, whether as part of creating the bourgeois man, like town houses and public buildings, or as places to relegate certain kinds of activities, like harbours, away from the polite spaces of gardens and parks.The cultural investment of public spaces, particularly of urban spaces, is a complex process of appropriation and adaptation. Doreen Massey argues that Particular ways of thinking about space and place are tied up with, both directly and indirectly, particular social constructions of gender relations…Some of this connection works through the actual construction of, on the one hand, real-world geographies and, on the other, the cultural specificity of definitions of gender.11 4

Gender and the Urban Experience

The study of emotions shows how emotions can be theorised and applied to urban histories and demonstrates the critical role they play in historical change and the construction of gender. We recognize the cultural differences in emotions, while exploring the ways that the biological, ‘felt’, experience of emotion can be articulated as a form of practice or performance. Within these histories, emotions become active, playing a significant role in the making of urban space and becoming essential in narrating and understanding urban history. Obviously, towns themselves are material objects and are shaped fundamentally by material artefacts and practices in gendered terms, such as consumption, luxury and ostentation, religious materiality, the body and architecture. Materiality is embedded with meanings, and matter is active in creating meanings as well. Thus, ‘things’ become agents in an equal interplay with humans and key to understanding towns and the human experience. While much of the volume is concerned with the metropole, and especially the European nations, it reaches out to European urban colonial worlds to contribute to understanding the themes of other sections, such as the gendered nature of the economy, the organization of urban space and the role of the town in forging local identities. It also reveals the distinctive gendered natures of a variety of colonial towns scattered across the globe, reminding us that these worlds were no more homogenous than the metropole. Gendered systems were neither uniform, nor were Europeans unchanged by encounters with the colonial world. The imperial project has been defined as a gendered project, and these chapters pay attention to the social and cultural forces that shaped colonial empires, particularly the construction of racial, social and cultural identities amongst both colonisers and colonized.12 This too was an urban story, and some of the most concentrated and persistent aspects of colonialism were encountered and elaborated in towns. So, we ask questions about how the urban past fashioned ideas about what it meant to be male or female; we look at how concepts of masculinity and femininity shaped the ways people of the past understood and constructed their urban worlds. As the authors demonstrate, gender is not an unchanging feature of the past; rather, relations between the sexes ‘varied appreciably, along with political, economic or cultural changes’.13 Throughout, the volume engages with the gendered context of towns.

Notes   1 United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Population Division, World Urbanization Prospects: The 2005 Revision.Working Paper No. ESA/P/WP/200. (2006).   2 Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840 (London: Longman, 1999), 2. See also Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).  3 E. A. Wrigley, ‘British Population during the “long” eighteenth century, 1680–1840’, in Roderick Floud and Paul Johnson, eds, The Cambridge Economic History of Britain,Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 89.  4 Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane, eds, On the Town: Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-century ­England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 1–3.   5 Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach, eds, Female Agency in the Urban Economy, Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Deborah Simonton, Anne Montenach and Marjo Kaartinen, eds, Luxury and Gender in the Modern Urban Economy: A European Perspective, c. 1700–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2014); Nina Koefoed, Åsa Karlsson-Sjögren and Krista Cowman, eds, Gender in Urban Europe: Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship 1750–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2014); Elaine Chalus and Marjo Kaartinen, eds, Conceived, Constructed & Contested Spaces: Gender in the European Town, c. 1500–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2017) and Deborah Simonton and Hannu Salmi, eds, Catastrophe, Gender and Urban Experience, 1648–1920 (London: Routledge, 2016).   6 Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship. Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands c. 1580– 1815 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007); Julie de Groot, Isabelle Devos and Ariadne Schmidt, eds, Single Life

5

Deborah Simonton and the City, 1200–1900 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); Janine Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy and Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). See also the ‘Further Reading’ for this volume.   7 See especially John Tosh, ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the history of gender’, in Stefan Dudink, Karen Hagemann and John Tosh, eds, Masculinities in Politics and War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 41–58. See also, Ken Moffatt, ed., Troubled Masculinities: Reimagining Urban Men (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011).   8 Mona Domosh and Joni Seager, Putting Women in Place, Feminist Geographers Make Sense of the World (New York: Guildford Press, 2001), 69.   9 M. Rosaldo, ‘A theoretical overview’ in M. Rosaldo and L. Lamphere (eds), Women, Culture and Society (Stanford, Ca., Stanford University Press, 1974), 23–4. 10 Lynn Abrams, ’Gendering the agenda’, in Lynn Abrams, Eleanor Gordon, Deborah Simonton and Eileen James Yeo, eds, Gender in Scottish History Since 1700 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press), 2. 11 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 2. 12 Catherine Hall, ‘Of gender and empire: Reflections on the nineteenth century’ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 47. 13 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women’s history in transition’, in Joan Wallach Scott, Feminism and History, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 81.

6

Part I

Economy, Circulations and Exchanges Introduction Anne Montenach

In early modern and modern Europe, towns were often the motivators for economic change, controlling trade and capital formation; and the disseminators of culture, resources and information. Commercial cities flourished and developed complex manufacturing practices, while articulating systems of exchange – involving goods as well as people – with their immediate hinterlands and with wider regions. At the same time, in many areas of Europe, standards of living for the majority improved dramatically, leading to new practices of consumption. Towns greatly contributed to material and cultural exchange across the whole of Europe, thus playing a central role in the rise of modern Western capitalism and in the economic integration of the continent.1 In many respects, the gendered character of towns has not been central to traditional urban and economic history. The ways that women and men articulated their relationship to the European urban economy and, more generally, the influence of gender on the economic shape of towns, have attracted little attention from historians. Even though women appear to be everywhere in pre-industrial and industrial towns, many economic and urban historians have failed to see them or have relegated them to ‘women’s history’, as though their experience had no real relevance for urban research. Gender and the construction of gender roles have thus long been neglected by urban history, whereas economic historians have positively constructed the economy as a man’s world, where, for instance, merchant and craft guilds played a central role in the economic – but also political, social and cultural – life of early modern European towns in particular.2 However, for the last three decades, inventive research has paid growing attention to gendered economic roles and activities in various urban contexts – though much of it is isolated articles in journals or chapters in books, in which the ‘urban variable’ is often not articulated. This has led, for instance, to a re-evaluation of the role played by working women in the European urban economy from the Middle Ages onwards.3 The aim of this section is therefore to explore explicitly the relationship between the town, gender and economic development. From this perspective, and across six chapters, authors address a number of questions, which speak to how women as well as men specifically articulated their relationship to the gendered urban economy and the strategies they employed to operate in these worlds. Among these strategies, the essays pay particular attention to work as a major social resource, to mobility, to a combination of licit and illicit activities and to the role of sociability and social networking – from kinship and family connections to business partnerships. The perspective is to re-interrogate the

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way in which economic practices and experiences contributed both to reinforce or challenge gender roles and identities and to shape the towns. The aim of this section is also to stretch the traditional idea of economy by exploring different types of markets and their nexus. Taking into account the urban context is a way of adding to our knowledge on classical issues of economic and social history such as patterns of transmission, credit, business, work, poverty relief or migration. Rules on transmission of properties and inheritance have thus mostly been studied in rural contexts. By considering the urban environment, Anna Bellavitis raises specific issues regarding the gendered transmission of immovable goods such as the family house or the workshop in early modern Venice. In the case of credit transactions analysed by Cathryn Spence, specific urban sources such as debt litigations from the burgh court records of Edinburgh show not only that women in towns had greater access to credit networks than their rural counterparts, but also that everybody could enter into credit transactions regardless of economic or social status. Hannah Barker’s chapter sheds new light on the small family-run businesses that played a central part in urban economic growth and social transformation during the period of the ‘industrial revolution’ but have been largely neglected by the historiography. It also stresses the fact that opportunities offered to female manufacturers and traders differed according to the dynamism and degree of regulation of a given town. Rules and institutions were indeed at the heart of urban life, and the chapters in this section show that economic life was, in early modern and modern urban Europe, not cut off from the social, cultural and religious but also political worlds. Deborah Simonton reminds us that gaining permission or a privilege to trade in the urban world of eighteenth-century Europe was also a political story, since guilds and corporations that organised the town economy and had profound links to urbanisation, were closely tied to citizenship and political power. Towns were situated in local and national cultures and in legal codes, customs and practices that shaped men’s and women’s agency. All over Europe, women were discriminated against in terms of rights of citizenship, of property ownership and in access to work. However, the legal framework of women’s activities varied widely from one end of Europe to the other. If women as a whole suffered from restricted legal capacities, their actual autonomy was nevertheless promoted by the indecisions and contradictions of the law throughout Europe. Medieval statutes of Venice, which were enforced in early modern times, thus gave women broader property rights than in many other Italian cities, which had paradoxical consequences on the urban real estate market. More broadly, rules could be more or less flexible according to the evolution of economy and society, as shown, for instance, by the changing relationships between guilds and unfree workers. On a different level, whereas the legal urban framework shaped male and female roles and rights, numerous urban institutions or private and semi-public organisations, analysed both by Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller and Manuela Martini, also played a significant role in providing economic support to poor people, orphans or abandoned children, young women or migrant families. The urban experience, or in other words, confrontation with the institutional framework but also with the spatial landscape of a given place, therefore shaped men and women’s identities. In fact, towns acted as gendered spaces not only at a very literal level, as shown for instance by Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller’s and Manuela Martini’s chapters, but also from a legal and cultural point of view. Local laws and institutions could thus enforce conventional gender norms or, on the contrary, enhance female agency. Of course women – and men – cannot be treated as homogeneous groups: their economic roles depended on a series of factors such as social, occupational and marital status. However, ideas about gender, about the definition of masculinity and femininity – the first increasingly shaped by work, the second associated with domesticity – and about activities appropriate to men and women had a great impact on economic o ­ pportunities 8

Economy, Circulations and Exchanges

for each sex.4 As shown by Deborah Simonton’s chapter, the concepts of skill and honour were thus at the centre of guildsmen’ identities in eighteenth-century Europe. But gender roles and stereotypes, which are themselves socially constructed, may shift and therefore need to be situated in time and space. Female servants who were engaged in moneylending in early modern Edinburgh learned to navigate networks of debt and credit and developed ‘life skills’ that challenged paternalism, argues Cathryn Spence. As in the case of businesswomen studied by Hannah Barker, reputation – or social credit – was a central value shared both by men and women engaged in economic transactions. Within a same social group – families in trade during the industrial revolution – some common elements, such as the domestic, the religious and the commercial, formed the basis of male and female identity. Gender is a multifaceted concept that not only refers to the social construction of the categories of men and women but also to the social interactions between the sexes. By interjecting gender into the history of migrations and highlighting ‘the gendered paths to incorporation into urban labour markets’, Manuela Martini raises complex questions about women’s emancipation or dependence and, more broadly, about the transformation of hierarchies within the migrant family.5 Familial relationships and family strategies are key elements in the six chapters of this section. Sociologists and anthropologists have shown that familial relationships cannot be seen as completely cut off from the economy. Households were enmeshed in a complex environment of social, economic and emotional interactions, which constituted the ‘domestic economy’ in the widest sense of the phrase. In European pre-industrial and industrial towns, this family economy was highly ‘adaptive’ and flexible, combining various kinds of activities and resources, often both formal and informal. Moreover, households were not homogeneous and static units, nor were they isolated from other social groups and networks; changes in their composition, conflicts, negotiation and cooperation within and beyond households influenced the range of economic opportunities open to their members.6 Building on a rich historiography on the topic, authors shed light, in different contexts, on the various patterns of transmission, on the changing balance between competition and cooperation within family life, or on the differential bargaining power of sex and generations within households. In fact, not only women’s social standing but also familial conventions and practices shaped their decision making and determined how proactive or passive they might have been. Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller demonstrates, for instance, that despite the patriarchal environment prevailing in late eighteenth-century Europe, women were at the core of the strategies developed by urban poor households to survive in everyday life. Their agency played a central part in the survival of individuals and families and implied an ability to navigate changing forms of aid and social protection while resorting to more or less formal money circuits such as microcredit. By providing detailed snapshots of specific localities but addressing transnational questions, these chapters aim at deconstructing the traditional opposition between northern and southern Europe in order to reveal the various ways in which men and women could become active agents in the urban economy. This section cannot and does not pretend to any geographic or thematic exhaustiveness. Nevertheless, taking into account, in different local and national contexts, the social construction of gender and the interactions between men and women in towns leads to new and more complex knowledge about patterns of transmission, labour or credit markets, family strategies or poor-relief systems. Market contractions or expansions throughout the early modern and modern periods, as well as the process of transition towards a liberal society and its effects on the constraints or opportunities for individuals from various social backgrounds to carve a niche in the urban world of exchange, are carefully explored and scrutinized. In an interactive dialogue with other disciplines, such as law history, economy, sociology or anthropology, the authors thus shed light on the symbiotic relationship between gender, 9

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town and the economy and contribute to a better understanding of European urban societies and cultures.

Notes 1 Martha C. Howell, Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010); Donatella Calabi and Stephen Turk Christensen, eds, Cities and Cultural Exchange in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); Alexander Cowan, Urban Europe, 1500–1700 (London: Arnold, 1998); Peter Borsay, ed., Eighteenth-century Town, 1688–1820 (London: Longman, 1990); Stephen R. Epstein, Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2 Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane, eds, On the Town:Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-century E ­ ngland (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); Marjatta Hietala and Lars Nilsson, eds, Women in Towns. The Social Position of Urban Women in a Historical Context (Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999). 3 For a recent overview of the literature on the topic, see Beatrice Craig, Women and Business since 1500. Invisible Presences in Europe and North America? (New York: Palgrave, 2016); Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach, eds, Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2013); Alexandra Shepard, ‘Crediting women in the early modern English economy,’ History Workshop Journal 79 (2015), 1–24. 4 Hannah Barker, ‘Women and work,’ in Women’s History: Britain, 1700–1850. An Introduction, ed. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (London: Routledge, 2010), 142. 5 For an overview of the ‘gender turn’ in migration studies, see Nancy L. Green, ‘Changing paradigms in migration studies: From men to women to gender,’ Gender & History 24, 3 (2012): 782–98. 6 Richard Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family: An illustration of the adaptive family economy,’ in The World We Have Gained: Histories of Population and Social Structure. Essays Presented to Peter Laslett, ed. Lloyd Bonfield et al. (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1986), 261–94; Laurence Fontaine and Jürgen Schlumbohm, ‘Household strategies for survival: An introduction,’ International Review of Social History 45 (2000): 1–17.

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1 Patterns of Transmission and Urban Experience When Gender Matters Anna Bellavitis Introduction In early modern Europe, patterns of transmission of properties and inheritance were based upon law, economy and relations between members of families. Of course, rules on transmission and inheritance do not only concern urban space. We can even say that they have mostly been studied and analysed for their consequences on land transmission and on relations between family systems and agriculture.1 However, the urban context raises some specific problems in relation to the gendered transmission of immovable goods, particularly if we consider that these could include the family house, that is, a building representing the identity and continuity of the lineage. It also raises specific issues to do with the transmission of workshops in a context in which a woman’s right to run a business was generally limited by the guild’s rules, and also by the job opportunities offered by urban economies. In western Europe, the transmission of goods, movable or immovable, was regulated and organised by different juridical systems, deriving essentially from two main traditions: Roman and Germanic laws.2 In recent decades, patterns of transmission relating to gender have been the object of much research, focusing on the rules and their enforcement as well as on the practices and the juridical devices that allowed the rules to be adapted to circumstances and economic situations. Research has been extended to a wider Mediterranean context, showing that in cities of the Ottoman Empire under Islamic law, like Cairo or Istanbul, women had sometimes more important property rights than in north-western Europe, regardless of their marital status.3 More generally, women’s rights must be situated and understood within specific contexts, and any changes in the employment market or in the urban economy can lead to a reconfiguration of women’s role and rights. The following pages will present some results of recent historical research on patterns of heritage and transmission of properties in different European cities from a gendered perspective and will give more detailed examples from specific research on Venice in early modern times.Venice was not only an aristocratic republic concerned with the well-being of its subjects, it was also a port, and, as has recently been stressed, women could play an important economic role in port towns, where, traditionally, men were often away and where it was necessary to allow women to stipulate contracts and to be heads of households during men’s absences.4 Medieval statutes of Venice, which gave women broader property rights than many other Italian urban statutes, were still enforced in early modern times, when the economic 11

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investments of the urban elites were much more often directed towards the land than towards the sea. As we shall see, the protection of women’s properties had then paradoxical consequences on the urban real-estate market.

Rules and spaces The juridical traditions influenced each other and were anything but static. They were adapted and modified at regional as well as at urban level. So, for example, in the French kingdom, customs in the city of Nantes were different from those in the city of Tours; and, in Flanders, customs in the city of Lille were different from those in the city of Douai.5 In the Italian states, almost every city had its statutes, which were adaptations of the ius commune to local situations and traditions. So, broadly speaking, the ‘urban experience’ of women and men in the transmission of goods changed according to places. In the Italian cities, the medieval statutes were the basis of the legislation on heritage and transmission – a highly ‘gendered’ matter. In Genoa, Bologna and many Tuscan cities like Florence, Pisa, Siena and Arezzo, daughters were excluded from inheriting their mothers’ dowries, which were reserved for sons or for male descendants. So, daughters only had the right to receive a dowry from their fathers, and in Arezzo, Pistoia and Florence women were also excluded from their grandmothers’ and great-grandmothers’ inheritance.6 The case of Venice is interesting from this point of view. According to the city’s statutes, a father’s movable goods were divided among his sons and daughters, but his immovable goods were divided only among his sons. On the contrary, a mother’s movable and immovable goods were divided equally among all her children. Inheritance was passed on to daughters and sons more evenly, and a widow’s right to the restitution of her dowry was better enforced in Venice than in many other Italian cities. There could be many reasons for this; from a juridical point of view, this was a consequence of the fact that Venetian statutes were influenced more by Roman law than by Germanic law, but, from a political point of view, the protection of women’s property rights was a way to preserve the rights of a woman’s lineage and to reduce potential tensions between the families of the political elite.7 As the Indian economist Bina Agarwal pointed out, women’s chances of inheriting immovable goods from their birth family tend to increase in social contexts in which the family does not fear the goods given to a daughter being ‘lost’.8 On a theoretical level, the immovable goods belonging to the father’s estate had to go to his male descendants, but when a widow reclaimed her dowry from her late husband’s family, she often received the immovable goods on which the dowry had been ensured by her husband and his family rather than the money, goods and trousseau that she had brought at the time of her marriage.9 A gloss to the city statutes specified that the immovable goods that could be given to widows or to their heirs (in the case of the restitution of a dowry by a living husband to the family of his deceased wife), were those ‘in which neither the husband nor the father-in-law are living’. The law authorised the transfer of immovable goods to widows but tried to avoid the transfer of a husband’s family home to his wife and to her family. In the eighteenth century, an interesting debate ensued between legislators on dowry matters about what constituted ‘movable’ or ‘immovable’ goods, arriving at the conclusion that houses in Venice’s city centre, in the middle of the lagoon, had to be considered ‘immovable’ whereas properties on the mainland – called terra ferma – had to be considered ‘movable’. This was so, contrary to all logic, because they could be transferred to women, whereas houses and lands inside the city were considered immovable because they pertained to the male descendants.10 In Flanders, too, in cities like Lille or Douai, some kinds of real estate could be considered movable.The gender of the transmission determined the very nature of the goods that could be transferred from one person to another, 12

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and this nature could change over time, following sometimes a particularly striking logic, as is the case with Venice. For the urban elites of Renaissance Italy, the identification of casa (house) with casata (­family) was reinforced by the ownership of the building and by the fact that several nuclear families from different generations lived under the same roof.11 Studies on Renaissance homes have pointed out that domestic spaces were organised very differently according to the gender of their occupants. In his treatise on the family, Leon Battista Alberti (1404–1472) suggested that wives were not provided with the key to the study, the supreme male space, while husbands never even set foot in the kitchen, where the ‘queen of the house’ reigned undisturbed. Among the elites, the paterfamilias organised his succession in order to preserve the house along the male line, as was the case with the Florentine Matteo Strozzi, who, in 1429, wrote in his last will: I wish the house where I live in Corso Strozzi be left to my sons and their descendants and that it never be sold or given up in any other way, except to my descendants along the male line, and if they fail, to the descendants of Filippo di Messer Lionardo, and if they fail, to the descendants of Messer Iachopo degli Strozzi.12 If these various male candidates were to be unavailable, Matteo Strozzi preferred to leave his house to the city’s two great convents of Santa Maria Novella and Santa Croce rather than allow it to be dispersed forever along the female line. The last will of the Venetian patrician Giacomo Corner was more favourable to women: he left the palace, which he had built and owned, in perpetuum (for ever) from his eldest son to the next one born from a legitimate marriage. Alternatively, ‘in the absence of male descendants’, it would be left to his brothers’ first-born son or to his sons’ daughters and, finally, to his daughters’ eldest son. Giacomo Corner’s daughters would be heirs in fourth position, after his brothers and after his granddaughters.13 The choice of binding the transmission of immovable goods according to a strict hierarchy and perpetually (usque ad infinitum was the evocative expression used by the will writers) was known as ‘entail’ and was widespread practice among the European nobility in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Entail, or, in its Italian version, fideicommisso, was also a strategy to protect the family’s assets from creditors, as capital, lands and buildings included in a fideicommisso could not be used to pay debts. The only case in which a property under fideicommisso could be sold was when a widow reclaimed her dowry from her husband’s family. Most of the time, entails excluded women and privileged the line of descent of only one of the sons, generally the firstborn. However, recent research on the subject has shown that these juridical devices could have many different forms, and that, for example, an inheritance could also be kept undivided, and passed on not only to the firstborn, but to all the brothers together.14 Even women could choose to bind the transmission of their inheritance for future generations, even if the word fideicommisso was rarely used in their last wills. The one established in 1572 by the Venetian Angela dall’Olmo, widow of a grocer and wife of a merchant, was to be shared between her two sons, all the children she could have in the future and their legitimate descendants. If there were no legitimate ones, even natural children could inherit, but they could not make wills. If her children died without leaving any issue, her inheritance (in fact her dowry of 300 ducats) had to be shared between her sister and her brother, but if the brother wanted to contest her will, all her goods would go ‘to the poorest of my blood’.15 Rules could be more or less flexible, and the economic circumstances could permit a greater or smaller degree of freedom in choices that affected the destiny of the future generations, but in some cases laws and statutes simply did not take all circumstances and situations into consideration. So, for example, the study of the notary records from the city of Tours in France has shown 13

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that unmarried adult women in the eighteenth century could have an active role in the handling of their wealth. The fifteenth-century statute of the city, still in force during the eighteenth century, neither removed nor granted legal rights to unmarried, over-age girls; it simply did not take them into consideration, as if single women did not exist and all women passed from their father’s to their husband’s authority.16 In a similar way, but in another kind of transmission, a new rule by Venice’s silk guild of 1680 restricted access to weaving only to the masters’ wives and daughters, recognising that there was no law in this matter.17 The very fact that the guild’s officers had to specify that ‘no law’ existed raises the (completely rhetorical?) question whether women could do (almost) everything, as long as there was no specific prohibition against them. In other words, what does the ‘silence’ of the law mean?

Last wills and contracts Rules changed as laws were adapted to the evolution of economy and society. In some cases, the coexistence of different systems and rules gave individuals and families the opportunity to choose the most convenient ones at the time of a marriage. In marriage contracts in the French kingdom, individuals could decide to follow the customary law of the city or region where the marriage was celebrated or of the city of residence of the spouses or even the place in which the immovable goods mentioned in the marriage contract were located.18 The community of goods between spouses was typical of the customary systems of northern Europe, whereas in Italy the spouses’ properties remained separated, with wives keeping the property of their dowry but not its management during their marriage.19 The medieval customary law of the city of Lille established a marital ‘community of goods’ made up of all movable goods, chattels and property acquired during the marriage (except fiefs) but excluding immovable goods brought at the time of the marriage, which had to be returned to the spouses’ families upon their death. The sixteenth-century written custom limited the rights enjoyed by wives as joint owners of community goods and put this property under the sole control of their husbands. At the same time, custom redefined urban real estate as movable goods, enhancing the rights of the surviving spouse, whether male or female: ‘all houses and land rights in the city and échevinage of Lille are to be considered movable goods’.20 Martha Howell has very convincingly analysed these developments in the context of the more general evolution of the economy of Flemish cities like Douai. New practices and new rules on the inheritance of goods arose from the decline of the mercantile economy at the end of the Middle Ages and the need to preserve houses, workshops and, more generally, inheritance and wealth for future generations.21 The marriage contract was a means to protect the rights of a surviving spouse, particularly a widow.22 The stipulation of a contract could introduce a separation of properties. This was the case in early modern Leiden and was particularly important in London, where, according to common law, a married woman lost all rights on her property and, during the ‘coverture’, a husband could do whatever he wanted with it. The enforcement of marriage contracts was under the jurisdiction of the equity courts; so, in England, women could appeal to several courts to have their rights enforced.23 In the southern European dowry system, on the other hand, a marriage contract was necessary to define the amount of a woman’s dowry. In fact, there were some exceptions if we consider that in Norman customary law, spouses’ properties remained separate and that in the seventeenth century, there were examples of ‘male dowry’ in the Cyclades.24 Daughters and sons differed in relation to the time of receipt of their family’s inheritance. Daughters received their inheritance at the time of their marriage and would not receive a share of their father’s properties after his death. Once again, there were exceptions: in early modern Lisbon, married daughters would also receive a share of their father’s goods after 14

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his death.25 Dowries had a time frame, too, since a father needed to earn it and a working-class girl had to work to earn enough for her own dowry. In Renaissance Florence, a specific banking system had been organised: when a girl was born, her father put a sum aside in the Monte delle doti, which would earn interest until the day of the girl’s marriage.26 The fact that it was mandatory for a woman to bring a dowry leads to an interesting paradox. If we decide to apply to early modern Europe the categories used by anthropologists, we must conclude that the southern European marriage pattern was a groom-wealth system, in which brides ‘bought’ their grooms.27 In exchange, they received protection, economic support and respectability. As the Venetian writer Moderata Fonte wrote in the sixteenth century, a woman could not be ‘bought’ by a man, because ‘like gems, we are priceless’. Behind this nice image, there was a very tangible but paradoxical system of values. A woman who was ‘bought’ was a prostitute, but a wife who had brought a dowry to her husband could be ‘kept’ by him. The dowry was the price for honour:‘there would be no honour if they gave a dowry to us’, wrote Moderata Fonte.28 The dowry was essential to set up a family. It is not a coincidence that traditionally in Venice, the nuptial bed had to be brought by the bride. In Venetian mercantile families, the women’s dowries were listed in the capital of the commercial company formed by the male members of the family and called fraterna. The fraterna was the basis of the Venetian mercantile economy but it also was not an easily attainable goal, and the vagaries of life could compel a Venetian merchant to leave his business in the care of his wife. A Venetian widow would probably not be the head of a commercial company doing business in London and Alep, but she could be the head of a textile enterprise of some importance and take care of the education of her sons, who would inherit their father’s business.29 In a mercantile family, a young merchant was educated mostly at home by his father, uncles and brothers, but in the families of members of the professions or of Venetian bureaucrats, the mothers’ dowries could play an important role in paying for their sons’ education. In their last wills, the fathers of these groups left the responsibility for overseeing their sons’ education and their daughters’ marriages to their wives. Sons had to obey their mothers, who would ‘give orders concerning their education and choose the daughters-in-law’.30 In these social groups, a wife’s dowry raised the social and symbolic capital of the family, and the choice of a son-in-law was based on the criteria of status and honour. In 1568, Nicolò Carlo wrote in his last will: ‘with 1.500 ducats I could not marry my daughter’, and he was compelled to use the 500 ducats that the Procuratori di San Marco, one of the most important offices in the Republic of Venice, had given him for his daughter’s dowry in recognition of 36 years of good and faithful service as a secretary.31 Inheritance was not only made up by land, houses, objects and money but also by a cultural tradition embodied in books and libraries. These goods could also be bequeathed to daughters. In 1569, Nicolò Massa, the great anatomist, left his best books in Latin and in the vernacular to his daughter and heir; in 1578, Andrea Frizier, Great Chancellor of the Venetian Republic, shared his goods and offices equally between his son and daughter; Carlo had the ‘printed books and the paintings’ and Camilla ‘all the manuscripts and papers’ because, Frizier wrote in his last will, ‘I educated them together’.32 We need more research to investigate exactly what it meant to educate sons and daughters together in early modern Venice.

North versus South? The theoretical link of the dowry with the family’s inheritance has led to the erroneous conclusion that while in northern Europe girls, like boys, used to leave their family homes to go to work as servants and apprentices in other families to save money for marriage, in southern Europe, on the contrary, girls did not need to earn their living as they just expected to receive 15

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a dowry from their families.33 However, it is obvious that in all urban societies all over Europe, working-class girls had to earn their living. Girls earned their dowry by migrating to towns from the countryside and working as apprentices, as did ‘Corona, the daughter of the late Bastian from Bassano, aged 13 approx.’, who in 1591 hires herself out to work at the silk drapery factory, with ser Zuanne de Dorigo, ­German, for eight years, starting on the present day and if she misses one day she will make it up. He offers to teach her his profession, to pay for her living expenses, to give her lodgings and a salary of 16 ducats.34 In 1591, Cattarina, the daughter of Donna Margarita from Tolmezzo, at the approximate age of 14, hires herself out as a domestic servant with the magnifico signor Zuanne Maraveglia, for seven years starting from 1st September, and the master offers to give her for that period of time 25 ducats [and] Cattarina will do all that is proper for a good servant, in the city and in the countryside.35 In vibrant, cosmopolitan sixteenth-century Venice, even a patrician woman could find it profitable to engage in silk production and teach a young servant to weave, ‘which is the trade and activity of the magnifica Madonna Andriana Morosini’.36 Were the ‘salaries’ of servants or apprentices, paid at the end of the working period, enough for a marriage dowry? Probably they were not, judging from some examples of marriage contracts found in notary records. In 1574, Paola, the daughter of a carpenter, gave her husband a dowry of 50 ducats and he promised her the same sum as a ‘counter-dowry’.37 In 1583, a silk weaver from Bergamo received 96 ducats from his wife Angela from Murano as her dowry; he promised her a ‘counter-dowry’ of 108 ducats.38 In 1584, a ferryman received 100 ducats from his wife Jacoba as her dowry and promised a ‘counter-dowry’ of 20 ducats.39 In the same year, a man from Genoa received a dowry of 64 ducats from a girl from Verona and promised a counter-dowry of 16.40 The controdote (counter-dowry) was given by the groom in order to increase the value of the dowry, which would represent the sum received by the widow from her late husband’s heirs. In artisans’ families, the counter-dowry was very common. Its existence emphasises the reciprocity that characterised the economic relations between husband and wife in these social groups, and it is also evident in the last wills of men and women from Venice and from other Italian cities, such as Siena.41 In 1574, a man from Vicenza received 150 ducats as the dowry of Laura, his daughter-in-law. Fifty ducats were the salary she had earned as a servant in two houses: that of Giovanni Toniolo, who had paid 15 ducats; and that of the late Giacomo Bollani, who had paid 35 ducats. The rest came from her mother’s legacy and from a patrician woman of the Memmo family.42 This example shows very clearly that a dowry was a complex matter, and that the family’s inheritance was, in many cases, only part of it. In this case, two different legacies completed Laura’s savings. We do not know if Laura had worked for madonna Memmo, or if her legacy was one of the numerous examples of the efficient urban charity system that existed in order to help young women raise their dowry. Urban institutions played a significant role in the whole process of transmission, not only in determining the rules and having them enforced but also in providing economic support when the hypothetical process of transmission from one generation to another proved impossible or inadequate. This was the case with the numerous institutions that provided dowries to young women in early modern Italian cities, either as charity or as salaries 16

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paid to orphans or abandoned children sheltered by foundling hospitals or different kinds of conservatori della virtù.43 We can give the example of Lucia from the foundling hospital of Santa Maria dei battuti in Treviso, who gave a dowry of 120 ducats to Andrea, a carpenter from B ­ elluno: 97 ducats (70 in goods and 27 and a half in cash), for which a half came from the clarissimo messer Leonardo Capello quondam Bernardi and 22 ducats and a half from the hospital. Andrea promised 25 ducats as a ‘counter-dowry’. Lucia was an orphan, and her dowry was made up by the salaries she had earned working for Leonardo Capello and by the salaries she had earned working inside the foundling hospital.44 But orphans or abandoned girls were not the only ones who needed the help of charity to raise a dowry. Confraternities like the Venetian Scuole grandi had among their most important tasks that of helping their members to raise dowries for their daughters. Richer members made legacies and set up foundations provided with regular income for this purpose. So, for example, in 1577, Lucieta, the wife of a carpenter from the Venetian Arsenal, received 10 ducats; and Clara, the wife of a fisherman, received 25 ducats as contributions to their dowry from the Scuola grande della Misericordia.45 However, in most cases, people married without any dowry, and the only resources were represented by the daily work of both spouses. In these cases, however, not much documentary evidence has been left. The difference between northern and southern Europe, between customary law and Roman law, then, was not whether girls did or did not work before marriage, but that, in some social groups, if their work was not enough for a dowry, they also had to be part of a social network based on patron–client relationships. To be eligible for help, one had to prove one’s honesty and morality. Many young women left their birth family to work in other people’s houses and workshops, but some had the opportunity of inheriting their parents’ businesses. So, for example, the Venetian goldsmith Bernardino Gandini bequeathed his shop and tools to his wife and daughters, and he added that if a son were born, everything had to be equally shared between them.46 The master weaver Paulo da Legnago bequeathed his looms to his daughter’s children, a boy and two girls.47 Passing on the workshop to the widow of a master craftsman, even if with some restrictions, was generally authorised by guilds’ rules in all European cities. Where female guilds existed, as in the city of Rouen, in France, the workshop was passed on to the widower.48 The transfer from a master to his sons was an even more general rule, but that of the master craftsmanship and the workshop to the master’s daughters was less easy. In some cases, as in the guilds of Rennes and Nantes in France, masters’ daughters could succeed their fathers.49 This was also the case in some Venetian guilds, for example that of the sausage-sellers.50 After the law of 1754 that admitted women to the silk-weavers’ guild, masters’ daughters had the same privileges as sons and could ‘use the name’ and inherit the workshop.51 Women were allowed to follow the entire career from apprentice to master, enrol in the guild, open workshops and hire salaried workers. The medieval statutes of many guilds lead us to believe that this was the situation in the past, but it is certain that, even if there could be mistresses in the guild, women could not participate or vote in guild assemblies and of course they could not hold offices.52 The sole reason why merchants gave women the title of master craftsman was the need to lower production costs; the silk industry was ‘saved by women’ but they were still badly paid workers.53 They had little in common with the proud linen drapers or seamstresses in the female guilds of Rouen or Paris, with their female officers and judges, but it was still something.54 The paradox is that the new law acknowledged a situation that was already widespread, commonly known and accepted in the silk workshops: the presence of women at the loom.The previous laws authorised women ‘of the family’ to work with the master weavers, but the concept of ‘family’ was intended in a very broad sense, and in some parts of the city it was very common to have a silk weaver as a relative, no matter how distant.55 17

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Conclusions and questions for further research The urban economies of early modern Europe gave different opportunities to men and women. In a provocative and stimulating article published in 2005, Amy L. Erickson suggested a relationship between the development of English capitalism in the eighteenth century and the fact that married women, under the ‘common law’ system, lost all their properties.This allowed husbands to use, and to invest, much more capital than if they had had to save for their wives’ dowry, in case they had to claim it when widowed. At the same time, single women had considerable control of their properties.The outcome was that, in early modern London, husbands and single women represented an important stock of potential investors.56 However, Monica Chojnacka’s research demonstrated that even in early modern Venice, single women owned properties and stipulated notary deeds.57 Medieval statutes, still enforced during the early modern period, limited the access of women to immovable properties, but at the same time, because of the complex system of restitution of dowries, upper-class widows often received the repayment of their dowries in the form of urban properties. The outcome, as has been shown by Jean François Chauvard, was that, in the eighteenth century, when the real-estate market had considerably slowed down – mostly because of the spread of entail (fideicommisso) – immovable goods circulated mostly through women.58 This research, in an interactive dialogue with other disciplines such as law history, economy and anthropology, has highlighted the relationship between men and women in the context of the entire history of urban society.We must certainly abandon a Manichean opposition between northern and southern Europe, but the difficulty of comparing research among scholars from different regions, juridical cultures and historical traditions is a real challenge for present, and future, research.

Notes 1 See, for example, Gérard Bouchard, Joseph Goy and Anne-Lise Head-König, eds, Nécessités Économiques et Pratiques Juridiques: Problèmes de la Transmission des Exploitations Agricoles XVIIIe–XXe siècles. Actes de la Session C33 du XIe Congrès de l’Association Internationale d’Histoire Économique (Milan, 11–16 septembre 1994), Special issue of the Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Italie–Méditerranée, 110, 1998; and for an analysis of the complex system of property in the urban context, Olivier Faron and Étienne Hubert, eds, Le Sol et L’Immeuble. Les Formes Dissociées de Propriété Immobilière dans les Villes de France et d’Italie (XIIe–XIXe siècle). Actes de la Table Ronde de Lyon (14–15 mai 1993) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 1995). 2 Anna Bellavitis and Isabelle Chabot, eds, La Justice des Familles. Autour de la Transmission des Biens, des Savoirs et des Pouvoirs (Europe, Nouveau monde, XIIe–XIXe siècle) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2009); Anna Bellavitis, Laurence Croq and Monica Martinat, eds, Mobilité et Transmission dans les Sociétés de l’Europe Moderne (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). 3 Jutta Gisela Sperling and Shona Kelly Wray, eds, Across the Religious Divide. Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800) (New York & London: Routledge, 2010); Jutta Gisela Sperling, ‘Women’s property in the wider Mediterranean. Toward a trans-regional, trans-religion approach’ in Gender Difference in European Legal Cultures, ed. Karin Gottschalk (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag 2013), 139–151. 4 Douglas Catterall and Jodi Campbell, eds., Women in Port. Gendering Communities, Economics and Social Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800 (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2012). On the economic investments of Venetian women during the Middle Ages, see Linda Guzzetti, ‘Gli Investimenti delle Donne ­Veneziane nel Medioevo’, Archivio Veneto 3 (2012): 41–66. 5 Nancy Locklin, Women’s Work and Identity in Eighteenth-Century Brittany (Aldershot: Ashgate 2007); Célia Drouault, ‘Aller chez le Notaire: Un Moyen d’Expression pour les Femmes? L’exemple de Tours au XVIIIe Siècle’, Genre & Histoire 6 (2010): http://genrehistoire.revues.org/961; Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange. Property, Social Place, and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1550 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).

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Gender, Transmission and Urban Experience  6 Isabelle Chabot, ‘Richesse des femmes et parenté dans l’Italie de la Renaissance’, in La Famille, les Femmes et le Quotidien (XIVe–XVIIIe Siècle).Textes Offerts à Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ed. Isabelle Chabot, Jérôme Hayez and Didier Lett (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2006), 263–290; Simona Feci, Pesci Fuor d’Acqua. Donne a Roma in Età Moderna: Diritti e Patrimoni (Rome:Viella, 2004).   7 Anna Bellavitis, Identité, Mariage, Mobilité Sociale. Citoyennes et Citoyens à Venise au XVIe Siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2001); Anna Bellavitis, Famille, Genre, Transmission à Venise au XVIe Siècle (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008); Anna Bellavitis, ‘Women, family, and property in Early ­Modern Venice’, in Sperling and Kelly Wray, Across the Religious Divide, 175–190.   8 Bina Agarwal, A Field of One’s Own. Gender and Land Rights in South Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).   9 On the organisation of this circulation of immovable goods, see Jean-François Chauvard, La Circulation des Biens à Venise. Stratégies Patrimoniales et Marché Immobilier (1600–1750) (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2005). 10 Bellavitis, Famille; Bellavitis, ‘Women’. 11 Stanley Chojnacki, ‘Families in the Italian Cities: Institutions, Identities, Transitions,’ in Famiglie e Poteri in Italia tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna, ed. Anna Bellavitis and Isabelle Chabot (Rome: École Française de Rome, 2009), 33–50. 12 Cited in Anna Bellavitis and Isabelle Chabot, ‘People and Property in Florence and Venice’, in The Renaissance at Home: Art and Life in the Italian House 1400–1600, ed. Marta Ajmar and Flora Dennis (London:Victoria & Albert Museum publications, 2006), 76–85. 13 Ibid. 14 Fidéicommis. Procédés Juridiques et Pratiques Sociales (Italie–Europe, Bas Moyen Âge–XIXe siècle), Special Issue of the Mélanges de l’École Française de Rome, Italie-Méditerranée 124, 2 (2012), ed. Jean-François Chauvard, Anna Bellavitis and Paola Lanaro. 15 Archivio di Stato di Venezia (ASV), Notarile Testamenti (NT), busta (b.). 783, n. 959, 15 November 1572. 16 Drouault, ‘Aller chez le Notaire’. 17 Walter Panciera, ‘Emarginazione Femminile tra Politica Salariale e Modelli di Organizzazione del Lavoro nell’Industria Tessile Veneta nel XVIII Secolo,’ in La Donna nell’Economia, secc. XIII–XVIII, ed. Simonetta Cavaciocchi, Istituto internazionale di storia economica F. Datini di Prato (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1990), 585–596; Marcello Della Valentina, ‘The Silk Industry in Venice: Guilds and Labour Relations in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in At the Centre of the Old World. Trade and Manufacturing in Venice and the Venetian Mainland, 1400–1800, ed. Paola Lanaro (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2006), 109–142. 18 Élie Haddad, ‘Mariage, Coutumes et Échanges dans la Noblesse Française à l’Époque Moderne,’ in Construire les Liens de Famille dans l’Europe Moderne, ed. Anna Bellavitis, Laura Casella and Dorit Raines (Rouen: Presses Universitaires de Rouen et du Havre, 2013), 49–68. 19 Giulia Calvi and Isabelle Chabot, eds, Le Ricchezze delle Donne. Diritti Patrimoniali e Poteri Familiari in Italia (XIII–XIX secc.) (Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, 1998); Maria Ågren and Amy Louise Erickson, eds, The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain, 1400–1900, (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005); Cordelia Beattie and Matthew Frank Stevens, eds, Married Women and the Law in Premodern Western Europe (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013). 20 Howell, The Marriage Exchange, 208. 21 Ibid. 22 See the special issue on marriage contracts of the Annales de Démographie Historique 121, 1 (2011), ed. Gérard Béaur. 23 Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Generous Provisions or Legitimate Shares? Widows and the Transfer of Property in 17th-century Holland,’ The History of the Family 15, 1 (2010): 13–24; Maria Ågren, ‘For Better for Worse. Swedish Marriage and Property Law in a Comparative Perspective,’ in Bellavitis and Chabot, La Justice des Familles, 11–28; Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Common Law versus common practice:The use of marriage settlements in early modern England,’ The Economic History Review 43, 1 (1990): 21–39; Amy Louise Erickson, Women and Property in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1993). 24 Aglaia Kasdagli, ‘Custom and law in early modern Aegean Islands: The case of marriage payments,’ in Gottschalk, Gender Difference in European Legal Cultures, 127–137. 25 Jutta Gisela Sperling, ‘Marriage, kinship and property in Portuguese testaments (1649–1650)’, in ­Sperling and Kelly Wray, Across the Religious Divide, 158–174. 26 Julius Kirshner and Anthony Molho, ‘The dowry fund and the marriage market in early Quattrocento Florence’, The Journal of Modern History 50, 3 (1978): 403–438.

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Anna Bellavitis 27 Maurice Godelier, L’Énigme du Don (Paris: Fayard, 1996); Maurice Godelier, Métamorphoses de la Parenté (Paris: Fayard, 2004); Jack Goody, Famille et Mariage en Eurasie (Paris: PUF, 2000). 28 Moderata Fonte, Il Merito delle Donne ove Chiaramente si Scuopre quanto Siano elle Degne e piu Perfette de gli Uomini, ed. Adriana Chemello (Mirano: Eidos, 1988). 29 On enterprises run by widows in the Venetian State, see Edoardo Demo, ‘Donne Imprenditrici nella Terraferma Veneta della Prima Età Moderna (secoli XV–XVI),’ in Donne, Lavoro, Economia a Venezia e in Terraferma tra Medioevo ed Età Moderna, Special Issue of Archivio Veneto 3 (2012), ed. Anna Bellavitis and Linda Guzzetti, 85–95. 30 ASV, NT, b. 192, f° 164, n. 190, 12 October 1540, last will of the physician Valerio Superchio. 31 ASV, NT, b. 1249, I, n. 5, 1 September 1568. 32 ASV, NT, b. 196, n. 870, 28 July 1569; b. 1258, n. 19, 25 January 1578. 33 Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘Girl Power: The European Marriage Pattern and Labour Markets in the North Sea Region in the Late Medieval and Early Modern Period’, The Economic History Review 63, 1 (2010): 1–33; Beatrice Zucca Micheletto, ‘Reconsidering the southern European model: Dowry, women’s work and marriage patterns in pre-industrial urban Italy (Turin, second half of the 18th century),’ History of the Family, Special Issue Marriage Patterns, Household Formation and Economic Development, 16, 4 (2011): 345–370. 34 ASV, Giustizia Vecchia, Accordi garzoni, b. 113, reg. 154, 4 November 1591. 35 Ibid., 29 October 1591. 36 Ibid., b. 112, reg. 151, 15 March 1576. 37 ASV, Notarile Atti (from now on NA), b. 5745, f° 282, 11 May 1574. 38 Ibid., b. 480, f° 98, 27 July 1583. 39 Ibid., b. 481, f° 104v, 2 January 1584. 40 Ibid., b. 481, f° 163, 15 October 1584. 41 Bellavitis, Famille; Anna Bellavitis, ‘Family and society’, in A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797, ed. Eric Dursteler (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 319–352; Gianna Lumia, ‘Mariti e Mogli nei Testamenti Senesi di Età Moderna,’ in Calvi and Chabot, 43–63. 42 ASV, NA, b. 5745, f° 171, 12 March 1574. 43 Isabelle Chabot and Massimo Fornasari, L’Economia della Carità. Le Doti del Monte di Pietà di Bologna (Secoli XVI–XX) (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1997); Angela Groppi, I Conservatori della Virtù. Donne Recluse nella Roma dei Papi (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1994). 44 ASV, NA, b. 480, f° 95v, 14 July 1583. 45 Ibid., b. 10654, f° 3, 10 January 1577; f° 20, 23 January 1577. 46 Ibid., b. 782, n. 830, 5 March 1545. 47 Ibid., b. 783, n. 1037, 23 October 1557. 48 Daryl Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007). 49 Elisabeth Musgrave, ‘Women and the craft guilds in eighteenth-century Nantes’, in The Artisan and The European Town, 1500–1900, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot: Ashgate 1997), 151–171; Locklin, Women’s Work and Identity. 50 ASV, Compilazione Leggi, Prima serie, b. 58, f° 526, 20 August 1577. 51 Ibid., b. 57, f° 12v. 52 Roberto Greci, ‘Donne e Corporazioni: La Fluidità di un Rapporto’, in Il Lavoro delle Donne. Storia delle Donne in Italia, ed. Angela Groppi (Rome–Bari: Laterza, 1996), 71–91; Simone Rauch, ed., Le Mariegole delle Arti dei Tessitori di Seta. I Veluderi (1347–1474) e i Samitari (1370–1475) (Venezia: Il Comitato per la pubblicazione delle fonti relative alla storia di Venezia, 2009). See also Deborah Simonton’s chapter in this volume. 53 Marcello Della Valentina, ‘Il Setificio Salvato dalle Donne. Le Tessitrici Veneziane nel Settecento’, in Spazi, Poteri, Diritti delle Donne a Venezia in Età Moderna, ed. Anna Bellavitis, Nadia M. Filippini and Tiziana Plebani (Verona: QuiEdit, 2012), 321–335. 54 Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women. The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001); Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France. 55 Della Valentina, ‘The silk industry,’ 127. 56 Amy Louise Erickson, ‘Coverture and capitalism,’ History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 1–16. 57 Monica Chojnacka, Working Women of Early Modern Venice (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 42. 58 Chauvard, La Circulation des Biens à Venise.

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2 Women, Gender and ­Credit in Early Modern Western European Towns Cathryn Spence

Introduction A shortage of specie (cash money) in Europe in the early modern period meant that everyone relied on credit for everything, from day-to-day purchases to luxuries. Moreover, gender played, and still plays, a critical role in the world of credit, as a person’s economic credit was often seen to be an extension of his or her reputation, often referred to as creditworthiness or social credit. This was particularly important to women, who were considered less likely than men to have a specific occupation or trade. However, such types of credit also affected men, with recent studies challenging the assumption that men’s creditworthiness was determined solely by their economic standing. Instead, reputation affected the creditworthiness of both men and women. This chapter will explore the role of gender and credit in early modern European towns, considering not only who participated in the ‘culture of credit’ that existed in Europe but also how influences such as gender and social and occupational status affected early modern understandings of credit and credit networks. While this chapter will use the towns of Scotland between 1560 and 1640 as a focal point for its discussion, it will also employ a comparative consideration of understandings of, and attitudes towards, credit in this period in Britain and in north-western Europe more broadly. This is facilitated by the increasingly numerous and detailed debt records of this period, the existence of which stems in part from the requirement to keep track of debts in growing urban areas. Credit was a multifaceted concept, something that can be illustrated by considering the reasons why people entered into credit transactions. These reasons ranged from daily provisions to the rental of property and overseas investments. For example, between October 1635 and February 1637, Marion Nemo and Alexander Mitchell, Nemo’s husband and a baxter (baker), appeared before the Edinburgh burgh (town) court ten times, always as creditors. In some cases, Alexander was obviously the prime creditor; in other cases, Marion was.The first time, Euphame Moffett, a widow, owed the couple complete payment for loads of ale furnished by them to her half a year previously. The second time, Walter Baxter owed money for maill (rent) and a small amount of ale. Debts for meat, drink and lent silver furnished by them to others followed. The final time Marion and Alexander appeared in the records, in February 1637, they were owed money by a female servant who had ‘run and vented’ ale for them and by John ­Hadden, 21

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an indweller, who owed them money for maill.1 These brief interactions over the course of a period slightly longer than one year serve to illustrate both the diverse ways in which people engaged in networks of debt and credit in early modern Edinburgh, how frequently they might do so and what the litigation resulting from these networks can reveal about economic roles. Marion and Alexander are revealed as moneylenders, ale sellers and landlords, while the people with whom they contracted these debts acted as borrowers, tenants, purchasers of food and drink and a servant contracted to sell ale for them. Roles changed depending on the transaction at hand, and networks were forged between multiple people and reflected a variety of needs.

Networks of credit and creditworthiness The monetary value of the goods or service purchased, or the amount of money lent, represented only half of the credit relationship. The other half concerned an estimation of the creditworthiness of the individuals involved in the transaction, specifically, whether or not they could be trusted to make good on the debt into which they had entered. Numerous authors have explored this concept, including Craig Muldrew and Marjorie K. McIntosh for England and Elizabeth Ewan, Gordon Desbrisay and Karen Sander Thomson for Scotland.2 In the case of creditors, this creditworthiness referred to their ability to deliver goods or services of acceptable quality, or the ability to lend money of the amounts and for the lengths of time agreed upon. Debtors, meanwhile, had to be trusted to repay the money they had borrowed or to completely pay the price of the goods or services for which they still owed money. In this way, personal credit and trustworthiness were important components of the debt and credit process even if they were not always explicitly discussed or even alluded to in debt and credit transactions. As a result, the most extensive credit networks in terms of lengths of time, size of debts and complexity were often those forged between relatives, friends, neighbours and business associates – in short, those who were best able to assess both the economic and personal creditworthiness of an individual. Trust was thus implicit in these networks. In the example above, Marion and Alexander trusted that the widow to whom they had lent £26 would repay the sum. The various customers to whom Marion and Alexander had sold ale or provided lodging trusted that the couple from whom they purchased their ale would provide a quality product of the amount and price agreed upon. Finally, Marion and Alexander trusted that the servant to whom they had provided ale to sell would in turn pay them the money they were due as her employers. Similar expectations of trust were common to every credit relationship, and so every such relationship was subject to a series of evaluations as both creditor and debtor weighed whether the other person or persons in the relationship could be trusted. When such relationships broke down, creditors could – and did – pursue those who owed them in court, with the result that debtors were ordered by the court to repay their creditors.3 While men tended to engage in this litigation more often than did women, women nevertheless accounted for as great a proportion as one-third of litigants. It is easy to understand the important roles Marion, Alexander and their co-litigants performed for one another, even from a distance of several hundred years. Today’s world of bank loans, mortgages and credit cards is – at its most basic level – little removed from the extensive debt and credit networks that bound people together in early modern towns. However, in the early modern period, the importance of these networks was even more pronounced than similar networks are today, thanks both to a chronic shortage of currency (in the early modern period, there was never enough coin in circulation to meet all the demands placed upon it) and to the often intermittent ways in which people received cash.4 Merchandisers and producers often sold their goods on a deferred payment system. These same merchandisers and producers would, as a 22

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result, sometimes have to delay payments to their suppliers until they had settled their debts with their customers.5 Other members of the community, such as servants, were paid their wages only at certain times in the year, usually at Whitsunday on 15 May and Martinmas on 15 November. To make ends meet between these times, they might have to borrow money from others or purchase items with the promise of paying for them later. Conversely, these same people might find themselves with large amounts of money when they were paid, which they could then lend out to others at interest. Credit was therefore fundamental to early modern society, either as a straightforward loan of money or goods or in the form of a deferred payment for goods or services already procured. Credit allowed for the purchase of food, drink, clothing and other necessities for the home; the purchase of the supplies necessary to carry out endeavours related to waged work; and the purchase of other, more luxurious items. In short, the provision and extension of credit allowed for a greater range of flexibility in the market of goods and services than would have otherwise been possible had full payments for such items been demanded at the time they were provided. In the late medieval and early modern periods, all members of society, including women, engaged in networks of debt and credit. Over the past two decades, a growing number of ­studies have explored the role of women in debt and credit networks in north-western Europe. Initially, these studies were largely concerned with the numbers and percentages of women who appeared in debt litigation to establish that women were in fact present. More recently, historians have begun to use debt litigation to look closely at both the type of women engaging in debt and credit networks, as wives, widows or single women; and the reasons why these women participated. These explorations have allowed historians to assess the economic activities in which women engaged in their communities, both in terms of occupations as producers, sellers and providers of a variety of services and also as money lenders.Within these discussions are considerations of the gendered nature of debt and credit relationships. Merry Wiesner, in her study of women in the distributive trades of early modern Nuremberg, uses debts owed to the wives of craftsmen listed in inventories to argue for the important role of women in the provisioning of early modern towns and cities.6 Maryanne Kowaleski, in her work on late medieval Exeter, uses primarily debt cases, but also other court records, customs accounts and wills to determine the main types of work in which women in that town engaged, noting that women often worked as retailers, producers, moneylenders and servants.7 As interest in debt and credit networks expanded, this approach was further adopted and expanded. Key among these emerging studies was William Chester Jordan’s Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies and Craig Muldrew’s The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England.8 Jordan attempted to synthesize recent work exploring women’s roles in debt and credit networks, arguing that ‘there is something distinctive and significant about women’s roles in credit’.9 Muldrew, meanwhile, used debt litigation to argue that a ‘culture of credit’ existed in England in the early modern period whereby members of urban communities were bound together by credit networks. The goal in these networks was not solely profit; mutual benefit and honesty, trust and good reputation on the parts of both the debtor and the creditor were also key.10 Other historians picked up on this important phenomenon and began to use credit as a lens through which to view various aspects of medieval and early modern life. This included work, as identified by Gervase Rosser in his discussion of craft guilds and by Garthine Walker and Marjorie K. McIntosh in their discussions of women and work.11 Walker explored the ways in which ideas of ‘female honour’, which she deemed a form of social credit, extended beyond sexual conduct into perceptions of honesty and morality that affected a woman’s economic credit.12 McIntosh, meanwhile, argued that ‘women were heavily involved in the market economy outside of their homes’ as they ‘worked 23

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to generate their own income’.13 As a result, women’s economic and social credit was i­mportant. Not only did women need to procure the supplies for their employments, they also had to ensure they were truthful and fair in these dealings so that others would continue to engage in business with them. Thus, while McIntosh admits that maintaining a positive reputation was a concern for all women in the late medieval and early modern periods, she argues that it ‘was especially important for those engaged in income-generating activities’ and that ‘[t]heir ability to function within a working environment depended in large part upon their own social and economic credit’.14 This mirrored the situation of men, whose income was similarly dependent on their reputation in the community. McIntosh’s discussion of women and credit is also important because it highlights the roles of wives who worked with their husbands or on their own to generate income. Many credit studies have focused on widows or single women. This reflected the challenge associated with uncovering evidence regarding married women, whose activities in debt and credit networks were often hidden by their husbands as a result of the common-law doctrine of coverture, whereby women of England and other parts of north-western Europe officially lost their individual legal personas upon marriage.15 Studies that attempt to address in depth the role of wives and credit must therefore be pieced together carefully. Shennan Hutton uses court registers from fourteenth-century Ghent to illuminate the extensive economic roles played by women in that city as moneylenders, investors and practitioners of a number of trades, including dyeing and textiles.16 McIntosh, meanwhile, makes extensive use of equity court records, which were willing to hear cases involving married women without representation by their husbands, to draw out women’s roles in providing services, including renting out property, lending money and pawning goods and in making and selling goods, primarily ale.17 Alexandra Shepard used the university courts in Cambridge to argue that wives made ‘many varied contributions to a household’s commercial life’, many of which stemmed from ‘service businesses’ that provided others with food, drink and clothing and ‘only became their husbands’ concern when litigation was necessary’.18 Shepard’s further work, especially regarding the concept of ‘worth’, has been particularly valuable for highlighting and problematizing the intersection of monetary and social credit.19 Elsewhere, McIntosh has explored the role of women in moneylending on the periphery of London.20 Other historians have shown that many women, both widowed and never married, used the proceeds from their moneylending as their primary, or as a significant, source of income. Case studies detailing the lives of early modern women like Joyce Jeffries by Robert Tittler and Hester Pinney by Pam Sharpe, for England; and Janet Fockart by Margaret Sanderson, for Scotland, make clear that women could live very well off the proceeds of moneylending.21 Further, Amy M. Froide and Judith Spicksley have used wills and inventories from a variety of communities in early modern England to show that single women in these areas played extensive roles as moneylenders in credit networks. Froide notes that ‘after apparel and linen, the most common personal property listed in a Southampton singlewoman’s will was money, in the form of credit instruments.This money was rarely “ready” (or on hand), but rather was comprised of money on loan’.22 In all, between 42 and 45 per cent of single women’s wills assessed by Froide for Southampton, Bristol, Oxford and York listed the testator as having money out on loan at the time of her death.23 Similarly, Spicksley found single women lending out money that had been left to them in testamentary bequests.24 The larger percentage of debts measured in money, rather than in kind, in urban settings provided women with increased access to credit networks as compared to their more rural counterparts, who tended to be more restricted than men in their access to negotiable goods. Thus, credit was not only found in many different realms of life, but it also, as Claire Crowston argues, ‘provided a common currency for transferring capital from one domain 24

Women, Gender and Credit

to another’, especially with regard to considerations of favour, money, personal c­onnections and intellectual influence.25 These aspects of credit were subject to constant negotiation – even to the extent of a day-to-day basis – ranging from friendly to fierce, depending on one’s role within a credit network. The economic was thus, in this period, inextricable from the social, cultural or political. Nowhere were the intersections of these four factors – and a fifth, gender – more significant than within the creditworthiness, organisation and administration of the early modern mercantile family.Women’s contributions to the running of the mercantile family in the late medieval and early modern periods have been increasingly recognised in recent decades.26 Families who lived in towns and were involved in the import or export of goods often relied on the combined effort of the husband and wife. In this regard, women contributed in a variety of ways. At the outset of a marriage, they often provided their husbands with wealth, connections and status.27 Women who became the wives of merchants engaged in the import–export trades seem to have often come to the position almost hereditarily, in that the wives of merchants were often born to the position as the daughters of other merchants. Heide Wunder argues that ‘the daughters of merchants were prepared from a young age for their future field of work’ in early modern Germany, either in the homes of their parents or in the homes of other merchants. Merchant daughters would often be charged with keeping the books of their fathers’ businesses, a task they would later perform for their merchant husbands.28

Merchants, merchandisers and credit It is easy to imagine that the various duties and responsibilities, including the extension and procurement of credit, expected of the wife of a merchant would have kept these women very busy and to understand why the husbands of these women would have valued their involvement and trusted their wives to act for them in their merchant booths and while they were away. Barbara Hanawalt, writing about the roles of wives in late medieval London, states The custom of leaving the wife at home to manage affairs was strongly ingrained in London merchants and craftsmen. Many of these men…had business factors who routinely handled their trade, but often the best expedient was to put the wife in charge of matters in London.Wives had direct access to accounts and knew the general family business deals. They could also assume legal responsibility, if need be. To many men… trusting [their wives] to carry on the business was a matter of routine.29 One example of this type of relationship is that of Balthasar and Magdalena Paumgartner, a husband and wife who lived in Nuremburg in the late sixteenth century. Magdalena never accompanied her merchant husband, Balthasar, on his trips to Lucca and Frankfurt, yet she acted as his ‘virtual agent’ at home, informing relatives, friends and clients of the state of their orders and receiving, storing and distributing merchandise as it arrived.30 She also, when necessary, negotiated with clients and suppliers over payments for goods.31 This was also the case elsewhere in Europe, where, in the medieval and early modern periods, it was routinely assumed that merchant wives could act on their husbands’ behalves. As a result, because overseas merchants were frequently absent, their wives effectively worked jointly with their husbands, supervising business affairs and receiving payments and goods while their husbands were away.32 Scotland did not bestow the femme sole designation used in London and other English communities to denote married women who had received special permission to trade under their own names rather than under the cover of their husbands.33 However, a wife could be praepositura negotiis mariti for her husband, as Katherine Fotheringham was to her husband Walter Rankin, a ­mariner, 25

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d­ uring his absence from the realm, when she appeared in front of the Dundee burgh court on 4 February 1600. This meant she had the authority to act in the place of her husband. In this case, David Thomson, a mariner, was ordered to pay Katherine 10 merks in her capacity as wife and stand-in for Walter, thanks to an obligation negotiated between David and Walter.34 While such a designation was temporary in relation to her husband’s absence, it likely resulted in permanent progress in regard to her agency, as she navigated transactions and increased her visibility in their family’s credit networks. The roles of women who acted as merchants were complemented by the roles of a much greater number of women who acted as merchandisers. Women merchants imported a variety of goods, including cloth, wine and merchandise, while women merchandisers sold such items through booths and stalls and in the streets. Women who acted as merchants with their husbands were often charged with selling the items their husbands had imported, and they must have sometimes carried out this task from a merchant booth. Women who acted as merchandisers came from a much broader spectrum of society, typically (though not always) being of lower status than those women who acted as merchants, and this was reflected in what they sold and where they sold it. Wealthy wives and widows of merchant burgesses, for example, typically sold from booths and shops, while never-married women and servants tended to sell from a stall or in the street. It was rare for a married woman to sell outside a booth. When Jean White of Haddington, Scotland died in 1636, the task of preparing her inventory fell to her husband, Robert Leirmonth. Robert noted that in ‘their’ merchant booth was held a variety of types and amounts of cloth worth £64, two large iron pots worth just over £6 each and three small pots worth 40s each, ten pounds of pepper worth £9, five pounds of ginger worth £3, 20 stone of iron worth £30 and certain unspecified but ‘small’ wares, all of which were valued to just over £20. Altogether, the inventory of the merchant booth was valued to just under £150. A further £1800, £600 of which had been paid since Jean’s death, was owed to merchants in Edinburgh for merchandise.35 Taken altogether, it seems obvious that Jean had run a merchant booth in Haddington prior to her death and perhaps, given the use of the word ‘their’ to describe the booth, in concert with her husband. Further, it is apparent that Jean oversaw a merchant booth similar to a modern-day general store or market, from which customers could purchase a variety of items. Undoubtedly, she used credit to purchase the items she sold in her booth, given the debt of £1800 – a significant sum – that was owed to Edinburgh merchants upon her death. Many women like Jean, and particularly those who were the wives and widows of merchant burgesses, owned or rented shops in which they stored, and from which they sold, a variety of items. In this, they acted in a similar way to women who lived in early modern England. ­McIntosh has uncovered evidence indicating that many women, and especially widows, were responsible for operating shops of ‘middling size’ in England in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. There, the most fortunate women merchandisers and, by extension, those of higher social status operated from an indoor shop. These shops ‘commonly offered a diverse array of goods whose total value rarely exceeded a few hundred pounds, with individual sales of not more than a few dozen pounds.’36 This was still a significant sum, as the average labourer would not have earned more than a few shillings a day. In Scotland, most women who are identified in their testaments as the owners of items that were held in merchant booths were the wives or widows of merchant burgesses, and so relatively high up the social ladder. Isabel Denholme and Isabel Forbrand were, respectively, the wife and the widow of two burgesses, one a merchant burgess and the other an armourer burgess, who had booths in Edinburgh in the 1630s. Isabel Denholme’s booth contained various amounts and types of cloth, the total value of which was just over £600.37 Isabel Forbrand, meanwhile, had in her merchant booth a variety of 26

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cloth, clothing, thread, paper, spices and candy, all in small amounts. The inventory of her booth was valued at just over £200.38 Most women who ran merchant booths sold a wide variety of merchandise, including ready-made clothing, gloves and trimmings, cooking and eating utensils, household wares, barrels of tar and oil, spices, sweetmeats and dried fruits, a practice that continued throughout the early modern period. Other women sold their wares not from booths or shops but from stalls. Often identified as ‘cramers’ in debt litigation, these women purchased relatively significant amounts of merchant and ‘cramery’ wares from merchant burgesses on credit and then resold these items, likely from stalls. Usually, these women were identified in debt litigation by their first and last names and by the occupational designation of ‘cramer’.This classification, derived from the German kramer, denoting a retailer who sold a variety of small wares, seems in the debt litigation for Edinburgh to have come to refer to women who sold goods from a stall or stand and were thus different from hucksters and regrators, who often sold on commission for others and did not have stalls.39 In her work on early modern Germany, Merry Wiesner has uncovered evidence of a similar type of female merchandiser – whom she describes as ‘not simply peddlers or hawkers, nor were they true shopkeepers, for they sold from a small booth or stand’ – although she describes the items sold by these types of women as ‘used merchandise’, which had either been bought from citizens who needed money in a form of pawnbroking, or after the death of a householder when the household was being broken up.40 Although operating on a social scale far below that of wealthy merchants or traders, these merchandisers were no doubt as dependent on credit networks as were merchants or traders. Indeed, their dependency may have been greater given the precarious line between financial success and failure that these merchandisers navigated. Although there is no evidence to indicate that cramers in Scotland functioned in a way similar to their contemporaries in Germany, evidence does exist in the burgh court records of Edinburgh for cramers engaging in credit networks by purchasing merchandise from Scottish merchants, presumably for resale. In the majority of cases, these women purchased their wares from male merchants or from male merchants and their wives. Because the women named as cramers in the Edinburgh debt litigation tended to appear alone and were only identified as cramers and not as wives, widows, or some other designation, little evidence of their marital or social status can be deduced. However, the ability of these women to engage in credit networks with male merchants of quite high social status when purchasing their wares indicates that they were able to procure sufficient credit, perhaps as a result of a favourable reputation, and that they were of sufficient status to engage directly with these men. Further, the place from which they sold their items – the street – and the fact that they were selling their items to both men and women shows the freedom with which they were able to operate and the social acceptability of women, as well as men, doing so. Debts accrued by women identified as cramers could be quite large, as in the case of Margaret Aikman, who was found to owe £76 2s to Alexander Reid, a merchant, on ­ 27 August 1622.41 Other cramers owed smaller amounts of money to multiple merchants who provided them with their wares. Mausie McNacht owed money to no less than nine Edinburgh merchants over the course of a two and a half year period.42 The debts owed by Mausie to the merchants ranged from £3 2s to £27, suggesting that she may have overseen a thriving business. The position of cramer also seems to have been a growing economic pursuit for women in Edinburgh over the course of the seventeenth century. No women identified as cramers appeared in the burgh court records before 1611, although one woman, Janet Craik, was identified as a cramer in her testament, proved in 1592.43 The inventory of her possessions, which listed items held in her merchant booth and included lengths of cloth, socks, thread, reams of paper, pieces of parchment and door and window nails, was valued at 27

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£129 111s 8d.44 Janet also employed a servant, to whom she owed 40s for the woman’s annual fee. That Janet’s wealth was relatively substantial is further illustrated by the bequests in her latter will and legacy. She left bequests of money ranging from 40s to £40 to seven people, plus 40s ‘to the women that kept her’ and bequests of clothing, household goods and a New Testament and Psalm book to a further six people. Finally, she left the surplus of her ‘gear’ to ‘the poor households at the discretion of her executors’.45

Servants and credit Evidence concerning access to credit for Scotland, therefore, points to a range of social classes, from the members of merchant families to single female cramers who purchased items from merchants on credit and sold them to others, also on credit. In the early modern period, credit was accessible to nearly everyone who was a member of the community. Only outsiders, strangers and those whose reputations had been compromised did not have access to credit. As Craig Muldrew argues, ‘in contrast to prevailing notions of paternalism, deference and patriarchy, the practice of litigation reflected the equality expounded in contemporary social theories of bargaining and market exchange’.46 An example of credit relationships that contrasted accepted notions of paternalism and deference can be found in credit transactions involving female servants in early modern Edinburgh. There, women identified as servants enjoyed a steadily increasing role in debt and credit networks over the course of the seventeenth century. Moreover, the majority of servants who acted in these cases did so as creditors, with 1285 servants appearing as creditors and 491 as debtors between 1590 and 1640. The reasons for which servants acted as creditors in debt litigation fell into four main categories: debts for drink, debts for money, debts for fie and debts for cloth. Servants also appeared as creditors in the sale of meat and bread; and other items, including merchandise and tobacco.47 Servants were primarily involved in debts for money lent by them to others, for drink they had sold and for money and items owed to them by their employers as part of their fie (fee) and bounteth (bounty, or bonus). The role of servants in the sale of drink tended to follow a specific practice. The servant would purchase a large amount of drink from her employer and then sell it, in smaller measures, to others. The servant was responsible for ensuring that her customers paid up, because she would then have to repay her employer for the cost of the drink that had been provided to her. This practice of purchasing large amounts of drink and selling it on to others in smaller amounts was even identified under a specific term in the records. Specifically, these debts were accrued by the servants for the ‘running and venting’ of wine, beer and ale, a branch of service that seems to have been performed particularly by female servants, both in Scotland and elsewhere.Very few debt cases have been found where a male servant owed money to his master for the running and venting of ale; male servants – who were much less active or much less numerous than female servants – tended to owe money for lent money. Indeed, for much of the medieval and early modern periods, and until the professionalization of the drink trade, women were responsible for the production and sale of ale and beer, as these were both time-consuming and episodically produced and so fitted around a woman’s other responsibilities. Once ale and beer began to be produced in larger quantities, women still tended to act as its sellers at the local levels. Often, the women who were contracted to sell drink to others were already servants, as they were explicitly identified as such in the records. Some servants who sold drink were identified as a servant of a third person and not the servant of the employer for whom they were selling wine. Such arrangements indicate not only that some servants engaged in the selling of drink as a by-employment, above and beyond their duties as servant, but also 28

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the lack of concern over young, unmarried women selling alcohol and the acceptability of them handling large sums of money. This evidence is in line with that uncovered by P.J.P. Goldberg for fourteenth-century York and Yorkshire, where female servants were particularly engaged in the victualing trades and particularly with houses associated with inns and hostelries, where they acted as ‘tapsters’.48 Female servants selling ale have also been uncovered by Helen Dingwall in the 1690 Poll Tax for Edinburgh. She notes that ale sellers ‘appeared infrequently on the Poll Tax, but it is obvious from those who appeared in this category that this was an occupation undertaken by poorer people, often women, who worked as domestic servants and sold ale as a sideline’.49 Like other, more conventional service contracts, servants who sold drink for their employers received a fie and bounteth for their efforts. It is not clear whether or not servants kept part of the proceeds from drink they had sold for themselves, but debts owed by servants to their employers for drink they had sold in their service could amount to hundreds of pounds. The largest debt owed by a servant to her employer for this reason was £813 for Spanish wine sold by Margaret Barrie, who acted as servant and taverner to Katherine Horne, the widow of a goldsmith, in 1595.50 The second most common reason for a servant to appear as a creditor in debt cases was for amounts of money lent by the servant to another. The amounts lent by servants ranged widely. In Edinburgh, these amounts varied from 30s to over £100. On 12 March 1629,William ­Ferguson, a servant, was determined by the Edinburgh town court to owe Janet Kilgour, another servant, £104. Most amounts of money lent by servants to others, however, were for £50 and below, but these were still significant amounts considering that a servant’s yearly fie tended to be only a few pounds. Servants in Edinburgh also lent money to people of all ages and classes: other servants, craftsmen, merchant burgesses and their wives and widows. Servants even lent to their own employers. Sometimes, such loans would not be repaid until the servant left service and had taken the employer to court over the lent money and final payment of her fie and bounteth. That servants could, and did, take their employers (or former employers) to court speaks to the accessibility of legal procedure to all members of the burgh. The involvement of women and servants in these types of by-employments has been noted in several studies, and it is generally accepted to have been a common activity among women throughout Europe, in Scandinavia, Germany, England and elsewhere in the early modern period, at least on a small scale.51 Merry Wiesner has suggested that German servants might have invested their savings52 in small loans and that in German cities, they also had the opportunity of putting their money in a more risky investment, the city lottery.53 Cissie Fairchilds has commented on the role of French servants in moneylending. She argues that engaging in moneylending and learning to navigate networks of debt and credit effectively were life skills that were just as important as domestic skills.54 By lending money, purchasing large amounts of drink for resale or purchasing household supplies for their employers, servants gained experience in managing money and credit.55 These skills would stand them in good stead when they set up their own households. Female servants, therefore, played significant roles as creditors in debt litigation, and their roles as creditors were, for the most part, not linked to their status as servants.

Conclusion This chapter has discussed the trust implicit and explicit in early modern credit networks and how roles in these credit networks were realised across economic and social statuses. However, women’s engagement in debt and credit networks far exceeded these few examples. There are also examples in debt litigation of women performing a wide variety of activities, such as h ­ iring apprentices, engaging in book selling and brewing ale. Notably, regardless of their economic roles, 29

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women are found to be selling to and buying from people of all socio-economic statuses. Money was owed from employer to servant, and from merchant burgess to stallholder. Married women often acted with their husbands, but it was equally common to find women acting on their own. In urban settings, in particular, women had numerous avenues to enter credit networks. In this respect, their access to credit was similar to that of men.The predominant reasons for entering credit relationships – including rent, food and merchandise – were accessible regardless of gender. While men dominated the higher end of the mercantile spectrum, women were prolific in conducting business in similar goods in smaller quantities. In rural areas, women were still active participants but represented a smaller percentage of actors. The demand for some services that were frequently provided by women in towns, such as renting rooms and provisioning food, were less common in rural areas. Further, more debts tended to be measured in kind rather than in money, which disadvantaged women who, on average, were less likely to produce these goods. It should be noted, however, that small debts often left no record because they were settled informally. This makes the frequency of small credit transactions, and the importance of these transactions for the lower classes, very difficult to uncover. Still, as an increasing number of studies examine both traditional and alternative sources for economic history, we are finding that women in early modern Europe had far more economic agency than was previously supposed. This is particularly evident in urban environments, where women had greater opportunity to participate in varied economic endeavours.

Notes   1 Edinburgh City Archives, SL234/1/16: 13 October 1635; 20 October 1635; 31 December 1635; 7 June 1636; 30 August 1636; 3 September 1636; 13 October 1636; 22 October 1636; 31 January 1637; 4 February 1637.  2 Elizabeth Ewan, ‘“For Whatever Ales Ye”: Women as Consumers and Producers in Late Medieval ­Scottish Towns’ in Women in Scotland, c.1100–c.1750, eds Elizabeth Ewan and Maureen Meikle (Edinburgh: Tuckwell Press, 1999), 127; Marjorie K. McIntosh, Working Women in English Society, 1300– 1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 120; Craig Muldrew, ‘“A Mutual Assent of Her Mind”? Women, debt, litigation and contract in early modern England,’ History Workshop Journal 55 (2003): 53; Gordon Desbrisay and Karen Sander Thomson, ‘Crediting Wives: Married Women and Debt Litigation in the Seventeenth Century’ in Finding the Family in Medieval and Early Modern Scotland, eds Elizabeth Ewan and Janay Nugent (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 85.   3 In extreme cases, letters of horning authorized a charge in the name of the king to make payment of the debt, and failure was construed as civil rebellion, authorizing imprisonment. George Joseph Bell, Commentaries on the Laws of Scotland and the Principles of Mercantile Jurisprudence,Vol. 2 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1870), 433.   4 See Marjorie K. McIntosh, A Community Transformed? The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 158; Craig Muldrew, ‘ “Hard Food for Midas”: Cash and its Social Value in Early Modern England,’ Past & Present 17 (2001): 83–4.  5 Merry Wiesner-Wood, ‘Paltry peddlers or essential merchants? Women in the distributive trades of early modern Nuremberg,’ The Sixteenth Century Journal 12, 2 (1981): 3–4; Craig Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the Market: The Ethics of Credit and Community Relations in Early Modern England,’ Social History 18, 2 (1993): 169, 171; Muldrew, ‘“A Mutual Assent of Her Mind”?,’ 57.   6 Wiesner-Wood, ‘Paltry peddlers,’ 3–4. See also Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter 6, and Muldrew, ‘“A Mutual Assent of Her Mind”?,’ 49–52.   7 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Women and work in a market town: Exeter in the late fourteenth century,’ in Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, ed. Barbara Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 147–8.   8 William Chester Jordan, Women and Credit in Pre-Industrial and Developing Societies (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993); Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation:The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998).

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Women, Gender and Credit   9 Chester Jordan, Women and Credit, 1. 10 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, esp. Chapters 5–7. 11 Gervase Rosser, ‘Craft, guilds, and the negotiation of work in the medieval town,’ Past & Present 154 (1997): 6. 12 Garthine Walker, ‘Expanding the boundaries of female honour in early modern England,’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6th ser., 6 (1996): 237. 13 McIntosh, Working Women, 4. 14 Ibid., 11. 15 Ibid., 34; Amy Erickson, ‘Coverture and capitalism,’ History Workshop Journal 59 (Spring 2005): 1–16; Desbrisay and Sander Thomson, 86; Claire Crowston, Credit, Fashion, and Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 284–5. 16 Shennan Hutton, Women and Economic Activities in Late Medieval Ghent (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011); Shennan Hutton, ‘“On Herself and All her Property’”, Continuity & Change 20, 3 (2005): 325–49. 17 McIntosh, Working Women, Chapters 5–8. 18 Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England, c. 1580–1640,’ Past & Present 167 (2000): 91. 19 Alexandra Shepard, ‘Crediting women in the early modern English economy,’ History Workshop Journal 79, 1 (2015): 1–24. 20 Marjorie K. McIntosh,‘Money lending on the periphery of London, 1300–1600,’ Albion 20, 4 (1988): 562. 21 Robert Tittler, ‘Money-lending in the West Midlands:The activities of Joyce Jeffries, 1638–49,’ Historical Research 67 (1994): 249–63; Pamela Sharpe, ‘A woman’s worth: A case study of capital accumulation in early modern England,’ Parergon 19, 1 (2002): 173–84; Margaret Sanderson,‘Janet Fockart, merchant and moneylender,’ Mary Stewart’s People: Life in Mary Stewart’s Scotland (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 91–102. 22 Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 129. 23 Ibid., 130. 24 Judith Spicksley, ‘“Fly with a Duck in thy Mouth”: Single women as sources of credit in seventeenthcentury England,’ Social History 32, 2 (2007): 187–207; Judith Spicksley, ‘Usury legislation, cash, and credit: The development of the female investor in the late Tudor and Stuart periods,’ Economic History Review 61, 2 (2008): 277–301. Spicksley further expounds on these ideas in ‘Women, “usury” and credit in early modern England: The case of the maiden investor,’ Gender & History 27, 2 (2015): 263–92. 25 Crowston, Fashion, Credit, and Sex, 22. 26 See Martha C. Howell, The Marriage Exchange: Property, Social Place and Gender in Cities of the Low Countries, 1300–1500 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); P.J.P. Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy:Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘The benefits and drawbacks of femme sole status in England, 1300–1630,’ Journal of British Studies 44:3 (2005); Barbara Hanawalt, The Wealth of Wives:Women, Law, and Economy in Late Medieval London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Elizabeth Ewan, ‘Mons Meg and Merchant Meg: Women in later medieval Edinburgh’ in Freedom and Authority: Scotland c. 1050–c. 1650, eds. Terry Brotherstone and David Ditchburn (East Linton, 2000). 27 Hanawalt, Wealth of Wives, 70, 114; Kowaleski, ‘Women and work,’ 147. 28 Heide Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 89–90. 29 Hanawalt, Wealth of Wives, 122–3. 30 Steven Osment, ed., Magdalena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in 16th Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremburg Husband and Wife (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1989), 17. 31 Ibid., 71–2, 152. 32 Ewan, ‘Mons Meg and Merchant Meg,’ 134; Crowston, Credit, Fashion, and Sex, 291. 33 For a discussion of what it meant to be a femme sole, see McIntosh, ‘The benefits and drawbacks’. 34 DCA, Burgh and Head Court Books,Vol. 21. 35 National Records of Scotland, CC8/8/58/146. 36 McIntosh, Working Women, 126. 37 NRS, CC8/8/59/265-6. 38 NRS, CC8/8/57/449. 39 Kowaleski and McIntosh discuss medieval and early modern English women described as ‘hucksters’ and ‘regrators’: Kowaleski, ‘Women and work,’ 147–8; McIntosh, Working Women, 130–2. These women

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Cathryn Spence seem to have been of lower status than ‘cramers’ in Scotland, as Scottish cramers often appeared as debtors for large amounts of merchandise. 40 Wiesner, Working Women, 134. 41 ECA, SL234/1/10. 42 See ECA, SL234/10/12: 30 August 1630, 27 November 1630, 2 December 1630, 26 February 1631 (two debts by Mausie to two different merchants were recorded on this day), 12 May 1631, 18 June 1631, 15 December 1632, 5 February 1633. 43 NRS, CC8/8/24. 44 NRS, CC8/8/24/148–9. 45 NRS, CC8/8/24/149. 46 Craig Muldrew, ‘The culture of reconciliation: Community and the settlement of economic disputes in early modern England,’ Historical Journal 39 (1996): 941; Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 253, 271. 47 NAS, B22/8/4–31; ECA, SL234/1/4–12, 14, 16; ECA, Register of Diets, 1606–1622. 48 Goldberg, Women,Work, and Life Cycle, 187–190. 49 Helen Dingwall, Late Seventeenth-Century Edinburgh: A Demographic Study (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1994), 150, 202. 50 NRS, B22/8/6, 234v–235r. 51 Chester Jordan, Women and Credit, 19–20, 32–3. See also McIntosh, A Community Transformed?, 63; Deborah Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 1998), 105. 52 See Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller’s chapter in this volume. 53 Merry Wiesner,‘Having her own smoke: Employment and independence for singlewomen in ­Germany, 1400–1750,’ in Singlewomen in the European Past, 1250–1800, ed. Judith M. Bennett and Amy M. Froide (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 202. 54 Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 78–9. 55 Ibid.; Merry Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers ­University Press, 1986), 91–2; Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Servants and the household unit in an Elizabethan English community,’ Journal of Family History 9, 1 (1984): 12, 18.

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3 Toleration, Liberty and Privileges Gender and Commerce in Eighteenth-Century European Towns Deborah Simonton

Introduction On 15 August 1754, Kingston-upon-Thames fined Thomas Worthington £20 to be ‘tolerated’ as a grocer. On the same day, Elizabeth Duke was fined £20 to operate as a linen draper. These were lucrative trades, hence the £20 fine.1 In Aberdeen on 30 May 1717, tailors granted Rachel Baxter ‘liberty’ for mantuamaking only, requiring guild fees and an extra sum for ‘banqueting money’.2 In La Rochelle, in 1760, Helene Poupelin from St Jean d’Angely applied to open a marchande de modes boutique. Despite having run the shop ‘illegally’ for a year, she was granted the privilege because ‘we have no rules to prevent her’.3 In 1781, the Gritti brothers and Zacharias Sütt set up pastry shops in Vienna and gained the privilege to trade as long as they did not sell Viennese pastries but ‘all kinds of baked goods in the French and Italian style’.4 In 1784, a Spanish royal order undercut calico guilds, declaring that ‘all women could freely sell the products that they themselves made, even if these were the privilege of a guild’.5 In these examples and many others in towns across eighteenth-century Europe, men and women gained privileges or liberty to trade or were tolerated despite not being guild members or having served an apprenticeship. Guilds are usually seen as the epitome of economic regulation and organization in earlymodern European towns. As guilds were corporations closely tied to the nominal male life cycle, historians of women have tended to be chary of them and have identified guilds as a key mechanism for restricting women’s access to honourable trades generally associated with skill – male skill. Clearly, guilds did not constitute an immutable universe, as their regulations and historiography suggest, but were more flexible than previously asserted. Many developed complex relationships with the ambiguous world of ‘non-guild’ workers. At the same time, a range of pressures challenged guilds. Undoubtedly there were shifts in how they operated, who they could maintain control over and the effectiveness of these essentially mercantilist organisations. Many skirmishes were about gender: ‘outsider’ men encroaching on the privileges of guildsmen and women impinging on the worlds of men. Clare Crowston underlined the fact that ‘gender in the guilds remains largely a non-issue for historians of the corporate system’.6 However, as the cases above show, the story of guilds is neither a simple account of exclusion nor inevitably 33

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about women. It is a story that is fundamental to the urban world of eighteenth-century Europe where permission to trade could depend on gaining tolerations, earning the liberty of the trade and using the privileges associated with it. It is also a political story, since guilds were intrinsically linked to the political organization and management of many urban communities.7

The guild system There is a renewed debate on the role and impact of guilds on the economic growth of towns. Some historians see them as a dampening force on innovation and change, while others argue that their institutional structure was ‘a vital ingredient in preparing [Western Europe] for its exceptional economic head start’.8 Yet, as Bert De Munck suggests, Most scholars now agree that guilds were not monopolistic [but]…conducive to economic growth. On the labour market, restricting the group of employers eligible to use skilled labour…encouraged masters to invest in training and promoted the formation of human capital. On the product market, standardizing products, guaranteeing product quality, and applying trademarks enabled masters to respond to price competition with niche products and high quality.9 Thus, Jan Lucassen suggests that the question is no longer whether guilds were important or unimportant, backward or innovative, but rather in what circumstances they could play such a role and in what conditions those involved could reap benefits of membership.10 This point is especially pertinent to issues of gender. Women’s access to recognised skilled work was customarily limited or prevented altogether. Men also were subject to restrictions, but simply being male and identified as ‘workers’ meant that their exclusions and inclusions often were of a different character. Prime among these was whether or not they had completed an apprenticeship, qualifying them for guild acceptance. Increasingly, other mechanisms of recognition for both sexes emerged, including tolerations, purchase and inheritance, while burgess rights and legislation could also by-pass apprenticeship. ‘Tolerations’ were simply a device to grant permission to trade when individuals were technically unqualified.They could involve a license, a fee or a fine, the latter implying the individual’s lack of ‘privilege’ to trade. Once individuals completed an apprenticeship, they had the ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ to trade. Those without this right were often referred to as ‘unfree’, which simply noted their lack of trading rights. By the eighteenth century, guilds were an established reality, and their link to urbanisation was profound. They were woven into the urban fabric, defining the essence of many European towns. Towns were built on a foundation of corporatism, and Geoffrey Crossick maintains that guilds were intrinsically, not accidentally, urban; and that artisans were historically bound up with the definitions and meanings of towns long before industrialisation made urban life a more general experience. Thus ‘Bologna’s shoemakers insisted…that crafts were an urban activity and had to be defended as such’.11 Sheilagh Ogilvie argues that urban guilds continued to monopolize proto-industrial production because they retained institutional powers, especially in central, southern and eastern Europe.12 Guilds derived their character and influence from their roles as organisers of the town economy, and they deliberately sought to keep bodies incompatible with guild organisation outside the town. They held the means of economic regulation by applying ostracism for disrepute against deviants outside and within.13 It is precisely the significance of guilds and corporations as urban legal and economic institutions that makes them important to understanding gender in the eighteenth-century urban economy. 34

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Figure 3.1  Vleeshuis (Butchers’ Guildhall), Antwerp. Photo © Deborah Simonton.

State intervention was a factor shaping the urban scene. For example, in Scandinavia, royal efforts to solidify absolutist government resulted in tension between central power and urban independence as towns clung to ancient privileges and traditions. In Denmark, the period from 1681 to 1862 was characterised by the royal government seeking to restrain guild culture, perceiving guilds as independent organisations operating outside their control. It intervened in guilds’ autonomy, removed restrictions on journeymen, supported free masters and promoted internal competition rather than the restraint of trade.14 Ogilvie argues that, in constrast, most German states ‘cooperated far more than they competed with guilds, securing local level ­political support, regulatory cooperation and concrete fiscal assistance, in return for confirming and enforcing guild privileges’.15 Across Germanic and Nordic regions, laws and customs regulated the mobility of labour and readily excluded individuals if they did not meet conditions for residence in a town.16 ‘Incomers’ were particularly vulnerable. Christian Iversen had to obtain citizenship (borgerbrev) in Odense (Denmark) in 1778 before operating a printshop, even though he came from Copenhagen, while Astrid Küntzel, considers ‘being alien’ one of the main reasons for exclusion from civic rights and guilds in Cologne.17 Tine De Moor argues that guilds needed state backing in their struggle for survival, and that in many places, the state was one of the forces undercutting them.18 The French government used the precepts of free trade to abolish guilds in 1776, reinstating and reforming them the next year, opening them to ‘unfree’ men and women who had not been able to meet previous tight guild controls. Steven Kaplan argues that the reforms attempted to create a rationalised system that would promote occupational mobility and greater competition while retaining quality assurance and an ordered economy. Thus, ‘Necker envisaged the creation of a climate of fruitful tension between liberty and a notion…deliberately vague of responsibility as defined by the state’.19 The British Parliament 35

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tended to support guilds and continued to practice mercantilist policies until the nineteenth century, since trade was Britain’s lifeblood, and supporting merchants and artisans contributed to Britain’s economic success. Legislative, social, economic and cultural environments were much more favourable to women’s business involvement in the northern Netherlands and, to a lesser extent, in Britain, where democratic impulses were stronger than in other parts of Europe.20 Yet, anxiety about ‘incomers’ remained active here too. Aberdeen regularly banished people like Isobel Camron, who was of ‘bad fame and character with no visible means of support’ although her only misdemeanour was vagrancy; as she ‘did not belong’ to Aberdeen, she could readily be sent away.21 Gender was an important, but not exclusive, element. Guilds were closely linked to citizenship and political power.Throughout Europe, guildsmen appeared on town councils, and the system ‘with all its ways penetrated…political institutions through and through’.22 In some towns, it was necessary to be ‘free of the city’ to join a guild, while in others only guild members were voting citizens. In Aberdeen, a small exclusive oligarchy closely linked through political, business and marital interests governed and also represented the businessmen who built and ran the economy. In Odense, Borgermeisters [mayors] similarly came from the economic elite, while a group of 24 men called the ‘eligedere’ citizens were consulted in questions of town revenues, expenses and projects.The key difference was the selection process. In absolutist Denmark, the king appointed the magistracy and town government rested on royal decrees, while Aberdeen was based on burgesses’ votes.23 Thus, how guilds operated varied, as did their strength and role in urban life and their relationship to political systems and structures.

Laissez faire, commerce and the world of goods Growing pressures from population growth, Enlightenment ideas of individual liberty and laissez faire, increasing local and international commerce and changes in the production and consumption of goods were important forces shifting the power and role of guilds. The emergence of a wider range of products, including more luxury and semi-luxury items, was a key aspect of this shift, in Britain marked by manufactories like those of Matthew Boulton in Birmingham and Josiah Wedgwood at Stoke on Trent.24 Simultaneously, the marketplace provided opportunities for men with money and acumen to establish themselves in commercial ventures. While guild structures and traditions retained purchase on how trade operated in corporate towns, commercial pressures undercut their hold.They fostered a more open approach to business and exchange and contributed to growing civic pride and self-confidence. Guilds and guildsmen were not equally powerful, with a hierarchical difference between merchant and trade guilds. In some towns, the corporate structure transformed as these merchants, rather than craftsmen, began to gain the upper hand politically and economically. For example, the artisans represented by Aberdeen’s Seven Incorporated Trades were politically inferior to the merchants.They could not elect councillors and could choose only two of their own to sit on the council. Similarly, tensions between the merchant elite who gained control over Milanese silk production in the eighteenth century and the weavers’ guild created a two-tiered system that meant the weavers’ guilds ‘became increasingly subordinate to the merchant class, a state of affairs accentuated by the growing importance of imitations of foreign fashions’.25 In Spain, ‘calico factories called into question the already unstable position of guilds’ in economic life.26 Masculinity is not homogenous, and one of the key issues of status and power is the conflicting masculinities thrown up by different situations and cultural traditions. Not all men link to power equally, and hierarchies of power exist within a hegemonic masculinity, itself constructed by context and relationships.27 36

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New working practices and non-guild trades undercut guilds’ solidarity and challenged occupational controls. As employers increasingly hired waged labour instead of journeymen and it became more difficult to achieve mastership, partly due to population increase, pressure from ‘outsider’ men trespassing on guildsmen’s privileges, and women encroaching on the male property of skill, challenged the standing of guildsmen. There also was a great deal of mobility with journeymen moving from one master to another and from one type of work to another. Additionally, the hierarchy of trades underwent disorientation in the fluid economic situation where time-honoured occupations declined and new ones rose to take their place. This created uncertainty about status and heightened concern for social distinctions, and guilds and civic authorities struggled to maintain rights between masters and men and between small and large masters. Each expected their position to be protected and their rights not to be abused. Increasing pressure on status and anxiety about masculinity provoked guildsmen to target ‘unfree’ workers, and they were more vigorous in policing men than women.28 De Munck argues that the system was more important to masters than journeymen or apprentices and that vested interest in their own position led them to fight for the retention of guild regulations.29 Leonard Rosenband illustrates the tensions and effective structures of bilateral power wielded by journeymen and masters in Lyonnais papermaking, which enabled journeymen to challenge masters’ control.30 Whilst the paternal image had meaning in the urban community, ‘the workshop was not…a system based on the bond between the master’s family and his journeymen where all lived together in blessed intimacy and familiarity’.31 Arlette Farge described three opposing concepts at work: the desire of authorities to see the power of the masters was not undone, guaranteeing the policing of the realm; economists looking for opportunities to suppress corporations who held back industrialisation; and wage earners allying with masters to gain the right to set up independently, whilst also undermining the system by breaking contracts to take on more advantageous ones.32

Guilds, skill and patriarchy Guilds were closely tied to the nominal male life cycle and strongly associated with masculinity. As Maurice Garden explained: ‘The hierarchy of work was…inherited from the basic stages of life: apprentice, compagnon, master. It was also a largely masculine organization: women’s work was considered inferior or even outside the corporate order’.33 Guilds defined the transition from apprentice to journeyman and ultimately to mastership; paralleling the male life cycle, it helped define manhood. The vast majority restricted membership to men, prohibited women from becoming mistresses and from accessing apprenticeship or even employment. Widows could inherit privileges, but these were always limited. Crowston argues, ‘the overwhelmingly male composition of the guild system, and its patriarchal vision of the social order, were common threads across western Europe’.34 But masculinity in the eighteenth century comprised more than a paterfamilias or even a male breadwinner ideal. Honour was central to the emergent Enlightenment man, and merit was key to male self-identity, which was associated with an imperative to enhance family position. Honour was fundamental to guilds. Honourable trades were associated with a concept of skill – male skill. The property of skill was at the centre of workers’ self-identities, and the notions associated with skill spilled far beyond the workplace to enter the vocabulary of a more generalised labour with its own rights and dignity.35 A worker possessed not only the tools of the trade but also the trade itself, and it ‘delimited the space between him and his master’.36 Rituals and ascription of status or honour were important to defend workers’ places and allowed masters a means of controlling work and journeymen. The ‘profundity of the divide between skill and lack of skill offers a key to understanding the insistent concern of 37

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those…whose skills were at risk, to create or consolidate their own associative structures’.37 The flux and change that infused these worlds exacerbated the issues, since increasingly laissez faire attitudes, a shift towards commercial activity and competition from unregulated protoindustries challenged ideas about work and skill. The need for guildsmen to protect their status was central. ‘Skilled’ work in guild shops was increasingly coded as male, and craft mysteries were not to be shared with women. Men might work alongside women, but skilled work was theirs to claim.38 Overtly gendered debates shaped how tasks and indeed whole areas of work were coded as appropriate for one sex or the other. Female skills were seen as ‘natural attributes’ and their abilities, like needlework proficiency, as not ‘skilled’. A deeply held sense of gender difference was embedded in concepts of skill. As Gertjan de Groot and Marlou Schrover succinctly stated, ‘Whether a job is skilled or unskilled is mainly determined by the social negotiations that surround the definitions of jobs and skill’.39 Clearly women did do skilled work; they were trained, and they frequently worked in guild shops, even substituting for men. Women in some female niche trades also had a sense of their own worth, and Crowston argues that they gained a corporate identity and a notion of female honour that derived from the female nature of their trades and the independence that it allowed them to enjoy. They took pride in their legal and professional autonomy.40 Apprenticeship opens a window into the working of gender. Apprenticeships were a distinct element in the male life cycle; boys entered apprenticeships nominally at 14 and, after a seven-year term, produced their masterpiece and entered manhood, although the age of entry and the length of apprenticeship varied according to guilds and towns. The completion of the masterpiece marked a rite of passage from youth to adulthood, as Robert Darnton explained, ‘Having gone through a rite of passage in the full, anthropological sense of the term, he became a Monsieur’.41 The relative stability of apprenticeship conveyed a symbolic importance of this stage to young men’s development. Girls too were apprenticed, illustrating the purchase the guild system had on urban life. However, it rarely acted as a rite of passage. They usually could not gain the freedom of the corporation, nor did apprenticeship necessarily enhance their trading position as it did with boys, although where female or mixed guilds existed, girls had more to gain. Apprenticeship mattered most for girls when they acquired a métier. Crowston demonstrates how important apprenticeship was in the world of the Parisian seamstresses, with approximately 1200 apprentices training at any one time. Similarly, in towns like Colchester, Wolverhampton, Bath and Stafford, female apprentices clustered in mantuamaking and millinery where those who had completed an apprenticeship had the best chance of continual employment.42

Tolerating ‘foreigners’ Granting ‘toleration’ or ‘liberty’ was a common approach to deal with ‘unfree’ traders. Margaret Adam, wife of an Aberdeen shoemaker, was ‘enacted’ [ordered] that ‘she shall not herself nor Allow any other on her Account to keep an open Shop or Cellar within this Burgh…without first liberty already obtained’.43 The usual reasons that people lacked liberty to trade were that they had not completed an apprenticeship or were ‘incomers’. The problem of ‘foreigners’, as people from outside the town were often termed, was persistent, and Kingston-upon-Thames noted regular complaints since the ‘freemen of this town are most aggrived [sic] and prejudiced’.44 The insistence on obtaining ‘toleration’ from guilds demonstrates their regulating and monitoring economic activity. The Court of Assembly regularly called people to account for conducting business while ‘unfree’. It was so common that in November 1759, the court required ‘the usual notice be served on several traders’. Periodically, they required ‘that the 38

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wardens of the several Companys [sic] do at the next Hall return a list of the Several persons ­exercising Trades within this Town not being free of the same’.45 Trades ranging from ironmongers and woollendrapers to shopkeepers, smiths, poulterers and chandlers appeared in the minutes. Men made up the majority, but a substantial number of women attended, often in trades we associate with men. In August 1754, the wardens warned Mrs Byrn ‘not to follow the business of a Chemist ... not being free’. Applicants often claimed exemption. Military service excused some men; thus, Robert Spry’s army service ‘justifies his keeping shop in the town’. A few, like William Worrell, claimed the Freedom of London, but the court required a toleration anyway, so he paid his modest fine of £5 as a hairdresser.46 Others specifically requested permission to trade, like James Hopwood, who ‘desired a Toleration to follow the trade of Cheesemonger and Oilman’ with his mother. They were fined £5 for him and £10 for her ‘being in partnership’, though no reason for the differential was given.47 Many procrastinated by ignoring notices or asking for more time, largely to avoid payment. Thomas Minchin ‘said he did not follow any trade liable to pay’, claiming Widow Salter kept the shop in Thames Street. William Robinson’s wife attended to say that ‘her husband had not been at home since the Notice was left’. In August 1768, George Smith’s wife appeared before the court only to be told that her husband was required to attend in person.48 Some resisted on the grounds that the fine was too great and they did not earn enough to pay; others decided to stop trading, or left town. Incomers may have been prepared to try elsewhere rather than pay and conform to the vigorous policy of Kingston. The persistence of both the court and the ‘unfree’ was apparent. On 25 April 1783, notice was served on Elizabeth Thompson, draper. On 9 May, ‘it is reported that Mrs Elizabeth Thompson…[has] been served with the usual Notice and that [she] continue[s] to sell in open defiance. It is therefore ordered that the wardens do purchase some goods…and make a report thereof ’. On 22 January 1784 and again on 18 March 1784, they attempted to summon her, ‘she continuing to carry on Trade without a Toleration’.49 At that point, the record went silent, but she had defied the court for at least a year; noting that she was always referred to as ‘Mrs’ Thompson and operated a high status trade suggests that she may have been of some eminence. She could have been taken to court. The process of granting tolerations was one strategy for regulating but permitting trade to flourish and to allow those who nominally sat outside the guild system to join the urban economy legitimately. In the case of Kingston, records also appear to show no differential treatment between men and women, although women’s access to trades was often restricted by custom and access to training at an earlier point. Tolerations were a formal way to loosen the boundaries of guild control, and they could be coupled with changes in rules, or new rules, to resolve disputes between unfree and free guild workers.

Women and guild membership Much of the debate about women’s place in guild structures, especially the ‘decline’ thesis, is built on a belief that in a ‘golden age’, women had greater access to independent and skilled high-status artisanal work. The argument runs: women were increasingly excluded from guilds from about the fifteenth century in many continental areas, while in Britain, a different pattern of continuity in low-paid and low-status work existed. However, detailed research often shows that women never had such enhanced access. There is no evidence for Kingston-upon Thames, Aberdeen or Odense that women had high-status work that they lost.50 Instead, Daryl Hafter argues that the system of privilege that structured ancien-régime France ‘carried within itself pockets of opportunity’ and flexibility that, paradoxically, enabled some women ‘to break through the web of restrictions’ and participate in the market economy as members of exclusively female 39

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or mixed guilds.51 Arguing against decline, Crowston says that ‘male prud’hommes’ administered women’s guilds in medieval Paris, while during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, female linen drapers and hemp merchants gained control of their guilds, ‘effacing previously existing male corporations and acquiring independent female guilds’. She sees no evidence of reduction in the privileges of female family members of masters in French towns.52 In fact, urban studies show the growth of commerce and capitalism during the long eighteenth century had contradictory effects for women. In the northern Netherlands, for instance, where women enjoyed greater legal autonomy and economic opportunities than elsewhere, guilds were omnipresent in the crafts and generally excluded women, whereas in the trade sector, guilds were less systematically organised and often allowed full female membership.53 While certain trades progressively excluded women, the decline of guild control over other sectors together with changing consumer demand gave women new opportunities in running independent businesses, especially in niches like millinery. Although the vast majority of women could not join guilds, they could forge complex links with the corporate system. Within the system, female life cycle mattered. Women’s relationship to guilds has to be seen within the framework of urban social relations, where family production nominally comprised all able-bodied members and guild membership belonged to the male head of household. Guilds gave protection to married women and co-resident daughters sharing the head of household’s occupation. Daughters could not gain entrance by patrimony although they could confer rights upon suitably qualified husbands, similar to those that widows could grant on remarriage. A master’s wife was normally more secure than a daughter, although her position was less formal than a widow’s.54 Most craft guilds recognised the important role that wives and journeymen’s families played in a shop. In the hatters’ trade, ‘the preparatory work of tearing and shaving fur from the pelts was done by women’.55 Because women’s work was often tacitly accepted, formal ‘records are only one part of the story, [since] guilds had no reason to provide information on women because they could not be masters (they were women), could not be apprenticed, and could not take apprentices’.56 If they had not served apprenticeships, daughters and single women had no right to trade, but could be ‘tolerated’. Even apprenticeship was no guarantee of a position in a system that was essentially patriarchal. In Nantes, three daughters of stockingframe knitter Saget successfully appealed on grounds of ‘inheritance’ to be allowed to work for a year after their father’s death to utilize materials he had purchased. They reappeared in 1781, when officials stated ‘they had always contributed to the debts [funds] of the community’ and their merchandise satisfied guild requirements.57

Figure 3.2  Regulations on Widows, Reglemens et statuts des maistres tailleurs d’habits, marchands ­drapiers et chaussetiers de la ville de La Rochelle, 1753, Article XX.

40

Gender, Privileges and Commerce

Guilds were keen to limit widows’ inherited privileges, while women with patrimonial rights remained outside of the political life of the corporation. Usually, masters’ widows were allowed to pursue their husband’s trade, but whether or not they could take apprentices in their own right or pass the trade on to children varied. For example, French printers’ widows were allowed to continue a shop and retain journeymen, but could not begin a new piece of work nor take on new apprentices, although late husbands’ apprentices could finish their time.58 La Rochelle tailleurs d’habits allowed ‘widows of the said masters received & tested by masterpiece for & during their widowhood [to] be allowed to have that trade kept & exercised in their homes by a boy who had been accustomed to work that said business’ (Figure 3.2).59 Similar restrictions operated in Oxford and Kingston-upon-Thames, allowing a widow to work if she paid quarterage to her husband’s guild; apprentices might serve her as long as she remained unmarried and practised only his trade. No widows took apprentices in their own right and girls were not apprenticed.Widows in the (London) Stationers’ Company retained trades privileges, could take apprentices, were entitled to run his business and his guild membership was transferred to her. Janine Lanza argues for Paris, Despite the male ideology of incorporated work, widows did forge an identity as part of these bodies.Their experiences showed that they did become highly integrated into the workings of all-male guilds; in turn other masters and the governing apparatus of guilds also acted in ways that acknowledged widows belonging to the late husbands’ guilds.60 Widows were frequently very successful and were able to support themselves rather than turning to charity. Their achievement depended on their access to resources and business acumen, although they could never have the same relationship to a guild that masters had, not having served an apprenticeship and lacking the political clout of men. Widows took over their late husbands’ businesses regularly in Odense and Aberdeen, usually trading outside guilds, like newspaperwomen Catharina Biering or Susan Traill, or like bakers Anne Kirstine From, in Odense despite having two qualified sons and Margaret Morice on Aberdeen’s Castlegate, whose house is depicted behind the market cross on the cover of this volume.61 Many guild regulations did not say that women could not be members, but they defined how women could access guilds, effectively constructing barriers against them. To maintain control, guilds creatively used their rules to provide alternative entry routes and ultimately created an informal and haphazard female admission system.

Figure 3.3  Guild trade signs, Odense, Denmark. Photo © Deborah Simonton.

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Tailors and seamstresses Requiring ‘unfree’ workers to join guilds was a step beyond toleration. With their capacity for multi-tasking, an essential skill for many urban dwellers in their quest for survival, women were involved in both licit and illicit markets, leading to friction with the guilds.62 Across Europe, urban tailors complained of ‘untrained’ seamstresses engaged in commercial dressmaking in their homes, challenging tailors’ right to make women’s clothes. In Aberdeen, [male] tailors had a monopoly on making women’s as well as men’s garments, and Ebenezer Bain, guild historian, explained they ‘resented very keenly the introduction of female labour, while the proposal that women should be allowed to set up in business as mantle makers filled them with dismay’. The voluminous minutes regarding ‘tollerations [sic]’ for mantuamakers ‘afford unmistakable evidence of the reluctance with which the craftsmen yielded to their demands’.63 Despite sturdy resistance, ultimately they granted women modified privileges and compelled them to come within the jurisdiction of the craft, but women did not gain full membership. Having granted individual tolerations as numbers of applicants continued to rise, on 7 November 1728, they argued that it was a great hurt and prejudice to this Trade, [and they] do therefore statute and ordain that every woman who for the future shall be tollerate to work at mantua-making by the Trade, shall pay yearly to the boxmaster of this Trade for such tollerance the sum of twenty-four shillings yearly, without any mitigation or defalcation whatever.64 Thus, in the face of this challenge to their ‘privileges’, the tailors required guild fees and a fine to make petticoats (undergarments) and mantuas, loose-fitting dresses often described as ‘blown together’, which disguises the high-quality skill and expertise required. ‘[B]ut on no consideration whatever were they to import or deal in stays and other articles of female attire’. Bain claimed they were the only craftsmen in Scotland who allowed females to share in their special privileges.65 Across England too, women seized this opportunity, and men in the old established drapers’ companies tried prosecution to extend their authority over women’s sewing. York’s Merchant Tailors joined Oxford in demanding legislation to proscribe their activities, and when unsuccessful, opted instead to admit women, so that by 1770, women made up 26 per cent of the merchant tailors guild.66 There was no real technical barrier, but the guilds tried hard to establish one. Thus, the guilds retained for themselves the right to control work and to keep the high-status aspect of the work by forcing women to pay guild fees and sometimes fines. Like Britain, customary practice often opened access to French guilds. Elizabeth Musgrave notes, ‘the rights of women to purchase rather than to inherit guild status increased in eighteenth-century Nantes and comprised an important modification of their legal position in the city’. A number of corporations modified membership rules to accommodate female artisans, who received limited economic freedoms in a ‘woman’s section’ within male guilds. Again, tailors allowed single and married women over the age of 20 ‘of good repute and standing’ to enter the corporation, sewing for women and children but with no rights to employ journeymen. They paid admission fees, took an oath before the police court and paid for economic privileges, not for full, adult membership.67 So while this permission to trade did not earn them political power, they used the corporate system to entitle them to engage in business. In La Rochelle, small numbers of women had a presence in the modistes, merciers and tailleurs guilds. In 1760, Helen Poupelin applied to the modistes to open a linen and marchande de modes boutique, one woman among four extant records, while the merciers guild admitted three women in the 1780s (38 records). Poupelin claimed she had come to town the previous year and 42

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had opened shop not knowing that she needed permission. The corporation and royal officials allowed ‘her to continue her establishment in this city, to conduct the fashion and linen business, just as the other merchants of the same sort (qualité), to conform with police ordinances and fulfil the terms of the application’.68 Although tailleurs were similarly overwhelmingly male, women made inroads here as they had in other towns. A list of 1671 included Maria Moyne and seven widows.69 However, timing is important; while some women joined before guild abolition in 1776, most entered later. When the Edict of 1777 reinstated and reformed the guilds, a flood of single, married and widowed women enrolled. Many had probably been working ‘informally’.70 Notably, while widowed and married women dominated female admissions, 14 were single or with an unspecified civil status. However, there is a potentially different reading to this story. As Hafter shows in Rouen, women were forced to join the guild and consequently lost much of their independence, including the right to govern their own activities. The merger effectively disenfranchised them. The lingères de vieux, or dealers in old clothes, however, responded by refusing to pay for repairs to the cloth hall. This was symptomatic of deep-seated tensions between men who ran guilds and women who were forced to join and pay fees.71 In La Rochelle, the documentation employed explicitly male language: women were listed quixotically as ‘messieurs’, and we cannot assume that this was necessarily a peaceful merger. As in other towns, admission brought income to the tailors’ guild and allowed them some control over what needlewomen were doing. The fact that there is a second small bulge in female admissions in 1783 suggests that there may have been another ‘crackdown’ on unregistered practitioners. And yet, some women resisted. In Oxford, when the Mercers’ Company required women to join the guild, ‘Ann *****’ advertised, the Mercer’s (but much more properly the Merciless Company) threatening me with immediate Distress, if I do no leave off my Business or purchase a Freedom of the Company, which would cost about 20£; a Sum almost equal to the whole I possess, and which money they would most probably…[spend] in luxurious Entertainments.72 Most simply refused or ignored the summons. Recent studies have highlighted both legal and illegal ways that women took advantage of guilds’ attempts to isolate them in order to retain a presence within the marketplace. The majority of Parisian seamstresses remained outside the guild, and after the abolition of corporations in 1776, seamstresses in Clermont-Ferrand proudly claimed freedom from guild control.73 In Bologna, women dominated the silk guild by 1796, with 72 female to only 15 male masters. Yet, this is misleading in that the large numbers represented ‘a means of controlling female textile labour and as a way to raise funds and… women often resisted guild membership’.The notion of ‘marginality’ is therefore ambiguous. As Dumont argues, women’s inclination to remain outside guilds suggests we need to re-examine ‘our assumptions about marginality and preferred positions in the world of work’.74 For some women, not joining was a choice, and thus we cannot presume they felt marginalised; poverty was not the privilege of women since guildsmen and masters could suffer too. Women could operate their own corporations as in Paris, some provincial French towns and Cologne. These reflected areas of the economy where women had an established footing in the garment trades. However, others were less obviously gendered, such as hemp and flax combers, hosiers, fan and wig makers and cloak makers. Notably, having adopted guild organization, female guilds replicated male traditions regarding apprentices, fees and passing on trades, usually restricting the position of maîtresse to daughters of maîtresses.Women tenaciously utilized the system, which gave them tangible economic benefits, legal rights and the privileges and structures 43

Deborah Simonton

to protect their trade. For these women, the strict adherence to guild traditions and regulations ‘provided an envelope of toleration and encouragement for guild members’ rights and this included the privileges of guildswomen’.75 Gender was the primary focus of these artisans; they worked for and with other women and belonged to guilds as individuals, not as family members. They took pride in their legal and professional autonomy and scorned the skills of women working in patriarchal workshops.76

Gender and commerce Custom and control in the workshop, divisions of labour and the political and economic life of many towns inhibited access to certain trades and occupations. The extent of such restrictions depended on the ability of urban power structures to control work and the workforce, which in turn depended on the corporate structure of the town. Changes in institutional structures, methods of production, ideologies and conditions of labour supply impelled guilds to become ever more assiduous in maintaining their control. Ultimately, guilds were important to town economies, but they were not the only game in town. Illicit activities and resistance to the normative influence of officialdom and guilds was significant. The shifts in urban economies allowed spaces within which women and ‘unfree’ men could conduct economic activities and establish identities. Tensions became most apparent when they operated in ways that appeared to challenge the rights and privileges of guildsmen. Many men and women did not want to be in guilds and found alternative strategies. The urban context shaped how they accessed tolerations, liberty to trade and guild privileges. Neither men nor women were passive actors in this situation, and some of the tension was not only about the challenge from unfree men but also concerned female resistance, evidenced by the number of overt attempts to bring them into line. Women often contributed to forcing change in those regulations and took advantage of a flexibility that existed even where guilds and their city corporations tried to ‘hold the line’. It was a losing battle, and by the end of the eighteenth century, urban economies largely functioned outside or alongside the remnants of the guild system.

Notes   1 Kingston Borough Records, KUT, Court of Assembly Minutes, KB1/2, v. i, f112, 114.   2 Ebenezer Bain, Merchant and Craft Guilds, A History of the Aberdeen Incorporated Trades (Aberdeen, 1887), 256–59.   3 Archives municipales de La Rochelle (AMLR), HH 14: Corporations. Merciers. Modistes.  4 Celia J. Goedde, ‘Competition, community, and privilege in eighteenth-century Vienna: Viennese ­pastry bakers,’ Austrian History Yearbook 31 ( January 2000): 41.   5 Marta J. Vicente, Clothing the Spanish Empire: Families and the Calico Trade in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 77.   6 Clare Crowston, ‘Women, gender and guilds in early modern Europe,’ in The Return of the Guilds. International Review of Social History. Supplement 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 20.   7 See Chapter 13 in this volume for the later medieval period.   8 Tine De Moor, ‘The silent revolution: A new perspective on the emergence of commons, guilds, and other forms of corporate collective action in western Europe,’ ‘Return of the Guilds’, 179–212. For an overview of the literature, see Jan Lucassen, Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten Van Zanden, ‘The return of the guilds: Towards a global history of the guilds in pre-industrial times,’ Ibid., 1–18.   9 Bert De Munck, ‘Skills, trust, and changing consumer preferences:The decline of Antwerp’s craft guilds from the perspective of the product market, c.1500–c.1800,’ IRSH 53 (2008): 197–233; Stephen R. Epstein, ‘Craft guilds, apprenticeship, and technological change in pre-industrial Europe,’ Journal of Economic History 58 (1998): 684–713. 10 Lucassen, De Moor and Van Zanden, ‘The return of the guilds,’ 9. 11 Geoffrey Crossick, ed., The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 15.

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Gender, Privileges and Commerce 12 Sheilagh Ogilvie, State Corporatism and Proto-industry, the Württemberg Black Forest, 1580–1797 (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 423–24. 13 Mack Walker, German Home Towns, Community, State and General Estate (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1971), 98. 14 Thomas Bloch Ravn, ‘Community and “zünftig” culture in Danish craft guilds,’ in Danish Towns during Absolutism. Urbanisation and Urban Life 1660–1848, ed. Søren Bitsch Christensen and Jørgen Mikkelsen (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008), 218–21. 15 Ogilvie, State Corporatism, 73, and Institutions and European Trade, Merchant Guilds, 1000–1800 (Cambridge: University Press, 2011), 186–91. 16 Ibid., 45–57. 17 Odense Stadsarkiv, Odensedatabasen (ODB), http://www.odensedatabasen.dk/ and Projekt Runeberg, Dansk Biografisk Leksikon, 1887–1905, http://runeberg.org/dbl/; Astrid Küntzel, ‘“Hernloses Gesindel” und “Unqualifizierte”,’ Geschichte in Köln 53 (2006): 63–74. 18 De Moor, ‘Silent Revolution,’ 210. 19 Steven L. Kaplan, La Fin des Corporations (Paris: Fayard, 2001), 163. 20 Sheilagh Ogilvie, A bitter living:Women, markets, and social capital in early modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 9; Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands, c. 1580–1815 (Amsterdam: Askant, 2007). 21 Aberdeen City Archives (ACA), Enactment Books, 1758–82, 5 December 1764. 22 Walker, German Home Towns, 100. 23 Hans Chr. Johansen, Næring og Bystyre, Odense, 1700–1789 (Odense: Universitetsforlag, 1983), 226–28. 24 See Maxine Berg. Luxury and Pleasure in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 25 Luca Mocarelli, ‘Guilds reappraised: Italy in the early modern period,’ IRSH 53, Supplement (2008): 169–70. 26 Vicente, Clothing the Spanish Empire, 77. 27 Michael Kimmel, ‘Masculinity as homophobia: Fear, shame and silence in the construction of gender identity,’ in Theorizing Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod and Michael Kaufmann (London: Sage, 1994), 136. 28 Merry Wiesner, ‘Guilds, male bonding and women’s work in early modern Germany,’ Gender & History 1 (1989): 125–137; Cynthia Truant, The Rites of Labor: Brotherhoods of Compagnonnage in Old and New Regime France (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 29 De Munck, ‘Skills, Trust,’ 212–14. 30 Leonard J. Rosenband, Papermaking in Eighteenth-century France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 2000), 51–52. 31 Arlette Farge, Fragile Lives:Violence, Power and Solidarity in Eighteenth-century Paris, (London: Polity Press, 1993), 108–09. 32 Ibid., 126. 33 Maurice Garden, ‘The urban trades: Social analysis and representation,’ in Work in France: Representations, Meaning, Organization and Practice, ed. Steven L. Kaplan and Cynthia Koepp (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986). 34 Crowston, ‘Women, gender, and guilds,’ 19. 35 See John Rule, ‘The property of skill in the period of manufacture,’ in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce (Cambridge: University Press, 1989), 99–118. 36 Farge, Fragile Lives, 125. 37 Stuart Woolf, ‘Order, class and the urban poor,’ in Social Order and Social Classes in Europe since 1500, ed. M. L. Bush (London: Longman, 1992), 189–90. 38 Deborah Simonton, ‘Gendering labour in eighteenth-century towns,’ in Working out Gender, ed. Margaret Walsh (London: Ashgate Press, 1999), 29–47. 39 Gertjan De Groot and Marlou Schrover, Women Workers and Technological Change in Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century (London: Routledge, 1995), 5; Deborah Simonton, History of European Women’s Work (London: Routledge, 1998), 76–83. 40 Crowston, Fabricating Women, 408–9. 41 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and other Episodes in French Cultural History (London: Penguin, 1991), 91. 42 Deborah Simonton,‘Apprenticeship:Training and gender in eighteenth-century England,’ in Markets and Manufactures in Early Industrial Europe, ed. Maxine Berg (London: Routledge, 1991), 244–46. Crowston, Fabricating Women, 299, 325.

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Deborah Simonton 43 ACA, Enactment Books, 28 July 1753. 44 Anne Daly, ed., Kingston upon Thames Register of Apprentices, 1563–1713 (Guildford: Surrey Record Society, 1974), ix. 45 KUT, Court of Assembly Minutes, KB1/2, v. 1, f131, f161; v. 2, f18. 46 Ibid., v. 1, f111, v. 2, f102, f106. 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid., v. 2, f76, f70, v. 1, f170. 49 Ibid., v. 2, f45, f46, f49. 50 See Grethe Jacobsen, ‘Women’s work, and women’s role: Ideology and reality in Danish urban society, 1300–1500,’ Scandinavian Economic History Review 31, 1 (1983). 51 Daryl M. Hafter, Women at Work in Preindustrial France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007), 1. 52 Crowston, ‘Women, gender, and guilds,’ 26, n23. 53 Van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship, 24; Ariadne Schmidt, ‘Women and guilds: Corporations and female labor market participation in early modern Holland,’ Gender & History 21 (2009): 170–89. 54 See Anne Montenach, ’Creating a space for themselves on the urban market,’ in Single Life and the City, 1200–1900, ed. Julie de Groot, Isabelle Devos and Ariadne Schmidt (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), especially 52–56, and Anna Bellavitis’s chapter in this volume. 55 Michael Sonenscher, The Hatters of Eighteenth-century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 23. 56 Marta V. Munck,‘Images and realities of work:Women and guilds in early modern Barcelona,’ in Spanish Women in the Golden Age: Images and Realities, ed. Magdalena S. Sanchez and Alain Saint-Saens (Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing, 1996), 130. 57 Elizabeth Musgrave, ‘Women and the craft guilds in eighteenth-century Nantes,’ in The Artisan and the European Town, ed. Crossick, 155. 58 Geraldine Sheridan, ‘Women in the booktrade in eighteenth-century France,’ British Journal for Eighteenth-century Studies 15, 1 (1992): 51–70. 59 Reglements et statuts, 19. 60 Janine Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy and Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007). 61 See Deborah Simonton,‘Widows and wenches, single women in eighteenth-century urban economies,’ in Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830, ed. Deborah S­ imonton and Anne Montenach (London: Routledge, 2013), 138–70; for Biering, Odense, Adresse Contoiret, 2 January 1777 and for Traill, ACA, Town Council Register,Vol. 63, folio 20, 5 September 1764. 62 See Anne Montenach, ‘Legal trade and black markets: Food trades in Lyon in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries,’ in Female Agency, ed. Simonton and Montenach, 17–34; Anna Bellavitis, ‘Genre, métiers, apprentissages dans trois villes Italiennes à l’époque moderne,’ Histoire urbaine 15 (2006): 5–12; Dora Dumont, ‘Women and guilds in Bologna: The ambiguities of “marginality”,’ Radical History Review 70 (1998): 4–25. 63 Bain, Merchant and Craft Guilds, 256, 257. 64 Ibid., 258. 65 Ibid., 256, 259. 66 S. D. Smith, ‘Women’s admission to guilds in early-modern England: The case of the York Merchant Tailors’ Company, 1693–1776,’ Gender & History 17, 1 (April 2005): 99–126. 67 Musgrave, ‘Women and the craft guilds,’ 159. 68 AMLR, HH 14: Corporations. Merciers. Modistes. Thanks to Brigitte Commun-Françoise and Jany Grassiot for assistance with these records. 69 Ibid. Tailleurs. 70 AMLR, HH 18:Tableau des Maîtres Tailleurs & Frippiers en neuf & en vieux de la Communauté de la Ville de la Rochelle, 1788. 71 Hafter, Women at Work, 165–73. 72 Quoted in Mary Prior, “Women in the urban economy, Oxford 1500–1800,’ in Women in English ­Society, ed. Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 112. 73 Crowston, Fabricating Women, 291. 74 Dumont, ‘Women and guilds in Bologna,’ 6. 75 Hafter, Women at Work, 91–92. 76 Crowston, Fabricating Women, 408–409.

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4 Gender and Business ­during the Industrial Revolution Hannah Barker

Introduction Small businesses were at the heart of urban economic growth and social transformation during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.1 In towns across Europe, shops and workshops dominated the streetscape and helped to satisfy an increasing desire for consumer goods. Yet despite their significance, we know surprisingly little about these businesses and the people who ran them, for whilst those engaged in craft-based manufacturing, retailing and allied trades during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constituted a significant proportion of the urban population, they have been often overlooked by historians. Instead, our view of the world of business is more usually taken up by narratives of particularly successful firms and especially those involved in new modes of production. Small businessmen and women have also rarely taken centre stage in histories of gender, and we know far more about the urban upper-middle and working or labouring classes than we do about those ‘in trade’. For scholars interested in gender and towns, however, this latter group is important, not just because of their contribution to economic and social development but also because of what their unique stories can tell us about gender and the urban experience. This chapter focuses on these men and women in the north west of England, an area famed for its striking urban growth and economic development during the period of the ‘industrial revolution’. Recent research on the lives and experiences of individual small businessmen in this region during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries suggests that masculinity was commonly expressed in terms of mastery of the self, devotion to God, hard work and family life.2 This finding emphasises the continuities evident in masculinity over several centuries, so that whilst Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall have argued that piety, domesticity and ‘a proper sense of responsibility about business’ were characteristics of the ‘new man’ of the nineteenth century,3 we can also see strong parallels with older and more established forms of early modern masculinity.4 Not viewing family, domesticity and piety as solely female preserves also impacts upon our view of the gendered history of women. Many of the traits associated with masculinity amongst men in trade during the industrial revolution we also see evident in contemporary conceptions of femininity within the same social group, where emphasis was similarly placed on the importance of the domestic, the religious and the commercial. Thus 47

Hannah Barker

Figure 4.1  John Ralston, Market Street, lithograph, 1823. Image reproduced by kind permission of Chetham’s Library, Manchester.

we find businesswomen advertising in north-west English newspapers to promote their image and reputation in a manner that differed little from that used by men. Such women submitted themselves to the public gaze readily and willingly, hoping to further their reputations and their fortunes not by emphasizing those domestic qualities that we are used to thinking formed the basis of female identity in this period, but by presenting themselves as respectable women of business.5

Families and business It would be difficult to study gender and businesses in this period without examining families, since they were central to the organisation of so many enterprises during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.6 As Margaret H. Darrow notes in her study of southern France at this time, ‘for most artisans and shopkeepers, the property of the business was the property of the family, be it capital or contacts and labor, were one and the same. Work, property and family formed one intricate pattern’.7 Many small businesses in this period were run by single men and women, either acting as sole traders or in partnership with non-relatives, and a significant proportion of these businessmen and women – in common with the population as a whole – never married, nor did they live with family members.8 Yet despite the significance of such individuals, the great majority of businesses during the industrial revolution were still dependent on families, whether in terms of day-to-day management and staffing and/or as sources of other forms of support such as finance and training. For this reason, the relationship between families and business forms a central focus of this chapter. Business families constituted particularly complex social entities as economic units that both produced and consumed, the site of both physical and social reproduction, a place where belief systems were inculcated, identity was formed and emotions were focused. Historians have argued persuasively that family businesses can only be understood within the context of family ambitions and priorities.9 Yet as we shall see, families did not necessarily act as single units with shared interests, whilst familial relationships and hierarchies of power within business families varied greatly, and could be determined by a number of factors – including gender and age – as well as by profound emotional attachments. 48

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Historians are divided as to whether the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries ­witnessed profound changes in the nature of the family and in the ways in which familial hierarchies operated.10 The evidence from studies of England and Germany seems to suggest that those in trading families expected, and, for much of the time, experienced, ‘companionate’ or ‘co-dependent’ models of familial and marital relations rather than those founded entirely on patriarchy.11 Within marriages wives were, as Rosemary O’Day notes, for the most part ‘helpmeets, not dependents’.12 The maintenance of the family was seen as a shared concern, not one where men took sole or primary responsibility. Women’s contribution to the family economy could be significant13 and gave them a sense of entitlement while helping to ensure the family’s social standing and creditworthiness.14 As Joanne Bailey has argued in her study of early modern marriages amongst the middling and lower orders in England, ‘the predicament of wives without their husbands is well known, but without their wives, husbands faced the loss of income, property, household management, child care and reputation’.15

Women and business The extent to which the type of rapid growth and social and economic transformation witnessed in many European towns during this period affected women’s experience of work is also open to question. However, it seems likely that in the fastest growing and least regulated centres, where opportunities were most prevalent, female manufacturers and traders had greater independence than in more established and less dynamic towns.16 Recent research on towns that experienced rapid growth in England – notably London, the north west and towns in the Midlands – presents extensive pictures of businesswomen’s economic activity.17 Moreover, Beverly Lemire’s research on credit depicts English women at the centre of small-scale financial dealings amongst non-elite groups between 1600 and 1900.18 Britain, and England in particular, is often celebrated for the precocity of its urban and industrial development in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But this does not mean that the picture of female economic activity presented here was unique, and in continental Europe, women such as Margueritte Blakey, a mercer with a ‘magasin anglais’ in the rue des Prouvaires in Paris, could be found operating freely in the French guild system.19 Other businesswomen traded independently in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Geneva,20 as well as acting on their own account as merchants in northern German and Scandinavian towns.21 Across Europe, examples can be found of women assisting in the family firm well into the nineteenth century.22 Bonnie Smith presents women’s participation in business in northern France as commonplace during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and describes ‘the legion of northern French businesswomen who probably inspired Michelet to comment that “in Flanders a woman is worth a man, and then some”’.23 Women have also been identified working alongside their artisan and craftsmen husbands in early modern Germany.24 Ogilvie’s research on the Württemberg Black Forest region of south-west Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows that married women’s work was widely distributed across economic sectors,25 while Darrow describes wives operating independently from their husbands as shopkeepers and hairdressers in the southern French town of Montauban.26 As Deborah Simonton’s chapter in this volume discusses, guildswomen in some French towns appear to have strongly supported the guild system on the grounds that it protected them from competition and gave them economic benefits and improved legal standing. In Cologne and Zurich, women’s guilds operated in silk making and gold spinning,27 whilst in Holland a flexible guild policy coupled with the pattern of commercial development in Dutch food markets benefited independent female entrepreneurship over the more traditional husband and 49

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wife partnerships.28 Yet elsewhere in Europe and in other trades, guilds could actively oppose women’s involvement, as Merry Wiesner has described in early-modern Germany.29 Guilds commonly allowed men much greater privileges than women, often restricting or preventing the participation of daughters and unmarried women in trades and curtailing the rights of widows to continue their husband’s businesses.30 Women’s legal standing could also hinder their involvement in business life. Throughout much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe, a married women’s legal identity was subsumed into that of her husband, which could severely curtail her control of property and her ability to trade independently.31 And though French women appear to have gained greater property rights during the Revolution, these were removed under the Napoleonic code.32 Yet whilst the picture across Europe and over time was complex, in England, for the most part, when male heads of business and household died or became incapacitated, it was normal for their wives to take over from them without apparent controversy, just as less senior male ­family members would do on other occasions. Thus, a court case from the 1780s records a tobacconist’s shop on Cateaton Street in Manchester passing to the control of Elizabeth Stevenson in January 1785 when her husband, John, was said to have become ill and was judged to be ‘insane’ so that he ‘since that time hath been wholly incapable of carrying out the said business of a Tobacconist or of managing his affairs in any respect or entering into any contract whatsoever’.This left Elizabeth to manage ‘the general affairs’ of her husband on her own with ‘a family of four children whom she supported by her industry by the produce of the said shop’.33 Sons might take over the family firm on the death of their father despite their mother being alive, but this seems to have been done in north-west England – at least where evidence exists – with their mother’s consent. The more common course of events was that generational hierarchies took priority over gendered ones, so that widows were more likely to seize the reigns upon the death of a husband, even when they had adult sons. Adult children might well be taken into partnerships with their mothers, but the division of power was made clear by trading names that typically took the form of ‘Mrs X and son (or daughter)’.34 Such practices seem to indicate not only the importance of age in deciding seniority but also the part played in familial hierarchies by skill and experience that could be honed by years of involvement in day-to-day business operations. Contemporary writers in the early-modern period often argued that the essential division in the family or household was not based on gender but was rather between ‘governors’ (husband and wife, or master and mistress) and ‘those that must be ruled’ (children and servants), or as Keith Thomas stated of early-modern Britain, ‘the prevailing ideal was gerontocratic: the young were to serve and the old were to rule’.35 We can see this ‘gerontocracy’, coupled with a widow’s confidence in ignoring her late ­husband’s instructions regarding the family business, in the case of the Edmundson family, who ran a cabinet makers and upholsterers in Liverpool in the early nineteenth century. Richard Edmundson, whose will was executed in 1810, ordered that his executors sell his entire estate and place the money from sales into ‘securities’ – that is, forms of passive investment. His widow, Rachel, was to receive the income to bring up their children, including at least one son, also named Richard. Before his death, Richard Edmundson senior appeared in the 1810 town directory as ‘Richard Edmundson, cabinet maker and upholster, 2 Oldham Street’, with a ‘repository’ situated at 2 Marshall Street. By 1814, the Oldham Street listing was unchanged, with the business almost certainly under the control of Richard senior’s widow, Rachel, whose eldest son joined her in the venture at some point; by 1816, ‘Mrs Edmundson’ is listed running the business at Oldham Street, while in 1821, the directory lists ‘Rachael Edmundson, cabinet maker, 2 oldham street’ and ‘Rachel Edmundson and son, cabinet repository and upholsters, 12 bold street’. The move to Bold Street from the more minor thoroughfare of Marshall Street suggests that 50

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the business was not only surviving but was also moving upmarket. It also indicates that Rachel Edmundson’s decision to carry on her husband’s business, rather than accept his instructions to try to live off rentier investments, was a sound commercial one from which both she and her children were likely to have benefited.36 Elsewhere in Europe, too, widows often continued family businesses.37 Thus, Wunder notes that the Göttingen university publisher Vandenboeck and Ruprecht was kept afloat by the ‘resolute widow’ of its founder in the eighteenth century,38 and Darrow describes the widow of the Montauban butcher, Jean Ramondis, taking out a large loan in 1795 to fund what appears to have been a new branch of the business in the form of a tannery.39 On a more modest scale in Carrick-on-Suir in Ireland in 1799, widows could be found continuing their husbands’ cloth dealing, dying and shopkeeping businesses.40

Family strategies? Though Rachel Edmundson and her son might well have agreed about the direction of their family business, other trading families in north-west England were far from unified concerning commercial strategy, and the apparent seniority of parents over their children did not always go unchallenged. Thus, in 1803, Betty Oldham, widow of the Ashton-under-Lyme cabinet maker Thomas Oldham, brought a case to the Court of Exchequer in England along with her sons, John and Joseph, to try to prevent her oldest son, also Thomas, from assuming control of the family house and business.41 The lack of unity shown by the Oldhams was not confined to this family, and the records of various courts in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century England, and indeed elsewhere in Europe, are littered with cases concerning trading families fighting over property. Disharmony amongst trading families is evident, for example, in Darrow’s examination of the southern French town of Montauban, where she found that ‘one family might be closely knit whereas another was strife torn’.42 The fact that families argue – and particularly that they argue over inheritance – is no surprise to historians who have examined court records or family papers, nor does the revelation that individual family members might act to further their own interests at the expense of those of their relations seem a particularly startling one. Yet it is an important issue to consider when examining business families, since disputes and fallings out could have major impacts on individual businesses that a focus on the family as a unified unit can obscure. The concept of family strategies – one used by economists, sociologists, anthropologists and historians alike – can both illuminate and cloud issues of familial relationships and actions, not least as the term is utilized by scholars in a variety of different ways, some of which treat families as unified units that pursue joint strategies, and some of which do not. Those models that emphasise the differential bargaining power of different genders and generations within the family, rather than assuming a unity of interest, are particularly useful for the examination of families and business in which competing designs are often apparent.43 However, we should also remember that the wants, needs and desires of different family members might well be satisfied by the same ends, so that, as Viazzo and Lynch note, it is probably ‘ill-advised to assume that the members of a household inevitably have conflicting wishes or goals’.44 Yet whether there is apparent harmony or not, we need to be wary of viewing the family simply as what Peter Laslett described as ‘a knot of individual interests’: one in which family members are only interested in themselves or are engaged in a constant process of power politicking and bargaining over resources.45 In research on peasant households in nineteenth-century France,Tessie Liu has described how past societies could exhibit ‘a normative view that men and women in families must cooperate’, which was in itself ‘a powerful reality that acts on family members at many levels, binding their actions and emotions’.46 51

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Indeed, the possibility that family members might disagree with each other over business strategy, or have divergent interests, was the reason why such care was taken by will-makers when detailing the distribution of family wealth in cases where more than one person would have a claim on an estate. The same motives to avoid familial disharmony were behind the formalized partnership agreements that were sometimes used by family members in business together in order to try to prevent or to minimise the impact of any future differences. Yet it would be a mistake to think that business families were full of division and bad feeling. Even within court documents that describe familial disharmony on a grand scale, it is also evident that there existed a pervasive sense that family members ought to get on and should be able to trust one another. We see this in a case brought before the Court of Exchequer in London in 1790 describing the dissolution of a firm of Salford dyers, run by two brothers, Robert and James Bancroft, where each accused the other of betraying their brother’s trust in them to keep the firm’s accounts.47 For his part, Robert claimed to be a very bad writer and being totally unacquainted with book keeping or the nature thereof and having a great confidence in the honesty and integrity of his said brother… left the whole and sole care and charge of the books belonging to the said copartnership and the conduct and management of the said partnership dealings to [James].48 James Bancroft also stated that he had ‘a great confidence in the honesty and integrity’ of his brother, who he claimed was in fact responsible for keeping the company’s accounts.49 Though the facts of the case were contested, the readiness with which brothers might work, and sometimes live, together and run a business in ways that left them open to being defrauded says as much about expectations that family members could trust one another than it does about the propensity of some individuals to betray that trust.The role of trust in family firms is something that historians have noted in terms of the perceived benefits of the family business model.50 But it was also the basis of family relations more generally, as was a sense of duty and feelings of affection and love – particularly, but not exclusively, in relationships between those related by blood and those who were married to each other.51 Sources other than court records, such as diaries and correspondence, present the historian with more positive aspects of familial and household relations within business families, which encourage us not to focus on the differential bargaining power of different genders and generations and the sometimes fraught nature of relationships, but instead to examine the more co-operative elements of family life and the instances in which unified interests seem to have been more apparent.52 Co-operation amongst family members is most apparent in instances where they lived and worked together in the same enterprise. But we also find evidence of relatives helping each other in alternative ways. Most importantly, parents and other family members commonly ensured that children were properly trained for employment; this can be viewed both as part of a family-centred strategy to ensure on-going prosperity and as evidence of a concern for the futures of individual offspring, siblings and other relations in a network of reciprocal social and financial credit.53 The Warrington family of grocers, headed by George and Anne Crosfield, used what appear to be religious networks to secure an apprenticeship for their son, Joseph. In 1807, when he was nearly 15, George travelled with Joseph to Newcastle, to place him in an apprenticeship with a fellow Quaker, Anthony Clapham,‘having agreed with him…to take him as an apprentice for 6 years to learn the trade of Chemist and Druggist’.54 The use of alternative, familial links to secure apprenticeships is illustrated in detail in the ‘memorandums’ book left by the Warrington watchmaker James Carter, which describes a variety of relationships between members of an extended and intermarried family.55 Carter’s notebook reveals a 52

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national familial network in the watch-making trade and something of a rolling programme of apprenticeship and training for its younger members, including himself. Families have also been well documented as sources of business finance – particularly for setting up in trade – throughout the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries.56 In the north west of England, we can see evidence of this in the dealings of a number of men linked to the grocery trade, who were able to raise business finance from a variety of relatives – both male and female – to whom they were either related by blood or through marriage from their wives’ relations. Griffith Owen, a grocer based at 64 Whitechapel in Liverpool, was lent money to set up in business by his father, Walter, who had also sponsored his apprenticeship.57 Similarly, a Manchester-based grocer, Micah Rose, told the Court of Exchequer in 1812 of the financial support that he had received from his late father-in-law, Robert Jones, a Chester shoemaker, upon marrying his daughter Catherine.58 Siblings as well as parents might be called on as sources of financial support; thus, in 1784, brothers William and James Leigh formed a partnership in a Warrington tobacconist’s shop. William was a grocer with an established business in the town when the agreement was drawn up, while James had recently completed his apprenticeship in Liverpool to ‘aquire the Art and Skill of manufacturing tobacco and snuff ’. Their agreement explained James’s desire to set up as a tobacconist in Warrington and also his lack of capital ‘to commence and carry on the said trade’. In return for the supply of a property in which to both live and work, plus a loan of £500 to set up his brother’s new venture,William was to become a ‘copartner’ in the business for a period of seven years, with the firm trading as James Leigh and Co. With his own grocery business to run, William was a sleeping partner who was not ‘obliged to give his attendance in any ways himself in or about the affairs and business of the said copartnership’, whilst his younger brother was to ‘transact and manage the principal part of the said Business’ and undertook to ‘diligently Honestly and faithfully employ himself in and about the Affairs and Business of the said copartnership and devote his whole time thereto’.59 Similarly, George Heywood of Manchester called upon his older and wealthier aunt to lend him money to set up in partnership with a fellow journeyman grocer in 1815.60

Conclusion In towns across Britain, the rapid urban growth and economic development that certain regions experienced between the last half of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth was a process that was primarily driven by the proliferation of small, often family-run, businesses. Thereafter, the following decades witnessed tougher times for small-scale British producers and traders, whose economic influence and importance began to wane in the face of much larger and more powerful firms.61 Though these newer enterprises were often family based too, they did not involve men and women working together in joint ventures in the same ways as have been described in this chapter, and as a result, gender relations amongst both employers and their workers in these larger businesses were likely to have varied significantly from the models presented here.62 Yet small family enterprises did not die out, and they remained in evidence late into the twentieth century, and not only in Britain. In mainland Europe, the pattern of small business expansion and contraction varied considerably: in Germany, the later nineteenth century saw a decline in the number of small enterprises and the rise of big businesses, whereas in France the picture was different again, with the economy dominated by small businesses until the 1930s – although here the rise of shop chains and department stores in the late nineteenth century presented a particular threat to some types of small firm that was less evident elsewhere on the continent.63 Thus, the importance and persistence of both the sorts of small business families described above, and the forms of gender that might be associated with 53

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them, varied significantly across both European regions and over time.64 However, as historians, we should remain mindful of the importance of family to such firms and the possibility that women could wield significant influence in enterprises in which gerontocracy might be as influential as gender.

Notes   1 Maxine Berg and Pat Hudson, ‘Rehabilitating the Industrial Revolution,’ Economic History Review 45, 1 (1992): 31–2; Maxine Berg, ‘Small producer capitalism in eighteenth-century England,’ Business History 35, 1 (1993).   2 Hannah Barker, ‘Soul, purse and family: Middling and lower-class masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester,’ Social History 33, 1 (2008).  3 Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987): 113.   4 Karen Harvey, ‘The history of masculinity, circa 1650–1800,’ Journal of British Studies XLIV, 2 (2005): 309.   5 Hannah Barker, The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), Chapter 3.   6 Peter L. Payne, ‘Family business in Britain: An historical and analytical survey,’ in Family Business in the Era of Industrial Growth, ed. Akio Okoshi and Shigeaki Yasuoka (Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984); Geoffrey Jones and Mary B. Rose, ‘Family capitalism,’ Business History 35, 4 (1993).   7 Margaret Darrow, Revolution in the House: Family, Class and Inheritance in Southern France, 1775–1825 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989): 132.   8 Edward A. Wrigley and Roger Schofield’s figures in The Population History of England, 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (London: Arnold, 1981), 260 suggest that around 6 per cent of individuals in this period never married. See also Bridget Hill, Women Alone: Spinsters in England, 1660–1850 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), Chapter 4; Amy M. Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), Chapters 3 and 4; Barker, Business of Women, Chapter 4.   9 Mary B. Rose, ‘The family firm in British business, 1780–1914,’ in Business Enterprise in Modern Britain: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Maurice Kirby and Mary Rose (London: Routledge, 1994), 72; Mark Casson, ‘The economics of the family firm,’ Scandinavian Economic History Review 47, 1 (1999); Alastair Owens, ‘Inheritance and the life-cycle of family firms in the early Industrial Revolution,’ Business History 44, 1 (2002); Andrew Popp, Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage, and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012). 10 See, for example, Edward A. Wrigley, Population and History: From the Traditional to the Modern World (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1969); Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (London: Methuen, 1965); Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1977); David Cressy, ‘Kinship and kin interaction in early modern England,’ Past & Present 113 (1986); Naomi Tadmor, ‘The concept of the household-family in eighteenth-century England,’ Past & Present 151 (1996). 11 David W. Sabean, Property, Production and Family in Neckarhausen, 1700–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Lynn Abrams, ‘Companionship and conflict: The negotiation of marriage relations in the nineteenth century,’ in Gender Relations in German History: Power, Agency and Experience from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Lynn Abrams and Elizabeth Harvey (London: UCL Press, 1996). 12 Rosemary O’Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500–1900: England, France and the United States of America (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 204. 13 Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, Chapter 6; Margaret Hunt, The Middling Sort: Commerce, Gender and the Family in England, 1680–1780 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996); Bonnie Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class: The Bourgeoises of Northern France in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 37–41; Olwen Hufton, The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe,Vol. 1: 1500–1800, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997), 92–3. 14 Margaret Hunt, ‘Wives and marital “rights” in the Court of Exchequer,’ in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (­Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 118–21; Shani D’Cruze, ‘The middling sort in eighteenth-century Colchester: Independence, social relations and the community broker,’ in The Middling Sort of

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Gender and Business People: Culture, Society and Politics in England 1550–1800, ed. Jonathan Barry and Christopher Brooks (­Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994). 15 Joanne Bailey, Unquiet Lives: Marriage and Marriage Breakdown in England, 1660–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 203–4. 16 Mary Prior, ‘Women and the urban economy: Oxford 1500–1800,’ in Women in English Society 1500– 1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985); Maxine Berg, ‘What difference did women’s work make to the Industrial Revolution?,’ History Workshop Journal 35 (1993); Katrina Honeyman and Jordan Goodman, ‘Women’s work, labour markets and gender conflict in Europe, 1500–1900,’ Economic History Review 44 (1991). 17 Nicola Phillips, Women in Business, 1700–1850 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006); Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s property and the Industrial Revolution,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, 2 (1993). 18 Beverly Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England, c. 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), chapter 2. 19 Carolyn Sargentson, Merchants and Luxury Markets: The Marchands Merciers of Eighteenth-century Paris (London:Victoria and Albert museum, 1996), 115–8; Cynthia M.Truant, ‘Parisian guildswomen and the (sexual) politics of privilege: Defending their patrimonies in print,’ in Going Public:Women and Publishing in Early Modern France, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith and Dena Goodman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Daryl Hafter, ‘Female masters in eighteenth-century Rouen,’ French Historical Studies 20, 1 (1997); Clare H. Crowston, Credit, Fashion, Sex: Economies of Regard in Old Regime France (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 20 Elizabeth Sanderson, Women and Work in Eighteenth-century Edinburgh (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); E. William Monter, ‘Women in Calvinist Geneva, 1550–1800,’ Signs 6 (1980). 21 Daniel A. Rabuzzi, ‘Women as merchants in eighteenth-century northern Germany: The case of Stralsund, 1750–1830,’ Central European History 28, 4 (1995). 22 Deborah Simonton, A History of Women’s Work, 1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1998), 156–9; Barker, The Business of Women, Chapter 2; Phillips, Women in Business, 134–46; Hunt, Middling Sort, Chapter 5; Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), Chapter 2; Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class; Darrow, Revolution in the House, 150–1, 160; Danielle van den Heuvel, Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands c. 1580–1815 (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007). 23 Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class, 35. 24 Heide Wunder, He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 73–4, 87–89. 25 Sheilagh Ogilvie, A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 142–6. 26 Darrow, Revolution in the House, 160. 27 Clare Haru Crowston, Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 408–9; Wunder, He is the Sun, 86–7. 28 Danielle van den Heuvel, ‘Partners in marriage and business? Guilds and the family economy in the urban food markets in the Dutch Republic,’ Continuity and Change, 23, 2 (2008). 29 Merry E. Wiesner, ‘Guilds, male bonding and women’s work in early modern Germany,’ Gender and History 1, 2 (1989). 30 Ogilvie, A Bitter Living, 151–72, 212–67, 277, 329–31; Hufton, The Prospect Before Her, 93, 239–45; Elizabeth Musgrave, ‘Women and craft guilds in eighteenth-century Nantes,’ in The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900, ed. Geoffrey Crossick (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997); Weisner, ‘Guilds, male bonding’; Jean Quataert, ‘The shaping of women’s work in manufacturing guilds, households and the state in central Europe, 1648–1870,’ American Historical Review 90 (1985); Janine Lanza, From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy and Law (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Deborah Simonton, ‘Widows and wenches: Single women in eighteenth-century urban economies,’ in Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830, ed. Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach (London: Routledge, 2013). 31 Simonton, A History of European Women’s Work 1700 to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), 57. 32 Darrow, Revolution in the House, 167–9; Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class, 47. 33 National Archives (TNA), E112/1529/204 (1788). 34 Barker, Business of Women, 111–5. 35 Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2007), 34–7; Keith Thomas, ‘Age and authority in early modern Britain,’ Proceedings of the British Academy, 62 (1976): 207.

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Hannah Barker 36 Gore’s Directory, for Liverpool and its Environs: for the year 1810 (Liverpool, 1810); Gore’s Directory, of ­Liverpool and its Environs (Liverpool, 1814); Gore’s Directory, of Liverpool and its Environs (Liverpool, 1816); Gore’s Liverpool Directory, with its Environs (Liverpool, 1821). 37 Deborah Simonton, ‘Women workers; Working women,’ in The Routledge History of Women in Europe Since 1700, ed. Deborah Simonton (London: Routledge, 2006), 145–6; Lanza, From Wives to Widows; Simonton, ‘Widows and wenches’. 38 Wunder, He is the Sun, 92. 39 Darrow, Revolution in the House, 160. 40 L. A. Clarkson and E. M. Crawford, ‘Life after death: Widows in Carrick-on-Suir 1799,’ in Women in Early Modern Ireland, ed. Margaret MacCurtain and Mary O’Dowd (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1991). 41 TNA, E112, 1534/357 (1803). 42 Darrow, Revolution in the House, 142. 43 Nancy Folbre, ‘Family strategy, feminist strategy,’ Historical Methods 20, 3 (1987): 115–8. 44 Pier Paolo Viazzo and Katherine A. Lynch, ‘Anthropology, family history, and the concept of strategy,’ International Review of Social History 47 (2002): 449. 45 Peter Laslett, ‘The family as a knot of individual interests,’ in Households: Comparative and Historic Studies of the Domestic Group, ed. Robert McC. Netting and others (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984). 46 Tessie P. Liu, ‘Le patrimoine magique: Reassessing the power of women in peasant households in nineteenth-century France,’ Gender and History 6 (1994): 30–1. 47 TNA, E112, 530/239. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid. 50 Stana Nenadic, ‘The small family firm in Victorian Britain,’ Business History 35, 4 (1993); Mark Casson, ‘The economics of the family firm,’ Scandinavian Economic History Review, 47, 1 (1999). 51 Amy Harris, Siblinghood and Social Relations in Georgian England: Share and Share Alike (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2012), 28–38, 55–79; Joanne Bailey, Parenting in England 1760–1830: Emotion, Identity, and Generation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Leonore Davidoff, Thicker than Water: Siblings and their Relations, 1780–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 52 Robin Holt and Andrew Popp, ‘Emotion, succession, and the family firm: Josiah Wedgwood & Sons,’ Business History 55, 6 (2013). 53 Harris, Siblinghood, 127–34; John Tosh, ‘Authority and nurture in middle class manhood: The case of early and mid-Victorian England,’ Gender and History 8 (1996): 53–4; Anthony J. Fletcher, Growing Up in England: The Experience of Childhood 1600–1914 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 136–8. 54 Unilever Archives, Port Sunlight, JCS/11/10/01, ‘Extracts from formal report by George Crosfield, of Warrington and Lancaster,’ 1807 9 mo.; Alfred E. Musson, Enterprise in Soap and Chemicals: Joseph Crosfield & Sons Limited, 1815–1965 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1965), 10. 55 Warrington Library, MS2433, ‘Notebook of James Carter, 1780–1869’. 56 Hunt, Middling Sort, chapter 1; Richard Grassby, Kinship and Capitalism: Marriage, Family, and Business in the English-Speaking World, 1580–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 282–8; Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair, Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 2003), 66–70. See also the much broader European overview surveyed in Richard Wall, ‘Introduction,’ in Family Forms in Historic Europe, ed. Richard Wall, Jean Robin and Peter Laslett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 22–8. 57 Gore’s Directory of Liverpool and its Environs (Liverpool, 1811); TNA, E112/1547/778 (1812). 58 TNA, E112/ 1543/656; Cheshire Archives, Will of Robert Jones of Chester (1826) [will written in 1810, the year Jones died; archival date later due to subsequent court case at Chester Consistory court over Jones’s property between the executors and Jones’s former tenants]. 59 Lancashire Record Office, DDCS/39/1/Warrington. 60 Hannah Barker, ‘A grocer’s tale: Class, gender and family in early nineteenth-century Manchester,’ Gender and History 21, 2 (2009): 345. 61 Pat Hudson, The Genesis of Industrial Capital: A Study of the West Riding Wool Textile Industry c. 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Chapter 2; Clive Behagg, Politics and Production in the Early Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1990), 54–5; Maxine Berg, ‘Small producer capitalism in eighteenth-century England,’ Business History 35, 1 (1993); Mary B. Rose, ‘The family firm in British

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Gender and Business business, 1780–1914,’ in Business Enterprise in Modern Britain: From the Eighteenth to the Twentieth Century, ed. Maurice Kirby and Mary Rose (London: Routledge, 1994), 63–5; Maxine Berg, ‘Inventors of the world of goods,’ in From Family Firms to Corporate Capitalism, ed. Kristine Bruland and Patrick O’Brien (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); Geoffrey Tweedale, ‘Backstreet capitalism: An analysis of the family firm in the nineteenth-century Sheffield cutlery industry,’ Business History 55, 6 (2013). 62 See, for example, Mary B. Rose, The Gregs of Quarry Bank Mill: The Rise and Decline of a Family Firm, 1750–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); John Tosh, A Man’s Place: Masculinity and the Middle-Class Home in Victorian England (New Haven, Conn.:Yale University Press, 1999); Robert J. Morris, Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870: A Social and Economic History of Family Strategies amongst the Leeds Middle Classes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Sonya O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-century England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992); Clark, Struggle for the Breeches. 63 Geoffrey Crossick and Heinz-Gerhard Haupt, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780–1914: Enterprise, Family and Independence (London: Routledge, 1995), 39–63. 64 Jones and Rose, ‘Family capitalism’; Roy Church, ‘the family firm in industrial capitalism: International perspectives on hypotheses and history,’ Business History 35, 4 (1993): 17–43.

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5 Poverty, Family Economies and Survival Strategies in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries A Gender Approach Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller

Introduction It is well known that eighteenth-century cities were places where power, business, wealth and revolt converged, as well as all the activities revolving around the survival of ordinary people. This chapter describes the part of eighteenth-century Europe’s urban economy that is associated with the survival of men and women as artisans, day labourers, washerwomen, servants, nursemaids, workers (employed, partially employed or unemployed), elderly people in the process of being excluded permanently from the labour market, the sick and recently arrived immigrants or vagabonds who populated the streets and squares of the main European cities of the old regime.We refer to this group as ‘ordinary people’.The survival strategies of men, women, families and households involved acquiring resources not only from regulated, formal work but also from other formal and informal practices to obtain food, household goods, money, medicines or a roof over their heads. The use of welfare institutions, alms, public soup, the help of primary networks of socialization, philanthropist activities, microcredits or the Church were sources that provided resources.

Towns, ordinary people and gender In cities, people learnt how to survive collectively over generations. They learnt to use the resource of available social infrastructures: poorhouses, hospitals, orphanages, homes for penitent prostitutes, microcredit institutions, forms of organized charity like soup kitchens, support for the ‘shameful’ poor in the parish, collection boxes in churches, alms, philanthropic activities like pious foundations and good works to help young, unmarried women, among others. However, survival strategies also included the use of resources from informal sources, such as impromptu begging, searching for food near markets and even crime, although the latter is not covered in this chapter.  58

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At the end of the eighteenth century and start of the nineteenth, the introduction of the factory system was advancing in many parts of Europe, and work-related initiatives were proliferating to lessen the vulnerability of working men and women. These initiatives juxtaposed the old trade associations linked to the guilds with new organizations such as charitable funds, strike funds, mutual-aid societies, credit institutions for the poor, ‘Mount of Piety’ pawnbrokers and saving banks. The initiatives arose in a context in which the moral economy and the old poor relief systems had been dismantled but had not yet been replaced by new forms of social protection. Ordinary people were clearly vulnerable in cities at the end of the eighteenth century.The old social protection institutions – hospices, houses of mercy, homes for penitent prostitutes – had a more feminized profile. As we go deep into the 1800s, the new institutions and organisations of social protection such as workhouses, Mounts of Piety, brotherhoods, trade unions and associations became masculinized. The city was also where all forms of capital developed in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: financial capital resulting from the changes in manufacturing, trade, business and finances; human capital due to the creation of universities, academies of arts and sciences and discussion circles where new Enlightenment thought was spread; and social or relational capital par excellence. Social capital refers to the trust, formal and informal norms, reciprocal relationships, information flows, attitudes and values that help people to form relationships of cooperation and mutual assistance. In the case of ordinary people, social capital was the most important element of cohesion, and trust was the most inclusive form of social capital.1 Social relationships of trust and reciprocity probably formed part of the intangible heritage of the men and women who made up the urban working classes in a context in which the moral economy had not yet been fully dismantled. Reputation indicated the value of each person. It determined the limits of those who were members of the community and could access the available social resources. Reputation in the urban context of the eighteenth century either opened up or blocked access to poor relief. Cities had always attracted people from other places, and migration was largely responsible for outlining the profile of urban centres. During the eighteenth century, European cities grew for several reasons. The first was the rate of natural increase in the population, that is, the higher number of births than deaths due to advances in hygiene, diet and vaccinations in this period. The second was the systematic arrival of immigrants from former areas of proto-industry and communities in the throes of change. The labour market that was forming drove various migration routes that often passed through or ended in cities as the moral economy of communities succumbed. The presence or absence of social infrastructure like hospitals, poorhouses, soup kitchens and good works, among others, and informal practices like begging or crime that supported the needy made the arrival of immigrants easier or harder. Despite the patriarchal environment in Europe at the end of the eighteenth century, women in the urban context developed a capacity for action and bargaining power to face their lives. The concept of ‘women’s agency’ was incorporated into the analytical instrument developed by Pierre Bourdieu and reinterpreted by Amartya Sen and refers to women’s capacity to have a voice and act, which was found in the gaps, on the margins or at the epicentre of the patriarchal order.2 For poverty historians, these contributions have been decisive in that they have allowed the reinterpretation of the vulnerability of men and women below the threshold of survival, who would become passive receivers of social aids and active agents of resource recruitment.The sources in urban centres of the south of Europe show the ability of women, in danger of poverty or already settled in it, to recruit resources beyond work: getting food in the public soup kitchens, obtaining microcredits in exchange for pawning very poor pledges, getting medicines at the church or arranging the admission of children and old relatives in the hospice. Men’s itineraries 59

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when facing poverty were more institutionalised and went from joining the army to, by means of the reforms of enlightened governments at the end of the eighteenth century, taking part in road construction and public works. Sen and Nussbaum proposed that capabilities and the potential to choose, act and have a voice that define women’s agency depend on the institutional framework, the opportunities for choice and the individual’s bargaining power.3 Bargaining power is a key factor that is relevant in different environments, starting with the family itself and extending to institutions, spaces or organizations. Consequently, Sen considers that the family is a ‘cooperative conflict’ within a specific institutional framework. In the urban contexts of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the ability of families to adapt to deep transformations that were taking place, like migrations, the emergence of the factory system and urban densification, lead to an indispensable development of an institutional framework that was able to offer some degree – however minor it may be – of resource complementarity. The third sector in an urban context drew on the old late-medieval and modern institutions of hospitals, nursing homes, orphanages, homes for penitent prostitutes, and Mounts of Piety as well as on the rising organisations such as new trade associations, savings banks, Mounts of Piety or brotherhoods, all of which rose from the initiative of ordinary people. Specialised public macro institutions of confinement, like workhouses, foundling and maternity homes, asylums, prisons and nursing homes, would appear from the mid-1800s.

The multidimensionality of poverty, gender and survival strategies Poverty is a relative term. Being poor does not mean the same in different societies and at different times. The situation is even more complex if we consider that the social perception of poverty includes those who see themselves as poor and those who are seen by others as poor. Jeremy Bentham considered that Poverty is the state of everyone who, in order to obtain subsistence, is forced to have recourse to labour. Indigence is the state of him who, being destitute of property…is at the same time either unable to labour, or unable, even for labour, to procure the supply of which he happens thus to be in want.4 Bentham associated the status of worker with that of poverty, which meant that poverty was a recurring experience among working men and women. In late eighteenth and early nineteenthcentury towns, the line that separated poverty from indigence was one on which many households of ordinary people teetered. This is evidenced in a statement made by Maria Sangés, who requested admission to the Casa de Misericordia de Barcelona workhouse in 1777 with the claim that ‘We are really poor people, so much so that we have no property, income, or other goods with which to support ourselves; only our sweat and the work of our hands’.5  In a study of York at the end of the nineteenth century, B. Seebohm Rowntree proposed a primary poverty line in an individual’s life cycle that is determined in relation to a person’s family unit rather than in isolation.6 He established a series of stages: childhood, adolescence, marriage and childrearing, the subsequent emancipation of children and exit from the labour market in old age. Rowntree considered that conditions of poverty existed at three points in the life cycle: childhood, the early years of marriage when children are young and old age. Twenty years later, in a study on Russian peasants, Alexander V. Chayanov described the ratio between workers and consumers in the family unit. When the ratio was negative, the unit crossed the poverty threshold.7 60

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At the beginning of the 1970s, Michael Anderson studied stages in the family life cycle, the proportion of children who worked and their contribution to family income in Lancashire in the mid-nineteenth century. His study showed the financial burden of the birth of the first children, which pushed many families over the threshold of primary poverty.8 These findings were supported in a study by Stuart Woolf on Florence at the start of the nineteenth century, which showed a close relationship between poverty and the family life cycle.The most critical points were found to be when the head of the family was between 35 and 45 years old and in old age.9 According to Woolf, insufficient income during most of the family cycle led to a structural possibility of poverty, except at the end of adolescence and during the first few years of marriage before children were born. Woolf formulated the notion of ‘household strategies for survival’ and stressed the importance of charity as an additional source of income, especially in southern European towns. Amartya Sen’s contributions at the end of the twentieth century finally led to a clear understanding of the fact that poverty was not merely a lack of income. Sen proposed a multidimensional approach in which poverty must be seen as the deprivation of basic capabilities rather than merely as lowness of income. For example, the greater the provision of social services like basic education and health care, the more opportunities there are for those who are potentially poor to avoid destitution.10 Similarly, Debraj Ray stated that inequality is the fundamental disparity that permits one individual certain material choices while denying another individual those very same choices.11 The opportunities for choice are determined by the institutional framework, the existence or absence of a network of social services, the presence or absence of knowledge built on informal practices for obtaining resources, the collective learning of survival, the degree of gender equality, the opportunities to participate in community life, the existence of a safe environment or an environmentally sustainable environment and, above all, women’s bargaining power both within and outside the household. It is in this multidimensional aspect of poverty that women’s agency develops to make the survival of individuals, families and households possible. Olwen Hufton formulated the phrase ‘economy of makeshifts’ to describe the many jobs and tasks that poor households undertook to survive, especially in an urban context.12 Louise Tilly and Joan Scott described the key role of women in this wide variety of tasks and their capacity to refocus survival strategies.13 Richard Wall highlighted the importance of the adaptive capacity of family economies: the composition of family units and households could change depending on their relationship with the survival opportunities offered by the environment.14 Similarly, in a recent study on the origins of the welfare state in Great Britain, Bernard Harris introduced the term ‘mixed economy of welfare’ to describe the different ways that individuals, families and households of workers could access resources: the state, philanthropic organizations, the Church, and workers’ organizations and associations.15 In the European cities of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the offer of care resources diversified and widened. The old care institutions overlapped with the new forms of aid and social protection. Proof of this was urban space and the queues in front of the Mount of Piety, the queues for the public soup, the comings and goings to the church by the shamefaced poor, the number of beggars asking for money in entrance halls or the new trade associations, brotherhoods and Mounts of Piety. In southern European towns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the offer of aid to the poor was transformed, and the mixed economies of welfare were manifested through strategies of survival of ordinary people.

Family, household, vulnerability and the use of welfare institutions Historical demography and the history of the family have been used to study how economic and social change enhances the adaptability of family structures to a new reality. This is not just 61

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a one-way relationship, as family structures frequently have an impact on social and economic change. In pre-industrial societies, the family and the community had various functions in addition to production, reproduction and consumption, including assisting the needy and facing up to individual and group risks. It was clear that major changes were taking place in various European cities at the end of the eighteenth century, including the emergence of the factory system, migration, new laws on poverty and a new poor-relief system.These changes reveal how the old moral economy that had supported life in the community was being dismantled. The process of transition towards a liberal society led to changes in the relationship between family, community and state. Women comprised the group that was affected most by many of these transformations. Women, who had been at the heart of the fight for survival and social reproduction in the old regime, who were experts in creating primary support networks involving relatives, friends, neighbours or others in their trade and who were experienced, active workers in the labour market, saw how their situation worsened as the transformations associated with economic and political modernization progressed. Studies by Maxine Berg and Jan De Vries defined the industrious household as an environment in which women would have bargaining power:‘It consists of an alliance between husband and wife and implicit contracts between parents and children’.16 In contrast, Louise Tilly defined the industrial household by the model of the male breadwinner and the female housewife: With the arrival of the industrial revolution, the higher wages that men earned outside the home strengthened their bargaining power from a very early stage, whereas women’s contribution (domestic work), which was increasingly difficult to measure, was frequently unrecognized or undervalued.17 As the old regime gave way to the new liberal capitalist society, women’s bargaining power and capacity to choose was diminished, and patriarchy was strengthened again. However, women’s agency meant that women’s voices and actions could penetrate the patriarchal structures. The progressive dismantling of the traditional community and the migrations and the construction of a new labour market facilitated the appearance of the new market society, which was, according to its advocates, composed of the juxtaposition of isolated individuals, the devaluation of women’s work and the invisibilisation of care. This process reached its highest point with the exclusion of women’s citizenship.The old market between equals typical of commoner economy, in which care was part of the economic activity, succumbed. Undoubtedly, it was women’s capacity for resilience and their agency that allowed the appearance of a new social movement, the feminist movement, which was born in Western countries in the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, this new movement has been able to combine political theory with collective action inside and outside institutions. There is a clear link between the structure of the family and household, the nature of the labour market and the various poor-relief systems that have arisen throughout the course of history. In general terms, the history of the family reveals how the family in the old regime was a unit of production, reproduction and consumption. It was subject to a framework of laws and customs that established marriage norms and the various inheritance systems and provided women with more or less bargaining power in the heart of the family. A range of property transfer systems existed, including indivisible inheritance, the principle of separate property, primogeniture, divisible inheritance and equal sharing of assets.18 Nevertheless, in the old regime, women were under the legal authority of their husband, father or brother. Dowries facilitated the movement of women in patrilineal families; they would procreate and work for their new family.19 62

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There is a strong analytical association between the form and size of the family and household on the one hand and poor-relief systems on the other. John Hajnal distinguished between two areas of European marriage norms, divided by an imaginary line running from Saint Petersburg to Trieste.20 First, north-western marriage norms would tend to consist of households comprised of nuclear families; late marriage (at 24–30 years); independent dwellings for offspring who formed a new family; children who left home during adolescence, at 15–18 years old, to become servants or apprentices; a high proportion of solitary households, particularly elderly people living alone; and high levels of migration. Late marriage and the practice of domestic service would have enabled women to save and fund their own dowry. Immigration in cities helped the labour urban servant market to be immensely dynamic, especially in the case of young women. The nuclear households that predominated in north-western Europe were ‘small, flexible and autonomous’. They created a favourable context for innovation in consumer behaviour and played a leading role in the industrious and industrial revolution.21 Nevertheless, according to Peter Laslett, these nuclear households were more vulnerable, particularly for elderly people who ended up living alone.22 The form of family structure and the strength of family ties would have an impact on the demand for welfare or the various poverty-relief systems. At times of crisis, the nuclear family would tend to turn to external institutions to survive. This explains the scope and efficiency of the British Old Poor Laws, which were created partly in response to the demand resulting from the predominance of nuclear households.23 In turn, the structure of households was adapted to the possibility of accessing the resources provided by the poor laws themselves, according to Richard Wall.24 Beyond the British case, since the mid-sixteenthcentury welfare reform described by Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, European towns became populated by a solid network of welfare institutions of hospitals, hospices and orphanages. Thus, the structure of households and the relief policies in the different European areas were both the cause and the consequence of historical transformations. The second trend in European marriage norms defined by Hajnal was found in Mediterranean Europe but would have a lot in common with marriage norms in the most eastern part of Europe, which extended beyond the imaginary line described above.25 In general terms, the predominant trend would be a marriage norm characterized by the extended family. Offspring would remain in their parents’ house after marriage, which would be at a young age; elderly people would live with their relatives; the strength of family ties would be extremely important; the proportion of solitary households would be lower; and poor-relief systems would be less important.26 However, proposals about the predominance of the extended family in Mediterranean Europe and its capacity to face difficulties and protect its members are being questioned in the light of new research.27 The difference between northern and southern European poorrelief systems is being reconsidered to reveal the complexity of the situation and get beyond the clichés. Generally, it is asserted that overall spending levels would be higher in the north.28 Resources would be managed and distributed more effectively than the indiscriminate assistance provided in the south.29 And poor relief in rural northern areas would be considerable, while it would be negligible in southern rural areas, where welfare institutions were concentrated in towns.30 Only a change of perspective and new empirical data can shed light on this debate. The key to this change in perspective lies in the consideration that poor relief did not only come from one public authority but was multidimensional. In response to Peter Lindert, Marco H. D. Van Leeuwen stated that, in times of difficulty, families were supported not only by formal poor relief provided by the state and determined by the proportion of gross domestic product (GDP) spent on social welfare, except perhaps in England when the Old Poor Laws were 63

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in force, but also by other sources of income originating from private bodies or from the Church, such as alms, philanthropic initiatives, charity or family and solidarity networks.31 In short, history shows us the complexity of the relationship between forms of family and the structure of households, the strength of family ties, poor-relief systems and the role of women in this framework. A good example about the multidimensionality of the poor relief is the use of microfinance institutions like montes de piedad. In Catholic, southern Europe, ‘Mount of Piety’ pawnbrokers proliferated, particularly in Italy, France and Spain. These were collateral credit institutions that offered two types of services. First, credit was given in exchange for items left as security. These could only be clothes, including fabric or unfinished garments, jewellery or household items. Borrowers were not liable to pay interest on the loan, but there was a widespread practice of leaving a donation, which acted in the same way as interest. The second service offered by the Mounts of Piety was savings, as both individuals and institutions had the opportunity to deposit funds. Widows, unmarried young women, ecclesiastics, soldiers and government officials were the main depositors. From the mid-eighteenth century, the Mounts of Piety acted as a real credit institution. They used interest rates to encourage people to deposit funds and granted small, short-term loans to families of artisans and day labourers in the cities. In Barcelona, ten thousand families were assisted by the Mount of Piety in 1764, which shows the incredible dynamism of the institution. A third to half of the city’s family units passed through its offices in a year of food crisis. In the most critical periods, pawning objects was a short-term strategy to survive everyday life.32 In Barcelona, most loans (80 per cent) were for low values of between two and 15 days of work for a building labourer.33 In winter 1764, which was one of the harshest in the century, the people with the least resources were those who managed to live most effectively with the scare assets available to them. In fact, smaller loans, which were mainly taken out by families in the textile and dressmaking sector, were more likely to be repaid and the pawned items recovered. Therefore, this modest sector could adapt well and was hardened to the changes in the modern period. Repayment of a loan and recovery of a pawned item were both a guarantee and a form of planning, as they enabled an individual to repeat this operation as many times as necessary. The type of objects that were pawned is a good indicator of the norms, levels and diversification of consumption by the working classes in the mid- to late-eighteenth century. Many pawned items came from the trousseaus that women took with them on marriage, however modest they might have been. In many cases, these objects were passed on from mother to daughter or between relatives and were inherited through testaments and marriage contracts. Maximization of the use of items from a trousseau as security in credit operations would largely ensure the capacity of working-class families to adapt to changing circumstances.The number of female ­borrowers increased as the value of the credit decreased. In other words, the lower the loans were, the higher the number of women among the borrowers. This was as much the case in 1750 as in 1850, in Barcelona as in Avignon, so it would seem that microcredits and formal banking for the poor in cities of the old regime tended to involve increasing numbers of women and formed part of the circuits of women’s agency.34

Poor relief between the moral economy and the market economy: The urban traces of transformation In the view of Sen, basic human needs are the same in all cultures and all historical periods. What changes over time and cultures are the satisfiers, that is, the method or means used to satisfy needs.35 A change in satisfiers occurred between 1750 and 1850: the former poor relief systems, 64

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in which paupers were the responsibility of the community and therefore a collective problem, were replaced by a new liberal model of assistance. In the new model, poverty was considered an individual problem rather than one of the community or the state, and the poor were blamed for their condition. It was during this process of transition that an international debate on public welfare arose in two different waves: one in the mid-sixteenth century and one at the end of the eighteenth century. This was a forerunner of the current debate on the adequacy of social services, and the key arguments are the same today. This debate left a trace in the urban space, in that the urban distribution of the third sector (hospitals, asylums, Mounts of Piety) became witness to the change in welfare policy. The new liberal system of the mid 1800s externalised a public network of welfare institutions. To which satisfiers are we referring? In the old regime, three kinds of agents provided social assistance to satisfy needs: public welfare; private welfare agents, the church, mutual aid and individuals; and the family and informal networks of relations, neighbours, fellow workers and friends (see Table 5.1). This third category of providers of assistance was mainly the responsibility of women. The combination, proportion and efficiency of public, private and family agents defined the poor-relief system that a society offered. The degree of involvement of women as providers of social assistance reflected the model of family in which they lived, their bargaining power and their dedication to the care of dependents. The family, and consequently the women in each family, was the welfare agent par excellence. It was responsible for meeting the needs of its members and covering shortfalls in the public welfare system. This led to the development of familism in Spain and other southern European countries. Table 5.1 Welfare Agents in Southern Europe in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries Public welfare agents

Public

City’s government Local power The state

Private welfare agents

Church

Ecclesiastical and monastic institutions Good works Collection of alms Religious foundations Parish churches Guilds Mutual-aid societies Charitable founds Friendly societies Labour unions, trade unions Private foundations Councils Ladies’ committees Mounts of Piety Saving banks Donations and inheritances Family Neighbours Fellow workers Friends

Mutual aid

Individual action

Family

Family Informal networks

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The debate on poor relief and social policies in Catholic Europe and England from a gender perspective What was the debate in question? In the early- to mid-sixteenth century, as the modern state developed and the transition towards capitalism began, social welfare systems were reformed in the main European cities. Humanists and reformers came together in intense debates as their works left their mark on European cities. Luis Vives and Erasmus of Rotterdam were the most representative thinkers at European level. The common features of the welfare reforms were a) the rationalisation and reorganisation of welfare with the creation of new institutions such as the Casas de Misericordia (workhouses) in southern Europe, designed mainly to take in women; b) the gradual secularization of the administration and governance of welfare institutions that, in Catholic Europe, became institutions that were both secular and religious; c) the classification of the poor depending on their degree of virtue and their capacity to sustain themselves through their own work (‘false’ poor versus true poor); d) the practice of generally gathering up and confining the poor – renfermement – to remove vagrants from the city streets. Prior to the reforms, the social welfare system in the main cities and towns of Catholic Europe, and particularly the most representative institution, the Casas de Misericordia, had been characterized by various factors. First, they were permeable institutions, in which inmates had contact with the outside world in order to buy raw materials for production; meet needs related to selling the fabrics, lace and stockings that were produced in the workshops; and make visits and participate in processions and funerals along the city’s streets. Second, the institutions took in a wide range of people: young unmarried women, widows, destitute old people, orphans, the sick, mothers and their children, married women confined by their husbands and women who paid to live in a room as an intern. Third, the function of these institutions was to keep women and men in the community by offering them resources. Reputation opened the doors of the institution to those who migrated to the city to look for work, whether by entering the labour market through domestic service or by entering the marriage market with a dowry provided by good works for young unmarried women. Letters of recommendation by parish priests, neighbours and relatives were the key to accessing the Casas de Misericordia.36 However, in this plural, dynamic pre-industrial space, the different ‘categories’ of inmates lived in rooms adjacent to beggars found hanging around markets and taken off the streets.37 In short, in Catholic southern Europe, poverty was a collective responsibility that had not yet been assigned to the family. Poorrelief institutions offered resources and were not completely demonized. In northern Europe, the paradigmatic example was the English poor-relief system, established in the Old Poor Laws. These laws defined the main mechanism for the redistribution of resources in England during a long period from the end of the fifteenth century to the start of the nineteenth century. The Elizabethan Poor Law of 1601 brought together existing norms and practices related to the phenomenon of vagrancy. A national system of legal, obligatory assistance for the poor was established, in which the parish was the basic unit of action in the territory and the neighbourhood. Poor relief was mainly financed through a local tax on property, levied on immovable assets and managed by government employees appointed by local judges.38 The type of assistance was not the same for everyone; it was adapted to each case and included benefits, in-kind donations, shelter, teaching of trades or work.39 In short, the Old Poor Law was a consolidated institution for the redistribution of income. Around two-thirds to threequarters of the population that had no property turned to this institution with the security that they would receive periodic assistance into their old age.40 In a context in which the nuclear family predominated, old people had a legal right to support from the community. In fact, the government did not try to transfer responsibility for old people from the community to the 66

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family until the mid- to late-nineteenth century.41 The Old Poor Laws were essential to support the life cycle of families and households with orphans, widows and old people and particularly households comprised of mothers and their children.42 However, these laws and practices were incompatible with the creation of the new labour market, which was in its early stages, and the mobility of workers that this required. Consequently, the debate on the adequacy of social assistance entered a second wave.

The liberal debate on poor relief and social policies in Europe from a gender perspective The industrial revolution and the emergence of the market economy in England at the end of the eighteenth century led to a series of changes, including an increase in inequality and ­poverty.43 In this context, the old debate on social protection and poor relief was rekindled, this time with new arguments in line with emerging capitalism. Adam Smith, David Ricardo and Thomas Malthus, among others, were openly opposed to the Old Poor Laws until they were overturned in the early nineteenth century. Specifically, Adam Smith was against the Settlement Act that kept workers in one place and provided them with benefits, which made it difficult to create a labour market.44 David Ricardo complained that the Poor Law and its system of benefits prevented salaries from being regulated by free competition.45 Malthus considered that the poorrelief system in England encouraged the marriage of those who did not have sufficient resources, reduced the purchasing power of the middle classes who had to pay taxes and discouraged men and women from working to earn a living and save.46 The discussion was long and intense. Finally, in 1834, the New English Poor Laws were drawn up. They eliminated ‘outside’ assistance for the needy, that is, benefits in cash and/or in-kind, which were replaced by confinement in poorhouses or workhouses. The management of the poor-relief system was transferred from local authorities to the central government.47 Karl Polanyi explained that the capitalist labour market could only be created by dismantling the traditional community, imposing ‘individual interest’ as a driving force in society and eroding what Thompson called the ‘moral economy’.48 In this way, male and female workers, supposedly converted into isolated individuals, would be at the mercy of labour market forces.The pre-industrial market that Fontaine analysed, in which buyers and sellers had a similar status in the trading, and the value of the item that was sold was more closely related to the value of the people involved in the exchange, would be eclipsed by the market as the mainstay of the capitalist economy. 49 The new liberal social policies spread throughout the European continent, with common objectives in countries as dissimilar as England, with its Protestant origins; and the southern European countries, with their deep Catholic roots. Basically, the aim was to replace the old forms of poor relief with a new liberal system of assistance that advocated an individual solution: self-help, saving and planning as individual mechanisms for facing difficulties at different points in the life cycle of individuals and family. The state would only get involved in extreme cases in which the needy had neither resources nor family. These individuals included marginal groups who would be confined in large, specialized institutions. As the nineteenth century advanced, the public institutions were filled with marginalised people: the chronically ill in hospitals, the decrepit and unsuitable for work in hospices, the mentally ill in mental hospitals, single mothers and abandoned children in maternity hospitals and criminals in prisons. Other groups such as the blind, deaf and dumb people and lepers were also confined. Public welfare was stigmatised. In pre-industrial welfare institutions, there were higher numbers of women than men.This situation changed, and more men than women were institutionalised as the nineteenth century progressed. In short, the new liberal welfare system neglected those who had been included in the former 67

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poor-relief system. In other words, it did not protect men and women of working families in situations of risk caused by illness, the death of a spouse, unemployment, being an orphan, childhood, childrearing, old age or migration. From this point, poverty was considered an individual problem and a social pathology. The poor were to blame for their poverty. Inequality was legitimised by the new liberal discourse.The operation of transferring the burden of caring for others to the household, and specifically to women, was a political operation of enormous scope.

Towns between resilience and precariousness European cities at the end of the eighteenth century and the start of the nineteenth underwent major economic, social, demographic, political and cultural changes as the new market economy became established. These were turbulent times in which individuals, families and the ­households in which they lived struggled between precariousness and survival. The cities, their spaces, institutions, practices and tangible and intangible culture acted as instruments that could increase resilience in the everyday life of ordinary people at times of crisis.The changing context shaped the atmosphere in cities. Fear, the stress of trying to survive and pleasure – in short, the emotions of cities’ inhabitants and the actions resulting from these emotions – filled the urban space as cities constructed a new image of themselves and their people. Many of the old cities of Europe succumbed to the demands of the new rationality, and the new layout of streets and squares, the urban space, was gradually imposed. In this context of change, the old social infrastructures and the people protected within them were given a new meaning, a different value. In southern Europe, the exclusion of women from many symbolic public spaces was an unquestionable fact. The city acted as a gendered space, in which revealing, excluding or hiding female realities became a political operation. The change in the symbolic role of urban social infrastructure of poorhouses, hospitals, Casas de Misericordia and orphanages, among others, and the symbolic value given to the people housed within them, is a good example of this transformation. In Barcelona, the practice of girls from the Casa Hospicio y Refugio de la Misericordia attending processions and funerals in the city was stopped in 1775. This practice had been carried out since the sixteenth century. Coffins would no longer be flanked, as had been the custom, by two rows of unmarried young women dressed very modestly with a candle in one hand and rosaries in the other.50 The girls were replaced by eighteen paupers wearing green smocks and arranged symmetrically beside the coffin. This image sums up the exclusion of women from the symbolic public space of the city, which contained the seeds of the discourse of domesticity that would spread so widely in the nineteenth century, together with the exclusion of women from civic responsibility. Once again, women’s agency, their capacity to choose, act and have a voice, enabled them to continue to operate in the normal economy of everyday urban life, and they were able to organize themselves and change the order of things.

Notes   1 See Cathryn Spence’s chapter in this volume.   2 Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) and Pierre Bourdieu, Esquisse d’une théorie de la pratique, précédé de trois études d’ethnologie kabyle (Genève: Éditions Droz, 1972). A good example of the application of this concept to the history is Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach, Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2013).   3 Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, The Quality of Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993).   4 Jeremy Bentham, Essays on the Poor Laws, 1796, cited in Stuart Woolf, Los pobres en la Europa moderna (Barcelona: Crítica, 1989), 20.

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Poverty and Family Economies   5 Arxiu Històric de la Casa de Misericòrdia de Barcelona (AHCMB), Assistencial, Memorials d’ingrés 1777.   6 B. Seebohm Rowntree, Poverty. A Study of Town Life (London: Macmillan & Co, 1899).   7 Alexander V. Chayanov, La organización de la unidad económica campesina (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nueva visión, 1985).   8 Michael Anderson, Family Structure in Nineteenth-Century Lancashire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971).  9 Woolf, Los pobres. 10 Sen, Development, Chapter 3. 11 Debraj Ray, Development Economics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). 12 Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France 1750–1789 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). 13 Louise Tilly and Joan Scott, Women,Work and Family (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978). 14 Richard Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family: An illustration of the adaptive family economy,’ in The World We Have Gained. Histories of Population and Social Structure, ed. Lloyd Bonfield, Richard L. Smith and Keith Wrightson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), 264–86. 15 Bernard Harris, The Origins of the British Welfare State: Society, State and Social Welfare in England and Wales, 1800–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 16 Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s work, mechanization and the early phases of industrialization in England’, in Ray E. Pahl, On Work (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), cited in Jan De Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer, Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 14. 17 Louise Tilly, ‘Women, women’s history, and the Industrial Revolution,’ Social Research 61 (1994), 133, cited in De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 208. 18 Vicente Pérez Moreda and David Reher, Demografía histórica en España (Madrid: Ediciones Arquero, 1988), Chapter 4. 19 Rafaella Sarti, Vita di casa. Abitare, mangiare, vestire, nell’Europa moderna (Roma-Bari: Laterza, 1999). 20 John Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns in perspective,’ in Population in History, Essays in Historical Demography, ed. David V. Glass and David E.C. Eversley (Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company, 1965), 101–43. 21 De Vries, The Industrious Revolution, 271. 22 Peter Laslett, ‘Family, kinship and collectivity as systems of support in pre-industrial Europe: A consideration of the ‘nuclear hardship’ hypothesis,’ Continuity and Change, 3, 2 (1988): 153–75. 23 England and Scotland had different poor law regimes, which remained separate after the Act of Union, 1707, although many of the same ideas infused practices both sides of the border. 24 Wall, ‘Work, welfare and the family’; Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-industrial Europe, 1350–1850 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979). 25 Hajnal, ‘European marriage patterns’. 26 John Hajnal, ‘Two kinds of pre-industrial household formation system,’ Population and Development Review, 8, 3 (1982): 449–94; David S. Reher, ‘Family ties in western Europe: Persistent contrasts,’ Population and Development Review, 24, 2 (1998): 203–34. 27 Katherine A. Lynch, Individuals, Families and Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Paolo Viazzo, ‘Family structures and the early phase in the individual life cycle. A southern European perspective,’ in Poor Women and Children in the European Past, ed. John Henderson and Richard Wall (London: Routledge, 1994), 31–50; Julie Marfany, Land, Proto-Industry and Population in Catalonia, c.1660–1829. An Alternative Transition to Capitalism? (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012). 28 Peter Lindert, ‘Poor relief before the welfare state: Britain versus the Continent, 1780–1880,’ European Review of Economic History 2 (1998): 101–40. 29 Hufton, The Poor. 30 Viazzo, ‘Family structures’. 31 Marco H.D. van Leeuwen, ‘Giving in early modern history: Philanthropy in Amsterdam in the Golden Age,’ Continuity and Change 27, 2 (2012): 301–43. 32 For information on credit practices in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, see studies by Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet. Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit (London: Methuen, 1984); Beverly Lemire, ‘Petty pawns and informal lending: Gender, households and small-scale credit in English communities,’ in From Family Firms to Corporate Capitalism: Essays in Business and Industrial History in Honour of Peter Mathias, ed. Kristine Bruland and Patrick O’Brien (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 112–38; Beverly Lemire, The Business of Everyday Life: Gender, Practice and Social Politics in England,

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Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller c. 1600–1900 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005); Laurence Fontaine, L’économie morale. Pauvreté, crédit et confiance dans l’Europe preindustrielle (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). 33 Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller, ‘Le petit crédit urbain et la mise en gage d’objets. Barcelone au XVIIIème siècle,’ in Des Personnes aux Institutions. Réseaux et cultures du crédit du XVIe au XXe siècle en Europe, ed. Laurence Fontaine, Giles Postel-Vinay, Jean-Laurent Rosenthal and Paul Servais (Louvain-la-Neuve: Academia Bruylant, 1997), 268– 83; Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller, ‘Using microcredit and restructuring households: Two complementary survival strategies in late eighteenth-century Barcelona,’ International Review of Social History 45 (2000) Supplement, 71–92. 34 Madeleine Ferrière, ‘The ‘Mont de Piété’ of Avignon: From charitable credit to popular credit (1610– 1790),’ in Prestare ai Poveri. Il Credito su Pegno e i Monti di Pietà in Area Mediterranea (Secoli XV–XIX), ed. Paola Avallone (Napoli: Consiglio nazionale delle ricerche, Istituto di studi sulle societa del Mediterraneo, 2007), 157–68; Marie E. Francois, A Culture of Everyday Credit: Housekeeping, Pawnbroking, and Governance in Mexico City, 1750–1920 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2006). 35 Sen, Development. 36 Marie Costa, ‘La Reclusión femenina a finales del siglo XVIII en Cataluña: la heterogeneidad del Real Hospicio y Refugio de Barcelona,’ in Asistencia y caridad como estrategias de intervención social: Iglesia, Estado y comunidad (siglos XV–XX), ed. Laurinda Abreu (Bilbao: Servivio Editorial de la Universidad del País Vasco, 2007), 217–40. 37 Montserrat Carbonell-Esteller, Sobreviure a Barcelona. Dones, Pobresa i Asistència al Segle XVIII (Vic: Eumo, 1997). 38 George R. Boyer, An Economic History of the English Poor Laws, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); Lindert, ‘Poor Relief ’. 39 Samantha Shave, ‘The impact of Sturges Bourne’s Poor Law reforms in rural England,’ The Historical Journal, 56, 2 (2013): 399–429; Anne Winter and Thijs Lambrecht ‘Migration, poor relief and local settlement policies in England and the Southern Low Countries in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, 218 (2013): 91–121: Keith Snell ‘In or out of their place: The migrant poor in English art, 1740–1900,’ Rural History, 24:1 (2013): 73–100. 40 David Thompson, ‘Social protection and the historians,’ in The World We Have Gained, ed. Bonfield, Smith and Wrightson, 362–3. 41 Thompson, ‘Social protection,’ 364. 42 Peter Laslett and Richard Wall, Household and Family in Past Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 43 Robert Allen, The British Industrial Revolution in Global Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 44 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London: printed for A. Strahan and T. Cadell in the strand, 1791, sixth edition. First edition, 1776). 45 David Ricardo, On the principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1821, third edition. First edition, 1817). 46 Thomas R. Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population; Or, a View of its Past and Present Effects on Human Happiness (London: John Murray, 1826, sixth edition. First edition 1798). 47 Boyer, An Economic History. 48 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation:The Political and Economic Origins of our Time (Boston, Ma.: Beacon Press, 1944); Edward P. Thompson,‘the moral economy of the English crowd in the eighteenth century,’ Past and Present 50, 1 (1971): 76–136. 49 Laurence Fontaine, Le Marché. Histoire et usages d’une conquête sociale (Paris: Gallimard, 2014), 262. 50 Carbonell-Esteller, Sobreviure.

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6 Gendered Experiences of Work and Migration in Western Europe in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Manuela Martini

Introduction At the crossroads of the history of migration, urban history and gender, historical research on the work experiences of migrant women and men and urban labour markets is a flourishing area of early modern and modern social history.1 No longer conceived as exclusively composed of men and young individuals, migration flows are now portrayed the way they were: variably mixed depending on ethnicity and destination. Rural areas were traditionally considered a preferred destination for international family migrations and therefore gender balanced. Nowadays, the opposition between rural and urban immigrant destinations is less pronounced.2 The historical understanding of the immigrant urban experience has profoundly changed over the last 40 years. Without denying the importance of pioneering male migrant flows, the historiography has introduced, at least since the end of the 1980s, autonomous female figures in urban spaces.3 This chapter provides an overview of the gender turn in migration history with a specific focus on migrant workers in western Europe.4 However, considering the importance of European labour migration to North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the diversity in migration trajectories will be considered here not only within continental Europe but also across the Atlantic Ocean. The emphasis is therefore more on simultaneously studying male and female migrant experiences and their mutual interactions in urban labour markets than on the perception and representation of sexual roles in urban areas.5 The approach adopted here also recognizes the interest of the ‘spatial turn’ in women and gender history.6 It will therefore take into account spatial dimensions of the migrant experience but will not develop all its aspects.

Parallel working lives in migration contexts Little attention has been given to a history of migrant men and women acting in the same home and host economic contexts, a topic still neglected not only in foundational studies such as 71

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John Bodnar’s Transplanted or Michael J. Piore’s Birds of Passage on European transatlantic migrations but even in more recent studies on the history of regional and international European migrations.7 When migrant women have attracted historiographical attention, they are studied separately from their male partners or road companions. Meanwhile, gender studies have started analysing the social construction of the sexual diversity of migrants and their perception by institutions and hosting societies.8 This involves considering the integration of migrant women and men in the receiving countries as a differentiated process but not necessarily reducing it to a dichotomy between tradition, that is, female follower relegated to the home; and modernity, that is, extra-domestic male factory worker. Instead of opposing (female) passivity to (male) activity, the social dimensions of adjustments and adaptive forms of home-based market work or ethnic and religious identities are now considered in urban spaces, like sweatshops, churches or market places, informal places to share experiences or exchange goods. All these dynamics are studied at the place of arrival. Nevertheless, the disrupting effects of departure begin before migration in the decision-making process and organization of migrants’ journeys. Travel and settlement issues and migratory infrastructure are different for men and women. Historians have recently started focusing on the mechanisms of migrant journeys, one of the areas most neglected by migration historians thus far. Ports, stage cities, stepping-out points, and urban and suburban areas around the borders are becoming a developed research field. The discovery of urban landscapes and new forms of collective living is another transit experience. In continental Europe, step-cities like Vienna, Budapest, Milan, Trieste, Prague and Odessa along eastern and southern migration roads towards the main transcontinental European ports like Hamburg, Le Havre, Genoa, Naples and Marseille became important receiving places and adapted accordingly.9 Thus, male and female migrants need to be considered as moving actors facing different institutional and urban spaces, which are themselves deeply and continuously transformed, adjusting their receiving infrastructure to migrants’ presence. Daily news on the massive influx of illegal migrants in the Mediterranean has helped renew European historical interest in past smugglers and middlemen. Indeed, they were already an expanding group in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ports and step-cities. This study begins by focusing on the different forms of organization of migrant worker journeys in modern western Europe in a wider Atlantic perspective. It then addresses differences in male and female migrant workers’ professional trajectories and, more specifically, the gendered pathways to integration in urban labour markets.

Intermediaries in the sending countries: Landlord and company agents Intermediaries, mediating actors and recruitment chains need to be investigated as a part of gendered migration infrastructures characterized by overlap between mixed migration chains and gendered ones. More broadly, formal and informal migration agencies between migrants and employers are now considered a significant part of migrant trajectories. Intermediary networks precede, accompany and represent an important step in migration. Close examination of these migratory actors and institutions reveals a range of mixed migration chains, as well as all-male and all-female networks. The participation of southern and eastern European workers in mass migration cannot be understood without accounting for the role of a wide range of intermediaries that accompanied and even generated unprecedented emigration. Crucial players in these dynamics were ‘recruiting sergeants’ roaming the German and Austrian Empire countryside in search of Polish peasants or maids to send to Germany, as well as ‘Caporali’ or ‘Padrone’ in southern Italy seeking unskilled workers, miners, young glassmakers or day labourers for the construction industry in northern France or Canada. According to Ewa Morawska, in the 72

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areas where villages were far from railroads and landlord agents or maritime transport recruiters were unknown, Polish peasants were not involved in interregional or international migration flows but only in short and mid-distance harvest migrations.10 Even in very small villages, these intermediaries generated collective migrations and created what a local observer called ‘a kind of employment agency’. Three main channels fostered these periodical labour migration flows: job and wage information spread by mail, return migrants’ personal contacts and local and exterior agents.11 For example, in the nineteenth century, Maszkienice women migrated to work in Denmark each year (from 17 in 1899 to around 50 in 1911), while men from the same village went to Ostrawa in Morava (now the Czech Republic).12

Foremen/forewomen as intermediaries Mediating migrant labour was also a widespread practice among the foremen or forewomen responsible for organizing work in urban workshops or factories. Italian and French women working in the textile and garment industries in the Lyon region at the end of the nineteenth century were generally recruited by their ‘maestre’ via regional or international migration channels. These skilled female worker ‘Mistresses’ were used to set up autonomous female recruitment chain migrations from the rural regions where they or their assistants were born.13 Across the Atlantic Ocean too, striking commonalities can be found in Tamara Hareven’s study of the Lowell factory, where American and Irish female workers worked, lived and slept in the same space. A similar set-up, including shared journeys and living conditions – except in the case of employer-controlled dormitories – was common among Piedmont masons who moved to Lyon or Paris and among German brick-makers in Amsterdam in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.14 In responding to employer demand, migration chains and migrant mediating institutions helped reinforce the gendered segmentation of urban labour markets.This was the case not only in industrial or handicraft activities but also in the service sector, where former servants could act as informal agents creating specialized chain migrations for housekeepers, nurses or midwives.15 Young women from the Dalsland and Velbo districts in northern Sweden used to move to Norway in search of domestic employment during the nineteenth century, before and after the railroad came in 1879. Mothers and older migrant maids accompanied their daughters or siblings to Gothenburg or Christiania near Oslo (in Norway), to help them find work through their own contacts.16 In southern Europe, similar specialized flows formed between the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century. From the northern mountains of Galicia, Asturias, Cantabria and the Basque region, a growing stream of Pasiego wet nurses travelled down to Madrid, beginning a structured chain migration from the last decades of the eighteenth until the mid-twentieth century.17 Influenced by new medical theories and prescriptions for reducing child mortality, the urban upper and middle classes started hiring live-in wet nurses instead of rural nurses beginning in the nineteenth century. Pasiego women who sold muslin fabrics (tax-exempt in the Basque country) in Madrid’s Santa Cruz square played an important role in helping immigrant wet nurses upon arrival. They were a key link in the migrants’ path to the urban market, as were doctor and midwife ‘intermediaries’ whose advice was crucial in the hiring process.18 From the same mountain area, male migration of dockworkers to Cadiz flowed from a migration chain structured by placement institutions or ‘companies’.Working for these ‘companies’ as skilled dockworkers or day labourers (jornaleros), the fathers ‘tried to have their sons hired by the company, and sent for them to come from their home towns’.19 These gender-shaped 73

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Figure 6.1  A wet-nurse placement bureau in Paris around 1909. © Manuela Martini.

migration chains changed along with institutional developments in the nineteenth century but continued to follow separate specialized paths. The renowned bureau des nourrices that opened in Paris in 1838 is a perfect example of a renewed form of migrant wet-nurse placement.20

Private and public employment agencies in the cities Informal mediation coexisted with institutionalized forms of labour mediation. In most European cities, private employment agencies started to be regulated during the nineteenth century. In Paris, after the abolition of guilds by the revolutionary assembly in 1791, a wide and heterogeneous set of private employment agencies quickly grew in the first half of the nineteenth century. Initially devoted to the placement of internal migrants, they soon also provided workplaces for international migrants from Luxembourg, Germany and Italy, particularly in cities like Nice, Marseille or Paris. The main activities involved were domestic service, textiles and garments, laundry for female migrants and bakery and catering for males. Workers in the building industry and dockworkers continued to offer their skills in public market places like the famous Place de Grève in Paris.21 A growing literature on modern and contemporary labour intermediaries has shown that a competition between public bodies, trade unions and private agencies arose for control over a growing urban labour market, not only in Paris but also across major French and European towns. Consequently, trade boards and reformers’ associations, as well as state and local bodies, promoted public surveys and also began to directly intervene in worker recruitment.22 Along with charitable and mutual-aid free placement institutions, the first public offices in major cities like Paris and Brussels were thus opened between the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century.

Mediating labour in transit Mobility skills, or know-how concerning transport, housing and papers needed for the journey, were often lacking in first movers and young migrants, necessitating the help of specialised 74

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mediating figures. This was the case before migration and upon arrival in a new social and economic environment, as well as during transit. Overseas eastern migrants, for example, took ‘complex and sometimes illogical routes’ through Vienna, Budapest and Prague as ‘nodal points’ on the way to big ports leading to the Americas.23 In these big cities, several urban and mobility skills were needed. Migrants, and especially s­ ingle women, according to contemporary social observers, were often unable to find the right path to their final destination on their own. The special knowledge needed to facilitate the ­journey yielded a migrant business in ports and step-cities: travel, transport and employment agencies, as well as hotels and catering businesses, grew in step with the growing number of migrants. This, in turn, changed the urban landscape and institutional framework of the r­eceiving places. The city police added special agents to conduct checks, municipal governments and health institutions enacted new legislation and created new procedures, new shipping agencies and employment offices were founded and religious and philanthropic societies focused on sending their members or opening their offices and information centres near railway stations and shipping ports. All these different institutions usually acted according to predefined gendered approaches, literally separating women and men in the spaces under their control. In continental Europe, a complex infrastructure of border posts between France and Italy, Spain and France and Italy and Switzerland was instituted at the beginning of the twentieth century, including border patrol posts as well as hospitals organized according to gendered criteria for migrants waiting for a health inspection or for their papers to be checked. Border cities followed suit, creating separate gathering points for traveling men and women. The Italian state, which sent the most migrants to western Europe and North America, with 14 million departures between 1876 and 1915, was the first to create a centralised institution to regulate outgoing migration flows in 1901 (Commissariato generale dell’emigrazione) and began to actively control the migration of women and children following laws of 1910 and 1912.24 This complex state infrastructure resulted from efforts led by social reformers between the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries. Labour and social legislation, including laws and institutions particularly focused on assisting migrant women and children, were vigorously promoted by private and semi-public associations founded by social reformers and charitable and philanthropic organizations related to church and religious communities.25 A major change occurred in the aftermath of World War I. Both internal and ­intercontinental migrations were affected, namely those towards the most important destination at the time for European migrants: the United States. War-related institutional changes deeply transformed the migrant labour market in European cities, especially for migrant women, who often lacked papers and had an irregular status. After the war, institutional barriers were reinforced: identity papers were mandatory across continental Europe during the inter-war period and were necessary to gain employment as a worker legally able to sign a work contract.26 During the same period, European migrants seeking to access the US labour market faced new visa and literacy tests in 1917 and quota legislation after 1921. Dorothee Schneider has studied the growing importance after World War I, particularly in the port cities of Trieste and Fiume, of morality checks for women by American consuls when their visa was delivered, to check east-European women passing through Austria and aiming to leave for the United States.27 It became very difficult for single women to overcome a tighter control system. Sanitary inspectors, with female assistants, and Immigration Bureau representatives adopted very restrictive and prescriptive criteria to verify their moral attitudes, on the one hand; and their ability, as single women without a family member or on-site host, to support themselves, on the other. In this strict migratory procedure, the decision-making was essentially made outside the American territory, in step-cities where consuls made the first decision after a preliminary inquiry; upon 75

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arrival, the main goal was to verify the accuracy of the information. Predictably, in order to meet the gendered expectations of state civil servants, single migrant women developed declarative strategies. Once they got through the first migration stages, these women unsurprisingly adopted the same autonomous attitude in the inter-war urban spaces where they were supposed to live independently, of course with more or less rewarding outcomes.28 The agency of migrants in shaping their migratory careers is one of the issues emphasized in recent historiography and is especially visible in the study of urban labour market dynamics.29

Gendered paths to incorporation in urban labour markets Historians have largely reconstructed and explained long-term features of specialized migrant workers’ trajectories and, more particularly, of gendered pathways to integration in urban labour markets.30 Economic and social path dependencies created particular gendered migration patterns between the end of the eighteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries. Some of these gendered specialized migrant flows were represented, in France, by regional coal sellers from Auvergne and Breton female domestic migrants in Paris; or, in the Netherlands, German brick-makers in Amsterdam and German and Swedish maids.31 Not that occupation and hiring processes were always separated by sex. As Marlou Schrover has clearly shown, the stoneware Westerwalder traders in Utrecht included both men and women who traded together abroad.32 More often, however, migrant merchants and peddlers in Europe were men, while catering or food sellers and small traders were women.33 Some of the first scholars to emphasize the importance of these differentiated migrants’ careers had an interest in European international migration in the arriving destinations, and particularly in American east coast cities.34 As Donna Gabaccia stated in a general overview of a century of mass migrations towards the United States: ‘It is the differences between men and women, not their many (and significant) similarities that begin to explain women’s varying participation in the mass migration’.35 These differences resulted from both gendered social assets in homelands and different opportunities in the destination labour markets. In a broad sense, general migratory patterns were alike. Most of the demographic and social characteristics – literacy, age and marital status – were similar for men and women of the same home country and varied more according to ethnicity than gender. Nevertheless, differential features in integration paths in the United States were striking. First, occupation choices were unsurprisingly different, affecting the migration’s annual rhythm – July to December for women – and destinations. Particularly single women chose urban destinations because of labour market demand for female workers.Women were more likely to move to towns that needed textile workers and domestics, namely New York and north- east coast urban destinations. Migration flows towards cities were sizable even when urbanisation rates were high. Contrary to widely held assumptions, several scholars have convincingly demonstrated that internal urbanoriented flows helped promote European intercontinental flows to major American cities.36 Urban and not just rural migrants formed the core of early twentieth-century mass migration. Women played a major role in this process. Female international migration has generally been associated with rural migration in the historiography: farming involved a gendered division of labour and encouraged family migration. But a comparison among different migration flows clearly shows that the correlation is weaker for women than historians assumed. The share of women among Dutch migrants, often farmers, bound for the United States totalled 30 per cent at the end of the nineteenth century. But women accounted for a much larger share – up to 49 per cent – for Irish migrants, and many Irish women were more likely to migrate towards urban destinations to work as domestic servants.37 76

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Migration and domestic service: An independent project? By emphasizing the link between international migration and previous local and regional migrations, current research highlights the role of gender differentials in the development of autonomous urban flows. Domestic service has been one of the most important vehicles contributing to the latter. Domestic servant shortages in industrialized cities with growing middle classes influenced women’s migration patterns in the nineteenth century. According to the 1901 census, in Paris, 74.2 per cent of the 206,254 women employed in domestic service were born outside the Paris district; of these, nearly 20,000 (10 per cent) were foreign born, mostly in Germany, Belgium and Switzerland. Urban domestic service was a major source of employment for unmarried women before skilled domestic work declined over the twentieth century. Several studies argue that domestic service and urban female migration were closely correlated.38 From a methodological point of view, they underscored the importance of studying the paths of single women versus a reductive approach based exclusively on the history of migrant families. Now-classical empirical studies addressed Irish and Swedish young maids’ autonomous (and massive in the nineteenth century compared to early modern times) migration due to both transformations in the economic environment and changing social opportunities.39 A different vision is provided in research by Selina Todd, who argues that in twentiethcentury England, family ties continued to play a crucial role in female experiences of finding work and entering the labour force until late in the century.40 More recently, Colin Pooley adopted a similar perspective by focusing on men and women in the mid-twentieth century, arguing that family and friends were widely used to recruit men and women entering urban labour markets during this period.41 In cities like Manchester or London, employment was mainly secured through word of mouth and family connections. Agencies were also a gateway to professional careers, but they rarely were the only means to get a job.42 Independent paths were not entirely solitary.

Migrants’ activity ratios Another important point highlighted by recent research is the activity rate among ­immigrant women compared to that of migrant men and locally born women respectively. In early twentieth-century and inter-war French towns, immigrant women worked as much as nationals even if their jobs were different (30 per cent active versus 70 per cent for foreign men, a few percentage points higher than the respective figures for French women and men): qualified labour in industry and white-collar activities in services, versus laundry, unskilled jobs or employment involving long training periods in textile trades such as spinning.43 Most interestingly, considering the whole range of formal and informal jobs helps explain migrant women’s massive presence in irregular economic activities, of which the legality depended on urban institutional contexts. Very young and married women both faced employment uncertainty: irregularity, pluriactivity and precariousness were daily challenges. As a result, they were overrepresented in small businesses, as independent sellers especially, but also in sweatshops and in domestic activities, both in big cities like London, Paris or New York and in mid-sized towns like Pittsburgh, Amsterdam or Marseille. Employers took advantage of migrants’ irregular status and family constraints. An undocumented status in a restrictive institutional framework – enforced in many European countries, namely Belgium and France after the 1930s crisis – was a simple but powerful tool limiting manpower turnover.44 77

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Precarious and uncertain migrant labour Migrant women, like men, were victims of specific forms of exploitation by their co-ethnic immigrant entrepreneurs, particularly when they lacked language skills and worked outside of the formal sector. Most Armenian and east European Jewish workers, mainly women, in the inter-war period were employed in co-ethnic textile sweatshops in Paris, London and New York.45 Especially after World War II, when European states adopted social protection policies, over-exploitation had heavy social consequences, particularly due to the long-term social costs it entailed. Undeclared male and female workers, especially those in irregular situations, were highly dependent on their employer. For women, this dependence might be exacerbated by family ties or debts they had to honour when family back home or intermediaries had financed their journey.46 Rarely could they take an abusive employer to court because of their irregular situation and because a private agreement, rather than a contract or collective agreements, often regulated their work. It was easier for irregular workers to hide in a city than in small villages. This was also true for men, but probably to a lesser extent because they often had easier access to credit than women and because their right of residence was slightly more assured. Between 1957 and 1974 (when the French government stopped labour migration flows), of the 900,000 Portuguese immigrants in France, 550,000 came without a regular work contract, but men working in the industrial sector or in building trades quickly legalised their situation while their wives continued to work in catering or domestic services as undeclared workers. But both male and female seasonal workers faced uncertainty.47 The structural changes wrought by the second industrialisation created completely new labour conditions for regional and international unskilled migrants recruited during seasonal peak periods in industries subject to climatic hazards such as building trades for men and feather fabric for women, for example, in early twentiethcentury Parisian suburbs or late nineteenth-century Amsterdam. These kinds of work were more subject to economic fluctuation than domestic service, but this did not mean the latter necessarily provided stable employment. According to Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder: The high turnover indicates widespread dissatisfaction with working conditions – on the side of the domestics as well as, often under pretence, by employers. In Berlin, in 1895, 61,063 servants registered 82,948 job changes. In industrial work as well as in trade unions membership fluctuation was as high. Contemporary advocates of stability disparagingly called servant women the ‘gypsies of the nation’.48

Migrants and urban settlement Instability in migrants’ work conditions went hand in hand with residential mobility and precarious housing. The link between migration and industrialisation is undeniable, but the nature of its correlations changed over time. Mass migration spread at the end of the nineteenth century, when industries began to move to the suburbs. Once city transport infrastructure was well developed, proximity between workplaces and residences became less important. A few employers in the nineteenth century developed paternalistic housing schemes, particularly to assist regional and international migrant families. However, most migrants preferred to live downtown, where informal housing was predominant. Both the effects of relative easy access to deteriorated inner cities and chain migration created segregation. Concentration defined migrant settlement patterns in the period of mass migration. To a lesser extent, this practice was also common in the nineteenth century: town centres were less expensive than newly built suburbs. They were 78

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therefore largely preferred to dispersed settlement. Several waves of Italian immigrants settled in Manhattan beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century due to chain migration, available factory jobs and low fares. An important decrease in transport fees due to electrification at the beginning of the twentieth century allowed middle classes to move to residential suburbs and host new waves of southern Italian migrants in their basements. In recent decades, urban historians have focused on the substitution process in these ethnically concentrated but mixed urban clusters. Irish settlements in nineteenth-century London now appear less sealed than previously thought.49 Meanwhile, geographers and sociologists have studied the changing configurations of gendered urban spaces.50 Less is known about past migrant spaces and gendered street practices for the poorest migrants, particularly urban sites mostly frequented by men, like sport areas, public balls, street-leisure activities like cockfighting, circuses, cafés and places of cultworship; or those frequented by migrant women: preferred churches, street fairs, ethnic clothes shops and hairdressers, such as those specializing in African braids in some northern Parisian neighbourhoods in the late twentieth century.51 Pending new research on the spatial gendered dimension of migrant lives in the cities, one of the few known facts is that women’s work was essential to increasing migrant family incomes and saving enough money to buy property was a key factor in spreading settlement.52 Gender divides also appeared across suburban slums. In several European industrial cities, immigrant families settled in urban wastelands. Care duties and women’s domestic tasks were especially burdensome in such precarious living conditions. In both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, informal housing eventually evolved into shanty towns in Europe. In the Parisian suburbs, a new wave of migrants from Portugal and North Africa built almost a hundred bidonvilles in the 1960s, which were first inhabited by young male migrants but then became home to expanding migrant families. In 1964, when a law was enacted to dismantle shanty towns as public funding became available for social housing policies, almost 15 per cent of the 12,000–15,000 inhabitants of the newly created Champigny-surMarne bidonville were women. Much less appreciated by migrant families, low-cost hotels, inns and migrant shelters were the realm of single migrants. Often managed by former migrants, mainly women, and ethnically specialized, they were located in city centres, close to the railway stations or urban junctions.53 Young men were over-represented in this supposedly temporary accommodation. But female migrants also had special dormitories, generally sponsored by their employers. Moreover, prostitution regulations in place since the nineteenth century and brothel keepers’ preference for migrant women created a particular urban phenomenon: the concentration in city centres of ‘closed houses’. In some cases, brothels gathered a huge share of sex workers. In mid-nineteenthcentury Italy, 60 per cent of prostitutes lived in case chiuse (the others, living on their own and looking for clients ‘on the road’, were ‘clandestine’), where migrant women were over-represented until the second half of the twentieth century.54 A majority came from rural areas located within a few hundred miles; being migrant and rural-born – as Mary Gibson has shown – was the most disadvantaged social profile in sex work.55

Conclusion: Changing migrant identities in the city The urban experience marked a great majority of migrant lives in modern and contemporary times. The spatial turn in social science pushes historians to investigate to what extent the urban experience shaped migrant identities. Much research remains to be done and subjected to historiographical scrutiny. Transit and social and economic incorporation paths are now fairly well explored, but studies of the link between migrant labour and urban resources from a gendered perspective are still lacking.56 79

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The issue of the migrant women’s identity and work is a classical one. Migrant identity has been widely explored from a gendered perspective and in relationship to the migrant’s professional course.57 Be it from the perspective of host societies or of the migrant population itself, representations of workers’ moral attitudes, the terms of their ethnic belonging, the social practices reflecting their economic integration, their confinement to closed enclave economies, or the importance of state and administrative actions in shaping their access to legal work have been the subject of research spanning various historical periods and contexts, from Galicia to the North American metropolis and from the Italian to the Nordic region. One of the most unexpected outcomes of these studies is a paradoxical aspect of the link between workplaces and workers’ social life.The most ‘emancipated’ female migrants – single and traveling alone – found occupations in domestic service, while female ‘followers’ traveling in migrant families often found jobs in the expanding industrial sector. While first-generation women were unskilled, they learned new ways of working outside the home and had to become familiar, while crossing the city to reach their workplaces, with entirely new urban spaces.58 Historians have thoroughly discussed the problematic issue of ‘emancipation’ in the migrant experience. Two potentially emancipatory processes for women combined here: migration and extra-domestic work. First, extra-domestic work was supposed to provide women with an opportunity for independent existence outside of their family; second, it was supposed to strengthen the bargaining power of wives and mothers by, thirdly, promoting – through increased purchasing power – social inclusion in a new modern world.59 However, emancipation is not necessarily a cumulative and linear process. Several studies have shown, regarding the Spanish in Paris or Italians in New York during the inter-war period, that more often than not, locally born migrant women were compelled to stop working outside the home because of family duties. Urban mothers of young children in particular were confined to the domestic sphere, more so than they were in the peasant societies from which they came. The difficulty in reconstructing an inter-generational network for migrant women could also increase women’s dependence on men and lead to a deterioration of their position and weaker bargaining power. In any case, all these women lived in an environment that did not allow for the reproduction of pre-migratory gender roles. The enduring question of the transformation of gender relationships and hierarchies within the migrant family would considerably benefit from fresh historical perspectives on the disrupting effects of women’s long-distance and daily mobility.

Notes 1 Dirk Hoerder, ‘Transcultural approaches to gendered labor migration: From the nineteenth-century proletarian to twenty-first-century caregiver migrations,’ in Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries, ed. Dick Hoerder and Amarjit Kaur (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 19–64; Jan Lucassen and Leo Lucassen, Migration, Migration History, History: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives (Bern: Peter Lang, 1999). 2 Donna Gabaccia, ‘Women of the mass migrations: From minority to majority, 1820–1930,’ in European Migrants. Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (Dexter, Mich.: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 90–111. 3 Leslie Page Moch, Paths to the City: Regional Migration in Nineteenth-century France (Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1983); Leslie Page Moch, Moving Europeans: Migration in Western Europe since 1650 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); Dirk Hoerder and Christiane Harzig, ‘Femina Migrans: Agency of European women migrating to domestic work in North America, 1880s to 1950s,’ in Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations, ed. Hoerder and Kaur, 151–174; Nancy L. Green, ‘Changing paradigms in migration studies. From men to women to gender,’ Gender & History 24, 3 (2012): 782–798. 4 Deborah Simonton and Anne Montenach eds, Female Agency in the Urban Economy: Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830 (New York: Routledge, 2013), Introduction.

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Gendered Experiences of Work and Migration   5 Katharine Donato and others, ‘A glass half full? Gender in migration studies,’ International Migration Review 40, 1 (2006), 3–26; Green, ‘Changing paradigms,’ 785.   6 For a theoretical assessment, see Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 178–9. See also Part 2 of this volume.   7 John Bodnar, The Transplanted: A History of Immigrants in Urban America (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1985); Michael J. Piore, Birds of Passage: Migrant Labor and Industrial Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Klaus J. Bade, Migration in European History (Malden, Oxford and Carlton: Blackwell Publishing, 2003); Mirjana Morokvasic, ‘The overview: Birds of Passage are also women,’ International Migration Review 18, 4 (1984): 886–907; Donato and others, ‘A glass half full?’.   8 Green, ‘Changing paradigms,’ 786.   9 Andreas Fahrmeir, Olivier Faron and Patrick Weil eds, Migration Control in the North Atlantic World.The Evolution of State Practices in Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2003); Manuela Martini and Philippe Rygiel, ‘Des formes de médiation sexuellement orientées ? Lieux, institutions et acteurs du placement des travailleuses migrantes à l’époque contemporaine,’ Migrations Société 127 (2010): 47–57 and the proceedings of the session ‘Cities en Route: Central European cities and overseas migration in the nineteenth and the early twentieth century,’ European Social Science History Conference, Vienna, and part. Markian Prokopovych, ‘Urban history of overseas migration in central Europe in the long nineteenth century,’ conference paper, 2014 http://www.researchgate.net/publication/264552878_Urban_History_of_Overseas_Migration_in_Central_Europe_in_the_Long_Nineteenth_Century, accessed 30 August 2015. 10 Ewa Morawska, ‘Labor migrations of Poles in the Atlantic world economy, 1880–1914,’ in European Migrants. Global and Local Perspectives, ed. Dirk Hoerder and Leslie Page Moch (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 70–208, here 187. 11 Ibid., 191. 12 Ibid., 191. 13 Linda Guerry, Le genre de l’immigration et de la naturalisation. L’exemple de Marseille (1918–1940) (Lyon: Éditions de l’École normale supérieure, 2013), 181. 14 Jan Lucassen, ‘Brickmakers in Western Europe (1700–1900) and Northern India (1800–2000): Some comparisons,’ in Jan Lucassen ed., Global Labour History. A State of the Art (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006); Gijs Kessler and Jan Lucassen, ‘Labour relations, efficiency and the great divergence. Comparing pre-industrial brick-making across Eurasia, 1500–2000,’ in Technology, Skills and the Pre-Modern Economy in the East and the West, ed. Maarten Prak and Jan Luiten van Zanden (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013), 259–322; Leo Lucassen, ‘The police, gender, and social control: German servants in Dutch towns, 1918–1940,’ in Social Control in Europe 1800–2000, ed. Clive Emsley and others (Columbus:The Ohio State University Press, 2004), 226–445; Marlou Schrover, Clé Lesger and Leo Lucassen, ‘Is there life outside the migrant network? German immigrants in 19th century Netherlands and the need for a more balanced migration typology,’ Annales de démographie historique 104 (2002): 29–50. 15 Christiane Harzig, ed., Peasant Maids, City Women. From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997); Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters in America. Irish Immigrant Women in the Nineteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983). 16 Margareta Matovic, ‘Maids in motion: Swedish women in Dalsland,’ in Harzig, Peasant Maids, 99–141, here 135–6. 17 Carmen Sarasua, ‘Leaving home to help the family? Male and female temporary migrants in 18th and 19th century Spain,’ in Women, Gender and Labour Migration: Historical and Global Perspectives, ed. Pamela Sharpe (London: Routledge, 2001), 29–59, here 34–35. 18 Ibid., 37. 19 Ibid., 43–4. 20 Emmanuelle Romanet, ‘La mise en nourrice, une pratique répandue en France au XIXe siècle,’ Transtext(e)s Transcultures [On line] 8 (2013), accessed 8 September 2015. URL: http://transtexts.revues. org/497. On hospital nurses, see Sue Hawkins, Nursing and Women’s Labour in the Nineteenth Century: The Quest for Independence  (London: Routledge, 2010). 21 Casey Harrison, The Stonemasons of Creuse in Nineteenth-century Paris (Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press, 2008); Allan Potofsky, Constructing Paris in the Age of Revolution (London: Palgrave Mc Millan, 2008). 22 Sigrid Wadauer, Thomas Buchner and Alexander Mejstrik eds, The History of Labour Intermediation. Institutions and Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries (New York: Berghahn, 2015). 23 Markian Prokopovych, ‘Urban history of overseas migration’. 24 Catherine Lejeune and Manuela Martini, ‘The fabric of irregular migration in 20th century Europe and North America: A comparative approach,’ Labor History, 56, 5 (2015).

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Manuela Martini 25 Martha Gardner, The Quality of a Citizen: Women, Immigration and Citizenship, 1870–1965 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport. Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 84–8; Paul-André Rosental, ‘Civil status and identification in 19th century: A matter of state control?’ in Keith Breckenridge and Simon Szreter eds, Registration and Recognition: Documenting the Person in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 137–65. 26 Guerry, Le genre; Christiane Harzig, ‘Women migrants as global and local agents: New research,’ in Mirjana Morokwasic et al., eds, Crossing Borders and Shifting Boundaries (Leske and Budrich: Opladen, 2003). 27 Dorothee Schneider, ‘The United States Government and the investigation of European emigration in the open door era,’ in Nancy Green and François Weil, eds, Citizenship and Those Who Leave.The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation (Urbana and Chicago: The University of Illinois Press, 2007), 195–210. For a broader institutional context, see Dorothee Schneider, Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011), 69–88. European migrants willing to go to the United States from Canada were submitted to a similar system, Ibid., 91. 28 As the US Migration Bureau tried to find out: Ibid. 29 Silke Wehner, ‘German domestic servants in America, 1850–1914: a new look at German immigrant women’s experience,’ in Dirk Hoerder and Jörg Nadler eds, People in Transit. German Migrations in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 267–93; Simonton and Montenach, Female Agency; Donato and others, ‘A glass half full’; Hoerder and Harzig, ‘Femina Migrans: Agency of European women’. 30 Moch, Paths to the City, 125. 31 Leslie Page Moch, The Pariahs of Yesterday: Breton Migrants in Paris (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 31–68, 93–119; on domestic servants see 33–5. 32 Marlou Schrover, ‘Women and long-distance trade migration in the nineteenth-century Netherlands,’ in Women, Gender and Labour Migration, ed. Sharpe, 85–107. 33 Anne Montenach, ‘Formal and informal economy in an urban context: The case of food trades in seventeenth-century Lyon,’ in Shadow Economies and Irregular Work in Urban Europe, 16th to early 20th Centuries, ed. Thomas Buchner and Philip R. Hoffmann-Rehnitz (Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2011), 91–106. 34 Silke Wehner, ‘German domestic’; Carol K. Coburn, ‘Learning to serve. Education and change in the lives of rural domestics in the twentieth century,’ Journal of Social History, 25 (1991): 109–122, here 128. 35 Donna Gabaccia, ‘Women of the mass migrations: From minority to majority, 1820–1930,’ in European Migrants, ed. Hoerder and Moch, 90–111, here 93. 36 One of the first studies stressing this point is Dudley Baines, Migration in a Mature Economy: Emigration and Internal Migration in England and Wales 1861–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Katharine M. Donato, ‘Introduction:Variation in the gender composition of migrant populations,’ Social Science History 36, 2 (2012): 191–95; Donna Gabaccia and Elizabeth Zanoni, ‘Transitions in gender ratios among international migrants, 1820–1930,’ Social Science History 36, 2 (2012): 197–221; Marlou Schrover, ‘Feminization and problematization of migration: Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,’ in Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations, ed. Hoerder and Kaur, 103–31. 37 Gabaccia, ‘Women of the mass migrations,’ 99; Schrover, ‘Feminization’. 38 Rachel G. Fuchs, Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-century Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 118–24; Antoinette Fauve Chamoux ed., Domestic Service and the Formation of European Identity (Bern: Peter Lang, 2004); Raffaella Sarti, ‘Historians, social scientists, servants, and domestic workers: Fifty years of research on domestic and care work,’ International Review of Social History 59, 2 (2014): 279–314. 39 Theresa McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France 1820–1920 (New York: Holmes and Meier Publishers, 1978); Hasia Diner, Erin’s Daughters; Wendy M. Gordon, Single Women’s Independent Migration in England, Scotland, and the United States, 1850–1881 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 40 Selina Todd, ‘Poverty and aspiration: Young women’s entry to employment in inter-war England,’ Twentieth-Century British History 15 (2004): 119–42; Selina Todd, Young Women, Work, and Family in ­England, 1918–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 41 Colin Pooley,‘“My father found it for me”: Changing experiences of entering the workforce in twentiethcentury urban Britain,’ Urban History 42, 2 (2015): 290–308. 42 According to Pooley, ‘My father,’ their influence grew over time. 43 This was the case for two big cities like Marseille and Lyon, see Jean-Luc Pinol, Les mobilités de la grande ville. Lyon, fin 19e-début 20e siècle (Paris: Presses de la Fondation Nationale de Sciences Politiques, 1991);

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Gendered Experiences of Work and Migration William H. Sewell, Structure and Mobility: The Men and Women of Marseille, 1820–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985) and Guerry, Le genre. 44 Guerry, Le genre, 183. 45 Nancy Green, Ready-to-Wear and Ready-to-Work: A Century of Industry and Immigrants in Paris and New York (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). 46 Daiva Stasiulis and Abigail A. Bakan, ‘Negotiating citizenship: The case of foreign domestic workers in Canada,’ in Feminist Review 57 (1997): 112–39. 47 Lejeune and Martini, ‘The fabric,’ 4; Hoerder, ‘Transcultural’. 48 Hoerder and Harzig, ‘Femina Migrans,’ 155. 49 Colin Pooley, ‘Segregation or integration? The residential experience of the Irish in mid-Victorian Britain,’ in The Irish in Britain, 1815–1939, ed. Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 1989), 60–83. 50 Massey, Space, Place; Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). 51 Fuchs, Gender, 152–5, 187–9. 52 Samuel L. Baily, ‘The adjustment of Italian immigrants in Buenos Aires and New York, 1870–1914,’ in European Migrants, ed. Hoerder and Moch, 282–308, here 287–8. 53 Alain Faure and Claire Lévy-Vroelant, Une chambre en ville. Hôtels meublés et garnis à Paris 1860–1990 (Paris: Chréaphis, 2007). 54 Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); Alain Corbin, Les filles de noce: Misère sexuelle et ­prostitution, XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 2010, first edition 1978); Lola Gonzales-Quijano, Capitale de l’amour. Filles et lieux de plaisir à Paris au XIXe siècle (Paris,Vendémiaire, 2015). 55 In northern and central Italy (Bologna, Milan, Genoa, Venice), between 45 and 75 per cent of registered prostitutes were born in 1875 in another province: Mary Gibson, Prostitution and the State in Italy, 1860–1915 (Rutgers: Ohio State University Press, 1999, first edition 1986). 56 According to Linda McDowell, Baltic refugees’ professional career and labour practices in Britain during the 1950s varied considerably depending on the place of their settlement. In particular, for migrant women who settled in textile cities, the rate of participation in the formal labour market were especially high and very similar to those of English working-class women: Linda McDowell, Working Lives: Gender, Migration and Employment in Britain, 1945–2007 (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013). 57 Carol E. Morgan, Women Workers and Gender Identities, 1835–1913: The Cotton and Metal Industries in England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2001). 58 Gabaccia, ‘Women of the mass migrations,’101. 59 Morokvasic, ‘“Birds of Passage” are also women,’ 886–907.

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Part II

Space, Place and Environment Introduction Elaine Chalus

The city speaks of intimacy and isolation; of crowded tenements, teeming streets and dingy alleyways; of jostling commerce, civic grandeur and genteel elegance. Street hawkers, opportunistic musicians and prostitutes mix with labourers, bustling servants and sharp-eyed shopkeepers, while the fashionable pass by in carriages or stroll in parks and public gardens. Paths cross and intersect, multi-layered, sometimes touching, yet often uniquely separate. The city speaks of opportunity and oppression, of a physical topography mapped into imagined neighbourhoods with invisible boundaries, stratified by gender, class, race and ethnicity. Where place has multiple meanings according to time and circumstance, and where space – licit or illicit, respectable or disreputable, public or private, to name only a few – is produced and reproduced by users through their social relations and their interactions with both the landscape and the changing built environment.1 Thus, space is performed – ‘a practiced place’, according to Michel de Certeau2 – created by people moving through place at a specific point in time with a given convergence of factors. Lloyd Edward Kermode’s idea of ‘accretion’ serves as a useful way of considering the relationship between place and space. Kermode understands it to be accumulative: ‘one becomes the other one, not so much in the sense of transforming it as it is in the sense of accreting, producing either interesting contradictory layers of meaning or complementary stratifications over time’.3 Space, therefore, as Henri Lefebvre has argued, has a history.4 Moreover, historical actors’ experiences of space are shaped and delineated by habitus – by the possibilities available to them in their social, cultural and/or physical environments.5 Central to habitus, with its collective societal and idiosyncratic individual influence, are gender and power. Space, then, is a useful multi–disciplinary tool of analysis, enabling access to a wider understanding of societies and cultures of the past through examinations of interactions of men, women and socially stratified homosocial groups with their built, lived, imagined and symbolic environments. As Leif Jerram has rightly asserted, space ‘offers a way of understanding relationships that opens up the particular and the peculiar… offering tools to link the particular to wider processes that tend to be analysed in taxonomic categories like class, race, gender, sexuality, state, expertise, or law’.6 Much of the early study of gender and space grew out of feminist academics’ desire in the late 1970s and 1980s to understand the ways that space and place were gendered – and what that meant to women’s lives – both in the present and the past. For anthropologist Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, exploring ‘[c]ultural expressions of sexual asymmetry’, women’s access to, or

Elaine Chalus

exclusion from, power and authority was viewed spatially in a model that opposed the ‘domestic’ to the ‘public’. She maintained that women’s status was lowest where the separation between the domestic and public spheres was greatest and where patriarchal control isolated women from other women and placed them under male authority in the home.7 For another early anthropologist, Shirley Ardener, space provided a means of examining the correspondence between the physical world and its ‘social reality’. The relationship between gender, space and identity was, she argued, reflexive: space reflected social organisation. It was defined by people; thus, it was gendered. Once ‘bounded and shaped’, however, it was no longer neutral, serving instead as a constituent factor in defining the people within it.8 Feminist geographers such as Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell expanded on this, calling attention not only to women’s experience of space and place, of belonging and exclusion across time and between cultures, but also to men’s. As Massey argued, ‘this gendering of space and place both reflects and has effects back on the ways in which gender is constructed and understood in the societies in which we live’.9 In a seminal essay written with Linda McDowell, which studied the impact of nineteenth-century capitalist modes of production on gender relations in four geographically separate and economically distinct areas of England, they demonstrated the importance of location and customary practice in constituting differing gender roles and behaviours. Geographically specific understandings of women’s ‘place’ in society – specifically, responses to women working outside the home – were shaped by place and historical experience and mapped on to location-specific interpretations of public and private. Spatiality and patriarchal control could combine to tie women to family and home, limiting their opportunities; or, conversely, in areas like the north-west English cotton towns, where there were already established traditions of women working away from the home, to facilitate women’s economic independence and foster their emergent identities as citizens.10 Writing later, in 1997, McDowell would provide a pithy explanation of why space matters when analysing gendered social relations: Spatial relations and layout, the differences between and within places, the nature and form of the built environment, images and representations of this environment and of the ‘natural’ world, ways of writing about it, as well as our bodily place within it, are all part and parcel of the social constitution of gendered social relations and the structure and meaning of place.11 Much of the research that has since been carried out by, among others, historians, geographers, architects and social scientists has focused on the interplay of gender, space, place and identity in urban settings.The historic rise of the town, with its increasing and divergent populations, often accompanied by socio-cultural dislocation and extensive technological and industrial change, has proven a particularly fruitful focus for the study of spatiality and gender relations over time and has produced studies that extend from the body to the nation.12 One of the consequences of historians’ interest in the relationship between gender and space has been the revision, if not the outright dismantling, of the model of separate spheres. While historical actors’ access to place and space mattered, both contemporaries’ understanding of gender and their experiences of urban space have proved to be more complex and fluid than any neat categorization into separate spheres allows. Factors as diverse as the time of the day or the reputation of specific streets or areas, as well as considerations such as race, religion, occupation or social status, all informed contemporaries’ perceptions of gender and character and shaped their judgements and responses to individuals and groups in urban situations. The chapters in this section reflect these considerations. 86

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As Katie Barclay argues in Chapter 8, the city was more than a map to be walked across; it was ‘a dynamic component of gender and class identity, implicated in the making of moral character’: ‘with both the city and those within it changing as night fell. The same body might be read and rendered differently as time moved on: the respectable woman marked as sexually available; the polite gentleman turned libertine.’ Her study of an 1816 lawsuit brought against a well-travelled young veteran of the War of 1812 for the seduction of a young middle-class woman in Dublin underlines the importance of location and time of day in determining female reputation. The trial demonstrated male freedom of movement in the city, while revealing that Catherine Creighton’s reputation as a respectable woman turned largely on where she had walked in the city – and when. Movement around and through the city also features importantly in the chapters by Kemille Moore and Rebecca Bender.They explore representations of gender and space in art and literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries respectively, yet they reveal very different responses to the urban experience. Moore’s study explores four contemporary paintings of London’s newly created Thames Embankments (1871–74), a construction project that created an extensive riverside promenade while also modernising London’s transport links. It reveals that for the male artists of these paintings, the embankments were an oasis of open, park-like calm in the midst of the crowded city’s grimy bustle. Not only did they offer the opportunity for respectable gendered leisure, exercise and observation, but their depiction of elegantly dressed women walking or watching, in small groups or alone, even at night, also linked modernity to gender and respectability. Bender’s study of the female experience of early twentieth-century Madrid, as presented in Carmen de Burgos’ novel La rampa (1917), serves as a stark contrast to this view of the modern city as an increasingly female-friendly space. Burgos maps the life of her fictional character, Isabel, onto the real streets and plazas of Madrid. This is a city replete with female spaces – the maternity ward, the orphanage, the Gota de Leche (a medical centre for infants and new mothers), a red-light district and a shelter for maids – but it is ‘a volatile city of partitioned spaces’, a place of entrenched female inequality and institutionalised, dehumanising oppression. Both Riitta Laitinen’s research and Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota’s chapter concentrate on the evidence located in court records to consider the wider experience of gender, space and place in seventeenth-century Turku and in Bologna from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. Laitinen’s examination of the crime of hemgång (violent invasion of the home) reveals that homes in Turku were multi-functional.They were sites of sociability and locations of family honour. Often no more than one room in size, they were often simultaneously public and private spaces; moreover, the home extended symbolically into yards, which were grouped around collections of buildings. While this could result in confrontations, it could also foster the creation of community. Distinctions of public and private in this context dissolved, with meaning attached to relationships, movements and identity in which physical space was implicated but not determinative. In their study of the gendered geography of violence in Bologna, Sanna Muurling and Marion Pluskota also question the relevance of separate spheres.They emphasize the importance of time of day and sites of sociability when examining the gendered incidence of crime. While women’s sociability (and recorded crime) focused on the immediate neighbourhood around the home and took place largely during daylight hours, men ranged further afield and stayed out later. As in Turku, Bolognese homes were by no means private spaces, however, nor were women confined to them.They were instead actively engaged in activities on the streets, including venting their frustrations and even purposefully acting out their disagreements in public – a performative use of space to shape community relationships. 87

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The ways that community relationships were inscribed through space is brought out clearly by Amanda Flather’s study of male domestic servants and apprentices in eighteenth-century English towns. Placement at the table, where they slept or the access they had to public amusements acted to manifest social and occupational hierarchies. At the same time, the access that men and women had to most domestic spaces, and much public space, complicates narratives of public and private. Similarly, the meanings associated with particular sites could be open to contest and change, even if only at particular moments (such as festivals). And for young men who were domestic servants – thus individuals whose status as men could conflict with their social and occupational positions – these were often central to such reinvention of social and public spaces as they sought to clarify their ‘place’ in the world. The chapters in this section demonstrate that towns are experienced as much as constructed. The urban experience reflects the cultural and intellectual currents of the day, the prevailing economic climates and the unresolved tensions in the lives of their inhabitants.The gritty physical reality of towns as places exists in perpetual dialogue with the more elusive abstraction of towns as social and spatial constructs, conceived, constructed and contested in a multiplicity of ways. As a fundamental constituent of personal, social and political power relations, gender plays an important part in shaping towns. It is both embedded into the built environment and reflected in the way that the built environment is experienced and used. Working in conjunction with such other key factors as class and time, it can be found in patterns of residence and movement, in the provision and consumption of services and consumer goods, in the nature of street culture and the diversity of the social arena and in the shifting boundaries between the public and the private, the social and the political, the licit and illicit, the respectable and the dishonourable.

Notes   1 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 46. For a useful introduction to the ‘spatial turn’, see Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne, ‘At home and in the workplace: A historical introduction to the spatial turn’, History and Theory 52 (2013): 305–16 [introduction to an excellent collection of essays on ‘Domestic and Occupational Space in Western Europe from the Middle Ages’].   2 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.   3 Lloyd Edward Kermode, ‘Experiencing the space and place of early modern theater,’ in Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 43, 1 (2013): 7.  4 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 46.   5 Pierre Bourdieu, Outlines of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), ch. 2.   6 Leif Jerram, ‘Space: A useless category for historical analysis?’, History and Theory 52, 3 (2013): 402.   7 Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, ‘Women, culture and society: A theoretical overview,’ in Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1974), 19, 23, 36.  8 Shirley Ardener, ‘Ground rules and social maps for women: An introduction,’ in Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps, ed. Shirley Ardener, Rev. edn (Oxford: Berg, 1993), 2, 3.   9 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 186. 10 Doreen Massey and Linda McDowell: ‘A woman’s place?’ in Geography Matters! A Reader, ed. Doreen Massey and John Allen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 128–47. 11 The 1997 volume has just been republished: Linda McDowell, ‘Introduction’, in Space, Gender, Knowledge: Feminist Readings ed. Linda McDowell and Joanne P. Sharp (London and New York: Routledge, 2016), 2. 12 See, for instance, Linda McDowell, Gender, Identity and Place: Understanding Feminist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Martina Löw, ‘The social construction of space and gender’, trans. Paul Knowlton, European Journal of Women’s Studies 13, 2 (2006): 119–33;

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Space, Place and Environment Dörte ­Kuhlmann, Gender Studies in Architecture: Space, Power and Difference (London: Routledge, 2013); Anna ­Papadopoulou, ‘Gendered spaces and participation in the urban realm’, Spaces and Flows 4, 2 (2014): 1–10. Significant historical contributions include Laura Gowing, ‘“The freedom of the streets”: Women and social space, 1560–1640’, in Londonopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 130–51; Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2007); Fiona Williamson, Social Relations and Urban Space: Norwich, 1600–1700 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2014); Karen Harvey, ‘Gender, space and modernity in eighteenth-century England: A place called sex’, History Workshop Journal 51 (2001): 158–79; Lawrence J. Taylor, ‘Re-entering the west room: On the power of domestic spaces’, in House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise Lawrence-Zuniga (Oxford: Berg, 1999): 9–23; Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space & Architecture in Regency London (Rutgers University Press, 2002); Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009); Susan Broomhall, ed., Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 2015); Thomas Dixon, Weeping Britannia: Portrait of a Nation in Tears (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).

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7 Male Servants, Identity and Urban Space in Eighteenth-Century England Amanda Flather

This chapter explores the neglected topic of the spatial experience of young male servants and apprentices in eighteenth-century towns and cities.1 Although a significant historiography exists on male youth, few historians have paid explicit attention to the way young men used urban space or how, during a period in which towns and cities were undergoing significant transformation, young men’s understanding and experience of space was changing.2 The chapter uses a variety of sources, including court records, to explore how young male servants and apprentices imagined, perceived, negotiated and used the spaces in which they lived, worked and worshipped in eighteenth-century England. It argues that in a period frequently seen as pivotal in shaping modern gender roles for men, space functioned as a central category in the creation of young male identity.The strategies and tactics that young men used to navigate and occasionally to contest patterns of use and control of certain urban spaces were also crucial ingredients in the making of the eighteenth-century town and city.

Urban servants Servants were defined very broadly in eighteenth-century England and were a very varied group.3 Apprentices to skilled manufacturers were often sons of gentlemen or yeoman, sent to towns in their mid-teens to train to become independent craftsmen; parish apprentices were generally orphans or much younger sons of pauper families placed in households by parishes and charitable institutions in preparation for future employment. Male servants tended to be older, from modest if respectable social backgrounds, and they were employed in wealthier households, for whom they were regarded as markers of wealth and status. Cities and towns were dominated by young people in the eighteenth century. Young men were less numerous than women, but in England, as elsewhere in Europe, male apprentices made up between 7.5 and 10 per cent of the urban population, and male servants were a significant proportion of immigrants to towns.4 They were visible enough to arouse considerable comment from contemporaries. The popular

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journal The Craftsman complained in the 1730s: ‘There is scarce a Mechanic in Town who does not keep a Servant in Livery’.5 Moral critics and legal commentators regarded eighteenth-century towns as risky places for servants. Many writers claimed that towns and cities corrupted young men and that an unruly youthful masculinity disrupted the spatial order of urban life. Towns were believed to provide too much freedom and temptation to young people, who were accused of flouting conventional social and age hierarchies and of being easily enticed away from their work by immoral entertainments. It was widely agreed that problems were compounded by the relative good fortune of servants in the eighteenth century who, through circumstances of demography and economy, enjoyed better wages and greater bargaining power than servants before or since. Fiction and conduct literature on ‘the servant problem’ railed against servants’ increasing economic and social autonomy.6 A shortage of labour and the tendency to change jobs frequently appeared to be altering the balance of power between master and servant and left many men in authority convinced that the foundations of patriarchal order were breaking down. In The Great Law of Subordination (1724), Daniel Defoe stated that England had become ‘rather the paradise than the purgatory of servants’. He complained of the ‘gentlemen’ apprentices who expected to have their own footmen to wait upon them, who once ‘submitted to the most servile Employments of the Families in which they served’ but now would not even sweep the shop floor or clean their own shoes, preferring to keep plate hours in the tavern. Lower servants, Defoe claimed, were equally guilty of insubordination and of aspiring above their place. Menservants displayed ‘Sauciness, Drunkenness, and abusive language’.7 Splendidly dressed male servants on display in town streets were a particular bone of contention. Frequently represented in fiction as foppish, lazy and even womanisers, they were frequently criticised for their idleness and negative effect on commercial life. Lived experience was of course more complex. Urban space opened up new opportunities and risks for young male servants, but access and mobility were highly varied and shaped by a complex combination of factors – gender, age, status, ‘place’ and context.

Domestic space ‘Live-in service’ was an integral part of young peoples’ lives in eighteenth-century England, and young men in urban areas lived with their employers in fairly close and intimate terms. Some historians have argued, on the basis of evidence from house plans and other material evidence, that some shifts in the organisation of domestic interiors from hall-based houses to specialised rooms reflected and reinforced a redefinition of domestic relations whereby a patriarchal model of inclusivity, where servants were embraced as part of the family, gave way to a system of spatial organisation that fostered social separation and segregation along class and gender lines.8 Newer research based on different sources that has attempted to recover spatial experience has revealed a more complex reality. Specialisation of space had occurred much earlier in urban dwellings, and by the seventeenth century most houses had single-function rooms like kitchens on the ground floor and bedchambers on upper levels.9 But the reality of the demands of trade and housewifery, even in wealthy urban households, meant that segregation of space was rarely possible or practical. For example, cooking was done mostly by women in urban households, but kitchens were not female spaces, whereas workshops were predominantly male arenas but were attached to houses and open to the street so female neighbours and fellow servants constantly and casually passed through. Apprentices, servants, masters, mistresses, their children, neighbours and customers coexisted and went about their daily tasks without strict patterns of spatial segregation or control.10 But lack of segregation did not mean that servants experienced, used and controlled their domestic spaces in the same way as their employers. Patriarchal prerogatives always lurked 92

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beneath the surface. Control of the body of male servants was very important in this respect. Young men were beaten by their employers, sometimes for the most minor of misdemeanours. Samuel Balls was servant to the Reverend William Shillito in the parish of St Mary-at-the-Walls, Colchester, in 1794, when he complained to the magistrate that his master ‘abused him very much by taking him by the arms, shaking him several times, flinging him down on the floor and turning him out of doors’.11 Samuel Pepys was quite matter-of-fact about how he dealt with his footboy in 1662 when his wife and maids complained about him: ‘I called him up and with my whip did whip him till I was not able to stir...so to bed my arm very weary’. He beat one of his footboys eight times in two days.12 Despite and perhaps because of worry about the pressures, tensions and instability within the urban social system, in particular with regard to innovation and emulation by servants in dress and deportment, eighteenth-century householders continued to take rules of gesture very seriously as a means of expressing and enforcing age and status hierarchies.13 Richard Mayo’s Present for Servants (1693) urged readers to show ‘respectful honour that your place requireth’ and to avoid ‘fawcy carriage’ in the presence of their superiors.14 Great emphasis was also placed upon the need for young men to remove or ‘doff their cap’ before superiors.William Phiston refers to these matters in some detail in his advice book for children The Schoole of Good Manners (1609), in which he states that, ‘in standing thus before thy betters, hold thy hat in thy left hand, with both hands mannerly before thee’.15 Distinctions were sometimes drawn between domestics and apprentices, who, depending on their ‘quality and degree’, might be permitted to wear their hat in the shop or the house. But inappropriate demeanour was regarded as a serious sign of insubordination and was punished severely, even in relatively modest middling-sort homes.Thus, apprentice Thomas Yeldham of Braintree’s offences were magnified in the minds of his superiors by his disregard for rules of social space and gesture.16 According to his master, the young man spoke to his betters ‘standing very close to his said master and facing him boldly with his hat on his head’. More dramatically, in the late seventeenth century the Welshpool apprentice feltmaker and Quaker Richard Davies apparently enjoyed a ‘close friendship’ with his employers until he took up the Quaker style of comportment and refuted conventional forms of deference, upon which his mistress ‘broke his head’ and threatened to murder him.17 The organisation of eating also expressed social distinctions spatially. At meal times, family members sat in an order distinguished by status and ‘place’. In more affluent homes, servants and apprentices of both sexes ate separately at a lower table, often in a separate room.18 In more modest households, servants and apprentices probably ate at the same table as the master and mistress. For example, in 1693, Benjamin Slade worked as an apprentice joiner in Covent Garden and reported that he sat at the same table as his master, Stephen Hennings.19 Power differentials within the household hierarchy were still symbolically defined and displayed by systems of seating, however. The master sat at the head of the table on the most comfortable chair, and subordinates sat lower down on less luxurious chairs, stools or benches.20 Most servants were probably fed reasonably well, but differences of status could also be emphasised by the allocation of different qualities and quantities of food according to rank.21 In 1656, Edward Barlow noticed that in the household of his prospective employer, apprentices were seated at the same table as the family, but at the lower end. They were given pudding without suet and plums, and meat of poorer quality.22 In one eighteenth-century case in London, it was alleged that William Coles and his wife ‘did usually feed very high...but as to his servants he kept an extraordinary bad house’.23 Even in more orderly and especially in larger households, consumption could be status-related. Reverend Thomas Twining of Colchester sent a letter to his brother Daniel in London in 1764 asking for despatch of green and bohea tea and coffee, some costing 12–14 shillings and some ‘the cheapest, for servants’.24 93

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Servants’ low status was reflected and reinforced by their lack of control over their time. They were liable to be sent on errands or ordered to stay indoors, told when they should eat or where they should sleep. One apprentice from Ilford in Essex was disciplined by ‘a blowe on the eare’ from his master for lingering too long on an errand and neglecting his work.25 Christopher Woods was also rebuked severely for drinking in the alehouse when he should have come home to finish his duties, and the anger of his employers was inflamed by his disrespectful ‘playinge with his fingers by way of derision’.26 Most masters expected their servants to wait up for them, to warm their beds and guide them by candlelight to their chambers. William Winter, apprentice to John Sumner of Barking, explained that one Sunday about eleven o’ clock at night, his master came home late and he immediately ‘waited upon him up to his Chamber doore and att the doore gave him a candle’ before he ‘went his way in order to goe to bedd’. Elizabeth Pepys expected help with undressing, and Samuel became disgruntled if his boy did not help him to bed.27 The secondary status of servants and, to a lesser extent, apprentices in the household hierarchy was further reflected and reinforced by the spatial ordering of sleep. Masters and mistresses generally slept in the most comfortable bed in the most comfortable room on the first or second floor.28 Accommodation for servants differed sharply according to the size and wealth of the household, the age and ‘place’ of the servant and his work. Some footmen in elite households were provided with separate rooms and feather beds.29 Many ‘gentlemen’ apprentices too had their own chambers, and those who could afford it sometimes rented a room separately from their master’s house.30 While distinct and single-sex accommodation was provided for servants in most urban houses by the eighteenth century, sleeping quarters were generally confined to dark, damp garrets or basements, where beds were often shared.31 Servants’ sleeping arrangements were also more temporary; they were required to move whenever their superiors commanded them. John Sadler, apprentice to Samuel Rouse, currier and leather-cutter of Colchester, complained that on a Saturday evening in 1800, his master knocked him off a chair on which he was sitting...several times and turned him out of the house without suffering him to finish getting his supper and...obliges him…to sleep in a worse bed than he did at the commencement of his apprenticeship.32 Many apprentices did not have bedrooms at all and were required to sleep on truckle beds in their masters’ shops so that they could serve customers late into the evening. William Stout, apprenticed to a Lancaster grocer in 1679, recorded that he and his fellow apprentices were obliged to ‘have a bed in the shop’ because they were ‘called up at all times of the night’ to serve customers.33 Servants rarely, if ever, possessed a key to the room in which they slept and so could not develop the sense of privacy that their employers began to enjoy in middling eighteenth-century homes. The only space over which almost all servants had control was a lockable box in which they kept their personal possessions. The most extreme manifestation of their lack of autonomy and control over the spaces in which they lived was their vulnerability to eviction. Because they had no title to property and the customary verbal agreements which served as servants’ contracts were difficult to enforce, they were frequently violated and servants simply turned ‘out of doors’. Apprentices were in a stronger position because their indenture agreements included a guarantee of board and lodging that carried greater legal weight, although there is plentiful evidence that they too could be thrown out.34 It would be entirely wrong, of course, to imply that servants were entirely passive or confined. Mistresses, in particular, often received violent threats from male subordinates, which may have been expressions of resistance by young men against a complex system of gendered ­domestic 94

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power that rendered them relatively powerless. In contrast to rural areas where the sexes tend to be separated for much of the day, urban occupations demanded that men and women frequently worked side by side, and this may have caused more friction. Thomas Yeldham challenged his mistress, Rachel Skynner of Braintree, when she chastised him for his ‘lewdness’ while at work in her shop. He ‘gave her such a thrust against the shop chest that in her conscience he was the very and only occasion of the death of her child and put her in great peril of death’.35 Edward Barlow had many ‘brawls’ with his mistress, and the Lancashire apprentice Roger Lowe was relieved to leave his master’s house to take up residence in his shop, despite its discomfort, because of his mistress’s ‘pestilential nature’.36 Although complaint literature exaggerated servants’ spatial autonomy and agency, it is clear that the law gave remedies to eighteenth-century servants and apprentices. The demand for domestic servants in eighteenth-century towns put those seeking work at an advantage, and servants in urban areas were able to move jobs relatively easily.37 A changing economy also meant that apprentices could quite often make a living without completing their training if they took positive decisions to leave.38 Servants who stayed did not always accept close supervision with obedience or submission. William Cope acknowledged that ‘he departed out of his master’s house in the night season without his master’s knowledge, knowing that his master would mislike of it, if he should know it’. Robert Coo, servant to Sir John Palgrave, was sent to the Bridewell for having on two nights run out to dances.…the first times he was out all night and the last time till midnight, for he would not come home until the dancing was over, though Sir John sent for him. The last time he carried away the key of the hall door to get in again.39 But consideration of how economic developments and domestic spatial arrangements offered servants opportunities for agency or resistance to patterns of domestic authority needs to be balanced against circumstances in which they experienced their houses as arenas of direct power. The variations in how domestic spaces were controlled and used illustrates that social relations fluctuated between rigid and relaxed hierarchical arrangements, but the lived experience of service was one where ‘servants in a household were not necessarily of the family: they were there by legal arrangement’.40

Urban space Servants worked long hours with leisure time limited to Sundays, feast days and the hours after work, but they rarely lived confined and isolated lives. Apprentices were more tied to the workshop than male domestic servants, whose work meant that they lived much of their lives out of doors. Some scholars have commented on the spatial liminality of the male servant experience, noting that they were often required to wait at doorways, gateways, or segregated rooms or outside shops and businesses while their employers worked or socialised inside.41 One French visitor to London noted, for example, that between 5 and 6 pm on a Sunday one could observe ‘great numbers of footmen near the gate at the entrance to Hyde Park, wrestling, cudgel playing and jumping while they waited for their mistresses to return from the park’.42 The tendency of young male servants and apprentices to go round in groups may have also separated them to some extent from the rest of the urban population, whereas the much-criticised ostentation of liveried servants and their tendency to put on airs may have marginalised them even more sharply.43 But eighteenth-century critics’ comments need to be weighed against evidence that shows that all servants’ work involved fetching, carrying, shopping and errand-running, tasks that 95

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brought them into regular, daily contact with neighbours, traders and other servants. Other evidence, too, shows that servants participated regularly in the everyday spaces of sociability that characterised eighteenth-century urban life. They were not only workers but also customers in alehouses and taverns, coffee houses, theatres, pleasure gardens and bawdy houses.44 Footmen were a significant and sometimes disorderly presence at Drury Lane, and Lillo’s The London Merchant (1731), the third most popular play in London in 1731, referred in the epilogue to apprentices sitting in the cheapest seats. The play was regularly included in the Christmas and Easter repertoire as ‘a proper play for the apprentices &c’. Furthermore, the provinces were visited by travelling theatre companies, so that plays were attended by apprentices and servants in Birmingham, Walsall, Norwich and Chelmsford.45 Of course, generalised access did not mean that the spatial experiences of different types of men were necessarily integrated or the same. There were myriad ways that locations sustained a masculine experience organised around class, for example, differentiating between servants and their masters and also between gentlemen apprentices with higher incomes and young male servants and apprentices in lower trades. Theatres had seats at different prices and servants sat in the cheaper seats. In Colchester in 1762, the theatre announced that, ‘at the request of the Ladies and Gentlemen in general, who have often been disturbed by the Rude Behaviour of Persons frequenting the Sixpenny Gallery, there will be no sixpences taken in future’.46 The presence of private rooms in inns, taverns and coffee houses suggest an intricate internal social and spatial geography constructed around wealth, age and class.47 There are occasional references to the presence of higher status servants at such meetings. For example, the Masonic Lodge of Unity in Colchester, which met in a room at the Red Lion Inn, attracted more prosperous men of the town and included among its members James Brooker, servant to Thomas Boggis, a wealthy baymaker and sometime mayor of the borough.48 More typically, coffeehouses and inns offered smaller rooms for private associations between middling, adult men. Boswell’s description of his trip to St Paul’s Coffee House is typical: I went to a club to which I belong…It consists of clergymen, surgeons and several other professions. There are of it Dr Franklin, Rose of Chiswick, Burgh of Newington Green, Mr Price who writes on morals, Mr Jeffries a keen supporter of the Bill of Rights and a good many more. We have wine and punch upon the table. Some of us smoke a pipe. Conversation goes on pretty formally, sometimes sensibly, sometimes furiously. At nine there is a sideboard with Welsh Rabbit, apple puffs, porter and beer. The reckoning is about 18d a head.49 There were also hierarchical distinctions between reputable and ‘disorderly’ drinking establishments that were known locally and attracted different custom.50 Coffeehouses were not all spaces of refined polite discourse, and several were renowned for their drunkenness and lax m ­ orals.51 For instance, tailor’s apprentice Edward Furse was seduced in ‘the backroome’ of the coffee house of Mary Hambleton on Little Drury Lane in London one Sunday early in the afternoon in 1695. Edward later confessed that he ‘used to frequent the said ill house very often’, sleeping with Mrs Hambleton and her two prostitutes.52 The house was quite different in its function and clientele from the Chapter House in St Paul’s yard, the favoured hostelry of booksellers, which kept entire runs of provincial newspapers and was frequented by gentlemen.53 In reality, the spatial experience of servants beyond the household was dynamic and varied according to status, occupation, location, time and context. Some spaces emphasised age and status hierarchies overtly. The parish church remained a significant social centre in eighteenthcentury towns for servants and their employers, and most servants seem to have attended service 96

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at least once on a Sunday.54 It was also the most important setting where traditional ideals of order and hierarchy were spatially, materially and symbolically mapped out by the precise placing of parishioners in their pews. Arrangements varied locally, and instability generated by social mobility meant that many urban churches resorted to market forces in the form of pew rents to resolve conflicts about social precedence. Most churches in towns maintained systems of seating that organised parishioners into status hierarchies, which also separated men from women, the old from the young and the married from the single. Male servants were generally assigned pews separate from their employers and from women, at the back of the nave. In some churches, they were expected to stand.55 There was also a ranking system: urban apprentices often sat apart from servants, nearer the chancel, in pews bought and paid for by livery companies.The Mercer’s company had a pew for its apprentices in St Nicholas Church in Durham, for example, and on 5 November 1743, churchwardens’ accounts record the payment of one shilling to John Thomson ‘for sitting in the apprentices pew’.56 Some churches also put on different services for servants at different times from those provided for their employers. Methodist and Quaker meeting houses segregated seating according to gender but not according to age and class.57 Streets, on the other hand were important social spaces where different ages and social categories of women and men met and mingled in less formal and hierarchical terms. The pace and traffic of street life meant that everyday social contacts were fairly fluid and social differences were not always obvious. Hat honour, for example, was minimised on crowded streets and occasionally not practised at all.58 Yet this impression of inclusivity should not obscure the importance of these informal social settings for the structuring of social difference. Dress and style were important for social recognition and, while social critics railed against the tendency of servants to social emulation, in reality, occupation and income had their own constraints. Senior apprentices such as the Bristol Merchant Adventurers, who were expressly forbidden from ‘dressing like courtiers’, had considerable latitude in costume and scope for social display in contrast to apprentices in lower trades, whose shabby clothes marked out their lower rank.59 Street life for all male servants was shaped and limited by time. Night streets brought more freedom, and there is plenty of evidence to show that young male servants and apprentices of a variety of social ranks rampaged in groups through the streets of London and many provincial towns after dark in this period, drinking, fighting, gambling and whoring.60 The ritual calendar also offered young men the chance to take to the streets in large numbers. In some contexts, participation was determined by age, rank and place. Annual mayoral processions served as a ritual reminder of civic authority’s adult, middling masculine identity.61 Processions by trade organisations displayed a different form of exclusivity. Promoted by masters, they displayed the value of the trade to the community and the place of apprentices in the hierarchy of the company. The processions of the woolcombers, staged in towns as far apart as Worcester, Coventry and Colchester in the eighteenth century on or around the feast day of St Blaze (3 February), were impressive events in which apprentice woolcombers marched behind masters and journeymen in their respective companies.62 Servants did not have a formal trade company, although in some circumstances the greater numbers of servants in eighteenth-century towns gave them a sense of corporate and collective identity that allowed them to defend their own interests over trade, access to theatre seats or customary allowances (vails).63 Other rituals were more inclusive, and age, more than status or occupation, was the more prominent determinant of access. Rogationtide processions that were still made each spring through the streets of urban parishes to mark the material margins of place initiated ‘the ancienter and younger sort’ of males from each household into the duties of civic remembrance.64 Each town also had its own cycle of fairs and festivities – Shrove Tuesday, fireworks on 5 November and impromptu rituals on May Day – all of which saw male servants of a variety of ‘ranks and 97

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qualities’ on the streets fighting, wrestling, drinking and swaggering on parade.65 Some festivals even included communal games, such as Derby’s Shrovetide football match, which was played in the streets by hundreds of young men.66 The meanings of these spatial and social practices were highly contested in the eighteenth century, and performances of masculinity and power play changed from context to context. In many instances men in authority accepted and even condoned displays of youthful disorder and aggression, especially when activities shaded into protest over issues and concerns that they shared. Shrovetide disorders were notorious for their attacks on brothels, assaults on foreign traders and political and patriotic demonstrations. They have been interpreted by scholars as acts of collective justice where political, social and moral values were defended and upheld.67 They were also especially inclusive spaces of masculine association that allowed young men with limited access to political authority the opportunity to participate in a sophisticated political culture and to express agency. Apprentices and servants of a various ages and ‘places’ joined with masters and journeymen in many of these crowd actions, and in several instances they were not prosecuted or punished by the law. Richard Price and Thomas Bean were London servants who participated in the patriotic ‘Mug-House’ riots of 1715 and benefited from the temporary licence offered to subordinates through the festive inversion of charivari.68 Crowd action was therefore not wholly conservative. It allowed young men to display such ‘manly attributes’ as public-mindedness, strength and courage, enabling them to consolidate and expand their claim to manliness through an expression of political authority by defending the interests of the community.69 Large and rowdy gatherings could nonetheless cause magisterial unease, and many middling urban reformers shared a profound ambivalence towards the disorderly activities of young males. Their hostility was exacerbated by the tendency to condemn similar behaviour in lower ranking men of any age, placing unruly masculinity in the context of conflict between classes rather than between ages or generations of men. Misconduct was mapped onto specific sites, such as alehouses, taverns and fairs, that were regarded as costly in terms of time, efficiency and public order.70 The Essex bench accordingly concluded in 1762 that fairs were occasions of ‘vice and immorality and the debauching and ruin of servants, apprentices and runaway people and many riots, tumults and other disorders are occasioned thereby’.71 Efforts at regulation largely failed in this period, however, because of the preferences of public taste. A discourse of polite improvement encouraged urban development that altered much of the architecture and organisation of eighteenth-century town life, but physical change did not necessarily determine behavioural shifts.72 ‘Disorderly masculinity’ was culturally embedded and practised by men of varied ages and classes. As Vic Gattrell has argued, ‘impoliteness’ was not a response to politeness but the continuity of ‘a more unitary culture in which many elite and vulgar attitudes remained congruent’.73 Fairs survived and thrived despite numerous attempts to suppress them; urban football matches remained popular with gentlemen as well as servants and artisans. Cockfights were widely condemned for their violence and associated vice, but cockpits were established in almost every town in the eighteenth century and matches attracted audiences of a variety of ages and types.The ‘polite’ town of Newmarket had a cockpit, and fights that were staged on race days were attended by gentlemen and plebeians. Orders issued by magistrates failed to suppress cockfights put on in inns and taverns in Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Essex towns, which were popular with servants and apprentices as well as the better sort of men.74 These spaces were homosocial and their role in the construction and performance of masculinity was central, but their spatial and social configuration demonstrates the problematic aspect of notions of a hegemonic masculinity constructed within discourses of politeness and progress mapped on to contours of age and class.75 The urban spatial geography of eighteenth-century England 98

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was constructed by, and in turn it constructed, multiple, competing masculinities that operated sometimes in tandem with, and at other times in contradiction to, conventional grids of power.

Conclusion In conclusion to this investigation of the ways that male servants used, organised and ­experienced urban space in eighteenth-century England we see that rigid and static social patterns were not mapped upon urban spaces. Meanings attributed to space were fluid, flexible and ­contextually determined; they were the basis of spatial identities that could be contested and continually reconstructed.76 In some circumstances such as the organisation of eating and sleeping, civic processions or the arrangement of church seating, patriarchal hierarchies of age and ‘place’ emphasised youthful subordination and dependence. In other contexts, occupation and wealth were more prominent.While it is quite clear that servants were not automatically excluded from most urban spaces on the basis of age or ‘place’, forms of service associated with humbler occupations and lower incomes did militate against access. New patterns of consumption enabled wealthier servants to spend money on costly forms of leisure that the humbler servant could not afford. Placed within the historiography of masculinity, these findings offers insights into questions about continuity and change between the seventeenth and eighteenth century, and the extent to which divisions of class began to override distinctions of age in the establishment of precedence between men.77 Consideration of street protest, on the other hand, illustrates that urban space could facilitate young men’s claims to manhood as well as complicate them. Either way spatial and social constructions were not hegemonic but complex, varied and bound to circumstance. A wide variety of social and hierarchical configurations were possible, and a range of social relations discussed in the historical literature were played out, depending upon the context.This should encourage investigation of the total picture of the social and spatial conflicts and negotiations involved in the making and changing of urban space instead of focussing on the perspective of the mature, middling man in formulating our understanding of urban change in the period.

Notes   1 Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Keith Thomas, ‘Age and authority in early modern England’, Proceedings of the British Academy 62 (1976), 205–48. Studies that focus on male servants include Jean Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class in Eighteenth Century England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1956); Bridget Hill, Servants: English Domestics in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996);Tim Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750 (Harlow: Longman, 2000); Kristina Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence Between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); R. C. Richardson, Household Servants in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010). For European studies see, S. C. Maza, Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century France: The Uses of Loyalty (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); Cissie Fairchilds, Domestic Enemies: Servants and Their Masters in Old Regime France (Baltimore MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).   2 For studies that explore the links between space and identity formation, see Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity, 1994); Hannah Moore, Space,Text and Gender: An Anthropological Study of the Marakwet of Kenya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).   3 Raffaella Sarti,‘Who are servants? Defining domestic service in western Europe (16th–21st Centuries)’, in Proceedings of the Servant Project,Vol. II, ed. S. Pasleau and I. Schopp with R. Sarti (Liège: Editions de l’Université de Liège, 2005b), 3–59.

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Amanda Flather  4 Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis, ‘Rules and reality: Quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern England’, Economic History Review 65 (2011); 4; Leonard Schwarz, ‘English servants and their employers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’, Economic History Review 52 (1999): 236–56.   5 Penelope Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700–1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 128.  6 Straub, Domestic Affairs, 6–14.   7 Daniel Defoe, The Great Law of Subordination Considered or the Insolence and Insufferable Behaviour of Servants in England Duly Enquir’d Into (London, 1724), 7, 12, 13, 14.   8 Matthew Johnson, An Archaeology of Capitalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 163–6.   9 Ursula Priestley, Penelope Corfield and Helen Sutermeister, ‘Rooms and room use in Norwich housing, 1580–1730’, Post-Medieval Archaeology 16 (1982), 93–123; Frank Brown, ‘Continuity and change in the urban house; Developments in domestic space organisation in seventeenth-century London’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 27 (1986), 558–90. 10 Meldrum, Domestic Service and Gender, 76–83; Laura Gowing, ‘The freedom of the streets: Women and social space, 1560–1640’, in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. P. Griffiths and M. S. R. Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 133–37; Amanda Flather, Gender and Space in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007) 39–74. 11 Essex Record office [hereafter ERO] P/CoR 17, 17 January 1794. 12 Samuel Pepys, Saturday, 21 June 1662, in The Diary of Samuel Pepys:Vol. III Robert Latham and William Matthews, eds (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1970–83), 116. 13 Jan Bremmer and Herman Roodenburg, eds, A Cultural History of Gesture (Oxford: Polity, 1991); Anna Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn, eds, Renaissance Bodies; the Human Figure in English Culture c.1540–1660 (London: Reaktion Books, 1990); Adrian Davies, The Quakers in English Society, 1655–1725 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 43–63; Michael J. Braddick, ‘Introduction: The politics of gesture’, in The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, ed., Michael J. Braddick (Past and Present, Supplement, 4, 2009), 9–5; John Walter, ‘Gesturing at authority: Deciphering the gestural code of early modern England’, in The Politics of Gesture: Historical Perspectives, ed., Michael J. Braddick (Past and Present, Supplement, 4, 2009), 96–127. 14 Richard Mayo, Present for Servants (London, 1693), 27–29. 15 William Phiston, The Schoole of Good Manners (London, 1609), sig. B2r; Penelope Corfield, ‘Dress for deference and dissent: Hats and the decline of hat honour’, Costume 23 (1989), 64–79. 16 Essex Record Office [hereafter ERO] Q/SR 81/47. 17 John E. Southall, ed., Leaves from the History of Welsh Nonconformity in the Seventeenth Century; Being Chiefly the Autobiography of Richard Davies of Welshpool – Quaker (1636–1708) (Newport: J. E. Southall, 1899), 23. 18 Peter Earle, A City Full of People: Men and Women of London 1650–1750 (London: Methuen, 1994), 241. 19 London Metropolitan Archives [hereafter LMA] DL/C/224 f.135. 20 Rachel Garrard, ‘English probate inventories and their use in studying the significance of the domestic interior, 1500–1700’, AAG Bijdragen 23 (1980), 59; Johnson, Archaeology of Capitalism, 175; Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800 (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2002), 155; Flather, Gender and Space, 60–68. 21 Studies of the historical, social and cultural significance of food include Stephen Mennell, All Manner of Foods: Eating and Taste in England and France from the Middle Ages to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985); Jack Goody, Cooking, Cuisine and Class: A Study in Comparative Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 22 Edward Barlow, Barlow’s Journal of his Life at Sea in King’s Ships: East & West Indiamen & other Merchantmen from 1659 to 1703, Vol. 1., ed. Alfred Basil Lubbock (London: Hurst & Blackett Ltd, 1934), 20. 23 Earle, City Full of People, 125–6. See also Peter Earle, The Making of the English Middle Class: Business Society and Family Life in London, 1660–1730 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 279–80. 24 Thomas Twining, letter 8, 27 Dec. 1764, in A Selection of Thomas Twining’s Letters 1734–1804: A Record of a Tranquil Life, ed. R. S Walker (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press 1991). 25 ERO Q/SR 81/47. 26 ERO Q/SBa 2/42. 27 LMA DL/C/245 fo. 398v; Pepys, Diary, vii, 200. 28 Garrard, ‘English probate inventories’, 57; Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour and Material Culture, 1660–1715 (London: Routledge, 1988),159–60; Johnson, Archaeology of Capitalism, 169.

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Male Servants, Identity and Urban Space 29 Richardson, Household Servants, 98–99; Jane Whittle and Elizabeth Griffiths, Consumption and Gender in the Early Seventeenth-Century Household: The World of Alice Le Strange (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 134. 30 Earle, Making of the Middle Class, 103. 31 Flather, Gender and Space, 69–70. 32 ERO P/CoR 22a. 33 William Stout, Autobiography of William Stout, of Lancaster, Wholesale and Retail Grocer and Ironmonger, a Member of the Society of Friends. A.D. 1665–1752, ed. J. D. Marshall (Manchester: Chetham Society, 1967), 13;William Sachse, ed., The Diary of Roger Lowe of Ashton-in-Makefield, Lancashire 1663–74 (New Haven and London:Yale University Press), 1938), 6. 34 Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), 27, 38; Flather, Gender and Space, 48–51. 35 ERO Q/SR 81/47. 36 Lowe, Diary, 119. See also Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet Women, Family, and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 4; Katherine Hodgkin, ‘Thomas Wythorne and the problem of mastery’, History Workshop Journal 29 (1990), 20–41. 37 Meldrum, Domestic Service, 23–25; Earle, City Full of People, 121; D. A. Kent, ‘Ubiquitous but invisible: Female domestic servants in mid-eighteenth century London’, History Workshop Journal 28 (1989), 111–28. 38 Patrick Wallis, ‘Apprenticeship and training in premodern England’, The Journal of Economic History 68 (2008), 832–61. 39 The Notebook of Robert Doughty, 1662–65, ed. James Rosenheim (Norwich: Norfolk Record Society Publications, 1989–91), 47. 40 Carolyn Steedman, Labours Lost. Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 18. 41 Straub, Domestic Affairs, 170. 42 Cited in Robert B. Shoemaker, The London Mob: Violence and Disorder in Eighteenth-Century England (London: Hambledon & London, 2004), 3. 43 Hecht, The Domestic Servant Class, 56. 44 John Rule, The Experience of Labour in Eighteenth Century Industry (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981), 103. 45 Straub, Domestic Affairs, 113–19; Joan Lane, Apprenticeship in England 1600–1914 (London: Taylor & Francis, 1996), 98; Hilda Grieve, The Sleepers and the Shadows. Chelmsford: A Town, Its People and its Past: Volume II. From Market Town to Chartered Borough 1608–1888 (Chelmsford: Essex Records Office, 1994), 211. 46 Ipswich Journal, 6 Nov. 1762. See also Straub, Domestic Affairs, 110–78. 47 Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (Harlow: Longman, 1983), 44; Brian Cowan, ‘What was masculine about the public sphere? Gender and the coffeehouse milieu in postRestoration England’, History Workshop Journal 21 (2001), 127–57. 48 Shani D’Cruze, A Pleasing Prospect: Society and Culture in Eighteenth-Century Colchester (Hatfield: University of Hertfordshire Press, 2008), 114. 49 John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 41. 50 On local knowledge of distinctions between disorderly and reputable drinking houses, see Keith Wrightson, ‘Alehouses, order and reformation in rural England, 1550–1660’, in Popular Culture and Class Conflict, 1590–1914: Explorations in the History of Labour and Leisure, ed. Eileen Yeo and Stephen Yeo (Brighton: Branch Line, 198), 19–20. 51 Brian Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2005), ­118–19; Markman Ellis, The Coffee House (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), 44, 11; Helen Berry, ‘Rethinking politeness in eighteenth-century England: Moll King’s coffee house and the significance of ‘‘Flash Talk’’’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 6, Vol. 11 (2001), 68. 52 Cited in Faramerz Dabhoiwala,“The Pattern of sexual immorality in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London”, in Londinopolis: Essays on the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 93; see also Ellis, The Coffee House, 113; Old Bailey Proceedings Online [www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, 26 Apr. 2016],Trial of Samuel Wilson, 23 Feb. 1734 (T174 30223-28). 53 Brewer, Pleasures of the Imagination, 39–40.

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Amanda Flather 54 Earle, Making of the Middle Class, 240–50; Ben Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 184–89; Rosemary Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840 (London: Routledge, 2014), 207–10. 55 W. D. Jacobs, ‘Sacred space in the long eighteenth century: Seating in churches’, Ecclesiology Today 44 (2011), 3–16; Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 105–109; LMA DL/C/236 fos 198v–210v; LMA DL/C/246 fo. 384v; Flather, Gender and Space, 152–54. 56 A. Hamilton Thompson, ‘On a minute book and papers formerly belonging to the Mercer’s Company of Durham’, in Archaeologia Aeliana, Or, Miscellaneous Tracts Relating to Antiquity, Third series Vol. 19, ed., Robert Blair (Newcastle: Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, 1822), 232. 57 Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in Early Modern England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge,1993), 56, n. 228. 58 Penelope Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets: The urban odyssey in the eighteenth century’, Journal of Urban History 16 (1990), 41. 59 Ben Amos, Adolescence and Youth, 197. 60 Griffiths, Youth and Authority, 213; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England, 96–99. 61 Peter Borsay, ‘“All the town’s a stage”: Urban ritual and ceremony, 1660–1800’, in The Transformation of English Provincial Towns, 1600–1800, ed. Peter Clark (London: Hutchinson, 1984), 228–58; Peter Burke, ‘Performing history: The importance of occasions’, Rethinking History 9 (2005), 35–52; Ipswich Journal, 2 May 1789. 62 Lane, Apprenticeship, 95; Arthur Brown, Essex at Work: 1700–1815 (Chelmsford: Essex Records Office, 1969), 78. 63 Hill, Servants, 86–87; Lane, Apprenticeships, 142. 64 Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 247. 65 Charles Phythian Adams, ‘Milk and soot: The changing vocabulary of a popular ritual in Stuart and Hanoverian London’, in The Pursuit of Urban History, ed. Derek Fraser and Anthony Sutcliffe (London: Edward Arnold, 1983), 83–104. 66 Robert Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society, 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 36–7, 79, 119–122, 138–4; Bob Bushaway, By Rite: Custom, Ceremony and Community in Britain, 1700–1880 (London: Junction Books, 1982), 6, 36, 51, 171–2. 67 Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration Until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 172–80; Nicholas Rogers, ‘Popular protest in early Hanoverian London’, Past and Present 79 (1978), 70–100. 68 Rogers, ‘Popular Protest’, 82; OBP t17160906–2. 69 John Walter, ‘Faces in the crowd: Gender and age in the early modern crowd’, in The Family in Early Modern England, ed., Helen Berry and Elizabeth Foyster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 103–10. 70 Malcolmson, Popular Recreations, 95, 149; E. P. Thompson, ‘the patricians and the plebs’, in E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common (London: Merlin Press, 1991). 71 ERO Q/SO 10, Essex Quarter Sessions Order Book, 13 July 1756 – 4 Oct. 1763, Entry 20 Apr. 1762. 72 Peter Borsay, The English Urban Renaissance: Culture and Society in the Provincial Town, 1660–1770 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991); Ann Wohlcke, The Perpetual Fair, Gender, Disorder and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth Century London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014), 9. 73 Vic Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London: Atlantic Books, 2006), 19. 74 Ipswich Journal, 14 Jan. 1758, 3 Mar. 1764; Grieve, Sleepers, 226. 75 Karen Harvey, ‘Ritual encounters: Punch parties and masculinity in the eighteenth century’, Past & Present 214 (2012), 165–203. 76 Massey, Space, Place and Gender, 2–3, 186. 77 Alexandra Shepard,‘From anxious patriarchs to refined gentleman? Manhood in Britain, circa 1500–1700’, Journal of British Studies 34 (2005), 295.

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8 Mapping the Spaces of ­Seduction Morality, Gender and the City in Early ­Nineteenth-Century Britain Katie Barclay

In December 1816, a young Lieutenant, Allan Maclean, testified on behalf of his fellow ­soldier and friend, Henry Dive Townshend (1795–1882), during John Creighton’s suit against Townshend for seducing his young daughter, Catherine Matilda Creighton.1 One evening, while Maclean and Townshend walked along the Dublin Canal, they passed 15-year-old Catherine walking with her 4-year-old sister on an errand for their father. It was roughly eight o’clock at night. Maclean was called to testify to the nature of their meeting, describing how they passed by Catherine but Townshend had turned back and ran after her, returning to meet him five minutes later. Maclean observed of her: ‘She appeared to be a girl of loose character walking about the Canal’. Maclean then continued with a list of other occasions that he had seen Catherine walking through town, mentioning the street names, time of day and her company, including ‘another female’ and a Lieutenant Bender. John Creighton’s lawyer, Thomas Wallace, interrogated Maclean on the latter encounter, which had also happened in the evening: ‘Was Bender’s character, I say, so bad that it would be disgraceful for a female to speak to him?’ Maclean replied: A. I did not conceive it proper for a female to speak to him at that hour. Q. Then it is quite right for a female who accidentally meets a person that she knows in the street to be considered by those who meet her as a woman of bad character? A. I thought she was a stranger to Mr Bender, I believe she was. ... Q. You met her in Merrion-square some time in August; now Merrion-square is I ­suppose as full of women of bad character, as the Canal? A. I do not know. Q. Do you believe that the Canal is a more proper place, or which scene do you think most proper? A. Merrion Square, I believe in the day. Q. Am I to understand, that ladies walk in the Summer there, until ten o’clock at night? 103

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A. Protected. Q. Then do you believe, that if an Officer’s wife, happens to be unprotected, any ­gentleman, who chooses, may take liberties with her? A. I do not conceive, that it is a proper place for a female to walk, at that time of night. Q. And if it is not, do you mean to convey, that if a young girl, happens to be found there in an unprotected situation; any gentleman, who chooses, is at liberty to treat her as he pleases; do you mean to convey that? A. Not at all. Q. Then if so, do you believe that the man, who seduced her on that night, is guilty or innocent? A. (None made by the witness).2 In this intelligent piece of cross-examination, Wallace, a well-known lawyer, attempted to unpick the cultural assumptions that were tied to women’s movements in time and space in an Irish city, seeking to articulate and so interrogate the relationship between the urban, gender, sexual morality and manly honour.Women’s movements through the city, particularly after dusk, became closely tied to their sexual reputations (with women who moved unprotected after dark viewed as immoral and therefore sexually available).Yet what about the vulnerable middle-class woman caught out in the wrong time and place? Was she to be exploited, or did the demands of masculine honour require middle-class men to take such women into their protection? And, if so, how were men to know who was an honourable woman and who was of ‘loose character’? Underlying and unsaid during this discussion, of course, was the implication that women of ‘loose character’ were sexually available, their exploitation of little concern. Recent work on space and human behaviour has moved from thinking about space as a fixed entity that humans behave on, or as the structures of the landscape that put boundaries around human behaviour, to a dynamic interaction between landscape, architecture, time, the behaviours of people in particular places and the cultural meanings attached to all of the above; and their interaction.3 Space is ‘performative’, as Henri Lefebvre notes, both constituted by and productive of social relations.4 In this, urban space is not simply the city but also the interaction between urban geographies, the people that live in and move through the city and the values attached to both and their interaction. For Catherine Creighton and other women, urban space was formed differently and held different meanings depending upon time of day, their gender and character and where in the city they walked.Walking by the canal held different meanings and reflected upon moral behaviour in different ways than walking on Merrion Square; while, in turn, who walked where could impact upon how such areas were interpreted, whether it was the prostitutes who defined red-light districts or the working and middle-class neighbourhoods that were identified by the economics of their inhabitants.5 The city, therefore, was not simply a map to be walked across but also a dynamic component of gender and class identity, implicated in the making of moral character. Similarly, time of day or night was an important component of urban space, with both the city and those within it changing as night fell.6 The same body might be read and rendered differently as time moved on: the respectable woman marked as sexually available, the polite gentleman turned libertine. The court case that arose after the seduction of Catherine Creighton provides a useful case study in exploring the ways that urban space was created through the interaction between the streets of the city and the gendered body. Seduction cases had a long history. In Ireland, as in 104

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England and Wales, they provided compensation to the parents or employers of seduced women for a loss of their services.7 Like annulments and legal separations, they had been tried in the ­ecclesiastical courts for centuries.8 There was, however, an alternative option of suing in the civil courts and, over the course of the eighteenth century, this became the most popular venue for such cases.9 Tales of seduction fascinated the eighteenth and early nineteenth-century public, inspiring a genre of novels wherein the seduction of an innocent woman and her subsequent social fall was the central story arc.10 Such stories, as well as considerable moral commentary, filled the press of the period with columns in newspapers, letters to the editor and numerous pamphlets and books. The narrative of seduction relied on a young, innocent female soiled by a calculating lover, who deprived her of her physical and emotional chastity by having her fall in love with him but ultimately not marrying her.11 In both instances, as her chastity was ‘corrupted’, her ­marketability as a wife was compromised, but, as importantly in a sentimental era, her innocence was lost. Catherine was the daughter of John Creighton, a Dublin slate merchant, recently bankrupted. She was one of nine surviving children, the second eldest child and eldest daughter. They lived on Grattan Street near Dublin’s Grand Canal in one of three houses on the street that had been built by her father. Grattan Street was a new street in the wealthy south of the city, marking part of its outward expansion in the building of homes for the nobility, gentry and professions.As the child of an embarrassed businessman, she was both used to wealth and educated to her social class, but she now lived with only one servant in the household, an old woman. Catherine was expected to run errands for her family where necessary, usually taking a younger sibling with her for company – and perhaps for protection.12 On one occasion, while out performing her filial duties, she met Henry Townshend. Over the next few weeks, they met regularly and promenaded across Dublin, before she finally agreed to accompany him to his barracks, where they had sex. She stayed there for three days before her father tracked her down and threatened to sue Townshend. Townshend then turned her onto the street, after 9 p.m., and Catherine returned to her parent’s home. As the courtship primarily happened during walks across the city, Catherine’s movements were the central focus of witness testimony during the trial, as the court attempted to assess the implications of her perambulations for her moral character and so to assess whether she was truly seduced. Through the subsequent court case, held in Dublin’s Court of Common Pleas in December 1816 and incorporating five witnesses, some of the most high-profile barristers of the age and a speech by Charles Phillips that was published across Britain (due to his claim that seduction was not native to Ireland), the often unspoken boundaries that shaped women’s movements in the city were explicitly articulated, allowing them to be mapped and observed.13

Moving through the British city The difficulty that Lieutenant Allan Maclean had in trying to articulate why both geography and time of day would justify the dishonourable seduction of a middle-class woman reflected the ambiguity of women’s place within the city during the long eighteenth century.The confusion felt by many eighteenth-century men and women as they negotiated the increasingly anonymous urban street and tried to distinguish the respectable from the rough is now commonly recognised in histories of the period.14 The problems that this caused for women, in particular, has been highlighted, as people found it increasingly difficult to differentiate between prostitutes and respectable women, leading to the plot device in novels wherein the eighteenth-century heroine found, to her horror, that she had befriended an immoral woman and been seduced into a brothel. In more everyday contexts, sexual harassment on the streets has been noted as commonplace experience of the era for women across social classes, while the ways that beautiful women used this to their advantages has also been noted.15 105

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The relationship between ‘sex’, both in terms of gender and sexuality, and the city was a central concern of the era, with large cities and towns, most particularly London but also Dublin, Bristol and similar places, causing anxiety for their corrupting potential.16 The sexual purity, particularly of young women, became a central focus for moral commentators on city life. The downward fall of the innocent ‘country’ girl as she arrived unprotected in town only to be seduced in her naivety by either a rake or brothel madam was a popular feature of novels, poetry and even the purportedly ‘real life’ stories of seduction and suicide that filled the press. In such accounts, the sexual corruption of young women stood for wider social anxieties over the increasingly anonymous nature of the city, with its decline of community discipline, its disruption of clear and knowable social hierarchies, the intermingling of different ethnicities and nationalities, the introduction of new consumer goods and the threat of luxury and the disruption to families as new opportunities dislocated the individual from their roots.17 In a number of seduction stories, the metaphor of movement was central to the imagining of the loss of innocence. While the male walker, epitomised in ‘The Rambler’ Samuel Johnson, was encouraged to roam the streets and so become acquainted with his urban environment, such familiarity with the urban was dangerously portent for women, who faced corruption through knowledge.18 It is telling that Betsey Warwick, the Female Rambler, whose adventures were novelised at the end of the century, walked about the city dressed as a man, while her escapades in female garb almost exclusively happened in convents.19 Her maleness – and fascinatingly, in the novel she is referred to as ‘he’ when in male clothing – acted as her protection when in public, ensuring that her chastity was never in question; when female, she needed to be contained in private for her safety. Several accounts reflected on the importance of travel and distance to understanding seduction, both in terms of the movement of women from the protection of their families and using their travel across the city as a metaphor for their moral decline. One article that appeared in the Caledonian Mercury in 1798 recorded the tragic story of a young girl taken by a family friend to a brothel, where she was ‘seduced’ before being returned home.The report noted that the girl and her seducer ‘went to the Circus, and on returning the girl frequently observed that she was sure the coach was going wrong’. This mis-travelling across the city – the ‘going wrong’ – acted as a metaphor both of the girl’s physical and her moral journey.20 Similarly, in an 1810 news article about a Scots girl who eloped with her English lover, the journey south operated as a metaphor for her downfall. The Caledonian Mercury reported: ‘He first took her to Carlisle, where he succeeded in triumphing over her virtue; from thence he proceeded to Whitehaven, and advanced by slow degrees to London. He never again talked of marriage, but became negligent and brutal in his conduct...’.21 When they arrived in London, he abandoned her: ‘Deceived and cheated out of her affections, deprived of her character and honour – deserted – pregnant – robbed of her money and her clothes – enfeebled by continued ill-usage and starvation – several hundred miles from her poor mother and friends’.The distance from her family acted to reinforce her downfall with physical distance in miles signifying how far she had travelled from her state of innocence, just as the journey south marked her tragic decline. In contrast, her saviour, at least in the short term, was ‘a gentleman, who expressed great feeling for her situation, and pledged his word of honour to take a post chaise and convey her back to Hampton’. Her journey north acted as the beginning of recovery.

Mapping seduction It is within this context, where movement across the city acted as a metaphor for female ­corruption, that Catherine Matilda Creighton’s journeys across Dublin could come to act as a metaphor for her moral character during her seduction trial. In 1800, Dublin city had a 106

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p­ opulation of 170,000, making it the largest city in the United Kingdom behind London. Like cities across the country, it was rapidly growing and its population had almost doubled to 318,000 by 1850. It was Ireland’s capital, home to its law courts, a major centre of trade and an important port that linked the country to empire. In the aftermath of the 1798 Irish rebellion, it was also a city that played host to a large and consistent military presence, housed across seven barracks that could hold up to 5500 men.22 As a result, it was a city with an increasingly international population, incorporating those brought through trade and migration networks and as part of a military force that had recruited members from across the British Empire. Despite this demographic expansion, the first few decades of the nineteenth century were economically difficult. The Union of Ireland with Britain in 1800 had closed the Irish parliament and moved the political elite to London, leading to a downturn in trade, particularly for those that created luxury goods.This was exacerbated at the end of the Napoleonic War when renewed trade with Europe flooded Britain with cheap goods that priced the Irish out of the market.With no major industries, Dublin’s economy was unstable, experiencing recurrent economic depressions, leading to widespread un- and under-employment.23 The layout of the city, in 1837 still only taking up five kilometres square, had been set in the previous century, where major building works had replaced narrow medieval streets with large Georgian promenades and brick terraces.24 As in many British cities, rich and poor had traditionally lived alongside each other, but population expansion and the building works of the late eighteenth century had started to demarcate space along classed lines (although the small area that the city encompassed ensured that such neighbourhoods sat cheek to jowl). Catherine lived in the wealthy south-east district (Division 4 in Figure 8.1), alongside the nobility, gentry and liberal professions (many of whom had moved from the city centre, leaving their Georgian tenements for the poor). Above her, in the north-east (Division 3) lived the mercantile and ‘official’ (civil servant) classes. The old medieval city (Division 5 around the castle area) had traditionally been home to the aristocracy, but in 1816, it was increasingly occupied by less wealthy families and tradespeople. The south-west (Divisions 5 and 6), ‘formerly the seat of the woollen and silk manufactures’ was in ‘a state of lamentable dilapidation, bordering on ruin’ in 1837, housing many of the more economically precarious. The poorest area however was the north-west, across the river, the location of the Royal Barracks and Smithfields, which presented ‘striking indications of poverty’ that year.25 Over the early nineteenth century, without the economic resources to continue building works and a growing population, Dublin became seriously overcrowded, and slum housing became a significant problem.26 Catherine’s father’s bankruptcy was situated against this economic backdrop, a context that allowed his situation to be viewed in a considerably more sympathetic light by a jury of his Dublin peers than it might have been at other times.27 Townshend, in contrast, was a military interloper in a city where such intervention continued to chafe.28 Henry Townshend was a Welsh lieutenant in the 41st Regiment stationed at the Great George Street Barracks in Dublin.29 He was about 21 years old at the time of these events, having taken a commission in 1812. Townshend never married, becoming a career soldier, eventually rising to colonel and inheriting his father’s estate of Trevelyan in Denbighshire, Wales, after his eldest brother John’s decease.30 When Townshend came to court in 1816, he brought with him fellow officers who lived in the same barracks. These included Allan Maclean, a Canadian of Scots parentage; Benoit Bender, a French Canadian who described himself as ‘North American’; and James Lewis Hill, who was probably Scottish.31 They had been stationed in Canada during the War of 1812 (between the United States and Britain) and had arrived in Dublin with their regiment in April 1816. Henry was also supported in court by his brother Thomas, who was then living in Liverpool. (The fact that Thomas died three years later in Calcutta may indicate 107

Figure 8.1  Samuel Neele, A plan of the city of Dublin as surveyed for the use of the divisional Justices (London: W. Faden, c. 1808–20). Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

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that he was a merchant. It was a truly international family, as a third brother had emigrated to Australia).32 Thomas testified exclusively to Henry’s age and income. As a group, they embodied the glamorous cosmopolitanism that military officers suggested to early nineteenth-century audiences; they were the sort of men who excited Jane Austen’s young female characters.33 They were the men that reminded society of female desire and its dangers, threatening chastity and innocence. Moreover, in this case, the men’s ‘foreignness’, and their presence in Ireland as an occupying force, heightened the threat they posed to Dublin’s daughters. As a result, while ultimately Catherine’s moral character was at stake, these military gentlemen were also required to walk carefully, showing that their steps remained within the boundary of honourable manhood.34 It is notable, however, how quickly these men learned the physical and moral topographies of Dublin city. Within months of arriving, they were able not only to flirt with women on Dublin’s streets but also to use that information strategically in court – perhaps reflective of an education bought through similar experiences at home and in empire. Throughout the trial, Catherine’s movements across the city were central evidence; they were used to support her claims of respectability and Henry’s claims that she was ‘a woman of loose character’. Benoit Bender’s testimony serves as an example of how witnesses were pressed on this issue. He was asked: Q. Where did you walk to? A. From what she told me, we were within three or four hundred yards of her home. Q. When did you see her again, where did you see her? A. In George’s-street.35 ... Q. Where did you walk with them? A. We walked around Merrion-square Q. How long did you continue walking? A. As I said I believe until a little after nine o’clock, when we parted. ... I had appointed to meet her in Hamilton’s-row, and saw her in George’s Street ... I drew back to the gate where I saw her at the corner of George’s street. Q. ... Did you see her then? A. We passed into a street, upon the other side, before you go into Dame-street, a narrow lane ... Q. Which way did she go? A. Somewhere near College-Green, towards the Barracks. Q. And she walked with you, as far as College-green? A.Yes, Sir.36 Similar narratives of movement were central features of all the major witnesses’ testimonies. Such accounts were more than a simple accounting of Catherine’s movement. Through having her walk in both respectable and non-respectable streets at hours of the evening where respectable women should not be walking alone, the mapping of Catherine’s movement became 109

Figure 8.2  Detail of Samuel Neele, A plan of the city of Dublin as surveyed for the use of the divisional Justices (London: W. Faden, c. 1808–20). Image courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

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implicated in her moral character. Catherine lived on Grattan Street; although unmarked on Figure 8.2, it sits at the top right of Merrion Square, between Lower Mount Street and Artichoke Road, parallel to Holles Street. It was a short walk from the Grand Canal that acted, at this time, as Dublin’s southern boundary, framing the lower part of the city. Most of her movement took place in the main shopping district and the wealthy south-east. Great George Street, where the barracks were located, acted as the boundary of her movement inwards to the city centre (see top left of Figure 8.2, beneath Dame Street and parallel to the castle). Catherine located most of her courtship with Townshend on the banks of the canal, which she walked to run errands for her father. She also described meeting him when walking to St Andrew’s Street (top centre of Figure 8.2; beneath Dame Street, on the boundary line for Division 4/5) to take a message to a businessman. On the night she was taken to the barracks and seduced, she described how she had been walking to Abbey Street, across the Carlisle bridge, to collect books from a friend (on the mercantile sector of the north bank, Division 3 of Figure 8.1). She also admitted to having met Townshend and his friends on several occasions while she was promenading in Merrion Square park. Catherine’s account always safely located her on busy main roads, where businesses were located, carefully skirting the red-light district in Temple Bar (between Dame Street and the river, top left of Figure 8.2), as well as the smaller areas that housed prostitutes near most of the city barracks, such as on Digges Lane and Dame Street (Digges Lane is described on Figure 8.2 as ‘Great Alley’, running beneath Drury Lane, left of Division 4/5 boundary line).37 Her journey encircles Dublin’s city centre, but her only incursion inwards was when taken by Townshend on the fateful day of her seduction. Moreover, almost all of her travels fell within Division 4 of Samuel Neale’s map of Dublin (c.1808, Figure 8.1).38 Neale’s six divisions refer to the administrative divisions of the police court, established by the 1808 Dublin Police Magistrate’s Act, and may suggest that, while partially lines of convenience, they were significant in shaping the public’s relationship with city geography.39 Whether it was coincidental or reflective of imagined boundaries within urban space, mapping Catherine’s movement against Neale’s map highlights how curtailed her travels were – she remained not only on particular streets but also within a relatively small area of the city. At average modern walking speeds, Catherine was never more than 20–25 minutes from home. Far from an urban flâneur, Catherine’s experience of the city was restricted, familiar and repetitive; if she is to be believed, this experience was also productive – to run errands – rather than leisured. Allan Maclean’s testimony not only confirms Catherine’s account but also attempts to widen her sphere of movement, noting that they walked around Merrion Square together and that he saw her on both Dame Street and York Street (the latter runs west of St Stephen’s Green at the boundary of Division 4/5 of Figure 8.1). He also observed that when he met her for the first time on the canal, it was by the horse barracks (marked as ‘Portobello’, at the southern end of the Division 4/5 boundary line of Figure 8.1).40 As suggested in the testimony that opened this paper, Merrion Square was an ambiguous space. An up-and-coming elite area, it would, 20 years later, represent the height of respectability, and it was certainly progressing towards that reputation in 1816. Later in the century, it would be a known location for prostitution after dark, perhaps taking advantage of the wealthy clientele that lived in the area. There is no evidence that Merrion Square had a particular reputation for prostitution in 1816, but the idea that a woman would walk there in the evening ‘unprotected’ seemed to cause some concerns for Maclean.41 Catherine’s respectability was also challenged by placing her on Dame Street, a major thoroughfare but one that bordered the red-light district and had a reputation for streetwalkers in the evening; and on York Street, which was in the centre of the red-light district that was bounded by Aungier Street and St Stephen’s Green (centre left of Figure 8.2).42 This was also 111

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noted in Benoit Bender’s testimony: he testified to seeing her in Dame Street and in ‘a n ­ arrow lane’ leading from it.43 Moreover, to get to York Street by either of the routes that Catherine acknowledged walking would have taken her past one of the barracks. Catherine ­consistently denied being near the barracks, except for when she was taken to Great George Street by Henry. All of the men testifying placed her in the streets around them. Maclean put their first meeting outside the Portobello barracks by the canal.44 Hill not only had Catherine skirting the red-light district in walking her by St Stephen’s Green to the top end of the main shopping centre of Grafton Street but also positioned her outside the main entrance to the Great George Street barracks. Moreover, Hill testified to escorting her out of the barracks after her seduction and, upon asking her where she would go, claimed that she replied that she would go to her friend at Arbour Hill (Division 1 of Figure 8.1, just above the river and beneath the market garden).45 Arbour Hill was the location of the Royal Barracks, the largest in Dublin, and would have required Catherine to traverse both the red-light district and the poor area of Smithfield alone (Division 1 of Figure 8.1). While Hill did not explicitly state that she was going to visit another soldier, he did his best to highlight the problematic nature of this decision: ‘I left her under the impression that she would go in the dusk of evening, either to her friend at Arbour-hill or to her father’.46 The ‘dusk of evening’ acted to situate Catherine, like her movements on the boundaries of red-light districts, at the edge of respectability, neither pure not entirely fallen – perhaps suggesting that her decision on where to go (either to her friend or her father) acted as a moral tipping-point for the seduced woman. Catherine testified that she went straight home after the events at the barracks, where she sought protection from her mother.47 While the men in this story were happy to admit that they observed Catherine in some of the less respectable areas, such as York Street or Dame Street, or outside of the barracks when they escorted her, they also skirted the problematic areas of the town – if walking considerably closer than Catherine would attempt alone. In doing so, they tried to locate Catherine’s corruption as a personal failing rather than a symptom of their own rakish behaviours, ­acknowledging the importance to male honour of protecting vulnerable, middle-class women during the period – a role that the all-male jury were being asked to perform during the trial when they passed judgement on their behaviour.48 They also reinforced a double standard whereby male sexual character was considerably more resilient than female, allowing them greater freedom of movement and activity.49 For both sides of this dispute, however, the city was implicated in character and movements across it acted to define its occupants.

Gender, morality and urban space: A conclusion A fascinating case study, the case of Creighton v. Townshend allows a number of conclusions. It ­provides insight into the ways that middle-class women’s movements in the city were ­constrained, with respectable women not only having to avoid ‘disreputable’ areas but also often having to provide considerable distance between those areas and themselves as they walked through the city. In small cities like Dublin, where respectable and disreputable areas overlapped, this could cause significant difficulties, especially for women like Catherine, who did not have male protection. The case reinforces the importance of time of day to how women’s movements were read, with darkness creating a curfew for women. It provides insight into how men ‘read’ women on the street and the confusion created for men when they found ‘respectable’ women in places, or at times, where they were not expected to be.Yet, such confusion may have been more legal justification than reality. While both Maclean and Hill blamed Catherine for the attention that she got by saying that ‘she smiled’ at them, Bender, when asked, ‘What induced you to speak to her?’ answered, ‘Nothing but her being female, I went up and spoke to her’.50 112

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In a seduction suit that focused on the vulnerability of an innocent woman as she travelled across Dublin, Catherine’s movements became a metaphor for her morality. Both Catherine and the male officers hoped to use her placement in the city as evidence of her character, with the reputation of particular streets directly informing Catherine’s own reputation as she walked upon them. As many streets acted as boundaries between areas with different reputations as well as main thoroughfares, often playing host to people from all walks of life, this could create a sense of ambiguity about the nature of the character of the women that used them. In this particular case, this ambiguity was deliberately employed by Townshend’s fellow officers, who were not trying to suggest that Catherine was a working prostitute – something that would have strained the imagination of the male jury given her age, social class and location within her father’s household – but rather to locate her ‘of loose character’, that is, as a woman of respectable social background but without appropriate morality. The corruption of innocence threatened by the city was not always absolute; rather, the city became implicated in the making of character, with corruption the risk that operated to constrain middle-class women’s activities within it. Urban space then was created in the intersection between these gendered bodies, their movements through the streets of the city and the meanings attached to both. As such, urban space was a gendered space, a moral space and a fluid space, shifting over the course of the day and with the various bodies that moved through it. Catherine and her lover’s perambulations vested the city with desire and, in turn, the city informed how that desire was understood by the couple, their families and friends and, ultimately, the legal system. In this, urban space was a performative space, serving to define and construct the identity of both the city and its inhabitants. The city corrupted because it was not just a map to walk across but also an active performer in the making of the gendered self. Catherine’s father was awarded £750 damages for the ­seduction of his daughter.

Notes   1 The case is detailed in An Accurate Report of a Trial for an Alleged Seduction, wherein John Creighton … was Plaintiff and Henry Dive Townshend, … was Defendant (Dublin: William Henry Tyrell, 1816).  2 An Accurate Report, 38–39.   3 The methodology used here is heavily informed by Mitch Rose in ‘The seductions of resistance: Power, politics, and a performative style of systems,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 20 (2002): 383–400. See also Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, ‘Taking Butler elsewhere: Performativities, spatialities and subjectivities,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 433–52; Katie Barclay, ‘Place and power in Irish farms at the end of the nineteenth century,’ Women’s History Review 21, no. 4 (2012): 571–88.   4 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Wiley, 1991); Deidre Conlan, ‘Productive bodies, performative spaces: Everyday life in Christopher Park,’ Sexualities 7 (2004): 462–79; Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994).   5 Patrick Joyce, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 182–83.   6 Craig Koslofsky, Evening’s Empire: A History of the Night in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Lynn Avery Hunt, Measuring Time, Making History (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2008); Karen Davies,‘Capturing women’s lives: A discussion of time and methodological issues,’ Women’s Studies International Forum 19, no. 6 (1996): 579–88.   7 On British colonisation, Ireland’s legal system had been shaped to the English model. Over the centuries, Ireland’s system evolved its own distinctive features, but, at least in the early nineteenth century, the Irish system continued to look to England for precedent, ensuring that they were never too dissimilar.  8 Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 1987), 192–205.  9 In England and Wales, this was due to changes in the law as a result of Hardwicke’s marriage act (1753): Susan Staves, ‘British seduced maidens,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 14 (1980–1): 109–34; David

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Katie Barclay ­ emmings, ‘Marriage and the law in the eighteenth century: Hardwicke’s Marriage Act of 1753,’ L Historical Journal 39, no. 2 (1996): 339–60. 10 Anna Clark, ‘The politics of seduction in English popular culture, 1748–1848,’ in The Progress of Romance: the Politics of Popular Fiction, ed. Jean Radford (London: Routledge, 1986), 47–70; Ruth Perry, Novel Relations: the Transformation of Kinship in English Literature and Culture, 1748–1828 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Katherine Binhammer, The Seduction Narrative in Britain, 1747–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 11 Staves, ‘Seduced maidens’; Katie Barclay, ‘From rape to marriage: Questions of consent in the eighteenth-century United Kingdom,’ in Interpreting Sexual Violence: 1660–1800, ed. Anne Greenfield (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 35–44. 12 An Accurate Report, 6–7. 13 An Accurate Report; Exeter Flying Post, 2 Jan. 1817. 14 Penelope Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets: the urban odyssey in eighteenth-century England,’ Journal of Urban History 16 (1990): 132–74; Krista Cowman, ‘The battle of the boulevards: Class, gender and the purpose of public space in later Victorian Liverpool,’ in Identities in Space: Contested Terrains in the Western City Since 1850, ed. S. Gunn and R. J. Morris (London: Ashgate, 2001), 152–64; Kate Hill, ‘“Roughs of both sexes”: the working class in Victorian museums and art galleries,’ in Identities in Space, ed. Gunn and Morris, 190–203; Patty Seleski, ‘Domesticity is in the streets: Eliza Fenning, public opinion and the politics of private life,’ in The Politics of the Excluded, c. 1500–1850, ed. Tim Harris (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 265–90; Fiona Williamson, ‘Space and the city: Gender identities in seventeenth-century Norwich,’ Cultural and Social History 9, no. 2 (2012): 169–85; James Grantham Turner, ­‘Pictorial prostitution:Visual culture, vigilantism, and “pornography” in Dunton’s Night-Walker,’ Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 28 (1999): 55–84. 15 Anu Korhonen, ‘To see and to be seen: Beauty in the early modern London street,’ Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 335–60. 16 Elizabeth Munson, ‘Walking on the periphery: Gender and the discourse of modernization,’ Journal of Social History (2002): 63–75; Amy Wyngaard, ‘Libertine spaces: Anonymous crowds, secret chambers and urban corruption in Rétif de la Bretonne,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 22 (1998): 104–22. 17 Corfield, ‘Walking the city streets’; John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 53–4; Peter Burke, ‘Imagining the early modern city,’ in Imagining the City, Volume 1: The Art of Urban Living, ed. Christian Emden, Catherine Keen and David Midgley (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006), 23–38; Steve Poole, ‘ “Bringing Great Shame upon this City”: Sodomy, the courts and the civic idiom in eighteenth-century Bristol,’ Urban History 34, no. 1 (2007): 114–126. 18 Paul Tankard, ‘Johnson and the walkable city,’ Eighteenth-Century Life 32, no. 1 (2008): 1–22; Deborah Epstein Nord, ‘The urban peripatetic: Spectator, streetwalker, woman writer,’ Nineteenth-Century Literature 46, no. 3 (1991): 351–75; Alison O’Byrne, ‘The art of walking in London: Representing urban pedestrianism in the early nineteenth century,’ Romanticism 14 (2008): 94–107; Göran Rydén, ‘Viewing and walking: Swedish visitors to eighteenth-century London,’ Journal of Urban History 39 (2013): 255–74; Lucy Frost, ‘Untrodden dresses, loose trowsers, and trailing skirts: Walking through colonial space,’ Women’s Writing 5, no. 2 (1998): 201–12; Joanna Guldi, ‘The history of walking and the digital turn: Stride and lounge in London, 1808–1851,’ Journal of Modern History 84 (2012): 116–44; 19 The History of Betsey Warwick, the Female Rambler (London: Sabine and Son, 1800). 20 Caledonian Mercury, 21 Apr. 1798. 21 Caledonian Mercury, 3 Nov. 1810. 22 The Picture of Dublin: or, Stranger’s Guide to the Irish Metropolis (Dublin: William Curry, 1835), 318; Anne Power, Hovels to High Rise: State Housing in Europe since 1850 (London: Routledge, 1993), 319. 23 Jacqueline Hill, ‘Religion, trade and politics in Dublin 1798–1848,’ in Cities and Merchants: French and Irish Perspectives on Urban Development, 1500–1900, ed. P. Butel and L. M. Cullen (Dublin: Trinity ­College, 1986), 247. 24 Samuel Lewis, A Topographical Dictionary of Ireland… 2 vols (London: S. Lewis, 1837), i, 532. 25 Ibid., 532–3. 26 Power, Hovels to High Rise, 319. 27 Margot Finn, The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 28 John Gamble, Society and Manners in Early Nineteenth-Century Ireland, ed. Breandán Mac Suibhne (Dublin: Field Day, 2011), 40.

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Mapping the Spaces of Seduction 29 An Accurate Report, 31 and 53. 30 Bernard Burke, A Genealogical and Heraldic Dictionary of the Landed Gentry of Great Britain and Ireland (London: Harrison, 1863), vol. 2, unpaginated ‘Townshend of Trevallyn’. 31 Maclean was the son of Donald Maclean, who migrated from Mull to New York and later to York (Upper Canada): Sandy Antal, Wampum Denied: Procter’s War of 1812 (Ottowa: Carleton University Press, 1997), 84. Bender details his origins in An Accurate Report, 41; Hill joined the 92nd regiment (his first) in July 1803 along with his twin brother, John. For Hill’s career, see Lionel S. Challis’s ‘Peninsula Roll Call,’ accessed 23 Mar. 2015, http://www.napoleon-series.org/research/biographies/GreatBritain/Challis/c_ChallisIntro.html.The regiment was based and heavily recruiting in Scotland at this time: C. Greenhill Gardyne, The Life of a Regiment: the History of the Gordon Highlanders (Edinburgh: David Douglas, 1901), 136. 32 Keith Binney, Horsemen of the First Frontier (1788–1900) and the Serpent’s Legacy (Melbourne: Volcanic Productions, 2005), 278–9. 33 See for example, Catherine and Isabella in Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (1817), and Lydia Bennet in Pride and Prejudice (1813); Louise Carter, ‘Scarlet fever: Female enthusiasm for men in uniform, 1780–1815,’ in Britain’s Soldiers: Rethinking War and Society, 1715–1815, ed. Kevin Linch and Mathew McCormack (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2014), 155–79. 34 Matthew McCormack, ‘Dance and drill: Polite accomplishments and military masculinities in Georgian Britain,’ Cultural and Social History 8, no. 3 (2011): 315–30. 35 The transcript here and throughout refers to Great George Street as George Street, but the location of the barracks there confirms that they mean Gt George St. Gt George St was the contemporary name, so this seems to be a quirk of the transcription. 36 An Accurate Report, 41–45. 37 An Accurate Report, 7–30. 38 See Figure 8.1. The map says 1797, but these divisions were not created until 1808 and were abolished in 1824. Based on street naming and layout, it appears that the divisions were a later addition to the 1797 map. 39 For a discussion of the importance of police courts to shaping urban space, see David Barrie and Sue Broomhall, Police Courts in Nineteenth-Century Scotland, Volume 2: Boundaries, Behaviours and Bodies ­(Farnham: Ashgate, 2014). 40 An Accurate Report, 31–41. 41 An Accurate Report, 39. 42 Maria Luddy, Prostitution and Irish Society, 1800–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 98. 43 An Accurate Report, 43. 44 An Accurate Report, 31. 45 An Accurate Report, 49. 46 An Accurate Report, 49. 47 An Accurate Report, 17. 48 For discussion see: Katie Barclay, ‘Emotions, the law and the press in Britain: Seduction and breach of promise suits, 1780–1830,’ Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies 39, no. 2 (2016): 267–84. 49 Katie Barclay, ‘Illicit intimacies: The many families of Gilbert Innes of Stow (1751–1832),’ Gender & History 27, no. 3 (2015): 576–90. 50 An Accurate Report, 41.

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9 Painting the Town Portrayals of Change in Urban Riversides, London and the Thames, a Case Study Kemille S. Moore

During the second half of the nineteenth century, the city of London underwent significant changes in infrastructure and the creation of space. From a historical perspective, it is fortuitous that photography had been invented only a couple of decades earlier to capture the changes in an ‘objective’ medium. Photographs, along with colour lithographs and popular press illustrations, portrayed the construction and transformation of the great city. Many of the century’s fine artists were also drawn to portray the city of London during this period of transformation. The works of these artists provide additional information and perspective on both the changes that were occurring and society’s responses to those changes.These artists did not focus on the construction of new infrastructure but rather on the urban environment as it became modernised. The Thames Embankments was a multi-phase construction project which, after it was completed, drew the attention of artists and, as such, it provides an excellent example of artists’ presentation of the unfolding history. The three structures involved in this engineering project, the Albert Embankment, the Victoria Embankment and the Chelsea Embankment, offered Londoners new avenues for leisure walking and commuting to and from work and more efficient means of transportation. Significantly, the embankments also changed how women moved through this part of ­London. Numerous artists captured the new expanses of open space and movement created by the embankments in their paintings. Artists James McNeill Whistler, Frederick Brown, Atkinson Grimshaw, John O’Connor, Giuseppe di Nittis, Paul Maitland and others painted contemporary scenes of the newly opened streets and walkways, often portraying the women of many classes who now walked in London, escorted or, in stark change to previous times, not. While it was not unprecedented for women to have moved with significant freedom in ­London prior to the opening of the embankments, these structures created an airy, open thoroughfare which, alongside favoured areas in the West End, proved attractive to respectable female walkers.1 In contrast to most of London, the West End and the embankments stood apart as places where women could be found walking – be it at leisure, or be it walking to or from work in one of the newer areas of employment for women, such as retail clerk or office worker. The construction of the Thames Embankments, completed in stages from 1871 to 1874, created a new urban space atypically accessible – even welcoming – to Victorian women. In considering the changes in London’s infrastructure and the very nature of its public space in the second half of the nineteenth century, it is important to understand how rapidly London 116

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was growing and how large a city it had become by 1900. In 1800, London had about a million residents; by 1860, there were 3 million people living in London; and by 1900, the metropolis was home to 6.5 million residents.2 The rapid growth was just one factor that led to London also being a modern city with crowded streets, increasing areas rife with poverty and a lack of sanitation that led to devastating outbreaks of cholera and London’s ‘Great Stink’ of 1858. When viewed from a civil engineering perspective, the goals of the embankments projects focused on cleaning up the Thames River and providing new avenues of transportation.Yet, the embankments were, from the beginning, intended to do much more than this. Each embankment was also intended to create a space. Along the river, the embankments created spacious walkways, affording scenic views of the river along with access points to the river. Similarly, at selected places along the embankments, there were parks that provided spaces for rest and socialization. Finally, the embankments were major arteries of transportation for trains, carriages, trams and pedestrians. Importantly, these engineering projects materialised at the same time as a number of other factors that facilitated women in moving more freely, even without escorts, within some areas of London.3 The newly constructed embankments created a new space where women could navigate parts of the city in ways that, only a few years earlier, were unimaginable. Victorian painters, aware of the significance of the novel use of space along the new embankments, emphasised and captured these cultural shifts in their paintings.The works portray scenes of openness, cleanliness, beauty and leisurely movement, in stark contrast to earlier depictions of congested, often chaotic, urban streets. Importantly, artists were not intending to present the viewers accurate ‘photographic’ scenes along the embankments. Rather, their works are visual interpretations of how the new spaces could appear and be used. While the locations are clearly recognizable and accurately portrayed, it must be understood that these scenes show the Thames Embankments as the artists wanted them to be seen. Thus, an examination of how the embankments are depicted by these artists informs our understanding of how changes in the structure and use of these spaces along the Thames were perceived by Victorian culture. Four works of art that provide good examples of both the depth and breadth of Victorian ­artists’ portrayal of social interaction and movement along the embankments are The ­Embankment (1874) by John O’Conner; Reflections on the Thames, Westminster (1880) by Atkinson Grimshaw; Variation in Pink and Grey – Chelsea Embankment (1872) by James McNeill Whistler; and An Impromptu Dance, A Scene on the Chelsea Embankment (1883) by Frederick Brown. No discussion of women as participants of the space of the embankments would be complete, however, without a brief mention of the Henry Fawcett Memorial Fountain, which is located in the Victorian Embankment Gardens and was funded by money raised by women. It also includes a portrait medallion created by prominent Victorian sculptress Mary Grant. Together, these five works provide a good framework for examining the impact of the embankments on Victorian society through the eyes of Victorian artists. John O’Connor’s The Embankment, which was painted soon after the completion of the first of the engineering works, presents a very topographic and panoramic view of the river and the Victoria Embankment. Reflections on the Thames; Westminster, by John Atkinson Grimshaw, provides a nocturnal view of the river and its pedestrians, in this case primarily women. Two paintings by Frederick Brown, executed in the 1880s, show different views of the Chelsea Embankment and depict an interesting juxtaposition of the activities encountered along the river. An Impromptu Dance, A Scene on the Chelsea Embankment depicts a more close-up view of figures and house fronts than we see in the other works. Brown’s other work, A Walk Along the Embankment in Chelsea, shows the usual view along the embankments with men and women strolling leisurely. Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Grey and Silver – Chelsea Embankment shows how the Chelsea Embankment was being utilised by women even before its completion. These 117

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paintings show the pathways being used by different social classes, but the dominant figures are predominately well-dressed women, walking leisurely. These fashionable dresses of soft multilayered fabrics are characteristic not of what women wore about the house or to work as shop clerks or street vendors but what they donned for leisurely outings. The sense of nonchalance is emphasised by the parasols they carry, as well as by the top hats and walking sticks of the men who often accompanied them. These depictions of how the embankments were being used by those who, moving through the space, emphasise the embankments as park-like social spaces within a densely populated urban environment rather than as strictly transportation routes. These four paintings highlight the embankments’ broadened pathways, the presence of individuals leisurely walking and the opportunities for people to have a larger personal space – a striking contrast to the foot traffic and appearance of most other thoroughfares in the city. Mary Grant’s portrait medallion on the Fawcett Memorial Fountain from 1886, while not a depiction of the embankments, is important in this discussion because it occupies a significant place within embankment public space and was paid for by subscriptions from suffragettes. Grant’s portrait medallion is affixed to larger memorial to Henry Fawcett, a tireless, blind reformer who fought for many social causes, including women’s rights. The Fawcett memorial is actually a monument with a drinking fountain placed in the Victoria Embankment Gardens on the north side of the Thames near the Charing Cross train station.

Research on Victorian women and space Extensive research has been done on the evolving nature of the relationship between women and the changing space of urban London during the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly in the newly developing shopping district of the West End. Lynne Walker, Erika Rappaport, Lynda Nead and I have all contributed significantly to an understanding of this subject.4 Walker focuses most specifically on women utilizing the space of the West End, Rappaport carefully explores the activities of shopping, dining and club life, Nead studies changes in the infrastructure and how it impacted movement in the West End and Moore explores the movement of women artists in the West End. The work of Judith Walkowitz and Martha Vicinus adds a great deal to an understanding of the changing nature of women’s lives during this period.5 Adding another dimension to the study of Victorian women in London that is particularly relevant to this study is the work by Deborah Cherry and Pamela Nunn in investigating the depiction of women in Victorian painting.6 The sections of London most carefully examined in these studies are the shopping district of London’s West End and the East End, where women undertook plentiful charity work. Other than discussions on prostitution, little research has been done regarding women in the public sphere in other areas of London. While the embankments do not constitute a specific region of London, they are a specific type of space, newly created by changes in infrastructure and transportation.

Thames Embankments: Planning and construction Discussions and presentations of proposals for building embankments, even the construction of modest embankments such as the one at Millbank, began in the 1830s. In fact, the new Houses of Parliament were built with an embankment during their construction from 1837 to 1850. The plan for constructing more elaborate embankments along both sides of the Thames was considered by parliament in 1848, where it died for lack of funding. However, during the 1850s, partially as a result of cholera epidemics in 1848–1849 and in 1853–1854 and coupled with the extensive work being done on the construction of a newer London sewer system, 118

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the concept of the embankments gained traction. In 1859, the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) established guidelines to include sewer lines in the construction of all embankments.7 Planning and momentum for the Thames embankments grew, with the decade of the 1860s being a time of major construction. The Albert Embankment opened in 1869; the opening of the Victoria Embankment followed in 1870; and the last of the three major projects, the Chelsea Embankment, opened in 1874. The sheer length and size of the embankments – 5½ miles long and 30 feet high – gives some idea of the size and significance of these undertakings. The construction of the Thames Embankments has been examined by Dale Porter in his meticulously researched volume The Thames Embankment: Environment, Technology, and Society in Victorian London.8 Porter’s monograph explores the proposals, designs, contracts, changes and construction of the three embankments in great detail. Additionally, he explores the stakeholders and the financial impact. As Porter explains, sanitation and transportation were among the prime reasons for building the embankments. He summarises: After considering several multifaceted schemes submitted to it in the late 1850s, the MBW developed a list of objectives for the Thames Embankment: (1) to improve the Thames as a navigable river, with due regard to the safety of existing bridges; (2) to increase wharfage and accommodation and shipping; (3) to improve the river’s sanitary condition; (4) to improve the appearance of the ‘unsightly’ river banks; (5) to open a new east–west thoroughfare; and (6) to facilitate the construction of the low-level sewer.9 In his study, Porter does not focus on the final appearance of the embankments, particularly the walking areas, roads, plantings and sculptures installed to create an aesthetic, as well as functional, appearance. Not surprisingly, it is primarily the achievements of number 4 above, ‘to improve the appearance of the “unsightly” river banks’, that our artists record. All of the works included here show the scenic improvements of the embankments while also emphasizing the broadness of the thoroughfares and the cleanliness of the area.

Artists and the Thames Long before the embankments existed, many artists captured the ‘rustic’ quality of the Thames shoreline, from the bridges at Battersea to the West India Docks and beyond. Paintings and prints showing various portions of the Thames were common in England from the seventeenth century. The exquisitely detailed London panoramas engraved by Wenzel Hollar in the 1640s and the expansive London views painted by Canaletto in the eighteenth century helped establish and perpetuate an artistic culture focusing on the Thames as an integral part of the London landscape. Hollar’s and Canaletto’s works are topographical in nature, and well into the early nineteenth century, the topographic approach was dominant in paintings of the city’s great river. Nineteenth-century Romanticism, particularly as illustrated in the paintings of J.M.W. Turner, brought a much more poetic interpretation of the Thames in London. Turner’s works range from his early studies such as Thames near Walton Bridges (1805) to the more atmospheric paintings of the 1830s and 1840s, which include such works as the Burning of the Houses of Parliament (1834) to the even more ethereal Fighting Termeraire (1839). British painters of the generation following Turner continued to be drawn to the Thames as a subject for a picturesque landscape within the town or city. The painting Cheyne Walk and Battersea Bridge by Moonlight, painted by Henry Pether in 1850, is just one example of artists portraying the haphazard angles of boats stuck in the mud, the irregular watery shoreline and the constant shifting of light and 119

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shadow. Paintings that focus almost exclusively on the river and its banks do not address the ­embankments, ­however, even those painted after their constructions. These works must be seen as a continuation of the landscape tradition in English art and not as a response to the modernisation of the urban environment, as can be seen more clearly in the works in this study. The interest of including the embankments in painting coincided with a growing i­nterest in painting London as a modern city. Often compared to Paris, particularly by Parisians and Londoners, London was seen as one of the great ‘modern’ capitals of Europe. It was not a modernization with a grand coherent concept, such as Haussmann’s in Paris, but London was a city with a sense of moving itself into the modern world.10 Much of its modernization came in infrastructure: sewers, transportation developments and massive projects like the embankments. Paintings of London as a bustling urban environment became increasingly popular from the middle of the century onward. Arthur Boyd Houghton, best known for his work in black and white, produced a handful of small paintings from 1859 to 1865 that capture much of flavour of the busy streets of portions of London. London in 1865 presents a street scene crowded with figures that almost seem to thrust the young woman with her pram relentlessly towards the viewer, while Holborn in 1861 depicts a bustling business street filled with men, women and children of various classes and occupations.11 Perhaps the best known of such city scenes is William Powell Frith’s monumental The Railway Station from 1862.12 This nearly encyclopaedic scene of Paddington Station shows different people of different classes and ages bustling, saying good-bye and handling luggage underneath the cast iron and glass roof so often associated with the modern train station. This work was viewed by more than 20,000 people over the course of its solo exhibition in 1862.13 The Railway Station was sold to Henry Graves & Co., who then produced the official engravings of the work – making it even more accessible and popular. These paintings by Houghton and Frith, as is the case in many paintings of Victorian London, show great diversity in their crowd scenes, populated with men and women of all ages, children and, occasionally, dogs. It is within this framework of paintings of London revealing aspects of the more contemporary urban experiences that our paintings of the Thames embankments should be seen. While there is nothing as encyclopaedic as Frith’s Railway, the paintings of this time, as exemplified by the paintings examined in this chapter, emphasise the scale and modernity of the projects while also communicating how these new spaces were used for transportation and leisure.

Paintings of the embankments The Embankment, painted by John O’Connor in 1874 shortly after the completion of the Victoria Embankment, shows a view eastward along the embankment from Somerset House, with St Paul’s in the distance (Figure 9.1). O’Connor’s work is the most topographical of the four paintings being discussed, which is not surprising considering his training as a scene painter.14 His paintings often showcase ceremonial events, such as this parade of a regiment along the roadway. O’Connor’s panoramic view shows not only the broad expanse of the embankment; it also records other notable monuments, such as the gasworks in front of St Paul’s, Temple Bar and Cannon Street Station, which had opened just eight years earlier in 1866. Included in the scene in the distance is a view of the massive concrete construction of the embankment walls. The Embankment records both the historical and modern nature of this sprawling urban environment. The bird’s-eye-view portrayal of the thoroughfare and walkway below not only emphasises the expansiveness of the project, but it also serves to emphasise the airy, park-like nature of the footpath. A few pedestrians walk along the sunlit path, which is bordered by recently planted trees, thus presenting a scene with the feel of the warmth of a summer stroll. The gasworks and 120

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hazes in the distance epitomise a more traditional view of London’s skyline, but in this section of London, the sun is shining and the air is clear. The regimental parade provides a sense of scale and the level of detail expected of a topographical painting. The lower left portion of The Embankment is filled with an angled view of Somerset House, where a well-dressed woman in white leans over the balcony while two small children rest behind her. Clearly, the figure provides a sense of scale, but she communicates much more than that. Her relaxed pose and the general stillness echo the sense of leisure that is present in those who stroll along opposite. The children behind her, one seated on the ground and one in a pram, appear to be either playing quietly or at rest. The visual quietness of the balcony space creates an atmosphere of calmness, providing respite from the busy city space below. The figures are all bathed in the same strong sunlight that strikes the pathway alongside the river. The woman and children on the balcony and the walkers along the Thames are wrapped in an open and brilliantly lit space that seems to be a world away from the dampness and filth of less modernised portions of London. O’Connor presents this section of the embankment as a stylish promenade and a respite from the busy-ness of much of the rest of the city. The sense of relaxation and openness that is seen in O’Connor’s work is also present in ­Frederick Brown’s Walk Along the Embankment at Chelsea.15 Brown’s work, painted from street level, shows a well-dressed mother and child walking towards the viewer. Brown also includes figures of a boy in tattered clothing leaning across the embankment wall, a Chelsea Pensioner seated on a bench with a child and two men and a woman chatting at the other end of the bench. The inclusion of the young boy and the Chelsea Pensioner provides information about the variety of visitors to the embankment as well as helping to locate this image as a Chelsea section of the embankment projects. Brown’s street-level perspective emphasises the length of the embankment, which is enhanced by the long curving row of street lamps along the embankment wall. On the right side, the line of young trees parallels the line of the lamps, which results in these two lines visually framing a space for men and women of various classes to walk or

Figure 9.1  John O’Connor, The Embankment, oil on canvas, 1874. By permission of the Museum of London.

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socialise. An important feature of the construction of the embankments was the inclusion of plentiful lighting. Creating and lighting such an open public space created a safer place for all walkers but particularly for the growing population of women walking and socializing in public. While the lamps are prominent in the Brown painting, their impact will be discussed more fully when considering a night-time view painted by Atkinson Grimshaw. It is difficult to know exactly where the artist James McNeill Whistler fits into a discussion of depictions of space, women, the Thames and urban London in the Victorian era. However, if there was any single artist whose name was associated with paintings of the Thames at this time, it was Whistler. He executed paintings and prints of the Thames and Chelsea throughout his career, from the early Thames Set of etchings executed from 1859 to 1861 to the small paintings of Chelsea executed in the 1880s. Whistler was also well-known for his depictions of the fireworks and entertainments of Cremorne Gardens, the pleasure garden that was popular in Chelsea during the 1860s and early 1870s until it closed in 1877.16 In several of Whistler’s works, women move through the spaces along the Thames, often as ethereal figures with little substance. Whistler spent two periods living on Cheyne Walk, the street that abuts the Thames and had a close view of the building of the Chelsea Embankment. He lived at no. 96 Cheyne Walk from 1866 to 1878 and later returned to the street, living at no. 21 Cheyne Walk from 1890 to 1892. During the 1870s, he was best known for his tonal paintings of Thames bridges, shorelines and structures along the shore.Works such as Nocturne: Blue and Gold – Old Battersea Bridge (1872–75) epitomise the nocturnes and riverscapes of this decade. With his adamant adherence to an ‘Art for Art’s Sake’ credo, Whistler’s paintings of the Thames do not explore narrative or morality; rather, they are his responses to a riverbank scene of subtle blues and greys with pinpricks of gold lights. Whistler’s Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea (1872) is one of the few paintings by any fine artist that shows the embankment during construction (Figure 9.2)17 Painted in Whistler’s signature style of the 1870s, Variations is limited in tonal range and very non-descript in its lighting. The top two-thirds of the painting depicts the river, with the familiar angular masts of small boats near the foreground.The bottom third shows the embankment walking path and the fencing used during construction. The fencing serves as a flattened backdrop for the several figures who walk by. Even though the construction on the embankment is not complete, a young tree has been planted. Although the Chelsea Embankment would not be opened until 1874,Whistler was already presenting it as an open space for public strolling and socializing.The female figures, while almost insubstantial in form, are elegantly dressed, with two women carrying parasols and three delicately draped women standing at rest. The asymmetry of the composition, the cropping of the fence and the kimono-like drapery on one of the women are formal elements in this work that are linked to Whistler’s fascination with Japanese art and his own influential use of Japonisme. In many of Whistler’s scenes of the Thames waterfront from the 1870s, he draws upon his familiarity with Japanese art when creating works emphasising quiet elegant spaces, subtly lit and more appropriate for leisure or contemplation than for restless urban activity. Throughout these scenes, almost always nocturnes, the women move with ethereal grace. Even in his depiction of the fireworks from the nearby Cremorne Gardens, Nocturne in Black and Gold,The Falling Rocket (1875), the fireworks are small golden touches of light and their sound is muffled by the inky stillness of Whistler’s nocturnal landscape.18 A delicate watercolour from 1885 by Whistler, Pink and Silver – Chelsea, The Embankment, shows several figures leaning against the edge of the railing or walking along the footpath.19 In Whistler’s characteristic style, the figures are sketchy and the surrounding space is open, lacking in detail. However, he has chosen the same lengthwise view of the embankment that features in works by O’Connor, Grimshaw, Brown and many others. He has placed the figures and young trees across from each other, emphasizing the width and openness of the space. 122

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Figure 9.2  James McNeill Whistler, Variations in Pink and Grey: Chelsea, oil on canvas, 1872. Freer Gallery of Art and Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian.

In Whistler’s two works, the women are at rest or silently gliding through space. While the lack of visual detail and complete absence of narrative does not give the audience information about how the figures perceive their surroundings, it is clear that Whistler observes the pathways along the embankments as a desirable place for ladies to be at rest or at leisure – escorted or not. Atkinson Grimshaw’s work Reflection on the Thames – Westminster from 1880 shows Whistler’s influence on Grimshaw, which is not surprising considering that Grimshaw maintained a studio in Chelsea, where he became acquainted with Whistler (Figure 9.3).20 Grimshaw’s nocturnal scene, dominated by the moonlit Thames, presents the gas-lit embankment as it curves away from the viewer past a glowing Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. The repetition of the gaslights emphasises the length of the structure, while also providing illumination for the walkway in the foreground. Gas lighting was widespread through London by the 1850s, a fact of which the city was proud. The quality of the light produced by gas lamps was soft, somewhat mysterious. As Lynda Nead has said, ‘Gas does not destroy the night; it illuminates it’.21 Creating a safer, better-lit space along the Thames was certainly one way to ‘improve the appearance of the “unsightly” river banks’, quoted by Porter above. Prominently and regularly placed gaslight helped to create a space that was visually more pleasing and undoubtedly much safer for men and women pedestrians. Grimshaw’s Reflections enhances the gas lighting with the backlighting of a full moon. The lamps and moon combine to highlight the most striking figure in the painting, the woman in 123

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Figure 9.3  Atkinson Grimshaw, Reflection on the Thames – Westminster, oil on canvas, 1880. Leeds Museums and Galleries (Leeds Art Gallery).

the foreground leaning on the edge of the embankment. She is shown largely in silhouette in a pose of gazing and ‘reflection’ included in the painting’s title. Research on Grimshaw’s work is not extensive, but at least two authors clearly identify this figure as a prostitute.22 Additionally, George Birkett, the first curator at the City Art Gallery in Leeds, commented on this work in 1899: Numerous figures are hurrying along the embankment, while one – a woman of somewhat showy appearance – leans against the parapet of the embankment and gazes ominously into the silent water in front of her. The material “Reflections” in the river we can see, but who will say what the mental “Reflections” may be in her case?23 While it seems to be the case that Birkett thought the woman was of questionable status, there is no way to be certain that she is prostitute. By 1880, respectable women could walk unescorted in many parts of London, particularly those areas that were well lit and designed for public ­walking. Additionally, at her side is a large dog, which appears well-fed. This retriever-like ­companion is not the scavenging stray cur of Charles Dickens, nor is it the small terrier or poodle that often accompanied ladies for show and some level of protection.The dog’s position, at an angle facing away from the figure, indicates perhaps protection, but its size and stance evokes more of a sense of companionship. So, is this figure a woman reflecting upon her wretched state, or is she simply a lady who is taking break from her stroll to contemplate the golden river? In either case, the painting portrays the quiet, well-lit space along the embankment as providing her with a space for contemplation and reflection. In addition to the woman in the foreground, Grimshaw includes other figures walking towards the viewer.The one closest to the viewer could be a young woman walking home from work, possibly from a job in an office or a department store, having taken public transportation for a portion of the journey. She looks straight ahead, apparently wrapped in her own thoughts. 124

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The third woman clearly visible in this work is an orange seller, who is being told to leave by a policeman. This may well indicate that her class of street-vendor is not welcome in this more upscale public place.24 In the distance of the composition, two women walk arm in arm. Grimshaw’s painting, therefore, includes women of different types, all participating in the more open and well-lit space of the embankment near Westminster. The final painting discussed here departs from the other works in the type of scene it shows along the embankment. Fred Brown’s An Impromptu Dance – A Scene Along the Chelsea Embankment from 1883 is a delightful combination of a genre scene and a landscape painting (­Figure  9.4).25 Brown’s scene takes place on the sidewalk on the Chelsea side of the embankment, where four young women and two children are engaging in a dance, no doubt inspired by the street organist nearby. In Brown’s work, the embankment’s roadway is again shown as spacious and lined with small trees and decorative lamp-posts. Brown’s work is unique in that it focuses on figures more than space and that it places greater emphasis on the side of the thoroughfare lined with shop fronts and other buildings. The street-side view we see in Brown’s painting reminds the viewer that the embankments were more than roadways or walkways along the Thames. The Chelsea Embankment created a wide buffer between the buildings on streets like Cheyne Walk and the river. These buildings, which before had faced a narrow street bordered immediately by the bank of the Thames, now had a wide thoroughfare and walking path in front of them. While it was clearly not a park on their front step, it was a more airy and pleasant environment, which could lead to more p­ layful social interaction like this event. As with Brown’s Walk Along the Chelsea Embankment, this work is painted from a street level. This perspective adds to the openness of the space beyond the figures, capturing the width of the embankment thoroughfare and the additional lampposts and plantings. The breadth of this setting is what provides a space for the organist. The young

Figure 9.4  Fred Brown, An Impromptu Dance – A Scene along the Chelsea Embankment, oil on canvas, 1883. Private collection.

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women and children in Brown’s painting dance with exuberance, enjoying the music and the space. That these are not the same class of women we see leisurely strolling along the embankment in O’Connor’s or Whistler’s paintings serves as a useful reminder that the construction of the embankments created space and more opportunity for leisure and recreation for women well below the social ranks of the ladies with their parasols who strolled along the pedestrian footpath. While the works of the artists discussed here may well depict the embankments with a high degree of fidelity to reality, they also reveal the artists’ choices of what to include and emphasise within each painting. In doing so, they present the embankments as poetic spaces along the picturesque Thames, which had only recently been rescued from its role as a sewage conduit. Another way in which art related to the embankments informs our understanding of how women interacted with this newly constructed modern space is through an examination of art placed within public spaces created along the embankments. One particularly relevant example is the Henry Fawcett Memorial in the Victoria Embankment Gardens. Women paid for this monument in honour of Fawcett, an activist for women’s suffrage, and the memorial includes a portrait medallion by a woman artist, Mary Grant. The Henry Fawcett Memorial, installed in the Victoria Embankment Gardens in 1886, is a striking indication of how women could actually claim a space in this recently created environment.26 The gardens are a series of public park spaces running along the inland side of the roadway on the north bank of the Thames. They are lush, green spaces intersected by walkways and punctuated with benches and other places to rest. The Fawcett Memorial is in the largest section of the gardens between the west end of the gardens and Waterloo Bridge. Subscriptions from women suffragists funded the memorial in honour of Fawcett’s t­ ireless work on their behalf. The inscription below the portrait medallion reads: ‘Erected to the memory of Henry Fawcett by his grateful countrywomen’. The medallion, designed by Mary Grant, shows the blind Fawcett in three-quarter view. Mary Grant (c.1830–1908) was a sculptress known for her portraits created in high relief.27 She executed portraits of aristocratic men and women, ecclesiastical sculpture and mythological works. Her work was widely exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and the Royal Academy of London. At the unveiling of the monument in 1886, Louisa, Lady Goldsmid, proclaimed: The reason of our meeting to-day is probably known to most of those present. The occasion is, or should be, one of special interest to women. Memorials of various kinds are not uncommon. But rarely, if ever, in this country have women as a distinct body come forward to recognise services rendered by any individual.28 At the end of her public remarks, she concluded: Mr. Fawcett’s active sympathies being ever connected with the welfare of his fellow creatures, it was felt that the Memorial should not only be a record of our gratitude and admiration, but should also serve a useful and beneficent purpose. We, therefore, after some consideration, decided on its taking the shape of a Drinking Fountain.29 Lady Goldsmid then unveiled the fountain and took the first drink. The Fawcett memorial, conceived by, paid for and partially executed by women, stands in what was at the time a newly created public space, offering refreshment to those who take a rest from their walks along the embankment or other nearby journeys. 126

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The London embankments construction projects, along with other major infrastructure developments of the time, created new urban spaces in London, and Londoners utilised and moved within those spaces in new ways. Prior to the building of the embankments and other mid-century infrastructure improvements, pedestrian movement in London often meant slogging through narrow, unsanitary, congested areas. Issues of safety and social norms restricted the movement of women, especially unescorted women, in significant ways. Infrastructure improvements, including the embankments, along with evolving social norms, radically changed physical space of the Thames area and how that space was accessed, enjoyed and navigated, especially by women. Women inhabited these spaces with a degree of freedom that would have been inconceivable a few decades earlier. These new spaces and the new freedom they helped create for women was clearly recognised and celebrated by many of the fine artists of the era.The paintings by O’Connor,Whistler, Grimshaw, Brown and others focus on the appeal and practicality of the new type of space and the women who moved within those spaces. From O’Connor to Brown, these artists celebrated the beauty of the spaces and the new opportunities these spaces afforded to women. Additionally, art within the embankments’ public spaces testifies to the evolving role of women artists and women’s involvement with public spaces, as exemplified by the Henry Fawcett Memorial. O’Connor’s topographical painting emphasises the scale and spaciousness of the embankment projects.The space he creates is warm and inviting, both to those who walk along the banks of the Thames and to the young woman who watches from the balcony.Whistler’s elegant female figures glide through an embankment space that is calm and peaceful, even though it is late in the day or deep into the night. In Reflection on the Thames – Westminster, Grimshaw shows the embankment as a broad, open space where women of diverse social standing can move with unprecedented safety, even at night. In his work, we see a contemplative woman leaning on the embankment wall at night, under the protective warm glow of the gas lights. In Impromptu Dance, Brown sets a celebration of light-hearted dancers and an organist enjoying a celebration that is only possible because of the amount of open space available on the sunny wide embankment space. These artistic interpretations invite the viewer to see the embankments as newly created modern public spaces. The artists present inviting spaces, be they brightly lit by strong sunlight during the day or bathed by the soft glow of gaslights at night. These are also spaces through which women of all classes move freely, whether it is to get safely to or from work, or to simply walk along the river, perhaps taking time to reflect, or for that matter, to dance. Along with other Victorian artists, these artists chose to emphasise the changing ways in which women navigated whole new kinds of urban spaces.The paintings show that these changes of physical urban space and the ways in which women navigated them were not merely accepted, but, at least by some, enthusiastically welcomed.

Notes 1 Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure:Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: P ­ rinceton University Press, 2000); Lynne Walker, ‘Vistas of pleasure: Women consumers of urban space in the West End of London, 1850–1900,’ in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester United Press, 2000), 70–85. For more discussion on the topic of women walking in ­eighteenth and nineteenth-century London, see the following: Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the ­Victorian Streets Women, Representation and the City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995); Alison O’Byrne, Walking, Rambling and Promenading in Eighteenth-Century London:A Literary and Cultural ­History (PhD diss., University of York, 2003); Alison O’Byrne, ‘The art of walking in London: Representing urban pedestrianism in the early nineteenth-century,’ Romanticism 14 (2008) 94–107, accessed 20 Mar. 2016, http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/E1354991X08000214.

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Kemille S. Moore   2 Kemille Moore, ‘Feminisation and the luxury of visual art in London’s West End, 1860–1890’ in Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914, ed. Deborah Simonton, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach (London: Routledge, 2015), 74–93.  3 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure; Lynne Walker, ‘Home and away: The feminist mapping of public and private space in Victorian London,’ in The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space; A Strangely Familiar Project, ed. Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 296–310; Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People Streets and Images in NineteenthCentury London (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2000), 62–73.   4 Walker, ‘Vistas of pleasure’; Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure; Nead, Victorian Babylon; Moore, ‘Feminisation and the luxury of visual art’.   5 Judith Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narrative of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Martha Vicinus, ed. A Widening Sphere: Changing Roles of Victorian Women (Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 1977).   6 Deborah Cherry, Beyond the Frame: Feminism and Visual Culture, Britain, 1850–1900 (London and New York: Routledge, 2000); Pamela Nunn. Problem Pictures:Women and Men in Victorian Painting. (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995).   7 Porter, Dale. The Thames Embankment (Akron: The University of Akron, 1998), 262.  8 Ibid.   9 Ibid., 120. 10 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 55–57. 11 Houghton’s London in 1865 is part of the collection of The Iveagh Bequest, Kenwood House. Holborn in 1861 is in a private collection. Both works are reproduced in colour in Nead, Victorian Babylon, 50–51, and are reproduced at this site, accessed 1 Mar. 2016, http://www.victoriangothic.org/arthurboyd-houghtons-city-of-strangers/. 12 Frith’s Railway in London is housed in Royal Holloway College, University of London, accessed 20 Mar. 2016, http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/frith/paintings/5.html. 13 Nancy Marshal, City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2012), 54–57. 14 O’Connor’s work is in the collection of the Museum of London, accessed 29 Apr. 2016, http://collections.museumoflondon.org.uk/online/object/102274.html. 15 Brown’s work is known to the author through reproduction as it is in an unknown private collection. The best reproduction located is at http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Walk-Along-the-Embankmentat-Chelsea-Posters_i10062461_.htm (accessed 30 Apr. 2016). 16 Nead, Victorian Babylon, has an excellent discussion on Cremorne Gardens, 109–146. 17 Whistler’s Variations is in the collection of Tate Britain, London, accessed 15 Mar. 2016, http://www. tate.org.uk/art/artworks/whistler-nocturne-blue-and-gold-old-battersea-bridge-n01959. 18 Nocturne in Black and Gold –The Falling Rocket (1875) Detroit Institute of Arts, accessed 15 Mar. 2016, http://www.dia.org/object-info/7d1a59d3-6163-440a-925a-b0978f1f8811.aspx. 19 Whistler’s Pink and Silver is in the Sterling and Francine Clark Collection, Williamsport, MA, accessed 30 Apr. 2016, http://www.clarkart.edu/Collection/949. 20 Grimshaw’s Reflections is in the collection of the Leeds Art Gallery, Leeds, UK. There has been little research done on Grimshaw, but in 2011 a richly illustrated exhibition catalogue, Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight, was edited by Jane Sellars and published by the Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate, in association with The Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London. Reflections on the Thames is reproduced in colour in its entirety and with a detail (Figs. 79 and 63, respectively). Jane Sellars, ed. Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight (Harrogate and London: Mercer Art Gallery, Harrogate in association with The Guildhall Art Gallery, City of London, 2011). 21 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 83. 22 Alexander Robertson, Atkinson Grimshaw (London: Phaidon Press,1988), 82; Jane Sellers, ‘The Girl with the Umbrella,’ in Atkinson Grimshaw: Painter of Moonlight, 59. 23 George Birkett, City Art Gallery Leeds: Catalogue of Paintings and Drawings in the Permanent Collection, with Notes (Leeds: City Art Gallery, 1899), np. 24 Sellars, ‘The Girl with the Umbrella,’ 59. Sellars also points out how Grimshaw borrowed this figure from an illustration by Frank Holl in the Daily Graphic from 1873. 25 As with the earlier work by Brown, Impromptu Dance is in an unknown private collection and is known only through reproductions, accessed 15 Apr. 2016, https://www.bonhams.com/auctions/14218/ lot/189/.

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Portrayals of Change in Urban Riversides 26 The Fawcett memorial includes sculptural relief designed by Albert Gilbert as well as the portrait medallion, accessed 20 Mar. 2016, http://womanandhersphere.com/tag/henry-fawcett/. For information on Fawcett, see Lawrence Goldman, The Blind Victorian: Henry Fawcett and British Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 27 ‘Miss Mary Grant’, Mapping the Practice and Profession of Sculpture in Britain and Ireland, 1851–1891, ­University of Glasgow History of Art and HATHI, online database, 2011, accessed 18 Mar. 2016, http://sculpture.gla.ac.uk/view/person.php?id=msib6_1210677881&search=Mary%20Grant. 28 ‘Women’s Fawcett memorial,’ The Women’s Union Journal:The Organ of the Women’s Protective and Provident League, 1 July 1886, 71. 29 Ibid.

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10 Modernity and Madrid The Gendered Urban Geography of Carmen de Burgos’ La rampa Rebecca M. Bender

Ambiguity, contrast, paradox. These descriptors have been employed by cultural critics and ­theorists alike to describe both the often ineffable concept of modernity and the mercurial development and urbanization of the Spanish capital city of Madrid. This descriptive overlap is not surprising, given that the urban experience of the metropolis has been inextricably linked to both modernity and its literature.1 But the Spanish capital is unlike any other European city, exhibiting an ‘unlikeness’ or ‘quirkiness’ that inevitably surfaces in the works of those who attempt to recreate this urban space through writing.2 In tracing a historical narrative of Madrid’s progression through modernity, Deborah Parsons captures the paradox and contradiction of life in this particular Spanish city, a crossroads of ‘confusion and fascination, produced by a clash of traditional local colour and sporadically energetic modernization’.3 This urban milieu of ambiguity, contrast and rapid growth is indeed a fitting stage for a modern novel; the cultural production created by city-dwelling Spaniards during the early twentieth century reflects these unbalanced and even unstable historical and cultural conditions. This chapter focuses on Carmen de Burgos’ 1917 novel La rampa (The Ramp),4 given that professional women like Burgos – and her fictional, working-class female protagonist – themselves occupied a paradoxical, even ambiguous space within Madrid’s modernizing urban cartography. As Madrid expanded and transformed into a modern, commercial centre, its rapid growth afforded aspiring writers (like Burgos) and working-class women (like the fictional Isabel) new opportunities for employment in the public sphere – a liberating sense of anonymity that was impossible to experience in small rural towns.5 Having relocated to Madrid from provincial Almeria in 1901 to escape an unhappy marriage and abusive husband, Burgos initially found work in the city as a teacher before moving on to work for a newspaper, becoming one of the first female journalists in Spain.6 She eventually found her niche among many of the most influential, male-dominated literary and intellectual circles of the city.7 But her success did not come without gossip or speculation about her personal life and relationships that her male contemporaries did not have to contend with.8 In her first long novel, La rampa, Burgos presents the gendered nature of urban space in early twentieth-century Madrid in a way that both complicates and expands our knowledge of the urban female’s experience of modernity.The novel depicts a variety of spaces and situations that are conspicuously absent from canonical male-authored narratives of life in Spain’s largest city. In fact, many of La rampa’s scenes take place within spaces populated almost exclusively by women: a maternity ward, an orphanage, an infant welfare centre, a plaza of prostitutes and a shelter for 130

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maids, to name a few. Burgos maps her fictional representation of Madrid onto the real streets and plazas of the city, while also bringing to life several places and institutions that would have been familiar to her readers, such as the Casa de Maternidad and the attached Inclusa (orphanage), the commercial Bazar and the Gota de Leche (a medical centre for infants and new mothers). She also includes entirely fictional depictions of spaces and businesses that would have existed in various parts of the city at the time, like a shelter for maids and a soup kitchen. Burgos filters the narration through her infelicitous protagonist; she is able to sketch out women’s experiences not merely in more private, female-dominated spaces, but also in public spaces occupied by both sexes. As a result, La rampa presents a fictional representation of the female experience of Madrid at the height of modernity that not only deals with historically real locations but also provides a valuable alternative way of exploring the historical experience of gendered urban space. To briefly summarize the novel, La rampa portrays the life experience of Isabel, a single, ­formerly middle-class woman in her early twenties who must suddenly struggle to support herself in Madrid after the deaths of her parents. Initially, she works as a shop girl in the centrally located Bazar alongside her friend and roommate, Agueda. When she becomes pregnant, the ­increasing physical limitations of her pregnancy force her to give up her job. Having lost her only source of income as a single woman, she seeks out Madrid’s charitable maternity hospital, the Casa de Maternidad. By the end of the novel, having suffered through pregnancy, childbirth and ­motherhood, the death of her child, a failed relationship and several short-lived low-paying jobs in bourgeois households, Isabel finds herself abandoned and alone. She finally enters yet another institution for women, the Colegio de Criadas (House of Maids), which the narrator describes as ‘a concealed prison, a purgatory’, where she will lose herself forever.9 The novel closes with a final reference to the book’s metaphorical title, capturing the failure of the protagonist to improve her life and the role of the urban atmosphere in paving such a harsh, downward trajectory: ‘She had arrived at the end of the ramp. She did not feel the force of falling. She was at the end, at the extreme, at the moment of being able to sit down; although permanently defeated’.10 Despite the fact that women – including Burgos herself – were attracted to the freedom, anonymity and employment that the city offered, La rampa suggests that these duplicitous qualities and illusory promises of the metropolis rarely worked in women’s favour. Prior to the analysis of space within the novel, it is necessary to examine the antagonistic nature of the modernizing Madrid cityscape during the early decades of the twentieth century. Demographic information on Madrid’s population reveals much about the rapid growth of the city.While the Spanish capital’s population increased slowly during the early nineteenth century, ‘from roughly 200,000 to 280,000, it boomed to almost 400,000 by the late 1870s, rising again to nearly 600,000 by 1910’.11 Between 1910 and 1920, the population climbed to 750,896.12 This represents an increase of over 40 per cent precisely during the time period represented in La rampa, despite the fact that infant mortality rates continued to remain high.13 Madrid’s population explosion generated stark contrasts between social classes, modern and traditional values and men’s and women’s social roles, and this diversity was reflected in urban geography and individual city spaces. Madrid was, at this time, a European capital marked by dramatic contrasts, exhibiting characteristics of both an urban centre and a provincial town, where dilapidated, medieval-style neighbourhoods existed alongside modern, elegant commercial boulevards lined with palatial residences.14 Parsons similarly highlights these contradictions, attributing their existence to the city’s retention of the castizo, ‘a resilient counter-cultural identity based in a popular mythology of [Madrid’s] traditional working class’.15 Parsons credits the castizo with creating a tension between the traditional, unpolished sensibilities of the working class and the bourgeois goals of Spanish and European modernity, as well as with contributing to Madrid’s rather uneven transition to modernity.16 The coexistence of such oppositions as the castizo and 131

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the modern, the upper and working-poor classes, and men and women within the same urban space produced an anxiety that is palpable in Burgos’ representation of the city in La rampa. In the broader context of modernity, however, the contradictions of the Spanish capital are not anomalies. Philosopher Marshall Berman, for example, has characterized modern environments and experiences as ones fraught with paradox, given that they transgress boundaries of geography, ethnicity, class, nationality, religion and ideology; in this sense, the unity they create is paradoxical, ‘a unity of disunity’.17 This overwhelming, fluctuating modern milieu ‘promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world – and, at the same time…threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are’.18 Feminist cultural critic Rita Felski argues that, within this radically transformative era where industrialization and urbanization have obvious impacts on both public and private life, ‘women have experienced these changes in gender-specific ways’, affected not merely by ‘hierarchies of class, race, and sexuality but by their various and overlapping identities and practices as consumers, mothers, workers, artists, lovers, activists, readers, and so on’.19 In discussing women’s position within modern spaces, feminist scholars have focused on the fact that women experienced modernity differently than their male counterparts. Janet Wolff has critiqued the literature of modernity for describing only the experiences of men and their interactions with the transforming public sphere.20 Missing from this literature are accounts of life ‘outside the public realm…the experience of “the modern” in its private manifestations, and also of the very different nature of the experience of those women who did appear in the public arena’.21 Griselda Pollock elaborates, demonstrating the ways in which sexuality, modernism and modernity are inextricably connected; thus, sexual dynamics played a fundamental role in how women used, experienced and represented space.22 Finally, with regard to Spanish modernism, Roberta Johnson argues that Burgos was a ‘social modernist’ in emphasizing social phenomena as opposed to form and philosophy privileged by traditional modernism.23 Despite the fact that women’s experiences of private life and spaces are certainly lacking in modern literature and male-authored histories, the entrance of working women into the labour market in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries meant that the divisions between the public and private spheres were not as fixed in practice as they were in theory; becoming more fluid, these divisions were ‘unmade and remade in new ways’.24 This is applicable to Spain, as the rigid divide between public and private that characterized nineteenth-century Spanish life was very gradually modified with the entrance of women of various social classes into the workforce.25 As a reflection of women’s excursions within the Spanish capital and its vast network of public and private spaces, La rampa foregrounds the ambiguous positions of women in this inconsistent city. In light of such feminist critiques of modernity, it is especially pertinent that Burgos dedicates her novel to a gendered audience, implicating a vast array of female roles and identities even before the narrative begins: ‘to that multitude of defenseless and disoriented women who have come to me…and have made me feel their tragedy’.26 In the chapters that follow, many of which are named after real and fictional city spaces or female identities, La rampa depicts with minutiae the realities of the urban geography through which women navigated – including both the open, public sphere and the traditionally private or enclosed spaces.27 The Madrid that Burgos brings to life in La rampa is a volatile city of partitioned spaces. Historically, much progress was made in the first two decades of the century in terms of urban planning, construction and renovations that were designed to make life more pleasing for Madrid’s inhabitants.28 For example, the connection of the city’s two grandest boulevards, the Gran Vía and the Castellana, was intended to mirror the wide avenues of Paris, establish a new central market and provide state-of-the-art drainage and sewer systems.29 Yet the 1917 city personified in the novel, and seen through the eyes of a working-class woman, is an aggressive 132

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and ­debilitating force: ‘la gran ciudad mataba’ (the great city killed).30 Women are disadvantaged, d­isabled and dehumanized by city life, treated as ‘esclavas,’ ‘ovejas,’ ‘bestias,’ ‘ganado,’ ‘rebaño,’ (slaves, sheep, animals, cattle, flocks).31 Where men move freely and confidently as active and vocal agents, confident ‘patrones’ (bosses), women are hesitant, passive, nervous: ‘sordas’ (muted/deaf).32 The use of the adjective ‘muted’ (or ‘deaf ’) communicates women’s silence, while also implying a shared sense of lack and depravation among marginalized individuals. In fact, in describing women’s lived experiences throughout the novel, Burgos employs a curious language of disability and impairment to emphasize women’s unequal and underprivileged positions. As Isabel strolls through Madrid’s central park, El Retiro, peripheral ‘bancos tristes’ (sad benches) serve as symbolic temporary sanctuaries for weary women who are described as ‘cojas’ (disabled, unstable) and ‘impedidas’ (handicapped, hindered).33 Burgos’ choice of language is indicative of her understanding of Spanish women’s historical reality. In her 1927 essay La mujer moderna y sus derechos (The Modern Woman and Her Rights), she repeatedly laments the fact that a woman’s subordination is inscribed in Spanish law, rendering her a veritable ‘eternal minor’.34 Burgos’ close analysis of the Spanish legal codes reveals situations in which women are indeed stripped of or denied their rights or ‘immobilized’.35 Citing various discriminatory articles in her diatribe, Burgos advocates the revision of the antiquated codes to eliminate, among other things, those articles that privilege a father or single man over a mother or single woman in legal and custodial family matters, and those that effectively prevented women from entering certain professions.36 While in theory, city parks were designed as spaces of leisure and relaxation, Burgos’ representation of Madrid’s El Retiro suggests that these possibilities for recreation were denied women, who experienced only a disquieting sense of objectification during their ‘leisure’ time: ‘Men seemed to pass them by as if they were trampling them; they did not bother to look at their faces, after noting their vulgar silhouettes and poor dresses’.37 The Sunday afternoon park becomes yet another threatening urban space for women, ‘a battleground where competitions between women and their performing bodies use visual display as a weapon’.38 The disjuncture between male and female experiences of identical city spaces reappears in La rampa, beginning with the very first chapter’s depiction of the fictional ‘El comedor de todos’, an inexpensive restaurant positioned in the heart of the city.39 In the purportedly egalitarian eatery that Burgos portrays, women are treated as outsiders, despite the fact that they lived and worked in many of the same areas of the city as the male patrons. It is in this space that the narrator puts forth an observation that effectively sets the tone for the entire novel: It was as if the entire world were nothing more than the domain of men; that only they occupied it and only they had rights to everything; women appeared as nothing more than vague shadows, imprecise, fearful, timid and always unsettled. They had to be in the company of a man in order to be protected.40 In addition to the Comedor de todos, the centrally-located Bazar where Isabel and Agueda work as shop girls is another significant space in La rampa where women’s marginal position and their mistreatment by men come to the fore.41 Much like the crowded, male-dominated comedor de todos, the salesgirl’s workplace is configured as ‘a dangerous space in the urban landscape of modern Madrid’.42 Yet even the relatively open city streets through which Isabel and Agueda walk are experienced as threatening, and they must learn to stay together, protect each other and withstand the verbal harassments of men: ‘The poor women were just as fearful of an empty street as of finding themselves among a crowd’.43 In all these public spaces, single women surrounded by lascivious and often aggressive men were not only viewed as commodities but were also considered especially prone to prostitution or moral and sexual corruption.44 133

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The notion that women need protection in Madrid’s public, male-dominated spaces reflects Fran Tonkiss’ argument that ‘women’s spatial practice is constrained by geographies of violence and fear’ as a result of the way in which issues of gender and sexuality affect the perception and use of modern urban spaces.45 In La rampa, women are nervous and fearful in public; exclusively female spaces that may be visible from within the public sphere, like the maternity ward, the orphanage and the refuge for maids, are in essence structures of enclosure, designed to position a very specific female populace within a systematized space. Such regulated, institutionalized spaces correspond with women’s ambiguous positions within the city – visible, yet invisible.The institutions, much like Madrid itself, offer promises of hope in theory, but in practice women experience them as oppressive and confining. La rampa portrays several notable urban spaces populated or frequented almost exclusively by women and, with the exception of the street and plaza populated by prostitutes, the spaces analysed here pertain directly to Isabel’s experiences of pregnancy and motherhood. 46 This makes sense, given that, ‘for a working-class woman like Isabel in urban Madrid, the abject experience of pregnancy (re)assigns her position within the city’s spaces’.47 Urban spaces that cater to women and reveal uniquely female experiences in La rampa include the maternity ward and its attached orphanage (the Inclusa), the doctor’s office and milk distribution centre for poor families (Gota de Leche), the domestic space of the home and a street and plaza populated by prostitutes. The presence of these liminal spaces in literature makes visible ‘those dimensions of culture either ignored, trivialized, or seen as regressive rather than authentically modern’, and their appearance challenges the very notion of what constitutions hegemonic evaluations of ‘meaningful’ history and experiences in terms of modernity.48 Beginning with the Inclusa, the precise geographic location of both the maternity ward and this attached orphanage within Madrid reveals the gendered nature of particular urban spaces. Along with the Hospital General, the open-air flea market El Rastro and the predominantly female-staffed tobacco factory, these institutions were strategically grouped together, just outside the bustling, increasingly modern city centre. While today this region of Madrid (the neighbourhoods of Embajadores and Lavapiés) is considered part of the city centre, in 1917 it was peripheral in terms of the true commercial and economic epicentre, Puerta del Sol, and the newly constructed Gran Vía.The Inclusa and the Casa de Maternidad, founded in 1860, occupied a ‘refitted old building’ at the end of the rather steep streets of Calle de Embajadores and Calle Mesón de Paredes, ‘forming a welfare complex for vulnerable women and children’.49 This perimetric location obscured the unpleasant aspects of pregnancy as well as the consequences of immoral sexual relations and impoverished motherhood. As Isabel approaches the doors of the Casa de Maternidad, she fixes her gaze upon its looming presence, comparing its marginal location to that of a cemetery: ‘It seemed that they had grouped everything together in this neighbourhood in order to clean the golden city centre of its miseries’.50 This negative depiction of these institutions’ location is not merely fiction; doctors who visited the Casa de Maternidad and the Inclusa for medical research blamed the poor location – amidst narrow, dirty and poorly paved streets, cluttered with factories, taverns and bars – for creating deficient, unsanitary conditions.51 Importantly, in La rampa, the Inclusa is even further removed from visibility within the confines of the institution – Isabel spends several weeks in the maternity ward before truly taking note of the orphanage. As she wanders through the courtyard one afternoon, she notices a small alleyway leading towards the chicken pen. She ventures through the passageway in the hopes of finding solace, but instead finds herself in a second interior patio surrounded by tall walls and the clouded windows of both the maternity ward and the Inclusa. She recognizes the Inclusa’s dining hall, referring to it as the ‘comedor de las niñas’ (girls’ dining hall).52 The use of the feminine noun form here, and throughout the chapter, is fundamental. The narrator remarks that boys would leave the orphanage as they matured, but it was rare that the girls – las incluseras – could abandon 134

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the institution.53 Historically, these institutions had been joined together to allow women giving birth in secret to turn their babies over to the Inclusa without having to make public their shame (‘vergüenza’); immediately upon birth, every infant was registered and given a number in the Inclusa.54 Curiously, 1917 marks the peak in admissions to both the Casa de Maternidad and the Inclusa: the maternity ward, with 100 beds, admitted over 1000 women that year; the orphanage admitted nearly 1600 infants and abandoned children.55 An educated and socially active woman like Burgos would have been especially aware of the fact that these were urban spaces populated by defenceless and distressed inhabitants, the majority of whom were women and children that bourgeois society labelled shameful or immoral. Returning to the spatial portrayal of the Inclusa, Isabel’s gaze alters between the two ‘sombre and blackened’ buildings as she explores the interior of these institutions before eventually focusing her attention on a chicken pen. The narrator details her contemplation of the hens (gallinas), focusing on the diversity of the animals and their primitive, inhuman living ­conditions: She saw them all grouping together to go to bed.…she entertained herself observing the hen’s variety of feathers and forms: one white… another blonde…other black ones…and some with black and white feathers…they all seemed restless.56 Isabel does not remain lost in thought for long, however, as she is promptly showered with eggshells by the young incluseras who had been observing her from above. The subsequent description of these young orphaned girls leaning out the windows of the Inclusa exhibits striking parallels with that of the hens in the chicken pen. Moreover, a second striking comparison follows as Isabel ponders the girls’ ‘poor, monotonous, oppressive fate’: Was it worth being born to live in such a small world? To see no more of the world than that home, that corner – to glimpse the great city only the few times that they would go out in the street in pairs, in their uniforms, under the supervision of nuns, with their heads down, as if dazzled and made silly by the noise, the sun, the air and the coming and going of people and carriages. They were like prisoners, condemned to live in prison since birth.57 In this concealed, enclosed space, Isabel discerns that young girls born in the Casa de Maternidad and subsequently turned over to the Inclusa are destined to a fate akin to that of prisoners or animals. If they do not profess a religious vocation, they may await a marriage proposal in which ‘un hombre iba a buscarlas como van a buscar las bestias a las ferias cuando las necesitan’ (a man would come to look for them the same way that they go to the fair to search for animals when they need them).58 In each of the above excerpts, the female-gendered Spanish pronoun for ‘they’ (las) may coincidentally refer to either the orphaned girls, the hens, or the animals (incluseras – gallinas – bestias).59 In the Inclusa, even the youngest of women are dehumanized, disadvantaged and ignored, even as they occupy a space that purports to ‘protect’ them from the corrupting city. The mysterious aura and suspicious views of this institution are reflected in Madrid’s urban history, as the Inclusa was frequently a target of inquisitive journalists seeking to uncover reasons for the institution’s notoriously high infant mortality rate; the headline ‘What happens at La Inclusa?’ appeared on several occasions as the headline of Madrid’s most popular newspapers.60 Again, Burgos’ fictional portrayal of this very real institution brings to light the disjuncture between theory – the intended benevolent uses of certain institutionalized spaces – and ­practice – the way in which women actually experienced them. 135

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Isabel is profoundly disturbed after her encounter with the Incluseras; each pregnant woman who neared the young girls reminded them of their own mothers’ abandonment.61 The terror and anguish provoked by this brutal interaction haunt her.62 Yet leaving these enclosed, institutional spaces provides little reprieve. After Agueda arranges a reunion with Fernando, the father of Isabel’s child, the protagonist’s ‘new life’63 as mother begins inside the confines of her private residence, a small room rented out in a larger apartment building. It is within this domestic space, long heralded as the most appropriate domain of women as ‘angels of the home’,64 that Isabel experiences a dramatic feeling of inferiority: ‘She felt the emptiness of her lack of independence, her servitude, her inequality with respect to Fernando’.65 The chapters staged in Isabel’s private residence are littered with words like ‘servidumbre, servir, esclavitud, esclavizar, resignar’ (servitude, to serve, slavery, to enslave, resign). Yet for all the misery portrayed within this domestic space, it is not an entirely impenetrable sphere. Visitors come and go – Isabel is forced to leave the home several times each week to obtain provisions for her sickly daughter. As a new mother who was relatively poor and malnourished during pregnancy, Isabel is unable to breastfeed, a ‘disgrace’, according to Fernando.66 Consequently, she must traverse the city streets, which become more debilitating with an infant, in order to make weekly visits to the charitable medical centre, the Gota de Leche,67 in order to see a doctor and receive rationed quantities of milk. Burgos dedicates an entire chapter in La rampa to the Gota de Leche, a small space that in the novel exemplifies ‘the agony of the mother. The servitude and sadness of motherhood’.68 As the narration is focalized through Isabel, readers observe that only women appear in this space – ‘los padres no iban nunca’ (fathers would never go).69 Much like the misery of the Casa de Maternidad and even the Inclusa, the Gota de Leche is portrayed as an unsettling, even terrifying, site of predominantly female illness, hunger, poverty and uncertainty. Women wait in a line outside the clinic, lamenting their children’s poor health. Again, an examination of the language used to describe this space is revealing: ‘pesadilla, lamento, angustia, miedo, temor, calvario, dolor, víctimas, inútil’ (nightmare, lament, anguish, fear, dread, torment, pain, victims, useless).70 The doctor is the only male figure in this institution, and his speech and diagnoses are reflective of a rather antimodern, even naturalist, sensibility that this atmosphere of constant poverty and illness foments: ‘He knew medicine was useless; that Nature would take care of everything…Medicine had no place near those creatures that were born already exhausted, emaciated, impoverished by the misfortunes of their mothers’.71 Observing the anguish on Isabel’s face, he provides her with a prescription that will serve more to console her (de consuelo) than to improve her daughter’s health. Leaving the Gota de Leche, Isabel passes between ‘two lines of sorrowful women who were still waiting’.72 The connection made here between the health and socio-economic position of the mothers and the fate of their offspring echoes the earlier portrayals of the incluseras, condemned to an oppressive life of servitude and misfortune simply for having been born in the Casa de Maternidad. Moreover, La rampa’s depiction of both this space and the doctor’s exasperation suggests scepticism not only towards modern science and medicine but also towards modernity’s faith in rational human thought and empiricism.73 In one of the final chapters of the novel, after Isabel has traversed the city streets for months, readers finally see her detained by the authorities, who mistake her for one of the prostitutes populating the street and plaza. The dark, deserted evening city street foreshadows the ensuing esperpentic scene.74 The streetlights afford only dim illumination, providing ‘a sensation of darkness, that tragic darkness of the great cities’.75 Despite the cold, Isabel does not dare enter one of the taverns or churro shops, fully aware that a woman on her own at such an hour would be judged poorly. When she notices the prostitutes, the narration filtered through her eyes reveals an empathy and sorrow that makes visible their suffering rather than merely their illicit practices: 136

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‘She saw with immense pain the breakdown, the grotesque, the dragging down of women’.76 ­Emphasis is placed on their tiredness, unhappiness, misfortune and deterioration (cansancio, infelices, desdichas, degeneración), all of which contrast with the sweet, intelligent, kind-hearted face that Isabel notes in one particular woman.77 Isabel recognizes that these women, either by choice or desperation, live by their own ingenuity, reflecting the fact that prostitution, unlike other careers or employment opportunities that required education, a degree or even initial capital, was the only ‘profession’ open to every woman in Spain at this time.78 While observing these surroundings, Isabel is surprised when the women begin fleeing. Assuming she must also be in danger, as a woman alone in the street, she too begins running in their direction, naïve to the fact that the authorities were chasing the women from the street. The melee is described as a ‘gran revuelo…su fuga’ (great disturbance; their flight) and most tellingly, ‘aquella caza de mujeres’ (that hunting of women).79 This phase in fact gives meaning to the formerly cryptic title of the chapter: ‘La caza’ (The Hunt). Just as hunting is a traditionally male pastime, here the male officers take delight in rounding up the women and removing them from the streets.80 Once again, animal imagery is used to describe the prostitutes, who typically represent the most marginal of female identities. Isabel takes in the repugnant scene (‘escena repugnante’) within which she is caught – the narration emphasizes the incivility of the practice through further animalization: ‘by a process similar to that in which mastiffs scare flocks of sheep by circling them in order to group them together… [The guards] pushed them in hordes, like cattle’.81 Unable to convince the guards that she is a ‘decent woman’ (‘mujer decente’), Isabel is forced to report to the authorities with the other prostitutes. The dialogue between Isabel and another woman en route to the station is another instance in which La rampa provides a glimpse into the lived experiences of marginalized women. This woman calms Isabel, assuring her that the chief of police recognizes all the prostitutes and that Isabel will be freed immediately. She goes on to relate her experiences between the plaza, the police station, a jail cell and El Hospital San Juan de Dios. In each of these spaces, male authorities attempt to wrest power and agency away from women, controlling, confining or silencing them. Isabel reacts with repulsion upon hearing the name of the ‘terrible hospital’, illustrating the extent to which the institution’s reputation for treating venereal disease was a cause for scandal;82 however, the unnamed woman speaks relatively highly of this space as a refuge: ‘They treat us well; the doctors are very affectionate – upon leaving we are like new women.’83 Listening to the woman’s story, Isabel realizes that she too had been ignorant of the precise situations and experiences of these women until now. She recalls seeing the enclosed vehicle on its way to the hospital or prison pass her by on the streets, without ever considering that it carried ‘poor sick women in pain, who were treated like prisoners’.84 Here, confused among the prostitutes, Isabel empathizes with them and considers more fully the hypocrisy of a society that punished female engagement in sexual commerce while accepting men’s participation.85 One prostitute explains that the women who are ‘pleasing to the guards’ will be let go, while the others will be sent to prison or the hospital.86 After having experienced her own dramatic downfall, Isabel does not judge or condemn the prostitutes but rather laments their shared situation as women in the city: ‘She knew women’s misfortune so well that she could forgive everything’. Though Isabel and the prostitutes are distinct in the nature of their oppression, they nevertheless share in the experience of feeling pushed, thrown and trapped within the city. Isabel observes: ‘It is like a woman is on a train platform in life: it seems she passes through catcalls – passes between traps and inconsiderateness’.87 This final comparison of women on a train platform immediately precedes the reappearance of novel’s driving metaphor, as Isabel considers the adversities that brutally force women down ‘the ramp’ – that have pushed her down the ramp.88 137

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In discussing the literary representation of complex city spaces, ‘metaphorization’ is essential and inevitable in a writing process that attempts to capture the gulf between the representation of the massive urban sphere – text – and its meaning – the lived experience of the city.89 Burgos’ selection of a mechanical, constructional metaphor (the ramp) evokes the concrete pathways of the urban streets but also the precarious, paradoxical experiences of being a visible-yet-invisible female in this urban space. Given that a ramp may slope upward or downward,90 La rampa allows for a binary interpretation of its driving metaphor that aligns with notions of success (incline) and failure (decline).Yet Burgos further genders her interpretation of the structure’s dual meaning, emphasizing the fact that men and women in early twentieth-century Madrid experienced city life from very different vantage points:‘All of the men pushed them down the ramp, without thinking that doing this also made it steeper and more slippery for their daughters, wives and mothers’.91 The implication is that men occupy positions of power at the highest point of the ramp and exert control over women’s successes or failures while remaining blind to their own privileged positions and complicit in the continued marginality of their female co-workers, companions and fellow citizens. While it was true that early twentieth-century Madrid offered possibilities for women to break free of the confines of the home, ‘prevailing hostile attitudes towards female wage work’, workplace segregation and unequal educational opportunities threatened women’s independence and limited their opportunities for upward social mobility.92 In fact, Burgos would continue to denounce women’s mistreatment and exploitation ten years later in La mujer moderna y sus derechos.93 As a fictional account of the female urban experience, La rampa provides readers with early insight into the alienating, marginal reality of modern, independent women in urban Madrid. By bringing female experiences to life through a socially conscious yet modernist style,94 Burgos offers an alternative, highly gendered perspective on urban life that complicates and expands our present-day understanding of the landscape and geography of Madrilenian modernity.

Notes 1 Raymond Williams, ‘Metropolitan perceptions and the emergence of modernism,’ in The City Cultures Reader, ed. Malcom Miles, Tim Hall and Iain Borden (London and New York: Routledge, 2003). ­Williams connects the metropolis with the development of modernity and modern processes, and more specifically with the early twentieth-century avant-garde movements. La rampa was written in Madrid in 1917, a year when avant-garde aesthetics were rapidly evolving in the Spanish capital. Burton Pike, in The Image of the City in Modern Literature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 26, links the modern city to literature by crediting the ‘clashing contradictions’ of the urban environment and its reflection of man’s contradictory feelings with propelling the human imagination. Pike observes a ‘long tradition of the city as a figure of ambivalence in literature’ (9), but significantly only analyses maleauthored texts. Female-authored texts like La rampa undoubtedly share many of these characteristics and would add much to Pike’s exposé of ‘word-cities’. 2 Michael Ugarte, Madrid 1900:The Capital as Cradle of Literature and Culture (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 187. 3 Deborah Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle (Oxford: Berg, 2003), 3. 4 Unless otherwise stated, all Spanish–English translations of the novel and criticism are my own. 5 Shirley Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid: Las grandes intelectuales españolas de la vanguardia (Barcelona: Península, 2001), 51–60. 6 Maryellen Bieder, ‘Carmen de Burgos: Modern Spanish Woman,’ in Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition, ed. Lisa Vollendorf (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001), 245. For a more personal understanding of Burgos’ private and professional life, see Federico Utrera, Memorias de Colombine: La primera periodista (Madrid: Fareso, 1998). 7 Pilar Ballarín, introduction to La mujer moderna y sus derechos by Carmen de Burgos (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007), 22. 8 Ibid. See also Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid, 60–61.

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Modernity and Madrid  9 Carmen de Burgos, La rampa (Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2006), 205. The narrator underscores the ­hopelessness and futility of Isabel’s future with bleak, colourless imagery: ‘She would enter the grey house to be a grey maid, a wise maid, an indeterminate woman, lost in foreign kitchens, behind long tunnels of hallways that separate the maids from others who live in the light’ (206). 10 Ibid., 207. 11 Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid, 58. 12 Antonio Fernández García, ‘La población madrileña entre 1875 y 1931. El cambio de modelo ­demográfico,’ in La sociedad madrileña durante la Restauración. 1876–1931.Volumen I, ed. Ángel Bahamode Magro and Luis Enrique Otero Carvajal (Madrid: Graymo, 1989), 52–53. 13 Ibid., 63–64. 14 Mangini, Las modernas de Madrid, 27. 15 Parsons explains the term castizo in A Cultural History of Madrid, 10: ‘Translatable as “authentically Spanish”…used by mid-nineteenth-century Madrid writers and commentators to describe the popular, local colour of its lower classes, and in particular the social identity of the southern-lying barrios [neighbourhoods]…lo castizo contrasted with both the national and imperial symbolism of the city on the [one] hand, and its burgeoning European modernity on the other’. See also Mar Soria López, ‘Modern Castiza landscapes: Working women in Zarzuela,’ Bulletin of Spanish Studies 88, 6 (2011): 821–23, for an analysis of lo castizo as it was portrayed in late nineteenth-century zarzuelas, short Spanish plays with music and dance. 16 Parsons, A Cultural History of Madrid, 10. Parsons captures these notions of contradiction and delay, describing the city’s sporadic transition as ‘halting and abortive’, suggesting that Madrid’s irregular transition to modernity was only ‘fully resumed’ in the 1980s and 1990s with democratic change (3–4). 17 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts in the Air. The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 15. 18 Ibid. 19 Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 21. 20 Janet Wolff, ‘The Invisible Flâneuse. Women and the Literature of Modernity,’ Theory Culture Society 2 (1985): 37. 21 Ibid., 45. Wolff expands her critique in ‘The Invisible Flâneuse,’ 44: ‘This silence [re: the private sphere] is not only detrimental to any understanding of the lives of the female sex; it obscures a crucial part of the lives of men, too, by abstracting one part of their experience and failing to explore the interrelation of public and private spheres’. 22 Griselda Pollock, Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art (New York and London: Routledge, 1988), 56. Pollock posits that these sexual dynamics functioned together to define the appropriate spaces of women and men as private (enclosed) and public (open) respectively: Vision and Difference, 69. 23 Roberta Johnson, ‘Carmen de Burgos and Spanish Modernism,’ South Central Review 18, 1–2 (2001): 66–67, emphasis mine. 24 Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 19. 25 Mary Nash, Mujer, familia y trabajo en España (1875–1936) (Barcelona: Anthropos, 1983), 40. See also Geraldine Scanlon, La polémica feminista en la España contemporánea 1868–1974, trans. Rafael Mazarrasa (Madrid: Akal, 1986), 81–82. Scanlon is more insistent on the rigidity of the public–private divide, yet she discusses the division in terms of ideology; women entered the public sphere to work, but they were still exclusively responsible for domestic chores and labour. 26 Burgos, La rampa, 1. Regarding the ‘multitude’ of women to which Burgos refers, La rampa in essence reveals a predominantly feminine universe: Helena Establier Pérez, Mujer y feminismo en la narrativa de Carmen de Burgos ‘Colombine,’ (Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 2000), 44. 27 Examples of chapter titles: ‘The Dark Corner,’ ‘The Cinema,’ ‘The Godmother,’ ‘The Nanny’ and ‘The Drunk Woman.’ 28 For the construction of the Gran Vía and Madrid’s urban planning, see Susan Larson, Constructing and Resisting Modernity: Madrid, 1900–1936 (Madrid: Iberoamericana, 2011), 33–67; Larson, Imagining the Metropolis, 104–44. 29 Larson, Introduction, xiii–xiv. 30 Burgos, La rampa, 60. 31 Ibid., 31, 43, 131, 186, 206. 32 Ibid., 38. 33 Ibid., 46.

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Rebecca M. Bender 34 Carmen de Burgos, La mujer moderna y sus derechos, ed. Pilar Ballarín (Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 2007), 165. 35 Ibid., 122. See Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women and the Spanish Civil War (Denver: Arden, 1995), 15: ‘women’s subordination was guaranteed by law’ until 1931, when the Second Republic and its democratic constitution introduced political equality between the sexes. 36 Burgos, La mujer moderna, 224–26. See Scanlon, La polémica feminista, 122–58, for further details on the legal position of women. 37 Ibid., 44. Wolff discusses women’s attire as an outward marker of social rank or respectability in ‘The Invisible Flâneuse,’41; Pollack states that women strolling in the park ‘pass by fused almost with their clothing so that, decorporealized, their dress defines their class position and meaning’ in Vision and Difference, 73. Burgos’ chapter on the city park (43–49) illustrates these late twentieth-century feminist observations. 38 [María del] Mar Soria López, In Her Place: Geographies of Urban Female Labor in Spanish Culture, 1880– 1931, (PhD diss., University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, 2010), 189, emphasis mine. 39 See López, In Her Place, 183–84, and Ugarte, Madrid 1900, 97–98, for more complete analyses of this particular space (comedor de todos). 40 Burgos, La rampa, 8–9. 41 The precise geographic location of the Bazar portrayed in La rampa is the Calle del Carmen, a busy commercial street close to the Puerta del Sol: Larson, Imagining the Metropolis, 163. 42 López, In Her Place, 160. In her chapter , ‘Dangerous spaces of work in the City:The store and the shopgirl in avant-garde literature,’ López analyses Burgos’ La rampa and Ramón Gómez de la Serna’s La nardo (1930) in her discussion of representations of female labour in Madrid’s commercial spaces (152–237). 43 Burgos, La rampa, 32. 44 López, In Her Place, 152–57; Felski, Gender of Modernity, 72. 45 Fran Tonkiss, Space, the City and Social Theory. Social Relations and Urban Form (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), 94–95. 46 Another prominent space related to Isabel’s maternity, Madrid’s charitable maternity ward (Casa de Maternidad), is not included in this essay. For it, see my ‘Maternity ward horrors: Urban motherhood in Carmen de Burgos’ La rampa,’ Cincinnati Romance Review 34 (2012): 79–96, accessed October 18, 2014, http://www.cromrev.com. 47 Bender, ‘Maternity ward horrors,’ 91. 48 Felski, The Gender of Modernity, 22. 49 Bárbara A. Revuelta Eugercios, ‘¿Qué pasa en La Inclusa? The role of press scandals, doctors and public authorities in the evolution of La Inclusa de Madrid, 1890–1935,’ Dynamis 35, 1 (2015): 114. See also Bárbara A. Revuelta Eugercios, Los usos de la Inclusa de Madrid, mortalidad y retorno a principios del siglo XX (1890–1935)/The uses of the Foundling Hospital of Madrid: Mortality and retrieval at the beginning of the 20th century (1890–1935). (PhD diss., Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, 2011), 196. 50 Burgos, La rampa, 103. Isabel’s pause upon processing the dramatic contrast between the pristine city centre and the desolate institutions that catered to poor women is reflective of Marshall Berman’s analysis of modern spaces and their impact on the individual in All That Is Solid Melts in the Air. The Experience of Modernity (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 153–54. 51 Revuelta-Eugercios, Los usos de la Inclusa, 206, cites the work of Hungarian doctor Felipe Hauser (Kobler) and his 1902 study Madrid bajo el punto de vista médico-social. 52 Burgos, La rampa, 131. Revuelta-Eugercios, Los usos de la Inclusa, 197, suggests that female orphans would have outnumbered males, as the maximum age for admission was six for boys but nine for girls. 53 Ibid., 131. 54 Revuelta-Eugercios, Los usos de la Inclusa, 194–95. 55 Ibid., 196, 246. 56 Burgos, La rampa, 131. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., emphasis mine. 59 Ibid., 130–31. 60 Revuelta-Eugercios, ‘¿Qué pasa en la Inclusa?’. 61 Burgos, La rampa, 131–32. 62 Ibid., 132. 63 Ibid., 145.

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Modernity and Madrid 64 The rhetoric of the ‘angel of the home’ (ángel del hogar) was especially strong in late nineteenth-century Spain. A resurgence of women’s literature sponsored by Isabel II produced moralizing manuals reinforcing the Catholic model of the self-sacrificing and wholly domestic wife and mother: Bender, ‘Maternity ward horrors,’ 80. Instructional manuals, such as María del Pilar Sinués de Marco’s two-volume El ángel del hogar (1859), remained popular into the twentieth century. 65 Burgos, La rampa, 147. 66 Ibid., 146. 67 Literally translated as ‘drop of milk’, Madrid’s Gota de Leche was founded in 1904 by Rafael Ulecia y Cardona. It distributed a limited quantity of bottled cow’s milk, made suitable for infant consumption, to low-income families and single women: Larson, Introduction, 149. Doctors also provided medical advice, but Madrid’s infant mortality rate remained high throughout the 1920s and 1930s: Fernández García, ‘La población madrileña entre 1875 y 1931,’ 58–60, 63–64. 68 Burgos, La rampa, 154. 69 Ibid. 70 Ibid., 153–58. 71 Ibid., 155. 72 Ibid., 155–56. 73 See Art Berman’s Preface to Modernism (Chicago: U of Illinois P, 1994), 4. 74 The esperpento is a genre of theatre created by Spanish author and playwright Ramón del Valle-Inclán (1866–1936) in his 1920 drama Luces de Bohemia (Bohemian Lights). Characterized by a grotesque deformation of reality that enacted an ironic, social critique, it is nowadays defined as a grotesque or disorganized incident. Many episodes in La rampa share curious aesthetic similarities with Valle-Inclán’s renowned representation of Madrid only three years later. 75 Burgos, La rampa, 184 76 Ibid., 185–86. 77 Ibid., 184–87. 78 Scanlon, La polémica feminista, 104. 79 Burgos, La rampa, 186. 80 Ibid. 81 Ibid. 82 Scanlon, La polémica feminista, 109. 83 Burgos, La rampa, 187. The Hospital San Juan de Dios also appears in Pío Baroja’s 1911 novel El árbol de la ciencia (The Tree of Knowledge), Scanlon, La polémica feminista, 104. 84 Burgos, La rampa, 188. 85 Scanlon, La polémica feminista, 104–21. Scanlon confirms that prostitution was treated as a female offense in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Spain, degrading for the woman but not for the man. 86 Burgos, La rampa, 187. 87 Ibid., 185. 88 Ibid., 188. 89 Pike, The Image of the City, 10–11. 90 Larson, Imagining the Metropolis, 166. 91 Burgos, La rampa, 32. 92 Nash, Defying Male Civilization, 23. 93 Carmen de Burgos, La mujer moderna y sus derechos, 138. 94 Johnson, ‘Carmen de Burgos’.

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11 Home, Urban Space and Gendered Practices in Mid-Seventeenth-Century Turku Riitta Laitinen

Home, house and town Urban space has most often been studied from the perspective of what is conceived public space, that is, civic and religious buildings, streets, taverns and market places. The domestic space of the town has received relatively little attention.1 The home has been studied mostly in the fields of family and gender history, and the space of the home has ended up as something that is somehow outside of the (shared) urban. How, and in what context, the home is discussed needs to be expanded. The division of life and space to ‘home’ and ‘not-home’, which essentially means to private and public, has had a key role in keeping the home away from the general discussion of urban space – regardless of various efforts to define urban space with regard to public and private in new ways.2 Mary Thomas Crane brings an important perspective to the discussion by opening the terminology of private and public and home with her consideration of the privacy of the outdoors. In early modern England, to do things hidden from others, one would go outside, not to closed locations inside. 3 Crane’s analysis of the use of outdoor space ushers us towards seeing the home as a part of urban space, not merely as a separate, domestic space. In this vein, I will explore the home in this chapter as an elemental part of urban space. The perspective of home as urban space is particularly pertinent for the time period before the division of houses into multiple single-function rooms, which in Turku, the town studied in this chapter, started to happen in the mid-eighteenth century.4 Before this development, urban houses can be regarded as open and shared. Most rooms were multi-purpose, and privacy as ‘freedom from interference or intrusion’ did not yet define the home. Home was seen as a centre of social order and societal harmony, and hence it could not be exclusively the private domain of an individual family. Houses and homes were accordingly open and their borders porous.5 Urban homes must be studied as urban space also because of their materiality. In addition to public buildings, streets and squares, the material urban space comprised houses, that is, homes. The ways that the houses were built in relation to the streets, how the rooms were laid out and 142

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how thoroughfares and entrances were constructed is of great consequence to the experience of urban space. Even if social and cultural values and conceptions influenced how shared urban practices were formed, the effect of urban space as a material environment must always be considered. 6 This chapter explores the relationship between houses, homes and other forms of shared urban space, with the help of some cases featuring the crime of violent invasion of a home (hemgång in Swedish) in mid-seventeenth-century Turku. It first examines homes from the perspective of sociability and the multi-functionality of a house. Then it explores honour and the house as a family home. Lastly, it considers how homes extended beyond houses and were sites where small ‘communities of dwelling’ formed. The main question of the chapter is: how was home a part of shared urban space, while it was simultaneously a space designated for an individual and a family? Turku was both a peripheral and an important town in the growing Swedish kingdom in the seventeenth century. Situated in Finland, the eastern province of Sweden, it was sometimes seen as a backwater of the kingdom. But the small community of Turku – 4000–6000 inhabitants – enjoyed the prestige of a university, a Royal Court of Appeal, and the seats of a general governor and a bishop. The town had full trading rights, and it was the second biggest town in the kingdom of Sweden.7 Christopher of Bavaria’s Law of the Realm (1442), an all-embracing law book used by the district courts of the monarchy until 1734, described hemgång as the violent invasion of a home, carried out with ill will and causing, or trying to cause, bodily injury.8 Hemgång was a serious crime; the fine according to the Magnus Eriksson’s Town Law (1350s) – a text similar to the Law of the Realm, but specifically written for the towns – was 160 marks, which was equivalent to the yearly contract of a male hired hand (of which he only received a portion in cash).9 In the Law of the Realm, the punishment was even harsher: it entailed losing one’s property and becoming an outlaw.10 The Law of the Realm stated that women could not be accused of hemgång, since the punishment – being made an outlaw – could not apply to women. Because the punishment was milder in town law, women were not excluded. Still, all the defendants in the cases found in mid-seventeenth-century Turku were men. One-third of the claimants were women, however; and, furthermore, when both counterparts were men, in most cases women appeared in court. They had either taken part in the melee that had broken out as a result of the invasion, or they acted as witnesses to the events.

Sociability, drunkenness and open homes The cases of violent invasion of a home were heard in Turku Town Court, where the burgomaster sat as judge and the town council functioned as a jury. The court sessions were held in conjunction with the council meetings several times a week. The cases were brought to court by the complainants themselves or through, in most cases, a not legally trained advocate; or a public prosecutor pressed charges. The councilmen and the burgomaster together deliberated and decided on the sentence. In Turku, the Town Court usually found people guilty of violent invasion of a home when the invader’s actions were incriminating in all three crucial points of the law: invasion of space, malicious intent and violence or the threat of it. Approximately half of the 25 cases from the 1640s and 1650s resulted in a verdict of not guilty. Several of these concerned drunken men in other people’s houses; many were about social encounters that turned into scuffles and fights. Usually, the court decided that it could not find bad intentions, but the fact that there often is no description of the actual invasion of space also appears important.11 These not-guilty cases illuminate the openness of homes and their nature as shared spaces. 143

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People in Turku moved quite freely in other people’s homes during the daytime, and even at night they could gain entrance by knocking on the door or the gate. Coming into another person’s home and causing a commotion, as such, was not a violent invasion of a home. For example, one Erich Stång in November of 1660 visited the house of the lawyer Sveno Kalliander when he was not at home. Erich asked a woman who lived in the sauna in Sveno’s yard to open the door and then ended up making a racket inside the house and hurting the woman. Erich was only sentenced for inflicting bodily injury, not for violent invasion of the home. The woman had let him in, and he had come to the house for a friendly visit.12 In another case in the spring of 1644, two drunken burghers who attacked Mistress Lucia Grå were not sentenced for hemgång either, again because they had not invaded her house with ill will. In this case, student Samuel Gabrielson, who took the case to court for Lucia Grå, described the two burghers as having come into her house very drunk. The student had been in the house to teach her niece and the burghers had started maltreating him. Soon all three ended up assaulting each other. Samuel asked the burghers why they attacked him, and they answered, ‘for the fun of it’.When Samuel escaped from their hands, the burghers turned their attention on Mistress Lucia and ended up hitting her, as well as calling her daughter a whore and pulling her hair. They finished their night by going after all of the ‘house folk’ with a poker.13 Samuel ended his complaint to the court by demanding that the burghers should be sentenced for violent invasion of a home.14 Even if this case involved two wealthy merchants and the widow of a nobleman, it is representative of the commotion that took place in urban homes. It was not uncommon to be rowdy and drunk at someone’s house. It seems that at night, when many of the incidents that ended up in court took place, the townscape was full of men. They visited homes, frequented taverns and went to houses that were something in-between. Some people, particularly widows, had permits to sell beer in their houses; others sold drinks illegally. Sometimes it is difficult to decipher whether the men entering houses at night entered a tavern or a home. Even in the case of Lucia Grå’s house, the details are not very clear. The court record talks about ‘her house’, which could indicate her personal home, but then again the term ‘her house’ or ‘his house’ was often used when official taverns were discussed. Lucia Grå’s case is particularly interesting, as she was the widow of Captain Daniel Swinhufvud, a nobleman. In addition, her father owned an ironworks, and her daughter was married to Christopher Bülow, also an officer. She was not of the lower classes. On the other hand, a Burgermaster’s widow at one point asked for permission to sell beer,15 so it is not impossible that Mistress Grå would also have done so. The evening’s events suggest that Mistress Grå provided some kind of hospitality. The two burghers, Christian Plagman and Albrecht Roskamp, told the court that they had been drinking with one Henrich Molterpass and that he had asked them to visit Lucia Grå’s house. The evening progressed with Henrich leaving the two men after the invitation. Later, Christian and Albrecht had gone and looked for Henrich at Christopher Frack’s house. When they did not find him there, they left for Lucia Grå’s house, where Henrich apparently had his lodgings. Grå’s house seemed to be awash with men. There was Samuel Gabrielson, teaching her niece; there was Henrich, possibly living there; and, in addition to Christian and Albrecht, there were at least two other men who were spending the night there.16 Widows’ homes, in general, appear to have been especially open to visitors, and they were also very clearly multi-functional. Phil Withington describes a Widow Webster’s house in Market Weighton (Yorkshire) as multi-functional. At her house, in one instance, a squire stopped for refreshments and a lawyer and a clerk came in to discuss legal business; they all ended up drunk and fighting with each other. The widow’s house had different functions for the men to begin with, but due to drinking, they ended up in the same company.17 There are similarities with some widow’s houses in Turku, Lucia Grå’s house being one. 144

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Because of room layout, the multi-functionality of houses in Turku was, however, perhaps different than that of the Widow Webster’s house in Yorkshire. In Turku, most houses had only one main room and one or two bedchambers; many had only the one room.18 This means that the family/personal living space in the house was the same as the space of sociability, company or hospitality. Everyday life, even sleeping, often centred on the one main room. These material conditions made the multi-functional and open nature of the home in Turku different from homes in towns where houses had more rooms, or where a tavernpart of a house was set apart from the living quarters. An indeterminacy of functions for both rooms and houses is one of the characteristics appearing in mid-seventeenth-century Turku court cases. Houses were multi-functional and open to the extent that it is difficult to identify them as merely homes or merely public houses. The difference between a home and a not-home was not significant in this context; the space of home and not-home were one and the same. This character of indoor space explains in part why the burghers were not guilty of invading Mistress Grå’s home, or why in general rowdiness in another person’s home was not hemgång. Men frequented homes in a similar way they frequented taverns and other establishments. The room layout in Turku houses enhanced the mixing of functions in houses; domestic functions could not be spatially separated from other functions. Sociability in the multi-functional open houses visible in the court records is usually of the male kind. In our example, it was the male burghers who were drunk and ‘invaded’ Lucia Grå’s house. Male drinking culture was very common in European towns, and Turku was no exception. Alcohol was part of socializing between men, and custom may have required even heavy drinking.19 Women are usually present only as mistresses of the houses or as maids or tavernkeepers. This shows very clearly how the nightly practices in urban space were gendered and how the houses at night time were mainly open for men. Unfortunately, both daytime sociability and sociability as a female practice are invisible in the court sources. Thus, our view of practices of sociability in urban Turku houses is rather skewed. Women must have socialized and drunk, even if a drinking woman was considered abhorrent, yet only individual heavy drinkers appear in the sources. Finnish historian Kustaa H. J.Vilkuna has found some examples of female sociable drinking in the countryside: women would gather at someone’s home when the men were away. It was impossible for an honourable woman to drink openly and/or with men, however, which means that women were unable to move among houses in the same way as men.20 However, the active roles played by women in the shared urban space of the home become clear in other cases of violent invasion of the home, as we can see in our next example.

Honour, family and home Regardless of the openness and multi-functionality of many houses, an urban home was more than just a house.This is very clear in many Turku hemgång cases.The violent invasion of a home was an attack against everyone in the home, and honour was an important aspect of the attacks. Elisabeth Cohen’s examination of ‘house scorning’ in early modern Rome is a prime example of the significance of such an attack. House scorning was a practice where attackers shouted insults, beat and kicked the door, threw stones at shutters and blinds and, ‘more importantly, left visible disarray’.21 Facades and doors of houses were used to insult the person occupying the house.This happened because people identified themselves with their homes and were identified through them. Although in Turku similar kinds of outright attacks against houses did not happen, the honour linked with ‘my house’ is discernible. 145

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Much has been written about male honour and violence in early modern society. A common interpretation is that slander resulted in violence wherever it happened, because slander could not go unanswered. Taverns and streets have been examined as important sites for violence and honour. Taverns were sites of male sociability and violence; slurs in taverns were heard by the company present and were not easy to pass without response. Streets were also key spaces for interpersonal violence, because people’s actions were less restricted there than in the taverns and also because the streets were where drunken men on their way home often ran into each other. Both taverns and streets were stages for various practices of negotiating male identity and territory.22 The cases of violent invasion of a home in Turku bring to the fore another site of interpersonal violence, one that lends a new perspective to personal and shared honour. Because hemgång violence was not usually limited to violence between men and it did not always happen in male-dominated space, the violence was not only about male honour, as an incident between Oluff Erichsson and Hans Kreijare in December 1647 shows. In this incident, regimental clerk Oluff Erichsson attacked Hans Kreijare in ‘his own house’, and Hans’s wife lodged a complaint to the court.23 Oluff had come to Kreijare’s house after drinking in another house. He sat with Kreijare, the master of the house and an old acquaintance, and drank three rounds of beer. Then Oluff accused Hans of handling the regiment’s affairs like a thief and a rogue. Hans ignored this insult, knowing that it was the beer talking. But Hans’s wife shouted from her bed: ‘God forbid, what words do I hear? Is this our thanks, for all the trouble we have gone to in handling your affairs?’ Oluff immediately got up and drew his sword, wanting to hit Hans, but suddenly ran out of the door and shouted in the gateway: ‘Come out you thief and rogue’. Hans’s wife sprang out of bed and, with a servant, tried to close the door. But Oluff was faster; he succeeded in hitting Hans with the flat side of the sword. Before he stabbed his friend, the servant stopped him and, with the help of Hans’s wife, succeeded in restraining him until the town servant arrived to help. Oluff ’s attack was found incriminating in all crucial points of the law – invasion of space, evil intent and violence – and he was sentenced for hemgång.24 While this case illuminates male, female and family honour, it also shows how the material conditions influenced their manifestation. In Hans Kreijare’s house, the master and mistress slept in the main room. Hans’s wife had already retired to bed when Oluff came in to drink with Hans. Kreijare’s house is thus a good example of a house where practices of sociability shared space with domestic practices and practices of rest.The wife’s participation in the male encounter was a result of the material circumstances. For many – mostly women – the space of the home remained open even after they retired to bed. Homes were not always a closed space for the occupants of the house, even at night. Mistress Kreijare’s shout from her bed illuminates active female participation in a male encounter. It is clear that the argument between the two men was not only their affair, even if it features some central tenets of ritualized male interpersonal violence. Oluff was drunk; he insulted his host; he left the house to call Hans out to fight; and then he forced his way in and injured the object of his anger. These events followed a common pattern in hemgång cases, as Karin Hassan Jansson’s study of masculinity and hemgång reveals: a man calls the other out before the violent attack occurs.This is a practice known from male interpersonal violence in general.25 In this instance, the mistress’s cry from her bed can be considered the calling out. Oluff did not draw his sword before her cry. He needed a response to his insults before he attacked.26 Hans’s wife clearly had more of a role in the incident than just being chosen or not chosen as a target of attack. It was she who reacted to Oluff ’s slanderous words, and it was she who brought the case to court. It is clear that a man’s honour was not only his to worry about. When Oluff 146

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accused Hans of doing shoddy work, he also insulted his wife. Her words are recorded as ‘all the trouble we have gone into’. The work done for Oluff or the regiment was not just Hans’s; it was hers, too. A woman’s honour, mainly her virtue, has often been described as being an integral part of the husband’s honour. Not much is written about man’s honour as part of the wife’s honour or about shared family honour. Men’s honour has been studied mostly in relation to male activities in male-oriented places, but when one looks at events in another kind of space, one can see that a man’s honour was not only his personal matter. Courtney Thomas writes that while a few scholars, such as Garthine Walker, have noted the one-sided and gender-divided treatment of honour, there is still need for a consideration of honour as a collective issue and as an issue of daily life that is not gendered in a very clear-cut way.27 When examining the space of home, where both husbands and wives were present and where both men and women were in a space they were identified with, the relationship between women’s and men’s honour shows its intricacy and communality. Conversely, the examination of shared honour here has shown how the open space of the home was still the site of family honour. Home was not just any shared space of the town.

House, home and the outdoors Home is easily equated with a house. However, particularly in towns, homes could also be rooms or even parts of rooms. Home could also extend outside the house. The door to a house or a room was not always the defining, or the only, boundary to a home. Examining gates, fences and windows and considering how they functioned as boundaries of urban homes is also important. In Turku, houses sat with their long side towards the street and the plot boundaries, forming central courtyards. What defined homes was strongly connected to this way of building. A case of violent invasion of the home between Margreta Markusdotter and Philip Mårthensson in March 1659 can serve as our guide in exploring this. Margreta Markusdotter complained to the court that a man named Philip Mårthensson had hit her. Margreta was a lodger in the house of one Sigfred Pihmonen. While outside the house, she went to the fence between Pihmonen’s house and Philip’s house, slandered Philip and accused him of hitting her pigs. Philip ran to the fence, and they exchanged insults. Philip threw three stones at Margreta, but missed, and he then proceeded to climb over the fence, taking a stick with him, intending to hit her. Others in Margreta’s yard took the stick away from him, but he attacked Margreta anyway: he pinned her against a wall, took her by the throat and hit her. Margreta got away and ran to the yard of the next house, but Philip followed and caught her by the hair, struck her to the ground, took a stone and hit her several times. In court, Philip was found guilty of hemgång.28 This case witnesses three things: that ‘home’ extended outside the house; that the home was important as an individual’s home; and that homes could be sites for what I call ‘communities of dwelling’. Let’s begin with the extent of ‘home’. Philip did not invade Margreta’s house or room but ran after her in two separate yards, apparently in the same block, because no streets are mentioned. Philip most likely owned or rented one of the houses in the block. Margreta was a lodger, but we do not know what kind of a dwelling she had. From what we know of urban lodgers in mid-seventeenth-century Turku, she could have lived in an out-building such as a sauna or a malt room, in the main room sleeping on the bench or even in a bed chamber with some members of the host family.29 Whatever the case, it is clear that Philip did not breach the boundary to the building or room she occupied. But as Philip was found guilty, it can be concluded that Margreta’s home extended to the fenced area outside her lodgings. 147

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The law concerning the violent invasion of a home defined the home as a fenced area inside which all the houses of the property were included.This definition arises from the circumstances of a farmhouse, but the same principle applied in the town. It is noteworthy that it was not only the owner of the house or the property whose home extended to the area marked by the fences but also a lowly female lodger. This speaks particularly of the importance of the individual in the law’s definition of (violent invasion of) a home.The law protected an individual in his or her home from violence at the hands of an attacker from outside the home. The result was that the individual was protected in the space beyond her specific sleeping place. Because Philip tried on two separate occasions to explain to the court that he did not enter Margreta’s yard with ill will, we can conclude that he understood what constituted hemgång and the meaning of the borders of Margreta’s home. In other cases, a door and a hallway of a rented room, a gate of a councilman’s yard and a window of a house of ill repute were understood by various parties as the material borders of persons’ homes.30 This was not the only way that the boundaries of personal homes were signified. There were also complaints in court about the windows of other people’s homes facing into people’s yards; they were ‘against all decency’, as one female householder put it.31 Having one’s own gate towards the street was important, too. When, in the spring of 1654, Pär Thomasson argued with a cavalryman’s wife, Brita, about a piece of land, one of the issues he raised was that Brita’s house blocked Pär’s direct route to the street. Pär wanted to be the only one to control the gate to the street.32 These kinds of complaints refer to a bounded family or personal space and signify that the space of one’s own home was very deeply felt. On the other hand, the incident between Margreta and Philip gives us the chance to consider ‘a community of dwelling’. Studies concerning European towns recount tales of various assemblages and ways of dwelling. In addition to families occupying their individual houses, both families and individuals rented lodgings of various sizes. Rooms and apartments were called homes, even when they were very small.33 In mid-seventeenth-century Turku, the yards around which various kinds of dwellings were grouped were important in the community formation of the town. Regardless of the deeply meaningful borders of gates, doors, windows and fences, people living in the same block or plot shared many aspects of their everyday life as they saw, heard and encountered each other in and around the yard. The small ‘communities of dwelling’ that were created in the properties may have been particularly important in a town like Turku, where smallish houses were situated around yards with apparently low fences between each yard, and where indoor living was centred in the shared main room. It is, however, possible that other towns had similar communities. For example, Julie Hardwick writes of seventeenth-century France and families living in multi-functional buildings with shared stairways, latrines, wells and yards.34 Lena Cowen Orlin writes about the shared dwelling space and crowded conditions in sixteenth-century London that sometimes resulted in families even sharing rooms.35 Dwelling in early modern urban Europe – its arrangements and material conditions – were prone to create associations over borders of houses and rooms where people dwelled, associations that cut across family or the conventionally understood household. Home as urban space shows itself here as a space central for both the individual and the urban community. Nevertheless, in the context of the actual crime of the violent invasion of a home, the individual was the key, and everyone’s home in principle was defined similarly. The role of gender was not important as it was in the context of nightly sociability or family honour. The courts were interested in the events in relation to the legal description of the crime and not much else. There are no discernibly strong male or female roles that the participants of the cases acted upon, although men’s tendency to appeal to their drunkenness is common in early modern European courts.36 Women in the hemgång hearings sometimes did take the role of a 148

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weak woman, but men also took on the role of a helpless victim, for example, that of an old or a sick bedridden man.37 The section of King’s Oath in the law protected individuals from violence in particular spaces and situations.There was a strong emphasis on the relationship between an individual and the peace provided by the law, which made emphasising gender roles unnecessary. Every individual was protected by this law in a similar way; even questions of morality seemed not to affect the situation, as women of ill repute or vagrants could accuse even burgher men of hemgång.

Conclusions While the law and the courts emphasized the individual, and while the court cases studied in this chapter have shown that homes in mid-seventeenth-century Turku were deeply meaningful as personal and family space, it has become equally clear that homes were multi-functional and communally shared spaces encompassing diverse gendered experiences. The closeness of the houses to each other, the confined quarters of the dwelling spaces and the prevalence of multipurpose rooms made homes open parts of the sociable town, a characteristic that Turku shared with many other European towns. Social practices in such open homes resulted in interpersonal tensions but also in the creation of diverse communities, the form of which was connected with the forms of the material environment the town. In Turku, the small size of the houses and the position of the houses around yards, combined with the understanding of the home as extending outside the house and the room, created an opportunity for the formation of ‘communities of dwelling’ around central yards, while in bigger European towns, multi-storeyed houses with several rooms created different kinds of relations and communities. There were discernible differences in how the multi-faceted space of home was open to men and women, but there were also many similarities, especially in relation to how people identified with homes. While ideals of gender, shared with other Europeans, restricted women’s activities in urban space and its open homes, particularly at night, women did have, on many occasions, active roles, because the open homes were still family spaces. Women’s roles in the family homes – like men’s – were tied not only to personal identity and family honour but also to the wider urban communities. While the gendered experience of urban space in mid-seventeenth-century Turku shared many characteristics with the general European gendered experience, this article has shown local features in the relationship between gender and urban space arising from legal considerations as well as from the material form of the town. Even if everyday practices in urban homes were strongly gendered, the law concerning hemgång resulted in an inclination to give men and women – and their relationship to the space of the urban home – similar treatment in court. At the same time, while the sociable space of the town was restricted from the female perspective, the position of the main bed in sociable space sometimes made women part of the male night life. Moreover, in the creation of ‘communities of dwelling’ reaching outside the houses, women and men equally negotiated the shared practices of urban space.

Notes 1 Paula Hohti, ‘Domestic space and identity: Artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena,’ Urban History 37 (2010): 373. 2 Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘To pray, to work, to hear, to speak: Women in Roman streets c. 1600,’ in Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets, ed. Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009), 97; Elizabeth S. Cohen and Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Open and shut: The social meaning of the cinquecento Roman house,’ Studies in the Decorative Arts 9 (2001): 61; Lucas Burkart, ‘Der v­ ermeintliche

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Riitta Laitinen Blick durchs Schlusselloch. Zur Kommunikation Zwischen unterschiedlichen Sozialsphären in der Städtischen Kultur Um 1500,’ in Offen und verborgen. Vorstellungen und Praktiken des Öffentlichkeiten und Privaten in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Caroline Emmelius et al. (Göttingen:Wallstein Verlag, 2004), 167–68, 174–75, 178; Joachim Eibach, ‘Das Haus: Zwischen öffentlicher Zugänglichkeit und geschützter Privatheit (16.–18. Jahrhundert),’ in Zwischen Gotteshaus und Taverne. Öffentliche Räume in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Susanne Rau and Gerd Schwerhoff (Köln, Weimar and Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2004), 183–205. For public and private in general, see Lena Cowen Orlin, Locating Privacy in Tudor London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Erica Longfellow, ‘Public, private, and the household in early seventeenth-century England,’ Journal of British Studies 45 (April 2006): 313–34; Susanne Rau, ‘Das Wirtshaus: Zur Konstitution eines Öffentlichen Raumes in der Frühen Neuzeit,’ in Offen und Verborgen. Vorstellungen und Praktiken des Öffentlichkeiten und Privaten in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Caroline Emmelius et al. (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2004), 214–27; Amanda Vickery, Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England (New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2009), 26–29; Ted Kilian, ‘Public and private, power and space,’ in The Production of Public Space, ed. Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith (Lanham and Oxford: Rowan & Littlefield, 1998), 115–34; Peter von Moos, ‘Öffentlich’ und ‘Privat’ im Mittelalter. Zu einem Problem der historischen Begriffsbildung (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2004). 3 Mary Thomas Crane,‘Illicit privacy and outdoor spaces in early modern England,’ Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 99 (2009): 4–22; See also Orlin, 155, 173. 4 Panu Savolainen, Tirkistelyä förmaakeihin ja ylishuoneisiin. Turkulaista asumista kahden vuosisadan takaa (Turku: Turun Museokeskus, 2014), 44–48, 53, 70–72, 76–79. For the general European development, see Raffaella Sarti, Europe at Home: Family and Material Culture, 1500–1800 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002), 139–42. For the complexity of the development (a case study), see Chris King, ‘ “Closure” and the urban great rebuilding in early modern Norwich,’ Post-Medieval Archaeology 44 (2010): 54–80. 5 Longfellow, ‘Public, private, and the household,’ 315–18; Burkart, ‘Der vermeintliche Blick,’ 168 n2; Eibach, ‘Das Haus,’ 189, 191; Kekke Stadin, ‘Stormaktskvinnor,’ in Makt & vardag. Hur man styrde, levde och tänkte under svensk stormaktstid, ed. Stellan Dahlgren, Anders Florén and Åsa Karlsson (Stockholm: Atlantis, 1993), 178; Renate Dürr, Mägde in der Stadt. Das Beisbiel Schwäbish Hall in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt and New York: Campus Verlag, 1995), 268; Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘Punishment, discipline, and power:The social meanings of violence in early modern England,’ Journal of British Studies 34 (1995). See particularly Joachim Eibach, ‘Das offene Haus. Kommunikative Praxis im sozialen Nahraum der Europäischen Frühen Neuzeit,’ Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 38 (2011): 621–64, for Eibach’s concept of das offene Haus. 6 About the materiality of towns, see Peter Arnade, Martha C. Howell and Walter Simons, ‘Fertile spaces: The productivity of urban space in northern Europe,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002): 515–48; Alan Latham and Derek P. McCormack, ‘Moving cities: Rethinking the materialities of urban geographies,’ Progress in Human Geography 28 (2004): 701–24; Leif Jerram, ‘Space: A useless category for historical analysis?,’ History and Theory 52 (2013): 400–19. 7 Nils Ahlberg, Stadsgrundningar och planförändringar. Svensk stadsplanering 1521–1721 (Uppsala: Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, 2005), 55; Sven Lilja, Tjuvehål och stolta städer. Urbaniserings kronologi och geografi i Sverige (Med Finland) Ca 1570-tal Till 1810-tal (Stockholm: Stads- och kommunhistoriska Institutet, Stockholms Universitet, 2000), 153–54, 167. The town of Riga in the Sweden’s Baltic dominion was much bigger than Turku, but the towns in various dominions acquired in the seventeenth century were not incorporated into the Swedish urban system of government, administration or law. Thus, they are not usually placed in the same context as the towns in what are currently Sweden and Finland. See Robert Sandberg, ‘The state and the intergration of the towns of the provinces of the Swedish Baltic Empire,’ in Baltic Towns and Their Inhabitants. Aspects on Early Modern Towns in the Baltic Area, ed. Kekke Stadin (Huddinge: Södertörns högskola, 2003), 10–26. 8 Hemgång directly translates to ‘home going’. More aptly it can be translated to ‘disturbance of domestic peace,’ ‘trespass’ or ‘violent invasion of a home’. I will use the term ‘violent invasion of a home’ because it best describes the content of the term as it appeared in the law, as hemgång was described as an invasion of somebody’s home with evil intentions and causing, or trying to cause, bodily injury. The legal text talks about someone ‘riding into another person’s property/home’ (as it originally describes farmhouse conditions), but the courts particularly emphasised an individual’s entry into a house/home without the permission, or against the will, of the occupant. 9 Jonas Lindström and Jan Mispelaere,‘Vad fick 1600-talets arbetare i lön?,’ Historisk tidskrift 135 (2015): 442.

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Home, Urban Space and Gendered Practices 10 Magnus Erikssons stadslag i nusvensk tolkning, transl. Åke Holmbäck & Elias Wessén. (Stockholm: Institutet för rätthistorisk forskning, 1966), 213–22; Kuningas Kristofferin maanlaki 1442, transl. Martti Ulkuniemi (Helsinki: Suomalainen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 1978), 125. These laws are problematic for translation. Both the Law of the Realm (sometimes translated as Law of the Land) and the Town Law (sometimes translated as Urban Law) are comprehensive law books including sections on marriage, inheritance, larceny, homicide, causing bodily injury and so on.They were devised by medieval kings and provided the basic texts for all courts in the kingdom until 1734, when they were replaced by a new, comprehensive Code of the Realm. In addition to the Law of the Realm and the Town Law, there was a multitude of royal ordinances from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; however, none of these are relevant to the crime discussed here, and not many of them were referred to in Turku Town Court. The towns themselves were not able to pass laws. 11 Riitta Laitinen, ‘Rajoja ja avoimuutta 1600-luvun kodeissa,’ Historiallinen Aikakauskirja 1 (2014): 20–31. 12 Turku City Archives,Turku Town Court Records [hereafter TRO] 26.11.1660, 385–89. 13 The original term refers most often, but not exclusively, to the household servants. 14 TRO 30.3., 6.4., 3.5., 4.5.1644, 246, 264, 298, 296. 15 TRO 23.6.1651, 164. 16 TRO 8.4.1644, 272; TRO 3.5.1644, 290. 17 Phil Withington, ‘Company and sociability in early modern England,’ Social History 32 (2007): 293. 18 Liisa Seppänen, Rakentaminen ja kaupunkikuvan muutokset keskiajan Turussa. Erityistarkastelussa Åbo Akademin päärakennuksen tontin arkeologinen aineisto (Turku: Turun yliopisto, 2012), 816–24; Marita Kykyri, ‘Österbladin tontin tutkimukset 1999,’ in Arkeologisia kaivauksia Turussa 1990-luvulla, ed. Marita Söderström (Turku: Turun maakuntamuseo, 2007), 94–95; Marita Kykyri, Rakennukset ja puurakennustekniikka Turun kaupungissa 1300–1600-luvulla arkeologisen lähdeaineston valossa (Kulttuurientutkimuksen laitos, Turun yliopisto, 1989), 116–26; Veli Pekka Toropainen, ‘Valtaporvari Thomas Trällin perhe Turussa 1630-luvulta 1730-luvulle,’ in Barokki – Barock, ed. Sirpa Juuti and Kari-Paavo Kokki (Heinola: Heinolan kaupunginmuseo, 2014), 135–36, 138. 19 For example, Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England c.1580–1640,’ Past and Present 167 (2000): 103–104; B. Ann Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001), passim.;Withington, 297. 20 Kustaa H. J.Vilkuna, Juomareiden valtakunta. Suomalaisten känni ja kulttuuri (Helsinki: Kustannusosakeyhtiö Teos, 2015), 412, see 407–28, 490–96 and 508–21 for alcohol and gender in Finland more generally. 21 Elizabeth S. Cohen, ‘Honor and gender in the streets of early modern Rome,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22 (1992): 602–607, 619–20. 22 Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, 129–32; Shepard, ‘Manhood,’ 102–104; Robert Shoemaker, ‘Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London,’ Social History 26 (2001): 195–99. 23 TRO 6.12.1647, 489. 24 Ibid. 25 Karin Hassan Jansson, ‘Våld som agression eller kommunikation? Hemfridsbrott 1550–1650,’ Historisk Tidskrift 126 (2006): 429–52; Pieter Spierenburg, Men and Violence. Gender, Honor, and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Ohio State University Press, 1998), 104–105, 112–13; Jonas Liliequist, ‘Violence, honour and manliness in early modern northern Sweden,’ in Crime and Control in Europe from the Past to the Present, ed. Mirkka Lappailainen and Pekka Hirvonen (Helsinki:The History of Criminality Research Project, 1999), 193–97; Tlusty, Bacchus and Civic Order, 129–133; Shoemaker, ‘Male honour,’ 1995. 26 Notably, Oluff did not attack Hans’s wife even if she was more aggressive than the man of the house himself. We do not know if Oluff wanted to avoid attacking the wife because she was pregnant or whether he wanted to follow the rules of an honourable fight with Hans, or if he actually was just angry at Hans in particular.Violence between men in Turku, be it in a case of hemgång or in other cases, very seldom seemed to follow any rules of honourable combat, and attacking women as such was not out of bounds. Compare this with Jansson’s study, where women could be sent to receive a potential invader because women were not likely to be attacked. 27 Thomas has written about honour and the elite family in early modern England, pointing out that women have had an active role in the maintenance of family honour, which has been overshadowed by the focus on the role of women’s chastity. Courtney Thomas, ‘ “The Honour & Credite of the Whole House”: Family unity and honour in early modern England,’ Cultural and Social History 10 (2013): 329–31. 28 TRO 28.3.1659, 111–114. 29 Riitta Laitinen,‘Renkejä, piikoja ja itsellisiä 1600-luvun Turussa,’ in Kaht pualt jokke.Turkulaisia vuosisatojen varrelta (Turku: Turun Seudun Sukututkijat ry, 2015), 43–56.

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Riitta Laitinen 30 TRO 4.2.1646, 93–99; TRO 13.11.1658, 194–224; TRO 1.6.1659, 246–50. 31 TRO 19.5.1655, 127–29. 32 TRO 5.4.1654, 43–44. 33 Orlin, Locating Privacy, 157, 163, 167, 169–70; Cohen and Cohen, ‘Open and shut,’ 65; Tiina Miettinen, Ihanteista irrallaan: Hämeen maaseudun nainen osana perhettä ja asiakirjoja 1600-luvun alusta 1800-luvun alkuun (Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2012), 44, 47; Gerhard Fouquet, ‘ “Annäherungen”: Grosse Städte – Kleine Häuser. Wohnen und Lebensform der Menschen im ausgehenden Mittelalter (Circa 1470–1600),’ in Geschichte des Wohnens. Band 2: 500–1800 Hausen, Wohnen, Residieren, ed. Ulf Dirlmeier (Ludwigsburg: Wüstenrot Stiftung; Deutcher Eigenheimverein e. V., 1998), 417–18; Corley, ‘On the threshold:Youth as arbiters of the urban space,’ Journal of Social History 43, no. 1 (2009): 146. 34 Julie Hardwick, ‘Early modern perspectives on the long history of domestic violence: The case of seventeenth-century France,’ Journal of Modern History 78, 1 (2006): 20. 35 Orlin, Locating Privacy, 156–77. 36 For example, Joachim Eibach, ‘Männer vor Gericht - Frauen vor Gericht,’ in Grenzen und Grenzenüberschretungen. Bilanz und Perspectiven der Frühneuzeitförschung, ed. Christine Roll, Frank Pohle and Matthias Myrczeg (Köln, Weimar and Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2010), 566. 37 See Eibach, ‘Männer vor Gericht,’ 570.

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12 The Gendered Geography of Violence in Bologna, Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota

Space and crime historians Crime historians have only recently started to engage with the notions of space and time through qualitative and quantitative research. Influenced by criminologists and helped by the development of digital resources, historians are now increasingly able to map offenders’ use of the urban space.1 However, in terms of understanding and interpreting how these spaces were used, there is still much progress to be made.This chapter intends to contribute to this by examining the gendered use of Bolognese urban spaces by violent offenders over a long-term period. Going further than the traditional, binary model of the private and public spheres, we argue that the combined factors of place, time2 and social function are pivotal for our understanding of men’s and women’s patterns of crime. Through a quantitative and qualitative examination of violent transgressions in the time and spaces in which they occurred, we want to show the intricacies between private and public sphere and re-evaluate women’s use of the urban space. A strong emphasis on a gendered divide between the public and private spheres characterizes the early historiography on the relationship between the urban geography and gender in the early modern period onwards. Based on didactic and prescriptive literature, as well as travel descriptions, the idea was being put forward that women, because they were secluded and enclosed by moral norms, were typically absent from public spaces.3 As sites of business and politics, piazzas, bridges, canals and streets have been described as male spaces, whereas female spaces were thought to have been more confined to the ‘home’. However, in the past decades, studies have indicated that, especially for non-elite men and women, such a binary divide between public and private spaces was an anachronistic projection of ideals that did not reflect the complex realities of past everyday lives.4 It is now generally agreed that, like men, women regularly used many of the urban spaces, and for various reasons: to attend religious or civic events, to go to church or to work and for recreation. However, if the concept of separate spheres has been widely dismissed, the notion of a public and private divide remains, notably when researching spaces of violence in relation to gender. Men are usually seen as being able to navigate between public and private places, committing violence in both realms,5 while women tend to be seen as 153

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more likely to commit violence in or near their household.6 We argue that the characteristics of these places, especially outside the home, need to be explored further in relation to gender and time to understand better the subtleties of the gendered use of the urban space. The definition of space, and how it will be used in this chapter, follows the definition of Michel de Certeau, who compared space and place to include people’s mark in the built environment: space is defined as a ‘practiced place’, which refers to a natural or built location, neutral in its identity, which is transformed into a space by pedestrians – a place constituted by a system of signs.7 The place loses its ‘neutrality’ to become a space where certain behaviours are expected. As John C. Wood emphasizes in his work on past violence, in crowded places, the breaking or the confrontations of different interpretations of the rules expected in these spaces led to violent behaviour.8 The expectations linked with places, the (unwritten) codes regulating the use of places, are combined with the imagined space, for which other sets of expectations are created, usually, but not only, linked to the risks faced in using these places. The advantages of studying the urban space lie in the extremely large variety of built as well as open places forming a city; codes to ‘practice’ these places and their imagined attributes can differ from one place to another and from one user to the other, as well as from one time of the day to another. The perception of the street, for instance, a necessary way of passage for both men and women going to work, to church or to visit someone during the day, can switch to a perceived unsafe environment once the sun has gone down. Poor street lighting in the early modern period and the common carrying of weapons by men, notably at night, strengthened the image of the unsafe street.This concept of practiced place and the gendered use of the urban space will be the foundation of this chapter, particularly in relation to the concept of public and private spheres. Committing a violent act often reveals a deep connection with the surrounding space. Indeed, violent offenders are dependent upon the way the place where their crime is committed is used.The well-known theory of Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson argues that the presence of a capable guardian in a specific place may suffice to prevent a crime being committed.9 Likewise, the broken-window theory of George Wilson and James Kelling reveals how a decrepit place could become a criminogenic space.10 But, according to the practice of certain places, these also become spaces guaranteeing the legitimacy of a violent act; for instance, fighting in a public space could be deemed legitimate if the honour of one of the parties has been insulted.11 Similarly, historians of both the early modern period and the nineteenth century have shown that the confines of the home and its somewhat illusory ‘privacy’ could prevent neighbours from interfering during a domestic quarrel.12 Its spilling onto the street, however, could lead to an opposite reaction and see neighbours taking sides for one opponent or the other. Thus, the intricate connection existing between violence and urban space appears as a legitimate starting point for an analysis of the gendered use of urban space.

Context Serving as the judicial arm of papal absolutism until the mid-nineteenth century, the Tribunale del Torrone was the only criminal court in Bologna from around 1600 onwards and accordingly dealt with a wide range of offences, from petty theft to murder. The offences brought before the court could have been committed either in the city of Bologna itself or in its surrounding countryside (contado). The Torrone was dissolved after the French invasion in 1796. Napoleon gradually imposed his style of gendarmerie and policing in the cities but, with the failure of the Napoleonic Empire, the pope took back control of the region and city and reinstated the court. The legato was in charge of the Tribunale Criminale e Civile di Bologna, which followed the old customary laws when trying and sentencing criminals. 154

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A body of policemen, the so-called sbirri, aided the criminal court. As in other early m ­ odern Italian cities, a relatively small group of less than 100 sbirri was responsible for the entire Bolognese territory.13 It is generally agreed upon that preventive policing in any modern sense was virtually unknown, not only due to the small number of sbirri but also because their primary function consisted of executing the dictates and warrants of the criminal tribunal.14 After the Napoleonic episode, the sbirri were brought back, but their bad reputation due to corruption and abuse of power clearly weakened their controlling power over the population (their misbehaviours were also fuelling the hatred of the population for them). By 1824, the sbirri system was effectively suppressed and replaced by the Carabinieri. After the Risorgimento, the Carabinieri remained in place, but a new police force was organized within the cities of the new nation: the Guardia di Sicurezza, copied from the Piedmont–Sardinia model of 1852.The confidence of the population in the police did not improve, however, even though most of the staff had been changed; new affairs of corruption emerged that undermined the image of the police.15 This chapter tries to discern the contours of the gendered geography of violence in B ­ ologna between 1650 and 1903. A sample of 328 cases taken from three time periods (1650–1655, 1704–1706 and 1754–1756) accounts for 473 violent offences in the city’s criminal court. The nineteenth-century sample covers the period 1816 to 1903 and includes 539 cases of violence, sampled every 10 years.16 The criminal tribunal of Bologna dealt with reported cases of physical violence – assault, robbery, murder and rape (rape and illegitimate pregnancy were listed under the same crime: stupro; in this study, only forced sexual intercourse was taken into account) – and verbal violence (insults and defamation). The culture of violence is often thought to have been male, linked to notions of masculinity and honour. Indeed, when we look at tried cases of violence, women only accounted for 4 per cent (6 out of 151) of the suspects during the early modern period and 6 per cent (32 out of 539) in the nineteenth century. However, violence was far from a male preserve. If we also take into account the reported violence that was not tried by the courts, as we are able to do for the early modern period because the untried complaints have also been preserved, almost 30 per cent of petty violence reported to the criminal tribunal was ascribed to female assailants.17 Unfortunately, nineteenth-century complaints have not been saved, and random samples of the police archives did not reveal a higher occurrence of violence committed by women.

Experiencing violence and fear in the urban space Both men and women used urban spaces for all kinds of activities, whether legal or criminal. The question is to what extent, and how, the geography of violence was gendered. Although Italy’s countryside was notorious for its banditry and violence by the nobility, making it dangerous to be outside, particularly after sundown, the urban spaces inside the city gates were not necessarily zones of safety either. The representation of Bologna’s dangerousness can be traced over the centuries, and the risk of being attacked was reported both in the countryside and inside the city gates. In addition, the high homicide rates compared to other early modern European cities can be viewed as indicative of levels of everyday violence as well as the general danger in Italian cities like Bologna.18 Despite the state’s efforts to pacify the city and countryside, the court records contain many forms of violence, including complex feuds, but more commonly stone fights between youngsters, escalating alcohol-fuelled brawls and violent responses to neighbourly gossip. Bologna’s economic stagnation in the eighteenth century saw increasingly large groups of unemployed people wandering the city, offering their services as day labourers, drunkenly starting trouble on the streets or living off small thefts.19 By the nineteenth century, the Bolognese 155

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population faced increased poverty in its countryside, which motivated poor peasants to join the ranks of more roughened criminals20 and enhance the development of associations of criminals within the walls of the city.21 In parallel with the rising European concern over pauperism, Bolognese elites’ worries heightened during the revolutionary periods of 1831 and 1848, especially towards the facchini, those men without qualifications who travelled the city and the countryside looking for work.22 The population felt a rise in criminality, especially in the countryside: briganti were said to be roaming country lanes and attacking farmers in their own homes, as well as travellers. The city streets were not considered any safer, and problems of corruption within the ranks of the police were reported at least until the end of the 1860s.23 Indeed, bands of ladri (thieves) were seen in the countryside, and the ‘Società dei Malfattori’ was known to have contacts within the walls of the city.24 The murders of two inspectors and a farmer in his own home at the beginning of the 1860s led to an appeal against ‘perceived’ dangerous spaces both within and without the home and within and without the city. In 1860, the newspaper Il Corriere dell’Emilia published an appeal to the municipality to restore safety and quiet in the region. The author claimed that ‘the citizen cannot use the streets safely, nor can he be safe at home at night’25 and asserted that citizens risked being killed, day or night, on the piazza, on the street and even next to the corpi di guardia. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did Bologna experience a decrease in homicides, thefts and robberies, due, to a certain extent, to better living conditions within the city and the rapid development of industrialisation.26 To counterbalance this perceived upsurge of violence over the centuries, the municipal authorities regularly attempted to control the movements of the population. The street was perceived as a particularly dangerous space; indeed, city regulations and police control focused on the public space, particularly at night. Seventeenth-century Spanish traveller Leandro Fernandez de Moratin described Bologna as having no public lighting and only a few private lanterns, leaving streets and entire neighbourhoods in ‘horrible obscurity’.27 Without any real systematic attempts at public lighting until well into the eighteenth century, it is hardly surprising that when thinking about crime, the night was a particularly alarming time. It gave cover to the disorderly and immoral and made the public spaces of the city stages for violence, theft and latent evil.28 The belief that the night had special powers that altered the behaviour of people and the community formed the basis of juridical doctrines and surveillance practices that arose from the late medieval period onwards.29 Municipal decrees sought to minimize the risks of the night streets; for instance, an official curfew restricting women’s (unescorted) mobility after sunset’s Ave Maria bell was in place in the early modern period.30 The idea behind this was not that women themselves were dangerous but that they attracted trouble. Moreover, the perceived significance of space and time in relation to the seriousness of the crime is also reflected in the scale of penalties imposed. Early modern cities such as Florence and Perugia gave double to quadruple fines for crimes in public places, such as the piazza, markets, bridges, palaces of the commune and churches. Nor were they alone; everywhere in Italy, heavier penalties were given for crimes committed at night.31 This was still the case under the Penal Code of 1859, which sentenced offenders to longer prison sentences for break-ins committed at night. For the criminal court, the phase of the day and whether it was light or (semi-) dark was more important than the exact hour a violent act took place. Roughly half of the denunciations in the seventeenth century and most of nineteenth-century cases where the court’s files are still available make references to the time of day, although the various early modern recording practices allow for that to be done in several ways. From the Renaissance onwards, public mechanical clocks encouraged a shift towards greater use of the measured hour that divides the day into 24 hours. In early modern Italy, the count started with sundown, followed by the first hour of the night. For example, in August, the sun goes down in Bologna at approximately 156

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8 p.m. contemporary time, making 9 p.m. the first hour of the night. From the testimonies in court records, we know that people used this system, but that they supplemented it with a set of general reference points marking the normative conception of time, such as dawn, dusk, lunch and communal or ecclesiastical bells.32 Particularly important in the context of time and space are the divisions between daytime, evening and night time for work, socialization and resting. When we apply a gender analysis to violent acts reported to Bologna authorities, we notice than the perceived dangerousness of the night needs to be nuanced. In the early modern period, men committed violent offences throughout the day: 36 per cent during daylight hours, 35 per cent in the evening and 29 per cent at night. This pattern is strikingly similar to patterns of nineteenth-century violent crime: men were prosecuted for violence committed in 29 per cent of the cases during the day, 42 per cent in the evening and 27 per cent at night. Despite better lighting and increased police supervision, the pattern remained the same, as did the representation of the dangerousness of the night. Although the fear of the night was widely shared by early modern and contemporary Bolognese citizens, day and evening (or, in other words, twilight) were actually more likely to be the setting of violent crimes than the dark of the night. What stands out when we look at the distribution of violent offences among early modern female offenders is that both daytime (52 per cent) and evening (39 per cent) figure prominently, whereas women were less likely to commit a crime during the night (9 per cent). According to both gender norms and civic legislation, early modern women were not allowed to be in the streets at night unescorted by their husbands or male relatives, which may explain the low level of crimes committed after the Ave Maria bell. Likewise, the sample shows that nearly all cases of violence committed by women at night occurred in a confined place, such as an acquaintance’s house. However, in the nineteenth century, when the curfew does not seem to have been enforced, violent crimes committed by women during the night nevertheless disappeared from the sample altogether: 54 per cent of female violence reported in the archives occurred during the day and 46 per cent during the evening. The absence of violent crimes committed at night by women can be explained by the motives behind the crimes. Quarrels with neighbours and fights at work and in the tavern were more likely to occur during the day and evening for both men and women than during the night, which was a time of rest. The night was more likely to be the setting for well-planned confrontations or break-ins and highway robberies than workrelated quarrels. The cases reveal a certain continuity in the time when violent crime was committed: women were more likely to commit violence during the day than at night; similarly, while men did act violently during the night, they did so less often than during the day or evening. Interestingly, the higher level of violence committed in the evening by men, especially in the last third of the nineteenth-century sample, may reveal a change in social behaviour in relation to migration and industrialization. New patterns of drinking linked with immigration from the countryside, as well as a growing number of drinking houses in the cities, suggest that alcohol and a culture of manly entertainment prevailed at the turn of the twentieth century.33 Although the drinking culture did not change radically, the increase in violent crimes committed in the osteria (tavern) or its surroundings indicates that more people tended to gather in the taverns and that an acute surveillance of these places was organized.

Gendered violence and types of space As in other early modern cities, violence erupted in places where men and women interacted on a daily basis; rules regarding what was acceptable in public could be broken, and it could lead to bursts of violence by the victims as a response to unacceptable behaviour.Violence, in that case, 157

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was used to claim redress after an offence. The various ‘public spaces’ or open places, such as the street, were important sites of everyday violence; however, these places deserve a more thorough definition than ‘public’, ‘private’ or ‘open’, based upon people’s use of these places. Indeed, the division between public and private spheres in the early modern period or in the nineteenth century according to gender remained somewhat artificial. Lower and middle-class women did not have the luxury of retreating into the domestic sphere and thus, like men, used many of the ‘public spaces’; furthermore, the private sphere was also a large component of a man’s life. Working-class men, for instance, used discourses of domestic ideals to assert their positions as breadwinners in the late nineteenth century.34 As in other European cities, the division in spatial terms between public and private in Bologna is not a realistic description; a family often worked and lived in the same place, even in the nineteenth century. This is especially true in the countryside, where share-cropping and large family households were the norm until the twentieth century.Women were also more than mothers; they had an economic role.They were shopkeepers and market sellers;35 they worked in the urban textile industry as thread makers, spinners or weavers; and they found employment in the city as domestic servants. Even when offences took place inside the house, the walls dividing the victim from the rest of the community were porous. Cesarina Casanova36 and Giancarlo Angelozzi37 have both shown that the papal police did not refrain from getting involved in private matters, such as divorces or runaway children; they were also involved in episodes of domestic violence when these were reported by the victims or the neighbours. Indeed, the neighbours or, as they were often called in the sources, la voce pubblica, were aware of possible violence in the confines of the house and did not hold back from demonstrating their disapproval of private, domestic matters, even when ‘uninvited’. Their involvement in their neighbours’ domestic affairs is reflected in Bolognese criminal court records as well as in other long-established communal shaming practices.38 For instance, in 1833 in Castel San Pietro, Enrico Paoli was accused by his neighbours of repeated assaults upon his wife: la voce pubblica, as seen in the testimonies, strongly condemned his behaviour towards his wife.39 He was accused of begging and drinking all the money he received, whereas she was known to be an industrious woman. Despite the complaints and testimonies, Enrico was not tried by the Tribunale Criminale, as his wife failed to take further action; he was sent back to the police of Castel San Pietro, who were advised to keep an eye on him. The same year in Bologna, Felice Rossi had to be ‘saved’ from an angry mob by the police to be taken to jail; he had beaten his own mother in the street and ran into his house as witnesses started to gang up upon him. While he was in jail awaiting trial, his mother died (although probably not from the wound he had inflicted); he was later released for ‘lack of victim’, and no charges of homicide were filed. The equation of these places to private, domestic space can be erroneous. When we look at the way places were used, we believe that the concept of spaces of sociability is a necessary addition to the understanding of urban spaces. Corley mentions that young women tended to remain close to their home, ‘but that they too used the streets and squares around their homes to foster and preserve their own identities and reputations’.40 The distinction between the private house and the streets as thoroughfares and spaces of sociability is made according to the individual’s practice of these environments. The street has to be considered as an open space where the victim or offender is only passing (except if his testimony says the contrary); it is a space used to go from one place to another, a transitional and liminal space. It is also a place where people could get robbed by unknown offenders. However, the street is not a clear separation between private and public, nor is it the epitome of the public sphere; the street could spill into the domestic sphere and vice versa. A street, or a section of the street, can become a space of sociability, as distinct from a transitional space. The definition of space of sociability 158

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resides in the way certain places were used or practiced; a space of sociability is a place where people stop, meet and share a certain amount of time together. In this sense, the built environment of the street (portico, pavement) can also become a space of sociability, for instance, when men sat down to drink and play cards. These places are polymorphous in nature, in the sense that they can become spaces to share ‘private moments’ while remaining open to the gaze and moral judgment of the surrounding crowd (passers-by, other customers in an osteria, parishioners). Certain places switched attributes according to the time of the day or gender of the user; for instance, the church could be used as a neutral geographical reference point in testimonies when going from one place to another, but it became a space of sociability just after mass, when parishioners congregated outside its doors after the service. Similarly, the public garden could be either a transitional space, crossed by the domestic servant going to work; or a space of sociability where people met and greeted. It was the latter in August 1823, when Camillo Bussi and his wife Barbara Bazzani met Fransisco Barbieri in the public garden and sat down for a chat.41 After an hour or so, Barbara Bazzani decided to go home; it was two hours after the Ave Maria, so already relatively dark and late. Her husband went to get his cart to take them home, but while coming towards his wife, the cart toppled over a stump onto the woman and broke her leg. Her screams of pain attracted a soldier at the gate. Seeing the woman’s broken leg, he decided to take her to the hospital and arrested the husband, despite the pleas of the wife, who claimed that it was an accident. This example illustrates the difference between the street space as a thoroughfare and a space of sociability. In a space of sociability, people are using an open (or semi-open) place for private matters, and these places can be multi-form, in the sense that they can be completely open, public and transitional and can become more enclosed and private according to the way people use them. Looking at the court proceedings in the early modern period again, from the perspective of the uses of spaces in terms of sociability, suggests that for many female victims, the conflicts occurred not in but rather at the doorsteps of their homes (56 per cent) – on the threshold, as noticed by Corley in Dijon.42 Most homes in the city of Bologna were located in a kind of apartment block with shared passageways and a communal courtyard separated from the street by a large, shared door. The spaces around the apartments or rooms the Bolognese inhabited were not open, like the street, but they were not entirely private either. It is in these in-between spaces of courtyards and indoor passageways where women gathered, where small talk was made and where conflict occurred. Cattarina Alonissi was hit in the face by her neighbour Maria in one of those shared spaces because Maria had seen her son Giorgio talking to Cattarina and had feared sexual transgressions.43 Homes could also function as sites of sociability, as shown by the court records, where disorderly behaviour, loud music and abundant alcohol preluded violent outbursts. In 1755 during a ‘house-party’, Anna Grilli, a weaver by trade, nicknamed La diavoletta (the little devil), threw a pair of scissors into the face of one of her male party guests when he admonished the ladies’ drunken behaviour.44 Other places of sociability included the church, where before, during or after the day mass, people met each other. This occasionally led to violent offences over seating precedence or due to other earlier, unsettled conflicts. What appears most interesting in the use of places by men and women is that women invariably portrayed the street as a thoroughfare rather than a space of sociability, even during the day. They reported walking from and to certain places during the day and evening, particularly to and from mass, but they did not appear to congregate there with their friends, as men would do. The picture is somewhat different for men, especially in their use of the street. On many occasions, male victims also reported that they had been on their way home, to work or to church at the time of the offence, but there are also other instances where they indicated that they were in the street for social gatherings. They reported having become the victims of vio159

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lence while ­sitting on benches under the porticos, playing cards, watching puppet plays on the piazza, playing games or drinking in and around the taverns or the city gates throughout the day and evening. In the early modern city of Bologna, the tavern, the streets and the piazzas around the city were important social sites where male victims reported to have been assaulted. This compares very well with the nineteenth century, where, in terms of spaces of sociability, the tavern was the most likely setting for a fight to occur. As junctions in everyday social interactions, communication and identity formation, they were also contested spaces and formed opportune sites of violence, be it for alcohol-fuelled brawling over game winnings or losses, insults to honour, the settlement of outstanding debts or encounters with rivals in love.45 A street or a shop can likewise become a space of contestation because of its public attributes; the case of Elisa Borgia and Clementina Melotti, next-door neighbours at Piazza d’Armi (now Piazza VIII Augusto), numbers 2125 and 2126, provides an example of this escalating violence.46 Clementina lent some clothes to Elisa for Carnival in 1863, at a price of 1 scudo per day; however, Elisa never paid back the money or returned the clothes to Clementina. The latter, seeing her neighbour in her bottega (shop), a few streets away from where they were living, went to confront her about the clothes. It was just near the Ave Maria, around 5.30 p.m., that Elisa first taunted her and told her to come in if she had something to say. She (Elisa) then screamed back at her and forced her to leave her shop, while shouting insults. She followed Clementina to her home, continuing to insult her in front of everyone in the street, and hit her on the head. This display of violence in a public space was not unusual for men or women. Margaret Hunt has shown that early-modern domestic violence in London was displayed in public space and acted out for ‘an audience’.47 However, this behaviour was not limited to cases of domestic disputes. In the case of Elisa and Clementina, the need to act in front of an audience, possibly to get approval from the passers-by, is shown by Clementina’s decision to go to the bottega. Whereas they were next-door neighbours, Clementina chose to confront Elisa in the shop, in front of her customers (there was at least one other woman present according to the witnesses’ testimonies). Thus, the importance of these spaces of sociability means that people were more easily subjected to the public gaze while dealing with private matters, and they were therefore in a situation where conflicts over codes of behaviours and practices of the place could arise more frequently because more people shared these places.The importance of public moral judgement shines under a new light in these spaces of sociability: the man or woman insulted felt the need to repair his or her honour in front of the other people gathered, and this often led to violent behaviour. While both men and women reported insults that took place in the streets or in places of sociability to a similar extent, reports were made far less often of insults in the victims’ or offenders’ houses. Losing face in front of a crowd was much more humiliating than behind the walls of one’s home.48 As such, the gendered practice of these places appears now very similar between men and women. Even if women tended to be violent closer to home, the aims they displayed by being outside, close to the gaze, judgement and interactions of passers-by, suggest motives similar to male offenders.Violent behaviour was encouraged by its own publicity. Consequently, rather than underlining the proximity of home in female violence, historians should turn their focus to the practice of spaces of sociability and what the users, here violent men and women, aimed to achieve by making them into spaces of confrontation.

Conclusion This chapter started by highlighting the necessity in historical research on urban space to combine time and space in a gendered approach. It also questioned the common emphasis on violent acts committed in the street, at night or by strangers. Be it in the early modern period or the 160

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nineteenth century, the focus must be reset on these spaces of sociability, which allowed the interaction of neighbours and passers-by, rather than on the imagined dangerousness of the dark streets.Throughout the early modern period and the nineteenth century, both men and women continued to use these spaces to get support in their fights (verbal or physical) or were pushed into confrontation because of the public nature of certain spaces. The binary divide between public and private, denounced by Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne,49 among others, and commonly referred to when studying the position of men and women in past societies, is again weakened by this gendered study of past violence. While the presence of men and women can be traced throughout the city, there seem to have been some gender differences in the geography of violence that, at least to some extent, spring from different patterns of sociability. First, gendered expectations and city regulations about the appropriateness of being at a certain place at a certain time, actively reinforced by policemen in the early modern period, did limit women’s mobility at night, and this is reflected in the limited presence of women in the court records. Secondly, there seem to have been different patterns of sociability for men and women according to space and time. A close examination often suggests that violence arose from earlier conflicts related to social life. Old and newer grievances could be settled through premeditated attacks in or around the house, but they could also spring forth from more random encounters in the streets and taverns. The court proceedings suggest that women’s social life centred on the immediate neighbourhood around the house, whereas men were more active in the various streets, piazzas and taverns. Thirdly, the geography of violence is gendered in a more diverse way than the binary divide between public and private suggests. The Bolognese apartment was the site of a lot of female violence, but it cannot be categorized as either private or domestic. Other people outside the household, such as neighbours and sometimes guests, were involved either as assailants, as interferers or as mere spectators. The comparison over time of the gendered spaces of violence suggests a relative continuity in the use of these spaces; the prevalence of women around the house or in the vicinity of their place of abode during the day shows a certain withdrawal of men in the daytime from their home, most likely linked with gendered working practices.50 However, even if women often remained in their parishes, they were not confined to the private domain: they interacted with the crowd and sometimes acted out their disagreements in a bid to find approval from the passers-by. Similarly, the irruption of the outside crowd into private matters shows how, despite the increasing influence of the Victorian model of domesticity and privacy, few barriers prevented women from venting their grievances.

Notes 1 Zoe Alker, ‘Street violence in mid-Victorian Liverpool’ (PhD diss., Liverpool John Moores University, 2013); Kallum Dhillon, ‘Locating crime and criminality in Edwardian London: A GIS-based approach’ (PhD diss., University College London, 2014). 2 Gerd Schwerhoff, ‘Spaces, places, and the historians: A comment from a German perspective,’ History and Theory 52 (2013): 420–32, 423. 3 Dennis Romano, ‘Gender and the urban geography of Renaissance Venice,’ Journal of Social History 23, 2 (1989): 339–53. 4 Amanda Vickery, ‘golden age to separate spheres? a review of the categories and chronology of english women’s history,’ The Historical Journal 36 (1993): 383–414, 383; Elizabeth Cohen, ‘To Pray, to work, to hear, to speak.Women in Roman streets, c. 1600,’ Journal of Early Modern History 12 (2008): 289–311, 294; Anne Jacobsen Schutte, ‘Society and the sexes in the Venetian Republic,’ in A Companion to Venetian History, 1400–1797, ed. Eric Dursteler (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 354–77, 363; Robert C. Davis, ‘The geography of gender in the Renaissance,’ in Gender and Society in Renaissance Italy, ed. Judith C. Brown and Robert C. Davis (London and New York: Longman, 1998), 19–38.

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Sanne Muurling and Marion Pluskota  5 Pieter Spierenburg, ed., Men and Violence, Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe and America (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 17; Martin Wiener, ‘The Victorian criminalization of men,’ in Men and Violence, Gender, Honor and Rituals in Modern Europe and America, ed. Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), 197–213, 207; Daniele Boschi, ‘Knife Fighting in Rome, 1845–1914,’ ibid., 128–58, 144.   6 Garthine Walker, Crime, Gender and Social Order in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 33, 37, 76; Christopher Corley, ‘On the threshold: Youth as arbiters of the urban space,’ Journal of Social History 43, 1 (2009): 139–56, 144.   7 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 117.   8 John C. Wood, ‘Locating violence: The spatial production and construction of physical aggression,’ in Assaulting the Past:Violence and Civilization in Historical Context, ed. Katherine Watson (Newcastle-uponTyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 20–37, 23.   9 Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson, ‘Social change and crime rate trends: A routine activity approach,’ American Sociological Review 44, 4 (1979): 588–608. 10 George Kelling and James Wilson, ‘Broken windows: The police and neighborhood safety,’ The Atlantic (1982), accessed 18 Aug. 2015, http://www.manhattan-institute.org/pdf/_atlantic_monthly-broken_ windows.pdf. 11 David Garrioch, Neighbourhood and Community in Paris, 1740–1790 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 43; Corley, ‘On the threshold,’ 150. 12 Wood, ‘Locating violence,’ 30–31. 13 Giancarlo Angelozzi and Cesarina Casanova, La giustizia criminale in una città di antico regime. Il tribunale del Torrone di Bologna (secc. XVI–XVII) (Bologna: CLUEB, 2008), 51–52. 14 Steven Hughes, ‘Fear and loathing in Bologna and Rome: The papal police in perspective,’ Journal of Social History 21, 1 (1987): 97–116. 15 Steven Hughes, ‘La continuità del personale della polizia negli anni dell’unificazione nazionale Italiana,’ Clio 26 (1990): 337–64. 16 Archivio di Stato di Bologna [hereafter ASBO], Tribunale Civile e Criminale, 1816–1903. 17 Information on their whereabouts and the time of the crime are, however, available only for 37 of them. 18 Manuel Eisner,‘Long-term historical trends in violent crime,’ Crime and Justice 30 (2003): 83–142, 99, 102. 19 Cesarina Casanova, Don Antonio e i suoi giudici. Storie criminali fra foro laico e foro ecclesiastico (Bologna, fine XVII-metà –XVIII secolo) (Bologna: CLUEB, 2009), 3. 20 Giovanni Galdi, ‘Verifiche storiche e costanti territoriali della criminalità ottocentesca bolognese,’ in Criminalità e Controllo Sociale a Bologna nell’Ottocento, ed. Giovanni Greco (Bologna: Pàtron, 1998), 21–36, 27. 21 Aldo Berselli and Angelo Varni, Bologna in età contemporanea, 1796–1914 (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2011), 442. 22 Berselli and Varni, Bologna in età contemporanea, 440–43; Clive Emsley, Crime, Police and Penal Policy: European Experiences, 1750–1940 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 23 Galdi, ‘Verifiche storiche e costanti territoriali della criminalità,’ 30. 24 Donato d’Urso, ‘La sicurezza pubblica a Bologna nei primi anni unitari,’ in Poliziotti d’Italia tra cronaca e storia prima e dopo l’unita, ed. Raffaele Camposano (Roma: Ufficio storico della Polizia di Stato, 2013), 79–94, 82. 25 Galdi, ‘Verifiche storiche e costanti territoriali della criminalità,’ 35. 26 Ibid., 36. 27 Fondazione Neri Museo Italiano della Ghisa, Le origini dell’illuminazione pubblica in Italia, 1, accessed 29 May 2015 http://www.museoitalianoghisa.org/documenti/Illuminazione-Italia-IT.pdf. 28 John M. Beattie, Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750: Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2001), 169, 184–90; Elisabeth Crouzet-Pavan,‘Potere politico e spazio sociale. Il controle della notte a Venezia nei secoli XIII–XV,’ in La notte. Ordine, sicurezza e disciplinamento in età moderna, ed. Mario Sbriccoli (Firenze: Ponte alle grazie, 1991), 46–66, 52; Luigi Lacchè, ‘Loca occulta. Dimensioni notturne e legittima difesa per un paradigm del diritto di punire,’ ibid., 127–40, 121. 29 Mario Sbriccoli, ‘Nox quia nocet. I giuristi, l’ordine e la normalizzazione dell’immaginario,’ ibid., 9–22, 10–12. 30 Cohen, ‘To Pray, to work, to hear, to speak,’ 303. 31 Trevor Dean, Crime and Justice in Late Medieval Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 172. 32 Elizabeth Cohen and Thomas Cohen, Daily Life in Renaissance Italy (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2001), 164.

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The Gendered Geography of Violence in Bologna 33 Danilo di Diodoro, Guiseppe Ferrari and Paolo Pasini, ‘L’osteria, la prigione, il manicomio: un ­biroccaiaio del XIX secolo,’ Rivista di Storia Contemporanea 14, 2 (1985): 275–88; Patricia Morgan, ‘Industrialization, urbanization and the attack on Italian drinking culture,’ Contemporary Drug Problems Winter (1988): 607–26, 612–13; Patrick Garfinkel, ‘In vino veritas, the construction of alcoholic disease in liberal Italy, 1876–1914,’ in A Social and Cultural History of Alcohol, ed. Mack Holt (New York: Berg, 2006), 61–79, 66. 34 Shani D’Cruze, ‘Sex, violence and local courts: Working-class respectability in a mid-nineteenth-­ century Lancashire Town,’ British Journal of Criminology 39 (1999): 39–55; Perry Willson, ed., Gender, Family and Sexuality: The Private Sphere in Italy, 1860–1945 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 3–4. 35 Sara Delmedico, Breve studio sulla condizione giuridica della donna nello Stato Pontifico dell’Ottocento (Urbino: Sara Delmedico, 2014), 38–40. 36 Cesarina Casanova, ‘Polizia e disordini nelle famiglie a Bologna nella prima metà del XIX secolo,’ Storicamente 8, 11 (2012), accessed 18 Aug. 2015, http://storicamente.org/casanova_1, DOI: 10.1473/ stor413. 37 Giancarlo Angelozzi, ‘Genitori, figli, polizia a Bologna nell’età della Restaurazione,’ Storicamente, 8–11 (2012), accessed 18 Aug. 2015, http://storicamente.org/angelozzi, DOI: 10.1473/stor414. 38 Martin Ingram, ‘Charivari and shame punishments: Folk justice and state justice in early modern England,’ in Social Control Europe, Volume 1: 1500–1800, ed. Herman Roodenburg and Pieter Spierenburg (Columbus: Ohio State University Press: 2004), 288–308. 39 ASBO, Tribunale Civile e Criminale, Busta 3033–1833. 40 Corley, ‘On the threshold,’ 151. 41 ASBO, Tribunale Civile e Criminale, Busta 8585–1823. 42 Corley, ‘On the threshold,’ 149. 43 ASBO, Torrone, Busta 7608–1, fol.195. 44 ASBO, Torrone, Busta 8175–1, fol.7. 45 Fabrizio Nevola, ‘Street life in early modern Europe,’ Renaissance Quarterly 66, 4 (2013): 1332–45, 1337. 46 ASBO, Tribunale Civile e Criminale, Busta 2900–1863. 47 Margaret Hunt, ‘Wife beating, domesticity and women’s independence in eighteenth-century London,’ Gender and History 4 (1992): 10–33, 23. 48 Corley, ‘On the threshold,’ 150. 49 Beat Kümin and Cornelie Usborne, ‘At home and in the workplace: A historical introduction to the ‘spatial turn,’ History and Theory 52 (2013): 305–18, 317. 50 Alberto Guenzi, ‘L’identità industrial di una città e del suo territorio,’ in Storia di Bologna nell’età moderna (secoli XVI–XVIII):Volume 1, ed.Adriano Prosperi (Bologna: Bononia University Press, 2008), 449–524, 507.

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Part III

Civic Identity and Political Culture Introduction Nina Javette Koefoed

From independent Italian city-states to northern European royal boroughs, towns have been the political centres of Europe. With the city wall not only as a marker of defence but also serving to delimit the extent of the town’s own legislation and political institutions, European towns were intense political places with specific political cultures and civic identities.1 Political institutions, political culture and forms of political influence operate within a wide spread of variation, but belonging to the town in different ways has been a prerequisite to rights, resources and influence. This part of the handbook investigates the different gendered ways in which this belonging has been negotiated, created, demanded and used. Through this, it explores different political cultures connecting to formal or informal political institutions, spaces and means of influence. Distinguishing between citizen and the other was a characteristic of the town long before formal political rights became an issue on a national level. Often, studies in political culture and citizenship have focused on the national level and on parliamentary suffrage in the nineteenth century.This movement is still important, but prior to the national state, citizens enjoyed, claimed and fought for citizenship and the rights of belonging in towns. Gendered dynamics were different in towns, with women more often able to claim a range of civic rights.2 Likewise, forms and definitions of local citizenship influenced possibilities for national political participation as shown by Åsa Karlsson Sjögren, who in her contribution discusses how the criteria for female suffrage and political participation in towns interacted with national suffrage. Citizenship has often been studied as a relation between rights and duties; possessing ­certain rights followed the fulfilling of certain duties towards society. T. H. Marshall’s definition of citizenship as made up by civil, political and social rights has been influential in this respect by both defining and broadening the rights of citizenship, but it has also been challenged.3 Gender studies have not only criticized Marshall for being gender blind in his approach to citizenship but have also developed a concept of citizenship as a less formal, more agent-oriented analytical category through the idea of active citizenship.4 Gender studies has thus shown how women’s participation in political and societal life not only gave them political influence without the formal recognition of citizenship and the rights and status granted with it, but also how this political agency was part of paving the way to formal political rights.5 Focusing on agency and active citizenship brought new attention to the local citizen and political life in towns, as women’s active citizenship was often practiced here. The suffrage

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­ ovement was thus closely connected to women’s philanthropic work addressing poverty, sick m relief and education on a local level. Female qualifications, both natural and acquired, within this field thus became an argument for female suffrage.6 Through the story of Eliza Fletcher and her daughter Grace, Jane Rendall investigates women’s work in the voluntary societies of Edinburgh during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and addresses the question of the connection between women’s social and public role and their political significance. Rendall not only demonstrates how women were part of a movement of religiously inspired associations as their work within education and poor relief was strongly influenced by Protestant Christianity, but also how the associations addressed the social problems and political questions of the growing town.Through this, she shows not only how women’s engagement with philanthropic work became a civic duty for women of certain classes but also how their work and engagement had to be gendered in order to be appropriate. The definition of political has been subject to intense debates within women’s history and gender studies. Challenging the perception of politics as only taking place in formal political institutions and only concerning high politics with such statements as ‘the private is political’, gender studies has played an important role in not only widening the definition of politics, but also of the understanding of political processes, political arenas and not least of political actions. By pointing at political processes taking place outside the official institution, gender research has contributed to a new understanding of politics and court in early modern history in which sociability and access to persons and places plays a much stronger role, leaving women to play a far more central political role than assumed.7 Habermas’ division between public and private has been challenged especially by early ­modern scholars emphasizing the political importance of social life in court, saloons and other semi-private places. My Hellsing addresses the political implications of the sociability taking place in different public and private leisure spaces in late eighteenth-century Stockholm in Sweden, discussing the different roles men and women played in political sociability and how different spaces could be accessed and used by newcomers. Hellsing points not only to the still significant position high-ranking women connected to the court had in political culture, even though this had moved from court to more commercial leisure spaces, but also to a possible masculinization of the political culture beginning through the establishing of the gentleman’s club. This meant, amongst other things, that newcomers to the city had a place to go without the formal introduction or invitation often mediated through high-ranking women. The cases also highlight the restrictions placed on women’s participation in the political sociability, being most dominant in domestic or demarcated spaces like boxes in the theatre. The combination of political, understood in a much broader sense, and the concept of active citizenship influenced the study of civic identity and political culture in towns. Often, the history of citizens has been a history of men and their possibility to possess citizenship. Women’s history has long argued that women were capable of acting economically independently.8 In her contribution, Sarah Rees Jones documents how women’s access to retail business in medieval York also gave them a position as citizens. By addressing the invisibility of women in the Register of the Freemen, Rees Jones is able to explain the dark figures and thereby give perspective to the problems of the sources when trying to place women in this history. Citizenship was not an individual right in medieval York but the right of the head of household. As women could be householders, they could also obtain citizenship, but it was mostly widows who did, and even though they enjoyed economic benefits and had financial obligations, they were not able to hold official offices and had no political privileges. Rees Jones thus also shows how different men and women made their way into citizenship and in what conditions and discusses how citizenship developed through the Middle Ages. 166

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Nonetheless, women’s history has not paid much attention to the fact that only some men had the possibility to become citizens. However, groups of men were also excluded from the status as citizens and from formal citizenship through their gender and class.9 In her contribution, Eleonora Canepari investigates how men who were not heads of households and consequently did not have access to citizenship nevertheless acted as citizens in order to secure themselves in sixteenth and seventeenth-century Italian towns, especially Rome. Boys, a term not related to age, but covering those who worked for someone else, did form their own guilds, mirroring the master’s guilds, and thus created a civic identity and a social bond of belonging even when employed in rather unstable businesses. In this way, they not only managed to create a civic identity of belonging to the town in spite of their lack of marriage and ownership and thus of full masculinity, but they also provided themselves with social security and access to the resources of the town. Inspired by the concept of the act of citizenship, developed by Engin F. Isin, Canepari approaches citizenship as right to the city rather than a legal status, showing how the use of the urban space through boy’s guilds as a performance of citizenship also contributed to their claim of belonging.10 Just as not all men enjoyed full citizenship, some women did have political rights. Åsa K ­ arlsson Sjögren focuses on formal routes to women’s political influence through an investigation of voting practices and female experiences of voting in Swedish towns from the eighteenth century until 1921, when women gained suffrage. She shows how women, when recognized as head of households, were sometimes able to vote in elections of clergy, chief magistrates and city court judges or even in national elections. Her chapter also shows how unstable this female position as voter was depending on different qualifications that were required for political influence in different elections, like ownership, taxpaying or membership of an estate. The movement for female and universal suffrage around the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century has to some extent created a story of women as being totally excluded from political rights and citizenship and men being included. This has made us overlook both the men excluded, as shown in Canepari’s contribution; and the women included in different ways and degrees, as addressed by both Rees Jones and Karlsson Sjögren. It is important to pay attention to the shift from a political system based on households, with political rights granted to the head of households until the eighteenth century, excluding some men and including some women, to a masculine political citizenship developing in the nineteenth century, to a much larger extent excluding women.This masculinization becomes clear in the examples of Karlsson Sjögren, showing a gradual development of gendered binaries putting women into the passive and non-political sphere. At the same time, the women’s movement and the fight for universal suffrage changed the understanding of women’s vote, and the demand changed from women being able to vote as head of households to a universal demand for female suffrage. It also, interestingly, changed the debate on male suffrage as well.The women’s movement also made it clear that suffrage might not be the most important right connected to citizenship. Women’s rights to education, professional occupation and their legal capacity seemed to have been much more relevant to fight for in the early phase of the women’s movement. Civil status was amongst the factors including some women in citizenship and excluding some men, but so was social class. Often, the right to vote depended on either ownership or paying taxes. In his chapter, Niels Nyegaard examines how the status of two respectable middle-class men, representing the ideal citizen, was both challenged and defended throughout a homosexual scandal in Copenhagen at the beginning of the twentieth century. Through an analysis of how it became crucial for men accused of buying sex from homosexual prostitutes to inhabit the qualifications of an ideal citizen, his contribution shows citizenship as very much a question of being able to perform the right civic identity. The contribution also reveals the sexual character 167

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of the citizen as being a heterosexual man and family father and, through the defence of the homosexual man, taking the first step towards a fight for sexual citizenship. Together, the contributions in this section address the variety and flexibility in the categories of civic identity, political culture and citizenship.The section underlines not only women’s presence in political life from the Middle Ages onwards but also its limits. Women could participate as head of households, as long as the political culture granted rights to the head of household instead of individuals. An individualization of the political culture, rights and participations thus also meant a masculinization. But even as head of households, women’s positions as citizens were more volatile and accidental and their political rights more limited than men fulfilling the same criteria. Civic identity stands out as a way to create belonging for both men and women, but one that was highly gendered. Men who were not head of households could, through guilds and other social, political organizations, perform a civic identity, which gave them some of the rights and status connected to being a citizen. Women seem to have been not only more dependent on their social and civil status in order to perform civic identity but also more limited in space and expression. Associations and philanthropy were one of the main arenas left for women to engage in social, political work in the transition from a household-based political culture when court and high rank slowly lost their influence through a masculinization into universal suffrage and individual political rights.

Notes  1 Christopher R. Friedrichs, Urban Politics in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2002); Barry M. Doyle, Urban Politics and Space in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Regional Perspectives (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009); Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Less, The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1994 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995).  2 Krista Cowman, Women in British Politics, c. 1689–1979 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2010); Åsa ­Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna och rösträtten. Medborgskap och representation 1723–1866 (­Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag, 2006). See also, Nina Koefoed, Åsa Karlsson Sjögren and Krista Cowman, eds, Gender in Urban Europe: Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship 1750–1900 (New York: Routledge, 2014).   3 T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950).   4 Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1997); Birte Siim, Gender and Citizenship: Politics and Agency in France, Britain and Denmark (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).   5 Christina Florin and Lars Kvarnström, ed, Kvinnor på gränsen till medborgarskap. Genus, politik och offentlighet 1800–1950 (Uppsala: Atlas Akademi 2001); Birgitta Jordansson and Tinne Vammen, ed, Charitable Women. Philanthropic Welfare 1780–1930 (Odense: Odense University Press 1998).  6 Cowman, Women in British Politics; Nina Javette Koefoed, “…formaalstjeneligt, at Kvinder og Mænd ogsaa stilles paa lige vilkaar med Hensyn til de politiske valg”. Kvindelig valgret i lyset af samfundsudviklingen og den parlamentariske situation i Danmark 1886–1915, in Historisk Tidsskrift 115, 2, (2015).   7 Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005).   8 See Part 1 in this volume.   9 See for example, Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland, Jane Rendall, eds, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and Keith McClelland, ‘Rational and respectable men: Gender and the working class, and citizenship in Britain, 1850–1867,’ in Gender and Class in Modern Europe, eds, Laura L. Frader and Sonya O. Rose (London: Cornell University Press, 1996), 280–93. Nina Javette Koefoed, ‘Maskulint medborgerskab. Politisk og deltagende medborgerskab i Danmark mellem 1849 og 1915,’ in Kari H. Nordberg, Hege Roll-Hansen, Erling Sandmo, Hilde Sandvik, eds, Myndighet og medborgerskap (Oslo: Novus forlag, 2015). 10 See also Part 2 and Lipsett-Rivera’s chapter in this volume.

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13 Women and Citizenship in Later Medieval York Sarah Rees Jones

Citizenship for women in later medieval towns was largely connected to their opportunities to develop retail businesses.While there was not always a formal bar on women becoming citizens, opportunities were limited by customary practices, particularly those that gave preference to men as husbands, as heads of households and as the holders of political office. The increasing association between these kinds of private and public male authority progressively restricted official female entrepreneurship to the private sphere.1 Thus most, but not all, women citizens were typically widows, were excluded from public office and were restricted to the temporary economic benefits and financial obligations of citizenship until they remarried or were replaced by an adult son.

Medieval York Throughout the later medieval period (c. 1300–1500),York was one of the largest retail centres in the north of England, and opportunities for female employment were high.2 The city of York was one of the largest cities in the kingdom of England, and its commercial culture was deeply rooted. By the later eleventh century, it was home to a large community of artisans and merchants and may have been the second largest city in England, with a total population perhaps half that of London’s. It was the administrative centre for both ecclesiastical and secular government in the north of England. After the Norman conquest, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the city was substantially redeveloped, its role as an administrative centre for royal government was much strengthened, two castles were constructed in the city centre and it was provided with a substantial circuit of stone defences. Similarly, its role as the see of one of two ecclesiastical provinces in England, the archdiocese of York, was reinforced; the cathedral church of York Minster was rebuilt; and many new religious houses were founded in the city. As a result, it attracted a diverse and relatively cosmopolitan population of residents and visitors, both clerical and secular, and it became an important centre of learning and cultural production, although it never developed a university in the medieval period. As a centre of overseas trade, via the Humber and, after c. 1275, through the port of Kingston-upon-Hull, it enjoyed strong connections with the towns of Flanders through the export of wool and later cloth, and it was host to merchants from as far as Italy.

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York played a central role as a royal administrative stronghold during the wars between England and Scotland, and this role was particularly important in the decades between 1298 and 1336, when the city probably reached the peak of its population in the medieval period at around 22,000 (compared to c. 75,000 in London). Thereafter, York remained an important regional centre, but London resumed its central importance as the royal capital, and over the remainder of the Middle Ages, London merchants would gradually encroach upon York’s overseas markets. The Black Death in 1349 and repeated epidemic diseases thereafter were a substantial blow from which the city’s population never fully recovered, and by 1500 it was perhaps home to no more than 8000 residents. Although the city was much smaller than earlier, it continued to be an important centre for the administration of England’s largest county and for royal government in the north. It remained a prosperous centre for high quality retail goods and services, which sustained a relatively prosperous population of both resident and visiting professionals, clergy, merchants, farmers and gentry, even though new urban centres in the north, such as Newcastle-upon-Tyne, increasingly also catered for such regional business by the fifteenth century. Throughout the later medieval period, therefore, c.1300–1500, demand for consumer goods and services remained strong, particularly in the victualing, clothing and hospitality industries; in professional services such as the law and education; and in more specialised crafts such as construction and stained-glass manufacture. The patterns of female citizenship discussed below reflect this healthy retail market. By contrast, demand for goods for export, such as cloth, rose and fell over the period in response to changing markets and the ability of York merchants to remain in control of them. Similarly, the market for arms and armour fluctuated depending largely on England’s relationships with Scotland. Women citizens, as we shall see, were also engaged in such wholesale trades and industries but in smaller numbers than those engaged in retail and services.

Freemen of York Lists of men, and some women, becoming citizens in York survive from c. 1272.3 Citizenship was a privileged status accorded to perhaps no more than one quarter of the adult male population, and it conferred economic and political privileges and obligations.4 Citizens enjoyed privileges in trading retail, in exemption from tolls, in the employment of apprentices and in participation in elections and political meetings. Citizenship could be purchased, inherited or acquired through apprenticeship.5 The term citizen (civis) gradually replaced burgess from the later twelfth century, while later medieval records sometimes refer to insiders (intrinseci) and most commonly to men and women entering the franchises or liberties of the City of York. Hence, citizens of York were commonly referred to in English as ‘freemen’. The application and meaning of the terms changed over time. In the twelfth century, the free ownership of burgage land (known locally as haimald land) seems to have conferred citizenship. However, people who became citizens through the inheritance of such land were not entered into the lists of new freemen compiled from shortly after 1272. Indeed, many leading male citizens, including most of the fourteenth-century mayors and several other civic officials, are not included in the lists, which seem, initially, to have been confined to recording those who had purchased citizenship. A large proportion of those included in these early lists of freemen (and freewomen) were thus probably recent incomers. Resident freemen inheriting their membership of the franchise are substantially under recorded. Indeed, those inheriting citizenship do not seem to have been recorded until the later fourteenth century and then not systematically so until the 1420s at the earliest. When we do have such records, in the latter half of the fifteenth century, we find that half the

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Women and Citizenship in Medieval York Table 13.1  Admission of Women to the Franchise of York, 1272–1510 Decades

ALL women Per Patres

Decades

ALL women

Per Patres

1270–79 1280–89 1290–99 1300–09 1310–19 1320–29 1330–39 1340–49 1350–59 1360–69 1370–79 1380–89 1390–99

1 0 2 1 7 10 0 11 0 3 6 2 3

1400–09 1410–19 1420–29 1430–39 1440–49 1450–59 1460–69 1470–79 1480–89 1490–99 1500–09 ALL

0 9 5 25 14 5 12 9 9 3 7 144

1 1 10 6 3 8 6 4 3 6 48

Breakdown by century 1272–1400 1400–1510

46 98

48

women who became citizens did so by inheritance from their fathers (Table 13.1, Figure 13.1). This reinforces the impression that such female citizens were under recorded earlier. The main recorded routes to citizenship were by purchase and through guild membership. Such entrance was via the guild merchant (also known as the hansa) in the twelfth century and later, especially after 1312, through the membership of craft guilds. By 1500, a much wider range of crafts and also services were represented among freemen than in 1300.This may be because of the development of guilds as regulating institutions in partnership with civic government. And it may thus also be the case that becoming a freeman changed from being a privilege sought by the more mercantile crafts to becoming, by the fifteenth century, more of an obligation imposed on all employers. Swanson argued that the mercantile elite imposed this obligation on artisans in a bid to regulate and control trade in the city and in order to swell the coffers of the civic government. Entrants to the franchise paid for their membership, usually by instalments over several years.6 Not all entrants completed their payments, but a typical full entry fee by c. 1440 was £1, and all funds raised went to the civic government and represented one of their more important sources of income by the fifteenth century. There is no evidence that women paid a different rate from men, other than widows, who may have been considered simply to have assumed their husband’s status without record (see below). An alternative argument would emphasise the honour associated with citizenship, which gradually made it attractive to those who had little economic need of it. This might explain the numbers of clergy and gentry who began to join the franchise in the later fifteenth century. Most such entrants were men, although the entry of Lady Joan de Heselrigg, widow, in 1398–99 and of Lady Margaret Soureby in 1457–58 proves that women of the gentry were admissible. Other new mechanisms also widened entry to the franchise. Entrants via apprenticeship seem always to have been included in the lists, but they were separately listed in the register for a few years after 1482, when new reduced rates of payment were introduced for some kinds of apprentice entrants to the liberty, who enjoyed slightly reduced privileges. Entry via apprenticeship was a more difficult route for women, who rarely benefitted from formal apprenticeship, and none are listed as gaining citizenship via apprenticeships. As many historians have noted, the rise of guild organisations, which privileged male members and perpetuated patriarchal household forms of service, did not aid the social advancement of economically independent women.7

171

Figure 13.1  All Women Admitted to the Franchise of the City of York. (Same data as in Table 13.1).

0

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

1272-3 1277-8 1291-2 1297-8 1302-3 1307-8 1312-3 1317-8 1322-3 1327-8 1332-3 1337-8 1342-3 1347-8 1352-3 1357-8 1362-3 1367-8 1372-3 1377-8 1382-3 1387-8 1392-3 1397-8 1401-2 1406-7 1411-2 1416-7 1421-2 1426-7 1431-2 1436-7 1441-2 1446-7 1451-2 1456-7 1461-2 1466-7 1471-2 1476-7 1481-2 1486-7 1491-2 1496-7 1501-2 1506-7

Per Patres

Women

Women and Citizenship in Medieval York

Female freemen and marital status Although there was no bar on female citizenship, the number of recorded women citizens was very small. Between 1272 and 1510, 192 women were included in the lists of new freemen, of which 46 were registered before 1400 and 145 afterwards, including 48 who acquired the franchise by inheritance (per patres) (see Table 13.1 and Figure 13.1.)8 As the franchise expanded in the fifteenth century to encompass a wider range of crafts and services, it therefore seems that roughly twice as many women were admitted to the franchise, and in addition, the new practice of recording per patres entrants swelled their numbers. However, over the whole period, women represented just 1.3 per cent of all recorded entrants (14,772).9 This proportion scarcely changed even as more women were admitted in the fifteenth century; the average percentage of female entrants, even when based only on those years when some were admitted, still only rose to 1.5 per cent (Table 13.2).10 Although the numbers were small, this was, nevertheless, more than in some other English towns, such as Norwich or Exeter. Indeed, only four women are recorded as becoming freemen in medieval Norwich, while in Exeter there was a bar on female members, although a small number of widows were admitted for the duration of their widowhood.11 Indeed, in York also, the lack of women in lists of freemen can be explained by the assumption that citizenship was not an individual right but a privilege accorded to a man as head of household; his economic status encompassed his household dependents (wives, children and servants), and most heads of household were male. The very development of official lists of freemen over the later Middle Ages could even be interpreted as entrenching this assumption. In addition, many women acting as citizens were invisible in the records. Since the freemen’s lists primarily include only those who paid for admission, and many of them were incomers to the city, many resident widows succeeded their husbands in enjoying the economic benefits of citizenship, including the training of apprentices, without any further record being made. Indeed, by the sixteenth century, it was the custom that ‘after the death of enfranchised men of the City then their wives [are] to be free as their husbands were so long as they keep themselves unmarried’.12 On the basis of this custom, Barrie Dobson suggested that many of the freewomen listed were also in fact widows, but he gives no evidence for this argument. It must remain a supposition and may well not be true.13 Given the frequency of common surnames, it has proved impossible to confirm his suggestion from the evidence of the register alone, but there are certainly many cases where no plausible husband can be found earlier in the lists for named women entrants, whether designated as a widow or not. It therefore seems more likely that the women listed represented new entrants, not successors to their husbands (who needed no record). This may be why only a tiny number of widows are explicitly identified as such in the register: there is ‘Agnes de Stamford, quae fuit uxor W. Bough’, who was admitted in 1340–41, and just another seven widows admitted between 1422 and 1500. Why their status is, exceptionally, mentioned is not clear, unless they too were incomers or buying entry to the freedom that their husband had never purchased. Such widows may not have run their family businesses for long, however, being expected either to remarry or to pass control to adult sons in due course. No sons of freewomen are ever listed in the register. Control passed to them silently. Women were thus much more rarely listed as new citizens than men, and many of those who were registered may have been newcomers to the city. Overall, the figures substantially underestimate the numbers of women acting as heads of household in running businesses, whether jointly with husbands and parents or independently. A few female entrants were designated ‘singlewomen’. One possibility is that this meant that they were designated as femme sole, which signified that they were temporarily permitted to act legally and economically as if they were 173

Table 13.2 York Freemen’s Register: Admissions of New Freemen 1300–1500, showing female entrants as a percentage (Sample: one in every five years) All new Freemen, totals Merged totals 1300-012 1305-06 1310-11 1315-16 1320-21 1325-26 1330-31 1335-36 1340-41

29 64 51 33 42 22 28 91 61

29 64 51 33 42 22 28 91 61

1345-46 1350-51 1355-56 1360-61 1365-66

55 67 72 71 153

1370-71 1375-63

Women %

Details

0

0

1

1.96 Elena de Angrom

1

Agnes de Stamford, quae fuit uxor W. Bough

55 67 72 71 153

1

98 77

98 77

1 1

1380-81 1385-6 1390-91 1395-6 1400-01 1405-6 1410-11 1415-16 1420-21 1425-6

97 132 115 121 51 22 65 88 85 123

99 132 115 121 54 22 76 102 107 138

1

Ameria de Feteplace, piscarius [sic] Christiana de Lydell Alicia de Midellton, clathseller Margareta de Beuham

1430-31 1435-6 1440-41 Per patres

73 42 114

88 60 128

1445-6 1450-51 1455-6 1460-61 Per patres

95 58 54 62 10

112 70 57 72

1465-6

69

76

1

1470-71

80

92

1

Per patres1

2

3

1 2

1 1 1 1

Johanna Spofford 1.45 Mariona Hill, chapwoman. Emma Clerk, chapwoman Alice Lygeard Alicia Hewlot Alice Alison, semester Juliana Fosse, filia Johanni Fosse, potter

11 14 22 15

15 18 14 17 12 3

1

Isata, filia Thomae Tapiter, semester Sicillia Beilby et Joh. Watson, walker Margareta Rede, semester

7 12

Women and Citizenship in Medieval York Table 13.2 Continued All new Freemen, totals Merged totals

Women %

1475-6

53

61

1

1480-81 1485-6

44 15 32

54 63

1

Margareta Yarom, chapwoman, filia Roberti Yarom, merchaunt Agnes Wodwerd, brewer

56

1495-6 Per patres

64

1500-01 Totals

51 3112

Per patres1 8

10

freemen admitted by apprenticeship with lower entry fine Johanna Marshall, filius (sic) 16 Johannis Marshall, parish clerc

1

1490-91

Details

69 1

Alicia Philip, singlewoman, 13 filia Johannis Philip, stevenour

1

Johanna Brokholez, singlewoman et sempster, filia Johannis Brokholez, bower

71

59 3112

7

8 21

0.67

Freemen admitted by inheritance from their fathers. Until 1375 accounting years began 29 September. 3 From 1375-6 accounting years ran from 3 February. 1 2

a male independent trader. However, the term singlewoman appears only late and was used for a short period in the York records. Its appearance coincides with the temporary introduction of new forms of entry for male apprentices at reduced rates and with restricted privileges.14 All the women admitted as singlewomen did so by inheritance from their fathers (per patres) between 1482 and 1495: Agnes Hall, Isabella Bryniet, Johanna Armorer, Alicia Philip and Johanna Brokholez. Their access to the freedom was perhaps the female equivalent to apprenticeship, albeit their training was completed within their father’s households. The occupation of most of these singlewomen is not given, though it seems certain that Johanna Armorer followed her father’s given occupation of armorer, while in contrast Johanna Brokholez was identified as a seamstress and her father a bower. Their appearance and that of other women admitted per patres confirms the impression that not all female citizens in York were widows. But most often the status of recorded women entrants was not stated, leaving the reason for their admission uncertain. In general, the bias against women therefore did not arise from the legal definition of citizenship, nor from lack of access to employment or property, but from the patriarchal customs associated with the creation and management of conjugal households and workshops and their standing at law, in which married women and daughters would typically be represented by their husbands and fathers. One exception to this, before 1290, were Jewish wives, who more often managed businesses on behalf of their husbands or adult sons, but no Jews are listed among the citizens of York in the few surviving lists from that period.15 175

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Occupations Although women became citizens, there is no indication that they ever enjoyed the political privileges associated with that status. None of the middling to higher-ranking civic officials of later medieval York were women, and references to other freemen participating in political meetings in the city’s town hall, the Guild Hall, are exclusively male.16 Even the recorded witnesses to transactions of property in the city were always male.17 Without doubt, holding public office, especially any kind of elected public office, was a male preserve, and even though wives and widows were permitted to supervise and train apprentices, they did so generally as householders, not as guild officials. One exception was Marion Kent, widowed in 1468, who sat on the council of the mercer’s guild in 1474–75.18 The benefits of entering the franchise for women were therefore solely economic in providing them with a privileged status to trade retail and to share in the other trading privileges of citizens. Occupations are recorded for only 79 of the 192 female entrants (Table 13.2). The majority, as might be expected, engaged in the retail trade. Some women did flourish in trades that were predominantly gendered male. There was one merchant, one mercer, one spicer and one vintner, all high-status trades in that they were the trades typically pursued by the higher civic elite, for example. But most women citizens were in trades that were accorded a lower status even though they were essential to normal everyday commercial transactions among residents and visitors alike. These were more typically, if not exclusively, gendered female: chapwomen, upholders (vendors of second-hand goods), hucksters, cloth sellers and brewsters.19 Most of these terms indicated petty traders, dealing in a wide variety of consumer goods, ­sometimes from shops and sometimes in the streets. At the upper end, their wares may have overlapped with those of merchants, mercers and spicers, but they perhaps dealt in smaller quantities and may have sold house to house. Men as well as women followed such occupations, although the term ‘huckster’ was used exclusively of women in the York freemen lists. A similar pattern was found in the crafts. An extremely small number of women were identified as professing typically male skills. If the evidence of occupational surnames is acceptable, there was possibly one buckler, one mason and one fishmonger (Ameria de Feteplace, piscarius, 1365).20 In one unique case, in 1465–66, a woman, Sicillia Beilby, was admitted with a man, John Watson, as a walker (a fuller of cloth). Women gaining citizenship in a craft that was typically male may have been more likely among women who acquired the freedom by inheritance from their fathers, as in the case of Johanna Armorer mentioned above. Nevertheless, most female craft occupations, among all types of recorded entrants, were those that were more typically gendered female, such as needlecrafts,. These occupations included seamstress, spinster and capmaker, representing crafts that were essential to the production of a wide range of everyday commodities. Indeed, this may even explain the female armourers, who quite possibly were engaged in stitching leather armour. Having a father, in any kind of occupation, as a freeman may have been some kind of advantage in developing business skills. Five daughters admitted as chapwomen per patres between 1422 and 1482 had fathers who practiced diverse trades, such as skinner, baker, cordwainer and merchant, but all would have provided opportunities to learn the arts of buying and selling.

Change over time Although the lists of recorded female citizens are not, by any means, a full source of evidence for women who enjoyed such status, a complete analysis of the data, which has not been done before, does reveal some interesting patterns. The figure of less than 1.5 per cent for women admitted to the franchise was not chronologically even; there were fallow periods when no women at all 176

Women and Citizenship in Medieval York Table 13.3  All recorded occupations of female entrants to the franchise of the City of York Occupations

No.

Occupations

No.

(chapwoman+huckster+uphalder) chapwoman seamstress Uphalder1 widow brewster singlewoman cap maker spinster cloth seller huckster Domina

(22) 11 10 9 8 7 5 4 4 3 3 2

stringer ancilla (nuper) Buckler damysell mason? mercer merchant piscarius? silkwoman spicer vintner weaver

2 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

1

A vendor of second-hand goods or a maker of fabric furnishings

were admitted and decades when unusually large numbers were admitted. Similarly, recorded occupations for women changed over time. There was a cluster of new female entrants in the two decades between 1309 and 1330 (18 out of 46 admitted in the whole fourteenth century). This was a period of particularly rapid economic growth in York as the city served as an administrative centre for wars between England and Scotland, now usually referred to as the Scottish Wars of Independence; and, on many occasions, major offices of the English royal administration, including parliament, were moved to the city.21 As a consequence, there was a particular growth in the victualing trades, in services and in crafts related to the production and refurbishment of armour and weapons. The population of the city grew: new streets and urban quarters developed with industrial and retail premises, and much new housing was provided for workers. At the same time, there were several major public building programmes, particularly at York Minster, where the nave of the cathedral was rebuilt and substantially enlarged over this period. This urban growth was achieved despite the fact that the same period in the countryside was one of devastating crop failures and epidemics of livestock disease that produced a check on human population growth, especially in the second decade of the fourteenth century.22 Urban growth, and the stationing in York of additional royal administrators and soldiers, placed a premium on the supply of essential goods and services to feed and support its growing population. The victualing trades thrived and as a result became the subject of new regulation.Victuallers, and the suppliers of other staples such as leather workers, were also prominent among new freemen and those elected to civic office. It is perhaps not surprising, therefore, that this was a period in which female-headed businesses thrived. At least three new female citizens in this period were brewsters: Alice of Wetwong in ­1312–13, Isabella Brewer in 1319–20 and Alice of Melburn in 1328–29. Beer was a staple of the medieval diet. In addition, Beatrix Bokeler (1329–30) may have been a buckler, a trade that thrived with the expansion of the contemporary armaments industry, and Margaret of Lonsdale (1316–17) was a mercer. Margaret Mason, daughter of R. of Doncaster was, possibly, a mason, although the occupational byname is not conclusive. The 1330s were a fallow period, but in the 1340s, up to 1349, another 11 women were admitted to the freedom, although none are provided with occupations. This pattern reflects the evidence for female tenants found in contemporary rent accounts, which suggest that over much of the first half of the fourteenth 177

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c­ entury, f­emale-headed households were sufficiently successful that they were able to pay the same level of rent as male- or conjugal-headed households, and that significant numbers of female-headed households tenanted the new small houses provided in the city for artisans and workers.23 However, the evidence for prosperity among female tenants is strongest in the 1320s and 1340s, matching the evidence for the recruitment of female citizens.24 Although the evidence is incomplete and unsatisfactory, the relative success of women in becoming citizens during these two decades contributes to a growing picture that this was perhaps the best period, for which we have records during the Middle Ages, in which urban female entrepreneurs could flourish in England.25 By contrast, between 1349 and 1364, no women were admitted to the franchise, and in the four decades between 1365 and 1400, just 14 women entrants are listed, mostly before 1382. They included three cloth sellers in 1375–78), one spicer, one brewer, one fisherwoman (as above) and one member of the gentry. This is a revealing pattern since 1349 was the year in which the Black Death struck in York, bringing about a substantial decline in population. In the following year, an exceptionally large number of freemen were admitted, 212 compared with a previous peak of 100 in 1333, perhaps to compensate for high mortality.26 Yet none of the new entrants were women. Their absence perhaps points to a collapse in demand for victuals and related services in which women typically thrived, as does the contemporary fall in the price of staples such as grain. It may also suggest a hardening of attitudes against female traders in the decades after the Black Death, which scholars have noted in other English towns, though this is more speculative.27 When women do reappear as freemen in very small numbers from the mid1360s, it was in the context of a revival of prices, and presumably demand, for staples, and also in the context of the revival of a native cloth industry in York, hence, perhaps, the presence of cloth sellers.28 This later period between the mid-1360s and mid-1380s was thus qualitatively different for women compared with the 1320s and 1340s. Fewer women became freemen, and those that did were succeeding in different trades. Jeremy Goldberg identified this period as one in which more women were drawn into service in York, deferring for a little while the age at which they married.29 The evidence from the freemen’s register does not suggest that this bore fruit in terms of more women establishing successful businesses and certainly not on a scale comparable to their success in the first half of the fourteenth century. Another fallow period, between the mid-1380s and the second decade of the fifteenth century, coincided with falling prices and rents and a decline in overseas trade. During this time, just four women were admitted, including one spicer and one gentlewoman, Lady Joan of Hesylrigg, widow of Sir Donald of Hesylrigg, knight, in 1398–99.30 From 1412, records of female entrants to the franchise begin again and continued throughout the fifteenth century. This time, the change most likely reflected changes in the keeping of the records as outlined above, including the more systematic inclusion of entrants per patres. However, a particular peak in the numbers of female entrants between the 1430s and mid-1440s is interesting. Over 15 years between 1430 and 1445, 37 women were admitted. Like the peak in the 1310s and 1320s, this coincided with a period of agrarian crisis that was particularly serious in the north.31 It also coincided with epidemic mortality.32 Rents were falling across the city, indicating a declining population, and female-headed households were both fewer in number and poorer in terms of the rent they paid compared to male- or conjugal-headed equivalents.33 The women admitted during this later agrarian crisis were not brewsters or victuallers. Their recorded occupations were seamstresses (6), upholders (6), capmakers (2) and hucksters (2), plus one silkwoman, one chapwoman, one weaver and one former maidservant. Such occupations were not recorded in the register before 1349 but must surely have been important sources of employment for women then, and they are certainly recorded in other sources naming women. It looks, rather, that the franchise 178

Women and Citizenship in Medieval York

was being broadened under the pressure of a widespread fiscal and economic crisis, perhaps to increase revenue for the city, and that on this occasion, unlike in 1349, civic officials were eager to include successful female businesses in the franchise, even though these were typically relatively unregulated. Other than the admission of ‘singlewomen’ admitted in the 1480s and 1490s (noted above), the occupations of women admitted to the franchise did not change significantly over the rest of the century. An administrative change that had perhaps been forced on the civic elite in the difficult recession of the later 1430s became embedded in the organisation of the franchise, even if the numbers of female citizens admitted reduced slightly.

Conclusion Overall, therefore, the recorded lists of female entrants to the freedom in medieval York may be a weak foundation for the study of women citizens, as so many previous scholars have concluded. Without doubt, the records omit many women and omit more women than men. Without doubt, the reasons for including names in the list changed over time, without explicit explanation. Nevertheless, used judiciously and in conjunction with other surviving sources, the patterns can suggest both some continuity and some change in medieval female citizenship in York. Among the continuities are the prevalence and the success of female traders in diverse victualing and needlecraft trades, indicating that their work was utterly essential to everyday consumerism and commerce. Changes in the numbers of women enlisted in the franchise at different periods in part reflected changes in the urban population and in the success of trade in overseas markets. But the most significant changes were probably those in attitudes towards the public status of businesswomen.The early fourteenth century stands out as a period of relative tolerance to successful businesswomen, both in their registration as freemen and in their acceptance as tenants on a par with male-headed households. The period 1349–1410 witnessed a change in attitude in both these areas: fewer women were admitted as freemen and the economic status of women tenants declined.This in part reflected a collapse in those sectors of the market in which women typically thrived and possibly their exclusion from others, such as brewing, with the growth in the organisation and influence of guilds.34 From 1412, numbers of women admitted as freemen resumed. The majority practised typically ‘feminine’ crafts, and their admittance to the franchise represents a greater inclination by civic administrators to recognise, and extract revenue from, such businesses. This change seems to have been driven by fiscal necessity, as the city’s revenues declined sharply from the 1430s; it was not a return to the conditions of the early fourteenth century. However, although women became slightly more visible in the official lists of new freemen of the city, no improvements followed in their political status.

Notes   1 Martha C. Howell, ‘Gender in the transition to merchant capitalism,’ in Judith M. Bennett and Ruth Mazo Karras, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 561–576.   2 For medieval York, see E. Miller, ‘Medieval York,’ A History of the County of York: The City of York, ed. P.M. Tillott, Victoria History of the Counties of England (Oxford, 1961) 25–116; P.J.P., Goldberg, Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300–1520 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Jenny Kermode, ‘The greater towns, 1300–1540,’ in The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1: 600–1540, ed. David M. Palliser, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 441–66; Pamela Nightingale, ‘The rise and decline of medieval York: A reassessment,’ Past and Present, 206 (February 2010): 3–42; Sarah Rees Jones, York, the Making of a City 1068–1350 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); David M. Palliser, Medieval York, 600–1540 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

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Sarah Rees Jones 2014); Peter V. Addyman, ed., The British Historic Towns Atlas,Vol. 5, York from Prehistoric Times to c.1850 (Oxford: Oxbow, 2015).  3 Register of the Freemen of the City of York, 1272–1558, ed. Francis Collins, Surtees Society, 96 (Durham, Andrews & Co., 1897); also published online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/york-freemen/vol1 [Accessed 11 January 2016]; David M. Palliser, ‘The York Freemen’s register 1273–1540: Amendments and additions,’ York Historian 12 (1995): 21–27. All references to freemen and women throughout this chapter are cited from this source.   4 For earlier discussion of the history of the franchise in medieval York, see Barrie Dobson,‘Admissions to the Freedom of the City of York in the Late Middle Ages,’ Economic History Review, 2nd series 23 (1973), 1–22; Heather Swanson, Medieval Artisans: An Urban Class in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 107–10; Goldberg, Women,Work and Life Cycle, 49–63, 123, 174–5, 191; Rees Jones, York, 60–61, 208, 229–31.   5 See also Chapter 3 in this volume.   6 John Muggleston, ‘Some aspects of two late medieval chamberlains’ account books of York,’ Yorkshire Archaeological Journal, vol. 67, 1995: 133–146. See also Chapter 3.   7 Kathryn Reyerson, ‘Urban economies,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Women and Gender, 295–310, esp. 303.   8 These figures are calculated from all records published in the sources noted in note 2 above.They are different from the figures in Dobson,‘Admissions,’ 13, who found only 138 women between 1272 and 1500.   9 Total number of entrants from Miller, ‘Medieval York,’ 114–6. 10 These figures are calculated from five yearly samples of all records published in the sources noted in note 2. 11 Maryanne Kowaleski, ‘Women’s work in a market town: Exeter in the late fourteenth century,’ in Barbara A. Hanawalt, ed., Women and Work in Preindustrial Europe, 145–164, at 146; Goldberg, Women, 51, n. 22. 12 York Civic Records, iii, 126. English modernised. 13 Dobson, ‘Admissions,’ 13–14. 14 Cordelia Beattie, Medieval Single Women: The Politics of Social Classification in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 15 Hoyle,Victoria, ‘Negotiating the margins: Anglo-Jewish women in the Plea Rolls of the Exchequer of the Jews 1218–1284,’ unpublished MA dissertation (University of York, 2006). 16 Charlotte Carpenter, ‘The formation of urban elites: Civic officials in late-medieval York, 1476–1525,’ unpublished PhD thesis (University ofYork, 2000); Philip Michael Stell,‘The constables ofYork, 1380–1500,’ York Historian, 15 (1998), 16–25. 17 Sarah Rees Jones, Medieval Title Deeds for the City of York, 1080–1530, UK Data Archive (Colchester, 1996), SN: 3527. 18 Goldberg, Women,Work and Lifecycle, 125. 19 R. H. Hilton, ‘Lords, burgesses and hucksters,’ Past & Present, 97 (1982): 3–15; Judith M. Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters in England: Women’s Work in a Changing World, 1300–1600 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). 20 Ameria was a rare first name in medieval England but was always feminine (various records, the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries, at British History Online, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ search?query=ameria. Accessed 15 January 2016). Piscarius, however, is the masculine form, but there are several gender inconsistencies of this kind in the freemen’s register. 21 For what follows in this paragraph, see Nightingale, ‘The rise and decline’; Rees Jones, York, 126, 227–32, 263–5, 289–92, 304. 22 Ian Kershaw, ‘The great famine and agrarian crisis in England, 1315–1322,’ Past & Present, 59 (1973), 3–50. 23 Rees Jones, York, 296–301. 24 Ibid., 298. 25 Matthew Stevens, ‘London women, the courts and the “Golden Age”: A quantitative analysis of female litigants in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries,’ The London Journal 37, 2 (2012): 67. 26 Dobson, ‘Admissions,’ 17. 27 Stevens, ‘London women’. 28 Rees Jones, York, 294–5. 29 Goldberg, Women, 336–9. 30 Lady Joan died in York in 1400. She and her husband owned land in Northumberland.

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Women and Citizenship in Medieval York 31 A. J. Pollard,‘The north-eastern economy and the agrarian crisis of 1438–1440,’ Northern History (1989): 88–105. 32 Dobson, ‘Admissions,’ 17; P.J.P. Goldberg, ‘Mortality and economic change in the Diocese of York, 1390–1514,’ Northern History, 24 (1988): 38–55. 33 Sarah Rees Jones, ‘Women’s influence on the design of urban homes,’ in Mary C. Erler and Maryanne Kowaleski, eds, Gendering the Master Narrative: Women and Power in the Middle Ages (Ithaca NY: Cornell, 2003), 190–211, at 204–9. 34 Bennett, Ale, Beer, and Brewsters.

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14 Civic Identity, ‘Juvenile’ Status and Gender in Sixteenth and SeventeenthCentury Italian Towns Eleonora Canepari

This chapter aims to explore the forms of civic identity of individuals excluded from full ­citizenship based on their gender identity. Through a focus on the political participation of craftsmen who were not domini, that is, owners of their own businesses, and thus did not enjoy any form of civic existence, it presents a study of seventeenth-century Rome, examining how these extremely unstable professional and geographical categories were able to enjoy some forms of civic identity and political existence. At the time, Italy was divided into several states, all with different institutional structures and sets of rules; therefore, the main Italian towns were situated in politically different territories.1 In northern Italy, many early city-states had evolved into regional states, while the Spanish monarchy dominated the south of the peninsula. At the end of the Italian wars, after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), the main change in northern Italy was the conquest by Spain of the Duchy of Milan following the defeat of the ruling family (the Sforza). In the north-western part of the peninsula, the Duchy of Savoy (Piedmont and Savoy) gradually increased its importance under the leadership of Duc Emanuele Filiberto; in 1562, Turin became its capital city. In the eastern part, the Republic of Venice had defended its territories, both continental and maritime, including Dalmatia and some Mediterranean islands, through all the Italian wars. On the contrary, the Republic of Genoa was almost limited to the region of Liguria. Besides these, other states existed in northern Italy, all of them centred on towns: the Duchy of Parma and Piacenza and some princely states such as Mantua. In the central part of the peninsula, Florence was the capital city of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany, where the Medicis increasingly strengthened their power, also thanks to the inclusion of the state of Siena to their dominions. As for Rome, it was the capital city of the pontifical state, ruled by the pope, whose territory included a good share of Latium, Umbria, Marche and Emilia-Romagna. As for southern Italy, Spain dominated this territory. While the Spanish monarchy had annexed the kingdom of Sicily and that of Sardinia as the Aragonese heritage of Charles V, the Spanish army conquered Naples and its kingdom at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

182

Civic Identity, Juveniles and Gender

The crisis that struck Italy between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – caused by the marginalization of the peninsula in international trade, two plague epidemics and the effects of the Thirty Years’War – deeply affected Italian towns’ demography. In fact, despite the political and institutional diversity, seventeenth-century Italian towns shared a significant population decline. Nevertheless, Italian towns remained highly populated spaces. Indeed, through the early modern period, Italy was highly urbanised; urban population density was comparable to that of the Netherlands. For instance, during the seventeenth century, Naples was the largest Mediterranean city and second largest in Europe after London. During the sixteenth century, Rome’s population increased from 20,000 to 100,000 inhabitants, and the town became not only the capital of the pontifical state but also the centre of the Catholic world. Thanks to the massive flows of immigrants – mainly pilgrims and labour migrants, attracted by the urban labour market but also by the ‘welfare’ facilities such as hospitals and hospices – Rome was one of three Italian towns (together with Turin and Livorno) whose population kept growing through the seventeenth century. The pope (together with his administrative offices – the curia) and a municipal government (the Capitol) ruled the city.2 Even if the Capitol, whose chiefs were the conservatori, had lost much of its importance at the beginning of the period, and even if the pontiff had reduced the autonomy of the municipal government, getting a municipal office still marked membership of the city’s political elite.The urban nobility of the city was an open group; the continuous arrival of new families in Rome and the foreign origins of many ‘old’ families contributed to keep the elite open to renewal. As in most Italian towns, as we will see, citizenship’s rights were granted to members of the urban elite and merchants, and craftsmen were excluded. From an economic point of view, as Renata Ago points out, Rome was a ‘normal’ city; indeed, its economy was comparable to that of the other ancien régime towns.The commerce and productive activities were well developed; a document of 1625 records one workshop (or shop) for every 20 inhabitants. The guilds did not have political power and, consequently, they were open to foreigners – who were especially numerous – and not only to citizens or permanent residents. As the capital of the Catholic world, after the Council of Trent (1545–1563), Rome became the centre of the Counter-Reformation. As a consequence, several confraternities were founded (a total of 107 at the beginning of the seventeenth century), working as a ‘welfare’ system for the inhabitants of the city, to whom they provided care in the form of hospitals, burials, dowries, support to prisoners and so on.3 Rome is the main case study, but this chapter will also draw on cases from studies of other Italian towns, including those on citizenship in Venice, boys’ confraternities in Genoa and artisans’ masculinity in Turin. By doing so, this chapter is built on premises that apply to all Italian towns: the relation between gender and exclusion in the cities and, specifically, on masculinity and civic identity. Starting from these premises, and relying on the notion of citizenship as access to the city (a notion that goes beyond Italian towns), the third section of the chapter uses a case study that explores the forms of civic identity of those who are usually excluded from political participation.

Gender and exclusion in the early modern city In early modern cities, sex was a very precise criterion for inclusion and exclusion from the city as a social body.4 While extensive literature details the way urban institutions defined a profile of female exclusion based on gender, documentation on the way such exclusion applied to men is much rarer. This is probably because, when addressing the connection between gender and civic identity, women’s exclusion from certain areas was so obvious as to have overshadowed other forms of sanctions linked to gender identity, specifically those based on male identities. As Renata Ago points out, the ideal citizen in the early modern city was the male pater familias, 183

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the dominus, simultaneously owner and master, who ruled over his house, shop and family.5 The dominus was therefore his own master and exercised his authority over the individuals living under the same roof, that is, the members of the family he headed, including apprentices. As dominus, the pater familias represented the embodiment of fully realized adult masculinity, while society perceived young people and servants ( famuli) as imperfect men.6 In her studies on male celibacy in Turin during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Sandra Cavallo thoroughly questions the close association between marriage and fully realized masculinity. By pointing out other areas in which unmarried men had the chance to enact the function of dominus in the family and at work, Cavallo provides evidence that even bachelors were able to access a model of fully realized masculinity.7 Thus, we ought seriously to reconsider the alleged degree of marginalization experienced by individuals who strayed from the model of pater familias by not marrying. However, as Renata Ago has noted, the pater familias/model citizen equation was not based solely on marriage but rather also on the role of dominus.8 What about individuals who failed to fit this definition, less as unmarried men but as employees and thus not domini? To what extent did these men experience civic identity? Early modern sources offer numerous references to exclusion based on imperfectly realized masculinity resulting from an individual’s lack of independence. However, even though political offices were reserved for an elite that did not engage in the mechanical arts (a gentleman was ‘elite’ because he did not need to work),9 artisans were not completely excluded from political life. They participated both as members of guilds – within which they could hold positions such as consul or chamberlain – and as the backbone of the town militia. However, there was a significant difference within the artisan class between masters, on the one hand, and apprentices or journeymen, on the other; that is, between those who practiced their trades as domini and those employed by others. In fact, in terms of civic identity, men were required to have the status of master in order to be eligible to hold office or form part of the municipal militia. For instance, the 1580 Statute of Rome specified that artisan consuls must be masters of the workshop.10 The same was true for members of the neighbourhood militia, who had to be patres familias, that is, heads of workshops and not servants.11 Along the same lines, the 1632 Statue of Verona required that the roll of town council members be drawn up based on the valuations listing the city’s pater familias.12 The Venetian glassmakers studied by Francesca Trivellato represent a more complex case.13 The requirements for aspiring ‘native citizens’ were legitimate birth in Venice going back three generations and honourable conduct, which mainly consisted in not engaging in the mechanical arts.14 Goldsmiths, furriers and glaziers were exempt, however, in view of the symbolic value of the raw materials they worked and the way their products were used.Yet, not all glassmakers were eligible to apply for the status of ‘native citizen’. It was not enough to be a master glassmaker; the applicant also had to be the owner of a furnace. In fact, becoming a master, that is, having achieved mastery, did not necessarily mean becoming an owner/employer, a status that opened the way for overseas trade and the label of ‘major merchant’ that some owners were able to attain. Craftsmen who were workshop owners and patres familias therefore enjoyed a different category of possibilities for achieving civic identity than did famuli (servants) and journeymen working for others. This clear distinction is evident in a text by Monsignor Marco Antonio Tomati, apostolic visitor and author of a report in 1661 on the living conditions of workers in certain suburban dioceses belonging to the abbey of San Paolo Fuori Le Mura.15 In describing the harsh methods used to recruit beggars and prisoners, often involving force, Tomati emphasized that this population included ‘Patres familias, Artisans and Pilgrims’ whose economic state had driven them to give up their status of domini to work for the corporal.16 Although political life, understood as access to city magistrates, excluded owner-craftsmen and prevented them from obtaining legal citizenship (except in Venice), these individuals were 184

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nonetheless considered part of the social body of the city, and they had a presence in civic institutions, albeit in keeping with the aforementioned limitations. The fact of being heads of the workshop allowed male artisans to reach a status of full masculinity, since they had all the requirements of the patres familias: professional independence and a household of their own. Indeed, artisans did not enjoy full citizenship in a purely legal sense, and yet they did enjoy some forms of inclusion in public life that shaped their civic identity.To resolve this ambiguity, it seems we must discard a notion of merely legal citizenship and instead employ the idea of citadinité, or right to the city.

The notion of citadinité: The social dimension of citizenship Two different threads of inquiry have highlighted this divergence between legal citizenship and political participation: studies of migration in the pre-industrial era and social scientific research into the relationship between the city and citizenship. In early modern cities, legal citizenship status was not representative of inclusion in the city, and only a small minority of foreigners actually resorted to that specific tool of legal recognition. In reality, the vast majority of those arriving in a new city pursued trajectories that never involved the need to apply for citizenship. In other words, individuals could live in a city, practice trades and access urban resources without requiring formal recognition of their belonging to the social body. Access to the city and its resources (institutional and other), therefore, did not depend upon individuals’ places of birth but rather on the length and continuity of their residence, the real key to urban life. Along these lines, historians have shown that it was not individuals born elsewhere who were excluded, but rather those without roots in the city. With this in mind, they have therefore investigated other, extra-legal forms of belonging to the city.17 The plurality of ways of belonging to the city and citizenship as individuals’ participation in urban life are the foundation of the concept of citadinité. Developed in 1970–1990 in the context of studies on urbanization in southern cities, this concept offers an approach to citizenship, understood in a broad sense, based on the practices of city inhabitants, their ways of appropriating urban space and their ways of learning typically urban skills. Citadinité refers to one’s ability to identify with the city, a process which, in the words of Brigitte Marin, ‘from integration and urban renewal, passes through the acquisition, by various routes, of strictly urban codes and ways of doing’.18 This process has a powerfully spatial connotation, associated with urbanity: Citadinité is expressed through practices and habits, both daily and exceptional, individual and collective, that denote forms of savoir-faire, competences in producing space through ways of inhabiting and occupying ground, navigating the city, appropriating, qualifying and organizing spaces and territories, through interactions among more or less legally formalized collective associations and mobilizations, and the urban management.19 The citadinité concept marks a significant change in the meaning of citizenship, understood less and less as a right and increasingly as participation in urban life. Engin Isin’s studies of the relationship between citizens and the city and the notion he developed of a ‘right to the city’ have contributed powerfully to this change in perspective. As Isin specifies in an article on urban citizenship in Toronto, he uses the term citizenship not in its legal sense but rather to indicate the practices that individuals employ to assert their belonging in the urban body. The starting point is a dynamic, contested understanding of the term citizenship.We conceive of citizenship broadly, not only as a set of legal obligations and entitlements that individuals possess by virtue of their 185

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membership in a state, but also as the practices through which individuals and groups formulate and claim new rights or struggle to expand or maintain existing rights. Analysing citizenship, therefore, requires investigating not only formal rights conferred by states, but also the autonomous actions, claims and struggles of diverse groups within the same state.20 Isin thus emphasizes the need to consider various groups’ autonomous actions and claims by studying their practices. Indeed, according to Isin, acting as a citizen certainly grants individuals a greater capacity; people exercised ‘their capacity to act without being granted the license to do so’.21 While this practice-focused approach is common to all the studies that have called into question the primacy of legal citizenship, Isin goes a step further to link these practices to the city as a specific site in which claims and autonomous actions take shape. As he argues, the city is the site of the social in this precise sense of both enabling the formation of social groups as claimants of rights that are not necessarily restricted to the rights of the city and of making use of rights that originate from the city.22 Specifically, the city as such allows social groups ‘to enact themselves through the city’, meaning ‘to organize, assemble, appropriate, stage, symbolize and imagine themselves, in short, constitute themselves as social groups, by claiming rights to and through the city’.23 By organizing, gathering, appropriating and staging themselves, individuals are able to form themselves into groups with a right to the city. Employing this perspective, it is possible to interpret some forms of association as examples of claiming rights and staging membership in the city as active citizens. This interpretive lens thus allows us to extend the range of possible civic identity and explore how even groups excluded on the basis of gender were able to implement forms of active citizenship. The following sections outline the case of men who, although part of the artisan world, were excluded from both full citizenship and activities such as the urban militia and holding guild office due to their conditions of professional dependence. In other words, I will identify a possible pattern of urban belonging and civic identity for men who were not domini and thus excluded from fully realized masculinity.

Providing civic identity: The case of apprentice and journeymen’s companies As the chapter has shown, the condition of employee, of serving someone else, was the common feature shared between apprentices, journeymen (significantly referred to as ‘boys’) and children, relegating them, as Renata Ago has noted, to a condition of ‘real or fictitious juvenile status’. Young people as such were not wholly excluded from urban political life, and numerous studies have demonstrated not only the existence of organizations comprised exclusively of young boys but also the rules and specific logics that characterized them.24 On closer inspection, however, we see that in some cases, admission to young people’s confraternities was not closely linked to age-related criteria, and they represented a means of accessing public life, the importance of which went beyond age and socializing with one’s peers, as Edward Grendi has noted in the case of sixteenth-century Genoa.25 There was thus a fairly wide age range that corresponded to a state of dependence during which belonging to a confraternity was one of the only means of participating in political life. The artisan’s ‘boys’ are a different category in that chronological age is not necessarily an applicable criterion. In reality, the definition of shop boy/apprentice corresponded much more closely to a place in an occupational hierarchy than actual age, and many apprentices and journeymen were not actually very young. A study of these groups shows that the 186

Civic Identity, Juveniles and Gender Table 14.1  ‘Boys’ associations in seventeenth-century Rome Trade

Year of foundation

Innkeepers Cobblers Pasta makers Vegetable dealers Fruit dealers Millers Hatmakers Gold- and silversmiths

1616 1614 1641 Before 1630 Before 1630 Before 1630 1757 1720

average age of apprentices and journeymen was 24 and 29 years respectively, and ages ranged from 10 to approximately 60.26 This study, based on parish registers, also reveals the lack of an effective distinction between these two groups; the terms apprentice, shop boy and journeyman were used interchangeably depending on which pastor conducted the census. In other words, a single category of non-independent worker, in service to a master, and the nuances associated with the different definitions were of little import. Indeed, as we have seen in the case of the 1580 Statute of Rome, the word used in Latin was famulus, a person in service to another, an all-inclusive category opposed to dominus. Taking into account the age factor, it is easier to understand how the condition of fictitious juvenile status could be extremely limiting for individuals since, in the case of artisans’ ‘boys’ as opposed to the members of young people’s confraternities, this condition was not necessarily destined to end. They could have a professional status of ‘boys’ even when they were aged 30 and more. In reaction to this situation, between the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, the ‘boys’ of a dozen crafts formed specific associations, different from those representing masters and reserved instead for apprentices and journeymen. It is worth highlighting that apprentices’ guilds mainly emerged in the trades that included higher numbers of not particularly young ‘boys’. These trades were easy to access and required few skills, involved a high degree of turnover and employment insecurity and could be carried out in numerous sites throughout Rome. One thinks, for example, of the spread of taverns, shoemakers’ shops and the many forms taken by the trade of vermicelli maker, producing pasta: home work, women’s work, multiple positions and so on. Another example is the resale of food products, often carried out between the master’s workshop and the street in a way that combined the permanence of the shop with the mobility of itinerant vending, a sector that is well known for having been accessible to socially and economically precarious individuals such as shop boys.27 For the purposes of this analysis, the chapter focuses specifically on three of these trades that were associated with employment insecurity: innkeepers, cobblers and pasta makers. Besides chronological factors, it is even more interesting to investigate the forms of active citizenship and civic identity that these guilds granted to their members, given that the workers they represented were highly socially and economically mobile and precarious. Through an examination of the organization of these three guilds established during the seventeenth century whose statutes are available, the chapter analyses in more detail three main aspects associated with the creation and claiming of civic identity: the guilds’ formation as urban bodies, their ability to confer rights and their relationship with public space. By doing so, we will see how even these ‘imperfect’ men were able to engage in some forms of political participation. 187

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Urban bodies These ‘boys’ guilds took the form of authentic urban bodies, drawing on the language and rhetoric of companies but adapting them to a specific context. This is particularly evident if we examine the characteristics that the lord – the guild’s highest office – had to possess in order to be appointed. In general, officers were required to be honest and possessed of a good reputation and knowledge of the trade as well as issues within the guild. For example, cobblers’ journeymen and apprentices specified that ‘gamblers, whoremongers, blasphemers, and others with documented vices’ were barred from holding guild offices.28 To attain the office of chamberlain, however, candidates also had to know how to read and write and, above all, to be able to demonstrate their stability in the city through the fact of maintaining a residence. Especially in the trades in question, apprentices and journeymen were often highly mobile individuals, not particularly rooted in the city and frequently hired for very short lengths of time, a condition that exposed them to intense occupational turnover. The causal link between the mobility of guild members and the requirement that they keep a residence in order to be elected to the office of chamberlain is explained by the shoemakers’ statutes, which state: because said cobblers’ journeymen and apprentices, in consideration of usefulness and convenience, want to stay in Rome, and return to their own countries or elsewhere, but we mandate that they cannot be elected by the general Congregation unless they maintain a current residence in Rome.29 This principle also was used by the other two guilds examined here. In their articles, the vermicelli pasta makers’ apprentices and journeymen specify that the lord must be an ‘appropriate person, worthy, with good morals and well-known, wealthy, and possessed of a house or maintaining a current residence’, and that the custodian (depositario) must ‘have stationary goods in Rome, and possess his own property without dispute or debts’.30 The innkeepers’ apprentices used exactly the same criteria to select their lord.31 Ownership of real estate was a common a criterion for granting citizenship.32 The articles of the apprentices and journeymen were modelled precisely on this form of distinction. In fact, while all workers were free to become guild members and enjoy the rights that, as I shall demonstrate, such membership granted them, the senior offices were reserved for men who were domini – masters, if not of a workshop, at least of their own homes. In doing so, the ‘boys’ demonstrated a desire to assert themselves as credible and respectable urban corps and, at the same time, to pursue a kind of legitimacy by electing to the office of guild head a member who more closely corresponded to the figure of dominus. They wanted someone possessed of a series of characteristics that the great majority of members did not hold: knowing how to read and write, owning property and maintaining fixed residence in the city. This insistence on fixed residence in the city is in the standard established by vermicelli pasta makers’ apprentices. These standards specify that those who agree to assume office in the guild must undertake to carry out their duties throughout the year. Specifically, ‘provided they are in Rome, they must do so all the year, which holds true also if they are not apprentices or journeymen, and even if they have set up their own workshop’.33 The apprentices’ and journeymen’s desire to create guilds that would be seen as true urban corps can also be seen from their choice to enter into the sphere of other local institutions rather than setting themselves up as isolated groups. On the one hand, they looked to local institutions to manage internal guild affairs. For example, the cobblers’ ‘boys’ stipulated that those who did not pay the required membership fee (1/2 grosso per month) would be subject to proceedings 188

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in the Court of the Vicar of Rome.34 The vermicelli pasta makers’ apprentices and journeymen made numerous references to intervention by the senator in order to govern issues such as insults sustained by guild officers or lack of payment.35 Moreover, the strongest bond between the guilds and an external institution was doubtlessly with the cardinal protector, who had the power to declare the lord and officers unfit and had the right to intervene in and have the final say in all areas of guild business. One of the articles of the statute of the innkeepers’ apprentices is particularly clear in illustrating the way these guilds were part of the network of local institutions and their interest in maintaining good relations with other actors of the Roman political scene. It specified who should be offered the ‘Candle of Purification’ that was ritually distributed by the company. In addition to guild officers, it was to be offered to certain clearly defined institutional actors such as the vicegerent, or the head notary of the governor and the tax advisor of Rome.36 In so doing, the ‘boys’ demonstrated their desire to position their association within the larger and more complex sphere of Roman politics and maintain relations with the particular institutional figures that played a key role in relation to their organization. Establishing a true urban corps was a fundamental objective for the apprentices and journeymen, who sought to construct a legal and social framework in which their existence as a group – and, above all, as a group with rights – would gain recognition. As we have seen, being part of a politically recognized group meant acquiring an identity and political existence that apprentices and journeymen would otherwise inevitably have lacked.

Granting rights In a society based on privilege such as that of the early modern period, it was crucial to have recognition as a group in order to claim specific rights. Specifically, being part of an officially recognized company allowed its members to take advantage of a number of possibilities, like jobs, social networks, assistance, charity and so on, that would otherwise be beyond their reach. This was especially true for individuals like apprentices and journeymen who held low status and moved around a great deal within the city and between one city and another. Joining a guild or confraternity opened the door to possibilities that were not accessible to those who belonged to groups that lay outside the institutional system of the time. Establishing local roots was one of the main conditions for accessing local urban resources. According to Grendi, alongside societal representation according to the orders there was (and operated) representation according to organized corps. This perspective isolated the population that Andrea Spinola terms the common people (plebe): ‘thousands of men and women, young and old’ who lived on subsidies and casual, temporary work.37 Being part of a recognized group thus conferred an identity and political existence that apprentices and journeymen would otherwise inevitably have lacked. In his study of fraternities in eighteenth-century Genoa, Grendi finds that the trades carried out three main corporate functions: politics, mutual aid and ritual.38 As we have seen, in the case of the apprentices’ companies, the political function lay in the simple fact of being recognized as a rights-holding group. As for mutual aid, according to Grendi, this function consisted of ‘aiding poor artisans, participating in weddings and funerals and providing dowries to daughters who were to be married’.39 Indeed, the statute of the cobblers’ journeymen and apprentices devotes a specific chapter to the organization of the care provided to its members, creating a safety-net device that was activated in four specific cases: illness (defined as infirmity), death, the inability 189

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to work and imprisonment. In these cases, the officers and other members of the company were to assist the ‘brother’ in difficulty. If a member became sick, he was to be visited by nurses – officials charged with caring for members of the company – who, having verified the illness, were to inform the guardians so that they might ‘bring charity’ to the sick member. If unable to work, the brothers were to generally ‘help and assist him’. It should be stressed here that the inability to work was a serious condition that drove individuals into poverty unless they were able to rely on the help of family members. Unsurprisingly, the condition for gaining admission to Rome’s poor hospital – the San Sisto Hospice for the Poor – was the inability to support oneself through one’s own labour and the absence of a family member willing to care for the now unproductive individual. Considering these elements, it is quite clear how important it was for members to be able to rely on the aid of the company they had joined. The company also promised to release its members from prison by paying the required 12 giuli and, as shown below, to give them a proper burial in the event of their death complete with masses for the salvation of the soul. To cope with periods of crisis that would inevitably have driven the apprentices or journeymen into poverty, the company therefore mobilized its members and got them to provide assistance, for which they were required to pay annual fees. Like a sort of ante-litteram insurance policy, these fees enabled members to call on the aid of the company in case of need. For example, by paying 12 giuli a year, the millers’ apprentices (whose statutes, unfortunately, are not available) gained the right to receive treatment at the hospital of the church of Santa Maria dell’Orto, which was reserved for specific categories of artisans, including master millers. Acquiring rights thus made companies more attractive to potential new members while at the same time allowing them to assert themselves as organizations that enjoyed the same privileges as other companies. A petition addressed to the pope in 1629 by the company of fruit vendor’s boys in San Carlo al Corso shows this. In it, they asked him to ‘grant the boon that, on the day they make their offer to the Church of San Carlo, they might free a condemned criminal in the way other companies are allowed to’.40 In keeping with a practice that was common among the masters’ confraternities and guilds, the cobblers’ boys’ and journeymen’s company also provided a form of assistance to its members’ families, and more specifically their daughters, in the form of a dowry. This represented a particularly important form of assistance. Since the lack of dowry made it impossible for women to access marriage or enter into convents, undowried women were left without male (or institutional) protection. This question of establishing a dowry thus had direct implications for the honour of the woman in question. Lacking a dowry would place her in a morally dangerous position. Also, the honour of the family as a whole was at risk, particularly that of the head of the family, where poverty or impoverishment prevented the male family head from settling his daughters in a respectable manner.41 By allocating 20 crowns of dowry to certain tradesmen’s daughters, selected during the festival of Sant’Aniano, the company’s patron saint, the cobblers’ apprentices’ and journeymen’s guild therefore met a need that was serious and keenly felt by its members.42 It is interesting to note that the girl, by accepting the dowry, committed to living in Rome for the rest of her life, as she was required to repay the dowry in full if she ever chose to leave. As in the case of the Annunziata di Roma, this condition tended to thoroughly bind the company’s charitable activities to the city in which it operated, functioning in this case as the generator of civic identity for tradesmen’s daughters as well. It is worth noting one last detail: in addition to 20 crowns, the girls also received a dress of white cloth for the festival of the patron saint. Indeed, this was the day that the guild assigned dowries and broadcasted its existence as a group in the public space of the city, seeking a form of visibility that went hand-in-hand with the claiming of rights. 190

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Spaces for identity Public space played a key role in the organizations’ efforts to demonstrate unity and assert their presence as a political corps in that it provided a backdrop for the company’s ritual dimension (and function) as identified by Grendi. Multiple passages in the statutes of the guilds under investigation reveal this desire to convey and demonstrate the group’s strength and cohesion, reflecting equally numerous moments of group collective life. Isin also highlights the close relationship between public space and gaining recognition as a group when he notes ‘the importance of public space in nurturing an inclusive sense of identity’, understanding public space as ‘streets for parades, marches and religious processions, civic squares, and parks for picnics and recreation events’. He concludes that ‘who uses and occupies the public realm is an important indicator of community and citizenship’.43 The most important event companies used to demonstrate their presence in urban public space was the festival of their patron saint. This day was central to the company’s organization in that it was the occasion for holding several key events. Collective mobilization for the festival began two days beforehand. At this point, all the innkeepers’ apprentices and workmen were required to ‘accompany the offering for Rome, and carry it to Madonna Santissima dell’Assunzione, our chapel in the Chiesa della Consolazione’.44 The offering referenced in this passage was the alms that the lord, wearing the chasuble and accompanied by all the guild officials and the members required to attend, had collected by going around the city four times throughout the year.45 On the day of the festival, the apprentices and journeymen were required to go meet the lord at his house and to walk together down the road leading to Santa Maria della Consolazione.46 The elections for choosing the lord were held on the same day. The vermicelli pasta makers’ statute contributes important additional details. These boys and journeymen likewise began mobilizing two days before the patron saint’s festival, when at least one apprentice per workshop was required to accompany the offering around Rome until it ended up at Santa Maria dell’Orto, the company’s church.47 They also began the festival day with a procession involving all the members, who were obliged to go meet the lord at his house or else pay a penalty of five giuli. There was a clear desire to gather a large number of people and demonstrate group cohesion, as evidenced by the requirement that ‘no one on the feast day should leave the company or take coaches or carriages’.48 The procession was to be attended on foot by all the members of the group, and they were not allowed to stray from it. In another instance of this desire to gain visibility for their existence throughout the city, sources show that the company also specified that musicians and ‘tamborrini’ (drummers) were to accompany the group sent around Rome to collect alms.49 As for the cobblers’ apprentices and journeymen, the festival was an occasion not only to deliver the offering and elect the lord but also to confer dowries on the ‘spinster’ daughters of tradesmen, who wore special white dresses for the occasion. The day of the festival and the day on which alms were collected thus constituted moments of greater visibility for the company, which exhibited itself by carrying out a series of operations that clearly illustrate the desire to perform or even flaunt the group’s presence throughout the city: traveling through the streets and squares of the entire city (not limited to the area surrounding the church), making as much noise as possible (arranging to be accompanied by musicians), being as numerous as possible (the obligation to participate), walking to the church all together (establishing the lord’s house as the starting point for the procession and punishing any defections) and so on. It is also worth noting that the church, and especially their personal chapel, represented particularly ‘charged’ sites for the company. Indeed, this is where meetings took place and, not surprisingly, it was also set as the destination of the festival-day procession. 191

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Conclusion In conclusion, this case study offers an insight into the relation between gender and towns by analysing the civic identity of a specific group of men: those craftsmen, apprentices and other working men in early modern Italian towns who were not admitted to full citizenship. We have seen that right of citizenship was granted only to the members of the urban elite and to merchants because they were domini and did not perform manual activities. Even if the Roman municipal nobility was an open group, this rule excluded from full citizenship a large part of its population; indeed, manual workers could not become citizens because they were not ‘rentiers’. They needed to work to make a living and could not live only off the incomes from their properties. Nevertheless, among craftsmen and other kind of workers, a great difference existed, separating those who were masters from those who were famuli, that is, apprentices and journeymen. In fact, masters were professionally independent workers, and, thanks to their status of domini, they did have access to a fully adult masculinity and to some forms of civic identity. As we have seen, master artisans could be part of the urban militia and obtain political offices in their guilds. However, those men who were dependent workers (  famuli) were usually excluded from the city’s political life. They experienced a life-long status of young men, of ‘boys’, that prevented them from achieving fully adult masculine identity. This situation was due on the one side to the hierarchical structure of labour relations (domini and famuli) and on the other one to the impossibility for all the apprentices and journeymen to become masters. For those men, ‘youth’ became a lasting condition that affected their masculine identity and prevented them from participating formally in political life. In, this case study shows the possibilities that the foundation of companies opened up to apprentices and journeymen within this institutional, social and cultural framework. For ‘boys’, joining a company of apprentices and journeymen represented an opportunity to build a civic identity for themselves and to achieve acknowledgement as part of a group that enjoyed institutional recognition. The apprentices and journeymen under investigation here – cobblers, pasta makers and innkeepers – experienced a high degree of mobility and employment insecurity and worked under masters who were often only a few years older than they were. Although they were often patres familias, they were not domini and thus did not enjoy any other opportunities for asserting a political existence. By creating their own specific corps with a structure modelled after the master’s guilds, these ‘boys’ (a traditionally non-rooted ‘urban proletariat’) accessed a range of benefits from which they would otherwise have been precluded.These included being part of a group, receiving aid and having their own place to gather; in other words, these groups created local belonging, which constituted an essential condition for the development of civic identity.

Notes   1 For an overview of the ancient Italian states, see Marcello Verga, ‘Gli antichi Stati italiani,’ in Storia ­moderna (Donzelli editore: Rome, 1998), 351–71.   2 Laurie Nussdorfer, Civic Politics in the Rome of Urban VIII (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).   3 For an introduction to Italian confraternities, see Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).   4 Simona Cerutti, ‘Donne e miserabili. Le trasformazioni di un privilegio nel Piemonte dell’età moderna,’ Genesis 1 (2002): 97–122; Simona Feci, Pesci fuor d’acqua. Donne a Roma in età moderna: diritti e patrimoni (Rome: Viella, 2004); Ead., ‘Sed quia ipsa est mulier. Le risorse dell’identità giuridica femminile a Roma in età moderna,’ Quaderni storici 98 (1998): 275–300; Thomas J. Kuehn, ‘Cum consensu mundualdi. Legal guardianship of women in Quattrocento Florence,’ Viator 13 (1982): 309–33.   5 Chapter 25 of the 1617 Statute of Ferrara groups apprentices together with the pater familias’ wife and children as individuals subject to the authority of the dominus. Statuta Urbis Ferrariae Nuper Reformata, 1617.

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Civic Identity, Juveniles and Gender   6 Renata Ago, ‘La costruzione dell’identità maschile (Roma, età moderna),’ in La costruzione dell’identità maschile nell’età moderna e contemporanea, ed. Angiolina Arru (Rome: Viella, 2003), 17–30; John Tosh, ‘Men in the domestic sphere: A neglected history,’ Ibid, 47–61.   7 Sandra Cavallo,‘Bachelorhood and masculinity in Renaissance and early Modern Italy,’ European ­History Quarterly 38 (2008): 375–97. On bachelorhood in early modern Italy, see Raffaella Sarti and Margareth Lanzinger, Nubili e celibi tra scelta e costrizione: Secoli XVI-XX (Udine: Forum, 2006).   8 Renata Ago, Economia barocca. Mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del Seicento (Rome: Donzelli editore, 1998), 93–4.   9 Anna Bellavitis, ‘‘Ars mechanica’ e gerarchie sociali a Venezia tra XVI e XVII secolo,’ in Technicien dans la cité en Europe occidentale, 1250–1650 (Rome: École française de Rome, 2004): 161–79. 10 Statute of Rome, 1580, chap. 42. 11 Ibid., chap. 8. 12 Statuta Magnificae Civitatis Veronae, chap. 52. 13 Francesca Trivellato, Fondamenta dei Vetrai. Lavoro, tecnologia e mercato a Venezia tra Sei e Settecento (Rome: Donzelli editore, 2000). 14 Bellavits, ‘‘Ars Mechanica’’. 15 Giorgio Rossi, L’Agro di Roma tra ‘500 e ‘800. Condizioni di vita e di lavoro (Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 1985). 16 Ibid., p. 44. 17 As Francesca Trivellato does in Fondamenta dei Vetrai. 18 Brigitte Marin, ‘Une citadinité ‘au ras du sol’? Gestion urbaine et habitants ordinaires,’ in Étudier en liberté les mondes méditerranéens. Mélanges offerts à Robert Ilbert, ed. Leyla Dakhli and Vincent Lemire (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2016), 189–99. 19 Ibid., 190. 20 Engin F. Isin and Myer Siemiatycki, ‘Immigration, diversity and urban citizenship in Toronto,’ Canadian Journal of Regional Science 20 (1997): 73–102, 73. 21 Engin F. Isin, ‘Citizens without frontiers,’ Open Democracy, 15/10/2012, URL https://www.opendemocracy.net/engin-isin/citizens-without-frontiers 22 Engin F. Isin, ‘The city as the site of the social,’ in Recasting the Social in Citizenship, ed. Engin F. Isin (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2008), 261–80, 273. 23 Ibid., 275. 24 Norbert Schindler, ‘Les gardiens du désordre: Rites culturels de la jeunesse à l’aube des temps modernes,’ in Histoire des jeunes en Occident, vol. I, eds, Giovanni Levi and Jean-Claude Schmitt (Paris: Seuil, 1996), 277–329; Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘The reasons of misrule: Youth groups and charivaris in sixteenth-century France,’ Past & Present 50 (1971): 41–75. 25 Edoardo Grendi, ‘Le societas juvenum e il cerimoniale’ in altri termini. Etnografia e storia di una società di antico regime, ed. Edoardo Grendi (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004): 111–32. Similarly, in the Società del nome di Gesù e di San Girolamo founded in Lucca in 1526, members were admitted at the age of 15 and were invited to leave the organization at 23 or 24 years of age. Nonetheless, this age limit did not involve a clear case of exclusion. In reality, individuals could continue to participate even after they had exceeded the age limit. In addition, the rule was abolished in 1542. Raffaele Savigni, ‘Le confraternite lucchesi (sec. xiv-xv) e l’evoluzione della religione civica: Relazioni tra chierici e laici e ridefinizione dei confine,’ online, URL https://www.academia.edu/4164304/Le_confraternite_lucchesi 26 Eleonora Canepari, ‘Working for someone else. Adult apprentices and dependent work (Rome, XVIIth to early XVIIIth century),’ in Guilds and Craftsmen in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, eds, Eva Jullien and Michel Pauly (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016), 263–78. 27 Eleonora Canepari,‘Le commerce de détail dans les parcours de mobilité professionnelle (Rome, XVIIe siècle)-XVIIIe,’ in Retail Trade. Supply and Demand in the Formal and Informal Economy from the 13th to the 18th Century, ed. Marco Belfanti (Florence: Firenze Università Press, 2015); Laurence ­Fontaine, Le ­marché. Histoire et usages d’une conquête sociale (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 28 Archivio Storico Capitolino (ASC), Cam. Cap., cred. XI, t. 52, chap. 2. 29 Ibid., chap. 7. 30 Ibid., cred. XI, t. 62, chap. 5 and chap. 10. 31 Ibid., cred. XI, t. 50, chap. 8. 32 Regarding the relationship between integration, property and citizenship in the early modern period, see Simona Cerutti, Étrangers. Étude d’une condition d’incertitude dans une société d’Ancien Régime (Paris: Fayard, 2012). 33 ASC, Cam. Cap., cred. XI, t. 62, chap. 49.

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Eleonora Canepari 34 Ibid., t. 52, chap. 18. 35 Ibid., t. 62, passim. 36 Ibid., t. 50, chap. 51. 37 Edoardo Grendi, ‘Ideologia della carità e società indisciplinata: La costruzione del sistema assistenziale genovese (1470-1670),’ in Timore e carità. I poveri nell’Italia moderna, proceedings of the conference Pauperismo e assistenza negli antichi stati italiani, Cremona, 28–30 March 1980, eds, Giorgio Politi, Mario Rosa and Franco Della Peruta, (Cremona: Libreria del Convegno editrice, 1982), 59–75, 62. 38 Edoardo Grendi, ‘Confraternita e mestieri nella Genova settecentesca,’ Miscellanea di storia ligure 4 (1966): 239–65. 39 Ibid., 244. 40 ASR, Camerale II, Arti e mestieri, vol. 45. 41 The practice of offering dowry subsidies became widespread during the early modern period. From the middle of the seventeenth century onward, there were 1700 different ‘bidders’ in Rome (Marina D’Amelia, ‘La conquista di una dote. Regole del gioco e scambi femminili alla Confraternita dell’Annunziata (secc. XVII-XVIII)’, in Ragnatele di rapporti. Patronage e reti di relazioni nella storia delle donne, eds. Lucia Ferrante, Maura Palazzi and Gianna Pomata, (Turin: Rosenberg e Sellier, 1988), 305–43; Anna Esposito, ‘Le confraternite del matrimonio: carità, devozioni e bisogni sociali a Roma nel tardo Quattrocento’, in Un’idea di Roma. Società, arte e cultura tra Umanesimo e Rinascimento, ed. Laura Fortini (Rome: Roma nel Rinascimento, 1993), 7–51; Angela Groppi, ‘Dots et institutions: La conquête d’un patrimoine (Rome, XVIIIe-XIXe siècle),’ Clio. Histoire‚ femmes et sociétés, 7 (1998), URL http://clio.revues.org/349. 42 It should be noted, moreover, that the fact that a guild of ‘boys’ would establish a regulation concerning its members’ daughters, thus implying that they could be the fathers of girls of a marriageable age, further confirms the fact that being an apprentice or journeymen did not necessarily mean being young. 43 Isin and Siemiatycki, ‘Immigration, diversity and urban citizenship,’ 97. 44 ASC, Cam. Cap., cred. XI, t. 50, chap. 21. 45 Ibid., chap. 55. 46 Ibid, chap. 6. 47 ASC, Cam. Cap., cred. XI, t. 62, chap. 17. 48 Ibid, chap. 34. 49 Ibid, chap. 50.

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15 ‘We Had a Row on the ­Politics of the Day’ Gender and Political Sociability of the Elites in Stockholm, c. 1770–1800 My Hellsing

Introduction In 1788, Duchess Charlotte, sister-in-law to the Swedish king Gustavus III, wrote a hasty note to her best friend Sophie Piper: ‘Will the Club take place or not, and if the party decides that it will, when do we go there, [I ask you for] one word as reply’.1 The Duchess referred to the fashionable novelty of elite Stockholm society, the Ambassador’s Club – the Société – which assembled regularly in a rented house close to the Royal Opera House.2 In the late eighteenth century, coffee houses had lost their appeal among the upper classes in Stockholm. The club replaced these as an arena where foreign envoys and the Swedish elite might mingle, gather news and make useful contacts. Duchess Charlotte’s note reveals that aristocratic ladies attended the club, most likely because of their political influence as patrons and social moderators.3 Not more than 15 years later, however, this aristocratic club had been joined with another for wealthy merchants – and women were excluded from both. This chapter explores spaces for political engagement in late eighteenth-century Sweden, demonstrating the opportunities and boundaries that different urban spaces played for the making of a political community.4 The analysis argues that urban sociability and leisure are pertinent to understanding the policy formation of the late eighteenth century, since politics was highly integrated with social life.5 Recreation aimed to showcase social distinctions and maintain social ties, two key components in the political advancement of both men and women.6 This chapter pioneers an exploration of gender and political sociability in Stockholm in the late eighteenth century.Via eyewitness accounts from travel literature, diaries and correspondence, it investigates the main urban leisure venues of the political classes: public gardens, theatres, assembly rooms, domestic sociability and clubs. It analyses the nature of sociability performed at the different venues in order to discern their political potential.Who had access to what venues and on what terms? Were there exclusively male venues? Did men solicit female company for political purposes? And what difference did social rank make? After an outline of the study and some introductory remarks on Stockholm and Swedish politics, the main leisure venues will be presented individually. They are thereafter analysed together, considering what political opportunities they provided for elite men and women in this period. 195

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The following chapter focuses on the urban sociability of court members, aristocrats, foreign diplomats and wealthy travellers in Stockholm. In this period, Sweden was an autocratic state where royal authority controlled political institutions, placing the royal court as the centre point for analysis. Political influence necessarily involved members of the court. Moreover, most reports on the social and political life of Stockholm are from the male elite.7 Notably, my sample of diaries and travel literature particularly represents the worldview of upper-class men.8 One major source has been included to compensate for the lack of a female perspective: the abundant writings of Duchess Charlotte (1759–1818), married to Charles, Gustavus III’s brother. In addition to the domestic elite, travel diaries also provide access to a number of people on short-term visits to Stockholm, often on business, and are particularly helpful for providing a comparative perspective with other European cities and insight into perceptions and experience of urban space. Focusing on key locations where elite society met to socialize, either in mixed-sex groupings, as in domestic houses, public gardens and the theatre; or in homosocial collectivities, such as gentlemen’s clubs, the chapter considers how these places and spaces of urban elite sociability were used to make and display status claims infused with politics, notions of belonging and citizenship. The diarists and travellers in my sample did not mention coffee houses and taverns as a space for sociable activity and are thus not included in the study.9 Coffee houses seemed to have remained important venues for political discussion and for the exchange of news in this period but only for the middling sorts without access to political decision-making.10 The first gentlemen’s clubs are included in the study as representing a new kind of sociability that proliferated in Stockholm in the nineteenth century.11 It is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter to explore the occasional clubs, balls and examples of domestic sociability in Stockholm that were policed in the politically turbulent 1790s.12

Political life in Stockholm From the mid-eighteenth century and for the next 100 years, Stockholm went through a period of high mortality, poverty and demographic slowdown.The population sat at about 60,000 people. In 1769, the upper classes in Stockholm – noble men, members of the clergy, officers and wealthy merchants and their families – represented about 13 per cent of the population. This group diminished in absolute terms until the mid-nineteenth century, when Stockholm transformed into a modern industrial capital. Stockholm nevertheless remained the principal seat for political institutions throughout the period and was the economic centre of Sweden because of the harbour, a major site for exports.13 The wealthiest and most densely populated areas of the city were centrally located, namely the ‘Town’ (Staden, today ‘Old Town’) and the southern parts of Norrmalm, where all the venues appearing in this chapter were located. The few building projects that were initiated in Stockholm in the Gustavian era consisted of fashionable urban amenities where the elite could socialise, such as the Stock Exchange with its assembly rooms and a new opera house, both placed in the main squares of the city centre. Gustavus III (1771–92), and his son Gustavus IV Adolphus (1792–1809), pursued personal rule without the assistance of a royal council. Freedom of speech, assembly, association and the press were severely circumscribed. The particularity of the Swedish political system, however, was the combination of an absolutist rule and a representative political body, a Diet with four corporations consisting of the nobility, the clergy, burghers and wealthy peasants. The Diet was summoned a couple of times per decade on royal request, since its approval was needed – according to Swedish constitution and practice – in matters of legislation and taxes. On these occasions, urban sociability was affected, since parliamentary debates were prepared and discussed at inns, coffee houses and people’s homes.14 The Danish official Hennings, who visited 196

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Figure 15.1  Johan Fredrik Martin, Norrmalm Square in Stockholm with view of the Castle, coloured etching c. 1797. Uppsala University Library.

Stockholm during the Diet of 1778, remarked for instance on the animated informal political meetings, stating that ‘society was a political battlefield’.15 A German traveller several decades later affirmed this, remarking upon the extent of Swedish political participation, embracing even the ‘simplest of peasants’ (and this when there was no Diet going on).16 Calling the fourth corporation the ‘Peasant Estate’ was rather misleading, concluded the French nobleman Beaugrenet de la Tocnaye, since they were often wealthier than their European peers.17 Stockholm of the late eighteenth century was, nevertheless, a society with strict social boundaries. Trade and political debate took place within ancient guilds and corporations until the mid-nineteenth century. The monarch dominated social life by monitoring venues in town such as the theatre. Gustavus III also desired to make social boundaries more apparent, introducing, in 1778, a national costume for men and women who were part of the noble estate, the burgher estate and the clergy. This meant that the upper classes were distinguished visually from commoners who wore their ordinary clothes.18 Despite this, however, there were a range of venues where social groups, if with some restrictions, had the opportunity to mingle and make political in-roads with the royal court.

The public garden A travel guide from 1790 mentioned four public gardens in Stockholm: the Royal Garden (Kungsträdgården), the Royal Game Park (Djurgården), the Hop Garden (Humlegården) and Carlberg Garden, the domain of the royal country palace of Carlberg.19 All of them shared common features but had different connotations and characteristics. Humlegården, originally the Royal Fruit Garden, was never mentioned in my sample, most likely because of its lack of appeal among the upper classes. It was, however, the original location of the Stenborg Comedy, which is explored further on. The main public garden was the Royal Garden (Kungsträdgården), adjacent to the most fashionable area of Stockholm where the court nobility and the diplomatic corps resided, and it was in constant use throughout the year. Entry to the garden was free for anyone from the mideighteenth century onwards.20 Daily tours on foot in the avenues, or on horseback in the royal paddock, were commonplace for the court and the aristocracy before dinner or supper. On 197

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warm afternoons, however, the fashionable crowd preferred to travel on horseback or in carriage to large green areas in the outskirts of Stockholm. The Royal Game Park (Djurgården), with its pruned wilderness and numerous inns and dance halls, was a popular resort for the court, the aristocracy and the urban population more generally.21 In order to appreciate the political importance of the public gardens, we must explore their design and function, comparing them to more secluded urban areas. First, the Royal Garden presumably attracted elite society because it was the closest one could get to a pleasure garden, following the wider European model, in Stockholm.22 Gustavus III had turned the old conservatory into a Vauxhall where he hosted masquerades, fireworks and balls in the summer season. The Stockholm Royal Garden had a classical baroque garden design, featuring three straight avenues, the middle avenue surrounded by a tall shrubbery and the outer ones lined with chestnut trees.23 Straight paths allowed the strollers to view other walkers easily and to encounter them separately when they advanced in small groups, and the shrubbery may have been used for privacy. The diaries of Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm (1756–1813) account for the beginning of a successful political career in Stockholm. As a Swedish nobleman, the 19-year-old Reuterholm was already socially established and employed in court service. He favoured the public gardens because they allowed him to make personal face-to-face encounters that had the potential to take him further on the career ladder and that were less easily obtained elsewhere. At court festivities and receptions, people were lined up according to rank, making private conversation difficult.24 Reuterholm often mentioned that he had the chance to speak to members of the royal family, foreign ministers, members of the senate (riksråd ) and aristocratic ladies on his frequent promenades.25 On 23 May 1775, for instance, Reuterholm wrote in his diary that he had turned up at the Royal Palace at noon in order to pay my humble respects to the Royal Highness, my new master, but he had just left for the Royal Garden, so I also went there.…After dinner I had the honour to speak to the Prince in the Royal Garden, where he always goes for his walk.26 Some weeks later, Reuterholm spent the day walking with his mother and noted in his diary that ‘the [Carlberg] Garden was crowded, and among others there was the new Russian Minister Simolin.…He also introduced himself to my mother and the other wives to members of the Senate’.27 Reuterholm socialised in the gardens together with his mother in a gender-mixed form of sociability, where he observed and interacted with foreign ambassadors and aristocratic ladies, an indication of their appeal to someone with social and political aspirations. The ample diary of Pierre de Gaussen (1747–1843) discloses a newcomer’s slow integration into the sociability of the Swedish capital, a sojourn that would last almost 20 years. The first moment of socialising for him as a French diplomat took place, according to his diary, a couple of days after his arrival in Stockholm in July 1783. He stayed in the French residence together with the ambassador, his employer; and the ambassador’s married daughter, the Marchioness Camille Du Bois de la Motte. During a walk together in the garden, they engaged in conversation with two other foreign ministers with the assistance of the marchioness, who had seated herself on a bench to attract the other ministers’ attention. Pierre de Gaussen was grateful for her initiative, which had allowed him and the ambassador to make these new acquaintances, and he complemented her ‘bel esprit’ in his diary and ‘the use she could be for her father during his embassy’.28 This passage shows the importance of elite women as managers of social situations that could be of political use, and also the significant role of the public garden for foreign envoys. 198

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Members of the royal family went to the public gardens for the same reason, namely to encounter the urban elite.29 Duchess Charlotte complained to her friend Sophie in 1786: ‘I have just returned from the Royal Garden…how boring Stockholm is at the moment! There were only three or four people there that I know, the others were strangers’.30 During the ongoing Swedish–Russian war in 1788, the Russian diplomat Rosemoffsky ventured into the Royal Garden to communicate with ladies from the court, although exchange with any Russian was illicit this summer. Duchess Charlotte excused her friend’s behaviour to her husband: when he approaches them [they told me that] they cannot be ill-mannered, and by the way we are no public persons…we treat Count Rosemoffsky like any other stranger and do not bother about the instructions that have been given, since we not are supposed to know about them. I find their judgement right, especially when they justify their behaviour by stating that they never have dinner or supper at his place but only meet him in a Public garden.31 This quote reveals how elite women could use their supposed ignorance to their advantage, making the political communication with the envoy from an enemy country appear random and harmless because of their gender and the nature of the location. Public gardens then as sociable spaces provided the opportunity to make new connections within aristocratic and diplomatic circles, with the possibilities such interactions held for political debate, advancement and patronage.

The theatre In the Gustavian era, there were four competing theatre troupes in Stockholm. The newly built Royal Opera by Norrmalmstorg, with its French and Italian repertoire, was the indisputable choice for members of the royal family and prominent aristocratic ladies. Several times a week, they gathered in subscribed boxes, sorted in differently priced sections, to hear political news and gossip. The ancient court theatre next to the Royal Palace hosted two troupes: the French Theatre and the Royal Dramatic Theatre, which performed Swedish plays. The French Theatre was the former main court stage, which had a steady audience of box subscribers similar to that of the opera but additionally opened its performances to the paying public. The fourth theatre was the private Stenborg Comedy.32 Visitors to the Swedish capital rapidly realised the importance of theatre life in Stockholm. De la Tocnaye stated in 1798 that: good taste requires everyone to visit all performances at the opera, even if you already had seen it without finding it entertaining. Homes are not open to visitors when performances are scheduled, because even if you do not go to the opera you pretend to, to be fashionable.33 In October 1783, Pierre de Gaussen complained in his diary that the French ambassador procrastinated his social duties: I had since long kept telling Marquis le Pons that he could not avoid taking on a box subscription, like his predecessors and all his pairs. Chevalier de Sainte Croix [previous French diplomat dwelling in Stockholm] joined me in, after having told me privately about the affability and necessity of it.34 199

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Figure 15.2  Johan Tobias Sergel, Foreign Diplomats at Stockholm’s Opera, sketch, early 1790s. Photo © Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.

The social dimension of theatre going was as important as the performance, judging from contemporary accounts.35 Reuterholm noted for instance in his diary on 1 November 1773 that I went to the Opera at half past 5, where I was seated in box number five at the premiere, right to the amphitheatre and quite close to the Queen’s box. Senator ­Gyllenstierna and several other cordons bleus were at the Opera. The Queen was seated alone in her big box on the front row, whereas the King was seated together with the Countesses Lewenhaput and Ribbing and several others in his barred box [loge grillée] on the second row. Senator Ulrik Scheffer was seated in Prince Charles’s box and General Posse in Prince Frederic’s.36 This quote reveals the prominent role of women at the theatre. Men and women, however, made different social use of the venue. Men often privileged the open seating at the galleries in the farthest part of the pit, the amphitheatre, which was open to subscription or on paying a single entrance ticket. The amphitheatre allowed them to mingle during the performance and meet with people from lower social strata who dominated the pit. Ladies preferred to remain in the boxes where they were less exposed to undesirable solicitation. They used them as drawing rooms where they invited select men and women for private conversation.37 Pierre de Gaussen was a frequent visitor to the theatre, where he appreciated the ­company of high-ranking ladies. An agitated remark that he made in his diary of May 1788, when Gustavus III prepared for war on Russia, revealed that politics could be a discussion topic: ‘I spent a while in Madame Koskull’s box, but to my great regret we had a row on the politics of the day, a topic I wish that women never would discuss’.38 Pierre de Gaussen’s opinion on women and politics seems to have been generally shared in this period.39 Nevertheless, it was a matter of propriety, because he does not seem surprised that women were as informed as men in political matters, nor did it stop such conversations taking place. 200

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The Gustavian court and the upper classes also used to attend performances at the private Stenborg Comedy.The first location of this theatre was the minor public garden in Humlegården, where it had had few aristocratic visitors. Reuterholm wrote in his diary in October 1773 that even though I did not fancy going to the Comedy some in our society did, so I accompanied them and was seated in a front row box together with Countess De La Gardie and the Misses Rudenskiöld, uncommonly grand people at this theatre’.40 Ten years later, however, the Stenborg Comedy was successful enough to be endowed with a more fashionable location in Town.41 Perhaps the modest origin of the theatre was the very reason for its popularity, giving it a special appeal compared to the haughty atmosphere at the royal theatres. At the Stenborg Comedy, courtesans could be seated like ladies in boxes, a space that was reserved for the most prominent visitors at the royal theatres. German travel writer George von Pollett wrote that the Stenborg Comedy ‘assembled every second-class beauty in town, who looked like enchanted princesses in their lavish dresses. They are rarely seen without their Don Quixote, and you often observe three or four men in one box competing on a heroine’s favour’.42 In the early nineteenth century, German visitor Hausmann remarked that the Royal Dramatic Theatre was an arena for sexual dalliance, writing ironically that you ‘had the honour to have a lady seated next to you on both sides, who entered the theatre without a chaperone but never left it without a companion’.43 One may of course wonder whether the public presence of courtesans also meant that they could play a political role.There are in fact two examples of well-off actresses, in this case also courtesans, with lasting relationships with Gustavus III’s brothers, whose influence on their royal lovers in political matters contemporaries noted.44 If they were exceptions, and that seems probable, being a ‘public woman’ (in contrast to being a ‘public man’) did not necessarily mean being politically influential.Yet, some women obviously defied social boundaries in the same way that men did. More broadly, the theatre, like the public garden, as a space for social mixing, if within strict boundaries, provided the opportunity to form social relationships that enabled political relationships and patronage.

The assembly rooms In the 1770s, the city’s burghers and the crown funded a new Stock Exchange by Stortorget, the Town’s main square. It featured a hall for stock transactions in the ground floor and a grand assembly room in the upper floor. Balls were organised here during the winter season, alternately by burghers and members of the court.45 The invitations were distributed as tickets that required every guest (even the royal family) to pay an entrance fee.46 It was a major occasion for ladies from the bourgeoisie, who were not high ranking enough to achieve a presentation at court, to meet with royalty. Present members of the royal family appeared incognito at the balls.47 The Danish traveller Hennings remarked that the royal incognito was ‘inexplicable’ since it only meant that the king could mingle unreservedly, not that people did not recognise him: ‘When the King appeared in the ball room on the first evening after the Queen’s confinement, he was received with immense cries of joy.You thus see, how little notice is taken of the incognito’.48 The ball invitations were occasionally expanded to ‘people of all sorts, even from the suburbs’, as Duchess Charlotte put it, thus turning the assemblies at the Exchange into a comparatively open venue for the court and the nobility, for merchants and even for people of lower social standing.49 It is nevertheless unlikely that the gatherings expanded beyond male and female relatives to members of the four Swedish political bodies, the Peasant’s Estate representing a wealthy 201

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albeit rural social group.50 Moreover, royal decrees that attempted to reinforce social boundaries offset the opportunity for equitable mingling. If we are to believe Pierre de Gaussen, one reason for the social inclusion at the balls was to sell enough tickets to cover costs. He wrote after his attendance at an Exchange assembly in October 1783: The Swedish King wished to separate women at the ball by offering white sleeves to introduced ladies [i.e. those formally presented at court] and imposing only black ones to the others. After this decision many ladies from the latter group decided not to come.…It seems very likely that the bourgeoisie will not frequent these assemblies anymore, and that the balls will cease altogether because of the lack of visiting paying peasants, who must be at least 200 to cover the expenses of the ball.51 De la Tocnaye made a similar observation as Pierre de Gaussen, remarking 15 years later on the rigorous sumptuary laws…the court costume is an old-fashioned gown à la polonaise. The particularity about this dress are the white sleeves, which cause much jealousy and resentment. Often when the court is invited to a ball, ladies from Town do not show up since only introduced ladies are entitled to wear those sleeves.52 Although de la Tocnaye does not explicitly mention the Exchange in this quote, his seems a similar case.When people had the occasion to mingle independently of gender and social origin, obvious marks of social distinction were installed. As a silent revolt, the ladies from town chose not to dance with members of the court rather than to bear the humiliation of being perceived as of a lower social group. For upper-class newcomers, the balls at the Exchange provided the opportunity to mingle with the royal entourage, which eventually could provide access to the Swedish court. After a ball in November 1783, when he had been staying in Stockholm nearly four months, de Gaussen reported to his diary that ‘I began to feel a little more at ease’ and that the Princess Sophia Albertina, the king’s sister, had had a long conversation with him. Camille Du Bois de la Motte, the French Ambassador’s daughter, also made her first entry to the court society at the balls of the Exchange before being invited to the palace by Duchess Charlotte.53 Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm, however, did not mention the balls at the Exchange. A reason might have been that he already had a kin and friendship network that introduced him to the right people.

Domestic sociability For newcomers to the Swedish capital, an invitation to prominent people’s homes seemed as sought after as it was inaccessible, perhaps reflecting its importance in other parts of Europe. ‘I notice it [in my diary] as something exceptional to have received an invitation to a home in Stockholm’, Pierre de Gaussen wrote after a month’s stay in the capital.54 Furthermore, strangers agreed on the seclusion and dullness of social life. ‘Except for the diplomatic corps you see few parties, while, as they assure me, no parties are given’, the Danish official Hennings declared in 1778. ‘Some ladies receive visits. It appears to be the fashionable thing for them to do, assumedly in order to chase boredom with boredom’.55 These ladies were all married. Either they or their husbands had high positions at court – they were in fact the same women that we have already encountered in the public gardens and in the theatre. Gustavus III enhanced their position by visiting their weekly assemblies in their palace apartments, and encouraged other members of the royal family to do the same.56 Pierre de Gaussen explained that these ladies hosted tea assem202

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blies once a week on their ‘day’ in the winter season and held dinner parties regularly. One could go there without having received a formal invitation, but de Gaussen hesitated. On 27 October 1783, he wrote: ‘Madame de Lantingshausen hosted a teaparty, but since I had made up my mind on only going where I was invited, I spent the evening at Madame Kuneman’s [the wife of the Danish envoy]’.57 For people with social and/or political aspirations such as Pierre de Gaussen, being noticed and accepted by high-ranking ladies was a key factor for succeeding in the capital, certainly because they functioned as gatekeepers to leading men.58 For instance, the French diplomat lost his patience after a few months in Stockholm because the ambassador did not assist his integration in the Swedish capital: I went together with Baron Liewen to pay visit to Countess Brahe, [de Gaussen wrote in his diary] having decided to achieve on my own and with the help of strangers what I never seemed to obtain from people, whose position nevertheless made me expect it from them.59 Another important domestic venue was the (mostly) modest country retreats on the outside of Stockholm, owned or rented by the nobility, diplomats and wealthy merchants. They were used to host luncheons, dinner parties and informal get-togethers. This sociability was apparently less about public display than it was a way of deepening an acquaintance or pursuing a negotiation. The country retreats were easily reachable within an hour from town, so that you could receive visits without having to offer them spare rooms to spend the night.60 Domestic gatherings then were rarer in Stockholm than elsewhere but nonetheless played an important role in deepening political ties and relationships.

Gentlemen’s clubs Private academies, societies and masonic lodges flourished in Stockholm in this period. They were open to a select few and functioned according to strict rules, thus being as impervious to strangers as the domestic space.61 In 1786, however, the diplomatic corps launched the so-called [Grande] Société, offering a sociability according to international standards that had not existed before in Stockholm.62 The Club, as it was also called, was accommodated in a rented house in the most fashionable part of the capital, close to Norrmalmstorg and the Royal Opera. In the early nineteenth century, the club was divided into two: one for the nobility, the Société; and another for merchants, the Société or Sällskapet (founded in 1800). Both clubs offered dinners and suppers to members, a library, national and foreign newspapers, a billiard room and spaces for discussion and meetings.63 Foreigners praised both clubs in Stockholm – which, confusedly, had the same name and similar functions.64 In 1820, Arthur de Capell Brooke called the Societé one of the most splendid establishments existing, and on a scale superior to anything of the kind in London, [it] forms a great convenience to the traveller during his ­residence in Stockholm, as he can be immediately balloted for, so as to become a ­temporary member, and at a trifling expense enjoy the first society, and a­ccommodations ­ ­exceeding anything elsewhere in Stockholm.65 Thomas Thomson, writing in 1812, preferred the Merchant’s Club, where he felt lucky to dine and spend his spare time: 203

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Any of the members has in its power to introduce a stranger to his Selskap [sic] for a month, by making himself answerable for the propriety of his conduct.…By the goodness of Mr. Siderholm, a Swedish merchant, to whom I had a letter of introduction, I was introduced to the selskap, and regularly dined at their table when I was not otherwise engaged.66 Temporary membership to both clubs required both a recommendation and the paying of an entrance fee. De la Tocnaye stated already in 1798 that the Société consisted of ‘three hundred balloted members, among them the most prominent people of the kingdom’. According to him, the club welcomed upper-class travellers but were more restrictive when it came to including Swedes from outside Stockholm. And he added another rigorous instruction for the club sociability: ‘The first rule is never to discuss politics’.67 The aim of these clubs was the polite socialising of male equals, merchants and nobles separately. Well-educated foreigners that could inform and animate the society were appreciated, since the exchange of news was crucial. But the club was apparently not supposed to be a platform for ambitious Swedish newcomers in town. It seems very likely that gentlemen’s clubs, in spite of what de la Tocnaye said, were in fact venues for policy formation – but this must be confirmed by further investigation. At the very least, like the other sociable venues of Stockholm, they enabled the formation of relationships between men that could provide political opportunities. The authorities supervised the noble’s club because of the interaction between foreign ministers and Swedish nobles that took place here. In October 1794, there was actually a police action against the club because coffee continued to be served here in spite of the national coffee prohibition.68 Women were allowed at the Société only on special occasions from the turn of the century onwards, when balls or assemblies were organised at the club.69 Apparently, the clubs were even perceived as challenging the home assemblies hosted by married women. De la Tocnaye reported on the lavish balls that were held every now and then at the Société: they are, in some way, a kind of consolation to the ladies so as to calm their aversion against this club, that often deprive them of company. Ladies are in their right not to like the Société, because although the club is important to strangers who may not have any other amenities in Stockholm, one must deduce from a native man [homme établi] who spends a major part of his day here, that his home is not pleasant to him, and this is a domestic secret that ladies do not wish to expose publically.70 Perhaps women were also aware of the way such clubs side-lined them from public life.

Political culture and civic identity in a European town This chapter has highlighted the ways that sociable urban spaces in Stockholm enabled political relationships within a system where power flowed directly from the court. The nature of this system ensured that high-ranking women with close ties to the court were politically significant, although their public presence was socially circumscribed. The emergence of commercial leisure, supposedly liberated from royal authority and potential vehicles for political and social transformation, did not guarantee the development of a political civic sphere beyond the court.71 Stockholm seemed a difficult city to navigate, where the court could not be bypassed for political decision-making and the elite sociability was exclusive. The sample reveals that the court, the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie engaged in the same activities, but that no venue was open to anyone who could pay.The clubs and the assembly rooms welcomed paying and invited 204

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guests. The seating at the theatre was socially and financially divided in boxes, galleries and a pit. Access to the homes of the Stockholm elite was limited to certain days and hours and excluded even upper-class strangers in town. My results thus concur with what Hannah Greig has stated for the London beau monde, that recreational activities reproduced social hierarchies rather than destabilising them.72 So far, this study particularly confirms results from Anglo-Saxon research, claiming the political importance of elite women in the domestic sphere.73 How and why this changed in the Swedish capital with the development of gentleman’s clubs is not covered in this chapter, encouraging further research on several issues. All leisure venues in Stockholm, except for the clubs from the early nineteenth century, were open to male and female interaction and political discussion. Elite women were even vital as monitors of domestic sociability. Looking more closely on the different use of these spaces, however, in situations where women could play an active part, there was also a tendency towards seclusion and supervision that did not seem to limit men. Women were dominant in people’s homes, in boxes at the theatre and in public gardens during daytime. Influential women were married, with some rare exceptions among high-ranking courtesans. In contrast, men had access to a much wider range of spaces and their political ambition was considered within the normal remit of their activities. A combination of high rank and gender (not all men nor all women) seemed decisive in enabling a political role in Stockholm.

Notes  1 Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte, undated note, 1788, Stafsundsarkivet, Smärre enskilda arkiv, vol. 15, Riksarkivet, Stockholm.   2 Ibid., 1787–88. Claës Lundin, Sällskapet 1800–1900: Historisk skildring (Stockholm: Sällskapet, 1900), 4 claimed that the club had monthly assemblies advertised in the newspaper Dagligt Allehanda, but, according to Pierre-Jean-François de Gaussen, Journal, passim, vol. 19, Mémoires et documents, Suède, Archives des affaires étrangères, La Courneuve there were more frequent activities on various week days. The location of the club in the 1780s was in Ekestubbska huset, according to Johan Flodmark, ‘En främlings Stockholms-intryck [Skizzen über Stockholm. Jahren 1789–90 entworfen von George von Pollett],’ Sankt Eriks årsbok (1907), 65 and in Daevelska huset at Norrmalmstorg in the 1790s, Nils Staf, Polisväsendet i Stockholm 1776–1850 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1950), 265.   3 See My Hellsing, Hovpolitik: Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte som politisk aktör vid det gustavianska hovet (Örebro: University of Örebro, 2013).   4 See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988).   5 Urban leisure venues such as public gardens, assembly rooms and dance halls have undergone an analytical evolution in later years; from being regarded as aesthetic and cultural phenomena to becoming vehicles for social change. See, for example, Urban History 40, no. 4 (2013), special issue on ‘Music and the city’ edited by Markian Prokopovych; Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).   6 See Greig, Beau Monde, especially 131–66.   7 The sample of travel accounts derives from the bibliography by Samuel E. Bring, Itineraria Svecana: Bibliografisk förteckning över resor i Sverige fram till 1950 (Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1954). To complete the picture and elucidate continuity and change, I have included some travel writings where the journey was undertaken after 1800. When the date of the journey is known, this is referred to; otherwise, I state the year of issue.   8 Among their titles and functions were nobleman, diplomat, officer, official, professor, court librarian and pastor in the protestant Reformed Church of France. See also Mark Davies, A Perambulating Paradox: British Travel Literature and the Image of Sweden c. 1770–1865 (Lund: University of Lund, 2000), 48–49. Female autobiographical writing in Sweden did not proliferate until the early nineteenth century; see Eva Haettner Aurelius, Lisbeth Larsson and Christina Sjöblad, Kvinnors självbiografier och dagböcker i ­Sverige 1650–1989: en bibliografi (Lund: Lund Univ. Press, 1991).

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My Hellsing   9 Johan Flodmark, ‘En främlings,’ 62–63. 10 Claës Lundin, ‘Källare och kaffehus i Stockholm under senare hälften af 1700–talet,’ Sankt Eriks årsbok (1903), 55–56; Annie Mattsson, Komediant och riksförrädare: handskriftcirkulerade smädeskrifter mot Gustaf III (Uppsala: Uppsala universitet, 2010), 193–95. 11 Lundin, Sällskapet 1800–1900, 4. 12 Staf, Polisväsendet i Sverige, 235–43. 13 Eva Eggeby and Klas Nyberg, ‘Stad i stagnation 1720–1850,’ Lars Nilsson, ed., Staden på vattnet. Del 1: 1252–1850 (Stockholm: Stockholmia, 2002), 187–93, 203–05. About Stockholm in this period, see also Mats Hayen, Stadens puls: En tidsgeografisk studie av hushåll och vardagsliv i Stockholm, 1760–1830 (Stockholm: Stockholms universitet, 2007). 14 About sociability earlier in the eighteenth century, see Sennefelt, Politikens hjärta. 15 August Adolf Friedrich Hennings, Briefe aus Schweden im Jahr 1778, 47. 16 Johann Friedrich Ludwig Hausmann, Reise durch Skandinavien: In den Jahren 1806 und 1807, vol. 3 (­Göttingen, 1814), 54–55. 17 Jacques-Louis de la Tocnaye, Promenade d’un français en Suède et en Norvège (Brunswick, 1801), vol. 1, 101. De la Tocnaye was born in Brittany 1767 and emigrated in 1791; Favier and Molander, Les relations, 230. 18 See Mikael Alm, ‘Making a difference: Sartorial practices and social order in eighteenth-century Sweden,’ Costume 50, no.1 (2016). 19 Henric Gustaf Runemark, ed., Vägvisare igenom Stockholm (Stockholm, 1790), 11. 20 Nils G. Wollin, ‘Kungsträdgården i Stockholm. II,’ Sankt Eriks årsbok (1924): 107. 21 Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm, ‘Gustaf Adolf Reuterholms dagbok från åren 1775–1776,’ Personhistorisk tidskrift 23, no. 3–4 (1923), 190–94, 222; Flodmark, ‘En främlings,’ 58–59; My Hellsing, ‘Court and public in late eighteenth century Stockholm: The royal urban life of Duchess Charlotte, c. 1790,’ The Court Historian 20, no. 1 (2015): 8. 22 See quotes by Jean-Pierre Catteau-Calleville, Tableau général de la Suède par M. Catteau (Paris, 1790), vol. 2, 115; Pierre Marie Louis Boisgelin de Kerdu and Alphonse Toussaint Joseph Andre Marie Marseille Fortia de Piles, quoted in Franck Favier and Marianne Molander, Les relations entre la France et la Suède de 1718 à 1848: Une amitié amoureuse (Paris: Michel de Maule, 2015), 224. On the ‘original’ pleasure garden in eighteenth-century London, see Greig, Beau Monde, 66–80. Peter Borsay, ‘Walks and promenades in London and provincial England in the long eighteenth century,’ in Christophe Loir and Laurent Turcot, eds, La promenade au tournant des XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Belgique – France – Angleterre) (Brussels: Université de Bruxelles, 2011), 82–88. 23 Flodmark, ‘En främlings,’ 58. On baroque garden design, see Laurent Turcot, Le promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Gallimard, 2007), 56–90. 24 For accounts of Gustavian court receptions, see, for example, Hennings, Briefe aus Schweden, 57–58; Mikael Alm and Bo Vahlne, Bo (eds.), Överkammarherrens journal 1778–1826: ett gustavianskt tidsdokument (Kungl. Samfundet för utgivande av handskrifter rörande Skandinaviens historia, Stockholm, 2010), passim. 25 Reuterholm, ‘Gustaf Adolf,’ 192–96, 223–27. 26 Ibid., 192. 27 Ibid., 194. 28 Gaussen, Journal, 27 July 1783, 6. 29 My Hellsing, Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte: Hertiginna vid det gustavianska hovet (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2015), 99–100, 110, 150–52. 30 Letter from Duchess Charlotte to Sophie von Fersen, 16 July 1786, Stafsundsarkivet, Smärre enskilda arkiv, vol. 14. 31 Letter from Duchess Charlotte to Duke Charles, 30 July 1788, Ericsbergsarkivet, Carl XIII’s samling, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. 32 For further details on the court’s sociability at the theatre and the composition of the audience at the Stockholm Royal Theatres, see Hellsing, ‘Court and public,’ XX. 33 De la Tocnaye, Promenade d’un français, 76. 34 Gaussen, Journal, 3 October 1783, 21. 35 See also Jennifer Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts: Opera and Elite Culture in London, 1780–1880 (Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2007), especially 3–11; Greig, Beau Monde, 80–94. 36 Forsstrand, En gustaviansk ädlings ungdomshistoria: Några anteckningar av och om Gustaf Adolf Reuterholm (Stockholm: Geber, 1925), 80. 37 For examples of Duchess Charlotte’s use of the theatre for political purposes, see My Hellsing, Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte: Hertiginna vid det gustavianska hovet (Stockholm: Atlantis, 2015), 96–98, 120, 192–95.

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Gender and Elite Political Sociability See also Hall-Witt, Fashionable Acts; Gillian Russell, Women, Sociability and Theatre in Georgian London (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007). In London theatres, the gallery was different since it was reserved for the most humble spectators, Greig, Beau Monde, 82. 38 Gaussen, Journal, 22 May 1788, 168. 39 Sennefelt, Politikens hjärta, 200. 40 Forsstrand, En gustaviansk, 67. 41 For a comprehensive picture of Gustavian stage performances, see Marie-Christine Skuncke, ‘Gustaviansk teater,’ Sven Åke Heed, ed., Ny svensk teaterhistoria: 1.Teater före 1800 (Hedemora: Gidlunds, 2007), 188–217. For European perspectives on the eighteenth-century theatre, see also Ute Daniel, Hoftheater: Zur Geschichte des Theaters und der Höfe in 18. und 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1995), 115–355. 42 Flodmark, ‘En främlings,’ 62. 43 Hausmann, Reise durch Skandinavien, 87–88. 44 Sophie Hagman (1758–1826) and Charlotte Slottsberg (1760–1800). On their political influence, see Carl Forsstrand, Sophie Hagman och hennes samtida: några anteckningar från det gustavianska Stockholm (Stockholm: Wahlström and Widstrand, 1911), 32–34, 108–09. The social status of actresses was, however, often modest and vulnerable, see Marie Steinrud, ‘Performing Women. The Life and Work of Actresses in Stockholm 1780–1850,’ in Early Professional Women in Northern Europe, c. 1650 to the 1850s, eds, Johanna Ilmakunnas, Marjatta Rahikainen and Kirsi Vainio-Korhonen (New York: Routledge, forthcoming 2017). 45 Thomson, Travels in Sweden, 99. 46 Hellsing, ‘Court and public,’ 5–6. 47 Lundin, Sällskapet 1800–1900, 8–9. 48 Hennings, Briefe aus Schweden, 57–58. 49 Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte, Journal, Lettre au mois de Janvier 1791, 19, Ericsbergsarkivet, Hedvig Elisabeth Charlottas samling, vol. 2, Riksarkivet, Stockholm. 50 For a European comparison, see Joonas Jussi Sakari Korhonen,‘Urban social space and the development of public dance hall culture in Vienna, 1780–1814,’ Urban History 40, no. 4 (2013): 606–24. 51 Gaussen, Journal, 12 October 1783, 25. See also De la Tocnaye, Promenade d’un français, 80–81; CatteauCalleville, Tableau général, 106. 52 De la Tocnaye, Promenade d’un français, 81. 53 Gaussen, Journal, 2 November 1783, 9 November 1783, 27–28. 54 Ibid., 20 August 1783, 12. 55 Hennings, Briefe aus Schweden, 35. See also quotes by a French aristocrat in Favier and Molander, Les relations, 225 and Francisco de Miranda, Miranda i Sverige, 46–47. 56 The organisation of court sociability in this period is described in Hellsing, Hedvig Elisabeth Charlotte, 81–89. 57 Gaussen, Journal, 27 October 1783, 27. See also 11 October 1783, 23. 58 Ibid., 3 August 1783, 9, 10/8 1783, 11, 19 October 1783, 26. 59 Ibid., 26 October 1783, 26. 60 Franscisco de Miranda, Miranda i Sverige och Norge 1787: General Francisco de Mirandas dagbok från hans resa september–december 1787 (Stockholm: Nordiska Museet, 1950), 96, 107, 122; Marc-Marie Bombelles, Journal 1789–1792, vol. 3 (Genève: Droz, 1993), 355. 61 Hausmann, Reise durch Skandinavien, 79–81. On Swedish voluntary associations, see also Anders Simonsen, Bland hederligt folk: organiserat sällskapsliv och borgerlig formering i Göteborg 1755–1820 (Göteborg: University of Gothenburg, 2001); Ann Öhrberg, Samtalets retorik: belevade kulturer och offentlig kommunikation i svenskt 1700-tal (Höör: Brutus Östlings bokförlag Symposion, 2014), 108–73. For international comparisons, see for example Peter Albrecht, Hans Erich Bödeker and Ernst Hinrichs, eds., Formen der Geselligkeit in Nordwestdeutschland 1750–1820 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003); R. J. Morris, ‘Introduction: Civil society, associations and urban places: Class, nation and culture in nineteenth-century Europe,’ in R. J. Morris, Graeme Morton and Boudien de Vries, Civil Society, Associations and Urban Places: Class, Nation and Culture in Nineteenth-century Europe (Aldershot: Asgate, 2006). 62 A similar institution was the Grande Société in the Hague, founded in 1748, Jan Hein Furnée, ‘In good company: Class, gender and politics in the Hague’s gentlemen’s clubs, 1750–1900, in Civil Society, 117–138. A Swedish precursor (to the merchant’s club) was the Royal Bachelor’s Club in Gothenburg, established in 1769. 63 Flodmark, ‘En främlings,’ 65 gives a detailed account of its organisation. See also Jens Lorentz Beeken, Dagbog paa en reise i Sverrig (Copenhagen, 1820), 158–60.

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My Hellsing 64 Flodmark, ‘En främlings,’ 65–66; Hausmann, Reise durch Skandinavien, 80–81. 65 Arthur de Capell Brooke, Travels through Sweden, Norway, and Finmark, to the North Cape: In the Summer of 1820 (London: Rodwell and Martin, 1823), 28. 66 Thomson, Travels in Sweden, 112–13. 67 De la Tocnaye, Promenade d’un français, 87–88. 68 Staf, Polisväsendet i Sverige, 265. 69 Lundin, Sällskapet 1800–1900, 7. 70 De la Tocnaye, Promenade d’un français, 88. 71 On the dynamics between court and town in the early modern period, see Jan Hirschbiegel, Werner Paravicini and Jörg Wettlaufer, eds., Städtisches Bürgertum und Hofgesellschaft. Kulturen integrativer und konkurrierender Beziehungen in Residenz- und Hauptstädten vom 14. Bis ins 19. Jahrhundert (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2012), especially 271–318; Greig, Beau Monde. On the transfer from royal to public control of leisure and the arts, see John Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1997). On the commercialization of leisure in the eighteenth century more generally, see John Brewer, Neil McKendrick and John Harold Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-century England (London: Hutchinson, 1983), 265–85; Peter Borsay, A History of Leisure: The British Experience since 1500 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 19–25. 72 See Hannah Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), especially 131–66. 73 Judith Schneid Lewis, Sacred to Female Patriotism: Gender, Class, and Politics in Late Georgian Britain (New York: Routledge, 2003); Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life, c.1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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16 Gender, Philanthropy and Civic Identities in Edinburgh, 1795–1830 Jane Rendall In July 1817, Eliza Fletcher, a Yorkshirewoman married to an Edinburgh lawyer, a literary h ­ ostess and later an autobiographer, wrote a short memoir of her daughter Grace, three months after Grace’s entirely unexpected death from typhus at the age of 20. The memoir begins with an account of Grace’s extensive education and early years, including her political interests and the ‘intrepid humanity’ she showed in confronting parish officers mistreating a poor pregnant woman.1 In the final pages, Fletcher recalls in detail the last week of her daughter’s active life before catching typhus. Grace was anxious, she wrote, to ‘avoid crowds and enjoy the real pleasures of society’. That is, she chose to engage with ‘the duties of humanity’ as well as ‘the duties of home’.2 The ‘duties of humanity’ were considerable, for in her last week of life Grace and her sister attended either the House of Industry or the Lancastrian School in Edinburgh three or four days a week, as well as visiting friends for dinner, going to the theatre and spending time with her family. Eliza Fletcher’s portrait of her daughter is also very relevant to her own life in these years, for she played a leading role in the growth of women’s associational life in early nineteenth-century Edinburgh. Her ideal of female sociability went far beyond the informal networks of women’s relationships and the life of the literary salon to include a commitment to civic duty and social improvement, in alliance with the inspiration of evangelical religion.

The City of Edinburgh and its voluntary societies The city of Edinburgh was a national capital without a parliament, yet it was the base for the administration of Scotland, the independent Scottish legal system and the regular annual meetings of the established Presbyterian Church of Scotland. It also had its own outstanding university and its own port, in neighbouring Leith. The creation of the Edinburgh New Town, begun in 1767, exemplified the drive for improvement characteristic of the age of the Scottish Enlightenment, though it was to bring the gradual impoverishment of the Old Town of tenement houses and narrow closes.3 In the eighteenth century, the city was known also for the range and vitality of its many societies, including debating clubs and masonic lodges; musical, literary, scientific, medical and improvement-oriented societies; and others that were sporting or simply convivial. Some were socially or intellectually exclusive and some primarily for university students, though others, like popular debating societies, had a much wider social recruitment.4 Yet almost all these were entirely masculine, as Rosalind Carr has recently demonstrated.5 209

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The late eighteenth century, however, in Scotland as in England, saw the growth of a different kind of association.Voluntary associations, open to all who subscribed, were established to achieve some common interest, such as the provision of education or poor relief, identified as being of benefit to a much wider public; they might also associate the moral and social order they sought to achieve with the spread of Protestant Christianity. These associations, like the older ones, had rules and a constitution, but they also reported to their members and to that wider public through regular meetings, annual reports and financial statements. R. J. Morris has influentially suggested that such societies contributed to the construction of middle-class identities among urban elites, although other historians remind us of the continuing importance of traditional forms of patronage even in urban settings and also that such societies were not only middle-class.6 Although the Scottish poor law and educational system, both administered by the local kirk session, were very different from those of England, the major Scottish cities by around 1800 faced the same social problems as English cities did. In Edinburgh, the town council, a selfrenewing oligarchy of merchants and tradesmen, had by the late eighteenth century mostly taken over the responsibilities of the kirk, but it was still unable to address the levels of poverty experienced in the city. This council was also entirely responsible for electing the member of parliament for Edinburgh; there was no wider electoral process.7 Voluntary associations offered their members a way of engaging with the social problems generated by rapid urban growth, especially where the state was failing to respond to such growth. They sought, often in the spirit of political economy, to eliminate what was viewed as a degrading dependency on relief through the discriminating application of charity and the use of the principle of self-help. The growth of newer forms of association was encouraged here as elsewhere by a religious revival. Although the Church of Scotland was dominated by the socially conservative Moderate party until the late 1820s, the late eighteenth century saw the growth of a significant evangelical movement in Scotland focused on moral and social reform, along with a much greater degree of religious diversity. The religious denominations involved included, by 1800, an evangelical minority within the Church of Scotland, seceding Presbyterian groups, Baptists, Congregationalists, Methodists and Episcopalians, but not Catholics, who were still affected by discriminatory legislation.8 Andrew Dalgliesh has examined the rapid growth of voluntary associations in Edinburgh from 1780 to 1820, years in which the population was growing heavily, from c. 82,000 inhabitants in 1801 to c. 138,000 in 1821. Between 1780 and 1810, he has identified 37 new associations, of which about one-third were of the older, often exclusive, kind.9 The new societies were, like the older ones, entirely male governed, although in many women might and did become members through subscription. From the late 1790s, women too were part of the expansion of voluntary associations formed for philanthropic and religious purposes throughout Scotland.10 Yet their participation has hardly been recognised. In contrast, for England, the explosion of female philanthropic societies among the women of the upper and middle classes from the 1790s onwards was first identified in 1974 by F. K. Prochaska in a pioneering article.11 Since then, many historians have contributed to our understanding of English developments from both national and local perspectives.12 Some emphasise the circumscribed nature of women’s power in these societies, though others argue that in spite of their limitations, through voluntary associations women became part of a modernising elite, sharing a commitment to the moral and social improvement of their society. 13 For Edinburgh, Dalgliesh occasionally acknowledges their membership of, and some participation in, male-led societies, and the existence of female auxiliary societies, but he identifies only one of the 18 autonomous female societies established in this period and traced for this study.14 In many ways, this is not surprising. Female societies were less effectively institutionalised than male societies; many did not keep regular records or print annual reports, and their existence has to be 210

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pieced together through newspaper reports and appeals, periodical references, charity sermons and directories, with a few rule books and reports. This paper considers both female societies and women’s participation in male-led societies for evidence of women’s identification with the regulation of Edinburgh and its working-class population. It also seeks to demonstrate the ways in which philanthropy was structured by gender, in relation both to the objects of relief and to the modes of action open to elite men and women.

Female associations in Edinburgh The female societies established in Edinburgh in these years were committed to moral, social and educational reform and to the spread of Protestant Christianity both at home and overseas. In both female and mixed societies, women from the upper and middle classes took on work that was, for the most part, viewed as gender appropriate and was directed towards the poor of their own sex. Middle-class women, with some female residents from a landed or rentier background, ran their own societies on the same basis as other voluntary associations, with income from subscribers and donors. They might need male assistance, in particular, for financial investments and for the auditing of accounts. They organised relief for, and undertook the domestic visiting of, poor households, and they established and ran girls’ schools, industrial schools and female-friendly societies. In May 1813, the Baptist physician and former Church of Scotland minister Dr Charles Stuart, speaking at a meeting of the Edinburgh Bible Society, described the novelty of these practices, and suggested that: Female societies for the relief of aged and indigent women – female subscriptions for supporting native missionaries in India – female associations for supporting schools for girls – females engaged in gratuitous teaching – female Bible societies, are a pledge to me, while conducted with delicacy and privacy, of better times to come.15 There is a note of qualification and ambiguity in Stuart’s call for ‘delicacy and privacy’, suggesting that there remained some tensions around and perhaps within these societies, and a few instances of this have been identified. Nevertheless, some women, even if in small numbers, responded actively to what they perceived as the civic and religious imperatives of the day through a sense that the ‘duties of humanity’ were as appropriate to them as to their male ­contemporaries. The earliest female associations identified in Scotland were founded in Edinburgh from 1797. Their numbers later expanded to include not only philanthropic visiting societies for sick and aged women but also clothing and lying-in societies, educational societies and female-friendly societies. The first societies clearly drew their inspiration in part from a group of Edinburgh ministers sympathetic both to philanthropic enterprises and to the new evangelical missionary movement marked by the foundation of the London Missionary Society in 1795. The leaders of this group came not only from the Church of Scotland but also from the seceding and dissenting churches. In February 1796, the Reverend James Peddie, a minister of the seceding New Light Burgher church, with others, founded the Edinburgh (later Scottish) Missionary Society; in the same year, the Reverend Greville Ewing, then a minister of the Church of Scotland, which he left for the Congregational church in 1798, became the co-founder and editor of the Edinburgh-based Missionary Magazine.16 It was within the pages of the Missionary Magazine that the case was first made for female philanthropic associations. In July 1797, ‘A Female Reader’, who can be identified as a 211

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Janet Jamieson, later Mrs Greville Ewing, contributed a letter ‘On Female Associations’ in which she asked why women alone were to be excluded from a share in philanthropic labours. Though she proclaimed ‘I am no advocate for the fancied equality of the sexes’, she also argued that ‘the united efforts of godly women’ might achieve much in ministering to the needs of their own sex and in superintending the education of poor children. She suggested that the accounting and minute keeping needed was well within the capabilities of middle-class women.17 In the same year, 1797, the Edinburgh Senior and Junior Female Societies for the Relief of Aged and Indigent Women were founded.18 They may have been influenced by the visit to Edinburgh in that year by a leading evangelical minister of the Church of England, the Reverend Charles Simeon from Cambridge, who associated himself with the group of ministers described above. The Leith Female Society for the Relief of Indigent Sick Women, founded in July 1798, was established as a direct result of his visit to Leith in the spring of that year.19 The regulations for these first Edinburgh societies have not survived, but we know that in 1806, the Junior Female Society was reborn as the Charitable Female Society, with a distinguished list of patrons. The reasons for this are not clear but may have had to do with denominational differences. It may be significant that the first sermon for the Charitable Female Society, in the Cowgate Episcopalian Chapel, was given by the Episcopalian minister for Haddington, Miles Jackson. The society then had over 200 subscribers and a committee of ten, with around 100 elderly women receiving relief, though these numbers are suspiciously round. As in all these charities, all recipients were visited personally and help was given ‘with a strict regard to prudence and oeconomy’…‘only to those aged and indigent females, who are not supported by any public charity’ .20 Similarly, the Leith Female Society was said in 1811 to have just ten members and to have relieved 693 families since its foundation.21 These initiatives were accompanied by clothing and lying-in societies and the provision of small-scale education for girls. Clothing societies were a natural extension of concern for the poor and destitute. The rules of the Edinburgh Society for Clothing the Industrious Poor, founded in 1815, have survived. They note that though a number of societies existed for the relief of the poor in the city, ‘no Society has yet been formed for the sole purpose of providing for the clothing of the more industrious and respectable of that class of the community’. Several ladies, having been encouraged by the example of other associations elsewhere, formed the society, which had 12 female committee members, six of whom met weekly to hear appeals for assistance and make clothes, with a committee of 12 visitors responsible for visiting the homes of the poor. A committee of four gentlemen was set up to assist in gaining information where needed.22 In the 1820s, the growth of lying-in societies demonstrated the close association between material relief and moral improvement and also a certain rivalry between female philanthropy and medical improvement. In 1821, the Edinburgh Society for Relief of Poor Married Women of Respectable Character when in Child-Bed was established under the patronage of a leading evangelical philanthropist, Lady Carnegie of Dalry. Its aim was to provide clothing and linen for mother and child, and help with fuel, to poor households recommended by subscribers who could affirm their moral probity. The committee of 12 met monthly, and the society appointed 12 visitors. In its first year, ‘feelings of unqualified satisfaction’ were expressed, with the institution exceeding ‘the expectations of its most sanguine friends’. In the first year, 29 cases were relieved; in the second, 53.23 In 1824, the Edinburgh Lying-in Institution for delivering poor women at their own houses was founded by a male initiative to provide the attendance of a doctor or midwife as well as a box of linen. It incorporated a committee of ladies to superintend the wardrobe department and act as visitors.24 It also attracted a hostile letter in the Scotsman 212

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newspaper from Senex, a supporter of the earlier society, who commented that no notice at all had been taken of it by the new institution: Is it because the ladies know that, in 99 cases out of 100, a ‘Canny Houdie [midwife] for the Job,’ and a fair allowance of wholesome nutriment, are of more benefit to poor lying-in women than all the Doctors and drugs our famed city can supply? [Moreover, Senex suggested,] unless the Institution devolve the active charge of their business on Ladies – unless the selection of proper objects be placed under the control of female delicacy, and the nature and extent of the relief to be administered be committed to female investigation and tenderness, the Institution may do more work, but will never do half so much good as the Society.25 Philanthropy also involved education, initially primarily in reading the Bible and in skills u ­ seful for employment and for domestic work, which was provided in what we would describe as industrial schools. In 1799, Alpha, from Edinburgh, called in the Missionary Magazine on her young countrywomen ‘to turn their attention to the young of their own sex’ and to form a society for this purpose. In 1802 O., also from Edinburgh, suggested ‘the erection of Female Societies, for completing the education of poor female children’, in which girls who could already read would be taught industrial skills.26 Many such schools, initially focusing on industrial skills rather than reading and writing, were set up in and around Edinburgh by all-female societies as well as by mixed ones. The first identified is the Leith Female Charity School of Industry, established in 1802; Mrs Colquhoun, the wife of the Church of Scotland minister for South Leith and secretary to the Leith Female Society in 1811, also acted as secretary of this school from at least 1811 to 1827.27 Others followed. The Address to the Ladies of Leith Walk, Greenside and Broughton, published in 1819, and directed to the establishment of a girls’ school, was written in a strongly evangelical spirit. On visiting the poor of Leith Walk, ladies had found ‘nurseries of ignorance, immorality and crime’ for which their solution was to be religious education and the training of girls to ‘industry and virtue’. In this school, managed by a committee of ladies and a general meeting of subscribers, each scholar was taught reading, sewing, knitting and spinning ‘and in addition to these, writing and arithmetic as rewards of good behaviour’.28 In April 1798, Eliza Fletcher, with other ladies, founded another kind of philanthropic society, the Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, for domestic servants and other poor women. This may have been the first friendly society in Scotland, as Fletcher claimed. In the preliminary to the regulations of the society, the encouragement given by the Friendly Societies Act of 1793 is noted, but it is also stated that: these societies, however, have hitherto, in this part of the kingdom, been confined solely to men, whilst it is obvious that they may and ought to be extended to women, as being equally well calculated to prevent or alleviate many of those distresses to which females in the lower industrious class of society are exposed.29 The society had both honorary middle-class members, who paid a subscription; and ordinary members, with a committee of seven honorary and four ordinary members, all of whom were required to be unmarried.30 Fletcher wrote in her autobiography of the vehement opposition of the deputy sheriff and magistrates when these were legally applied to according to the Act of 1793 to sanction the rules of the society. She suggested in retrospect that ‘for ladies to take any share, especially a leading share, in the management of a public institution, was considered so novel and extraordinary a proceeding as ought not to be countenanced’.31 The magistrates had 213

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refused to sanction the rules of this society, and later of other societies, as required by the Act of 1793, on the quite indefensible grounds that neither female societies nor societies with honorary members fell under the meaning of the act. Fletcher continued the struggle against Edinburgh magistrates until, as late as 1825, she enlisted the help of Francis Jeffrey, a leading lawyer and editor of the Edinburgh Review, who pointed out in a memorial to the justices that such societies were perfectly conformable to law and had been universally approved and registered across the rest of Britain since 1793.32 At this point the magistrates finally caved in.33 Perhaps unsurprisingly in the face of such opposition, no examples of friendly societies founded by Edinburgh working women have been found, although two other philanthropic societies with an occupational base were established. The Edinburgh Institution for the Benefit of Female Teachers and Governesses, founded before 1809, was managed by its members but had five male trustees, including ex officio the Lord Advocate and Solicitor General for Scotland.34 The Edinburgh-based Scottish Friendly Society of Governesses and Female Teachers, founded in 1830, allowed an equal role to honorary and ordinary members.35 Nothing is known of how effectively the two latter societies operated.36

Women in the world of male-led societies As female societies were emerging, ladies’ committees were simultaneously established in ­charities run by men.They were in demand for the internal management and oversight of female institutions of all kinds, although they were not part of management committees or openly involved in strategic or financial discussions. They also proved themselves extremely successful fundraisers. Many examples can be given of this from the late 1790s onwards. In August 1797, the first meeting of the Edinburgh Philanthropic Society, modelled on the London Philanthropic Society, was held. Its founders, James Peddie and the Reverend David Black, an evangelical minister of the Church of Scotland, proposed that they should found a refuge for prostitutes and fallen women, to be reclaimed from the Edinburgh Bridewell and the streets of Edinburgh.37 In the Missionary Magazine of August 1797, the editor appealed particularly to ladies to help in the work of reclamation in Edinburgh: ‘Let not female delicacy recoil from the distressing sight!’ He cited the Lock Penitentiary set up in Dublin in 1794, which had a lengthy list of female ‘Governesses’ and issued a direct invitation to ladies, in particular, to help shape the new refuge in Edinburgh in the same way: If any lady of public spirit and Christian charity will please to promote a design so excellent, and shall prosecute it with success, – posterity shall rise and bless her, and shall say, ‘Many daughters have done virtuously, but thou has excelled them all!’38 In November 1798, a committee of 12 ladies met in the Magdalene Asylum newly established in the Old Town, charged with taking particular care of the women admitted and especially their work, dress and conduct. Eliza Fletcher was one of them and remained an extremely active committee member until 1810, taking her turn as one of the visitors attending the asylum weekly, with a particular responsibility for purchasing clothes for the inmates from their own earnings.39 The surviving minutes of the Ladies’ Committee of the Magdalene Asylum show the detailed care they gave to its administration. In 1820, the annual report acknowledged ‘the benevolent and Christian superintendence by the Ladies’ Committee of all the internal arrangements of the House and…their diligent attention to the religious improvement of the women’.40 In January 1801, a House of Industry was set up in Edinburgh by the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging the Industry and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, inspired by a similar 214

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­ ondon-based society. From its beginning, it included an industrial school for girls. In ­November L 1806, the male committee appealed to ‘a number of ladies every way qualified for so important a trust’ to take charge of what were described as ‘the internal arrangements of the house…as this is entirely a female institution’.41 The committee of ladies then set up included the novelist and educationalist Elizabeth Hamilton. Other ladies were invited to join and attend the next general meeting. By 1809, the House of Industry School was divided into a lace manufactory, a spinning school and a school for servants.42 By 1815, the ladies are described in the annual report as having the sole management of the institution.43 In 1810, the Edinburgh Lancastrian School Society was established following the foundation of the British and Foreign Schools Society in London in 1808 to defend the monitorial methods of teaching, which Joseph Lancaster had developed in his Southwark school. This was a system that promised cheap and universal education and inspired wide-ranging enthusiasm across ­Britain in its very early years. Reforming opinion in Edinburgh was passionately in favour, believing that the distinctive Scottish provision of parish schools provided for the countryside but that the Lancastrian system might offer an answer in the major cities. When the directors of the Edinburgh Lancastrian School established a new school house in 1813 with space for separate boys’ and girls’ schools, the directors reported in May 1813 that ‘several respectable ladies, distinguished for their benevolence’ had agreed to visit the girls’ school and oversee its management. These ladies also suggested the importance of sending a young woman to be trained at the girls’ school set up in London by Joseph Lancaster’s sister, suggesting their awareness of the importance of new systems of training female teachers. The directors went on to report further that ‘as the detail of female education properly falls within the province of the ladies’, the superintendence of the girls’ school would be given over to them.44 The female visitors rapidly became a ladies’ committee, including Eliza Fletcher and Elizabeth Hamilton, now responsible for the internal management of the school.45 The Edinburgh Society for the Suppression of Beggars was established in January 1813 at a time when economic distress meant the proliferation of beggars on the streets in Edinburgh. It was modelled on the example of similar societies elsewhere, and its goals included not only suppressing the practice of begging on Edinburgh streets but also the relief of ‘the Industrious and Destitute Poor’, of whom the female poor were ‘by far the most numerous class we have’. The committee of the society suggested opening a repository for work to be taken on for the poor to execute and for teaching poor children useful employments, and it looked to ‘a Committee of Ladies’ to help it execute these schemes.46 The repository was opened in March 1813, and the female committee played a major part in superintending its organisation. One or more members attended the repository daily to superintend the work, mainly sewing, with one of the male directors. The committee arranged for children to be given clothes for school, established a strawplaiting school for girls and provided childbed linen for married women of good character. Eliza Fletcher was also a leading player in this society and in 1813 personally offered premiums to ‘the most industrious, cleanly, and sober’ of those working in the repository.47 The directors of the society repeatedly expressed their gratitude to the ladies’ committee, who ‘yield to none, either in zeal for the objects of their interest, or in intelligence as to the most effectual mode in assisting them’.48 However, male directors alone were responsible for the policies and public meetings of the society, the allocation of resources and the investigation and choice of cases for relief. Middle and upper-class men and women collaborated along these gendered lines in a number of other institutions and societies across Edinburgh in this period, too many to be described here. Along with these initiatives and closely associated with them came the growth across S­ cotland of female Bible and missionary societies. The impetus for this came from the establishment in 215

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London of the immensely successful British and Foreign Bible Society in 1804; its primary aim was the unsectarian distribution of the text of the Bible at home and overseas, and to achieve this, it constructed a network of branch and auxiliary associations, including the very active Ladies Bible Associations, in the main auxiliaries of local male-led parent societies.49 The foundation of the Edinburgh Ladies’ Auxiliary Bible Society came late compared to many in western Scotland and followed promptings from London. The Edinburgh Bible Society had been founded in 1809, and at its annual meeting in 1813, the Reverend George Payne commented that ‘Fruitful as this city has been in benevolent institutions of all kinds, I believe we have no Ladies’ Auxiliary Bible Society in Edinburgh’. He asked ‘Might not such a Society be instituted with advantage in this city?’ But this did not happen until 1818, when the annual report recorded ‘several communications…lately…received from England, on the subject of Ladies’ Auxiliary Bible Societies’, especially the news of the successful foundation of a Liverpool Ladies’ Auxiliary. A meeting for Edinburgh ladies was rapidly organised by the secretaries of the society, though its form, and the spectacle of ladies ‘holding up their hands in token of their approbation’, met with some disapproval from within the Church of Scotland.50 The Edinburgh Ladies’ Association in Aid of the Society for the Support of Gaelic Schools, founded a year earlier in 1817 and similarly committed to biblically-based religious education, also had a powerful ladies’ committee. Both these societies were to become very successful fundraisers for their parent bodies. The Bible Society movement was accompanied by a rapid growth in missionary societies. In 1815, the Leith Female Auxiliary Missionary Society was established at ‘a very numerous and respectable meeting of the ladies of Leith, held in the Rev. Mr Aitchison’s Church’, a seceding Presbyterian church; the Rev Mrs Aitchison, as she is referred to in the report, became the first president.51 The Lady Collectors of the Edinburgh New Town Auxiliary Scottish Missionary Society, led by the Honourable Augusta Mackenzie, in 1824 collected £283 out of the society’s total income of £472 and continued to provide the majority of the funds.52 The 1820s saw a more extensive growth of missionary societies, whether linked to particular denominations, like the Ladies’ Association of the Edinburgh Church of England Missionary Society, in existence before 1820; or directed towards a particular object, such as the Edinburgh Ladies’ Auxiliary Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews (1822).The Scottish Ladies’ Society for Promoting the Education of Greek Females was founded at an exceptionally well-attended meeting in Edinburgh in April 1825, at which no woman spoke; but the Reverend Thomas McCrie and the Reverend Henry Grey gave supportive accounts of how ‘some of the ladies in this place’ had originated the idea of encouraging female education in Greece. In early 1830, the society was able to send out its first female agent, a Miss Robertson, to Corfu, by then part of the British Protectorate of the Ionian Islands.53 And in November 1830, the first female anti-slavery society in Scotland, the Edinburgh Female Anti-Slavery Association, met, its formation encouraged by the evangelical campaigner for immediate abolition, the Reverend Andrew Thomson.54 Its rules declared the aims of the association to include the circulation of anti-slavery books and tracts, the improvement of the welfare of Africans and the encouragement of the use of free-grown sugar.55 These last two societies suggest a campaigning force that broadened the imperatives of civic and evangelical philanthropy into an imperial context.

Women in the city Throughout this period, female societies and women’s committee work were becoming publicly visible in the life of the city. The income received from subscribers and donors had to be supplemented by public appeals in newspapers and by church collections, especially those following sermons in aid of the cause. Individual ministers from across denominations gave 216

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their support, as did James Peddie for the Junior Female Society in 1802 and the Baptist James Haldane for the Senior Female Society in 1807, both in meeting-houses in Edinburgh’s Old Town, to take just two examples.56 Church of Scotland ministers for the most part gave their sermons in St Andrew’s Church in the wealthier New Town, and Episcopalian ministers in their chapels. Such sermons also reported to the public on the work of the societies. These soon became part of an urban charitable establishment through which the town council distributed funds from major events, court fines and legacies to the poor. So, in 1815, the Town Council of Edinburgh distributed £1500, the profits of the Edinburgh Musical Festival, to 17 institutions and societies; the Royal Infirmary received £400, the Magdalene Asylum £100, the Senior Female Society £50, the Leith Female Society £30.57 There were, too, occasional sociable fundraising events, like the assembly held for dancing in Corri’s rooms in 1809, advertised and organised by ‘the ladies who have charge of the House of Industry’.58 And in 1827 and again in 1828, the Edinburgh Ladies’ Association for the Support of Gaelic Schools held sales of work in the Assembly Rooms on George St, raising £220 and £229 respectively. It has been suggested that the growth of voluntary associations reflected the formation of middle-class identities; however, some women’s associations also drew heavily on women of aristocratic and landed backgrounds, both as patronesses and as committee members. Lists of committee membership survive more often in the fuller records for ladies’ committees of mixed societies than for female societies. Women from the middling ranks of Edinburgh society, who came from a mixture of professional, mercantile and trading backgrounds, may well have dominated the smaller societies. Of the 12 who met in 1798 to form the ladies’ committee of the Magdalene Asylum, five were the wives or daughters of professional men, including a dissenting minister’s wife and a schoolmaster’s daughter; and at least two, probably more, came from mercantile backgrounds. But women from landed or rentier families also came to be active in committee work, especially where societies had aspirations to influence across Scotland. Of the 21 women who made up the ladies’ committee of the Lancastrian School Society, 15 have been identified; five were from aristocratic or landed backgrounds, including two from families with military or naval connections. Five were married to lawyers, two to surgeons and one to a minister. Two women can be identified from their own occupations: Elizabeth Hamilton, the novelist; and Mrs Small, the keeper of a boarding school. In the course of the period discussed here, as one reformer, Henry Cockburn, wrote, the city’s elite had built control of ‘almost all the modern institutions’, in contrast to those ‘ancient establishments’ from which they were excluded; he concluded that ‘a public has arisen in Edinburgh’. This ‘public’ was in effect a mixed urban elite, mobilising the professional, mercantile and trading population together with residents from a landed and rentier background who shared a commitment to the management of social order and the growth of economic ­prosperity, to be achieved through voluntary means. It was a profoundly Protestant public united by a broadly conciliatory interdenominationalism, though such unity was not without tensions and was not to last.59 Elite women from similarly mixed backgrounds had become part of this ‘public’ as, for the first time, they claimed a small stake in the voluntary regulation of their city along lines that reflected both their gender and their class. In making such a claim, Edinburgh women were also part of a wider movement across Britain. They sometimes followed English models, as, for instance, in the establishing of the Lancastrian school for girls, though these were always adapted to the different political, social and religious circumstances of Scotland. Other towns and cities in Scotland rapidly followed Edinburgh’s example, with Glasgow establishing its first female society in 1799 and Aberdeen in 1804. In Scotland as in England, women’s involvement was welcomed because the energy, time and ability they brought to religious and philanthropic enterprises were invaluable. It was 217

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acceptable because associations were structured by gender difference, through the restricted range of women’s societies, through their limitation, in the main, to concern for their own sex and through the maintenance in mixed enterprises of male authority, oversight and financial control. Yet women’s roles in voluntary organisations were also contested because they could still seem at odds with that ‘delicacy and privacy’ of which Charles Stuart spoke. This anxiety was shared by women themselves. Male assistance was often requested. Women presiding over a mixed meeting or speaking in public to mixed audiences remained rare, though not unknown, and the autonomy of their associations within wider movements remained limited. Both the emergence of a female ‘public’ and its limitations have to be recognised. Legislative reforms of 1832 and 1833 restructured the parliamentary constituency and the town council and for the first time gave Edinburgh a wider, if still property-owning, electorate. In December 1832, Eliza Fletcher celebrated the election of two reforming MPs for the city of Edinburgh, chosen by this newly expanded electorate, and watched as they were borne through the city in triumph: ‘few events ever excited me more that those which took place in Edinburgh at that time’, she wrote.60 In the following years, the Church of Scotland, local government and the British state came to play a greater role in the regulation of the city and the dynamic years of voluntarist initiative came to an end. One of their lasting legacies was the engagement of elite women in the collective work of regulating the lives of the city’s poor, in a commitment to ‘public spirit and Christian charity’.

Notes   1 [Mary Richardson], ed., Autobiography of Mrs Fletcher with Letters and Other Family Memorials (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1875), 341–59, here 346.  2 Ibid., 353–57.  3 On Edinburgh in these years, see Charles McKean, Edinburgh: Portrait of a City (London: Century, 1991), 108–59; A. J. Youngson, The Making of Classical Edinburgh, 1750–1840 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1970).   4 Davis D. McElroy, Scotland’s Age of Improvement: A Survey of Eighteenth Century Literary Clubs and Societies (Washington: Washington State University Press, 1969); Peter Clark, British Clubs and Societies 1580– 1800:The Origins of an Associational World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 91, 131–2, 213, 459.   5 Rosalind Carr, Gender and Enlightenment Culture in Eighteenth-Century Scotland, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 71, 82–92.   6 R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary societies and British urban elites, 1780–1850: an analysis,’ Historical Journal 26, no. 1 (1983), 95–118; Clark, British Clubs and Societies, 8–9, 444–46.   7 R. J. Morris, ‘Philanthropy and poor relief in 19th century Edinburgh. The example of a capital city without a national state government,’ Mélanges de l’École française de Rome, Italie et Méditerranée 111, no. 1 (1999), 367–79.   8 William Law Matheson, Church and Reform in Scotland: A History from 1797 to 1843 (Glasgow: James Maclehose, 1916), chap. 2.  9 Andrew J. Dalgleish, ‘Voluntary associations and the middle class in Edinburgh, 1780–1820,’ Ph. D. thesis, University of Edinburgh, 1992, 2, 30. 10 For women’s associations throughout Scotland in this period, see Jane Rendall, ‘Women’s associations in Scotland, 1797–1830,’ in The Need to Belong: Associationalism in Enlightenment Scotland, ed. Mark Wallace, forthcoming Bucknell University Press, 2017. 11 F. K. Prochaska, ‘Women in English philanthropy, 1790–1830,’ International Review of Social History 9 (1974), 426–45. 12 See, for instance, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2002), 429–36; Donna Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989); Amanda Vickery, ‘Introduction,’ to Women, Privilege and Power: British Politics, 1750 to the Present, ed. Amanda Vickery (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 24–25; Rosemary Sweet, ‘Women and civic life in

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Gender, Philanthropy and Civic Identities eighteenth-century England,’ in Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England: On the Town, ed. Rosemary Sweet and Penelope Lane (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 39–41. 13 Martin Gorsky, Patterns of Philanthropy: Charity and Society in Nineteenth-Century Bristol (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2011), 164–72; Vickery, ‘Introduction,’ 25; Sweet, ‘Women and civic life,’ 39–41. 14 Dalgliesh, ‘Voluntary associations and the middle class,’ 156, 184, 208–10. My figure includes philanthropic and religious associations but excludes those auxiliary to male societies. 15 Proceedings of the Fourth Annual Meeting of the Edinburgh Bible Society, held on Monday 31 May 1813 (Edinburgh: A. & J. Aikman, 1813), 11–12. 16 For James Peddie and Greville Ewing, see the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 17 ‘A female reader,’ ‘On female associations,’ Missionary Magazine [MM ] 2 (1797): 360–62; [ Jessie J. Matheson], Memoir of Greville Ewing (London: William Tegg, 1847), 88–90. 18 For the later history of this society, see Viviene Cree, A Family Concern:A History of the Indigent Old Women’s Society, 1797–2002 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh, 2005) at http://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/ en/publications/a-family-concern(498bc8e1-1759-4bce-91e7-5d12f91805dd)/export.html. The Senior and Junior Female Societies amalgamated in 1907 under the title of the Indigent Old Women’s Society, which survived until January 2002. 19 Rev William Carus (ed.), Memoirs of the Life of the Rev. Charles Simeon ... , 3rd ed. (London: J. Hatchard & Son, 1848), 98 and 119–20; John Jamieson, The Beneficent Woman: A Sermon, preached at Leith on Sabbath, March 10, 1811, for the Benefit of the Female Society in that place for the Relief of Indigent Sick Women (Edinburgh: J. & J. Robertson, 1811), Preface. 20 Miles Jackson, The Constraining Power of the Love of Christ. A Sermon, Preached on ... Oct 28 1806, in the Episcopal Chapel, Cowgate, for the Benefit of the Charitable Female Society, Edinburgh (Edinburgh:T.Turnbull for Ogle & Aikin, 1806), 33–35, Appendix. 21 Jamieson, Beneficent Woman, Preface. 22 Edinburgh Christian Instructor [ECI ] 10 (February 1815): 139–40. 23 First Annual Report of the Edinburgh Society for Relief of Poor Married Women, of Respectable Character when in Child-Bed (Edinburgh: Anderson & Bryce, 1822); The Scotsman, 3 March 1824. 24 Edinburgh Lying-in Institution for delivering Poor Married Women at Their Own Houses (Edinburgh: Murray and Mitchell, 1824). 25 The Scotsman, 3 March 1824. 26 ‘Alpha,’ ‘Education of poor female children,’ MM 4 (1799), 504–6; ‘O,’ ‘Plan for Female Schools,’ MM 7 (1802), 291–92. 27 Edinburgh Almanack and Imperial Register for the Year 1812 ... (Edinburgh: for William Turnbull, Glasgow [n.d.]), 134; Edinburgh Almanack, or Universal Scots and Imperial Register for the Year 1828 ... (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1827), 372; Jamieson, Beneficent Woman, Preface. 28 Address to the Ladies of Leith Walk, Greenside and Broughton ([Edinburgh]: n.p., 1819), C.R.15.3.16/16–17, University of Edinburgh Special Collections. 29 National Records of Scotland [NRS], Regulations for the Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, instituted 19th April 1798 (Edinburgh: Neill and Company, 1832), 2, FS1/17/58. 30 Regulations for the Edinburgh New Town Female Friendly Society, 4. 31 [Richardson], Autobiography, 76–77. 32 University of Edinburgh Special Collections, [Francis Jeffrey and Robert Hunter], Memorial for the Edinburgh New-Town Female Friendly Society: Submitted to the Honourable the Justices of the Peace for the County of Edinburgh ([Edinburgh]: n.p., [1825]), 3–6, FAct: Pamphlet file, vol. 3; NRS, Minute-Book of the Justices of the Peace for Midlothian, 1810–26, JP4/2/2, 30 September 1818, fos. 144–45. 33 Ibid., 17 May 1825, fo. 408. 34 Maxwell Garthshore, ‘Account of the Edinburgh Institution, for the benefit of female teachers and governesses,’ The Reports of the Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor, 6 vols (London: W. Bulmer and Co, for the Society, 1797–1814), vol. 6, 29–40. 35 NRS, Rules of the Scottish Friendly Society of Governesses and Female Teachers (Edinburgh: Caledonian Mercury Press, 1830), art. 2, FS1/17/122. 36 For a more general view of female friendly societies in Scotland, see Jane Rendall, ‘ “The principle of mutual support”: Female friendly societies in Scotland, 1789–1830,’ forthcoming. 37 For the London Philanthropic Society, see Donna Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 182–86; David Black, Christian

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Jane Rendall Benevolence Recommended and Enforced by the Example of Christ: A Sermon preached before the Edinburgh Philanthropic Society (Edinburgh: John Brown, 1798), 26–47. 38 ‘Religious Intelligence,’ MM 2 (1797), 382–4. 39 Edinburgh City Archives [ECA], Magdalene Asylum, Ladies’ Committee Minute Book, minute for 23 November 1798, SL 237/2/1; ECA, Ladies’ Committee Inspection Report, 1798–1800, miscataloged and appears to be male committee minute book, minute for 18 June 1799, SL 237/3/1. 40 Report from the Directors of the Edinburgh Magdalene Asylum for 1820 (Edinburgh: J. Ritchie, 1820), 11. 41 Caledonian Mercury [CM ], 27 November 1806. 42 ‘Account of the Edinburgh House of Industry,’ Scots Magazine 71 ( January 1809), 20–22. 43 CM, 9 January 1815. 44 Reports of the Ordinary Directors of the Edinburgh Lancastrian School Society to the General Meetings of the Society … on July 2 and November 15, 1813 (Edinburgh: Alex. Lawrie, 1813), 7. 45 Ibid., 24. 46 Society for the Suppression of Beggars; for the Relief of Occasional Distress, and the Encouragement of Industry among the Poor, within the City and Environs of Edinburgh, (Edinburgh: Alex. Lawrie, 1813), 11–17. 47 First Report of the Society, instituted in Edinburgh on 25th January 1813, for the Suppression of Beggars, … (Edinburgh: Alex. Smellie, 1814), 9–16, 25–28, and subsequent reports of this society, 1815–24. 48 Third Report of the Society … for the Suppression of Beggars, 18. 49 Leslie Howsam, Cheap Bibles: Nineteenth-Century Publishing and the British and Foreign Bible Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52–61. 50 ECI 16 (April 1818), 267–68. 51 ECI 10 (June 1815), 422–23. 52 SMPR 6 (May 1825), 242; SMPR 8 (May 1827): 282. 53 CM, 2 April 1825; SMPR 11 ( June 1830): 294–95. 54 Iain Whyte, Scotland and the Abolition of Black Slavery, 1756–1838 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 197. 55 Resolutions and Rules of the Edinburgh Female Anti-Slavery Association (Edinburgh: Ballantine, 1830). 56 CM, 29 May 1802; CM, 31 October 1807. 57 CM, 1 December 1815. 58 CM, 19 January 1809. 59 Henry Cockburn, Considerations submitted to the Householders of Edinburgh, on the State of their Representation in Parliament (Edinburgh: Adam Black, 1823), 6; Dalgliesh, ‘Voluntary associations and the middle class in Edinburgh,’ 178, 21–6, 253–71. 60 [Richardson], Autobiography, 209–210.

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17 Negotiating Respectable Citizenship Homosexual Emancipation Struggles in Early Twentieth-Century Copenhagen Niels Nyegaard

Introduction At the turn of the twentieth century, numerous efforts at the emancipation of h ­ omosexuals proliferated across Europe. They particularly occurred in the grand metropolises of those European countries where same-sex relations were objects of legal discrimination. The modern city afforded the masses and public spaces necessary for the performance, constitution and negotiation of homosexual identities.1 As scholars of gay history have noted, many of the period’s homosexual emancipation struggles focused on the issue of civil citizenship, the claim to freedom from state interference in same-sex relations between consenting adults. They have further pointed to the key role played by medical science in these claims to full civil citizenship.2 During the last decades of the nineteenth century, German scientists began to define samesex relations as a symptom of congenital pathology. They thus abandoned existing perceptions of such liaisons as immoral debauchery. As the Austrian psychiatrist Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1902) explained, contrary sexual instinct, or homosexuality, was the effect of a hereditary degeneration of the central nervous system. It was furthermore often accompanied by an inversion of gender identity, which constituted homosexuals as a kind of ‘third sex’ within the human species.3 Importantly, this scientific understanding of same-sex desire was quickly supported by individuals who habitually engaged in same-sex relations. By recounting their life stories to the medical establishment, many of them actively contributed to the formulation of homosexuality as a scientific concept.4 The ensuing body of knowledge, in return, could be deployed in the service of homosexual emancipation. At the turn of the twentieth century, same-sex acts, particularly between men, were a criminal offence in several European countries. Following a general European pattern, predominantly protestant countries in the north, like Denmark, Sweden, Germany and Britain, criminalized such acts as so-called ‘sodomy’ or ‘intercourse against nature’. Conversely, the Catholic southern countries like France, Italy and Spain followed the 1810 Napoleonic Code in its separation of religion and law, sin and crime. As a consequence, private same-sex acts between consenting adults were legal in these countries, although morally frowned upon.5 At the same time, large 221

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and diversified homosexual subcultures began to emerge in Europe’s major cities. In ­countries where same-sex relations were criminalized, activists emanating from these milieus soon began to argue for legal reforms. The emancipatory struggles were launched in mid-nineteenthcentury Berlin, where homosexual activists began to deploy the scientific concept of homosexuality to argue for the injustice of prosecuting a supposedly natural and fixed homosexual desire. On this basis, they claimed the full civil citizenship they were excluded from because they had been categorized as criminals.6 During the final decades of the nineteenth century, Berlin became home to one of Europe’s largest homosexual subcultures. In 1897, the German capital witnessed the foundation of the Scientific Humanitarian Committee [Wissenschaftlich-humanitäres Komitée], in which the concept of homosexuality, medical science and homosexual emancipation all came together. The committee was led by the renowned sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld (1868–1935), who himself was homosexual. Through various educational efforts, it worked tirelessly for the abolition of Germany’s sodomy statutes.7 In Britain, early homosexual emancipation efforts were far less institutionalized than in Germany. Here, homosexual-rights activists like John A. Symonds (1840–1893) and Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) authored various private and public scripts in which they disseminated the latest scientific discoveries on same-sex desire and argued for legal reforms. In particular, Ellis’ 1897 book Sexual Inversion, which legal authorities banned, gained public attention.8 In predominantly rural countries like Denmark and Sweden, homosexual efforts at emancipation were considerably less developed and vociferous than in the urban centres of Britain and Germany. However, a few, typically lone-standing, activist voices did appear.9 In 1892, for instance, a homosexual man published a scholarly article in the prominent Danish medical journal Library for Doctors [Bibliotek for Læger]. Under the pseudonym of Tandem,10 he openly defended homosexuality, arguing that homosexuals could be respectable, learned and intelligent people. He supported his claims by referencing the newest German scientific literature.11 As indicated in this brief outline, early twentieth-century homosexual efforts at emancipation seemingly were dominated by two major themes: first, the claim to full civil citizenship and second, the forging of a close alliance with medical science. Indeed, these are points that scholars of gay history have repeatedly emphasized.12 However, as this chapter argues, the period’s homosexual emancipation struggles were far more diverse and multi-faceted than is indicated by this grand narrative. At times, other issues were equally important. Among these, the representation of homosexuals as dignified and respectable citizens, their claiming of what we might term respectable citizenship, should not be underestimated. Furthermore, close collaborations with medical science were not always of prime importance.The chapter builds these arguments on its examination of a hitherto unexplored homosexual emancipation struggle, which took place in early twentieth-century Copenhagen. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Copenhagen had a population of about half a million inhabitations, making it Denmark’s largest city by far. With its densely crowded urban spaces, anonymous masses and relative lack of social control, the capital provided the perfect conditions for the existence of a distinct homosexual subculture.13 More specifically, the chapter examines two public defences of homosexuality authored by Carl Hansen (1870–1939) and Emil Aae (1873–1926), in 1907 and 1909, respectively. Both defences emanated from the so-called Great Morality Scandal of 1906–07.This scandal consisted of a well-publicized criminal trial dealing with male homosexual prostitution. At the trial, both Hansen and Aae were convicted for engaging in illegal same-sex liaisons. Consequently, they lost their status as respectable middle-class citizens. In their defences, both men sought to reclaim this status by addressing the general public of Copenhagen. Unlike Tandem in the 1890s, they did not confine their writings to the medical establishment. 222

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In its exploration of the two defences, the chapter will examine how Hansen and Aae attempted to reclaim their respectable citizenship. It does so from a theoretical perspective of citizen performativity. In this line of thought, the category of citizenship involves more than formal rights and duties. It touches upon identities, subject formations, modes of belonging and acts. Acts are especially important, as they constitute subjects as citizens or, at least, as legitimate claimants of this status.14 Building on this theoretical perspective, the chapter further assumes that, in order to become culturally legible claimants of respectable citizenship, Carl Hansen and Emil Aae had to cite and perform certain regulatory norms permeating the era’s societal images of the respectable male citizen.15 A brief outline of these regulatory norms will be presented shortly. In the subsequent analyses, the chapter then shows how Hansen and Aae attempted to reclaim their respectable citizenship by purporting to perform a selection of these ideals. Importantly, both stated that they were men of honour, men of a certain age and maturity and men of education and culture. Finally, the chapter discusses the stakes involved in Hansen and Aae’s emancipatory efforts, including their principal negotiations of respectable citizenship, gender and sexuality.

Regulatory norms of respectable citizenship in early twentieth-century Copenhagen In order to gain a better understanding of Hansen’s and Aae’s defences, it is necessary to begin with a brief consideration of the regulatory norms that defined early twentieth-century Danish images of the respectable male citizen. Here, it may be useful to look at the period’s constitutional suffrage criteria. At the turn of the twentieth century, various civil and social rights had already been granted to all members of the Danish nation-state. Political rights, however, was a privilege of the few.16 Consequently, the political citizen may be perceived as a subject associated with special social legitimacy and intelligibility, an especially worthy and respectable citizen.17 The constitutional suffrage criteria may therefore offer an idea of the characteristics that defined the ideal and respectable citizen in early twentieth-century Denmark. According to the constitution of 1849, which introduced constitutional monarchy to ­Denmark, only naturalized men of honour who had passed the age of 30 could be endowed with suffrage to the two chambers of parliament, the House of Commoners [Folketinget] and the House of Lords [Landstinget].18 Implicitly, all women were barred from the status of being full citizens. However, various groups of men were equally excluded. The constitution of 1849 explicitly excluded from the right to vote male farmhands and male domestic servants who did not have their own households, men who had received public poor relief without paying it back, men who did not own their own houses and men who had not lived in the constituency for a year before an election.19 Thus, the status of being an ideal citizen with suffrage was conditioned on gender, civil status and social class.20 As Danish historians have noted, the 1849 suffrage criteria were permeated by a series of norms defining the full citizen. Importantly, they included an inherently masculinized image of this citizen. Only men could become political citizens.21 Consequently, political citizenship may be seen as a marker of masculinity in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Denmark. It separated an elite group of male political citizens from various groups of disenfranchised men, relegated to the same secondary, inherently effeminized, citizen status as women.22 In this line of reasoning, the constitutional criteria defining the enfranchised male citizen, such as the possession of honour and a certain age of maturity, may be seen as emblems of masculinity. Furthermore, there existed a close linkage between being an independent male householder and a full citizen.23 Drawing on early modern Lutheran ideas of the householder as an emblematic figure 223

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of authority and independence, this alignment between civil status and the right to vote explains why neither male farmhands nor male domestic servants could become political citizens. Both social groups were subordinated to a group of male householders who represented them in the political sphere.24 Finally, the importance of social class must not be underestimated.25 As the 1849 constitution declared, no man dependent on public poor relief could become a political citizen. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, the question of social class grew increasingly important in Denmark. In 1866, a constitutional revision provided the wealthiest men from the electorate, men from the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy, with two votes to the House of Lords.26 Conservative members of parliament introduced this privileged vote to keep the uneducated peasants away from political power. The 1866 constitutional revision constituted the gifted, well-educated and wealthy men of the electorate as ideal citizens worthy of privileged suffrage as the country’s largest taxpayers.27 Alongside gender and civil status, these norms of social class played a key part in early twentieth-century Danish images of the ideal and respectable citizen.

The Great Morality Scandal in Copenhagen, 1906–07 By the middle of the nineteenth century, Copenhagen was already home to a circle of men who convened at the city’s embankments to engage in same-sex liaisons. This rudimentary network was the precursor of the male homosexual subculture that emerged in the city at the turn of the twentieth century.28 Up until the 1930s, the legal authorities defined the sexual activities performed within this subculture as criminal offences.29 According to section 177 of the 1866 Danish penal code, so-called ‘intercourse against nature’ was to be punished with up to six years of hard labour.30 Furthermore, cases of indecent conduct, intimate touching, caressing and mutual masturbation between men could be prosecuted when causing public offence.31 Typically penalized with 40 days of imprisonment, such actions were only illegal when taking place in public or involving legal minors.32 In 1905, the legal authorities further attempted to circumscribe Copenhagen’s growing homosexual subculture by making homosexual prostitution punishable with up to two years of forced labour.33 Particularly the issue of male homosexual prostitution gave rise to the Great Morality Scandal in 1906–07. During the summer of 1906, Copenhagen’s municipal police arrested a handful of young working-class men for homosexual prostitution. Initially, the arrests were not an object of great public concern.That all changed, however, during the fall of 1906, as the prostitutes began to reveal the names of their customers. They all belonged to the city’s respectable middle classes. Soon the examining judge, Julius Wilcke (1875–1951), had arrested a total of eight middle-class men for engaging in illegal same-sex relations. They were charged according to section 177 of the penal code, as the 1905 interim penal statute only applied to homosexual prostitutes.34 Undoubtedly, the two most prominent men arrested were the 33-year old dentist Emil Aae and the 36-year old superintendent at Copenhagen’s Criminal Police, Carl Hansen. The latter was especially renowned for his position as editor of the local police journal The Police Friend [Politivennen]. The social positions of the arrested men, their public arrests and the fact that male homosexuality apparently was a widespread urban phenomenon quickly generated a state of moral panic in Copenhagen. Led by the tabloid press, the city’s morning papers soon began to cover the criminal case intensively, naming it the Great Morality Scandal. Until October 1907, the newspapers regularly reported the latest developments in the case proceedings as they were conducted by Judge Wilcke.35 On 1 October 1907, 13 months after the initial arrests, sentences were finally passed. Seven of the eight middle-class men were found guilty of having committed intercourse against nature and 224

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acts of indecent conduct with other men. Of these, Emil Aae received the harshest punishment: two years of hard labour. The remaining six men were sentenced to between eight months and one year of hard labour. The last middle-class man, Carl Hansen, was only found guilty of having committed indecent conduct. For this crime, he was sentenced to 60 days of imprisonment. Simultaneously, six male prostitutes were sentenced to a few months of forced labour.36

The public defences of Carl Hansen and Emil Aae The Great Morality Scandal gave rise to numerous newspaper writings and debates on the question of male homosexuality. Accordingly, the novel scientific concept of homosexuality was disseminated among a wider urban public. Most of the participants in the public debates did not identify as homosexuals. On the contrary, they clearly dissociated themselves from the arrested men by depicting these as degenerate and effeminate creatures who took a special interest in adolescent boys.37 To counter these public images and reclaim their respectable citizenship, Carl Hansen and Emil Aae each published a personal defence, in 1907 and 1909, respectively.38 Hansen’s defence was printed as six large articles in the daily newspaper The Evening Paper [Aftenbladet] during the month of June 1907. At the time, he was still waiting for his verdict. Emil Aae published his defence in 1909, right after he had served his sentence at Vridsløselille Penitentiary. His defence became a whole book, titled The Unadorned Truth About my Arrest and the Formerly Appointed, Investigating Judge Wilcke’s Great Morality Scandal, 1906–07 [Den fulde Sandhed om min Arrestation og fhv. kst. Kriminalretsassessor Wiclke’s store Sædelighedssag 1906–07]. Importantly, both men attempted to reclaim their respectable citizenship without denying their homosexuality. Emil Aae shortly described himself as ‘ab origine homosexual’,39 whereas Carl Hansen spoke more subtly of his ‘psychopathological character’.40 With these expressions, the two men deployed the period’s emerging medical vocabulary on homosexuality. They framed their desire as a fixed congenital pathology. The nature of this desire, however, was only an issue of minor importance to Carl Hansen and Emil Aae. They devoted their defences to other questions. In particular, the question of who could actually be considered a proper and respectable citizen was of key importance. Both men argued that they, above all other actors involved in the Great Morality Scandal, embodied a series of qualities associated with the respectable male citizen. They alone were men of honour, men of a certain age and maturity and men of education and culture.

Men of honour Of vital importance to both Carl Hansen and Emil Aae was the question of who was actually a man of honour. In their defences, both men explicitly emphasized that they had not violated any sections of the Danish penal code.41 Despite of their involvement in the Great Morality Scandal, they thus professed that they were still men of honour.42 These statements did not necessarily imply that Hansen and Aae depicted themselves as virginal creatures that had never been intimate with other men. Rather, as especially Emil Aae emphasized, their sexual encounters had only been of such a nature that they could not be prosecuted according to the prescriptions of the penal code. On several occasions, Aae accentuated that he had only sought out the private company of sexually mature men who were already familiar with homosexuality. He did not think that the authorities had any legal right to interfere in such acts between consenting adults.43 Moreover, both men stated that it was their accusers, the male prostitutes, who were criminal men without honour. Carl Hansen in particular considered this fact in great detail. The former superintendent explained that the sole reason for his arrest had been an untruthful accusation 225

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put forward by a single witness.This witness was a male prostitute who on several occasions had been punished for theft and fornication with other men.44 Thus, Hansen argued, the witness was certainly not a man of honour whose word could be trusted. As he suggestively asked his readers, ‘When the fallacious gossip of disreputable persons already at the very first opportunity led to police interrogations, what harms and dangers would the future not carry within it’.45 Hansen’s considerations may be interpreted in several ways. First, they obviously served as a way of discrediting his accuser and, thus, the whole court procedure. In this reasoning, the word of a criminal man without honour was obviously not to be trusted. Any criminal trial built on such loose wordings was inherently unjust and illegitimate. Second, they further enabled the former superintendent to draw up a negative counter-image against which his own status as a man of honour could be implicitly accentuated. Like Carl Hansen, Emil Aae also emphasized that the sole reason for his arrest had been a charge put forward by a dishonest prostitute with a long criminal record.46 However, he added that the judge who had presided over the case, judge Wilcke, also was a disreputable man. According to Aae, Wilcke’s lack of honour was a logical consequence of his conduct during the official court investigations. Importantly, the judge had only prosecuted a small handful of the homosexual men who had actually violated the Danish penal code. To Aae’s outspoken dismay, he had in particular allowed a number of prominent upper-class men to escape public enquiry.47 With this conduct, judge Wilcke had violated both the Danish constitution and the penal code, which specified that all men were equal under the law and that judges had an obligation to prosecute any legal violations coming to their knowledge. For his arbitrary handling of the court interrogations, Aae claimed that Wilcke was to be punished with hard labour. He was certainly not a man of honour.48 Once again, these claims may be read as efforts at discrediting the criminal trial, as well as a way in which Aae could set up a negative counter-image to his own honourable status. The possession of honour was thus of key importance to both Carl Hansen and Emil Aae. One way of understanding this circumstance is to consider the ways in which honour permeated early twentieth-century Danish images of the ideal and respectable male citizen. At a normative, constitutional level, honour had for decades been part of the regulatory norms that defined the ideal citizen with suffrage. Both the constitution of 1849 and the 1866 constitutional revision explicitly stipulated honour as a key criterion for enfranchisement.49 In this perspective, it was widely recognized as a marker of difference in early twentieth-century Denmark. Honour signified a key quality of full citizenship and, in continuation hereof, of masculinity. Against this background, Carl Hansen and Emil Aae’s claims to being men of honour may be read as attempts at constituting themselves as legitimate claimants of respectable citizenship. They argued that they, above all others, performed this key quality of the respectable male citizen. On this basis, no one could deny their claims.

Men of age and maturity A second issue of great importance to Hansen and Aae was the question of who was actually a man of age and maturity, experience and self-restraint. In their defences, both men explicitly noted that, at the age of 30, judge Wilcke was a very young, inexperienced and temperate man. For instance, Emil Aae remarked that ‘One had to be surprised that this case was not handed over to an older, more calm and temperate judge’.50 For his part, Carl Hansen stressed the young judge’s lack of professional knowledge. He claimed that judge Wilcke was totally unfamiliar with the established practice of not prosecuting male same-sex acts. The older and experienced judges at Copenhagen’s Criminal Court allegedly regarded the sodomy statutes as out-dated 226

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remnants from pre-modern times.51 Obviously, these considerations further contributed to the impression of a criminal trial that was unwarranted and gratuitous. In his defence, Emil Aae further emphasized that judge Wilcke’s lack of age and personal maturity manifested itself in his failure to uphold a dignified and composed demeanour. One day during the court proceedings, Aae recalled, the young judge had become so furious with a witness that he began to scream and shout uncontrollably. Wilcke’s behaviour became so excessive that people on the street [outside of the court] stopped to look at the windows, thinking that a mad man was ravaging the chamber; like a hysterical woman he threw his writing set and everything else not fixed to the desk up in the air, stamping angrily like a little ill-tempered troll.52 Interestingly, this characterization entailed a subtle attack on the judge’s masculinity. Aae likened Wilcke’s fits of anger to the fits of a hysterical woman. His immature behaviour, in other words, was incompatible with the implicitly masculinized virtues of personal maturity, tact and self-control. Notably, these were gendered virtues that the dentist himself claimed to embody. In his defence, Aae stressed that he had always spoken in a firm and steadfast tone of voice during the court interrogations.53 Furthermore, he contended that had always managed to conduct a life of the upmost self-restraint, stating that, Unlike most other young men, I have never indulged myself in any kind of excess or exaggerated pleasure. I only smoke rarely, drink rarely, gamble rarely (and then never at a casino), likewise regarding the satisfaction of my sexual instinct I have always been very moderate.54 Thus, Aae portrayed himself as a mature, masculine, self-possessed man. Unlike Wilcke, he had never succumbed to a de-masculinizing loss of self-control. Obviously, the logics of discrediting the criminal trial and putting up a negative counter-image may once again be read into these recounts of the court proceedings. Age, maturity, experience and self-constraint were questions of key importance to Carl Hansen and Emil Aae. Like honour, these considerations may be understood in relation to the regulatory images of the ideal and respectable male citizen that permeated early twentieth-­ century Denmark. For decades, the constitution of 1849 and the 1866 constitutional revision had prescribed the age of 30 as a central criterion for enfranchisement.55 Both bodies of law defined the ideal citizen with suffrage as a man of a certain age and maturity. Thus, age functioned as a marker of social differentiation in early twentieth-century Denmark. Against this background, it is important to remember that, at the time of the Great Morality Scandal, Carl Hansen and Emil Aae were 36 and 33 years old. Judge Wilcke, on the other hand, celebrated his 31st birthday during the court investigations.56 Thus, both Hansen and Aae could reasonably claim that they embodied the age-related norms of respectable citizenship to a higher degree than judge Wilcke did. In terms of age, they were more worthy and dignified citizens than he was. Aae’s elaborate characterizations of Wilcke in particular as a young, immature and ill-tempered man – his own antithesis – may be read as an example of this kind of claim making. As Aae’s writings also revealed, these claims further entailed a subtle appropriation of masculinity that countered popular ideas of homosexual men as inherently effeminate. By embodying these 227

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regulatory norms, Hansen and Aae could position themselves as culturally legible claimants of respectable citizenship.

Men of education and culture A third issue of great importance to Carl Hansen and Emil Aae was the question of who was actually a man of education and culture. Regarding this issue, both men contended that judge Wilcke and his superintendent at the criminal court, officer Tilge, were crude men without proper educations. Their minutes of the court proceedings allegedly were so grammatically deficient that Hansen and Aae had been forced to correct them themselves.57 As Hansen noted, these rectifications had left judge Wilcke ‘blushing with mortification of his intellectual impotence’.58 In this way, the two homosexual men generated an image of two court officials who, in terms of formal education, were unworthy of their distinguished positions at Copenhagen’s Criminal Court. On this matter, too, Hansen and Aae depicted the criminal trial as flawed. Distancing themselves from Wilcke and Tilge, Hansen and Aae further argued that they were men of proper education. Carl Hansen especially emphasized his personal intellectual capacities, as his defence listed the intellectual feats that he had achieved before the Great Morality Scandal. Besides his official occupation as a police superintendent, Hansen had attended the city’s language school, obtaining a degree in translation; written a social novel titled Waste [Spild]; almost finished a book on the history of Copenhagen’s police; carried out extensive preparatory work for a popular scientific publication on homosexuality; been the sole editor of the police journal The Police Friend; and, finally, singlehandedly established the city’s Museum of Crime. After having summarized these activities, Hansen rhetorically asked his readers whether they thought it possible ‘for a man, during his few hours of leisure, to carry out such an amount of difficult intellectual work and still be a debauched voluptuary’.59 Thus, Hansen represented himself as a well-educated and hardworking man who did not ramp around town searching for heedless sexual liaisons. He was not a licentious pervert. In continuation of his formal education, Emil Aae further emphasized his personal affiliation with bourgeois culture and standards of living. Among other things, these attachments manifested themselves in his dismal impression of the city’s jailhouse at Nytorv. Especially the jailhouse smells, from the clogged lavatories and the malodorous personnel, were singled out as sources of constant discomfort. Aae noted that he on several occasions had been forced ‘to seize [my] soap and sniff at it for several minutes, until the putrid smell had disappeared’.60 Furthermore, the dentist had been plagued by the many noises permeating the building. The nights especially were terrible, as he was kept awake by the chatting night officers who strutted about on their clacking boots and peeped into the cells to check if he had committed suicide. Aae further reported how he eventually had been forced to ask the superintendent to provide his night officers with soft boots and a request to speak quietly. To his outspoken relief, the petition was accommodated.61 By recounting these impressions, Aae implicitly emphasized his personal unfamiliarity with the social milieu of the city’s jailhouse. He was a man accustomed to spending his days in proper, sanitary and quiet houses because he descended from a good family and had spent his entire life in the upper echelons of society.62 By articulating his personal discomfort at the jailhouse, Aae depicted himself as a man inherently shaped by the city’s bourgeois culture. The possession of education and culture was thus of central importance to both Carl Hansen and Emil Aae. Like honour and maturity, this circumstance may be understood against Denmark’s early twentieth-century images of the ideal and respectable male citizen. Since the 1840s, the country’s bourgeoisie and aristocracy had pointed to education and culture, the hallmarks of their own social classes, as key characteristics of the ideal citizen worthy of suffrage. Importantly, these 228

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ideals had entered the 1866 constitutional revision, which provided the country’s wealthiest, and well-educated, male citizens with two votes to the House of Lords.63 Consequently, at the beginning of the twentieth century, being a man of education and culture was closely aligned with being an ideal and respectable male citizen. From this perspective, Hansen’s and Aae’s claims to being men of education and culture may be understood as attempts at constituting themselves as respectable citizens. They, above all others, embodied these qualities aligned with respectable citizenship.

Negotiating respectable citizenship, gender and sexuality As indicated in these readings of the two defences, several alignments obviously existed between the period’s image of the respectable male citizen and the personal qualities that Carl Hansen and Emil Aae claimed to embody. This condition naturally leads to a closer consideration of the stakes actually involved in the two men’s negotiations of respectable citizenship. In what ways did they conform to existing societal images of the ideal and respectable male citizen? Conversely, on what scales did they enact a critical negotiation of these regulatory norms? In their attempts at reclaiming respectable citizenship, Hansen and Aae depicted themselves as men of honour and men of age and maturity as well as men of education and culture. In one way or another, all of these qualities were in the period’s constitutional suffrage criteria. In fact, Emil Aae noted that he was a man who embodied these qualities so perfectly that he was still worthy of suffrage.64 Naturally, this statement must be seen in light of the fact that, after a dishonouring stay at Vrideløselille Penitentiary, Aae’s political rights were in great danger of being taken away from him.65 In Denmark, the constitutions of 1849 and 1866 stipulated that any man convicted for an infringement of the penal code was to be deprived of his political rights.66 Against this background, it could seem as if Hansen and Aae confined themselves to citing the period’s regulatory images of the ideal and respectable male citizen – that they avoided any attempt at actively negotiating them. In their efforts to reclaim respectable citizenship, they clung to a series of ideals that, for decades, had defined societal images of this elite citizen. Thus, their strategy towards emancipation was rather conservative and assimilationist, disciplined by a series of regulatory citizen norms. This reading, however, runs the danger of overlooking the scales on which Hansen and Aae failed to embody the period’s image of the ideal and respectable male citizen. These were the sites on which the two men had to engage in critical negotiations. Importantly, both obviously failed to embody and perform the sexuality associated with any respectable male citizen at this point in history. As mentioned earlier, the Danish suffrage criteria envisaged the ideal citizen with suffrage as an honourable male householder.67 That image implicitly also touched upon the sexuality of this citizen. He was a man who engaged in sexual liaisons with women, preferably with his lawful wife. He certainly did not seek out other men for sexual intimacy, as the penal code defined such relations as dishonourable criminal offences.68 Thus, at a normative, legal level, a distinct heteronormativity permeated early twentieth-century Danish images of the ideal and respectable male citizen. In their defences, neither Carl Hansen nor Emil Aae cited this sexual norm of respectable citizenship. On the contrary, both openly confessed their homosexual identities. The two men argued, however, that despite this circumstance, they were still capable of being respectable. In their line of reasoning, it was possible to be both homosexual and a respectable male citizen in possession of honour, maturity, culture and education. Their homosexuality, in other words, did not affect their status as respectable citizens. Obviously, this argument may be read as way in which 229

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the two men attempted to negotiate the social stigmatization aligned with their homosexual identities. Hansen and Aae sought to avoid marginalization by purporting to perform a number of qualities associated with respectable citizenship, masculinity and bourgeois culture. They claimed to embody a series of qualities potentially able to provide them with access to the echelons of a gendered and classed citizen hierarchy. Importantly, even though this strategy entailed a toning down of their sexuality, Hansen and Aae still engaged in these negotiations as openly homosexual men. They thus proposed a new order of citizenship in which homosexuals could be respectable citizens. The two men attempted to broaden the boundaries of respectable citizenship by placing themselves and their homosexuality within the ranks of the ideal and respectable male citizens. This symbolic conversion of their homosexual identities particularly challenged the sexuality associated with respectable citizenship – its heteronormativity. It confronted the sexual character of the ideal citizen and marked one of the first occasions in Danish history in which sexual citizenship was actively negotiated. This kind of negotiation would later become a key characteristic of the ­twentieth-century Danish LGBTQ-movement.69 In this reading, the two men’s defences entailed a critical rupture with existing images of the ideal and respectable citizen in early twentiethcentury Denmark. In these negotiations, medical science naturally played a role of some importance. Carl Hansen and Emil Aae deployed the era’s novel medical vocabulary to argue that their homosexuality was a fixed and stable property. However, this argument did not take first place in their defences. Rather, in their addresses to the general public of Copenhagen, the embodiment of various personal qualities associated with respectable citizenship took on prime importance. Hansen and Aae’s defences thus exemplify that not all homosexual emancipation efforts at the turn of the century centred on establishing a close alliance with medical science. Interestingly, this distance from medical science turned out to be a disadvantage to the two men. In June 1907, one of Copenhagen’s large tabloid newspapers swiftly dismissed Carl H ­ ansen’s defence as the ‘recordings of a half-mad, degenerate individual’ and the ‘diary of an insane criminal’.70 By characterizing Carl Hansen as degenerate and insane, this heteronormative critic deployed a discourse of pathology and medicalization against his claims to respectable citizenship.This public dismissal indicates that the discourses of medical science were not always a given ally to homosexual emancipation at the turn of the century. Perhaps the two men’s distance from medical science further explains why neither Carl Hansen nor Emil Aae apparently made a lasting impact on public opinions about homosexuality in early twentieth-century Denmark. Had they actively sought the support of the medical establishment, the period’s authority par excellence on issues of homosexuality, their claims might have stood a better chance of success. In any case, the defences of Carl Hansen and Emil Aae demonstrate that early twentiethcentury efforts at homosexual emancipation were intrinsically diverse and multifaceted. The fight for civil citizenship and the establishment of a close alliance with medical science were not always the only themes dominating early homosexual struggles for emancipation. Only further comparative studies can reveal whether the strategies deployed by the two men were peculiar to Denmark or whether we may be able to detect such strategies all across late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Europe.

Notes   1 Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1977), 97–99.   2 See, for instance, Jeffrey Weeks, Coming Out: Homosexual Politics in Britain, from the Nineteenth Century to the Present (London: Quartet Books, 1977); James D. Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement in

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Homosexual Emancipation Struggles Germany (Salem: Ayer, 1982); Wilhelm von Rosen, Månens kulør: Studier i dansk bøssehistorie 1682–1912 (Copenhagen: Rhodos, 1993); Harry Oosterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature: Krafft-Ebing, Psychiatry, and the Making of Sexual Identity (Chicago: University Press, 2000); Robert Beachy, ‘The German invention of homosexuality,’ The Journal of Modern History 82 (2010): 801–38.   3 Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Psychopathia Sexualis mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der conträren Sexualempfindung, 4th ed., (Stuttgart:Verlag von Verdinand Enke, 1889), 73ff.  4 Ooisterhuis, Stepchildren of Nature, 131ff.   5 Dagmar Herzog, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: University Press, 2011), 36–37.   6 Beachy, ‘The German invention of homosexuality,’ 802–804.  7 Steakley, The Homosexual Emancipation Movement, 23–24; Beachy,‘The German invention of homosexuality,’ 824–25.  8 Weeks, Coming Out, 45ff.   9 See Rosen, Månens kulør, 672–679; Jens Rydström, Sinners and Citizens: Bestiality and Homosexuality in Sweden 1880–1950 (Chicago: University Press, 2003), 47–53. 10 The man was most probably the Danish civil servant and author Poul Georg Andræ (1843–1928); see Robert Aldrich & Garry Wotherspoon, ed., Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History: From Antiquity to World War II (London: Routledge, 2001), s.v. ‘Andræ, Poul (Georg)’. 11 Tandem, ‘Den kontrære Sexualfornemmelse: Fragmenter til Oplysning,’ Bibliotek for Læger (1892): 205–23, 247–281. 12 See endnote 2. 13 Wilhelm von Rosen, ’Denmark: From sodomy to modernity,’ in Criminally Queer: Homosexuality and Criminal Law in Scandinavia 1842–1999, ed. Jens Rydström and Kati Mustola (Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007), 61–90. 14 See Ruth Lister, Citizenship: Feminist Perspectives, 2nd ed., (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); Engin F. Isin and Greg M. Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed Books, 2008). 15 On the importance of citing certain regulatory norms in order to be constituted as a culturally legible and legitimate subject, see Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990) and Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’ (New York: Routledge, 1993). 16 Universal suffrage was introduced in Denmark in 1915; Jytte Larsen, Også andre hensyn: Dansk ligestillingshistorie 1849–1915 (Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2010), 176–179. 17 Nina J. Koefoed, ‘Demokrati og medborgerskab: Sociale og kønspolitiske strategier i debatten om den almindelige kommunale valgret 1886–1908,’ Fortid og Nutid (2008): 251–278. 18 Danmarks Riges Grundlov af 5. Juni 1849, §§ 35, 39. 19 Ibid. 20 Koefoed, ’Demokrati og medborgerskab,’ 253–255. 21 See Nina Javette Koefoed, ’Demokrati og medborgerskab’; ’Performing male political citizenship: Local philanthropy as an arena for practicing and negotiating citizenship in late nineteenth century Denmark,’ in Gender in Urban Europe: Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship 1750–1900, eds, Krista Cowman, Nina Javette Koefoed and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (NewYork: Routledge, 2014), 162–172; ’Maskulint medborgerskab: Politisk og deltagende medborgerskab i Danmark mellem 1849–1915,’ in Myndighet og ­medborgerskab: Festskrift til Gro Hagemann på 70-årsdagen, eds Kari H. Nordberg, Hege Roll-Hansen, Erling Sandmo and Hilde Sandvik (Oslo: Novus Forlag, 2015), 31–43; and Larsen, Også andre hensyn, 86–87. 22 Koefoed, ’Demokrati og medborgerskab,’ 273. 23 See Niels Finn Christiansen, ’Grundloven historikerne og det moderne Danmark,’ Den jyske Historiker 83/84 (1999): 7–32; Henrik Horstbøll, ’Politisk medborgerskab og Junigrundloven: Den almindelige valgrets begrebshistorie,’ Den jyske Historiker 83/84 (1999): 168–180; Anette F. Jacobsen, Husbondret: Rettighedskulturer i Danmark 1750–1920 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanums Forlag, 2008). 24 Jacobsen, Husbondret, 285–288. 25 See Karin Lützen, Byen tæmmes: Kernefamilie, sociale reformer og velgørenhed i 1800–tallets København (Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 1998) 37ff; Koefoed, ’Demokrati og medborgerskab,’ 258–259. 26 Den gennemsete Grundlov af 28. Juli 1866, §§ 35–37. 27 Lützen, Byen tæmmes, 44–45. 28 Wilhelm von Rosen, ’Den pæderastiske subkulturs opståen i København i 1860’erne,’ Den jyske Historiker 58/59 (1992): 80–100. 29 In 1933, same-sex relations between consenting adults were legalized in Denmark; von Rosen, ‘Denmark: From sodomy to modernity,’ 72.

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Niels Nyegaard 30 Almindelig borgerlig Straffelov af 1866, § 177. ‘Intercourse against nature’ comprised both acts of sodomy and bestiality; von Rosen, Månens kulør, 397. 31 Almindelig borgerlig Straffelov af 1866, § 185. 32 von Rosen, ’Denmark: From sodomy to modernity,’ 63. 33 Midlertidig Lov om nogle Ændringer i Straffelovgivningen af 1905, § 4. 34 von Rosen, ’Denmark: From sodomy to modernity,’ 64–65. 35 von Rosen, Månens kulør, 719ff. 36 Ibid., 745. 37 See, for instance, Aftenbladet, 23 November 1906; and Middagsposten, November 22, 1906. 38 Carl Hansen, ’Carl Hansens Defensorat,’ Aftenbladet, 14 June 1907; Emil Aae, Den fulde Sandhed om min Aarrestation og fhv. kst. Kriminalretsassesor Wilcke’s store Sædelighedssag 1906–07 (Copenhagen: Universalforlaget, 1909), 235. 39 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 235. All translations are the author’s. 40 Hansen, ‘Defensorat,’ 19 June 1907. 41 Ibid.; Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 130. 42 In Denmark, being a man of honour was legally defined as being a man who had not violated criminal law; Larsen, Også andre hensyn, 173. 43 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 34, 49, 130. 44 Hansen, ‘Defensorat,’ 13 June 1907. 45 Ibid. 46 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 69–70. 47 Ibid., 106–109. 48 Ibid., 71. 49 Junigrundloven, §§ 35, 39; Den gennemsete Grundlov, §§ 30, 35. 50 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 15. 51 Hansen, ‘Defensorat,’ 19 June 1907. 52 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 99. 53 Ibid., 64. 54 Ibid., 53–54. 55 Junigrundloven, §§ 35, 39; Den gennemsete Grundlov, §§ 30, 35. 56 Svend C. Beck, ed. Dansk biografisk leksikon, 3rd ed. (Copenhagen, 1979–84), s.v. ‘Julius Wilcke’. 57 Hansen, ‘Defensorat,’ 14 June 1907; Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 69. 58 Hansen, ‘Defensorat,’ 14 June 1907. 59 Ibid., 18 June 1907. 60 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 244. 61 Ibid., 241–242. 62 Ibid., 170. 63 Den gennemsete Grundlov, §§ 35–37; Lützen, 29–48. 64 Aae, Den fulde Sandhed, 283. 65 We do not know if Emil Aae actually lost his right to vote. He left the country in October 1909, soon after he had published his defence; Politiets Registerblade (Copenhagen, 1890–1923), s.v. ‘Aae, Emil’ http://www.politietsregisterblade.dk/component/sfup/?controller=politregisterblade&task=viewReg isterblad&id=3434687&searchname= (assessed April 8, 2016). 66 Larsen, Også andre hensyn, 173. 67 Junigrundloven, §§ 35, 39; Den gennemsete Grundlov, §§ 30, 35. 68 Almindelig borgerlig Straffelov, § 177. 69 On the Danish post-war LGBTQ movement, see Peter Edelberg, Storbyen trækker: Homoseksualitet, prostitution og pornografi i Danmark 1945–1976 (Copenhagen: Jurist- og Økonomforbundets Forlag, 2012); Michael Nebeling Petersen, Somewhere, over the rainbow: Biopolitiske rekonfigurationer af den homoseksuelle figur, PhD Dissertation (Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen, 2012). 70 Ekstrabladet, 16 June 1907.

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18 Voting as an Act of Estate or Voting as an Act of Class? Voting Women in Swedish Towns, c. 1720–1920 Åsa Karlsson Sjögren

In the official story of women’s political rights in Sweden, 1921 is the year when democracy was fully introduced, because women received suffrage. This chapter analyses women’s voting experiences in Swedish towns over a long period before that event, from the Age of Liberty in eighteenth-century Sweden up to 1921. The chapter discusses how gendered meanings of voting interacted with the changing economic and legal structures of the town. Moreover, the chapter contributes to a discussion of how national and local politics interacted in the development of gender and politics from an estate-based to a class-based society. In eighteenth-century Sweden, the vast majority of the population lived in the countryside. The towns were small, with around 500–2000 inhabitants. Five towns had around 5000 inhabitants, two fully 10,000 and the capital Stockholm had 69,000 inhabitants in 1770.1 The towns nevertheless fulfilled important functions for the realm: to collect taxes, to control trade and collect customs, to host military institutions and schools and to be regional centres for state and church bureaucracy. They were organised on a German model based on privileges of individual burghers, who were organised in corporative societies and guilds governed by magistrates and specific legislation. While urban conditions in many ways differed from the countryside, the towns at the same time could be characterized as rural as they also possessed rights to town land for activities like cultivation and the pasturing of cattle. The Swedish development from an estate-based to a class-based society was slow, and the new constitution of 1866 finally abolished the privileges of the estates when the Diet of four estates (of peasants, burghers, clergy and nobility) was replaced by a two-chamber parliament. The industrialisation of Sweden accelerated during the 1870s and so did urbanisation, especially around 1900. Many towns were still small, but many had grown substantially in population, industry and density. Gothenburg saw, for example, a growth from 11,000 inhabitants in 1770 to over 130,000 in 1900, while Stockholm had over 300,000 inhabitants. The small town of Sundsvall, in the heart of the expanding forest industry, grew from a population of 1300 in 1770 to almost 15,000 in 1900. Throughout these years, women in towns voted in different elections, but not all women, not always and not everywhere. Their participation differed because of regulations about elections 233

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and local political practices, as well as because of regulations about the legal statuses of unmarried and married women and widows. Sometimes women voted only in clergy elections, sometimes in the elections of chief magistrates and city court judges and sometimes in national elections. Voting was not a universal right but was built on different criteria. Who was entitled to vote depended on which qualifications were emphasized for political influence in different elections, such as ownership and taxpaying, or membership of an estate, in towns of the burgher estate. Eligibility to stand for elections was another criteria for the right to vote, which was impossible for women until the late nineteenth century and could therefore be used as an argument against female voters.2 Even when women had gained legal rights to act as representatives, they did so to a much lesser extent than men, both at local and national levels.3 Voting was, indeed, also a question about sex, since women’s participation was not evident in a universal sense. However, women in towns voted, and after 1870, their participation gained new meaning as voting in town elections became a strategy for the emerging women’s movement.

Setting the scene Gender, politics and power have been central themes within gender studies, which has contributed to developing the concept of politics to extend to a broader understanding of power relations, formal as well as informal. Not least within pre-modern gender studies, the modern concept of politics and the dividing line between public and private spheres in the understanding of politics has been challenged, as research has shown that women’s political roles within households were fundamental.4 This was certainly true among the leading elites in different countries, but whether the political acts of women were formal or informal differed because of legislative and cultural norms.5 For lower social groups, the ability to act politically differed too and changed over time. It is a well-known fact that women of these groups participated in direct political actions, such as upheavals and riots, but they also used legal channels to make improvements, for example, as petitioners.6 This chapter concentrates on formal routes to political influence and thereby addresses a quite narrow definition of politics – as an act of influence on decision-making in a community at local, regional or national levels.7 Over this period, Swedish political institutions changed in many ways, and the right to vote had different meanings in terms of political influence. Nevertheless, there is a significant difference between being entitled to vote and being denied that right. The suffrage movement, which spread over the world from the late nineteenth century onwards, might be the most important feminist movement in history to date, as in many ways it encouraged so many women of different political colours to stand up for the same political goal; moreover, it succeeded in most countries as well.8 The reason for this is probably that the right to vote was as much, or even more, a reflection of a symbolic view that included women in ‘humanity’, as citizens of a democratic nation, as a way of giving women better living conditions. Before democratisation, polling was situated in other contexts, and the franchise never included all adult inhabitants, male or female. The Swedish political institutions differed in some ways compared to other European countries. For example, the peasants had their own place in the Swedish Riksdag, which was organised as a Diet of four estates. The power of the Riksdag changed several times, and during a period of 50 years in the eighteenth century, it gained substantial power. In towns, the right to vote was based on the specific kind of urban citizenship that, as in other parts of Europe, had developed over centuries: the burghership.9 As burghers resided in the Swedish Riksdag, they also had political influence over the realm, at least during periods when the Riksdag was more powerful than the crown. Burghership was based on residence and on traditional urban occupations, 234

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but the concept was fluid and changed over time. One question was whether women – that is, widows – could be included and seen as ‘proper burghers’, and in what ways and whether they could participate in elections. During the nineteenth century, the burghers gradually lost their privileges as freedom of trade acts passed and as the burghership as legal grounds for economic privileges and exclusive political influence disappeared. Instead, after a reform in 1862, taxpaying defined the qualification for political influence, which meant that affluence became the prerequisite for political power in towns. Swedish towns had grown rapidly by the end of the century, and demands for democratisation of the municipalities as well as the nation emerged. Soon, women started to demand national suffrage. Urban political culture and local elections played an important part in that struggle; however, women’s ability to vote in different elections in eighteenth-century towns needs to be clarified.

Age of Liberty: gender and the burgher estate The period between 1718 and 1771 in Swedish historical writing is called the Age of Liberty. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when parliamentarianism and democracy were under debate, historians and political scientists argued about whether the period should be interpreted as a chaotic parenthesis in history or if some elements could be interpreted as steps towards democracy. In contemporary research, historians pose the questions differently and instead address how to understand the political system that developed, both at national and local level. Historians have interested themselves in Swedish political culture and studied in detail how ordinary people met and made decisions of importance for their own daily life, or participated in elections of clergy and other important positions in the local communities.10 During the 1720s and 1730s, elections of different kinds were introduced in towns: of magistrates and chief magistrates, of members of the Diet and of clergymen. These elections varied in many ways. Chief magistrates and clergymen held positions that could last for many years, and the king and bishop had a say in their appointments. The elections of representatives to the Diet developed from a tradition of sending a chief magistrate to the Riksdag to organise proper elections between different candidates of the town. The election regulations were vague, however, and political cultures differed between towns. In some towns, the elections were indirect; in others, the votes were counted per capita, with one vote for every entitled voter; in yet others, the votes differed according to how much each voter paid in taxes. The more tax paid, the more votes the voter could use. This way of organising political influence corresponded to the idea that the more voters contributed to society by paying taxes, the more influence they should have.11 A study of preserved electoral registers shows that the possibility of finding female voters in elections increases in elections where the votes were counted according to a graded scale rather than in elections where each person only owned one vote. As polling according to a graded scale became more common in the 1740s, more women appeared in electoral registers during that decade than ever before. Their participation was not, however, self-evident in all towns. In some towns, women never voted. In others, women did not vote in person but used proxies. In the towns where entitled female voters appear in the electoral registers, they were always in the minority compared to the men. Most were widows. Wives were under their husbands’ ­målsmanskap (guardianship or ‘spokesmanship’) and voted only as an exception. In towns, property was owned jointly, but as long as the husband lived, it was he who managed the household economy and paid the taxes. The surviving source material is scattered, however, and electoral registers are too randomly preserved to make conclusions about, for example, geographical differences between different towns. Furthermore, electoral registers from indirect elections 235

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have not been found. Electors within corporative bodies conducted these elections. There is no ­positive evidence from other sources, such as minute books, that women participated in choosing electors to the corporative bodies. These elections mainly took part in larger towns and cities, such as Gävle, Malmö and Stockholm.12 Taxpaying was not the only important ground for participation in elections; other criteria were also of great importance. The first concerned the specific kind of membership that had developed in towns from the middle ages, the burghership. Burghers were citizens in towns occupied with typical town business such as craft and trade. They were members of corporate societies and privileged by the state. Who was considered a ‘proper’ burgher caused several conflicts, as other inhabitants in the towns wanted to be included. The question of whether burgher widows should be seen as ‘proper’ burghers arose in economic matters, such as access to the business or town land on the same conditions as male burghers, but also in electoral matters.13 Women were questioned and excluded from elections of chief magistrates in 1758. A new ordinance stated that ‘neither absent burghers nor burgher’s widows’ would be allowed to vote in those elections.14 It was immediately interpreted as an exclusion of widows. While source material on elections seldom explicitly comments on gender, it contains traces of an underlying distrust of women in public life in urban political culture. In a conflict about a chief magistrate election in the town of Köping in central Sweden in 1759, one of the arguments against approving widows’ suffrage was that it might lead to their being present in ‘public places’.This might in turn ‘cause a great deal of disorder and less quiet living among ordinary people’.15 The exclusion of women in chief magistrate elections had consequences for the political culture in towns. The town hall, a masculine place, became even more male, and it became less common as a whole for women to vote in elections to the Riksdag after 1758 than before.16 The fact that women were excluded became, as will be seen from examples below, a powerful argument against female voters to the Riksdag. Eligibility was another criteria for voting that became important in the Riksdag elections. During the Age of Liberty, the balance of power between the estates shifted, and commoners gained power in the Riksdag at the cost of the nobility. This was especially true for the burghers who received seats in the ‘secret committee’, the most powerful committee of the Diet, which had influence over foreign and financial policy. During this period, a party system of ‘hats’ and ‘caps’ developed. The names of the parties originated from the group of opponents who, in the 1730s, railed at the then governing politicians by calling them nattmössor (nightcaps). The ‘hats’, who by then consisted of many young officers, disapproved of the foreign policy. When they gained power, they declared war on Russia (‘Hattarnas krig’ – ‘The war of the hats’, 1741–43). These parties were much more loosely organised than modern political parties and lacked such things as party programmes, but they gradually developed a practice whereby they developed in the direction that each representative of the estates also had to belong to one of the parties, a development that also excluded women from voting.The ‘caps’, which by the end of the Age of Liberty gained power over the ‘hats’, could by then be characterized as a group of persons who wanted to withdraw much of the privileges in society, not least those privileges of the nobility. The introduction of the Freedom of Press Act in 1766, in combination with more powerful groups of peasants and burghers, led to a more politicized society, not least in the towns. As the party system developed and as the burgher estate gained more power, the elections to the Diet became more important. This in turn had the effect of excluding women from national elections. The political development led to eligibility to stand for election becoming an important factor in the right to vote. Before, the towns regularly elected their chief magistrates as representatives to the burgher estate; even if elections were organised, no candidates other than the 236

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chief magistrates were actually chosen. From this point onwards, however, those men who were entitled to vote also had a chance to be elected. The political institutions that developed at national level included all burgher men in the towns, and thereby there was a clear connection between the individual burgher, urban political culture and national politics.17 It seems to have been out of the question for women to be representatives and to stand for elections in eighteenth-century Swedish towns. Some women did gain informal power by economic wealth and social and cultural capital upheld by networks of kin, friends and professions, but when it came to formal influence as representatives of the town or realm, they were hindered by their sex. When the widow Anna Elisabeth Baer wanted to use her vote in the Riksdag election in Turku in 1771, one of the counterarguments was that ‘nobody can have the right to elect a member of the Riksdag other than a person who can be thus appointed’.18 The fact that the regulations of the Diet elections were so vague led to conflicts over elections in towns as well as in the Riksdag; there were occasions when two representatives from the same town showed up at the same Riksdag meeting, which certainly caused great confusion. With the development of new regulations for elections in early 1770s, women’s right to vote was questioned. In 1771, the burgher estate decided to exclude ‘burgher widows’ from voting as for members of the estate. The arguments in the Riksdag were that women were already denied the right to vote for chief magistrates, and besides, ‘the female sex’ was excluded from politics in other countries. This was the first time references to ‘sex’ appeared. Also, the estate of peasantry had to decide whether women should be allowed to vote in Riksdag elections. It is interesting in this context to compare the different decisions of the burgher estate with those of the peasant estate. At the same Riksdag meeting in 1771, the estate of peasantry decided that farm-owning widows ‘could not be refused permission to participate in the election’. Ownership was so crucial to estate affiliation that it overshadowed the issue of gender. The articulation of the estate that they could not refuse female participation indicates that they rather wished that women would stay at home.19 Although taxpaying and property ownership were important grounds for the vote in towns, other criteria also had to be fulfilled. Eligibility became very important for Riksdag elections but most fundamental was, of course, burghership. In towns, as discussed above, burghership was a fundamental criteria for various rights, and whether widows actually could be defined as ‘proper burghers’ was also questioned in connection with Riksdag elections. In a Riksdag election in a town in northern Sweden in 1771, a number of burghers protested against 12 widows having cast their votes. They could not be regarded as ‘proper burghers…nor be said to represent their deceased husbands, who bear no association with the now living burghership’.20 This argument corresponded to a changed view of marriage that developed over these years, from the traditional religious assumption that marriage joined the man and the woman into ‘one flesh’ to a contract-based union of two (different, but complementary) individuals.21 At the same time, many male town inhabitants were denied formal routes to political influence and power. These were, of course, men of lower classes, such as servants, soldiers, sailors and workers, but the category also included those men from the emerging middle classes who did not belong to the burghers and therefore lacked formal political influence. They nevertheless acted politically in different ways, not least by developing urban institutions of poor relief and philanthropy. It was within this group of well-educated men, in cooperation with well-established burghers, that demands for reform of the estate system were pursued until the legal, educational and political institutions were reformed during the nineteenth century. However, before this development, there was a political period of royal autocracy. By two coups d’état, in 1772 and 1789 respectively, Gustav III gained more power. As an enlightened 237

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king, he introduced a lot of new legislation; for example, he reduced death penalties for many crimes, such as infanticide. He favoured the upcoming peasant class at the cost of nobility. In his rhetoric, there was indeed talk about citizens, and he described himself as the first citizen, but he introduced censorship and diminished the political influence of the Riksdag.22 After his assassination in 1792, the crown kept its political power, first under regency and later under Gustav III’s son. The Swedish Riksdag met only once, and during that meeting it was more a question of procedures than of making politics. The social and economic changes in society, with an expanding middle class and a class of more well-to-do peasants on one hand and, on the other, the growing lower classes, did not correspond to any thorough political reforms. However, after its failure in the war against Russia in 1808–09, when Sweden lost Finland, there were sharp criticisms against the sovereign king. A group of young officers dethroned him, and soon the Riksdag met and decided on a new constitution.

Nation building and gendered voting The constitution of 1809–10 strove towards a balance of power between the king, the justice and the Riksdag. At the Riksdag meetings in these years, proposals to replace the Diet of four estates with a two-chamber parliament were also suggested. Thereby, the issue of changing the basis of representation was placed on the political agenda. In many ways, this theme came to dominate the subsequent political discussion up to the representation reform in 1866, when the Diet was finally abolished. In the political discussion, different interests and views about the individual and the individual’s role in society were expressed. It was the ‘personal principle’ that needed to be defined. The estates of the clergy and burghers successively opened up to new groups of middle-class men. Even if women as potential voters in national elections were mentioned by some radicals in the 1830s and 1840s, arguments against female participation were put forward by prominent creators of public opinion: women were said to be emancipated from politics, and their role as mothers was put forward.23 With reference to a European discussion about women and politics that had developed at the time, these Swedish arguments fit well into contemporary thinking about the division of the sexes, about dependent–independent and passive–active binaries; women could therefore be put into the passive, non-political sphere. Still, there was some uncertainty regarding whether women were excluded from voting for the estate of burghers. The decision of the estate in 1771, referred to previously in this chapter, actually did not receive royal authority, and therefore no legislation that excluded women from voting to the estate of burghers existed. Even if, as a rule, women disappeared from elections after 1771, there were still some exceptions in the form of urban women who participated in a few elections for the Riksdag in nineteenth-century Sweden. As late as 1859, there was a conflict in Uppsala about whether female taxpayers should be entitled to vote for the burgher estate. In 1862, the Supreme Court finally decided that only those who were eligible should have the right to vote, which meant that, as women could not stand for election, they should be denied the vote.24 This local conflict, however, left no traces in the political discussion at national level. By this time, the debate had become totally male, and it seems to have been out of question to imagine women as political citizens in the nation, taxpayers or not. The debate up to the reforms of the Riksdag and municipalities in the 1860s concerned many complex questions about how to shape the new institutions. One central question was the issue about taxpaying and the general rule that those who contributed to society (by paying taxes) also should take part in decision-making. As the tax base widened, decisions could be made by not only members of estates or by landowners but also by all taxpayers. These discussions dealt with local issues, not least with problems of financing poor relief, an area where women acted. 238

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In towns, women acted in philanthropic activities, especially from the 1840s and onwards. In the countryside, women could act as representatives at a local level in poor relief issues.25 Another important question at the local level was the difference between representative and direct decision-making, and furthermore, who would be forced to follow decisions once made: only those who made them, or also the absent? These discussions ended with the general view that representative decision-making was best for stability in society and that decisions should affect all inhabitants in the municipality. This had implications for women’s participation in politics, at least indirectly. In the countryside, women seem not to have participated in formal decision-making, but if there was a question of voting for representatives, they did appear in some elections. In towns, however, women were absent in formal politics by this time and did not have access to local elections, except for the election of clergy. These elections were less important for town administration.26 Yet another question concerned anxieties of political turbulence. If the state did not rest on the stable ground of the estates of nobles, clergy, burghers and peasants, which institutions should replace them? The municipalities were the answer. Municipalities and county councils were reformed in 1862. This reform, together with industrial reforms of the 1840s and 1860s, deprived the burghers of their specific right to political influence in the towns. The local franchise from then on was closely connected to taxpaying and was graded on a scale of 100 votes, which meant that the poorest taxpayers owned one vote each while the wealthiest could use 100 votes in elections. Even companies had the local franchise. The voter was described as gender neutral, but only men could stand for election. The legislation of 1866 on voting for the Riksdag’s second chamber changed with the introduction of the census. For those men who paid taxes over a certain sum, the votes were allocated per capita, with only one vote each. As a concession to the conservatives, the elections to the first chamber became indirect. This meant that towns and county councils elected MPs of the first chamber. Since the voting to these institutions was truly class based, this meant that the MPs of the first chamber represented a small and wealthy part of the nation. In the reforms of the 1860s, therefore, it was possible to separate the two principles. In the municipalities, the principle of taxpaying was so important that questions of the voter’s sex became uninteresting. In national elections, the entitled voter had to be an independent male citizen, who contributed to society by paying taxes over a certain level and could stand for election as well. This divergence of municipal and national rights opened up the possibility of female formal political participation in the towns, at least as voters. In 1889, women also became eligible for positions in poor relief and school boards.

The emergence of the woman question and a first attempt to ­mobilize female voters Education and the right to professional occupations were very important issues for early female and male activists for the woman question, not suffrage. Another important political question was women’s legal capacity, which was connected to suffrage. Legal reforms in 1858, 1863 and 1872 made unmarried women independent of guardians, first over their property and then over marriage, which also meant that they were entitled to vote in local elections. The next step was married women’s rights. The first women’s association in Sweden put married women’s rights to ownership on the agenda: Föreningen för gift kvinnas eganderätt (the Association for Married Women’s Right to Property, est. 1873). In 1874, married women gained the right to dispose of their own work income. It took, however, many years before married women reached their full majority. Not until 1920 did the state declare married women as fully legally capable of taking 239

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decisions for their own and family’s good. But the progress went step by step, and during the first decades of the twentieth century, as will be discussed later in this chapter, some married women actually paid taxes and voted in local elections, and a few were elected as political representatives despite the general rule that they were under their husband’s målsmanskap. The Association for Married Women’s Right to Property was based in Stockholm and attracted both male and female members. It was mainly a lobby organization but was also concerned with education and some political actions to involve more women. After the first legislative reform of 1874, its members met difficulties in keeping the question of married women’s rights on the political agenda. At that point, it seems like they had to search for a new question to work with. As the legislation regarding the local franchise of 1862 was gender neutral, this meant that each taxpaying person with legal capacity, male or female, had the right to vote. In the 1880s, the organization tried to mobilise women in Stockholm to use their votes in the local elections. However, their strategy did not succeed, because the organization could not encourage more than 10–15 per cent of the entitled women to use their votes, and the campaign faded away. The reason for this is probably that ordinary women in Stockholm were not included in the political culture of the city. As a rule, ordinary men who were entitled to vote were not included in the political culture in Swedish cities and towns either, and they seldom used their votes. The graded scale led to small, wealthy, elite groups of men ruling towns and cities all over the country. This truly class-based situation was criticized, and demands for democratic reforms of the towns were put forward.27

Local franchise as a strategy for women’s suffrage and a way of changing urban politics In late nineteenth-century Sweden, Folkriksdagar were a strategy to reform the parliament. The demands for universal rights only concerned male voters, however. Women should wait. It was not until the early 1900s that the situation started to change and women began to demand suffrage of their own. Actually, a proposal in the Riksdag that would give married men two votes added fuel to the question and mobilized women to organize in a suffrage movement: Landsföreningen för kvinnans politiska rösträtt, LKPR (the National Association for Women’s Suffrage, established 1902–03).28 The movement used several strategies to reach its goal.29 One of them was to persuade women to use their votes in local town elections. A few married women who tried to vote in the city election in Stockholm 1903 were restrained, but after an appeal against the decision to the magistrate, they won. The decision was precedential, and hereafter women who paid taxes of their own had the local franchise. A loophole in the legislation also made it possible for married women with incomes of their own, from either work or interest on savings, and who paid taxes in their own name, to vote in local elections.30 Men received equal suffrage for the second chamber of the parliament in 1909. The reform of local elections 1907–09 was a compromise in order to please the conservative interests who ran the towns since it kept the graded scale. The reform of the local elections in 1907–09 not only made the graded scale of votes a bit more equal as it changed the scale from 1–100 to 1–40 votes for the wealthiest taxpayers, it also made women eligible in the municipalities. From then on, married women could use their votes if they paid taxes of their own; they could also stand for election, despite the fact that they still were under their husbands’ målsmanskap. This reform of local elections made it possible for women to participate in local elections on a much broader scale than before, both as voters and as representatives. From this point on, the gendered division of eligibility and franchise was withdrawn as a fundamental principle of local political culture, at 240

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least legally. The initiative for this reform actually did not come from the LKPR but from MPs in the parliament.31 The suffrage movement worked to get female representatives elected in some cities and towns in the first elections in 1910. However, they were not as successful as one might assume: 37 women were elected in towns in the whole country, three of whom were elected via ­women’s lists. Among the political parties, the liberals had the most elected women, 20 members of local town councils, whereas the conservative party had 10 and the social democrats only had three. The proportion of women among the elected representatives in Swedish town and city councils was consistently little more than 30 women, or slightly more than 1 per cent, up to the democratic reform of municipalities of 1918.32 There are several reasons for this. As the party system developed and as the electoral system was proportional, candidates were chosen within the political parties. Within the conservative party, which was strong at local level and which dominated local politics due to the undemocratic graded voting scale, there was a strong resistance against women’s participation in national politics. When in 1911, LKPR decided to exhort women to only vote for those political parties that were positive to female suffrage, this led to a schism within the suffrage movement. Conservative women had to choose where their loyalty lay, and they chose the political party. The liberals, who were in the forefront in the suffrage question, did not gain any political success in the urban elections of 1910 because of female candidates. Their hopes were dashed that female candidates should attract more voters. Within the Social Democratic Party, the class issue had priority over gender issues, as the main goal was to democratise the municipalities in order to gain majorities there.33 However, by the reform of 1907–09, the strategy to encourage women to use their local votes as a proof of their willingness to take part in politics bore fruit. In each election every second year during the 1910s, more women as well as men participated in elections in towns.34 A closer look at two elections in a Swedish town in 1910 and 1912 shows interesting results. More men than women were entitled to vote, and they voted to a higher degree.This is not surprising, as most of the men who used their votes were married, well established and on average owned more votes than the women. This is also a general pattern for polling under democratic circumstances, whereas groups of people with a looser relationship to the labour market, lower income and so on cast their votes less frequently than more well-to-do groups. At the same time, it is worth noting that amongst the women who actually used their votes in these town elections, it is possible to discern wives of influential men, who indeed only owned one vote but who nevertheless used it. These wives probably responded to the call from LKPR for women to use voting in local elections to show themselves as politically competent citizens, ready for political suffrage at national level.35 In the first democratic municipal elections in 1919, in fact, more women than men participated, but their polling later decreased in the 1920s.36 Voting in local towns was not only a symbolic act on the part of those women who actually voted. As the electorate increased, more people became involved in urban political culture. In early twentieth-century Sweden, the local press as well as the party system developed, and women could thereby act politically as conservatives, liberals or social democrats in order to gain influence over the development, at least as voters. Eager social and health questions were put on the political agenda in the towns, especially by the social democrats, which was the first political party with political programmes for the municipalities. Ever since the reform of 1862, which had given the wealthiest men the power in towns, urban politics could be characterized more as running a business and favouring the elite groups of the towns than conducting local politics to benefit the whole population. It seems that the political culture that crystallized over these first decades of the twentieth century, when democracy developed step by step, strengthened rather than challenged the perception of the 241

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r­epresentative as a male, well-established, independent person in the town. There was never a question of female leaders in the towns.This long-standing normative idea that a prerequisite for being a representative was being of the male sex has been an enduring one within Swedish local politics. A similar development occurred in national politics. The suffrage movement worked foremost for suffrage, not eligibility, and when suffrage was won in 1921, the nomination of candidates to the parliament became a question for the political parties.

Conclusion Urban experiences both facilitated and prevented women’s political participation in elections. In the traditional small eighteenth-century towns where burghership and taxpaying were the most important criteria for women’s franchise, some women, mostly widows, could use their votes. These rights were, however, not evident, as some towns did not allow women to vote, and as women became barred from politics because of their sex. Actually, women first became excluded from local urban elections, not national ones, as they were excluded from elections of chief magistrates in 1758. Women were not eligible to stand for election by that time, a fact that was used as an argument against female voters, especially since the connection between the voter and the representative became more evident in the Riksdag elections. Taken together with a masculinization of the local political culture, as well as a masculinization and individualization of the burghership, women’s entitlement to vote in Riksdag elections was also called into question in 1771. During the nineteenth century, the Swedish political citizen at national level was defined as an independent eligible man. In local elections, the development took another direction, as taxpaying and voting according to a graded scale became superior to sex. The burghership lost its grounds for political influence in towns and was replaced by wealth.This meant that as the votes were counted according to a graded scale of 1–100 votes, an affluent minority of the town gained power, and as a rule, there were low turnouts in town elections. Workers and lowincome inhabitants mostly did not use their few votes in those elections. The gender-neutral legislation of town elections, which in theory opened up female participation, was in actuality as much of an obstacle, since an urban political culture had developed where most people stayed at home, not least low-income women. This situation, however, changed as the suffrage and worker movements became stronger, and as the demands of democratization of the towns by a partial reform diminished the class effects of the graded scale in 1907–09. Married women who paid taxes in their own names could vote, and women could stand for election. Thereby, women could show themselves as responsible political citizens not only in local towns but also at national level. The mobilization of female as well as male voters increased in the towns in the 1910s. In the first democratic municipal elections of 1919, more women than men participated. The gendered meanings of urban women’s participation in eighteenth-century elections seem to have not much in common with later periods. Before the nineteenth century, women’s voting was never an issue of women’s universal rights. Rather, it was a question of burghership and taxpaying, and whether some women could be regarded as privileged local citizens or not. This idea changed when the women’s movement gained momentum in towns and women themselves articulated demands for universal rights as women, and when women used local elections to attain universal suffrage. However, women’s participation in politics corresponded largely to class interests, which is not least evident concerning representation. Even though legislation opened up the possibility of women as eligible representatives, the classbased party system as well as the local political culture that developed in towns worked in the opposite direction, and the norm for being politically elected was to be male, both in local elections and at national level. This norm of political representation as male, which developed 242

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in ­eighteenth-century politics, became even more evident when women gradually gained the same formal political rights as men.

Notes   1 Statistics compiled and published on the internet by the Institute of Urban History, Stockholm: http:// www.baltictowns.com/cybcity/befolkning/1770t.htm.  2 Eighteenth-century legislation does not explicitly state that only men could stand for election. In 1723, for example, it was said that the towns should be free to choose representatives for the Riksdag within their own estate; they should elect ‘those who they find are most clever’. Many elections concerned specific public functions that only men could hold, such as clergymen and chief magistrates. In nineteenth-century legislation, the elected persons are defined as ‘men’ in the legislation concerning municipal elections. Åsa Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna och rösträtten. Medborgarskap och representation 1723–1866 (Stockholm: Carlssons, 2006), 68, 179.   3 In the municipalities, the total share of elected women varied between 2.2 and 2.7 per cent in 1910– 1918. Between 1919 and 1938, female councillors varied between 1.0 and 3.5 per cent.The first democratic elections of 1919 saw 3.5 per cent elected women, a figure that fell significantly in the late 1920s, down to 1.0 per cent in 1930; and rose up to 2.7 in 1938. Kjell Östberg, Kommunerna och den svenska modellen. Socialdemokratin och kommunalpolitiken fram till andra världskriget (Stockholm/Stehag: Symposion, 1996), 225, 226. Only five women were elected in the first national election 1921. Until the late 1930s, no party had more than 5 per cent of female MPs, and in the early 1960s, the only political party with slightly more than 20 per cent of female MPs was the Social Democrats. Camilla Norrbin, Från isolering till integrering. En kollektivbiografisk studie över de kvinnliga riksdagsledamöterna under tvåkammarriksdagens tid (Umeå: Institutionen för historiska studier, 2004), 40, 79.   4 For Scandinavia, see, for example, Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (ed.), Kvinnor och politik i det tidigmoderna Norden (Reykjavik: Islands universitets förlag, 2007); Svante Norrhem, Kvinnor vid maktens sida 1632–1772 (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2007); Anu Lahtinen, Anpassning, förhandling, motstånd: Kvinnliga aktörer i släkten Fleming 1470–1620 (Stockholm:Alantis and Helsingfors: STS, 2009).   5 Compared to for example England and Sweden, France saw never reigning queens who had inherited their status from their fathers, but nevertheless there were queen dowagers who executed power. See, amongst others, Karin Tegenborg Falkdalen, Kungen är en kvinna. Retorik och praktik kring kvinnliga monarker under tidigmodern tid (Umeå: Institutionen för historiska studier, 2003); Sharon L. Jansen, The Monstrous Regiment of Women. Female Rulers in Early Modern Europe (New York: Palgrave ­Macmillan, 2002).  6 Nina Koefoed, ‘Kvinder i politik 1500–1800 – forskningens status i Danmark’ and Hilde Sandvik, ‘Politiske kvinner på 1700-tallet i Norge,’ both in Kvinnor och politik i det tidigmoderna Norden, ed. Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (Reykjavik: Islands universitets förlag, 2007); Mats Berglund, ‘Food riots in nineteenth-century Sweden,’ in Gender in Urban Europe. Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship 1750–1900, eds Krista Cowman, Nina Javette Koefoed and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (New York: Routledge, 2014); Arlette Farge, Livets sköra tråd.Våld, makt och solidaritet i 1700–talets Paris (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 1989) Original title: La vie fragile.Violence, pouvoirs et solidarités á Paris au XVIIIe siècle, 1986.   7 Peter Lindström, ‘Kvinnor i den lokala politiken på landsbygden i Sverige under 1600– och 1700– talen’ in Kvinnor och politik i det tidigmoderna Norden, ed. Åsa Karlsson Sjögren (Reykjavik: Islands universitets förlag, 2007). Swedish political culture seems not to have been as open to women’s political participation in election campaigns as in England. In her study of elite women’s involvement in elections in eighteenth-century England, Elaine Chalus has examined a broad spectrum of the political culture and analysed these women’s political activities in different arenas. Compare Elaine Chalus, Elite Women in English Political Life c. 1754–1790 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005) with Karin Sennefelt, Politikens hjärta. Medborgarskap, manlighet och plats i frihetstidens Stockholm (Stockholm: Stockholmnia förlag, 2011).   8 Recently, women in Saudi Arabia have received local franchise.   9 Antony Black, Guilds and Civil Society in European Political Thought from the Twelfth Century to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). 10 Amongst others: Peter Aronsson, Bönder gör politik. Det lokala självstyret som social arena i tre smålandssocknar, 1680–1880 (Lund, 1992); Peter Lindström, Prästval och politisk kultur (Umeå: Institutionen för historiska studier, 2003); Marie-Christine Skuncke and Henrika Tandefelt (ed.), Riksdag, kaffehus och predikstol.

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Åsa Karlsson Sjögren Frihetstidens politiska kultur 1766–1772 (Stockholm: Atlantis and Helsingfors: SLS, 2003). Karin Sennefelt has studied the political culture in Stockholm in relation to the politics in the Riksdag, see Sennefelt, Politikens hjärta. 11 Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna. 12 Ibid, 34, 39–46, 79–80. In some cities and towns, such as Gothenburg and Turku, both systems were used during the Age of Liberty. In Turku, three corporative bodies existed: The ‘Swedish society,’ the ‘Finnish society’ and the ‘Artisan society’. 13 Ibid, 53–64. See also chapter 3 in this volume. 14 R.G. Modée, Utdrag utur alle ifrån den 7 December 1728 utkomne Publique Handlingar ... (Stockholm: NA, 1742–1777), 19 January 1758. 15 Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna, 44–52, quotation, 48. 16 Ibid, 73–74. 17 Ibid, 75–78. 18 Handlingar, som utwisa, huruledes walet af Åbo stads fullmägtig til 1771 års riksdag blifwit förrättadt … (Åbo: NA, 1771), 24. 19 Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna, 75–78, 96–101. 20 The National Archives, Landshövdingars skrivelser till Kungl. Maj:t Västernorrland, Volume 34, 19/6 1771. 21 Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna, 115–119. 22 Nordin, Ett fattigt men fritt folk. Nationell och politisk självbild i Sverige från sen stormaktstid till slutet av frihetstiden (Stockholm, Stehag: Symposion, 2000), 362. 23 Erik Gustaf Geijer, Samlade skrifter 9 (Stockholm: PA Norstedt & Sönner, 1929), 126. 24 Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna, 144–146; Berit Borell, De svenska liberalerna och representationsfrågan på 1840–talet (Stockholm and Uppsala: Almqvist and Wicksell, 1948), 52–53. 25 Karlsson Sjögren, Männen, kvinnorna, 163–171. 26 Ibid, 166–169. 27 Åsa Karlsson Sjögren, ‘Women’s voices in Swedish towns and cities at the turn of the twentieth century: Municipal franchise, polling, eligibility and strategies for universal suffrage,’ Women’s History Review 21, no. 3 (2012), 384–386. 28 Josefin Rönnbäck, Politikens genusgränser. Den kvinnliga rösträttsrörelsen och kampen för kvinnors politiska medborgarskap 1902–1921 (Stockholm: Atlas akademi, 2004), 58–59. 29 Christina Florin, Kvinnor får röst. Kön, känslor och politiska kultur i kvinnornas rösträttsrörelse (Stockholm: Atlas akademi, 2006). 30 Karlsson Sjögren ‘Women voices,’ 385, Rönnbäck, 32, 115. 31 Rönnbäck, Politikens genusgränser, 89–91. 32 Ibid, 124. 33 Åsa Karlsson Sjögren and Peter Lindström, ‘Rum för röstande. Om kön, klass och valdeltagande vid stadsfullmäktigevalen i Gävle 1910 och 1912,’ Scandia 77, vol. 1, 2011, 39–56. 34 Karlsson Sjögren, ‘Women’s voices,’ 385–388. 35 Karlsson Sjögren and Lindström, ‘Rum för röstande,’ 41–53. 36 One explanation for this is that after 1919, proxies were only permitted for married couples and that unmarried women therefore stayed at home to a higher extent. See also Kjell Östberg, Efter rösträtten: kvinnors utrymme efter det demokratiska genombrottet (Eslöv: Symposium, 1997), 72.

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Part IV

Material Culture in Gendered Urban Settings Introduction Marjo Kaartinen

Materiality defines us: we are material beings, and we surround ourselves with matter. In today’s affluent societies, the materiality of our world can be so dominating that we can feel overwhelmed by stuff, things; too much of which creates clutter. This was not always so; while items may have been pleasing to the eye, the first things human hands made were very likely for practical purposes. Human beings exceed other animals in language skills and tool making. Human skills have filled the earth with artefacts, good and pleasurable as well as destructive. Artefact making is so central in human life that we think it defines us as a species. We think we need our products to survive – certainly, without protective clothing and dwellings, we could not live in all inhabited areas of our globe. However, we have certainly also created needs for our things that were previously less necessary and even unimaginable; today, we desperately need our cars, forks and mobile devices. Much of our material production is for the amusement, leisure, pleasure and beautification on which consumer culture is largely based. Our abilities to create things that allow us to thrive in the most remote of places have allowed humans to spread our influence around the globe, even to the most hostile of lands. Furthermore, our tool-making skills have allowed us to increase in numbers so that there are numerous constructed, essentially material, metropolises of millions of people, and so that our number will soon be eight billion. Only in the twenty-first century has the majority of the world’s population lived in cities. In 2006, urban population reached 50 per cent for the first time, and it is constantly growing.1 But even before this historic watershed, while not necessarily considered the healthiest of choices, urban ways of life have been considered the more progressive, and, for many, they are even the most satisfactory in terms of sensory stimuli or even of aesthetic satisfaction. It has even been argued that it was the urban that enabled thought to be the form of life that leads intellectual revolutions. This has been emphatically true in terms of material culture. Though the division into country and city is mostly an imaginary construction, we have often associated the countryside with nature, while towns concern themselves with human creativity and matter. Therefore, it is worthwhile taking a historically informed look at gender in towns from the perspective of material culture.2 Harvey Green has helpfully defined material culture as

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the study of the made and built world includ[ing] – academic and vernacular ­architecture, the ordinary artefacts of human and animal history, the history of the natural and altered landscape, the interactions between humans and flora and fauna, photography and visual material from mass media, works of art, and the artefacts of technology.3 This leads us to the fact that the central focus of the study of material culture is things t­ hemselves, although we cannot forget the ideas that surround the material and act with them to give them meaning. Matter is understood here as cultural, historical and social and thus changing over time. It is a part of cultural processes that are in constant movement and change as matter, things and objects influence their environments as well as being shaped by them. Culture is a web, and therefore fields of influence are never only one way. If we understand matter – and things – as cultural elements in this boundless web, we can study the immaterial in relation to materiality: the influences, effects and networks these reveal. We can study the practices that are related to the materiality we study, as well as ways to understand these.4 This is, of course, the way into the material that is most familiar to historians. Even though we often speak of the recent discovery of material culture by historians, Peter Burke calls this, quite correctly, a rediscovery, as things have been ‘discovered’ before; objects have always interested historians.5 For instance, a multitude of studies has focused on the history of collecting, which nicely reflects historical interest on things in the more distant past.6 What proposes to be relatively new in the recent trend called ‘the material turn’ is taking the study of the physical materiality of objects a step further. It sees materiality as embedded with meanings, and it sees matter as active in creating meanings as well. Here, the material turn takes steps towards a new materialism, although, as the essays in this section show, this is not necessary.7 Essentially, criticizing ‘discursive history’ for forgetting the agency of matter, new materialism proposes to give matter an active role in the past. It thus proposes to promote things as agents and lift them to the forefront of study and in an equal interplay with humans. In other words, new materialism sees culture as a dialogue between the agencies of various beings. It remains to be seen if this challenge to cultural and ‘discursive’ history will have a lasting effect and if it will open truly new vistas to the past. The challenge is, without doubt, welcome, even if its only lasting input is to remind us that the agency of human beings is only one form of power in our material world. The essays in this section represent a selection of the various fields of interests in the c­ urrent study of material culture: consumption, luxury and ostentation, religious materiality, the body and architecture are but a few aspects the following essays explore.8 Together, however, the essays propose approaches with which to look at the many ways in which materiality and things matter in urban setting. At times, they also venture beyond the artefacts themselves and find materiality in immateriality. When studying urban gendered materiality and the gendering of things, an innovative approach to one’s sources and a close reading of them is particularly necessary. Taking a new look at old and well-known sources, too, can reveal new aspects of the past. The chapters in the following provide meticulous readings of newspapers, letters, probate records, courts records, society papers and the things themselves to tease out the gender and the material in urban settings. Renata Ago uses inventories in her study of the gendered intersections between space and the material in early modern Rome, uncovering the materiality of the domestic environment and its implications for a city where women far outnumbered men. She reminds us that certain forms of material goods – such as ovens – were not available to all in the early modern town, while also highlighting the possibilities for decoration through the cheap prints available to 246

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even very poor families. Ago emphasises the ways that owning things was gendered, noting that ‘women had different ways of feeling poor or rich than men,’ and her chapter reminds us that, perhaps contrary to our assumptions, male consumption was much more ostentatious than women’s, which was oriented towards the practical and devotional. Such differences highlight the gendered social status of men and women. For men, it was important and even essential to have things for display and to showcase their social rank, whereas for women, it was important to own things that were easy to change into money; things gave them security. A focus on material goods clarifies and sheds light on the gendered urban experience. Ana Marinković’s chapter makes a similar point but takes us beyond the home into civic devotional practices. Through tracing the purchasing and commissioning decisions of a late medieval Dalmatian confraternity as it moves from a male to a female organisation, she demonstrates how a focus on material goods can give insight into the social and political roles of men and women in city life (particularly in the absence of other data). Whilst men could use their civic devotion to more actively shape political life, women’s role was more exclusively targeted a religious practice, yet, even for them, in shaping the nature of civic devotion, women set the boundaries of the Trogir community and made claims for the nature of civic identity. In her study of a votive study of a local saint, Marinković therefore highlights not only the use of material culture as evidence for the past but also as an active agent in shaping the urban experience and its gendered dimensions. Similarly political were early American women’s shoes, as studied by Kimberly Alexander. As objects that signified impeccable taste, suitable breeding, wealth, class and status, as well as engagement in local and international fashion trends, shoes became implicated in identity making and thus in political life. Alexander’s case study demonstrates the ways that the War of Independence shaped, and was shaped by, shoe purchasing decisions, with the political demand for ‘patriotic purchasing’, buying at home rather than abroad and according to national fashion trends. Such trends were not just about the location of where goods were made but could also speak to a person’s politics – a rejection of luxury and over-consumption in favour of frugality and simplicity. In this sense, fashions in shoes became a measure of political identity and will. Teija Försti’s chapter on the introduction of the automobile in Helsinki provides a parallel discussion. Enormously big, heavy, difficult to drive, ostentatious and luxurious, as well as symbols of wealth and success, cars were highly gendered things. Like elsewhere, the car was a symbol of female independence in Helsinki but also threatened the moral danger that such freedom could entail.Yet, women withstood such criticism to drive from the earliest years, taking part in races and joining automobile clubs. In many ways, the car represented the new age of technology and was greeted as an agent of change, including change to gendered social relationships. Within urban spaces – already associated with the modern and technology – cars became an irresistible fashion accessory, speaking to and in turn shaping the identities of their drivers. It is not just what the body wears or uses that forms part of material culture, but the body itself. Anne Carol drives home this idea in her history of caring for the body in urban environments. Work that was frequently designated as female – caring for the body, such as in nursing or domestic service; and providing access to the body for other’s comforts, such as prostitution or wet-nursing – was essential to the functioning of newly expanding cities, often taking domestic roles from the home and into the marketplace. In turn, over the nineteenth century, some occupations, like medicine, became specialized and professionalized, while others, notably prostitution, were subject to control but not status. As Carol emphasises, taking the female body seriously in this context draws attention to the fractured and contested relationship between nineteenth-century urban publics and ideas of health, hygiene and morality. 247

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If the body speaks to the human shaping the environment, then architecture might form a key role in shaping the body. In her chapter, Despina Stratigakos argues for the important role of architecture in shaping the meaning of urban spaces, focusing our attention on the clubhouses built by fin-de-siècle elite women across the world. Through emphasising the ­architectural choices made when building these organizations, she highlights how these women sought to convey themselves as workers, professionals and advocates for self-improvement. The clubhouse was a material symbol of the new women’s movement around the world, and, like the movement, blurred the Victorian distinctions of public and private. Symbolizing women’s rising political significance, the clubs were a material means to access physical power centres. As the author notes, ‘architecture had a central role to play in gender equality’. The essays in this section explore and discuss the many ways in which material things – objects, matter – shape towns, and the ways, in turn, that towns form matter in gendered ways. In fact, the essays remind us that what makes a town is essentially material. They also point out the multitude of ways in which matter relates to spatiality. Out of necessity, space always has its material dimensions, and these two cannot be separated without great difficulty. Whether it is through the body, what they wear, the tools they use, the items that decorate homes, or architecture itself, material culture intrudes into, shapes and is implicated in meaning making in urban environments, not least in determining its gendered dimensions.

Notes 1 http://www.worldometers.info/world-population/world-population-by-year/ [Accessed 25 February 2016.] 2 For an excellent recent introduction to gendered material culture, see Hannah Greig, Jane Hamlett and Leonie Hannan, eds, Gender and Material Culture in Britain Since 1600 (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2016) as well as Moira Donald and Linda Hurcombe, eds, Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000). 3 Harvey Green, ‘Cultural history and the material(s) turn,’ Cultural History 1:1 (2012): 61. 4 On the study of material culture, Maija Mäkikalli, ’Johdanto. Materiaalisen kulttuurin historiaa’, in Esine ja aika. Materiaalisen kulttuurin historiaa, eds, Maija Mäkikalli and Riitta Laitinen (Helsinki: SKS, 2010), 9–24. 5 Peter Burke, ‘The meaning of things in the early modern world’ in Treasured Possessions from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, eds,Victoria Avery, Melissa Calaresu and Mary Laven (Cambridge:The Fitzwilliam Museum 2015), 3. See also Green, 61–82. 6 Burke; see also Paula Findlen, ed. Early Modern Things. Objects and their Histories, 1500–1800 (London and New York: Routledge, 2013). 7 It is often also called neo materialism. On new materialism, see for example Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, eds, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanism Press, 2012), open access at http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.11515701.0001.001. Related to new materialism is praxiography, an attempt to study ‘material practices, to different kinds of actors and purports to have a more open eye to encounters (between bodies, objects, experts, and techniques),’ Iris Clever and Willemijn Ruberg, ‘Beyond cultural history? The material turn, praxiography, and body history’, Humanities 3 (2014): 546–566, citation at 546. In new materialist terms, the most influential for historical thinking on the body promises to be physicist and philosopher Karen Barad’s thoughts on agential realism and especially her concept of intra-action, especially Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 8 For example, the very exciting fields of the materiality of reading and clothing culture (excepting shoes) are not largely discussed here. For books and reading, see Jennifer Lotte Andersen and Elizabeth Sauer, eds. Books and Readers in Early Modern England: Material Studies (University of Pennsylvania Press: Philadelphia, 2002). For clothes, see, for example, Catherine Richardson, ed. Clothing Culture, 1350–1650 (Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate 2004). Medical things: Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore, eds. Spaces, Objects and Identities in Early Modern Italian Medicine (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).

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19 Gender, Material Culture and Urban Experience in Early Modern Rome Renata Ago

Towns are primarily defined by their very materiality – their walls, their streets and places and their buildings, religious or secular, public or private. The lives of their human inhabitants are also largely shaped by the material environment in which they live, and their interplay with other individuals is continuously mediated by the use of material objects. In all this, gender plays a primary role.Thus, this chapter will use a specific case study – that of early modern Rome – in order to explore some general issues concerning the relationship between gender, materiality and urban experience.

The number of urban women and men Historical demographers who have been working on the urban populations of pre-industrial or proto-industrial Europe have often noticed a marked imbalance between the number of men and that of women. The high predominance in the number of women recorded in the censuses data of many French or Swiss cities as well as in those of late seventeenth and eighteenth-­ century Amsterdam and other Dutch towns cannot be explained by purely demographic ­factors.1 Historians have tried to explain these anomalies by calling migrations into question, pointing to the high number of young unmarried women who worked as servants in well-off urban households. This imbalance affected the marriage market and often condemned a certain number of women to forced celibacy. The shorter life expectancy of men resulted in a high proportion of marriages interrupted by the death of the husband and produced a significant number of households with female heads. Since rich single women had better opportunities to marry or re-marry or otherwise find a refuge in the house of a male relative, these female households, mostly made up of widows and orphans, were much more frequent in the lower ranks of society, among the labouring classes or those people who depended on charities. They consequently tended to concentrate in the poorest neighbourhoods of the city, which, in their turn, were obviously affected by their numerous presence. In this regard, Rome was rather an exception.We indeed know that the popes’ city tended to attract males and that throughout the seventeenth century, men largely outnumbered women, especially among young adults.2 Most craftsmen and tradesmen were indeed foreigners to the 249

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city and came not only from the surrounding countryside but also from one of the many other small states of the peninsula.3 Moreover, until the end of the eighteenth century, domestic ­service was more a male than a female job. Rome’s richest employers were in fact members of the high clergy, who preferred to hire men in their service and marginalized women to conducting very few humble tasks. The combined effect of these factors was a city that, during the entire seventeenth century, counted at least 140 men for every 100 women. With these figures, the marriage market was obviously favourable to women, and celibacy concerned only women of the higher classes. Only at that social level did parents indeed worry about the preservation of the family estate and preferred to enclose their daughters in a convent rather than paying an expensive dowry to marry them. Marriage records, moreover, show that even young widows had good chances to re-marry. Female households nonetheless existed and therefore were not completely negligible.The parish censuses of 1645, for example, show that, out of a total number of 14,579 households, 1890 (13 per cent) were headed by a widow or widower. Since widowers more easily found a new spouse in early modern societies and were thus remarkably fewer in number than widows, we may presume that many of those almost 15,000 families were led by a woman. The other members of these households were also predominantly female (139 women to every 100 men on average) and, as above, very probably poor.The smaller than average size of these units confirms this. This was an epoch in which well-off and rich families were characterized by their size, and they had a high number of children, servants and cohabiting relatives.

Women earning a living The major problem single women had to face was to earn a living for themselves and those depending on them. Roman crafts and trades were very active, but until the end of the eighteenth century, none of them had the truly industrial dimension that would allow women to be regularly employed, as was the case, for example, in contemporary Florence or Bologna.4 This does not, however, mean that women did not work outside their homes or their husbands’ shops. Many of them actually worked for craftsmen or tradesmen who had no family ties to them, but they usually did this on an putting-out arrangement, accomplishing their tasks at home. These tasks characteristically included sewing, embroidering, knitting, spinning and starching pleated collars and cuffs, but none of these activities were given real professional recognition. As compared with occupations that ‘official’ craftsmen carried on, with their workers and apprentices in their shops, homemade female work was considered of second quality and paid accordingly. Moreover, if both male and female apprentices had a right to bed and board, male ones were usually lodged in the shop, while young girls lived with the family and their tasks typically also included those of a maid. More frequently than boys, furthermore, apprentice girls were paid only on the expiration of their contract when they left their master’s home, and this could happen many years after they had been hired. However, a few activities existed that were exclusively feminine and, what is more, were not considered the natural extension of the domestic duties of a housewife, like the other abovementioned ones, but a real profession: that of a laundress and that of a prostitute. Early modern Rome had a widespread system of washhouses, usually belonging to wealthy families, noble or not, who considered them as an investment and rented them to a certain number of ‘chief laundresses’. These in their turn admitted in other laundresses, who paid a fee for the use of the tub filled with hot water where the linens were left soaking with ashes and for the subsequent usage of the fountain with cold running water where they were washed and rinsed. Professional laundresses regularly appear in private account books and are easily found in law court records where they complained of attacks on the washhouse or the theft of the linens.5 250

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Prostitution was also a profession, and courtesans, as they were called, were recorded as such in parish records. From time to time, the ecclesiastical government of Rome considered the idea of banishing them from the city, but they always resolved on a compromise, consisting in obliging them to reside in a circumscribed neighbourhood.Their presence often disturbed their neighbours because their dwellings attracted boisterous young men who played the guitar and sang under their windows, called out their names, threw stones at their window-screens, and so on. Like laundresses, prostitutes thus frequently appear in law court records.6 As stated, the authorities’ decrees wanted them to live in a few streets around the port of Ripetta, the social composition and material settings of which were obviously affected by their substantial presence. The parish censuses, which often recorded them separately, and court records show, however, that prostitutes could also live in neighbouring parishes or even in rather distant areas.

The spatial distribution of economic activities Like many other early modern cities, Rome was not particularly characterized by the spatial segregation of economic activities.With few exceptions, tradesmen, craftsmen and poor workers lived in the same streets and often in the same buildings as the nobility and the higher clergy. In fact, rich noble families often rented the ground-floor shops situated in the palace they lived in to craftsmen and tradesmen. Modest two or three-story houses with just one or two windows facing the street usually flanked the more imposing buildings inhabited by the well-to-do. The greatest, the princely families who could boast a pope among their relatives, like the Farnese, the Borghese, the Barberini and the Chigi, had managed to build or acquire an isolated palace, fronted by a square that carried their name. However, they also did not disdain to rent a shop or a small apartment to a labouring household. This said, the almost 80 parishes of the city and its 14 rioni presented remarkable differences. With a few exceptions, Trastevere and even more so Monti were characterized by a very limited presence of noble families and, consequently, of important private buildings. From the beginning of the fifteenth century, the area of the via Giulia, on the left bank of the Tiber, underwent a process of gentrification and was rebuilt and refashioned in order to accommodate new and more prestigious inhabitants.7 The process continued in the following decades, progressively conquering the area of the Via del Corso and the hills beyond it. In the middle of these gentrified zones, however, many blocks of more modest buildings actually survived, and two neighbouring parishes, like for example San Lorenzo in Damaso and San Tommaso in Parione, could present a rather different concentration of poor residents.8 If social segregation was somewhat limited, so was professional specialization. Only crafts requiring particular environmental conditions converged in a single neighbourhood to the exclusion of all the others.Tanneries were, for example, concentrated on the left flat bank of the river, where their smell would not displease the better off, and they had access to all the water they needed. However, this was the most evident example of professional concentration. In most other cases, we only have some evidence of a tendency to congregate around trades. Thus, merchants often lived in the precincts of the customs, booksellers in those of the university, bankers and goldsmiths in those of the Banco di Santo Spirito and the Monte di Pietà. Nevertheless, this by no means was an absolute rule, and we know of many exceptions.9 The same can be said of women’s activities. Only prostitutes were concentrated in a few specific streets, while all other working women, who toiled at home for a master craftsman, were scattered throughout the entire city and did not particularly affect the material setting of any specific neighbourhood. For different reasons, the presence of seamstresses and prostitutes, in contrast, made a deep mark on the physical structure of the neighbourhoods they lived in: prostitutes because they were segregated by the civic authorities; seamstresses because of their 251

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connections with the washhouses and their use of the surrounding spaces to hang out washed linens to be dried.

Male and female urban spaces Recent researches on the role of the built environment and the different uses of urban space, carried on mostly by architects and town planners as well as sociologists or historians of urban design, show that there was a considerable difference between the experiences of women and men.10 As described above, foreign men were much more numerous than foreign women in Rome. The city attracted labourers and craftsmen – especially masons, tanners and weavers – and petty and great merchants, but also artists and members of the clergy from all over Italy and even from northern Europe. To arrive there, they had travelled many miles and yet, once installed in the city, they often tended not to go beyond the borders of their neighbourhood. A historical survey of the criminal records between the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century provides evidence that both men and women belonging to the labouring classes usually moved in a rather limited area within the city. Men moved within a space the vertexes of which were the home, workshop, tavern and eventually the parish church; women moved even more in the immediate neighbourhood of their house, the nearby fountain and shops.11 There is no similar research on higher-ranking tradesmen, but we can imagine they moved in wider spaces, either because their business put them in contact with a larger set of associates or clients or because their interests brought them to different institutional sites scattered within the city, such as the customs, the private or public banks, notaries and attorneys. Their wives and daughters, on the contrary, conducted a relatively retired life. Daily life therefore formed different spaces for different inhabitants: for manual workers the boundaries of their city centred on the workshop and the tavern, even if many of them had, at least once in their life, experienced the prison or the police office. They rarely crossed the borders of the rione they lived in. Only lay or religious festivities, such as the carnival or one of the many processions that cut across the entire urban area, pulled them out of the few streets where they were accustomed to hang around. At the same time, these people were among the more unstable dwellers of the city and moved from one to another master, from one to another rented room or house, every time repeating the same pattern of occupation of the urban space. Tradesmen, in their turn, were much more stable and lived for years in the same house and toiled in the same workshop, to the extent that the workshop became a spatial landmark, but they also experienced a much wider city. They travelled from all the rioni to attend their guild meetings taking place in their patron saint’s church, they frequented and served the guild’s tribunal on the Capitol Hill, they visited the shops of their suppliers and the houses of their more respectable clients and so on.This was true also of those who exercised a liberal profession or to the numerous artists that inhabited Rome. Lawyers, solicitors and notaries moved almost daily between their offices, the many urban law courts and their clients’ houses. The artists went from their ateliers to the different places where they were temporarily appointed, and the physicians served both in their patients’ houses and in one of the urban hospitals. Noblemen shared similar experiences. Many of them actually served in a public institution and attended its meetings, which could take place either in the building that hosted that specific institution or in the home of the cardinal who headed it. However, they also frequented the papal court, both in the Vatican palaces and in the Quirinal, and they spent much of their time visiting people of the same rank or hanging about the antechambers of their superiors, waiting to be admitted to their presence. This meant they often had to cross the entire city to get from their own palaces to the palaces of foreign ambassadors and their other contacts. 252

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Noblemen, well-off members of the liberal professions, scholars and artists also had other opportunities to move to places distinct from their homes or their offices. These were the ‘conversations’ and the ‘accademie’ that regularly gathered in one of the many urban palaces and were attended by the most brilliant and cultivated men. These more fashionable activities also involved crossing the city and experiencing it in its almost entire expanse. Particularly persuasive preachers also attracted a large number of attendants, creating fashionable events not very dissimilar from the performance of a drama or an opera in a public or private theatre. By the second half of the seventeenth century, musical theatre had become very popular in Rome, and many cultivated aristocrats enjoyed writing librettos for religious performances, patronized a certain number of musicians and had a theatre built within the walls of their palace. Upper-class women had fewer opportunities to leave their homes, but they frequently ­visited their own female relatives and the female members of the ruling families, even when they were confined to a monastery.They also attended the public ceremonies and were in some cases admitted to ‘conversations’ and ‘accademie’. In the eighteenth century, these fashionable events became more and more frequent. Similarly, one can add the theatres to these women’s increasing activities. Their opening season was limited to the carnival, but they were nonetheless very popular. Notwithstanding the social distinctions discussed above, there is evidence that Rome, like any other early modern city, overall offered different spaces to men and to women. Women’s urban spaces were smaller, as we have seen, but they were also limited by different landmarks. A woman’s city, especially if she belonged to the labouring classes, was made up of her doorstep and the immediate surroundings of her home, the nearby retail shops, the public oven and the fountain of the district and the parish church.To this one can finally add the conservatory where her daughters, nieces or other young relatives were enclosed to be protected from the vices of the external life; and the poorhouse, where she planned to retire when too old or too lonely to live by herself. Unlike in Amsterdam and other northern cities, the Roman marketplace was not a typical female place.The Monte di Pietà, the main Roman public pawnshop, could also be part of their urban landscape, but the many private intermediaries, who collected goods from their neighbours to pawn them, often relieved them of the embarrassing burden of reaching it. If they spun, embroidered or starched pleated collars at home for a merchant, from time to time they could be obliged to cover the distance between their home and the merchant’s shop, but the opposite could also happen, with the merchant visiting them in their house. Recent research on seamstresses shows that they also moved within the boundaries of a quite small district perimeter: the families where they went to collect the dirty linens lived nearby and the washhouse they used was the nearest one, as was the carpenter’s shop where they bought the wood to light the fire under their washing basin. Finally, women’s and men’s cities also differed according to time. It was dangerous for women to walk around at night, and criminal records show they ran serious risks of assault, while prostitutes who did so to visit a client frequently incurred trouble with the police and were arrested. The city of a labouring woman or even of a labouring man was thus considerably smaller than that of a member of the nobility, who, moreover, moved on horseback or sitting in a carriage and only rarely walked around the streets. Only extraordinary events encouraged lowerclass members of society to cross the borders of their district and reach a faraway street or square. In the course of the year, these events were, however, quite frequent. Only some of the religious festivities that characterized Rome were the burial of an old pope; the election of a new one; his ‘Possesso’ cavalcade, by which he took possession of his bishopric in St. John in the Lateran; the un-walling of the ‘holy door’ in each of the four great basilicas, which the pilgrims were required to visit at the beginning of a Jubilee year; the Corpus Christi procession, in late 253

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May or early June, which represented a major civic event and involved the whole city both in the spatial sense and in the social one; and the feast of the Assunta, on 15 August, when all the urban crafts and trades gathered behind the city officials in a solemn pageant. In addition to these, one must mention the lay public ceremonies that included the festivities organized by the foreign ambassadors for the coronation of a new king or queen; a royal marriage or birth; the solemn entry into the city walls of a visiting monarch, from queen Christina of Sweden to James Stuart the ‘pretender’ to the throne of England and others; as well as the pageant for a victory of the Christian armies against the Turks, like the one organized in 1683 after the end of siege of Vienna. All these events attracted masses of people of every class and every urban district and, for the more secluded among them, they were the occasion for experiencing unfamiliar parts of the city together with unusual itineraries through its streets and squares. When they did so, women managed not to be alone and always moved in the company of a relative or of another woman, showing also by this behaviour how much unfamiliar spaces generated anxiety or fear. Finally, Rome, like most other contemporary cities, hosted a large number of temporary inhabitants: peasants from nearby villages, seasonal workers, vagrants, beggars and so on. Theirs was an almost exclusively male presence. The built urban environment particularly influenced their distribution throughout the city. Having no other place to sleep, they slept under the porches of the churches or, more frequently, among the Roman ruins of the Coliseum, the nearby Campo Vaccino (the ancient Roman Forum) or the slopes of the Capitol Hill, where the daily rural workers who were waiting to be hired gathered. Although included within the ancient Roman walls, all this area situated at the southern end of the city was typically almost empty of buildings and represented a sort of countryside penetrating the urban space and introducing rural features into it. If this part of the urban poorest population was almost entirely male, both genders, on the contrary, crowded the hospitals and the poorhouses that characterized the city. While in the case of men, only the old and the invalid had a right to poor relief, in the case of women, the urban structures offered a much wider array of possibilities. There were many conservatories the task of which was to shelter young girls in danger, as well as a house that hosted repenting prostitutes.

The materiality of the dwellings As has been said, Rome typically was a male city. Furthermore, a high percentage of its men lived by themselves with no woman living under the same roof. According to the parish censuses, in the middle of the seventeenth century, a rather consistent percentage (14 per cent) of the population did not live in a traditional family but in a household made of cohabiting persons, be they kin or not. Among them, more than three out of four individuals were men (77 per cent). These figures show that exclusively male households indeed existed and were rather numerous. The social differences separating them could, however, be enormous, since single males could live together in lodgings or hostelries, where they often shared not only a room but also a bed; or in a cardinal’s court, where they enjoyed the greatest comforts offered by the epoch. In the palaces of the noble families, moreover, male siblings were expected to live together, even if the married ones lived in a separate wing with their wives, children and servants, while his ecclesiastical brothers enjoyed an apartment of their own. The presence of a frequently pregnant wife and of many young children and babies, with their maids and wet-nurses, imposed a certain distribution of the rooms that was not necessary in the purely male apartments. This often brought to the creation of a third, female apartment. In each of them, the public rooms, with their well-codified succession of antechambers, were in contrast similar both in the case of a lay or ecclesiastical landlord and in that of a married or dowager landlady. 254

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The composition of the familia – the retinue – also influenced the spatial arrangements of the home. The high-ranking servants were all men, and each of them had the right to have a room, or even a suite of rooms, of his own. This obviously happened only in the well-off households but, from this point of view, the gender of the head made no difference: a rich widow could have a maestro di casa (a sort of household administrator) exactly like any wealthy gentleman belonging to the urban elite. Parish censuses show that maids mostly served in households that included a woman. Their salary being lower, they also served even in the households of the lower middling sort, who could not afford to hire a male servant. In the palaces of the nobility, the female servants’ room or rooms had to be close to the ones of the mistress and her younger children, again influencing the spatial distribution of the domestic spaces. The uses of the domestic spaces influenced their distribution. For example, the number of the antechambers was a consequence of social hierarchies and materialized the social distance between the host and his or her visitors. The small hidden staircases or corridors between the bedroom of the master and that of his wife responded to a quest for privacy that the monumental ones could absolutely not provide.12 The material form of the building also influenced the uses of the rooms. The rich medical literature on the healthy home, produced in Italy between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries, suggested how to isolate the urban palace from the noxious vapours of the city, how to expose it to the beneficial winds and to protect it from the harmful ones, how to build a northern wing for the summer and a southern one for the winter, how to distribute loggias and courtyards for the private use of the ladies, how to distribute the fireplaces and so on.13 At the other end of the social ladder, the houses of the poor often had no fireplace at all and consequently no kitchen. The lack of kitchen, in our eyes a fundamental part of any home, was rather common and not only in Rome. The presence or the absence of a kitchen, be it in a separate room or simply consisting of a fireplace and a few saucepans and pots, deeply influenced the daily life of the inhabitants of the house. Since they could not cook at home, if they wanted a real meal, they had to resort to the nearest tavern. There is evidence of many lower-class individuals of both sexes repeatedly consuming their meals at a tavern; but we also have evidence of better-off people ordering their food from the tavern and having it brought to their home. An important economic and social divide also separated the families who could store larger food – flour, wine, oil – and wood provisions from those families who had to buy what they needed from day to day.

Home furnishings and the role of material objects The basic Roman residential unit was the apartment, an organic unity of rooms that all occupied the same floor. In larger houses, this format could be repeated on a second or third floor, while in great palaces every floor could contain more than one apartment. In addition to this, as soon as the dimensions of the dwelling allowed, the basic functions of sleeping, cooking, eating and entertaining did not occur indiscriminately within the same spaces but took place in specialized rooms designated by precise names – room, hall, kitchen and so forth – and accompanied by specialized furnishings. Rarely did a space defined as a room and one defined as a hall, let alone one called a kitchen, contain the same type of furniture and movable goods. Beds were mostly found in rooms, dressers and chairs in halls and fireplaces and andirons in kitchens, evidencing the diffusion of the functional distinction among spaces.14 With respect to gender differences, women’s dwellings were overall smaller than those of men with a more limited number of rooms. They were, however, more crowded with pieces of furniture like chests, dressers and sideboards: almost three pieces per room in the houses of 255

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women compared to only 1.5 for men. Even studioli (small cupboards), which we customarily associated with the very male space of the educated and the scholarly, appeared slightly more frequently in women’s houses. The smaller number of chairs and stools that women owned reflected the different nature of their houses, which were not only smaller but also less furnished with antechambers and halls. An examination of materials confirms this impression. Albuccio, a soft wood similar to fir, characterized the furniture of women much more than it did that of men. The apartments of women were therefore more full of furniture than men’s, but their furniture was of poorer quality and often second rate. Even in these conditions of relatively greater poverty, however, some of them could construct a domestic space that evoked a modicum of splendour, as did a certain Maria de Litteris, who lived in an apartment with two rooms and a kitchen. The doors to her hall were covered with leather painted with red and gold, her dresser was entirely of walnut and on one of the two sideboards there was a studiolo carved with figures. The walls were almost completely covered with gilt-framed paintings. In the bedroom, the luxury bed was flanked by a prie-dieu, a cupboard and two large chests; the walls again were covered with paintings large and small. At any level of the social ladder, the description of Roman domestic interiors strikes the reader with the number of pictures hanging on the walls (23.5 pieces per head on average). Nevertheless, such a large quantity of pictures in male and female patrimonies that were in other respects rather poor, or even devoid of other decorative objects, merits some further reflection. Even the most ordinary pictures indeed possessed that capacity to make contact with the invisible, as it has been argued.15 Such a capacity was particularly evident in devotional images. Paintings and statues of religious subjects possessed a metaphysical virtue. They were a key to accessing the afterlife, ‘they stimulated the imagination of the faithful to the point of making a presence perceptible, they made such a presence a living reality and hence true’.16 This, however, turns out to be a shared characteristic of all images, provided that they have been removed from the realms of use and exchange. Sacred or profane, cheap or refined, pictures were capable of speaking the language of the invisible world, composed of ideas and abstract concepts. It is moreover likely that both sacred and profane images had many meanings beyond our analytic simplifications and could therefore reflect a variety of abstract concepts. Sacred meaning does not exclude the possibility of a connection with culture or innovation or even eroticism. Similarly, an object designed for elegance or for the creation of pleasant surroundings could in turn imply an attempt to communicate nobility or a desire to convey the magnanimity of the family.17 In light of these considerations, the pictures decorating the walls of even the most modest habitations assume a new significance.The most interesting question concerns the different imageries in male versus female patrimonies. This difference helps indicate how the attempt to make contact with the invisible could become a reality. In contrast to men of their same social standing, women were both financially and, perhaps more importantly, culturally more impoverished. Since they were poorer, women could invest less money in purely decorative goods. Similarly, their weaker cultural standing meant that when they decided to spend their money, it was usually for the purpose of an immediate and elementary form of legitimation. In fact, the paintings owned by women in large part depicted devotional images, with such images constituting 60 per cent of the total works that they owned. In contrast, men preferred profane subjects, such images making up 57 per cent of the total for men. With fewer means, both economic and cultural, women evidently worked harder to renounce the utility of their goods and, when they did, it was nearly exclusively for the purpose of establishing contact with the realm of the sacred. It is not random chance that they tended to prefer images of the Madonna, Mary Magdalene and other female saints, which were proportionally three times more often present in female versus male inventories, since they could find in the Virgin and the saints a sacred patronage specifically addressed to 256

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them.18 The images of the Madonna or of female saints possessed by women numbered at least 63, equivalent to 15.5 per cent of the total, against 186 for the men, or 5.9 per cent. Beyond the sacred imagery, only portraits – of members of the family or illustrious personages – reflected an invisible realm solemn and elementary enough to justify the expense of a painting. Paintings were not the only category of collectable objects that were produced in a series at moderate prices. Dolls from Lucca, for example, were already present in Florentine inventories from the fifteenth century.19 Roman inventories from two centuries later reveal that this object was still in great demand. In the meantime, demand for woven ‘Agnus Dei’, which were both embroidered and painted; little saints on parchment; and silk flowers began to match that for terracotta dolls. Less popular but still rather diffused were ‘novelties’ such as clocks, powders and perfumes as well as fragile and decorative objects made from crystal, porcelain or fine ceramic. The ownership of this kind of objects often correlated with the possession of other categories of goods, first of all books but also musical and scientific instruments or natural curiosities. Those who did not own books, in contrast, had a much smaller chance of owning even some of the items just mentioned. The impression is therefore of a material culture in which habitual reading was associated with other forms of cultural distinction such as the possibility of making music, a certain interest in nature and technology and an openness to uncommon and ostentatious goods. The image that emerges is one of ‘cultivated’ and fashionable individuals who were capable of differentiating themselves from others, thanks to a lifestyle that appears to be more refined, elegant and richer in ‘immaterial things’, less oppressed by physical needs, less dominated by the ethics of utility and hence more disposed towards making aesthetic choices.

Status, class, wealth and citizenship The material arrangements of everyday life project a type of social stratification based on ­lifestyle rather than on other categories.This way of understanding social stratification was rooted in the culture of the period and not, as statistics for the nineteenth century have uncovered, founded on estates or professions. The attention to appearances, so typical of the ancien régime, also forms a piece of the evidence: social status was connected with lifestyle.To this end, people paid attention to the clothes and jewellery that they wore and, more generally, to displays of wealth. This also explains concerns about sumptuary abuses as a subversion of social order and the corresponding efforts to use laws to guarantee a perfect correspondence between the appearance and the quality of an individual.20 Gender difference constitutes the final element of this social stratification. The fact of being a man or being a woman signified a level of noteworthy discrimination generally ignored by traditional principles of classification. Such criteria tend to assume, somewhat casually, that women enjoyed the same social prestige as the men who had jurisdiction over them, that is, their fathers, husbands and, in some cases, brothers. However, investigating material culture illustrates profound differences between women and men of the same social class. Women appear to have been more utilitarian in their material culture and much less inclined to cultivate a taste for the superfluous. The boundaries of legitimation within which they moved were much more restricted. Only contact with the sacred or considerations regarding the stability and perpetuation of the lineage – and their own position within this familial structure – allowed women to abandon an essentially instrumental rapport with things. Taken as a whole, such considerations imply a cultural formation more tied to practice and less open to abstract ideas, but they also suggest a different conception of one’s own patrimony and possibilities for economic survival. In other words, women had different ways of feeling poor or rich than men. Finding honourable employment in the exercise of a trade or a profession was especially difficult for women. 257

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Instead, their things, which served as a treasury, assumed for them a fundamental and permanent guarantee of whatever security life might offer. For this reason, their patrimonies tended to be made up primarily of goods that were easy to convert into money: clothing, fine wall hangings and jewellery that could easily be pawned as a guarantee for credit and enjoyed a steady demand on the market for used and rentable goods.

Notes   1 Antoinette Fauve-Chamoux and Sølvi Sogner, eds, Socio-economic Consequences of Sex Ratios in Historical Perspective, 1500–1980 (Milan: Università Bocconi, 1994).   2 Eugenio Sonnino, ‘In the male city: The Staus Animarum of Rome in the seventeenth century,’ in Fauve-Chamoux, Sogner, eds, 19–29.   3 Eleonora Canepari, Stare in compagnia. Strategie di inurbamento e forme associative nella Roma del Seicento (Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007); Angiolina Arru, Franco Ramella, eds, L’Italia delle migrazioni interne. Donne, uomini, mobilità in età moderna e contemporanea (Roma: Donzelli, 2003).   4 Angela Groppi, ed., Il lavoro delle donne (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1996).   5 Edoardo Lilli, Lavandaie nella Roma del Settecento. Strategie territoriali e reti di relazioni, PhD thesis in Storia delle donne e delle identità di genere (Università di Napoli l’Orientale, 2008); Edoardo Lilli, ‘Lavandaie nella Roma del Settecento’ Genesis,VII/1–2, 2008, 193–217.   6 Tessa Storey, Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).   7 Luigi Salerno, Luigi Spezzaferro and Manfredo Tafuri, Via Giulia: una utopia urbanistica del 500 (Roma: Staderini, 1973).   8 Margherita Pelaja, Matrimonio e sessualità a Roma nell’Ottocento (Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1994).   9 Renata Ago, Economia barocca. Mercato e istituzioni nella Roma del Seicento (Roma: Donzelli, 1998). 10 Bill Hillier, ‘A theory of city as object: Or how spatial laws mediate the social construction of urban space,’ in Proceedings of the 3rd International Space Syntax Symposium (Atlanta, 2001), 02: 1–28; Rachel Kellus, ‘From abstract to concrete: Subjective reading of urban space,’ Journal of Urban Design, vol. 6, no 2, 2001, 129–50; Susanne Rau, Ekkehard Schonherr, eds, Mapping Spatial Relations, their Perceptions and Dynamics:The City Today and in the Past (Cham: Springer, 2014). 11 Archivio di Stato di Roma, Tribunale criminale del Governatore, Processi XVII sec., b. 576 e Processi XVIII sec., b. 20. 12 Patricia Waddy, Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of the Plan (New York, Cambridge, London: The Architectural History Foundation, 1990). 13 Sandra Cavallo and Tessa Store, Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy (Oxford: University Press, 2013). 14 Renata Ago, Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome (Chicago: University Press, 2013). 15 Ktrysztof Pomian, Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990); Giovanni Pozzi, La parola dipinta (Milan: Adelphi, 1981); Giovanni Pozzi, Sull’orlo del visibile parlare (Milan: Adelphi, 1993); Marc Fumaroli, L’école du silence. Le sentiment des images au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1994). 16 Alphonse Dupront, Du Sacré. Croisades et pélerinages. Images et langages (Paris: Gallimard, 1987), 119. 17 A member of the high clergy, for example, described the decorations of his rooms as ‘grotesque’, saying that they inspired ‘a devotion but also a noble horror’ (see Renata Ago, Carriere e clientele nella Roma barocca, Rome: Laterza, 1990, 76). On the role of the spectator and responses to images, see David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); John K. G. Shearman, Art and the Spectator in the Italian Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 18 Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Women on top,’ in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1976), 124–51. 19 Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, ‘Holy dolls: Play and piety in Florence in the Quattrocento,’ in Women, Family, and Ritual in Renaissance Italy (Rome: Laterza, 1988), 310–29. 20 Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968). See also Deborah Simonton, Anne Montenach and Marjo Kaartinen, eds, Luxury and Gender in the Modern Urban Economy: A European Perspective, c.1700–1914 (New York: Routledge, 2014).

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20 The Changing Objects of Civic Devotion Gender, Politics and Votive Commissions in a Late Medieval Dalmatian Confraternity Ana Marinković Among the most distinctive features of late medieval cities, the institutions of lay confraternities take prominent place. These pious associations reflected both the development of ‘civic religion’ as well as shifts in broader political culture. Through the direct involvement of their members in the social and political life of the city and indirectly through shaping public worship by votive commissions, confraternities played a significant role in civic life. The nature of a confraternity’s involvement in the civic sphere of devotion depended not only on several factors such as the organisation’s gender (male–female–mixed), social hierarchy (patrician–commoner) and purpose (professional–charitable–flagellant, etc.), but also on the wider urban context, ranging from the type of governmental system to the relation to the sovereign or military threat. This chapter discusses consororities’ role in shaping devotion to civic patrons and compares male and female devotional commissions, placing them in political context, to explore their role in the construction of official forms of urban civic piety. Whereas most studies dealing with gender in late medieval lay confraternities focus mostly on gender balance within mixed communities, the case of Trogir offers a rather exceptional example of a transformation from a male to a female confraternity. The confraternity was dedicated to the civic patron of Trogir, local holy bishop John (c.1062–after 1111), and after it was abolished by a city government decree in 1365 due to its strong political influence, the confraternity silently transformed into a consorority. Under these new conditions, many of the features of the civic cult that the confraternity had formed around Bishop John ceased. However, the sisters continued to influence the cult of the patron saint, especially with respect to the chapter in Trogir Cathedral, where the saint’s body was placed, and eventually the society was renamed the ‘sorority of the chapel of St John of Trogir’. At the beginning of the fifteenth century, the sorority commissioned a silver statue of the patron saint holding a model of the city. Although the statue has not been preserved, several documents attest to the commission, notably the contract with goldsmiths describing the iconography of the statue, which is the earliest documented ‘civic’ iconography in Trogir and among the earliest on the eastern Adriatic.

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Civic government and the confraternity After the subjection of Dalmatia in 1358, the new Hungarian Angevin rulers encountered sophisticated urban social structures in Dalmatian cities, developed mainly by the previous Venetian government. In addition to patricians operating through the city councils, the citizens were organized by the traditional institutions of confraternities (fraternitates, affra(c)tilliae, societates). These associations, originally of religious character, had gradually grown into important political factions, acting through their assemblies as parallel ‘shadow councils’.1 Unlike the Hungarians, the Venetians generally supported confraternities in the Dalmatian cities, suppressing the power of the local patriciate by strengthening the non-patrician fraternal associations. The confraternity dedicated to the Tragurian patron saint was in a different position, since it was a noblemen’s association, at least according to the extant documents. Despite this, the confraternity of St John did not play a role in promoting peace and order within the civic community through cooperation with the communal authorities but ‘ultimately posed as much of a challenge to peace as they did a guarantee of its promotion’.2 Consequently, disturbances to urban peace led to strict restrictions on confraternal associations.3 With the withdrawal of Venetian officials and installation of the new, pro-Hungarian ­government in Trogir, citizens’ riots broke out. Since the confraternities were apparently the main instigators of the revolt, the uprising resulted in the Great Council’s decision of 14 May 1365 to restrict the autonomous functioning of the Tragurian confraternities and to place them under the control of a newly elected body of 12 sapientes.4 This measure did not satisfy the government’s desire to suppress civic disobedience, but it served to pave the way for the next step. Only six days later, the senate (consisting of the comes, judges and 12 sapientes) decided to abolish all Tragurian confraternities save that of the Holy Spirit.5 It should be underlined that the decision was determined by a small circle of the comes’ collaborators and not by the whole council, probably because many councillors would not have agreed to the removal of their own channels of power. The law passed two days later expressly confirmed the annulment of the confraternity of St John of Trogir, ordering that the comes was to take charge of the oblations for the feast of the holy bishop.6 The latter arrangement should not, however, mislead us into assuming that the communal authorities had a particular plan to take control of the cult; that a civic official assumed responsibility for the oblations attests rather to the strengthening of the civic cult as well as the government’s consciousness of the need for continuity of public worship. Having determined the ending of the confraternity of St John, we are on considerably weaker ground regarding its beginnings. The reformation of the confraternity was undoubtedly related to the civic appropriation of the existing episcopal cult, as well as being informed by developments amongst the Tragurian confraternities in general.There is little evidence about confraternities active in Trogir before their abolition in 1365.7 Moreover, the evidence for early forms of the local bishop’s public veneration suggests a conspicuously early date for organized civic devotion. If we take into account the appearance of other civic manifestations of the cult, no form of organized public veneration is evident before the period of the first Venetian ­government (1322–58). The first reliable evidence of organized civic veneration of the holy bishop is his insertion among the obligatory feasts in the communal statutes in 1322.8 This was soon f­ollowed by the crucial moment in the rise of the Tragurian civic cult, namely, the commission of a chapel in the cathedral for housing the saint’s relics in 1331. The first documented mention of the ­societas dedicated to St John of Trogir can be found in a contemporaneous contract drawn in 1332 between the socii and the master masons for building another chapel dedicated to the Tragurian bishop on the cape Planka (Plancha).9

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Male devotion: The multiple role of the votive church Immediately after the contract for the saint’s new funerary chapel in the cathedral had been drawn up, the confraternity commissioned its own votive chapel on the location of one of the few holy bishop’s miracles in vita, the promontory Planka where a ship cargo was miraculously saved from a shipwreck.10 In the contract for the construction of the church at Planka, dated 25 October 1332, two representatives of the confraternity (Ciprianus Bubolus, et Maroy Mathei Dobre nomine eorum, et cuiuslibet eorum et aliorum suorum sociorum) agreed with four stonemasons on the construction of a church dedicated to St John of Trogir.11 A later contract regarding the renting of a cellar belonging to the church at Planka confirms the corporate nature of the commission. This contract, composed on 17 October 1379, identifies the hirers as four noblemen, the founders of the church of St John at Planka.12 Seeing that the foundation of the church took place almost half a century before the renting contract has been drawn, the noblemen mentioned in the contract were in 1332 apparently still young boys (also having their fathers still living in 1379), not adequate to the task of executing the confraternal commission. This clearly leads to the conclusion that the patronate of the church was not individual but corporate, that is, that the confraternity was its commissioner.That the noblemen were not referred to as ‘brethren’ in the latter document can be explained by the abolition of the confraternity of St John of Trogir in the interim period. As is discussed below, in the post-abolition period, the confraternity of St John of Trogir was referred to as fraternitas dominarum or fraternitas sororum, a sisterhood. The full meaning of the confraternal commission at Planka becomes clear when put in the wider context of Trogir’s territorial policy. The promontory represented the border in a longlasting dispute between the communes of Trogir and Šibenik over their regional boundaries; building the church at that spot was not only an act of devotion to the city’s patron saint but also a reflection of wider territorial issues. However, as the memories of this topographical debate faded, the church at Planka assumed a basic votive role, inspired by one of the bishop’s most important miracles. Daily politics thus gave way to devotion, with the church presenting St John as saintly healer and helper of the citizens of Trogir, with a slight maritime accent. Three miracles recorded in a collection from the 1440s document this shift.13 The first account records the tale of the Tragurian Canon Blasius Hercegovich who, having been miraculously cured from fever, vowed to celebrate annual masses at the church of Planka. Holding the first mass, the gathered men heard the voice of an invisible old man and later realized it was St John’s voice. The second miracle explains how the said Canon Blasius and his company, after holding his annual votive mass at Planka, were attacked and robbed by pirates, who were eventually miraculously punished.The fact that the inhabitants of the Šibenik district helped the canon attests that no inimical attitude was present and old territorial issues were forgotten. The third miracle tells of the Tragurian citizen Johannes Ostoich, who, transporting a group of men from Trogir to Šibenik by his boat, fell ill. The saint twice appeared to him in a dream, warning him not to sail by the church of Planka without stopping over; after he did as he was told, Johannes was miraculously cured. It should be underlined that in these miracle reports there was no mention of the confraternity whatsoever, thus reflecting the change in the character of the confraternity that took place immediately after the abolition in 1365. After that, the confraternity transformed from an association of politically active Tragurian noblemen into an association of religious women who took care of the saint’s funerary chapel. The reference to the fraternitas dominarum appears in sources only after the abolition of confraternities, predominantly in the last wills of Tragurian women but also in a small but important group of three documents regarding the commission of a silver statue of the civic patron.

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Female devotion: The praying community in the saint’s chapel A contract from the year 1408 for the commission of a gold-plated silver statue of St John of Trogir by the homonymous confraternity, as well as two related documents from 1409 and 1410, refer to the confraternity expressly as fraternitas sororum or fraternitas dominarum.14 Among various questions on which these documents could shed light, the question of the survival of confraternity of St John of Trogir is tackled first. The confraternity’s activities after the mid-fourteenth century were so far rather obscure and, in general, the confraternity was considered to have been extinguished after its abolition in 1365.Yet, the three contracts, as well as a number of last wills from the end of the fourteenth and the first half of the fifteenth century and an important miracle report from 1440s, delineate the very vivid life of a sorority of the Chapel of St John of Trogir. The female confraternity of St John of Trogir can be traced in the sources from the year 1377, when it was mentioned in the testament of a laywoman, Domincha, daughter of Michael Magorovich.15 Domincha left two pieces of land to be sold to pay for the commissioning of a missal for the use of the confraternity of St John ‘the Confessor’. She also stated that the bequest was intended to ensure that her funeral was conducted according to the regulations of the confraternity. The fact that at the time Domincha composed her will there was already established consuetudines for funerals strongly suggests that the confraternity had been active for several years, which roughly corresponds with the abolition of Tragurian confraternities in 1365. Moreover, since the commune only partially took over the care for the offerings for the altar in the newly built saint’s chapel (the candles, oil for the lamps and wine for the vigils and the evening of the feast), the establishment of a devotional association related to the chapel was only a question of time. It appears that the sisterhood was founded immediately after the abolition of the male confraternity, which had until then taken care of the offerings for the altar, as expressly stated in the regulations.16 That the last wills at the turn of the fifteenth century frequently refer to the confraternity as fraternitas cappelle Sancti Joannis attests to its main role in taking care of the oblations for the feast, the linen for the altar and so on.There are three testaments from the year 1370 mentioning the bequest of facioli for covering the altar of the holy bishop;17 the testators were women (one of them referred to as domina, a noblewoman), plausibly belonging to a formal or informal group taking care of the saint’s chapel. The persistence of the confraternity after the subjection of Trogir to Venetian rule in 1420 is witnessed by a series of wills mentioning the confraternity in their bequests, sporadically featuring references to funeral arrangements for members of the confraternity. Thus, the last will of Mira, wife of late Radoglianus, composed in 1424, mentions that Mira bequeathed eight small pounds to the chapel of St John, wishing to be buried in the burial place of the chapel’s confraternity.18 In the fifteenth century, legacies intended either for the chapel of the holy bishop or for the confraternity of the chapel appear relatively frequently, and members of both patriciate and commoner social groups bequeathed them, but notably women.19 Among 11 documented bequests from the late thirteenth to the early fifteenth century, there is only one male testator, and that legacy was intended for the chapel in general (capelle beati Joannis Confessoris) and not specifically for the sisters, possibly for some works in the chapel.20 Moreover, this last will was composed on 10 November, four days before the saint’s feast, which might have inspired the testator to endow the chapel. Other than the liturgical cloth, votive offerings included a box (capsa)21 and the aforementioned missal, but most frequently bequests were simply intended for the sorores (capelle) sancti Johannis (confessoris de Tragurio) (the sisters) or (in opere) capelle sancti/beati Johannis confessoris (traguriensis) (the chapel). Distinctions between these two types of legacies did exist, since one of the testators made two separate bequests to the sisters 262

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and the chapel respectively (sororibus capelle sancti Johannis confessoris de Tragurio and capelle sancti Johannis confessoris).22 An additional reference in a somewhat earlier testamentary bequest concerned a major commission for the confraternity, that of a silver statue of the patron saint.The 1409 document refers to the execution of a testamentary bequest of certain land, which was to be sold and the money to be spent on a silver statue of St John of Trogir. Although the testator (Pribislaf Rubicolich) was a man, the will’s executor (commissaria testamentaria) was a woman (Stanziza uxor Zvitchi Bartolovich), who was to ensure that the money was spent on the bishop’s statue ‘and not another purpose’.23 The will also noted that the land belonged to the late wife of the testator, perhaps indicating that both Stanziza and Pribislaf ’s wife were related to the confraternity. These testaments demonstrate that the confraternity of St John of Trogir was not extinguished after its official abolition in 1365 but continued to exist as a sorority linked to the chapel of its patron saint. This association, gathering pious women who developed special devotion towards the holy bishop’s tomb, in addition to providing oblations for the altar, performed other pious activities, as witnessed in the aforementioned miracle collection. A report on the healing of a young boy, recorded shortly before 1445, mentions that the boy’s mother commissioned ‘certain pious women’ to pray for him in St John’s chapel.24 A description of the nocturnal prayers – ‘while they observed nocturnal vigils and prayed there going on their knees one after the other around the altar where the precious body of the saintly bishop is placed’ – attests to the fixed ritual played out by the sisters as an appeal to the saint’s miraculous intervention. 25 Unfortunately, the sources do not allow speculation on the internal hierarchy of the consorority. Neither matriculation list nor the statutes are preserved; surviving documents do not mention a gastalda/priorissa or decane (prioress), but they do refer to a procurer dealing with financial matters. All of the known sisters are non-patrician (although there is a documented testamentary legation by a noblewoman); thus, it is possible that the confraternity underwent not only a transformation from a (politically active) male to a (exclusively devotional) female association but also from patrician to commoner. It is notable that the Tragurian nobleman Marcula Petri Cipichi (Ćipiko) was the main procurer of the cathedral and also acted on behalf of the female confraternity of St John, as attested by the documents concerning the commission of the statue. However, the procurer’s affiliation to the patrician elite does not indicate any political authority, since the political influence of confraternities was normally acted through their assemblies, while the procurer’s role was administrative.The only possible political meaning the confraternity’s activities could have acquired was by directing its commissions towards the sphere of civic veneration, as shall be argued below. Despite the active role of the sisters in maintaining the chapel and certain forms of public devotion, when in 1446 a new reliquary for the miracle-working hand of the patron saint was commissioned, it was not an undertaking of the confraternity but of the Tragurian Archdeacon Lucas Škobalić as the testamentary executor of the late Canon Gregory Duhović. The commission was effected immediately after the compilation of the miracle collection, which was plausibly authored by Škobalić or Duhović.26 Possibly, Škobalić’s sister Franziza, who in 1450 bequeathed five small pounds ‘in aid of a silver angel for the embellishment of the arm of St John of Trogir’,27 was also a member of the confraternity, but the fact that the chapter, and not the confraternity, was supposed to take care of Franziza’s funeral makes it somewhat doubtful. Nevertheless, in spite of the evident termination of male participation in the confraternity and its radical exclusion from an active political role in civic life, the confraternity still nurtured a clear desire for and active role in civic engagement around the bishop’s cult, as shall be shown in the analysis of the commission of the saint’s silver figure in the year 1408. 263

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The commission of the silver statue: In manu sinistra teneat unam civitatem cum turribus Documents offering abundant data on the methods of financing the artwork and the ­commissioners’ role in its iconographical rendering reveal the practical circumstances of the ­commission. The first contract allows one to trace both the first appearance of the iconographic type of ‘patron saint holding the model of the city’ in the Tragurian imagery and the active engagement of the commissioner in the development of the communal cult. This engagement is of particular interest in the context of the Venetian reconquest that was under way. A comparison with the earlier commissioning practice of the confraternity can shed light on how devotional practices around the confraternity’s patron endured and transformed over the period. This very commission exemplified the confraternity’s role in such arrangements. The only attention the three documents related to the silver statue of the Tragurian saint ever received was more than a century ago by Croatian historian Petar Kaer, who published their regesta (summaries).28 None of the scholars dealing with Tragurian confraternities took into consideration the documents appertaining to the commission of the saint’s silver statue.29 The first of the three documents is a contract drawn up in 1408 between the procurer of the confraternity of St John of Trogir and two goldsmiths, Peter Arbanas from Zadar and Stephen from Split, concerning the commission of the gilt silver figure of the holy Tragurian bishop.30 The second document, dated 1409, concerns the sale of land explicitly bequeathed to pay for this commission;31 and the third document, contracted in 1410, records the consignation of gold from the sale.32 The location where the contracts were agreed is indicative of the authorities responsible for the cult and for the confraternity. The first document, the contract between the confraternity’s procurer and the two goldsmiths, was drawn in the communal chancery in the presence of sworn witnesses. The second, recording the consignation of land by a testamentary commissioner to the operarius (the canon who served as the building manager) of the Tragurian cathedral and instructing that the money received for selling the land should be spent in the execution of the saint’s ‘image’, took place in the cathedral in the presence of an examinator and witnesses, but without the procurer. The third document, the goldsmiths’ confirmation of having received all the gold needed for completing their work, was contracted in the main square, plausibly in the city loggia, between the sorority’s procurer and the goldsmiths, again in the presence of an examinator and witnesses. Thus, it seems that the procurer acted independently of the operarius, but that the members of the sorority turned to the operarius for helping with matters related to the sorority’s property. The goldsmiths were provided with precise instructions on how to represent the saint’s ­figure, agreeing to produce ‘a gilt silver image of St John the Confessor after the wax model ­prepared for this occasion…and in the left hand holding a city with towers, similarly made of gilt silver, and giving a blessing with the right hand’.33 A later description of an item in the inventory of the cathedral’s treasury, dating from 1517, attests that the commission was completed as described in the contract: ‘a large silver statue of St John with gilded head, and with the city of Trogir in hands, made of gilded silver, as well as his mitre’.34 The importance of these descriptions of the statue, attesting an iconographical type tightly related to civic imagery, cannot be overrated, since it represents the earliest documented ‘civic patron iconography’ in Trogir and one of the earliest on the eastern Adriatic. It was a testament to the commissioner’s high level of familiarity with modern forms of civic visual representation. The iconographical type of patron saint holding the model of the city originates from north and north-central Italy, where the earliest preserved models (in sculpture and painting) date 264

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from around 1340, notably from Siena and Trieste.35 Contemporaneously in Milan, there is early ­evidence of an important iconographical variant, namely, the depiction of the votive offering of the city to a celestial protector.36 These earlier examples of civic iconography attest to the relation between the development of ‘canonized’ forms of civic iconography and the development of complex forms of urban political and social structure, that is, the communal system. In the regions neighbouring the most developed Italian communes, this type of civic iconography was popularized somewhat later in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.37 However, early examples exist outside of the main communal centres due to the import of artworks or itinerant artists. Such are the cases of Paolo Veneziano’s altarpiece for the Dominicans of San Severino in Marche, where the patron of Camerino, St Venantius, is holding the model of the city as early as 1358;38 or the figure of St Nazarius on the saint’s arca from the 1350s in the cathedral of Koper (Justinopolis), attributed to the de Sanctis workshop.39 Conforming to the pace of development of communal structures in Dalmatian cities, this iconographic type had initially spread to the eastern Adriatic in the second half of the fourteenth century. Several eastern Adriatic examples are dated to this period, though all are limited to the cities of Dubrovnik and Kotor.The central panel of the (later recomposed) silver altarpiece from the Kotor Cathedral with the image of the city patron, St Tryphon, is dated broadly to the fourteenth century. However, the two silver arm reliquaries from Dubrovnik, with the images of St Blaise and the secondary patrons of Dubrovnik, local martyrs from Kotor – Peter, Lawrence and Andrew – can be dated more precisely to the 1370s or 1380s.40 The earliest monument of this iconographical type in the eastern Adriatic is a stone statue of St Blaise above the harbour gate in Dubrovnik dated to the period between 1360 and 1380.41 This dating, however, is based only on stylistic analysis, as no written confirmation survives.42 The remainder of these representations on the eastern Adriatic date from the mid-fifteenth century and later, with the exception of a miniature of St Blaise in a 1420s copy of the Ragusan Statute Laws and a possibly somewhat later silver figure of the same saint from the main church of the Ragusan patron.43 This silver figure, executed as a high relief and representing St Blaise holding a remarkably realistic model of Dubrovnik, is dated through the city’s architectural features to the period around 1450 but possibly relates to a 1417 contract for a silver altarpiece for the high altar.44 Remarkably then, and against the concentration of this iconography in the southern area of the eastern Adriatic (Dubrovnik and Kotor), the Tragurian statue stands out not only as the earliest documented example (possibly the earliest in general) of such iconography in Trogir but also as the earliest precisely dated example of this iconographical type in Dalmatia and the sole commissioned by a confraternity. It is important to underline that the next documented Tragurian example of this iconographical type appears only in 1471, on a large relief in the city loggia, pointing to a background of lay commissions involving this iconographical type of patron saints. The appearance of such an innovative iconography with predominantly lay connotations in early fifteenth-century Trogir suggests the active involvement of the sorority’s procurer in the formulation of the commission, tracing back the iconographical choice to the mercantile or other professional connections between the patricians of the late-medieval communes on the two Adriatic shores. The procurer, Marcula Petri Cipichi, belonged to one of Trogir’s leading patrician families, and his overseas contacts could have brought about the iconographical innovations in local civic imagery, inspired by the growing popularity of the ‘patron holding the city’ iconography during the early fifteenth century. However, the sisters’ role in the commission should not be underrated, especially in the context of the generally unstable position of Dalmatian cities of the period. The civic iconography in its essence represents an expression ex voto by which the citizens put trust in their patron to act as an intercessor for the safety of their community, embodied in the image of the city. Raised 265

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to the official level of communal institutions, the same function was fulfilled by the invocations in the city statutes or the taking charge of the oblations for the patrons’ feasts by communal officials. The occasion for a votive offering or act was most frequently the saint’s feast but also included moments of peril, such as an epidemic or a military threat. In the case of Trogir, the latter was the immediate context of the commission of the votive silver statue. In late 1408, negotiations between Ladislas of Naples and Venice about the acquisition of Dalmatia began, intensifying a period of political uncertainty, which began in 1403 due to the continuous conflicts between Ladislas and Sigismund of Luxemburg and announcing the impending Venetian siege from 1409 to 1420. Trogir was traditionally opposed to Venetian rule and resisted the attacks until 1420, the last among the Dalmatian cities to bow to Venice. The commission of the silver statue of Trogir’s holy patron fits seamlessly into such events and offers a plausible context for the iconographical innovation where the saint symbolically protects the city he holds in his hand. Moreover, the most prominent episode in Trogir patron’s (rather antiVenetian) hagiography is related to the miraculous return of his arm relic to Trogir after it was stolen during an 1171 Venetian siege.The episode was very popular during the late Middle Ages and provided a hagiographical basis for the imagery on the civic insignia, thus keeping the idea of Venetian siege very strong in the civic memory.45 When the siege happened again, it is likely that the citizens readily reacted to the re-enactment of the legendary 1171 attack – while men participated in military defence, women were striving to help the city with pious deeds such as prayers and votive offerings.46

Conclusion The silver statue commissioned by the consorority in 1408 represents the earliest documented representation of the Tragurian patron holding the model of the city in his hand and the earliest firmly dated of such representations in the eastern Adriatic. Although a lack of evidence makes firm conclusions difficult, the confraternity’s direct instructions regarding the saint’s iconography shed light on their role in promoting the holy bishop as protector of the city as well as on the meaning the commission had within the wider political context and the creation of civic identity. In order to provide insight into this problem, it was necessary to take into consideration both of the confraternal commissions: the (original) confraternity’s votive chapel and the (new) consorority’s votive statue. Although commissioned for the confraternity’s veneration, both of them represented public objects, vividly present in citizens’ devotional landscape and shaped with the goal of engaging the patron saint in the protection of individual citizens or the city as a whole, thus also shaping the form of civic devotion. The commission of the church at Planka promontory was a votive offering related to a ­miracle recorded in the early hagiography of the Tragurian bishop, but the subtext of the offering was local political propaganda regarding current relations with the neighbouring city of Šibenik. Conversely, the commission of the silver figure by the consorority happened in the context of the Venetian conquering war in Dalmatia. The consorority’s commission did not literally reveal any local history or directly refer to daily politics but reflected a general striving to recommend the community to the saint’s protection. Civic identification through the saint’s patronage is present in both commissions, but the former could be described as an active involvement of the cult in actual political affairs, whereas the latter is a passive response to the political situation through abstract pious deeds. Both, however, reflect a reaction to the wider political context, each in accordance with the character of the institution that carried out the commission. Though a passive method for shaping political actualities, the iconographic choice for the patron’s statue commission discloses extremely modern attitudes and an active role in shaping civic visual identity. 266

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It is quite surprising that this important iconographical innovation, indicating the final phase in the formation of a civic patron’s cult, appeared under the auspices of a female community. This is not to say that the sisters were accountable for the iconographic choice, but the fact that the procurer introduced this important innovation under their watch attests to the consororities’ prominent place within the civic community. Did, then, the sisters play an active role in the formation of the visual civic identity and the transformation/modernisation of the patron’s cult? Were they the agents of these developments? The answer is yes and no. The Tragurian sisters’ constant presence in the important moments of citizens’ lives, and their incessant repetition of the rituals related to the patron’s tomb, allowed the male procurer of the confraternity to use the quantity of the consorority’s activities as a basis for introducing an innovative moment in the visualisation of the civic cult.Thus, the sisters might not have played the role of agents in the development of the cult, but they surely were the catalysts of its transformations, taking part in the subtle strategies of influencing civic piety through the design of devotional artefacts.

Notes   1 For a general survey of lay confraternities, the fundamental study remains Gilles Gerard Meersseman, Ordo fraternitatis. Confraternite e pieta’ dei laici nel Medioevo, 3 vols. (Rome: Herder, 1977); see also the bibliography in Konrad Eisenbichler, ‘Italian scholarship on pre-modern confraternities in Italy,’ Renaissance Quarterly 50, no. 2 (1997): 567–80. Among the vast historiography on the topic, I am pointing to selected titles more closely related to the problem of civic devotion, political context and gender aspect of confraternities; Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); ibid., ed., The Politics of Ritual Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); ibid., ‘Confraternities and local cults: Civic religion between class and politics in Renaissance Bologna,’ in: Civic Ritual and Drama, ed. Alexandra Johnston and Wim Huesken (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 143–74; ibid., ‘Women in the brotherhood: Gender, class, and politics in Renaissance Bolognese confraternities,’ Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, N.S. 14, no. 3 (1990): 193–212; Giovanna Casagrande, ‘Women in the confraternities between the middle ages and the modern age (research in Umbria),’ Confraternitas 5 (1994): 3–13; Francesca Ortalli, ‘Per salute delle anime e delli corpi’: Scuole piccole a Venezia nel tardo Medioevo (Venice: Fondazione Giorgio Cini, 2001), 115–44; Linda Guzzetti, and Antje Ziemann, ‘Women in the fourteenth-century Venetian scuole,’ Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 1151–95. However, the studies dealing with women’s role in the confraternal associations largely focus on the gender balance within the confraternities and not on the exceptional cases of gender succession. On confraternities in medieval Trogir: Ivan Strohal, ‘Bratstva (bratovštine) u starom Trogiru,’ Rad JAZU 201 (1914): 47–66; Irena Benyovsky, ‘Bratovštine u srednjovjekovnim dalmatinskim gradovima,’ Croatica christiana periodica 41 (1998): 137–60; ibid., ‘Uloga bratovštine Sv. Duha u Trogiru u srednjem i ranom novom vijeku,’ Povijesni prilozi 32 (2007): 25–61. A rather general survey of female participation in Dalmatian confraternities in Vilma Pezelj, ‘Žene u bratovštinama srednjovjekovnih dalmatinskih gradova,’ Zbornik radova Pravnog fakulteta u Splitu 47, no. 1 (2010): 155–73.   2 Jennifer Fisk Rondeau, ‘Homosociality and civic (dis)order in late medieval Italian confraternities,’ in The Politics of Ritual Kinship, 30–47, here 30.  3 Similar policies of controlling the confraternities were present in the Italian cities in the fifteenth century, notably in Florence, where the government occasionally dissolved the confraternities in the periods of political crisis; see William B. Wurthmann, ‘The Council of Ten and the Scuole Grandi in early Renaissance Venice,’ Studi veneziani N.S. 18 (1989): 15–66, esp. 19–20; Gennaro Maria Monti, Le Confraternite medievali dell’alta e media Italia, vol. 1 (Venice: La Nuova Italia, 1927), 125, 143.  4 Statuta et reformationes civitatis Tragurii, in Statut grada Trogira, ed. Antun Cvitanić et al. (Split: Književni krug, 1988), lib. RI cap. 49 bis (De libertate data aliquibus nobilibus super fraternitatibus civitatis Tragurii providendi), 169–70.  5 Statuta et reformationes civitatis Tragurii, lib. RI, cap. 50, 171 (Quod a modo in antea non fiat aliqua fratalia, societas vel cohadunatio in civitate nec in burgo et districtu). The confraternity of the Holy Spirit was spared, since its sanitary role was highly important for the city, and, moreover, was not potentially harmful in the political sphere. However, the decision, passed three days after the abolition, imposed strong control

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Ana Marinković over the activities of the only remaining Tragurian confraternity on the part of the civic government; ibid., cap. 51, 171–2.  6 Ibid., cap. 52, 173 (De oblacionibus fiendis [per comitem] in honorem beati Ioannis [confessoris]).   7 The statute regulation from 1322 mentions only the confraternity of the Holy Spirit, and those of leather- and shoemakers; ibid., lib. III, cap. 63, 125. Several other confraternities sporadically appear in the notarial sources as the receivers of the testamentary legates from the late thirteenth century onwards. In the last will of 1287, a ‘confraternity of St John of Trogir’ is mentioned (affratillia sancti Johannis de Tragurio), but its dedication should be related to the titular of the Benedictine monastery, St John the Baptist; Barada, Monumenta Traguriensia, I/1, 261.  8 Statuta et reformationes civitatis Tragurii, lib. I, cap. 3, 8.   9 The lack of mention of the confraternity in the 1322 redaction of the Statute Laws does not provide any strong point for dating of its foundation, being an argument ex silentio. However, conforming to the general rise of confraternities in Dalmatia in the first half of the fourteenth century, on the one hand; and the strong local rise of the civic cult of the Tragurian holy bishop in the same period, on the other, one should not assume the existence of this particular confraternity much prior to its first mention. Moreover, the founding of the confraternity could be related to the period of Venetian government, which may have supported familiar forms of social organisation. 10 Život sv. Ivana Trogirskog po izdanju Daniela Farlatija, ed. Kažimir Lučin (Split and Trogir: Književni krug and Matica Hrvatska, 1998), 44. 11 Zagreb, National and University Library, sign. R6608, fol. 51r–53r; the transcription (of a 1617 copy) is included in Johannes Lucius’ manuscript collection of texts the historian used for preparation of edition of Vita beati Joannis traguriensis (1657). 12 Nicola q. Domiche, Stipe Duymi, Dessa Lucani, et Paulus Marini, tamquam fundatores Ecclesie S. Johannis de Plancha, R6608, fol. 58r. 13 R6608, 42v–45v. 14 The contracts are preserved in a copy in Lucius’ manuscript R6608. 15 Et de tota pecunia habita de dictis terris venditis ut predicitur ipsi comissarii faciant fieri unum missale pro fraternitate sancti Iohannis confessoris de Tragurio, quod quibid. missale debeat semper esse donec duraverit in ipsa ecclesia predicti sancti Iohannis pro anima ipsius testatricis. Et hoc si per ipsam fraternitatem exibebitur(!) funeri dicte testatricis debitum obseqium secundum consuetudinem dicte fraternitatis Marija Karbić, and Zoran Ladić, ‘Oporuke stanovnika grada Trogira u arhivu HAZU,’ Radovi Zavoda za povijesne znanosti HAZU 43 (2001): 161–254, here 181, no. 15. 16 Statuta et reformationes civitatis Tragurii, lib. RI, cap. 52, 173 (loco oblacionis quam faciebat fraternitas sancti Iohannis praedicti). There is no proof of existence of female members prior to the confraternity’s abolition in 1365. 17 The State Archives in Zadar (DAZd), AT XLVI/1, fol. 5v, 15r, and 17r. I am grateful to Ana Plosnić Škarić from the Institute of Art History in Zagreb for sharing the reproductions of unpublished Tragurian last wills kept in Zadar. 18 DAZd, AT XLVI/2, fol 17rv (Item reliquit capelle Sancti Iohannis confessoris de Tragurio libras octo parvorum volens et mandans sepelliri in sepultura sororum fraternitatis dicte capelle). 19 Five documented bequests in the period of 1435–6, 1444 and 1454 (two loose testaments), and 1459–60; DAZd, AT XLVI/4, XLVI/5, and XLVI/8. 20 DAZd, AT XLVI/8, 1v. 21 Ibid., AT XLVI/1, 17r. 22 Ibid., AT XLVI/4, 7rv. 23 R6608, 60rv. 24 Coadunari fecit in Capella Sancti Pontificis nostri aliquas devotas mulieres, ut pro languido orarent, R6608, 45v. 25 Cum custodirent noctis vigilias et orarent, eundo genibus flexis una post aliam circumcirca altare ubi est praeciosus corpus eiusdem Sancti Praesulis collocatum, ibid. 26 See Vanja Kovačić, and Jadranka Neralić, ‘Ymago angeli trogirskog zlatara Tome Radoslavića,’ Prilozi povijesti umjetnosti u Dalmaciji 41 (2008): 199–236; for the contract see 228–9. 27 In auxilio Angeli de argento pro ornatu brachii Sancti Iohannis Confessoris Traguriensis;Trogir, Chapter Archives, parchment no. 193. 28 Petar Kaer, O pravom auktoru ‘Vita S. Joannis episcopi et patroni civitatis Tragurii versibus latinis conscripta’ i o jednomu nepoznatomu rukopisu Ivana Lučića (Zagreb: A. Sholz, 1904), 20–1. The documents are ­preserved in a seventeenth-century copy in the mentioned manuscript collection of sources ­compiled by Johannes Lucius during the preparations for his edition of Vita beati Joannis traguriensis (R6608).

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The Changing Objects of Civic Devotion 29 Several documents regarding the commission were previously known but feature no reference to the sorority: a 1410 addition to the contract with the goldsmith masters; Fisković, Zadarski sredovječni majstori (Split: Matica hrvatska, 1959), 126, n. 773; and several entries copied from the book of operarii from 1407 and 1408, regarding collecting the silver and gold for the statue; Kovačić, and Neralić, ‘Ymago angelis’, 222–223, n. 66.These documents are preserved in the manuscript collection S. Gioanni, Chapter archives in Trogir, no. 69. 30 R6608, fol. 59rv. 31 Ibid., fol. 60rv. 32 Ibid., fol. 61rv. 33 Unam imaginem S. Johannis confessoris de argento deauratam ad instar eiusdem imaginis cere factae ob hanc causam...et quod in manu sinistra teneat unam Civitatem cum turribus similis de argento deauratam, cum manu vero dextra det benedictionem, ibid., fol. 59r. 34 Imago magna sancti Johannis argentea cum capiti deaurato cum civitate Tragurii in manibus argentea deaurata et mitra sua’; Nevenka Bezić-Božanić, ‘Prilog poznavanju riznice trogirske katedrale,’ Prilozi povijesti umjetnosti u Dalmaciji 21 (1980): 403–10, here 406. 35 Vittoria Camelliti, Città e santi patroni: offerta, protezione, difesa della città nelle testimonianze figurative dell’Italia centro settentrionale tra XIV e XV secolo, PhD dissertation (Università degli Studi di Udine, 2010), 71–86; ibid., ‘Tradizione e innovazione nell’iconografia dei santi patroni marchigiani tra Medioevo e Rinascimento,’ in Santi, patroni, città: immagini della devozione civica nelle Marche, ed. Mario Carassai. Quaderni del Consiglio regionale delle Marche XVI, no. 132 (2013): 71–146, here 74. There are several examples in Tuscan paintings around the mid-fourteenth century, notably depictions of St Zanobius, patron of Florence, and St Geminianus, patron of Modena and San Gimignano; George Kaftal, Iconography of the Saints in Tuscan Painting (Florence: Sansoni, 1952), passim. 36 In 1340, Giovanni di Balduccio’s workshop executed the groups of St Ambrose offering the city of Milan to the Virgin, intended for placing on the city gates; see Vittoria Camelliti, ‘Patroni ‘celesti’ e patroni ‘terreni’: dedica e dedizione della città nel rituale e nell’immagine,’ in Städtische Kulte im Mittelalter, ed. Susanne Ehrich and Jörg Oberste (Regensburg: Schnell & Steiner, 2010), 97–121, here 110ff; ibid., Città e santi patroni, 47–69. 37 See Camelliti, ‘Tradizione e innovazione,’ 92. 38 Ibid., 78–79, 98, 137 (Fig. 36). 39 Michele Tomasi, Le arche dei santi: Scultura, religione e politica nel Trecento veneto, Études Lausannoises d’Histoire de l’Art 13 (Rome:Viella, 2012), chapter Corpus, no. 3, Table III. 40 Nikola Jakšić, ‘La pala aurea di Cattaro,’ in Le plaisir de l’art du Moyen Age: commande, production et réception de l’oeuvre d’art: mélanges en homage à Xavier Barral i Altet, ed. Rosa Alcoy, et al. (Paris: Picard, 2012), 227–33, with bibliography; ibid., in Milost susreta, umjetnička baština Franjevačke provincije sv. Jeronima, Exhibition catalogue, ed. Igor Fisković (Zagreb: Galerija Klovićevi dvori, 2010), 282, cat. Z/19, and 283, cat. Z/20;Vinicije Lupis, in Sveti Vlaho u povijesti i sadašnjosti. Exhibition catalogue, ed. Pavica Vilać (Dubrovnik: Dubrovački muzeji, 2014), 471–2, cat. 11. 41 Igor Fisković, in: Sveti Vlaho u povijesti i sadašnjosti, 179, cat. 3. 42 The dating of a stone statue of St Blaise holding the city model, kept in the City Museum of Dubrovnik, to the second half of the fourteenth century was recently reconsidered and postponed to the second quarter of the fifteenth century; Igor Fisković, ‘Kameni likovi svetoga Vlaha u Dubrovniku,’ Dubrovnik 5 (1994), 94–112, here 98; ibid., in: Sveti Vlaho u povijesti i sadašnjosti, 181–2, cat. 7. 43 Zlatno doba Dubrovnika 15. i 16. stoljeće (The Golden Age of Dubrovnik 15th and 16th c.). Exhibition catalogue, ed. Milan Prelog (Zagreb: MGC, 1987), 227, cat. I/8; and 257, 378, cat. Z/46;Vinicije Lupis, ‘O srebrnoj pali i srebrnom reljefu sv.Vlaha,’ Peristil 51 (2008), 119–130; ibid., in Sveti Vlaho u povijesti i sadašnjosti, 470–1, cat. 10. 44 A similar gilt statuette of St Secondo on the saint’s reliquary in the Duomo of Pergola (Marche) is dated to after 1450; Camelliti, ‘Tradizione e innovazione,’ 111, 135 (Fig. 30). 45 See Ana Marinković, ‘Hagiographical motifs and visual identity: The late-medieval communal seal of Trogir,’ Hortus Artium Medievalium 12 (2006): 229–35; ibid., ‘Tamquam lupi rapaces: Dynamics of the image of the Venetian Army in the Tragurian Hagiography,’ in Identity and Alterity in Hagiography and the Cult of Saints, ed. Ana Marinković and Trpimir Vedriš (Zagreb: Hagiotheca, 2010), 179–200. 46 In addition to the probable channel of model transmission through the Italian contacts of the consorority’s procurers, the possible intermediary chain in this transmission could have also included other devotional objects possibly existing in the city, such as votive models of the city made of wax or silver, which, however, have not been found in Trogir. For instance, city models in silver, commissioned by

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Ana Marinković women of Parma during the siege of Frederick II, were recalled in Salimbene de Adam’s chronicle; see Camelliti, ‘Patroni “celesti” e patroni “terreni”,’ 114; ibid., ‘Tradizione e innovazione,’ 72, 74; ibid., Città e santi patroni, 19–30.

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21 Caring and Healing Women, Bodies and Materiality in Nineteenth-Century French Cities Anne Carol

During the nineteenth century, cities hosted an ever-expanding population from which emerged more finely diversified social categories. Ruptured from traditional social networks and family or village solidarities, migrants to towns required access to a range of services that they ­previously received through local and familial relationships in their countryside communities. Among such services were those involved in managing the body. This chapter focuses on the role of women who provided services for the body’s organic materiality, whether curing its defects or satisfying its needs. In rural Europe, women were often accountable for caring for the body in all life’s ­circumstances: birth, illness, nutrition, death.1 They presided over childbirth, treated the diseased, fed men and cattle and prepared bodies for burial.These tasks essentially fell within the domestic sphere and, as such, were not clearly visible, often remaining informal as part of an extension of maternal functions. Women’s ‘feminine nature’, as described by doctors throughout the century, located them as sensitive and empathic beings, driven by maternal instincts to care for the weak, feed the hungry and care for the ill. Furthermore, their presumed limited intellectual capacity rendered them more able to apply their aspirations to material tasks than theoretical works. Whether they carried out these tasks directly or, for higher social groups, just supervised them, women were in charge of healing and caring for other people’s bodies. Urban modernity and the triumph of the science of public health imposed new management strategies onto bodies whether dead or alive, their associated wastes and desires. A whole level of urban engineering was deployed to tackle challenges associated with housing, urbanism, graveyards and entertainment resorts.2 Moreover, in the expanding cities, the dislocation of traditional social bonds required the material management of bodies to move from the domestic sphere to be cared for by other means, perhaps collective and anonymous. The diseased were now treated in hospitals; sexual desire was satisfied through professional connections. Greater degrees of social distinction required delegating more of the material labour of care to paid subordinates. Some of these services, until then more or less informal, started to professionalize, thus acquiring increasing visibility and promotion.This phenomenon was not homogeneous. Healthrelated professions emerged and provided means of empowerment to women on the basis of their material competencies and natural vocation, but it must be noted that such formalization did not always lead to a real professional autonomy. Moreover, some business sectors dealing with the body were little valued, even disregarded and viewed as dirty or shameful, especially 271

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those dealing with sex or dishes. This chapter uses a case study of French cities to illustrate how women took over certain materialistic and bodily dimensions of urban life as economic activities in their own right. It discusses how such phenomena were simultaneously shaped by concepts of social class and processes of rationalisation, as well as how the gendered and organic nature of these activities could, sometimes, hinder their social recognition.

Women and health care in cities: From informal activity to recognition Women caregivers occupied an important place in the city, although one that was not clearly visible. The tension between their ‘natural’ vocation to care for and their restricted ambitions resulted in a large portion of their activity being diffuse and informal.3 Doctors held the top of the hierarchy within the health-care professions; the law of 1803 established medicine in France as a monopoly for two types of graduates: doctors and health officers. Although the law did not explicitly prohibit women from entering the medical profession, they were in practice excluded during the first two thirds of the century. Therefore, it was elsewhere, outside of formal medical practice, that one could observe them at work during this period.4 Nineteenth-century hospitals were not the health institutions of today. They were places of assistance, in particular for the poorest who could not afford home care and whom the hospital was obliged to receive. Women were a significant part of a hospital’s staff. Beside the scarce medical staff, whose presence was for a long time intermittent, these women undertook tasks dealing with both supervision and healing. The vast majority were not there by profession but by vocation: they were the sisters of charity. Within a context of religious renewal, spiritual communities were on the upswing in early nineteenth-century France, and a great many of these women devoted themselves to education or health care.5 Given board, lodging and a very modest fee, a small community of sisters settling in a hospital would assume care for the diseased, the preparation and distribution of meals, the laundry, often the pharmacy and even sometimes financial management. By the end of the 1830s, the monarchy increasingly pushed hospital authorities to work closely with them. There were about 7000 sisters of charity in France in 1840 and 12,000 at the beginning of the ­twentieth century. In Paris in the middle of the century, seven religious communities serviced 12 hospitals; in 1840 in Marseille, 30 Augustinians cared for the Hôtel-Dieu patients.6 Besides the care services provided to the body, such women cared for the soul, acting as ‘moral police’ of the institutions, a service viewed positively by the paternalistic dignitaries that comprised the hospital authorities. Relationships with doctors could be tenser, as the religious sisters had their own ideas about health care and particularly dietary regimes. Sisters were often reluctant to put patients on a diet; they also rejected certain medical acts, such as vaccination, anaesthetic, injections and thermometers; or certain categories of patients. Like many other sisters, the contract of the Augustinians in Marseille exempted them from caring for venereal patients, women of disrepute and women in labour, whilst their common monopoly on the hospital’s pharmacy provided them with a certain autonomy when allocating remedies.Yet, their place within the hospital was not challenged before the end of the century, and they represented a devoted and almost free workforce, caring for patients until death without reluctance. Sisters came from all social classes. It could be a guarantee against poverty for the poorest classes or provide a stimulating and socially respectable alternative to being a housewife or housekeeper in a society where most women’s work was viewed negatively. In this context, many young women acquired responsibilities and competences that they would not have otherwise gained in ordinary life. Two categories of assistants supported the sisters; the first was 272

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lay people, men and women, recruited to assist them, and these were placed directly under the sisters. This workforce was volatile, the job being hard and poorly paid. Indeed, lay people ­performed much of the material care of the body under the surveillance of the sisters, apart from distributing meals and remedies. Sisters were also supported by lay people who worked alongside them in their role as ‘care attendants’, in charge of administering remedies prescribed by doctors and providing basic care to patients that remained at home. This was a role mostly performed by women, who had to be available day and night. Not only did female religious orders devote themselves to this but also lay women, particularly senior widows, who had more free time and needed the additional income. Such labour was supported by a range of other caring occupations. In cities, one of the most common figures of care was the concierge, who was in charge of cleaning and dressing the corpse and placing it in its coffin. And, although they could not legally run a pharmacy, women could work as herbalists, selling medicinal plants – a competency they had often performed in the countryside. Many city herbalist shops were run by women, allowing patients to seek medical aid while avoiding doctor’s consultation fees. Despite the important role of these care workers, doctors regularly accused female caregivers of ‘overstepping the mark’, creating illegal competition or thwarting the doctors’ treatment with untimely modifications. The existence and experience of a popular knowledge on the body was not valued but rather interpreted as being archaic or irrational.

Midwives, nurses and doctors Besides on-going informal activities, such as those of lay carers and concierges, professions ­relating to care expanded, particularly in cities where women could no longer rely on traditional networks of female solidarity. Chronologically, midwives were first.7 The profession of midwife existed before the nineteenth century. In the eighteenth century, medical courses providing guidance to midwives were organised across the country, with the goal of replacing the traditional role of the ‘village matron’ and labelling incompetent those who would not cooperate. The law of 1803 organised the profession, much like doctors in medicine or surgery, showing how much respect the authorities had for this activity and the social importance it granted. The law required a degree in order to practise the profession and regulated graduates setting up in business. It also limited their practice, prohibiting the use of instruments and requiring them to call a doctor in cases of difficulty. First-class midwives were trained in medical schools or in the prestigious school of Maternity of Paris (Maternité de Paris); they could practice anywhere they wanted. Second-class midwives were trained through département (regional administrative divisions) courses and were bound to practice within the area where they passed their examination. It was likely that the legislator’s intention was to have qualified midwives for the cities and others, less knowledgeable, for the countryside.This goal was only partially achieved; many, of both ranks, preferred to set up in the city, where customers were found in high numbers and were considered more likely to be creditworthy. Here too, there was no competition with local matrons. Midwifery attracted a considerable number of women: it is estimated around 30,000 between 1800 and 1850. Towards the end of the century, they outnumbered doctors and health officers combined.8 Midwives working in cities often performed several activities.They visited pregnant women’s homes to help them give birth and procure post-natal treatments, as well as caring for infants. For most of the century, a home birth with an attending midwife was far less dangerous than giving birth in hospital, which had high mortality rates despite the competency of obstetrician surgeons. Hospitals were regularly ravaged by puerperal fever epidemics, whereas midwifes’ compartmentalized practices diminished contagion risks. In 1857, Dr Tarnier raised a scandal 273

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when he calculated that mortality at the Maternité de Paris was 17 times higher than outside the hospital; closing the establishment was considered for some time. Midwives could also open ‘childbirth houses’ containing fewer beds than hospitals, where women could rest after giving birth. Midwives running such facilities sometimes acted as intermediaries between employers and wet nurses. Finally, they could be consulted for gynaecological problems, women being less reluctant to be examined by them than by men. Such extension of their competencies incited them to sometimes step outside the law and perform illegal abortions. Advertisements praising their capacity to ‘help returning menstruations’ furtively give a glimpse of such a possibility. Another profession emerged towards the end of the century: the nurse.9 Pasteur’s discoveries profoundly transformed the relationship between objects and their handling, and in the domestic context, the petty task of cleaning was transformed by hygienists into a real crusade against the microbial menace. Pasteurism led to the questioning of hospital routines and imposed new antisepsis and asepsis practices. In order to apply these, doctors needed a better trained and more obedient workforce than the sisters of charity. Additionally, the republicans’ coming to power was marked by a desire to secularize public services such as schools and hospitals and exclude religious people, who were accused of anti-republicanism. In this context, sisters of charity were increasingly criticized; they were decried for their ignorance, their zealousness (viewed as an obstacle to progress) and their fanatical proselytism. Most hospitals in Paris were secularized between 1878 and 1888. The trend was slower in the provinces. It was therefore necessary to train women capable of applying Pasteur’s principles at the hospital, both regarding the treatments and maintenance of objects and premises. Municipal courses first opened in Paris in 1878 and then in the major cities of the provinces to train the already existing lay staff. These were confined to teaching general hygiene concepts and some technical procedures.The goal was not to train an exclusive nursing staff. Facing such low ambitions, private initiatives developed.The Red Cross societies opened schools dedicated to training volunteer staff. In 1902, a female doctor, Anna Hamilton, created in Bordeaux a nursing school based on the English model of Florence Nightingale, which was followed by other private schools. In contrast with the municipal courses, these schools excluded popular recruitment, deciding that treating patients required a high level of education. Their other common feature was to focus on medicine rather than domestic hygiene; nurses had to be fully-fledged caregivers. The growing will to raise the standard of the nursing profession acted as a major challenge to public hospital administration, which responded by opening qualified nursing schools. The most famous was Salpetrière School in Paris, inaugurated in 1907. At the same time, a clearer distinction was established within the hospital between nursing staff and serving staff. Some specialities also appeared with respect to radiology and bandaging wounds, and hierarchies were formed within services. Taught in schools, recognized through a diploma and marked by selective recruitment, nursing as profession attracted a small group of the lower urban bourgeoisie who wanted to work in an honourable context, that is to say in roles compatible with ‘female nature’. Such nurses progressively replaced not only sisters of charity but also care attendants in cities. Two factors limited this process of professionalization, however.The religious model it drew on was a burden to these women, whose uniform was reminiscent of the sisters’ gown. They too were expected to enter the profession by vocation, not as a career. Therefore, they had to sacrifice their lives to the patients and accept low wages and difficult working conditions, such as living on site and remaining single. Such training or career did not attract men. There was one final category of female caregiving profession that opened to women during the century: female doctors. Women were originally restrained from enrolling in medical faculties as there was no official female baccalaureate, the requirement for student entry. Until the 274

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1870s, women studying at the medical school of Paris were foreigners with equivalent diplomas. The first French woman to be recognised as a doctor of medicine was Madeleine Brès in 1875. Her enrolment was only made possible with the intervention of Empress Eugénie herself.10 Women were not well received in faculties for reasons that had nothing to do with their abilities. It was thought that their hypersensitivity and emotional instability (increased during menstruation) would make them incapable of dissecting corpses, or even more, performing surgical operations. Caring for men was thought to be incompatible with their natural sense of decency. They were also perceived by male doctors as additional competition in an allegedly cluttered marketplace, an excuse also used to reject foreign students. Despite such hostility, the number of female students rose (270 in Paris in 1903), as well as the number of graduates. Even then, however, such professionalization was bound by certain limitations. Many graduates only briefly practiced before getting married or returning to a more conventional path or did not practice at all.The number of female doctors working before the First World War is low: for Paris, some 60 female doctors were known to be practicing at the beginning of the twentieth century; in Marseille, the 1914 year book indicates two women among 265 doctors. In addition, most of them oriented towards medical sectors traditionally associated with women: gynaecology, obstetrics and paediatrics. Large areas of medicine remained off limits, and surgery, first and foremost, was considered as a particularly manly form of therapeutic intervention. In cities, hospitals and maternity units were designed to meet the increasing health-care demands of a growing urban population. Designed as places of technical innovation and academic studies, these institutions increasingly required highly qualified, but still devoted, medical staff.This demand provided an opportunity for women to transform their traditional roles in the material management of the body into a profession.

Satisfying needs: Prostitutes Whether understood in terms of charity or public hygiene, providing medical care for bodies constituted a noble activity. Yet, in other domains, notably prostitution and wet nursing, care for the body was neither honourable nor transcendent. It also did not lead to a recognized ­profession, placing the women performing such duties in a subordinate position in respect to their customers. Urban prostitution in France operated under a specific regulatory framework, elaborated at the very beginning of the century and theorised later by Dr Parent-Duchâtelet (1790–1836).11 The law tolerated prostitution as it was considered inevitable, but under two sets of conditions: it had to be invisible in the public space, and it was subject to a double control by the police and sanitary inspectors. Women who practised within this context were considered not only necessary but also subject to great moral and social disapproval. According to Parent-Duchâtelet, prostitution was an activity inherent to urban concentrations. His thinking was informed by his wider research on Paris sewers and waste deposits. Cities create disturbances, such as garbage, sewage, rendering waste and so on, and efforts had to be made to manage the pollution associated with large populations. Similarly, the large unmarried male population in cities, who could not otherwise fulfil their ‘natural needs’, required an outlet. Without it, such men would look for ‘satisfaction’ in general society, leading to adultery, debauchery and the corruption of youth, so destabilizing its foundations. Legal prostitution provided an outlet for such sexual needs in a manner (like sewage) that was both controlled and separate from public space. At the core of the regulatory apparatus was the brothel or ‘tolerance house’ (called maison close or maison de tolérance), described by another doctor as ‘a seminal sewer’, towards which the demand for prostitution was directed. Brothels housed both prostitutes and prostitution 275

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p­ractices. Their locations had to be controlled within the urban space; police regulations ­prohibited their establishment near to churches, schools or high schools. In major cities, notably ports, there were sometimes ‘dedicated areas’ (quartiers réservés) where pleasure facilities were concentrated, such as Le Panier in Marseille. In addition, brothels had to remain discreet: a red lantern and/or a large number next to its door were sufficient to indicate this; shutters had to be permanently closed. Such discretion went hand in hand with tight police control.12 In order to open a brothel, one had to submit a written request to the police headquarters in Paris or to the mayor in the provinces. The direction of the facility was entrusted to a woman, of whom the police expected the capacities of authority and morality. Girls working there were registered with the authorities and listed on registers held within the brothel. They were ‘numbered girls’ (  filles en numéro) and regularly underwent medical examinations, which focused on the detection of venereal diseases to prevent their spread among the population. If disease was detected during a medical examination, the prostitute was removed from the brothel and isolated at the local hospital or, in Paris, at the infirmary of the Saint-Lazare prison. This regulatory framework was extended to nearly all European countries during the second half of the century. In the major cities of Europe, as in the United States, the brothels’ hierarchy mirrored social hierarchies.13 There were luxury facilities as well as low-end brothels; their differences lay in the luxury of the decoration, the beauty of the girls, the sophistication of the services and presence or absence of a bar. In small provincial cities, a couple of brothels sufficed. The majority of women working there came from the female urban working class (sewing, laundry and domestic sectors) and not, as often mentioned, from factories. When they became prostitutes, they abandoned their name for a pseudonym (which was imposed).They often moved from one establishment to another but could only leave with a revocation, which was difficult to obtain; the fear underpinning this regulatory control was that prostitutes might return and blend into mainstream society. Contrary to Parent-Duchâtelet theorizing, sexual demand was not marginal; it came from all classes of society. Girls in brothels, and prostitutes in general, had to satisfy various sexual needs. Traditionally, the brothel was a place for individual or collective sexual initiation, for secondary-school students or during review boards, for example. It was also a form of sexual release for enforced singles such as servicemen, sailors, migrants, students and members of the petite bourgeoisie who could not afford to marry. For married men, it could be an alternative to a disappointing sexual life in a context where eroticism was not associated with marriage. This was even evident in provincial cities, predominantly a place for relaxed male sociability. Finally, prostitutes provided complacent partners for those who were ashamed of their bodies or looking for non-standard sexual practices. Major urban facilities proposed various services able to satisfy all types of customers and ‘perversions’. Girls had to be at the disposal of customers every night. They could be entirely maintained by the institution, in which case their only income was gifts from clients. They could also pay a fee and receive half the money for their services. Indebted to the owner, who provided everything they could not acquire, girls often got trapped in a life which, with the help of routine and alcohol, seemed less hard and precarious than that of domestic servants or casual workers. The regulatory apparatus did not account for all urban prostitution. In major cities, it was even in the minority and appeared to disappear; in Paris, the number of brothels dropped from 193 in 1842 to 47 in 1903.14 In reality, the law was circumvented in several ways, and sexual demand was satisfied elsewhere. The administration also had to deal with non-enclosed prostitution (i.e. street walkers and other independent operators) but struggled to control it; this form of prostitution was 276

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p­ redominant in major cities, notably in Paris. Such women were also meant to register with the authorities as à la carte girls, and they had to comply with high levels of regulation. Like brothel girls, they had to regularly undergo medical examinations for venereal disease. When examined by the ‘moral doctor’ (médecin des mœurs) at the clinic, they had their cards validated and were immediately sent to hospital if testing positive for disease. Accounts of these examinations, where doctors examined dozens of women with a poorly-washed speculum, highlighted the poor efficacy of the apparatus, its noxiousness and humiliating nature. Prostitutes hence renamed the speculum ‘the government’s penis’. More broadly, these women’s activities were entangled in a mesh of prohibitions whose strict application was left to the judgment of the police.They had to be as discreet as possible in public space. They were forbidden to accost clients in the street with equivocal speech or gestures, to frequent certain areas, to go out at certain hours, to recurrently walk around on pavements or to hail men from their windows and so on under penalty of being arrested and imprisoned.The authorities did everything to discourage them and redirect them to regulated brothels, which were easier to control. In practice, however, women,‘disobedient girls’, were often pushed underground and towards illegal activity. It is difficult to estimate the number of these clandestine prostitutes. Their number included a fringe of occasional prostitutes, as well as the other extreme of the social ladder, the demimonde, that is to say those luxury prostitutes more akin to courtesans and supported women. In the latter case, the women’s sexual function was often over-shadowed by their social function. They shared certain forms of festive social life with those maintaining them, providing an alternative and less constraining home and showing their social standing by the luxury of their outfit or their market value. Their visibility was actually at the opposite spectrum to the discretion of brothel women. The prototype is Nana, described by Zola in his novel of the same name. The world of prostitution evolved during the second half of the century, at the same time as cities changed and modernized.15 No longer conceived as a hygienic outlet but rather a form of consumption and leisure, prostitution expanded within urban space and took on multiple forms. The customer base was no longer the same; migrations became permanent and migrants started families. The petite bourgeoisie emerged and constituted the heart of the new customer base, avid for pleasures.16 Clandestine prostitution inflated to adapt to the new demand and extended to new locations: the grand boulevards, the new high streets and train-station districts, the periphery. Benefiting from gas lightning, mobile clandestine prostitution developed in the streets. Prostitution also benefited from public gardens, bus stations or public dances, which provided sites to accost and take customers to garnished hotels until late at night. In new spaces of male sociability and consumption like cafés, brasseries and live e­ ntertainment bars, prostitution was very active and supported by venue managers. Waitresses and regulars encouraged clients to consume alcohol and eventually sex in the back rooms or nearby ‘shorttime hotels’. Restaurants, which were often fitted with discreet chambers, were also places of bourgeois prostitution, either where clients brought courtesans for fine parties or where one could ‘brighten up’ a meal by resorting to professionals recruited for the occasion. In a context of increasing syphilophobia, the police became increasingly anxious about this multi-faceted type of prostitution, which was largely beyond control. Repression increased and roundups in the streets multiplied, which particularly put the most vulnerable women even more at risk. The ordinary city brothel lost its appeal, while in the provinces they remained a favoured place for young men’s sexual initiation during the inter-war period, and some very highend forms of brothels, where one came for something ‘original’ or to satisfy ‘perversions’, remained popular. The brothel was replaced by the appointment house (maison de rendez-vous), 277

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where a matchmaker proposed to clients, depending on their resources, a discreet act with a ­professional or with an irregular worker, dancer, singer, comedian or courtesan looking for additional income. Prostitution, which Parent-Duchâtelet wished to confine behind closed doors, hence became more and more visible in public space. Present in the street, in the middle of crowds seeking distractions, mixing with the demimonde, prostitutes inspired painters (Degas, Manet,ToulouseLautrec) and novelists (Zola, Huysmans, Goncourt). This visibility did not mean recognition. On the contrary, prostitutes’ social necessity was overshadowed at the end of the century by their supposed noxiousness, whether they were perceived as social parasites or as vectors of the venereal peril that threatened the race.

Satisfying needs: Wet nurses and domestic servants If public authorities wished to isolate and marginalise prostitutes from the rest of the urban population, the same was not true for another category of women dedicated to satisfying other needs and whose tasks put them at the heart of the bourgeois household: the domestic servant. Amongst the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, daily material tasks were the responsibility of servants: they were in charge of cleaning, buying and preparing food, laundry, transport, even caring for toddlers. The higher a family on the social ladder, the more numerous were the servants and the more specialised were their tasks. Domesticity was ideally divided up into two groups. In the first were chamber maids, cooks, linen maids and wet nurses; and in the second were valets, coach drivers and gardeners. Women made up a majority of servants during the nineteenth century. Although one cannot speak of domestic service as a career or profession in the sense of requiring formal training and regulation, servants were drawn into a professional trajectory through skills and status gained with successive employers and certificates that acknowledged their skills for the employment market. This section focuses on two categories of strictly female domestic servants: the onsite wet nurse (nourrice sur lieu) and the maid of all work. Both jobs required considerable proximity to the material body and were hence denigrated, and they shared a parallel trajectory over the nineteenth century in both France and the United Kingdom.17 However, they did not evolve exactly in the same social worlds. Wet nurses were found in the wealthiest fringes of urban society, whereas the maid of all work multiplied in the inferior fringe of the bourgeoisie. It is known that the large-scale private fostering of children is specific to France. Originally affecting the aristocratic elite, it reached the urban bourgeoisie, craftsmen and shopkeepers in the eighteenth century to finally touch all social classes in the nineteenth century. To continue working or operating in high-society life, women chose not to breastfeed and entrusted a wet nurse with their new-born. In Paris at the beginning of the 1860s, half of new-borns (about 20,000) were privately fostered.18 Most of them were sent to wet nurses in the countryside, where mortality was high, two to three times higher than the overall child mortality rate; this was caused by lack of hygiene, care and milk. In the last third of the century, in a context of fear of depopulation, doctors, demographers, journalists and writers criticised ‘the private foster industry’ more and more vocally and promoted maternal breastfeeding or the use of pasteurised milk. This general discourse was, however, adapted for the elites; doctors were not hostile to the recruitment of wet nurses provided that they stayed on-site within the families, where they could be constantly watched.This was the beginning of the vogue for on-site wet nurses, which also reached Victorian England and America.19 In France, on-site wet nurses were recruited by employment agencies or, even more frequently, through networking. They came from the peripheral areas of the cities, Burgundy and 278

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Brittany for Paris, Auvergne for Lyon. They also came from poor regions, where temporary migration was customary, to increase incomes.Women who had recently given birth had market value that could be exploited. Hence, they left their village to go to the city and be placed in a family. Their own child was left behind in their village and was fed with artificial milk, which drastically reduced his or her chances of survival. Although the recruitment of domestic servants was, in general, humiliating for those o ­ ffering their services, it is not an exaggeration to say that the role of wet nurse was particularly dehumanizing. What the family sought was a healthy milk producer, available and controllable. The question of choosing a wet nurse led to a plethora of medical literature. She had to have obvious physical attributes: she was not to be a primiparous woman, if possible – she would lack experience – or too old, with under 35-year-olds being preferred. Her milk had not to be too ‘old’; in theory, her own infant should have just been weaned, but in reality, wet nurses who had just given birth were preferred. Normally accompanied by her own child, she had to demonstrate she was a good feeder by presenting a healthy baby. Contemporaries complained about the cunning of those who ‘hired’ children for this purpose. She had to be robust; aesthetically pleasing, rather than attractive; and healthy, especially without venereal diseases. It was often cautioned that nurses should undergo a thorough physical examination, from teeth to genital organs, including breasts, but it is unlikely that such examination was systematically performed as the wet nurses themselves were particularly unwilling to be examined. The wet nurse also had to have good moral values, which were demonstrated by the certificate delivered by the mayor of her village. The question of her social status was, however, delicate. In principle, it was in the interest of the families to recruit married women on the grounds of morality, experience and stability. But it was beneficial to hire a teenage mother, even if inexperienced, as they were less demanding financially, more dependent upon the hiring family and could be freed of their own infants. Wet nurses were among the best-paid servants.Their pay was almost as high as that of a cook, although they were not hired for as long: one was rarely a wet nurse for more than a couple of years, and the risk then was to be demoted to domestic servanthood, unless restarting a cycle of breastfeeding through pregnancy.Wet nurses were particularly well treated; their food was abundant and varied – although monitored – and they often stayed in the child’s bedroom or next door, that is to say in the bourgeois apartments and not the spaces reserved for other servants. Their hygiene being closely watched, they enjoyed the same conditions of sanitary comfort as their masters. As they occupied a strategic position, efforts were made to avoid upsetting them. Neither the milk nor the child’s education was to be spoiled. Bonuses were abundant, in the form of money or in kind, for the first teeth, first steps and so on. Families paid particular attention to wet nurses’ clothes. This was especially for hygienic reasons but also because wet nurses were part of a more general apparatus of social exhibition. To have an on-site wet nurse showed her employer’s wealth. Obliged to walk the children in public spaces, parks and gardens, wet nurses often wore typical regional dresses, which were remade in the city for the occasion, even though this type of dress had been abandoned in their region of origin. These material benefits barely hid a situation of great alienation. The wet nurse, after abandoning (legally or physically) her own child, was considered above all as a milk producer. Under a double guardianship, that of the mother and that of the doctor, she had almost no autonomy for the care given to the infant and was subject to a great regulation. For example, in contrast to the traditional habit of feeding babies on demand, modern childcare proponents promoted breastfeeding at set times. They were also forbidden to swaddle babies. In general, their capacity to raise and educate a child was denied in favour of their sole feeding function. Wet nurses’ 279

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physical comfort was counterbalanced by a lack of privacy, as the parents might enter their room at any time to see the child. As they needed to be constantly available, their social life was very limited (meetings at the public garden, in particular with other wet nurses) and even more so their private and sexual life. Due to her pivotal role in the continuity of the family lineage, the wet nurse was the subject of a considerable number of fantasies at the end of the century. The parents supposedly saw the wet nurse as tyrannical, subjecting them to her whims. She was mercenary, terrorising and robbing the parents in every possible way and caring very little for the child she was entrusted with, too busy flirting with soldiers at every possible opportunity. Such fantasies stemmed not only from a suspicion of social origin but also from the materialistic, if not organic, dimension of their task – a task that the bourgeoisie refused to assume. This was also the case of the maids. Maids of all work constituted a sort of proletariat among the world of domestic servants.20 Often freshly arrived from the countryside, they had no particular qualification except for their own home education. Their number greatly increased at the end of the century, both because of the agricultural crisis and rural exodus and because of the development of an urban petite bourgeoisie anxious to imitate the rich without necessarily having the means. Social standing meant they had to be served, even if at the price of budgetary sacrifices, but only one domestic servant could be recruited in this case. For their part, young girls (les Bécassines) coming from all over France looked for work in the city and the possibility, so they thought, of saving some money. Maid recruitment was carried out through countless specialist employment agencies, through migration networks and through word of mouth. A bourgeois family going on holidays could, for example, bring back with them a girl who had served them during the summer. At the end of the century, due to the multiplication of maids, the proportion of women in domestic service rose to 83 per cent. In Paris in 1901, they numbered 171,220 women compared to 35,981 men.21 The function of a maid within the family was to take charge of all material aspects of familial life: cleaning, sewing, shopping, cooking, laundering and so on. It was their responsibility to manage the wastewater, faeces, dirty laundry and household waste.The workload was very heavy and the timetable limitless. In low-income households, some of these tasks could be undertaken by the housemistress, but they were usually the least messy ones; for example, sewing. What remained for the maid was not only everything that was tiresome but also dirty, running the risk of turning her into a slattern (souillon). Nineteenth-century urban apartments, even those built during the second half of the century, sacrificed the space devoted to these tasks for living and reception spaces. Water supply and sewage systems were only modernized very slowly. Kitchens were often cramped, opened onto narrow courtyards and were inconvenient, and bathrooms were non-existent. Similarly, servant accommodation was far from being a priority. The staff bedrooms (chambres de bonnes) were relegated to under the eaves or were sometimes non-existent, obliging servants to sleep in box rooms or even in the kitchen. Servants’ quarters were distinct from those of their masters and were accessed by back stairs. In Pot-Bouille (1882), Zola describes the contrast between the opulent and respectable bourgeois facades and the courtyards on which kitchens opened, where waste water and garbage were drained and where maids leaning on the windowsill endlessly exchanged intimate information about their masters. Hence, every effort was made to render their activity as invisible as possible. Efforts to compartmentalize household space (the bourgeois family’s space on one side, the working-class servants’ space on the other) struggled with their own limitations. In the homes of the lower social classes, those employing a single maid, the apartments were too cramped to keep maids separate. People, therefore, spent their days and nights close to each other, which fuelled fantasies around the potential threat of these women who were situated at the heart of 280

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the ­household. Maids, typically belonging to the ‘poor and venal’ working class, were further degraded by their labour, handling waste and their location within the household. They were suspected of stealing food, clothes and goods and of cheating employers of shopping money. Their proximity to children, in particular teenage girls, could turn out to be dangerous; maids could corrupt them through their lack of morality. Their gender was potentially a threat to marital harmony, hence their body was often hidden under a neutral outfit, meant to mask their femininity as well as to signal their low status. However, maids were more often victims than perpetrators. The case of a maid made pregnant by the household master or by a son seeking sexual initiation was common and resulted in her dismissal due to fear of scandal. Such activity ultimately fuelled prostitution all through the nineteenth century. By the eve of the First World War, a public debate around domestic servants’ status, their life and work conditions started taking shape. This movement was not pushed, as in Great Britain, by an organisation internal to the profession. Servants’ unions were few and weak, and the servants themselves did not feel they belonged to the same class as workers. Rather, social reformers developed the idea that household tasks could be performed, as in the Americas, by external employees, rather than domestic servants living on site, who were subject to arbitrary relationships with their masters. It was only during the twentieth century that the maid disappeared and was replaced by the cleaning lady, the housewife and home appliances.

Conclusion In the nineteenth century, both philosophy and medicine insisted on women’s affinity with the natural world. Such affinity was thought to prevent their emancipation from their material body, restricting their ability to function in intellectual or political fields. Whether belonging to the elite or the common people, the scope of their tasks was essentially material and domestic. As mothers and spouses, they had to ensure the well-being of their relatives, and, above all, of bodies.The body was both their vocational root, the tool by which they made themselves useful, and the horizon of their social function. However, women’s domestic role as caretakers of the body was profoundly challenged by urban growth during the nineteenth century. The urban space dislocated traditional social networks and rendered anonymous and mercantile services that were until then informal and diffuse. Women’s body work became a site of paid employment and implicated in larger urban processes, including the development of public sanitation and debates around hygiene or leisure. As body work became more significant to the public imagination, different forms of female labour gained different levels of social status. Some, such as medicine, professionalized, providing opportunities for women to have careers and status through their labour; others were demeaned, and their association with body work fuelled their social degradation and fantasies of the corrupting potential of such workers.These contradictory pathways might be explained by the ambiguous relationship that nineteenth century society had with the organic: between fascination and revulsion.

Notes   1 For a broader discussion of these trends, see Susan Broomhall, Women’s Medical Work in Early Modern France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Kathleen Brown, ‘Body Work in the Antebellum United States,’ in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Stoler (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 213–40.   2 For a wider discussion, see Ann F. La Berge, Mission and Method: the Early Nineteenth-Century French Public Health Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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Anne Carol  3 Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives and Nurses: A History of Women Healers, 2nd ed. (New York: The Feminist Press, 2010).   4 See also Anne Carol, ‘Les femmes dans le champ de la santé. L’exemple des Bouches-du-Rhône au XIXe siècle,’ in Jacques Guilhaumou, Karine Lambert, Anne Montenach, eds, Genre Révolution Transgression, (Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2015), 277–289.   5 Claude Langlois, Le catholicisme au féminin (Paris: Le Cerf, 1984).   6 On sisters of charity, see Rachel G. Fuchs and Victoria E. Thompson, Women in Nineteenth-Century France (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 141–42.   7 Scarlett Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, Naître à l’hôpital au XIXe siècle (Paris: Belin, 1999); Danielle Tucat, Les sages-femmes à Paris 1871–1914, thèse de l’Université de Paris VII, 1983. For a wider view, see Hilary Marland and Anne Marie Rafferty, eds, Midwives, Society, Childbirth Debates and Controversies in the ­Modern Period (New York: Routledge, 1997).   8 See Phyllis Stock-Morton, ‘Control and limitation of midwives in modern France: The example of Marseille,’ Journal of Women’s History, 8, 1 (Spring 1996): 60–94.   9 Véronique Leroux-Hugon, Des saintes laïques. Les infirmières à l’aube de la IIIe république (Paris: Sciences en Situation, 1992); Yvonne Knibiehler ed., Cornettes et blouses blanches. Les infirmières dans la société ­française 1880–1980 (Paris: Hachette, 1984). 10 The history of the first women doctors can be found in Mélanie Lipinska, Histoire des femmes médecins depuis l’antiquité jusqu’à nos jours, (Paris: Jacques, G & cie, 1900) and Les femmes et le progrès des sciences médicales (Paris: Masson, 1930) and Caroline Schultze, Les femmes médecins au XIXe siècle (Paris: OllierHenry, 1888). 11 Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet, La prostitution à Paris au XIXe siècle.Texte présenté et annoté par Alain Corbin (Paris: Seuil, (1836) 1981). 12 Jill Harsin, Policing Prostitution in 19th Century Paris (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985). 13 Judith Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 14 Harsin, Policing Prostitution, 309–11. 15 Lola Gonzalez-Quijano, Capitale de l’amour. Filles et lieux de plaisir à Paris au 19e siècle (Paris:Vendémiaire, 2015). 16 Alain Corbin, Les filles de noces. Misère sexuelle et prostitution aux 19e et 20e siècles (Paris: Aubier, 1978). 17 Lucy Lethbridge, Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Modern Age (New York: Norton & Company, 2014). 18 Fanny Fay-Sallois, Les nourrices à Paris au 19e siècle (Paris: Payot, 1980). 19 Valérie Fildes, Wet Nursing. A History from Antiquity to the Present (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988); Melisa Klimaszewski, ‘Examining the wet nurse: Breast power and penetration in Victorian England,’ Women’s Studies 35 (2006): 323–46; Jacqueline H. Wolf, ‘ “Mercenary hirelings” or ”A great blessing”?: Doctors’ and mothers’ conflicted perceptions of wet nurses and the ramifications for infant feeding in Chicago, 1871–1961,’ Journal of Social History 33, 1 (1999): 97–120. 20 Anne Martin-Fugier, La place des bonnes. La domesticité féminine à Paris en 1900 (Paris: Grasset, 2004). 21 See for example, Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution:The Modernisation of Household Service in England and France, 1820–1920 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1976).

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22 Architectural Language and Mistranslations A Comparative Global Approach to Women’s Urban Spaces Despina Stratigakos

Women’s claims to urban space: A transnational phenomenon From Dallas to Berlin, urban landscapes were transformed at the turn of the twentieth century by a novel type of builder: women. Changing patterns of life and work prompted women to seek and define new territories, both imaginary and physical, that supported their evolving identities as modern gendered citizens. Scholars have investigated this widespread phenomenon through case studies of London, Boston, Chicago and other Western cities.1 By focusing their investigations on particular locations, these authors capture the specificity of circumstances – cultural, political and economic – that gave rise, in each place, to gendered architectural claims. Historical records make clear, however, that female urban activists paid close attention to developments beyond their cities; influences crossed the Atlantic in both directions. A transnational approach is needed to unite these case studies and to demonstrate how women pioneering a female public sphere learned from one another. In the course of writing a book on women and architecture in Berlin, I became keenly aware of the role played by foreign models.2 In this essay, I examine the architectural politics of women’s clubhouses in London, Berlin and New York to suggest how a comparative approach to gendered space might address both local and transnational perspectives. This approach reveals both the extent and limitations of a common language in architecture that could be evoked to overcome national boundaries in the search for a globalization of women’s spaces. In particular, I am interested in how architectural language translates and in the slippages of meaning – in some cases quite disastrous – that occur in the import and export of spatial concepts. The clubhouses – as material objects in the urban landscape – also point to the importance of scale in considering how women shaped material expressions of their urban identities. Architectural historians have typically considered monumentality a male strategy for marking and appropriating urban space, with the domestic positioned as a counterbalancing and less visible female realm. As an architectural type, however, the clubhouse blurs those distinctions and allows us to investigate how men and women created, through their respective club buildings, a form of urban space and agency that blended concepts of the private and public as well as 283

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domestic and monumental scales in a manner that cannot be reduced to simple architectural or gendered categories. By the end of the nineteenth century, clubs and commercial establishments catering to women were spreading rapidly in Western cities. They served a female bourgeoisie, who, as workers and consumers, demanded their own places of rest and leisure in the city. Alarmed social observers warned that these enterprises freed women from male authority and encouraged them to neglect domestic duties in pursuit of dangerous passions.3 A 1906 study of urban vice portrayed women’s clubs in Berlin as the lair of the trousered lesbian, who indulged her desires free of the male gaze.4 In 1912, a New York Times reporter, sensing something amiss in ladies’ tearooms – which he claimed abetted ‘the modern woman’s invasion of man’s sphere’ – enlisted a female informant to expose their dirty secret: teapots filled with whiskey.5 More concerned with politics than prohibition, an English novelist vilified female clubs in London as ‘a nursery for man-haters and rebels, and the nucleus of the new order of feminine supremacy’.6

Constance Smedley and the founding of the Lyceum Club in London Rather than allay such fears, a young English woman named Constance Smedley raised the stakes. In 1903, she and a group of friends founded the Lyceum Club, a professional organization for educated, middle-class women. The idea originated as a response to the excitement and pathos of the ‘modern girl’, who lived independently and supported herself through a profession. Smedley, a young writer privileged by wealth and an indulgent family, felt compelled to help her less fortunate female colleagues. Personally working only for pocket money, she worried about daughters from ‘respectable’ homes, who, unsheltered and alone, faced innumerable difficulties in earning a living without losing their reputations. Smedley thus directed her concern to educated middle-class women, whose numbers in the English workforce had risen sharply in the last decades of the nineteenth century.7 As she stated in her autobiography, their entry into the professions yielded them meagre salaries that barely covered room and board. One of her journalist friends skimped on food to pay for clothes that displayed gentility and thereby commanded respect. Social snobbery necessitated such sacrifices. As Smedley wrote: ‘The difference of the treatment accorded in newspaper offices to women who looked shabby and wretched and those who looked prosperous and insouciant was so great that it infuriated me’. Often unable to rent more than a single room, professional women lacked a place to meet with employers or clients. Crucially important social connections also depended on the ability to return invitations with a comparable ‘impressive hospitality’. In class-conscious London society, ‘the girls felt the need of a substantial and dignified milieu where women could meet editors and other employers to discuss matters as men did in their professional clubs: above all, in surroundings that did not suggest poverty’.8 Far from being incidental, architecture had a central role to play in gender equality. With the support of powerful backers, Smedley and her friends acquired a grand clubhouse in Piccadilly, directly in the heart of male clubland. Occupying the former quarters (complete with furnishings) of the Imperial Service Club, a bastion of masculine empire, the Lyceum Club offered its members a place to socialize and to conduct business comparable to the best men’s clubs in London. In such surroundings, women could compete with men on a more level playing field for advancement in the professions. Indeed, Smedley considered the ‘inheritance’ of a masculine environment, complete with ‘masculine furniture’, particularly advantageous for helping male visitors feel ‘at home’. As the first women’s club to enter Piccadilly, and the only one to hold its ground there for the next quarter century, the Lyceum Club excited 284

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Figure 22.1  Lyceum clubhouse at 128 Piccadilly, London, postcard from c. 1905.

great curiosity: Smedley observed ‘The presence of women on the Club balconies and in the great bow-windows created a general stir: the passengers on every bus craned their necks as they passed’.9 Word of the new institution spread quickly. Within a year of opening its doors, the club had 2000 members, despite turning away scores of applicants on account of insufficient qualifications.10 Membership was ‘limited to women of any nationality who have published (a) any original work in literature, journalism, science, art, or music; (b) who have University qualifications; (c) who are wives or daughters of men distinguished in any of the branches of work already referred to.’11 Although those in the last category lacked professional accomplishments of their own, Smedley realized the value of having members with access to powerful male networks.12 Given the pecuniary difficulties of many professional women, the club attempted to accommodate small budgets, offering, for example, differently priced menus in its restaurant. Nonetheless, fees and membership dues were far from negligible and certainly beyond the range of the working classes, a group elided, in any case, in the Lyceum Club’s understanding of the ‘modern worker’.13 At the same time, the inclusion of all nationalities (across racial categories) was truly extraordinary for a British club of this period.14 For their money, members received goods and services that made the club highly attractive. The club presented itself as a labour union for female ‘brain workers’, aggressively pursuing international markets for their creative work. Promoting a form of gendered free trade, the club promised both English women new opportunities to sell their work abroad and foreign members access to domestic markets.15 To this end, a specially staffed bureau assisted members in their various occupations.The point was not only to promote members’ work but also, by rigorous means of selection, to improve its professional calibre.16 Indeed, an early mission statement published in the club’s journal, The Lyceum, emphasized the collective effort ‘to lift the onus of inferiority from women’s work and to raise it by a strenuous effort and rigid self-denial to the high plane of man’s achievement’.17 Smedley claimed that by elevating ‘the standard of work’, 285

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the club would thereby raise ‘the standard of pay’, erasing the difference between what men and women earned.18

Men and women’s clubs and their institutional and spatial differences Despite similarities to elite men’s clubs in London – namely exclusivity, conspicuous luxury and sociability – the Lyceum Club presented itself as a different sort of institution.Whereas the hallmark of gentlemen’s club culture was aristocratic leisure, the Lyceum Club defined itself around the bourgeois values of professional advancement and self-improvement. Moreover, these elite clubwomen framed their intentions in decisively public terms, in opposition to the rhetoric of privacy articulated by male clubs.19 This difference is revealing. As architectural historian Jane Rendell argues, ‘Existing simultaneously as both a public and a private space, the “club” collapses the separate spheres ideology of two distinct spaces, the male, public city and the female, private home’.20 Clubs, whether for men or women, were public institutions inasmuch as they enabled people to gather for conversation or entertainment. At the same time, exclusionary membership and other policies, such as forbidding outsiders from entering the premises, asserted club privacy and secrecy. Clubhouses were modelled on domestic dwellings to symbolize their role as a second home, a refuge from the heterogeneous publics of London, and, in the case of men, a place to escape wives and children. Clubs also performed domestic functions for their members, such as providing meals or overnight accommodations. And yet, if clubs blurred the separation between the male, public city and the female, private home, as Rendell maintains, the very different ways in which men and women occupied those realms structured the position of their clubs vis-à-vis broader society. Despite their attention to leisure, male clubs also represented sites of power where some of the nation’s most important business was conducted ‘off the record’ by an old boys’ network. In this sense, gentlemen’s clubs domesticated public matters. The Lyceum Club operated in the opposite direction, pushing from the domestic toward the public. Thus, in a speech delivered at the first anniversary celebration, club president Lady Frances Balfour referred to the clubhouse in Piccadilly as the realization, in a larger sphere, of the same moral values on which women had built British homes, ‘a city set on a hill among the clubs of our weaker brethren’.21 This metaphor, drawn from the Sermon on the Mount, emphasized the redemptive power of female, domestic virtues for urban life.

The female conquest of male clubland: Strategies and reactions To a large extent, the desire for a public presence was true of all women’s clubs established in London during this period. By the time the Lyceum Club opened its doors in Piccadilly, a separate ‘female clubland’, nicknamed ‘Petticoat Lane’, had grown up around Dover Street, in close proximity to the men’s club district.22 As historian Erika Rappaport demonstrates, these clubs enabled women to enter more fully into the public life of the city as consumers and citizens. The Lyceum Club’s breach of male clubland marked a radical turn, for ‘nothing so palpably represented masculine power and dominance of the public sphere as the clubhouses that lined Pall Mall, Piccadilly and St. James’s’.23 The perceived threat to male privilege was captured by a reporter on the Lyceum Club’s opening day, when from the windows of the eleven other clubs on Piccadilly men looked out with shocked faces, and in Pall Mall and St. James’ Street there was a shaking of bald heads 286

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and a gloomy rustling of The Times newspaper. First Dover Street, now Piccadilly.What would the women conquer next?24 By ‘conquering’ Piccadilly, the Lyceum Club created female public space that literally overlapped with that of men and made explicit, in geographical terms, the founders’ intention to gain access to the nation’s centres of power. The architectural splendour of the clubhouse physically underscored this claim. Smedley and her friends understood the visible signs of privilege deployed by male clubhouses. By appropriating the latter’s majesty and opulence, the Lyceum clubhouse (Figure 22.2) threatened those visual markers of difference. Smedley’s comment on the public’s shock at seeing women in bow windows is of particular relevance here. This architectural feature was famously associated with the most exclusive gentlemen’s clubs in London. ‘The bow window provided a place for viewing the street, but also allowed the occupants of the club to display their “conspicuous consumption” or their dress and leisure time to the public’.25 Women’s appropriation of such spaces, which put them on display in the city not as potential victims of the street but rather as its masters, thus constituted a highly charged architectural act. Beyond geography and architecture, the activities taking place within the clubhouse reinforced women’s claim to public life as artists, intellectuals and professionals. As much as Lyceum Club members inhabited male clubland, however, they were not of it; at least, not yet. If it did not quite achieve integration, the club attained a proximity to the male public sphere – an ideological space more pervasive and difficult to penetrate than physical male space – that clearly made men uncomfortable.

Figure 22.2  Lyceum clubhouse at 118b Potsdamer Strasse, Berlin, 1905. From ‘Die Lyzeumklub’, Die Frau 12, no. 12 (1905): 752.

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Beyond London: The Lyceum Club’s international ambitions and the desire for a women’s spatial commonwealth And perhaps men were right to be worried. The Lyceum Club was an ambitious organization, setting its sights far beyond male clubland, even beyond England’s borders. As Smedley noted in her autobiography, travel to foreign cities posed difficulties for women with limited financial resources or social connections. From the beginning, Smedley and her friends conceived the club as an international network, with ‘a chain of Clubhouses’ uniting the urban centres of Europe and the New World.26 Like embassies, they would create a welcoming home for the clubwoman abroad, offering inexpensive accommodations and entry into influential circles. The self-governing European social clubs established throughout the empire in the nineteenth century to foster Britishness in the colonies became the model for the International Association of Lyceum Clubs.27 In place of their imperial nationalism, however, the Lyceum Club sought to establish a commonwealth of clubwomen. Judging from the list of foreign women who joined the Lyceum Club in its first year, which included Jane Addams (director of Hull House in Chicago) and M. Carey Thomas (president of Bryn Mawr College), the idea of an empire of female public space resonated strongly across national borders.28 Even before the clubhouse in London had opened, Smedley travelled to the continent to promote the Lyceum Club idea and prepare the ground for future chapters. In 1905, Berlin became the site of the second clubhouse. German feminists, although politically less radical than English suffragettes, understood the importance of creating a public presence for women in the nation’s

Figure 22.3  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Potsdamer Platz, drawing, 1914. Photo: Joerg P. Anders. © bpk, Berlin / Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen, Berlin, Germany / Art Resource, NY.

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capital. Smedley’s offer of a readymade clubhouse, on par with the one in Piccadilly and under English management, was enthusiastically received.Within a year of its opening, however, German members realized they had made a terrible mistake in relinquishing control of their public identity, and tensions escalated between the two clubs.These struggles reinforce the importance of cultural differences in the creation of women’s urban space and, more particularly, the role of visual signs in articulating those claims, which, like any other language, did not always translate well across national divides. Ultimately, the strategies that worked so effectively to assert a public presence for British women in London threatened to undermine the very same endeavour in Berlin. Unlike London, Berlin did not have an established club district, and most men’s clubs were little more than gambling dens.29 The Lyceum Club in Berlin thus was a foreign type transplanted to German soil. The English managers selected a highly visible location for the clubhouse on Potsdamer Strasse, revealing their intention to create, as in London, a public presence for women. Potsdamer Strasse was a busy commercial thoroughfare, lined with drapers, milliners and other shops that catered to the affluent bourgeois women whom Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, working a decade later, captured in his representations of Potsdamer Platz. Through its milieu, the Lyceum Club implicitly united the modernity of its members with the commercial vitality of the city. For the clubhouse, the English managers chose a large and luxurious apartment house that dated to 1883, when the street was being developed as a f­ashionable residential and commercial district. Following extensive renovations to the interior, the new clubhouse opened to much fanfare on 4 November 1905.30 Passing through the doorway of the rusticated sandstone façade and climbing a flight of stairs, members entered a grand foyer. Proceeding inward, a stunning sequence of spatial riches unfolded: exhibition spaces, an auditorium with a stage, a grand restaurant and a tea room, as well as common rooms such as a reading room filled with newspapers and magazines, a music room, a library and rooms for smoking, writing and billiards. About 30 guest rooms were located on the upper stories. As in London, these rooms were intended for traveling members from other clubs or, more commonly, women living at a distance from the city’s centre. The club’s sumptuous grandeur was unlike any other building devoted to middleclass women in the German capital, and the press emphasized the close parallels to London models.31 Almost immediately, this became a problem.

Figure 22.4  Lyceum clubhouse at Lützowplatz 8, Berlin, as redesigned by Emilie Winkelmann. From Jarno Jessen, ‘Der Deutsche Lyzeumklub und seine bildenden Künstlerinnen’, Westermanns Monatshefte 120, no. 716 (1916): 165.

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The problems of opulence: A mistranslation of the aesthetics of power Conspicuous displays and consumption of luxury in London clubhouses signalled exclusivity, privilege and power.32 Having access to this symbolic capital, and the status it conferred, translated into real material advantages. In this context, mimicking the opulence of male clubland made strategic sense; certainly, the Lyceum Club did nothing to tone down the luxurious setting of the Imperial Service Club it inherited. Indeed, its likeness to the other clubhouses on Piccadilly was part of its special appeal, communicating to outsiders that its members stood on the same playing field as elite men. When the Lyceum Club’s management sought to re-create the success of the London clubhouse in Berlin, they fell into the trap of imperialist thinking, failing to see that the aesthetic culture of clubland was not universal but uniquely English. They were also unlucky in their timing, for the Potsdamer Strasse clubhouse made its debut in the middle of a widespread debate in Germany on luxury. As historian Warren Breckman points out, this discourse ignored the aristocracy, focusing instead on the corrupting effects of luxury consumption on middle-class identity. Bourgeois authors, writing for a middle-class audience, contrasted the parvenu’s bombastic show of wealth to the bedrock ideals of Germany’s educated middle class: self-restraint and Bildung, or personal cultivation.33 As Wilhelm Bode, the powerful director of Berlin’s royal museums, wrote in 1906, ‘The splendid king Luxus has a philistine face’.34 Bode might well have substituted the term Queen Luxus, for women were often blamed for the descent of the respectable middle class into luxury. Their subservience to foreign tastemakers, particularly to French couture, was especially decried. One can understand why members of the Lyceum Club in Berlin, forging an institution for bourgeois women modelled on elite English clubs, would be sensitive to conspicuous displays of luxury. Being kept in extravagant surroundings and wined and dined by an English master sent exactly the wrong kind of public message about these educated women: it suggested, as Bode argued, that those who lacked Bildung, the true cultivation of the spirit and mind, hid their deficiencies behind the spectacle of their riches.35 Whereas in London, the appearance of luxury, as Smedley noted, concealed the taint of women’s economic poverty, in Berlin it exposed the shaming spiritual poverty of the nouveau-riche mind. In 1906, the Berlin club seceded from the London organization, becoming the German Lyceum Club. In the following years, and culminating in the construction of a new clubhouse, members reclaimed control over their public identity, articulating an image that spoke to their national and class ideals. Soon after the break with London, members abandoned the luxurious clubhouse on Potsdamer Strasse for a stately neoclassical residence that Berlin architect Martin Gropius had designed for his family and offices in 1868. The location on Am Karlsbad, only a block away from the old clubhouse, offered a quieter, more residential environment. Rather than turning away from the bustle of the metropole, however, this choice signified the embrace of an urban heritage that spoke directly to the club’s identity struggles. A follower of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gropius made his mark with projects that combined restrained classicism with local brick traditions in the search for ideal Prussian form. He found receptive patrons among the city’s well-to-do bourgeoisie, for whom his domestic architecture struck the right chord of enduring cultivation in the face of increasing prosperity.36 By taking up residence in Gropius’s former home, the club donned the mantle of an architect whose nativist principles represented a kind of antithesis to grandiose, Piccadillystyle clubhouses.

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The continuing reliance on a domestic model for the clubhouse did not in itself distinguish women’s from men’s clubs. As noted earlier, gentlemen’s clubs in London drew on domestic architecture to suggest privacy and a retreat from the city’s social heterogeneity. The earliest and most prestigious clubs, such as Brooks’s and Boodle’s, adopted the eighteenth-century aristocratic country mansion as the model for their clubhouses.37 Along with this house type came associated formalities (such as evening dress for dinner), decoration reflective of aristocratic tastes (‘hippophilic’, according to a club historian) and a large staff of servants in black kneebreeches.38 At the Lyceum Club in Berlin, a good deal of that legacy had been retained, down to the butler.39 After declaring its independence, the club increasingly looked to another, more meaningful model of domesticity for its premises. In late eighteenth-century Berlin, a new institution of the Enlightenment public sphere arose in the homes of the educated middle class: the salon. Hosted by a woman, these weekly gatherings united people from different classes, genders and religious backgrounds for free intellectual and cultural exchange in a relaxed, informal environment.40 What better model for the Lyceum Club, which promoted itself as a forum for the mutual cultivation of women? The informal sociability of the club interiors, designed to foster conversation, recalled the settings of these older salons. Thus, the dwelling of the salonnière took precedence over that of the English country squire as the architectural setting for a new community of modern women.

German design reform and the creation of a new clubhouse on Lützowplatz The turn away from aristocratic luxury also bears the mark of the German design reform movement. Hermann Muthesius, one of its leaders, argued for the creation of a national style based on the modest and ‘honest’ tastes of the bourgeois citizen.The hegemony of bourgeois tastes, he believed, would eradicate the use of luxury (whether simulated or real) as a means of asserting class difference.41 In 1914, the Lyceum Club commissioned a new clubhouse that showcased the group’s loyalty to bourgeois ideals of practicality and reticence. The club purchased a nineteenth-century townhouse on Lützowplatz, a square with stately homes close to the zoo and Tiergarten and amply served by trams. The residences of many of Berlin’s leading feminists (and Lyceum Club members) were located in the adjacent streets.42 Emilie Winkelmann, a club member and architect, thoroughly renovated the existing building, expanding the interior space and adding a new fourth floor. She stripped the street facades of neoclassical ornament, leaving strikingly bare surfaces that were highly unusual for the time. Elaborate window casings, floral railings, pilasters and rusticated plaster were removed; plain frames, simple railings and flat plaster took their place. By stripping away rusticated plaster and other ornament, the surface of the walls was made to appear naked and the windows more pronounced, an effect that suggested a more permeable boundary and greater interaction with the outside world than traditionally associated with the hidden, fortified spaces of the home. With almost no decoration to obfuscate its form and with its large apertures, the clubhouse presented an ‘open’ face to the city. A comparison of the renovated exterior to that of its neighbours reveals how ‘modern’ the building would have appeared in this context, even as its size and forms echoed the surrounding domestic architecture. In its height and simple, bold masses, the clubhouse achieved a dynamic monumentality. Critics applauded the lack of ornament, hailing the building as a testament to a ‘sachlich’, or sober, feminine modernity.43 Moreover, this modernism offered an alternative to the modernism of certain members of the artistic avant-garde, who viewed the metropolis through the lens of a

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depraved female sexuality. A comparison of Kirchner’s Potsdamer Platz (see Figure 22.4) with the clubhouse, both created in the same year, reveals how differently progressive Germans understood the role of the feminine in constructing the modern city: whereas Kirchner objectified women and suggested danger and instability in his aesthetic choices, Winkelmann represented female mastery of a bright, rational world. In this juxtaposition, we see how pessimistic and misogynistic strains in the ‘crisis’ of modernity articulated by German artists and intellectuals, who often focused their attention on issues of gender and sexuality in the metropolis, met with resistance from women producing counter narratives that cast female agency and urban life in a far more positive light. Thus, despite drawing on radically different sources, the members of the German Lyceum Club – like those in London – ultimately succeeded in engineering a powerful image of the New Woman through their clubhouse architecture.

New world frontiers: Women’s clubs but no clubhouses in New York City By the late 1920s, the International Association of Lyceum Clubs had established 28 sister clubs in 13 countries and on three continents, reaching from London to as far as China and Australia.44 Intriguingly, the chapter envisioned from the beginning for New York City never materialized, despite efforts by Smedley and American club members. With the loss of the association’s records, it is impossible to know why they failed. A brief look at the situation of women’s clubhouses in New York, however, allows us to speculate. There was certainly no dearth of interest in women’s clubs among New Yorkers; by the end of the nineteenth century, the New York Times claimed that New York – with an estimated 800 women’s clubs – had more active clubwomen than any other city in the world. What it lacked were women’s clubhouses, an absence so conspicuous in relation to other American cities that it attracted the attention of journalists. In 1893, this situation seemed about to change: the New York United Clubs Building Company proposed a giant clubhouse, 14 stories high, that would shelter the city’s women’s clubs ‘under one splendid roof ’. The design imitated the massive Renaissance palazzo style of men’s clubs, ‘symbolic of the autocratic power of their members’.45 The lavish interior was based on famous historic rooms: a banquet hall, for example, was designed after the ducal palace in Genoa. Meeting rooms, as well as a shared theatre, library and museum, served the clubs’ functional needs. A gymnasium, pool and Turkish baths promised to keep members fit. Finally, the building would contain shops and work spaces for members. A board of 100 women would oversee the building’s management.46 Recalling the novel Martin Dressler, the giant clubhouse represented a mini-city for women in the heart of New York.47 This elaborate scheme required a membership of 10,000 women to make it profitable. A meeting between the company and clubwomen revealed strong support for the project. Larger women’s clubs in particular called for an alternative to the disagreeable public nature and ­inadequate facilities of hotels.48 Although hailed as a brilliant solution, the idea of the giant clubhouse was short lived, undoubtedly because of the financial risk and complexity of the undertaking. By the turn of the century, nothing had changed. A columnist for the NewYork Times jealously considered the clubhouses ‘springing up like mushrooms’ in other American cities – among them a clubhouse for women in Denison,Texas funded by Andrew Carnegie – and asked, ‘What is the matter with New York?’The columnist harshly criticized Carnegie for not supporting the construction of a local clubhouse, suggesting that he preferred to ‘peep’ at clubwomen who met in Carnegie Hall. ‘Why’, complained the writer, ‘must New York come in second in so many things? Why can’t she have a woman’s clubhouse?’49 292

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The failure of the Lyceum Club and the founding of the Colony Club Given this broader context, the Lyceum Club, with its focus on clubhouses, would seem ideally poised to meet the needs of New York clubwomen hungry for a building of their own. Efforts to start a transatlantic chapter began as soon as the London clubhouse opened. Women from New York who enjoyed the hospitality of the club while in London were eager for similar facilities at home.50 Smedley planned to travel to New York in 1905 to help launch the club but cancelled for health reasons.51 When a women’s clubhouse was finally erected in New York in 1907, it was not by her. The Colony Club, founded by elite women such as Mrs. John Astor and Mrs. Payne Whitney, sought to replicate the luxurious comforts enjoyed by members of New York’s oldest and most prestigious men’s clubs. High fees ensured its social exclusivity.The clubhouse, located at Madison Avenue and Thirtieth Street, was designed by Stanford White, who rejected the palazzo style of men’s clubs in favour of the pretty grace of a southern antebellum home.52 The much acclaimed interiors by Elsie de Wolfe launched her career as a decorator. A New York Times article placed the creation of the clubhouse in an international context, comparing it to women’s clubs in London and Paris, while also asserting that – unlike these others – it did not harbour feminists.53 Why did the Colony Club succeed where the Lyceum Club did not? Wealth seems an obvious answer. Perhaps the Lyceum Club failed to find the financial backers needed to build a clubhouse for radically minded middle-class women. I rather doubt this and believe we should look instead to spatial habits and resources. In her memoirs, Smedley argued that Americans had access to a greater range of resources than their European sisters, which meant there was less need for a centre.54 Had a clubhouse truly been urgent, one would expect that the 800 or so existing women’s clubs would have found the means to build one. Its absence suggests that women used other methods to claim space in accordance with New York’s own urban culture. The work of historian Maureen Montgomery points, in particular, to the empowering function of commercial enterprises.55

Conclusion: Situating the local within the transnational Ultimately, local factors determined how women played out their roles as urban builders. To ignore broader connections and influences, however, is to lose sight of how women responded to ideas and challenges that began far from home. In constructing their identities as urban citizens, women looked to other places in order to better define their own landscapes of possibility. By tracing such interactions, the local picture grows sharper, and we gain a deeper understanding of what made being a modern woman in New York different from being a modern woman in London or Berlin. At the fin-de-siècle, the clubhouse stood as a symbol and locus of a broad movement of new women who, in exploring the limits and potential of their modernity, understood its intimate connection to the physical structures of their city. For that reason, too, an idea that began in London required a process of naturalization to take root in Berlin or elsewhere, for the struggle to take space that united women internationally could be won only at street level.

Notes   1 See, for example, Erika Diane Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Maureen A. Flanagan, ­Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); and Elizabeth York Enstam, Women and the Creation of Urban Life: Dallas, Texas, 1843–1920 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998).

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Despina Stratigakos   2 Despina Stratigakos, A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). The second chapter of the book, ‘From Piccadilly to Potsdamer Strasse: The politics of clubhouse architecture,’ analyses in greater depth the issues of mistranslation discussed in this essay, focusing on the London and Berlin clubhouses.  3 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 92–93; Karen J. Blair, The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914 (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 70–1.  4 Spectator [Leopold Katscher], Berliner Klubs, vol. 25, Die Grossstadt Dokumente, ed. Hans Ostwald (Berlin: Seemann, 1906), 61–2.   5 Richard Barry, ‘The tea rooms, where society and business meet: Where the women from one field reach up, and from the other down, groping toward each other – the drinking and the intrigue – the froth and the earnest purpose’, New York Times, 1 December 1912.   6 Eliza Lynn Linton, The New Woman in Haste and at Leisure (New York: Merrian, 1895), 52; quoted in Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 92.  7 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 85.   8 Constance Smedley, Crusaders (London: Duckworth, 1929), 54–6.   9 Ibid., 94, 68–9. 10 Ibid., 59, 67, 70. 11 ‘A new club for women workers: Opening of “The Lyceum”,’ The Sketch (29 June 1904): 382. 12 Smedley, Crusaders, 61. 13 ‘A new club for women workers,’ The Sketch, 382; ‘Women’s club in London,’ New York Times, 26 June 1904. 14 On this point, see Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, clubbability, and the colonial public sphere:The genealogy of an imperial institution in colonial India,’ The Journal of British Studies 40:4 (2001): 520. 15 ‘E. M. E.’, ‘What the Lyceum Club is doing,’ Queen:The Lady’s Newspaper 116 (1904): 539. 16 Smedley, Crusaders, 79–80. 17 Reprinted in Ibid., 91. 18 ‘E. M. E.’, ‘What the Lyceum Club is doing,’ 539. 19 Ralph Nevill, London Clubs:Their History and Treasures (London: Chatto and Windus, 1911), 135–6. 20 Jane Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 63, 66–71. 21 Smedley, Crusaders, 73. 22 ‘A New Club for Women Workers,’ 382. 23 Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure, 86. 24 Dora D’Espaigne, ‘The Lyceum Club for ladies,’ Lady’s Realm 16 (1904): 602. 25 Rendell, The Pursuit of Pleasure, 74. 26 Smedley, Crusaders, 55, 58; Marie von Bunsen, ‘Einiges über den Lyceum-Club,’ Lyceum-Club Berlin (Berlin: Lyceum Club Berlin, 1905), 7. 27 Albertine Maier-Dependorf, ‘Constance Smedley,’ in Lyceum Club (Hamburg: Association Internationale des Lyceum Clubs, 1986), 15. On the European social clubs, see Sinha, ‘Britishness, clubbability, and the colonial public sphere,’ 489–521. 28 ‘Women’s club in London,’ New York Times. 29 Berlin und die Berliner: Leute, Dinge, Sitten,Winke (Karlsruhe: Bielefelds, 1905), 252. 30 ‘Im Lyzeumklub,’ Berliner Tageblatt, no. 565, 5 November 1905. 31 Jarno Jessen [Anna Michaelson], ‘Der Lyceumklub,’ Daheim 42, 41 (1905): 23. 32 Werner Glinga, Legacy of Empire: A Journey Through British Society, trans. Stephan Paul Jost (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 7. 33 Warren G. Breckman, ‘Disciplining consumption: The debate about luxury in Wilhelmine Germany, 1890–1914,’ Journal of Social History 24:3 (1991): 485–505. 34 Wilhelm Bode, ‘Vom Luxus,’ Der Kunstwart 19, no. 22 (1906): 493; quoted and translated in Breckman, ‘Disciplining consumption,’ 488. 35 Breckman, ‘Disciplining consumption,’ 489. 36 Manfred Klinkott, ‘Martin Gropius und die Berliner Schule’ (doctoral dissertation,Technical University Berlin, 1971), 98. 37 Glinka, Legacy of Empire, 7. 38 Anthony Lejeune, The Gentlemen’s Clubs of London (New York: Mayflower, 1979), 59. 39 Luise Marelle, Die Geschichte des Deutschen Lyceum-Clubs (Berlin: Deutscher Lyceum-Club, 1933), 11.

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Architectural Language and Mistranslations 40 James Van Horn Melton, The Rise of the Public in Enlightenment Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2001), 219–23; Petra Wilhelmy-Dollinger, Die Berliner Salons: mit historisch-literarischen Spaziergängen (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000). 41 Frederic J. Schwartz, The Werkbund: Design Theory and Mass Culture before the First World War (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1996), 39–43. 42 ‘Orte der Mütterlichkeit: Tiergartenviertel,’ in Immer den Frauen nach! Spaziergang am Landwehrkanal zur Berliner Frauengeschichte, ed. Cornelia Carstens and Margret Luikenga (Berlin: Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt, 1993), 130–4. 43 Jarno Jessen [Anna Michaelson], ‘Der Deutsche Lyzeumklub und seine bildenden Künstlerinnen,’ ­Westermanns Monatshefte 120, no. 716 (1916): 165. 44 Smedley, Crusaders, 132. 45 Alfred Allan Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women (New York:Viking, 2000), 210. 46 ‘A building for women’s clubs,’ New York Times, May 3, 1896. 47 Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler: the Tale of an American Dreamer (New York: Crown, 1996). 48 ‘A building for women’s clubs’. 49 ‘Women here and there – their frills and fancies,’ New York Times, 5 November 1899. 50 Jane S. Smith, Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in High Style (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 102. 51 ‘The Lyceum Club of London,’ The Critic 46, no. 2 (1905): 137; M. R. C., ‘Club life among English women – similar work planned here,’ New York Times, January 28, 1906; Smedley, Crusaders, 191. 52 Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women, 210. 53 ‘Pioneer women’s club ready to build home: The colony the first to have a clubhouse in New York,’ New York Times, 26 February 1905. 54 Smedley, Crusaders, 73. 55 Maureen Montgomery, Displaying Women: Spectacles of Leisure in Edith Wharton’s New York (New York: Routledge, 1998).

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23 Shoes and the City Shoes and Their Sphere of Influence in Early America, 1740–1789 Kimberly Alexander

Behind me in the pit sat a young fop who continually put his foot on my bench in order to show off the flashy stone buckles on his shoes; if I didn’t make way for his precious buckles he put his foot on my coat-tails.1 Throughout history, it seems, footwear has exerted a surprisingly strong pull on wearers and observers. Shoes, like art, have the power to inspire, excite and, as we see in the passage above, to repel. And, with a dozen or more new titles available at any given moment, one must muse – why shoes? This chapter will examine three aspects of shoes in Georgian towns and cities (1740–1789): first, access to and acquisition of shoes; second, how and where shoes were worn ‘on display’; and third, the politicization of footwear through the era of the American Revolution. We begin with an analysis of consumers who had access to the latest fashions and proceed to an analysis of public display, as British American women in growing urban centres such as Boston, New York, Philadelphia and Charleston used shoes to fashion an identity. 2 We conclude with the process of shoes

Figure 23.1  Woman’s silk shoes, England, c. 1700–1715. Silver lace, metal sequins, silk satin, leather. Courtesy of Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Costume Council Fund (M.64.85.7a–b).

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becoming politicized via newsprint. In addition, we will ponder what it meant for several British American ‘women of quality’ who appeared in London society before and after the Revolution as representative examples of the power of shoes in the literal self-fashioning of identity. As we delve into an Atlantic world of cosmopolitan fashion, one that carried the elegant ‘fripperies’ and ‘gewgaws’ of modish London to the gentle folk of provincial British America, we recover a forgotten history. One can chart the journey of genteel footwear from London’s select shops to the bustling seaports, the nascent cities of early America in the days of the Georgian kings (1714–1820). By examining the domestic and public spaces where these accessories were worn, it is possible to decode some elements of the ever more rapidly changing politics of fashion from 1740 to 1789 – from continuing British traditions to the rejection (in some quarters) of British fashion and, finally, to the process of fashioning shoes from American materials for American consumption.3 Through Anglicization, revolutionary rejection and republican sensibility, Americans were aware, as Massachusetts politician Fisher Ames observed in 1800, that cultured Europeans viewed them as backward provincials. Their responses can be traced in cultural forums that ranged from teas to dances to poetry readings and weddings, in public spaces and private spaces. The ­stylish shoes worn in these contexts, connecting British Americans to their ‘home’, were proof of cultural legitimacy and signified to observers that those who wore them were as genteel and civilized as those in the cultural capitals of London and Paris. It is as if their fashions were shouting, ‘We are just as good as you are’. Shoes were long acknowledged as important to the success of colonial ‘planting’. We might take it for granted today, but ‘sensible shoes’ were essential for the founders of the American colonies in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In the fledgling colony of Virginia, none other than Captain John Smith revealed as much. In his Generall Historie of Virginia (1624), Smith described the importance of shoes in settling the wilderness: for want of Shooes among the Oyster Banks wee tore our hatts and Clothes and those being worne, wee tied the Barkes of trees about our Feete to keepe them from being Cutt by the shelles amongst which we must goe or starve, yett how many thousand of Shooes hath been transported to these plantations… As Smith tells it, he could not have trekked through a ‘howling wilderness’ of forest trails and soggy swamps without rugged footwear. Likewise, for later families of settlers, for whom horses were rare, good shoes eased the discomforts of travel along rough paths, primitive roads and even the few pocked and muddied ‘streets’ were that were commonplace in the colonies. Indeed, without a rudimentary shoemaking industry, the colonies would not have survived.4 Smith’s Jamestown settlement seems to have recruited shoemakers, or ‘cordwainers’, as early as 1609. By 1616, surviving accounts tell us that a domestic shoe trade was thriving in Virginia. To the north, Massachusetts Bay Colony made similar efforts to foster a home-grown shoe industry. Soon after the founding of the colony, William Wood offered advice to would-be immigrants in his 1634 guide, New England’s Prospect: ‘Every man likewise must carry over good store of Apparrell...Hats, Bootes, Shooes, good Irish stockings, which if they be good, are much more service-able than knit-ones...[from England].’5 Consequently, New England drew tradesmen who could practice the shoemaker’s trade and accept the rigor of Puritan regulations. By 1635, shoemakers Henry Elwell and Philip Kirkland had settled in Lynn and established the trade for which the ‘shoe city’ would become renowned. Given the activity in shoemaking and tanning in the northern colonies, it is not surprising that the first American guild was that of the ‘Shoomakers of Boston’. Its charter of incorporation was granted by the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay on October 18, 1648.6 297

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By the late seventeenth century, we learn that shoes were the sixth most exported item from London to North America, with a total value of more than £5000. Given the relatively small population of colonial America, this represented substantial revenue.7 As the population grew and inhabitants sought to retain their connections to their home country, located as they were on the periphery of the empire, exports increased. By the 1740s, the aptly termed ‘consumer revolution’ described by T. H. Breen was well underway. The number of British merchants or factors in the colonies was abundant. Indeed, Benjamin Carp has noted that by the 1760s, the influx of British factors into Boston threatened to crowd out local merchants. Then, as now, clothes formed the permeable boundary between who we are and who we imagine ourselves to be.Through the lives and letters of clever apprentices, skilled ­cordwainers, wealthy merchants and elegant brides, this chapter explores the production and dissemination of shoes through bustling London streets, ship cargo holds, New England shops and, ultimately, to the wardrobes of eager consumers. It describes, also, the places and spaces where shoes were worn and discussed: the rugged Maine frontier in the 1740s, where an aspiring lady promenaded in her London-made silk brocade pumps; Philadelphia in 1775, as John Hancock presides over the Second Continental Congress and sends his fiancée shoes and stockings as gifts, possibly for their upcoming wedding; and Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1789, to peer in on newlywed Sally Brewster Gerrish, who is accompanying President George Washington to dance at the Assembly, clad in her London-made silk brocade shoes, during his first presidential tour.

Access, acquisition and the act of purchase In 1786, Sophie Von Roche, a minor German aristocrat, traveller and writer, who was then touring England, turned her thoughts to the temptations of London window-shopping. She mused: ‘now large shoe and slipper shops for anything from adults down to dolls can be seen...Behind great glass windows absolutely everything one can think of is neatly, attractively displayed, and in such abundance of choice as almost to make one greedy’.8 While a very few Americans actually made trips to London to shop during this period, those who were in London availed themselves of its shops. Thus, in a letter from March 1770, Courtney Norton of Yorktown writes from London to John Hatley Norton, noting that ‘Mrs. Hatley has been in London buying wedding clothes for daughter who marries Captain Woleston’.9 As noted by scholar Georgio Riello, ‘The act of acquiring a pair of shoes is not only distributive in nature but also defines the product in relation to specific customers’ needs. Shoe retailing therefore involves both a possibility for the customer to try on and the possibility for the seller to display.’10 This is a scenario only possible in an urban setting. As Gary Nash observes, the colonial seaports were able to provide regional customers with just such an experience, albeit on a much smaller scale than that of European market towns and cities. In rural areas, the selection was smaller and based on personal interactions with the local shoemaker for much of the eighteenth century. Whether Boston women made their purchases at the shop of the colourful proprietor Hopestil Capen at Cornfields or from the beleaguered Henrietta Marie East Caine’s millinery shop, ‘at the sign of the fann’, or from Rebecca Steele or George House in Philadelphia, there were certain similarities between available merchandise, just in on ‘the latest ships from London’.11 One revealing piece of evidence comes from the journal of Elizabeth Sandwith, a wealthy young Philadelphia Quaker, who described her daily routine in entries from 1757 and into the early years of the nineteenth century. Throughout the journal, Sandwith captured the burgeoning concept of ‘shopping’. For instance, she recorded on 27 April 1759 that she ‘went in the 298

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afternoon with M. Parr to M. Burrows and Rebecca Steele, and several other shops; she came home and drink tea with us.’ On 13 July, she went to ‘R. Steele to buy silk.’ Several elements are of interest in Sandwith’s notations. First, on her shopping trip, a friend or perhaps a family member, M. Parr, accompanied Sandwith to several ‘shops’. Secondly, although the terminology associated with contemporary shopping had not yet been developed – Sandwith and her contemporaries did not employ modern terms such as ‘shopping trip’ – shopping as an experience, characterized by convention and even ritual, marked the growth of urban centres.12 Indeed, urban seaports attracted immigrants from the countryside in part because they were places in which fashionable and even exotic goods, imported from the great overseas entrepôts from Europe, met consumers who were hungry for wares that would distinguish their imagined identities. Shopping opportunities became one of the attractions of a colonial town. Finally, the passage also reveals the several channels through which clothing, shoes and accessories could be acquired in the colonies before the Revolution. Sandwith was engaged in both domestic production and local consumption, completing hand-sewn items at home and shopping for more expensive goods such as silk from the shop of Rebecca Steele. Historians recognize Steele as a savvy, no-nonsense businesswoman who sold tea to, among others, George Washington’s ­aide-de-camp.13 As a measure of the sophisticated nature of urban shopping by the 1750s, we find early indications of branding by English shoemakers such as John Hose, Davis & Ridout and William Chamberlain. Reciprocally, there is some suggestion that British American consumers were aware of these names and that a London label distinguished an elegant, fashionable pair of shoes from ordinary footwear. Then, as now, certain shoes appear to have found favour (or at least were more readily available to consumers) in the shops of Boston, New York and Philadelphia. Examples of shoemakers who show up repeatedly in North American collections, in addition to Hose, Ridout & Davis and Chamberlain, include Bragg & Luckin, John Didsbury, John Gresham and Hoppe.These craftsmen labelled their shoes with paper labels affixed to the footbed of their products.14 What did it mean to a British American woman who wore these London-made shoes? This is difficult for the modern historian to discern, as wearers appear to have been generally silent on the subject. A colonial consumer, no doubt, had numerous reasons for spending more for a name-brand, London-made pair of shoes. The product could signify her as a savvy, sophisticated aesthete; as a member of the privileged elite; or as a shopper attuned to the latest fashions (as Abigail Adams will reveal later in this essay). For the ‘middling sorts’ who could purchase second-hand shoes that had been cleaned up and perhaps sent in bulk from London, Bristol or Dublin, imported footwear was a marker of success as they attempted to ascend a colonial social hierarchy.

Shoes on display A 1754 excerpt from ‘A Satire on Women’s Dress’ (published in London and reprinted in the Boston Evening Post) captures the mood of many readers regarding the perceived excesses of women’s fashion: Let your gown be a Sack, blue, yellow or green, and frizzle your elbows with ruffles furl off your lawn aprons with flounces in rows puff and pucker up knots on your arms and your toes make your petticoat short that a hoop eight yards wide may decently show how your garters are tyed with fringes of knoting, your Dicky cabob on slippers of velvet, set gold A’– la-baube 299

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The aspersions cast on shoes are of equal interest: but mount on French heels when you go to a Ball ’Tis the fashion to totter and shew you can fall throw modesty out from your Manners and Face A-la-mode de Francois, you’re a bit for his Grace.15 The cautionary note that this satire intended for the cautious reader was to avoid shoes of foreign make (in this case, French), as these could easily bring public disgrace. As the year 1754 marked the beginning of the French and Indian War (the Seven Years War in Europe), the warning likely resonated with British Americans. Shoes would have occupied a special role in public display at special events, such as one’s wedding, but also at teas, public fetes, dances or visiting – an especially popular pastime in the southern colonies, according to South Carolina’s Eliza Pinckney. Entertainment such as Susanna Rowson’s play The Slave of Algiers (1793), performed at Boston’s Federal Street Theatre; or Mercy Otis Warren’s farce The Motley Assembly (1779) provided other venues for showing off one’s elegant footwear.16 Even church attendance could be an opportunity for display. Members of Boston’s merchant elite, such as Rebecca Tailer Byles, who wed in Boston in 1747, were clearly in step with the latest fashions coming from London, evidenced in Tailer Byles’ stylish deep green, luxurious silk damask gown with matching shoes.17 Boston was not an available venue for the Hancocks’s wedding following the Battles of Lexington, Concord and Bunker Hill, although the shoes that are thought to have been Dorothy Quincy’s wedding footwear survive at The Bostonian Society. Her 28 August 1775 wedding to John Hancock, then president of the Continental Congress, had been moved from Boston to Thaddeus Burr’s estate in Fairfield, Connecticut, distant enough from the presence of British troops to avoid any danger to the patriot leader. According to family tradition and based on the style of the shoes, it is quite possible that she wore delicate London-made, cream silk, low-heeled shoes. While we do not, at present, have letters from those in attendance remarking on the attire of the bride or groom, one can speculate that these semi-public events were places where guests discussed just such things and brought ideas back home or penned descriptive letters. Fortunately, a few such letters have survived, including as one reportedly authored by Charlotte Chamberlain of New Kent County, describing the nuptials of Martha Custis and George Washington on 6 January 1759. Chamberlain sent her letter to Lady Frances Shelbourne in London:  The greatest social event that has ever taken place in our colony, occurred some three months ago, being the wedding of our mutual friend Mrs. Dandridge’s daughter, Mrs. Martha Custis to Colonel George Washington. The wedding was a splendid affair, conducted after the old English style that prevailed among wealthy planters. Military and civil officers with their wives graced the occasion. Ladies appeared in the costliest brocades, laces and jewels which the old world could provide. The bride was arrayed in the height of English fashion, her wealth of charms a fit accompaniment to the manly beauty of the bridegroom, who stood six feet three inches in his shoes. The tallest and handsomest man of the Old Dominion...I know you have heard his name often mentioned in England, and will be interested in him so [I] will tell you more particularly of the life of this young man to whom we give a kind of hero worship.18 Martha would have appeared on her wedding day much as she does in the famous portrait of 1757 by John Wollaston. Her wedding dress was fashioned of yellow gold silk, trimmed with 300

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lace. Beneath her gown, she wore a white silk petticoat stitched with silver threads. Observers reported that Martha also laced pearls through her hair for the occasion. Her unlabelled, London-made shoes featured purple satin uppers encrusted in silver metallic lace and the spangles that were popular at the time. A French heel and a strip of silk lining the underside of the tongue accentuated Martha’s fashionable footwear. No doubt the shoes were a more vibrant purple when she wore them for her nuptials, but, prior to the invention of chemical or aniline dyes a century later, natural purple dyes were very prone to fading when exposed to light. Chamberlain’s letter offers insight into how information about fashion was spread – even from the colonies back to Britain, thus revealing the importance of current fashion in presenting the colonial world as a civilized space. After the wedding, the streets of Williamsburg were no doubt abuzz as the newlyweds spent their wedding trip in Virginia’s capitol, allowing ample time for the citizenry to observe and compare notes on the gracious bearing and fashionable ensembles of this eighteenth-century power couple.19 In the collection of the Portsmouth Historical Society in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, we find another pair of special occasion shoes that reveal a trans-Atlantic connection. ­Throughout the eighteenth century, Portsmouth was an important secondary seaport and urban centre, exchanging the lumber and produce of the Piscataqua River for the manufactured wares of Great Britain. Although not as prominent as neighbouring Boston or the rapidly growing towns of New York or Philadelphia, the modest port served as a locus of cosmopolitan consumption for northern New England. A story survives, captured in the silk satin shoes worn by Patty Rogers to a dance in neighbouring Exeter in the 1780s. Here, again, the label offers a clue to their provenance and their journey. It reads: ‘Chamberlain & Sons, London’. These delicate shoes probably belonged to Martha (Patty) Rogers (1762–1840), youngest daughter of the Revd

Figure 23.2  Woman’s shoes, silk satin with wood heel, possibly worn by Patty Rogers, c. 1780s. Maker, Chamberlain and Sons, Cheapside, London. Photo © Kimberly Alexander. Courtesy of Portsmouth Historical Society, Gift of Mrs Albert Remick, accession no. 593.

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­ aniel Rogers of Exeter, and were likely procured in Portsmouth. They would have been worn D with buckles to attach them to the foot. In a recent discovery, it appears that a pale salmon-hued wallet may have gone with the shoes. In the small silk damask wallet, curator Sandra Rux discovered a note asking Miss Rogers to a dance, most likely an exclusive event for area elite. Tucked into the wallet was a carefully folded message, resembling an origami tulip – a love fold. In it, Mr Parker asks Miss Patty Rogers to dance with him at a gathering in Exeter. Although not dated, it is probably from the mid-1780s – contemporary with the shoes. The cleverly folded small note reads, ‘____ Parkers compliments to Miss Rogers Would be glad to wait on her this evening to dance at Capt True Gilman’s Friday 10 Oclock’. Beginning at 10:00 pm, it was clearly a fashionable gathering. Although we do not know what dances were undertaken that evening, the couple may have danced a minuet, a country dance or the newly embraced cotillion. Prints of such galas reveal that many young women wore their dresses well above the ankle, permitting them to reveal not only their footwork but also their stylish footwear. Captain Trueworthy Gilman (b. 1738) lived in Exeter, and Nathaniel Parker (1760–1812) was the likely author. The end to this story may

Figure 23.3  Woman’s shoes, detail of paper label affixed to footbed, ‘Chamberlain & Sons Shoemakers in Cheapside London’. Silk satin with wood heel, possibly worn by Patty Rogers, c. 1780s. Photo © Kimberly Alexander. Courtesy of Portsmouth Historical Society, Gift of Mrs Albert Remick, accession no. 593.

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not have been a happy one for Miss Rogers: Nathaniel Parker later married Catherine Tilton, while Miss Rogers never wed.20 However, the London shoes place us at an actual event in a known place, worn by a young woman who most likely danced at least one dance with Nathaniel Parker. Such is the power of footwear to add depth and specificity to otherwise unremarked or forgotten events in towns and small cities throughout the colonies. While we cannot know what Miss Rogers was thinking that evening, we can speculate that she put on her best ensemble, including stockings, shoes and shoe buckles. This is also of considerable interest as Chamberlain was an apprentice to the well-established London shoemaker John Hose, and the survival of many pairs of shoes provides an opportunity to observe how Hose’s apprentices made out in the world. Then a cordwainer in his own right, William Chamberlain was likely competing for the same clients as John’s son, Thomas, who he had probably known for some time. This opens an interesting historical question as well. How was Patty Rogers able to procure London-made wares during the War for Independence? What was the connection between Revolutionary-era urban centres like Portsmouth and London? Although not a large city or even a large town by European standards, Exeter, New Hampshire, was a significant New England town, boasting wealth and prestigious residents, vying with neighbouring Portsmouth some 12 miles distant for the honour of holding New Hampshire’s seat of government. Another example of urban consumption revolves around the visit of President George Washington to Portsmouth in October/November 1789. Washington stayed at Brewster’s tavern while at the seacoast town. Sally Brewster Gerrish was the tavern owner’s daughter and a recent newlywed. According to family tradition, Mrs Gerrish accompanied Washington via carriage to the local assembly hall where a dinner and dance were held in his honour. In his diary for Tuesday, 3 November 1789, Washington recorded: At half after Seven I went to the Assembly where there were about 75 well dressed, and many of them very handsome Ladies – among whom (as was also the case at the Salem & Boston Assemblies) were a greater proportion with much blacker hair than are usually seen in the Southern States. About 9 I returned to my Quarters.21 Throughout the late colonial era, assembly halls could be found in urban centres such as Boston, Newburyport, Portsmouth and Salem, to name just a few representative sites. They were popular locations for large gatherings, frequently dances. As noted by ‘A Lady of Distinction’ in her Mirror of Graces from 1811, the importance of a ball or dance to highlight a lady’s grace, carriage and dress cannot be overstated. The author noted: As dancing is the accomplishment most calculated to display a fine form, elegant taste, and graceful carriage to advantage, so towards it our regards must be particularly turned: and we shall find that when Beauty in all her power is to be set forth, she ­cannot choose a more effective exhibition.22 Dances were exceedingly popular social events that enabled young ladies and gentlemen to become acquainted safely, with a bit of distance and under supervision.23 Although there was little necessity for most British American women to invest in the most stylish and expensive shoes – those which were reserved for presentation at the courts of ­European royalty – there are several intriguing examples of colonial women who spent time in London and who were presented at the Court of St James. Eliza Lucas Pinckney of South Carolina was in London from 1753 to 1758; Elizabeth Bull of Boston spent from 1754 until 303

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her death in England; and Abigail Adams was in London and Paris from 1784 through 1788. All were presented at court, and in the case of Adams, spent time in the sphere of the monarchy and parliament. As a teenager, Eliza Pinckney had lived in London as part of her education and still retained friends there after her return to South Carolina. We know from her correspondence that she was a fan of the actor David Garrick; that she spent an afternoon with the Dowager Princess Augusta and the royal family at Kew, and exchanged gifts; and that at some point she may have purchased shoes from Thomas Hose (although they could just as easily have been purchased for her while in South Carolina).24 We know little about Bostonian Elizabeth Bull’s time in England; however, we have an especially interesting bit of correspondence from Abigail Adams that sheds light on American expatriates’ urban consumption patterns.25 Adams seems to have taken advantage of her proximity to the elite shops of Europe’s urban centres. A revealing letter penned in 1785 – sent from her temporary residence in London to none other than Thomas Jefferson, ambassador to France, who was then residing in Paris – concerns shopping for shoes. At the time, her husband, John, was ambassador to Great Britain and had not yet broken with Jefferson, who remained Abigail’s close confidante and frequent correspondent at the time. What was her request of Thomas Jefferson, then in Paris while she was in London? She prevailed upon the Virginian to purchase French-made shoes for her. Her entreaty is interesting as it shows a side of her that we rarely see, one that is perhaps even a bit coquettish, when she writes: You were so kind sir as to tell me you would execute any little commission for me, and I now take the Liberty of requesting you to let petit go to my paris shoemaker and direct him to make me four pair of silk shoes 2 pr. sattin and two pr. fall silk; I send by Mr. Short the money for them. I am not curious about the colour, only that they be fashonable. I cannot get any made here to suit me, at least I have faild in several attempts. Col. Smith proposes visiting Paris before he returns, and will be so good as to take Charge of them for me.26 Adams’s correspondence with the man who would soon become her husband’s political enemy fascinates us in part because the letters reveal a woman who seems to present two quite different personas. They intrigue us also because her request to Jefferson that the shoes be made ‘fashionable’ suggests priorities that seem to contradict her identity as the simple Yankee matron. She was clearly ordering bespoke, or custom-made, shoes, not ready-made, off-the-shelf footwear. But, here, it is the qualifying constraints that tell us what she was about: she does not care what colour her four pairs of silk shoes should be, whether they should have any additional adornments or embellishments or even if they should have heels – high or low – or be flats. How do we reconcile these contradictions? The key is her observation to Jefferson, a man who understood matters of genteel diplomacy in Europe’s capitals, that she could not receive satisfaction from her own London cordwainer. As Massachusetts politician Fisher Ames would later lament, Until that contest [the War for Independence] a great part of the civilized world had been surprisingly ignorant of the force and character, and almost the existence, of the British colonies...They did not view the colonists so much a people, as a race of fugitives, whom want, solitude, and intermixture with the savages, had made barbarians.27 As the wife of the American ambassador, presenting herself before the royalty and aristocracy of Great Britain, it was essential that Adams appear as genteel and ‘fashionable’. 304

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However, once her stint in Europe was complete, she returned again to her earlier life. In a letter penned in 1794 and sent from the family farm in Braintree to husband John in New York, the capital of the young country, Adams presents herself, chameleon-like, as the frugal Yankee goodwife, counting pennies and bearing an account to her husband that the only expenditure she had made that winter was for a pair of shoes for herself. These were most likely made in New England.28 Indeed, in this respect, she was similar to male contemporaries such as Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, who sought ‘refuge’ from the growing towns and cities on their farms and their land. Much had changed in the affairs of her country and in her station. The United Colonies were now a new nation, virtually the world’s sole republic, and she was the wife of the vice president, second in importance only to George Washington, reputedly the most famous man in the world. And, yet, the question haunting the new nation remained one of identity. ‘What then is the American, this new man?’ asked that typical American, Jean ­Guilliame Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur. Would Americans seek to imitate the opulent courts of Europe? Or would they remain true to the republican principles that had fuelled the Revolution? For Abigail and John Adams, how they presented themselves and their choice of clothing and footwear said as much as about the values of the new people as what they wrote and how they behaved.29 Over this 15-year time period, the vicissitudes of Adams’s middle years were reflected in something seemingly as mundane as her shoes. Her footwear choices tell us where – to borrow from her own writing – her own shoe pinched and where it stretched. In fact, the buttercream yellow leather shoes that she donned in the 1790s have survived, and we can view them in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution. The flats feature a blue stylized neoclassical symbol.30 They were lined with linen, and inside, affixed to the footbed, is a label revealing that the shoes were made in London – not in America nor in France. They were manufactured by a popular London shoemaker, Hoppe and Heath.

Conclusion Combining both acquisition and display is the most significant role played by colonial footwear: that of the politicized shoe. Lest we question the important political associations and implications connected with wearing the ‘correct’ shoes, we need only turn to colonial newspapers. The moral problem of luxury goods became a political threat when George III and parliament sought to squeeze more revenue out of provincial taxpayers to pay for the Seven Years War. In the 1760s, as British American colonists mounted resistance to Parliament’s ‘innovations’ – increased taxes and regulation – goods imported from England, including shoes, became a political issue. London merchants and artisans became a target for propagandists who vocally promoted the ‘virtue’ of homespun and local manufacture as a means of liberating Americans from Britain’s mercantilist hold. In colonial newspapers and pamphlets, some merchants were vilified as examples of purveyors of the frippery and finery that American consumers should boycott in favour of products made in the colonies.

Figure 23.4  Advertisement for London sale goods in the shop of George House, Chestnut Street, 1741. From The American Weekly Mercury [Philadelphia, PA], 19 November 1741, 4.

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By the mid-1760s, the verbal barrage between excess and luxury versus American values reached a fevered pitch. The contest was being played out in many venues, including the newspapers serving the large seaport towns. In the wealthy shipping town of Newport, Rhode Island, the Newport Mercury, on 20 August 1764, published the opinions of one opponent (whose page one letter was signed simply ‘O. Z’.) who directly criticized the London cordwainer John Hose, observing that ‘great Virtue may even be exerted by the Ladies in taking the snuff of Rhode-Island, or preferring the well-turn’d Shoes of Hall and others in Newport, to those of John Hose of London, only made for Lump sale, or as the Tradesmen phrase it, for the Plantations’.31 Colonial ladies were encouraged to set a good example and eschew such luxury items. In response to ‘O. Z.’, a ‘matron’ who styled herself ‘Sophia Thrifty’, urged women of the colonies who represented ‘mothers and mistresses of families, and know that our husbands and sons must prosper or decline, with our flourishing or sinking country’. She chastised the ‘darling appurtenances’, ‘gaudy plumes’ and ‘modish expenses’ that took trade away from the country’s shopkeepers and craftsmen, who daily faced ‘the difficulty of procuring an estate or even providing for a large family’. Against such luxury, she extolled those who practiced household economy. Every female patriot and virtuous woman, she thought, must feel pride that ‘any part of her dress has employed the poor of her own country, provided food for the Orphan, or made the widow’s heart leap for joy’. She closed by asking why any American would prefer ‘pampering Mr. HOSE with his army of journey-men’.32 In another striking example of the politicization of shoes is an account of an incident during the height of the town’s non-importation picketing in February 1770. Isaac Vibird defended his wife Mary from the charge of buying tea from a Boston importer by publicly offering to swear that she had gone into Mr. Jackson’s shop only to pick up ‘a Number of Shoes from Lynn’.33 Historians are well aware that Europeans and their provincial counterparts choreographed their presence in public spaces to represent their sense of identity, whether personal, local or national. Often left out of their interpretations has been the signifying role of material culture and of shoes in particular. For British American colonists of the eighteenth century such as Eliza Pinckney and Dorothy Hancock, fashion was a function of social status, regional loyalty and political culture, and its display in urban places and spaces enabled them to mark the coordinates of self. At court in London or a dance in Charleston, Eliza Pinckney used elegant footwear to signify her gentility, her role as a Southern indigo planter and her feelings about the evolving relationship with the home country. Likewise, Dorothy Hancock’s purchases of London-made shoes, and their wear in Boston at a banquet to celebrate General Washington’s victories, reveal a complicated minuet between genteel personas and revolutionary sentiments. Even the decision to wear Lynn-made silk or woollen shoes over a foreign import had the potential to make a political statement as one walked along a colonial street.

Notes   1 Carl Moritz, at a London theatre, from Journeys of a German in London in 1782, in Richard B. Schwartz, Daily Life in Johnson’s London (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983), 171.   2 For information on the size of colonial towns port towns and their comparison with secondary commercial centres in western Europe, see Gary B. Nash, ‘The web of seaport life’ as excerpted from Major Problems in American Urban and Suburban History, 47. By 1690, Boston had a population of about 6000; New York had by the same time 4500.   The importance of these seaport towns was actually the servicing of large regional populations despite the small numbers in the town borders. It was virtually impossible to be a stranger in a town like Boston, where one could walk from end to end in 30 minutes, as Nash so pithily points out.Your customers or your neighbours and friends or friends of friends and most of the work that was created

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Shoes and the city was for individual clients and customers. Bostonians preferred to crowd onto the end of the peninsula bounded by the waterfront.  3 For information on American shoes and labels, see Linda Baumgarten, What Clothes Reveal: The ­Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012); Kate Haulman, The Politics of Fashion in Eighteenth-Century America (Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Nancy Rexford, Women’s Shoes in America, 1795–1930 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000); Giorgio Riello, A Foot in the Past: Consumers, Producers, and Footwear in the Long Eighteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); D. A. Saguto, M. de Garsault’s 1767 Art of the Shoemaker: An Annotated Translation (Lubbock, TX: Texas Tech University Press, 2009); June Swann, Shoes (London: B.T. ­Batsford, 1983); Jonathan Walford, The Seductive Shoe: Four Centuries of Fashion Footwear (New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2007); Woolley, Linda and Lucy Pratt. Shoes. London:Victoria & Albert Museum, 1999; Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American ­Revolution (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001).   4 The Generall Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles: With the Names of the Adventurers, Planters, and Governours from Their First Beginning, Ano: 1584. To This Present 1624. With the Procedings of Those Severall Colonies and the Accidents That Befell Them in All Their Journyes and Discoveries. Also the Maps and Descriptions of All Those Countryes, Their Commodities, People, Government, Customes, and Religion Yet Knowne. Divided into Sixe Bookes. By Captaine Iohn Smith, Sometymes Governour in Those Countryes & Admirall of New England: Electronic Edition. Smith, John, 1580–1631. University Library, UNC-Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 2006. http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/smith/ smith.html   5 William Wood, New England’s Prospect, 1634, reprint (Boston: Prince Society, 1865), 189.   6 ‘Shoomakers of Boston’ were granted a charter for incorporation by the Colony of the Massachusetts Bay, October 18, 1648.   7 These figures are for 1686. ‘London and the colonial consumer in the late 17th century’ from The Economic History Review, cited in Riello, A Foot in the Past, 105.   8 Sophie Von Roche, Sophie in London, 1786: Being the Diary of Sophie V. la Roche (London: Jonathan Cape, 1933).  9 Cargo Waste Book 1748 to 1749 from Colonial Williamsburg Research Library Francis Jerdone collection. Norton family letters at Colonial Williamsburg 31 March 1769; in a letter from London John Norton to John Hatley Norton, a merchant in Yorktown also mentions sending shoes for Richard ­Taylor.These were left out of Gresham’s package (the shoemaker John Gresham from London). Norton family papers 6 March 1770 Folder 27 10 pieces. 10 Riello, A Foot in the Past 108,109. 11 See Gary B. Nash ‘The web of seaport life’ as excerpted from Major Problems in American Urban and Suburban History. 12 Elizabeth Sandwith letters, as excerpted from Major Problems in American Urban and Suburban History ‘Elizabeth Sandwith, a wealthy young Philadelphian describes her work 1758 to 1760,’ 43. 13 Ibid. 14 For information on American shoes and labels, see Nancy Rexford, Women’s Shoes in America, 1795–1930. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000, and Meaghan Reddick, ‘An American identity: Shoemaker’s labels in Colonial, Revolutionary and Federal America, 1760–1820,’ MA thesis, George Mason University, 2014. Electronic version: http://digilib.gmu.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1920/9054/Reddick_thesis_2014.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y. 15 Excerpt from ‘A satire on women’s dress, 1754,’ in the Boston Evening Post, 4 February 1754. The title of the piece is ‘A receipt for modern dress’ and it was printed in London, 16 October 1753. 16 For information on Susanna Rowson, see ‘Papers of Susanna Rowson, Accession #7379, -a, -b, -c, Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library, Charlottesville,VA’ and http://www.womenhistoryblog.com/2012/04/susanna-rowson.html. 17 Rebecca Tailer Byles’ wedding ensemble is in the collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 18 The letter detailing the wedding of Martha Custis to George Washington has a number of questions surrounding the source, provenance and accuracy. A full account is in the attached link from the Revolutionary Archive: http://www.revolutionarywararchives.org/washington-link/134-georgewashington-and-martha-custis-an-unpublished-letter-on-their-courtship-?tmpl=component&print= 1&page=. 19 Joseph E. Fields, ‘Worthy Partner’: The Papers of Martha Washington (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994). Robert Cary & Company, ‘Invoice, “Sundry Goods for a Bride”,’ Robert Cary & Company to

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Kimberly Alexander George Washington, September 20, 1759,’ in Martha Washington, Item #359, http://­marthawashington. us/items/show/359 (accessed January 27, 2016). 20 Collection of the Portsmouth Historical Society, John Paul Jones House. The author thanks Curator Emerita, Portsmouth Historical Society, Sandra Rux, for sharing her information on the shoes and wallets. The textile is from c. 1750s. A second wallet, which entered the Portsmouth Historical Society at the same time as the shoes and salmon-coloured wallet, is a blue silk brocade from late in the eighteenth century. The wallets were likely fashioned from remnants of earlier garments. 21 George Washington diary entry for Tuesday 3 November 1789. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/ gwhtml/gwhome.html. 22 The Mirror of the Graces; or, the English Lady’s Costume: Combining and Harmonizing Taste and Judgment, ­Elegance and Grace, Modesty, Simplicity and Economy, with Fashion in Dress (London: B. Crosby and Co., 1811). 23 Ibid. 24 Eliza Lucas Pinckney to unidentified person, [1753], in The Papers of Eliza Lucas Pinckney and H ­ arriott Pinckney Horry Digital Edition, ed. Constance Schulz. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, Rotunda, 2012. http://rotunda.upress.virginia.edu/PinckneyHorry/ELP1015 (accessed 2015–05–18). 25 Several garments and accessories owned (or created) by Eliza Pinckney survive in public institutions, including the Charleston Museum and the Smithsonian Institute. 26 ‘Abigail Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 12 August 1785,’ Founders Online, National Archives (http:// founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04–06–02–0085 [last update: 2015–12–30]). Source: The Adams Papers, Adams Family Correspondence, vol. 6, December 1784–December 1785, ed. Richard Alan Ryerson (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993),’ 262–6. 27 Fisher Ames, ‘Eulogy of Washington,’ 8 February 1800, Works of Fisher Ames, ed.W. B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. 1, 523. 28 ‘Abigail Adams to John Adams, 26 March 1794’ [electronic edition]. Adams Family Papers: An Electronic Archive. Massachusetts Historical Society. http://www.masshist.org/digitaladams/. 29 J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, More Letters from the American Farmer: An Edition of the Essays in English Left Unpublished by Crevecouer, ed. Dennis D. Moore (University of Georgia Press, 1995), 29. 30 The decoration is most likely stamped or stencilled. 31 ‘O. Z’. letter as published in the Newport Mercury, 20 August 1764, 1. 32 ‘Sophia Thrifty’ letter, published in the Newport Mercury, Monday 24 December 1764. 33 Alonzo Lewis, History of Shoemaking in Lynn, 1829.

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24 Gendering the Automobile Men, Women and the Car in Helsinki, 1900–1930 Teija Försti Introduction What is an automobile? The design of the car has changed so much that it is difficult to imagine the early motorcar as the same vehicle we know as the car today. The first-generation motorcar was invented in the late 1880s. The birthplace of the automobile is in Europe: in Germany and in France.The design of that new technical invention resembled a horse-drawn carriage with an engine attached to it. The coachman was replaced by a chauffeur who, instead of reins, steered the vehicle with a wheel. In other words, the first-era motorcars were more like modified wagons with an engine instead of a horse. At the turn of the twentieth century, the modern car was invented; the engine was moved to the front, and the design was freed from the coach-style model.1 Clearly, the technological prehistory of the car is more complicated than this simplification, but the focus of this article is elsewhere. The automobile was a new technological invention and a material object, but it became meaningful in relation to social and cultural practises. This essay aims to demonstrate how the emergence of the automobile shaped life in Helsinki, the capital of Finland.2 In this process, notions of gender played a significant role. Scholars of design and material culture Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield have reminded us that, in studying objects, we should locate them both historically and in the cultural sphere of consumption. The relationship between objects and gender is constructed in ways that have become the accepted norm and, thus, invisible.3 The focus of this article is to discuss the dialectical relationship between the automobile as a material artefact and gender in Helsinki in 1900–30. During that period, Helsinki was the most motorized city in the whole country.

The automobile age begins in Finland ‘Motorcar trips are comfortable and especially popular among the ladies. No stress, just motion and fun’.4 So claimed the first motorcar advertisement in a Finnish newspaper in late August 1899. Since the Finnish audience was not familiar with the new vehicle, the advertisement gave technical information about cars along with driving instructions. The company promised to provide different kinds of French and German models designed for ‘1, 2, 3, 4 and more persons’.5 In October, the company tried to promote the automobile with a picture of two fashionable 309

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ladies sitting on a French De Dion Bouton car. The text suggested that, due to the climate and road conditions in Finland, electric cars would be the best option.6 Despite the tempting ­promises, not a single motorcar had yet sold. The cold autumn and snowy winter ahead meant that it was not the best time of year to try to promote the new open-model vehicle with ­unfamiliar technology. These first Finnish advertisements are similar to the early advertising and gendered images of motoring in Europe and the United States. Historian Kurt Möser has observed the gendered nature of automobility at the turn of the century. He has linked, on the one hand, the flâneur culture in the big cities, such as Paris, with women’s use of cars; and on the other hand, car races and dangerous speeding on the open roads with male drivers.7 Furthermore, in the United States, automobiles were considered fashionable accessories for wealthy men and women. But as Cotten Seiler has pointed out, American women also participated in races, car clubs and cross-country road trips prior to the First World War.8 In Europe, Baronesse Hélène van Zuyel competed in the international Paris–Amsterdam–Paris race in 1898. In Finland, the first car races were organized in 1910, and bigger races began in the 1920s. Before the motorcars eventually appeared on the market and the streets of Helsinki, newspapers and magazines began to familiarize the reading audience with the concept. In December 1899, a Finnish newspaper published a humorous fictional story of a wife who had begged her husband to buy an automobile. Finally, the husband promised to test drive one for a week.When he was trying to steer the monstrous and uncanny vehicle, the wife’s screaming caught the attention of the passers-by. One of the spectators on the street wondered why the husband wanted to kill his wife in such a horrible way. Another one commented that it would not be a surprise if the woman lost all interest in having an automobile after all.9 In following years, jokes about women who wanted to have an automobile or preferred to marry a man with an expensive car became popular. Texts like the first Finnish car advertisement and the humorous stories are valuable sources for studying the interrelations between objects and gender. Not only do they show us how the automobile and gender were linked from the very beginning, but they also reveal the ways in which these cultural representations began to construct the image of the automobile as a desirable material object even before most Finnish people had seen a car in real life. The advertisement implied that motoring was socially acceptable for ladies. It also explicitly linked motorcars with attributes such as pleasure and ease and with upper-class identity. The first motorcars were luxury items that offered adventure and freedom to move independently, but only to those who had the money and leisure time. However, the humorous story about the unpredictable car also represented the criticism of the machine that became commonplace in the media over the following decades. The story gave a gendered meaning to the automobile by implying that it was the woman that wanted to have the automobile in the first place, not the man. Thus, these texts also constructed the gendered role of the consumer. Since these pioneering representations, not only has the design of the car changed, but the meaning of the automobile and the image of the driver have also been repeatedly renegotiated. As historian of design Penny Sparke has stated, the meanings of material objects change in response to different contexts. At the same time, objects also carry their accrued and gendered meanings from one context to another, transforming in the process.10 In May 1900, the first motorcar arrived in Finland as Benz Velo Comfortable was imported from Lübeck in Germany to Turku on the south-west coast of Finland by businessman Victor Forselius (1838–1905).11 Gradually, after the turn of the century, more people began to import cars to Helsinki. According to the newspaper Helsingin Sanomat, by July 1908, 75 motorcars had been registered in Helsinki; 54 of them were privately owned and the other 21 belonged to 310

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government agencies and public bodies.12 The population of Helsinki had surpassed 100,000 in 1907, so at the beginning of the century, it was still a relatively small town with more pedestrians and horse-drawn wagons than automobiles. Regardless of the low numbers at the beginning, in the following decades, the automobile began to irreversibly shape the traffic systems and the ways in which people moved and experienced the town. Automobiles were advertised for leisure, but in reality, driving a motorcar was not just fun and games as the first car advertisements were trying to establish. In fact, in the open-design motorcars, motoring could be quite dirty. Starting the engine by cranking was dangerous, and it required physical strength. Therefore, cranking was not seen as an appropriate job for a lady. Streets and country roads were designed for horse-drawn wagons and pedestrians, and the road and weather conditions in Finland limited motoring mainly to the summer months. The socioeconomic group of people who could afford an automobile, or who was even interested in buying one, was also narrow. Not surprisingly, compared to the first motorized European countries like France, Germany and Great Britain, Finland motorized rather slowly.

Emergence and reception of the first cars Before automobiles, cycling as a sport and leisure activity had attracted especially young men in Helsinki. The first high wheel was brought from England to Helsinki in the 1880s by Lars Krogius (1860–1935), and he and his brother Ernst Krogius (1865–1955) took part in the first official cycling race held in Kaisaniemi Park in 1884. Both were leading figures in the shipping industry and in Finnish sporting life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ernst was also one of the founding members of the first national automobile club in 1919.13 The most prominent motor trader before the First World War, Sergej Nikolajeff, Jr (1878–1920), was also involved in cycling before the automobile era.14 The close relationship between high wheels, bicycles and automobiles as sports equipment was evident when one of the cycling clubs in Helsinki changed its name to the Automobile and Bicycle Club of Helsinki in 1907. In Finland, the first popularity boom of the car took place in 1910 to 1914. By 1912, the number of cars had increased to 237. Before 1914, car ownership was confined to the upper and middle classes in Helsinki: motor traders, wealthy entrepreneurs and industrialists and some doctors and engineers. Restaurants and hotels, for example the luxury hotel Kämp along the Esplanade Park in the city centre, also had automobiles, as stated in the first motor register (1912–13) held by the Helsinki City Police Department.15 The reception of the car in Finland resembles the early history of the automobile in other European countries and in the United States. The first automobiles owned by the wealthy evoked resentment and suspicion both in the country and in towns among the less well off. The emergence of the automobile emphasized the differences between the wealthy bourgeoisie and the working classes and increased the tensions between the urban and rural.16 The first automobiles were frequently referred to as the beast or the motorized monster in folktales and early car memories. They also affected people’s senses. The bright lights of the automobile were described as the eyes of the devil, and the sound of the engine and the horn frightened both horses and pedestrians.17 In studying early automobility in Finland, the symbolic meanings and the cultural representations of the automobile are to be taken as seriously as the physical presence of the object. In the early 1900s, automobiles were so rare that every minor car accident was carefully reported in Finnish newspapers. Even car accidents abroad, in the big European cities like Berlin, Paris and London, received press coverage. To give an example, in May 1903, a Finnish newspaper published two news items on automobile accidents in Europe. According to the newspaper, on 311

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25 May, there had been nine fatalities in a car race from Paris to Madrid. Several drivers had been killed or badly injured. ‘The automobiles have even killed some spectators’, said the paper emphasizing the active role of the car instead of the driver. The following short news item explained that in London there had also been many car accidents in which several people had died.18 The news item did not indicate the exact places or the actual time of the accidents, since the point was simply to convince the readers of the dangerous nature of cars. The automobile caused problems on city streets and country roads, which were still seen as public places, accessible to everyone. Another discourse of the resistance was humour. Humorous stories and jokes that made fun of car owners and drivers were central to the early negative media publicity. Short films with names like The Bolting Automobile referring to the similarity between horses and automobiles, and A Dangerous Animal or the chase of an Automobile Driver were shown at cinemas in Helsinki.19 However, some films presented a more adventurous and appealing side to motoring to the ­Finnish audience by showing how one could easily travel around Europe by car.

The first women taking the wheel in Helsinki In 1909, the first car accident caused by a female driver in Helsinki was reported in the newspapers. Mrs Olga Nikolajeff, the wife of motor trader Sergej Nikolajeff, Junior, had taken some of her friends for a short drive in the centre of Helsinki. She forgot to signal at a busy corner and crashed into a boy on his bicycle. Fortunately, the boy was not badly injured and only his bicycle suffered damage. The local newspapers pointed out that Mrs Nikolajeff ’s lack of driving experience and her high speed had caused the accident. The newspaper Uusi Suometar wanted to draw the readers’ attention to the driver’s gender by making a comment that driving seemed to be difficult in general and especially difficult for the ladies.20 Olga Nikolajeff was working in the automobile business with her husband, so she was undoubtedly more accustomed to automobiles than other women in Helsinki at that time. Before that, she had worked in an agency that sold bicycles. Sergej Nikolajeff, Jr began to sell automobiles as early as 1904 whilst he was officially working at Stockmann’s department store. In 1905, he started his own business with his wife Olga. Nikolajeff, Jr visited the main car shows in Berlin, London and Paris and the biggest car manufacturers on the continent. Between 1906 and 1913, there were around 1000 cars in Finland, most of them imported by Nikolajeff. In 1913, he built a huge five-storey car showroom called ‘The Car Palace’ in the centre of Helsinki. In 1914, the First World War ceased the business, and after a couple of years, the family moved to the French Riviera.21 British historian Sean O’Connell has pointed out that the car arrived at the time of great controversy over the issue of women’s role in society. While the debate over suffrage was raging in Britain, the female driver became a powerful symbol of potential equality.22 The automobile was an ideal vehicle to manifest political aims and rights to public places. In the United States, for example, impressive automobile campaigns for suffrage took place in the 1910s.23 In Finland, women gained voting rights before the era of the automobile properly began, since Finland was the first European country to grant equal and universal suffrage to its citizens in 1906. In the 1907 elections, 19 female MPs were elected to parliament. Nevertheless, the automobile was an artefact that provided free and autonomous mobility for those women and men who could afford to buy one. In Helsinki, the question about women’s right to drive a motorcar was not raised officially until 1913. Car inspector Pehr Blom was asked whether it was appropriate for a woman to become a chauffeur. Blom addressed the question to the register office of Helsinki. Since 312

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women were not forbidden to drive according to the rules and regulations of Helsinki, the register office could only suggest that women should not work as professional chauffeurs. Female drivers were also advised not to wear clothes that could pose a risk to driving.24 The reference to women’s long skirts and scarves in this suggestion was obvious. As scholars of design and gender have pointed out, clothing and fashion are the essential issues that define and redefine the gender boundary in our culture.25 Furthermore, the statement of the register office explicitly defined a gendered line between professional and leisure driving. Taxi cars took customers to restaurants and to a variety of entertainment in the city, including brothels, so working as a taxi driver was not seen as an appropriate job for a decent woman. Such examples show how, through the gendering process, the car eventually began to be coded as dangerous, both physically and morally. It must be noted, however, that there were a few female taxi car owners in Helsinki. In 1912 and 1913, there were at least four female entrepreneurs who did not drive themselves but had several professional male chauffeurs working for them.26 The taxi cars thus provided income for some women, even though driving a taxi was gendered as a man’s job. Automobile clubs and organisations of professional drivers played a significant role in developing and promoting early automobile traffic in Finland. Doctor Karolina Eskelin (1867–1936) was the only female car owner among those first automobile enthusiasts who wanted to establish a Finnish automobile club in 1914. However, the time was not right for the national automobile club until 1919, when car owners’ club the Finnish Automobile Club was founded at hotel Kämp in Helsinki.The club accepted some female members from the very beginning. However, until the 1950s, the members were mainly upper and middle-class Swedish-speaking Finns from the metropolitan area. Eskelin was an exceptional woman in many ways. She had lost her parents at an early age, but she managed to educate herself. She started her studies in the field of medicine at the university with special permission, and in 1895, she became the first Finnish woman to defend her doctoral thesis. Apparently, Eskelin had become familiar with automobiles during her visits to the leading motorized countries of the time, since she made study trips to Germany at the beginning of the century. From 1903 to 1908 and in 1912, she practiced medicine in the United States, in the Finnish immigrant settlements in Massachusetts.27 In automobile historiography, medical doctors have acquired an almost iconic status as the first adopters of automobiles. But as Gijs Mom has noted, it was not as simple as that. Physicians, especially in many European cities, might have been the most likely car owners, but the situation in the countryside varied around Europe.28 Karolina Eskelin got her driving licence when she was in her late forties in 1913. In a letter to a relative, she expressed her joy at having passed the chauffeur’s exam at such a late age and stated how much fun it was to drive around town with a mechanic boy at the back of the car and a driver’s license in her pocket. The automobile was also handy for driving from town to her villa in Alberga on the outskirts of Helsinki. She wrote that the only unfortunate thing was that she had had to miss the congress of surgeons in Copenhagen, as all her money had gone on the car.29 Eskelin’s friend, historian Alma Söderhjelm, wrote in her memoirs how the flâneurs of the city enjoyed watching Eskelin drive.30 Interestingly, Helmi Tengén’s (1875–1971) memories of how the first female drivers were received are in stark contrast to Söderhjelm’s recollections. In a late 1960s newspaper interview, Tengén reflected on how difficult it was for Doctor Eskelin to drive in her open-top car when ‘the gentlemen of the capital’ threw sand at her face. Tengén was never mistreated that way herself, even though her driving also earned much attention. In her own opinion, the reason for that was her ‘masculine’ occupation as a carpentry teacher:‘Men soon got used to seeing me drive’.31 Stoning automobiles and bicycles was a form of resistance towards these new upper-class technical objects around Europe.32 Stoning in Tengén’s memories might have been resistance to 313

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the elite automobile as well as to the female drivers. Tengén’s memories should be interpreted in the context of her life story. She was an active member of Unioni, the League of Finnish Feminists (founded in 1892 in Helsinki), which focused primarily on fighting for women’s right to vote, equal pay, improvements in education and the prohibition of prostitution.33 For her as a suffragette, driving a car and the ownership of one were battlefields of gender and strong symbols of the women’s movement in the early twentieth century. As machines, automobiles have been connected to masculinity from the very beginning, but, at the same time, the automobile has been a strong symbol of female emancipation and gender equality. The stories of these independent, wage-earning female drivers as examples demonstrate that women were also active motorists from the beginning of automobile history in Helsinki. They used the car for fun and leisure, but it was also a useful object for business or simply travelling freely and fast in and around town. In European automobile history, racing young men have often been presented as the pioneers of automobility. As noted, in Helsinki, the small group of the early adopters of the car included middle-aged women as well.

The chauffeur, the New Man At first, professional chauffeurs had to be hired from abroad. Even when the car owner had the ability to drive, a chauffeur or a mechanic boy was required to change flat tires and to do all the dirty and physical work that motoring required. During the first decades of the twentieth century, motoring was mainly a luxury male hobby with the exception of some privileged women, but it also became a male profession. As the numbers of cars went up, the automobile offered a new profession for working-class men as chauffeurs, taxi drivers and mechanics. Taxi drivers who had a car of their own fell somewhere in between working class and middle class, like coachmen before them. In terms of gender, clothing is an important factor, as was noted earlier. Taxi drivers had to start wearing special chauffeur uniforms in order to be distinguished from their customers as well as from leisure drivers. At the same time, the uniforms began to underline the professional

Figure 24.1  A taxi driver, Helsinki, 1910s. Source: Helsinki City Museum.

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male identity of the chauffeur. In 1911, the guidelines for the automobile traffic in Helsinki stated that taxi drivers were to wear a uniform that was clean and immaculate. The authorities kept careful watch that the guidelines were followed, and a chauffeur with the wrong trousers or without a uniform was sometimes sent home to get changed. Furthermore, the automobile clubs of leisure drivers began to offer suits that resembled a uniform and caps to their male club members in the late 1920s. These items of clothing thus coded both the gender and the social group of their wearer. When looking at chauffeurs’ uniforms, it is easy to see their resemblance to other masculine garments and especially officers’ uniforms.34 The suit as a garment is a symbol of the non-personal; it does not tell who the wearer is, but it gives a clue as to what he or she does for living. Clearly, it is an import object in the discourses of power and gender and, thus, social relations.35 A foreign chauffeur driving the owner’s luxury car was also a symbol of wealth and prestige. For example, chamberlain Hjalmar Linder (1862–1921), the richest man in Finland and the pioneer of Finnish automobility, owned several cars in the 1900s and 1910s, and he had a French chauffeur for many years. In the 1920s, when the cheaper American mass-produced cars had arrived in the market and cars had become more reliable, a chauffeur still symbolized the social status of the car owner. Madame Minna Craucher, a famous socialite, purchased a WillysKnight car from Stockmann’s department store on deposit and hired a Russian chauffeur in order to present herself as a wealthy lady. She introduced the chauffeur as an emigrant prince, even though he had been a pilot before this new job. The chauffeur was almost like an accessory of the car, one that underlined the social class that Craucher wanted to be identified with. Craucher (née Aalto) had a shady past, and she had changed her name and invented an exciting life story for herself to impress the high society of Helsinki. Craucher kept a literary salon, which was a popular meeting place for writers such as Olavi Paavolainen and Mika Waltari, who were central figures in a literature group called Tulenkantajat (The Flame Bearers). The motto of the group was ‘Windows open to Europe’. In the late 1920s, both writers praised urban life, technology and automobiles in their writings. Waltari’s first novel begins with a scene that takes place in Madame Spindel’s, aka Craucher’s, salon. Eventually, Craucher had to give up the car since she could not pay the loan instalments, and her Russian chauffeur resigned when he realized the truth about Craucher’s messy money affairs.36 In Craucher’s life story, the car with its foreign chauffeur symbolized the desire to climb up to the upper class.

Speeding and racing in Helsinki During the 1920s and especially between 1923 and 1928, the number of cars increased in Finland due to economic growth as well as the import of cheaper mass-production cars, ­primarily Ford Model T. In 1925, there were two cars per 1000 people in Finland.37 The numbers were still relatively low compared to the most motorized countries in Europe. According to a Finnish motoring journal, there was already one car per 57 inhabitants in England and one car per 69 inhabitants in France in 1925.38 In 1928, the busiest year for car import before the Great Depression of the 1930s, the total number of passenger cars was approximately 3600 in Helsinki.39 The prohibition of alcohol (1919–32) is considered to have promoted motorization in ­Finland. The smuggled spirits had to be transferred quickly from the seaside into the rest of the country, so smuggling increased the demand for cars.With the income from smuggling, new and better cars were purchased both for smuggling purposes and legal transportation.40 Speeding, drink driving, smuggling or delivering spirits and driving drunken customers were the main traffic offences in Helsinki during prohibition. Speeding and drunk drivers were problems that 315

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drew much publicity in the press. The car was represented as a modern and advanced vehicle, which, unfortunately, had transformed traffic in cities into chaos. The police authorities and automobile organisations, in particular, expressed the need for an organized traffic culture. In the mid-1920s, Helsinki City Council founded a special committee to develop the traffic system in town, and the European cities of Paris, Berlin and Stockholm were used to find a new model for safer traffic in the city.41 More civilized speeding was seen in car races. After the declaration of independence in 1917, the first Finnish Winter Games were arranged on sea ice on the Taivallahti bay in 1920. The games featured different sports, including car races. That was an important event for the new nation. The presence of President K. J. Ståhlberg and his family manifested the significance of the games.42 In 1923, the first female drivers took part in the winter car races. Dagny Krogius (1902–81), the daughter of Ernst Krogius, and her friend Brita Saurén (1901–79) competed with each other on a one-kilometre track. Saurén won by only three seconds. The two young women, wearing leather ‘from head to toe’, attracted wide publicity from the audience and media. In the women’s magazine Våra Kvinnor, they were represented as exotic ‘automobile princesses’, and, according to the journalist, the motoring garments made them look like ‘elegant bats’.43 The nature of the race was more a social event than an aggressive battle of motors. In the late 1920s, the organizations and clubs of professional drivers began to organize car races in Helsinki and other towns around Finland. The first races organized by the chauffeur’s association in Helsinki took place at Käpylä trotting track. According to the motoring journal Autoilija (Motorist) the race attracted 1500 paying spectators inside the racetrack, and at least the same number of non-paying spectators were watching the races from the hills around it.44 From a gender perspective, it is noteworthy that the drivers were mainly men, but the races attracted female spectators as well. Some women raced in the same series with male competitors. Miss Terna Åkerman, who successfully participated in short and long-distance races, was called ‘our sprightly Car-Amazon’ by Ford-news.45 The model for calling racing women warlike Amazons and Valkyries was adapted from the European press. For instance, the pioneering female driver from France, Camille du

Figure 24.2  Miss Terna Åkerman and her Singer car, 1928. Photo © Olof Sundström. Source: Helsinki City Museum.

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Gast, who took part in the notorious Paris to Madrid race in 1903, was called ‘l’Amazone’ and ‘la Walkyrie de la Mécanique’.Women who were dressed in unfeminine motoring clothes, drove big and heavy cars and were competitive blurred the conventional boundaries of gender and thus caused unease. However, the racing women with their goggles, leather jackets and helmets also provided a new model for identification. Towards the end of the 1920s, a woman behind the steering wheel was no longer an anomaly. Nonetheless, the automobile was considered a technical artefact that primarily belonged to the masculine domain. Racing women were admired, whilst female drivers were also consistently presented as incompetent in humorous sources as well as in serious articles. In literature, films and advertisements, the automobile and the new woman at the wheel became one of the most noticeable symbols of the new era in the 1920s.46 The gender of the driver was constructed by repeating these cultural representations.The word ‘driver’ simply referred to a male driver, while a female driver always needed the sex prefix. A speeding young man in a luxury car was a common fictional image of a modern hero in light reading and in the literature group Tulenkantajat’s poetry and prose.The driver was a modern knight, and the fast car was his best friend. The Spanish luxury car Hispano Suiza was presented as the most romantic car of these modern times. The literary references to French Pierre Frondaie’s novel L’Homme à l’Hispano (1925) and (Armenian-born) British writer Michael Arlen’s novel The Green Hat (1924) were obvious. The leader of Tulenkantajat, Olavi Paavolainen, praised the car in his collection of essays Nykyaikaa etsimässä (In Search of the Modern Age, 1929). For Paavolainen, the car was the symbol of the present day and the future, made of iron, steel, leather and varnish. In his opinion, only a modern, civilized man could fully understand the contours, strength and speed of the car. According to Paavolainen, Helsinki was the only city in Finland that deserved to be called a city, while he also criticized it by saying that, compared to the big European cities, Helsinki was still just a small town, where one could easily cross the road reading a book without the fear of cars.47

From beast to beauty During the 30-year period from 1900 to 1930, the car became established in Helsinki.The story of the object began with it being depicted as a scary beast in the press. By the end of the 1920s, the car had become the symbol of modern times and a potential means of transport in town. Car advertising reflected and constructed the binary notions of gender that set the gendered spheres for car usage. For men, cars were advertised as useful vehicles for work and family outings on Sundays, whereas for women, reliable and comfortable cars were promoted as tools for more efficient housekeeping. In Helsinki of the 1920s, however, that was more of a gendered representation than reality, although the number of female drivers began to rise from the mid1920s onwards.48 The car as an object was both gendered and humanized. As a prime example, the Ford Model T was called in Finnish, ambivalently, Heikki after Henry Ford or sometimes Liisa after the Model T’s English nickname, Tin Lizzie. In humorous stories and jokes, cars were repeatedly compared with women’s looks and stereotypical feminine features and vice versa. In the context of material culture, the car is a tangible object but a visual one as well. The appearance of the car and how and where it is looked at are important factors in studying the gendering process of the object. In 1923, General Motors introduced colours for its Chevrolet Superior Model. From the mid-1920s onwards, Ford’s slogan ‘any colour as long as it’s black’ was challenged by the updated idea for mass production introduced by General Motor’s new Art and Colour Section: ‘Car for 317

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every person and purpose’.The aesthetics of the car, its colour, line and form, became an important factor in the design and marketing of mass-produced cars. Penny Sparke has suggested that the idea of feminine fashionability, which was, in the previous century, transferred from women’s dress to the domestic interior, was now extended into a new masculine arena.49 Yet, it is worth emphasizing that cars were associated with fashion and femininity from the very beginning. In Finnish motor journals, the beauty of the car was repeatedly mentioned as one of the key factors when choosing a new car. Already by 1924, the Finnish Automobile Club organized a beauty competition in which cars were judged by their shape and colour. The jury also reviewed the shape and comfort of the seats and the automobile equipment and accessories. The winner was an Essex with a radio.50 By the end of the 1920s, beauty and technology were equal factors in marketing and representing cars. In Helsinki, the car traders association’s annual car exhibitions from 1926 to 1928 presented the public with the newest models and fashions of the car industry. Rather than just selling cars and giving customers information about them, the exhibitions also aimed to influence public opinion and transport policy, especially with regards to road construction. From the mid-1920s onwards, car buyers and taxi services welcomed with pleasure the new closed-bodied cars, which offered shelter from the changeable weather conditions and a private place within an urban space. The interior design of the car started to resemble a home with its comfortable upholstery, rugs and curtains and small accessories such as mirrors and flower vases. Eventually, the car became a spatial extension of the home.

Conclusion In conclusion, the emergence of the car speeded up the pace of life in town and created new cultural practices, consumer culture and social activities, such as car clubs, races and car shows. The automobile presented a new technology and an object that not only influenced the lives of car owners and drivers but also had a huge impact on urban culture and everyone’s rights to the streets and mobility in general. It was an object that aroused feelings and emotions among owners and non-users. In terms of gender, the automobile is an important artefact, since the object itself, as well as the representations and narratives of the automobile and driving, reflected and constructed the notions of gender. The concepts of femininity and masculinity and the gendered ideology of separate spheres have influenced the design, technical development, advertising and uses of the automobile. Gender and the car were intrinsically linked, and they shaped each other from the very beginning of the history of the car. The car was a technological object that provided free and individual mobility and was thus associated more with the male sphere. Then again, the driving jazz-girls in popular fiction and the growing numbers of female drivers in real life expressed the changing notions of gender in the early 1900s.

Notes   1 See Wolfgang Sachs, For Love of the Automobile. Looking Back into the History of Our Desires (Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1984), 6–10; Christoph Maria Merki, Der holprige siegeszug des Automobils 1895–1930: Zur Motorisierung des Straβenverkehrs in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz (Wien, Köln,Weimar: Böhlau Verlag, 2002), 38–65; Rudi Volti, Cars & Culture:The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006), 1–5.   2 Finland was an autonomous region of the Russian Empire from 1809 to 1917. The Grand Duchy of Finland was ruled by the Russian Emperor as Grand Duke. Finland became an independent republic in December 1917, and it went through a short civil war in spring 1918.

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Men, Women and the Car   3 Pat Kirkham and Judy Attfield, ’Introduction,’ in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 2–3.  4 Hufvudstadsbladet, 20 August 1899, 1.  5 Ibid.  6 Ibid., 15 October 1899, 1.   7 Kurt Möser,’The dark side of “automobilism”, 1900–30: Violence, war, and the motor car,’ Journal of Transport History, volume 24/2 (2003): 244–245.   8 Cotten Seiler, Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America (Chicago and London:The University of Chicago Press, 2008), 50–54; see also Virginia Scharff, Taking the Wheel. Women and the Coming of the Motor Age (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 67–88.   9 Automobiilin ansioita, Päivälehti, 6 December 1899, 4. 10 Penny Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink. The Sexual Politics of Taste (London and San Francisco: Pandora/ Harper Collins, 1995), 8–9. 11 Jukka Marttila, ‘Satavuotisen autoilun alkuvaiheet Turussa,’ in Sata lasissa, ed. Ismo Vähäkangas (Turku: Turun Historiallinen Yhdistys 2000), 15–16. 12 Helsingin Sanomat, 22 July 1908, 4.There are no statistics on motorcar registrations from the first decade of the twentieth century. 13 Lars Krogius, Ernst Krogius, Biografiakeskus, http://www.kansallisbiografia.fi.libproxy.helsinki.fi/kb/ artikkeli/6167/ (accessed 13 May 2015). 14 Kenneth Danielsen, Promenade des Anglais 139: Historien om Villa Huovila, dess finska ägare och invånare (Helsingfors: Svenska Litteratussällskapet i Finland 2011), 117–18. 15 Private Car Register in Helsinki, 1912 and 1913, Department of Transport, Helsinki Police Department, the National Archives. 16 Gijs Mom, Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car 1895–1940 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2015), 74–79; see also Sachs, For Love of the Automobile, 12–31; Seiler, Republic of Drivers, 36–37. 17 Teija Försti, Vauhtikausi. Autoilun sukupuoli 1920-luvun Suomessa (Turku: Turun yliopisto 2013), 71–94. 18 Päivälehti, 26 May 1903, 4. 19 Advertisement of Tähti-Biografi, Työmies, 16 October 1909, 2; Helsingin Sanomat, 29 October, 1909, 2. 20 Uusi Suometar, 17 September 1909, 4. 21 Danielsen, Promenade des Anglais 139, 135–52. 22 Sean O’Connell, The car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896–1939 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998), 45. 23 Scharff, Taking the Wheel, 79–88; Georgine Clarsen, Eat My Dust. Early Women Motorists (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008), 86–103. 24 The letter from the superintendent to the register office of Helsinki, 23 April 1913, Judgement Book 1913, Helsinki City Archives. 25 Elizabeth Wilson, Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity (London:Virago, 1985), 117; Kirkham and Attfield, The Gendered Object 4–10. 26 Register of entrepreneurs in 1912 and 1913, Archives of the Register Office, Helsinki City Archives. 27 Arno Forsius, Karolina Eskelin. http://www.saunalahti.fi/arnoldus/eskelin.html (accessed 22 July 2015). 28 Mom, Atlantic Automobilism, 71–72. 29 A letter from Karolina Eskelin to Hilda Elmgren, 29 June 1913, Archives of the Elmgren family, the National Archives. 30 Alma Söderhjelm, Min värld (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1930), 108. 31 Eeva Särkkä, ‘92-vuotiaana autonratissa,’ 13 October 1968, Aamulehti, 12. 32 Mom, Atlantic Automobilism, 75. 33 Nowadays the Feminist Association Unioni http://www.naisunioni.fi/english (accessed 1.12.2015). 34 Försti, Vauhtikausi, 143–48. 35 Lee Wright, ‘The suit: A common bond or defeated purpose?’ in The Gendered Object, ed. Pat Kirkham (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 158, 160. 36 Kari Selén, Madame: Minna Craucherin levoton elämä (Helsinki: WSOY 1991), passim. 37 Tapio Bergholm, ‘Suomen autoistumisen yhteiskuntahistoriaa,’ in Viettelyksen vaunu: Autoilukulttuurin muutos Suomessa, ed. Kalle Toiskallio (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura 2001), 70, 79. 38 Suomen Moottorilehti, 6, 1926, 276. 39 Autoilija, 6, 1928, 32.

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Teija Försti 40 Bergholm, ‘Suomen autoistumisen yhteiskuntahistoriaa,’ 68–70. 41 Kaarlo Soinio, ‘Liikennekulttuuria kohti,’ Suomen Kuvalehti, no. 20, 1925, 710. 42 ‘Talviurheilujen viikko,’ Suomen Kuvalehti, no. 11, 1920, 256. 43 Britt Benning, ’Auto girls,’ Våra Kvinnor, no. 4, 1923, 70. 44 Jarru, ‘Autokilpailut Helsingissä Käpylän raviradalla,’ Autoilija, no. 5, 1927, 15–19. 45 Ford-uutiset, no. 7, 1929, 1. 46 See also Adam C. Stanley, Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press 2008), 109–110. 47 Olavi Paavolainen, Nykyaikaa etsimässä, [In Search of the Modern Age] (Otava: Helsinki 1929), 255–57. 48 Driving Licence Register 1915–1926, Department of Transport, Helsinki Police Department, the National Archives. 49 Sparke, As Long as It’s Pink, 134–39. 50 Försti, Vauhtikausi, 229.

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Part V

Intimacy and Emotion Introduction Katie Barclay

If, as the anthropologist Donna Birdwell-Pheasant contends, ‘place’ is a location that is named and holds the ‘symbolic and imaginary investments of the population’, then all towns and cities are born of emotion.1 The process of identifying a location by a particular appellation, of determining its borders and boundaries and then, and perhaps most importantly, in making decisions about who can live, work, hold civic rights and exercise duties, and call themselves ‘of the town’, requires human beings to make particular emotional investments in physical and imaginary space. Once such decisions are made, the towns and cities people make are deeply implicated in shaping the emotional lives of their inhabitants and those that move through them. Such shaping is, of course, like so much of life, informed not just by physical environment but also by the characteristics held and attributed to the individual being produced through space – whether they are male or female, rich or poor, in-dweller or migrant, black or white, gay or straight, adult or child. This Part 5 of the handbook seeks to interrogate what difference emotion makes to a gendered history of urban experience. Across six chapters, authors explore the different ways that emotions can be theorised and applied to urban histories and, through that theorisation, enable us to understand the important role that emotions have played and continue to play in human experience. That emotion is not only something that can be studied but also that should be understood to play a critical role in historical change is increasingly recognised by scholars.While early work emphasised emotion as a biological experience that was labelled, contextualised and judged differently depending on culture and historical moment, scholars now recognise that the biological, ‘felt’, experience of emotion can differ across cultures. The body, as well as ideas about it, is subject to culture. Emotion is now understood as something that is produced through social relationships within particular spaces and indeed can be articulated as form of practice or performance – a model of emotion that emphasises human agency, society and dialectic exchange in the production of feeling.2 Performed emotions, like Judith Butler’s construction of gender, are taught from birth, can feel ‘natural’ or innate to the performer and are often performed unthinkingly in response to stimuli but are nonetheless products of culture.3 As a result, the location of emotion – where people feel things, both bodily and geographically – can be understood to play a significant role in its making and in the significance people place upon it; alternatively, how people feel within particular places informs the meaning given to them – whether they are safe or scary, comfortable or distressing, stressful or peaceful. Emotions are increasingly understood as

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playing a significant role in human society, a necessary variable to be taken into account when making sense of the past. Given this, historians have begun to reflect and theorise the ways that emotion shapes experience. Within the context of urban history, two approaches have been particularly significant. The first is the work being produced under the umbrella of ‘emotional geographies’. Such work seeks to particularly interrogate the relationship between landscape, space, place and human emotions. Scholars have explored the way that urban planning can shape emotion and behaviour, encouraging people to feel harried, stressed or crowded or, alternatively, calm, peaceful and reflective. It has considered how these emotion-scapes inform the behaviours that go on there, whether that is violence, road rage or even compassion.4 Similarly, in this volume, Jeff Meek demonstrates the ways that for mid twentieth-century gay and queer men, some of Scotland’s urban spaces enabled sexual thrills tinged with fear, anxiety and occasionally dislocation, as they sought sex in public places; conversely, some urban private spaces could provide ‘emotional refuges’, where such men found safety, comfort and love. The emotional experiences of these men were profoundly connected to the contours of urban space and the meanings attached to them and were shaped by their gender, which provided them with places – such as the public toilet – that were not available to lesbian and queer women. Moreover, the urban – with large populations and the possibilities of anonymity – enabled some of these men to find a sexual liberty that was not possible in their small home towns or countryside, where they were ‘known’ and where the opportunities to form socially and legally illicit attachments were more difficult. The impact of the urban on incomers has been particularly interrogated. Why is it that some cities, such as eighteenth-century London, cause such profound dislocation for newcomers, who feel out of place on entering? Why do cities produce important attachments and a sense of belonging for some inhabitants and not others, and how do new migrants come to feel at home in such locations?5 As Mark Steinberg demonstrates in Chapter 29, the Russian capital cities of the early twentieth century were not only places of modernity, pleasure and hedonism but also profound dislocation and despair, particularly for young women from the countryside who ultimately took their own lives. Moving into new urban anonymity did not always liberate. As this suggests, the role of emotion in histories of mobility, migration and settlement is increasingly recognised as significant, while the importance of trust to accessing resources is highlighted, particularly in the lives of very mobile migrants like soldiers, sailors and vagrants.6 Such research confirms the significance of the formation of emotional bonds – connections between ­people – to social integration, perhaps especially in eras where people relied heavily on credit to survive.7 Given this, the role of emotion, notably feelings of belonging, safety and security, to the physical and mental health of urban inhabitants has been highlighted, with social and economic marginality playing a significant role in a range of health, educational and economic outcomes.8 Such emotional geographies are deeply inflected by gender, race and other facets of identity. The ways that different bodies are interpreted in the same physical spaces has been shown to have different emotional impacts on those bodies and vice versa. For example, as I demonstrate in Chapter 8, women’s movements through cities were not only more restricted than for men, reflecting on their moral character, but also held different meanings depending on the time of day. In such a context, we might expect that women would not only feel less secure in urban spaces, particularly when ‘out of place’, but also perhaps experience heightened levels of fear and anxiety. Sonya Lipsett-Rivera conversely demonstrates the emotional possibilities of the urban setting for boys, trained in the rigours of emotional discipline and control by their families. Outside of the home and workplace, however, the streets, where boys of all ages came to play, socialise, watch parades and participate in urban life, could provide opportunities for emotional excess, rebellion and carnival. The streets provided an opportunity to resist and contest 322

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the ‘­spatial ­control’ of the home, as Doreen Massey described it, suggestive of possibility and ­ pportunities for the formation of independent identities.9 Their emotional freedoms, of course, o were a privilege of their gender, since girls’ movements were typically more restricted; and perhaps also of their youth, with the practice of emotional control a more significant concern for the parents and employers such boys would eventually become. Scholarship has also demonstrated the ways that emotion is an important constituent of space in a Lefebvrian sense (explored in more detail in Part 2), where space is both constituted by and produces social relationships.10 Heikki Lempa’s chapter on nineteenth-century German spas are perhaps a classic example as sites that were intentionally designed to produce particular emotions but equally required such performances from those who visited. Such spas disciplined spa-goers through ritualised routines, designed to instil calm, peace and pleasure, in contradistinction to the harried and stressful urban world beyond its boundaries. Spas were also sites that enabled sociability and interaction between spa-goers of different genders and backgrounds, the formation of a democratic ethos at least amongst the privileged. Peasants, of course, were expected not to disturb this world with their visible presence. The spa produced and was itself produced through these emotional expectations and their active performances, setting itself as distinct from other urban spaces. It can perhaps be contrasted with Steinberg’s Russian capitals, where crisis, despair and hedonism disrupted and disturbed, producing a sense of contested social relations and anxious lives. As well as ‘emotional geographies’, the concept of the ‘emotional community’ has held particular resonance for urban historians. First, as articulated by Barbara Rosenwein, the emotional community is a group with its own particular ‘norms of emotional valuation and expression’, that is, one that shares a consensus on what emotions exist, how they are performed and their social significance: whether they are ‘negative’ or ‘positive’, productive or destructive.11 Importantly, for Rosenwein, emotions are key to group formation, determining who is part of the group, who is not and who sits beyond it. This model has been particularly fruitful for urban historians who seek to understand how cities determine who belongs, who does not, how such decisions are made and what relationships people should have within it. As Susan Broomhall demonstrates in Chapter 26, rich and poor were brought together as a single community within French cities by shared expectations around charitable giving to neighbours and understandings of belonging. The poor were integrated into cities through being recognised by systems of poor relief and by neighbours who vouched for their poor neighbours’ entitlements. Yet, that is not to say there was no conflict. Authorities’ desires to regularise alms-giving and move it into institutions was challenged by longer-standing beliefs around the importance of personal giving and the emotional pull that the poor placed on the heart-strings of the city’s wealthier inhabitants.Yet, city authorities were not above using emotional rhetoric themselves, placing ‘worthy’ middle-class women to stand in place of the poor outside churches or when collecting donations. Such choices enabled charity that was produced through emotional bonds of obligation between people, but interestingly not between people and institutions, without the disorderly giving they associated with the poor doing this themselves. Moreover, this was an emotional community where emotional expectations and feelings were shaped by gender. On one hand, poor women were more likely to receive poor relief and to be seen as ‘deserving’ of such charity; on the other, middle-class women were placed in charge of collecting donations for the poor, perhaps at least in part because women were associated with virtuous giving. Here, what emotions – charity and obligation – city inhabitants should have towards their poor were informed by the gender of the recipient, while the locations of poor across cities produced the meanings attached to particular spaces, creating a gendered emotional landscape. 323

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Conversely, emotions could become implicated in social discipline within emotional c­ ommunities, as groups regulated appropriate emotions and determined where and how they should be expressed. Merridee Bailey’s chapter looks at apprentice–merchant disputes in late medieval London and the ways that both parties drew on emotion in their making of urban behavioural standards. Both sets of men used emotional rhetoric in the petitions to the court, hoping at least to engage the sympathies of decision-makers, and their performance is suggestive of a shared expectation around how such rhetoric should work to persuade. Yet, the stories such men told were also stories of emotional practices: employers who showed anger and excessive discipline towards their wards and unruly apprentices who did not appropriately restrain their desires. In coming to court, these men drew on a wider set of expectations around appropriate emotions amongst the merchant classes in late medieval London and sought to demonstrate how their use of such emotions placed them within the orderly community and others beyond its boundaries. Emotion became implicated in creating spaces of containment and bodily control over others and in determining the boundaries of community. As such, emotion informed moral codes and social order. Such disciplining is perhaps usefully contrasted with Meek’s cities as sites of emotional liberty. The city may have provided emotional opportunities for some incomers, but it also required inhabitants to learn new codes that shaped and constrained emotional opportunities in particular ways. As Steinberg suggests in his chapter on early twentiethcentury Russia, some people found this easier than others, and some socio-temporal contexts provided more space for such opportunities. Across this section, there is a strong sense of the importance to the making of urban space of the ways that people performed, interpreted and imagined their emotional worlds. Steinberg’s emotional dramas were played out in the writings of journalist Olga Gridina, whose imagining of urban Russia as site of moral breakdown and despair was inflected in how she interpreted the behaviours of those she wrote about. Meek highlights how the emotional refuges queer men made in Scottish cities were always fragile in a context where homosexuality was a criminal offence, the boundaries of such a community always at risk from police or a hostile public. Bailey and Broomhall demonstrate the desire of populations to make meaning out of emotion and inscribe it on their urban landscapes, to use their interpretation of emotion to determine the moral boundaries and acceptable behaviours within their urban communities. Within these histories, emotion becomes a site of social practice, with a felt or bodily dimension. Emotions become active within these urban histories, playing a significant role in the making of urban space and a necessary part of the telling of urban history.

Notes   1 Donna Birdwell-Pheasant, ‘The home ‘place’: Center and periphery in Irish house and family systems,’ in House Life: Space, Place and Family in Europe, ed. Donna Birdwell-Pheasant and Denise LawrenceZúñiga (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 105–32.   2 Monique Scheer, ‘Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion,’ History and Theory 51 (2012): 190–220; Katie Barclay, ‘Space,’ in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2016).   3 Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1999), 181–90; Nicky Gregson and Gillian Rose, ‘Taking Butler elsewhere: Performativities, spatialities, and subjectivities,’ Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 18 (2000): 433–52.  4 Emotional Geographies, ed. Joyce Davidson and Mick Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007); Nicholas Kenny, ‘Emotions and city life,’ Urban History Review 42 (2014): 5–7; Peter Kraftl, ‘Beyond “voice”, beyond “agency”, beyond “politics”? Hybrid childhoods and some critical reflections on children’s emotional geographies,’ Emotion, Space and Society 9 (2013): 13–23; Jelle Haemers, ‘A moody community? E ­ motion and ritual in late medieval urban revolts,’ in Emotion in the Heart of the City (14th–16th

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Intimacy and Emotion ­Century), ed. Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardins and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005), 63–81.  5 Maurizio Marinelli and Francsco Ricatti, ‘Emotional geographies of the uncanny: Reinterpreting Italian transnational spaces,’ Cultural Studies Review 19 (2013): 5–18; Ilaria Vanni, ‘Oggetti Spaesati, Unhomely belongings: Objects, migrations and cultural apocalypses,’ Cultural Studies Review 19 (2013): 150–74; Laura Gowing, ‘“The freedom of the streets”: Women and social place, 1560–1640’, in Londinopolis: Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, ed. Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000): 130–53.  6 Katie Barclay, ‘Marginal households and their emotions: The “kept mistress” in enlightenment ­Edinburgh’. in Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, ed. Susan Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2015), 95–11; K. D. M. Snell, ‘Belonging and community: Understandings of “home” and “friends” among the English poor, 1750–1850,’ Economic History Review 65 (2012): 1–25.   7 Craig Muldrew, ‘Interpreting the market:The ethics of credit and community relations in early modern England,’ Social History 18 (1993): 163–83.   8 Barclay, ‘Marginal households’.  9 Doreen Massey, Space, Place and Gender (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1994); Daphne Spain, ‘Gendered spaces and women’s status,’ Sociological Theory 11 (1993): 137–51. 10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Wiley, 1991). 11 Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011); Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and methods in the history of emotions,’ Passions in Context 1 (2010): 1–32.

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25 Shaping London Merchant Identities Emotions, Reputation and Power in the Court of Chancery Merridee L. Bailey Every merchant in London lived with the fear of debt. Apprentices lived with the fear of ill treatment by their masters. But merchants also experienced other emotional states, or passions as they were known at the time: excitement, regret, hopefulness, anger, envy, pride and a host of other emotions, some of which we recognize and some of which no longer resonate.1 We can reasonably assume that medieval and early modern people felt these emotions, even if it is difficult to uncover evidence of them in the writings left behind. There is now a growing body of empirical work that suggests that emotions exist in a universal potential state and that these are arranged by cultural groups into systematically different emotional practices.2 Historians, therefore, ask how emotions were culturally construed and what meaning they had to people at the time. They look to what the expressions of emotions are doing in particular times and amongst particular groups. What social information did the emotion of fear or dread convey to the wider community? What could anger legitimately lead you to do? Who benefited when fear was introduced into a court case or when an apprentice criticized their master’s behaviour by drawing attention to the dread they supposedly felt at his conduct? This chapter investigates occasions in the court of Chancery in which emotional strategies were used by members of London’s mercantile community to scrutinize, dispute and draw attention to one matter: reputation.3 Reputation has been a rich field mined by social and economic historians seeking to understand how social and economic networks were constructed and practised in everyday life, but the extent to which emotional behaviour was implicated in public reputations has been less closely examined.4 Economic historians have been particularly alert to the importance of reputation for merchants and traders in economic systems that were characterized by a scarcity in bullion (coinage), requiring people to enter into long chains of credit relationships.5 Youthfulness made apprentices particularly vulnerable to, and sensitive of, their reputations, as they still had to establish credit in their own right. Comparable work on women’s reputations has shown that women vigilantly guarded their good name from gossip and defamation. Bernard Capp has suggested that women who failed to respond to attacks upon their reputation might find themselves ‘gradually frozen out of their former social networks’.6 Similar, although not identical, pressures existed for young people, and Capp’s argument presents an opportunity 327

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to likewise investigate how young men protected their livelihoods and reputations, both present and future. Chancery offers evidence of concerns that were highly pertinent to younger merchants; expressions of fear over ill treatment are central to many contemporary reports about apprentice–master relationships. Going to Chancery provided young men with the opportunity to assert themselves to superiors and to rehearse allegations about conflict and its meaning to the authorities, all of which contributed to the creation and maintenance of their reputations and mercantile identity more generally. This chapter argues that the court of Chancery assisted some merchants, including young male apprentices, to navigate and present valuable information about their position within society. London merchants had recourse to a number of different courts to air their disputes with fellow merchants. This included the city’s courts, such as the Mayor’s Court, the Court of Aldermen and the Sheriffs’ Court, as well as the central common-law courts, such as King’s Bench and Common Bench.The relationship between these courts and the city, and these courts and Chancery, fluctuated over the years. Penny Tucker has charted the courts’ business in London, noting how Chancery came to intervene in city cases in the fifteenth century, weakening the city courts’ autonomy.7 Chancery’s relationship with the city also developed through its people and their use of the court.The court of Chancery was a barometer of London’s social complexity. Apprentices used the court, as did adult merchants who operated only slightly above the threshold of poverty and merchants who were more substantial. Married women could bring suits in their own right, and women’s use of Chancery has been the subject of some considerable attention.8 The popularity of Chancery’s equitable jurisdiction meant the court enjoyed particular prominence in London’s legal environment, a special role that is reinforced by the range of people who could bring cases to the court. Amanda Capern argues that Chancery was deeply embedded within the ‘collective, local consciousness’ of early modern people because it was a space that prioritised justice in terms of fairness or equity.9 Unlike other courts, Chancery was more relevant to, and resonant with, people’s notions of what constituted good community relationships, including emotional ones. Because Chancery was known to deal in fairness, it is important that we examine how understandings of the court differed for people at different life cycle stages, for those with different occupational status and, naturally enough, for men and for women. In this chapter, Chancery’s importance to the making of London relates not just to its physical location within the city, nor to its attractiveness to London’s mercantile community, nor because of the access to justice it provided young people, although all of these factors play an important role in how the city and the court worked. Just as meaningful is how these legal narratives offer evidence of the different types of emotions that merchants could selectively draw upon and the purpose they served in mediating social relationships. By looking at these cases, we can begin to uncover how petitioners and counsel selected between emotional strategies according to what was of most value to them and how expectations about emotional norms were brought into semi-public view and then tested, negotiated and judged. In this way, Chancery cases reflect not just private emotional relationships between people but the social, hierarchical and community implications these had for the city.

London’s apprentices London’s early modern merchant community had enormous social complexity. It comprised men and women, young people and adults, English-born ‘foreigners’ and ‘strangers’ from other countries, small-scale traders and the wealthiest merchants. By the late medieval period, London had a population of 50,000 (c.1500), which by c.1550 had risen to 100,000 and by 1600 had doubled to 200,000.10 London was England’s biggest city by far; by 1550, it outstripped ­provincial 328

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English cities in size by 10:1.11 High mortality and even higher immigration into the city have long been noted as features of London’s history. Many of the migrants into London were young people coming to take up apprenticeships with one of the Livery Companies (trade guilds). According to Steve Rappaport, there may have been 7000 apprentices in London in any given year, with 1200 new apprentices arriving annually.12 Paul Griffiths, Patrick Wallis and a host of others have commented on the early departure rates for early modern apprentices, suggesting that fewer than 50 per cent went on to become masters.13 With so many people coming and going, the city could be a place of transience, movement, alienation, emotional disorientation and shifting community membership.14 Just what London was like to live in, and particularly whether the city was stable or unstable, has been a contested topic. London has been described as a place overwhelmed by crisis, lawlessness, poverty and unrest. Others have defended ‘the stable London thesis’ in which stability, not instability, is key to understanding London’s economic and social development and where contemporaries were alert to social dynamics in the growing city.15 Within London, there were numerous official controls that brought people into line with specific elements of normative community, moral and civic values. London’s aldermen, sheriffs, parishes, guilds and various arms of civic administration kept the city running more or less smoothly. Some of these controls provided obvious means for managing and regulating behaviour and have been the subject of considerable work.16 Apprentices and merchants were automatically part of London’s civic bureaucracy as a result of their membership in the guilds. Social and cultural historians are equally interested in how communities regulated and policed themselves through other means. Gossiping about reputation, for example, has been carefully studied for its influence on sociability and behaviour.17 Rappaport has pointed out that apprenticeship profoundly shaped the personalities of young men, who could spend up to a quarter of their lives serving as an apprentice in the city, while Laura Gowing has noted that apprentice workplaces were conflicted and ambivalent spaces.18 Competing expectations over who had authority and power, and what roles male and female apprentices could have in households, made the conscious performance of particular roles and demeanours vital. Apprentices’ aspirations towards establishing economic independence existed in tension with the deference they were supposed to show to adult men and women. Bernard Capp has noted that affronts initiated by young people were particularly insulting.19 Such attacks undermined the normal rules of deference and made the adult’s status suspect. And yet the evidence reveals apprentices’ adeptness with legal courts as spaces to negotiate power with superiors, alongside the more informal mechanisms available to them, such as simply departing from London or gossiping.Within the court system, apprentices were highly alert and motivated to assert their status and defend their reputations in two ways. They did this by criticizing the reputation of others and by presenting a plausible account of their own actions as evidence of their good judgment and trustworthiness.20 The evidence from Chancery shows that presenting emotional evidence, not just about themselves but about fellow members in their community, was a strategy employed to defend or attack reputation. This is suggestive of emotion itself as a dimension in how reputations were conceived, at least within the late medieval and early modern mercantile community.21

Approaching legal narratives Exploring emotions within legal genres presents particular challenges.22 Chancery was a court based on written pleadings that were presented to the Chancellor. No juries met in Chancery and oral testimony was not publicly heard.23 It has long been noted that medieval courts saw more truth value in written statements than in the personal appearance of witnesses, thus privileging the 329

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t­ extual record.24 Chancery’s particular jurisdiction into matters of conscience and the specific legal conventions of the court gives the petitions a distinctive shape.25 All Chancery petitions emphasize the matter of harm and immoral actions, as this went towards the issue of whether there had been a conscionable offence that could be admitted into Chancery’s jurisdiction. The petitioner and their counsel formally argued that the matter had to be heard in Chancery and not in another jurisdiction. Petitioners and counsel often did this by claiming that the petitioner would be unable to receive justice in common-law courts, usually by arguing that the petitioner was poor and powerless. Throughout this process, the court did not formally assess emotional evidence, nor did it have any jurisdiction over the emotional experiences or lives of petitioners and defendants.This complicates how we can read legal genres for emotional evidence, but it does not eliminate these records from the historian’s repertoire. By being attentive to the legal requirements and formulas required in Chancery petitions and understanding that evidence was presented according to the moral, theological, spiritual and jurisdictional nature of the court, it is still possible to excavate the described emotions that petitioners and their counsel presented in the petitions. It can be tempting to see the traces of emotion in the historical record as offering insight into the core of someone’s authentic self, but the construction of legal records belies that interpretation.Very few historians argue that court records present objective facts or unfiltered truth. It is often next to impossible to definitively interpret whether a plaintiff, defendant or witness was lying, or sometimes even what the incident was that caused the matter to be brought to court.26 These problems are aggravated in Chancery by the infrequency of having the other side’s pleadings, which only appear around the 1450s and even then with infrequency; or the Chancellor’s decision, which was only formally recorded after about the 1530s.27 Historians have worked hard to develop approaches to court material that recognize their mediated nature but that still give them evidentiary value. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Natalie Zemon Davis and Laura Gowing focused on the question of authorship. They showed that the stories created in court records effectively offered a window into people’s mental worlds and internal narratives.28 This is not to say that legal records only contain one voice. Chancery bills were a collaborative work between the petitioner and legal counsel, who tailored the petitioner’s words to meet the court’s requirements using appropriate legal formulae. Petitions cannot be thought of as having a single author, and we cannot assume that we are reading the unreconstructed words and, importantly, the unreconstructed emotional experiences of an individual. Historians like Tim Stretton have looked explicitly at these filters, investigating how they shaped the record in meaningful ways. By thinking of what was occurring in the petitions as a practice of communication between the petitioner, their counsel, the court and the wider community, we move beyond issues of authorship and truthfulness. Instead, we are able to investigate how petitioners and counsel constructed meaning out of the circumstances that had befallen them. As Stretton puts it, we can focus on the story-telling and not just the story-teller.29 This approach helps us to understand the work that emotions are doing in records. I argue that, with careful attention to the legal conventions and jurisdictions of the court and acknowledging that these shape the creation of all petitions, it is possible to find evidence of emotional discourse, even if evidence of the antecedent emotional experiences eludes us. I now turn to several Chancery petitions in which evidence about mercantile reputations, youthfulness, gender and power within the city can be seen.

Power, emotions and assertiveness in Chancery In the medieval and early modern economy, a good reputation was a mechanism for ­gauging a trader’s reliability, character and credit.30 Maintaining, criticizing and commenting upon 330

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r­eputation were continual preoccupations for those who relied on on-going access to credit to earn a living, run a household or pursue a trade. Reputation was based on informed knowledge about someone’s past economic conduct and their character.This information was derived from a gamut of traits and activities involved in economic practices, including someone’s creditworthiness (which in turn made for a good reputation), their reliability in meeting obligations, their dependability over repeated interactions, their diligence and their honesty. As Sheryllynne Haggerty has noted in early modern British Atlantic trade records, reputations needed to be painstakingly maintained and could be threatened by gossip and by the known failure to meet obligations.31 Craig Muldrew has commented that reputation was essential for early modern transactions that occurred below the wholesaling level and that arrest for debt would tarnish a good name.32 Retaining a good reputation was therefore a matter of urgency for anyone who was engaged in regular equitable exchanges. As reputation was constructed in various ways, including through the careful noting of demeanour and behaviour in social settings as well as through past economic performance, slurs on emotional temperament and character could also damage it. By focusing on some types of emotional behaviour, such as displays of uncontrollable anger or malice, Chancery cases show that emotions had an important role in society as they could be used as a source of information about someone’s trustworthiness. By providing clues about how well someone interacted with others in the community, some emotional behaviours became a means to pass judgement on others. Haberdasher’s apprentice Thomas May’s petition from 1504–1515 relied on the cultural value of reputation. May was the subject of a suit of trespass for the theft of goods from his master, John Hill, to the value of £10 and above, and a plaint of covenant for breaching his indenture. Consequently, May found himself in prison, unable to draw on the surety of any friends ‘of sufficient habilite in the seid citie to be his Sewerty for suche a some’ and was using Chancery to seek a writ of corpus cum casua (a writ requesting Chancery to review the initial reason a plaintiff had been imprisoned due to an action in an inferior court).33 The petition does not explicitly address the charges. May and his counsel instead rehearse allegations about the economic injury May suffered because of his master’s behaviour, and much of the case is taken up with details about Hill’s character and reputation, which the petition later underscores as being well known within the city. At the petition’s core is the allegation that Hill had failed to teach May the haberdashers’ craft and that Hill ‘contynually set hym into his kechyn [kitchen] & such other vyle besynes by the space of iiij yeres’, a typical complaint made by apprentices to prove unfair treatment. The point, of course, is that May’s future earning potential was being threatened by poor training. The petition goes to lengths to create a sense of May’s environment, presenting evidence about excessive physical punishment and May’s alleged ‘drede of his seid [master’s] unlaufull corrections’. This dread was May’s supposed emotional response to being ‘handelyd… w[ith]out cause reasonable gevyn on his behalf ’ and because of ‘all the afore specifyed unreasonable causys & extreme corrections’. May then acted ‘for savegarde of his body’, presumably by leaving his master’s household.34 Criticizing Hill’s reputation provided May with an opportunity to assert his own good character and identity by providing an explanation for his actions. Moreover, he defended his claims by drawing on a wider community within which both he and his master were embedded. The petition reinforced the presence of community knowledge by referring to the city as a knowing observer of Hill’s disposition: ‘the seid John Hill beying a verey unreasonable man & so knowen w[ith]in the seid cite’. Hill’s supposedly well-known public reputation was used to support May’s claims of poor treatment. The city in the petition was not merely a ­geographical space but represented his fellow apprentices, other merchants and the guilds who shared knowledge, information and gossip with each other. May’s petition can be thought 331

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about not only in terms of how it instigated a legal process in court but also of how May gave notice to Hill and the community about alleged moral and economic conflict and his readiness to challenge this. Apprentices and poorer merchants had to be flexible in the types of evidence they could bring to defend their reputation. John Baker had finished his apprenticeship as a skinner with Roger Lilly but argued that his former master had prevented him from being entered as a freeman into the city. In his 1518–1529 petition, Baker and his counsel emphasized Baker’s good name by referring to how he had faithfully served his apprenticeship ‘truly and duly with all his diligence’.35 No reference is made to Baker’s credit reliability, his standing with friends or any surety upon which he could draw.The most likely explanation is that Baker was poor and could not point to any credit history to which witnesses could testify. Baker and the petition writer therefore emphasized the only element of Baker’s reputation that they could: the quality of his past service. Petitioners stressed their poverty and low status to ensure their cases could be heard in the court, usually by referring to themselves as ‘poor orator’. While this was normal Chancery procedure, it is at odds with many of the norms from literary and didactic sources about male economic credit. The common conceptual lexis in the early modern period was that adult men were assessed according to how well they provided for their dependants (for example, men might be critiqued in court records for being negligent) and how industrious they were (accusations of idleness were a way to challenge this).36 These norms informed ideas about masculinity and economic standing. However, as Shepard has argued, credit could be, and needed to be, claimed in other ways. For men who were poor and unable to demonstrate credit worthiness through proof of paid debts or on-going access to credit chains, value and credibility could be defended by focusing on character, reliable service and meeting household obligations.37 Chancery was not the only location in which men and women had space to define reputation despite their poverty. Gendered strategies for reconciling poverty and reputation were also used in petitions in the Court of Requests, an equity court that developed during Henry VII’s reign and which echoed Chancery practices in many of its forms, particularly in Chancery’s early jurisdiction providing relief on the basis of poverty.38 Stretton has shown that female petitioners in Requests were more likely to emphasize their weakness and helplessness, while men highlighted their temporary powerlessness or focused on the influence of their opponents rather than endemic poverty.39 As Alexandra Shepard proposes, looking for the fissures between the normative values espoused in didactic materials (and which were still reinforced in legal and legislative sources) and how real agents made positive statements about their credit and reputation brings a different perspective to how power was created and asserted. 40 Apprentices and newly minted craftsmen had to fashion different interpretive frameworks to evaluate worth, with this becoming part of how economic relationships were created and how notions of identity were rehearsed and presented.

Helpful emotions? I earlier highlighted Thomas May’s alleged dread, which was expressed in the petition as his ‘drede of his seid [master’s] unlaufull corrections’. This phrase offered the chancellor a sense of May’s alleged emotional reaction to harm as well as his master’s unlawful excesses, providing us with an opportunity to think more explicitly about the historicity of emotions. May’s stated emotional reaction can be thought about as a helpful response to his specific situation. Barbara Rosenwein has argued that different modes of emotional expressions are collectively ‘valuable or harmful’ inside

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different communities, while Linda Pollock addresses the positive uses of supposedly negative emotions, for example, how displaying anger could be a source of pride.41 These approaches emphasize the value of looking at how appropriate or useful emotions are to an individual or to a group in their particular environment, community and context.42 The helpfulness of feeling (as well as expressing) culturally appropriate emotions has been proposed in recent empirical research that shows how ‘emotional fit’ brings benefits to someone in their particular community.43 In this case, we should interpret May’s emotional statement in terms of whether it helped him to align his experiences with norms about the authority of adult male householders, and not because of any inherent negative or positive value we automatically cast onto the emotion of dread. The connection between power, punishment and legitimate household authority has been the subject of considerable attention. Susan Amussen has noted that ‘violence was legitimate when used by superiors against inferiors’, while ‘the right to “correct” (i.e., punish) his dependents’ was part of a male householder’s responsibility and a legitimate expression of his authority and power.44 Shepard has also explored how violence could be asserted by young people as a marker of masculinity and identity but in ways that were very finely attuned to precise circumstances, against certain groups and in particular ways.45 It is equally clear from the records of many different courts that an adult householder’s absolute authority was mediated by a concern for whether the punishment was seen as appropriate, even if what was considered appropriate might itself be contested and ambiguous.The intervention by authorities in cases where a householder’s punishment against subordinates appeared excessive is well documented.46 May and his legal counsel were harnessing a well-worn and acceptable trope by arguing that Hill’s punishments were inappropriate in their severity and form. What would have been Hill’s undoubtedly genuine power over his dependents involved his reciprocal obligation to control his actions or risk being seen as a man whose heightened emotions made him ill fitted to ­manage his own behaviour, let alone that of others. That emotional excess could be one of the factors mentioned in outbursts is deliberately noted in the late fifteenth-century petition of John Webbe, when butcher Thomas Colman, who was master to the petitioner’s brother Thomas, is alleged to have nearly killed his apprentice with ‘great fury’. Pollock has argued that the English elite distinguished between acceptable and unacceptable anger.47 The Chancery evidence shows that this judgement was more widespread, and that merchants carefully differentiated anger based on the specific context in which it was shown and particularly whether anger was exacerbating the conflict, as the Webbe versus ­Colman case indicates. John Webbe’s alleged sequence of thoughts and decisions are worth noting for several reasons. John initially acts as a witness: ‘the said Thomas Colman aynst all lawefull punysshment/smot the said brother of your Suppliant on the hede with a staff which made him fall to the ground’.48 Families were not supposed to intervene in apprentice–master disputes except in extreme circumstances. John Webbe then reasoned with Colman, verbally pointing out the community’s expectations about reasonable behaviour: ‘Wherefore your said Oratou[r] resoned the said Thomas Colman and said that he was mysse avysed so cruelly to [smy]te49 any s[er]vint or apprentice aynst all reson and lawefull correction’. At this point, Webbe alleges that Colman reacted with anger to Webbe’s verbal intervention and that Colman was fuelled by uncontrolled (‘great’) emotion when he moved to attack his a­ pprentice: ffor which the said Thomas Colman of grete fury and cruelte ran to his said apprentice with the said staff and by lyklyhod/ne had not your said Oratour ben p[re]sent he wold a maymed or slayne the said Thomas Webbe.50

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Finally, John Webbe explains his own motivations and how he has himself suffered from Colman’s malice: for cause that your said Oratour of love51 and nature withstod and lettid52 the cruelte of the said Thomas Colman he therefore of his grete malice by subtile and wrongfull meanys and synyster informacion unto the maire of the said citee/hath caused the said maire to ley his comaundment upon youre said pore Suppliant/where upon with owten any annswere he is arrestid and comitted unto Newegate.53 In its entirety, the sequence indicates Webbe and his counsel’s interpretation of both the rational argument that had supposedly been made and the emotional response it incited. The case charts the progression of Colman’s emotional state, which became more excessive.Webbe also reported seeing fine-grained changes in Colman’s demeanour, which he identified as having a bearing on the subsequent actions. Colman’s sudden, spontaneous anger supposedly solidified into longer-term maliciousness. It is the combination of excessive anger and then cold vengeance that the petition argues undermines Colman’s moral authority and so his right to have Webbe imprisoned. Alternatively, draper William Chaldwell in a petition from 1480–1483 argued the opposite, alleging he laid hands only peaceably on his apprentice, Thomas Corset: ‘wherefore the seid Willi[a]m Choldwelle leyd his oon hand pesibylly upon the seid Thom[a]s Corset seying unto hym that he…id hym as his apprentice and requirid him to use[?] hym accordyng to his seid bond and coven[a]nt as right requirid’.54 Early modern people carefully observed how and when they did, or did not, lay hands upon another’s body and wanted this information to be known and understood. Having to respond to an accusation like this also reveals that masters could be forced to give subordinate apprentices a voice in legal arenas and thus not inconsiderable power and agency. Chaldwell’s petition had to present him as an innocent man injured by the false accusations of his apprentice, who ‘hath take an action of Trespas of a sawte55 and batt[er]y before the mayre and baylies of the same towne agayn the seid Willi[a]m his maist[re] for the leyying of his hond on the seid Thom[a]s his apprentice to his Damag of x[?] li’. Although we will never know what took place between Chaldwell and Corset, the fact that evidence about this event made its way into the petition shows the power that accusations of unreasonable punishment could have. Emotions function in a dynamic way. One of the breakthroughs in social and cultural ­psychology in the last 30 years has been the idea that emotions have action tendencies. That is, emotions ‘do things’ by being motivational or inspiring action.56 There is an appealing intuitiveness to this idea. John Webbe was arguing that emotions caused events when his brother was beaten. May’s petition argued that Hill’s intemperate disposition motivated his actions, while May’s own stated emotion of dread became part of the evidence given to the court to explain his actions. For May, dread was an emotional response that he could use to good effect to safeguard his own reputation. As Pollock has shown, in some circumstances, emotion could be a ‘responsible reaction’ to have. Webbe presented similar evidence about Colman’s ‘great fury’ because it signalled an on-going emotional state that could not be resolved through discussion. Emotional communication can also be used as a persuasion strategy to demonstrate, amongst other things, innocence.57 Moreover, the portrayal of innocence was not simply about factual innocence of a crime, such as in May’s case, but about overall disposition and character. Petitioners like May, but also Webbe and Chaldwell, aligned themselves with social and cultural mores and affirmed the appropriateness (even if only in their own minds) of their actions and feelings through the claims they and their counsel made about emotion. 334

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Conclusion Although the history of emotions is still in its infancy, we know that medieval and early modern people selected from emotional norms to suit their circumstances. As Pollock has argued, emotions were conceived as ‘highly manipulable’ for the elite in the early modern period.58 The evidence from mercantile cases suggests a similar adeptness with judging the social utility of emotions. Commenting on the emotional outbursts of superiors could benefit someone of lower status, while it was accepted that younger people would feel fear and dread when being punished and so was a response that young people could use to restore their own character. The conditions that helped people select between appropriate emotional expressions took account of age, gender, status relative to others and the specific context of the conflict. Legal activities provided a space for the self-presentation of identity, one facet being a selfconscious dexterity with the law. By using the court of Chancery, London apprentices positioned themselves as knowledgeable operators of legal mechanisms. While this facilitated practical interaction between merchants and apprentices who were experiencing conflicts, albeit in a mediated manner through written pleadings, access to the court constituted a deeper articulation of power and personal assertiveness and was implicated in the formation of power relations. Litigants articulated their sense of personal authority through how they defended themselves from perceived economic threats or from accusations of improper conduct. ­Chancery c­ onstituted a physical space but was also part of how order and hierarchy was navigated within the mercantile community. Young people in particular invested in Chancery as a place where they could defend their positions and, as we have seen, strategically lay open aspects of their experiences by rehearsing allegations to those in power. Emotional language about mistreatment and descriptions of emotional responses could be part of these strategies. To the extent that Chancery provided a space to assert membership in the merchant ranks, using Chancery was a powerful investment for apprentices in defending their status and reputation to the watching community. Finally, we would do well to remember that for all merchants inside London, negotiating emotional cultures and social relationships was necessary to successfully establish livelihoods, to create valuable support structures and to strengthen community ties with others within the city. The court was a place that helped to define roles as well as emotional and moral norms within the merchant community, insofar as it comprised one small, but important, part of London’s environment.

Notes   1 Ute Frevert, Emotions in History: Lost and Found (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2011).   2 Some social constructivists might question the assumption I am making that people in the past felt similar emotions, while those with a universalist perspective would insist that emotions are hardwired and innate. Instead of feeling that we need to adhere to one particular approach, thinking about emotions as existing in a universal potential state, one that is then heavily enculturated, opens up significant gaps in which we can examine the role cultural learning plays in the human condition. B. Mesquita, N. Vissers, J.D., Leersnyder, ‘Culture and emotion,’ in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, ed. James D. Wright (Oxford: Elsevier, 2015), 5: 542–49; W. Gerrod Parrott, ‘Ur-emotions and your emotions: Reconceptualizing basic emotion,’ Emotions Review 2 (2010): 14-21. Also Nicole ­Eustace, Eugenia Lean, Julie Livingston, Jan Plamper, William M. Reddy and Barbara H. Rosenwein, ‘AHR conversation:The historical study of emotions,’ American Historical Review 117 (2012): 1487–531.   3 Daniel Lord Smail examined civil litigation as an effective way to manage one’s reputation, demonstrating that the courts were part of how people attempted to control public good name. The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseilles, 1264-1423 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).   4 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation:The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998); James Davis, Medieval Market Morality: Life, Law and Ethics in the English Marketplace, 1200–1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Sheryllynne Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?: Business Culture in the British Atlantic, 1750–1815 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012).

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Merridee L. Bailey  5 Muldrew, Obligation; Davis, Morality; Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money’?.   6 Bernard Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighbourhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 212. Of course, young male apprentices had the potential to become adult men with status equal to those around them.   7 Penny Tucker, Law Courts and Lawyers in the City of London 1300–1550 (Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press, 2007), 350–55. In the fifteenth century, Chancery also took over testamentary cases from the church courts. Joseph Biancalanca, ‘Testamentary cases in fifteenth-century Chancery,’ Legal History Review 76 (2008): 283–306.  8 Cordelia Beattie, ‘Single women, work and family: The Chancery dispute of Jane Wynde and Margaret Clerk,’ in Voices from the Bench: The Narratives of Lesser Folk in Medieval Trials, ed. Michael Goodich (­Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 177–202; ‘Your oratrice: Women’s petitions to the late medieval court of Chancery,’ in Women, Agency and the Law, 1300–1700, ed. Bronach Kane and Fiona Williamson (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2013), 17–30. Sara M. Butler,‘The law as a weapon in marital disputes: Evidence from the late medieval court of Chancery, 1424–1529,’ Journal of British Studies 43 (2004): 291–316.   9 Amanda L. Capern, ‘Emotions, gender expectations and the social role of Chancery, 1550–1650,’ in Authority, Gender and Emotions in Late Medieval and Early Modern England, ed. Susan Broomhall (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 187–209 (188). 10 The c.1500 and 1600 figures are from Caroline M. Barron, London in the Later Middle Ages: Government and People, 1200–1500 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 4, 241. The c.1550 figures are from Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, Joseph P.Ward, ‘Introduction,’ in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550–1850, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 9. On the difficulty of determining London’s size, see Vanessa Harding, ‘The population of London, 1550–1700:A review of the published evidence,’ The London Journal 15 (1990): 111–28. 11 Robert O. Bucholz and Joseph P. Ward, London: A Social and Cultural History, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 7. 12 Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: ­Cambridge University Press, 1989), 1–22; Ian W. Archer, The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 1–17; Paul S. Seaver,‘Apprentice riots in early modern London,’ in Violence, Politics, and Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Joseph Patrick Ward (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 17–40 (18). 13 Patrick Wallis, ‘Apprenticeship and training in premodern England,’ The Journal of Economic History 68 (2008): 832–61; Chris Minns and Patrick Wallis, ‘Rules and reality: Quantifying the practice of apprenticeship in early modern England,’ Economic History Review 65 (2012): 556–79; Paul Griffiths, Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 330–35. 14 Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (­Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 12–32. 15 Rappaport, Worlds, 51; Steve Rappaport, ‘Reconsidering apprenticeship in sixteenth-century London,’ in Renaissance Society and Culture, Essays in Honor of Eugene F. Rice, Jr., ed. John Monfasani and Ronald G. Musto (New York: Italica, 1991), 239–61. 16 Barron, London, 255–62; Archer, Stability. 17 On formal and informal mechanisms working in parallel see Capp, Gossips, 224. See also, Alexander Cowan, ‘Gossip and street culture in early modern Venice,’ in Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets, ed. Riitta Laitinen and Thomas V. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 119–39. 18 Rappaport, ‘Reconsidering apprenticeship,’ 239; Laura Gowing, ‘The manner of submission: Gender and demeanour in seventeenth-century London,’ Cultural and Social History 10 (2013): 25–45. 19 Capp, Gossips, 210. 20 Gowing, ‘The manner of submission,’ 40. 21 Work would need to be done on other social groups to see if this existed more generally. 22 William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honour, Social Discomfort, and Violence (Ithaca: ­Cornell University Press, 1993); Paul R. Hyams, Rancor and Reconciliation in Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Daniel Lord Smail, ‘Hatred as a social institution in late-medieval society,’ Speculum 76 (2001): 90–126; John Bossy, ed., Disputes and Settlements: Law and Human Relations in the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). 23 This distinguishes Chancery from the civil cases examined by Smail which were open to the public to hear, Consumption of Justice. 24 John H. Arnold, ‘The historian as Inquisitor: The ethics of interrogating subaltern voices,’ Rethinking History 2 (1998): 379–86 (383); Frances E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 4.

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Shaping London Merchant Identities 25 G. Dodd, ‘Writing wrongs: The drafting of supplications to the Crown in later fourteenth-century England,’ Medium Aevum 80 (2011): 217–46 (224). 26 G.R. Elton, Star Chamber Stories (London: Methuen, 1958), 17. 27 Timothy S. Haskett, ‘The medieval English court of Chancery,’ Law and History Review 14 (1996): 245–313 (281). 28 Natalie Zemon Davis, Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987); Laura Gowing, ‘Gender and the language of insult in early modern London,’ History Workshop Journal 35 (1993): 1–21; Tim Stretton, Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 29 Tim Stretton, ‘Social historians and the records of litigation,’ in Fact, Fiction and Forensic Evidence, ed. Sølvi Sogner (Oslo: Skriftserie fra Historisk Institutt, Universitetet i Oslo, 1997), 15–34 (28–29). 30 Davis, Morality, 121–2. 31 Haggerty, ‘Merely for Money?,’ 97–131. 32 Muldrew, Obligation, 148–72. 33 The National Archives, Kew [hereafter TNA], C1/369/3 (1504–1515). 34 The bill refers to a departure, probably May’s, however it is not clear as the document is worn on the right-hand side. 35 TNA, C1/468/7 (1518–1529). 36 Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, credit and patriarchy in early modern England,’ Past and Present 167 (2000): 75–106; Bernard Capp,‘The double standard revisited,’ Past and Present 162 (1999): 70–100; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex and Marriage (New York: Longman, 1999). 37 Shepard, ‘Manhood’; Alexandra Shepard, Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 38 J. H. Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th ed. (Oxford University Press, 2007), 119–20; Stretton, Women Waging War, 70–100. 39 Stretton, Women Waging War, 180–4. 40 Shepard, ‘Manhood,’ 101–2. 41 J. Plamper, ‘The history of emotions: An interview with William Reddy, Barbara Rosenwein, and Peter Stearns,’ History and Theory 49 (2010): 237–65 (252); Linda A. Pollock, ‘Anger and the negotiation of relationships in early modern England,’ Historical Journal 47 (2004): 567–90 (574). 42 For a critique of valence, or negative–positive emotions, see Giovanna Colombetti, ‘Appraising valence,’ Journal of Consciousness Studies 12 (2005): 103–26. Barbara Rosenwein sees problems with conferring valence to emotions as it undermines their historicity, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 194. By contrast, William Reddy sees valence as a way to understand the political control exerted on emotions, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the ­History of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 21–5. 43 This approach still incorporates the idea of valence. Mesquita et al., ‘Culture and emotion,’ 547. 44 Susan Dwyer Amussen, ‘Punishment, discipline, and power: The social meanings of violence in early modern England,’ Journal of British Studies 34 (1995): 1–34 (4, 5). 45 Shepard, Meanings of Manhood. 46 Amussen, ‘Punishment,’ 12–18. 47 Pollock, ‘Anger,’ 581–2. 48 TNA, C1/66/236 (1475–1480 or 1483–1485). 49 A lacuna or fold in the vellum suggests the word is either “smyte” or “bete”. 50 TNA, C1/66/236. 51 The document is damaged and an emendation may have been made, but love is the best reading. 52 That is, prevented. 53 TNA, C1/66/236. 54 TNA, C1/61/353 (1480–1483). 55 Assault. 56 Nicho H. Frijda, ‘Emotion, cognitive structure, and action tendency,’ Cognition and Emotion 1 (1987): 115–43; N. H. Frijda, ‘Emotions and action,’ in Feelings and Emotions, ed. A.S.R. Manstead, N. Frijda and A. Fischer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 158–73. 57 Unveiling Emotions Sources and Methods for the Study of Emotions in the Greek World, ed. Angelos Chaniotis (Stuttgart: Steiner Verlag, 2012). 58 Pollock, ‘Anger,’ 585.

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26 Love Thy Neighbour? The Gendered, Emotional and Spatial Production of Charity and Poverty in Sixteenth-Century France Susan Broomhall This essay explores how bureaux, donors and the poor in Catholic urban communities in ­sixteenth-century France produced meanings of poverty and charity. It analyses how these meanings were negotiated discursively through administrative documents produced by town councils and poor-relief bureaux and the spatial, gendered and emotional practices that these revealed. These texts relate to a number of French towns and cities, including both Paris and provincial hubs spread across France that differed in size and significance at this period, such as Verdun, Troyes, Tours and Nantes. Through the administrative archives of these towns, I explore how understandings of poverty and charity were made by individuals, through texts and acts, in particular urban spaces that included physical sites shaped by collective use and participation such as squares, hospitals and churches; boundary and marginal spaces such as city walls and gates; more intimate locations such as households, lodgings and doorways; and through conceptual spatial units that were spiritual, such as the parish, and municipal, such as the quartier and dizaine.1 Urban space, I argue, played a key role in identifying the needy and in shaping practices of charity and, in turn, gained new emotional and gendered meanings over the century as provisions for poor relief shifted and changed in response to new circumstances and pressures in French towns. Although the written texts that I study were created by powerful elites who played a key role in defining charity and poverty by what they sought to know and leave on record, concepts and experiences of both were not constructed solely by these cohorts.This essay explores how the meanings and practices of poverty and charity were continually re-navigated across multiple interactions among urban populations and materialities that ranged from urban spaces to objects such as badges and alms boxes and documents prepared for varied contexts. In each case, unique articulations of poverty and charity were generated, but these were bound by historically specific, cultural contexts of production.These contexts included contemporary understandings of gender, faith, emotions and space, among others, which both informed these articulations and were being shaped through them.2 The extant archives provide patchy access to experiences of sixteenth-century poverty and charity and thus, in the sections to follow, I consider four aspects of how powerful discourses of gender and emotion were critical to the negotiation of urban space in relation to poor relief. These sections reveal how ‘belonging’ would be defined in Verdun, how space and funds would be shared with the poor in Paris, how ‘the needy’ were located within the urban landscapes of Nantes and Troyes and, finally, who could stand as an appropriate witness to the need of 338

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others in Tours. In all four contexts, assumptions about gender, negotiated through emotional ­rhetoric, informed both the identities of donors and the poor and the actions that they were able to undertake in, and within, French towns.These actions were also emotional practices that produced or reinforced bonds of affinity, intimate connections, social networks and obligations between urban inhabitants.

Belonging In the sixteenth century, the administration of charitable endeavour shifted to municipalities under the crown.3 However, in many cases, it remained underpinned by powerful Catholic beliefs. Fresh demarcations of space and gendered identities were essential elements of the new practices of charity and experiences of those recognized as needy. Support for some was always correlated with discrimination of others.Thus, this section explores how the concept of ‘belonging’ was navigated in relation to charity and poverty, entailing a responsibility for women and men to feel, give and act in distinct ways in particular city spaces. Verdun was newly annexed to the French kingdom in 1552 but continued to enjoy special administrative autonomy in the years to follow. Under Nicolas Psaume, count-bishop of Verdun from 1548 to 1575,4 revised and reformed regulations for the administration and maintenance of the poor provided a new articulation of charity and poverty in this episcopal town.5 Psaume’s document defined the needy via a range of spatially distinct units that differentiated the care they were perceived to require. The Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Nicolas was designated as a site for the sick, while those who were merely poor would be assisted in other locations. Lepers remained far from view in the sixteenth-century cityscape and were now joined outside the city walls by ‘pestiferous’ of other kinds. Hôpital Saint-Jacques became an orphanage and provided lessons that poor children were also eligible to attend. The individuals who accessed these sites of care were strictly limited to those who could claim affiliation to Verdun. No pauper was to be admitted to the town’s facilities if they had not been resident before the publication of the ordinance.6 These were common restrictions imposed in urban centres, in which the poor and sick were spatially segregated not only from each other and differentiated in terms of their care but were also defined by their affiliation to the urban community. Sick foreigners could now only be treated at the discretion of the rectors.7 However, ‘discretion’ appeared emotionally and financially costly for, by the end of the century, the auditors of the public alms accounts recommended that poor strangers should be allocated a set sum of money, ostensibly to prevent abuses that had arisen through rectors’ discretion.8 For those confronted with the responsibility to decide others’ fate, strict guidelines may have been preferable, eradicating either potential guilt or costly generosity in the performance of Christian duty. The Hôtel-Dieu Saint-Nicolas was to cover its costs from the proceeds of rents and properties, but all the other charitable facilities would be supported at public expense. The first act of the alms rectors who met in March 1565 was to publish an ordinance redefining how charity would operate spatially and in gendered terms that both assumed and created specific emotional responses from inhabitants. It forbade begging – specifically in the streets, in front of houses and churches – on pain of prison and corporal punishment. No one was to give alms in the street, although it was still permissible at the door.9 Alms boxes were placed in the cathedral and HôtelDieu and given to ‘a number of bourgeois women’ to be taken about the streets every Sunday.Two orphan recipients of alms would also stand with boxes outside each church on Sunday.10 On feast days there would be ‘ladies deputized…to ask for alms at the parishes during divine service’.11 ‘To incite and persuade the people to the good, profit and upkeep of this charity’, a procession was to take place through the town annually of all the paupers who were being assisted by alms.12 339

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This effectively institutionalized a new form of begging by respectable women and r­ecipients in place of the more random and personalized system of the past. It was as yet a rather passive system of collective assistance, relying primarily on the kindness and zeal of inhabitants to generate donations rather than mandating regular contributions. Its success was questionable, however, for, in 1586, the rectors proposed a commission be held to deal with those who sought exemption from support of the poor and to consider ways to exhort those who gave nothing.13 This was a tension that many French Catholic communities would confront over the century, as charitable organization was systematized as part of the municipal bureaucracy, but the almsgiving that serviced the system was still framed in terms of spontaneous donations inspired by spiritual and emotional responses distinct to women and men and conducted primarily in key Catholic sites of worship and via ambulant, municipally validated, supplicants. The concept of ‘belonging’ therefore demanded responsibilities of all inhabitants to ­contribute in varied forms that were gendered and performed in specific urban sites. The corollary of inclusion in French Catholic towns was the rejection of support to those beyond it. Belonging, though, came with heavy financial responsibilities and difficult decisions that were emotionally fraught. Coming face to face with the needy and hearing their plight entangled donors in complex emotional relationships that made determining who one supported with the limited resources available an unenviable task. Moreover, bestowing charity empowered particular individuals to subordinate the vulnerable: a beguiling source of personal authority for some and a fearful Christian burden for others. The response was ever more detailed documentation regulating the precise, and non-discretionary, degree of charitable care for distinct cohorts. Ordinances and revised regulations thus echoed and created emotions about charity and the needy, as well as their gendered and spatialized practices and identities.

Sharing Almost every town in France faced increased pressure from paupers seeking relief, requiring increasingly inventive ways to invoke charity and define the poverty that townspeople chose to document, visualize and respond to. Secular systems applied religious frameworks for charity to new spaces and new practices in urban sites, while progressively demanding more of inhabitants emotionally and financially, in surveillance of, contributions for and, ultimately, accommodating the poor. This section thus analyses how urban space and the support of its inhabitants would be shared with those considered in need. As Paris moved towards secular provisions for the able-bodied poor in 1535, it mapped poverty and charity through civic spatial boundaries and units. A parliamentary ordinance required that the sectorial divisions and sub-divisions of the city employed by the militia be used to organize quarteniers, cinquanteniers and dizeniers to visit each house in their section: and inquire about the people who lodge in them, the number of households, for how long they have lived in this town, in what state they lived before and live at present; and those who say they live on alms are to be interrogated more closely than the others, and enquiries made of their neighbours, if they have the capacity and means to earn their living and to live elsewise than by alms.14 The responsibility to inquire and oversee was now a neighbourly duty. In 1551, local commissioners were to visit the able-bodied poor to investigate their health, whether they were truly native to Paris and to ‘advise, according to their conscience’ of any who should be supported, 340

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providing they had been in Paris for ‘five years or a similarly long time, and were once workers who had earned their living but who, by illness, losses or otherwise had fallen into poverty or incapacity’.15 Not only did this reinforce that assistance was only for those who could demonstrate prior economic contribution to the city, but it also gave those spatially proximate to the poor new supervisory and discretionary power. Some regulations articulated the frustrations of governing officials at resistance to the implications of the new system. In 1551, householders were forbidden ‘from giving alms any longer at their doors, because it attracts the poor into the streets’ and ‘to whisper or go against the policy, either by word or deed’.16 A regulation concerning poor employed in city works in 1570 demanded that they should neither abuse those passing by the workshop nor ‘tell people that they only earned a sol or three blancs each day which is not true’.17 These regulations documented dissenting views and practices from both donors and recipients visible in public locales, which destabilized the municipal order of city space and had to be negotiated through increasingly precise demands about pauper and donor behaviour. In the latter half of the century, the regulations of Parisian officials shaped male and female spaces of charity as they sought more creative sites and emotive ways to generate funds. These governing men knew how emotions, particularly when evoked by women and children, could spur action. They had, for example, forbidden women selling candles in churches to have any children with them in 1551 because there are several women who can be found at the thresholds of churches, with a ­handful or two of wax candles, which provide their cover for begging, who hold with them two or three small children to invite and move inhabitants to pity.18 Later, however, Parlement decided that each parish should elect two or three honourable women to go about the parish seeking, gently and discretely, sheets, and other linen to provide for the necessity of the poor and for wrapping the dead who are often buried without being wound, because the hospital is denuded of all linen, without applying any ­constraint to do so, only accepting that which is given in good and free will.19 Additionally, the town council decided to deploy alms boxes in new urban spaces beyond the city’s churches. All merchants who had a shop were ‘to hold a box, in which they can put by charity and alms as many deniers that they can, by those and with those with whom they trade merchandise’.20 While respectable women could gently coax inhabitants to give household goods at their door, merchants would collectively give money as a reflection of their professional status and identity. These regulations reflected and reinforced the idea that the desired emotions of zeal, compassion and duty were evoked by gendered, spatial practices. City officials applied emotive rhetoric to inspire inhabitants to feel part of the Parisian and Catholic community, often in equally salvific terms. In 1589, an influx of injured foreign soldiers fighting for the Catholic League forced another order to quarteniers that they make known to the households in their districts that these men had no commodities with which to subsist, if they do not receive some aid and charity from Catholics and those who care for the Union party, for whom they left their goods, their country, their wives and children – which must move everyone to do their best according to the means God has given them, for which they can expect a very certain recompense.21 341

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Spiritual sentiments were blended throughout these secular documents, but civic men were equally adept at tapping into darker feelings, particularly fears about safety in city spaces. The provost suggested in 1590, for example, that priests should press all those men and women who come to them in confession to give their goods to aid the feeding of the poor in the alms boxes, especially the noteworthy and obviously rich, and women, making them understand that laziness among the able-bodied poor is the cause of their stealing or committing other evils, and that the use of their donations in the workshops will prevent this.22 This threatening tone continued in 1595 when the local district officers were told to make clear to households that without immediate support, ‘the workshops will be destroyed and there will be no means to contain the poor’.23 In 1596, they were told to threaten recalcitrant contributors with seizure and sale of their goods as well as ‘placement of ten paupers in their homes for each of the refusers to pay for’.24 In September, the arrêt announcing a new levy to cover mounting costs associated with a contagion warned that ‘the governors of the Hôtel-Dieu say that it will be necessary to open their doors to 300 pestiferous…who, if they are not provided for, will infect all the town’.25 Charity took on a particular urgency with this evocation of new emotional, gendered spatial meanings and without which neither the safety of one’s home nor the city’s streets could be guaranteed. This succession of arrêts, ordinances, mandates and deliberations among the city’s secular governing men were negotiations with both the needy who demanded their help and inhabitants from whom they expected support for municipal relief efforts. Through these texts, charity was produced as a set of distinctly gendered, emotional and spatial practices – a burden to be shared among Parisians – from the compelling emotive nature of female alms collection and the emotional susceptibility of men and women who witnessed poverty, to determining the most persuasive location for alms boxes or threatening the security of urban spaces from squares to homes, and in the demands made of neighbours and locals for surveillance, contributions, audible support and, ultimately, lodging.

Locating City governors insisted that those who were designated as needy were the responsibility of all urban inhabitants, female and male. However, analysis of other records demonstrates how texts produced and located poverty and charity as relational and spatial experiences, by what they aimed to achieve and where the poor were to be found and charity to be undertaken. In the municipal archives of Nantes, one extant poor-relief record listed recipients of alms distributed from the Hôtel-Dieu (over which secular administration began in 1532 and was formalized in 1539) from March 1536 to September 1539 by their parish of origin, still an important socio-spatial unit for charitable practices in many towns.26 This account allows us to chart the gendered nature of relief and the parishes in which it occurred (Table 26.1). This suggests that, over that period, fewer men were supported by the Hôtel-Dieu in total: 80 men compared to 99 women. This is consistent with other analyses of contemporary charitable practice: women were more likely to be recipients of urban relief programmes. In addition, it suggests that men were supported for far less time than women: an average of 33 days for men compared to 46 days for women.They were also more likely to receive one-off payments: 15 men compared to six women. Furthermore, there were large contrasts between urban spaces: some parishes had far more men and women accessing poor relief than others. Saint-Laurent, a small, relatively wealthy 342

Love Thy Neighbour? Table 26.1 Comparison of the nature of alms support by parish and gender. Nantes, March 1536 to ­September  1539 Parish

Number Number of men of women supported supported

Number of Number of Average Average days of one-off payments one-off payments days of relief relief provided to to men to women provided to men women

Saint-Nicolas Saint-Sembin [Similien] Saint-Clément Saint-Leonard Sainte-Radegonde Saint-Vincent Saint-Saturnin Saint-Denis Sainte-Croix Saint-Laurent Total

19 18

10 18

5 3

0 1

37 37

74 61

13 10 7 5 3 3 2 0 80 men

23 17 5 3 8 4 10 1 99 women

3 1 0 1 1 0 1 0 15 payments

2 0 0 0 2 1 0 0 6 payments

51 30 14 55 38 60 7 0 33 days

50 37 35 55 32 42 59 13 46 days

*Entries where the sex of the recipient is not known have not been included: ‘two poor’, ‘a blind person’.

inner-city parish occupied by royal officials and religious and legal professionals, had only one individual receive aid during this time, named as ‘Jehanne Vernier, widow of the late Jehan de Billon, controlleur of La Rochelle’.27 By contrast, some 36 individuals from the far poorer Saint-Clément were supported, the same number from Saint-Sembin [Similen] and 29 from the waterside parish Saint-Nicolas, which contained a wider socio-economic spread. But SaintNicolas and the poorer, extramural Saint-Sembin each had equal or more men supported but for shorter times and by more one-off payments. This was a common means of support for men, typically out of work due to what was hoped was short-term misfortune and with a high chance of economic re-integration.The parishes in which alms supported the largest number of women (Saint-Léonard, Saint-Clément and Saint-Sembin) were among the city’s poorest, and a tax assessment at the end of the century indicates that these areas contained a high number of poor female-headed households.28 Gendered realities thus shaped the provision of relief and the nature of poverty and charity within and between urban spaces. The records of a tax raised in the town of Troyes in 1553 enable us to further explore sociospatial and gendered dimensions of poverty and charity in this town of about 27,000 people.29 It identified the degree of tax-paying male and female households, their contribution, some living arrangements and those declared too poor to contribute or receiving alms. For example, in the first dizaine in Belfroy, the collector recorded that ‘the widow Claude Thenenin lodges with Jehan Nandyer’, while among the poor in Saint-Jacques’s first dizaine was ‘a crippled prostitute (she is no longer)’.30 After a population explosion mid-century, the town appeared to be in some decline, echoed in this document’s listing of various householders as ‘at war’, ‘absent’, ‘dead’ or ‘house empty’ and in the large number who were too poor to contribute. The tax roll documents more male-headed households receiving public alms than female. However, generally at this period, it was women who dominated French poor-relief clientele. This demonstrates how documentary genres and contexts shaped poverty and charity – the lens of this text was tax, and its spatial unit of concern was the household. Most of the men noted as receiving alms were identified by a profession, evoking both their past and potential future 343

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contribution to Troyes (see Table 26.2). At the macro level, however, households headed by females, almost all of them widows, were poorer than those of their male counterparts.The percentage of female-headed households too poor to contribute to the tax was disproportionate to their overall number. Poor and female-headed households were also clustered in the same area: the poorest quartier, Saint-Jacques. This matches comparable data from other sixteenth-century towns.31 However, as with other centres, rich and poor did not appear completely segregated. The percentages of women who could contribute to the tax in both the wealthiest and poorest suburbs were not widely different (13.5 per cent in both Belfroy and Saint-Jacques). However the latter quartier clearly raised far less among its larger number of households, including those headed by women, and the percentage of households considered too poor to contribute was far higher (12 per cent in Belfroy compared to 43 per cent in Saint-Jacques). Significantly, the record produced different mappings of poverty and of charity in the town. Only 6 per cent of households were documented as receiving alms, and they were heavily skewed to the wealthiest quartier (Table 26.3). In Belfroy, 31 households were listed as receiving alms (amongst the 129 unable to pay due to their poverty). In Croncels, the quartier that had provided the second-highest amount to the 1553 tax, 33 households were recorded as receiving alms, more than half of which were in the 15th and 16th dizaines (15 and 6 respectively). Both these dizaines had high numbers of poor households (39 and 29) and over a third of those in the 15th dizaine (15 of 39 or 38 per cent) appeared to be receiving public assistance. By comparison, in Comporté, which contributed an amount just over half of Belroy’s tax contribution, only Table 26.2  Comparison of number and nature of the households and tax amounts raised in the four main quartiers of Troyes, 1553 Quartier and amount raised

Number of households assessed

Number of householders listed as too poor to contribute (% of total)

Number of female-headed households (% of total)

Number of tax-paying female-headed households (% of total)

Number of femaleheaded households listed as too poor to contribute (% of poor households)

Belfroy 9770l, 18s Croncels 7044lt, 17s, 10d Comporté 5645l, 12s Saint-Jacques 2071l, 10s, 6d

1037 1300

129 (12%) 317 (24%)

188 (18%) 226 (17%)

140 (13.5%) 144 (11%)

48 (37%) 82 (26%)

1160 1526

254 (22%) 659 (43%)

205 (18%) 416 (27%)

124(11%) 207 (13.5%)

81 (32%) 209 (32%)

Table 26.3  Comparison by gender and quartier of those receiving alms. Troyes, 1553 Quartier

Number of poor households

Number listed as receiving alms

Number of male recipients

Number of female recipients

Belfroy Croncels Comporté Saint-Jacques TOTAL

129 317 254 659 1359

31 33 2 0 66

21 24 0 0 45

10 9 2 0 21

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two households were listed as alms recipients among its 254 households and none at all were recorded in Saint-Jacques.This may reflect both emotional and socio-cultural dimensions of tax collection: those too poor to contribute in wealthier areas perhaps felt more pressure than those in less affluent parishes to explain their lack of contribution and therefore made efforts to have their explanatory status as poor-relief recipient noted on the tax roll. More practically, individuals residing in wealthier suburbs may have been able to draw on their personal relationships with such better-off neighbours as influential support to marshal resources and press their claims for municipal assistance with powerful backing. And in thus enabling a poor neighbour to access the town’s shared funds, a parish’s wealthier inhabitants could allay any feelings of guilt while alleviating the immediate financial burden on their doorstep. By comparison, Saint-Jacques had most households that were too poor to contribute but no listed alms recipients. Perhaps significantly, it contained a high proportion of the town’s listed prostitutes (41 of 44).32 Most were too poor to contribute (21 of the 41). Within Saint-Jacques, these workers were clustered in particular dizaines. The 10th dizaine, for example, listed ten prostitutes, six of whom were too poor to contribute. The 1st and 15th dizaines both contained another five women, among whom six were too poor to contribute. These data may suggest that women of shared social and working circumstances clustered together in the same streets, or perhaps even lodgings – even though, as working women with incomes, they were listed independently in the tax roll. Additionally, Saint-Jacques had the largest number of female-headed households (416) of any quartier. Why were none of these women, mostly widows, considered worthy recipients of public alms? The reputation of this area and the sex work conducted by some women here, however small a number, must surely have been a factor. In fact, the tax rolls recorded that a considerable number of its prostitutes were able to make some tax contribution. In Saint-Jacques’ 12th dizaine, for example, the five listed prostitutes all contributed (albeit at the very lowest level of contribution). Perhaps the fact that sex workers could pay something assuaged the guilt of governing officials about not supporting other women associated by residence in the same districts. There has been widespread literature, especially for France, that demonstrates that the ‘needy’ who most commonly received support from poor-relief programmes were able to present a contrite emotional performance that structured their identity for donors as remorseful, socially redeemable and malleable to control – as the ‘shamefaced’ victims of circumstance, the pauvres honteux. By contrast, those who had opted for criminal or immoral means to support themselves were perceived to be less easily reconcilable to municipal and religious forms of authority and were thus more likely to be considered ‘undeserving’.33 It was likely easier for widows of Belfroy, who did not live cheek by jowl with the town’s prostitutes, to achieve the necessary social and emotional criteria that would enable them to be assessed as ‘good women’. If the latter was to be constructed with the help of reports of neighbours in the locale, governors were perhaps most likely to be swayed by witnesses who were wealthy male professionals and their respectable widows than by other poor female householders and practising, rather than repentant, prostitutes. Analysis of this roll therefore suggests that socio-spatial networks among the poor and of charity were influential in determining who received formal assistance from the relief bureau. This reflects conclusions drawn by Sandra Cavallo for later early modern Italy that access to municipal funds could be a measure of one’s status as much as one’s need.34 These documents suggest that both poverty and charity were in some aspects relational – both to a document’s aims and focus and to the gendered, emotional and spatial locations in which they was perceived. Defining charity and poverty was therefore also a socio-spatial event, and those in some areas of the urban environment were more likely to have the networks to articulate voices that could help them obtain official support. 345

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Witnessing These data from Troyes and Nantes raise questions to which only speculative answers can be given. However, records from the poor relief archives of Tours mapped and enacted networks of support that surrounded poor recipients, revealing neighbourly relations and meanings of urban charity and community, in distinct gendered and emotional ways. Witness statements were essential in assisting the poor and to the functioning of this municipal relief system. When supplicants initially petitioned the council for financial aid in Tours, any supporting documentation was included in the dossier. Although it is unclear how these witness statements were secured, they show that people in the wider community came forward to assist others in need. Sometimes a witnesses’ role is only extant through a signature at the bottom of the relief council’s documents. Perhaps they came before the council to provide a verbal account of the supplicant. Other witnesses, however, supplied written documentation that is still attached to the supplicant’s petition. The letter of Marie, widow of Mathurin Prion, was supported by a now anonymous document, assuring the governors ‘that you will be doing a charitable work, for this poor women is indeed poor, for I have known her a good time. She nursed her husband ill for more than ten years’.35 Often a first witness called upon to support a claim for poverty was the parish priest. When Magdelayne Landrieu sought relief for her family, an ailing husband and four small children, her own pauper letter was attached to that of the curé of her parish St Clement certifying that ‘the poverty and misery being in these poor people greater than you could believe’.36 Sometimes curés also wrote the initial letter alerting the council to a case in need of aid. François Girard, curé of the parish church of St Venant, wrote to the council in 1581 about Marie Jollye, daughter of Michelle Jollye her mother, her father having gone from life to death a long time ago and the said girl, twenty-three years old, is unable to use her limbs and has never spoken or moved about on one of her legs except in great pain.37 Priests might also present foundling children discovered in their parish or draw the plight of orphans to the council’s attention. The curé of La Riche asked the governors to place a ‘poor child who has been left orphaned, completely deprived of goods’ in the town’s orphanage.38 Curés were the governors’ most reliable means of obtaining a character reference for the morality and reputation of the supplicant, as well as corroboration of their life circumstances and history. Although relatives often seemed to collect payments on behalf of the poor, they are difficult to trace as witnesses unless their name suggests a kin connection. In one rare case, Gilles Lallier; Pierinne Lallier, wife of Jehan Marquier; and Marye Guerin, widow of Jehan Lallier, all acted as witnesses with ‘good knowledge of Gillecte Lallier, widow of Urban Tixier, a poor woman… who is indigent having no means to earn her living nor that of her child, crippled by illness’.39 Significantly, Lallier’s support network appears to have stemmed from her natal family, with her brother, sister and the widow of another brother as her witnesses rather than any member of her husband’s family. Kin requests may have been rare, but it is clear from many accounts that family members did nurse relatives and care for their children when their circumstances allowed. Marie Moreau, the widow of Nicolas Chirente, had been caring for the son of her deceased sisterin-law, Jehanne Chirente, before she asked the council’s help in providing a wet nurse and care for the infant.40 In 1583, Thienette Moureau, the wife of a clothworker, came to the governors to seek assistance in resolving the welfare of three children that her kin, Mathurin Moureau, a clothworker, had left in her care. Thienette explained that a fellow clothworker, Jean Pillante 346

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(who may have been a work colleague of Moureau’s husband or kin), had agreed to care for one of the children. A relative, Jacquine Charbonneau, was caring for another. The youngest child, a two-year-old girl also named Thienette, remained in her care.41 Cases that did come before the council concerning kin were most often presented by women. In the very rare cases where male relatives presented the plight of a kin member to the bureau, they felt the need to highlight why public alms were needed.The record of 66-year-old Jehanne Fournoy, a widow with four living children, noted that her son Guillaume, who had brought the case forward, was unable to care for her because of his own unemployment.42 By contrast, neither Marie Moreau nor Thienette Moureau provided any detailed reason of why they were not able by themselves to support the children of kin who had been left in their care. These variations likely reflected contemporary expectations about the economic potential of women and men. Male kin were considered primarily responsible for supporting their relatives and had to provide justifications when they were not able to do so, whereas female relatives bringing forth a case for public relief gave no such explanations of their own lack of capacity to provide assistance. Far more requests to initiate payments to the poor were made at the behest of neighbours. Thienette Mabilleau’s neighbours made a request for assistance on her behalf in 1581.43 The neighbours of 92-year-old Jehanne Gougeon were responsible for both her relief and renewal of her payments.44 Others helped to verify claims of poverty. Jehanne Myoche’s neighbours signed the bottom of her pauper letter seeking assistance: ‘The undersigned will certify to you Monsieur her said poverty, they are her close neighbours’.45 A witness statement in support of Mathurin Gasnyer demonstrates that neighbours were close observers of fellow community members’ behaviour, and could provide the council with detailed information: He has a wife and four little children, one of which is aged eight or nine, who is injured and Gasnyer has no means to have him fixed or medicated with alms…the second is aged four and the third is a girl aged three and the youngest was born on last All Saint’s Day…all this is known from the nearest neighbours and those living near and next door to the house of Gasnyer in rue des Colombiers.46 Jehanne de Breuzay’s request for assistance demonstrates that a wide network of parish church officials, notable citizens of Tours and neighbours, amongst others, could be called upon. Jehan Michel, priest of Saint-Pierre-du-Boille in Tours, confessed ‘that I know Jehanne de Breuzay widow of late Lois Villamoyne. She has no goods to support herself except the alms of good people and is living burdened with three small children who have no means to earn their living because of their young age, which I attest is a true account’.47 Sebastien Coquau, procureur at the presidial of Tours, and Marie Salmot, his wife, attested to knowing Jehanne de Breuzay, widow of Loys Villamoyne. She has no goods to feed herself with and is living after the death of her husband burdened with three small children who cannot earn their living because of their young age which we see ­ourselves each day and is a true witness.48 An identical statement was supplied by René Salmot, merchant of Tours, but the widow of late Jehan Salmot declared simply: ‘I know a woman named Jehanne de Breuzay’.49 This seemingly simple phrase participated in making social knowledge and the notion of belonging powerful and authorizing evidence in charity claims. The widow’s written statement, however succinct, gave material enactment to Breuzay’s inclusion in a respectable social community. Ellen Ross 347

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has argued that, in the context of survival networks during the First World War, ‘ties of friendship and mutual aid among non-kin seldom crossed gender boundaries’.50 Yet the evidence from Tours suggests that men in positions of spiritual and professional authority, but who were not kin, could be powerful allies to women seeking municipal support. They did not feel obliged, it seems, to justify why they could not support a neighbour, and their communications to men on the bureau who were similarly part of the town’s civic elite evidently held compelling force. Neighbours and those with whom one lodged, particularly women, also provided support in a variety of often very practical ways. Martine, the 60-year-old widow of Jehan de la Roche, struck down by a paralysis, had lain ill for more than a year and a half in bed, with no means to survive. She had not been able to pay the ‘rent of a little room in which she was lodged without the charity of her neighbours and friends, and became well as a result of the said alms’.51 The widow Renée Guillotier saw to the care of an orphaned infant girl whose father had lived in her street.52 When a female lodger in their house died, leaving the infant Pierre Lendore, the couple Pyballeau (almost certainly the wife) cared for him until the council could find a permanent wet nurse.53 In 1582, Gastian Foucray and his wife reported to the governors the situation of Judie Roy, who had just given birth. The child’s father, a certain ‘Braguette’, had been recently executed. The governors paid the Foucrays for taking in Judie while she was pregnant and subsequently taking care of the child.54 In such ways, proximity often became a first recourse for practical, generally female support in times of trouble. Significantly, some statements make clear that the friends and neighbours who assisted were poor themselves – a reason why they now needed the bureau’s help. Jehanne Crouslard’s neighbour, noted as a poor woman, breastfed Crouslard’s child when she fell ill in 1590.55 Marie Parue, a 45-year-old woman who had been unable to leave her bed for six years, had been supported with food and lodgings by ‘her friends who had always provided for her until now which they can no longer afford to continue’. They reported that Parue was now in the care of a poor woman named Martine Legrand, who had taken her home, ‘without which she would be living on the cobblestones but neither of the two have any means to live without your help’.56 The council thus paid Legrand a small pension to continue her care to Parue. The governors often consolidated its help in this way, solving one pressing problem, particularly an orphan or foundling children, by paying a woman to wet or dry nurse who would otherwise need to be paid poor relief. Some poor women were paid to nurse patients in their own homes. Through this policy, the council facilitated networking amongst the poor. Furthermore, it may be the case that the motive for helping other poor was indeed so that the council would pay them to continue the service into the future, thus providing them with a small income. Spatial links were evidently important networks for the poor, with neighbours and relatives providing distinctly gendered forms of support and the capacity to persuade the bureau’s governing men.They could obviously testify convincingly to paupers’ on-going need and quotidian character. Testimony to moral qualities was not explicit, but the social standing of those who supported a case may perhaps be read as a proxy for a pauper’s moral standing. It seems unlikely that high-standing members of the community would have knowingly assisted those whose moral behaviour was doubtful. Perhaps some willingly assisted the claims of the poor because, pragmatically, it assuaged any guilt at witnessing a visible problem on their doorstep. However, bonds of friendship and shared support made by proximity, and the sheer everyday visibility of the poor in their streets, made neighbours an important source of both support and reliance before cases ever reached the poor-relief council, as these documents often reveal. Indeed, good neighbourly, and ideally familial, relations were critical to all poor, not just those fortunate to receive formal municipal and religious charity whose cases we know about but also those who 348

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lacked the powerful, persuasive networks to intervene before the council and who would therefore require even more everyday assistance from those nearest and dearest to them.

Conclusions Urban space was given new gendered and emotional meanings by the changes in charitable provisions of the sixteenth century. However, at the same time, poverty and charity were themselves produced through spatial, gendered and emotional practices and the texts that both reflected and created these ideas and practices. These records made gendered, emotional affiliations to urban environments, and within varied sites and locales, that were crucial to understandings of those who would be supported by public alms and those who would be excluded, obscured or rendered invisible. Those who gained municipal or religious support were clearly not always the same individuals defined as poor in other documentary forms. In each textual instance and practice, emotional, gendered and spatial qualities of poverty and charity were negotiated among bureaux governors, donors, witnesses and needy individuals. These interactions both reflected and articulated the appropriate emotional responses and actions of varied female and male ­participants, both echoing and becoming lived experiences.

Notes   1 On other enactments of contemporary urban space, examining frontiers of intimacy and territories of self-entangled public/private dichotomies, see Diane Roussel, ‘Effets de seuils: Espace public et espace privé à Saint-Germain-des-Près au XVIe siècle,’ Travaux de l’Institut de géographique de Reims 31, no. 121/122 (2005): 119–31.  2 On the relational production of emotions, see also Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004); and on the concept of intra-action, Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 33.   3 There is as yet no national study of poverty and charity at this period, but analyses of change in urban centres include Natalie Zemon Davis, ‘Poor relief, humanism, and heresy,’ Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1978), 17–64; Susan Broomhall, ‘The politics of charitable men: Governing poverty in sixteenth-century Paris,’ in Experiences of Poverty in Late Medieval and Early Modern England and France, ed. Anne M. Scott (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012), 133–58; Sharon Farmer, ‘From personal charity to centralised poor relief: The evolution of responses to the poor in Paris, c. 1250–1600,’ in Experiences of Charity, 1250–1650, ed. Anne M. Scott (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), 17–42.   4 I G 1 in L.-H. Labande, Département de la Meuse: Ville de Verdun, Inventaire sommaire des archives hospitalières antérieures à 1790 (Verdun: CH Laurent, 1894), 115.   5 I E 8 in Ibid., 79–80.   6 I G 1, in Ibid., 116.   7 I G 1 in Ibid., 115.   8 I G 2 in Ibid., 116.   9 I G 5 in Ibid., 117. 10 I G 1 in Ibid., 116. 11 I G 1 in Ibid., 116. 12 I G 1 in Ibid. See also I E 8 in Ibid., 80. 13 I G 5 in Ibid., 118. 14 7 October 1535. Alexandre Tuetey, ed., Registres des délibérations de Bureau de la Ville de Paris, vol 2: 1527– 1539 (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1886), 208–9. See also Marcel Fossoyeux, ‘Les premiers budgets municipaux d’assistance,’ Revue d’histoire de l’église de France 20 (1934): 407–32. 15 16 April 1551. Paul Guérin, ed., Registres, vol 3: 1539–1552 (Paris, Imprimerie Nationale, 1886), 245. 16 18 March 1551, Guérin, Registres, 3: 245. 17 14 November 1570. Guérin, ed., Registres, vol 6: 1568–1572 (Paris, Imprimerie nationale, 1892), 198. 18 18 March 1551, Guérin, Registres, 3: 245.

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Susan Broomhall 19 4 January 1590. François Bonnardot, ed., Registres, vol 9: 1586–1590 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 563. 20 9 June 1586. Paul Guérin, ed., Registres, vol. 8: 1576–1586 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1896), 583. 21 21 November 1589. Bonnardot, Registres, 9: 526. 22 18 April 1590. Guérin, ed., Registres, vol. 10: 1590–1594 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 7. 23 22 June 1595. Tuetey, Registres, vol. 11: 1594–1598 (Paris: Imprimerie nationale, 1902), 141. See also Jacques Depauw, ‘L’assistance à Paris à la fin du XVIe siècle,’ Bulletin de la Société française d’histoire des hôpitaux 59 (1989): 10–24. 24 9 March 1596. Tuetey, Registres, 11: 230. 25 7 September 1596. Tuetey, Registres, 11: 310. 26 Alain Croix, Nantes et le pays nantais au XVIe siècle. Etude démographique (Paris: SEVPEN, 1974); E ­ lizabeth C. Tingle, Authority and Society in Nantes during the French Wars of Religion, 1558–1598 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 24–52. 27 Archives municipales de Nantes, GG 706, ‘deniers donnés a pouvres honteux,’ March 1536 to midSeptember 1539. 28 Tingle, Authority, 29–31. 29 Archives municipales de Troyes, Fonds Boutiot, F 235, Roolle de 1553. Michel Turquois, ‘La population de Troyes au XVIe siècle,’ in Le Beau XVIe Siècle troyen, ed. Pierre-Eugène Leroy (Troyes: Centre Troyen de Recherche et d’Études Pierre et Nicolas Pithou, 1989), 63–73; Penny Roberts, A City in Conflict:Troyes during the French Wars of Religion (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 11–30, 197–198. 30 AM Troyes, F 235. 31 Tingle, Authority, 31. 32 Michel Turquois, ‘La prostitution à Troyes au XVIe siècle,’ in Le Beau XVIe Siècle troyen, 138–9. 33 For France, foundational works include Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1790 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), 215; and Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société et les pauvres en Europe, XVIe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1974), 9. 34 Sandra Cavallo, ‘Charity as boundary making: Social stratification, gender and the family in the Italian states (17th–19th centuries),’ in Charity: Philanthropy and Reform, c. 1690–1850, ed. Hugh Cunningham and Joanna Innes (London: Macmillan, 1998), 108–29. 35 Archives municipales de Tours (AM Tours), GG 3, Carton 2, 868. 36 Ibid., GG 4, Carton 1, 121. 37 Ibid., GG 3, Carton 1, 130–134. 38 Ibid., 371. 39 Ibid., 120–4. 40 Ibid., 228–36. 41 Ibid., GG 4, Carton 1, 163. 42 Ibid., GG 3, Carton 1, 183–4. 43 Ibid., GG 3, 51. 44 Ibid., Carton 1, 284–311. 45 Ibid., 27. 46 Ibid., Carton 2, 824–5. 47 Ibid., GG 2, 12 June 1573. 48 Ibid., 16 June 1573. 49 Ibid., GG 2. 50 Ellen Ross, ‘Survival networks: Women’s neighbourhood sharing in London before World War I,’ ­History Workshop 15 (1983): 5. 51 AM Tours, GG 3, Carton 1, 152–5. 52 Ibid., GG 5, Carton 1, 230–1. 53 Ibid., 100. 54 Ibid., GG 4, Carton 1, 367. 55 Ibid., GG 5, Carton 1, 76. 56 Ibid., GG 4, Carton 2, 14–18.

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27 The Emotional Life of Boys in Eighteenth-Century Mexico City Sonya Lipsett-Rivera Boys navigated their way around colonial Mexico City in ways related to their status. It was, for the times, a huge and complex city with extremes of wealth and poverty alike. Unlike girls, boys were expected to be out and about in the city; their comparative freedom, however, was constrained by the emotional control they were expected to develop. Street urchins begged and stole; other boys worked with their fathers or were apprenticed to a master craftsman; those fortunate enough went to school; and the very wealthy came to know their place in society both at home and in institutions of higher learning. All these various boys had to learn how to negotiate their place within a very hierarchical society in which they were expected to show obedience and deference, submission and respect.1 One of the fundamental experiences that these boys shared – irrespective of status – was their insertion into networks of family and community and their acceptance of their place in the social rankings.2 Their reactions to this process of indoctrination and the emotions that it evoked are harder to discern. Mexican men from this period did not leave journals or memoirs of their boyhood. Etiquette and morals manuals provided an image of the ideal to which young men were supposed to aspire, but those outside the literate classes learned more from the examples around them than from books. Although Mexico was highly stratified, with a small aristocratic rank; a slightly larger middle group composed of professionals, business owners and artisans; and a larger lower caste of labourers, many of the ideas about emotional containment crossed these class boundaries. The ways that boys negotiated these expectations emerge in the documents more from their failures and rejections of these norms than from the success stories. Yet these rebellions provide some insights into the emotions that boys and adolescents felt in this period and how the strictures imposed upon them chafed. Using the episodes captured in the documentation of the judicial archives allows us to perceive how boys negotiated their way through the city and developed a commonality of emotions with others. This chapter explores the way that boys went through childhood in colonial Mexico City and the emotions that were associated with their experiences. Boys have been little studied and thus their emotional lives remain rather ­mysterious.3 When they have been considered, it is often their insertion into a family that historians emphasize, but as Cynthia Milton reminds us, children had their own independent experiences.4 Poor boys, especially, had to fend for themselves and deal with many dangers and risks at an early age, and thus they experienced urban life very directly.

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One of the fundamental divisions that governed the lives of colonial Mexicans in terms of city life was the split between house and street – the boundary between these two spaces was also a moral one, and the containment of homes was reflected in the ways that boys were supposed to control and discipline their bodies.Yet, unlike girls, who were expected to remain very much confined within the home, boys could run about in the streets, explore parks and markets and encounter all types of dangers, both moral and physical.Their freedom translated frequently into both excitement and danger. Although it is hard to find children within the early archives of Mexico, some traces of their activities and challenges can be found in court records; these documents were the result of complaints over the mistreatment, misconduct or rebellion of young males. These fragments allow a partial glimpse of boys’ lives and the emotions that must have dominated their lives. Within their families, boys were supposed to learn respect and submission – qualities that would allow them to fit into society and inculcate a type of emotional containment that was prized. Yet they acted out and sought pastimes and games that reflected their need for excitement and thrills. Growing up in the city was, for boys, the negotiation of this contradiction between the ideal of restraint and their desires.

Ideal boys A few early writers in the Hispanic tradition published manuals to guide the formation of a model boy, one who would insert himself seamlessly into the codes of conduct of the day. It is not clear who read these guides, but the rules they espoused did mould ideas about conduct for the population in general. These books began to appear in the fifteenth century and were imported into New Spain.Their ideas did not alter significantly over the colonial period and, in fact, there was considerable continuity of their accepted wisdom into the nineteenth century.5 All boys had to learn a body language of deference and submission – these included lowered heads and doffed hats as well as proper salutations. Upper-class boys had to leaven this corporal deference, keeping their body straight and upright.6 Probably, many boys learned these bodily attitudes through watching their fathers and older men, but schools also served to inculcate such ideas. Control and calm were central to the models that guided both young and mature men. Within the documents, men continually referred to themselves as ‘quieto y sosegado’ or ‘still and serene’, since these qualities were the ideal male qualities.7 Young boys of the elite began this journey close to home, learning table manners, to make their bodies quiet and to avoid fidgeting, looking about or making noises such as sneezes, yawns or spitting and gargling.8 But, even more importantly, all young men had to learn the rules of hierarchy and how to demonstrate their acceptance and recognition of their rank by their actions. Elite boys were taught to position themselves to the left of a person of higher rank, to allow adults and social superiors the right of way whenever they were in the streets and to walk a few steps behind such persons of respect.9 The hierarchical nature of colonial Mexican society played out not just in public but also within families. Boys, no matter their status, had to defer to their fathers and elders and show their respect by demonstrating their obedience and their acceptance of social and family rules.10 It is hard to know how these young boys felt about the demands of emotional control that were imposed upon them. However, in adolescence and early manhood, some did reject these rules. In extreme cases, middle-class parents denounced these misfits as vagos or vagrants. In the late eighteenth century, as the Bourbon kings imposed far-ranging reforms, some of the old laws that sought to bring shiftless Spaniards into line began to be used with greater frequency.11 Vagrancy laws also affected plebeian youth. They risked being rounded up in the streets and, if they could not prove employment and good character, they were sentenced to serve in the army.12 When plebeian boys were accused as vagrants, their families tried to defend them; it was 352

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only middle-class families that sought out this strategy to protect their family honour from the embarrassment their son’s bad behaviour caused. Beatriz Cáceres Menéndez and Robert Patch argue that parental denunciations were motivated by their sons’ immorality, which certainly is true, but these young men also demonstrated an inability or a refusal to practice expected emotional containment.13 As Peter Stearns reminds us, when parents imposed obedience on unwilling children, they engaged in an emotional conflict and sought to break their offspring’s seeming rebelliousness.14 In many of the vago denunciations, parents described their efforts at imposing proper obedience and conduct upon their sons and frequently reported a cycle of punishment, repentance, forgiveness and then reoccurrence.15 Don Miguel Ramiro Rodríguez, a military officer, denounced his son for ‘a lack of obedience so punishable that it has turned him into a libertine’. He described his son’s temperament as wrathful, arrogant and violent, echoing the portraits of dissolution and disobedience that run through this type of parental denunciation.16 One of the ways that young men acted out their disobedience was to engage with the city’s streets, especially at night. Mexican spatial conceptions meant that homes were regarded as bastions of morality and uprightness, whereas the streets were places of pleasure but also ­immorality.17 Thus, when parents and witnesses invoked the phrase ‘andar en calle’ or ‘roaming the streets’, as they did so often to describe their sons’ disobedience, it was shorthand for a lack of seriousness and the young men’s want of obedience.18 Generally, streets were considered male territory.19 Why, then, did some parents object so adamantly to their sons being outside? Essentially, it seems to be that the young men primarily went out at night when morals were looser. Thus, when José Timoteo Dera, a 14 or 16-year-old apprentice, was apprehended in the streets and accused of vagrancy, his mother pleaded with the authorities that his presence in the streets was innocent. He and some companions were playing outside and a mild disagreement between sculpture and silversmith apprentices led to a quarrel and his subsequent arrest.20 In Mexico City, certain crafts were grouped on particular streets; for example, the silver- and goldsmiths were located on calle San Francisco.21 This congregating of shops also meant that young boys – the apprentices – would have developed a sense of community and so José Timoteo Dera’s ‘pique’ or ‘grudge’ may have come about because of rivalry between the two groups of young workers.22 The emotional connection between the boys meant that they did not maintain the required composure and reacted to insults with violence. The connectedness that occurred on the street among apprentices was one manner that boys developed bonds outside of their families.

Religion and boys The interiority and control that was paramount for ideal boys to learn was also inculcated through their religious education. Elite and plebeian boys were equally surrounded by customs, patterns and even images that reminded them of their faith. Homes, of both the rich and the poor, had images of saints scattered about; the sounds of church bells penetrated the walls and called the faithful to prayer.23 The rhythms of daily life for young boys were also punctuated with invocations of protection; when they went into the streets, parents taught boys to make a sign of the cross in order to call upon their guardian angel and namesake saint to protect them.24 Piety was also supposed to teach young boys an interiority that not only promoted the desired emotional self-control but also would make them reject the streets and choose domestic enclosure. When they went about the city, they were constantly reminded of their faith. The city was dotted with hundreds of churches, and rituals were often played out in the street. When priests went to conduct last rites, musicians often accompanied them or at the very least they rang small bells.25 The liturgical calendar provided many occasions for lush and entertaining processions such as Corpus Christi and those of the titular saints of each neighbourhood. Although these 353

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were solemn occasions, they were magnificent and entertaining, and plebeians boys joined the crowds climbing up the bars on the street-side windows to get a good look at the musicians and the costumed participants as well as the saintly objects.26 Wherever they went in the city, boys were reminded of their religious duties and called upon to perform acts of worship. Colonial Mexicans used religious doctrine to justify parental discipline aimed at keeping these young men in line. As Bianca Premo reminds us, canon and secular doctrines conveyed upon fathers the right of potestad or authority.27 Moral authorities, such as the seventeenthcentury writer Pedro Galindo, urged parents to use harsh methods with their offspring, as it was their duty to discipline them so that they would grow up with the proper values.28 At times, the failure of parents to beat and punish their children harshly was considered to be instrumental in their boys’ misbehaviour.29 Most parents or guardians spoke of counselling their offspring but some recounted the punishments that they tried. At 12, don José María Marcelino Davalos’s father disciplined him for hitting another boy on the head; don José then let off all the rockets in his father’s shop storeroom. His father subsequently chastised him by making him work as a peon in the family’s estate wearing sackcloth – a punishment that had religious overtones.30 Lorenzo Lagunas tried to inspire his wayward adopted son with ‘the most beautiful religious sentiments’ in order to modify his conduct.31 Don José Antonio de Echagaray hoped that by placing his son in a Carmelite monastery for a few days, making sure that he attended the sacraments, he would ‘come around to a proper behaviour’, as if the religious environment might act as a type of emotional counterbalance to the street.32 Another approach to calm anger in sons, advocated by doctors and phlebotomists, was to bleed the patient, thus purging him of his ‘coléra’ or anger.33 Don Antonio Zedillo and doña María Sánchez Arefansor emphasized that they had raised their son ‘in the fear of God’.34 These attitudes were not, however, uniform within the population. Dorothy Tanck de Estrada reports that indigenous peoples were quite alarmed at the Hispanic emphasis on corporal punishment and within their families adopted a much more gentle and loving attitude towards their children.35 Some Spanish fathers were more sanguine about the need for harshness. One such father tried alternating between affection and warmth and harshness and strictness.36 Nevertheless, the connection between religious upbringing, emotional containment and obedience was a strong trope within the models and practices of childrearing.

Leaving home In their early years, boys lived within their mother’s sphere along with other siblings. This ­initial phase of their lives – called la infancia or infancy – was female dominated and was probably the only time in their lives in which boys were expected to remain within the home.37 They undoubtedly did chores around the house such as getting water, but as this stage ended, they were expected to leave this maternal domain and many began their lives in the streets but especially their lives as workers.38 It was at this point that their lives really diverged from that of girls, for whom the expectation of domestic enclosure never ceased. Plebeian boys began to venture out in the world for work, adventures and fun. The ways that boys experienced Mexico City depended very much upon their families – those of higher status and wealth went to school, while others began work at a very early age. The kinds of employment for boys were extremely diverse. Luis Barreto, for example, was an 8-year-old mulatto slave when the cathedral bought him to sing in the choir. His early training, along with many other boys of his age, both free and enslaved, was marked by complaints of mischief and thieving, but these did not detract from the quality of his voice. Because of its purity and tone, the cathedral choir officials decided to preserve it by turning him into castrati.39 Many boys, however, followed their fathers into work, much of which took not so much talent 354

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as strength. Quite a few children grew up within the work environment of their parents since many shops or workshops were also homes. In the eighteenth century, as the Royal Tobacco Manufactory began to employ a large number of women, their offspring played on the work floor.40 Day labourers did the worst and most unstable jobs in Mexico City. These boys and men lived rather precariously, and some might have lapsed into a life of homelessness and begging quite easily. Because they were independent, such jobs still afforded better labour conditions than institutions such as obrajes (textile workshops) or bakeries.41 Some boys were born and grew up in the drab and prison-like conditions of the textile workshop, while some parents sent their children to work in these establishments at a very young age.42 Elsa Malvido reports that some individuals adopted multiple children, in one case 18 at once, probably to secure a captive workforce.43 Young boys in these circumstances experienced the city in very different ways – either enclosed in institutions or free in the streets – but their lives were no less difficult. As they struggled to survive, they had to constantly negotiate their place both in the hierarchy both that of the labour force and society in general. They had to obey orders and repress their instincts for fun and play. Families with greater means or possibly strong connections tried to assure their sons of a ­better economic future by apprenticing them. Via a cash payment and a notarized contract, these boys traded their own families for that of a master craftsman, living and working in the same place and often, as we saw earlier, participating in the rich social life of streets all devoted to one specialty.44 Both the fees and the work were an investment, one that did not always work out. Catalina de la Cruz, a free black woman, paid for her 11-year-old son to be apprenticed to a shoemaker, but when her son reported that he had learned nothing, she transferred him to a tailor.45 Apprenticeships were a highly hierarchical arrangement; master craftsmen demanded the same obedience and respect that sons owed their fathers, and sometimes their demands lapsed into abuse.46 Juan José Doistua was apprenticed to the master silk weaver, Juan Antonio Delgado, for a year. In 1791, his mother complained that Delgado’s corrections had surpassed acceptable limits. Saying that Doistua had not fed his horse, Delgado tied him to a tree and whipped him repeatedly, using buckets of cold water to revive him if he passed out. Doistua managed to escape by untying himself with his teeth. When confronted, Delgado did not deny the beating but rather explained that the young boy was wilful and disrespectful; he wanted to break his spirit by making him cry.47 Doistua was undoubtedly trying to prove himself as a man, refusing to provide the cheerful obedience required of him.48 Master craftsmen like Delgado were supposed to take a paternal role with their apprentices but, in this case, the enforcement of submission went too far. Nevertheless, it is another example of the manner in which boys had to conform to the model of deference or pay the price. Very few boys received any education other than the training needed for manual labour, but there were many paths to schooling. Generally, the amigas (friends) were the earliest source of affordable instruction. In a system sometimes compared to day care, these women received very young children into their homes and provided very rudimentary tutelage in the basics.49 After the age of seven, boys generally began to take instruction in a more masculine environment, either with a male tutor or in a school – most often with the Jesuits.50 The philosophy underpinning much early education was not so different from the harsh ways that boys were trained in the workplace. It was only in the predominantly indigenous schools that teachers might face criticism if they treated their charges with the characteristic brutality of most other educational establishments.51 Within Jesuit schools, boys went through their days structured around various activities combining learning and religion but, in their free time, they played with balls or dominos and sometimes napped. They had to be careful to not appear too at ease because the Jesuits worried about idle minds and organized instructional chats to prevent such laxity.52 In 355

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education, as in other areas of the lives of boys, deference to hierarchy was the guiding principle of education.

Play, thrills, danger and excitement In colonial Mexico City, boys were supposed to live within very precise boundaries of containment. Whatever their status, they were constantly reminded of their duties within the hierarchical structure of family, their workplaces and society at large. Moral authorities such as the Padre Gerónimo de Rosales even instructed boys that they should not play or talk to others.53 Despite these admonitions, boys devised all sorts of games and also were able to roam the city, finding amusement in diversions that were aimed both at children and adults. It is hard to recreate play from the past, but the toys that boys used for their games provide some clues as to the types of amusements they enjoyed. Kites seem to have been an obsession for children all over New Spain.54 In Mexico City, boys flew their kites from the flat roofs characteristic of the local architecture. These rooftops were social spaces, accessible to all in the building, and the boys could run around trying to catch the wind. Such pastimes must have been exhilarating and, in fact, some boys were so caught up in the excitement that they fell off the roof.55 Many of the games that aroused these boys were dangerous. The juego del volador or flying game consisted of a tall pole with ropes tied into a loop, which served as a swing.56 Towards the end of the eighteenth century, toy cannons became available in the Mexico City markets, and some boys who could afford fancy toys began to engage in mock war games that were very risky. Consequently, Viceroy Venegas (1754–1838) prohibited them.57 Not discouraged by the ban, boys took up another equally dangerous pastime using rather long lances that were perfect for pitched battles between boys in the various city parks and streets.These mock battles alarmed the viceroy and so, once again, he forbade them, thus depriving many boys of a source of thrill and excitement, along with many perils. The boys’ fascination with war games was probably partly related to the fun that they provided but, in addition, these diversions allowed the lads to imitate adult pursuits. This simulation can be seen in another type of toy: clay figurines that reproduced miniature versions of chapels and altars, but also the figures from the Paseo del Pendón. This ceremonial event commemorated the victory of the Spanish soldiers over the Aztecs. It was celebrated with shows of military horsemanship and, in the early colonial period, with the juego de cañas – a mock battle on horseback.58 In the days before organized team sports, boys found fun in many different venues. Competitive events of the day included regular cockfights in the Plaza de Gallos and periodic bullfights, which boys slipped into along with the adult crowd.59 The religious calendar provided multiple processions complete with musicians, dancers, men dressed as giants and different kinds of floats.60 These were supposed to be solemn occasions, as were the more secular vice-regal entries, but for children, they must have provided entertainment value similar to a parade. In between ritual occasions, they congregated in the streets and engaged in paseos or promenades in various parks, such as the Alameda and Chapultepec in the case of the elite. Those of more modest means would ramble in areas such as the La Viga canal.61 While adults were flashing their best attire, boys enjoyed the music and dancing; they might have tagged along on a boat ride along the canal and, if they had the means, bought the delicious treats for sale along the waterway.62 Those who went to the more upscale Alameda Park were treated to puppet shows.63 All these entertainments delighted boys who were able to roam the city in relative freedom. Mexico City enjoyed a wonderful climate that allowed people to spend a great deal of time outside.The streets were a place of work, play and socializing for both adults and children. L ­ iving 356

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Figure 27.1  Plate 48: L’enjambée des Géans. Jeu Mexicain. From Claudio Linati, Costumes Civils, Militaires, et Religieux du Mexique (Bruxelles: Ch Satta Nino, 1828).

conditions for many plebeians were barely adequate and being outside was a more attractive option.64 Therefore boys not only wandered the streets but also played innocent games such as blind man’s bluff (gallina ciega) or Moors and Christians, sang songs or hunted salamanders and birds.65 Because the streets were so busy, their presence there put them at risk. Along with pedestrians and vendors of many types, people transited through the city on mules and horses and in carriages. The poor conditions of the roads made passage difficult in addition to the fact that the numbers of vehicles and animals had grown to numbers that did not seem practical.66 Apart from regular traffic, some men engaged in informal horse or sometimes carriage races. In 1795, a mulatto named José Justo Tamayo was riding through the plaza de San Pablo when another man raced by him on another mount. Piqued by being left behind, Tamayo engaged pursuit at a gallop and soon the two were in a dead heat. But their race did not take into account pedestrians, and they hit and wounded two young boys who happened to be in the plaza.67 Mexico City authorities recognized the danger posed to boys by horses and carriages when they were out in the streets and tried to regulate this peril.68 Still, for the many boys who were not victims, these impromptu races may have provided the thrill of watching such feats of horsemanship and competition. These races represented the kind of liberty that was, so often, out of reach for so many boys.

Conclusions Unlike girls, whose movements were scrutinized and limited, boys had comparative freedom in colonial Mexico City.They learned how to be men both within their families and in the streets. They left the protection of home early to work or study, and they had to negotiate the pressures of fitting into a hierarchy that included not just their family but also their neighbourhoods and their work environment. Despite what seemed like incredible freedom in comparison with girls, boys had their own emotional straightjackets. Within their liberty, they had to show restraint and control; they needed to provide tangible signs of deference and submission. Undoubtedly, 357

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most boys conformed to these expectations; they learned within their homes and in the streets by example and by instruction. But those young men who rebelled against such tenets provide us with a view into the ways that parents and others tried to guide the emotional containment of boys and adolescents. Despite all these strictures, boys experienced their liberty and rambled around the city, watching the available excitement and finding fun in dangerous pastimes. Boys in colonial Mexico City were diverse both in terms of their racial identity but also their economic and family status. But all were expected to develop an emotional control. They either complied or rebelled against the ideals they were supposed to emulate. But even within these limitations, the lure of the streets, the parks and the many enjoyments to be found in Mexico City brought them out of their homes. Research for this chapter was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

Notes   1 Peter N. Stearns, in ‘Obedience and emotion: A challenge in the emotional history of childhood,’ Journal of Social History 47, no. 3 (2014): 593, notes that historians have tended to ignore the inculcation of obedience in children because it was so obvious.   2 Deborah Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730–1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008), 55; Laura M. Shelton, For Tranquility and Order: Family and Community on Mexico’s Northern Frontier, 1800–1850 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2010), 123.   3 J. Jordan, ‘“To make a man without reason”: Examining manhood and manliness in early modern England,’ in What is Masculinity? Historical Dynamics from Antiquity to the Contemporary World, ed. J.H. Arnold and S. Brady (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), 245, notes an absences of studies on boys within the field of masculinity.  4 Cynthia Milton, ‘Wandering waifs and abandoned babes: the limits and uses of juvenile welfare in eighteenth-century Quito,’ Colonial Latin American Review 13, no. 1 (2004): 104.  5 See Victor Macias-González, ‘Hombres de mundo: la masculinidad, el consume, y los manuales de urbanidad y buenas maneras,’ in Orden social e identidad de género, México, siglos XIX y XX, ed. María Teresa Fernández Aceves, Carmen Ramos Escandón and Susie Porter (Guadalajara: CIESAS Guadalajara, 2006), 267–97; and Valentina Torres Septién, ‘Notas sobre urbanidad y buenas maneras de Erasmo al Manual de Carreño,’ in Historia de la educación y enseñanza de la historia, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1998), 89–111.  6 Anonymous, Reglas de la buena crianza civil y christiana, Utilísimas para todos y singularmente para los que cuiden de la educación de los Niños, a quienes las deberían explicar, inspirándoles insensiblemente su práctica en todas ocurrencias (Puebla: Oficina de Don Pedro de la Rosa, 1802), 8–9; Don Juan de Escoiquiz, Tratado de las Obligaciones del Hombre (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1803), 112–14, 137–39.   7 Andrew B. Fisher, ‘Keeping and losing one’s head: Composure and emotional outbursts as political performance in late-colonial Mexico,’ in Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, ed. Javier Villa-Flores and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014), 168–97, explores emotional composure for officials, but such equanimity was more widely desired among men.  8 Anonymous, Reglas de la buena crianza civil y christiana, 8–9; Escoiquiz, Tratado de las Obligaciones del ­Hombre, 112–14, 137–39; Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, ‘Los primeros siglos de la Nueva España,’ in Historia de la educación en la ciudad de México, ed. Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru and Anne Staples (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2012), 98.  9 Anonymous. Reglas de la buena crianza civil y christiana, 11–13, 15–16. 10 Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo, 55; Shelton, For Tranquility and Order, 123. 11 Norman Martín, Los Vagabundos en la Nueva España, siglo XVI (Mexico City: Editorial Jus, 1957), provides a good background to these laws and their implementation. 12 Archivo General de la Nación [hereafter AGN] Criminal, vol. 675 fol. 88–103 Mexico City 1797. 13 Beatriz Cáceres Menéndez and Robert Patch, ‘“Gente de mal vivir”: Families and incorrigible sons in New Spain, 1721–1729,’ Revista de Indias 66, no. 237 (2006): 363–91, provide one of the few studies on this phenomenon. 14 Stearns, ‘Obedience and Emotion,’ 593–94.

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The Emotional Life of Boys in Mexico City 15 AGN Criminal, vol. 622 fol. 119–126 Mexico City 1757; AGN Criminal, vol. 675 fol. 23–31 Mexico City 1794; AGN Criminal, vol. 675 fol. 75–103 Mexico City 1754. 16 AGN Criminal, vol. 415 fol. 1–14 Mexico City 1807. In a similar case, don Ángel de la Torre c­ omplained that his son ‘did not obey him in the way he should’. AGN Tribunal Superior Judicial del Districto Federal [hereafter AGN TSJDF] (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios, caja 31B exp. 93 Mexico City 1729. 17 See Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life in Colonial Mexico, 1750–1856 (­Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 18 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores, Serie Criminal, caja 17A exp. 14 Mexico City 1797; AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores, Serie Criminal, caja 17B exp.114 fol. 1–34 Mexico City 1807; AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios, caja 32A exp. 18 Mexico City 1785; AGN Criminal, vol. 715 fol. 397–404 Mexico City 1796; AGN Criminal, vol. 560 fol. 231–255 Mexico 1749; AGN Criminal, vol. 415 fol. 1–14 Mexico City 1807. 19 Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo, 47. 20 AGN Criminal, vol. 675 fol. 88–103 Mexico City 1797. 21 Jorge González Angulo, ‘Los gremios de artesanos y la estructura urbana,’ in Ciudad de México: Ensayo de Construcción de una Historia, ed. Alejandra Moreno Toscano (Mexico City: SEP-INAH, 1978), 29. 22 AGN Criminal, vol. 675 fol. 88–103 Mexico City 1797. 23 Rosalva Loreto López, ‘Familial religiosity and images in the home: Eighteenth-century Puebla de los Angeles, Mexico,’ Journal of Family History 22, no. 1 (1997): 27; Anne Staples, ‘El Abuso de la campanas en el siglo pasado,’ Historia Mexicana 27, no. 2 (1977): 178, 180–81. 24 Padre Gerónimo de Rosales, Catón Christiano y catecismo de la doctrina christiana para la educación y nueva crianza de los niños y muy provechosos para personas de todos estados (Mexico City: Imprenta Nueva de la Biblioteca Mexicana, 1761), 52–54. 25 David Carvajal López, ‘La cultura sonora de las cofradías novohispanas, 1700–1821,’ Temas Americanistas 27 (2011): 26. 26 Luis González Obregón, La Vida de México en 1810 (Mexico City: Editorial Innovación, 1979; first edition 1911), 64–65. I am extrapolating a bit here as the author is describing the crowds for the 1810 vice-regal entry. 27 Bianca Premo, Children of the Father King:Youth, Authority and Legal Minority in Colonial Lima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 23–24. 28 Pedro Galindo, Parte segunda del directorio de Penitentes, y práctica de una buena y prudente confesión (Madrid: Antonio de Zafra, 1680), 156; Padre Matías Sánchez, El Padre de familias, Brevemente instruido en sus muchas obligaciones de padre (Madrid: sin imprenta, 1786), 398–400. 29 Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo, 56, also notes that people were suspicious of single mothers because no one believed that they could punish their children adequately. 30 AGN Criminal, vol. 415 fol. 1–14 Mexico City 1807; AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios, caja32A exp. 18 Mexico City 1785; AGN Criminal, vol. 560 fol. 231–255 Mexico City 1749; AGN Criminal vol. 556 fol. 34–41 Mexico City 1798. 31 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores, Serie Criminal, caja 17B exp.115 Mexico City 1803. 32 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores Serie Civil, caja 13B exp. 73 Mexico City 1791. 33 Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España: Orden y desorden en la vida cotidiana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2009), 34. 34 AGN Criminal, vol. 675 fol. 75–103 Mexico City 1754. 35 Dorothy Tanck de Estrada. ‘Muerte precoz. Los niños en el siglo XVIII,’ in Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, vol. 3 (Mexico City: Colegio de México, Fondo de Cultura Econónica, 2005), 225, points to the Nahua tradition of the huehuetlatolli or talks of the elders as a reason for embracing a gentler manner of setting children on the right path. Dorothy Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de Indios y educación en el México colonial, 1750–1821 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1999), 392, notes that the parents in Santa Cruz Atoyac in Coyoacán praised their teacher for instructing ‘our children lovingly while maintaining great tranquility and peace’. 36 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores Serie Civil, caja 13B exp. 73 Mexico City 1791. 37 Doctor Don Manuel Rossell, La educación conforme a los principios de la religión christiana, leyes y costumbres, de la nación española en tres libros dirigidos a los padres de familia (Madrid: Imprenta Real, 1786), 51–53; Shelton, For Tranquility and Order, 119; Claudia Rosas Lauro, ‘El derecho de nacer y crecer. Los niños en la Ilustración. Perú, siglo XVIII,’ in Historia de la infancia en América Latina, ed. Pablo Rodríguez Jiménez and María Emma Manarelli (Bogotá: Universidad Externado de Colombia, 2007), 220.

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Sonya Lipsett-Rivera 38 AGN Criminal, vol. 134 fol. 80–110 Mexico City 1801, Fol. 84v, Sebastiana María relates how she sent her young son to fetch water at 8:00 am, but he was scared because of a man who seemed to be sleeping in the road. Later it turned out that the man was dead. 39 Alfredo Nava Sánchez, ‘La Voz descarnada: Un acercamiento al canto y al cuerpo en la Nueva España,’ in Presencias y miradas del cuerpo en España la Nueva, ed. Estela Roselló Soberón (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2011), 33–41. 40 Susan Deans-Smith, Bureaucrats, Planters and Workers: The Making of the Tobacco Monopoly in Bourbon ­Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1992), 207. 41 Silvia M. Arrom. Containing the Poor.The Mexico City Poor House, 1774–1871 (Durham: Duke ­University Press, 2000), 25. 42 Francisco Joseph de Soto, free mulatto, recounted that he was born in the obraje del Placer. AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores (Coyoacán), Serie Criminal caja 29A exp.86 Mexico City 1749. For labour conditions, see Manuel Carrera Stampa, ‘El Obraje Novohispano,’ Boletín Historial 54, no. 146 (1969): 26–53; Richard Greenleaf,‘The Obraje in the Late Mexican Colony,’ The Americas 23, no. 3 (1967): 227– 50; R. Douglas Cope, ‘Los ámbitos laborales urbanos,’ in Historia de la vida cotidiana en México, Tomo II, La ciudad barroca, ed. Antonio Rubial García (Mexico City: El Colegio de México and Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2005), 412. 43 Elsa Malvido, ‘El abandono de los hijos: una forma de control del tamaño de la familia y del trabajo indígena: Tula (1683–1730),’ Historia mexicana 26 (1980): 521–61. 44 Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination, 87. 45 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Alcaldes Ordinarios, caja 4A exp. 7 Mexico City 1632. 46 Sonia Pérez Toledo, Los Hijos del trabajo. Los artesanos de la ciudad de México, 1780–1853 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México and Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa, 1996), 60; Manuel C ­ arrera Stampa, Los gremios mexicanos. La organización gremial en Nueva España, 1521–1861 (Mexico City: Ibero Americana de Publicaciones, 1954), 27; Lyman L. Johnson, ‘The role of apprenticeship in colonial Buenos Aires,’ Revista de historia de América 103 (1987): 13, writes that masters insulted non-white apprentices with racial epithets. 47 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores, Serie Criminal, caja 16b exp. 87 Mexico City 1791; to a certain extent the master confirmed this story by stating that he found Juan José disrespectful and wanted to get him to toe the line. He was upset that Juan José simply laughed when reprimanded. 48 Stearns, ‘Obedience and emotion,’ 602–603; Anthony Fletcher, Growing Up in England.The Experience of Childhood, 1600–1914 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2008), 13, writes about boys using bravado to enter the ranks of adult men. 49 Angela T. Thompson, ‘Children and schooling in Guanajuato, Mexico, 1790–1840,’ SECOLAS Annals 23 (1992): 37; Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, 119; Silvia Arrom, The Women of Mexico City, 1790–1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), 17–18; Pilar Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Historia de la educación en la época colonial. La educación de los criollos y la vida urbana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1990), 39. 50 Gonzalbo Aizpuru, Vivir en Nueva España, 120–21. 51 Tanck de Estrada, Pueblos de Indios, 392, notes that the parents in Santa Cruz Atoyac in Coyoacán praised their teacher for instructing ‘our children lovingly while maintaining great tranquility and peace’. 52 Antonio Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos: La vida cotidiana en la época de Sor Juan (Mexico City: Taurus, 2005), 204. 53 Rosales, Catón Christiano, 54. 54 Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo, 56; Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, 68; González Obregón. La Vida de México, 98. 55 Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, 68. 56 Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, 72. 57 González Obregón. La Vida de México, 98–99. 58 González Obregón, La Vida de México, 99; Marión Juliette Valeri Du Bron, ‘El Caballo en la sociedad virreinal Novohispano de los siglos XVI y XVII. La caballería del Dios Marte,’ in La Gesta del caballo en la historia de México, ed. Miguel Ángel J. Márquez Ruiz (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2010), 73. 59 Menéndez and Patch, ‘Gente de mal vivir,’ 380. 60 Linda Curcio-Nagy, The Great Festivals of Colonial Mexico City (Albuquerque: University of New ­Mexico Press, 2004). 61 González Obregón, La Vida de México, 96, 98; Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, 71.

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The Emotional Life of Boys in Mexico City 62 González Obregón, La Vida de México, 96. 63 González Obregón, La Vida de México, 98; Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, 73. 64 Gerardo Lara Cisneros, ‘Religiosidad indígena en contextos urbanos. Nueva España, siglo XVIII,’ in Los Indios y las ciudades de la Nueva España, ed. Felipe Castro Gutiérrez (Mexico City: Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas, 2010), 281–82. 65 Rubial Garcia, Monjas, cortesanas y plebeyos, 71. 66 González Obregón, La Vida de México, 7–9. 67 AGN TSJDF (Colonial) Corregidores, Serie Criminal, caja 16b exp. 109 Mexico City 1795. 68 Tanck de Estrada, ‘Muerte precoz,’ 223, cites a decree that recognized the dangers posed to boys by horses and carriages when they were out in the streets.

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28 Emotions, Gender and the Body The Case of Nineteenth-Century German Spa Towns Heikki Lempa

Some time in late July or early August 1833, Heinrich Laube arrived in Carlsbad, the p­ reeminent spa town of central Europe. With excitement, he noticed ‘the colourful and tumultuous hustle and bustle on the narrow Ergerstrasse. The carriage could hardly push through the throng of people and vehicles’.1 What he found there was familiar: I greeted my six-week-friends who come to the spa every year and need friends…they are the furniture of the spas and I greet them with the same excitement as I do the bridges and streets of Carlsbad. They belong to the picture. Without them, Carlsbad is not the same. When I have nothing else to do I engage them.2 But most of the time, Laube did engage and he recognized them as essential for his spa experience, the interesting world, the ‘reduced mirror, the chessboard of Europe’, the nobility, the bourgeoisie, the literati, mayors, and craftsmen from many corners of the world.3 A spa town was for Laube a mixture of familiarity and excitement. So it was for Bertha von Suttner, the winner of the Nobel Peace Price in 1905. In the summer of 1864, she arrived at the Homburg spa with her mother: When we arrived, we knew nobody, but one makes connections fast at a spa. So it happened that we got to know an elderly gentleman already during the first evening in the office of our landlord…Mr.Worms introduced him to us as Banker Königswarter from Paris. As we attended a music performance in the afternoon the gentleman joined us and introduced us to many spa guests, men and women.4 The guests had arrived at Carlsbad and Homburg for centuries – many spa towns had long histories, often modified to be even longer and more glorious by the promoters – first as sites to do a healing pilgrimage; then, from the late eighteenth century, as places to restore health; and, finally, by the end of the nineteenth century, as pleasurable vacation destinations.5 David Blackbourn has argued that spa towns were quintessential sites of social mingling in nineteenth-century Germany.6 This is an important observation. But spas and their thousands 362

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of guests were not typical hometown Germany. Spa visitors were a self-selected group of the wealthy – who often stayed long – and the middle class – who came for short visits of a day or two – and occasional poor who, in the course of the nineteenth century, were increasingly relegated to the outskirts of town, out of sight of the guests proper.Yet, spas were not universally homogenous and elitist. As Reinhold Kuhnert argues, they were sites of distinction and separation, places where social, class, and religious boundaries were constantly negotiated.7 An exploration of German spas is a look into a laboratory of old forms of sociability being confirmed and new forms tested.8 In this chapter, I first probe spas as urban environments. Then I investigate the role emotion played in sociability at spas, first as the sites of emotional expectations and then as places of emotional management and regimes. Finally, I will ask whether spas shaped specific emotional communities and if so, how they were organized.

Spa towns as urban environments In his comprehensive Bäder-Lexikon of 1883, Robert Fleschig recorded 369 spas in Austria and Germany.9 The spas were omnipresent in German life regardless of one’s social class. There were the elite spa towns, such as Carlsbad, Marienbad, Baden-Baden and Kissingen, frequented by the nobility, wealthy bourgeoisie and the intellectual and cultural elite. But there were also the dozens of local spa towns, such as Blasibad and Niedernau near Tübingen that recruited their clientele among commoners, impoverished students and local peasants. Many spas were clustered around major cities and towns. Leipzig provided a market for Lauchstädt; Radeberg, Tharand and Meißen encircled Dresden;10 the residents of Hamburg visited Travemünde and other spas on the coast; the notables of Vienna frequented Baden; and the cultured class of Mainz and Frankfurt visited Wiesbaden, a well-known summer resort.11 And the guests came in increasing numbers. The leading German spa towns showed remarkable growth. Only 200 guests came to the Kissingen spa in the summer of 1800, but 50 years later, there were close to 4000 and, by the turn of the century, there were 15,000 guests proper and more than 20,000 day visitors.12 Pyrmont, one of the most popular spas in the eighteenth century, started with 1424 guests proper (not including peasants, who were not considered guests proper), reaching 2800 guests by the middle of the century and around 19,000 by 1900.13 By the mid-century, the number of guests at all German and Austrian spas had reached 100,000 a year.14 By 1900, hundreds of thousands of Germans visited spas on a regular basis. What Heinrich Laube found at Carlsbad was a small town centred on the river. It was small enough to walk through in half an hour but big enough to provide a variety of urban spaces, sceneries, plazas, parks, and other places of congregation. In this respect, Carlsbad was a typical spa town. It was older than many others – its municipal roots were in the Middle Ages – but it was not unique. Baden-Baden and Pyrmont could also demonstrate long communal histories. Then there were the newcomers, such as Marienbad and Norderey, which saw the establishment of spa facilities at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But they all demonstrated remarkable similarities in spatial design, facilities and even cures and forms of social interaction. Borrowing from Foucault, Mirjam Zadoff has called the spa towns heterotopias, counter-worlds and other worlds to the everyday worlds of the guests.15 They were, however, not the opposites of the everyday life of the guests, those of the cities and towns they came from but, rather, provided a more or less perfect version of their own imperfect urban environments or how they imagined them to be.While spas were engaged in a competition in building up their facilities, the towns and cities in the Germanic world were going through dramatic changes. Perhaps the most remarkable change was the dismantling of city walls between 1770 and 1850.16 This allowed rapid urban expansion, the emergence of walking facilities and the beautification of city surrounds. In spa 363

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Figure 28.1  Baden-Baden Health Spa, wood engraving, c. 1865. © INTERFOTO / Alamy. 

towns, the facilities for walking, parks and promenades were integrated into their main function; they were part of the cure allowing the healing spa walk during the intake of waters and socialising. The spas were the smaller, polished and perfect versions of the redesign projects introduced in rapidly growing cities. In this sense, they were laboratories of urban design and social life.

The dietetic cure and emotional expectations The classical era of German spa towns extends from the end of the eighteenth century to the Great War. Besides the expansion of the facilities and growth of attendance, the era was characterized by adherence to a set of practices that were ritualized in institutional arrangements and discourses. I call the era classical because the notion of modernity fails to capture what was essential in the nineteenth-century German spas. Rather than seeing them as emerging modern facilities of health and leisure, one should view them, I argue, as amalgamations of the old and the new. It is these classical practices that also framed how the spa guests were expected to express their emotions and how they lived through and experienced them. An important domain of classical practice was medicine.The spas were sites for restoring and preserving health. They served that function since the Middle Ages, although the means were often seen in curative miracles, the magic embedded in the waters consumed in bathing and drinking. In the course of the eighteenth century, the curative function of the spas became more clearly framed in medical language, and that language was from Hippocrates and Galen, the masters of ancient medicine. In the Germanic world, ancient medicine, especially its Hippocratic tradition, experienced a revival towards the end of the eighteenth century.17 According to this medical theory, the health of the human body is a combination of three interrelated natures: the nature of the human body, its physiological and anatomical constitution; the counter-naturals, the diseases that destroy and attack the nature of the body; and the non-naturals, the useful functions that mediated the relationship between the body and its environment.The body is healthy when it is in balance with its environment (eucrasia) and sick when the relationship is in imbalance (dyscrasia). In the centre of health were, therefore, the six non-naturals that constituted a discipline called dietetics: air, food and drink, motion and rest, sleep and waking, evacuations and passions.18 The theory of dietetics was the foundational discourse of early modern medicine and, 364

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regardless of the development of modern medicine, its influence was still tangible at the end of the nineteenth century. One of the most common domains of dietetic discourse was the spa. The leading spa doctors promoted it in their manuals, guests internalized it and administrations enshrined dietetics in the spatial designs of the facilities. In short, the dietetics of non-naturals was the ideology of nineteenth-century spas in the Germanic world. The etiology and pathology in dietetics might have misunderstood the causation in medicine, but the popularity of dietetics is hard to miss. Our investigation of emotions starts in the ideology of dietetics, in the sixth non-natural: the passions. A sample of quotes from German spa doctors over 100 years shows a pattern. Henrich Matthias Marcard, the spa doctor of Pyrmont, gave in his 1785 compendium clear recommendations on the dietetics of the soul: ‘During a regimen that contributes to improving health one has to be avoid all unpleasant passions as much as possible’.19 In 1837, Johann Wendt warned the guests of Kissingen spa that ‘it would be best if any guest who wants to travel to Kissingen left all his real and imagined concerns at home’.20 In 1888, Hermann Welsch recommended in his The Springs and Baths of Kissingen that bad habits, business, grief and sorrow are to be left at home as much as possible; a quiet life, cheerful society and innocent amusements ought not to be undervalued, as being powerful auxiliaries to the beneficial effects of mineral waters.21 Clearly, a certain tranquillity or even cheerfulness was requested from the spa guests. But how should we interpret the meaning of these requests? Peter and Carol Stearns have suggested that expressions and prescriptions like these constitute what they call ‘emotionologies’, or standards and expectations for emotional behaviour, which should be separated from emotional experiences.22 The dietetics of the six non-naturals provided the spa guests with their emotional expectations; tranquillity, life-affirming cheerfulness and joy were their ­emotionologies. There were different dietetics for men and women. The prescript of emotional tranquillity was designed particularly for men, whose businesses (Geschäfte) made them anxious, agitated or revengeful. Women, and especially noble and middle-class women, were not expected to have these ‘burdens’. But the tools for maintaining tranquillity were surprisingly similar to both sexes. The physical activities – and they were the core of the dietetic therapy – at spas were moderate. Taking baths was important, but equally so was moderate physical exercise, walking and dancing. One should avoid exhaustion and sweating at any cost.23 The classic exercise was the so-called spa walk, in which one proceeded between 75 and 80 steps a minute while drinking a glass of spring water.24 Spa exercise did not celebrate the sporty and muscular masculinity of the German gymnastics movement launched by Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Friedrich GutsMuths in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The gymnasts had either excluded women from their activities or assigned them to secondary fields of dancing and swimming.25 The repertoire of spa exercises provided a strong counter-narrative to the rising cult of muscular masculinity. Their focus was on moderate exercises, and the exercise culture at spas was clearly heterosocial and inclusive because dancing and walking were not only forms of motion but also of social bonding.

Emotional regimes, managing emotions Social bonding is doing, and emotions play a significant role in doing things. Emotives or emotion words do things, argues William Reddy, in that they do not only reflect reality but also have the capacity to alter it. They create emotional regimes and techniques of emotional m ­ anagement; they reflect and mobilize power relationships.26 In spas, two configurations played a pivotal role 365

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in the management of the clients’ emotions: space and time. Spas were created for water cures, and water also defined the spatial design of spas. There were two forms of water cure: drinking and bathing. In the beginning of the classical period, the intake of waters had become the dominant and the most popular cure. It allowed social interaction and could be conducted in public, whereas the replacement of communal baths with separate ones had made bathing an isolated exercise. The centre of drinking was the spring – the most sophisticated spas had multiple springs. It was space that was defined in clinical terms – the spa doctors prescribed the number of glasses and the mode of consumption – but the patients perceived it as a space for social interaction, a contest of appearances to the extent that Friedrich August von Ammon in his widely read manual Brunnendiätetik warned men not to wear their pants too tight and women not to wear ball gowns when they consumed their first waters in the morning.27 This warning also had a political agenda. One was expected to appear casual because the spring was seen as a democratic place, a space ‘where…all…seemed brothers’.28 It gave the appearance of democracy without demanding it. And this appearance of democracy spilled over to the spaces that came next in hierarchy, the promenades or parks. It is here that the patients consumed their waters, holding their glasses or mugs and carefully following the moderate pace of a spa walk. Many renowned spa towns, such as Pyrmont, Carlsbad and Kissingen, had a band playing music, often chorals, to enforce the curative rhythm of the early spa walk.29 It was the rhythm of the walk and the accompanying music that created the emotional regime present at the spring and on the adjacent promenade and park. It was a regime of tranquillity and calmness or even solemnity, as Schmidt-Lisber described his mood in Pyrmont in 1828.30 The spring and promenade were there to give the appearance of equality and democracy. In reality, there were important distinctions that regulated the access to these spaces. Only rarely did the lower classes, especially peasant women and men, consume their waters next to middle and upper-class patients. For instance, in Pyrmont, they came two hours before the regular spring hour started at 6 am.31 The central walking areas, promenades and parks were often reserved for the middle and upper-class guests, whereas the poor and peasants were relegated to the side streets and outskirts of the spas.32 For women, and especially single women, the appearance at the spring and the promenade could be a challenge. How could one tell a prostitute from a middle or upper-class woman when the dress codes were rapidly disappearing? And an increasing number of women came to spas unaccompanied by men and sometimes by themselves.33 The same regulations applied to other public spaces at spas, theatres, restaurants and especially ballrooms. Dancing was a favourite pastime for many guests, and it was also one of the exercises recommended by spa doctors. But dancing was an exclusive exercise. Not only was access to ballrooms limited but further restrictions applied once the guest was inside. A woman was not expected to dance with strangers; she had to wait for a formal introduction, as Franz Ebhardt reminded readers in his widely read etiquette book for spa guests.34 Yet this expectation was challenged by reality; far more women than men attended balls.35 The emotional regime of German spas was grounded in the spatial arrangements, but it was enforced through the management of time: schedules and rituals. A spa season stretched from early June through August; some guests stayed even longer. The most avid and wealthiest spent as many as three months on the road, often visiting two or three of their favourite spas. Bertha von Suttner, whose family was in no way wealthy, spent her time in Baden in Austria but went also to Baden-Baden.36 Eduard Reichenau, a Prussian civil servant, spent his summers between 1861 and 1863 in Kissingen in Bavaria, the coastal resort Niederney and, as a followup cure (Nachkur), spent a few weeks in Friedrichsroda in Thuringia.37 Once at the spa, the 366

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daily ­schedule set in. Theodore Menke, the leading physician at Pyrmont in the first half of the nineteenth century, recommended:   1. Waking up no later than six o’clock.   2. Between 6 and 7:30, washing, rinsing one’s mouth, dressing, walking to the spring, and drinking six to eight glasses of water.   3. At 8, a light breakfast.   4. Between 9 and 12, a bath or socialising, walking, light reading or drawing.   5. Between 1 and 2 in the afternoon, lunch in company.   6. From 2 to 5, walking, riding, and relaxing excursions.   7. After 5, an hour of drinking waters, if prescribed.   8. From 6 to 8, cultural activities, theatre, concerts or assemblies (on Wednesdays).   9. At 8, a light supper either in company or alone in one’s room. 10. By 10, a patient is in bed.38 Similar schedules can be reconstructed from the guidebooks of all leading German spas. In Carlsbad, Wiesbaden, Baden-Baden, Ems, Teplitz and Aachen, we find the same daily routine, including the dietetic schedule of a spa regimen. What did this regime do emotionally? It created a routine, a series of expectations, a hope for pleasant experiences, predictable and safe, but still something new. It framed the spa as a heterotopia, as an order in opposition to and as a compensation for the chaotic or stressful world of home and work.39

Emotional communities But emotions were not only in the service of power from above. Barbara Rosenwein has suggested that emotions can also constitute communities. Emotional communities are people who share a system of feeling and its expression. Emotions within them are relational, often reciprocated, and allow certain agency.40 Within the confines of the spa regimes, there were spaces for emotional communities, and it seems as if they were there by design. I focus on two of them, an arrangement called Partie and friendships. Partie was a French term introduced into German by the middle of the eighteenth century. At first it was synonymous with Partei (political party or military detachment), but around 1800 it started to acquire a meaning of its own.41 By the Napoleonic Wars, the meaning of Partie had been established, becoming a generic term for activities of leisure and pleasure, especially card games and excursions to the country.42 According to G. M. S. Fischer, Partie was a ‘soft’ French form of sociability and bonding, whereas the Teutonic Partei was an institution of controversy and antagonism.43 Partie was an institution for social interaction. In early nineteenth-century descriptions, Partie referred, first of all, to a place, location and route.44 Yet the action by which a specific form of sociability was undertaken was also called a Partie. For instance, a report tells us that at the Liebenstein spa, the afternoon was predominantly ‘dedicated to Lustpartien [pleasure parties] in the vicinity’, if the weather was nice.45 In 1812, an anonymous writer described how, at the Ronnenburg spa in Altenburg, ‘I am not always alone. Friendly acquaintances walk with me; we play and joke, and arrange our Partien. When we rest, someone may read to us and all kinds of anecdotes are told’.46 At spas, the Partie could create meaningful emotional communities. A Partie could start spontaneously. Georg Sponagel described in his spa novel on Pyrmont how the protagonist, an overly anxious young man, met a group under the supervision of a local principal who made guided walking tours to nearby sights in the afternoons. When the protagonist asked ‘whether their group was exclusive’, a member answered that it was not. In fact, 367

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the members assured him that ‘the spa life was free and, consequently, he could simply join the group without any further scruples’. But the young man found the proposal less than comfortable and he did not join.47 Why? He might not have liked the company or found the destination attractive enough. The most common time to make arrangements for Partien was during the first drinking session at the fountain or at the adjacent promenade in the morning.48 A short Partie often followed right after the drinking session and breakfast, which was itself an arranged Partie. Because of the imminent lunch, some guests preferred the afternoon for Partie engagements. Then, between two and five, one could see groups of spa goers in a variety of settings wandering towards nearby hilltops, caves or villages.They could also see wealthier guests renting carriages for excursions to nearby cities. Some chose to stay in the city and, if they did not have a prescribed bath, made a Partie by playing music or simply strolling on the main promenade. In the evening, after supper, gambling and dancing were the final Partien.49 Like most social interaction at the spa, the Partie was considered free. But as much as the appearance of freedom was important, the Partie was structured and exclusive. Not just anyone was suitable company for a walk on the main promenade. Neither was walking alone considered appropriate. Unless one was with family, relatives or old friends, one was under pressure to find congenial yet appropriate company. A Partie, therefore, took different shapes. It could be a walk, a carriage ride, a ball, playing music together, a card game and, in a more serious sense, part of a search for a spouse or, as Reichenau reports from the North Sea resort Norderney, a boat ride.50 Though different in several ways, these activities shared features that made them all Partien. They served as excuses for social engagement, to make guests belong. But who, ultimately, could belong? Could one engage a peasant met early at the spring? Could an aristocrat, burgher, foreigner, Jew, gentile, woman or man join a Partie that did not share those characteristics? The uniqueness of the Partie was its potential to create excitement. Like Heinrich Laube’s foreigners of different occupations and social classes, the members of a Partie played on the asymmetry of its members’ social standing. And this was the foundation of its emotional appeal. Like the democracy at the spring and spa walk, the Partie created an emotional environment, an emotional community that allowed social asymmetry to find its emotional symmetry. Whereas the Partie left the ultimate desiderata of its emotional bond undefined and insecure, friendship played on security and reliability. Many spa reports and memoirs testify to the experiences of individuals travelling alone. Rudolf von Jhering, Bertha von Suttner and Heinrich Laube were by themselves on the road and then negotiated their friendship circles once they arrived at the spa. The case of Professor von Jhering is intriguing. In his elaborate notes on spa visits from 1854, not once is his wife mentioned accompanying him. In fact, the report starts with a laconic note: ‘In the beginning of August, I finished my lectures and after a visit of one or two days to my wife in Wiesbaden I headed toward Kissingen and stayed there for five weeks’.51 She was at home with their four-year old son, while von Jhering was engaged in an active social life in Kissingen. The ease of his departure was in contrast to the agony of his arrival, which casts light on the type of experience that was shared by many men of von Jhering’s generation. When the first excitement was over, he discovered that none of his friends from an earlier visit were present. In fact, the only people he recognized were acquaintances, not friends.Von Jhering had to start from scratch to build up a social network to make his visit meaningful, wholesome and restorative: ‘This time I had to find my circle by myself individually and therefore I lost the first week’.52 And he found one, a Mr. Simson from Konigsberg, ‘and I am quite charmed by him’.53 To make a friend, it was not enough to find a congenial person but also to establish a bond of emotional equilibrium, of reciprocal envy.Von Jhering was extremely envious of his new acquaintance’s splendid rhetorical skills based on the superiority 368

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of his education (Bildung), and now he had to reciprocate and make Mr. Simson envious of his learnedness as a published law professor. The act was successful and von Jhering had gained a new friend.54 Similar strong friendships were behind Eduard Reichenau’s recurring visits to Kissingen.55 Heinrich Laube’s ironic description of his friends as the predictable and slightly boring fall-back plan and reserve for his adventures does not diminish the importance of their role as friends.56 Without friends, and especially a circle of male friends, the spa experience was left wanting. What we find in these assurances is the camaraderie that in the Germanic world developed into a cult of male friendship, Männerbund, by the end of the century.57 The circles of male friends came together supported by the emotional game of mutual recognition.These circles were an important ingredient of the masculine and patriarchal foundation for civil society in nineteenth-century Germany. Friendships were equally important for women.When Bertha von Suttner’s mother intended to return to their ‘own’ Austrian spa in Baden, her daughter insisted on staying in Baden-Baden. Bertha had become friends – she used the term ‘acquaintance’ (Bekanntschaft) – with Countess Seutter, who ‘showed great fondness toward me and invited me often to her house where the native high society of Baden frequented’.58 The older noblewoman provided comfort, protection and access to important and interesting people. For Bertha, the friends included men as well, like Mr. von Königswarter, who a few years earlier in Homburg spa had become acquainted with the mother and daughter von Suttner. And then came the moment – the only one her report described as having the certain intimacy of friendship – when Bertha got to know William I, the King of Prussia, in Baden-Baden in 1868. There was mutual attraction, glances exchanged and flowers and messages sent.59 The relationship had become romantic. Bertha von Suttner had used the whole spectrum of friendship to make the best of her spa visits. For women, spas often provided a space, an emotional community that was not bound by the constricting rules of their homes. Not only was the number of female visitors to spas significant but, as Gudrun König’s analysis of the frequency of visits to Wildbad near Tübingen reveals, a surprisingly high number of female visitors were independent; in 1800–01, women were the majority, and several of them came without a male patron.60 Similar observations can be made of Pyrmont spa in the first half of the nineteenth century, where a significant number of women were arriving by themselves or accompanied by a female friend or relative.61 The peasant women who played such a conspicuous role at Pyrmont had a regular spa visit stipulated in their marriage contracts.62 The spas were for many women not only emotional communities but, perhaps, also emotional refuges that allowed an agency that was not possible when with their families or at home outside of the spa.63

Conclusions During the classical era, German spas centred on the cure of the body.Whereas new medicalized cures had significant impact on French spas, the traditional dietetics of ancient medicine, the art of six non-natural things, continued to serve as the accepted ideology of German spas. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, this classical discourse and its practices lost ground. The spas started to acquire some of the best medical technology available, including X-rays.64 They introduced sports, such as tennis, running and swimming to compete with the traditional moderate exercises.65 The emotional expectations, regimes and communities of the classical German spas rested on the leisurely pace of exercises, on the moderation of the body. By doing so, they opened a space for men and women to find their heterotopias. Miriam Zadoff has argued that they were compensatory in their nature, well-organized other worlds that acted as compensation for the messiness of the everyday world.66 They could also be seen, I suggest, as divided: for men, they restored the traditional patriarchal order, such as through their genuine male camaraderie; 369

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for women, the spa practices served as what Foucault had called the crisis heterotopias, places of privilege for those who were in the state of crisis or transition.67 What makes these heterotopias especially interesting for urban history is the way they served as laboratories of German civil society.68 They experimented with practices of democracy by creating spaces where persons from different social classes and sexes could test their tolerance of equality without fully paying the price for this commitment. The early morning crowds at the spring and mid-afternoon ones on the promenade gave the appearance of democracy without demanding real equality, real loss of status and power. Another feature of the emerging ­German civil society was the careful calculation of reciprocity, the process of mutual recognition, A ­ nerkennung, that sealed especially male friendships and friendship circles. In this process, emotional vulnerability was important, be it mutual envy, as was the case with Rudolf von Jhering and his friend Mr. Simson; respect; or a sense of honour. For women, spas were often de-gendered spaces that allowed agency and freedoms not available at home.They made possible hetero- and homosocial relationships with varying degrees of emotional engagement, from the excitement of the Partie and the love affair to the trust and affection of the companionship of other women. In Germany, spa towns were experimental spaces for emotional regimes and communities that cultivated social forms of democracy and reciprocity before the launching of political democracy in 1871 – universal male suffrage – and 1918 – universal female and male suffrage.

Notes   1 Heinrich Laube, Gesammelte Werke,Vol. 4 Reisenovellen I (Leipzig: Max Hesse, 1908), 91.  2 Laube, Reisenovellen I, 94.   3 Ibid., 105–106, 117–18.   4 Bertha von Suttner, Memoiren (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1909), 72.   5 See, for instance, Jill Steward, ‘The culture of the water cure in nineteenth-century Austria, 1800–1914,’ in Water, Leisure and Culture: European Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan C. Anderson and Bruce H. Tabb (New York, NY: Berg, 2002), 23–34.   6 David Blackbourn, ‘Fashionable spa towns in nineteenth-century Europe,’ in Anderson and Tabb, eds, Water, Leisure and Culture, 16.  7 Reinhold Kuhnert, Urbanität auf dem Lande. Badereisen nach Pyrmont im 18. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: ­Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 34, 147–63.   8 Apart from spa guides and manuals, which became increasingly popular during the nineteenth century, reviews of spas provide a rich source. Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden (Weimar, 1788–1827) published regular reviews on major and sometimes minor German spas. After 1827, Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Leipzig, 1801–1859) became the leading forum for spa discourse. Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland, whose Makrobiotik (1796/1805) was an early precursor of the physical wellness movement, published in 1815 the Praktische Uebersicht der vorzüglichsten Heilquellen Teutschlands nach eignen Erfahrungen (Berlin). Monograph-length studies of German spas are Burkhard Fuhs, Mondäne Orte einer vornehmen Gesellschaft. Kultur und Geschichte der Kurstädte 1700–1900 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1992); Kuhnert, Urbanität; Fred Kaspar, Brunnenkur und Sommerlust: Gesundbrunnen und Kleinbäder in Westpfalen (Bielefeld: Westfalen Verlag, 1993); Hermann Sommer, Zur Kur nach Ems. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Badereise von 1830 bis 1914 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1999); Petra Simon and Margit Behrens, Badekur und Kurbad: Bauten in deutschen Bädern 1780–1920 (Munich: Eugen Diedrichs Verlag, 1988); Karl Wood. Health and Hazard: Spa Culture and the Social History of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012).   9 Robert Flechsig, Bäder-Lexikon: Darstellung aller bekannten Bäder, Heilquellen, Wasserheilanstalten und klimatischen Kurorte Europas und des nördlichen Afrikas in medizinischer, topographischer, ökonomischer und finanzieller Beziehung (Leipzig:Verlagsbuchhandlung von J.J. Weber, 1883). 10 Schmidt, ‘Das Buschbad, bey Meißen,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, February 1799, 76. 11 ‘Bruchstück einer Reise von Frankfurt nach Wisbaden, Langenschwalbach, Schlangenbad und ­Brückenau, nebst Nachrichten von diesen Bädern im Monat August 1808,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, September 1808, 629.

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Emotions, Gender and the Body 12 Kissingen Spa:The International Health-resort, in its Medical and Social Aspects (Munich, 1900), 55; Hermann Welsch, The Springs and Baths of Kissingen (Kissingen, 1888), 5–6. 13 Sibylle Lehmann, Das fürstliche Schauspielhaus in Bad Pyrmont. Die Funktion eines Kurtheaters im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Hubert & Co., 1994), 110. 14 Wilhelm Mehrdorf, ‘Geschichte des Bades Pyrmont,’ in Chronik von Bad Pyrmont (Bad Pyrmont: Stadt Bad Pyrmont, 1985), 91. 15 Miriam Zadoff, Next Year in Marienbad.The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 9. 16 Yair Mintzker, The Defortification of the German City, 1689–1866 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 85–255; Peter Grobe, Die Entfestigung Münchens (Munich: Oppermann, 1970); Helmut Friedmann, Alt-Mannheim im Wandel seiner Physiognomie, Struktur und Funktionen (1606–1965) (Mannheim: Bundesforschungsanstalt für Landeskunde und Raumordnung, 1968); Klaus Bocklitz, ‘Hamburgische Festungsanlagen,’ in Studien zur Topographie Hamburgs, ed. Armin Clasen and Klaus Bocklitz (Hamburg: Hans Christians Verlag, 1979), 94–154; Heikki Lempa, Beyond the Gymnasium. Educating the Middle-Class Bodies in Classical Germany (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2007), 168–74. 17 On the revival of Hippocratic medicine in Germany, see Thomas S. Broman, The Transformation of ­German Academic Medicine 1750–1820 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 140. 18 Lempa, Beyond the Gymnasium, 22. 19 Henrich Matthias Marcard, Beschreibung von Pyrmont (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben und Reich, 1784– 1785), 1–2: 318. 20 Johann Wendt, Die Heilquellen zu Kissingen im Königreiche Baiern (Breslau: Gosohorsky, 1837), 155. 21 Welsch, Springs and Baths of Kissingen, 58. 22 Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns,‘Emotionology: Clarifying the history of emotions and emotional standards,’ American Historical Review 90 (1985): 815–20. 23 Christian Friedrich Ludwig Wildberg, Handbuch der Diaetetik für Menschen im gesunden Zustande (Leipzig: Cnobloch, 1828), 286; Joseph Carl Eduard Hoser, Beschreibung von Karlsbad (Prag: Calve, 1797), 102–103; Wendt, Heilquellen, 153; Marcard, Pyrmont, 2: 301–5. 24 Karl Theodor Menke, Pyrmont und seine Umgebungen mit besonderer Hinsicht auf seine Mineralquellen; ­historisch, geographisch, physikalisch und medicinisch dargestellt (Pyrmont: Georg Uslar, 1840), 353. 25 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn and Ernst Eiselen, Die deutsche Turnkunst zur Einrichtung der Turnplätze (Berlin: Auf Kosten der Herausgeber, 1816), 232; L.F. Kümmerle, Praktische Anleitung zu Leibesübungen für Mädchen. Nebst einem Anhang über die Haltung des Körpers und über die Anfangsgründe der Tanzkunst (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1832), 26–48; Franz Anton Roller, ‘Leibchen für Damen, zu Beförderung einer schöneren Haltung des Körpers,’ in Erstes Toilettengeschenk. Ein Jahrbuch für Damen (Leipzig: Georg Voss, 1805), 78. 26 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling. A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 128–29; Cas Wouters, ‘Etiquette book and emotion management in the 20th century: Part one: The integration of social classes,’ Journal of Social History 29 (1995): 107–24. 27 Friedrich August von Ammon, Brunnendiätetik.Anweisungen zum zweckmässigen Gebrauche der G ­ esundbrunnen und Mineralbäder Deutschlands.Vierte Auflage (Leipzig:Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1841), 46–47. 28 Eduard Hlawaczek, Karlsbad in medicinischer, pitoresker und geselliger Beziehung. Für Kurgäste (Prag: Kronbergers Wittwe und Weber, 1838), 118. 29 Kissingen Spa, 47; Marcard, Pyrmont, 1: 15–16; Friedrich Steinmetz, Pyrmont und seine Mineralquellen. Anleitung zu Trink- und Badecuren, in Bezug auf die neueste Analyse (Pyrmont: G. Uslar, 1825), 64; Hlawaczek, Karlsbad, 115. 30 H. Schmidt-Lisber, Die Reise nach Pyrmont:Wahrheit und Dichtung (Braunschweig, 1828), 51. 31 Gottfried Käppel, Pyrmont’s Merkwürdigkeiten. Eine Skizze für Reisende und Kurgäste. Zweyte stark vermehrte Auflage (Pyrmont: Helwingsche Buchhandlung, 1810), 87–88. 32 Stadtarchiv Bad Pyrmont, B: Zeitraum 1648–1848, A.I.70, Besuch der Bälle – Bekleidungsvorschriften, 1837; Karl Friedrich Heinrich Straß, Pyrmont und dessen Umgebungen. Ein Taschenbuch für Curgäste und Reisende. Aus Dankbarkeit gegen die kräftigenden Quellen des herrlichen Bades (Pyrmont: Georg Uslar, 1850), 51–2; Theodor Valentiner, Pyrmont für Kurgäste und Fremde (Kiel: Carl Schröder & Comp., 1859), 139; Menke, Pyrmont 1840, 143–4. 33 Heikki Lempa, ‘The spa: Emotional economy and social classes in nineteenth-century Pyrmont,’ Central European History 35 (2002): 52,Table 3; Marion Kaplan, The Making of the Jewish Middle Class.Women, Family, and Identity, in Imperial Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 123–6; Gudrun M. König. Eine Kulturgeschichte des Spazierganges. Spuren einer bürgerlichen Praktik 1780–1850 (Vienna: Böhlau, 1996), 192.

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Heikki Lempa 34 Franz Ebhardt, Der gute Ton in allen Lebenslagen. Ein Handbuch für den Verkehr in der Familie, in der Gesellschaft, und im öffentlichen Leben. Unter Mitwirkung erfahrener Freunde (Leipzig: J. Klinkhardt, 1886), 601. 35 ‘Ueber Pyrmont,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, October 1802, 581; ‘Ueber Badeleben in Carlsbad während der Monat Julius und August in diesem Jahre,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, November 1815, 671. 36 Suttner, Memoiren, 105. 37 Eduard Reichenau, Erinnerungen aus dem Leben eines Westpreußen (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1890), 210–37. 38 Menke, Pyrmont 1840, 445–8; Straß, Pyrmont, 42–5. 39 Zadoff, Next Year, 9. 40 See Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 25; and, more recently, Barbara Rosenwein, ‘Problems and methods in the history of emotions,’ Passions in Context 1 (2010): 11. 41 Johann Christoph Adelung, Grammatisch-Kritisches Wörterbuch der hochdeutschen Mundart mit beständiger Vergleichung der übrigen Mundarten, besonders aber der Oberdeutschen (Vienna: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1808), 3: 661; Johann Georg Krünitz, Ökonomisch-technologische Encyklopädie oder allgemeines System der Staats-, Stadt-, Haus- und Landwirthschaft, und der Kunstgeschichte, in alphabetischer Ordnung (Berlin: Joachim Pauli, 1773–1858), 107: 660; a more detailed analysis of Partie can be found in my ‘The spa,’ 62–4. 42 Theodor Heinsius, Volksthümliches Wörterbuch der Deutschen Sprache mit Bezeichnung der Aussprache und Betonung für die Geschäfts- und Lesewelt (Hanover: Hansche Hofbuchhandlung, 1820), 3: 792. 43 G. M. S. Fischer, ‘Part, Partei, Partie,’ Allgemeine Encyclopädie der Wissenschaften und Künste in alphabetischer Folge, ed. J.S. Ersch and J.G. Gruber (Leipzig: Gleditsch, 1838), 334. 44 Anton Johann Heinrich Meyer, Hamburg und Altona nebst Umgegend: Topographisch-statistisch-historisches Handbuch für Einheimische und Fremde: Mit einem neuen Plan der Stadt nebst Wall-Anlagen (Hamburg: Schuberth und Niemeyer, 1836), 421; C. Reinhold. Wien’s öffentliche Gärten und Bäder (Vienna, 1828), 8. 45 ‘Gesundbrunnen in Liebenstein,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, October 1799, 505. 46 ‘Das Ronneburger Bad im Herzogthum Altenburg,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, October 1812, 670. 47 Georg Sponagel, Meine viertägigen Leiden im Bade zu Pyrmont. Eine Brunnen-Lectüre. Dritte unveränderte Auflage (Pyrmont: Georg Uslar, 1824), 232–33. 48 Adolph Bühren, Vier Wochen in Pyrmont, oder Wer’s Glück hat, führt die Braut heim. Erzählung in Briefen (Braunschweig: G. C. E. Meyer, 1824), 165; ‘Carlsbad und Töplitz,’ Journal des Luxus und der Moden, November 1798, 628. 49 Bühren, Vier Wochen, 46, 50–51, 125; Käppel, Pyrmont’s Merkwürdigkeiten, 88, 93; Straß, Pyrmont, 45. 50 Reichenau, Erinnerungen, 165–66. 51 Rudolf von Jhering, Briefe und Erinnerungen 1852–1868 (Berlin: H. W. Müller, 1907), 38–39. 52 Ibid., 38. 53 Ibid., 39. 54 Ibid. 55 Reichenau, Erinnerungen, 248–49. 56 Laube, Reisenovellen I, 94. 57 George L. Mosse, The Image of Man. The Creation of Modern Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 142–59; Christiane Eisenberg, ‘English Sports’ und deutsche Bürger. Eine Gesellschaftsgeschichte 1800–1939 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999), 116. 58 Suttner, Memoiren, 104. 59 Ibid., 106–107. 60 König, Kulturgeschichte des Spaziergangs, 192. Cf. also Kaplan, Making, 125 and Douglas Peter MacKaman, Leisure Settings. Bourgeois Culture, Medicine, and the Spa in Modern France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 36, 136. 61 Pyrmonter Brunnen- und Bade-Liste 1838, No. 1–61 (Pyrmont, 1838); Pyrmonter Brunnen- und Bade-Liste 1839, No. 1–71 (Pyrmont, 1839). 62 Friedrich Lyncker, Altes und Neues über den Kurort Pyrmont und seine Mineralquellen (Pyrmont: Georg Uslar, 1880), 22; Franz Mantey, ‘Pyrmont als Bauernbad,’ in Kleine Studien zur Pyrmonter Geschichte und Heimatkunde (Bad Pyrmont: Arnold Reinhardt´s Buchdruckerei, 1939), 3: 12–13. 63 Reddy, Navigation, 129, 149–54. 64 Zadoff, Next Year, 50; Adam Rosenbaum, ‘Grounded modernity in the Bavarian Alps: The Reichenhall spa culture at the turn of the twentieth century,’ Central European History 47 (2014): 39–48. 65 Rosenbaum, ‘Grounded,’ 44.

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Emotions, Gender and the Body 66 Zadoff, Next Year, 9. 67 Michel Foucault, ‘Of other spaces, heterotopias,’ Foucault Info, http://foucault.info//documents/­ heterotopia/foucault.heterotopia.en.html (15 May 2015). 68 In England, for instance, the increasing wealth of the middle and upper-middle classes had a significant impact on the development of civil society as it was reflected in what Peter Borsay has called the urban renaissance and Angus McInnes the rise of a leisure town.This development set in about 100 years earlier than in Germany. See Peter Borsay, ‘The English urban renaissance: the development of provincial urban culture c.1680–c.1760,’ Social History 2 (1977): 581–603 and Angus McInnes, ‘The emergence of a leisure town: Shrewsbury 1660–1760,’ Past & Present 120 (1988): 53–87.

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29 Feeling Modern on the Russian Street From Desire to Despair Mark D. Steinberg

Introduction In 1910, a series of columns in The Kopeck Gazette (Gazeta-kopeika), a popular ‘boulevard’ ­newspaper published in St. Petersburg, the Russian capital, described a ‘typical story’ of gender, sex and emotion in the modern city. ‘Liza’ was 22 years old, cheerful and pretty. The author had first met her at a friend’s home, where Liza worked as a maid. Like most female domestic servants, she likely grew up in a village. City life, it seems, made her ambitious and dissatisfied. Seeking a change, she welcomed the promises of a polite and nicely dressed woman who seemed to be offering her a better job but was actually luring young women into prostitution. Liza’s ‘fall’ is marked by some of the usual elements of deception and victimization in such tales. But Liza is also a wilful subject, far from innocent. When she quit her work as a maid, she did so declaring ‘What am I, a slave or something? I will be my own mistress!’ Soon, she was promenading down Nevsky Prospect, the capital’s main business and shopping street, wearing ‘gaudy silk finery and a huge fashionable round hat’. Her former employers wished they had reminded her of the virtues of ‘labour, honour and modesty’. But Liza would likely have rejected their moralizing appeal, having implicitly embraced an alternative moral argument: her right to choose and the values of ‘finery, pleasures, wealth and a life limited by nothing’. Two months later, the reporter noticed her walking the streets and stopped to ask her about her new life. Her manner was bold and saucy. She was proud to be a ‘carouser’ (guliashchaia), a term in Russian that refers to both merry-making and prostitution. She was offended that some people considered her ‘trash’ and would even spit at her in public. Her choice of sex work, she insisted, was both rational and ethically legitimate in the world as it really existed. ‘Everyone sells what they can.You sell your essays’, she tells the reporter, ‘and I sell my body – it’s mine, isn’t it?’ And it’s better work than domestic service: ‘When I was a servant, I sold my hands, my eyes, my legs. “Run, look, bring, give!” Nothing more. Servile and dirty work. But now!...I see no difference in selling my body. And the work is easier and more profitable’. A reader might well begin to wonder how much Liza was an actual person speaking in her own voice and how much a journalist’s creation designed to embody arguments. The tale’s denouement offers a stark moral lesson. Several months later, the journalist again noticed Liza working Nevsky Prospect. But now her beauty was gone and even some of her teeth were missing. We learn that her madam 374

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beats her and clients beat her. She realized now that her philosophy of life had been mistaken: ‘I did not understand the sort of pit I had fallen into!’ It was not enough that they had taken her body; they also ‘defiled’ her ‘soul’. ‘I gave myself to the streets and they swallowed me’. Few exits remained: ‘I can drink myself into unconsciousness, or get beaten senseless by some man’, or end it all with poison or under the wheels of a streetcar, ‘for there is a life worse than death’.1 This urban morality tale offers almost every trope in public discussions in fin-de-siècle Russia of women’s modern urban experience: hardship and opportunity for young people migrating to the expanding cities, the growing desire for individual freedom and agency, the invasion of the capitalist marketplace into the most intimate spheres, the inequalities of power and possibility, violence against women, disillusionment and suicide. Whether or not the story was perfectly factual should matter no more to us than it did to the author: it was a ‘typical story’, a reflection of well-known realities and widely shared interpretations, not least about what it meant for women to experience the modern city. In this case, we have before us two women: the emblematic young working-class victim of the debauched street and the middle-class female journalist who told her story, Olga Gridina. This chapter looks at gender and the urban experience through the eyes of this first female journalist in Russia who had a regular newspaper column under her own byline, though we know nothing about her life outside what she revealed (or made up) in her own columns.2 By describing the harm modern urban life inflicted on women’s lives, including their intimate lives, Gridina sought to shatter the myth of the modern city as a space of human progress. In the sections ahead, I highlight and interpret key themes in her writing about the urban experience: the promises of city life as a mirage, where disenchantment often led to suicide; sex and the self; and emotional experience as both evidence of the modern condition and a critical and transformative tool. As it has been famously said of other times and places, the point, she understood, was not only to interpret the world but also to change it.

Olga Gridina: Unmasking the modern The street, especially the woman’s street, was Gridina’s beat. Her newspaper writing was in the tradition of the feuilleton – a genre of informal and personal journalism with a special relationship to city and street. The mass-circulation newspaper, the historian Vanessa Schwartz argues for nineteenth-century Paris, can be seen as a ‘printed digest of the flâneur’s roving eye’, which revels in the ‘never-ending festival of modern life’ and helps form a ‘distinctly urban and quintessentially “modern” ’ community of readers.3 Journalists like Gridina, I would add, were flâneurs much as Walter Benjamin famously described them: wandering and observing everyday street life, feeling the ‘intoxicating’ power of the crowd and public spaces and so mastering the art of seeing, hearing and ‘empathy’ that enabled them to reconstruct ‘an entire existence’ from a ‘word overheard in passing’.4 Differing from the lightness of tone and wry wit that marked the typical European feuilleton, Russian journalists like Gridina favoured pathos over levity, perhaps because the objects of their gaze were so much more troubling. But Gridina also differed, including from her male colleagues, in putting women and gender at the centre of her gaze and narrative pathos. I suspect that before Gridina had her own byline, she was the author of the regular series of unsigned feuilletons in 1908, also in The Kopeck Gazette, headlined ‘The Maelstrom of Life’ (Omut zhizni). In style and content, these columns are much like her later signed work. They described, for example, an armed robbery on the street of two young women, ‘representatives of fun-loving Petersburg’, by men they had befriended;5 a servant girl shot in the head by the jealous son of her employers;6 the rape of a one-and-a-half-year-old girl by a drunken lodger living in her mother’s house;7 a 22-year-old prostitute who falls in love with a young man 375

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but cannot escape her ‘shameful trade’ because of debts to the owner of this ‘den of iniquity’, and so hangs herself on the post of her bed;8 a young man (with a ‘worn, senselessly malicious physiognomy’) who beat his girlfriend on the street because she wanted to go out with another man;9 and one of the most common street stories in the press: a group of men approach a young woman walking home at night and make ‘vile propositions’, responding to her pleas that they leave her alone with ‘loud, brazen laughter’ and answering her attempt to run away with a beating and rape.10 As in Liza’s story, the author often emphasized the ‘typicality’ of these cases. And the most ‘typical story’ of all (the title of this particular example) was this: a ‘young and inexperienced’ woman came to the city from the provinces and accepted the invitation of an elderly woman to live with her. This ‘lady’ treated her well at first, but the young woman soon discovered that she had ‘fallen into a den of iniquity’. Once in debt to the madam, she recognizes, as Liza and so many other prostitutes did, only one path to escape: she poisons herself with vinegar essence.11 For Gridina, as for many writers at the time, the city was not only the epicentre of modern experience but also the key symbol with which to interpret modernity. Gridina judged the city as many critics did: as a murderous ‘trap’12 and a fatal ‘mirage’,13 especially for women. Most of Gridina’s writing showed the devastating effects of the city on women’s lives. In 1913, for example, she reported a letter she had received from a young woman in the provinces who longed to move to St. Petersburg, dreaming, as so many did, of the ‘full and diverse life’ of the capital, its ‘richness of ideas and moods’. This young provincial dreamed that in the big city she could feel ‘the pulse of the age’, could truly feel and be modern. Gridina was determined to unmask and demystify the modern. She recognized that thousands of young people, living in ‘the depths of Russia’ amidst ‘age-old silence’, ‘think and feel’ just like this: they dream of the big city as a ‘bright temple’ where a great ‘festival of the human spirit’ is under way. At first, new arrivals see what they desire: entrancing streets, theatres and stores, with electric lights everywhere shining like suns. But they discover that the city is a cruel ‘deceiver’ (obmanshchik), hiding the real truth behind its bright mask: ‘indifference and the harsh and bitter struggle to survive – nothing else’. ‘Disenchantment’ follows, which all too often, for desiring and sensitive young people, leads to suicide. If these young dead could rise from their graves and return to their villages and small towns, Gridina melodramatically concludes, they would warn everyone about the ‘city-deceiver, city-trap, city-destroyer’.14

Death and the maidens: The ‘suicide epidemic’ A particularly dramatic example, widely discussed in the press, was the suicide in the spring of 1910 of three young Jewish women who had come to St. Petersburg from Minsk the previous summer to study. Two of the dead women, Mina and Sluva Kalmanson, were sisters, aged 18 and 19. The third was a 15-year-old friend, Maria Lur’e. Almost every evening, according to the Kalmansons’ landlady, one heard the pleasant sounds of ‘piano music, singing and happy laughter’ from their room. But gradually, according to their landlady, their moods darkened. The problem was not the usual ‘struggle to survive’, for their parents regularly sent sufficient sums of money for their support, and Maria lived with a kind aunt. Still, they decided to die together. One evening, according to the landlady and the maid, they gathered as usual for tea and music, but specially dressed all in white. Sluva sang an aria from Wagner’s Tannhäuser, presumably Elizabeth’s prayer: ‘Here in the dust I bend before thee, / Now from this earth oh set me free. / Let me, a maiden, pure and white / Enter into thy kingdom bright’. Peering through the keyhole, the curious servant saw the four girls face east, hands held together, whispering what she assumed was a Jewish prayer. Then Mina, a student at the conservatory, played Chopin’s funeral 376

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march at the piano. The landlady was now also at the keyhole, and the two witnesses saw the girls approach a writing table with three small glasses and a flask. Assuming they were about to have something alcoholic to drink, the watchers left. At two in the morning, Maria’s aunt came looking for her niece. The three young women were found to have poisoned themselves: Mina and Maria were dead; Sluva would soon die in the hospital.15 The story was dramatic enough in itself, made more theatrical still by the girls’ ritualized preparations and the presence of a hidden audience, allowing the entire Russian newspaper public to peer through that keyhole. But the case was also typical, every commentator noted. Gridina interpreted this story as one more illustration of what the city-deceiver did to innocent young women who dreamed of finding happiness in the modern metropolis. The Russian press was full of attempts to explain the ‘suicide epidemic’ among the young that began after the 1905 revolution and continued until the war. Some writers saw suicide as a purely internal disorder of the individual mind and psyche. But most were certain that, like all emotions, the desire for death was deeply social in both its causes and meanings. That so many suicide victims were young made sense: young people, young women especially, were naturally sensitive to the pathologies of modern life and to the inevitable feelings of disillusionment when reality clashed with one’s dreams.16 As Gridina wrote of this case, ‘Their young spirits thirsted for what is elevated, ideal, great. But everyday reality was empty’. Although these three women did not fall into the ‘pit’ of temptation that the ‘complete freedom’ of the metropolis opened before them, they were still affected by it and wished to escape the ‘coarse world’.17 Women from the provinces wrote to Gridina in large numbers, she reported, to express their inability to understand these girls from Minsk: they were the fortunate ones who had made it to St. Petersburg, the ‘magical city’ of light and culture that had everything the provinces lacked and offered every opportunity to make a better life. Gridina warned, as she would often over the years, that this was a fatal illusion: ‘Nowhere is a person so alone, miserable and unhappy as in big cities. Every day, the capital cities [a traditional Russian designation for the modern capital St. Petersburg and the old capital Moscow] are stained with the blood of dozens of suicides. If one could count the numbers who sorrow and suffer in cities, humanity would shudder’.18

Sex, love and the gendered self Sex was essential to the new urban experience and a compelling subject for journalists. Sex sold papers. But sex was also a symbol of the modern, including new conceptions of the self, the pleasures and dangers of the desiring subject, the place of women and men in an increasingly dynamic public sphere, and the commodification of almost everything. Especially as elite Russians became increasingly nervous about the morally corrosive atmosphere of urban life, the individualistic and amoral pursuit of happiness and lower-class unreason and desire, sex seemed both an exemplar and a cause of trouble.19 Women suffered most in these conditions, for the power to harm was overwhelmingly on the side of men. The traditionally gendered view of male will and aggression and female passivity and victimhood shaped Gridina’s narratives about the urban maelstrom: with rare exceptions (which usually ended tragically), we read of men’s voracious desire and women’s ‘shame’ – and of suicide as one of the few forms of female power to escape this fate. Gridina’s columns were in tune with the typical narratives about the ‘bacchanalia’ of the age: women walking alone on the streets harassed by ‘street Don Juans’ and ‘Lovelaces’ who make ‘vile’ or ‘insulting’ propositions; young girls stalked and seduced by paedophiles; sexual violence against women; women’s ‘fall’ into prostitution as a result of deceit or seduction; and a textual marketplace flooded with sexually explicit books, magazines, photographs and postcards in which women were invariably objects to be consumed.20 377

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Gridina highlighted, more than most journalists, the gendered inequality of the urban ‘b­acchanalia’, where there exists ‘one morality for men and another for women’.When a woman ‘betrays’ her husband – according to his definition of ‘betrayal’, which can cover a multitude of sins, including having fun without him – there is likely to be murder: of the woman, of the assumed rival or of both. But who, she asked rhetorically, fills the nightclubs and café-chantants of the city? Petersburg husbands! Who supports the city’s thousands of euphemistically named ‘free women’? Petersburg husbands! By contrast, a ‘carousing woman’ is greeted with men’s ‘scorn and condemnation’.21 This double standard was made worse by the moral ‘degeneration’ of masculinity itself. Male sexual desire, in the conditions of the modern city, had become unnatural and animalistic, she argued, even joking that the public need not worry about the temporary closing of the Petersburg zoo, for if people wanted to observe ‘bestial mores’ they need only visit the city’s streets with its ‘wild tigers’ in the public squares who bare their ‘teeth’ (knives) when you refuse them money and the ‘packs of fierce wolves’ who prey on women and girls.22 A guest columnist at The Kopeck Gazette similarly described the city as the scene of a public sexual ‘hunt’ for young girls by ‘modern fauns and satyrs’, which had ‘reached a positively monstrous scale in recent times’.23 Journalists dubbed such men ‘Diu-Lius’, after the Russified name of a French teacher in St. Petersburg who had been convicted in 1908 of having sex with his young pupils. Diu-Lius were said to prowl streets, parks and courtyards where children were playing, luring girls with candy and deceptively pleasant appearances to a dark corner, a stairwell or his apartment.24 Gridina’s first column under her own byline warned mothers to protect their daughters from these ‘diuliunists’ whose sexual desires were so debauched that the only ‘the freshness of children’ could satisfy them.25 Love itself had degraded in these times, she argued. A story about an 18-year-old man who wounds a 17-year-old who refused his love and kills her mother before shooting himself in the head led Gridina into a tirade about the state of modern love. This is not ‘real love’, such as we know from the great novels of the nineteenth century, but selfish, egoistic twentieth-century love. Instead of ‘tender and ideal feelings as the source of a beautiful impulse and moral maturity’, this so-called modern love is only self-love, and it has poisoned the hearts of youth. ‘Look around’, she demanded, where today can you find ‘pure, tender and good people who can forget their own ‘I’?...They don’t exist.There are only brutal and morose self-lovers for whom nothing in the world has more value than their vicious “I want!”’ Sexuality attached to loving feeling has been supplanted by selfish, crude and transgressive ‘sensuality’ ( grubaia chuvstvennost).26 Even murder in the name of ‘love’ was acceptable in the new morality of ‘modern youth’.27 The traditional narrative binary of male aggression and female innocence and victimhood, so strongly shaping these stories, was also breaking down in the moral chaos of modern life. Gradually, Gridina recognized that women also could have agency in these stories of urban degeneration, that women could be active decadent subjects. The euphemisms Gridina (and many other journalists) used to describe professional prostitutes were often ambiguous: ‘night fairies’ (nochnye fei), ‘gay maidens’ (veselye devitsy), ‘nocturnal butterflies’ (nochnye babochki), ‘carousers’ (guliashchie) and participants in ‘fun-loving Petersburg’ (veseliashchiisia Peterburg) could also refer to ‘free’ women indulging in the ‘sexual bacchanalia’ of the times. Although not ignored by Gridina, other journalists were more likely to highlight women’s sexual agency, even the danger that sexually active women posed to men. A 1906 popular brochure by Vera Nedesheva, for example, described ‘goddesses’ of love and fashion prowling Nevsky Prospect at night in search of ‘victims’. Typical was the ‘night predator’ Klara. She was said to be tall and beautiful with ‘burning black eyes’ heavy with makeup, with ‘red, joyous lips, parted to reveal two rows of sharp, white teeth’, smelling of potent perfume and wearing a large hat that was elevated over the 378

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crowd like ‘the victory trophy of an Australian savage’.28 The unashamed gaze of such women was treacherous: like the ‘firing of a machine gun’, one male journalist wrote, ‘that enchants, entices and invites’.29

Emotions as social experience and social critique Gridina, however, was interested more in the deep social effects of the modern urban environment on men and women – on their emotional experience. Gridina was not unique in her interest in emotions as a key for understanding the urban experience. Affect, especially the ‘social mood’ (obshchestvennoe nastroenie), was a ubiquitous theme in the Russian press. In some ways, Russian journalists anticipated later theories of emotion and affect, recognizing that these are not merely internal and personal but always embedded in social experience, that feelings are social and relational, that affect is thick with culture and discourse as well as being physiological and embodied. They also understood that emotions are strongest and most difficult where self and society are most troubled.30 Along with a great many officials, clergy, doctors, scholars and fiction writers, journalists like Gridina were interpretively certain that the deepest and truest meaning of their times would be found in this ‘social mood’. Emotions were signs to be read in order to diagnose the condition of their society, culture and polity (though explicit talk of politics was restricted by censorship). They did not ignore the inner psyche and self. Indeed, the modern psychological, even neurobiological, language of analysis was known to them. But public emotion talk in urban Russia was overwhelmingly about the relationship between self and society.31 Gridina was not original in diagnosing the Russian social mood as sick, nor in the vocabulary she used to describe the illness. Across the press, writers wrote of the dominant emotions among urban Russians as ‘disenchantment’ (razocharovanie) and ‘melancholy’ (toska, a sense of anguish, longing, loss and despair), and painful feelings of ‘groundlessness’ (bezpochvennost, the sense that everything is unstable and uncertain) and ‘untimeliness’ (bezvremen’e, literally a time without time, an untimely time marked by temporal drift and disorder rather than confident progress).32 Louise McReynolds has described Gridina as a ‘Russian sob sister’, borrowing the American journalists’ slang of the early twentieth century for women reporters, who were thought to be ‘big-hearted but soft-minded, emotionally generous but intellectually sloppy’.33 ‘Sob sisters’, McReynolds comments, could exploit sensationalism since expressing emotions was deemed natural to the fair sex, and thus gain access to a particular sphere of influence. Like the domesticity that gave women power in the home, the sob sister’s authority was restricted to specific spaces. She nonetheless enjoyed unprecedented opportunity to bring women into the larger public world represented by the newspaper.34 Gridina’s columns, in the manner of the ‘sob sister’, certainly made plentiful use of the power of sensation to express emotions, as can be seen in titles like ‘A Sea of Misfortune’, ‘The Flood of Filth’, ‘The Bounds of Despair’ and ‘Without a Rudder’.35 But Gridina also used emotionality as a critical tool with which to awaken attention to the many pathologies of urban life. Tragedy was a key motif. People complain, Gridina wrote, that there are no great tragic actors in the theatre these days, that the theatre no longer shocks or disturbs audiences. But who needs the simulacrum of stage emotions when ‘life itself is so full of tragedy’. She illustrated her point by describing her experience visiting one of the city’s many flop houses (nochlezhnye doma), which offered thousands of men and women the most meagre sort of shelter for the night. 379

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Here, she declared, one can experience feelings that no tragic actor could convey: ‘the bounds of despair, the final humiliation of a human being as an outcast from the big city, the other side of the city’s wonders’.The tragedy that art might try to create ‘is only a pale shadow, only child’s play, before that which life creates’. Among the homeless, Gridina witnessed the ‘ninth circle of human hell’, where people live no better than ‘stray dogs’. That people accept this as a natural part of ‘our civilization’ is as shocking as the dark, poisonous, humiliating conditions the homeless suffer. This experience made her feel the most ‘terrible melancholy’ (zhutkaia toska).36 The melodramatic qualities of Gridina’s storytelling, and of her understanding of tragedy, are worth pausing over. Her stories of moral degradation are not only melodramatic in tone and style, full of the emotional excess of their presentation, but they also partake of melodrama’s critical interpretive power to offer a moral condemnation of a reality that crushes the human soul. Women have often been key figures in this social melodrama; newer to public life and assumed to be more delicate and innocent than men, women were viewed as particularly sensitive barometers of the anti-human conditions of social life, as more likely to experience and understand the horrors of everyday life.37 The epidemic of suicide exemplified the emotional toll of the dehumanizing and demoralizing effects of modern city life, especially the modern ethos of individualism, egoism, materialism and deceit for the sake of gain – all targets of Gridina’s dismay and disgust. After the triple suicide of the young Jewish women, Gridina declared that she could no longer bear even to look at the daily newspaper listings of suicides by young people and would write no more about it. But when suicide devolved from ‘madness’ to ‘stupidity’, she could not remain silent. The story provoking this outburst involved two sisters, daughters of a country priest, who came to Petersburg to attend special university-level courses for women. Their desire for knowledge, for ‘science’, was enormous. But the city that they imagined to be a ‘bright centre of life’ tricked them as it deceived so many others; the private ‘higher courses for women’ in which they enrolled offered only ‘the appearance of science’, with the real lesson, Gridina bitterly remarked, being only ‘deception and self-deception’. But why kill themselves over this!? These girls could have gone home and been useful, Gridina declared. That they did not, that disappointment turned into despair and despair became a desire for death, testified to the tragic force of the distorted emotional atmosphere of the times.38 Gridina’s own moods – ranging from melancholy to disgust to anger – may be seen as an argument for the epistemological truth and critical necessity of the similarly dark ‘social mood’. Answering critics who complained that the newspapers were themselves to blame for depressing people, even for causing many suicides, Gridina insisted that ‘the mirror is not to blame…. Let life become graceful, pure and joyful – then every issue of the newspaper will become a continual hymn of joy’. But ‘life such as it is’ is full of ‘horror, cold and egoism’.39 Analytically and emotionally, her mood was more than maudlin emotionality. Nor was it a simple expression of cynicism or pessimism. Instead, I would argue that the disenchanted and melancholy voice can be a critical and even political voice, a protest against the world as it actually is – and was for Gridina, who used emotional accounts of individuals’ experiences in the city to expose the moral deformity of modern reality and the false promises that modernity brings progress towards greater happiness.40

The impulse to hope Gridina resisted dwelling entirely in this darkness, however true it may have been as a diagnosis of the conditions of life. She looked for hope, not only in altered conditions, a life that was ‘graceful, pure and joyful’, but also in changed affect, the power of positive emotions. She s­ometimes 380

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found people’s weak and depressed mood to be contemptible, even ‘stupid’, as we have seen.The remedy, she argued along with other liberal journalists, was to nurture a strong and vital ‘will’ (volia), an act of emotion as much as mind. In her Christmas essay for 1909, for example, Gridina complained that Russians ‘think’ too much about life’s difficulties and do too little about them; that what is most needed is the will to move forward and act with initiative to make life better, ‘for it is far better to perish while creating and achieving things than to be slowly extinguished in hopeless and pitiable despondency’.41 Russians need a changed ‘social mood’ and ‘strength of spirit’ in order to face the realities of modern life – including its inevitable deceptions and disappointments – rather than hurrying towards the ‘easy way out’ of suicide.42 Gridina responded to news of the sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 with an existential and moral lesson. The Titanic might be seen to embody human desire and hubris. ‘I want this!’ humanity declares, with supreme faith in human will and mastery and expecting all of nature to obey. ‘But the elements laugh coldly at man’s proud genius and with blood-stained irony says to him, “You are nothing!” ’ But Gridina refused to accept this simple logic, offering evidence against the argument of the elements; two days after the Titanic went down, an eclipse of the sun unfolded precisely as predicted by scientists. It was as if they had ordered the sun to obey and the sun bowed down before humanity, declaring ‘You are everything!’ Why, she asked, should we ‘believe an iceberg and not believe the sun, the great and beautiful sun?’ The time had come to start believing the sun!43 The early twentieth-century philosopher Ernst Bloch saw a ‘utopian impulse’ in the human spirit: a deep and ubiquitous human urge to look beyond assumptions about what is possible, constrained by the facts of the present, and to find the imagination and will to refuse to accept what others feel is impossible to change. The utopian impulse wills the mind and the emotions to look beyond the ‘darkness of the lived moment’, beyond the merely factual world of ‘misery and death’, and to ‘summon’ what is ‘not yet’.44 This is the impulse that led Gridina to ‘believe the sun’ and to imagine the daily newspaper able to sing a ‘continual hymn of joy’ about a different reality. For all her awareness of the realities of suffering, disenchantment and despair, of the seductive lies of modern progress, she could not abandon what Bloch would call the ‘emotion of hope’, the ‘work’ of which is to reach beyond the darkness of ‘what is’ and see ‘what is becoming’, though this may take ‘the most extreme effort of will’.45 Gridina knew how difficult this was to achieve, even for herself. Hence, perhaps, her embrace of a more modest form of emotional resistance to the darkness: laughter. Russians might benefit, even be saved from death, by learning to laugh differently, positively, hopefully. After Mark Twain died in 1910, she reflected on the laughter that allowed him to face so many hardships in his own life. Had Twain been a Russian, she quipped, he would surely have hanged or shot himself.46 In this melancholy joke, as in bolder appeals for will and spirit and belief in the sun, Gridina imagined a social mood that might itself help make reality different. Meanwhile, she recognized the truth of melancholy, disenchantment and despair as an emotional map of the world as it really was, especially the world of ordinary women. She wished for ‘humanity to shudder’ at the stories she told about how women ‘sorrow and suffer in cities’.47 Perhaps, this shudder was also an emotion that could produce the will and spirit needed to even imagine a different reality. According to McReynolds, Gridina wrote for women who, poor and badly educated, had new opportunities to pull themselves out of their straits. Attentive to their harsh realities, Gridina encouraged among them a philosophy of feminism that combined female solidarity to overcome the prejudices of society’s dominant male structure with the individualism of self-help. In short, she sold 381

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a fundamentally bourgeois worldview in that she dissociated gender from class and emphasized the importance of individual efforts to raise one’s status and enter the world of comfort and security.48 I think Gridina had a more ambitious desire for a ‘graceful, pure and joyful’ life than that contained in this individualistic, bourgeois, liberal ideal, though I am not sure she could have imagined what such a world might be like. She does not seem to have embraced the revolution in 1917. At least, she was not heard from after the war. Perhaps she found ‘comfort and security’ in her own private life. Or tired of her role as a Jeremiah for downtrodden women. Or feared the full logic of her own thoughts and emotions. Other women writers were less hesitant, even in the face of state censorship and men’s criticisms, and we can measure something of the limits of Gridina’s vision against them. Ideas about the ‘new woman’, appearing in these same years in journal articles by Alexandra Kollontai (among others), extend the logic of Gridina’s work in a direction she hesitated to go. Kollontai saw the spiritual solitude of the individual as the defining emotional experience of men and women in the ‘crowded, alluring and carousing, noisy and shouting cities’.This essential modern experience drove people to ‘grab with sick greed at the illusion of a “congenial soul” ’ and be enchanted by the magic of ‘crafty Eros’. But the most likely outcome, especially for women, was disenchantment. As Kollontai saw it, writing with a frankness rare in the Russian press – and which might have embarrassed Gridina, though she had made similar arguments – a ‘normal women seeks in sexual intercourse completeness and harmony; the man, reared on prostitution, overlooking the complex vibrations of love’s sensations, follows only his pallid, monotone, physical inclinations’. The conditions of modern life degraded the ‘love act’ from ‘the ultimate accord of complex spiritual feelings and emotional experience’ into something ‘shameful, low and coarsely animalistic’. But in this ‘tragic’ modern condition Kollontai saw hope: ‘a longing [toska] for the ideal of the still unrealized future’, ‘the fresh scent of new strivings in life, rising from the social depths’.49 Salvation would come from a ‘new morality’ and ‘new people’. In 1913, Kollontai described the emerging new woman as possessing ‘a self-defining inner world, living as a whole person’ (zhivet interesami obshchecheloveka). She might be only a factory girl, but she is ‘proud of what she is, proud of her inner strength, proud that she is her own self ’. She knows that modern life demands a new emotional personality: not traditional feminine ‘compliance and softness’, but ‘action, fortitude, decisiveness, and toughness, in other words “virtues” that were until now considered the property of men’. The new woman ‘does not fear life’ or ‘hypocritically wrap herself in the faded cloak of female virtue’ but ‘demands from fate her share of personal happiness’, though she knows better than to treat love, as women in the past did, as the whole ‘essence of her life’.50 Gridina was a ‘new woman’, by Kollontai’s definition, in her career as journalist and in her outspoken social advocacy, though we know nothing of her private life, and she endorsed the emotional ideal of the new woman as inspired by healthy pride and will. But she did not embrace Kollontai’s Marxist view of history. Kollontai was sure that the conditions of the modern city, and the life of the poor especially, would foster the new morality and the new person: ‘amidst the stench and terrors beget by capitalism, amidst tears and curses, living springs find a way to emerge’.51 Gridina, by contrast, warned women to keep away from the abyss of the modern city and to doubt its promises. Perhaps, Gridina might have said, the radical faith that the springs of the new will arise in very darkest spaces of human experience – that revolution and socialism will finally make social life a ‘festival of the human spirit’ – was yet another modern illusion. 382

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Notes   1 I dedicate this essay to Jane T. Hedges (1951–2015), my partner in life for 35 years – an extraordinary observer, reader and editor.This was the last essay she critiqued. Ol’ga Gridina, ‘Obyknovennaia istoriia,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 4 October 1910, 3; ‘Po baryshu – chest’,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 5 October 1910, 3–5; ‘Est’ zhizn’, kotoraia …,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 6 October 1910, 3.   2 Louise McReynolds is the only other historian to have paid Gridina much notice. See McReynolds, The News Under Russia’s Old Regime: The Development of a Mass-Circulation Press (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 231–33; and James von Geldern and Louise McReynolds, eds, Entertaining Tsarist Russia, Tales, Songs, Plays, Movies, Jokes, Ads, and Images from Russian Urban Life, 1779–1917 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 292–95 (includes a translation of the final installment of Liza’s story).   3 Vanessa Schwartz, Spectacular Realities: Early Mass Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 16.   4 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1999), section M (The Flâneur): 416–55 (quotations 417, 431, 432, 443, 448).   5 ‘Omut zhizni,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 20 June 1908, 3.   6 Ibid., 21 June 1908, 2.   7 Ibid., 26 June 1908, 2.   8 Ibid., 2 July 1908, 3.   9 Ibid., 13 July 1908, 3. 10 ‘Omut zhizni: khuligany-nasil’niki,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 22 July 1908, 2. 11 ‘Omut zhizni: obyknovennaia istoriia,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 6 July 1908, 2–3. 12 Gridina, ‘Gorod-obmanshchik,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 24 December 1913, 3. 13 Gridina, ‘Prostoi vykhod,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 8 May 1910, 3. 14 Gridina, ‘Gorod-obmanshchik,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 24 December 1913, 3. 15 Peterburgskii listok, 4 March 1910, 6; 5 March 1910, 4; 6 March 1910, 4; 9 March 1910, 5; Gazeta-kopeika, 4 March 1910: 3; 5 March 1910: 3; Sovremennoe slovo, 4 March 1910, 2; 5 March 1910, 3; 6 March 1910, 3; Rech’, 4 March 1910, 4; 5 March 1910, 4. See also Susan Morrissey, ‘Suicide and civilization in late imperial Russia,’ Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 43 (1995): 201–202, 213–17; and idem, Suicide and the Body Politic in Imperial Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 340–41. 16 The most influential commentator on suicide was the Petersburg physician Dmitrii Zhbankov. See, especially, D. Zhbankov, ‘Sovremennye samoubiistva,’ Sovremennyi mir 1910, no. 3 (March): 52–55. 17 Gridina, ‘Smert’ otvetila!’ Gazeta-kopeika, 5 March 1910, 3. 18 Gridina, ‘Rokovaia oshibka,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 13 March 1910, 3. 19 See important discussions and arguments in Laura Engelstein, Keys to Happiness; Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siècle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Laurie Bernstein, Sonia’s Daughters: Prostitutes and Their Regulation in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Aleksandr Etkind, Sodom i Psikheia: Ocherki intellektual’noi istorii Serebrianogo veka (Moscow: ­Its-Garant, 1996). 20 Mark Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle (New Haven:Yale University Press, 2011), chap. 5. 21 Gridina, ‘Vse khuzhe,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 10 December 1909, 4. 22 Gridina, ‘Zverinye nravy,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 14 May 1910, 3. 23 Mariia Volgina, ‘Okhota na detei,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 14 August 1913, 3. 24 ‘Nasha ulitsa: Milyi diadia,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 22 August 1908, 4; ‘Diuluizm v Peterburge (Torgovlia maloletnymi det’mi), Peterburgskii listok, 23 October 1908, 2; ‘Eshche odin Diu-Liu,’ Peterburgskii listok, 3 ­September 1910, 3; ‘Po-stopam Diu-liu,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 17 June 1912, 3; ‘Po-stopam Diu-Liu,’ Peterburgskii listok, 25 January 1913, 4. 25 Gridina, ‘Beregite detei!,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 28 October 1909, 3. 26 Gridina, ‘Griaznyi potok,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 27 February 1910, 3. 27 Gridina, ‘Puti liubvi,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 29 March 1910, 3. 28 V. Nedesheva, Nevskii prospekt (St. Petersburg: Tip. Ministerstva vnutrennykh del, 1906), 3–4, 10. 29 Peterburg noch’iu, addendum to the journal Shut, 1911, no. 3 (12 November 1911): no pagination; N.V. Nikitin, Peterburg noch’iu (St. Petersburg: Trud, 1903), 99. 30 For the theoretical perspective, see, especially, Catherine S. Lutz and Lila Abu-Lughod, eds, Language and the Politics of Emotion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990); William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001);

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Mark D. Steinberg Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions (New York: Routledge, 2004); Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005). 31 Steinberg, Petersburg Fin de Siècle, chap. 7. 32 Ibid. 33 Howard Good, Girl Reporter: Gender, Journalism, and the Movies (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 1998), 50–51. 34 von Geldern and McReynolds, eds, Entertaining Tsarist Russia, 292. 35 Gridina, ‘More bed,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 29 December 1909. 5; ‘Griaznyi potok,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 27 February 1910, 3; ‘Predel’ skorbi,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 13 September 1910, 3; ‘Bez rulia,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 11 April 1910, 5. 36 Gridina, ‘Predel’ skorbi,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 13 September 1910, 3. 37 Peter Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1976); Ben Singer, Melodrama and Modernity: Early Sensational Cinema and Its Contexts (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001); Louise McReynolds and Joan Neuberger, eds, Imitations of Life:Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). 38 Gridina, ‘Prostoi vykhod,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 8 May 1910, 3. 39 Gridina, ‘Zerkalo ne vinovato,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 31 October 1910, 3. 40 See, Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotions; Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Jonathan Flatley, Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008). 41 Gridina, ‘Vpered,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 25 December 1909, 6–7. 42 Gridina, ‘Prostoi vykhod,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 8 May 1910, 3. 43 Gridina, ‘Poverim solntsu,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 5 April 1912, 4. 44 Ernst Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia, trans. Anthony Nassar (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000 [from the revised 1923 German edition]), 7. See also Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope, 3 vols (Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1995). 45 Bloch, The Principle of Hope, I: 3–4. 46 Gridina, ‘Bez rulia,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 11 April 1910, 5–6. 47 Gridina, ‘Rokovaia oshibka,’ Gazeta-kopeika, 13 March 1910, 3. 48 McReynolds, The News under Russia’s Old Regime, 231–33. 49 Aleksandra Kollontai, ‘Na staruiu temu’ and ‘Polovaia moral’ i sotsial’naia bor’ba,’ published in Novaia zhizn’ in 1911 and republished in Novaia moral’ i rabochii klass (Moscow: Vserossiiskii tsentral’nyi ispolnitel’nyi komitet sovetov, 1918), quotations 40–41, 51. 50 ‘Novaia zhenshchina’ (The New Woman), Sovremennyi mir 1913, no. 9, 151–85, as reprinted in Novaia moral’, 3–35 (quotations 3–6, 8–9, 17–18, 24, 30–31). 51 ‘Polovaia moral’ i sotsial’naia bor’ba’ (1911), in Novaia moral’, 58–61.

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30 Risk! Pleasure! Affirmation! Navigating Queer Urban Spaces in Twentieth-Century Scotland Jeff Meek

The city has a long association with same-sex desire and identities, occupying a prime position in the gay imaginary, not only representing a site for queer sexual performance but also offering the potential for the broadening of sexual and emotional relationships.1 Critical mass too has played a significant role in the queering of the city. Bob Cant has discussed how queer men and women, having no ‘homeland’ to validate their identities, migrated in numbers to cities,2 and as Henning Bech has discussed: ‘The city is the social world proper of the homosexual, his life space and the vast majority must get out into “the city” one way or another, into the open mass of strangers’.3 In the years before the proliferation of gay ‘quarters’ or ‘ghettos’,4 the city presented the queer subject with ‘a productive space that generates and stabilizes a new form of selfhood and way of life’.5 The sexual act, if performed, is just one feature of this form of urban spatial engagement, where public spaces acted as locations for the performance, constitution and configuration of queer identities, which are not only sexual in their nature but political. These engagements constitute an ‘affirmation of the self, personality, body politics and identities’.6 Queers also commanded attention through their subversion of normative behaviour; they have influenced culture and energized the political sphere through activism,7 and shaped, reshaped and contested urban geography.8 The ‘Molly markets’ of eighteenth-century London, the queer subcultures in naval towns in early twentieth-century New England,9 the Stonewall Riots of 1969 in Manhattan, the emergence of gay ‘quarters’ in cities around the world, the proliferation of Pride marches; all these point to the salient position that the city has played in queer history. The history of the city as a queer space positions it ‘as a space of affirmation, liberation and citizenship’, reflecting the shifts in experiences of queer men and women over the past century or so.10 While the examples noted above point to the prominent position that towns and cities have played in the affirmation of dissident sexualities, there is a notable silence from Scotland. Yet, the absence of Scottish studies does not indicate the absence of queer urban navigators but reflects the hidden nature of queer experience from Scottish historical perspectives: there was very little open discussion of homosexuality from institutions, agencies and rights organizations even by the mid to late twentieth century.11 While homosexual acts between consenting male adults in private were decriminalized in England and Wales in 1967, the criminalization of homosexual acts continued in Scotland until 1980 and reflected Scottish legislators’ ­concerns

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that ­decriminalization might challenge the independence of Scots law and destabilize Scotland’s moral order.12 Yet, in Scotland there was a curious peculiarity; the legal requirement for corroboration – that at least two independent strands of evidence must exist to successfully prosecute – meant that private intimacies between males were rarely prosecuted and thus the full force of the law was focused upon men who sought sexual release in public. While the inner workings of Scots law were evident to the legal profession and the police, corroboration was not a commonly understood concept among Scotland’s queer men. Prior to the 1970s, there were no obvious leisure platforms for queer men in Scotland. Thus, the only accessible places for expressions of sexuality could be found within the public spaces of Scottish towns and cities. Specific urban spaces have existed as areas for queer sexual performance for some considerable time, with parks and public toilets featuring heavily as sites of expression for dissident sexualities.13 Between 1885 and 1935, the majority of prosecutions for sodomy or attempted sodomy in Scotland between consenting male adults took place in locations that were ‘public’: public lavatories, parks, urban waste ground, tenement closes, poorhouses and model lodging houses.14 By the inter-war period, Glasgow and Edinburgh were Scotland’s major urban centres. In 1921, Glasgow boasted a population of over one million, significantly enlarged by historic migration from other parts of the country and through immigration from Ireland and eastern Europe. Although Edinburgh, Scotland’s capital, had a population of less than half a million by the same period, it also benefitted from significant in-migration.15 Both cities quickly became a popular destination for queer men seeking employment but also hopeful for greater sexual and emotional opportunities amongst the anonymous throngs. Not only did the city offer multiple opportunities, it also presented a considerable threat to the self, both physical and emotional. What is apparent is that the men who used public spaces in both cities for sexual encounters during the inter-war period came to represent the unacceptable meshing of public and private, and while Scots law was unable to interfere in the domestic, private lives of queer Scots, instances of homosexuality and gender transgressions that threatened public decency were pursued with some vigour.16 By examining prosecutions against gender-transgressing men and male prostitutes in inter-war Glasgow and Edinburgh, I offer some insights into how emotions were experienced by queer men in urban space and how these emotions came to define them as criminal, deviant and disordered. Further, through the use of autobiographical material, this chapter will explore how the authorities dealt with gender and sexual non-conformity in inter-war Scotland and how public spaces as loci for the performance of dissident sexualities were used and regulated. Finally, this chapter will explore the personal testimonies of queer Scottish men to understand how the development and regulation of queer urban sexual spaces in the inter-war period impacted upon their use in the post-war period. As this chapter will explore, the queer man did not passively accept criminalization; it remained a constant threat but also nurtured some sense of queer community and solidarity. Exposure to disgust, intolerance and disapproval of homosexuality had the potential to provoke varying emotional reactions, from shame, fear and anger, most often directed inwardly, to politicization.17 According to William Reddy, there is a strong constitutive link between language and emotion in that speech acts not only express emotion but generate it.18 Exposure to devaluing language about homosexuality has the potential to provoke feelings of disconnectedness, self-loathing and low self-esteem but, conversely, can lead to the construction of emotional refuges: relationships, rituals or organizations that provided ‘safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allow relaxation of emotional effort, with or without ideological justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime’.19 The criminalization of the queer Scottish man and the regulation of queer urban spaces exposed him to emotional crises, 386

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but it also revealed how immersion in these spaces provided the potential for emotional refuges that promised some level of self-realisation and provided some protection from dominant emotional regimes.

Abnormative emotions? When William Merrilees, the former Chief Constable of Lothian and Peebles, reflected in 1966 upon his ‘crusade’ against homosexuals in inter-war Edinburgh, his central concerns focused upon the emotional, sexual and gendered transgressions of the men he sought to criminalize. For Merrilees, the committed homosexual occupied a subversive space that problematized the public/private binary of urban space.20 Of particular alarm for Merrilees was the sudden appearance in the city of ‘effeminates’, a type of man he particularly despised due to their inability to conform to hegemonic understandings of masculinity.Their crimes were not private; these men contested urban spaces, using them as theatres of queer performance, or through, as Merrilees himself lamented, ‘the haunting of urinals...parks, and houses of convenience’.21 Merrilees perceived homosexuals as flawed characters who fell into two camps: the effeminate and the criminal. According to his thinking, the criminal was not a natural (or unnatural) homosexual but an opportunist who saw associations with homosexuals as being filled with felonious potentials such as blackmail and robbery.22 The former was a deeply flawed character who had immersed himself in perversion, not only of a sexual variety but one that transgressed accepted gender conventions. On raiding an Edinburgh brothel, Merrilees was astonished to find men ‘dressed in brassieres, and knickers, with toenails and fingernails painted, using all types of cosmetics, and...adopting women’s names – Gloria, Godiva, Blondie, Princess this and that...’23 By this period, the city was fast becoming an arena for gender-transgressing men, the dominant visual representation of male queer urban culture.24 Visual indicators say little explicitly about queer subjectivities, but they did inscribe upon the deviant male body an emotional meaning, for the authorities at least. Merrilees imposed upon the effeminate men he met an emotional ‘taint’, that they were ‘inauthentic’ emotional subjects: We then seized love letters in which these creatures were claiming to be engaged or married. One can hardly blame anyone for disbelieving the authenticity of these letters, but they were in fact proved genuine...many were disgusting in nature, but it was obvious the letter-writers were in fact more female than male, and actually thought of themselves as women.25 The feminine taint with which Merrilees became obsessed was reflected in the letters he seized during raids: ‘I met a swell sheik on Saturday and I’m madly in love with him’; ‘He says I’m his girl’; ‘Your loving sister’.26 These men constructed a discursive and performative safe zone within a queer environment, where formations of identity and resistance to heteronormative pressures were reflected in behaviour and articulations of emotion. As such, verbal and written expressions of love and desire were emotional refuges for such men. However, their illicit character meant that the private nature of these zones was under continual threat. That the First World War enabled men to express emotions that crept beyond masculine boundaries has been explored by authors such as Jason Crouthamel, whose work on German soldiers at the front examines their desire to acquire ‘feminine emotions’, under which love, nurturing and emotional attachments to other soldiers figured prominently.27 Yet, what may have been acceptable in the trenches during conflict was quite different to what was acceptable in civilian life. 387

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The idea that queer urban men not only made themselves up to appear feminine but also demonstrated ‘feminine’ emotions was reflected in court cases brought against male prostitutes in Glasgow during the same period.The city’s ‘whitehats’, an organized band of male prostitutes, viewed the metropolis as an arena for sexual transgression. ‘Whitehats’ such as John Rae and William Paton exhibited all the signs of the effeminate homosexual: they painted and powdered their faces and spoke in feminine voices.28 Rae in particular exhibited an emotional condition deemed largely suspect by the police surgeon and prison psychiatrist who examined him, with the latter deeming the 37-year-old hospital orderly as a ‘person of unsound mind’ who required ‘care and control’ and was ‘silly and fatuous’.29 Not only had this man exhibited the classic fashions of the queer urban gender transgressor, but he was an emotional cripple, unable to perform in a responsible manner. Second-hand accounts of queer emotions and subjectivities are inherently unreliable as the subject is effectively silenced. Yet, the trial records relating to male prostitutes, coupled with Merrilees’ recollections of the men he encountered, do offer some insights into queer performance in inter-war Scotland. What emerges is the manner by which queer men immersed themselves within a select subculture that offered some protection from the dominant emotional regimes prevalent at this time. In Glasgow, as in Edinburgh, the legal authorities recognized that the city was becoming a haven for homosexuals, attracting men from all corners of Scotland in the pursuit of potential sexual release in the anonymity of its wynds, closes and green spaces. While William Merrilees appears to have believed that he had rid Edinburgh of the public homosexual menace, it is apparent that he underestimated the much deeper motivations that had led to the construction of emotional refuges that allowed queer men to partially escape public vitriol. Queer urban space was much more than a place of transience; it presented the queer subject with opportunities for entry into a subculture where their private emotions blossomed in an environment protected (to some extent) from dominant emotional regimes and normative expectations of gender and sexuality. The men William Merrilees encountered in ‘brothels’, whose private letters spoke of queer homosociality and romantic desire, are likely to have used initial forays into queer urban space to cement deeper emotional, romantic and sexual ties. The importance of the urban environment to the emergence of inter-war queer subcultures in Scotland is easy to measure: the vast majority of men picked up during so-called anti-homosexual ‘crusades’ were found in larger urban centres. To demonstrate the much deeper influence the Scottish queer urban landscape had upon such men, this chapter will now examine how, despite significant police intrusion into such spaces, their importance in queer consciousness and imaginary survived well into the post-war period.

Risk, fear, affirmation Between 2007 and 2008, for my research on male homosexuality in twentieth-century Scotland, I interviewed 24 men who lived in the country between the end of the Second World War and 1980 (when partial decriminalization of homosexual acts occurred in Scotland). David Halperin argues there has been a general silence concerning ‘queer subjectivities’ – individual experience has been obfuscated by collective experience. By reshaping non-heterosexuality as a collective identity, queer activism has presented an alternative discourse of non-heterosexuality ‘in political rather than psychological terms’.30 These interviews provide significant insight into the emotional and subjective experience of queer men in Scotland. Navigating sexual spaces in Scottish cities was not simply focussed upon the wheres and whens, but also the emotions and experiences, individually and collectively, that emerged when seeking sex and companionship. 388

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There are additional reasons why this later period offers us greater scope in Scotland to examine queer subjectivities: decriminalization occurred in Scotland over a decade later than in England and Wales, and homosexual rights activism did not reach the country until 1969 with the formation of Scotland’s first homosexual law reform organization, the Scottish Minorities Group. While radical organizations – such as the Gay Liberation Front – gained a foothold in cities in the United States and in London, they had little impact in Scotland’s urban centres, where a relatively small number of homosexual rights activists saw assimilation with heteronormative society as one of their main goals. This had implications both for the trajectory of homosexual activism and for queer men and women maturing during the 1960s and 1970s. More militant LGBT activism did exist in Scotland, but this tended to be associated with women’s rights organizations where lesbian feminist activism formed part of select women’s right groups, such as the St Andrews Women’s Liberation Group.31 Emotional refuges within a LGBT context are evident within rights organizations such as those that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, and they were at odds with existing emotional regimes, which promoted normative emotions and practices that conflicted with the lives, feelings and experiences of non-heterosexual men and women.32 According to David Halperin and Valerie Traub, pride has been the normative emotion for American gay men and lesbians since Stonewall.33 Within a British context, it is more difficult to ascertain the tipping point; perhaps the push for law reform in England and Wales during the 1960s, or the first Gay Pride march in London in 1971. Within a Scottish context, it is even more difficult to identify the emergence of pride as a normative queer emotion. Scotland did not decriminalize male homosexual acts until 1980, and it was not until 1995 that an organized ‘Pride’ event took place. Scotland’s relationship with its non-heterosexual population has been complex, and perhaps until the introduction of civil partnerships in 2005, it continued to be so.34 Thus, in Scotland, queer men and women long occupied a hinterland largely absent of any visible queer agency and community.35 If pride was not the dominant emotion of queer Scotland, other emotions and emotional practices emerged from the testimonies of men in my study. Risk has occupied a central place in the subjective experience of men who seek men in public locales,36 and risk can provoke several emotional reactions relating to the fear of arrest, the fear of exposure and the fear of ‘gay bashing’.Yet, as James Jasper has argued, there are potentially multiple feelings experienced when presented with emotional triggers.37 Indeed ‘risk’ and ‘fear’ also provoked positive emotional responses, as Alastair (b. 1948, Glasgow) details: [T]he furtiveness [of cruising for sex in public places] was not necessarily an unpleasant thing, it was very exciting, very dangerous...I read a description in one of Alison Uttley’s books about a hare stealing an Easter egg and describes his feelings in it and it’s that sort of low gut excitement, which apparently is your blood pressure changing to allow you to have an erection to do the sort of things you are going to do.38 The dangers faced and the emotions they provoked are linked to the notion of contested spaces. Pleasures sought in urban spaces – especially queer pleasures – are frequently constrained by the threat of discipline and regulation through the ‘panoptical gaze of homophobia’.39 In some respects, the concept of emotional refuges does not offer an entirely adequate framework for the analysis of queer subjectivities and subcultures, as the demarcation between dominant emotional regimes and refuges is not at all clear cut. As I have suggested, the queer urban space occupied a middle ground between a dominant emotional regime and the relative safety 389

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of queer emotional refuges. For Alastair, the ever-present danger of arrest while cruising added further to the heady emotional cocktail: I was actually stopped one night [by the police] with a man, up a close, and I can remember this heat of terror and I told him pack of lies, a complex pack of lies and then they just let us go...we weren’t in flagrante we were just standing up a close so I think there was nothing they could do about it.40 This combination of excitement, sexual arousal and danger presents a potent emotional reaction from participants. In Laud Humphreys’ controversial study of the ‘tea-room trade’ in the United States of America, the author ignores or plays down the emotional interplay of the participants, referring to its impersonality and the lack of emotional connectedness between the men he studied.41 Further, Humphreys’ study fails to explore the personal emotional experience of the participants.42 On every occasion that Alastair went cottaging, there were multiple emotional reactions at work: the shared sexual arousal; the pleasure from the furtiveness of the encounter; the threat of exposure, arrest or violence – ‘I was robbed a couple of times, picked up by men and then [made to] hand over your money, that was scary’. For Robert (b. 1937, Glasgow), who regularly visited Calton Hill, a hill adorned with monuments in Edinburgh and a regular haunt for men seeking sex, the fear of violence typified emotional reactions to cruising for sex in urban spaces: I got attacked once on Calton Hill, I mean other bad things happened on occasions, but I got beaten up. [The] guy attracted me [with] his hard penis and he lured me on and I sat on a bench with him, and then his mate attacked me from behind, by the throat.43 In these examples, danger is presented as a multiple ‘risk’; emotional reactions were evident in pleasure at the furtiveness of the activity and the associated fear of exposure. Risk also presented much more negative emotional reactions such as terror and the fear of physical harm. These layers of risk and danger are evident in other studies that have examined public sex in urban spaces. According to Flowers, Marriot and Hart, ‘danger’ and ‘risk’ had multiplicities of meanings in these environments and were accepted dimensions of cruising for sex, particularly in public parks.44

Hope, pleasure and affirmation Seeking sex in the urban sprawl was not simply about the sexual act; there were multiple emotional and performative dimensions. Each sexual theatre had its own regulatory praxes: the public park was least rigid, while the cottage (public toilet) had its own limitations, both spatial and sexual. For Colin (b. 1945, Forfar), cottaging in Dundee was not a simple process; there were embedded rules and procedures that, as a young man, he was unable to fathom: Dundee was quite an exotic place to me and it was quite nice to go in on my own... and I remember going in for a pee in this gents’ toilet at the top of Whitehall Street... Anyway, I went in and there were men there and I had a pee...I was sort of the last one in and I was the first one out and I noticed over the next few months, I don’t know how I could explain this in terms of my consciousness...[I]t was always the same sort of pattern, that people were there when I went in and they were still there when 390

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I came back out and nobody approached me but I was aware that there was a sexual atmosphere.45 The notion that public toilets or ‘cottages’ were the most regulated – spatially, sexually and ­emotionally – is evident from Ed’s (b. 1950, Edinburgh) recollections: I would always go to the furthest away urinal from anyone and wait for someone to come and stand next to me. Then I would check out what he was doing and if he was, em, wanking well I knew straight away, and if I was interested I would stay there and if I wasn’t I would walk away. If I was interested we would look at each other and we would either go into a cubicle or we would meet outside and we would go back to his place.46 What Colin had missed were the – at times, overt – sexual cues that indicated availability. Ed saw more emotional potential in sexual acts that took place in private, away from the public toilet: ‘if we met outside and walked home to his place or my place, yes we talked and we would talk all the way’. Whilst cruising for sex had an element of what Morris (b. 1933, Aberdeenshire) termed ‘ready dicks and ready arses’,47 the spatial limitations of the public toilet meant that, for some, meaningful sexual encounters were impossible. Joseph (b.1959, Glasgow) was ambivalent about the emotional relevance of hurried and uncomfortable sexual acts in a bathroom stall: I know that some people cottage for the sheer thrill of it but I think with retrospect the majority of the people that I met were actually looking for the same kind of thing as me, the physical contact, some kind of sexual release and, in actual fact, some kind of affirmation. The public toilet added further possibilities, both sexual and emotional, for men such as Joseph. JM – Do you think that it was a realistic feeling to have [to find love in a toilet]? Joseph – I believed that it was a realistic expectation...I knew there were gay bars but I wasnae entirely sure where they were, so...it was…a realistic option to go [to public toilets] because it was somewhere I could meet up [with other gay men]. You met people who were looking for more than a quick jerk-off, other people like myself who were probably looking to be affirmed in some way and probably looking to find some kind of contact that reinforced the belief that they werenae on their own, that they were not struggling with this themselves...48 Comparisons between this research, which focuses on the period 1945–80, and more recent periods offers suggestions that motivations for sexual encounters in Scottish urban spaces have shifted since decriminalization. Although sex was a central part of the process, there were significant emotional reasons for navigating this form of sexual arena.While more contemporary studies of public sex have tended to position the sexual act and sexual actors centrally,49 interviewees such as Joseph speak of the potential of public sexual encounters to ‘affirm’ the legitimacy of their sexual desires and provide emotional support to counter the isolation he felt. Similarly, Stephen (b. 1939) sought men in public parks for reassurance that he was not alone and that his sexual desires were not abnormal: ‘I had been warned of various places as everybody warned their children “not to here, don’t go there”, you know. “There’s men over there, there’s dirty 391

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men here”, and things like that. The grannies of the day advised everybody, and I deliberately sought these men out’.50 While Stephen was content to use public parks as an opportunity to engage in sex that offered relief and reassurance, Joseph believed in the potential for sexual encounters to lead to a more emotionally satisfying outcome. Similarly, Ed (b. 1950, Edinburgh) acknowledged that his use of public toilets for sexual encounters was not simply about the sexual act but was used to displace much deeper emotional needs: I knew you could go and cruise toilets [and] I was in and out of toilets all the time, having sex right, left and centre but feeling so empty afterwards and I did that for a few years and then eventually I just stopped it altogether. Looking back I am almost sure that I was using sex as something to replace something deeper, which I never ever found.51 The discomfort and dissatisfaction that Ed experienced during his cottaging years can be assessed by way of Sara Ahmed’s theories on ‘discomfort’ and the inhabiting of ‘spaces’ that do not ‘extend’ their shape.52 Although this allusion might be figurative, in these cases it is literal. While, for some men, the urban ‘cottage’ was a queer space, it was still one that was governed by heteronormative assumptions; the public toilet was a contested space where queer sexual and emotional performances were regulated, internally, through unwritten customs and rules; and externally, by criminalization and threats made to many of those who used it. While Ed and Joseph longed for a deeper emotional connection that saw sex as an extension of the initial meeting in public, others rejected the emotional potential of urban queer spaces. While Robert (b. 1937) suggested that he experienced no deeper emotional reaction from sex in public toilets and parks – ‘I wasn’t feeling empty or anything’53 – he did experience pleasure and satisfaction from escaping his troubled relationship with his alcoholic father and from his ability to lead a secret, double life unknown to his family and work colleagues: My dad’s [reaction to] sex being seen would very nearly have ended the world so there I was. It was very exciting as I wanted to go on but it was dangerous...I might go out on a conventional social evening with people I work with, go out with friends or go to the theatre and go for a drink then ‘Bye!’, off home and then I would go out unknown to them and I used to be quite pleased with myself that I was having this extra ‘thing’.54 The axes of public/private are not simple binaries but are negotiated, reshaped and reinterpreted by individual actors and groups alike. Sonia Magni and Vasu Reddy have explored the temporal and spatial dynamics of public/private in their examination of performative queer identities in bathroom usage amongst gay South African men.55 Although their focus is upon bathrooms within an LGBT environment (a club), their research situates the bathrooms as loci of identity formation, affirmation, interaction and sex.Yet, the authors also point to the ‘emotional ambivalence’ of participants: this venue is without the emotional reactions to risk most often associated with contested spaces, such as public bathrooms.56 In effect, these bathrooms were free from external intrusion and policing resulting in fewer emotional reactions relating to uncertainty, risk or fear. Emotions were central to the experience of Scottish urban cruisers57 and cottagers58 and, in some cases, marked their entry into the homosexual world. Alastair – I can remember it [his first experience of public toilets as a sexual place] so vividly. I was [visiting my brother in London] and I was getting on the coach to come 392

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back to Glasgow and I went for a pee. I went into the loo and I suddenly realised I could see [a man’s] cock and this was really exciting. So, I started to pop around a bit and then one day a guy was jerking off, wow!59 The idea that queer urban spaces acted as a supportive emotional environment emerged from several of my interviews. As Emma Vickers has detailed, the emergence of an ‘urban collective’ of queer men associated with ‘queer places’ ensured, for the most part, that other men found there regularly would be seeking similar pleasures.60 This emotional and sexual assuredness is reflected in the experiences of Stephen (b. 1939, Glasgow) who from his mid-teenage years was visiting a public park in Glasgow’s east end. Despite the lack of emotional connection with his sexual partners, the experiences regulated Stephen’s feelings of isolation and loneliness as a queer adolescent in the metropolis: I had sex with them and the panic attacks and fear [disappeared]. [It] calmed me down, the panic attacks and stress in my chest disappeared and went away down to a lower level. At least I had found out there was others [like me], albeit older men; men in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s.61 Stephen’s experiences hint at the potential for emotional refuges through interaction with queer urban space: his desire for sex was just one dimension. The sexual and social interactions he experienced offered him much more meaningful outcomes that hint at the potential for an emotional refuge, which lessened both emotional and physical trauma.The use of a sexual urban space also played a part in Alastair’s experiences in Glasgow; the sexual space led directly to a form of emotional refuge where he felt a stronger sense of freedom and protection from the very real risks associated with cruising and cottaging: I met one or two pivotal people who introduced me to some very interesting, wellconnected people like X, who taught political rhetoric. He was one of the most fascinating men you might ever meet and X, a well-heeled solicitor, a whole cache… they had parties and the ballet was involved and the opera…I had died and gone to heaven…getting an entrée into this world that I wanted to inhabit.62

‘Queer’ emotions The emotions and emotional reactions detailed in this chapter are not experienced solely by queer men. However, the context within which these emotions are experienced and performed – queer(ed) urban spaces – are. As Sara Ahmed has argued, the closer that queer subjects get to spaces that are defined by heteronormativity, the greater the potential for the reworking or reshaping of those spaces.63 The public toilet is shaped by heteronormativity in that its design, purpose and existence ignored, or failed to appreciate, that single-sex spaces designed for intimate behaviour had the potential to be reshaped.These are in fact contested emotional spaces; the emotions experienced by queer men when navigating the public toilet as arenas of pleasure, risk and affirmation demonstrate their flexibility of purpose and their impact upon emotional subjects. The city as a place in the queer imaginary figures prominently in queer history, and Scotland was no exception. The queer men of inter-war Glasgow and Edinburgh sought sex, love, community and support from their visitations to queered urban spaces, but emotional refuges are more difficult to identify as no space or subculture was safe from intrusion by hostile forces.Yet, the letters seized by the Edinburgh police demonstrate that some level of emotional liberty was 393

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achieved in their freedom to express desire, hope and love, however temporary (and ultimately damaging) this may have been. This underlines the difficulty of queer emotional refuges in pre-decriminalization Scotland as a concept, as they are rarely left unmolested and the risk of disclosure was ever present. Post-war queer spaces also offered men an opportunity to engage in behaviours and interactions that temporarily offered escape from demonizing rhetoric and dominant emotional regimes. While the subject in the inter-war queer space remains largely silent, the post-war queer urban navigator has a voice through which to express the emotional implications of queered urban spaces. Joseph and Stephen viewed their experiences of sex in public places as affirming their own private sense of self and offering reassurance that their desires were neither abnormal nor unique.Yet, shame is evident in some testimonies; the dominant emotional regime operating in Scotland during the post-war period meant than non-heterosexual men could only explore their sexual and emotional drives within a contested space. Shame and anger also emerged when sexual and emotional opportunities were denied by interlopers who encroached upon these potential emotional refuges. The queer urban spaces of Scotland’s large cities cannot realistically be termed as emotional refuges in their own right, as risk and fear often regulated positive experiences. The intrusion of the police into this realm was only one mediating factor; the threat of robbery and physical assault offered another layer of threat. Where emotional release was sought, the queer urban space often acted as a stepping stone to more personally meaningful outcomes. Alastair’s experience demonstrates that immersion within the urban sexual arena led directly to immersion within an urban queer homosocial environment that offered him much more than sex or basic companionship; this was in effect an emotional refuge where he was protected from the worst excesses of homophobia. Thus, the public spaces of Scotland’s larger towns and cities had the potential to enable sexual and emotional development through the presence of both a critical mass of agents and the potential for extending into more private spaces. Ultimately this meant that for some queer men, shared and individual experiences and emotions had significant potential to bring affirmation, sexual pleasure and a step towards emotional liberty.The public/private dichotomy of Scots law assisted some in these pursuits, as men who shifted from public urban networks to private networks were relatively free to construct their own sexual and emotional refuges and, with careful demarcations, could remain relatively unmolested.

Notes 1 I am using the term queer to denote individuals who did not conform to dominant understandings of gender and/or sexuality. 2 Invented Identities: Lesbians and Gays Talk About Migration, ed. Bob Cant (London: Cassell, 1997), 1. 3 Henning Bech, When Men Meet: Homosexuality and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1997), 98. 4 Michael Sibalis, ‘Urban space and homosexuality: The example of the Marais, Paris’ “gay ghetto,”’ Urban Studies 41, no. 9 (2004): 1739–58. 5 Matt Houlbrook, Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957 (Chicago: ­University of Chicago Press, 2005), 3. 6 Sonia Magni and Vasu Reddy, ‘Performative queer identities: Masculinities and public bathroom usage,’ Sexualities 10, no. 2 (2007): 229. 7 Robert Aldrich, ‘Homosexuality and the city: An historical overview,’ Urban Studies 41, no. 9 (2004): 1719. 8 See, for example, Sy Adler and Johanna Brenner, ‘Gender and space: Lesbians and gay men in the city,’ International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 16, no. 1 (2009): 24–34; Gavin Brown, ‘Urban (homo) sexualities: Ordinary cities and ordinary sexualities,’ Geography Compass 2, no. 4 (2008): 1215–31; David Bell, ‘Insignificant others: Lesbian and gay geographies,’ Area 23, no. 4 (1991): 323–29; Mickey Lauria

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Navigating Queer Urban Spaces and Lawrence Knopp, ‘Towards an analysis of the role of gay communities in the urban renaissance,’ Urban Geography 6, no. 2 (1985): 152–69.  9 Rictor Norton, The Myth of the Modern Homosexual: Queer History and the Search for Cultural Unity (­London: Cassell, 1997), 242–43. 10 Houlbrook, Queer London, 3. 11 Jeffrey Meek, Queer Voices in Post–War Scotland: Male Homosexuality, Religion and Society (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 39–89. 12 Meek, Queer Voices, 40–53. 13 Matt Houlbrook, ‘The private world of public urinals: London 1918–57,’ London Journal 25, no. 1 (2000): 52. 14 Meek, Queer Voices, 40. 15 Ibid., 20. 16 Ibid., 42. 17 See, for example: IIan H. Meyer, ‘Prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: Conceptual issues and research evidence,’ Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003): 674–97; Robin J. Lewis et al, ‘Stressors for gay men and lesbians: Life stress, gay-related stress, stigma consciousness, and depressive symptoms,’ Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology 22, no. 6 (2003): 716–29; Iain R. Williamson, ‘Internalized homophobia and health issues affecting lesbians and gay men,’ Health Education Research 15, no. 1 (1999): 97–107; J. Diplacido ‘Minority stress among lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals: A consequence of heterosexism, homophobia, and stigmatization,’ in Psychological Perspectives on Lesbian and Gay Issues: Stigma and Sexual Orientation: Understanding Prejudice against Lesbians, Gay Men, and Bisexuals, ed. G. Herek (Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, 1998), 138–60; D. Davies, ‘Homophobia and heterosexism,’ in Pink Therapy, ed. in D. Davies, and C. Neal (Buckingham: Open University Press, 1996), 41–65. 18 William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 63–111. 19 Reddy,The Navigation of Feeling, 129. 20 William Merrilees, The Short Arm of the Law: The Memoirs of Chief Constable William Merrilees, OBE (London: John Long, 1966), 116. 21 Merrilees, Short Arm of the Law, 119. 22 Ibid., 115–6. 23 Ibid., 117. 24 Matt Houlbrook, ‘“The man with the powder puff ” in interwar London,’ The Historical Journal 50, no. 1 (2007): 154. 25 Merrilees, Short Arm of the Law, 117–18. 26 Ibid., 118. 27 Jason Crouthamel, An Intimate History of the Front: Masculinity, Sexuality and German Soldiers in the First World War (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). 28 National Records of Scotland [hereafter NRS], Trial and Precognition Records, AD15/28/84 & AD15/30/59. 29 NRS, AD15/30/59. 30 David M. Halperin, What do Gay Men Want?: An Essay on Sex, Risk, and Subjectivity (Ann Arbor: ­University of Michigan Press, 2007), 1–2. 31 Sarah Browne, “‘A veritable hotbed of feminism”:Women’s liberation in St Andrews, Scotland, c.1968– c.1979’, Twentieth Century British History 23, no. 1 (2012): 100–23. 32 Reddy,The Navigation of Feeling, 129. 33 David Halperin and Valerie Traub, ‘Beyond Gay Pride,’ in Gay Shame, ed. David Halperin and Valerie Traub (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 3. 34 For further discussion of the Scottish context, see Meek, Queer Voices; Roger Davidson and Gayle Davis, The Sexual State: Sexuality and Scottish Governance, 1950–80 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). 35 Meek, Queer Voices, 191. 36 John Bancroft, Erick Janssen, David Strong et al.,‘Sexual risk-taking in gay men:The relevance of sexual arousability, mood, and sensation seeking,’ Archives of Sexual Behaviour 32, no. 6 (2003): 555–72. 37 James Jasper, ‘Emotions and social movements: Twenty years of theory and research,’ Annual Review of Sociology 37 (2011), 286. 38 Interview with ‘Alastair’, 16 May 2007.

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Jeff Meek 39 David Bell and Gill Valentine, Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1995), 211. 40 Interview with ‘Alastair’. 41 Sex in public toilets. 42 Laud Humphreys, The Tea-Room Trade: Impersonal Sex in Public Places (New York and London: Aldine de Gruyter, 1975), 32–33. 43 Interview with ‘Robert’, 1 August 2007. 44 Paul Flowers, Claire Marriott and Graham Hart, ‘“The Bogs, the Bars, and the Bushes”: the Impact of Locale on Sexual Cultures’, Culture, Health and Society 2, no. 1 (2000): 69–86. 45 Interview with ‘Colin’, 20 September 2007. 46 Interview with ‘Ed’, 5 September 2007. 47 Interview with ‘Morris’, 29 August 2007. 48 Interview with ‘Joseph’, 11 July 2008. 49 See for example, Flowers, Marriot and Hart, ‘The bars, the bogs, and the bushes’; Bancroft et al., ‘Sexual risk-taking in gay men’; J. Church et al., ‘Investigation of motivational and behavioural factors influencing men who have sex with other men in public toilets’, AIDS Care 5, no. 3 (1993): no. 6, 337–46. 50 Interview with ‘Stephen’, 19 March 2007. 51 Interview with ‘Ed’. 52 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 152–53. 53 Interview with ‘Robert’. 54 Ibid. 55 Magni and Reddy, ‘Performative queer identities,’ 229–42. 56 Ibid., 233. 57 Those who seek sexual partners in public spaces. 58 Those who visit public toilets seeking sex. 59 Interview with ‘Alastair’. 60 Emma Vickers, ‘Queer sex in the metropolis? Place, subjectivity and the Second World War,’ Feminist Review 96 (2010): 70. 61 Interview with ‘Stephen’. 62 Interview with ‘Alastair’. 63 Ahmed, Cultural Politics, 152.

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Part VI

The Colonial Town Introduction Nigel Worden

This section focuses on the experience of gender in Europe’s colonial towns. Gendered s­ ystems were not uniform, nor were Europeans unchanged by those that they encountered in the colonial world. These chapters thus not only contribute to understanding the topics of other sections, such as the gendered nature of the economy, the organization of urban space and the role of the town in forging local identities, but they also reveal the distinctive gendered natures of a variety of colonial towns scattered across the globe.1 Each chapter analyses specific colonial towns, ranging from sixteenth-century Latin America; seventeenth-century Dutch Java; eighteenth-century North America, the Caribbean, and South and Southeast Asia; and nineteenth-century South Asia, Africa and Australasia to twentiethcentury southern Africa, and each offers a particular perspective on the character, construction and significance of gender in these urban contexts. We have not been able to include all areas or themes, but we have tried to provide a range of examples of how recent work on the town has contributed to understanding gender in the context of European colonialism. Over the past few decades, the study of colonialism has been transformed. Earlier foci on administrative, military and economic mechanisms and institutions have now been enormously enriched by increasing attention to the social and cultural forces that shaped colonial empires. Key themes in this are the salience of race and the construction of racial, social and cultural identities amongst both colonisers and colonized.2 Another is the transnational (or transcolonial) interflow of peoples, commodities, cultural manifestations and ideologies between metropole and colony, between different colonies and with regions not under colonial control but engaged in trade or warfare. Imperialism is no longer seen as the unidirectional imposition of European forces onto colonial territories and populations. Gender has been a key element in this more recent scholarship. ‘The work of Empire was gendered work’, argues Catherine Hall, one of the leaders of this new wave of imperial history.3 At one level, gendered approaches to colonialism, like gendered approaches to very many other historical topics and themes, ‘[allow] us to see familiar stories in a new light’.4 Empire has often been seen as a fundamentally masculine project, in which women played no active role. This can no longer be sustained given the critical role of women in many colonial contexts, as all of the chapters in this section reveal. Moreover, masculinity in colonial contexts was neither uniform nor unproblematic. Settler men did not always dominate commerce or politics, while

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the domestication of colonial masculinity was a key development in nineteenth-century South Asia and Australasia, as the chapters by Mary Hancock and Penny Russell show. Gender has thus become a way of revealing and understanding the very essence of the imperial project and the ways in which it varied over time and place. European colonialism attempted to impose a deeply gendered political, social and cultural order, following the norms of metropolitan Europe. Not only was this evident in the way colonial authorities tried to mould male and female roles and identities amongst the colonisers in an often volatile and fluid demographic and social context, but it was also apparent in the gendered ways in which it assessed and depicted colonized populations. This was usually to their detriment, since they failed to meet the conventions of masculinity and femininity taken as norms by the colonialists. However, the prescripts and desires of colonial authorities rarely matched reality on the ground. Gendered notions imported from the metropole were often reshaped by the differences of the colonial situation and by resistance from both colonisers and colonised, who rejected or subverted them by creating other gendered realities. As Kathleen Wilson has argued for the British Empire in the eighteenth century, ‘British people confronted other cultures and gender systems which were not structured by the binaries and complementarities familiar to Europeans and which used alternative markers of social relation and difference. Colonial institutions nonetheless strove to regulate the sexual, conjugal and domestic life of those within their purview.’5 The chapters in this section provide rich examples of such strivings and such reshapings, as well as demonstrations of the limitations of colonial control in these spheres. The dominant image of colonial societies, both in academic studies and in popular perception, is usually of territorial frontiers of conflict and conquest succeeded by rural slave plantations or settler farms.Yet, it was in the town that the most concentrated and persistent aspects of colonialism were encountered and elaborated. Those discussed in these chapters ranged widely in form and function, including towns imposed on conquered indigenous urban settlements (Mexico City, Batavia), new trading outposts perched on the edges of indigenous states (Calcutta, Madras, Auckland), ports forming cogs in wider maritime empires (Cape Town, Sydney), inland administrative and trading centres (Lima, Philadelphia), mining towns (Potosí, Johannesburg) and hill stations (Udagamandalam).Yet, all of them possessed features that accentuated the means by which colonialism shaped gendered roles and identities. They were places of control where the physical presence of institutions of colonial authority, such as administrative offices, law courts and churches, were highly visible. They contained the markets, warehouses and factories that turned the wheels of colonial economies. But at the same time they possessed a fluid and often eclectic demographic mixture of local peoples, immigrant settlers and labourers from surrounding rural areas and from across the world, as well as a transient population of those passing through en route elsewhere or dislocated by the massive changes that colonialism effected. The result was a wide diversity of cultural norms and practices.Towns in Europe were also places of political and economic power with diverse and migrant populations. However, colonial towns were usually places of more intense flux and experimentation, where distance from the conventions and limitations of both the metropole and the rural hinterland enabled many inhabitants to forge new lives and identities and where differing racial and ethnic demographics produced new kinds of spatial patterns and personal and kinship relationships.6 Both men and women could benefit from such opportunities, although urban colonial encounters were not straightforward and were resolved in differing ways in differing places and periods, as these chapters illustrate. In some cases, colonisers created urban worlds that excluded local populations. In others, the colonised shaped urban environments to meet their own needs in a period of exploitation and dislocation. Collectively, these differing experiences highlight the distinctiveness of the colonial town in the forging of gendered roles and identities. 398

The Colonial Town

Several distinguishing gendered characteristics of colonial towns are apparent from these chapters. In the early stages of their development, the majority of the colonial inhabitants were male. The conquistadores and early Spanish settlers of Latin America, the employees of the Dutch East India Company in Batavia, the English East India Company in Madras and Calcutta and the militia of the convict settlement in Sydney were all men. This had several results. Either nuclear family formation was inhibited where local women were unavailable or unwilling, as in large parts of North America and the Caribbean; or partnerships and families were formed with indigenous women or imported slaves, as in Latin America, South Asia, Kingston and Batavia. Local concubines and wives, and in time their mixed-race offspring, thus came to form an essential element of many early colonial urban populations. In early Sydney, convict women fulfilled such a function, frequently forming partnerships and families with both military and civil men. Settler men asserted and retained authority, and sexual exploitation was often explicit in such relationships.The fluidity and disorder of the early colonial town could make it a place of danger and risk for both settler and local women, as Penny Russell argues for early Sydney. However, the town also provided opportunities for women that were less available to indigenous or slave and convict men. Leo Garofalo shows how in colonial Latin America, indigenous and slave women not only dominated local urban markets but also were key in creating urban cultures in ways that were much less available to women in Mediterranean metropoles. Jean Gelman Taylor reveals that in Batavia ex-slave women became part of the ‘Dutch’ population, their social mobility concealed behind an ethnic label that researchers have taken too literally. There, as in Kingston, Madras and Calcutta, local women obtained social status through their connections with colonial men. Indigenous or slave men were by contrast generally excluded from such social mobility or economic independence. Clare Lyons argues that the rapid urbanization, geographic maritime mobility and multi-cultural populations of the eighteenth-century Anglophone colonial towns created sexual cultures in which settler women could exert a level of economic and social independence that greatly exceeded that of contemporary Britain. Moreover, while their levels of freedom differed markedly from the sexual exploitation of slave women in Kingston or ­Calcutta, concubinage nonetheless offered a possible path to manumission for some female slaves. However, the relative gendered flexibilities and opportunities provided in these early colonial towns were not to last. Intensified metropolitan interventions in Spanish America in the later eighteenth century began to restrict local initiatives. In Philadelphia, a new national culture from the 1790s reined in the gendered and sexual fluidities of earlier decades. Similarly, in colonial South Asia, as both Clare Lyons and Mary Hancock show, the nineteenth-century shift away from a racially mixed public culture and household formation led to separate colonial residential areas and new norms of gendered domesticity, with colonial homes under the control of white women in charge of servants, and institutions such as the social club carving out spaces of colonial masculine homosociality. In Sydney, the earlier opportunities that existed for convict and emancipist women in small-scale commercial activities faded by the 1830s as ‘freed women were locked more tightly into marriage and domesticity and bond women into more restrictive forms of penal discipline’.7 Penny Russell outlines how in the course of the nineteenth century, the fluidities of spatial and social patterns in Australasian towns gave way to a more structured gender order. Indigenous men and women were excluded from the centres of cities and inhabited the liminal spaces beyond. The city became a more domesticated space, with white women visible in the public arenas of the centres and men incorporated into the spaces of suburban domestic households. It was in the Bush, rather than the town, that colonial masculinity in ­Australia came to be defined. Vivian Bickford-Smith demonstrates how in South Africa the inculcation of a colonial ‘­Britishness’ to include African elites in the early nineteenth-century city was modified in the 399

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later decades as rural migrants flooded into towns such as Johannesburg to provide the mainstay of a colonial labour force. Colonial authorities strove to forge new patriarchal gendered roles for urban newcomers with ‘invented traditions’ that placed women in domestic labour and encouraged a work ethic, thrift and ‘appropriate husbandly behaviour’ amongst men. This was inculcated for both White and African urban dwellers through institutions such as prayer groups, sports clubs and the scouting movement. Yet, such colonial restructurings were rarely fully successful. Indigenous women played a key role in challenging the colonial ‘second conquest’ of Spanish America in the Bourbon era. ­African men and women in Johannesburg and other South African cities formed countercultures, expressed through female beer brewing economies, the organization of gangs of both genders and language, music and dance that satirized and subverted the hegemony of colonial gendered norms. In Australia and New Zealand, the domestication of urban space was contested by masculine camaraderie and drinking cultures in a process that some historians have characterized as a ‘battle of the sexes’. The most striking subversion of colonialism came with the emergence of powerful anticolonial nationalisms in the twentieth century. Nationalists both appropriated and transformed colonial gendered orderings, not only by constructing masculine political organisations and public spaces but also by mobilizing women in their causes and campaigns.8 These topics fall outside the remit of the chapters in this book, but they point to the continued legacies of the colonial period to the construction of gendered orders in the contemporary post-colonial city.9

Notes 1 I am grateful to their authors for helpful comments on drafts of this introduction. 2 For collected examples of such studies, see Stephen Howe, ed. The New Imperial Histories Reader (London and New York: Routledge, 2010) and Robert Aldrich and Kirsten McKenzie, eds, The Routledge History of Western Empires, (London and New York: Routledge, 2014). 3 Catherine Hall, ‘Of gender and empire: Reflections on the nineteenth century’ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 47. 4 Philippa Levine, ‘Introduction: Why gender and empire’ in Levine, Gender and Empire, 5. 5 Kathleen Wilson, ‘Empire, gender and modernity in the eighteenth century’ in Levine, Gender and Empire, 16. 6 For example, Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds, Moving Subjects: Gender, Mobility, and Intimacy in an Age of Global Empire (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009), Kirsten McKenzie, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016). 7 Marian Aveling, ‘Imagining New South Wales as a gendered society 1783–1821’, Australian Historical Studies 98 (1992), 11, cited in Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1997), 233. 8 Barbara Bush, ‘Gender and empire: The twentieth century’ in Levine, Gender and Empire, esp. 100–102. 9 For example, see Robert Home, ‘Shaping cities of the global south’ in Routledge Handbook on Cities of the Global South, ed. Sue Parnell (London: Routledge, 2014), 90–99.

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31 A Gendered History of Colonial Spanish-American Cities and Towns, 1500s–1800 Leo J. Garofalo

Transforming Mesoamerican cities and Andean administrative and ceremonial centres into the hubs of Spanish power and commerce affected men and women differently, creating new roles and relations. For centuries, prior to the arrival of southern Europeans and their slaves among Mesoamerican Aztecs, Maya and Tlaxcalans, women enjoyed public ceremonial roles, individual property rights and a presence in city markets. In short, pre-Hispanic gender roles allowed women to fulfil specific local religious, political, market functions. Urban Mediterranean traditions of restricting women’s activities as healers, public figures and commercially active members of society clashed and at times blended with long-established practices. From the 1500s to the 1700s, Iberian norms of behaviour and organization penetrated deeper into colonial society and even into rural towns. These changes affected marriage patterns and other interactions between men and women while continuing to allow female domination of local markets. Spanish colonizers in the 1530s encountered a different situation in the Andes. Inca cities housed only rotating labour draftees, emissaries and governing imperial classes and priests. During the sixteenth century, Spanish domination introduced markets to places where exchange among kin or redistribution organized by the Inca state once prevailed. It also settled new European, African and indigenous populations in cities and mining centres. As the sixteenth century progressed, indigenous women found opportunities in feeding and attending to these new urban groups. By the 1600s, rural-to-urban migration and intermarriage created new plebeian, ethnically blended and mixed raced populations. These new residents often confounded royal, municipal and indigenous authorities’ goals for orderly administration and clearly defined roles for men and women. Indigenous and African women and their mixed-race descendants, termed castas by Spanish administrators, came to dominate markets, taverns and shops from the 1600s.1 These non-European women also created informal networks of curing, divining and religious mysticism. These challenged Church and municipal councils’ authority. In colonial cities, women conducted much of the daily life and local market activity. They brewed and sold drinks, prepared and dispensed foods and ran a variety of market stalls and shops.This activity supplied fuel, fish, credit, places to 401

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  Figure 31.1  Cuzco centred on two main plazas surrounded by merchant shops’ arcades, government buildings and church towers and façades. Spanish on horseback or with staffs of office pass a fountain in Haucay Pata [plaza of festivals]. Canopied market stalls and men and llamas bearing burdens occupy the marketplace of Cuci Pata. Drawing c. 1615 by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, The city of Cuzco, principal city and royal court of the twelve Inka kings of this realm and bishopric of the church. Courtesy of The Royal Library, Copenhagen (GKS 2232 4º: Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). Page 1051 [1059]. Drawing 372).

sell and pawn items and indirect access to rural production zones as well as goods imported by Spanish, Portuguese and American-born or creole European merchants. To oversee commerce and urban life, Spanish colonial rule depended heavily upon a strong presence in the cities of the Crown, Church and European colonists and their creole descendants.These colonial bureaucracies brought courts, litigation and legal documents. Consequently, urban life gave common men and women, slaves and illiterate majorities greater access to the power of documents, law courts, literate culture and Catholic life. In particular, women in Andean cities availed themselves of the protection afforded by wills and litigation. The late 1700s witnessed a renewed Crown interest in policing men and women’s actions as well as reining in the American Church and limiting American-born creoles in courts and customhouses. The Spanish Bourbon ‘second conquest’ unfolded just as cities became more ethnoracially, politically and socially complex and independent. Between 1714 and 1800, indigenous women and men – both nobles and commoners – played important roles in challenging the abuses of imperial rule and royal officials’ extortions. Intensifying towards the end of the century, 402

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localized riots and revolts and far-reaching rebellions involved urban populations. In the 1780s and 1810s, rebels laid siege to major cities in Peru and Mexico. Women and men defined roles for themselves in these struggles to reform or end colonialism well before nineteenth-century movements, dominated by creole elites, finally secured independence and shifted political power to rural areas and military forces.

Gendered roles before and during the conquest Women in Aztec city-states and those in regions opposed to Aztec rule fulfilled roles common throughout Mesoamerica. The Nahua-speaking Mexica ethnic group forged an empire through marriage alliances and warfare. Among both the Mexica and the ethnically distinct Tlaxcalans that resisted them, women raised children, produced cloth and clothing, cooked meals, preserved food and tended gardens and animals.Village and city women and girls performed these tasks even in artisan households. They worked in multi-generational groups. Noble women u ­ ndertook some tasks and supervised others. Households included enslaved women and ­children captured in war, offered in tribute or sold by families in moments of need.2 In marketplaces, women bought and sold food, produce and many other items; the Spanish conquistador Bernal Díaz del Castillo wrote, let us also mention the fruitsellers and the women who sold cooked food, dough and tripe in their own part of the market;…and the fisherwomen and others who sell some small cakes made from a sort of ooze….3 A smaller and even more specialized group of women served as midwives and healers and in leading household and neighbourhood-level rituals and ceremonies: ‘The [marriage] ceremony began when the bride, just after dark, was carried on the back of an amanteca [female physician]. They are accompanied by four women carrying flaming pine torches to light the way.’4 Evidence for pre-Aztec and pre-Inca periods suggests that women managed public rites and temples dedicated to female deities while males attended male deities. According to the Mendoza Codex, girls learned to grind corn, make tortillas, sweep and weave.5 In Mesoamerica’s city-states and their hinterlands, male children learned to hunt, fish, drive off pests and collect reeds. Although in Mesoamerica there were many large cities, the vast majority of the estimated 25 million people lived in rural communities.6 Aztecs differentiated gender and age by clothing. For example, they associated the loincloth with manhood and only allowed boys to wear it after age 13. When 15, some boys would be selected for specialized education to become priests or warriors. In noble families, boys born to a primary wife or concubine could be selected for leadership of family, kin, neighbourhood or state. In the constant rivalry among the many city-states in central Mexico, warfare provided recognition and social mobility even to commoners. Historian Inga Clendinnen explains that through childbirth, women displayed their prowess and courage. The midwife’s chants likened the birthing mat to the battlefield, with its attendant dangers of death and willing self-sacrifice for the greater good.7 Both males and females could establish their worth in ‘battle’. Therefore, some scholars identify a ‘gender complementarity’ that affords valued and essential ways for each to contribute in indigenous societies. Complementarity neither celebrates male superiority nor offers equality. Research suggests that a male–female gender binary may mask a more complex set of genders in Mexico and the Andes. These may reach beyond genders as solely biological identities to recognize the ways in which genders are also culturally constructed and subject to alteration.8 The conquest and early colonial era in Mexico and Peru spanned periods of initial peaceful encounters followed by fighting, punctuated by negotiations and alliances. These culminated in 403

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compromises and new arrangements of power among new configurations of indigenous elites and invaders. During this period, towns, cities and imperial centres came under Spanish ­domination. A shared patriarchal ideology helped Spanish invaders communicate and negotiate with Aztecs, Incas and their opponents. A common language of patriarchy countenanced the ‘donation’ or surrender of women by one group of men to another as spoils or to forge alliances.9 This same masculinist discourse silenced the native and female voices expressing Andean and Mesoamerican women’s understandings of sexuality and kinship. It also dismissed women’s roles in the Spanish occupation of cities and exploitation of rural populations. However, a careful r­e-reading of the textual and visual sources can reveal women’s roles during the European invasion. The most celebrated (and vilified) female figure of Mexico’s conquest is Malintzin, a Nahuaspeaking Mayan woman. Sold into slavery by her family as a child, she was given to Hernán Cortés as a young woman to serve as a concubine and cook. Baptized along with 19 other women given to the invaders at a Maya trading city at the edge of the Aztec empire, she was christened Marina. She came to Cortés’s attention because she could translate. Malintzin made Aztec diplomacy and inter-ethnic rivalries intelligible to the Spanish during the struggle with the Aztec Emperor Moctezuma (1519–1521) and the campaign in Honduras.10 The Spanish prevailed in Mexico and the Andes because they quickly acquired numerous allies through such relationships. After the first initial raids and skirmishes, the Europeans never again fought alone. Numbering in the hundreds, small parties of Iberians fought alongside thousands of indigenous warriors and were supported by supply trains and thousands of porters and cooks. In this era, women emerged as essential translators, guides, diplomatic negotiators or allies with access to the military and economic resources of kin. The daughter of an Andean cacica, or ethnic chief, married to a conquistador brought her mother’s army to lift an Inca siege of the Spanish capital in Lima (1536), thus preventing the invaders from being driven into the sea.11 An Inca noblewoman supplied her husband, Juan de Betanzos, with information on the political and religious organization of Inca society. His chronicle helped new governors and missionaries replace or blend the old beliefs with the new in the political and spiritual conquests.12 Eager to reap political and economic benefits from connections to Inca nobility, Spanish conquistadores established personal liaisons with Inca noblewomen, producing a generation of mestizos. Often raised in both traditions, these mestizos sought a place for themselves in Hispanic institutions, including the convents founded in colonial cities. Born to a Spanish conquistador and Inca royalty, the Renaissance writer and soldier Garcilaso de la Vega called himself ‘the Inca’. Raised in both traditions in Cuzco but living most of his life in Spain, he described how Spanish women and households like his father’s helped introduce grapes, wheat and other trappings of Mediterranean life. His mother’s household helped secure a place for Inca tradition and power in the colonial city.13 Spanish women were few in Mexico and Peru in the conquest period, and, unlike indigenous nobility, they conferred little political, social or economic power upon their spouses, unless, when widowed, they retained the lands and indigenous labour bestowed upon their late conquistador husbands. These newly wealthy Spanish women and indigenous noblewomen allied with the Spanish set up large houses in the cities complete with retainers and relatives.Thus, they helped lay the basis for an enduring colonialism and a strong Hispanic presence in urban areas.

Creating colonial society in Mexico’s cities and towns Under Spanish rule, Mesoamerican Indian women and men contended with Hispanic norms of behaviour and organization. Iberian traditions severely restricted women’s activities as healers, public figures, artisans and merchants. Nevertheless, Mesoamericans still expected that women 404

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could labour without immediate male supervision in marketplaces. Cabildos (Spanish municipal councils) were established in every Spanish settlement and some indigenous communities. Only principal local men could serve as councillors. In many cities, especially Mexico City, women retained and even expanded their direction of marketing, preparation of food for sale, smallscale commerce and the very lucrative production and sale of the drink pulque. Indigenous women benefitted from cities’ concentration of consumers and variety of economic activities. Researchers indicate that many urban indigenous women maintained or increased their economic power under Spanish overlordship by asserting private ownership of formerly communal property and engaging in commerce. In addition, indigenous women actively sought redress in the Spanish legal system for themselves, their families and their communities. Urban naming patterns show that indigenous women and men continued to hold and mark social rank, even as they began to adopt Spanish appellations. Established Nahua-speaking neighbourhoods remained highly stratified. Spanish settlers marrying into these social hierarchies benefited from their wives’ status. Unions with commoners might not be formalized by marriage, remaining instead as cohabitation. Elite indigenous women continued to hold significant amounts of land and other property, giving them social status, marriage options and ways to avoid most kinds of manual labour. Indigenous women who married into wealthy and landowning Spanish families usually moved to the cities and became urban women. Although elite women could prosper in the system, most women who worked outside of their homes, especially as domestics, were of humble origins and remained so even though they proved indispensable to the cities’ economic activities and enjoyed more options than rural women. Rural communities relied very heavily on indigenous women’s production of tribute goods, although this work was less varied and harder to change or escape than women’s urban labour. In contrast to already rooted and urbanized indigenous groups in ethnic enclaves, rural women and men migrating to the cities often encountered social and cultural difficulties and an erosion of ethnic identity and the weakening or loss of kin and networks of support. This could alter gender relations and expose Indians to abuse and discrimination. In the more homogeneous and less Hispanicised countryside, greater cultural conservatism survived even as colonial exploitation flattened the indigenous social hierarchy. Ecclesiastical and civil hierarchies suppressed most of the pre-Hispanic and conquest-era ceremonial and political roles held by indigenous women in the colonial cities. However, indigenous women in the countryside and smaller towns continued to exercise some power and local leadership if they were in the class of caciques or native lords.14 Regional exceptions also existed. In Oaxaca’s colonial cities, for example, Mixtec cacicas legitimately inherited and passed on titles and property. They outranked all but the most powerful Spanish colonists. Colonial secular and ecclesiastic authorities recognized these noblewomen as traditional rulers and patronesses of the Church. From 1550 to 1620, they received tribute and services and owned the best houses, irrigated lands, orchards, pastures, herds and salt and mineral deposits. After 1620, the prestige of royal caste lineage weakened and competition for land intensified. Even so, some Mixtec cacicas’ family estates endured into the 1900s.15 In rural Toluca outside Mexico City and in the Yucatan, indigenous women enjoyed the protection of local Indian town councils. They expanded their colonial economic roles by controlling property in their own right, marshalling community resources and increasing weaving and beekeeping for local markets.16 The colonial system sought to harness indigenous communities’ resources to an imperial project. Tribute and mining would enrich the Crown, and colonists secured access to indigenous labour and land. However, by adapting some colonial institutions and forces to communal goals and resistance, the system could be checked. Shifting gender norms played a role in both. 405

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Pre-Hispanic and colonial cities and towns in the Andes The Iberians and enslaved Africans entering the Andes found an empire called Tawantinsuyu built on its capacity to marshal men and women in rotating labour drafts (mit’a) or detached from home ethnic groups to serve permanently as yanakuna or the female mamakuna. Mamakuna worked as servants, weavers, brewers, musicians or wives. The Inca rooted the mit’a system in pan-Andean concepts of mutual obligations and reciprocity. The state ritually asked for labourers to build roads, storehouses and ceremonial centres. Inca political, military and priestly elites lived in these cities. In these administrative centres, they also temporarily housed and feasted workers, collected the fruits of their labour on Inca lands, sacrificed to Inca and local deities and impressed subject ethnic groups’ nobles. These caciques or kurakas received coca leaf, textiles and other products for redistribution among their own ethnic networks. Kurakas returned mit’a workers home and shared the gifts among the entire ethnic group. These rituals and the gendered labour that men and women representing the empire’s many different peoples performed under the supervision of ethnic chiefs defined urban life in the pre-Hispanic Andes. Men and women played specific roles within the Inca’s political economy. In addition to controlling labour, Inca elites also orchestrated marriages to strengthen political alliances with the nobles of other ethnicities. Not surprisingly, Inca gender ideologies also structured the supporting ritual practices to access ancestors and the supernatural. The consorts of the Inca ruler called coyas – chosen by lineage, ability and political expediency – were treated as sacred beings, as was the Inca ruler. Coyas fulfilled important ceremonial and possibly other functions.The coya Curi Ocllo, wife of Manco Inca, rallied forces in 1539 to resist the Spanish at Yucay.17 Scholars debate if women lost opportunities for self-representation as kurakas (cacicas) and priestesses upon integration into Tawantinsuyu. If true, Inca imperialism undermined a gender complementarity that ‘defined the roles carried out by women and men as being roughly balanced rather than asymmetrical’.18 This would move Andean society closer to future Hispanic attitudes that associated the feminine with physical, moral and intellectual inferiority.19 Attempting to preserve the productive capacity of peasant and artisan populations, Spain favoured indirect rule through ethnic elites and by keeping people in their villages. Colonists needed workers to build cities and mansions and serve in them, to work the mines and fields and to feed the colony. Colonists, Crown and Church competed for indigenous labour and community resources. Iberians coveted going to Peru as an opportunity for enrichment and power. To obtain labour draftees, tribute and converts, the imperial state sought to keep colonists and indigenous populations apart. It also depended on kurakas to cooperate with royal officials and priests to govern local affairs. As colonialism continued, the socio-economic burdens of state labour drafts and tribute payments and the demands upon Indians made by local magistrates, priests and kurakas increasingly impoverished rural populations. These fell heavily on both men and women (additionally exposing women to sexual abuse by local power holders) and pushed many to abandon home. In the 1500s, indigenous commoners fleeing hometowns resettled in more remote communities. As outsiders called forasteros, they were usually exempt from tribute and labour drafts. To escape those demands in the 1600s, they resettled in cities and mining centres. This phenomenon of ‘fleeing towards the enemy’ helped the silvermining centre of Potosí grow into one of the Spanish empire’s largest cities, with a population of 150,000 after 1600.20 In post-conquest Peru’s cities, evidence indicates that indigenous women working in Spanish homes and supplying markets experienced more contact with Spaniards and more options and advantages than indigenous men did. Males usually undertook gang labour in construction, mining and agriculture. This intimacy and the rarity of Spanish women outside of Lima in the 406

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1500s helps explain why many of these indigenous women, and eventually African and casta women, formed liaisons or households with Spanish men in colonial cities.21 Historians note factors that facilitated integration into the new cities and social mobility: [t]he new cash and credit economy; a legal system offering redress to indigenous as well as African and Spanish complainants; Catholic community organizations that provided capital as well as moral support for their memberships; multiple identity and status codes including European, indigenous, and transcultural dress and hair styles.22 In colonial cities, a close relationship existed between social organization and gender. Socio-economic status and ethnic origin further defined women’s participation in the economy. Hispanic norms of gendered honour and behaviour dictated that elite women remain within a cloistered space: in a home’s interior, running the household and caring for children and family; or serving God in a convent. Some elite women – often widows – administered family businesses. Elite women’s greatest economic role appeared in administering the dowries

Figure 31.2  The honorific Spanish doña and the Quechua term for noblewoman, coya, denoted the social and political importance of Doña Juana Curi Ocllo, coya. Her opulent Spanish-style city home boasts tile floors and carpets. The indigenous artist and author pictures her wearing Spanish lace, puffed sleeves, jewellery and a beaded hairnet combined with a woven Andean wrap-around skirt, fine woven cumbi belt and a lliclla shawl held in place with a tupu pin made in the colonial style. Her Christian first name indicates baptism, and her rosary emphasizes public piety. Drawing c. 1615 by Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Qhapaq apu mama, Wives of Powerful Lords: Poma Valca and Juana Curi Ocllo, quya, Principal Wife and Queen of Peru. Courtesy of The Royal Library, Copenhagen (GKS 2232 4º: Guaman Poma, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615). Page 757 [771]. Drawing 287.).

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brought to convents. They made money available – for interest – to landowners, mill operators and other entrepreneurs. Non-elite women could not aspire to the same level of enclosure, although they might subscribe to some of those values. Plebeian women suffered in the eyes of elite, male authorities for falling short. When obliged to work by necessity, Spanish and creole women might seek less ‘dishonourable’ work: sewing at home, shopkeeping or lending money. Elite standards deemed disreputable running a business such as corn-beer (chicha) shops, wine shops or dry-goods stores or engaging in ambulatory sales or market stalls. These activities involved commerce and required contact with men, thus endangering a woman’s honour. The women dominating petty commerce were indigenous, African, mestizo or casta. Owning one of these enterprises and a home signified an enhanced social standing in local plebeian society. One chicha brewer in Lima accumulated enough money to buy a house and slave. She sold her chicha and offered credit in the tavern belonging to the Indian parish’s town council.23 Women throughout Spanish America combined economic activities. For example, merchants rented rooms in houses they owned, and street peddlers and seamstresses served as midwives and herbal healers. Domestic service remained primarily feminine and followed an ethnic division of labour: housekeeper and supervision of other servants for Spanish and creole women and cooking, cleaning and childcare for Indians, blacks, mestizas, mulatas and other castas.24 An Indian nursemaid like María Sisa in Cuzco nursed at her breast and cared for children from five days to ten months of age.These contracts lasted as long as 30 months. In exchange, she received two sets of clothing, sandals, five reales a month and a daily ration of food, including mutton once a week.25 A parallel gendered honour system existed for men in both Mexico and the Andes. Similarly, an elite–plebeian divide existed in cities. Elite men emphasized inherited social status, access to resources to avoid manual labour and commerce and cloistering womenfolk. Urban plebeians recognized men’s personal qualities and individual actions as generating honour and social worth, obtainable even without access to wealth and high birth. In an extraordinary example of performing manly honour, a runaway novitiate from Spain, disguised as a man, engaged in insults, duelling and wooing and jilting women.26 Public forcefulness, violence against adversaries and sexual conquest constituted markers of masculinity common to both elites and subalterns. Failure to obtain or maintain elite male status brought dishonour and shame and even a return to Spain for immigrant men.27 Junior elite men within a patriarchs’ household could also be subordinated even though they might hope to inherit rule someday.

Creating new colonial populations and cultures Creating Spanish-American cities and cultures depended as much upon slavery as on Iberian immigration and Indian resettlement. In Peru and Mexico, blacks from Iberia and Africa or born in the Americas made up as large a group as Europeans and European creoles. In cities like Lima, the black population outnumbered Spanish and indigenous populations. In Spanish-Caribbean plantation zones centred on Havana and Santo Domingo or mainland Cartagena and Caracas, black populations comprised both the rural and urban workforces. Port cities like Buenos Aires and Montevideo traded in slaves, and mining operations in the highlands required slaves as overseers, artisans and elites’ retainers. For example, 5000 blacks lived in Potosí. Africans arriving with the first conquistadores and the mestizos, mulattos and other castas that appeared soon after created a disruption in the neat administrative division of society into two ‘republics’: Spanish and Indian, each with their own towns, parishes and authorities charged with collecting their unique contributions to the state (the Spanish paid taxes and Indians paid tribute and provided labour). The nature of men’s employment in and between cities allowed them more mobility and more formal options than women had. Mobility was especially true of sailors, soldiers, l­ong-distance 408

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traders and even artisans. Men could also emigrate from Spain or from one colony to the other more easily to find opportunities or escape debt, unwanted marriage or the law. Men exercised most formal economic, social and political power in cities. Central to the economic and civic life of every Spanish-American city were the men who dominated the urban artisan classes and gremios (guilds) that controlled training, licensing and regulating work. They excluded all women, except as influential artisan’s widows. Often gremio exclusions appeared along ethno-racial lines, allowing only Spanish, Indians or mestizos to practice a craft in a particular city. In some cities, enslaved men could become artisans. Confraternities and official office were also male dominated. Confraternities frequently included only men and sometimes only men from a specific gremio or ethnic group. The merchant classes and shop owners were almost exclusively male. Among both European-born and American-born Spanish men in the cities, especially elite men, employment as clergy or as royal or municipal officials reached high levels because the cities constituted the seats of Church and administrative power and activity. Like other elite men, even landowners would maintain houses in town and often hold office in courts, customs houses, Spanish municipal councils (cabildos), tax collection and law enforcement. Only principal local men could serve on the cabildos established in every Spanish settlement and some indigenous communities. Cities, not to mention nearby plantations and farms, could not function without the black population’s labour, creativity, production and reproduction any more than tribute and mining economies could prosper without Indian draftees, wage labourers and thousands of women providing food, drink, clothing and subsidies to sustain male miners. Lima’s 1614 census gives a sense of the multi-ethnic nature of these colonial cities. Living in Lima were 10,386 Africans, 9616 Spanish, 1978 Native Andeans, 744 mulattos, 192 mestizos, and 1720 male and female religious.28 Setting religious aside, Africans outnumbered all other groups. Most Indians had migrated to the city. Many formed unions there with Indians of different ethnic groups or with the city’s dominant Afro-Peruvians or Spanish. Cities like Lima, Quito, Bogota,Veracruz and Tucuman contained people living and labouring under an array of arrangements of compulsion: enslaved (blacks, Indians captured in war, Asians from Manila); children compelled to serve until adulthood (placed in a household voluntarily or somehow separated from home); state-supplied labour draftees; debtors working off debts; wage-earners; servants; kin; and formerly enslaved (bound by familiarity or lacking other options). Frequently, a prominent home or a busy workshop depended upon several of these arrangements simultaneously. Gendered roles in mid-to-late colonial Spanish America developed within these diverse settings to create urban colonial cultures. Like indigenous women, black women found more opportunities to insert themselves into urban environments than black men did. Consequently, they proved better able to secure freedom through a master’s bequest or, more frequently, by saving or borrowing the money to purchase release for themselves or their children. Black men more often engaged in manual labour, transportation or rural agriculture. In most seventeenth-century Spanish-American regions, the majority of blacks were free through manumission or birth to a free mother. Like indigenous women and Indian-descent castas, black women and African-descent castas in towns engaged primarily in petty commerce and domestic service. In Lima, for example, black women cornered the sale of fish. They also worked in eateries and taverns. They set up market stalls or hawked produce and prepared foods and goods in the streets. Merchants and shop owners depended on female networks of distribution and small-scale credit to move stock and reach consumers. Historian Rachel Sarah O’Toole documents the case of Ana de la Calle, who supported her family by selling bread in the streets of Peru’s northern city of Trujillo.29 Given Spanish social and patriarchal values that denigrated women and stigmatized Africans and Indians, black and indigenous women accumulating property and purchasing their freedom 409

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and that of others were anxious to avail themselves of the legal protections of their property afforded by wills and the social and gendered protections offered by naming more powerful male executors.30 Fearing that her husband’s owner might thwart plans to free her spouse and another enslaved woman, the free black María Angola dictated a will with prominent executors and Church backing. She placed the proceeds from selling her property with a monk charged with helping her husband, entrusted 200 pesos towards the other woman’s purchase price with a locally prominent Spanish woman and made donations to confraternities bringing ecclesiastic judges to see her will done. Humble women and those achieving some social mobility made noteworthy use of legal documents drawn up at their request by notaries. The case of Ana de la Calle also shows how a successful market woman registered a series of wills in which she acknowledged her specific African ethnic identity and the connections that came with it, even as she slowly distanced her daughter from the stigma of slavery and African origin.31 Women used notaries and colonial courts. Colonialism derived legitimacy from administering the King’s Justice, including the right to appeal to Spain. Women’s creative role was not only economic; women played a role in creating and maintaining an urban culture. An important fixture throughout Spanish America, colonial convents not only supported the reproduction of elite creole society through loans and the provision of an institutional base for daughters to exercise power shielded from male view, but they also reproduced colonial society within their walls by allowing slaves, domestics, and hierarchies of nuns – some dedicated to prayer and leadership and others toiling as servants. By raising children, nuns also reproduced colonial society without marriage and men.32 Elite women like the Baroque poet and intellectual Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz in Mexico found the convent a propitious place to hold a salon, write and stage plays and compose the ironic, erudite and mystical poetry she published in Spain. The convent housed her library and scientific equipment, about which she corresponded with other intellectuals. However, even as an elite person, her position and that of other women writing proved vulnerable; when her protectors in the viceroy’s palace lost power, conservative critics in the ecclesiastical hierarchy silenced her. Nuns were subject both to the elected prioress and to male confessors, who could refer them to the Inquisition. European- and American-born men made up the priesthood, and they formed the majority of people taking vows and living in religious communities. Popular religion offered another area of cultural development. Denied a role in the priesthood or leading public worship, some women developed a mystical vocation within Catholicism, while others drew upon Iberian, African and indigenous traditions to become ritual specialists. Despite official scepticism and hostility, mysticism remained a very strong and very female orientation among nuns and the laity. Enslaved in a Lima convent, Ursula de Jesús earned her freedom, wrote down her visions and gained a following due to her ability to communicate with souls in purgatory.33 An elite creole laywoman in Lima also became a mystic and a recluse within her family’s home without entering a convent. After her death, Lima’s cabildo took up her case and successfully lobbied Rome for her canonization as Santa Rosa of Lima.There were many beatas like her. These female lay mystics typically lived communally under religious direction and separate from the distractions of family and society.34 Indians and Africans – men and women – participated in urban centres’ literate culture through petitions, creating pageants and performing in public plays, even if they could not read or write.35 Indigenous and African women created informal networks of curing and divining. These challenged both Church and cabildo authority. In seventeenth-century Santiago de Guatemala, religion intersected with race, gender and class to determine the Church’s view of women’s healing and religious practices as illegitimate. This condemnation shaped women’s own negative view of themselves exercising agency within the structures of colonial patriarchy.36 In some 410

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places, women resisted this denigration. In Lima, female specialists divined the location of s­ tolen goods, foretold a women’s love life and provided powders to attract an admirer for modest pay. Yet, they believed that they were not violating Christianity. These indigenous, African and casta women pointed out that they also invoked the saints and used ground altar stone.37 In Mexico City, by contrast, Spanish and mestiza women engaged in similar practices admitted that they invoked the devil and his diabolical power.38 From the 1580s to the 1690s, Afro-Peruvian women establish a combination of West and Central African, Iberian, and indigenous traditions as colonial Peru’s urban witchcraft tradition. In the 1580s and 1590s, they adapted Iberian and Catholic practices to the Andes. In the 1620s and 1630s, these specialists experimented with Andean products and techniques. By the 1650s, they incorporated and reinterpreted them. In addition, in the 1660s forward, they blended Christian prayers, Native Andean coca leaf, invocations of the Inca ruler and brandy into a unique and coherent body of urban witchcraft. Male ritual specialists appeared more frequently divining for valuable items in pre-Columbian burial tombs, reading cards and practicing astrology. In adapting distinct traditions of divining and amatory magic to cities, Afro-Peruvian women followed the same pattern they had when commercializing indigenous drinks among a wider range of urban drinkers.39 Seventeenth-century African women in Mexico also played a bridging role between indigenous women’s beliefs and practices and those of urban Spanish women.40 In the 1650s and 1660s, indigenous specialists brought mixed groups of women together in Lima for rituals involving the coca leaf and wine. Men dominated farming and long-distance trade. To distribute the coca leaf banned by local ecclesiastical and municipal authorities, urban women relied upon male networks of supply reaching back to rural production zones, places of exchange in city inns and female-controlled connections to a variety of clients.

Anti-colonial resistance and gender in the cities Collective resistance in cities and towns to colonialism can be understood as gendered. A relationship exists among ‘modes of production, market systems, and household structure, on the one hand, and patterns of women’s political action and the gendered construction of political discourses, on the other’.41 In 1690, a grain riot in Mexico City began with a crush of Indian and casta women at the city granary.They demanded lower prices for corn and an end to hoarding by merchants and landowners.They denounced patrician city authorities for failing paternal obligations to guarantee food supplies. After seeing a woman supposedly killed in the crowd, plebeians and artisans attacked property and rebuffed priests’ calls for peace. Only a united front among crown and cabildo officials and fearful elite property owners succeeded in rallying militia forces to rout protestors and hang instigators. The vertical ties of clientelism that held the city together prevailed after receiving this rebuke.42 In 1693, women were prominent in a riot in a provincial centre in Chiapas against the mayor’s forced sale of goods to Indian communities (repartamiento). Other communities were often compelled to produce the goods. The struggle, therefore, was as much about Zoque men and women’s household production and their ability to participate unmolested in local markets as it was about abuses of power. Women were among those tried for stoning to death the mayor, the indigenous governor and a royal official.43 Gender norms dictated that Indigenous and plebeian women in the cities and towns shared an obligation to physically defend the collective against these outside threats. Localized acts of violence by women and men and sparked by local understandings of a ‘moral economy’ continued throughout the eighteenth century. In the late eighteenth century, the nature of resistance to Spanish rule began to deepen and include a wider range of colonial subjects. ‘Bourbon Reforms’ brought more officials from 411

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Spain with higher sales taxes upon all colonial subjects, more customs houses on the roads and more forced sales of trade goods to Indian communities. They limited local Church power and autonomy. They increasingly used courts and policing in cities for social control, especially against public drinking in female-controlled taverns and licentious behaviour between men and women.44 Peru’s 1780–1784 ‘Great Rebellion’ proclaimed a return to Inca rule for all those born in the Americas regardless of caste. A long-distance trader and kuraka charged with collecting tribute and turning out labour draftees,Tupac Amaru, and his wife Micaela Bastides, a kuraka from a neighbouring town, commissioned a painting depicting themselves as an Inca king and coya. They invoked the neo-Incanism popular among many highland creoles and Hispanized indigenous elites facing increased imperial demands and increased class and cultural distance from their subjects. They sought legitimacy by offering a gender parallelism of male and female lines of authority and power harkening back to Inca and pre-Inca times. Rebels c­ontrasted benevolent Inca paternalism with abusive Spaniards.45 Micaela Bastides exercised sweeping authority. She raised and directed forces, dealt with prisoners, issued orders and engaged in propaganda. She characterized the Spanish as treacherous and deserving destruction, contributing to rebels’ viewing them as non-human.46 When Aymara rebels in Upper Peru joined with a more radical agenda and launched a socially and ideologically distinct revolt, their leader’s sister, Gregoria Apasa, established a liaison with Andrés Túpac Amaru Inca, leading Quechua forces from the north.47 Royalist forces executed Bastides, Tupac Amaru and other male and female relatives. Dozens more of both sexes were exiled, demonstrating the subversive power of the male and female leadership, lineage and family that shook Spanish rule to its foundations.

Conclusions The history of gender for colonial Spanish America remains rooted in the particulars of each city and region and the configuration of dominant forces present at any moment. A gendered history of colonial Spanish-American cities and towns reveals the difference between Mesoamerica’s urbanization and commercial markets and Andean ceremonial centres and exchanges of goods motivated by kinship and imperial redistribution. It also reveals the difference between Iberian notions of female inferiority and enclosure and Mesoamerican and Andean beliefs in women’s essential worthiness. Indigenous society allowed women specific roles in leadership, control of resources and production. Where an indigenous population and native elites remained strong, these attitudes strongly influenced the emerging Ibero-American societies. ‘Some measure of mutuality, parallelism, or complementarity existed between indigenous women and men across Mesoamerica both before and after Europeans came on the scene’.48 In the colonial period, similarities developed between the two regions. Colonizers infantilized and feminized indigenous men as needing the paternal control of missionaries and Europeans, just as children and women required a patriarch’s guidance and correction. As mining accelerated economic activity and the disruption of rural life, cities and their markets grew in both the Andes and Mexico. Migrant women and Africans arriving in numbers equal to the Spanish dominated these markets, creating a multi-ethnic plebeian population in the cities. Alongside elites, plebeians contributed to a contested colonial culture with spaces for men and women. Male codes of honour and conduct diverged between the commoners who valued individual action and physical courage and elites who valued birth and lineage. Within popular sectors, women challenged men’s view of unconditional patriarchal rights to control women’s labour, movement and bodies. Women treated patriarchal rights as conditional and dependent upon men’s actions and their providing for the family. Women’s spaces were increasingly informal and labelled illegitimate by secular and religious authorities.When subjects began imagining 412

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reforming or replacing Spanish imperialism, women also raised their voices and joined struggles to reassert a violated moral economy or to define enemies and allies of a new order and to push for its realization. In the new republics, enshrining male dominance in the home and before the law helped creole elites forge patriarchal pacts with indigenous and popular sector men. This occurred even as elites denied subalterns political rights like the vote due to their economic dependence, which elites reasoned reduced men to a child-like state.

Notes   1 Leo J. Garofalo and Rachel Sarah O’Toole, ‘Introduction: Constructing difference in colonial Latin America’, Journal of Colonialism and Comparative History, 7:1 (2006).   2 Children were born free.   3 Bernal Díaz del Castillo, History of the Conquest of New Spain, translated and edited by David Carrasco (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2009), 174.  4 The Codex Mendoza, translated and edited by Frances Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) vol. 4, folio 60v.  5 Ibid., folios 59v, 60r.   6 Latin America only shifts to a majority urban population after WWII.   7 Inga Clendinnen, ‘The cost of courage in Aztec society’, Past and Present, 107 (1985), 44–89.   8 Van Deusen, Nancy E. ‘Recent studies on gender relations in colonial native American history’, in New World, First Nations: Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes under Colonial Rule, ed. David Cahill and Blanca Tovías, 145. (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2006).   9 James Krippner-Martínez, ‘The politics of conquest: An interpretation of the Relación de Michoacán’, The Americas, 47:2, (1990) 177–197. 10 Frances Karttunen, ‘Rethinking Malinche’, in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Susan Schroeder, Stephanie Wood and Robert Haskett (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997), 291–312. 11 María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Señoríos indígenas de Lima y Canta (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1978). 12 Maria N. Marsilli, ‘Chroniclers (Cronistas)’, in Iberia and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History, ed. J. Michael Francis, (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 215–19. 13 Garcilaso de la Vega, Royal commentaries of the Incas and general history of Peru, abridged, translated by Harold V. Livermore, with notes and introduction by Karen Spalding (Cambridge: Hackett, 2006). María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Doña Francisca Pizarro: Una Ilustre Mestiza, 1534–1598 (Lima: IEP, 1989). 14 Miriam Melton-Villanueva, ‘On her deathbed: Beyond the stereotype of the powerless indigenous woman’, in Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire, vol. I, ed. Erin E. O’Connor and Leo J. Garofalo (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2011), 168–73. 15 Ronald Spores,‘Mixteca Cacicas: Status, wealth, and the political accommodation of native elite women in early colonial Oaxaca’, in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Schroeder, Wood and Haskett, 185–88. 16 Marta Espejo-Ponce Hunt and Matthew Restall, ‘Work, Marriage, and Status: Maya Women of Colonial Yucatan’, in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Schroeder, Wood and Haskett, 231–52. 17 María Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca Realm (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 18 Stephanie Wood and Robert Haskett, ‘Concluding remarks’, in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Schroeder, Wood and Haskett, 317. 19 Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, El Primer Nueva Crónica y Buen Gobierno [1615/1616] (København: Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 2232 4°), http://www.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage. htm, accessed 9 Oct. 2015. 20 Karen Vieira Powers, Andean Journeys: Migration, Ethnogenesis, and the State in Colonial Quito (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995). 21 Elinor C. Burkett, ‘Indian women and white society: The case of sixteenth-century Peru’ in Latin American Women: Historical Perspectives, ed. Asunción Lavrin (Westport: Greenwood, 1978), 101–28. 22 Karen B. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 3. 23 Leo J. Garofalo,‘La Bebida del Inca en Copas Colonials: Los Curacas del Mercado de Chicha del Cuzco, 1640–1700’ in Élites Indígenas en los Andes: Nobles, Caciques y Cabildantes bajo el Yugo Colonial, ed. David Cahill and Blanca Tovias (Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2003), 175–211.

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Leo J. Garofalo 24 Teresa Vergara, ‘Aporte Femenino a la Creación de la Riqueza’, in La Mujer en la Historia del Perú (Siglos XV al XX), ed. Carmen Meza and Teodoro Hampe (Lima: Fondo Editorial del Congreso del Perú, 2007), 109–45. 25 Leo J. Garofalo, Drinking, Divines, and Markets:  Marking Race and Ethnicity in Colonial Peru (forth­ coming, 2016). 26 Catalina de Erauso, Lieutenant Nun: Memoir of a Basque Transvestite in the New World, translated by Michele Stepto and Gabriel Stepto (Boston: Beacon Press, 1996). 27 Brian Owensby, ‘A romance of early-modern Mexico City: Self-interest and everyday life in colonial New Spain’, in Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire, vol. I, ed. Erin E. O’Connor and Leo J. Garofalo (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2011), 134–39. 28 Miguel de Contreras, Padrón de los Indios que se Hallaron en la Ciudad de Los Reyes del Perú Hecho en Virtud de Comision del Excelentisimo Señor Marques de Montesclaro Virei del Piru, ed. Noble David Cook (Lima: Universidad Nacional Mayor San Marcos, 1968 [1614]). 29 Rachel Sarah O’Toole, ‘The making of a free Lucumí household: Ana de la Calle’s will and goods, northern Peruvian coast, 1719’, in Afro-Latino Voices: Narratives from the Early Modern Ibero-Atlantic World, 1550–1812, ed. Kathryn Joy McKnight and Leo J. Garofalo (Cambridge: Hackett Publishing, 2009), 142–43. 30 Frank Salomon, ‘Indian women of early colonial Quito as seen through their testaments’, The Americas 44:3 (1988), 326–341; Karen B. Graubart, With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru1550–1700 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 95–120. 31 O’Toole, ‘The making’, 143–53. 32 Kathryn Burns, Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru (Durham: Duke ­University Press, 1999). 33 Ursula de Jesús, The Souls of Purgatory: The Spiritual Diary of a Seventeenth-Century Afro-Peruvian Mystic, Ursula de Jesús, ed. and trans. Nancy van Duesen (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2004). 34 Karen Melvin, ‘Spiritual directions: Gender, piety, and friendship in late colonial Mexico’ in Documenting Latin America: Gender, Race, and Empire, vol. I, ed. Erin E. O’Connor and Leo J. Garofalo (Upper Saddle River: Pearson, 2011), 89–96. 35 José Jouve Martín, Esclavos de la Ciudad Letrada: Esclavitud Escritura y Colonialismo en Lima, 1650–1700 (Lima: IEP, 2005). 36 Martha Few, Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002). 37 Leo J. Garofalo, ‘Conjuring with coca and the Inca: Defining colonial cultural among Afro-Peruvian ritual specialists, 1580–1690’, The Americas 63:1 (2006): 53–80. 38 Ruth Behar, ‘Sexual witchcraft, colonialism, and women’s powers:Views from the Mexican Inquisition’ in Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, ed. Asunción Lavrin, 2nd ed. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1989), 178–206. 39 Garofalo, ‘Conjuring’, 69–79. 40 Laura A. Lewis, Hall of Mirrors: Power,Witchcraft, and Caste in Colonial Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003). 41 Kevin Gosner, ‘Women, rebellion, and the moral economy of Maya peasants in colonial Mexico’ in Indian Women of Early Mexico, ed. Schroeder, Wood and Haskett, 230. 42 R. Douglas Cope, The Limits of Racial Domination: Plebeian Society in Colonial Mexico City, 1660–1720 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1994). 43 Gosner, ‘Women’, 228. 44 Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, Gender and the Negotiation of Daily Life, 1750–1856 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2012). 45 David Cahill, ‘A liminal nobility: The Incas in the middle ground of late colonial Peru’ in New World, First Nations: Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes under Colonial Rule, ed. David Cahill and Blanca Tovías (Brighton, UK: Sussex Academic Press, 2006), 169–95. 46 David T. Garrett, ‘“In spite of her sex:” The Cacica and the politics of the pueblo in the late colonial Andes’, The Americas 64:4 (2008): 547–81. 47 Sinclair Thompson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002). 48 Wood and Haskett, ‘Concluding remarks’, 330.

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32 Gender in Batavia Asian City, European Company Town Jean Gelman Taylor

Introduction Around 1728, the Amsterdamer Jan de Marre wrote these lines in praise of Batavia (present-day Jakarta): O lovely Batavia, that holds me spellbound, There your Town Hall with its proudly arching vaults Rears its profile! How splendid is your situation! Your broad Canals, replenished with fresh water, beautifully planted, Need bend before no city in the Netherlands … The Tiger’s Canal, of which Batavia well may boast, Throws up proudly to the skies a row of Palaces And glitters from end to end with jewels of architecture … O’ershadowed by an avenue of eternal spring green … How does Batavia charm the stroller then! 1 Batavia had been founded by the Dutch East Indies Company2 (VOC) in 1619 at a point on Java’s north coast where trade routes within the Indonesian archipelago linked up with sea highways connecting China, India, the Middle East and Europe. By the seventeenth century, Indonesia’s port cities were busy markets for Chinese, Indians, Arabs, Southeast Asian, Indonesian and European merchants trading in spices, silks, porcelains, precious metals and utilitarian goods such as salt, rice and teak.3 The Company inserted itself into Asia’s trade networks by setting up commercial outposts wherever local harbour authorities granted its employees rights to do business. Uniquely, Batavia was built on territory wrested from its Indonesian ruler. The Company, headquartered in Amsterdam, envisioned Batavia as chief city of its operations in Asia. It installed a governing Council of the Indies in Batavia and, over two centuries, sent out from the Netherlands a steady flow of male personnel – sailors, soldiers, clerks, bookkeepers, merchants, surgeons, clergy and scholars – to staff its operations. Batavia became the major emporium of the region and a wealthy city that attracted migrants from across the Indonesian archipelago and from ports

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on the seaboards of India and China. Careers of VOC employees were capped by transfer from the Company’s outposts to Batavia, which was planned as a Dutch town. We see in old maps of Amsterdam and Batavia the distinctive Dutch layout of canals, rectangular housing blocks, market sites and city walls.Within five years of Batavia’s founding, typically Dutch urban social institutions such as town council, church synod, orphanage, poorhouse and hospital were operating. These products of Dutch thinking on town planning and governance led European visitors in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to perceive Batavia as a mini Amsterdam. In recent scholarship on the interaction of individuals with their built environment, colonial art historian Marsely Kehoe has argued that Batavia’s gridded town plan and its canals, bridges and building styles were determinants of its residents’ behaviour.4 Maps of Batavia from 1650, 1681 and 1770 show European suburbs located on the eastern side of the canal bisecting the city, residential quarters of the city’s various Asian ethnic groups on the western side of the canal and areas throughout the city marked off as worksites. Kehoe draws attention to the relatively few bridges crossing Batavia’s main canal in comparison to the many facilitating easy movement throughout Amsterdam. A consequence was to limit the ability of Batavia’s Asian working class to move freely and conveniently around the city. Kehoe argues that the city’s characteristically Dutch features reminded Batavia’s governing class of Holland, thus fostering and sustaining their Dutch identity and social cohesion. Urban layout imposing segregation on Batavia’s Asian residents facilitated control by the Dutch minority. Kehoe supports these conclusions with reference to seventeenth-century Dutch theories of town planning, to travel writings by Dutch visitors and to Batavia’s sumptuary laws, which restricted luxurious apparel, jewellery, carriages and liveries to its Dutch residents. The maps locate Batavians in city space by labels such as Dutch, Chinese, Malay and slaves. These identifiers are standard in municipal and other records relating to the Dutch in Indonesia. An ode composed in honour of Batavia’s reigning governor-general in 1702, for instance, lauds him as the glorious sun over the city’s Asian inhabitants.The poet identifies them as people from across the Indonesian archipelago – Ambonese, Malays, Makassarese, Buginese and Timorese – and people from further afield – Siamese, Arabs, Chinese, Bengalis, Malabarese and Singhalese.5 This study applies the lens of gender to these homogenising labels to bring another layer of understanding to the rich insights generated from urban design. To demonstrate the complexities and nuances that a gender orientation offers, I will pay particular attention to Batavia’s Dutch and their relationships with the city’s free and enslaved Asian inhabitants.

Batavia’s Dutch Between 1602 and 1799, 4800 ships, a million men and a few hundred women and children sailed from the Netherlands to places in Asia where the VOC did business.The Company’s male workforce signed five-year, renewable employment contracts. While the sailors crewing VOC ships were transient visitors in the VOC’s many Asian outposts, men hired by the Company often spent years overseas before repatriating or chose, at the end of their working lives, to settle permanently in Batavia. The Company recruited a wide range of employees in the Netherlands, from soldiers to men with university degrees. In its Asian trading settlements, it was also possible for Dutch men of modest origins to rise through the ranks. Five eighteenth-century governorsgeneral started in the VOC’s service as a ship’s boy or soldier. Two ‘snapshots’ of Batavia from the 1650s tell us that, from first encounters, the daily lives of these predominantly male Dutch immigrants were closely entwined with the lives of Asian men and women. The first, a coloured engraving on copper, is a bird’s-eye view of Batavia from the 416

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deck of a Dutch ship.6 The mapped city stretches out on either side of the main canal bisecting Batavia’s neighbourhoods. Walls enclose a long rectangle. Outside are villages and rice fields, and beyond, lofty mountains conceal the interior of Java. In the foreground, we see large, threemasted Dutch cargo ships anchored in deep waters. A myriad of small Indonesian craft, capable of navigating the shallow entry into Batavia, surround them. Such scenes tell us that the Dutch were dependent on Indonesian seamen and vessels to ferry passengers and goods ashore. From the moment of anchorage, Dutch men entered transactions with Indonesian interpreters, pilots and crew. Onshore, they hired local men as porters, watchmen, builders and trade agents. They went to the markets where women were the moneychangers, handling the many currencies circulating in Asian ports. Other women sold the Dutch foodstuffs and domestic and sexual services. The second ‘snapshot’ places the Dutch man in the city. It is a painting by Andries Beeckman (?–1664) of Batavia’s market on the west bank of the canal, which Kehoe’s maps locate in the city’s Asian zone. Representative Asians inhabit the central space of Beeckman’s canvas.There are throngs of men and women shoppers; robed Chinese men in conversation; a Muslim teacher in white turban and robe; manual labourers in loin cloths and head wrappers; women selling goods and shopping; men unloading baskets of produce from small boats at the river’s edge; and, in the centre, an Indonesian woman in kain kebaya walking arm-in-arm with a Dutch man. An Indonesian servant holds a sunshade over them.7 Key elements to note are the miniscule presence of Dutch men among the crowds of Asian men and women; the market as site for business and socialising by working women and men; the absence of Dutch women; and the Asian women who replace Dutch women as companions to Dutch men. A survey from 1699 records the Dutch as representing 4.8 per cent of Batavia’s residents.Visual evidence prompts us to ponder the presence and absence of women in understanding what it meant to be Dutch. The VOC’s directors originally intended to develop Batavia as a colony of Dutch settlers by sending out male and female migrants alongside its male Company employees. Migrant men would fill service roles such as shop and tavern keepers in the city’s economy; migrant women would staff the municipal posts of midwife and matron of poorhouse and orphanage. It was expected that the birth of children would bind immigrant families to Batavia. Boys would work for the VOC as soldiers and clerks; daughters would be wives to generations of incoming men from the Netherlands. To this end, the Company sent out Dutch families and orphaned girls, to whom it gave dowries, to be brides for bachelor employees. There is no first-hand account from the Dutch female pioneers of their life in Batavia. Few would have been literate in the sense of being able to compose a letter independently or capable of leaving visual documentation of their new environs. We have, at most, records of their names, place of origin and age. A list of girls sent to Batavia in 1622, for example, begins: ‘Anneken Meynerts from Jeveren, about 20 years old; Angnietje Coninck from Antwerp, aged about 12; Maritjen Jans from Munster; Elsjen Barents from Husum, 13; Trijntjen Jans from Embden, 11.’8 We see female immigrants only through the unsympathetic eyes of senior Company officials. In reports from the 1620s to the directors in Amsterdam Governor-General J. P. Coen wrote of the women’s ‘bestial living, constant drunkenness and lewdness’ and accused the directors of sending out ‘the scum of the land’.9 However, the tropics have never been hospitable to European settlers. The great outflows of men and women from Europe were to temperate regions of the world. Batavia’s high death rates from fevers and the restrictions that the VOC imposed on municipal rights and occupations made migration from Holland unattractive to settler families. The daily reality was instead that most Dutch men formed temporary relationships with Asian women.10 The VOC repeatedly issued decrees prohibiting Dutch men from engaging prostitutes or ‘concubines’, condemning these as ungodly habits causing public disorder and resulting in 417

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abandoned children. Batavia’s orphanage was established as early as 1624.VOC policy changed. Employees should marry local women and make Batavia their permanent home. Policy makers expected that mixed-race babies would thrive in the tropics. The sons of Dutch men and Asian women would fill the Company’s lower ranks; their daughters would be wives for men from Holland who would staff the VOC’s senior ranks. Knowing no other world, women born in Asia would not want to move to Europe. Accordingly, the VOC ended sponsored female migration from Holland in 1632. Thereafter, only a few senior officials and ministers of the Dutch Reformed Church brought wives and families out from Holland. In most of the Indonesian ports where the Dutch traded, Asian families with social standing were Muslim. Dutch suitors had no access to their daughters. Unmarried girls were secluded; parents demanded conversion to Islam. So, brides had to be sought in public places. Batavia’s governors took practical steps. Company agents purchased young female slaves from Indian and Southeast Asian slave markets for employees wishing to marry. The Company required that Asian brides be transformed into Dutch women: they had to be baptised into the Reformed Church and given Christian names and surname. Slave women had to be manumitted prior to the wedding ceremony. The freed slave acquired the surety of a legally registered marriage, Dutch nationality, maintenance and inheritance rights for herself and her children, residence in a European suburb of Batavia, membership in the Reformed Church and a claim on the city’s charitable organisations. Her (new) name was recorded in the civic register of all the Dutch inhabitants of Batavia. To ensure social stability and to build up a colony of loyal settlers, in 1639, VOC administrators prohibited a Dutch man from retiring to the Netherlands if he were married to an Asian woman or to a Eurasian, defined as the child of a Dutch father and Asian mother. Nor could he do so when widowed if children from the marriage were still alive. In 1716, the ban on repatriation was extended to all Dutch men, married or single, who had part-Asian children. Despite Company edicts, many men continued to have relationships with slave women whom they did not marry. Children of Dutch fathers born outside marriage to Asian slave or free women were counted in their mother’s ethnic group, for example, as Malay or Buginese. They had no rights to support from the father. Unacknowledged children lived in Asian neighbourhoods within the city or in the surrounding villages. Dutch men could officially acknowledge illegitimate children born from temporary liaisons with Asian women by formally adopting them.VOC law required Dutch fathers to have children they acknowledged baptised and raised in a Dutch household and the boys prepared for jobs with the VOC. Like the term Dutch, ethnic labels of Asians are thus ambiguous. Over time, a pattern emerged. Men from Holland, while still junior employees of the Company, partnered with an Asian free or slave woman. As Company employees rose through the ranks, they sought a wife among the daughters of their work superiors, that is, a Eurasian woman one or more generations removed from slavery. Marriage connections accelerated promotion. In the mature Batavia settlement, candidates for the offices of senior merchant, councillor of the Indies or governor-general came from a group of men who were related to each other through marriage to Batavian women. The Council of the Indies of 1775 exemplifies this web of office and family connections. Twelve of the thirteen councillors were related to each other as fatherin-law and son-in-law, uncle and nephew-in-law. Case studies from the mid-seventeenth century and the mid and late eighteenth centuries demonstrate varieties of relationships between Dutch men and Asian women that VOC edicts attempted to regulate.The first illustrates diverging pathways of parallel families. François Caron (1600–1673) had two families, one formed early in his VOC career, the other at the point where he expected appointment to the most senior position in the VOC’s hierarchy of Asia-based 418

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­ fficials. During 22 years working for the VOC in Japan, he had children with his Japanese o ­partner (whose personal name is not recorded). In 1641, Caron moved his five surviving children and their mother to Batavia.There he called on the religious and legal services of the Dutch city to have his children baptised and entered in the civil register of Batavia’s Europeans before he returned to the Netherlands alone. Back in Batavia in 1643, Caron applied to the Council of the Indies for a certificate of legitimacy for the children, explaining he had intended to marry their mother to ensure their social position but she had died while he was in the Netherlands. He sent his sons to study theology at Leiden University and found Dutch husbands in Batavia for his daughters. He then brought out a wife from the Netherlands. His second set of children shared Batavia with their half-Japanese stepsisters between 1645 and 1650. The European wife and legitimate children returned with Caron to the Netherlands when his Indies career ended amid charges of illegal trading. The second example is of contemporaneous relationships with a Creole wife and Indonesian slave.11 Gustaaf Willem baron van Imhoff married in mid-career Catharina Magdalena Huysman, who had been born in one of the Indian ports where the VOC conducted business. In the course of his diplomatic duties as governor-general in 1743, he received from a female ruler in eastern Indonesia the gift of a slave girl, who bore him three children. Van Imhoff ’s only legitimate child died in infancy, so Van Imhoff sent his part-Indonesian children to the Netherlands, requesting the authorities to declare them legitimate and to confirm the son, Jan Willem, as successor to his baronetcy. Before his death in Batavia in 1750, Van Imhoff manumitted the children’s mother, had her baptised and settled a large fortune on her. She entered Batavia’s civil register as the Dutch woman Helena Pieters and subsequently contracted a legal marriage with a Dutch immigrant.12 The third example points to distinctions in status among free women with slave origins. As a young lawyer, Willem Arnold Alting married the freed slave Hendrina Maria Knabe. After her death and shortly before he became governor-general in 1780, Alting chose a woman one generation removed from slavery.This was Maria Susanna Grebel, daughter of a Dutch man and his freed slave Susanna van Makassar.13 The domestic arrangements of Dutch men who rose to senior positions in the Company are better documented than those of more junior VOC men, their wives, slave partners and children.

Figure 32.1  Batavia Castle seen from the west side of the Kali Besar [Grand River], Andries Beeckman, The Castle of Batavia, sketch, c. 1656. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam SK-A-19.

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Before natural increase by settled families produced sufficient numbers of free women, clerks and junior merchants had to purchase a slave bride from the VOC and pay her manumission fees. Prospective brides were housed in a Company dormitory while purchase price and fees were deducted in monthly instalments from the groom’s salary. Slave women, translated into the Dutch group by marriage, appear as representative types in scenes of Batavia. By contrast, Batavia’s women who sat for their portraits were daughters or granddaughters of slaves and identifiable by name. For instance, the woman at Alting’s side in a drawing from the 1770s by Johannes Rach (1720–1783) is his second wife. She lays claim to Dutch identity in her European frock and hat, while simultaneously demonstrating status in Indonesian cultural terms through the slave attendant who carries her betel box.14 The pair stands before Alting’s ‘grand palace’ with its rows of seating on the front veranda for male guests. Generations of male migrants married into this mixed community. None came to Batavia without a set of beliefs, cultural practices and folkways, whether free or slave, European or Asian, male or female. Acculturation was two-way. When we put gender into ethnic labels, we discover that people identified inVOC d­ ocuments and civic registers as Dutch were male and female immigrants from the Netherlands; men and women born in Asia to Dutch immigrants; men and women whose fathers were from Europe and whose mothers were Asian or Eurasian; and children born outside marriage to Asian women but formally recognized by a European father. In some periods, the tally of Dutch residents also listed Christian Asians. Implications went far beyond the name changes that concealed a woman’s origins. They involved the language spoken at home, the way children were reared, daily habits and relationships with domestic staff. Men from the Netherlands lived in Batavia’s European neighbourhoods, but among Asian household staff who were slaves, not waged servants. They acquired their slaves from commercial hubs in India, where Portuguese was a lingua franca, or from eastern Indonesia where Balinese or varieties of Malay were spoken.The home and marketplace became formation centres for Batavian Malay. Dutch was a male tongue in Batavia. It was the language of men in the VOC merchant arm; it never became the language of Batavia’s streets. François Valentijn, writing in the early eighteenth century, described the sound of Batavia’s public places this way: The languages one ordinarily uses in Batavia are Portuguese, low Malay, and Dutch. There are also Javanese, Chinese, and all the other languages of the peoples who reside here; but these are used only when speaking among themselves, never being used by other nationals; but Portuguese and Malay are the two languages one can communicate in easily with all manner of peoples, not only in Batavia, but throughout all India as far as Persia.15 In his home, the immigrant man was the sole fluent speaker of Dutch and only he had personal knowledge of the Netherlands. It is doubtful if Batavia’s canals inspired tender nostalgia in any household member other than its Dutch male head. Parts of old Batavia can still be seen in photographic albums and architectural studies.16 To enhance our understanding of how Batavia’s Dutch lived, we can turn to contemporaneous visual records left by Batavia’s great illustrators, Johannes Rach and Jan Brandes (1743–1808). Rach drew Batavia’s castle ramparts, its grand residences along the canals and civic buildings over 20 years from his arrival in 1764. His are exterior views of buildings. He does not invite us inside; but, in the foreground, he placed groups of residents strolling or working in Batavia’s streets and squares and ferrying goods in small boats on the canals. VOC officials stand with 420

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slave ­attendants before their mansions; Chinese peddlers carry goods in baskets slung from poles across their shoulders; Indonesians in sarongs haul carts, women sweep streets and Eurasian women in kain kebaya socialise in groups. Where Rach leaves us on the doorstep, Jan Brandes takes us indoors to see Batavia’s Dutch in private settings and public gatherings. One of his coloured drawings presents a Eurasian lady at home in Indonesian dress, taking tea with a fairer female visitor in a Western frock. Slave personnel wait on them. One, seated on the floor, readies her mistress’s betel. In another drawing, a group of men in Western dress sit around a table convivially together, while the lady of the house, in Indonesian dress, sits apart. Male and female slaves attend them. Brandes also takes us into a vast, mirrored hall to see how a grand reception was conducted Batavia-style. Again, the guests are segregated by sex. The bride receives female guests who appear in European dress or a variant of the kain kebaya. Male and female slaves serve them; a male slave orchestra performs on wind and stringed instruments. We glimpse male invitees through a doorway to a separate room.17 These protocols of elite behaviour derived from Asian models. Dutch paintings of the time show that in cities in the Netherlands men and women mixed freely together in churches, parlours and inns.

Batavia’s slaves Population counts for Batavia were estimates at best.They are consistent in showing slaves as the largest group in Batavia’s population for two centuries. The earliest head count of inhabitants, taken in December 1618 in what was to become Batavia, totalled 350 people, identified simply as Dutch merchants, soldiers and settlers; Asians, both free and slaves; and women (not identified by place of origin or marital status). By 1638, the number of Dutch and Asian residents living inside the new city’s walls was estimated as 12,000. Later population tallies are more descriptive. The 1673 head count of Batavia’s inhabitants, for instance, identifies 13,790 free individuals and 13,278 slaves. Batavia’s free population was further classified as follows: 2750 Dutch and Eurasians, 2747 Chinese, 5362 Mardijkers, 1339 Javanese and Moors, 611 Malays and 981 Balinese. No breakdown exists for the slaves.18 Another survey from1699 recorded slaves (male and female) as 39.9 per cent of Batavia’s population; and free Asians, tallied separately as Javanese, Balinese, Chinese, Buginese, Makassarese, Malays, Ambonese, Mardijkers and Muslim Indians, as 55.3 per cent. Europeans and Eurasians made up the remaining 4.8 per cent.19 Remco Raben estimates that, from the late seventeenth century, at any one time there were between 25,000 and 40,000 slaves in Batavia.20 In the absence of a pool of free labour, the Dutch purchased and employed enslaved men and women, thereby engaging in a relationship with workers that was unknown in the Netherlands. The VOC employed male slaves for heavy manual labour as well as in skilled jobs such as bricklaying, carpentry and silver-smithing. Both male and female slaves were employed in private households. From 1760, children slave women bore to Christian slaveholders, European or Asian, could not be sold. An edict of 1772 required manumission of a female slave on the death of a Christian owner if she had borne him children. Enslaved fathers had no rights over their own children. Wealthy occupants of town houses and country villas had over 20 household slaves, as well as slaves who did outdoor work and attendants to hold their sunshade and carry their betel box. Modest households employed around six slaves. Maids and nannies slept in their employers’ bedrooms; other slaves slept in kitchens and outbuildings. Visual records, judicial court proceedings and Batavia’s law books bring us a more complex understanding of slaves’ lives. We can turn first to Brandes’s sketchbooks, which he filled with drawings of people, places, birds and his own large house and grounds while ministering to Batavia’s Lutheran congregation from 1779 to 1805. Batavia artists such as Beeckman and Rach 421

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placed anonymous slave personnel in their street scenes and family portraits. Brandes admits us into the privacy of his own home, a household made up of himself, his infant son Jan and his slaves. His wife, who accompanied Brandes from the Netherlands, had died shortly after giving birth to Jan in Batavia in 1780. Brandes did not remarry until after he repatriated. He drew and named the slave women who were important to him during his sojourn in Batavia: Bietja, his son’s playmate; and Roosje, his own companion. We see Jan and Bietja on the veranda playing with a toy horse, and Roosje drawn in profile and head-and-shoulders. Brandes drew himself, Roosje and the little boy in a picture of his Batavia ‘family’.21 Here we have a glimpse of working women and slave companions in a seemingly benign domestic setting. However, women who had been detached by the slave market from the supports of kin and village had none of the protections of a wife when they were slave partners of Dutch men, nor did they have claim to long-term financial support. Another perspective on slaves’ experience comes from criminal cases heard before Batavia’s Council of Justice that Eric Jones has studied.22 The cases he selected deal with female slaves charged with theft, striking their employer or running away and date from the 1770s. The accused slaves were from various regions of Indonesia; the slaveholders were Chinese, Indonesian, Arab and European, that is, people with European names, who could have been Eurasians, Indonesian Christians or Dutch immigrants. Testimony from slave witnesses and accused slaves gives a vivid picture of their daily life.We see them out and about in Batavia, running errands for their employers, shopping, selling goods in the market, chatting with fellow slaves and lingering with a lover. The trials give us a different view of Batavian households. Where Brandes’s drawings evoke harmony and intimacy, Danie, Poedak, Christina van Ambon, Sitie van Makassar and Esperanca

Figure 32.2  Jan Brandes, Jan Brandes, Son Jantje and Slave Companion Roosje, sketch, c. 1782–3. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam NG-1985-7-2-139.

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van Bugis tell of verbal abuse, beatings and unjust punishments. The women describe for the judges their feelings of offence and rage, explain why they struck back or fled their owners’ service, how they organised their flight with help from fellow slaves, where and with whom they found shelter. All were sentenced to flogging, branding and chained labour on Batavia’s public works. Mobility was a feature of slaves’ lives. Uniquely, for a small number of women there was the personal transformation of emancipation brought about by marriage to a Dutch man. Slave mistresses might also be freed. When councillor of the Indies, Willem Jacob Cranssen, emancipated his slave companion, he gave her as baptismal names the feminine forms of his own Christian names and his surname in reverse: Wilhelmina Jacoba Nessnarc. No such route to freedom was open to male slaves. Most male and female slaves knew only servitude. Some slaveholders, such as Sophia Francina Westpalm, widow of Governor-General Reynier de Klerk, released a few of her slaves on her death in 1784, but her will also stipulated that another 100 be put up for sale to cover debts to her creditors.23 The VOC required slaveholders to deposit funds with the church poor relief if they emancipated their slaves. The Company did not promote manumission for male or female slaves as a general good.

Batavia’s free(d) Asian inhabitants Hendrik Niemeijer’s study of cohabitation and marriage in villages outside Batavia’s walls leads to his designation of the area as a ‘melting pot’.24 The results defy the neat labels of Chinese, Balinese, Buginese or Ambonese.When a Balinese woman married a Chinese man, for example, the census takers counted her as Chinese. Peoples’ identities on paper, formulated by clerks, notaries and magistrates, were administrative identities that could be at variance with an individual’s own sense of personhood. First-hand accounts of cross-ethnic relationships do not exist from the VOC centuries, but we can note characteristics in the formation of Batavia’s Chinese that were similar to the Dutch case: all-male Chinese migration to Batavia; absence of Chinese women; and partnering with slave women, especially Balinese. In time, Chinese communities in Batavia and in Java generally spoke their mothers’ language at home. Where a Chinese dialect was spoken in mixed families, it was the language of men; all others spoke Malay or Javanese. The Mardijker family Michielsz demonstrates the ambiguity of labels when the lens of gender is applied to Asian Christian communities of Batavia.25 It starts when the Bengali slave Titus took the surname of his baptismal sponsor in Batavia in 1694 and was manumitted. As Titus Michielsz, he married the Indian Christian Martha Pieters (again, a name that suggests a journey). The wives and partners of their male descendants were local Batavians and Javanese. The most famous of this clan, Augustijn Michielsz (1760–1833), had a house in Batavia’s Mardijker neighbourhood and country estates. Personnel on one estate included 117 house slaves, 48 free servants, 24 stable hands, 28 grass cutters, 20 cattle tenders, a smith and a saddle maker. Like Caron, Michielsz maintained parallel families, one formed with his first wife, the Christian Batavian Maria Wilhelmina de Bruijn, the other with the freed slave Davida Elisabeth Augustijns. Michielsz married her some years after Maria’s death, and together they formally adopted Augustina, Michielsz’s daughter by his slave Julia van Javanen. Michielsz’s estate was divided between his surviving daughter by Maria and adopted daughter Augustina. Legacies were left to four younger children born to different slave mothers. Immigrant groups from across the Indonesian archipelago acquired rights from the VOC to set up villages outside Batavia’s walls. Using slave labour, they cultivated rice and vegetables and ran their own affairs. A prominent member acted as go-between with the VOC administration 423

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in the city. At the beginning of the eighteenth century there were seven Balinese villages, three Javanese, two Buginese, one Butonese, one Makassarese and one Christian Ambonese. Again, ethnic labels distort our perception, because the villages were multi-ethnic, home to migrants from many parts of the archipelago, to slaves and ex-slaves of diverse origins. Marriage and ­co-habitation were based on the proximity of available partners rather than on ancestral traditions. The ethnic labels identify men and subsume women.

Gender in the colonial town An important issue is how far the ways in which people used Batavia and how gender conditions an individual’s opportunities within it were distinctive to the colonial character of the town. This may be considered by contrasting Batavia with the main city of its metropolitan empire, Amsterdam. The dominant buildings of Amsterdam and Batavia encapsulate the essence of urban life in the two cities. Amsterdam’s civic life centred on its town hall, which was accessible to residents and the locus of municipal government. Batavia’s most imposing building was not its town hall but its fort. We see Batavia Castle in Beeckman’s painting, looming at water’s edge on the east side of the main canal. Gun emplacements faced the Java Sea. High stone walls, moat and parade ground separated it from foreign enemies and city residents alike. Batavia had the social institutions, waterways and layout of Amsterdam.Yet, most people who lived in and used the city had no municipal rights, even in the limited terms allowed by the Council of the Indies. Amsterdam was a city of immigrants too. Its offer of freedom of conscience and jobs attracted skilled workers and refugees from lands ruled by Roman Catholics. Mechanisms for integrating migrants were the dominant Dutch language, Protestant congregations and artisans’ guilds. Only Jewish immigrants were excluded from the guilds and denied civic rights until the very end of the Dutch Republic. Batavia, on the other hand, had no vehicles for integrating its diverse residents into a cohesive civic identity. There were no guilds. The workforce was made up of slaves. Dutch never became the lingua franca of Batavia, nor did the majority of Batavians become Protestants. Peter Clark writes that European cities were characterised by the ‘feminization of public and private space’.26 His evidence – elite women holding honorary civic roles, the prevalence of female shopkeepers, craftswomen and domestics – apply to Amsterdam in our period. Women workers clustered in the low-paying sectors of the economy, participated in civic and religious life and sought relief from municipal charities run by the wives of the city’s councillors. These ladies were different by class and formal education, but they were not foreign. Amsterdam’s female elite sprang from a home-grown network of prominent families. Paintings from the seventeenth century show us councillors’ wives overseeing charity homes for the poor. We see middle-class women performing housewifely tasks (peeling potatoes, shelving linen), and painted evidence of middle-class female education (women reading letters, playing an instrument). We see working women as domestics, barmaids and market stallholders. Family portraits show parents and children in the intimacy of the home. While seventeenth-century Amsterdam was a magnet for immigrants, Dutch art of the time portrays ‘Dutchness’. For Batavia, the painted record is of exotic difference, not a homogenising Dutchness.VOC employees were a tiny male minority in a city whose inhabitants were drawn from all over Indonesia, India and mainland Southeast Asia. The women who were everywhere in the public eye in Batavia, buying and selling in markets and running small businesses, were Asian. Maidservants, cooks and nannies staffing the households of VOC merchants were slave women. Free and slave women held the low-skilled, low-paid, low-status jobs that serviced the urban economy. 424

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The upward social mobility of women who married VOC employees took them out of workplaces and introduced a greater gendered segregation into their daily lives. The city’s elite was internally divided between men born in the Netherlands and women born in Asia. Batavia’s ladies spoke Malay or Portuguese from birth; they were rarely literate in Dutch. They did not preside over municipal charities but demonstrated their status by withdrawal from public space and activities. Amsterdam offered newcomers the chance to become part of the community. Batavia offered a qualified belonging only to the fraction of the city’s residents who were wives or acknowledged children of Dutch men. Recent research by Ulba Bosma and Remco Raben expands exploration of the Dutch beyond the timeframe of V   OC settlement to the colony that succeeded the merchant company and that, between 1800 and 1920, extended its control to the entire Indonesian archipelago.27 Their focus is on Eurasian men who, under the VOC, were relegated to low-ranking positions with the Company. In the nineteenth century, the expansion of Dutch-language education fostered upward mobility for Eurasian men and secured their place within the Dutch sector of colonial society. These men regarded jobs in the colonial administration as their birthright. Bosma and Raben introduce class into the racial terminology for both men and women of the mature colony and demonstrate the ambiguity of male labels. Men of mixed heritage with fluent command of Dutch, formal academic credentials and government jobs were considered Dutch; men of mixed heritage who lacked these qualifications were Eurasian. In VOC Batavia, Asian and Eurasian women had gained entry to the Dutch group through marriage. In the colony, the way women slotted into colonial social and administrative categories remained dependent on the status of father and husband. In the twentieth century, cross-ethnic marriage helped foster the new political identity of Indonesian.Today, people with long roots in Jakarta demand recognition and special rights as an indigenous community distinct from all other Indonesians. They call themselves Batavians (Orang Betawi). Categories of identity on Batavia’s maps and in census classifications communicate a static segregation. However, an investigation through the lens of gender challenges such homogenising ethnic labels. It establishes mobility across residential boundaries, fluid identities and new forms of social relations growing out of the beliefs, cultural practices and folkways of all Batavia’s residents, Asian and European, free and slave, male and female. This permeability and variety of human experience was apparent well into the twentieth century, but its roots were firmly established during the period of VOC rule.

Notes 1 Reprinted in Edgar du Perron, De Muze van Jan Compagnie, (Bandung: A.C. Nix & Co., 1948), 154–155. All translations from Dutch in this chapter are the author’s. 2 The United East Indies Company (1602–1799) is referred to here by the initials of its Dutch name,VOC (Verenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie), or as the Company. In 1602, the Dutch Republic awarded the VOC sole rights to conduct Dutch trading in Asia, establish settlements and military fortifications, conclude treaties with Asian rulers and control the market in Indonesian spices. 3 Indonesia and Indonesian are convenient shorthand for the islands and peoples of the Indonesian archipelago in the years before these terms were adopted by nationalists and formalized with the declaration of Indonesia’s independence on 17 August 1945. 4 Marsely L. Kehoe, ‘Dutch Batavia: Exposing the hierarchy of the Dutch colonial city’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 7:1, (2015), doi:10.5092/jhna.2015.7.1.3. 5 Ode to Willem van Outhoorn (governor-general 1691–1704) by Abraham Bogaert, quoted in du ­Perron, De muze, 122–23. 6 Vue de l’isle et de la ville de Batavia appartenant aux Hollandois, pour la Compagnie des Indes (Paris: Daumont, c. 1780) http://imagebase.ubvu.vu.nl/getobj.php?ppn=330026852, accessed 30 April 2016.

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Jean Gelman Taylor  7 Kain kebaya is a generic form of Indonesian female dress consisting of a long-sleeved blouse and a length of material wrapped around the waist, covering the legs to the ankles. The sunshade is a symbol of status in Indonesian cultures.   8 Quoted in Jean Gelman Taylor, The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Colonial Indonesia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2nd ed., 2009), 13. The complete list named eight married couples and 31 girls.   9 Ibid., 12. 10 The information in this section is based on VOC documents summarised in Taylor, Social World. 11 Creole signified a person born in Asia whose mother as well as father was Dutch by birth. 12 Taylor, Social World, 90–91. 13 Ibid., 62. 14 Batavia’s Dutch ladies borrowed the habit of chewing betel quids from everyday Indonesian life. The betel box was a ceremonial item of Indonesian palace regalia carried in processions. Governor-General J. Mossel equated Batavia’s Eurasian female elite with Indonesian palace ladies in his sumptuary laws of 1754, which reserved betel boxes ornamented with gold and jewels for the wives and widows of the governor-general, councillors of the Indies and president of the court of justice. 15 François Valentijn, Oud en Nieuw Oost-Indiën (Amsterdam, 1726, vol. 4), 366–67.Valentijn (1666–1727) compiled materials for his encyclopaedia while he was minister to Malay-speaking congregations of the Dutch Reformed Church in Ambon. 16 Adolf Heuken, Historical Sites of Jakarta (Jakarta: Cipta Loka Caraka, 1982), and Scott Merrillees, Batavia in Nineteenth Century Photographs (Richmond: Curzon, 2000). 17 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search, object codes NG-1985-7-2-15, NG-1985-7-2-8; and NG-369, respectively. 18 The figures are from Batavia’s Daily Register (Daghregister) for 1674, cited by Pauline Milone, ‘Queen city of the east: The metamorphosis of a colonial capital’, (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1966). Mardijkers were free(d) Asian Christians of Indian origin; Moors were Indian and Arab Muslims. 19 Hendrik E. Niemeijer, ‘Slavery, ethnicity and the economic independence of women in seventeenthcentury Batavia’, in Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia, ed. Barbara Watson Andaya (Hawaii: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 2000) 176. 20 Remco Raben, ‘Cities and the slave trade in early-modern Southeast Asia’, in Trade, Towns and Kin in Asian History, ed. Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt (Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008), 131. 21 https://www.rijksmuseum.nl/en/search object codes NG-1985-7-2-3, NG-1985-7-2-72, and NG-1985-7-2-139, respectively. 22 Eric Allan Jones, ‘Fugitive women: Slavery and social change in early modern Southeast Asia’, Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38, 2 (2007): 215–45. 23 Taylor, Social World, 70. 24 Niemeijer, ‘Slavery’, 174. 25 F. de Haan, ‘De Laatste der Mardijkers’, Bijdragen tot de Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde, 73 (1917): 219–54. 26 Peter Clark, European Cities and Towns, 400–2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 2–3. 27 Ulbe Bosma and Remco Raben, Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920 (Singapore: National University of Singapore Press), 2008.

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33 Cities at Sea Gender and Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century British Colonial City, Philadelphia, Kingston, ­Madras and Calcutta Clare A. Lyons British colonial cities created the most dynamic sexual cultures in the eighteenth-century Anglophone world. They were laboratories of invention and hybridization fuelled by the characteristics of early modern port cities. This essay explores how the urban colonial environment facilitated the development of these particularly dynamic sexual cultures. It focuses on the premier cities in the three principal eighteenth-century British colonial ventures: settler societies of British North America (Philadelphia); slave societies of the British West Indies (Kingston); and British mercantile communities in the East Indies (Madras and Calcutta). Philadelphia, Kingston, Madras and Calcutta each experienced rapid growth in the early decades of the eighteenth century, gaining a position of supremacy amongst their regional peers at mid-century.1 Eighteenthcentury British colonial cities were cities at sea. Each was a port in a maritime world. Together, they formed an interconnected series of hybrid cultural landscapes. Examining them together allows us to see commonalities and illuminate transregional influences as well as local particularities. These four premier cities shared the urban colonial characteristics that facilitated the creation of dynamic sexual cultures: vibrant, expanding, commercial economies; diverse populations increasing rapidly through constant in migration; relatively weak governing institutions and multi-faceted cultural environments enriched by ethnic and religious diversity; and transoceanic communication networks via seafarers, print culture and maritime transportation. The long transition from early modern to modern society brought upheaval in intimate ­relations throughout much of western Europe, evident in an escalation of sexual behaviour outside of marriage and a flourishing of new meanings associated with sexual practices.2 British colonial cities took part in these transformations in intimate life, but they did so in particularly diverse environments influenced by both the rapid pace of urbanization and the dynamics of multi-cultural colonial societies. Philadelphia, Kingston, Madras and Calcutta played a constitutive role in the eighteenth-century development of key intellectual and cultural beliefs attached to sexual practice: the solidification of Anglophone belief in racialized sexualities, gender difference rooted in binary male and female sexual natures and the construction of individual sexual character as a strand of identity recognized as significant for the newly conceived individualized self. The residents of these cities forged sexual cultures that increased the breadth of white male sexual privilege, extending the sexual prerogatives granted to elites in Britain down the social ranks to all white men; and intensified the sexual exploitation of women through the pervasive influence of slavery. And yet, they simultaneously created environments within which 427

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free women, and in some instances those enslaved, might manoeuvre more adeptly to achieve a degree of self-direction less accessible in the rural surrounds. For much of the eighteenth century, the prime British colonial cities were left to their own devices to navigate within the worlds of expanded sexual possibilities they had created. But, as we shall see, at the end of the century these urban colonial sexual cultures collided with the needs of the new national and imperial modern state.

Philadelphia Eighteenth-century Philadelphia earned a reputation as a city with a permissive sexual culture and exceptionally independent women. John Adams described Philadelphia of the 1760s as a city where ‘diseases, vicious habits, bastards and legislators, are frequently begotten’.3 The assertive character of Philadelphian women was also particularly notable; The Antigua Gazette published the details of a Philadelphian wife who had self-divorced, eloped and cuckolded her husband as an example of sexual scandal that undermined masculine patriarchal prerogatives.4 Each of these characterizations contained a grain of truth: Philadelphians had created a permissive sexual culture that afforded free women a considerable degree of sexual independence, countenanced extensive non-marital sexual behaviour and embraced enlightened individualism that animated the purposeful construction of the self, including the sexual self. Mid-century Philadelphia was the most cosmopolitan city in British North America. It was an important commercial, intellectual and cultural centre, home to the first libraries and philosophical society in British North America and the largest shipping centre of the region. Philadelphia’s expanding economy fuelled its demographic growth through immigration, increasing the population from 8000 in 1734 to 13,000 in 1751 and up to over 30,000 by 1775, when it was the largest city in Anglo America.5 The community they created was built upon a foundation of ethnic diversity and religious tolerance grounded in the Quaker belief in freedom of conscience. The city’s English majority lived side-by-side with Scots, Welsh, Germans, ScotsIrish, Africans and Afro-Caribbeans and a smattering of French, Spanish and Portuguese. Philadelphia served as a minor entrepôt in the transhipment of slaves from the British Caribbean, but enslaved Africans were never a large part of the population, accounting for approximately 8 per cent of Philadelphians in the decade before the American Revolution.6 To borrow from historian Ira Berlin, it was a society with slaves, not a slave society.7 This polyglot urban setting provided an environment where people could exercise new levels of self-fashioning and innovation in personal life. Here, women created relatively wide options for themselves outside of marriage, and female sexuality was not rigidly tied to lifelong monogamous marriage. It was not unusual for wives to separate themselves from husbands, challenging the patriarchal prerogatives granted husbands in marriage.They did this in contradiction to English law in force in the colonies, which prohibited divorce except under limited circumstances.8 Hundreds of Philadelphian husbands placed elopement notices in the city’s newspapers, declaring a wife’s departure and notifying the public that her husband had therefore severed his economic ties to her. In many instances, it is clear that wives made intentional choices to leave their marriages. Sometimes they left to escape physical abuse or the economic failings of a husband; often they left to establish a new intimate relationship with a different man.9 Hannah Joyce was said to have ‘eloped from her said husband, and lives in a scandalous manner, with another man, named Richard Stagtham Thomas’.10 Such female sexual independence increased in the decades after mid-century and was much more common in Philadelphia than its rural surrounds.11 Scottish ethnic and Welsh and English plebeian traditions of self-marriage and self-divorce, together with Quaker belief in equalitarian marriage, provided the platform upon which Philadelphians 428

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developed accepted protocols of marital dissolution and rejected ­mandatory life-long ­marriage. Self-divorce often evinced disagreement between Philadelphia’s men and women over the proper gender distribution of power and authority in marriage.12 In this world, a wife might sever the bonds of marriage by posting her own notice in the city’s newspapers, as Margaret Flack did in 1771: ‘Margaret Flack, the wife of Robert Flack, declines living with him any longer’.13 Margaret’s desire became a realistic course of action only because the city provided opportunities for female self-support.Women earned their livelihoods in the female professions of domestic labour, whitewashing, nursing, midwifery and mortuary work, and like men, women worked as merchants, retailers and shopkeepers and ran grog shops, taverns and boarding houses. Such female economic independence was nearly impossible in eighteenth-century rural America, where the family farm required both male and female labour for success, and women had few economic opportunities outside the family economy.14 The urban economy rewarded women’s labour inequitably; their earnings were half those of men, but it did make it possible to opt out of marriage. By the 1770s, more than one-third of the city’s adult female population was unmarried and living in households of non-relatives. Femaleheaded households accounted for between 12 and 20 per cent of all Philadelphian households.15 Some women never married, despite a sex ratio that gave men a slight numerical edge; others were widows who chose not to remarry; and some had separated from their husbands, choosing instead to live independently. By the 1760s, a broad spectrum of Philadelphians embraced personal lives that deviated from monogamous marital sexual practice. Casual sexual relationships resulting in bastardy, sex commerce, adultery and serial sexual relations all became regular and recognized parts of the city’s sexual landscape.16 As a result, venereal disease became widespread, and advertisements for venereal medicines and doctors who specialized in its cure proliferated.17 Philadelphians also initiated the eroticization of print culture, importing British bawdy texts of sexual intrigue and libertine excess, and including salacious material in the almanacs and pamphlets produced in their own press.18 Here, as in the other areas, Philadelphia was in the lead among the other British North American cities. Sexuality was loosened from its marital moorings in Boston and New York as well, but to a smaller degree.19 For many, sexual intimacy had become part of relationships that fell outside of courtship and marriage, and personal pleasure and individual happiness guided them to create expansive sexual lives. One result was a rise in casual sexual behaviour. This afforded women greater choice in intimate relations but also increased the opportunity for predatory male sexual behaviour and sexual exploitation of women. Child-support records of illegitimate children were filled with men who had no on-going relationship with the mother of their child. The city’s Overseers of the Poor administered such mandatory support, documenting increasing rates of this form of illegitimacy from the 1760s into the early decades of the nineteenth century, when they peaked at 6.6 per cent, a rate slightly above that in England.20 The Philadelphians who conceived these children were a cross-section of the city’s population, representative of its class structure and ethnic composition, but their offspring were often the products of cross-class and cross-ethnic unions.21 Unlike the rural Pennsylvania communities where mothers of illegitimate babes were tried, convicted and fined, in Philadelphia women rarely appeared in court. Only in the rare instances when enslaved black men fathered children with white women did Philadelphians activate legal action.22 Many Philadelphians were remarkably open about conducting an adulterous affair or publicly entertaining their mistresses, and prostitution took place openly in all sections of the city. Women stepped in and out of prostitution, were usually their own proprietors and often used sex commerce to supplement low incomes.23 Pre-revolutionary Philadelphians shared the early modern belief that sexual desire was an inherent part of the human condition, 429

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and that woman, by her very nature, was lustful. Marriage remained a possibility for a woman who bore an illegitimate child or made her livelihood by prostitution, and rarely was anyone criminally prosecuted for sexual behaviour. In this environment, sexuality was becoming an aspect of self-expression and a strand of identity that an individual might shape. Some adopted Enlightenment-inspired personal lives that included exploration of sexuality in ‘a state of nature’, unconfined by the social dictates of marriage. Men created a new life stage of ‘bachelorhood’, a period devoted to personal and professional development but also to self-indulgence and sexual experimentation free of the obligations of marriage. Same-sex intimacy was also part of the sexual landscape. Ann Alweye, a male transvestite, lived with John Crawford in a relationship presumed to be sexual; and Margaret Marshall ‘cohabited’ in an intimate relationship with Ann Hannah. And it was here that Mary/Charles Hamilton fled, from England, after her conviction for ‘pretending herself a man’ in her marriage to Mary Price. Philadelphians were relatively tolerant of same-sex intimacy and gender non-conformity.They were conversant with the contemporaneous British social type of the sodomite and aware of the periodic harassment of men who loved men in London, but they chose not to follow their lead. 24

Kingston For British subjects in eighteenth-century Kingston, self-fashioning – sexual and otherwise – was bound up in the dynamics of the slave society they were creating. Kingston owed its existence to the rise of sugar plantation economies and the Atlantic slave trade. Its growth outpaced that of Jamaica as a whole, accelerating between 1720 and 1760, leading one historian to characterize eighteenth-century Kingston as the epitome of early modern urbanization.25 It was the urban centre of the most profitable British colony in the new world and surpassed Barbados ports as the heart of the British Atlantic slave trade.26 Like Philadelphia, it was a fashionable British city with its theatre, vibrant print culture and shops selling luxuries from across the globe. Maritime commerce and local economic development fuelled rapid in migration (much of it involuntary), increasing Kingston’s population from roughly 4500 in 1730 to over 14,000 in 1774 and 26,500 in 1788. These figures belie the thousands of newcomers constantly disembarking in Kingston to replenish those who quickly died there.27 Kingston was more diverse than the surrounding countryside, attracting both the island’s free people of colour and resident whites, including a sizable Portuguese Jewish population, reducing the magnitude of the enslaved black majority. Enslaved Jamaicans were 60 per cent of Kingstonians but near 90 per cent of the countryside population; whites comprised one third, but only 11 per cent island wide; and free people of colour increased in Kingston from 6 per cent in 1720 to 12 per cent in 1788.28 Freed people saw Kingston as a place of relative economic and personal opportunity. Disproportionate numbers of unmarried free women – white, black, and women of colour – made Kingston their home. As was the case in Philadelphia, the urban economy provided openings for female self-support in contrast to the rural surrounds. Here, retail, from huckstering to shopkeeping, real estate and slave ownership were the paths to female economic independence, and female-headed households were more abundant, consistently accounting for one quarter of Kingston’s household heads.29 Slavery permeated all aspects of the sexual culture Kingstonians created as the city rose to prominence. It shaped the lives of the city’s enslaved majority, those enacting their enslavement and the city’s freed people as well. British new-world slavery granted masters outright ownership of enslaved peoples’ bodies and labour and granted masters judicial authority to compel their submission through violence.30 Gender and sexuality were at the heart of the creation 430

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of British slavery and its perpetuation. As historian Jennifer Morgan has demonstrated, slavery not only depended on the ownership and sexual exploitation of female bodies but was based on the commodification of the sexual and reproductive bodily functions of enslaved women.31 ­Enslaving Africans simultaneously empowered white men to embrace sexual domination as part of white male privilege. In Kingston, these sexual imperatives of slavery combined with the urban character of this eighteenth-century port city to generate particularly audacious forms of family and household formation by white patriarchs, illustrating slavery’s power to increase the magnitude and scope of traditional British male sexual privilege and slavery’s influence on emerging white male sexual subjectivities. And yet, Kingston also provided the city’s subalterns with a more hospitable environment to pursue their personal lives than the surrounding ­plantation countryside. In Kingston, a free black man could advertise for the return of his runaway wife, drawing on both the patriarchal rights of husbands and simultaneously the property rights of masters, as Tobia Hardy did. As he explained, he was ‘a Free Negro, but his wife is a Slave, the property of Col. Fanning of New-York, who gave her to him during his life’.32 Tobia’s ownership of his wife in 1779, albeit via the gifting of Abby by her former white owner, was built upon a century of embedding the sexual prerogatives of slavery into Kingston households. Complex households containing a white man’s multiple sexual partners were common and common knowledge. Wealthy Kingston merchant Edward Pratter’s1730s home included his sexual partners Juno, a ‘negro woman’, and a ‘mulatto woman’ named Betty. Their sexual slavery had engendered their favoured status in Pratter’s eyes. His will freed both women, and each bequeathed other enslaved women as their property. Pratter sought to protect them from re-enslavement, declaring each ‘to be free and clear from any Claim or pretense of Work or Slavery that my Heirs or Executors may set up or lay claim’. Betty’s legacy went further, including an annual annuity, all wearing apparel and the promise that all children born to her during Pratter’s lifetime were manumitted. Before his death, Pratter added a codicil, affirming the freedom of Betty’s new-born daughter, providing the infant with a legacy of 500 pounds sterling and instructing that Betty care for her until age four and that the child then be sent to Pratter’s sister in England to be educated and cared for until her marriage. His daughter with Betty would not be his heir; his nephew would inherit his vast wealth. However, Pratter envisioned a place for her, albeit a subordinate one, within his larger network of kin; and yet he owed her very existence to his ownership of her mother. Most of Pratter’s slaves, sexual partners or not, were put out at rent in the city, sent to his plantation or sold when he died in 1736.33 For many British men in Kingston, concubinage within sexual slavery was the primary form of family formation. Others combined it with legal marriage to European white women who resided variously in Jamaica or in Britain; and still others established concubine relationships with free women of colour whom they did not own. While these practices could be found throughout Jamaica, what distinguished Kingston was the openness of cross-racial concubinage and its pervasiveness.34 In Kingston, one third of the men who died between 1740 and 1760, and whose wills were probated in England, had made financial provision for their mixed-race children and/or their Negro or coloured sexual partner.35 The sexual politics of these relationships were complicated. White men often privileged the children they had with coloured women, over those they fathered with Negro women; and whites’ bequests of slave property to their freed children and freed sexual partners frequently initiated slave ownership by those freed. The children who enter into the historical record in wills and manumission papers were a minority of those born by enslaved women fathered by white men. The growing population of coloured enslaved Jamaicans evince that most went unacknowledged and lived their lives in slavery. Sex, nevertheless, was one possible path to freedom and might secure a better life for one’s children. 431

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It was also a vehicle to create whiteness through generations of strategic family formation and procreation with white men.36 Legally, the Jamaica Assembly determined, in 1732, that the mixed-race status of ‘mulatto’ would extend ‘to the third generation’.37 Legally, socially and politically, cross-racial sexual relations created an intermediate population in Jamaica.The sexual transformation of race and status might take place anywhere on the island, but the majority of women who successfully accomplished this lived in the cities, especially Kingston. They were women like tavern keeper Elizabeth Ford, a free mulatto woman who secured for herself and two sons, Benjamin Tanner and Frances Ebzory, ‘the same Rights and Privileges with English Subjects born of White Parents’ by Act of Assembly in 1744. Six years later, the boys were the main beneficiaries of Kingston gentleman Conyers Dobby’s will, had inherited their mother’s house in Port Royal Street and were under the guardianship of Peter Furue; Benjamin was living abroad in Bristol. The exact nature of Dobby’s relationship with Elizabeth Ford and her family is unclear, but his will attests to a network of white men whom she had successfully endowed with the care of her children.38 Kingston free women of colour Charity Stevens; Susanna, Mary, and Elizabeth Augier; ­Elizabeth Pinnock; and Catherine Christian had similar success.39 Living in the city, their property ownership, free status, unmarried condition and often home ownership did not stand out as it would in the plantation countryside; in these ways, their experiences conformed to that of many of their fellow female urban dwellers (see Figure 33.1).

Figure 33.1  Agostino Brunias, A West Indian Flower Girl and Two Other Free Women of Color, oil on canvas, 1769.Yale Center for British Art.

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Legal marriage was not the cornerstone of family formation in Kingston. This was not only true in cross-racial relations between white men and women of colour, where ­marriage was rare, though not unheard of. 40 It was also the case among the city’s white women. ­Kingston’s baptisms reveal an illegitimacy rate for children born to white women of 31 per cent (1722–1753). In these years, the overall illegitimacy rate was 38 per cent. 41 This was six times greater than the peak illegitimacy rate in eighteenth-century England.42 The magnitude of d­ isregard for marriage as the prime location for family formation and reproduction was unprecedented in the Anglophone world, though we will see it replicated in early Calcutta. It is hard to know much about the relationships that produced these children. Some were ­probably the offspring of women living by choice outside of marriage – children of Kingston’s female-headed householders and women supporting themselves in the city’s robust female economy.43 But, the sexual privilege slavery granted white men meant that all women were vulnerable to sexual coercion and sexual assault. Certainly some of these children were the products of such connections. The pervasive influence of slavery is evident in the city’s sex commerce as well. Here, ­prostitution had been radically transformed from that of the individual operator, often engaging in a form of casual labour, which existed in Philadelphia and London.44 As historian Marisa Fuentes points out in her analysis of Bridgetown madam Rachel Pringle Polgreen, a freed woman of colour, the lexicon of ‘prostitution’ is wholly inadequate to describe the commercial sexual exchange in which the woman performing sexually does not own her body nor reap the financial benefits of her sexual labour.45 These insights apply to commercial sexual slavery in eighteenth-century Kingston. While early in the century some white women transported as convicts from England may have continued their careers in prostitution in Kingston’s taverns and hotels, the commercial trade in sexual services was dominated by the involuntary sexual labour of enslaved women.46 Whether they were rented out to meet the sexual demands of the military personnel at the Garrison, or in town to accommodate visiting merchants and sea captains, or sent by their owners to service men shipboard in port, sex commerce embedded in slavery was organized to benefit masters and was based on the threat of violence. Urban Caribbean slave owners, including Kingston’s, innovation in grafting prostitution onto slavery commodified female sexuality in new ways and intensified and expanded the sexual exploitation of women. The urban environment of Kingston did open limited opportunities for enslaved people to direct the contours of their intimate lives against the tide of slavery. We catch glimpses of their efforts in the city’s newspapers, where runaway slave ads make mention of a spouse harbouring her mate, as Sheba had done for Jeffrey, an enslaved Jamaican-born carpenter. As a skilled artisan in a city that relied on skilled hired slave labour, Jeffrey might avoid detection for some time.47 Concern that unauthorized employment, especially on vessels, fuelled an underground labour market and facilitated escape as ships departed the port is revealed in repeated legislative measures to stop it.48 Masters frequently complained that slaves used the urban environs to ‘conceal’ themselves, as Pheba had done for two years when her owner Mary Satchwell advertised her, noting that Pheba now had ‘a child about four or five months old’.49 The same busy port city, bustling with commerce and awash with newcomers that created opportunities for the city’s free women, might also shelter the truant slave and give her a means to secure her daily bread.

Madras and Calcutta Kingston and Philadelphia were dwarfed by the early eighteenth-century British trading ports of Madras and Calcutta in India. Founded by the East India Company to spearhead English trading ventures to Asia, each had grown from a garrisoned fort situated among Indian fishing and 433

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agricultural villages to a port city of at least 100,000 residents by 1750.50 First Madras, and then Calcutta, experienced tremendous economic and demographic growth in the early eighteenth century. The East India Company’s (EIC) decision to allow private trading, beginning in the 1670s, together with low import and export taxes under EIC’s governance, served as a magnet to merchants, bankers, tradesmen, weavers and dyers from throughout the Coromandel coast. Madras became a hub of Asian trade (spanning from the Red Sea to China) comprised of a multi-ethnic community of Tamil (Malabar) South Asians, Portuguese and Portuguese Eurasians, Armenians and Britons, living in a semi-segregated city divided into ‘White Town’ and ‘Black Town’ districts.51 Religiously diverse, Hindus, Muslims, Jews, Catholics and Protestants were united in their pursuit of economic opportunity through commerce. Calcutta’s rise accelerated in the 1720s, following the same pattern of multi-ethnic growth spurred by maritime economic opportunity. At the turn of the eighteenth century, Madras was the centre of both EIC business and British private trade in the transhipment of goods throughout Asia, and by 1740 Calcutta had surpassed it.52 In each city, British subjects were a tiny minority, primarily male, and were dependent on the expertise and support of native Indians for their success. As in Kingston, the prospect of dazzling wealth brought English, Welsh and Scots to Madras and Calcutta, but disease cut them down in similar fashion. High mortality required a steady resupply of EIC employees and compulsory long terms of service to guarantee the Company’s success. The two cities shared many characteristics, and the British among them developed similar, innovative, urban colonial sexual cultures. British subjects in early Madras and Calcutta created a sexual culture that was particularly eclectic.They solved the problem of a dearth of British women by intermarriage with local Portuguese Eurasian women, but simultaneously they forged intimate connections through sexual slavery, concubinage and casual sex commerce. As was true in Kingston, British men frequently established households that contained their multiple sexual partners. Here, however, the sexual politics required a degree of cross-cultural literacy to keep one’s intimate relations working in concert with one’s economic interests. In Madras, Company personnel built upon previous Portuguese traders pattern of family formation using European Indian cross-cultural marriage.53 A sense of how common crosscultural marriage was can be gleaned by the Company’s annual list of inhabitants at Fort St. George, which enumerated an ethnic/racial designation for wives of all men listed as married. In 1702, half of the men were married, and equally as many of their brides were English (47 per cent) as were Portuguese (‘mustee’) and Portuguese Eurasian (‘castee’) (47 per cent). William Mayhew had recently married Lucia Gomez, designated ‘mustee’ in 1702, and John Cockroft had been married to his Eurasian wife Johanna Richardson for nearly a decade. In 1708, half of the Company wives were Portuguese and Portuguese Eurasian.54 These marriages often offered British men important business alliances and access to expertise and resources to navigate the multi-cultural commercial environment. Despite the racial designation given these brides, their marriages were viewed as legitimate and advantageous in British eyes, at least until mid-century. John Affleck’s son with his ‘castee’ wife Nettie Shaape, for example, was deemed such a promising marital choice that fellow Fort St. George resident John Dolben tripled his granddaughter’s inheritance if ‘she shall marry Gilbert Affleck the son of my good friend Mr John Affleck’.55 As they were doing in Kingston, British men in Madras used inter-ethnic reproduction to create a population of females they found suitable as sexual partners.56 Here, the intermediate population became increasingly anglicised and ‘white’ through generations of marriage and reproduction but without the need for legal affirmation. By mid-century, the maternal South Asian ancestry of women who married elite Company personnel was nearly erased.57 British men in early Madras and Calcutta frequently used sexual slavery to constitute their households and satisfy their sexual desires, and the urban colonial ports provided them with 434

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the opportunity to do so. Their wills regularly included instructions to free an enslaved sexual partner.58 Madras inhabitant George Petty wrote his will shipboard in 1727 distributing 2000 pounds in legacies, willing the remainder to his father in England. A week later he thought to add a codicil freeing ‘my Servant Mercella’, bequeathing her 50 Pagodas and giving instructions ‘that in case the Child she is now big with should live, I order it to be taken from her’. His business partners were to supervise the maintenance and education of the child, using interest from a 500 Pagoda bequest he made for the unborn child.59 The same year, Thomas Hawker, ship captain of Calcutta, made provision for his ‘son Thomas whom I own to be mine by my Slave Girl Named Sophia’ and the unborn child Sophia was carrying. Hawker ‘bequeathed’ Sophie ‘her liberty and freedom forever’, 200 rupees ‘with all her clothes and trinkets and the slave boy named Antonio to be her slave for seven years’.60 Sophia might enjoy a measure of financial security, as Hawker bequeathed 2000 rupees to each child and gave Thomas a house in Calcutta along with a slave boy; but Marcella’s freedom came with only a small monetary token and the loss of her child. As they did in Kingston, some men combined marriage and sexual slavery. Adam Dawson left much of his estate to his wife and daughters in Calcutta, including ‘all my slaves, except my Slave boy Fobi’. Fobi he bequeathed ‘unto my son Francis born of the Body of a late Slave wench of mine by the name Flora but now deceased’.61 British men in early eighteenth-century India participated in myriad forms of slavery. Sexual service was part of the traditional duties of female domestic slaves enslaved through warfare, kidnapping and debt bondage in pre-colonial India.62 Some of the women British men held as sexual slaves were certainly attained this way; British traders in late seventeenth and eighteenth-century India were active in distress-induced sales of local native residents.63 But EIC personnel and British private traders also participated in the wider Indian Ocean slave trade, bringing Africans from Madagascar and east Africa and Malays from Batavia to Madras and Calcutta.64 These women too became potential sexual partners through the outright ownership of their bodies that British enslavement entailed.65 Slave ownership extended to men of moderate means. In Calcutta, 16 per cent of the wills recorded in the Mayor’s Court in the 1740s freed slaves and made bequests to them.These were the wills of self-made men, usually lower on the economic ladder, whose estates rarely included property in England,66 men such as John Ross, whose will freed Lucretia and bequeathed her ‘my Garden…and a Legacy of three hundred Rupees’. Lucretia was almost certainly Ross’s concubine in addition to his slave. In pre-colonial Indian society, concubines and domestic slaves were regular, expected ­members of elite households. Concubines entered their position through ritual ceremonies and were often entitled to revenue and gifts during the lifetime of their paramour.The children born to them became members of the household, with expectation of paternal support.67 Some of the British subjects who adopted concubinage appear to have done so with some knowledge of these reciprocal responsibilities. Their wills carefully stipulate on-going shelter and maintenance for their concubine, as Andrew Pechier, surgeon of Fort St. George, did when he bequeathed Phillippa de Luna ‘two Hundred pagodas and the House She now lives in near the padres burying place’. Piecher allocated the remainder of his estate to support his four-year-old daughter Catherine, ‘got upon the Body of Phillippa’, bequeathing her 600 pounds, with the remainder to his sister for Catherine’s care, charging her to ‘bring her up as a Mother’ in England.68 At the very least, these men granted their concubines their jewels and clothes, recognizing that without specific articulation, concubines could lose possession of these gifts at the death of their male counterpart.69 Other men saw concubinage as an opportunity to extend the male sexual privilege granted to elite white men in British culture to themselves in relations with subordinate women, such as concubines in India. Their adaptation of concubinage was similar to their counterparts in 435

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Kingston. Sometimes they made provisions in their wills for their ‘natural’ non-marital children, even naming the mothers of those children, without bequeathing anything to them, as Alexander Arbuthnoll, Calcutta merchant, did in 1738.70 Promiscuity among male British subjects was pervasive. Of the babes baptized in Calcutta from 1758 to 1766, 37 per cent were born out of wedlock and recorded without fathers, the same level of documented illegitimacy as in early eighteenth-century Kingston.71 Here too we find a radical departure from marriage as the centrepiece of family formation: British men created complex households containing a hierarchy of women and their children, from legitimate martial children to acknowledged non-marital children by their Indian or Portuguese Eurasian concubines and children born by the Indian, African and Malay women they owned as slaves. Such innovation in personal life could hardly be imagined outside the eighteenth-century colonial context and was certainly not attainable for clerks and artisans or men of their ilk in Britain as it was in Kingston, Madras and Calcutta. Like the ‘overly independent’ women of Philadelphia and the free women of Kingston, they too had utilized the urban colonial environment to self-fashion personal life.

Cities at sea: Transregional developments The eighteenth-century colonial city was fertile ground for innovation. The British colonial cities that experienced the quickest pace and most intense urbanization, Philadelphia, Kingston, Madras and Calcutta, were all communities that simultaneously forged inventive sexual cultures. Their vibrancy and ingenuity created an environment within which budding forms of individualized sexual subjectivities could emerge, but also supported a stunning increase in the sexual exploitation of women and expansion of white male sexual privilege. During the first six decades of the eighteenth century, demographic and economic growth went hand in hand with a revolution in personal life of the British subjects building the colonial project abroad. Then, in all three places, the last decades of the eighteenth century ushered in new efforts to shape, constrain and regulate sexuality. First in Kingston, Madras and Calcutta, beginning in the 1760s; and next in Philadelphia, starting in the 1790s, these multi-faceted, freewheeling sexual cultures were reined in to support British imperial and American national goals. Promotion of a distinct white sexual subjectivity, in contrast to that ascribed to people of colour, took centre stage. In Jamaica, the assembly put limits on the financial legacies white men could bequeath to their children of colour and extended mulatto legal status from three to four generations, erecting a roadblock in the procreative path to whiteness. In British India, the EIC officially condemned unions with local women (licit and illicit), eliminated pension rights to Indian wives of Company personnel, prohibited the education of orphan Eurasian children in Britain and banned Eurasian offspring from appointment as civil and military officers. In Philadelphia, public policy on illegitimacy shifted to highlight the out-of-wedlock sexual activity of women of colour and hide that of white men and began dismantling the child support system.72 Stepping back from the particularities of each colonial city allows us to see this as a transregional development. Politicians in all three places, and in Britain itself, articulated a political philosophy of state formation and empire that clashed with the innovative sexual cultures its largest eighteenth-century port cities had created. British interests in making their expanding empire respectable conflicted with the variety of sexual relationships that male British subjects had with native women in India and with enslaved African women in the Caribbean. In the new United States, the sexual profligacy of the citizenry conflicted with the project of building a virtuous republic. The emerging modern state now sought to shape the sexual scripts used to explain this diversity of sexual behaviour. In light of the new EIC policies, many British men sought to shield themselves from scrutiny by secreting their relationships. In Kingston, the 436

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longstanding British fiction of black female licentiousness was now combined with a cultural imperative to draw the curtain on white men’s sexual slavery and concubinage with women of colour, to promote an image of white British gentility and to highlight racialized sexualities.73 In Philadelphia, heightened attention on white women’s sexuality and compulsory compliance with new norms of inherent female passionlessness became the locus of racialized sexual difference.74 In none of these cities did the state’s efforts change the sexual behaviour of its late eighteenth-century white male inhabitants.75 However, placing a veneer of racialized sexualities over the diversity of sexual behaviour in the chief colonial cities in the Anglophone world did obscure the gendered and racial politics at work as Britain entered its imperial golden age and the nascent United States emerged.

Notes  1 Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Seaports and the Origins of the American Revolution (­Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 109–14, 210; Trevor Burnard and Emma Hart, ‘Kingston, Jamaica, and Charleston, South Carolina: A new look at comparative urbanization in plantation colonial America’, Journal of Urban History 39:2 (2012): 217–218; Trevor Burnard, ‘Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of modernity’ in The Urban Black Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esquerra, Matt D. Childs and James Sidbury (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 126–27; P. J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia: Trade to dominion, 1700–1765’ in The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume II The Eighteenth Century, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 494; Philip Lawson, The East India Company: A History (London: Longman, 1993), 26, 42–50.   2 Katherine Crawford, European Sexualities, 1400–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).   3 Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America 1743–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1955), 160.  4 The Antigua Gazette, ‘TRANSATLANTIC CRIM. CON’, 13 September 1798.  5 Nash, Urban Crucible, 109–110, 209; Billy G. Smith, The ‘Lower Sort’: Philadelphia’s Laboring People, 1750–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 206.   6 George E. O’Malley, Final Passages:The Intercolonial Slave Trade of British America, 1619–1807 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 201–207; Gary Nash, Forging Freedom:The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 8–10, 38.   7 Ira Berlin, Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998), 7–13.   8 Norma Basch, Framing American Divorce: From the Revolutionary Generation to the Victorians (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).   9 Clare A. Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, Philadelphia, 1730–1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 14–58. 10 Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 June 1772. 11 Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 14–58. On self-divorce throughout the British North American colonies: Clare A. Lyons, ‘Discipline, sex, and the republican self ’, in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), 560–77. 12 Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 42–58, 173–81. 13 Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 April 1771. 14 Joan Jensen, Loosening the Bonds: Mid-Atlantic Farm Women, 1750–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). 15 Karin Wulf, Not All Wives:Women of Colonial Philadelphia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 93–94, 130–48. 16 Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 59–114. 17 Ibid., 112–14. 18 Ibid., 115–81. 19 Lyons, ‘Discipline’. 20 These quantifiable cases of illegitimacy recorded by the Guardians of the Poor constitute only a portion of the out-of-wedlock births in Philadelphia; Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 62–94. 21 Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 69–72. 22 Ibid., 69, 88–91, 224. 23 Ibid., 101–112.

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Clare A. Lyons 24 Clare A. Lyons, ‘Mapping an Atlantic sexual culture: Homoeroticism in eighteenth-century Philadelphia’, William and Mary Quarterly 60:1 (2003): 199–54. 25 Burnard and Hart, ‘Kingston’, 214–17. 26 Atlantic Slave Trade Database, slavevoyages.org. During the eighteenth century, 317,932 enslaved Africans arrived in Barbados and 927,350 in Jamaica. (Kingston was Jamaica’s sole disembarkation port until mid-century and primary thereafter.) 27 Burnard, ‘Kingston, Jamaica: Crucible of modernity’, 125–27. 28 Ibid., 123–28. 29 Trevor Burnard, ‘  “Gay and agreeable ladies”: White women in mid-eighteenth-century Kingston, Jamaica’, Wadabagei, 9, 3 (2006): 27–49; Burnard and Hart, ‘Kingston’, 214–34; Edward Brathwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica, 1770–1820 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). 30 Diana Paton, ‘Punishment, crime, and the bodies of slaves in eighteenth-century Jamaica’, Journal of Social History, 34, 4 (2001): 923–54. 31 Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Hilary McD Beckles, ‘Property Rights in Pleasure’ in Centering Women: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society ed. H. Beckles (Kingston: Ian Randle, 1999), 22–37. 32 Supplement to the Jamaica Mercury, 7 August 1799, 24 June 1780. 33 Edward Pratter, 11 May 1736, Prerogative Court of Canterbury, National Archives, Kew (hereafter PCC). 34 Analysis based on Jamaica wills probated in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury (PCC), 1701–1769. Probate through the PCC was required of English subjects who died abroad but owned property in England or Wales and of mariners who died at sea. 35 Ibid. 36 This was first explored by Lucille Mathurin Mair in her 1974 PhD dissertation, recently published as Lucille Mair, A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655–1844, ed. Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepard (Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006). 37 Journals of the Assembly of Jamaica, vol. 3 (1731–1745): 122–123, 19 April 1732. 38 Conyers Dobby, 17 December 1750, PCC. 39 Robert McCulloch, 9 September 1750; Richard Ashton, 5 June 1732; Edward Manning, 5 May 1758, PCC; Journals, vol. 3, 440, 446 (1738), vol. 4, 66–67, 84, (1747), vol. 5, 376–377 (1762); James Hilton, 6 January 1772, Jamaica Supreme Court, Wills. Samuel J. Hurwitz and Edith F. Hurwitz, ‘A Token of Freedom: Private Bill Legislation for Free Negroes in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica’ William and Mary Quarterly 24 (1967): 423–431. 40 William Wyllys and Lucea Gregory, Journals, vol. 3, 569 (1741). 41 Kingston Baptisms, vol. 1 Sept 1722-1753, Registrar General’s Office, Twickenham Park, Jamaica. 42 R. L Adair, ‘Regional variations in illegitimacy and courtship patterns in England, 1538–1754 (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 1991); Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, Table 4, 75. 43 Between 1753 and 1774, most white women were unmarried at the time of death, when 34 per cent were widows and 24 per cent had never married. Burnard, ‘Gay’, 31. 44 Tony Henderson, Disorderly Women in Eighteenth-Century London: Prostitution and Control in the Metropolis 1730–1830 (London: Longman, 1999). 45 Marisa J. Fuentes, ‘Power and historical figuring: Rachel Pringle Polgreen’s troubled archive’, Gender & History, 22, 3 (November 2010): 564–584. 46 www.oldbaileyonline.com; Treasury T/53/25/224, National Archives, Kew. 47 Royal Gazette, Kingston, 27 October 1781. 48 Jamaica Assembly, 9 March 1725, 4 February 1731, National Archives, Kew. 49 Jamaica Mercury, 9 October 1779. 50 Madras was founded as Fort St. George in 1639 and Calcutta as Fort William in 1680. Population: Miles Ogborn, Global Lives: Britain and the World, 1550–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 89; Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (London: Random House, 2004), 247; P.  J. Marshall, ‘The British in Asia’, 494. 51 Armenian and Portuguese merchants were routinely residents of ‘White Town’ until 1749, when they were banned and many relocated to ‘Black Town’, the primary residential area of native Indians. Carl H. Nightingale, ‘Before race mattered: Geographies of the color line in early colonial Madras and New York’, American Historical Review, 113, 1 (Feb 2008): 48–71. 52 P.  J. Marshall, ‘Private British trade in the Indian Ocean before 1800’, in European Commercial Expansion in Early Modern Asia, ed. Om Prakash (Aldershot: Variorum, 1997), 237–61; Marshall, ‘The British in Asia’, 490–94.

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Cities at Sea 53 Adrian Carton, Mixed-Race and Modernity in Colonial India: Changing Concepts of Hybridity Across Empires (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 11–27. 54 List of Free Inhabitants of Fort St. George, February 1702, and Feb 1708, Oriental and India Office Collections, British Library (hereafter OIOC); ‘Register of Marriages St. Mary’s Fort St. George, 1680–1711’, The Genealogist 29 (London 1903); India Office Family History Search (hereafter IOFHS), ­British Library. 55 John Dolben, 12 May 1713, PCC; ‘Register of Marriages St. Mary’s’; List of Free Inhabitants of Fort St. George, February 1702. 56 Inter-ethnic marriage was also practiced by Company personnel in early Calcutta. Kathleen ­Blechynden, Calcutta Past and Present (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1905) 26, 79. 57 OICO. 58 Analysis based on all extant wills of British subjects who died in Madras and Calcutta, 1700–1749. Sources: Early Wills (all India) 1700–1725; Bengal Wills, 1704–1749; Madras Wills, 1736–1745 (1746– 1749 have not survived), OICO; and Madras decedents in Wills, PCC. For the late eighteenth century, see Indrani Chatterjee, ‘Coloring subalternity: Slaves, concubines and social orphans in early colonial India’, Subaltern Studies, 10 (Delhi, 1999) 47–97; Margot Finn, ‘Slaves out of context: Domestic slavery and the Anglo-Indian family, c. 1780–1830’ Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 19 (2009): 181–203. 59 George Petty, 24 June 1727, Bengal Wills, OIOC; Diary and Consultation Book for 1726 (Madras, 1919), 134–135. (hereafter DCB) 60 Tomas Hawker, 25 April 1727, Bengal Wills, OIOC; DCB for 1720, 73. 61 Adam Dawson, 9 April 1733, Bengal Wills, OIOC. 62 Ramya, Sreenivasan, ‘Drudges, dancing girls, concubines: Female slaves in Rajuput polity, 1500–1800’, in Slavery and South Asian History, ed. Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Maxwell Eaton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 136–61. For the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Indrani Chatterjee, Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 63 DCB (1895) 9 November 1682; DCB (1910), 2 February 1688, and 14 May 1688; Vestiges of Old Madras, 545; Chatterjee, ‘Coloring subalternity’. 64 Richard B. Allen, ‘Satisfying the want of the labouring people’: European slave-trading in the Indian Ocean, 1500–1850’, Journal of World History 21, 1 ( 2010): 45–73; Markus Vink, ‘”The world’s oldest trade”: Dutch slavery and slave trade in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century’, Journal of World History 14, 2 (2003): 131–77; Andrea Major, Slavery, Abolitionism and Empire in India, 1772–1843 (­Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012). 65 Samuel Glover, 9 January 1715, Mary Addison, 5 October 1719, Thomas Lovell, 26 June 1712, PCC; Baptisms St. Mary’s Madras, IOFHS, 1705–1706; DCB, 22 February 1699, 17 March 1702. 66 Only 10 per cent of the wills recorded in the Calcutta’s Mayor’s Court were subsequently proved in England’s PCC, as was required of estates with property in England. Mayor’s Court Calcutta, 1738, 1739, 1742, 1746, 1747, 1748, 1749 OICO. Not all years are extant. 67 Sreenivasan, ‘Drudges, dancing girls’, 144–46. 68 Andrew Pechier, 1 December 1730, Bengal Wills, OIOC. 69 Sreenivasan, ‘Drudges, dancing girls’, 149–52. 70 Alexander Arbuthnoll, 18 March 1738, Mayor Court Calcutta, OIOC. 71 Data derived from IOFHS, British Library, baptisms of the congregation of St. Anne’s Kathleen ­Blechynden, Calcutta Past and Present, (London: W. Thacker & Co., 1905) 78–79. 72 Devises Act, 19 December 1761, Laws of Jamaica 1681–1816 (St Jago de la Vega, 1819),Vol. 5, 67; Journals,Vol. 5, 376–377 (1762); Brooke Newman, ‘Gender, sexuality and the formation of racial identities in the eighteenth-century Anglo-Caribbean world’, Gender & History, 22, 3 (2010): 585–602; Mair, A Historical Study, 88–97; Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations: The Making of a Eurasian Community in British India, 1773–1833 (London: Curzon, 1996), 55–92; Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India:The Making of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) esp. 1–132, 213–223 (The 1800 pension policy was rescinded in 1825); Lyons, ‘Discipline’; Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 354–392. 73 The increased importance of sentiment and the British anti-slavery movement’s use of sexual slavery to illustrate slavery’s corrupting influence encouraged greater discretion. Sarah M. S. Pearsall, ‘“The late flagrant instance of depravity in my family”: The story of an Anglo-Jamaican cuckold’, William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Series, 60, 3 (2003): 549–82; Henrice Altink, ‘“Deviant and dangerous”: Proslavery representations of Jamaican slave women’s sexuality, ca. 1780–1834’, Slavery and Abolition 26

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Clare A. Lyons (2005): 271–88; Barbara Bush, ‘”Sable venus”, “she devil” or “drudge”? British slavery and the “fabulous ­fiction” of Black women’s identities, c. 1650–1838, Women’s History Review, 9, 4 (2000): 761–89. 74 Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble, 237–392. 75 Ghosh, Sex and the Family; Christopher Hawes, Poor Relations, 4–9; Mair, A Historical Study, 268–294; Lyons, Sex Among the Rabble.

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34 Gender, Race and the Spatiality of the Colonial Town in India Mary Hancock

Introduction Britain’s colonization of South Asia began in the early seventeenth century with a handful of East India Company-controlled coastal trading posts, but by the end of the eighteenth century, the Company had extended its territorial control deep into the subcontinent’s interior through annexure, alliances, seizure and purchase.The colonial ports that grew from its original entrepôts anchored its power: Madras (now Chennai) on the south-east coast, Bombay (now Mumbai) on the west coast, and Calcutta (now Kolkata) in the north-eastern Gangetic delta region. Originally, these settlements, essentially fortified trading posts with adjacent, more populous indigenous habitation sites, were similar in morphology, function and demographic composition.1 Over time, they, along with the former Mughal centre of Delhi, were transformed into primary cities serving as hubs within the networks of communication and transportation that linked British India with imperial metropoles and other colonies.Their stabilisation and growth led, moreover, to the emergence of secondary, or link, cities, often pre-colonial administrative and market centres such as Bangalore (now Bengalaru) and Bareilly, which connected coastal sites with interior areas of extraction, manufacture and commerce.2 Finally, a unique type of town, the hill station, emerged in the early nineteenth century following Britain’s consolidation of territorial control. Located in temperate mountainous areas, these sites included Simla, Udagamandalam, Naini Tal and Darjeeling. They were built in regions of sparse, usually tribal, occupation and served as summer retreats for British civil servants and businessmen and military personnel, joined later by Indian royals and professional elites.3 Despite differences in form and function, all three types of towns were hybrid spaces in which Indian and Eurasian residents outnumbered Britons and other Europeans throughout the colonial period.4 In plan, they comprised mosaics of indigenous and European settlement forms and architectural styles, while also generating novel amalgams. In India, as in other colonies, domination by a foreign minority rested on force and on the intricate bureaucratic machinery of surveillance; colonial cities, however, were made up of social spaces in which domination was enacted also in quotidian and informal ways.The hybrid spaces of the colonial town were constitutive spaces of such domination insofar as they arose within and helped perpetuate networks of affect, information, governance and finance between 441

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colonial cities and European metropoles, with nodes for the exercise of power encompassing the homes and home-like spaces of colonial occupation. This chapter argues that ‘home’, as much as it was a trope for narratives on both national pasts and futures, was also a site of and model for the exercise of colonial power.5 Domination within these spaces took the form of ‘domestication’, which included the gendered social labour of reproducing the ‘ruling race’ through socialisation, leisure and sports, dress and commensality within contexts of European residential and associational life, yielding both the whiteness of British colonizers and the myriad status distinctions within that community.6 The same homes, clubs, gardens, schools and churches where Britishness was cultivated, moreover, were also contact zones between European and Indian populations where racial boundaries were made and crossed through interactions, initiated during the period of ‘nascent colonialism’ that preceded the British Raj, between conjugal partners (typically European men and Indian or Eurasian women), between servants and masters, between East India Company merchants and local suppliers and brokers, between teachers and students, between missionaries and local residents.7 In these contexts, European domestic imaginaries – packaged in the form of pedagogy and reform – were sites of everyday exercises of power through their circulation as models for the reorganization of local lifeways.8 This chapter draws on previous work on the domesticating projects of empire in its analysis of colonial town formation, using as case studies two colonial towns, Chennai and Udagamandalam. Both were located in what was initially called Madras Province and later Madras Presidency, and each exemplifies a distinct type of colonial town, a primary city and a hill station, respectively. Following brief histories of each town’s development, the chapter considers how colonialism’s civilising mission unfolded through making and crossing gendered and racialized boundaries in three key arenas: homes, clubs and mission stations. Each exhibited distinctive strategies for enacting colonialism’s domesticating power through their transfers of a metropolitan domestic imaginary, and together they formed a socio-spatial nexus of colonial occupation, their production of gendered and racialized order as necessary to the formation of the colonial towns as roadways, financial institutions, courts, factories and offices.

Emergent urbanisms In 1639, British merchants established a trading post on the site of the south Indian city now known as Chennai.9 It comprised a fortified trading post, dubbed ‘White Town’, adjoined by ‘Black Town’, a settlement of indigenous weavers, artisans, merchants, brokers and service ­workers.10 The site, just north of a Portuguese settlement and Roman Catholic mission station (San Thome) established a century earlier, was quickly populated, with its size estimated at 7000 in 1639; of these, no more than 300 were European men, many of whom adopted the Portuguese settlers’ practice of maintaining sexual liaisons with Indian and Eurasian women. Europeans’ minority status persisted throughout the colonial period, as did the imbalanced gender ratio. The paucity of European women, while initially a product of the Company’s prohibition of women on its posts, reflected the capitalist logic of British colonial expansion in India, which relied on economic and political control by a ruling minority shored up by military force rather than settler colonialism. Over the next two centuries, the trading post grew into a city known by Europeans as Madras and by Indians as Chennai, retaining its racially bifurcated geography as it expanded. Although its European population increased only marginally during Chennai’s first century of existence, the geographic area under Company control grew. During the 1600s, Chennai’s Fort St. George was rebuilt and enlarged and, by 1700, it housed the town hall, an arsenal, a mint, a Roman Catholic chapel and an Anglican church, as well as assorted residences and barracks. 442

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The final quarter of the seventeenth century saw the Company’s acquisition of territory to the south and west of the fort, with Mount Road (now Anna Salai), a seven-mile corridor running southwest from the Fort; and the west-running Poonamallee High Road being the primary axes for this growth. As the Company annexed surrounding villages to the west and south of the fort as ‘suburbs’, its more affluent servants purchased or leased plots in those areas, building walled compounds housing bungalows and gardens that sat alongside vernacular residences and religious sites. Institutional expansion followed residential growth; by the mid-eighteenth century, institutional spaces included assembly rooms, a renovated government house and banqueting hall, additional Anglican and Catholic churches, and leisure sites such as the Pantheon (a literary club), a freemason’s hall and the Asiatic Society.11 Over this same period, indigenous and Eurasian merchants and dubashes (persons who served as language translators and business brokers) were also enriched by the Company’s trade, and many joined Europeans in these new suburbs.12 And, given the prevalence of conjugal relations between European men and local women, encompassing concubinage, slavery, cohabitation and, more rarely, marriage, mixed-race households were also present in some of the new residential areas, notably in San Thome and Vepery, a village west of the fort. Throughout the eighteenth century, men outnumbered women among the European population, despite the Company’s encouragement, and occasional facilitation, of marriages between its employees and European women.13 The few European women who had joined Companyemployed husbands and brothers in Chennai by the mid-eighteenth century were expected to act as hostesses for dinner parties, dances and similar gatherings. More typically, Chennai’s European public culture involved male-centred, but class-segregated, events that extended both emergent metropolitan club life and styles of military sociality.14 And, mirroring the ubiquity of mixed race unions as well as the emerging interests in Orientalist scholarship among Company officials, these activities included Eurasians and indigenes. Banquets, cultural gatherings and games took place in the new institutional spaces, like the Pantheon and the Asiatic Society, and in bungalows. They were attended by Company officials and by local merchants and dubashes. Wealthy indigenous and Eurasian merchants also acted as cultural patrons, hosting vernacular musical and poetic performances in their Black Town and suburban homes for European and local audiences. Barracks and workers’ residential areas furnished spaces of social interaction for the Company’s mercenaries and contract labourers.

Making municipalities As of 1798, when its municipal boundary was drawn, Chennai’s 27 square miles comprised a decentralised amalgam of various kinds of settlements, including 35 villages, with commercial and public spaces typical of both European and Indian towns interspersed with open, agricultural space. Its population, estimated at 236,500 in 1798, had grown to approximately 397,000 by 1860.15 Over that time, its European population increased from about 500 to 3500 (the latter approximately 25 per cent female) due to the migration of ‘non-official’ residents that followed the Company’s loss of its trading monopoly (1833) and India’s designation as Crown Colony (1858).16 Affirming the persistence of inter-racial conjugality, Chennai’s Eurasian population was estimated at just over 26,000, with nearly equal proportions of males and females.17 As Chennai grew, its colonial core was further enlarged with banks, rail stations, museums and archives; Protestant mission stations, including schools and a press, joined the Roman Catholic mission operations, founded earlier by Portuguese settlers, in mixed-race areas adjacent to the fort and to its west. By the final quarter of the nineteenth century, as the numbers of European women and children increased in the city, commercial and leisure spaces, including 443

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department stores, theatres, parks and a broad promenade, the Marina, helped expand Chennai’s colonial core.18 Chennai’s urbanisation was sustained by the Company’s ever-growing territorial control during the first half of the nineteenth century; this control underwrote the establishment of hill stations, which commenced in the 1820s with the founding of Udagamandalam and, shortly thereafter, Simla and Darjeeling. Hill stations were in mountainous areas, where cooler and more temperate climates offered seasonal respite to Europeans who lived and worked in the plains. Putative connections linking climate to race and to health, as well as the appeal of hunting and other leisure activities, made the various hill stations attractive to Europeans, official and non-official.19 Udagamandalam (Anglicised as ‘Ootacamund’ or ‘Ooty’), a village in the Nilgiri mountains of peninsular South Asia, began life as a colonial town in 1827, when the provincial government erected a sanatorium for injured soldiers and a few colonial officials built seasonal residences.20 Udagamandalam quickly gained a reputation as a convalescence site for anyone considered vulnerable to the dangers attributed to the region’s tropical climate, which was thought to have debilitating physical and moral effects, theorized as being responsible for the racial inferiority of native populations. These recommendations were both gendered and racialized. Udagamandalam’s temperate climate was deemed to offer masculinising benefits for soldiers because it afforded the pursuit of sports such as hunting. Its climate was also thought to protect women and children from the dangers to health and morality attributed to the tropics.21 Although Udagamandalam’s population was a fraction of Chennai’s, the European portion of that population was considerably higher, with women (mostly wives of civil and military officers) making up a comparatively greater proportion of the European segment, a pattern repeated in other hill stations.22 Udagamandalam grew quickly; by the mid-1840s, it included 100 dwellings and, in the 1860s, when rail connections were established, the numbers of homes and temporary accommodations increased, reaching 328 by 1897.23 Due to its popularity among government officials, it was declared provincial summer capital (1860), entailing the shift of official functions and personnel to Udagamandalam for 4–6 months each year, a pattern repeated in Darjeeling and Simla. In 1866, it was designated a municipality, using revenues gained through fees and taxes to develop and maintain infrastructure, public buildings, gardens and other facilities for European residents.24 It also attracted indigenous royals and urban elites, who began to acquire property in the 1870s.25 Contrasting with Chennai, however, the missionary presence in Udagamandalam was largely limited to missionaries on furlough, with a few small stations (both Protestant and Roman Catholic) in the town’s periphery for proselytization, education and medical assistance among the nearby tribal communities. Dispersed cottages, styled after England’s rural vernacular, surrounded by gardens and orchards (including transplanted species of British flora) dominated Udagamandalam’s built environment.26 These residential and garden spaces flanked a town centre formed, initially, by St. Stephen’s Anglican church (1831) and later filled in by public and commercial structures, including Madras Army Headquarters (1884).27 As the seasonal stays of European families had shifted to year-round residencies for wives and children of businessmen and officers, boarding schools, a racetrack, a library, botanical garden, assembly rooms, and a pedestrian promenade appeared. Its European aura was further sustained by the invisibility of areas of indigenous occupation.28 The bazaar, where indigenous commercial and residential sites were clustered, was physically separated from the central thoroughfare, while tribal communities occupied areas outside the town – together, these made indigenous inhabitants, with the exception of servants and labourers, marginal elements of European experience.29 Reinforcing the spatial assertions of Britishness were Britons’ reproduction of the social conditions of their homeland and, 444

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in particular, its gendered domestic order, through the rituals of hospitality, courtship and child socialisation that were pursued in Udagamandalam more intensively than in Chennai and other colonial centres.30 In both Chennai and Udagamandalam, new public spaces were sites of mixed-gender sociality; and, especially in Chennai, they were also racial contact zones. These sites’ design and use incorporated norms of European civility. Central promenades, for example, typified the healthenhancing ‘lungs’ being introduced in European cities.31 In the colonies, these were considered essential because of the ‘congestion’ attributed to native settlements, also thought to prevail among metropolitan working classes; they also facilitated British habits of promenade, the seeing and being seen that was part of their own sociality while offering object lessons in civility for colonial subjects. Similar object lessons were essayed in government schools and museums and in Protestant mission stations, where design and pedagogy were combined to promulgate new norms of domesticity, work, education and worship.32 The next section expands on these observations by considering how colonial power was enacted in Chennai’s and Udagamandalam’s homes, clubs and mission stations, revealing further the simultaneously gendered and racializing processes of urban formation.

Domesticating power The racialized order of colonial towns from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was sustained and regenerated within homes and home-like institutions, with white women often acting as ‘custodians’ of racial distinctions.33 Within Victorian metropolitan culture, the domestic world of the white middle classes was understood as a sphere that conjoined patriarchal authority and feminine nurture, grounded in Christian principles and capable of yielding the masculine citizens and soldiers of the nation.34 These values were intensified in their transfer to colonial towns, where producing and maintaining racial difference within a world of cross-racial dependencies constituted the ‘central paradox’ of the British Raj.35 The socio-spatial order of the home, moreover, was mirrored in the extra-domestic worlds of colonial clubs and mission stations, both of which replicated elements of everyday domesticity. Clubs were important stages for the collective activities, such as sports, that knit colonial society together, their spatial layouts and sociality derived from the rhythms and rituals of domestic life.36 Yet, while clubs, like homes, sought to minimize and control cross-racial interactions, including those involving Eurasians, Protestant mission stations were explicitly intended as sites for racial interactions, with Eurasian Christians envisioned as ideal brokers for Christianity’s role in the civilising mission. Mission stations, usually compounds with residences, orphanages, schools and other institutions, incorporated the socio-spatial norms of British middle-class homes in their design but used those spaces to impart object lessons in Christian modernity to the colonial subjects with whom those spaces were unequally shared. In Chennai, European families continued to reside in the architecturally hybrid bungalows popularised in the eighteenth century, with hotels and guesthouses offering accommodation for single men. In Udagamandalam, family homes – bungalows as well as cottages that recalled village England – were distributed in plots along meandering lanes extending from a c­ ommercial/ administrative core. In both towns, homes were spaces of intimate labour as well as nodes for social networks. Domestic sociability ranged from the everyday activities associated with women’s supervision of servants and child socialisation to the elaborate rituals associated with visitation.37 Home-based sociality also entailed mixed-gender activities, such as dinner parties choreographed by senior women. All such activities were critical to the cultivation of white femininity and to household status production and, while characteristic of all spaces of colonial 445

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domesticity, were intensified in hill stations. During sojourns in hill stations, Europeans could cultivate social and affective ties with each other rather than engaging principally in performances meant to maintain their status as ruling race.38 Although anxieties about racial reproduction were evident in the colonial prohibition on inter-racial marriage and the encouragement of prostitution as a space of inter-racial sexuality, the popularity of housekeeping manuals suggested that the same anxieties suffused colonial domestic life. This genre appeared contemporaneously in both colonial and metropolitan contexts, but those targeting colonial contexts addressed the perceived loss of household skills among women in colonial society, a phenomenon attributed to the numbers and duties of servants in colonial homes.39 The manuals also acknowledged the conditions of colonial life, such as the types of available foodstuffs and utensils, incorporating this information in narratives that emphasized the challenges of producing racial identity and difference in foreign environments. With their advice about proper diet, instructions for making dishes suited to the British constitution, methods of cleaning and home maintenance and management of servants, the manuals reveal how status and whiteness were understood to be entwined with physiological well-being and domestic order.40 The frequent attention to servants indicates that, although the domestic realm was a key site for producing the ruling race, it was also considered a space of intimate and potentially damaging race mixing.41 Housekeeping manuals asserted, on the one hand, that proper household functioning required as many as 30 servants, both regular and occasional. On the other hand, they described the prolonged contact with Indians that the presence of servants entailed as having degenerative effects (especially for children, who were routinely cared for by Indian and Eurasian servants) that could be compounded over time and transmitted intergenerationally. Racial mixing due to bodily contact and affective ties was not the only form of interaction that could weaken British identity and power; interactions between persons and material environments also required management. While such threats were anticipated in public spaces, homes were also susceptible to the dangers of such contact. The concern with climate that underwrote Britons’ seasonal flight to hill stations is an obvious example of how porous bodily boundaries were secured. Less obvious was the potential degradation of British identity through the muddling of aesthetic distinctions regarding material culture. Household manuals offered prescriptive remarks about furnishing, including how to select among available local ­materials – acknowledging that the frequency of colonial families’ transfers between cities made the maintenance of a British space a matter of continuous negotiation.42 Clubs, like homes, were spaces of domestic intimacies where racial interactions, while anticipated and necessary, were subject to control. Clubs were ubiquitous in colonial urban landscapes, facilitating sociality through sports, commensality and leisure among colonial families as well as the single males who predominated within the European population. Chennai’s clubs grew out of the cultural and literary societies and Masonic lodges popular in the eighteenth century, and like them were designed for male sociality. They were organized with varying degrees of racial exclusivity, with full membership usually reserved either explicitly or in common practice to European men, and other, more restricted categories of participation, for example, guests, for elite Indians. Most clubs further restricted membership using occupation, titles and wealth as criteria, with the result that larger towns had a stratified group of clubs. The Madras Race Club (1777) and the Madras Club (1832), both exclusively for a male, European membership, were joined by the Boat Club, Gymkhana and Cricket Club in the mid-1800s; and later by the Adyar Club. In 1873, indigenous elites countered with their own Cosmopolitan Club, open to both European and Indian members.43 Udagamandalam’s ranked roster included the Ootacamund, Nilgiri and Hunt Clubs.44 446

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Wives and children of club members were allowed to participate as guests in designated sections, such as the Madras Club’s Ladies Pavilion, or for special events; only one, the Adyar Club, admitted women as members. Only late in the nineteenth century did Chennai’s and Udagamandalam’s clubs begin to include women as members, and it was still later, in the early twentieth century, that women founded their own clubs. Headquartered in purpose-built structures, clubs were proximate to European residential and commercial zones, and many shared the neo-classical architectural styles of government buildings.They were usually set in large compounds, surrounded by gardens and open areas meant for outdoor recreation. Interiors included game and dining rooms, libraries, smoking chambers and assembly halls. While accommodating extensions of everyday domesticity, such as meals, they served also as spaces of colonial public culture.45 The British books, newspapers and magazines that were stocked in club libraries enabled patrons to maintain senses of simultaneity and connectedness with imperial metropoles; clubs were also stages where local networks of political and economic influence could be cultivated. If club-based sociality helped constitute networks among Europeans and Indians, elites’ clubs also were emblematic of the core tensions of that sociality.46 While bonds forged by common racial identity extended potentially to all Europeans, clubs also rested on and reproduced elaborate intersectional hierarchies of race, class, occupation and gender, both formally, in explicit status ranking, as in the 1866 Warrant of Precedence, a ranked order of titles for the purposes of official protocol; and in practice.47 Different categories of participation within clubs differentiated men from women, businessmen from officials and elite Indians from their middle-class counterparts. Moreover, like colonial homes, clubs’ physical plants and services required the daily labour of Indian and Eurasian servants. Clubs, even if nominally restricted to European members, thus entailed continuous, quotidian negotiations of racial, gender and status boundaries.48 Clubs’ exclusivity thus extended and replicated metropolitan notions of distinction and status, entwining these with both gender and race. They perpetuated the culture of male homosociality that had prevailed during the early decades of colonial expansion, but, by reorganizing the interactions with wealthy indigenes and Eurasians that eighteenth-century social spaces had accommodated, put this homosociality to use within colonial state formation and in ­imperial networks. While homes and clubs were spaces in which Britons sought to minimize and control crossracial interactions, such interactions were solicited in Protestant religious institutions, missions especially. Portuguese expansion into South Asia had been accompanied by the establishment of Roman Catholic missions in southern coastal areas, a process that accelerated in the sixteenth century, producing many Roman Catholic converts among populations with whom Portuguese settlers intermarried. Churches, sometimes displacing mosques or temples, anchored Portuguese settlements. Protestant mission stations were inaugurated in the early eighteenth century and multiplied in the nineteenth century after Company restrictions on immigration were relaxed. These stations were in primary and secondary cities and in rural areas, and, by 1906, 1846 of these existed.49 Most (719) were managed by British missionary organizations, followed by American (331) and other European operations (124), with the remainder jointly administered by Indian and foreign bodies.50 Like the colonial household, the mission station was a site of patriarchal authority complemented by feminised affect, anchored in the early nineteenth century by the figure of the missionary wife and later by the unmarried female missionary.51 Women’s participation in mission was solicited by appealing to the same ideals of Victorian womanhood that sanctified women’s roles as mothers and domestic helpmeets. Christian modernity was presented as the antidote for the brutalisation of women that ‘Oriental’ religions, Hinduism especially, were thought to valorise. Armed with the idea that mission was ‘woman’s work for woman’, British 447

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and American women travelled to India from the mid-century forward to evangelise; to staff orphanages, schools and clinics; and to train native evangelists, catechists and Bible women.52 These activities reproduced racial hierarchies while also fostering complicated partnerships between missionaries and local mission subjects.53 Female missionaries delivered object lessons in Christian modernity to local populations by modelling Christian domesticity through stations’ layout, architecture, furnishings and social life; and by intervening in local homes, typically by visiting local women to teach skills such as reading and needlework. These projects, moreover, engaged missionaries and local Christians in various forms of collaboration, which brought the work of making and unmaking racial boundaries into contexts of religiously inflected work and affect.‘Zenana mission’ (zenana referred to the women’s quarters of elite Hindu and Muslim homes) encompassed these efforts. Indeed, the strategy of zenana mission relied on and extended the zenana as a key colonial trope.54 On the one hand, zenana denoted a gendered and sexualised emblem of the corrupt moral order of South Asia, which linked Hinduism’s and Islam’s putative victimisation of women with the stereotypical effeminacy of Hindu and Muslim men. On the other hand, it also identified a principal locus for intervention by colonialism’s civilising mission, through both secular reforms and Christianisation. One of Chennai’s stations, the Madras Zenana Mission, can illustrate these operations and the racial boundary work that they entailed. Located alongside other Protestant institutions in Vepery, an historically Eurasian district just west of the fort, the station was founded in 1863 by an Indian convert as a residence-cum-office. It expanded in the 1890s under the supervision of a Eurasian Christian Methodist missionary, Grace Stephens, to a complex of six buildings, including two reception areas (one for low-caste visitors, the other for elite), a residence for high-caste converts, missionary residences, offices and work spaces and an orphanage and nursery.55 Outside the compound’s walls were brick cottages housing the station’s Indian Christian workers. The station served simultaneously as a residence for the missionaries (American, European and Eurasian) stationed in Chennai, who travelled to local homes to conduct the incremental work of Christianisation. As an office, it was a node in the global mission bureaucracy. Like other such stations, it was also intended as an exemplary Christian home whose cleanliness and rationalised time discipline would educate neophyte Indian Christians about the flaws in their own homes and lifeways and the promise of Christian modernity.56 Achieving the latter aim involved bringing local women and children, like orphans, widows and converts, into the mission station space as residents. The mission station, like the club, extended and reimagined domestic space and its daily rituals. In the mission station, neophyte Christians were incorporated within a familylike unit headed by missionaries, and they were encouraged to adopt the signs of respectability in behaviour, dress and marriage customs that had come to be associated with a Christianised bourgeoisie.57 Missionaries also devised a new technique, the ‘zenana party’, to bring local Hindu and Muslim women to mission stations as visitors.58 A temporary zenana was fashioned in the station’s courtyard using curtains and existing architectural features, and women were entertained there with contests and games, gift distribution and snacks. By appropriating and re-signifying the zenana, they hoped to expose elite women to the Christian modernity that suffused the domestic world of the mission compound. This ensemble of material practices produced the mission station as a social space by drawing upon existing racial categories but also by reworking them, in particular through the focus on Eurasian spaces and persons. Stations throughout the colonial world tended to be set apart, often located in racial frontiers – spaces between European and indigenous habitation areas.59 In Chennai, these included the districts west of the fort, where Eurasian Christian descendants of eighteenth-century mixed-race unions remained concentrated. Udagamandalam’s English village-scape lacked comparable mission stations; instead, stations founded for work with local 448

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tribal communities were located in rural frontiers, near indigenous habitation areas outside the municipal boundary. Racial frontiers also existed in embodied forms among stations’ staff. British and ­American missionaries recruited Eurasian Christians as teachers, catechists and evangelisers precisely because of the affinities with both European and indigenous moral and physiological attributes that they were thought to embody. While Eurasians were routinely denigrated in the mission press, like in other European sources, as ‘vain’, ‘suspicious’ and ‘untrustworthy’, they were also considered more capable of gaining converts due to their racial affinity with indigenes. E ­ urasian Christians were thus described as essential links, with capacities to strategically affiliate and disaffiliate with local Hindus and Muslims.60 The Madras Zenana Mission’s Eurasian supervisor embodied this polarity and its instability.61 She used English as her first language, and all surviving photographs show her in Western dress and accoutrements; she nonetheless took opportunities to emphasise her Indian-ness. Her reports claim familiarity with Hindu ritual space and practice and, in letters, she routinely described herself as ‘India’s Own’. The white missionaries who staffed the stations also performed frontier identities. While sharing core values and a common sense of racial identity with colonial ruling and elite classes, their often working-class backgrounds, zealous religiosity and close interactions with indigenous and Eurasian Christians (many of whom were poor and/or low caste) earned the disdain of elites, both British and Indian. For their parts, missionaries occasionally criticised those colonial laws and mores that seemed to forestall Christianisation, such as the colonial government’s reluctance to interfere with caste institutions and with Hindu and Muslim religious practices; in some instances, they made common cause with abolitionists who critiqued the parallels between systems of caste and racial discrimination.62 The nineteenth-century mission station and the relations between missionaries and mission subjects that it fostered were key sites for grappling with the intrinsically unstable and always intersecting boundaries of race and gender. Like the British homes and clubs where whiteness was cultivated, Protestant mission stations were intended as islands of Christian modernity. Unlike those other colonial institutions, however, mission stations were also laboratories where new forms of Christian domesticity could be displayed and enacted, where missionaries themselves attempted to manage the sources of moral and physiological contagion that they perceived around them and where racial boundaries were made and crossed in the making of a new type of home.

Conclusion The urban experiments of South Asia’s colonizers introduced novel morphological and infrastructural features and settlement types to the subcontinent while appropriating and re-­signifying extant urban spaces. These new cities were not only crucial nodes for maintaining political and economic connections with imperial metropoles and industrial centres but were also enclaves for constituting and reproducing British colonisers as a ruling race, processes that were fundamentally gendered. Racial boundaries of colonial were thus drawn and redrawn on gendered and sexualised bodies. A comparison of two colonial towns, Chennai and Udagamandalam, show how race and gender were, together, spatially inscribed and embodied in the establishment of colonial rule. Each developed by claiming territory deemed, in European eyes, to be empty, and each grew by importing European socio-spatial norms and practices – architectural styles, infrastructural features, institutional and residential spaces – producing ‘homespun creations’ that recombined those elements with indigenous materials and social forms.63 449

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These homespun creations were products and vehicles for colonial rule, an enterprise that entailed exercise of power through political, economic and military force as well as through domestication. The latter rubric encompasses the socio-cultural and biological reproduction of Britons as India’s ruling race and Britain’s promulgation of its civilising mission. Both aspects of domestication shaped and were, in turn, shaped by colonial urban form, especially its homes and the home-like institutions of clubs and mission stations. Colonial cities were extensions of metropolitan socio-spatial arrangements; these arrangements were enacted in myriad rituals of colonial life performed in homes and clubs, such as visiting, dinner parties, dances and games. In these arenas, status and distinctions within colonial society were negotiated and racial boundaries between Britons and indigenes asserted. Chennai and Udagamandalam were complementary spaces for these practices, with Udagamandalam, as ‘nursery’ of the ruling race, being home to more intensified forms of social and racial reproduction.64 These same racial boundaries, however, were on-going products of negotiation in arenas that ranged from Europeans’ daily interactions with Indian servants to the uneven expressions of cross-racial sociality within ­British Indian clubland. These negotiations mean that colonial cities were also spaces of experimentation; they were places where Britain’s civilising mission was enacted in new spatial forms and practices, including those crafted through the influential evangelical mission movement of the nineteenth century. The idea of a civilising mission had been fuelled by evangelical Protestant aspirations and, not surprisingly, India was a site of intense mission interest throughout the nineteenth century, resulting in the creation of nearly 2000 Protestant mission stations. Issues of gendered and racial representation and action are entwined with the development, use and occupation of these spaces of modern Christian domesticity. They materialised the gendered nature of colonialism’s civilising mission: its foundation in a gendered critique of the ‘heathen’ world of the colony; its articulation with reformist projects dedicated to correcting local gender norms; and its enactment through the gendered agency of mission practice, from the heteronormative missionary couple of the early years to the female-dominated missions of the late nineteenth century. At the same time, mission stations’ position within and reproduction of racial frontiers – including white missionaries’ simultaneous valorisation and denigration of mixed-race Christian subjects – depended on and reworked the racial hybridity that characterized the nascent colonialism of the eighteenth century. Like colonial clubs and homes, mission stations exerted power through their recreation and continued reinvention of racially complex domestic spaces. This chapter’s comparison of three exemplary spaces within colonial towns reveals the ways that spatial norms and practices of European domesticity were transposed to colonial towns and reworked as colonisers and colonised grappled with always-unstable distinctions of race and gender.

Notes 1 James Heitzman, The City in South Asia (New York and Oxford: Routledge, 2008), 87–100, 108–15; see also Om Prakash, European Commercial Enterprise in Pre-Colonial India, New Cambridge History of India 2.5 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 2 James Heitzman, Network City: Planning the Information Society in Bangalore (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 23–32; Heitzman, The City, 118–21, 129–35. 3 Heitzman, The City, 118–128; Dane Kennedy, The Magic Mountains (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 3; Judith Kenny, ‘Climate, race and imperial authority’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 85 (1995): 694–96; see also Judith Kenny, ‘Constructing an imperial hill station’, (PhD dissertation, Syracuse University, 1990. 4 Eurasian rather than Anglo-Indian is used to describe these mixed-race communities to denote the variety of groups encompassed and to avoid the ambiguity of Anglo-Indian, which can refer to British colonial residents and to mixed-race descendants of European and Indian unions.

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The Colonial Town in India   5 Antoinette Burton, ‘House/daughter/nation’, Journal of Asian Studies 56 (1997): 922–23; see also, Ann Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).   6 See, for example, Swapna Bannerjee, Men, Women and Domestics (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004); Benjamin Cohen, In the Club (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015); Mary Procida, Married to Empire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); Mrinalini Sinha, ‘Britishness, clubbability and the colonial public sphere’, Journal of British Studies 15 (2001): 489–521.  7 Durba Ghosh, Sex and the Family in Colonial India (Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 35–39; Catherine Hall, ‘Of gender and empire’ in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 72–75; Philippa Levine, ‘Sexuality, gender and empire’ in Levine, Gender and Empire, 138–44.   8 See for example, Mary Hancock, ‘Home science and the nationalization of domesticity in colonial India’, Modern Asian Studies, 35 (2001): 871–904.   9 Mary Hancock, The Politics of Heritage from Madras to Chennai (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 22–24. 10 Black Town quickly developed a heterogeneous population with ethnically distinct Indians, as well as Armenian, Portuguese, English and Eurasian residents. By the late 1600s, its population was estimated at 80,000, and it remained the centre of the city’s indigenous population for the next 200 years. Susan Neild, ‘Madras: The growth of a colonial city in India, 1780–1840’, PhD dissertation, University of Chicago, 1977, 310–327. 11 Thomas Metcalf, An Imperial Vision (Berkeley: University of California Press 1989), 8, 11–12, 15. 12 Neild, ‘Madras’, 18, 30–31; Henry Davidson Love, Vestiges of Old Madras, 1640–1800, 4 vols., (London: John Murray, 1913), 2: 614, 3:512. 13 In the late seventeenth century, the Company facilitated the immigration of prospective brides by offering unmarried British ‘gentlewomen’ free passage to India as well as clothing and a year’s stipend. Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (London:Thames and Hudson, 1988), 35. See also, Love, Vestiges, 3: 617–618; for Calcutta, see Ghosh, Sex and the Family, 48–49. 14 Ralph Nevill, London Clubs (London: Chatto & Windus, 1911), 212 cited in Cohen, In the Club, 8. 15 Love, Vestiges, 3: 577; Neild, ‘Madras’, 271. Statistical Abstracts Relating to British India from 1867/8 to 1876/7 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1878). 16 Prior to 1813, British India’s non-official population was estimated at 2000; by 1861, the European population of 126,000 included over 50,000 ‘non-official’ members. Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 118, 135; Statistical Abstracts Relating to British India from 1860–69 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1870). 17 Eurasians’ numbers fluctuated during the colonial period due to differences in reporting. Most counts, including early Company estimates and later census reports (starting in 1871), indicate that Eurasians significantly outnumbered Europeans. Lionel Caplan, Children of Colonialism (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2001), 3, 22–32, 66–67. 18 Hancock, Politics, 34–35. 19 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 3–6, 120–121; Kenny, ‘Constructing’, 695, 706–708. 20 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 36, 121. 21 Problems of vagrancy, unemployment and crime among Europeans were also attributed to the tropical climate; in the mid-1800s, there were efforts to build schools and training facilities in Udagamandalam to address these problems. Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 135–41. 22 Women increased from 39 per cent of the European population in 1871 to 53 per cent in 1921, ­Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 123. 23 Ibid., 91. 24 Ibid., 96. 25 Ibid., 198–212. 26 Ibid., 3; Kenny, ‘Constructing’, 698–700, 702–704. 27 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 138–45, 166–67. 28 Ibid., 70–77. 29 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 99–106, 123, 191–94; Kenny, ‘Constructing’, 706–708. 30 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 7, 118. 31 Henry Lanchester, Town Planning in Madras (London: Constable, 1918), 41, 110; A. Srivathsan, ‘City and public life’, in Madras:The Architectural Heritage, ed. K. Kalpana and Frank Schiffer (Chennai: INTACH, 2002), 206–208. 32 Hancock, ‘Home science’, 873; Gyan Prakash, ‘Staging science’, in No Touching, No Spitting, No Praying, ed. Saloni Mathur and Kavita Singh (Delhi: Routledge, 2015), 92–94.

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Mary Hancock 33 Ann Stoler and Frederick Cooper, ‘Between metropole and colony’, in Tensions of Empire, ed. Frederick Cooper and Ann Stoler (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 25. 34 Catherine Hall, ‘Of gender and empire’, in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 47. 35 Mary Procida, ‘Feeding the imperial appetite’, Journal of Women’s History 15 (2003): 125. 36 Cohen, In the Club, 56. 37 Indira Ghose, ed. Memsahibs Abroad (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1998), 262; Hall, ‘Of gender’, 65–66. 38 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 117–118; Ann Stoler, Race and the Education of Desire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995), 10–12. 39 Procida, ‘Feeding’, 127. 40 Bannerjee, Men,Women and Domestics, 3–4. 41 See, for example, Wyvern [Arthur Kenney-Herbert], Culinary Jottings (Madras: Higginbotham and Company, 1891). 42 Procida, ‘Feeding’, 125; MacMillan, Women, 76–77. 43 Kalpana and Schiffer, Madras, 154–58, 196, 327. 44 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 109. 45 As in Britain, clubs in Chennai were seen as spaces of alternative domesticity; Amy Milne-Smith, ‘A flight to domesticity?’ Journal of British Studies, 45 (2006): 798. 46 Sinha, ‘Britishness’, 489, 501. 47 Ibid., 511. 48 Cohen, In the Club, 100, 125–131. 49 James Thoburn, The Christian Conquest of India (New York: Eaton and Mains, 1906), Appendix E. 50 Ibid. 51 There were 575 male missionaries in India by 1906, against a total of 930 women – half of whom were unmarried. Thoburn, Christian Conquest, Appendix E. 52 American missionaries cooperated with and relied on the British colonial state in advancing America’s ‘moral empire’ through social reform, education, medical assistance and Christian evangelization. Ian Tyrrell, Reforming the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 4. 53 See Western Women and Imperialism, ed. Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, (Bloomington: ­University of Indian Press, 1992). 54 Eliza Kent, Converting Women, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 129–140. 55 Anonymous, ‘Dedication of mission buildings at Madras’ in The Gospel in All Lands, ed. Eugene Smith (New York: Missionary Society of the Methodist Episcopal Church, 1900), 178–179. 56 Mary Hancock, ‘Landscapes of Christian modernity in colonial India: The gendered matter of Hindu ritual and Christian conversion’, in Ritual, Caste and Religion in Colonial South India, ed. Michael Bergunder, Heiko Frese and Ulrike Schroeder (Halle: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen, 2010), 165, 170–72. 57 Kent, Converting Women, 9–12, 127–29. 58 Mary Ninde, ‘A Zenana Party’, Heathen Woman’s Friend, 22 (1891): 159–161; Grace Stephens, ‘A Madras Zenana Party’, Heathen Woman’s Friend, 23 (1891): 50–52. 59 Ingie Hovland, Mission Station Christianity (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013). 185–190. 60 Hancock, ‘Landscapes’, 170. 61 Ibid., 170–72. 62 Tyrrell, Reforming, 74–77, 82–83, 166–74. 63 Stoler, Carnal Knowledge, 24. 64 Kennedy, Magic Mountains, 117–18.

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35 Gender and Urban Experience in Nineteenth-Century Australasian Towns Penny Russell

Introduction Australasian cities were like Australasian women: integral to the development and character of society, yet strangely invisible in emerging national cultures. Towns and cities grew and populations clustered disproportionately in them, while national identity in Australia and New Zealand was persistently imagined as rural. Women were part of the fabric of community life, but their value was systematically disavowed in national mythology. Urban history is a gendered history. Gender was formed, experienced and invested with meaning in the physical and imaginative spaces of Australasian colonial cities. In these settler colonies, it seemed axiomatic that both manliness and national identity were forged in the conquest of land, the tussle with nature, the penetration of the interior. While the land itself was feminised in such imaginings, the place of women on the land was – culturally at least – more problematic. As helpmeets and pioneers on family farms, women held a valorised place at the centre of an image of yeoman families settling and civilising the wild bush. But the struggles and frequent failures associated with farming life saw this yeoman ideal increasingly displaced by a different bush legend, one that celebrated masculine camaraderie and the freedoms of itinerant labour. In the bush, women were a disavowed ‘other’: either left behind in towns or destroyed and defeminised by the hard struggle with the land.1 The bush, it was frequently asserted, was ‘no place for a (white) woman’ – and the relative scarcity of women in rural areas suggested that demographic reality matched the ideological prescription. But if towns and cities were understood as women’s more natural home, they were also considered to be less culturally significant, less formative of national identity. No brief survey could hope to tease out the full variety of urban experience across regions so geographically dispersed, topographically distinct, culturally diverse and historically divergent as the towns of Australia and New Zealand. On the Australian continent, each colony was dominated from the outset by a port city, which retained its status as the chief point of entry for the immigrants and goods on which the colonies relied, the point of export for staples and the 453

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centre of administration and vital infrastructure. The character of each capital was ­nevertheless distinctive, shaped by the motives for initial settlement and later growth (whether as penal ­settlement, gateway to pastoral lands, experiment in systematic colonisation or a complex mixture of these and other factors); by the topography of the town’s location and the resources of its hinterland; and by the particular mix of class, ethnicity, religion, age and gender of the emigrants attracted to it. The pattern of urban development in New Zealand was different, with no single town assuming easy dominance. The mountainous and difficult terrain of the islands made travel by sea the preferred mode of transport and communication and ensured that small towns could find a footing in many convenient ports, while the spacing of inland towns reflected the distance that could be covered in a day’s challenging journey. Many New Zealand towns were (like Adelaide in South Australia) established on Wakefeldian principles of systematic colonisation: the failings of such schemes tended to retard urban growth. There was no obvious location for a New Zealand metropolis; the question of which towns would grow into major urban centres was determined less by topography than by contentious human choices. Wellington and Auckland, Christchurch and Dunedin, were of comparable size, and throughout the nineteenth century, all four were tiny compared with those giants, Sydney and Melbourne, that vied so relentlessly for precedence on the other side of the Tasman.2 The history of Australasian colonial towns, then, comprises an extraordinary range of experience: from the poor who huddled in the slums of Sydney and Melbourne to the wealthy residents of their more salubrious suburbs; from the conscious urban pride of these expanding metropolises to the battles of innumerable tiny towns to secure the railway stations that would determine which might survive and which would certainly fail; from the legacies of harsh penal settlement that cast long shadows over Sydney, Hobart and even Brisbane to the rampant speculation that characterised Adelaide and many New Zealand towns; from flourishing commercial growth on the eastern seaboard of Australia to the prolonged stagnation of Perth or the genteel decline of Hobart; from the bustle of prosperous regional centres to meagre settlements that comprised little more than a pub, post office and general store. Notwithstanding this diversity, the character of urban experience in Australia and New ­Zealand, especially in the major port towns, had some unifying elements. Large or small, these towns were the chief point of contact and exchange between the imperial metropolis, global trade networks and rapidly expanding rural hinterlands. They were the first – and for many immigrants, the last – stopping place for the streams of people, bond or free, who crossed thousands of miles of ocean to find their destiny in southern lands. They were at once gateways to a new world and the locus of attachment to the old. It was in these towns, particularly, that cultural contests over gender and national identity were played out. The social reality was that men as well as women tended to cling to the towns, finding their economic futures within them and their domestic futures in their surrounding suburbs. Yet even within this reality, men were often more oriented – culturally, economically and politically – towards rural hinterlands and the opportunities they presented. Many urban avocations pursued by men were connected to rural life: the railways and wharves that handled the export of wool; the banks and financial institutions that flourished on pastoral capital; the importers and retailers who sold to rural markets. Men, then, could be city dwellers and yet still imagine themselves as mysteriously connected to the pulsing heart of the bush. They celebrated the manly independence and boyish camaraderie associated with bush life and endeavoured to live, in their urban and suburban lives, according to the same values.Women more readily accepted town life as the locus of new attachments and identities. Their lived urban experience flourished in the shadow of rural mythology. A chronological account of urban growth and change in Australasia across the whole of the nineteenth century would provide little insight into the tensions of gender. Instead, I divide my 454

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chapter into two main parts. The first section is set in the 1830s and 1840s and is particularly concerned with Sydney, at that time already a flourishing town of some 30,000 inhabitants while most other Australasian towns – Hobart excepted – had only recently established a ­toehold on the coast. I follow one thread in the gendering of urban experience through the story of a single family before casting my net more widely to consider the opportunities and dangers that early colonial towns presented, particularly to women.The second part of the chapter offers a broader analysis of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, a period of acute gender tension in which the pace of urban and suburban growth played an important, if ambiguous, role.

Opportunity and risk Until 1840, Rees Jones, grocer and oilman, rode high on a tide of prosperity. He had set up business in Sydney in the mid-1830s, at a time when eager settlers were pressing outwards along the pastoral frontiers of New South Wales, wresting land from Indigenous peoples in order to ‘squat’ on it (without purchase) by stocking it with their hungry, destructive, profitable merino sheep. Each year, these squatters would drive their bullock drays down to the rapidly growing town to collect supplies for the ensuing months.Their teams congregated outside Jones’s grocery store in George Street, blocking the traffic in Sydney’s principal thoroughfare.The congestion prompted one correspondent to lodge a ‘Friendly Objection’ in a local newspaper. He did not mind the store ‘doing extensive business’, he wrote, but did ‘decidedly object to their occupying or lining both sides of the street opposite their own and their neighbours’ doors with country bullocks and drays…to the imminent danger and obstruction of her Majesty’s liege subjects’.3 A skilled salesman, Jones built up good relationships with his rural customers, who returned year after year to his store. According to his son’s reminiscences, he was able to help one customer, at least, with more than mere material goods. On one of his yearly visits, the settler told him he was doing well and now wanted a wife, and asked if the grocer could ‘recommend one’. Jones retorted that finding wives was not in his line of business, but after a moment’s thought, he added that each morning, while shaving, he watched the women who came to the market pump for water. He had noticed one girl who always quietly waited her turn to fill her pail then left at once, not lingering to gossip with the others. He did not know the girl, but if the squatter would come to the store the following morning at 7 o’clock, he would introduce them. The

Figure 35.1  Henry Curzon Allport, George Street, Sydney – Looking South, watercolour, 1842. Courtesy of Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.

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man duly appeared; Jones honoured his promise and, according to his son’s tale, ‘spoke highly of the man and left them to arrange affairs. Next day they were married. The following year the settler told my father that no man could have a better wife than he had. My father was pleased’.4 Jones’s urban existence was wedded to the bush. His George Street shop was at the hub of a network of squatters. To maintain their loyalty, he offered generous credit, handing out stores on the promise of payment when the lucrative wool cheques came in. His network also alerted him to numerous opportunities for speculative investment. In the late 1830s, Rees Jones had a finger in many pies, from grinding inferior flour in a time of shortage to sending cattle to New Zealand, just then opening up as an enticing prospect for speculative settlers.The squatters who dropped into his store before heading back up country with their laden drays seemed to represent his own path to prosperity, but he envied their freedom and opportunities to amass great wealth. His speculations grew more ambitious, and in 1840 they combined with his extension of generous credit to bring him undone. Prolonged drought, followed by the collapse of wool prices, brought the pastoral industry to its knees; few of his customers could pay him what they owed. Jones’s finances grew more and more entangled, and in 1841 he was arrested for debt. When his financial affairs were finally sorted – which took several years – he was tired of being a grocer. Someone offered him cheap land; knowing nothing of farming, he eagerly accepted, stocked it with cattle and took his wife and young children to live there. In the early years of her widowhood, many years later, his wife would recall this period of her life with a kind of desperate bitterness.5 Ann Thompson had arrived in Sydney in 1834 as a young woman with her parents and nine younger siblings. Their initial experiences were of bewildered alienation: on their first walk about the town, Ann and her sister were jostled and jeered by resentful emancipists as ‘gemmies’ (a contraction of ‘jemmygrants’, rhyming slang for emigrants);6 a few weeks later, their mother was mugged and her reticule stolen.7 But compared with many others, they had a soft landing. Ann’s father Joseph was a cousin of the prosperous tanner and soap manufacturer James Wilshire, who hospitably took the family in and helped them to find their first home. Joseph Thompson was an experienced draper, and within a couple of years he was able to purchase outright a block of land in Pitt Street and build on it a substantial store and house. The commercial residents of the town at this time all tended to live above their shops; the central business district was their local neighbourhood. Devout Christians, the Thompsons were early members of the Independent (Congregationalist) Church, also in Pitt Street – where Rees Jones’ brother David, another draper, was one of the earliest deacons.When Ann’s favourite sister married her second cousin James Robert Wilshire, and Ann herself married Rees Jones a couple of years later, both women seemed settled in an urban community bound by church and family, with their parents and other siblings within an easy walk. All that changed for Ann when she discovered that her husband, without a word of warning to her, had fled his home to avoid arrest for debt. After he returned to face the consequences, Ann struggled to care for her children in their suddenly reduced circumstances, taking comfort in the nearness of family, and at last redecorating a tiny cottage to her satisfaction. Her distress at being wrested from the home thus precariously restored to a life of desperate poverty in the bush was all the more bitter for being unspoken; with love and loyalty to her husband, she found every possible excuse for him, but her loneliness and suffering were intense. Her bleak memoir is lightened only by moments when – between repeated pastoral failures – she returned to town and her family and for a brief time took up again the threads of her former life.8 Rees Jones’s urban community, tied to the bush, had brought him prosperity then poverty, and finally enticed him away from the city altogether. Ann Jones’s urban community, concentrated on church and family, had been her emotional sustenance. The uneven division of power in this marriage hit 456

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her particularly hard; her responsibility for home-making, which she accepted implicitly, tied her emotionally to her urban roots but gave her no say in her husband’s decisions about where, ultimately, that home should be made. ‘I mean to get a wife, me boys, when I get into town’, declares the lonely bullocky in the popular Australian ballad of the ‘Old Bullock Dray’, reflecting a popular conception of the town as a source of wives or sexual companions for lonely men. There was some demographic basis to this: the settler population of the ‘bush’ remained overwhelmingly male long after a relatively equal gender balance had been achieved in the major towns. Hasty, opportunistic town marriages, of the kind Rees Jones supposedly engineered for his squatter acquaintance, were the stuff of anecdote and legend. They probably did not happen so often in real life, but there was certainly a strong colonial disposition to encourage women to marry and move ‘up country’, with little concern for what such a life might mean for them. Stadial theories of civilisation, developed during the Enlightenment, placed a high value on urban culture and celebrated the opportunities it offered, to women as well as men, for a leisured, cultivated existence. However, in settler colonial societies, including Australia and New Zealand, what was most highly valued in emerging national mythology was the conquest of the frontier that made ‘civilisation’ possible. Men’s place in that conquest was clear; women’s was not. They were variously depicted as its agents, its victims and its passive beneficiaries. In one strand of cultural imagining, women seemed to flourish only amid the comfort of civilisation. Bushmen who sought a wife in town did so from avowedly self-interested motives, a desire to bring domestic comforts to a lonely and rugged bush life. The married life outlined in the ‘Old Bullock Dray’ is not all joy: they will have ‘lots of tucker’, but the lucky wife will be a hard-working ‘offsider’ on the land and the bullock team while producing ‘children five times three’. The wry implication that the bush was tough for women found more serious expression later in the century in Henry Lawson’s fictional depiction of the lonely, careworn figure of the ‘drover’s wife’, her feminine softness eaten away by struggle and isolation.9 However, the realities of colonial urban life did not always measure up to pure ideals of civilised community. Where towns became spaces of moral danger, a romanticised rural family life could appear the safest refuge for vulnerable women. Many middle-class reformers believed wholeheartedly that in assisting young women into marriage and a bush life, they were safeguarding their interests and their fragile virtue. At about the time Rees Jones was lining up a bush marriage for the woman he watched from his window, a social reformer named Caroline Chisholm was voicing concern about the sad circumstances of many young migrant women, brought from poverty, orphanages and workhouses to swell the ranks of domestic servants in the colony of New South Wales only to find themselves unemployed, homeless and vulnerable in the streets and parks of an unwelcoming city. Soon after she arrived in Sydney in 1838, Chisholm lobbied the governor to allow her to establish a refuge for immigrant women, and she set about finding work for them in the country. Identifying rural households where a woman was present to provide protection, she accompanied wave after wave of nervous young women into the interior. She also sought to promote family emigration and settlement and made it her special project to ‘introduce matrimony into the bush’.10 Chisholm’s image of colonial development evoked a settled, moral rural society composed of prosperous yeoman families: an ideal solution to the dangers and vices of city life. Congregations of poor and disadvantaged women in urban spaces attracted opprobrium as well as moral concern. Shiploads of unattached convict or assisted emigrant women were regarded – often in exaggerated terms – as a source, as well as potential victims, of colonial vice. Despatching single women to rural areas as servants or wives was just one of many strategies to disperse such undesirable clusterings of ‘disorderly women’. Female convicts were either assigned 457

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to domestic service or confined in ‘Female Factories’ at some distance from the town centres, at Parramatta in Sydney or the Cascades in Hobart. Neither assignment nor ­confinement served to allay the sense of moral threat; moralists deplored the influence of convict servants on domestic homes and vulnerable children, while prison officers despaired at scenes of disorder in the ­‘factories’, ranging from unseemly cavorting and raucous laughter to more alarming outbreaks of defiance and insubordination.11 In such an atmosphere of moral alarm, the emotional value of community for women was of little concern. Historical evidence for the existence of quotidian, urban, female sociability, especially in the early decades of colonial settlement, is sparse and easily overlooked. If Rees Jones had not had an amusing story to tell about his wife-brokering activities, that scene of gossiping women outside his window, although it drew his eyes each morning as he lathered and scraped, would never have been written down. We should be careful, nevertheless, not to invest such rare images with romantic nostalgia. Grace Karskens’ history of 1820s’ life on ‘The Rocks’ – the craggy slopes on the western side of Sydney town that were home to many convicts, ex-convicts and poorer immigrants – presents an account of local community that recognises the ‘stresses, the multiple voices, the ambivalences and contradictions, as well as the binding and nurturing ties’.12 For women as for men, neighbourliness in this impoverished neighbourhood produced a curious mix of loyalty, tolerance, indifference, violence and betrayal in a closed community that could both protect its own and freeze out strangers. But for women, this very local community and the networks it provided were pre-eminent determinants of their experience. Dean Wilson has shown how similarly for nineteenth-century central Auckland, at a slightly later period and for a different social class, women’s networks of mutual dependence were firmly rooted in their immediate neighbourhood, while those of men operated across broader social and spatial terrain.13 Attachment to specific neighbourly communities and awareness of their social, material and emotional value reinforced emigrant women’s tendency to cling to urban centres, withstanding pressure to go ‘up the country’. Material as well as social or emotional factors attracted women to an urban life. The limited opportunities available to make a living, especially for a woman with a young family to care for, were most likely available in the service occupations generated by the needs of a concentrated population. Catherine Bishop’s comparative study of female ‘business women’ in Sydney and Wellington explores the variety of occupations – dressmaking, retail, lodgings, pubs or ­laundry – to which women turned, either by choice or because they had been left destitute by the death, desertion or business failure of a parent or partner. For many women, such occupations provided only a perilous, hand-to-mouth existence as they battled to support themselves and their families through the vicissitudes of life and financial cycles.14 However, Bishop’s study certainly shows that whether they chose, or were forced, to earn a living, the limited options for women to do so were almost by definition urban in character. Towns that were large enough to create the conditions for their own continued growth offered the best opportunities for female employment in service industries.They also had more organised provision – however meagre – of charitable support for women and children. For this reason, too, destitute or deserted women clung to the towns. While concentrations of disorderly women filled moralists with alarm, concentrations of men were taken for granted as integral to colonial existence. However, they tended to produce, especially when fuelled by drink, more tangibly menacing instances of violence.The urban landscapes of Sydney and Hobart were long dominated by the presence of convicts and associated scenes of spectacular discipline, punishment and sporadic resistance. The maintenance of order in the penal society was entrusted to military garrisons from Britain; in Sydney in 1838, 500 soldiers from three British foot regiments were stationed at the Barracks in George Street.15 The streets of Sydney were periodically disrupted when soldiers, roistering off duty, e­ ncountered 458

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convicts or emancipists who jeered at them, mocked their uniforms or themselves became resentful targets of the soldiers’ high-handed contempt. Brawls, violent and occasionally fatal, were a common outcome of such encounters.16 For women, the masculine violence of Sydney’s streets readily translated into threats ranging from casual insult to violent rape. The Thompson women, wrapped around by a protective web of kin and church, were relatively immune from danger. Poorer women were more vulnerable. In 1833, an Irish convict servant was beaten and raped on her walk home from St Mary’s Catholic Church to her master’s home in Darlinghurst. Although at least one witness heard her screams from his own front door, no one came to her assistance. Her attacker was identified and brought to trial.The judge condemned the man to death, observing that the patch of wilderness where the woman was attacked ‘had been the scene of many similar attempts’ and that the road was in ‘such a state, that, although under the immediate eye of the police, it was unsafe for any decent female to proceed there, even in the day-time, without an escort’.17 By the 1830s, such pockets of wild bushland in urban areas were the haunt of convict escapees and other lawbreakers – spaces of violence and precarious freedom, which became the target of civic order as towns grew. In Sydney’s earlier years the gullies, waterways and rocky harbour shores had offered refuge for Aboriginal people, allowing their tenuous community survival even while the European town relentlessly encroached upon their traditional lifeways. Although their numbers rapidly declined, Aboriginal people continued to live in Sydney, especially on the northern shore of the harbour and along the Parramatta River. ‘It is time’, argues Grace Karskens, ‘to shake off the idea that Sydney was a “white” city, that Aboriginal people simply faded out of the picture and off the “stage of history”; it is simply untrue.…Aboriginal people became urban people very quickly.’18 The inequalities of gender and race, however, made such ‘urban frontiers’ always spaces of potential danger. Penelope Edmonds has explored the complex urban history of early contact in Melbourne, which was first established as a settler town in 1835 and retained a significant, though largely disavowed, Aboriginal population until after the city was transformed by the gold rushes of the 1850s. Edmonds shows that during those early years, the city formed a critical component of the ‘violent array of spaces’ of settler colonialism. Melbourne, like other colonial cities, was built across communities of interconnected Indigenous groups. Dispossession in the pastoral hinterland fuelled urban prosperity, producing the property booms that consumed urban land around Port Phillip Bay. As the town grew, Aboriginal people lost access to much of their traditional land but continued to live and move and fish in the ‘liminal spaces’ of the city: the swamps and waterways that could not be built over. Soon about half a dozen ‘native camps’ were informally established on the south bank of the Yarra River. These camps became places of exotic appeal and fascination to white settlers, but they were also places of disorder and temptation – and of danger, especially for Aboriginal people themselves. Aboriginal protectors complained that drunken white men haunted the camps, often in search of sexual encounters. Some Aboriginal women may have been active agents in these encounters – seeking profit or advantage, or even tenuous possibilities of love or affection, within the context of the deep power imbalance imposed by dispossession. Some were traded as partners by Aboriginal men. Many were direct victims of white settler violence.19 The accelerated growth of towns from the mid nineteenth century – especially Melbourne, whose population rose at a meteoric rate in the gold fever of the 1850s and its prosperous aftermath – saw areas of ‘unsettled’ land in urban centres disappear under increased settlement and surveillance. Displaced once again by the burgeoning settler population and themselves dwindling in numbers, Aboriginal people had little choice but to ask for land reserves further out from town. By the 1860s, the majority of Aboriginal people of Victoria were living on isolated 459

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reserves at least 25 miles from Melbourne. If the bush was ‘no place for a white woman’, cities by the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were considered to be no place for Aboriginal people – and, as Victoria Haskins has suggested, to be places of particular danger for vulnerable Aboriginal girls.20 The cultural gendering of city and bush always had racial undertones.21

Domestic battlefields After six years of watching his daughter suffer through one doomed pastoral venture after another, Joseph Thompson had had enough. He acquired the lease on a general store in the thriving rural town of Yass and set up his son-in-law as its manager. Several years of relative stability and happiness ensued for Ann; she assisted in the store and advised the matrons of Yass on the latest fashions from Sydney. Rees Jones acquired more land a short distance from town and at last seemed to be combining his squatting aspirations with urban sociability in a way that suited them both.22 All this unravelled, however, when Ann learned that her husband had decided – again without consulting her – to sell the store she loved. Thereafter, she spent most of her time, miserable and often alone, on their property outside Yass. Rees, in contrast, enjoyed a world of masculine sociability: he had joined the Freemasons and became a local councillor, later enjoying a stint as mayor. He stayed each week in lodgings in town, visiting his wife only at weekends – but he would not hear of taking a cottage in Yass where they could be together. Ann’s memoir comes to a jarring, irresolute halt in the midst of her distress at this cruel return on her years of suffering. A temperance poem she wrote in 1883 may obliquely allude to one cause of unhappiness that went unspoken in the memoir. The curse of ‘Old Brandy, Ale and Whiskey’, she wrote pointedly, attacks ‘Not only thus our working men, But men of education’ – who heed not ‘in their wasted hours/That wives are bathed in tears’.23 Ann Jones’s temperance moment belonged within a sad individual story of loneliness and marital breakdown, but it also has a place in the history of gendered tensions that emerged in the later nineteenth century. These were a direct product of the phenomenon of urbanisation, the shifting character of urban life and the ambivalent relationship between city and bush in national culture. By the end of the century, Australia’s population was distributed in a way that caused alarm to those who still thought that the best prospects for democratic prosperity lay in small-scale farming. While about one third lived in the ‘bush’, another third lived, like the Joneses, in provincial towns, and the rest clung to the coastal fringe and the reassuring urbanity of the capital cities. Sydney and Melbourne, in particular, had grown into large, modern industrial cities, but the pace of change was also apparent elsewhere. Urban growth, steadily fuelled by immigration, created its own logic of expansion, as builders and labourers, shopkeepers and accountants, lawyers and politicians found in cities the most reliable markets for their services. Industries flourished around the wharves and rail centres. Miles of rail track were laid down in the second half of the nineteenth century, connecting rural hinterlands to urban enterprise. ‘The mighty bush with iron rails/ Is tethered to the world’, mourned the Sydney-dwelling poet Henry Lawson; modernity was linked, in cultural imagination, with loss of freedom.24 Especially of masculine freedom.The early suburbs of New Zealand and Australia were ‘born modern’, as one recent study of southern Dunedin puts it, ‘not just in their technologies and their workforces, but also in the home lives of their inhabitants’.25 Urbanisation transformed the meanings of non-Indigenous masculinity as men’s lives increasingly included home and family.26 Growing numbers of men worked, not as independent yeoman farmers or in the celebrated freedom and male companionship of a roving bush life, but as wage labourers in urban environments. Their hunger for land ownership was redirected to the more achievable ambition of a 460

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suburban lot.27 Certain values still held strong – man as breadwinner and head of household, in particular – but other cherished qualities of manliness, particularly of rural sociability and an independent, untrammelled existence, were increasingly compromised. For women, in contrast, the expanding and modernising city offered new opportunities for both work and leisure. The technologies of the second industrial revolution, the expansion of new service industries and the growth of educational opportunities for girls opened up a wide variety of paid employment for women in factories and in the retail and service industries. S­ ingle women, in particular, had access to occupations hitherto undreamt of. Technologies of transport had an impact too: bicycles gave women independent mobility, while trains and tramcars facilitated their movement into and through urban centres, where tea rooms, rest rooms and circulating libraries sprang up to cater to their needs.The forms of entertainment – theatres, operas and, later, cinemas – expanded to meet, and create, new markets for urban leisure and culture. Urban life began to demand new rules of conduct, to govern relations between strangers in professional and public contexts: on the streets, at the theatre, in railway carriages, on tramcars and in public parks. While men strengthened their ties to home, women were moving far beyond it.28 Their intrusion into public and leisure spaces that were previously assumed to be safe masculine precincts triggered fierce contests over the use of space. New levels of surveillance and regulation of public conduct arose, reflecting anxiety about the ‘New Woman’ and the question of how men should conduct themselves when women invaded traditionally male spaces. Deeply divisive gender conflicts were played out, too, in the private space of the suburban home, where so many men were now firmly ‘domesticated’. Graeme Davison has pointed out that the cultural dominance of the ‘bush legend’ in Australia owes much to the imagination of urban and ­suburban-dwelling writers and artists, whose cultural productions were infused by romantic nostalgia for a world they saw rapidly disappearing.29 Marilyn Lake argues that yearning for masculine freedom and the camaraderie of the bush found expression not only in such cultural forms, but also in compensatory acts of suburban sociability – binge drinking or gambling in the local pub. Women who suffered the consequences, in increased domestic violence, loss of household income or, like Ann Jones, sheer unhappiness, responded by joining temperance organisations in droves. Such organisations provided a broad base of support for feminist projects to reframe society through the exercise of female suffrage, by supporting the regulation of home life and pub culture through legislative change. But men who already saw the walls of suburban domesticity – the cares of family, responsibilities of home ownership and dependencies of wage labour – closing in on their dreams of freedom were swift to resent both the silent reproaches of wives and the efforts of public campaigners to curtail their pleasures. The ‘battle of the sexes’ that was joined in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth was, as Lake argued, a battle for national culture and an imagined male freedom.30 It was also a battle that reflected, in multiple ways, the opportunities, tensions and constraints that characterised the modern city. Of course, the polarities of gender were never quite so stark. Movements for the moral and social regulation of urban life constrained women’s sociability as well as men’s; sometimes they did not represent a campaign in the battle of the sexes so much as a middle-class attack on the freedoms of working-class culture.31 Nor were men invariably hostile to women’s political goals: as John Docker has shown, satirical mockery of ‘wowsers’ and ‘New Women’ frequently co-existed with a certain receptive curiosity and even goodwill towards the cause of female emancipation.32 Men who mobilised politically to protect their own industrial working conditions had considerable respect for the possibilities of concerted action to achieve social change, a respect that could translate into powerful support for women’s organisations.33 But the general point holds good. For women who lived in the city and its suburbs, neighbourly community and familial domesticity tended to form the weft and weave of life and, to a 461

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large degree, to define its possibilities. The professional and political networks of men, as much as their cultural training, connected their urban lives to the ‘mighty bush’ of nationalist mythology and allowed them to dream of the freedoms and independence of a rural life. The clubs, pubs and rituals to which they turned in compensation when those dreams proved elusive – and which they guarded so jealously as the privileges of masculinity – too often tore at the fragile fabric of women’s urban lives. By the last decade of the nineteenth century – despite an economic depression that brought Melbourne’s spectacular growth, in particular, to a jarring halt – Australasian cities were recognisably modern. Many had taken significant strides towards the ‘suburban sprawl’ that would become the most notable characteristic of city living in the twentieth century. The urban community and domestic sociability that Ann and Rees Jones had briefly enjoyed in Sydney in the 1830s was no longer to be found in the central business districts: the gendered tensions of urban living now played out across a suburban landscape clearly marked by class and opportunity. In these cities, the demographic dominance of men was a thing of the past, but the celebration of masculinity was deeply ingrained in the culture, as Australasian urban dwellers continued to look towards the ‘bush’ and pioneering enterprise as the source of cultural identity. Rural dreaming still infused the gendered tensions of the modern city.

Notes  1 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Melbourne: ­Cambridge University Press, 1988).   2 Graeme Davison, ‘Australia: The first suburban nation?’ Journal of Urban History 22, 1, (1995): 40–74; David Hamer, ‘The making of urban New Zealand’, Journal of Urban History 22, 1, (1995): esp. 6–11.  3 Colonist, 7 March 1840, 2.   4 Reminiscences and Memorabilia of Rees Rutland Jones M.A. 1840–1916 [comp. E. R. Baker, 1984], National Library of Australia, 2.  5 The Reminiscences of Ann Jones née Thompson 1810–1903 [transcribed by E. R. Baker, 1992], National Library of Australia.   6 Rees Rutland Jones, Reminiscences, 1.  7 Sydney Gazette, 14 June 1834.   8 Ann Jones, Reminiscences, esp. 1–6.   9 Henry Lawson, ‘The Drover’s Wife’ in A Camp-Fire Yarn: Henry Lawson Complete Works 1885–1900, ed. Leonard Cronin (Sydney: Lansdowne 1984), 238–43. 10 Patricia Grimshaw, ‘The moral reformer and the imperial major: Caroline and Archibald Chisholm’, in For Richer, For Poorer: Early Colonial Marriages, ed. Penny Russell (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), esp. 102–108. 11 Joy Damousi, Depraved and Disorderly (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Kay Daniels, Convict Women (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 1998). 12 Grace Karskens, The Rocks: Life in Early Sydney (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1997), 50. 13 Dean Wilson, ‘Community and gender in central Auckland’, New Zealand Journal of History 30, 1 (1996): 24–42. 14 Catherine Bishop, ‘Commerce was a woman: Women in business in colonial Sydney and Wellington’, PhD Thesis, Australian National University, 2012. 15 Gavan Souter, Company of Heralds (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press 1981), 16. 16 See for example The Australian, 20 August 1828. 17 Sydney Gazette, 14 January 1834. 18 Grace Karskens, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009), 12. See also ‘A history of Aboriginal Sydney’ (University of Western Sydney 2010–2015), http://www.historyofaboriginalsydney.edu.au (accessed 1 January 2016). 19 Penelope Edmonds, ‘The intimate, urbanising frontier: native camps and settler colonialism’s violent array of spaces around early Melbourne’, in Making Settler Colonial Space: Perspectives on Race, Place and

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Gender and Urban Experience in Australasia Identity, ed. Tracey Banivanua Mar and Penelope Edmonds (Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010), 129–154. 20 Victoria Haskins ‘From the centre to the city: Modernity, mobility and mixed-descent Aboriginal workers from central Australia’, Women’s History Review 18, 1 (2009): 155–175. 21 In New Zealand, Maori initially engaged with European towns and settlements as traders, choosing on the whole to maintain a separate existence in their own village communities. By the late nineteenth century, families of mixed descent were an ‘invisible presence’ in the towns, often choosing to conceal their Maori ancestry. The twentieth century saw a significant trend towards urbanisation among Maori, along with a reassertion of Maori identity; Angela Wanhalla ‘  “In/visible sight” Maori–European Families in Urban New Zealand, 1890–1940’, Visual Anthropology 21, 1 (2008): 39—57. See also James Belich, Making Peoples: A History of the New Zealanders, from Polynesian Settlement to the End of the Nineteenth Century (Auckland: Penguin, 1996), esp. 247–77. 22 Reminiscences of Ann Jones, 36–43. 23 ‘Rhyme and Reason’, printed poem, 27 Jan 1883, annotated by hand ‘Taemas, Mrs R Jones Composition’, Thompson Family Papers, Mitchell Library ML MSS 2043, Box 2. 24 Henry Lawson, ‘The Roaring Days’, in Cronin, Camp-Fire Yarn, 67–68. 25 Sites of Gender: Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1939, ed. Barbara Brookes, ­Annabel Cooper and Robin Law (Auckland: Auckland University Press 2003), 3. 26 Ibid., 7. 27 Davison, ‘First suburban nation’. 28 Andrew Brown-May, Melbourne Street Life (Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Press, 1998); Jill Matthews, Dance Hall and Picture Palace: Sydney’s Romance with Modernity (Sydney: Currency Press, 2005); Penny Russell, Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia (Sydney: NewSouth, 2010). 29 Graeme Davison, ‘Sydney and the bush: An urban context for the Australian legend’, Historical Studies [Australia], 18, 71, (1978): 191–209. 30 Marilyn Lake, ‘The politics of respectability: Identifying the masculinist context’, Historical Studies 22, 86 (1986): 116–131. 31 Chris McConville, ‘Rough women, respectable men and social reform: A response to Lake’s “Masculinism” ’, Historical Studies 22, 88 (1987): 432–40; Judith Allen, ‘ “Mundane” men: Historians, masculinity and masculinism’, Historical Studies 22, 89 (1987): 617–28. 32 John Docker, ‘The feminist legend: A new historicism?’ in Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s, ed. Susan Magarey, Sue Rowley and Susan Sheridan (Sydney: Allen & Unwin 1993), 16–26. 33 Annabel Cooper, Erik Olssen, Kirsten Thomlinson and Robin Law, ‘The landscape of gender politics: Place, people and two mobilisations’ in Sites of Gender, ed. Brookes, Cooper and Law, 46–48.

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36 South African Cities, Gender and Inventions of Tradition in the Late Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries Vivian Bickford-Smith

The argument of this chapter is that for those interested in gender and the urban experience, Eric Hobsbawm’s concept of the ‘invention of tradition’ can be usefully deployed in exploring the rules, rituals and regular practises – in other words, the ‘traditions’ – associated with the teaching, maintenance and promotion of appropriate gender behaviour. This would certainly seem to be so in understanding elements of gendered experience and identity in the towns that were fashioned or re-fashioned by the process of British colonialism. Some of these gender traditions were learnt elsewhere and brought to South African cities by the likes of immigrants from Britain or migrants from rural Africa. All such groups came from patriarchal societies, albeit of differing kinds.1 Political and social patriarchal traditions were then frequently adapted or, especially in the case of indigenous Africans, subject to almost revolutionary change in the urban context, not least in terms of divisions of labour. New traditions were more frequently invented in the city, the site of numerous, rapid or radical examples of innovation, than in the countryside. Hobsbawm used the term ‘invention of tradition’ to refer to the plethora of traditions ‘invented’ in the age of high imperialism in Europe between 1870 and 1914, a similar period to the one covered in this chapter. The term referred to A set of practises, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past....The historic past into which the new tradition is asserted need not be lengthy.2 In Hobsbawm’s view, traditions were invented to convey a sense of continuity and stability during ‘constant change and innovation’. Cities were of course places where constant change was happening in abundance in the industrial age. Inventions of tradition, which centrally included 464

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inventions of gendered tradition, usually took their place alongside, or frequently incorporated or adapted, older (sometimes much older) traditions. This is demonstrated by scholars who have investigated the supposed invention for rural Africa of ‘tribal’ traditions by colonial officials or missionaries. Even for the modern metropolis, invented traditions had, as Patrick Harries has argued, often to be ‘manufactured, or assembled, from an existing body of knowledge that, consciously or unconsciously, includes myth and symbol’.3 As Thomas Spear has written, ‘far from being created by alien rulers...tradition was reinterpreted, reformed and reconstructed by subjects and rulers alike’.4 The Christian missionary activities in town and countryside that accompanied colonialism would appear to have had a revolutionary effect on gender relations among a significant number of converts in terms of appropriate gender behaviour and divisions of labour, even if the extent of such change varied. The process included women being urged to focus on domestic work rather than the customary agricultural work, whether within their own household or as domestic servants in the cities; and men being taught to embrace and value the ethic of hard work, sobriety and thrift involved in wage labour and appropriately Christian husbandly behaviour.5 In the early years of mass urbanisation in the late nineteenth century, such labour included laundering and domestic service in cities such as Durban and Johannesburg, which could be experienced by non-converts, or the only partially converted, as demeaning ‘women’s work’ and consequently as emasculating.6 Such gendered ‘traditions’ came to form a major part of the African experience of urbanisation.

South African cities and the teaching of British gender traditions The history of urban settlement in southern Africa stretched back well before colonial times, but such places were relatively small and impermanent.7 Colonial settlements themselves were limited in scale before the late nineteenth century. Cape Town – founded by the Dutch in the mid-seventeenth century – was the largest in 1806, the year that the British seized control of the Cape Colony from the Dutch for the second and more enduring time. Yet Cape Town’s population in that year was only some 16,000, divided almost equally between the free, who were mostly of Protestant north-west European origin (albeit including some ‘free blacks’) and slaves imported from the Dutch East India Company’s regions of trade in the Indian Ocean.The population of Durban amounted to fewer than 100 around 1850 and it was still a small village, but it evolved into the main port town of Natal, another British colony established to the northeast of the Cape in the mid-nineteenth century.The two republics of the Orange Free State and Transvaal, established by emigrant Dutch or Boer (farmer) settlers from the Cape Colony, were overwhelmingly rural. Substantial urbanization was a result of the Mineral Revolution, the discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1870 and gold on the Witwatersrand in 1886, which produced cities of more than 100,000 by the early twentieth century. The three largest were the gold-mining city of Johannesburg, originated in 1886; and the burgeoning ports of Cape Town and Durban, where most British immigrants settled and whose built environment and culture in large part reflected this. The broader political and economic processes caused by the Mineral Revolution included the accelerated conquest and annexation of independent African societies by the British and their subsequent use of taxation to extract indigenous African labour.8 These processes also led to the British coming into conflict with the Boer republics, leading to the establishment of the Union of South Africa comprising both these republics and the erstwhile British colonies in 1910. Union cemented British political control of South Africa and allowed the extension of British inventions of tradition. 465

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In expanding on his understanding of inventions of tradition, Hobsbawm distinguished between ‘political’ (official or formal, established by the state) and ‘social’ (unofficial or informal, created by citizens or subjects) traditions.9 For British colonial authorities, as well as for ­British immigrant elites who controlled the largest cities by the early twentieth century, the task of inculcating Britishness involved teaching appropriately British gender behaviour. It was made easier by the fact that political inventions of British tradition that communicated such values – like a franchise that was reserved for men, or male-only participation in parades marking loyalty to the British crown – were reinforced by social inventions of tradition that taught similar patriarchal lessons. Anthony King usefully suggested that colonial urbanism should be understood to incorporate the entirety of a city’s ‘social, economic, and cultural systems’. Conceived of in this way, and with the addition of political systems, appropriately British gender roles and behaviour could be taught, and on occasion resisted, in all these domains in South African cities.10 Unlike African or Afrikaner identity, the acquisition of Britishness and its associated appropriate gender values was open to all within the Empire across possible racial or ethnic divides. This was because, from its eighteenth-century inception, Britishness had been established as a civic rather than ethnic national identity to forge Britons out of the likes of the Scots, Welsh, English and Irish. Hence it was designed to serve as an umbrella nationalism over other actual or potential sub-nationalisms. Britishness could be acquired through naturalisation, birth or residence in the territory of Britain, its colonies or dominions. Consequently, it remained an available and sometimes attractive identity for those who at times might see themselves as, for instance, South African, Xhosa, Zulu, Dutch, Coloured or Indian.11 Social inventions of tradition that taught British gender values accompanied numerous civic associations and institutions, both religious and secular, that were introduced by accelerated British immigration over the course of the nineteenth century. Like the immigrants themselves, these institutions and associations were concentrated in the major cities such as Cape Town, Durban and Johannesburg. It was, consequently, in such cities that British gender traditions were seemingly most extensively established, aided by missionary activities in the countryside. Black converts played an important role in both urban and rural evangelism. British values and gender roles were taught in British religious and educational institutions – which were often one and the same thing – through song, prayer, sermons, lessons, text books, magic lantern shows, stained-glass windows and informal conversations. In rural areas of southern Africa, the conversion to and absorption of Western culture more generally was an uneven process, one that, initially at least, would appear to have largely attracted the socially marginalised in search of safe refuge, among whom women were in the majority. Many African women sought to escape difficult relationships with co-wives, the stigma of being unable to conceive, accusations of witchcraft or relative (to men) lack of power in indigenous societies. African men, in contrast, were probably less eager to embrace Christianity precisely because it threatened traditional ideas of appropriate masculinity, whether through condemnation of polygamy, circumcision or ‘unrespectable’ recreation like stick fighting. The growth of male Christian conversion towards the end of the nineteenth century was probably encouraged by concerns for self-improvement among both younger men and women after colonial conquest had loosened the grip of elders and led to new material requirements and desires.12 Male conversion also offered to African men the possibility of reasserting authority over women in keeping with Christian tradition, while marriage conferred British respectability and acceptability within urban society on both partners. Recipients of rural missionary education who moved to the cities joined the Westernised and Christianised Black elites already there. In Cape Town, for instance, an ecumenical mission under the auspices of the Presbyterian Church had been established in 1838 to minister to ­ex-slaves. 466

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From 1859, an Anglican clergyman, Canon Lightfoot, played a central role in ­instituting day and night schools for the poor in the western part of town connected to St Paul’s Mission. When Lightfoot was asked what ‘coloured’ children gained by schooling, he replied ‘manners...habits of diligence...and order, and also respect and reverence’.13 A church was eventually built there in the 1870s, and a Cape Town English Church Friendly Society and St Paul’s Benefit Society established.14 A further mission, St Philip’s, was set up in District Six in 1884 to serve the rapidly developing eastern part of the city. For two decades before the church was built, services were held in the private homes of several ‘coloured’ women.These became focal points of missionary endeavour, like the cottage of an ex-slave, Lydia. In 1893, Lydia was reported as ‘keeping with festival the anniversary of the proclamation that abolished slavery [on 1 December 1834], and bears still on her back the marks of the slave whippings she got in her youth under Dutch regime’.15 During an anniversary commemoration in 1901, a Cowley Evangelist found Lydia in her ‘oneroomed church and cottage...with a court of ladies all with white handkerchiefs on their heads, seated around’.16 Lydia was just one notable example of a ‘coloured’ woman who became an active agent in conveying British notions of respectable gender behaviour. Christian conversion accelerated among Africans after colonial conquest and the Mineral Revolution. Census returns show that around 25 per cent of Africans saw themselves as Christian in 1911, a figure that had risen to over 50 per cent by 1946. Although the exact gender breakdown within these percentages is not known, evidence suggests that women remained in the considerable majority well into the twentieth century. Anglican records, for instance, suggest that the confirmation of young women in the Transkei in the early 1930s outnumbered that of young men by a factor of four. In the cities themselves, evangelists still had difficulty in winning converts among male migrant labourers, still the sizeable majority of urban Africans in this decade. More success was achieved among African women, whether single and seeking their own employment opportunities or married and following husbands to the city.17 The first of several hostels for single African women was opened by Anglican Cowley evangelists in Doornfontein in 1908. A second, called the Helping Hand Club and instigated by the American Board Mission (ABM), was established in Fairview to the south-east of the city centre in 1919. Both offered training in domestic skills and aimed to provide respectable recruits for domestic service. By the 1930s, the hostels housed single women in a range of employment, from factory to social work.18 For such women, conversion provided social support networks. By 1910, the Methodist, Anglican and ABM churches all had African women’s manyano Prayer Unions, in Johannesburg or Durban, which normally met on Thursday afternoons. Members created uniforms: for Methodists, modelled on British military redcoats; for Anglicans, dress included black headscarves and skirts and white jackets. Uniforms that signified membership of Prayer Unions subtly indicated hierarchy and signified respectability conferring status. The meetings were occasions to share anxieties about the morality of children and express solidarity through sighing or weeping. Members organised savings’ schemes and gained self-confidence through a social support network.19 Christian clergy’s encouragement of Prayer Unions among African women was but one among a multitude of initiatives, most notably by churches, schools and employers, aimed at moralising the leisure time of urban South Africans, irrespective of class, race or gender, along British metropolitan lines. These were cross-racial enterprises, not just something Whites imposed on Blacks in a particular colonial urban context. Black Christian converts like John Dube, first president of the South African Native National Congress (later the ANC), energetically promoted Christian gender traditions and values. Thus, when Dube addressed girls at the Inanda seminary near Durban, he spoke about ‘what our sisters do in public in cities and town, and cautioned us to lead upright lives’.20 Charlotte Maxeke, who founded the Bantu Women’s League (later the 467

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ANC’s Women’s League) in 1918, was equally concerned about the ­particular moral dangers women faced in the city and the breakdown of family life.21 In 1928, she was appointed as a Native Probation Officer attached to the Johannesburg Magistrate’s Court, becoming the first Black woman officially employed as a social worker. After her retirement, Maxeke became the inaugural President of the National Council for African Women (NCAW) in 1935, the initiative of a group of African women in Kimberley who wanted to ‘care for Non-European welfare’.22 Sport was ubiquitously used as a means of moralising urban leisure time along gender lines. Cricket, soccer and rugby were taught to boys in government and church schools, promoted by urban employers among their male employees and deemed acceptable if learnt through emulation by urban male inhabitants of whatever background. City councils and some employers facilitated the process through the provision of designated urban recreational space. Sport was perceived by the middle-class urban elite, whether White or Black, as a means of weaning young men away from urban immorality and crime and as something that would teach them to be loyal, brave and active. An Anglican evangelist, while regretting the lack of success in converting Muslim slave descendants in Cape Town, was partially consoled by the thought that ‘at least they have turned to cricket’.23 Sports clubs that have endured to the present were formed within each major British sporting code, commonly on a geographical and racial basis, though there were exceptions. Different businesses in Cape Town also sponsored their own sports teams that played in an industrial league.24 Black elites also established sports teams, whether Sol Plaatje’s Duke of Wellington cricket club in Kimberley in the 1890s or the Western Province Coloured Rugby Union in 1886. In contrast, for much of the nineteenth century, the dominant view was that contact sport was not deemed appropriate for women. Instead, recreation should be in keeping with their supposed spiritual, sensitive and vulnerable female character, possibly in the form of music, needlework or reading.25 Yet women challenged such restriction and, by the late nineteenth century, elite girls’ schools like Roedean, Johannesburg, had introduced competitive outdoor sports like cricket.26 Competitive sport, if more usually hockey and netball, was subsequently introduced into less elite schools. The Boy Scout movement, inaugurated by Robert Baden-Powell of Siege of Mafeking fame, was another British import that inculcated respectable masculine values, especially in urban areas. Baden-Powell’s aim was to address the supposed physical and moral decay of young British men noticed during recruitment for the war, an aim shared by Anglican Boys’ Brigades throughout the Empire. Boys inducted as scouts were taught appropriate British values: self-discipline, sobriety, thrift, honour, courage, chivalry (particularly towards women), thrift and Christianity. Morally and physically improving recreation and reading were suggested: woodcraft, flag raiding and throwing an assegai (a spear). The telling of instructional tales was advocated, like the tracking and summary execution of the Diamond Thief in South Africa; so was reading Walter Scott, Conan Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Percy Fitzpatrick.27 Sport was important too. Baden-Powell approved of the playing of football and cricket, though not spectatorship. He also supplied detailed instructions on how to play basketball, and what constituted fouls: ‘holding, dashing, charging, shouldering, tripping’. The appearance and advocacy of regulated sports like football or basketball were of course shaped by the accelerated global pace of industrialisation and urbanisation. Such sports were invented traditions that were expected and intended to help inculcate desirable male values such as discipline, fitness and fair play suitable for ordered city life.

African urbanisation and less ‘respectable’ gender traditions in the city Predictably, though, there were limits to the transmission of British or Christian identities and values. The Mineral Revolution was central to changed social relations that touched all African 468

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societies, from the Cape Peninsula to north of the Zambezi, within the context of colonial expansion and ecological crisis: drought, cattle disease and diminishing land and animals. The result was a rapid acceleration in African urbanisation. Among White urban elites, the racial segregation of such migrants became the generally accepted ‘solution’ for many real or imagined urban problems, in keeping with developments in other parts of the colonial world as well as North America.28 Among the most impressive work within South African urban historiography is that which has focused on the gendered urban experience of these African migrants, and this informs the remainder of this chapter.29 Travelling and working as migrant labourers in the mines or in other urban occupations became a desire or necessity initially for young African men, particularly in southern Africa. Such work could pay for guns, clothes, blankets, ploughs and wagons or provide money to pay bride wealth (lobola) or colonial taxes. Migrant work in the emerging cities became a new rite of passage, one in its early stages aimed at maintaining viable rural households and African patriarchal traditions.30 African women also moved to the city, whether to join husbands who had gone there or to escape the control of men in the countryside. Displaying sensitivity to complex constructions of gendered and age-related urban identities, attention was drawn by Dunbar Moodie and Patrick Harries to the extensive existence of same-sex ‘mine marriages’. Together with a monograph on female migrancy by Belinda Bozzoli, this work demonstrated intricate urban–rural links and showed the syncretic (creolized or hybrid) nature of urban African popular culture. Bozzoli showed how urbanization on the Rand was a phase in the lives of women from Phokeng (north-west of Johannesburg).31 Large numbers of African men working at the docks of the port cities or in the mines of Kimberley and the Rand arrived with a mixture of bravado and trepidation. Shared identity and rural traditions that helped to maintain it were demonstrably strong. Often in sizeable groups led by a local headman, they were further bound together by migrant associations and kinship relationships that linked them to particular villages and regions. Also important in creating a strong sense of common identity once in the city were shared accommodation, communal eating and drinking and mutual financial support. Shared traditions, with adapted or newly invented elements, played an important additional role here, whether they were mutually held supernatural beliefs or shared participation in storytelling, songs and dance. Embarking on migrant work itself became a rite of passage, one that could include rituals practised while travelling, older men taking younger ones as a ‘wife’ while barracked together on mine compounds or the acquisition of a city name like ‘Jim’, ‘Shilling’, ‘Cape Smoke’ or ‘God Damn’. These ostensibly demeaning names were seemingly appropriated by Mozambique migrants at least, perhaps because of their limited English, along with sometimes garish Western dress, to situate themselves within a new social context when at work and to serve ‘as badges of self-worth and achievement’ when back home in the countryside.32 Musical and dance traditions were adapted to urban experiences and conditions. Some songs offered direct commentary in this respect. One sung by Xhosa dockworkers in Cape Town in the early 1900s described ‘the ringing of the six o’clock bell calling [them] to work at the ‘docksin’ [Dock’s Location] and...the hard life of the native...banished from home and comfort, and compelled to eat calves’ heads and such poor food’.33 Several songs of migrants from Mozambique in the 1920s and 1930s were assertive, celebrating the courage of miners and exhorting them to dance in warlike, thus traditional masculine, fashion.34 Dancing in this fashion became part of self-generated recreation and masculine self-assertion for African migrants whether on the mines, at the docks or on the streets. The invented traditions involved with Sunday Mine Dance performances in Johannesburg compounds seemingly stemmed from similar occasions in Kimberley. The dances, music and stick fighting 469

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that ­accompanied them were adapted and creolised versions of rural forms, licensed by mine ­managers as a means of ethnic team building and to release tension. Managers promoted British sports like football and cricket for similar reasons, while African men appropriated such ‘foreign’ sports as their own and in keeping with traditional gender values.35 From participants’ perspectives, mine dances were in part licensed occasions for ethnic and masculine self-assertion also displayed in unlicensed violent clashes or ‘faction fights’ with workers perceived to be of other ethnicities. In both cases, the aim was often to protect the group’s position in the employment market. This also fed on occasion into industrial action, sometimes involving cross-ethnic alliances, most notably in a strike by 70,000 Black Johannesburg mineworkers in 1920 and, periodically, among stevedores at the Cape Town and Durban docks.36 Not all African migrants came to the cities in large groups, or returned at regular intervals to the countryside, or were male. Nor did all migrants seek, find or remain in legal employment; and even some who did were involved with crime and disorderly behaviour.Thus many African women who arrived individually or in small groups in the early 1900s attempted to make a livelihood in whatever manner they could, when even occupations like domestic work and washing in Durban and Johannesburg were dominated by men, in sharp reversal of traditional gender divisions of labour in the countryside. Commonly, this was through the illegal brewing of ‘traditional’ beer or far stronger adulterated concoctions, and for some it was through prostitution. Such activities were associated with illegal canteens, soon dubbed ‘shebeens’, in inner-city areas or sometimes in shacks on the outskirts. In the ‘slumyards’ of Doornfontein after the First World War, now abandoned by wealthy Whites, as well as those of inner city ‘Prospect Township’ in Johannesburg, Sotho ‘shebeen queens’ attracted the attention of male patrons by performing the Famo dance, ‘a rather wild form of choreographic striptease’, and accompanying self-assertive laments. These spoke of the woman’s abandonment, loss of family ties and home, and the general hardness of her lot, while criticising the bad character and anti-social behaviour of others and praising her own personal qualities and attractions.37 Famo dancers were undoubtedly in the mind of Rolfus Dhlomo, journalist and pioneer of African city novels, when he wrote of unrespectable loose women without ‘moral or religious scruples...in short, daring skirts’ selling noxious Skokiaan alcohol and themselves in an African Tragedy.38 Interest in migrancy and urbanization underpinned the emergence of work on the history of gangs. The path-breaking work of Charles van Onselen on late nineteenth and early twentieth-century gangs on the Rand was built on by Bonner for the mid-twentieth century and by Paul La Hausse for early twentieth-century Durban.39 A ‘civic association’–style need for mutual support and sense of belonging, the absence of which Famo songs lamented, combined with economic necessity or perceived opportunity, were undoubtedly factors in gang formation among young men in the cities. So were both adolescent rebellion against authority and the self-assertion of independent masculinity. Sizeable organised gangs developed in an urban world full of class and race prejudice, inequality and exclusion that frequently meted out demeaning experiences to the less powerful. Many gangsters in both Johannesburg and Durban were drawn from the ranks of male domestic servants or ‘houseboys’, usually youths aged between 12 and 20 whose rural elders had determined that this was age appropriate. Like respectable British civic associations, gangs had their own invented traditions, many of them complex and in some cases highly visible. Of major pioneering importance in terms of African gang formation in Johannesburg was ‘The Regiment of the Hills’, otherwise known as ‘The Ninevites’ because members saw themselves as rebelling against the Lord. It was formed by an ex-houseboy who called himself Jan Note or Nongoloza (‘He of the piercing eyes’) and initially consisted of Zulu-speaking bandits living in the Klipriversberg hills to the south of the city. 470

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The organisation of the Regiment of the Hills demonstrated something of the creolised nature of migrant culture in the cities, allied in this case with unlicensed ritual inversion of British and Boer institutions, satirical in effect. Note styled himself Inkoos Nkula or king and appointed a governor-general or Induna Inkulu. ‘Government’ members of his gang were given numbers from one to four, while a ‘judge’ and ‘landrost’ administered justice. A general modelled on a ‘Boer vecht generaal’ as well as colonels, captains, sergeant majors and sergeants controlled his ‘Amasoja’ or soldiers. Note’s followers greeted him with ‘Bayete’, the salute usually reserved for royalty. After the Boer War, Ninevite activity moved into Johannesburg itself, with gang members operating in and from mine compounds.This continued even after Note received a life sentence in Pretoria Central Prison because he introduced the Ninevite military-style gang structure there as well, with only senior Ninevites having the right to take younger males as ‘wives’, and a complex communication system with outside members.40 Brutal punishment faced anyone who defied the authority of gang leaders. Note’s endeavours have proven to be a model for prison gangs in South Africa’s cities ever since.41 The Ninevites seem to have played a part in the rise of Amalaita gangs of houseboys in Johannesburg and Durban. Amalaita was seemingly a creolised English term that derived from victims being told to ‘light’ the way of gang members by handing over money.42 Having been a houseboy himself, it would seem that in the 1890s Note offered violent Ninevite assistance to Zulu-speaking houseboys in disputes against their employers.43 Some of these houseboys left for Durban during the general refugee exodus during the Boer War, where they paraded through the streets by day and night (thereby brazenly defying the 9 pm curfew) in groups of 14–20, noisily playing harmonicas and challenging rival groups to fights. By 1903, these gangs, predominantly of houseboys (males constituted 7590 out of 8944 domestic workers in Durban as late as 1921), were being referred to as Amalaita. In similar fashion to the Ninevites, Amalaitas gave themselves military ranks. Significantly, Nongoloza became a term used to describe their leaders.44 Connections between small groups of houseboys were facilitated by ‘homeboy’ migrant associations and kinship links to particular rural areas, as was the case with the large groups of miners and many other urban African workers. Amalaita were highly noticeable in city streets not only for their youth but also because of their dress and music. During the First World War in Durban, different gangs were distinguished by a range of headgear: umshokobezi or ox-tails tied round the head in Zulu warrior tradition, black-ribboned hats, ground hornbill feathers or red ribboned headbands, the latter similar to those worn by participants in the Bambatha rebellion.45 In Johannesburg, where Pedi migrants came to dominate large Amalaita gangs of some ­50–100 members of both sexes who paraded the streets in military style, men wore red cloth badges and knickerbocker trousers while women sported pleated tartan skirts (‘Scots rokkies’), black stockings and high-heeled shoes.46 Although the relationship of women to gangs may in many instances have been that of victim, ‘show-piece’ girlfriend or ‘possession’ (boosting male egos), they were sometimes active gangsters themselves, occasionally even gang leaders. Such was the case, for instance, with the ‘women’s wing’ of Sophiatown’s (  Johannesburg) Berliners’ gang of the 1930s through to the 1950s, whose members wore the swastika tattoo like their male counterparts. The head of the women’s wing for some years was a weightlifter and boxer called Mamang, while Sinna, another Berliner, broke away to form her own gang in Meadowlands (Soweto, Johannesburg). Two other notable women gangsters in the 1950s were Alexandra (  Johannesburg), gang leader Sponono, of whom men were apparently scared and so seldom refused her advances; and Bitch Never Die, who ‘just took’ men she wanted.47 Gangster clothing in all the main cities became a sub-cultural bricolage of old and newly invented traditions. It achieved defiant distinction from both typical working clothes and 471

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r­espectable British Sunday best. An emerging tsotsi taal, or gangster slang, had much the same effect in marking its speaker as unrespectable. Some sartorial and linguistic elements, like ebusengi or the rural metaphors used by Ninevites, bore witness to on-going rural ties; others spoke loudly of adaptation or invention in the city, indeed of urban belonging.48 By the 1920s, and perhaps pioneered by Pedi migrant Amalaita in Johannesburg, the appearance of some gangsters, like Durban’s abaqhafi who rejected both Zulu tradition and Christianity, was unambiguously and fashionably urban: ‘wide open shirts, coloured scarves and Oxford bags tied below their knees’.49 A satirical element in South African gangs’ disrespect for authority and British notions of respectability is evident in such gangster dress and could also be present in gang language and names. Hence the names of two Cape Town gangs in the 1900s were ‘The Steal Club’, which met outside a hotel where members worked as musicians; and ‘the Hanover Street Burglar’s Club’, operating out of District Six. As the latter’s sobriquet suggests, and several reports of trials of gangsters appear to confirm, there was also an emerging urban territorial dimension to gangster identity and activity in Cape Town, as there was in Durban, perhaps because of the growing size of both towns.50 Apartheid-era social history that dealt with gangs accurately guessed at enduring urban realities. By the early 1990s, and in the context of dreadful acts of urban ‘political’ violence, La Hausse and Clive Glaser drew attention to the relationships between gangsterism, masculinity and youth (as a stage of life). Glaser’s work continued through the 1990s, culminating in a monograph in which he explored connections between political organization and tsotsis and suggested that the distinction between political and criminal activity became blurred in the 1980s with the appearance of the ‘com-tsotsis’. Glaser explained the masculine attractions, hybrid style and value systems of gangsterism within an understanding of urban family structure, gender socialization and generational tensions. Glaser portrayed this phenomenon as profoundly anti-social banditry and a deepening problem in South African cities, not least in terms of violence against women.51 Another historian, Gary Kynoch, who worked on Marashea gangs on the Rand after the Second World War, reached similar conclusions.52 The work of both Glaser and Kynoch suggests that any attempts to deal with gangsterism as a phenomenon should take its particular South African history into consideration.

Conclusion This chapter has argued that studying invented or adapted traditions in the city, and the rules, rituals and practices associated with them, is a fruitful way of exploring the relationship between gender and the urban experience. Many traditions that taught or maintained British identity simultaneously inculcated contemporary British values, including those deemed to be gender appropriate. So too did traditions brought by African migrants to the city, only a minority of whom became thoroughly anglicised, in part because of racial segregation.Yet the traditions of all migrants were subject to creolised and transnational adaptation in the city; and part of the consequent gendered urban experience included adaptation, sometimes in seemingly satirical fashion, of British models.

Notes   1 Robert Morrell, ‘Of boys and men: Masculinity and gender in Southern African Studies’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24, 4, (1998): 605–630. Morrell’s article provides a very useful guide to the achievements and shortcomings of gender studies in southern Africa by the late 1990s.   2 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Introduction: Inventing traditions’ in The Invention of Tradition, ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [1983] 1996), 1–3. Hobsbawm associated ‘customs’ with ‘traditional’ societies and with the possibility of variation not present in invented

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South African Cities, Gender and Tradition traditions; and ‘convention or routine’ with the absence of ‘significant ritual or symbolic function’.Yet he also allowed that conventions could acquire such significance, albeit ‘incidentally’ (in other words not obviously planned), and work on invented traditions associated with the British monarchy, for example, demonstrates that they could vary, or be reinvented, over time. See David Cannadine, ‘The context, performance and meaning of ritual: The British monarchy and the ‘Invention of Tradition’, c. 1820–1977’, in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 101–64.   3 Patrick Harries,‘Imagery, symbolism and tradition in a South African Bantustan: Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inkatha and Zulu History’, History and Theory 32 (1993): 106–7.   4 Thomas Spear, ‘Neo-traditionalism and the limits of invention in British Colonial Africa’, Journal of African History 44,1 (2003): 4.   5 J. Comaroff and J. L. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 1 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1991); J. L. Comaroff and J. Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, Volume 2: The Dialectics of Modernity on a South African Frontier (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2009).   6 Morrell, ‘Of boys and men’.   7 Bill Freund, The African City: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–7.  8 Charles H. Feinstein, An Economic History of South Africa: Conquest, Discrimination and Development (­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–73.   9 Eric Hobsbawm, ‘Mass-Producing Traditions: Europe, 1870–1914’ in Hobsbawm and Ranger, Invention of Tradition, 264. 10 Anthony D. King, Urbanism, Colonialism and the World-economy: Cultural and Spatial Foundations of the World Urban System (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1990), 1. 11 See, for instance, Liah Greenfield, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge MA: Harvard ­University Press, 1992), 11–13; Steven Grosby, Nationalisms: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14, 33–35. 12 Comaroff and Comaroff, Of Revelation and Revolution, vols 1 and 2, and Elizabeth Elbourne, Colonialism, Missions, and the Contest for Christianity in the Cape Colony and Britain, 1799–1853 (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 2002). For a useful discussion of gender and conversion from which these brief remarks are drawn, see Debbie Gaitskell, ‘Devout domesticity? A century of African women’s Christianity in South Africa’, in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town and London: David Philip, 1990), 251–72. 13 Transvaal Government, South African Native Affairs Commission, (Pretoria: Government Printers, 1903–5), vol. 2, 191. 14 H. P. Barnett-Clarke, The Life and Times of Thomas Fothergill Lightfoot, BD, Archdeacon of Cape Town (Cape Town: Darter, 1908), 110–85. 15 Cowley Evangelist, Sept, 1893. 16 Cowley Evangelist, 1902, 36–7. 17 Gaitskell, ‘Devout domesticity?’ 18 Alan Gregor Cobley, The Rules of the Game: Struggles in Black Recreation and Social Welfare Policy (­Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 85–9. 19 Gaitskell, ‘Devout domesticity?’ 20 Cited in Hughes, ‘Inanda Seminary’, 215. 21 Cherryl Walker, ‘The women’s suffrage movement: the politics of gender, race and class’ in Women and Gender in Southern Africa to 1945, ed. Cherryl Walker (Cape Town and London: David Philip, 1990), 329. 22 Cobley, Rules of the Game, 76. 23 Vivian Bickford-Smith, ‘Leisure and social identity in Cape Town, British Cape Colony, 1838–1910’, Kronos: Journal of Cape History, 25 (1998–9): 113. 24 Cape Argus, 4 February 1895. 25 Richard Holt, Sport and the British: A Modern History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). 26 Joan Raikes, Honneur Aulx Dignes: Roedean School (S.A.), 1903–1978 (  Johannesburg: Lorton Publications, 1978). 27 R. S. S. Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys: A Handbook for Instruction in Good Discipline (London: Horace Cox, 1907). 28 Two key works are Maynard W. Swanson, ‘The sanitation syndrome: Bubonic plague and urban native policy in the Cape Colony, 1900–1909’, Journal of African History 18:3 (1977): 387–410; and Paul Maylam, ‘Explaining the apartheid city: 20 years of urban historiography’, Journal of Southern African Studies 21, 1 (March 1995): 19–38.

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Vivian Bickford-Smith 29 K. E. Atkins, The Moon is Dead! Give Us Our Money: The Cultural Origins of an African Work Ethic, Natal, South Africa, 1843–1900 (Portsmouth, NH, and London: Heinemann and James Currey, 1993); D. B. Coplan, In the Time of Cannibals: The Word Music of Africa’s Basotho Migrants (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1994); P. Harries, Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant Labourers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860–1910 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994); T. D. Moodie with V. Ndatshe, Going for Gold: Men, Mines and Migration (Berkley: University of California Press, 1994). See also E. T. Maloko, ‘Basotho and the mines: Towards a history of labour migrancy, 1890–1914’, PhD thesis, University of Cape Town, 1995. 30 William H. Worger, South Africa’s City of Diamonds: Mine Workers and Monopoly Capitalism in Kimberley, 1867–1895 (  Johannesburg: AD Donker, 1987), 64–109; Harries, Work, Culture and Identity. 31 B. Bozzoli with M. Nkotsoe, Women of Phokeng: Consciousness, Life Strategy, and Migrancy in South Africa 1900–1983 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1991). See also D. James, Songs of the Women Migrants: ­Performance and Identity in South Africa (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999). 32 Harries, Work, Culture, and Identity, 60. 33 Cowley Evangelist, 1903, 90, ‘Native Acting Songs’. 34 Harries, Work, Culture and Identity, 201–11. 35 Peter Alegi, Laduma! Politics, Soccer and Society in South Africa (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2004). 36 Phil Bonner, ‘The 1920 Black Mineworkers’ Strike: A preliminary account’ in B. Bozzoli (ed.), Labour, Townships and Protest: Studies in the Social History of the Witwatersrand (  Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1979), 273–97; Harries, Work, Culture and Identity; Vivian Bickford-Smith, Ethnic Pride and Racial Prejudice in Victorian Cape Town (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 180–4; David Hemson, ‘In the eye of the storm: Dock-workers in Durban’, in The People’s City: African Life in Twentieth Century Durban, ed. Paul Maylam and Iain Edwards (Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 1996), 145–73. 37 David Coplan, ‘The emergence of an African working-class culture’, in Industrialisation and Social Change in South Africa: African Class Formation, Culture and Consciousness, ed. Shula Marks and Richard Rathbone (London: Longman, 1983), 363–4. 38 R. R. R. Dhlomo, An African Tragedy (Alice: Lovedale Press, 1926), 8. 39 Charles Van Onselen, Social and Economic History of the Witwatersrand: New Nineveh, vol. II, (London: Longman, 1982), 171–201; P. Bonner, ‘The Russians on the Reef, 1945–1957: Urbanisation, gang warfare and ethnic mobilisation’, in Apartheid’s Genesis, ed. P. Bonner, Peter Delius and Deborah Posel (Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1993). D. Pinnock, The Brotherhoods: Street Gangs and State Control in Cape Town (Cape Town: David Philip, 1984); Paul La Hausse, ‘The cows of Nongoloza: youth, crime and Amalaita gangs in Durban, 1900–1936’, Journal of Southern African Studies 16 (1990): 79–111; Paul La Hausse, ‘  “Mayihlome”: Towards an understanding of Amalaita gangs in Durban, c. 1900–1930’, in Regions and Repertoires:Topics in South African Politics and Culture, ed. S. Clingman (  Johannesburg: Ravan Press, 1991), 30–59. 40 Charles Van Onselen, ‘The Regiment of the Hills – Umkosi Wezintaba: The Witwatersrand’s Lumpenproletarian Army, 1890–1920’, New Nineveh, 171–201. 41 This is certainly argued by a modern account of South African prison gangs; see Johnny Steinberg, The Number (Cape Town: Jonathan Ball, 2004). 42 Charles Van Onselen, ‘The witches of suburbia: Domestic service on the Witwatersrand, 1890-1914’, New Nineveh, 56. La Hausse, ‘The cows of Nongoloza’, 79-111; La Hausse, ‘“Mayihlome’’’, 30–59. 43 Van Onselen, ‘Regiment of the Hills’, 176. 44 La Hausse, ‘The cows of Nongoloza’, 90, 98. 45 Ibid., 91, 94, 99, 105. 46 Van Onselen, ‘The witches of suburbia’, 57–9. 47 Lisa Vetten, ‘Invisible girls and violent boys: Gender and gangs in South Africa’, Development Update, 3, 2 (2000): 5–8; Clive Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi: theYouth Gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976 (London: James Currey, 2000). 48 Dick Hebdige, Subculture:The Meaning of Style (London and New York: Routledge, 1979).Van Onselen, ‘Regiment of the Hills’, 194. 49 La Hausse, ‘The cows of Nongolza’, 105. 50 This was reported on from the 1870s onwards for Cape Town, see Cape Times, 23 November 1876, 25 December 1876, 5 January 1878, 9 January 1878, 11 January 1897, 22 January 1897, 11 August 1897, 6 December 1905; see also Cape Argus, 7 September 1893. For Durban, see La Hausse, ‘The cows of Nongoloza’, 95–7.

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South African Cities, Gender and Tradition 51 Clive Glaser, ‘“We must infiltrate the Tsotsis”: School politics and youth gangs in Soweto, 1968–76,’ Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (1998): 301–24; Clive Glaser, ‘Swines, Hazels and The Dirty Dozen: Masculinity, territoriality and the youth gangs of Soweto, 1960–76’, Journal of Southern African Studies 24 (1998): 719–36; Glaser, Bo-Tsotsi. 52 G. Kynoch, ‘From the Ninevites to the Hard Livings Gang: Township gangsters and urban violence in twentieth century South Africa’, African Studies 58 (1999): 55–85; G. Kynoch, ‘A man among men: Gender, identity, and power in South Africa’s Marashea gangs’, Gender & History 13 (2001): 249–72; G. Kynoch, ‘Marashea on the Mines: Economic, social and criminal networks on the South African gold fields, 1947–1999’, Journal of Southern African Studies 26 (2000): 79–103; G. Kynoch, ‘Politics and Violence in the Russian Zone: Conflicts in Newclare South, 1950–1957’, Journal of African History 41 (2000): 267–90; G. Kynoch, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947–1999 (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005).

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Further Reading

Ago, Renata. Gusto for Things: A History of Objects in Seventeenth-Century Rome. Chicago: University Press, 2013. Agren, Maria and Amy Louise Erickson, eds. The Marital Economy in Scandinavia and Britain, 1400–1900. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005. Angelozzi, Giancarlo and Cesarina Casanova. La giustizia criminale in una città di antico regime. Il tribunale del Torrone di Bologna (secc. XVI–XVII). Bologna: CLUEB, 2008. Appadurai, Arjun, ed. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Arnade, Peter, Martha C. Howell and Walter Simons. ‘Fertile spaces: The productivity of urban space in northern Europe.’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32, no. 4 (2002): 515–48. Arru, Angiolina and Franco Ramella, eds. L’Italia delle migrazioni interne. Donne, uomini, mobilità in età moderna e contemporanea. Roma: Donzelli, 2003. Bannerjee, Swapna. Men,Women and Domestics. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004. Barclay, Katie. ‘Marginal households and their emotions: The “kept mistress’ in enlightenment Edinburgh.” In Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850, edited by Susan Broomhall. London: Routledge, 2015. Barclay, Katie. ‘Space.’ In Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, edited by Susan Broomhall. London: ­Routledge, 2016. Barker, Hannah. The Business of Women: Female Enterprise and Urban Development in Northern England, 1760–1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Baumgarten, Linda. What Clothes Reveal: The Language of Clothing in Colonial and Federal America. New Haven:Yale University Press, 2012. Beattie, Cordelia and Matthew Frank Stevens, eds. Married Women and the Law in Premodern Western Europe. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2013. Beattie, John M. Policing and Punishment in London, 1660–1750. Urban Crime and the Limits of Terror. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Beauvalet-Boutouyrie, Scarlett. Naître à l’hôpital au XIXe siècle. Paris: Belin, 1999. Bellavitis, Anna. Famille, Genre,Transmission à Venise au XVIe Siècle. Rome: École Française de Rome, 2008. Ben-Amos, Ilana Krausman. Adolescence and Youth in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Bender, Rebecca M. ‘Maternity ward horrors: Urban motherhood in Carmen de Burgos’s La rampa.’ Cincinnati Romance Review 34 (2012): 79–96. Bennett, Herman. Colonial Blackness: A History of Afro-Mexico. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009. Bieder, Maryellen. ‘Carmen de Burgos: Modern Spanish Woman.’ In Recovering Spain’s Feminist Tradition, edited by Lisa Vollendorf. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2001. Blair, Karen J. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, 1868–1914. New York: Holmes and Meier, 1980.

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Further Reading Bosma, Ulbe and Remco Raben. Being ‘Dutch’ in the Indies: A History of Creolisation and Empire, 1500–1920. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press, 2008. Brookes, Barbara, Annabel Cooper and Robin Law, eds. Sites of Gender:Women, Men and Modernity in Southern Dunedin, 1890–1939. Auckland: Auckland University Press 2003. Broomhall, Susan, ed. Gender and Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Destroying Order; Structuring Disorder. Farnham: Ashgate, 2015. Burgos, Carmen de. La rampa, edited by Susan Larson. Buenos Aires: Stockcero, 2006. Burns, Kathryn. Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. Durham: Duke University Press, 1999. Canepari, Eleonora. Stare in compagnia. Strategie di inurbamento e forme associative nella Roma del Seicento. Soveria Mannelli: Rubbettino, 2007. Carbonell-Esteller, Montserrat. Sobreviure a Barcelona. Dones, Pobresa i Assistència al Segle XVIII. Barcelona: Ed. Eumo, 1997. Catterall, Douglas and Jodi Campbell, eds. Women in Port. Gendering Communities, Economics and Social ­Networks in Atlantic Port Cities, 1500–1800. Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2012. Cavallo, Sandra and Tessa Store. Healthy Living in Late Renaissance Italy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Chalus, Elaine. Elite Women in English Political Life, c. 1754–1790. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Chatterjee, Indrani. Gender, Slavery and Law in Colonial India. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999. Chaudhuri, Nupur and Margaret Strobel, eds. Western Women and Imperialism. Bloomington: University of Indian Press, 1992. Cherry, Deborah. ‘Going places: Women artists in central London in the mid-nineteenth century.’ The London Journal 28, 1 (May 2003): 73–96. Christensen, Søren Bitsch and Jørgen Mikkelsen, eds. Danish Towns during Absolutism. Urbanisation and Urban Life, 1660–1848. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008. Clarsen, Georgine. Eat My Dust. Early Women Motorists. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2008. Cohen, Benjamin. In the Club. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2015. Cohen, Elizabeth S. ‘Honor and gender in the streets of early modern Rome.’ Journal of Interdisciplinary ­History 22, no. 4 (1992), 597–625. Cohen, Elizabeth S. and Thomas V. Cohen, ‘Open and shut: The social meaning of the cinquecento Roman house.’ Studies in the Decorative Arts 9, 1 (2001), 61–84. Corley, Christopher. ‘On the threshold: Youth as arbiters of the urban space.’ Journal of Social History 43, 1 (2009): 139–156. Cowman, Krista. Mrs. Brown is a Man and a Brother: Women in Liverpool’s Political Organisations, 1890–1920. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004. Cowman, Krista, Nina Javette Koefoed and Åsa Karlsson Sjögren, eds. Gender in Urban Europe. Sites of Political Activity and Citizenship. New York: Routledge, 2014. Cowman, Krista. Women in British Politics, c. 1689–1979. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Craig, Beatrice. Women and Business since 1500. Invisible Presences in Europe and North America. New York: Palgrave, 2016. Crane, Mary Thomas. ‘Illicit privacy and outdoor spaces in early modern England.’ Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies 99, 1 (2009): 4–22. Crossick, Geoffrey, ed. The Artisan and the European Town, 1500–1900. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Crowston, Clare Haru. Fabricating Women: The Seamstresses of Old Regime France, 1675–1791. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Crowston, Clare. ‘Women, gender and guilds in early modern Europe’. In The Return of the Guilds. International Review of Social History. Supplement 16, edited by Jan Lucassen,Tine De Moor and Jan Luiten van Zanden. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Davidson, Joyce, and Mick Smith, eds. Emotional Geographies. Farnham: Ashgate, 2007. De Garsault, François A. M. De Garsault’s 1767 Art of the Shoemaker: An Annotated Translation. Edited by D. A. Saguto. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2009. Deutsch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Donald, Moira and Linda Hurcombe, eds. Gender and Material Culture in Historical Perspective. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000.

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Further Reading Dudink, Stefan, Karen Hagemann and Anna Clark, eds. Representing Masculinity: Male Citizenship in Modern Western Culture. 2nd edition. New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Dumont, Dora. ‘Women and guilds in Bologna: The ambiguities of “marginality” ’. Radical History Review 70 (1998): 4–25. Edmonds, Penelope. Urbanizing Frontiers: Indigenous Peoples and Settlers in 19th-Century Pacific Rim Cities. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2010. Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives and Nurses, A History of Women Healers, 2nd ed. New York: The Feminist Press, 2010. Eisenbichler, Konrad. ‘Italian scholarship on pre-modern confraternities in Italy.’ Renaissance Quarterly 50, 2 (1997): 567–80. Enstam, Elizabeth York. Women and the Creation of Urban Life: Dallas, Texas, 1843–1920. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1998. Erickson, Amy Louise. ‘Coverture and capitalism.’ History Workshop Journal 59 (2005): 1–16. Fay-Sallois, Fanny. Les nourrices à Paris au 19e siècle. Paris: Payot, 1980. Few, Martha. Women Who Live Evil Lives: Gender, Religion, and the Politics of Power in Colonial Guatemala. Austin: University of Texas, 2002. Flanagan, Maureen A. Seeing with their Hearts: Chicago Women and the Vision of the Good City, 1871–1933. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. Flather, Amanda. Gender and Space in Early Modern England. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007. Froide, Amy M. Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Fuchs, Rachel G. Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archives in the Urban British Caribbean. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Gaspar, David Barry and Darlene Clark Hine, eds. Beyond Bondage: Free Women of Color in the Americas. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004. Gauderman, Kimberly A. Women’s Lives in Colonial Quito: Gender, Law, and Economy in Spanish America. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Ghosh, Durba. Sex and the Family in Colonial India:The Making of Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Glaser, Clive. Bo-Tsotsi:The youth gangs of Soweto, 1935–1976. London: James Currey, 2000. Goldberg, P. J. P. Women, Work, and Life Cycle in a Medieval Economy: Women in York and Yorkshire, c. 1300– 1520. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992. Gonzalez-Quijano, Lola. Capitale de l’amour. Filles et lieux de plaisir à Paris au 19e siècle. Paris: Vendémiaire, 2015. Gowing, Laura. ‘“The freedom of the streets”: Women and social space, 1560–1640.’ In Londinopolis. Essays in the Cultural and Social History of Early Modern London, edited by Paul Griffiths and Mark Jenner. ­Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000. Gowing, Laura. ‘The manner of submission: Gender and demeanour in seventeenth-century London.’ Cultural & Social History, 10 (2013): 25–45. Graubart, Karen B. With Our Labor and Sweat: Indigenous Women and the Formation of Colonial Society in Peru, 1550–1700. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007. Green, Nancy L. ‘Changing paradigms in migration studies: From men to women to gender.’ Gender & History 24, 3 (2012): 782–98. Green, Richard. John Atkinson Grimshaw: 1836–Leeds–1893. London: Three London Galleries, 2003. Griffiths, Paul. Youth and Authority: Formative Experiences in England, 1560–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Groppi, Angela, ed. Il lavoro delle donne. Roma–Bari: Laterza, 1996. Guzzetti, Linda and Antje Ziemann. ‘Women in the fourteenth-century Venetian Scuole.’ Renaissance ­Quarterly 55, 4 (2002): 1151–95. Haemers, Jelle. ‘A moody community? Emotion and ritual in late medieval urban revolts.’ In Emotion in the Heart of the City (14th–16th Century), edited by Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardins and Anne-Laure Van Bruaene. Turnhout: Brepols, 2005. Hafter, Daryl M. Women at Work in Preindustrial France. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Greig, Hannah. The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.

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Further Reading Harsin, Jill. Policing Prostitution in 19th Century Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985. Heinsohn, Kirsten. Politik und Geschlect Zur Politischen Kultur. Bürgerlicher Frauenvereine in Hamburg. ­Hamburg: Verlag Verein für Hamburgische Geschichte, 1997. Heitzman, James. The City in South Asia. New York, Oxford: Routledge, 2008. Hietala, Marjatta, and Lars Nilsson, eds. Women in Towns. The Social Position of Urban Women in a Historical Context. Helsinki: Suomen Historiallinen Seura, 1999. Hillier, Bill and Julienne Hanson. The Social Logic of Space. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. Hoerder, Dick and Amarjit Kaur. Proletarian and Gendered Mass Migrations: A Global Perspective on Continuities and Discontinuities from the 19th to the 21st Centuries. Leiden: Brill, 2013. Hohti, Paula. ‘Domestic space and identity: Artisans, shopkeepers and traders in sixteenth-century Siena.’ Urban History 37, 3 (2010): 372–85. Houlbrook, Matt. Queer London: Perils and Pleasures in the Sexual Metropolis, 1918–1957. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Hovland, Ingie. Mission Station Christianity. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2013. Howell, Martha C. Commerce before Capitalism in Europe, 1300–1600. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Hubbard, Eleanor. City Women. Money, Sex and the Social Order in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Hunt, Margaret. ‘Wife beating, domesticity and women’s independence in eighteenth-century London.’ Gender & History 4 (1992): 10–33. Jones, Eric Allan. ‘Fugitive women: Slavery and social change in early modern Southeast Asia.’ Journal of Southeast Asian Studies, 38, 2 (2007): 215–45. Jones, Robin. Interiors of Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007. Lützen, Karin. Byen tæmmes: Kernefamilie, sociale reformer og velgørenhed i 1800–tallets København. Copenhagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag, 1998. Karskens, Grace. The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2009. Kehoe, Marsely. ‘Dutch Batavia: Exposing the hierarchy of the Dutch colonial city.’ Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art, 7, 1 (2015), doi:10.5092/jhna.2015.7.1.3 Kellus, Rachel. ‘From abstract to concrete: Subjective reading of urban space.’ Journal of Urban Design 6, 2 (2001): 129–50. Kenny, Nicholas. ‘Emotions and city life.’ Urban History Review 42 (2014): 5–7. Kent, Eliza. Converting Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kirkham, Pat, ed. Gendered Object. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996. Kümin, Beat and Cornelie Usborne. ‘At home and in the workplace: A historical introduction to the “­spatial turn”.’ History and Theory 52 (2013): 305–18. Laitinen, Riitta and Thomas V. Cohen, eds. Cultural History of Early Modern European Streets. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2009. Lanza,  Janine. From Wives to Widows in Early Modern Paris: Gender, Economy and Law. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. Lejeune, Catherine and Manuela Martini. ‘The fabric of irregular migration in 20th century Europe and North America: A comparative approach.’ Labor History, 56, 5 (2015): 1–29. Leroux-Hugon, Véronique. Des saintes laïques. Les infirmières à l’aube de la IIIe république. Paris: Sciences en Situation, 1992. Lethbridge, Lucy. Servants: A Downstairs History of Britain from the Nineteenth Century to the Modern Age. New York: Norton & Company, 2014. Levine, Philippa, ed. Gender and Empire. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Levine, Philippa. Prostitution, Race and Politics. New York: Routledge, 2003. Longfellow, Erica. ‘Public, private, and the household in early seventeenth-century England.’ Journal of ­British Studies 45, no. 2 (April 2006): 313–34. Lyons, Clare A. Sex Among the Rabble: An Intimate History of Gender and Power in the Age of Revolution, ­Philadelphia, 1730–1830. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Macdonald, Charlotte. A Woman of Good Character: Single Women as Immigrant Settlers in Nineteenth-Century New Zealand. Wellington: Allen & Unwin, 1990. Mair, Lucille Mathurin. A Historical Study of Women in Jamaica, 1655–1844. Edited and with an introduction by Hilary McD. Beckles and Verene A. Shepard. Kingston: University of the West Indies Press, 2006. Mangan, Jane E. Trading Roles: Gender, Ethnicity, and the Urban Economy in Colonial Potosí. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. Marshal, Nancy. City of Gold and Mud: Painting Victorian London. New Haven and London:Yale University Press, 2012.

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Further Reading Massey, Doreen. Space, Place and Gender. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. May, Andrew Brown. Melbourne Street Life. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Press, 1998. McIntosh, Marjorie K. Working Women in English Society, 1300–1620. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Meldrum, Tim. Domestic Service and Gender, 1660–1750. Harlow: Longman, 2000. Merki, Christoph Maria. Der holprige siegeszug des Automobils 1895–1930: Zur Motorisierung des Straβenverkehrs in Frankreich, Deutschland und der Schweiz. Wien, Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2002. Milne-Smith, Amy. ‘A flight to domesticity?’ Journal of British Studies 45 (2006): 796–818. Mom, Gijs. Atlantic Automobilism: Emergence and Persistence of the Car 1895–1940. New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015. Morrell, Robert. ‘Of boys and men: Masculinity and gender in Southern African studies.’ Journal of Southern Studies 24, 4 (1998): 605–630. Muldrew, Craig. The Economy of Obligation:The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1998. Murdoch, Lydia. Daily Life of Victorian Women. Santa Barbara, Greenwood Press. 2014. Nauright, John. Sport, Cultures, and Identities in South Africa. London: A&C Black, 1997. Nead, Lynda. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000. Nevola, Fabrizio. ‘Street life in early modern Europe.’ Renaissance Quarterly 66, 4 (2013): 1332–1345. Niemeijer, Hendrik E. ‘Slavery, ethnicity and the economic independence of women in seventeenth-­ century Batavia’, in Other Pasts: Women, Gender and History in Early Modern Southeast Asia, edited by Barbara Watson Andaya. Hawaii: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Hawaii, 2000. Nocentelli, Carmen. Empires of Love: Europe, Asia, and the Making of Early Modern Identity. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Nord, Deborah Epstein. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation, and the City. Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1995. O’Connell, Sean. The Car in British Society: Class, Gender and Motoring 1896–1939. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1998. O’Toole, Sarah Rachel. Bounded Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012. Ogilvie, Sheilagh. A Bitter Living: Women, Markets, and Social Capital in Early Modern Germany. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Olssen, Erik. Building the New World: Work, Politics and Society in Caversham 1880s–1920s. Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1995. Orlin, Lena Cowen. Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Ouzgane, Lahoucine and Robert Morrell. African Masculinities: Men in Africa from the Late Nineteenth Century to the Present. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Parsons, Deborah. A Cultural History of Madrid: Modernism and the Urban Spectacle. Oxford: Berg, 2003. Patton, Diana. No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Phillips, Nicola. Women in Business, 1700–1850. Woodbridge: Boydell, 2006. Pike, Burton. The Image of the City in Modern Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. Pollock, Griselda. Vision and Difference. Femininity, Feminism and Histories of Art. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. Popp, Andrew. Entrepreneurial Families: Business, Marriage, and Life in the Early Nineteenth Century. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012. Porter, Dale. The Thames Embankment. Akron: The University of Akron, 1998. Powers, Karen Vieira. Women in the Crucible Of Conquest: The Gendered Genesis of Spanish American Society, 1500–1600. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005. Procida, Mary. Married to Empire. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002. Raben, Remco.‘Cities and the slave trade in early-modern Southeast Asia’. In Trade,Towns and Kin in Asian History, edited by Peter Boomgaard, Dick Kooiman and Henk Schulte Nordholt. Leiden: KITLV Press, 2008. Rappaport, Erika Diane. Shopping for Pleasure,Women in the Making of London’s West End. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000. Rau, Susanne and Ekkehard Schonherr, eds. Mapping Spatial Relations, their Perceptions and Dynamics: The City Today and in the Past. Cham: Springer, 2014.

481

Further Reading Reagin, Nancy R. A German Women’s Movement: Class and Gender in Hannover, 1880–1933. London: ­University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Rees Jones, Sarah. York, the Making of a City 1068–1350. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Rendell, Jane. The Pursuit of Pleasure: Gender, Space and Architecture in Regency London. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. Rexford, Nancy. Women’s Shoes in America, 1795–1930. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2000. Richardson, R. C. Household Servants in Early Modern England. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010. Romano, Dennis. ‘Gender and the urban geography of Renaissance Venice’. Journal of Social History 23, 2 (1989): 339–53. Rosenwein, Barbara. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011. Russell, Penny. Savage or Civilised? Manners in Colonial Australia. Sydney: NewSouth Publishing, 2010. Scharff, Virginia. Taking the Wheel.Women and the Coming of the Motor Age. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999. Schmidt, Ariadne.‘Women and guilds: Corporations and female labor market participation in early modern Holland.’ Gender & History 21 (2009): 170–89. Schneider, Dorothee. Crossing Borders: Migration and Citizenship in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011. Schwerhoff, Gerd. ‘Spaces, places, and the historians: A comment from a German perspective.’ History and Theory 52 (2013): 420–32. Scully, Pamela and Diana Paton, eds. Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Seiler, Cotton. Republic of Drivers: A Cultural History of Automobility in America. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Sellers, Jane, ed. Atkinson Grimshaw, Painter of Moonlight. Harrogate: The Mercer Art Gallery, 2012. Sennefelt, Karin. Politikens hjärta. Medborgarskap, manlighet och plats i frihetstidens Stockholm. Stockholm: Stockholmia förlag, 2011. Shepard, Alexandra. ‘Crediting women in the early modern English economy.’ History Workshop Journal 79, 1 (2015): 1–24. Shepard, Alexandra. Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. Simonton, Deborah. A History of European Women’s Work: 1700 to the Present. London: Routledge, 1998. Simonton, Deborah. Women in European Culture and Society, Gender, Skill and Identity. London: Routledge, 2013. Simonton, Deborah and Anne Montenach, eds. Female Agency in the Urban Economy. Gender in European Towns, 1640–1830. New York: Routledge, 2013. Simonton, Deborah, Marjo Kaartinen and Anne Montenach. Luxury and Gender in European Towns, 1700–1914. New York: Routledge, 2015. Sinha, Mrinalini. Colonial Masculinity. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Sjögren, Åsa Karlsson. Männen, kvinnorna och rösträtten. Medborgarskap och representation 1723–1866. ­Stockholm: Carlsson Bokförlag, 2006. Sparke, Penny. As Long as It’s Pink. The Sexual Politics of Taste. London and San Francisco: Pandora/Harper Collins, 1995. Spence, Cathryn. Women, Credit and Debt in Early Modern Scotland. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016. Sperling, Jutta Gisela and Shona Kelly Wray, eds. Across the Religious Divide. Women, Property, and Law in the Wider Mediterranean (ca. 1300–1800). London: Routledge, 2010. Spicksley, Judith. ‘Women, “usury” and credit in early modern England: The case of the maiden investor.’ Gender & History 27, 2 (2015): 263–92. Stanley, Adam C. Modernizing Tradition: Gender and Consumerism in Interwar France and Germany. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Stansell, Christine. City of Women: Sex and Class in New York: 1789–1860. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. Stern, Steve J. The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men and Power in Late Colonial Mexico. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Storey, Tessa. Carnal Commerce in Counter-Reformation Rome. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Stratigakos, Despina. A Women’s Berlin: Building the Modern City. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008.

482

Further Reading Sweet, Rosemary and Penelope Lane, eds. Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth-Century England: On the Town. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Taylor, Jean Gelman. The Social World of Batavia: European and Eurasian in Colonial Indonesia. 2nd ed. M ­ adison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. Terpstra, Nicholas, ed. The Politics of Ritual Kinship. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. Terpstra, Nicholas. Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1995. Tlusty, B. Ann. Bacchus and Civic Order: The Culture of Drink in Early Modern Germany. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Tonkiss, Fran. Space, the City and Social Theory. Social Relations and Urban Form. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Townsend, Camilla. Malintzin’s Choices: An Indian Woman in the Conquest of Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2006. Twinam, Ann. Public Lives, Private Secrets: Gender, Honor, Sexuality, and Illegitimacy in Colonial Spanish America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Van den Heuvel, Danielle. Women and Entrepreneurship: Female Traders in the Northern Netherlands c. 1580– 1815. Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007. Van Deusen, Nancy E. ‘Recent studies on gender relations in colonial Native American History’. In New World, First Nations: Native Peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes under Colonial Rule, edited by David Cahill and Blanca Tovías. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2006. Vetten, Lisa. ‘Invisible girls and violent boys: Gender and gangs in South Africa.’ Development Update, 3:2 (2000), 5–8. Vickery, Amanda. Behind Closed Doors: At Home in Georgian England. New Haven, London:Yale University Press, 2009. Villa-Flores, Javier and Sonya Lipsett-Rivera, eds. Emotions and Daily Life in Colonial Mexico. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2014. Volti, Rudi. Cars and Culture: The Life Story of a Technology. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 2006. Von Germeten, Nicole. Black Blood Brothers: Confraternities and Social Mobility for Afro-Mexicans. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. Vries, Jan de. The Industrious Revolution: Consumer, Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Wadauer, Sigrid, Thomas Buchner and Alexander Mejstrik, eds. The History of Labour Intermediation. Institutions and Finding Employment in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Waddy, Patricia. Seventeenth-Century Roman Palaces: Use and the Art of Plan. New York. Cambridge, London: The Architectural History Foundation, 1990. Walford, Jonathan. The Seductive Shoe: Four Centuries of Fashion Footwear. New York: Stewart, Tabori and Chang, 2007. Walker, Lynne. ‘Vistas of pleasure: Women consumers of urban space in the West End of London, 1850– 1900.’ In Women in the Victorian Art World, edited by Clarissa Orr. Manchester: Manchester Press, 1995. Walkowitz, Judith R. City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Walkowitz, Judith. Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State. New York: Cambridge ­University Press, 1988. Wanhalla, Angela. In/Visible Sight: The Mixed-Descent Families of Southern New Zealand. Edmonton: AU Press, 2010. Wilson, Elizabeth. Adorned in Dreams: Fashion and Modernity. London:Virago, 1985. Wilson, Elizabeth. The Sphinx in the City: Urban Life, the Control of Disorder, and Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. Wilson, Kathleen, ed. A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Wohlcke, Ann. The Perpetual Fair, Gender, Disorder and Urban Amusement in Eighteenth-Century London. ­Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014. Wolff, Janet. ‘The invisible flâneuse. Women and the literature of modernity.’ Theory, Culture & Society 2 (1985): 37–46. Woolley, Linda and Lucy Pratt. Shoes. London:Victoria & Albert Museum, 1999. Wunder, Heide. He is the Sun, She is the Moon:Women in Early Modern Germany. Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1998.

483

Index

Aberdeen 33, 36, 38–9, 41–2, 44–5, 217 Åbo see Turku Aboriginal Australians 459–60 abortions 274 accessories 247, 297, 308, 318 Adelaide 454 adolescence 60–1, 63, 225, 351, 352, 393, 470 advertising 43, 48, 205, 217, 274, 305, 309–11, 317, 318, 429, 431, 433 Africa see South Africa age 42, 103, 109, 120, 193, 322–3, 347–8, 408; apprentices 16, 186–7, 327, hierarchies and status 48, 50, 92–4, 96–9, 113, 223, 225–9, 335; and life cycle 60–1, 63, 66, 68, 211–12, 281, 304, 313–14, 351–6, 393, 430, 472; and marriage 178, 194, 403; migrants 417; servants 470 agency 76, 137, 246, 321, 367, 389, 450; apprentices 330, 334, female 8–9, 26, 30, 59–64, 68, 283, 292, 369–70, 375, 378, 410; institutional 73, 312; male 1, 94–5, 97–102; political 165 ale 21–2, 24, 28–9, Alep 15 alms see charity America, Early 247, 296–306 America, North 71, 75–6, 80, 107, 278, 292–3, 296–307, 310, 315, 389–90, 397, 399, 427–9, 469; see also Canada, and individual cities America, Spanish 351–61, 399, 400, 401–13; see also individual cities; slaves Amsterdam 73, 76–8, 249, 263, 310, 415–16, 417, 424–5 amusements 297, 300, 356, 365 Andes 401–4, 406–8, 411–12 Anglicization see Britishness apartments 136, 148, 159, 161, 202, 251, 254–6, 279–80, 289, 378

apprentices 52–3, 63, 88, 91–9, 184, 298, 303, 351; civic identity 170, 171, 186–92; discipline 324, 331, 333; gender and 15–18, 29, 40–1, 43, 173, 250; and master relations 327–37, 353, 355; system of 33–4, 37–8, 175, 176, 186, 328–9, 338; see also servants architecture 5, 98, 104, 126, 248, 283–94, 356, 415, 447–8 Arezzo 12 Armenian 78 art and artists 87, 116–27, 252–3, 265, 278, 287, 292, 407, 421, 461 artefact 4, 5, 245–6, 267, 309, 312, 317, 318 artisans 169, 184, 305, 406, 442; civic identity 1, 36, 171, 186–92, 411, 424; culture 4, 34, 98; family and household 16, 48, 64, 178, 403, 436; gender 42, 44, 183–7, 404; work and economy 1, 36, 39, 49, 58, 171, 351, 406, 408–9, 433 Ashton–under–Lyme 51 Asturias 73 Atlantic Ocean 71, 73, 430 Atlantic world 72, 283, 297, 301, 331, 430 attorneys see lawyers Auckland 398, 454, 458 Australia 109, 292, 379, 399, 400, 453–62; see also individual towns Austria 75, 221, 363, 366, 369 Austrian Empire 72 automobile see car Auvergne 76 Avignon 64 Aztecs 356, 401, 403–4 Baltic, The Bangalore 441 bankruptcy 105, Barcelona 64, 68

484

Index Basque region 73 bastardy see illegitimacy Batavia 398, 399, 415–25; see also Slaves in Batavia bathroom see rooms begging 58–9, 158, 215, 254, 339–41, 351, 355 Belluno 17, 165, 167, 185, 196, 223 belonging 80, 92, 95, 322–3, 338–40, 347, 368, 377 Benz Velo Comfortable bequests 24, 28 Bergamo 16 Berlin 78, 222, 283, 288–93, 311, 316 bicycle 311–13, 461 body 87, 93, 104, 247–8, 321, 331, 334; body language 352; health of 227, 271–81, 362–65; sexual bodies 374–5, 387, 433, 435; Bologna 12, 34, 43, 154–61, 250 books 15, 105, 111, 257, 351, 377, 389, 429, 447; accounts 25, 52, 212, 250, 305; conduct books 91–2, 352–3; guidebooks 197, 297, 367, 370n8; minute books 42, 214, 236; rule books 211; sellers 96, 251; textbooks 466; tracts 216 Boston 283, 296–306, 429 bounteth 28–9 brewing 29, 179, 400, 470 Brisbane 454 Bristol 24 Britain 21, 36, 39, 42, 49–50, 53, 61, 105–6, 214, 217, 222, 327–37, 385–96 Britishness 108–9, 288, 399, 442, 444, 466 Brittany brothels see prostitution Brown, Frederick 117, 121, 122, 125–7, 128n15 and 25 Brussels 74 Budapest 72, 75 Buenos Aires 408 buildings 13, 147–8, 356 burgesses 26–7, 29, 36 Burgos, Carmen de 130 business 7, 24–5, 38–9, 57–9, 75, 166, 182, 189, 236, 365, 415, 417, 434; small businesses 77, 424, 455–6; family businesses 173, 175, 407; women and 158, 169, 177–9, 408, 424, 430, 458 caciques 405–6 Cadiz 73 Cairo 11 Calcutta 107, 398, 399, 427, 433–6, 441 Canada 72, 82 Cantabria 73 Cape Town 398, 465–72 capitalism 18, 40, 66–7, 375, 382 car 245, 247, 309–18, accidents 311, 312; clubs 311, 313, 247; racing 310, 315–17 Caracas 408 caregiving 271–81; caregivers 272–4, 339, 346–8 Caribbean 397, 399, 408, 428, 433, 436; see also Kingston (Jamaica)

Carlsbad 362–3, 366–7 Cartagena 408 Casa de Maternidad 131, 134–6 Casa de Misericordia 60, 66, 68 castas 401, 408, 409 Catholicism: Australia 459; Europe 64, 66, 67, 183, 210, 221, 338–42, 424; India 442–4, 447; Spanish America 402, 407, 410–11 celibacy 184, 249, 250 census 423–5, 467, 451n17; local and parish 187, 249, 250, 251, 254, 255, 409; national 77, 239 Champigny–sur–Marne 79 character 36, 103–13, 167, 212, 215, 225, 230, 322, 330–5, 346, 348, 352, 387 charity 16–17, 41–2, 58, 61, 64, 189, 210–14, 218, 275, 323, 338–49; alms 58, 64–5, 191; charity work 118, 213–14; institutions 213–14, 272–4, 424; mutual support 189–90, 210 chauffeurs 309, 312–13, 314–15, 316 Chennai see Madras Chicago 283; Hull House 288 children and childhood 59–63, 120–6, 278–80; adolescence 327–8, 352, 378; boys 15, 38, 183, 186–92, 215, 225, 351–61, 403; discipline 322, 324, 467; girls 14–17, 38, 41–2, 68, 190, 211–13, 215, 217, 323, 351–2, 354, 357, 376–80; inheritance 12–13, 41; parent–child relationships 17, 25, 50–3, 352–4, 418–21, 424, 429, 431–2, 435–6, 446, 456; play 356–7; rebellion 352–3, 392; socialization 445, 448; toys 356; welfare and 58, 60, 63, 66–8, 75, 80, 134–5, 213–15, 339, 346–8, 418; work 331–2, 347, 354–5, 409 China 292, 415, 416, 434 Chinese, in Batavia 415–17, 420, 421–3 Christchurch 454 Christiania 73 Christianity 166, 210, 216, 411, 445, 466, 468, 472 churches 153, 156, 159, 169, 190, 254, 323, 338, 339, 341, 398, 402, 442, 443; as centres 59, 253; denominations 209–18, 418, 442, 444, 456, 466; philanthropy 58, 61, 64–5, 75, 213–17, 323, 347, 423, 468; religious institution 58, 61, 233, 346–7, 353, 401, 405–6, 409–10, 418, 447; as spaces 72, 79, 96, 97, 99, 191, 252, 253, 300, 421, 456, 459; votive 261–7 citizenship 3–4, 62, 165–8, 182–92, 221–31, 234, 257–8; and economy 58, 35–6, 38, 169–79 city 59, 68, 85, 138; as corrupter 79, 105–6, 374–84, 457; as deceiver 376–7, 380; as destination for rural people 66, 322, 374–84, 386, 401, 405, 412, 464, 466, 469–70; festival 356, 376, 402, 467; government 328–9, 341–2, 424; moral danger 105–6, 374–84, 444, 455–7, 459–60, 468; spatial planning see space, urban; see also specific cities class 18, 27–30, 47, 228, 249, 251, 257, 271–81, 324, 339, 342–5, 366–9, 370, 377, 381–2;

485

Index hierarchy 92–8, 158, 186, 230, 335, 351–3, 366; middle classes 67, 73, 77, 79, 104–5, 112–13, 131, 133, 201–4, 210–14, 217, 222–30, 237–8, 274–80, 284–93, 311–14, 323, 352–3, 363, 365–6, 382, 424, 445–7, 457–61; working classes 59–60, 64, 131–2, 211, 285, 311, 416, 445, 449, 461 working–class women 15–16, 130, 132, 134, 375; working–class men 158, 192, 224, 314; see also class; mobility, social Clermont–Ferrand 43 climate 310, 311, 318, 367, 444, 446, 451n21 clocks 156, 257 cloth 26–8, 42–3, 64, 79, 169, 170, 177, 403; cloth workers/dealers 51, 176–8, 346; loincloths 403, 417; symbolic 190, 262, 354, 471 clothing attire 68, 97, 106, 133, 201–2, 245, 297, 313–15, 421; charity 211–15; commodities 23–4, 27–8, 43, 170, 257–8, 281, 409, 469; cross dressing 106, 387; dress codes 366; meaning 79, 97, 197, 214, 248n8, 257, 279, 284, 298, 305, 313–15, 317, 403, 407, 442, 448–9, 471–2; production 42, 64, 299, 403, 458; shoes 247, 296–306, 471; servants 87, 92–3, symbolic 190–1, 290, 376; in transactions 28, 64, 157–61, 258, 408, 435; uniforms 314–15, 354, 403, 408, 409, 467; ‘well–dressed’ 118, 121, 122, 374 clubs 118, 195–6, 209, 284, 399; car clubs 247, 310–13, 316, 318; clubhouses 283–94; colonial 400, 442–3, 445–50, 462, 467–8, 472; cycling 311; men’s 96, 166, 196, 203–5, 287–9, 291–3, 315; women’s 248, 283–94; see also names of specific clubs Cologne 35, 43, 49 Colony Club, New York 293 commerce 1, 15, 24, 33–44, 49–51, 85, 176, 179, 183, 293; colonial 399, 402, 405, 408–9, 412, 415, 420, 430, 454; commercial culture 1, 3, 4, 7, 9, 47, 92, 169, 401, 428; location 130–1, 166, 284, 289–90, 443–4, 447, 456; sex commerce see prostitution community 23–4, 28, 143–58, 191, 195, 234, 260, 323–4, 339–41, 346–8, 351, 405, 453; ‘community of goods’ 14; discipline 106, 229, 323, 324, 389; emotional communities see emotions; ethnicity 420, 425, 428, 434, 442; formation 59, 61–2, 65–7, 87–8, 148, 335, 353, 375, 456–9, 461; institutions 40, 247, 262–7, 272; mercantile 37, 40, 97, 169, 327–35; queer 386, 389 concubines 399, 403–4, 417–18, 431, 434, 435–7, 443 conduct books see books confraternities 17, 183, 186–90, 247, 259–67, 409–10 Congregationalists 210–11, 456 Conservatori della virtù 17 consororities 259–67 consumerism 179

consumption 5, 7, 62, 64, 88, 93, 99, 246, 207, 296–306, 309–18; ‘conspicuous’ 288, 290; male 247, 277 convents 13, 106, 190, 250, 404, 407–8, 410 convicts 399, 433, 457–9 corporations 8, 33–4, 37–8, 40–4, 196–7; see also guilds courtesans 201, 205, 252, 277, 278 court records see law courtship 103–13, 378, 429, 445 courtyards 134, 147–8, 255, 280, 378, 448 coverture 14, 24 crafts 34, 38, 40, 42, 47, 73, 170–9, 187, 236, 250–2, 254, 331, 353, 409; craftsmen/women 17, 23, 25, 29, 36, 49, 91–2, 182–4, 192, 249, 250–2, 278, 299, 306, 332, 351–5, 362, 424; see also guilds cramers see streets: stall holders credit 8, 9, 21–30, 49, 52, 58–9, 64, 78, 258, 401, 408–9, 456; creditworthiness 21–2, 25, 49, 273, 322, 327, 330–2; honesty 23, 331; Monte de Piedad 64; trust 22–3, 25, 29, 322, 329, 331, 370; see also debt, pawnbroking, reputation creoles 402–3, 408, 410, 412, 419, 426n11 crime 58–9, 143–9, 151n10, 153–7, 213, 238, 334, 345, 375–6, 451n21, 468, 470; sex–related 153–7, 221–8, 386–8 crowd 98, 159–61, 356, 370, 375, 379, 411, 417; crowds 209, 278, 354, 370, 417 culture 2–4, 7, 18, 68, 134, 246, 321, 377, 379, 466; colonial 402, 412, 443, 447, 461–2, 465; cultured 223–9; economic 3, 169, 21, 23; group 35, 287; male 145, 197, 356–7, 447; material 119, 290, 245–8, 249–57, 306, 309, 317, 446; political 3, 97–8, 165–8, 204–5, 235–42, 259, 306; national 3, 8, 453, 460–1; popular 469; subcultures/sexual cultures 222, 224, 385–93, 417–36; urban 10, 293, 318, 399, 410, 445, 457; see also print culture curfew 112, 156–7, 471 curiosities 257 Cuzco 402, 404, 408 Cyclades 14 cycling 311 Dallas 283 Dalmatia 182, 259–67, 268n9 dance 117, 125–7, 139n15, 198, 202; dance halls 198; dancers 278, 356; dances 95, 277, 297, 300–4, 443, 450; dancing 217, 356, 365–66, 368, 400, 443, 450, 469–70 danger, narratives of 131–8, 374–84, 408, 455–60; boys and 351–8; cars and 310–13; moral 190, 226, 254, 444, 468; night 157–61, 253; sexual 377, 389–92; urban 155–6, 399; women as 109, 156, 281, 284, 292, 378; see also city as corrupter, streets Darjeeling 441, 444

486

Index dating see courtship debt 8–9, 13, 21–30, 40, 78, 160, 188, 327, 331–2, 409, 423 as bondage 276, 376, 435, 456; see also credit Delhi 441 Denmark 35–6, 73, 221–30; see also individual towns design 126, 198, 252, 256, 267, 323, car 309–18, spatial 119, 124, 132–4, 198, 291–3, 363–6, 393, 445–6 desire 352, 380; consumer 47; sexual 109, 113, 188, 221–2, 225, 374–84, 387–8, 391–4 diaries 52, 195–203, 303; see also memoirs disease 1, 170, 261, 271–2, 339, 364, 417, 428, 434; livestock 177, 469; mental 376–7; puerperal fever 273; venereal disease 137, 276–7, 279, 429 diviners 401, 410, 411 divorce 428–9 doctors 73, 136–7, 212–13, 252, 271–8, 354, 365–6, 379, 429; female 274–5, 313 dolls 257, 298 domestic servants see servants doorways see thresholds Douai 12, 14 dowry 12–18, 62–3, 66, 183, 189–91, 407, 417 dress see clothing drinks 21–4, 28–9, 364, 377, 392, 401, 405, 409–12, 458; drinking 1, 94–8, 144–6, 157–60, 227, 299, 313, 365–8, 377, 400, 461, 469; drinking fountain 118, 126 drivers 247, 278, 310–18 drunkenness 96–8, 143–8, 155, 159, 315, 375, 417, 459 Dublin 87, 103–13, 214, 299 Dubrovnik 265 Dundee 26, 390 Dunedin 454, 460 Durban 465–7, 470–2 East India Company, English 399, 433, 434, 441, 442 East Indies Company, Dutch 415, 425n2 economy 7–10, 14–15, 18, 34–43, 53, 58, 61–8, 95, 327–37, 397, 424, 459–60; bankruptcy 105; economy of credit 21–32, 64, 327–37, 407; economy of makeshifts 61; household economy 212, 235, 306; plebeian economy 412; political economy 210, 406: see also family economy, survival strategies, individual towns Edinburgh 8–9, 21–2, 26–8, 49, 166, 209–18, 386–8, 390–3 education 61, 166, 170, 237, 279–80, 322, 425; of men 15, 109, 223–40, 353–6, 403, 425, 460; as philanthropy 209–18, 435–6, 444–5, 466–8; of women 137–8, 167, 237–40, 274, 304, 314, 461, 424, 461 élites 4, 234, 248, 255, 256, 263, 278, 281, 302, 333, 363; Africa 399, 466, 468–9; Batavia 423–5;

civic 12–3, 107, 176, 179, 183, 223, 240–1; Danish 223, 229; English 98, 151n27, 333, 335; female 287–93; French 338, 348; India 435–6, 441–4, 446–9; Irish, 107, 111; Italy 11–13, 156, 183–4, 192, 255, 263; mercantile 36, 171, 183–4, 192, 300; Russia 377; Scottish 210–18; Spanish America 352–6, 403–13; Swedish 195–205, 234, 240–1 elopement 428 embankments 87, 116–28, 224 emotions 48, 51, 68, 321–96; anger 94, 146, 227, 324, 327, 331, 333–4, 354, 380, 386, 394; body 321, 379, 381; compassion 322, 341; emotional communities 323–4, 363, 367–9; emotional geographies 322–3; emotional refuges 322, 369, 386–90, 393–4; fear 68, 133–4, 136, 155–7, 159, 276, 281, 254, 317, 322, 327–8, 335, 340, 342, 354, 386, 388–90, 392–4; 411; history of emotions 323, 332, 335, 365–7, 386; joy 132, 201, 306, 313, 365, 378, 380–2, 457; love 1, 52, 160, 322, 334, 370, 375, 377–9, 382, 387, 391, 393–4, 430, 456, 459; pain 136–7, 159, 346, 379; panic 224, 393, place 321, 339–40, 353, 370, 388; sorrow 136, 365, 377, 381; terror 382, 390; tranquillity 365–6; trauma 393; vengeance 334, 365 empire 5, 107, 109, 288, 397–400; British 298, 427–40, 441–52, 466, 468; Dutch 415–26; German and Austrian, 72; Napoleonic 154; Ottoman 11; Spanish 351–61, 401–14 employment 11, 67, 78, 91–2, 130–1, 433; agencies 73–5, 278, 280; female 24, 28–9, 37–8, 67, 77–8, 116, 169, 175, 178, 213, 257, 278, 281, 355, 458, 461, 467; male 187, 192, 347, 352–5, 386, 408–9, 416, 470; philanthropy and 213–14, unemployment 68, 107, 340–41, 347; see also apprentices, servants England 14, 22–9, 42, 47–53, 63, 66–7, 77, 86, 91–9, 105, 119, 142, 210, 216–17, 373n68, 389; see also individual towns Enlightenment 3, 36–7, 59, 209, 291, 430, 457 eroticism 256, 276, 429 Essex 92–8 Eurasians: in Batavia 418–25, 426n14; in India 434, 436, 441–9, 450n4, 451n17 Europe 2–10, 165, 249, 252, early modern 11–44, 91–9, 142–63, 182–208, 233–44, 327–50; empires see empire; medieval 169–89; modern 47–80; 103–41, 153–63, 209–44, 271–92, 309–20, 362–96; see also individual towns exercise 87, 365–6, 369; see also dance Exeter, Britain 23, 173 Exeter, New Hampshire 301–3 exhibition 120, 289, 318 family 11–20, 37, 34, 44, 92–5, 105–6, 145–9, 240, 351–4, 368, 392, 399; family businesses 8,

487

Index 47–57, 173; family economy 7–9, 25–6, 47–57, 58–70, 158, 341, 346–8, 355, 407, 429; family strategies 9, 13, 51–4, 58–70, 189–90; family ties 11–20, 63–4, 77–8, 250, 331, 399, 418, 461, 468, 472; household 24, 27–9, 40, 61–4, 67–8, 184, 329, 331–3, 338, 340, 343–5, 431–6; intergenerational relationships 9, 13–14, 16, 48, 50–2, 80, 333, 351–4, 369; migration 71, 75–80; royal 198–202, 304 fashion 36, 43, 93, 97, 247, 296–301, 306, 313, 318, 374, 378, 387–8, 460, 472; fashionable 85, 118, 195–203, 253, 257, 289, 302, 304, 309–10, 430, 472 fees/fies 33, 42–3, 79, 190, 273, 285, 293, 355, 420, 444 feminine 153, 159, 179, 190, 250, 271, 284, 291–2, 317–18, 382, 406, 445, 457; female passivity 72, 345, 377, 382; femininity 2–5, 8, 47, 281, 318, 345, 382, 398, 445–6; transgression 386–8; see also reputation and credit Feminist Association Unioni 314 femme sole 25, 173 festivals 88, 98, 190, 191, 217, 402, 467; carnival 160, 252, 253, 322; festivities 97, 252, 254, 260 Fideicommisso 13, 18 Finland 142–53, 238, 309–18; see also individual towns fireplace 255 Fiume 75 Flanders 12, 49, 169 flâneur see walking Florence 12, 15, 61, 156, 182, 250 food 30, 93, 278, 284, 348, 446, 364, 469; crises 64; preparing/selling 58, 76, 187, 401, 403, 405, 408, 409, 417; public distribution 59, 306, 411; purchasing 22–4, 28, 49, 255; France 1, 39, 48–9, 51, 53, 64, 72, 75–8, 148, 221, 271–81, 305, 338–50; cars in 309, 311, 315, 316; see also individual towns Fraterna 15 freedom of the town 34, 38–9, 42–3, 173, 175–7, 179 Freemasons 443, 460 friendship 93, 202, 331–2, 345–8, 353, 362, 367–9, 376–7, 392 funerals 66, 68, 189, 262, 263 furnishings 92–3, 171, 177, 255–7, 284, 362, 446, 448 Galicia 73, 80 gang labour 406 gangs 353, 400, 470–2 gates see thresholds General Motors 317 Geneva 49 Genoa 12, 16, 72, 182, 186, 189, 292 gentrification 251

geography 87, 96, 98, 105, 111, 130–8, 153–61, 287, 321–4, 331, 385 Germany 49–50, 53, 72, 74, 77, 221–2, 290, cars 309–13; credit 25, 27, 29, spas 362–73; see also individual towns Ghent 24 Glasgow 49, 217, 386, 388–91, 393 gossip 155, 199, 455, 458; salacious 130, 226, 327, 329, 331 Gota de Lecha 131, 136 Gothenburg 73 Göttingen 45, 51 government 12, 14, 35–6, 60, 64–7, 75, 78, 169–71, 183, 218; see also town councils Grant, Mary 117, 118, 126, graveyards 271 Grimshaw, Atkinson 116, 117, 122–5, 127, guilds 7–9, 11, 14, 33–44, 187–92, 197, 233, 252, 329, 331; challenged 37, 43, 74, civic roles 36, 167–8, 171, 183–4, 187; colonial 297, 409, 424; masculinity and identity 9, 37–8, 167, 184, 191 179, mutual aid 59, 65, 190; women and 17, 38–44, 49–50, 176, 179 Haddington 26, 212 hairdressers 39, 49, 79 Hamburg 72, 363 Havana 408 healers 261, 401, 403, 404, 408 health 136, 241, 245, 247, 255, 279, 322, 340, 444 healthcare 61, 75, 271–5, spas and 362, 364–5 Helsinki 247, 309–18 hemgång 87, 142–53, 151n26 Henry Fawcett Memorial Fountain 117, 118, 126–7 heterotopia 363, 367, 369, 370 Hinduism 434, 447, 448, 449 Hobart 454, 455, 458 Holland see Netherlands, The home 2, 13, 87, 134, 142–9, 153–6, 202–4, 284–93, 408, 422, 442, 445, 457; see also house homosexuality see sex/sexuality honour 9, 15, 93, 104–6, 154, 160, 171, 274–5, 407–8; family 87, 143–9, 353; female 23, 38, 104, 145, 147, 190, 374; male 33, 37–8, 104–6, 109, 112, 147, 154–5, 223–9, 370, 412, 468 horse–drawn carriage 117, 135, 191, 253, 303, 309, 357, 368, 416 hospital 58–68, 75, 81, 137, 159, 271–7, 341, 416; foundling, 17, 183, 252, maternity and 67, 131, 134, 273; and the poor 59, 190, 254, 272, hospitality 144–5, 170, 284, 293, 445 house 136, 142–52, as building 4, 16–17, 29, 41, 92–6, 117, 178, 196, 209, 251, 339–40; and domestic violence 157–61; homeless 348, 355, 379–80; as private spaces 228, 252–3, 255–7, 347–48, 369, 375, 404; as property 8, 11–15, 51,

488

Index 63, 188, 223, 405, 408–9, 421, 423, 435, 456; spaces of control 43, 95, 184, 191; workplace 41, 42, 72 household 9, 49–52, 249–51, 340–5; colonial 403–11, 418–24, 429–36, 443–7, 465–9; economies 24, 61–8, employees 91–5, 105, 171, 278–81, 329–34; goods 27–9, 58, 255–7, 341; heads of 11, 40, 50, 166–9, 173, 178–9, 223–4, 229, 343–5, 461; management 49, 92, 175, 235; see also family housing 74, 78–9, 107, 177, 271, 379, 416, 443 humour 312 illegitimacy 115, 418, 429–30, 433, 436 immigrants 313; colonial 398, 416, 417, 420, 422, 424, 453–4, 458, 464–6; female 73; male 91, 297, 386, 408; urban 58–9, 71, 77–9, 157, 299, 321–2, 329, 374–6 Imperial Service Club 284, 290 Inclusa 131, 134–5 India 211, 415, 416, 419, 420, 424, 433–7, 441–50; see also individual towns industrialisation 3, 34, 49, 78–80, 132, 156–7, 233, 311, 468; industrial revolution 8–9, 47–8, 62–3, 67, 461; industrial towns 7, 77, 79, 196, 449; reform 239; schools, 211–15 inheritance 8, 11–17, 51, 64–5, 405, 408, 418, 431–4; guild rights and franchise 34, 40–2, 170–6, systems 62; see also wills instruments, musical 257, 421; scientific 257, 273 interest (financial) 15, 23, 64, 240, 435 International Association of Lyceum Clubs 288, 292 invented tradition 400, 464–5, 468–71, 472n2 inventories 23–7, 92, 246, 256–7, 264 Ireland 51, 103–13, 386; see also individual towns Islam 417–18, 421, 434, 448–9, 468; Islamic law 11 Istanbul 11 Italy 11–20, 64, 79, 153–63, 169, 182–4, 221, 255, 264, 345; migration 72, 74–5, 252; see also individual towns Jakarta see Batavia Japan 122, 419 Java 415–25; see also Batavia jazz–girl 318 jewellery 64, 257–8, 300, 407, 416, 435 Jews 78, 175, 216, 368, 376–80, 424, 430, 434 Johannesburg 398, 400, 465–72 Kingston, Jamaica 399, 427, 430–6 Kingston–upon–Hull, England 169 Kingston–upon–Thames, England 33, 38–9, 41 Kissingen 363, 365–6, 368–9 kitchen 13, 58–9, 255, 280, 331, 421 Koper 265 Kotor 265

labour market European 9, 11, 34, 58–67, 71–83, 132, 183, 241, 278, 415; colonial 433, 470; slave 418, 422 laissez faire 36, 38 Lancashire 61, 95 landlords 22, 72–3, 254, 362 language 188, 400, 420, 423–5, 443, 449; architectural 283–95; emotional 136, 335, 386; gendered 2, 43, 133, 352, 404; and politics 335, 386; skills 78, 245, 256 La Rochelle 33, 40–3, 343 laundresses 250, 251 law 3, 8–9, 11–18, 24, 35, 75, 79, 103–13, 385–6; Court of Chancery 327–37; court records 8, 23–8, 51–2, 87, 145, 155–61, 250–3, 330–3, 387–8, 352–7, 402, 421 criminal 252–3; legal narratives 327–37; notary 13, 16; Tribunale del Torrone 154; women and the law 12, 14, 17–18, 24, 103–13, 428; lawyers 103, 104, 105, 144, 209, 214, 217, 252, 393, 419, 460 Le Havre 72 Leiden 14, 419 leisure 79, 96–7, 116–26, 133, 195, 204–5, 284–8, 310–16, 362–73, 386, 442–6, 457, 461, 467–8 lesbianism see sex/sexuality lifecycle 33, 37–8, 40, 60, 61, 67, 328 lighting 94, 122–3, 127, 136, 154, 156–7, 311, 376 Lille 12, 14 Lima 398, 404, 406, 408–11 Lisbon 14 litigation 8, 22–3, 27–30, 103–13, 327–37, 402; see also law Liverpool 50, 53, 107, 216 loans 22–4, 29, 51, 53, 64, 315, 410 lodgers 147–8, 340, 343, 345, 348, 375, 386 London 87, 93, 96, 311–12, 433; business 14–15, 18, 24–5, 39, 41, 52, 324, 327–55; charity 211–16; consumption 93, 297–305; demography 49, 107, 148, 169–70, 183; leisure 95, 96, 203, 205, 283–94; migrants 77–9, 322; sex 106, 385, 389, 392, 429; streets 97, 98, 160, 298; Thames Embankment 116–29 Luxembourg 74 luxury 287, 290–1, 314; commerce 5, 36, 246, 107; facilities 276, 287, 313, 315, 317; goods 256, 277, 305, 310; as negative 106, 247, 305–6; Lyceum Club, Berlin 290–2 Lyceum Club, London 284–8 Lyon 37, 73, 279 Madras 398, 399, 427, 433–6, 441–50 Madrid 73, 87, 130–41, 312, 317; Casa de Maternidad, Inclusa 131, 134–5; El Retiro 133; Gota de Lecha 131, 136; Hospital San Juan de Dios 137 magazines 211, 213–14, 289, 310, 316, 377, 447; see also press

489

Index maill (rent) 21–2 Malintzin 404 Manchester 48, 50, 53, 77 Manhattan 79, 385 manhood see masculinity Marche 182, 265 mardijkers 421, 426n18 markets 8–9, 23, 36, 42–3, 49, 179, 274, 461; domestic 287; international 170, 179, 286; market economy 23, 28, 39, 62, 64, 68, 97, 375, 411; marketplaces 26, 72, 132, 134, 142, 156, 158, 253, 352, 385, 398–9, 401–12, 416–17, 420, 422, 424, 455; real estate 12, 18; towns as market 298, 363, 399, 441, 460; value 277, 279; see also labour market marriage 12–17, 24–5, 40, 49, 53, 60–7, 184, 237, 249, 250, 276, 399; in Australia 456–7; in Batavia 418–20, 423–5; contracts, law and property 14–16, 24, 62, 64, 190, 151n10, 369, 418; in India 433–6, 443, 446, 448 in Kingston 430–3, market 66, 249–50, 275; in Philadelphia 428–30, remarriage 40, 250; in South Africa 466, 469, in Spanish America 401, 403, 405, 409, 410 Marseille 72, 74, 77, 82n43, 272, 275, 276 masculinity 91–102, citizenship 167, 184–6, 192, 223–30; conceptualising 2–5, 8, 47, 184, 332, 352–4, 466; male aggression 327, 329, 331, 333, 353, 375–8, 390, 408, 470; male authority 14, 42, 62, 169, 218, 329, 332–5, 345, 354–5; performance 36–8, 98, 109, 112, 314, 318, 365–8, 387–8, 397–9, 460–2, 466; unruly 92, 470, 472; violence 146, 155, 183, 227, 378; see also honour masons 73, 252, 260–1 materiality 5, 142, 245–320; material turn 246, 248n7 maternity institutions 60, 67, 87, 130–6, 273–5 Maya 401, 404 mediation 74 medicine 247, 272, 274, 281, 313, 364–5; centres 87, 131, 136; dietetics 364–5, 369; information 134, 255, 279, 444; medical care 58–9, 73, 141n67, 273, 276–7, 275, 369, 429, 444; philanthropy 209, 212; science 221–2, 225, 230 Mediterranean, The 11, 63, 72, 182, 399 401, 404 Melbourne 454, 459–60, 462 memoirs 209, 293, 313, 351, 368, 456, 460, 368; see also diaries memory 4, 266 merchandisers 22, 25–7 merchants 7, 24–5, 36, 76; Batavia 415, 418, 420, 421, 424; England 42, 43, 96–7, 105, 109, 169–77, 305, 324, 327–37; Finland 144; France 40, 42–4, 341–7; India 434, 436, 442, 443; Italy 12–17, 183–4, 192, 253; Jamaica 431, 433;

North America 298, 300, 305, 429; Scotland 25–30, 42, 210; in Spanish America 402, 404, 408, 409, 411; Sweden 195–6, 201–4; see also apprentices Mesoamerica see America, Spanish Methodists 97, 210, 448, 467 Mexica 403 Mexico 351–61, 403–5, 408–13; see also Mexico City Mexico City 351–61, 398 microfinance 9, 58–9, 64 middle class see class midwives 73, 212–13, 273–4, 403, 408, 417, 429 migration 1–2, 8–9, 59–63, 68, 185, 249, 277, 321–2, 417; colonial 409, 417, 423, 427, 430, 443, 457, 467, 469; gendered 16, 71–83, 279, 280, 374–6; networks 107, 280; to towns 16, 59, 66, 157, 329, 374–6, 385–6, 401, 405 Milan 36, 72, 182, 265 military 322, 341, 397, 387, 406, 467, 471; connections 217, 404; force 259, 266, 442, 450; garrisons 107–9, 233, 367, 403, 458; personnel 39, 300, 353, 399, 433, 436, 441, 444; sociality 356, 443 mining 398, 401, 405–6, 408, 409, 412, 465, 469–70 miracles 261–3, 266, 364 missionaries 404, 412, 442, 444, 447–50, 452n52, 465, 466–7; missionary societies 215–16, 447 Missionary Magazine 212, 213, 215 mission stations 442, 443, 445, 447–50 mobility 7, 35, 37, 67, 74–5, 78, 192, 322; female 80, 156, 161, 461; male 92, 95, 187–8; social 97, 138, 309, 403, 407, 410, 425; see also immigrants, migration modernity 72, 87, 120, 271, 289, 291–3, 317, 322, 364; Christian 445–8; city as modernity 130–9, 374–84 money 12, 15, 36, 43, 58, 79, 117, 158, 247, 258, 310, 376; demanding 106, 378, 390, 471; investing 50, 256, 408; owed 21–3, 27–8, 30, 315; 160; pocket money 284; saving 15, 79, 280; spending 99, 256, 263–4, 281, 309, 313, 469; see also charity, fees moneylending 9, 21–30, 53, 160, 408–9, 417 Montauban 49, 51 Montevideo 408 moral economy 59, 62, 64, 67, 103–13, 327–37, 411, 413 morality 17, 23, 75, 103–13, 135, 153–60, 178, 196, 273–4, 278, 329–35, 345–8, 352–6, 374–82; 434; child 73, 131, 135, 278; Great Morality Scandal (Denmark) 222–8 Moscow 377 motherhood 134–46, 346, 354, 378 movable/immovable goods 8, 11–14, 18, 66, 255 municipal government see town councils

490

Index music 109, 139, 209, 353–7, 362, 366, 368, 376, 400, 468–72; musicians 85, 191, 253, 353–6, 406; venues 217, 253, 290, 443 Muslim see Islam myth and mythology 126, 131, 375, 453–7, 462, 465 Nantes 12, 17, 40, 42, 338, 342–3, 346 Naples 72, 182, 183, 266 nationalism 288, 400, 466 nation building 2, 155, 238, 305, 436, 453, 457 neighbours 22, 62, 65, 92, 96, 154–61, 253, 291, 323, 338–50, 455; neighbourhoods 79, 85–7, 104, 107, 131–4, 184, 249–53, 357, 403–5, 417–23, 456 Netherlands, 2, 36, 40, 49, 76, 415–25 networks 72, 209, 216, 327, 339, 345–9, 351, 368–9, 456; communication 427, 441; credit 8–9, 21–30, 52; economic 52, 62, 278, 327, 409, 411, 415, 454; ethnic 406; female 273, 288, 401, 409, 410, 458; kin and friendship 53, 65, 202, 351, 405, 424, 431; male 224, 286–7, 387–8, 394, 411, 432; migration 72, 80, 107, 280; political 447, 462; social 7, 17, 189, 271, 281, 327, 339, 368–9, 445, 447, 467; welfare 58, 61, 63–5, 345–9, 467 new materialism see material turn Newport, Rhode Island 306 newspapers 203, 211, 216, 246, 289; British 48, 96, 105–6, 213, 284, 289, 447; colonial 305, 306, 428–9, 433, 455; Danish 224–5, 230; Finnish 309–13; Italian 156; Russian 374–84; Spanish 130; see also press and individual titles New York 76–8, 80, 283, 292–3, 296, 301 New York Times 284, 291, 293 New Zealand 400, 453–62, 463n21; see also individual towns Nice 74 nobility 4, 13, 287, 291, 298, 362–5, 368–9, British 105, 107, 126, 155, 217; Finnish 144; French 278; Hungarian 260–3; Italian, 155, 183, 192, 250–6; Spanish America 351, 402–7; Swedish 183, 192, 196, 203, 236, 238–9 Nordic countries 35, 80 North America see America, North Norway 73 notarial records 13, 16, 18, 402, 421; notaries 189, 252, 410, 423 Nuremberg 23 nurses 73, 81n20, 273–4, 190, 346–8; see also sisters of mercy, wet nurses obedience see submission O’Connor, John; 116, 117, 120–2, 126, 127 Odense 35–6, 39, 41 Odessa 72 opera 195–6, 199–200, 203, 253, 393, 461

orphanages European 58, 60, 63, 68, 87, 130–5, 339, 346; colonial 416–18, 445, 448, 457 orphans 8, 17, 66–8, 91, 134–5, 249, 306, 339, 346, 348, 417–18, 436, 448 Oslo 73 Ottoman Empire 11 ovens 246, 253 Oxford 24, 41–3, paintings 15, 87, 116–27, 256–7, 264, 412, 417, 421, 424 Paris 120, 132, 293, 297, 304, 362, 375; business 17, 38, 40–1, 43, 49, 73–4; cars 310, 311, 312, 316–17; charity 272–80, 338, 340–2; migrants 76–80 parish 93, 161, 329, 408; churches 96–7, 159, 252–3, 338, 346–7; records 187; schools 215; welfare 58, 65–6, 91, 339, 341–7 parks 95, 133, 279, 311, 358, 461; leisure spaces 4, 85, 87, 111, 117–20, 125–6, 191, 197–8, 363–6, 444; sexual haunts 378, 390–3, vulnerable spaces 352, 457; see also urban space passions see emotions patriarchy 28, 37, 49, 62, 94–102, 369, 400; in India 445, 447, in Kingston 431; in Philadelphia 428, in South Africa 464, 466, 469, in Spanish America 404, 408–13 pawning 24, 59, 64, 253, 258, 402; pawnbroking 27, 253 peasants 51, 60, 72–3, 80, 156, 202, 254, 406; citizenship 197, 201, 224, 233–9; and spas 323, 363, 366, 368–9 pedestrians 117, 154, 357; see also walking Perth, Western Australia 454 Peru 403–4, 406, 407–8, 411–12; see also Cuzco Philadelphia 296, 298–9, 301, 398–9, 427–30, 433, 436–7; see also slaves Piccadilly, clubland 284, 285, 291 Piedmont 73, 155, 182 Pisa 12 Pistoia 12 Pittsburgh 77 place 4, 8, 85–8, 153–61, 166, 321–4, 329, 335, 362–3, 367, 370, 388, 393–4; female 92–9, 103–6, 112, 116, 122–3, 253, 267, 272, 284; hierarchy 39, 86, 234, 267, 355, 377; locational 12, 14, 48, 58, 67, 72, 75, 79, 117, 236, 252–3, 275–7, 299–300, 306, 312, 339–40, 353; male 92–9, 147, 192, 287 planning, urban 117–19, 132, 322, 416; see also space pleasure 68, 127, 227, 322–3, 374, 377, 385, 389–94, 429; activities 245, 277, 310, 367; gardens 96, 122, 198; places 276, 322, 353, 367, 389, 353; restraining 461 police 75, 155–8, 204, 252–3, 275, 277, 311, 316, 324, 366; court 42–3, 111; personnel 125, 137,

491

Index 155, 161, 388; and sexual behaviour 224–8, 386–94, 459 politics 3–4, 188–9, 195–204, 233–43, 366, 370, 379–80, 385–8, 393; see also culture; language poor 8–9, 58–62, 189–90, 211–18, 255, 272, 323, 330, 338–50, 363, 366, 449, 467; female 133–7, 140n50, 209–15, 247, 250, 256, 281, 381–2, 457–9; male 332, 351, poorhouses 58–9, 67, 68, 190, 253–4, 386, 416–17, 424; Poor Law 62–3, 66–7, 210, 429; poor relief 8–9, 59–68, 166, 209–15, 223–4, 237–9, 254, 323, 332, 338–48, 423–4 popular culture see culture, popular population 1, 245; decline 183; density 118, 460; diversity 80, 86, 107, 169, 211, 217, 398, 427; ethnic diversity 399, 401, 408–12, 430–2, 442–8, 459, 465; gender 91, 122, 249, 254, 275, 429, 457; growth 36–7, 47–8, 59, 86, 107, 210, 233, 245, 271, 275, 343, 459; rural 233, 404, 406; see also individual towns porcelain 257, 415 ports 11, 72, 75, 169, 251, 297–306, 398, 408, 415, 427, 436, 469 Portsmouth, New Hampshire 298, 301–3 Portugal 79 Potosí 398, 406, 408 poverty 8, 43, 58–68, 210, 256, 332, 328–9, 338–50; locations 107, 117, 136, 196, philanthropy 166; precariousness 68, 77, 355, 456–7; rural 156; vulnerability 59, 61, 190, 340; see also poor Prague 72, 75 pregnancy 131, 134, 136, 155, 279, 348; pregnant women 106, 209, 254, 273, 281, 348 press 105–6, 224–5, 236, 241, 316–17, 374–84, 428–9, 433; freedom of 196, 236; popular 116, 224; see also magazines, newspapers print culture 119, 122, 246, 302, 352–3, 374–84, 427–30 privacy 142, 211, 218, 255, 286; domestic 94, 154, 161, 280, 422 processions 66, 68, 97–8, 339, 426n14; religious 191, 253, 353, 356 professionalization 3, 28, 247, 271–81 prohibition alcohol 284, 315; coffee 204 promenading see walking property 48–53, 60, 66, 94, 148, 339; in Australia, 459, 460, and citizenship 188, 218, 237, 239–40; in India 435, 444; in Kingston 431, 432; of skill 37–8; in Spanish America 401, 405, 409–10, 11; transactions 62, 79, 176, women and 3, 8, 11, 13–14, 24, 239–40 prostitutes/prostitution: brothels 96, 275–6, 387–88; female 79, 104–5, 111, 113, 124, 134–7, 250–3, 275–8, 345, 366, 374–82, 429–30, 433–4, 446, 447; institutions for 58–60, 214; male 167–8, 222, 224–6, 386, 388 Protestantism: Europe 67, 166, 210–11, 217; Batavia 424; India 434, 443–50; South Africa 465

public health 75, 135–7, 204–5, 234, 241, 247, 271–5, 340–1 public sphere 130–4, 287, 291, 377; see also separate spheres; space Quakers 52, 93, 97, 298, 428 race 85–6, 132, 322, 354, 357; colonial 397, 410, 432, 441–50, 459, 467, 470; mixed–race 399, 401, 418, 432, 443, 448, 450 rape 155, 375; sexual harassment 155, 375, 376, 459, 375–8 religion 209, 221, 338–40, 345, 349, 353–4, 355; popular 259–67, 356, 410–11 religious communities 65, 169, 247, 250, 253, 272–3, 410; see also churches reliquaries 263 remembrance 97; see also memory Rennes 17 reputation 49, 86, 158, 284, 327–9; economic 9, 21–8, 48–9, 59, 66, 330–7; moral 87, 103–13, 345–6; see also credit resistance 42, 44, 94–5, 241, 322–3, 341, 387; colonial 405, 411–12, 458; counter narratives 97–102, 292, 387; with humour 312, 381; to innovation 313 respectability 15, 103–13, 137, 448, 466–7, 472 ritual 146, 376–7, 386, 435, 445, 448–50, 462, 464, 469, 472; ceremonial 97–8, 263, 267, 353, 356, 403, 406, 410–11; spas 323, 364–7; workplace 37, 93, 189, 191 Rome 145, 167, 182–92, 246, 249–58 rooms 87, 92–6, 142, 145–9, 159, 274, 279–80, 284, 354, 421; bathrooms 280, 391–2; rented 30, 66, 136, 252, 254–6, 348, 376, 408; social spaces 195–6, 200–4, 217, 284, 291, 292, 312, 366–7, 399, 443–4, 447, 461, 467 Rouen 17, 43 rural 8, 24, 30, 63, 402–12, 447, 449, 464–72; as idea 3, migration 71–9, 280, 322, 398, 400, 401, 464; trade 298, 402, 454–5, 460; urban/ rural 233, 311, 254, 460, 469; women 30, 271, 428–30, 453, 457 Russia 60, 198–200, 236, 238, 315, 322–4, 374–82 sailors 237, 276, 322, 408, 415, 416 Saint Petersburg 63, 374–84 Salford 52 Sbirri 155 Scandinavia 29, 35, 49; see also individual countries and towns Scotland 21–8, 42, 170, 177, 209–18, 322, 385–96 Scouts, Boy 468 seamstresses 17, 38, 42–3, 175–7, 251–3, 408, 448, 468; mantuamaking 33; millinery 38, 40, 289, 298; modistes 42 seating 93, 159, 200, 205, 420; church 96–7, 99

492

Index seduction see courtship segregation 78, 92, 95, 97, 138, 251, 339, 344; racial 469, 472 separate spheres 3, 86–7, 153–4, 158, 234, 283–91, 377 servants 15–16, 26–30, 50, 58, 63, 73, 78, 131, 173, 184, 215, 291; in Australia 457–8; in Batavia 424; civil 76, 107, 366, cooks 278, 404, 424; domestic 16, 76–7, 158–9, 213, 223–4, 249, 250–4, 276–81, 374–6, 399; female 9, 15, 23, 76, 105, 146, 178, 233, 374–6; in India 445, 446–7, male 26, 88, 91–9, 224, 237, 470; in South Africa 465, 470, in Spanish America 406, 408–10; see also apprentices, homosexuality sewage 126, 275, 280; sewers 118–20, 132, 275 sex/sexuality 23, 79, 85, 105–6, 223, 229–30, 322, 374–85, 385–96, 427–37, 446; chastity 105–6, 109; cottaging 183, 196, 211–14, 234, 237–40, 390–3; female 105–6, 374–85, 404, 428, 433, 437; homosexuality 222–30, 385–96; lesbianism 284; male 111, 385–96; Pride 385, 389; same– sex 221–2, 224, 226, 385–96, 430 shoes 247, 296–306, 471 shops 26–7, 33, 38, 47, 53, 79, 125, 136, 160, 176, 250–1, 253, 273, 289, 292, 297, 401–2, 430, 456; employees 118, 131, 133; shopkeeping 39, 43, 48–53, 85, 158, 278, 306, 408–9, 417, 424, 429–30, 460; shopping 95, 111–12, 118, 280–1, 298–9, 304, 374, 417, 422; sweatshops 72, 77–8; workshops 8, 11, 14, 17, 35–41, 44, 66, 73, 92–5, 175, 183–91, 252–3, 265, 341–2, 353–5, 409; see also space Siena 12, 16, 182, 265 Simla 441, 444 singletons 133; men 184, 254, 276, 373; women 75–7, 79–80, 131, 249, 366, 418, 430, 432, 447; women and law 14, 234, 239; women and money 18, 23–4, 28, 41, 64; women and work 40–3, 50, 29, 48, 77, 173–9, 249–50, 274; women and welfare 58, 66–7, 141, 213 sisters, religious 259, 262–7, 272–4 sisters of charity 272–4 skill 4, 9, 33–9, 42, 50, 53, 213, 245, 424, 446, 448; deskilling 2; female 44, 73, 77–8, 446, 467; life skills 9, 29; male 73–4, 91, 176, 187, 189, 421, 433, 448; mobility skills 74–5, unskilled (low skilled) 72, 78, 80; 424 slander 146, 147 slavery 374, 408, 410, 418–19, 427, 430–7, 443, anti–slavery 216, 467; domestic, sexual 136; see also slaves slaves 354, Batavia 399, 416, 418–25; freed, India 434–6, 443; Jamaica 427–8, 430–3, 436–7, 438n26; Philadelphia 428, 429; South Africa 465, 466, 467, 468; Spanish America 354, 399, 401–4, 406, 408–10; see also castas

sleeping 1, 94, 96, 99, 145, 254, 255, 364; places 147, 148, 254, 286, 360n38 sociability 1, 7, 148, 166, 195–8, 203–5, 323, 329, 363, 367–9, 458; female 209, 461–2; male 146, 204, 276–7, 460; sites of 87, 96, 143–5, 158–61, 202–3, 286–91, 323, 445 social class see class, status social credit 9, 21, 23–4, 49, 52, 327–37 soldiers 103–13, 356, 387, 404, 445, 458–9, 471; as inhabitants 64, 237, 421; mobility 322, 341, 408, 415–17; welfare 444 South Africa 399, 400, 464–72; see also individual towns Southampton 24 space 1–4, 12, 85–6, 104, 142–3, 153–4, 166, 195–6, 321–4, 441–50; contested 385–94, 400, 412, 446; domestic 13, 92–4, 136, 142–9, 166, 203, 255–6, 280–1, 297, 329, 399, 407, 450; as figurative 37, 44, 328–9, 332, 335, 366–70; gendered 8–9, 13, 75, 85–6, 88, 92, 104, 131, 252–4, 339, 399–400, 412; male 37, 91–8, 277; public 68, 116–27, 156, 158–61, 187, 190–1, 221, 328, 375, 385–96, 424–5; representations in art 116–27, 416–17; spatiality 86, 248, 255, 441–50; transitional 158–9, 351; urban 1–4, 14, 68, 71–2, 76, 79–80, 91–8, 103–13, 116–18, 130–8, 153–6, 185, 277, 338–49, 457–62; women and 118–19, 126, 131–38, 283–93, 424; see also types of spaces Spain 36, 64–5, 75, 130–41, 404, 406, 408, 409, 410, 411–12 Spanish America see America, Spanish spas 323, 362–73 sport 98–9, 311, 316, 356, 365, 369, 400, 442, 444–6, 468, 470; arenas 79, societies 209, 408 state intervention 35, 78, 80, 189, 275, 333, 382 statues 256, 259–67 status 4, 8, 15, 36–9, 75–7, 91–7, 165–8, 335, 382, 419–25, 442, 467; civil 11, 43, 76, 173–5, 234, 421; gender and 86, 103–5, 185, 222–4, 226–9, 279–81, 407, 447; occupational 8, 11, 21, 42–3, 60, 67, 170–9, 176, 179, 184–7, 192, 278, 328–9, 341, 424; race and 420, 431–6, 445–7, 450; social 25–30, 247, 257, 306, 315, 332, 351–6, 399, 406–8; see also age step–cities 72, 75 Stockholm 166, 195–205, 233, 236, 240, 316 streets 47, 58, 66, 97–8, 132, 153–60, 215, 322, 339–48, 351–8, 362, 374–84; processions 66, 68, 191, 339, 353, 356; stall holders 26–8, 27–8, 30, 32, 401–2, 408, 409, 424; street sellers 176; see also urban space studioli 256 submission 48, 92–3, 95, 119, 351–3, 355, 357, 430 suffrage 126, 165–8, 223–9, 233–6, 239–42, 312, 370, 470 suffragettes 118, 289, 312, 314

493

Index suicide 106, 228, 375–7, 380–1 survival strategies 9, 42, 58–62, 348 Sweden 73, 143, 166, 195–203, 221–2, 233–43; see also individual towns Switzerland 75, 77 Sydney 398, 399, 454–62 tailors 33, 42–3, 96, 355 tanners 51, 251, 252, 456 tapsters 29 taverns 92, 96, 142–5, 187, 196, 252, 255, 303, as dubious spaces 98, 134, 136, 146, 157, 160–1; colonial 401, 408, 409, 412, 417, 429, 432, 433 taxes 66–7, 196, 224, 233, 343–5, 412, 444, 465, 469 exemption 73; export 434; poll tax 29; and suffrage 167, 234–42; taxpayers 242, 305, 408 taxi 313–18 technology 246–7, 257, 309–18 temperance movements 460–1 tenants 22, 177–9 Thames, The 87, 116–27 theatre 96, 195–205, 376, 379, 430, 444, 461; buildings 292, 300; going 97, 209, 253, 366–7, 392 theft 154–6, 226, 250, 331, 422 thresholds 95, 159, 338, 341 time 22, 39, 153, 322, 366–7; afternoon 96, 133–4, 198, 299, 304, 362, 367–70, 467; control over 366–7, 448; daytime 144–5, 157, 161, 205, 459; evening 94, 103, 109, 111–12, 136, 144, 157, 159–60, 201–3, 302–3, 362, 368, 376, 392; morning 366–70, 377, 455, 458; night 87, 94–7, 103–5, 111, 122–3, 127, 144–9, 154–61, 203, 228, 253, 273, 276–7, 353, 376–9, 390, 471; twilight 104, 112 Tlaxcalans 401, 403 tolerations 33–4, 38–9, 40, 42, 44 tools 17, 37, 245, 248 Tours 12–13, 197, 338–9, 346–8 town councils Europe, northern 36, 143, 210, 217, 218, 239, 241, 316, 328–9; colonial 401, 405, 408, 409, 416, 468; Europe, southern 65, 67, 184, 260, 265; France 338–50 towns see individual towns trade 7–9, 16, 21–30, 33–44, 47–50, 52–3, 66, 76–8, 95–8, 107, 169–79, 183–91, 233–6, 249–57, 327–9, 331, 341; associations 59–62; motor trade 311–12, 318 traffic 97, 118, 313, 315, 316, 357, 455 tragedy 379–80, 470 transit 72, 74–6, 79 Treviso, Ospedale di Santa Maria dei Battuti 17 Trieste 63, 72, 75, 265 Trogir 247, 259–67 Troyes 338, 343–5 trust 22–9, 52, 59, 215, 226, 265, 322, 329, 331, 370, 449; see also credit Turku 87, 142–9, 237, 310

Udagamandalam 398, 441, 442, 444–50 unfree labour 8, 34–5, 37–9, 42, 44; see also slavery United States 75–6, 107, 276, 310–13, 389–90, 436–7; see also America, early urban danger see danger urban economy see economy urbanisation 2, 4, 76, 132, 185; colonial 399, 444, 460, 465, 468–72; European 412, 417, 430, 436; and guilds 8, 34 urban space see space urban statutes 8, 11–13, 17, 187–91, 266 utopia 381 Utrecht 76 vagrancy 36, 66, 149, 254, 322, 352–3, 451n21 Venice 8, 11–16, 18, 182–4, 266; Arsenal 17; Procuratori di San Marco 15; Scuola Grande della Misericordia 17 Verdun 338–9 Verona 16, 184 Vicenza 16 Vienna 33, 72, 75, 254, 363 violence 98, 322, 353, 390; domestic 416; gendered 375–78, 390, 408, 459, 461, 472; geographies of 87, 134, 153–61; home invasion 143–49; physical 390; riot 385; slavery 430, 433; urban 327–33, 411, 458–61, 472; see also rape visibility 26; female 134, 190–1, 277–8; the poor 348, invisibility 166, 444 vocation 271–4, 281; religious 135, 410 VOC see East Indies Company, Dutch votive commissions 259–67 wages 23, 62, 73, 92, 274; wage labour 37, 138, 314, 409, 420, 460, 461, 465 walking 103–13, 116–29, 132–3, 191–8, 253, 352, 356, 363–8, 374–7, 391, 417, 456, 459; flâneur 310, 313, 375; walkways 118, 120–6 walls, city 156, 249, 254, 338–9, 363, 416, 421, 423–4 warfare 1, 397, 403, 435 Warrington 52–3 washhouses 250–3 waste 271, 275, 280–1, 386 wealth 14–15, 25–8, 52–3, 91–9, 229, 237–42, 257, 278–9, 290–3, 323, 343–5, 351, 354, 374; in Australasia 454, 456 in Batavia 415, 421, in India 431, 443, 446, 447 in Kingston 431, in South Africa 469, 470 in Spanish America 404, 405, 408; wealthy 92, 105–11, 188, 196, 201, 250, 300, 310, 311, 351, 363; wealthy men 27, 96, 144, 195, 196, 203, 223–4, 255, 298, 345; wealthy women 26, 105, 315 weather 311, 318, 367; see also climate weavers 16–17, 36, 158–9, 177–8, 252, 406, 434, 442 weddings 189, 297–301, 418

494

Index welfare 63, 65–7, 134–6, 183–216, 338–48; institutions 58, 61–7, 338–48; mixed economy of 61, 346–8; public soup; 58–9, 61; social protection 9, 59, 61, 67, 78, 468; see also poor Wellington 454, 458 wet nurses 73–4, 247, 254, 274, 278–80, 346, 348, 408 Whistler, James McNeill; 116, 117, 122–3, 126, 127 widowhood widows 12–18, 21–4, 64, 249–50, 255; in Australia 456; in Batavia 418, 423, 426n14; in India 448; in Kingston 438n43; in Philadelphia 429; in Spanish America 404, 407, 409; widowers 17, 250; widows and business 15, 17, 26–9, 37, 34–43, 50–1, 144–5; widows and citizenship 166, 169, 171, 173–8, 234–42; widows and poverty 66–7, 343–8 wills 13–16, 423, 431–2 men’s 15, 431, 435–6; women’s 13, 23–4, 261–2, 402, 410

windows 134–5, 147–8, 227, 251, 277, 280, 287, 354; architecture 287, 288, 291, 298, 466 work 3–4, 7–8, 34–44, 48, 58–61, 66–7, 71–80, 91–9, 183–92, 341–2, 351–5, 367, 374; women’s work 15–17, 23–5, 29, 34, 37–44, 49, 53, 61, 73, 76–8, 158, 166, 209–18, 250, 345, 374–5, 379, 382, 403, 405, 406, 408–9, 424, 429, 447, 457, 461, 465, 467; workers 8, 17, 33–42, 53, 58–67, 71–80, 96, 116, 177–8, 184–92, 250–4, 273, 340–6, 353–5, 406, 421, 424–5, 442–3, 460–1, 469–71; workplaces 74–80, 329, 342, 355–6, 392, 416, 422, 448, 469; see also servants, apprentices, shops and workshops working class see class York 24, 29, 42, 60, 166, 169–79 Yucatan 405 Zurich 49

495