Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

Louvier, Fanny

doi:10.1080/14780038.2019.1691475

Cultural and Social History

2019

DOI: 10.1080/14780038.2019.1691475

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Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

Fanny Louvier

Abstract: Far from being a trivial detail, clothes fundamentally define who we are and how we are perceived by others. Drawing on a large sample of French and British servants' memoirs, this article explores how dress served a crucial but contrasting role in the way French and British servants articulated their identities within and outside the home between 1900 and 1939. It argues that servants' dress was deeply linked to the nature of the occupation in each country and the structure of their respective female labour m… Show more

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Cited by 4 publications

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“Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

Griffin¹

2021

J. Br. Stud.

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It is now nearly forty years since John Burnett, David Vincent, and David Mayall compiled their invaluable and much-used three-volume finding aid, The Autobiography of the Working Class: An Annotated, Critical Bibliography (1984–1989), and established working-class autobiography as an important documentary source for exploring the lives of the working poor. Life writing now forms the basis of historical research into areas such as the emotions and domestic life that had hardly been imagined at the time that the annotated bibliography was produced. Yet as research into working-class autobiography has extended into new domains of enquiry, there has been less innovation in methodology. Historians typically use autobiographical material to pursue deep-reading strategies and unpack the meaning, experience, and identity of individual writers rather than generalize about working-class life more broadly. In this article I offer an alternative strategy: to take the autobiographical corpus and read it at scale in order to better understand fatherhood in Victorian Britain. Through a combination of intensive and extensive reading, I demonstrate that many working-class men failed to live up to expectations as breadwinners, and I explore the ramifications of that failure for the women and children with whom they lived.

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“Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

Griffin¹

2021

J. Br. Stud.

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Writing about Life Writing: Women, Autobiography and the British Industrial Revolution

Griffin

2022

Trans. R. Hist. Soc.

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Few historical problems have attracted so much attention over so many years as the social consequences of the British industrial revolution. For the most part, historians presumed that working people produced very little historical evidence that could be used to contribute to our understanding. However, projects to catalogue and encourage the use of the nation's scattered, yet extensive, archive of working-class autobiography have revealed that such evidence does, in fact, exist. The insertion of working-class autobiography helps to offer a new perspective, one which suggests a more positive interpretation of industrial life than historians have usually been willing to admit. Yet there remains a problem with the archive. During the industrial revolution, life-writing was a male art form. Women only started writing autobiographies in any number around 100 years after the conventional periodisation of the industrial revolution. This article surveys the autobiographical writing during and after the industrial revolution – around 1,000 items in all – in order to rethink the relationship between economic growth and social change. It confirms that industrial growth improved the position of working men in society, but concludes that female perspectives on this change are far more ambivalent.

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Recent Articles on French History

Hérubel¹

2021

French Historical Studies

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Beyond the Black and White: Female Domestic Servants, Dress and Identity in France and Britain, 1900-1939

Cited by 4 publications

References 9 publications

“Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

“Things I Can Remember about My Life”: Autobiography and Fatherhood in Victorian Britain

Writing about Life Writing: Women, Autobiography and the British Industrial Revolution

Recent Articles on French History

Contact Info

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