Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (review)

Worlds Between is a collection of essays by noted British social historian Leonore Davidoff. The collection ranges from her groundbreaking work from the mid-seventies, such as her study of domestic service, to her well-known work with Catherine Hall on the Victorian middle-class family in the mid-eighties, to more recent work on sibling relationships and the public/private dichotomy. Davidoff, in her Introduction, explains the connection between the articles by pointing out that all the topics “come from the margins,” and “are often seen as peripheral to historical and sociological interests” (1). Those categories are so broad, however, that it is probably better to see the book as a capsule picture of Davidoff’s evolution as an historian of gender.

In some ways, this book is dissatisfying. Almost none of the articles are original to the collection. Most have been published and even reprinted before; the one exception is the seventh article, on siblings (the last article, too, is a much expanded version of a previously published piece). Since these articles are very well known and, in fact, have been most influential in family history, why republish them here, sometimes for the third time? After all, they have hardly been buried in obscure journals or overlooked by other historians. In addition, Davidoff has included only a short Introduction and no conclusion; thus, she has made only a superficial effort to connect the works with overarching themes or to trace the trajectory of her thought. She does not even include an index to make it easier for the reader to do so. Even more disappointing, she decided not to try to update most of the articles, but to leave them as they first appeared. Though understandable, this decision means that she missed the opportunity to rethink some of her most interesting ideas in the light of new methodologies and theoretical constructs.

And yet, given all that, the collection remains absorbing. Rereading Davidoff’s work means rediscovering her skill and intelligence as a researcher, thinker, and writer, and remembering her enormous impact. Indeed, the very reason that the articles do not seem fresh is that her ideas are so embedded in modern British family history. Though her influence is wide-ranging, this book especially highlights five of its trajectories. First, in all her work, implicitly or explicitly, Davidoff questions historical categories, particularly the division between public and private. Servants, for instance, were paid employees, yet also “part of the family”; landladies ran businesses, but also acted as substitute wives; housework was both a paid occupation and a “natural” aspect of femininity. In her later work, Davidoff has concentrated more and more on examining the very categories as historical entities—how they came into being and how they have influenced historians. She concludes that often “it is classification systems themselves” (11) which determine what will be studied, and so it is all the more important for historians to understand how the systems developed. Second, Davidoff has always made excellent use of a wide range of disciplines, including feminist theory, sociology, and anthropology. Yet she grounds these in a specific historical time. As she insists, “The effort to conceive gender—or class or race—as an abstract logical grid without a notion of historical process is doomed for the categories are only worked out during that process and are emergent in social practices” (10, all emphases as in original).

A third major theme of the collection lies in Davidoff’s insistence that the key period in gender and class formation was the “long nineteenth century” between 1780 and 1914. Though she recognizes that many of the ideas and economic forces of the nineteenth century had roots in the early modern period, she asserts that the crucial moment of class and gender formation was the age of industrialism. This period saw the hardening of gender ideology, the “rationalization” of housework, the problematic (and sometimes imaginary) separation of home from work and private from...