Yorkshire lasses and their lads: Sexuality, sexual customs, and gender antagonisms in anglo-american working-class culture

Journal of Social History

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2006, Pages

  Blewett, Mary ^a,b  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS   (United States)

^b Department of History ^*  (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33846372021     PISSN: 00224529     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jsh.2007.0004     Document Type: Review

References (130)

1. Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London, 1981), pp. 57-9, 61.
2. Patrick Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (Brighton, 1980).
3. Rudolph Vecoli called for more clarification of the lived and imagined culture of ethnicity in "Comment: We Study the Present to Understand the Past," The Journal of American Ethnic History 18 (Summer 1999): 115-25.
4. Historians find evidence on migrant working- class female sexual agency elusive, for example, Christine Harzig, "The Role of German Women in the German-American Working-Class Movement in Late Nineteenth-Century New York," Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring, 1989): 87-107.
5. Hedley Smith published two collections of short stories The Yankee Yorkshireman (1970), More Yankee Yorkshiremen (1974) and one novella, Yankee Yorkshirewomen (1978) at Harlo Press, Detroit, MI, which published ethnic fiction. Smith wrote over a dozen unpublished novellas, including a three-part trilogy "The Millmaster," "The Tongue-Tied Town," and "The Lion and the Eagle" set in his fictional mill village of "Briardale." The published work, correspondence with his publisher, a transcript of the 1997 taped interview with his children, and the cited e-mails are in the archives of the American Textile History Museum, Lowell, MA. The published and unpublished work remain the property of Portia Thompson, Wakefield, RI and of Duncan Smith, Professor Emeritus, Department of German Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI and are quoted with their permission, e-mails, Nov. 16, 19, 2002.
6. Smith who had passed the eleven plus exams in Yorkshire was refused admission to high school, 1997 interview.
7. See "English Village in Rhode Island," Providence Tribune, Nov. 15, 1912.
8. E-mail, Portia Smith Thompson, Feb. 10, 2002.
9. Rowland T. Berthoff, British Immigrants in Industrial America, 1790-1950 (Cambridge, 1953)
10. and Charlotte Erickson, Invisible Immigrants: The Adaptation of English and Scottish Immigrants in 19th-century America (Ithaca, NY, 1990 reprint of 1972 edition)
11. and Leaving England: Essays on British Emigration in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1994).
12. Robin Cohen, Global Diasporas: An Introduction (Seattle, 1997), pp. ix-xii and chapter 6. Also see Steven Vertovec and Robin Cohen, eds., Migration, Disaporas and Transnationalism (Cheltenham, UK, 1999), pp. xiii-xxvi, especially p. xxi. Although his work focuses on migration during the 1990s, Cohen explicitly questions whether the nation state was ever historically able to contain "the wider socialities" it sought to represent.
13. Cohen, Global Diasporas, pp. ix-xii.
14. For recent work on gender and the family in immigration, Suzanne M. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women in the United States, 1880-1920 (Urbana, IL, 2002). Especially relevant for this paper is Monika Blaschke's exploration of the life experiences of farm maids, their refusal to allow legal restrictions on marriage to control their sexuality or emigration, and local rituals with sexual overtones in '"No Way but Out': German Women in Mecklenburg," pp. 35-42 in Christiane Harzig, ed., Peasant Maids - City Women: From the European Countryside to Urban America (Ithaca, NY, 1997).
15. Karen Majewski argued in Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880-1939 (Columbus, OH, 2003) that Polish language literature offered the possibility to the "community for reading itself as Polish in an American context," p. 11. Majewski's analysis of "Love, Sex, and the State of Marriage" in chapter 6 demonstrates that marriage and sexuality in the "ethnic romance" is often a metaphor for sustaining national authenticity, pp. 122-44.
16. Daniel Bender, "'Too Much of Distasteful Masculinity': Historicizing Sexual Harassment in the Garment Sweatshop and Factory," Journal of Women's History, 15 (Winter, 2004): 91-116.
17. These sources include James Burnley, Phases of Bradford Life: A Series of Pen and Ink Sketches (Bradford, UK, 1871)
18. and Looking for the Dawn: A Tale of the West Riding, (London, 1874, reprinted New York, 1986);
19. J. B. Priestley, Margin Released: A Writer's Reminiscences and Reflections (London, 1963);
20. Maggie Newbery, Picking Up the Threads: The Complete Reminiscences of a Bradford Mill Girl, edited by James Ogden (Bradford, UK, 1993);
21. Elizabeth K. Blackburn, In and Out the Windows: A Story of the Changes in Working Class Life 1902-1977 in a Small East Lancashire Community (Burnley, UK, 1978);
22. Ben Turner, About Myself, 1863-1930 (London, 1930);
23. James Lawson, Letters to the Young on Progress In Pudsey During the Last Sixty Years (Stanningley, UK, 1887).
24. For the dismissal of "book nonsense," see the characters of Joth Booth, "The Conscience of Mr. King," p. 20, and Ruth Binns, "Squire Widdop's Wooing," pp. 37-8, The Yankee Yorkshireman
25. and David Greaves, "The Wise Child," pp. 56, 63-4, More Yankee Yorkshiremen.
26. For condemnation of "wedding" out of class, see Aunt Sarah Jane Denby, "Wedding Dress," p. 112, The Yankee Yorkshireman.
27. "Squire Widdop's Wooing," The Yankee Yorkshireman, pp. 37-8, 42-8. Karl Ittmann's study of declining fertility in Bradford based on data between 1851and 1881 discussed turn of the twentieth-century working-class knowledge of birth control and abortion including the uses of "penny royal" and other herbal substances and the general availability of information on sexuality among female worsted workers, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (New York, 1995), pp. 230-3.
28. Also see, Weeks, Sex, Politics and Society, pp. 69-72
29. and Patricia Knight, "Women and Abortion in Victorian and Edwardian England," History Workshop Journal, no. 4 (Autumn 1977): 62-3.
30. Karl Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (New York, 1995), pp. 152, note # 56, 230-5.
31. Working wives with families in Burnley, Lancashire, practiced similar family limitation, Diana Gittins, The Fair Sex: Family Size and Structure in Britain, 1900-1939 (New York, 1982), pp. 87-94, 158-165.
32. Knight, Women and Abortion," pp. 57-70.
33. Smith, "The Mill Folk," pp. 17-18. The "safe period" in the female fertility cycle was however misunderstood and useless for birth control, Knight, "Women and Abortion," p. 59.
34. Priestley, Margin Released, p. 11.
35. Priestley, Margin Released, pp. 59-60.
36. Priestley, Margin Released, p. 60.
37. Elizabeth who entered the mills at thirteen in 1915 could observe the mill at night because her father also served as watchman and the family occupied housing on the mill grounds, Blackburn, In and Out Windows, pp. 9-10, 29.
38. Blackburn, In and Out the Windows, pp. 21, 29.
39. Turner, About Myself, pp. 62-3.
40. Lawson, Progress in Pudsey, "Courtship and Love-Making" and "Old Time Weddings," pp. 29-39, especially p. 36.
41. "Coortin Days," John Hartley, Yorkshire Lyrics: Poems Written m the Dialect as Spoken in the West Riding of Yorkshire (London, 1898), pp. 35-6.
42. Newbury, Picking Up the Threads, pp. 12-52.
43. Newbury, Picking Up the Threads, pp. 42-3, 54-61, quote, p. 60.
44. Maggie went into domestic service, Newbury, Picking Up the Threads, pp. 121-2.
45. Phyllis Bentley to Hedley Smith, Oct. 10, 1974, possession of author. On Bentley, Eric Ford, "Phyllis Bentley: Novelist of Yorkshire Life," Contemporary Review v. 270 (Feb 1997): 89-94.
46. For example, Andrew Davies's study based on early twentieth- century oral history and other sources in Lancashire, Leisure, Gender, and Poverty: Working-Class Culture in Salford and Manchester, 1900-1939 (Buckingham, UK, 1992).
47. ignores sexuality, while Stephen G. Jones, Workers At Play: A Social and Economic History of Leisure, 1918-1939 (London, 1986) equates "leisure" with cinema, church, drink, gambling, holidays, sport, hobbies, magazines, and clubs but does not discuss sexual activities in dancehalls or courtship.
48. James Hammerton's Cruelty and Companionship: Conflict in Nineteenth-century Married Life (London, 1992) remains the best study of English working-class marriage, see chapters 1, 2. Hammerton used dialect poetry and prose as well as newspapers and court records to probe the nature of turn of the century marital conflicts based on male violence.
49. Elizabeth Roberts, A Woman's Place: An Oral History of Working-Class Women 1890-1940 (Oxford, 1984), p. 88.
50. Jan Lambertz, "Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry," History Workshop Journal, no. 19 (Spring 1985): 48.
51. Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family, pp. 6, 141-2, 129, see note # 168, 232-3.
52. See the descriptions of Bessie King, "The Conscience of Mr. King," p. 15, of Emma Briggs (perhaps based on Smith's mother), "Uprooted," p. 57, and of Bertha Stott, "The Black Sheep," p. 74 in The Yankee Yorkshireman. Also the description of Cissie Petty, Yankee Yorkshirewomen, p. 8.
53. Smith, "The Mill Folk," pp. 74-5.
54. A perceptive reviewer of Smith's second collection of short stories suggested that like D.H. Lawrence, Smith understood that sexual attachments were the glue that bonded society, Gordon E. Rowley, The Observer (Scituate. RI), November 28, 1974. Also, email, Duncan Smith, Sept. 3, 2005.
55. Sian Moore, "Women, Industrialization and Protest in Bradford, West Yorkshire, 1780-1845" (Ph.D. diss., University of Essex, 1986), p. 61.
56. Frank Mort, Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830 (London, 1987), pp. 47-49.
57. Yorkshire Factory Times, February 14, December 19, 1890.
58. Cotton Factory Times, August 2, 1907, courtesy of Alan Fowler.
59. Lambertz, "Sexual Harassment in the Nineteenth Century English Cotton Industry," pp. 29-61.
60. See Ittmann, Work, Gender, and Family, pp. 141-64.
61. For the quote and the general acceptance of paternalism along the lines of Saltaire in the West Riding, D. James, "Paternalism in Mid-Nineteenth Century Keighley, pp.104-119, esp. 107, and R. Reynolds, "Reflections on Saltaire," pp. 43-72 in J. A. Jowitt, Model Industrial Communities in Mid-Nineteenth Century Yorkshire (Bradford, UK, 1986).
62. Lawson, Progress in Pudsey, pp. 35-6.
63. James Burnley's sentimental 1874 novel about Chartist activity in Yorkshire, Looking for the Dawn, also depicted casual night-time courtships of lads and lasses in the countryside.
64. Reynolds, "Reflections," in Jowitt, Model Industrial Communities, pp. 46-50, 55.
65. On Salt, Reynolds, "Reflections," in Jowitt, Model Industrial Communities, pp. 46-50 and on middle-class views of female working-class sexuality, Jane Lewis, Women in England, 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (Bloomington, IN, 1984), pp. 127-8, 184-93.
66. Burnley, "A Day in the Mill," Phases of Bradford Life, p. 195.
67. Also see, Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family, pp. 149-53.
68. Burnley, "The Dance Halls," "Out in the Streets All Night," Phases of Bradford Life, pp. 196-99, 105.
69. Joanna Bornat, "Lost Leaders: Women, Trade Unionism and the Case of the General Union of Textile Workers, 1875-1914," in Angela V. John, ed., Unequal Opportunities: Women's Employment in England, 1800-1918 (London, 1986) pp. 207-33.
70. Tony Jowitt, "The Retardation of Trade Unionism in the Yorkshire Worsted Textile Industry," J. A Jowitt and A.J McIvor, eds., Employers and Labour in the English Textile Industries, 1850-1939 (London, 1988), pp. 84-106.
71. June Hannam, "'In the Comradeship of the Sexes Lies the Hope of Progress and Social Regeneration': Women in the West Riding ILP, c. 1890-1914," in Jane Rendall, ed., Equal or Different: Women's Politics, 1800-1914 (Oxford, 1987), pp. 224-5.
72. Nicola Reader, Ph.D. candidate, University of Leeds, work in progress, cited by permission, e-mail, March 16, 2005.
73. Joanna Bornat, '"What About That Lass of Yours Being in the Union?': Textile Workers and Their Union in Yorkshire, 1888-1922," in Leonore Davidoff and Belinda Westover, eds., Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words (Totowa, NJ, 1986), pp. 90-6.
74. Deirdre Busfield, "Skill and the Sexual Division of Labour in the West Riding Textile Industry, 1850-1914," in Employers and Labour, pp. 153-170.
75. Ittmann, Gender, Work and Family, p. 163.
76. Bornat, "Lost Leaders," pp. 207-233, and Maria Bottomley, "Women and Industrial Militancy: The 1875 Heavy Woolen Dispute," in Employers and Labour, pp. 171-86.
77. Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family, pp. 202-22, 234-5.
78. Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family, pp. 203, 209.
79. Jowitt, "Retardation," in Employers and Labour, p. 102.
80. Busfield, "Skill and the Sexual Division of Labour," in Employers and Labour, pp.154-6.
81. Maria Bottomley, "Women and Industrial Militancy: The Heavy Woolen Dispute," in Employers and Labour, pp. 176-7, 184.
82. J. Reynolds, "Reflections on Saltaire," in Jowitt, Model Industrial Communities, p. 57
83. and Jack Reynolds, The Great Paternalist: Titus Salt and the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Bradford (New York, 1983), pp. 317-21.
84. Bradford Observer, August 14, 22, 24, 25, 26, 31, September 1, 2, 1882.
85. Mary H. Blewett, "Diversities of Class Experience and the Shaping of Labor Politics: Yorkshire's Manningham Mills Strike, 1890-1891 and the Independent Labour Party," forthcoming in Labor History 47 (November 2006): 511-35.
86. See photograph between pp. 128 and 129 in Ben Turner's, Short History of the General Union of Textile Workers (Heckmonewike, Yorkshire, 1920) of the 1891 Manningham strike committee with sixteen women and eleven men.
87. Bradford Observer, Jan. 7, 1891;
88. Turner, Short History, pp. 139-41.
89. E. P. Thompson, "Homage to Tom Maguire," Essays in Labour History, Asa Briggs and John Saville, eds., (London, 1960): 276-315;
90. J. Reynolds and K. Laybourn, "The Emergence of the Independent Labour Party in Bradford," International Review of Social History 20, 3 (1975): 313-46
91. and Keith Laybourn, "The Manningham Mills Strike, December 1890 to April 1891," in D. James, T. Jowitt, and K. Laybourn, The Centennial History of the Independent Labour Party (Halifax, 1992), pp. 117-36.
92. Bomat in "Lost Leaders," in Unequal Opportunities, pp. 216-8, 221, 228. For a more optimistic view based on middle-class feminist activism in Leeds and Bradford, see Hannam, '"In the Comradeship of the Sexes," pp. 214-38, esp. 237-8.
93. For the passionate, experienced nature of Yorkshire mill lasses' sexuality, see Emma Briggs in "Uprooted," p. 65,
94. Emily Waddington, "Wedding Dress," pp. 104, 108-110,
95. Martha Hobson and Emily Binns in "Squire Widdop's Wooing," pp. 31, 52, The Yankee Yorkshireman, Barbara Craven in "The Partnership," p. 39
96. and Sally Greaves in "The Wise Child", pp. 78-9, More Yankee Yorkshiremen, and as cited below in the typescript, "The Mill Folk." For calculating and prudish Yankee women, see "The Lion and The Eagle," typescript, pp. 92-94, 109-10, 114.
97. An overlooker is a foreman. Knowles is referring to Minetta Sweet, in "The Wise Child," More Yankee Yorkshiremen, pp. 58, 74.
98. 1997 interview.
99. E-mail, Portia Thompson, September 26, 2000.
100. Smith, "The Mill Folk," pp. 28-37.
101. Smith, "The Mill Folk," pp. 170-1.
102. Priestley, Margin Released, pp. 60-61.
103. Priestley, Margin Released, p. 61.
104. Ittmann briefly noted the ritual of sunning and female bawdy conduct as "sexual antagonism," Work, Gender and Family, pp. 224, 232-3.
105. Daniel Bender, e-mail, Sept. 15, 2003.
106. Such boisterous behavior in pre-factory mill villages occurred only among men and boys except for women's participation in "Riding the Steng," part of the Yorkshire charivari tradition, Lawson, "Manners, Customs, Sports and Pastimes," Progress in Pudsey, pp. 74-85.
107. Smith, "The Mill Folk," pp. 72-75.
108. English historians, such as James Hammerton, have applied the nineteenth-century term "rough usage" almost exclusively to male actors.
109. Sinke, Dutch Immigrant Women, p. 4.
110. Busfield, "Skill and the Sexual Division of Labour" in Employers and Labour, pp. 153-70, esp. pp. 163-5;
111. Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, et. al., Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), pp. 67-72.
112. Laurence Gross, The Course of Industrial Decline: The Boott Cotton Mills of Lowell, Massachusetts, 1835-1955 (Baltimore, 1993), p. 66; e-mail, September 5, 2005, Larry Gross to author.
113. My thanks to Felicity Harrison for this insight.
114. Smith, "The Mill Folk," pp. 72-5.
115. Memo of personal conversation with Bart De Wilde, participant in Global Textile Workers conference, Amsterdam, November 2004. See his, Witte boorden, blauke kielen: patroons en arbeiders in de belgische textielnijverheid in de 19e en 20e eeuw, [Belgium]: Ludion: AMSAB: Profortex, 1997.
116. Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family, pp. 57-66, 136-7, 153.
117. Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family, p. 63.
118. Michael J. Childs, "Boy Labour in late Victorian and Edwardian England and the Remaking of the Working Class," Journal of Social History 23, 4 (Summer 1990): 783-803.
119. On labor conflicts, Providence Daily Journal, Nov. 23-24, 1912; Jan. 11, 12, 14, 16-17, 21, 24-25, 28, 30; Feb. 7, 12, 17-19, 28; April 4-7, 15, 1913; Providence Bulletin, Jan 11, 13, 1913; Labor Advocate (Providence weekly), Jan. 5, 12, 19, 26, Feb. 19, 23, Mar. 23, 30, April 12, 1913; and Rhode Island Commission for Industrial Statistics, Twenty-Seventh Annual Report (1914), pp. 92-6, 108, 110.
120. For middle-class antagonisms, see Smith, The Lion and the Eagle," unpublished novella.
121. The term appears as "the Jickeys" in Smith's "The Wise Child," p. 60, More Yankee Yorkshiremen. Also see "jicki," as used in southern Massachusetts and Rhode Island textile centers in the 1930s and 1940s, Dictionary of American Regional English, Frederic G. Cassidy, ed., v. III (Cambridge, MA 1996), pp. 128-9.
122. On Lancashire immigrants in Rhode Island, Paul Buhle, "The Knights of Labor in Rhode Island," Radical History Review 17 (Spring, 1978): 39-73;
123. Mary H. Blewett, Constant Turmoil: The Politics of Industrial Life in Nineteenth-Century New England (Amherst, 2000), Chapter 7.
124. James R. Barrett and David Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples: Race, Nationality and the 'New Immigrant' Working Class," Journal of American Ethnic History (Spring 1997): 3-44, esp. pp. 7-9.
125. For references to shoddy meaning adulterated worsted made of cotton and wool, "Squire Widdop's Wooing," The Yankee Yorkshireman pp. 33-4,
126. and "The Mill Folk." "Middle-class Yorkshire immigrants often expressed scorn for American ways, "King George's Idea, " in More Yankee Yorkshiremen, pp. 86, 89.
127. On the racialization of Italian immigrants, Barrett and Roediger, "Inbetween Peoples," p. 22
128. and Ardis Cameron, Radicals of the Worst Sort: Laboring Women in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1860-1912 (Urbana, IL, 1993), pp. 130-1.
129. "The Wise Child," pp. 59-63, 66, More Yankee Yorkshiremen; Yankee Yorkshirewomen, pp. 31-3, and as the major theme of the novella "The Lion and the Eagle" and "The Tongue-tied Town."
130. Judy Giles, "'Playing Hard to Get': Working-Class Women, Sexuality and Respectability in Britain, 1918-1940," Women's History Review, I (Spring 1992): 239-55.