The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England

Thomas Gainsborough, The Byam Family, 1762-6, National Gallery

By Amanda Vickery, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, p. 436.

The Gentleman's Daughter: Women's Lives in Georgian England is social history at its very best.  Decorously welding a battle-axe (I've been reading too many sagas), Vickery takes on Thomas Laqueur, Alice Clark, and other feminist scholars who argue that the birth of the modern age produced a "separate spheres" ideology that inevitably shut women out of public life.  The traditional narrative in women's studies is that during the eighteenth century genteel women were relegated to the hearth while men strode out into the vibrant world of capitalist economy. 

Vickery argues that continuity--not change--characterizes the long, late early modern period.  More important than haggles over historical periodization, she argues that the dichotomy of aligning women with the domestic and men with the public is simply not an helpful distinction.  This dualism is alien to the 18th century British world view.  There were "public" and "private" spaces within a single upper middle-class dwelling: women entertained in the drawing room and men drank with sporting buddies in the kitchen/ breakfast room.  These were understood by 18th century families as public spaces.  In contrast, elites had closets with interior locks were one could pray, wrote letters, or simply seek refuge.

A well-run home that showed an easy elegance was a public asset to any ambitious man.  While Georgian women were shut of public institutions of governance, the home was a stage set for the display of rank and neat propriety.  Domesticity was another location for the play of status within a community.  Women were executive administrators within the home, and their rights as such were broadly endorsed.  Hierarchy was a matter of common sense, and married women were mistresses. In addition, women were tied to the larger world as kin, employers, benefactors, etc. 

What is so admirable about Vickery's scholarship is that she takes Georgians on their own terms.  While not explicitly using the term mentalite, Vickery examines archival material using the categories of thought she finds within letters, diaries, account books, etc.  That is, she evaluates women  who counted themselves as among "the polite" from their point of view.  The discrete values that animated Georgian women's lives (e.g., gentility, love and duty, fortitude and resignation, civility and vulgarity) are explored in separate chapters. 

By highlighting the modes of thought prevalent in Georgian England, Vickery shows just how different people living in the 18th century were.  This was a world based on social connections, and visiting was an important social ritual.  The phenomena of "taste" that developed during this time put women at the front and center of British cultural life.  In addition, women were tied to the larger world as kin, employers, benefactors, etc. 

This is a very carefully constructed piece of scholarship: Vickery defines her group by social role rather than income, separates ladies in the provinces from those in London, and analyzes her sources for what they can and cannot say.  Brava!  Finally, The Gentleman's Daughter is a pleasure to read.  She has an eye for significant detail and in lieu of boring explication drives home her point with a lot of entertaining vignettes.