WOMEN'S NETWORKS
No woman was an island, even when a lone, home-based domestic manager. Women cultivated networks amongst themselves based on their shared interest in issues of home and family. For the working-class woman the networks were usually economic in nature, focusing on assisting family survival, and they were often constructed around the public sphere of the street immediately outside the home.
For the middle-class woman, networks were rarely economic in character (which would have conferred a loss of bourgeois status), but rather were based on kinship and good works.Kinship is a set of socially recognised ties based on physical relatedness but also what are called affinal relationships, which might include relatives by marriage and even contractual relations such as godparents.30 Women played an increasingly important role in constructing and maintaining kinship networks in the nineteenth century. ‘If kinship relations are not seen as confined to the domestic unit alone', writes Jill Dubisch with reference to modern Greece, ‘then the broader role of women in kinship structures becomes more clear.'31 In south-west Germany, for example, the enhanced role of women in agricultural production by the 1840s encouraged women to manipulate kinship relations in order to maintain and enhance land, property and the enterprise. ‘As women grew older', writes David Sabean, ‘they became experienced in wielding authority, managing farm and trading enterprises, pursuing the interests of themselves and their families, and negotiating effectively with their kindreds.'32 By the 1860s these women occupied a central position in the sale of land and they carefully used sisters and sisters' husbands as godparents, they arranged marriages within the kin group, building up credit or what may be called kinship capital for both their own prosperity and that of future generations.
In Spain, where women had the right to inherit and pass on land, widows — free of husbands who managed property on their behalf — had some power to use their land for strategic means although the cultural traditions of Spain meant that it was much harder for women to translate their property into influence.33Amongst the middle classes the reasons for women's central role in the maintenance of kinship ties were both functional and emotional. Bourgeois women were at the centre of kinship networks in the nineteenth century, creating and sustaining complex alliance systems by means of marriage negotiations, the choice of godparents, persistent letter-writing, frequent travel, the exchange of gifts, the care of children, visiting, organising social events and mediating in family disputes.34 Women were also the active promoters of family and kinship relations: remembering birthdays and anniversaries, organising family events, creating a sense of family unity amongst members dispersed far and wide by frequent visiting, maintaining through correspondence and the display of photographs the family's constant presence even in its absence, and creating a family history through the collection of mementoes and the creation of albums.35 These activities did not merely provide emotional sustenance for women confined within the home, rather they placed women at the core of business and family structures. As the German feminist Louise Otto-Peters explained in 1869:
The family is... almost the only institution, in which not only the men but also the women, may develop characteristics and set in motion strengths which are dormant in them. Only in family affairs does the woman have the vote, and indeed not just in a consultative but in a decisive way, her influence here is by far the most powerful, so that she consciously or unconsciously as it were provides the tone, the keynote which rings through the whole house, and all members tuned to the same pitch sing together in a beautiful harmony.36
The example of Charlotte Kestner of Hannover, who assumed the role of ‘emotional pole' for a wide circle of family, kin and friends, nicely illustrates how a woman might direct or even orchestrate family relations.
It was said that, ‘In friendly reciprocity her hospitable house was almost never empty of relatives and friends'. Moreover, ‘In the large family network, however, and also way beyond it, Aunt Lottchen was Providence itself. Everyone turned to her in joy and sorrow, at any time of despair, in every difficulty and found even if not always material help then always wise and sober advice and heartfelt comfort.'37 This was a woman who never married but who had brought up her widowed brother's family and helped the family of one of her nieces, thereafter actively keeping the dispersed family in contact and establishing herself as the focal point.The attention paid to women's construction of kinship networks served a number of purposes. Women's personal contacts, their skill at providing hospitality, their matchmaking skills and assiduity in maintaining contact with distant relatives all contributed to the survival and success of the family enterprise.38 Individuals found security in the network of interests and relationships formed in ever increasing circles around the nuclear core. The thousands of letters which passed between the four aristocratic Lennox sisters in Britain and Ireland between 1740 and 1832 demonstrate how contact between women did not merely centre upon the emotional or domestic sphere, although of course their shared concerns about health, marriage, pregnancy, children, home interiors and intimate relationships served to strengthen the ties between them. Rather, all four sisters corresponded with one another and with other male and female relations on the political issues of the day such as the Irish Question and the French Revolution, and thereby struggled to retain the position of the aristocratic Lennox family.39
Amongst the middle and working classes, neighbourhood groups and extended families had a similar structural function, ‘providing a strict system for establishing and maintaining social mores'.40 And it was primarily women who manipulated the networks, managed the relations amongst kin, and made judgements about whom could be relied upon and whom one might associate with.41 Elizabeth Roberts suggests that working-class women who maintained kinship networks were not solely motivated by what Michael Anderson called calculative instrumentality whereby help was extended because one knew that a time would come when the tables were turned.
The tradition of relatives taking in orphans — an arrangement which accrued few immediate measurable benefits to the adoptive parents — is illustrative of a more complicated conception of kin relations. In north-west England the extended family invariably took in orphaned children through a sense of obligation to kin, whereas in early modern France the legal adoption of children by members of extended kin — godparents, aunts, uncles — was a means by which the blood family could be maintained through the transmission of property to an adoptive child. And it was often widows who pursued what has been termed adoptive reproduction, suggesting the existence of female-headed households using kin for structural as well as affective or emotional reasons.42 Women's maintenance and orchestration of kinship relations was not primarily a means to emotional fulfilment or even dominated by material considerations; rather, it had a functional role, facilitating women's participation in political and economic networks and maintaining a set of social and moral boundaries. Being integrated into a wider kinship network allowed women to interact with the world of business, politics and culture and for some it was a way of accruing a sense of power, yet it was done in a personal way, through friendships rather than through impersonal relations.Amongst the rural and urban lower classes it was women’s responsibility to manage; to distribute resources in order to ensure the well-being of household members. This task involved women in reciprocal exchange amongst neighbours and kin, the use of credit, the careful use of scarce resources and, at all times the maintenance of respectability when a woman was judged by the outward appearance of her home and its members. In the context of what has been called the family consumer economy, whereby wageearning was often insufficient to meet consumer expectations, numerous historians have pointed to the need for working-class women to engage in a series of transactions in order to maintain the fiction that the male wage earner could keep his family.
Resorting to the pawnshop, keeping on the right side of the local grocer, knowing who would lend a cup of sugar or a pinch of tea, taking in a lodger — all were female survival strategies based on women’s control of family consumption and integration into a network of kin and neighbours.43 Although the financial and practical support offered by family and neighbours should not be exaggerated, these wider networks beyond the immediate household were crucial: in-laws and neighbours were used as paid or unpaid childminders, sisters passed on outgrown baby clothes, grandparents helped to keep children out of the workhouse, neighbours rallied round in the case of illness.44 All of these patterns of exchange bound together women and their households both materially and psychologically.For working-class women the line separating the private from the public sphere, the home from the street, was permeable. It was simply not practical for such women to stay at home. Fetching water, disposing of waste products, doing the laundry and shopping, all required forays into the streets to public wells, sanitation facilities, wash-houses and corner shop and markets. Communal female activities — the twice or thrice yearly wash-day, waulking cloth in textile-producing areas, sewing and knitting circles — and the everyday realities of survival, helped to form and strengthen female networks outside the home. It was largely poverty and strategies for survival that forced working-class women to look beyond their immediate household although we should not forget the gaps in the working day when women might gossip, engage in public sociability on the street or at the wash-house. Not all relations between women were based on material need.
It is difficult to judge how far these material relationships translated into other forms of collective support or consciousness amongst working-class women. In the sphere of intimate relations there is some evidence to suggest that female networks functioned to support victims of domestic violence, with women more likely to intervene in disputes than men, who were reluctant to interfere in another man's sphere of authority.
Women who fled the hands of a violent husband invariably sought refuge with female relatives or neighbours who provided shelter, financial support and presented themselves as witnesses if the case ended up in court. Such unselfish behaviour was more forthcoming in villages and small towns than in the larger urban centres where, by the end of the century, kinship networks were more thinly spread and informal regulation was giving way to police involvement.45 However, there was one area where women's networks were less useful. Women's refusal to speak openly about sex meant there was no ‘collective sense of where their “rights” lay and what their interests were'. Ellen Ross suggests that mothers deliberately kept their daughters in the dark about sex in order to keep them ‘respectable', and that, added to the fatalism of women who felt they had no alternative but to submit to their husbands, meant that sexual relations were the one area where female networks were of little use until a pregnancy ensued, when neighbours and family once more came to the support of the expectant mother.46In extreme circumstances, women's networks assumed a political function. In 1789, Parisian women marched on to the streets of the city to demand bread for their families. In Nottingham in 1812, women congregated and marched around the town in protest against rising bread prices. In 1871, French women again were out on the streets of Paris attacking bread stores. Spanish women engaged in a series of collective actions in the years 1910—18. During the First World War, strike action by women workers in German, Austrian and Italian cities on account of acute food shortages sent warnings to complacent governments, whilst, in Glasgow, female tenants spearheaded a rent strike in protest at rising rents at a time of extreme economic hardship. And in 1917 a women's protest against bread rationing in St Petersburg was a catalyst for revolution. Women's strikes and political protest had their origins in the neighbourhoods and women's immediate concerns associated with the struggle for survival. According to Temma Kaplan, working-class women developed a female consciousness which was drawn from a sense of female community in the shared work they undertook to sustain the lives of their families. When working-class women took collective action they were aroused by more immediate issues — social concerns of everyday life such as food, fuel and shelter. These women never created permanent associations based on female consciousness in the way that their male allies developed revolutionary organisations based on the principles of anarchism and socialism.'47
Women's collective action throughout the long nineteenth century has often been intimately connected with their relationship to household consumption.48 Not only food riots, but also protests against enclosure of common land and grazing, against the recruitment of men for the militia and against the introduction of new machinery, all reflected women's concerns about family subsistence and were manifestations of female networks consolidated around everyday activities. During the defence of the Paris Commune in 1871, housewives were prominent amongst those on the streets. It was reported that ‘the national guardsmen descended into the streets where groups of housewives were gathered, having left their homes to do their morning shopping. They learned of the retaking of the cannons, and they spread the news in all directions.'49 Women also supported men during strikes, using existing female networks based on laundries, child care and soup kitchens. In the case of a textile strike in Barcelona in 1913, which involved thousands of male and female workers, women used their networks to mobilise support for the strike, sending representatives to the food markets to talk to female shoppers. They organised daily street demonstrations independent of the trade union. And women's private work — feeding their menfolk and patching up their wounds — became public work.50 During these instances of collective protest, women demonstrated the permeability of the private and public spheres and showed how the household as a unit of economic and social organisation might be extended beyond four walls into the streets and into the realm of the political.