White, Male and Middle Class

What are the relations between feminism and history, feminist politics and historical practice? What are the connections between gender and class? What part have racial identities and ethnic difference played in the construction of Englishness? Through a series of provocative and richly detailed essays, Catherine Hall explores these questions. She argues that feminism has opened up vital new questions for history and transformed familiar historical narratives. Class can no longer be understood outside of gender, or gender outside of class. But English identities have also been rooted in imperial power. White, Male and Middle Class explores the ways in which middle-class masculinities were rooted in conceptions of power over dependants - whether black or female.

Acknowledgements vii 1 Feminism and Feminist History 1 Part I The Beginnings 2 The History of the Housewife 43 Part II Gender and Class 3 The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology 75 4 Gender Divisions and Class Formation in the Birmingham Middle Class, 1780–1850 94 5 The Butcher, the Baker, the Candlestick-maker: the shop and the family in the Industrial Revolution 108 6 The Tale of Samuel and Jemima: gender and working-class culture in early-nineteenth-century England 124 7 Private Persons versus Public Someones: class, gender and politics in England, 1780–1850 151 8 Strains in the ‘Firm of Wife, Children and Friends’: middle-class women and employment in early-nineteenth-century England 172 Part III Race, Ethnicity and Difference 9 Missionary Stories: gender and ethnicity in England in the 1830s and 1840s 205 10 Competing Masculinities: Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill and the case of Governor Eyre 255 Index 296