Women, the Public Sphere, and Middle-Class Culture

Compared to the long pedigree in British and American historiography of the working classes, our historical understanding of what constituted middle–class identity remains underdeveloped. Despite several landmark monographs and collections of essays that have addressed the question of how a common core of middle–class values was constructed, these studies remain focused largely upon the political and economic realms of middle–class discourse and behavior.¹ As a result the emergence of the middle classes has been seen generally as a masculinist process and one linked inevitably to the emergence of a liberal public sphere. This male–centered metanarrative has been greatly revised both by Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, and by Anna Clark, who critically altered the historiography of social structures (in Britain) by inscribing notions of gender into the analysis of class formation.² Their work was pathbreaking in so far as they transformed the categories of class history both by integrating women into its broad outlines and by focusing upon the domestic realm of the family as a formative site of class identity. As important as these monographs have been in reinterpreting the periodization and loci of working– and middle–class values, and in placing notions of masculinity and femininity at the center of definitions of class, their work has nevertheless reaffirmed the separate spheres framework, in which the realm of the "private" family was constituted as a female space which contrasted with the male "public" sphere of political life and the marketplace.

In focusing largely upon the discourse of separate spheres these authors have, perhaps unwittingly, all too readily concluded that this ideal rendered women passive victims of the constraints of domesticity, a view which remains a much contested aspect of women's studies, and which forms the central pole of debate in the books under review here. The authors of these four works explore the dominance of women in the field of charitable work in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in so doing, they collectively challenge the separate spheres framework, either by demonstrating how middle–class women contested normative gender boundaries or by positing that women's participation in the wider world was integral to middle–class culture. By claiming that women were active participants in the public sphere, despite a male discourse which sought to consign them to the role as moral guardians within the home, they argue that women cannot be viewed merely as marginal to the liberal project, but that they actively contributed to and revised the contours of liberal thought and practice from the nineteenth century onwards. While it might be argued that it has become commonplace to view charitable work as the privileged realm of women, the recently published authoritative six volume compendium on charity and philanthropy in Britain follows the older separate spheres trajectory by continuing to place women outside the main contours of historiography, despite the numerically dominant place of female caregiving in poor relief.³ This reminds us yet again of the need to affirm the way in which women dominated the charitable public (even as they were excluded from the public realm of politics) and that by so doing they were, in many ways, the principal guardians of class boundaries as well as architects of the emerging modern social state. And as these books make abundantly clear, just as women were critical...