10.
Title: [The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain: Masculinity, Political Culture and the Struggle for Women's Rights]
Author: Ben Griffin
Genre: Masculinity Studies
Medium: Paperback
Acquisition: IS Book 2
Date Completed: February 5, 2016
Rating: ****

The Politics of Gender in Victorian Britain takes for its subject the culture of gender in the Victorian Parliament, seeking to understand the negotiations of masculinity and feminisms to consider how the established patriarchy supported, opposed, and legitimized early feminist movements as a law-making body. Griffin forwards that “the gendered identities of politicians shaped particular legislative outcomes” (7), and that “an anatomy of a patriarchal state” may help breach artificial limitations of research in historical feminism which, while not incorrect, “hermetically seal[s]} the subject from other cultural contexts (8). Griffin’s efforts are to place feminist history more broadly in Victorian culture by examining patriarchal responses to suffragists, feminists, and the changing cultural space in which they operate. Griffin’s project is achieved through an examination of Parliamentary reports published in three reputable newspapers, which were themselves the early sources of Parliamentary records.  These papers serve as efficient cultural artifacts, having preserved the discourses essentially in real time, without the editorial efforts of Parliamentary secretaries.

“Why did so many men change their minds about women’s suffrage?” Griffin asks, as he outlines his project (17). The answers, he posits, help break the isolation and aggregation of traditional feminist studies by examining the culture at large through the study of the ruling body of wealthy white men.  “…[D]ebates about women’s rights were often also debates about masculinity, and … politicians’ actions were fundamentally shaped by the identities that they constructed as men” (309). Like Kimmel, Griffin identifies a shift in gendered culture with the American Revolution; as Kimmel describes early American masculinity forming as a rejection of the oppressive father, British masculinity retreated into the home, seeking to reestablish the patriarchy through the authority of the family unit.  In chapter two, Griffin discusses “The domestic ideology of Victorian patriarchy,” and the gendered spheres of the Victorians which are largely familiar.  Griffin states, however, that these separate spheres do not provide a space of power for women; rather, one’s domestic authority (largely related to property rights and the financial maintenance of the family) is a performance of one’s masculinity, and thus greater political authority.  Questions of marital unity, and the definition thereof, are discussed, with their cultural and religious definitions.  This leads directly to two major points of discourse in the Victorian parliament, and Griffin’s study: domestic abuse and property rights.  For nineteenth-century MPs, the two become inherently linked.

The question of how and why a powerful body would relinquish control of a marginalized class is a significant one, especially as even partial liberation requires and acknowledgment of failure on the part of the rulers. This is initially achieved through the vilification of working class men; Griffin recounts that the earliest acquiescence are allowed when MPs consider the plight of honest working-class women being victimized by drunken scoundrel husbands.  By law, these women are without protection, and Parliament recognizes that a husband’s rule may in face be detrimental when the husband in question is willing to, say, beat his pregnant wife in order to take the money she’s saved for her confinement, for drink. Chapter three examines the class lines of masculinity, and how the characterization of lower class “tyrannical” (88) husbands as drunken and bestial allow MPs to artificially divorce their own masculinity from these brutes, and pass laws chivalrously protecting women of lower classes by allowing them to control their own incomes, while retaining their own household authority and preserving the myth that domestic abuse and moral lapse are conditions of the poor.   

Chapter four shifts to a reading of religious changes in the mid- to late-nineteenth-century which challenge the earlier understanding of women as “naturally” (i.e. Biblically) subservient to men, who are made to serve as the ruling class. Changes in religious thought, such as the belief that the Bible cannot actually be taken as a word-for-word historically-accurate text, allow for Victorians to challenge assumptions of sex. St. Paul, who is often cited by anti-suffragists, is now read as a product of his times rather than a direct guide to gendered expectations forwarded by the church, and the masculinity is redefined to include necessitous care and compassion for wives, as opposed to draconian control.

These cultural tug-of-wars continue throughout the book, and Griffin demonstrates how lawmakers wade through evolving cultural and religious beliefs to acknowledge cases of necessitous female autonomy (in property rights, maternal rights, etc). For my own research purposes, I found chapters five and six most interesting – those concerning paternal rights (which concerns the “natural” parenting qualities of women) and the performance of masculinity within Parliament itself (especially dress, mannerisms, and self-control).

Recommended for anyone interested in legal and cultural history, feminism, masculinity, and/or the Victorians.