Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth - Century Europe
by Rachel G. Fuchs

ISBN 0521629268 (paperback) - £14.99 (US$ 22.99)
ISBN 052162102X (hardback) - £40.00 (US$ 65.00)

Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe is one in a series entitled ‘New Approaches to European History’ published by Cambridge University Press. A list of the other titles in the series can be found at the back of this particular book.

Professor Fuchs’s avowed aim is to provide a social and cultural history of poor men and women, depicting the texture of their everyday lives, providing a human face to poverty, and reclaiming poor men and women of Europe from anonymity’. In with this aim is attention to the approach that constructs gender and the book is organized around five themes: a climate of calamities, the existence of poor women’s agency, the importance of community connections, relationships of exchange and reciprocity, the overlapping nature of the private and public spheres.

Let me say a little about the set up of the book and its intended audience. Fuchs says that the ‘book is intended for the non-specialist and is based on a wide variety of books and articles that I’ve used over many years’ (p19). She has decided not to cite all her sources, her footnotes applying only to direct quotations, there is a list of further reading but this is confined to the books used the most. Personally I find this an example of ‘dumbing down’; it must surely send out the wrong message to her student readers, maybe causing a seismic change in their approach to academic work should they progress to higher levels.

For Professor Fuchs the nineteenth century runs from 1770 to 1914, the so called long nineteenth century, not many would argue with that. However, what I couldn’t understand was the need to devote Chapter 1 to the ‘revolutionary era 1770 –1815’ unless of course subsequent chapters were also constrained by a time frame, which they weren’t. That is not to say that the era was unimportant, it was the birth of the industrial age and the French Revolution, furthermore, Fuchs makes interesting points throughout the chapter. To me having just had nineteen pages of introduction we had another twenty-three pages of introduction.

Fuchs next deals with Poverty and Population not without good reason for, as she says, between 1750 and 1850 the population of Europe more than doubled (p.43), while between 1740 and 1840 Ireland’s population quadrupled (p.55). Yet the nineteenth century saw a move towards smaller sized families, a trait that occurred in different communities at different times, perhaps due to economic factors (pp.58-9). Fuchs deals with rural society and the problems of poverty making very important points and comments about day labourers and seasonal workers in Italy and Germany, later pointing out the plight of the farm servant. Although she runs male and female together, was there not a gender dimension to the hiring and firing of agricultural workers? Certainly in mid-nineteenth century England women before men would be laid of in times of recession. When Fuchs comes to deal with work in rural regions (p.86) she finally comes into her own; even if she falls into the realm of generalization by saying that men worked in the fields and tended large animals while women ran the household and the kitchen garden.

Two pages later she as good as admits the error by listing the many tasks performed by women in the rural scene. Fuchs makes much of the problems of food shortages, even famines, driving people from the countryside into the cities, yet ignores the fact that they still had to fed in their environment. Perhaps the Corn Laws together with programmes such as the Scottish highland and lowland clearances might have merited a mention. When dealing with work in the cities Fuchs falls into the trap, as do many middle class historians, that women’s work in industry was unskilled. True, they may have been paid lower wages than men, but they were, or became, equally as skilled as most men. However, the sub chapter (p.110 ff) on ‘the male breadwinner model’ is excellent and is worth anybody’s time to read. This statement really applies to all of Chapter 4 ‘Working in the Cities; we might even forgive her giving no definition of sweated labour, getting it somewhat confused with homework and outwork. Her thoughts on various labour legislation bear scrutiny, for she offers new interpretation to the many legislations, although I’m not in full agreement with her statement (p.139) that ‘the over-whelming majority of women covered by protective labor legislation were single women’ [added emphasis]; at least not without some statistical evidence. After all the greatest single employer of women was domestic service and I suspect that most of those employed were single women.

Fuchs finishes her book with chapters on ‘Life in the Cities’ and an excellent one entitled ‘Charity and Welfare’. Having spent four pages discussing Prostitution under its own heading in Chapter 4, Fuchs spends another four pages dealing with the same subject under ‘Crime’ in Chapter 5. Why? It’s confusing. Fuchs does, however, make some telling points in Chapter 5 ‘Life in the Cities’. For instance that the poor were forced to conduct their private lives in public and were then blamed by the middle classes for doing so. Fuchs has a tendency to pour scorn on the middle classes and to glorify the poor; “[m]uch of what investigators and reformers wrote was tinged with fear of women’s sexuality; they eroticised poverty” (p.155), this surely is too strong. Furthermore while agreeing that many of the working poor sought the notion of respectability that many, mostly middle class, people wanted them to have (p.163), we have to wait until the same page for Fuchs to admit that many of the poor were not noble or respectable, they stole, were lazy, drank to excess, had many sexual partners, just like any other class. The chapter on Charity and Welfare is quite worthy of being expanded, even if it follows the usual condemnation of workhouses. It deals, not unexpectedly, with the deserving and undeserving poor; the abandonment of babies, definitely a pan-European problem; public welfare and a section on ‘Using charity and welfare’. The latter is often ignored by many commentators for as Fuchs says women lived in a culture of expediencies fashioning welfare to suit their needs. With this in mind and with the growing demand, by the poor, that welfare was a right how can Fuchs make the generality that ‘nobody likes welfare’ (p.223). I expected some mention, somewhere in the last two chapters, of the practice, in England, of the poor and working class collecting ‘tickets’ and ‘lines’ from philanthropic upper class hospital subscribers so that the impoverished might attend hospital.

I found Rachel G Fuchs’s book Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth-Century Europe to be quite good in a general sort of way. There’s the rub, it is full of generalities and all generalities are necessarily false, including that one. It may be that it is impossible to consider the poor in Europe as a whole in a book of this size and nature. By the time that the Russian serfs had secured emancipation, in 1861, Britain was an industrialized and urbanized nation. How can it be possible to consider the two countries as part of a single whole? I found that Professor Fuchs tended to ignore the better off working class, she jumped straight from the poor to the middle classes.

Although she did mention that the elite workers might have their lunch at cafés. I doubt that many of the poor, without two ha’pennies to rub together, understood the term lunch let alone sought to buy and eat it at cafés. I also found it disconcerting to read chapters that were partitioned by sub heading only to find the chapter’s conclusion demarcated by a mere double space. As regards the 15 illustrations they must surely be of limited if any use no reference to them was made in the text. While they may be evidence of how their instigators saw the depicted lives they are not presented as factual evidence are they? I don’t know the nature of Fuchs’s intended readership but it may well be aimed at the senior high school student. If that is so then Gender and Poverty in Nineteenth –Century Europe will give them a good general start in women’s and gender studies, as long as they come to realize the book’s limitations.

Don Vincent