Some Thoughts on Masculinity and the ‘Representative Artisan’ in Britain, 1850‐1880

Abstract

In discussions of British workingclass life between about 1850 and the 18705, most historians have agreed that there was a new tone and pattern evident after the crises of the 1830s and 1840s. The dominant figure in many accounts of this working class, as in so much contemporary social commentary and imagery, was that person who Thomas Wright in 1873 took to be the typification of the working class as a whole -'the working man'.' Many historians have followed Wright further in concentrating their attentions upon the 'representative artisan' as the working man par excellence. He was, thought Wright, someone who in times of anything like averagely brisk trade 'can command good work and good pay all the year round, has a comfortable home, saves money, provides through his benefit and trade clubs for the proverbial rainy day, is in his degree respected because self-respecting, and on the whole is a person rather to be envied than pitied'.2 And such a man is often taken to be at the centre of key developments in the working class in the period: the establishment of a more secure and visible trade unionism, albeit one confined to a minority of workers; the expansion of the resources and members of friendly and co-operative societies and other means of collective security; the gaining of 'citizenship' by a significant minority of working-class men in 1867; the new legitimacy of the working class and its institutions in both civil society and the state.3There have been considerable disagreements about how the changes in the post-1 850 working class may be described, explained and evaluated, as there have been also about the relationship between those changes and the evolution of the whole ~o c i e t y .~ Yet whatever can be learned from these, one of the most persistent absences in the historiography has been the realization that this was a gendered working class and that an adequate history will not be written until this is taken on. There has been important work by feminist historians and others on, among other things, post-Chartist politics, women's employment, marital, familial and sexual practices and beliefs, and the culture of respectability.' However, much mainstream

Networking Respectability: Class, Gender and Ethnicity among the Irish in South Wales, 1845–1914

“…Historians concerned with the cult of respectability have always paid attention to the significance of the household and family life in the pronouncements of those concerned with promoting the respectable ideal, but historians of gender have taken this further by foregrounding the relationship between women's position in the household and their place in the sexual division of labour, emphasising also that working men's position in society rested on women's exclusion within capitalist relations of production as well as their own subjection in the labour market. 17 By placing gender relations at the centre of attempts to explain the cult of respectability, such historians have collapsed the distinction between work and home which was increasingly being made by Victorian social commentators.…”

Working-class Men's Constructions of Masculinity and Negotiations of (Non)Participation in Higher Education

“…In British industrial society, the achievement of manhood for working-class men has been linked inextricably with the achievement of secure and skilled work, both as a source of income and of social status, while its absence (e.g. through unemployment) represents a serious loss in terms of male identity (see, for example, Tolson 1977;McClelland, 1991) . Notwithstanding the contradictory nature of paid employment (a source of both ful lment and restriction/ oppression) and multiple contemporary changes in the nature of work and labour markets, the pervasiveness of this ideology of work-based masculinity among the young men in our study is striking.…”

Dislodging the Center/Complicating the Dialectic: What Gender and Race Have Done to the Study of Labor

“…A lot of women's social labor still looks like housework writ large: personal service, cleaning up, emotional support (cooking, cleaning, fetching, carrying, mopping up vomit, and wiping butts). 25 Complicating the Dialectic But opening labor history to consider women and gender was only a first step. An example is "the myth of nimble fingers," the view that women are naturally suited to fussy, tedious work, such as electronics assembly.…”