Making Respectable Women: Changing Moralities, Changing Times

116 Pages·2020·2.84 MB·English

by  Mary Evans

Making Respectable
Women
Changing Moralities,
Changing Times
Mary Evans
Making Respectable Women
Mary Evans
Making Respectable
Women
Changing Moralities, Changing Times
With Contributions by Kimberley Beach
Mary Evans
London School of Economics
LSE Gender Institute, UK
London, UK
ISBN 978-3-030-60648-0 ISBN 978-3-030-60649-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-60649-7
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A
cknowledgements
As the title pages of this book suggest, it is a work which has benefited in
important ways from the work of Kimberley Beach, who did a great deal
of work on the research in archive material from print journalism. She has
also contributed in equally significant ways to discussions about the overall
thesis of the book and the various ways in which people from different
generations interpret aspects of social change. I would also like to thank
Imogen Tyler and Beverley Skeggs, who invited me to talk in a seminar at
the University of Lancaster; it was an afternoon and evening of richly
informed discussion and debate. On another continent my thanks go to
Balaganapathi Devarakonda and Tariq Islam—respectively—of the
Universities of Delhi and Aligarh Muslim University in India, who organ-
ised seminars and lectures at which colleagues from across the world dis-
cussed ideas about changing ideas about respectability. All these events
made it clear that the ‘respectability’ of women is an endlessly contested
and manipulated construct.
I would also like to thank the Leverhulme Trust, whose award of an
Emeritus Fellowship made possible the work of this research. Whilst I was
working on the project I was also fortunate in the support of the
Department of Gender Studies at the London School of Economics; the
endless intellectual vitality of the Department makes it an outstanding
location for academic work. The staff of the Women’s Library at the
London School of Economics were endlessly helpful, in particular the
librarians Indy Bhular, Heather Dawson and Gillian Murphy. An anony-
mous reviewer spent time reading a draft of this book, and I am extremely
grateful to them for their helpful comments.
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are other individuals who have helped me in various ways whilst
I was working on this project; amongst those many people I would par-
ticularly like to thank are Elizabeth Cocks, Elizabeth Cowie, Diane
Cunningham, Rod Edmond, Martin Hammer, John Jervis, Hazel
Johnstone, Sonia Kruks, Diane Lindsay, Jan Lindsay, Christina Lodder,
Pat Macpherson, Linda McDowell, Steven Pollock, Susan Rudy, Janet
Sayers, Maggie Schaedel, Karen Shook, Jenny Uglow, Clare Ungerson
and Anna Whitham. Tom, Cadence, Jamie and Christy were all invaluable.
c
ontents
1 T he Context 1
2 Victorian Values 17
3 Making the ‘Modern’ Woman 41
4 The Right Body 71
5 Judging Women 91
Bibliography 99
Index 107
vii
l f
ist of igures
Fig. 1.1 Son de Flor: Romantic nostalgia. (Source: @sondeflor
Instagram, reused with permission) 5
Fig. 2.1 Surplus women: The ‘problem’ of surplus women. (Source:
Home Notes, 7 May 1896) 33
Fig. 3.1 Madame: Body work. (Source: The Tatler, 4th June, 1930,
(c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture Library;
reprinted with permission) 56
Fig. 3.2 Freedom corsetry: The forms of ‘freedom’. (Source: Modern
Woman, Vol. XV, March 1935) 64
Fig. 4.1 A youthful necessity: the rewards of youth. (Source: The Tatler,
4 June 1930 (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture
Library; reprinted with permission) 74
Fig. 4.2 Elizabeth Arden: Retaining youth. (Source: The Tatler, 21 June
1939 (c) Illustrated London News/Mary Evans Picture
Library; reprinted with permission) 75
ix
i
ntroduction
This essay is about the ways in which women are judged, and how and
why those judgments have changed. The particular judgement at issue is
of ‘respectability’ and being ‘respectable’. A central theme is that this
judgment is not static; it has changed as new forms of the ‘respectable’
emerge, just as others become redundant. Those changes say much about
the gendered implications of shifts in the moral economy of the UK in the
historical period from the late nineteenth century to the present day. What
is proposed here is that the meaning and the implications of the word
‘respectability’ have altered dramatically in the past one hundred and fifty
years, in ways which for some people suggest a greater ‘freedom’, ‘eman-
cipation’ or ‘liberation’. In some obvious and visible ways that much is
obvious since it is clear from any glance at the public visual history of
women that expectations about the expectations of behaviour and dress of
women have shifted. Issues about personal appearance, the making of the
self are all, as Beverley Skeggs and Annie Ernaux have pointed out, the
ingredients which are central to the moral order of gender.1 But that order
changes constantly. To assume that there is a single, hegemonic definition
of the ‘respectable’ is questioned here, as is the assumption that moral
judgments about women are necessarily always those which are chosen
and initiated by women. Women are still being judged, and judged in ways
which are often both negative and punitive. The concept of the ‘respect-
able’ is central to those judgments; it has, as Imogen Tyler has argued in
another context, ‘material force’.2
xi
xii INTRODUCTION
It should therefore be apparent that this essay does not accept those
‘progress ‘narratives which see only emancipation in the history of
women in the UK in the past decades. On the contrary, what is sug-
gested here is that the changing constructions of the ‘respectable’
woman have both enlarged and restricted the possibilities open to
women. Thus on the one hand women have been accorded a civic status
which is similar to that of men at the same time as institutional contexts
have become accessible to both women and men. On the other hand,
the expectations about women, in terms of demands about their appear-
ance, the persistence of assumptions about their responsibility for vari-
ous forms of care and their participation in paid work have become
increasingly present as have the levels of media abuse and physical vio-
lence. These changes matter because they are central to discussions
about a number of questions: how women are judged in a variety of
social contexts, what should constitute a feminist agenda, what ‘empow-
ers’ women, in whose interests ideas about women change and what has
been lost and/or gained by and for women in that historical arc from
the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. But above all else
two issues dominate the discussion that follows. First, the central theme
of ‘what a woman should be’; a definition that is of crucial importance
because it is related to legal, political and moral judgments about
women and the various forms of social possibilities, definitions and
expectations that are derived from them. This is the point where it also
has to be acknowledged that an issue confronting everyone, not least
those writing about gender, is that of who can define themselves as a
‘woman’. The public discussion about ‘trans’ gender and gender transi-
tions, has opened up debates which have become divisive. Here, the
category of ‘woman’ is used inclusively. Second, views about women are
part of the fantasies and fears about ourselves and others which inform
politics and human agency. The expression ‘zeitgeist’ is widely used to
indicate the content of the culture in which we all live. In that culture,
gender relations play a central part, a part which is constitutive of more
general social relations and foundational to the workings of power and
politics.3 That there are connections between authoritarian gender
regimes and equally controlling forms of politics is without doubt: of
interest here is the more subtle ways in which apparently more liberal
societies control and define women and what a woman can be. It should