22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Summary of Family Fortunes, May 23, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Women in Culture and Society Series) (Paperback)
Family Fortunes focuses on the rise and influence of the middle class in late eighteenth and early ninteenth century England. The book is divided into three distinct parts. The first section centers on "Religion and Ideology"; here, authors look at fractions among Protestant sects during their time period, and the mututally reinforcing ideas of domesticity and religion. The second section is called "Economic Structure and Opportunity." It begins with a discussion of middle class attitudes towards property, especially as it effects providing income for a family. The other discussion in this section looks at men and women's respective roles in the economy, focusing on men's action and women as the "hidden investment." The final section, "Everday Life: Gender in Action," looks at marriage, the respective roles of motherhood and fatherhood, defintion and importance of the home, how gender was registered and finally, middle class influcen in the reform-minded public sphere. Family Fortunes is a big, thick, informative book which is well worth reading for people interested in the rise of the middle class, and social or religious history. Though clearly scholarly in focus it is relatively accessible, and the use many different textual sources helps to illustrate some of the more dense parts of Davidoff and Hall's arguments.
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Class and a Half, November 3, 2007
This review is from: Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Women in Culture and Society Series) (Paperback)
Family Fortunes is an account of the rise of the middle class, both as a class and as individuals, in England between 1780 and 1850. The book's focus is on "the delineation of gender difference at a time of rapid economic, political and social change." It argues that class consciousness always takes a gendered form and that the sexual division of labor within families was central to the development of capitalist enterprise. This approach rehearses arguments that are commonplace in feminist historiography, but Davidoff and Hall add a significant dimension to the case and hold their reader's attention through a narrative built around religion and ideology, economic structure and opportunity, and an account of gender in action in everyday life. Their section on religion and ideology is particularly informative and the strengths and weaknesses of the book can be ascertained by examining this section's analysis and contentions. (p.13)
Religion played an important role in shaping the culture of the emerging middle class. Even though attitudes towards masculinity, femininity, and the family varied among the different Christian denominations, all accepted that the home had to act as the basis of moral order in the immoral world of the market. The family therefore stood at the center of attempts to construct a moral order for capitalism. Indeed the concept of the Christian family was a metaphor for the organization of society. The Birmingham Independent minister, John Angell James, stated that the family: "when directed as it should be, has a sacred character, inasmuch as the head of it acts the part of both the prophet and the priest of his household, by instructing them in the knowledge, and leading them in worship, of God; and, at the same time he discharges the duty of King by supporting a system of order, subordination and discipline." By extension, a congregation of believers gathered in a church was regarded as a family. The concept was also applied, through the language of paternalism, to social structures where the servants and laborers of the middle class man were seen "as the dependants and children of their father, their master, their guardian." Similarly business partners "were in some senses brothers who represented each other." (p.109, p.89, p.21, & W. Holdsworth, A History of English Law, cited ibid., p.200.)
For middle class men the church also provided an opportunity to display their worthiness for public office by acting as church officials and engaging in public works. Davidoff and Hall note that by "the early nineteenth century the traditional concept of stewardship associated with aristocratic patronage and the devolution of obligations from the lord to his agent was transposed into religious discourse." (pp.73-74)
The position the church assigned to women was filled with tension. In an eulogy of a pious Christian woman, James wrote that "the same blessed page which proclaims your dishonour in the sin of your first mother, displays the glorious part you are to bear in the instrumentality of saving a lost world." Because of Eve's transgression, women had to suffer. Through childbirth woman suffered and came to understand the nature of sin. At the same time, childbirth opened a road to personal salvation through the link between maternity and salvation established by Mary the mother of Jesus. The need for women to contain their sexuality, through service to the family, justified women's social subordination even if men and women were spiritually equal. Subordination did not imply inferiority but separate spheres of activity. The home and children were women's sphere. Because of the pressures of business men left the moral education of children to women. This situation led to a contradictory position for many women personified in the life and attitudes of Hannah More. In her writings, More confined women to the domestic sphere but argued for the central importance of woman's influence in nurturing morality in an immoral world. She played a leading part in public moral crusades arguing that the home was the only sure basis for a moral nation. More's terrain was the contested ground that Davidoff and Hall see "between the recognition of influence [within the home and on children] and the marking out of the female sphere." Women often had to enter the male sphere to provide for themselves and/or their families. But this was an action open to condemnation unless presented in terms of maternal necessity or along religious lines as in the activities of More. (p.115, p.114, p.171, & p.117)
Davidoff and Hall comment that religion was the key "that could give meaning to women's experience and express some of their aspirations." While this was no doubt true, the authors here come up against the issue of oppressed/oppressor relations. Woman may well have used religion to give their life meaning, and to give voice to some of their aspirations, but the parameters of the discourse of religion ultimately were set by men for men. Women's experience within these parameters may have been rich and fruitful, but their experience was still within a male discourse. Hall and Davidoff are sensitive to this issue, but they offer nothing to move us beyond the impasse of a hegemonic oppressor discourse. For instance in discussing women's philanthropic work they argue: "Women may not have been exerting real social power and engineering major social change through their associations, but nor were they simply taking as given the boundaries of female social action." (my emphasis.) What, we may ask, would it have taken for women to exercise real social power? Davidoff and Hall regard the period as one when there may well have been more cooperation between middle class men and women because they were involved in shaping the basis of their identity in middle class families. It was only when this identity was established that the isolated and trivialized nature of the domestic sphere became apparent. In other words women played a part in shaping a middle class identity that debased women's place in society. The authors show how the male discourse was able to override attempts by women to create a position for themselves that engendered respect but the reader is left to ponder whether the situation could have been, or ever could be, different. If the aim of Family Fortunes was only to recount the rise of the middle class this lack of analysis would not be such a serious shortcoming, but given that the authors specifically link themselves to "the Women's Liberation Movement and the questions which feminist history has raised" the reader is justified in expecting some discussion of the difficulties in moving beyond a hegemonic discourse. (p.148, p.430, p.454, & p.11.)
In some ways this criticism is unfair because, in general, historians who deal with the social relations that stand behind an analytical term like hegemony have not confronted the issue of how to move beyond one set of relations to another. The greater the degree of dominance the more likely this statement is to be true. For instance E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class displays some hope for alternative social relations in the nineteenth century whereas David Montgomery's The Fall of the House of Labor is ultimately a grim reminder of the ability of capitalism to gain compliance from American workers. Few historians are as successful as Davidoff and Hall in showing how a shared ideology, and its practice in everyday life, produces hegemonic relations. With the understanding they provide it is possible to ask how real power can be exercised by women and other groups whose interests are marginalized by hegemonic discourses.
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