Male honour and the decline of public violence in eighteenth-century London

In explaining the long-term decline of violence in English society, historians have failed to recognize the importance of changing gender-based conceptions of honour. During the eighteenth century the per capita rate of homicide in London decreased dramatically, and because 93% of homicides were committed by men, this decline essentially involved a change in male behaviour. At the start of the period violence served to enhance or defend men's reputations, and thereby to reinforce their social and gender identities. In order to maintain their honour, most men felt the need to physically challenge anyone who insulted them or questioned their honesty or courage. Such disputes often took the form of duels and other ritualized staged fights and were conducted by men of all social classes. While the violence was limited by accepted rules (violence committed by women, though much rarer, more easily got out of hand), fatalities nonetheless occurred. Over the course of the century, however, these types of disputes became far less common as reputations came to be defined much less publicly in London, and men found new ways of establishing and defending their honour, and thus of asserting gender and social differences. However, private violence, notably wife beating, continued behind closed doors.     

Introduction: Beyond the Great Divergence

Was today’s alternative model of development universal in the eighteenth century? By comparing what was then mainstream economic development with today’s alternative model, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (hereafter, The Great Divergence) reminds us that development has many possibilities. Like many of us who are familiar with the classic research models for the origins of Western European capitalism, Pomeranz, on encountering evidence betraying the paucity of advocates for the “European miracle” and the backwardness of early modern England and Europe, was irresistibly impelled to reassess this period. What he found was a decline in environmental resources relative to the growing population in the preindustrial world—an issue that can hardly be said to be economic; rather, for the moment, let us acknowledge it as arising from the demand for plant and animal resources. The Great Divergence asserts that in the eighteenth century, when timber had not yet been completely replaced by coal, four major products of the land—food, fuel, fiber and building materials—were facing increasing demographic pressure, which people in Europe, especially England, and in China, especially the lower Yangzi Delta (Jiangnan), and even in Japan and India, were all trying to deal with, and to which they all responded by choosing a labor–intensive path. This raised output and satisfied the environmental resource needs of a growing population. In the end, however, The Great Divergence lets the cat out of the bag, holding that environmental pressures were considerably relieved in England in the mid- to late eighteenth century, due to the industrial revolution sparked by its coal and iron and the abundant supply of land-intensive products imported from the New World; England then abandoned its labor-intensive path and took the road of industrialization, in which capital and labor made up for shortage of land. With the advent of the industrial revolution, Pomeranz’ doubts about Eurocentrism automatically come to an end; the nineteenth century becomes a dividing wall. The concept of development that takes environmental resources—including land—as existing merely for demand and consumption takes its fixed form in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the stage in which economic development reigned supreme and industrialization proceeded through plunder and rapine.     

Regime change: gender, class, and the invention of dieting in post-bellum America

"Regime Change" argues against commonly held interpretations that see dieting as a practice established in the 1920s to control women at a time when they gained suffrage and greater economic independence. This article offers an alternative reading, arguing that diet advice literature arrived in the US in the 1860s and originally targeted a male, white, middle-class audience. While the hegemonic beauty ideal for the female body was at its heftiest, men started to build muscle and reduce weight. The ideal of the slender male body was associated with white superiority, social mobility and the national ambition for an American empire. When white middle-class women eventually started dieting in greater numbers in the 1890s, it was because they claimed the same mastery over their bodies as men—and demanded the same privileges as their male peers over immigrants, African Americans and working-class people, who were increasingly imagined as overweight. Revising the history of dieting to show its origins as a masculine practice appropriated by women to stake a claim to class and race privilege invites a rethinking of power and resistance in the disciplining of the female body.     

Still working for the man? Women's employment experiences in Australia since 1950

This article tackles the question of what is the ‘good life’ for women in employment in Australia through an examination of national legislation and policies. Since 1950 what has been seen as the good life has changed dramatically. The article outlines three phases of change: in the 1950s and 1960s men were regarded as the wage earners and women the homemakers, with women barred from some jobs and paid less than men; in the 1970s legislation and equal pay cases removed overt discrimination against women; from the mid 1980s the complexity of achieving equality for women at work was recognised through equal opportunity legislation, work and family policies and equal pay inquiries. In 2010 the ‘good life’ for women is having the same opportunities and outcomes in employment as men. While policy provisions support this, the reality of achieving this is difficult. So in 2010 many women are still ‘working for the man’ in the context that most managers are men.     

Homicide in eighteenth-century Cheshire

This article provides an analysis of indictments and coroners’ inquests dealing with homicide coming before the Court of Great Sessions at Chester during the eighteenth century, with a special focus on the better documented second half of that century. The Court of Great Sessions was the equivalent of the assize court for the County of Chester, which was a Palatinate enjoying its own legal institutions. Initially the social status of offenders and the method of killing are analysed, and the results compared with patterns extant for the early seventeenth century, Cheshire being one of the few English counties whose records survive sufficiently to permit such long-term comparisons. The main features are a retreat by the gentry from homicidal violence by the late eighteenth century, and the preponderance of killing by simple kicking or beating in contrast to an earlier emphasis on the use of weapons. This latter feature is reinforced by the discovery of numerous cases, normally categorized as manslaughter by the court, in which death followed what appears to be a formalized form of fighting, obviously based on contemporary boxing practices. The findings are then placed in the broader context of cultural change in the eighteenth century, and it is argued that Cheshire materials relating to homicide and violence more generally provide a local perspective on the general shift towards ‘polite’ values which has been seen as characterizing the upper and middling social strata of eighteenth-century England.     

Consumption and poverty in the homes of the English poor,c. 1670–1834

The consumer behaviour of the poor in the long eighteenth century has attracted more historical attention in recent years. Yet, we have little understanding of whether regional factors affected consumption or how the poor’s ownership of household goods was influenced by level of poverty and the life-cycle. By focusing on Kent and drawing comparisons to other counties, this article argues that the material lives of the poor were improving by the late eighteenth century, but finds that there were distinct regional differences as the poor acquired more and better goods in London and the Home Counties than in relatively remote areas. Moreover, by using pauper inventories and labourers’ probate inventories, the research finds that the poor were not a homogeneous group with similar levels of material wealth, but should be considered in terms of different subgroups which often led very different material lives to one another due to life-cycle-related problems including sickness and old age. Labourers’ probate inventories are found to represent a minority of the poor who were materially richer than most, whilst pauper inventories appear to represent a more typical subgroup of the poor that struggled to make do and owned most types of goods in smaller numbers.     

Political information,gender and the vote: the differential impact of organizations,personal discussion,and the media on the electoral decisions of women and men

Although there are many demonstrated ways in which men and women approach politics differently, we know very little about how sources of political information, e.g., mass media, political organizations, differentially influence the vote choices of men and women. Using a rich, contextual dataset containing measures not only of respondent perceptions of political information, but actual content coding of those sources of political information, we estimate how television, newspapers, personal discussants, organizations, and political parties may have impacted the voting of men and women in the 1992 U.S. presidential election. We find that women’s vote choices are more likely than men’s to be influenced by the organizations to which they belong. Women are also more likely to respond to television news with a hostile media bias—they see television newscasts as definitively favoring the candidate that they oppose. We address possible explanations for these patterns of results and point towards directions for additional research.     

21世纪以来中国电影女导演创作研究

新世纪以来,两岸三地中国电影女导演的创作呈现出非常活跃的态势,老中青几代电影人纷纷推出自己的新作,成为新世纪中国影坛不可忽视的一股创作力量。在新世纪中国电影女导演的影片中,两性形象的塑造有着诸多相似之处,女性力量的张扬、女性气质的挥洒与男性形象的令人失望交相辉映,充分展现出新世纪中国女性自我实现的信心和行动力,她们在不无落寞的独舞中努力绽放仅仅属于女性的精彩。     

Epistolary emotions: Exploring amorous hinterlands in 1870s southern Italy

Abstract

Drawing upon a chance find of a cache of love-letters penned by Italian women in the late nineteenth century, this article investigates an emotional landscape that is rarely documented in the archives: the amorous feelings of ordinary women. The writers were anonymous, literate and presumably fairly well-to-do women from various regions in the southern half of Italy. Each of them had an intensely emotional correspondence with a man who toured the provinces in his professional capacity as an equestrian artiste. We know much about the extent to which women were constrained in the nineteenth century, particularly in Mediterranean societies, but we know less about how they experienced and expressed their emotions within those constraints, or how those feelings and expressions reflected or circumvented prevailing cultural models. Ultimately, using a small but valuable sample of evidence, the article aims to show how sensitivity to emotions as an historical category can open new vistas on the subjective hinterlands of the past.     

Child protection and fathering where there is domestic violence: Contradictions and consequences

Children live in different contexts of protection and vulnerability when exposed to domestic violence. The negative impacts for many children are consistent and widely acknowledged. However, the implication that this requires men who use violence to address their fathering has been slower to emerge. This article draws from 69 in‐depth qualitative interviews with men, women, and workers across four men's behaviour change programmes in rural Victoria, Australia. Particular attention is given to men's attitudes to their fathering and the formal and informal consequences they experienced as a result of their violence and its impact on their fathering. Although most men came to recognize that their violence impacted their children, they failed to make the connection that the involvement of statutory child protection services in their lives was a direct consequence of their abusive behaviour. This article explores this disconnection by fathers who use violence, their attitude to the involvement of statutory child protection services, and identifies the implications for social work practitioners in addressing this issue.     

‘Some hidden purpose’? Class conflict and co-operation in Belfast’s Working Men’s Institute and Temperance Hall 1865–1900

While debates over social control and working-class culture have formed a lively part of British urban and social historiography, they have received much less attention in an Irish context. This article provides an overview of working-class associations in Belfast throughout the nineteenth century, before investigating specific working- and middle-class attitudes towards Belfast’s Working Men’s Institute and Temperance Hall during its early phase in the 1870s. The aims of the institute’s gentlemen founders – to maintain social order by providing workers with an alternative to the tavern, moralizing lectures on topics such as temperance, and evening classes – were only partially achieved. Middle-class motives, although mixed, betray a clear desire for social control. Many of the benefactors’ words and actions were met with suspicion or resistance by a group of fiercely independent working men who, while not averse to self-improvement, carved out their own agenda. A strong working-class identity, free from any sectarian character, was expressed with articulateness and vehemence. This phenomenon is particularly striking in a city not known for working-class activism.     

Running Against a Woman: Do Female Opponents Shape Male Candidate Behaviors?*

Objective. The male‐dominated nature of U.S. politics still means that the vast majority of women who run for office face a male opponent. As a result, one dramatic change in U.S. politics—the increase in women candidates—may contribute to another change, that being the experience of men who run for office. The research reported here begins to consider how running against a woman might have influenced the behavior of male candidates for Congress in 2002 and 2006. Past research suggests that men who run against women feel that they need to take steps to appeal to women voters by giving attention to issues of concern to women in their campaigns. Methods. To test the hypothesis that men will alter their attention to women's issues in the face of a woman candidate, I use campaign websites to examine the issue priorities of men who ran against women and compare them to a sample of men who ran against other men. Results. Counter to expectations, I find no evidence that men “play” to women voters through their attention to women's issues and instead demonstrate the relatively limited visibility that men give to these issues when they run against a woman. Conclusions. Running against a woman may have some limited impact on male candidate behaviors, but does not appear to be a significant influence.     

家庭背景与教育：婚姻中地位交换的性别与时期差异

本文利用2018年“中国家庭追踪调查”（CFPS）数据,使用对数线性模型,分析了1978～2018年家庭背景与自身教育在择偶过程中地位交换的性别与时期差异。研究发现,在跨越出身阶层与自身教育地位的异质婚中,夫妻一方会利用自身的相对教育地位优势交换另一方的相对出身阶层优势,这支持了地位交换论。1978～1991年结婚的夫妻中,女性更多通过相对教育优势交换男性的相对出身优势。随着时间的推移,出身阶层与教育在择偶过程中的地位交换强度不断增强,但更多体现在男性通过自身相对教育优势交换女性相对出身优势的婚配模式上,而女性的这一婚配模式呈先降后升趋势。可见,随着时代变迁,家庭背景在女性的向上婚姻流动中扮演着越来越重要的角色。     

‘Orderly made’: re-appraising household inventories in seventeenth-century England

The amateur appraisers who prepared probate inventories were commentators on social and economic change in early modern England. This article considers the form these sources took, to illuminate the thinking of appraisers and the social context of appraising. Although historians recognise the limitations of inventories, they have paid little attention to them as records of the act of appraisal. Through a case study of one seventeenth-century town – Thame in Oxfordshire – individual styles of appraising are explored. Inventories were representations, based on conscious reflection about how to arrange these ordered lists. Appraising had its own history, and approaches changed over time in response to the growing number of household goods and spaces. Broad participation supported a culture of appraisal, but a small number of mostly better-off individuals were often able to control the process, using specialist skills. The study of appraisal brings to life the cooper Andrew Parslow, the town’s dominant appraiser in the late seventeenth century, who devised an entirely new ‘summary’ format, and whose standing in society depended upon his role as an appraiser. Parslow’s practice is significant in demonstrating how appraisers devised new ways of representing material culture during the century, as their understandings of possessions changed.     

“Respect for each gender”: Gender,equity and backlash in Australia's male health policy

Australia is one of the few countries which has specific health policies for boys/men and girls/women as distinct groups. In this article I present an analysis of the discourses of gender, equity and disadvantage drawn upon in Australia's men's health policy. Through comparison with the women's health policy, I show that a dual focus on the essential differences between men and women and the ways in which the health system has failed men contribute to an adversarial gender politics, positioning men and women as rivals with competing needs. Reflecting broader debates concerning the negative impact of societal change on boys/men, I argue that, in its current form, Australia's health policy both taps into and, crucially, legitimises backlash politics, enabling it to ‘pass’ as sound public policy.     

Gender differences in ambiguity aversion under different outcome correlation structures

This paper studies the impact of different outcome correlation structures on gender differences in ambiguity aversion. We conducted an investment game with two separate treatments. In the uncorrelated treatment, the outcomes of the investment game were determined individually. In the correlated treatment, the outcomes of the investment game were determined collectively within a reference group. From an evolutionary perspective, men should be more concerned about relative outcomes, because their reproductive success mainly depended on their relative standing within society. Women, by contrast, should be more concerned about absolute outcomes, because their reproductive success was mainly linked to their access to resources for themselves and their children. Therefore, we predict that the type of outcome correlation structure has a larger impact on men than on women. In particular, we hypothesize that men are less ambiguity averse under an uncorrelated outcome structure. In this situation, the ambiguous alternative should be more attractive, because it potentially reduces inequality and thereby improves men’s relative standing within society. Women’s choices should not be significantly affected by different outcome correlation structures. Both hypotheses are supported by evidence from laboratory experiments.     

The more-than-human sensorium: sensory engagements with digital self-tracking technologies

In this article, we draw on findings from an empirical project involving talking to Australian women about their sensory and sensemaking engagements with digital health technologies. Adopting a new feminist materialist perspective, our analysis identified a series of relational connections, affective forces and agential capacities generated when our participants came together with digitized modes of self-tracking. The agential capacities engendered through and with these technologies included discovering and uncovering information, motivation, quantifying and automating data collection, distinguishing “false” bodily sensations from “real,” discerning patterns, and enhancing sensory capabilities. Working with these technologies, the women were able to access insights into their bodies, feel more in control of bodily activities by reflecting on this information and any patterns over time it revealed. The limitations of these sensory devices were also revealed in the women’s accounts. The devices sometimes closed off or challenged women’s sensory knowledge in ways they found less than useful or helpful, due to failings in the devices’ design or functionality. Our analysis, therefore, highlights the intra-action of enactments of human sensory responses as they engage with digital devices and digital data, including the ways in which these responses were extended, facilitated, or, in some cases, challenged.     

Empirical Evidence of the Effects of Marriage on Male and Female Attendance at Sports and Arts*

Objectives. This article provides an examination of how men and women spend their recreational attendance time and how their behavior differs when they are single and married. The battle of the sexes model and the theory of artistic human capital acquisition from one's spouse both suggest that married individuals will have different patterns of attendance than singles. Methods. Using data from the Performing Arts Research Coalition, we estimate a number of models to examine the differences between male and female attendance at art, professional sports, and popular culture events for those single and married. Results. We find that single males prefer sports, while single females prefer the arts. As predicted by the battle of the sexes model, men are more likely and women less likely to attend art events after marriage. This increase in male attendance is also predicted by human capital models of attendance that argue that the choice of art events is based on acquired tastes that can be influenced by the human capital of one's spouse. The battle of the sexes model, however, also predicts a decline in male and an increase in female attendance at professional sports. We find a small increase in female, but also an increase in male, attendance. Conclusions. The behavior of married and single males and females tends to correspond to the predictions made by the battle of the sexes and human capital models of attendance.     

Society without the social: the Spanish labour movement and the rise of the social, 1840–1880

Focusing on the Spanish case, this article addresses two fundamental questions: why were many unionized workers sceptical about state intervention in labour issues throughout the nineteenth century, and why did this attitude begin to change from the 1860s onwards? Its main thesis is that workers’ attitudes derived ultimately from different historical notions of ‘society’ that shaped their perceptions and experiences of labour relations and their attitude toward the role of the state. Thus, a notion of society as an aggregation of individuals shaped unionized Spanish workers’ hostility toward state intervention since the creation of the first unions in the 1840s. From the 1860s onward, a new conception of collective relations, namely ‘the social’, began to transform some workers’ expectations of the role of the state in labour conflicts. The main factor that explains this change, it is argued, lies in the relationship between the workers’ imaginary, their actions, and their expectations about these actions.     

Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages

There are few studies of insult in later medieval Italy. This article aims not only to fill that gap, but also to show the value of applying one branch of modern linguistics to the evidence for medieval insult. The overall aim is to study the particularly gendered aspects of insult: what words and actions could men and women use against their own gender and against the other? The copious judicial archive of Bologna allows for extensive study of this phenomenon. The article falls into three parts: first, establishing the general pattern of insult; second, examining closely the strongest male term of insult; and finally investigating the practice of ‘doorscorning’, by which the doors of victims’ houses were defiled. To interpret the findings, methodological approaches are borrowed from anthropology, medieval legal theory and modern linguistics.