Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth Century England

Studies on the History of Society and Culture

by Sonya O. Rose

Integrating analytical tools from feminist theory, cultural studies and sociology to illuminate detailed historical evidence, Sonya Rose argues that gender was a central organizing principle of the nineteenth-century industrial transformation in England. She elaborates a cultural theory of gender that suggests why it is an inherent aspect of all social and economic relations. Analysing employer strategies and state policies and the role of work in family life, she demonstrates that neither industrial transformation nor class relations can be understood when reduced to gender-neutral and abstract forces.

Genres: History, Class, Grad School

304 pages, Hardcover

First published March 19, 1992

About the author

Sonya O. Rose specializes in the study of women and gender in nineteenth and twentieth-century Britain, and has recently turned her attention to the impact of empire and decolonization on British metropolitan life. Her publications deal with the intersections of gender and class in the development of industrial capitalism, and she has published both theoretical and historiographical essays on the subjects of gender, class formation and citizenship. She has also published on nineteenth-century family and household strategies, and on national identity and citizenship in World War II Britain.

Reviews

[آية · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sonya Rose uses gender as a lens of understanding the working class in industrial 1800s England. Gender as a lens can be used for understanding both men and women ("men are gendered, too"). Ideas of what masculinity and femininity were often shaped class relations, gender relations, politics, and workplace relationships.