The Politics of Domestic Authority in Britain since 1800 (review)

This edited collection emerges from a conference organised by the book's editors and held at Kings College, Cambridge during the summer of 2006. This event showcased some of the most interesting work being researched and written by scholars, established and new, on the history of the modern household and family in Britain, and this collection is a testament to much of that innovative work.

The volume is prefaced by an excellent introduction that outlines recent historiography on the domestic sphere and demands us to think about the many forms of familial authority in new ways. The book's editors ask us to pay careful attention to the negotiation of power relations between members of household units (familial and not), growing state intervention into the family, and the ways in which domestic authority extended beyond the home. In so doing they aim "both to acknowledge the flourishing nature of the study of authority practices and to enable a broad historical review of the household as a site of the 'micropolitics' of the negotiation of authority—the power to speak, to spend, to consume, to name, to command, to trespass and cross boundaries. The concept of domestic authority helps us to reconceive the home as an arena of active negotiation, agency and remembering" (4). This volume shows us how far many scholars (if not students) have come from a dependence upon a simplistically utilised concept of separate spheres, incorporating the analyses and critiques provided by Leonore Davidoff, Catherine Hall, and their respondents into their research and writing. It is nevertheless clear that we need far more research on the domestic world in order to better understand the relationship between public and private and the wider history of domestic authority.

The editors agree that despite powerful arguments for long-term continuities in the history of domestic authority, gender relations changed from 1780: the history of domesticity and the meaning of terms such as family, public, and private were transformed as "companionate marriages" became more common (though the editors rightly urge caution when using such a slippery concept as companionate), as contracts rather than deference came to define household power relations for servants as well as family members, and as "expertise" on the family spread among state and non-governmental authorities (13). Most of the articles collected in this volume, however, chart the history of the post-1850 period; it would have been perhaps more convincing to include further evidence from the earlier period.

While alert to the impact of regional specificity on the history of the family—Sian Pooley's chapter, for instance, highlights the different impact of childrearing discourses on two separate working-class communities, Auckland and Burnley, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—the editors argue that large-scale trends nonetheless affected all domestic units across the country. One of the most important was the evangelically defined mode of domestic authority that predominated among the culturally dominant educated classes throughout Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century. The volume shows that this model was to come under greater pressure from 1850 as family size decreased, women's employment rose, domestic service declined, knowledge of sex, the body, and the family grew, and people lived through the transformations resulting from two world wars.

In a compilation of this breadth, which includes twelve separate chapters, it is inevitable that some of the essays are stronger than others (some, such as the first two, though excellent, seem very short in comparison with the rest). Though it is clear that some of the writers engage with each other's work, there is perhaps not quite as much conversation between authors as readers might wish for. The volume is split between five subjects: violence and the law, poverty and the state, domesticity, domestic service, and parenting and childhood. Most of the authors in each section explore the disjuncture between cultural representations of...