The categories ‘public’ and ‘private’ continue to play a central role in histories of women and gender. Ever since Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall's classic Family fortunes, the importance of the ‘separate spheres’ model of gender experience has provoked debate, and several authors whose works are discussed here acknowledge their debt to their work.Footnote ¹ Kathryn Gleadle, for instance, has previously contributed to the ongoing reappraisal of Family fortunes, emphasizing its insistence on the essentially unstable nature of the dichotomy between public and private, notwithstanding Amanda Vickery's claims to the contrary.Footnote ² Subsequent research has demonstrated that widespread acceptance of women's essentially domestic role was compatible with engagement in a whole range of causes related to social reform, imperial endeavour, and even political campaigning, as long as women were able to claim that such activity remained within the elastic and permeable boundaries of their ‘sphere’. Equally, the fact that women frequently transgressed these boundaries, though it compromised the usefulness of ‘separate spheres’ as a descriptive framework, did not preclude it from comprising a powerful organizing discourse that could either justify or censure such activities. Despite Matthew McCormack's suggestion in Public men that the linguistic turn has effectively by-passed the separate spheres debate, scholars such as Gleadle and Jane Rendall have long since demonstrated the essentially discursive nature of a paradigm as likely to be honoured in the breach as the observance.Footnote ³

To elucidate the connections between domesticity and public engagement some historians have described the existence of a third, ‘social’ sphere, where female activity could be portrayed as a natural extension of maternal roles and duties.Footnote ⁴ The continued influence of this notion is apparent in the books considered here by Alison Twells and Clare Midgley.Footnote ⁵ Moreover, as Julia Bush demonstrates in Women against the vote, notions of femininity predicated on the benefits of exercising a broader social motherhood and engaging in ‘maternal reform’ gained renewed vigour at the turn of the twentieth century in the hands of women anxious to promote active public femininity as an alternative to the suffrage; though here the ‘social’ sphere was clearly the product of ideological debates over acceptably feminine roles in society rather than an identifiable sociological space.Footnote ⁶

However, as recent studies of urban communities have demonstrated, middle-class women were more than capable, through engagement with civic culture or local and national politics, of developing public identities that went far beyond anything comprehended by the ‘social’.Footnote ⁷ Women were not actually excluded from the public domain, though their activities were often circumscribed and the existence of multiple publics has long been acknowledged.Footnote ⁸ But accepting the complexity of women's relationship with the public sphere creates further complications, not least the question of how individual women constructed and managed their own public subjectivities as they wove them from the tangled threads of their day-to-day experiences. Here, the neat metaphor of ‘spheres’ finally breaks down, in the same way as Newtonian physics when applied to the less predictable behaviour of subatomic particles. Just as physicists have hankered after a Grand Unified Theory to unite the elegance of the Newtonian universe with the unpredictability of the subatomic world, the challenge for historians of gender has been to find a theoretical framework that allows us to understand the influence of wider discourses and social structures on the subjectivities of individual women, without the wider picture being overwhelmed by the confusing mass of empirical detail at the micro-level.

It is this conundrum that Kathryn Gleadle's Borderline citizens tackles head on. Gleadle's imaginative engagement with recent developments in sociology and psychology and painstaking empirical research allows her to explore the ramifications of female political subjectivities as they were developed and expressed across a range of different situations. Reflecting the influence of psychological theories, Gleadle opens by stating her desire ‘to understand how it felt for women of the middle and gentry classes to engage in British politics in the early nineteenth century’, with subjectivity understood ‘as the process whereby individuals seek to make sense of their own experience and identities through the cultural resources available to them’.Footnote ⁹ Gleadle therefore starts from a similar point to Michael Roper, who has argued for the construction of subjectivity to be understood as a process of negotiation between cultural representations and emotional impulses.Footnote ¹⁰ The first half of the book consists of an exploration of the main sites where women could develop awareness of themselves as conscious political agents: the world of ‘official’ political engagement focusing on parliament; the bourgeois ‘public sphere’ of local politics, civic ritual, and associational life; the world of the family, where women could obtain political knowledge and a certain degree of influence deriving from wider family networks and prestige; and finally what Gleadle calls the ‘parochial’ sphere of face-to-face interaction, where political influence derives from a combination of social status, family connection, and personal knowledge.Footnote ¹¹ This generates a fairly comprehensive picture of the various loci of female public engagement, moving beyond identification of the existence of multiple ‘publics’ by providing a framework onto which women's public engagement might be mapped in all its complexity. In each of these realms Gleadle stresses the contingent nature of feminine political subjectivities, getting away from the deterministic language of ‘spheres’. By the same token, she rejects Dror Wahrman's late eighteenth-century discontinuities in the history of selfhood, stressing the persistence of older collective forms of identity centred on the family or community alongside ‘modern’ articulations of the self as an autonomous agent.Footnote ¹²

The second half of Borderline citizens consists of a series of ‘micro-histories’, through which Gleadle traces the sources of feminine political influence and identity across a number of sites.Footnote ¹³ These include a re-evaluation of the relationship between women's political agency and the Great Reform Act of 1832, an exploration of the career of Mary Ann Gilbert of Eastbourne in Sussex, and an analysis of the family circle of Quaker anti-slavery campaigner, Thomas Fowell Buxton. Gilbert provides a striking example of a woman able to transcend the limitations of sex in her dealings with tenants and local opinion formers by virtue of heredity and landowning status, while her writings on the Poor Law and agricultural reform earned respect in government circles for her acknowledged expertise. Gleadle contrasts this contemporary acceptance at the masculine heart of government with memorials of Gilbert's life that tried to shoe-horn her activities into the limited confines of traditional benevolent femininity. The Buxton family provide an even more telling vignette, as Gleadle skilfully demonstrates the opportunities presented to the women of the family by their famous head of household. Not only was Buxton extraordinarily reliant on his female relatives in an era when women commonly filled the role of amanuensis, but his name came to function as a ‘brand’ under which the more politically minded women could anonymously publish their views on matters such as slavery, without necessarily even having to consult with him.

Borderline citizens is an innovative and challenging book. It pushes the exploration of women's political activities beyond urban centres into much-neglected rural communities. It presents a convincing, yet elegant and persuasive model of female political engagement which allows free rein to the subtleties of the empirical evidence without being constrained by the language of ‘spheres’. Above all, it takes the story of women's engagement in public life beyond the lives of ‘great women’ or generalizations about ‘women’ in public discourse to think about the complex matrix of relationships which each and every woman had to negotiate in order to register her existence as an autonomous politically engaged individual. Gleadle displays a fine ear for the nuances of family relationships, talking about the ‘microclimates’ that encouraged or enabled some women to become more deeply involved than others in familial public activities. In particular, the Buxton family circle demonstrates the limitations of female political subjectivity. Buxton remained the unequivocal head, and despite the family's high-profile involvement in the national campaign against slavery, women such as his cousin, Anna Gurney, came closest to achieving real autonomy through their parochial activities.

If anything is lacking, it is any sustained analysis of the religious springs of many women's public activities. Denominational differences were surely important. The Unitarians and Quakers, with which Gleadle is most familiar, were well known for the relative autonomy they granted to women, but others were not so fortunate. Alana Harris's exploration of the domestic expectations of post-war English Catholics in The politics of domestic authority is a useful illustration of the impact of such differences on lived experience within a denomination too often abandoned by nineteenth-century historians to the ‘little Ireland’ of immigrant studies.Footnote ¹⁴ Perhaps more importantly, as Alison Twells contends, a fuller understanding of the world of feminine feeling and subjectivity requires us to engage with religious beliefs and impulses, particularly the role of scripture in shaping women's emotional engagement with the public sphere.

While feminism itself plays a relatively minor role in Gleadle's latest work, it is central to Clare Midgley's book on empire, although the author is quick to stress that her early nineteenth-century context means this is best understood as a moral rather than political category, based on the notion of ‘equal worth, rather than equal rights’.Footnote ¹⁵ Midgley's concern is to demonstrate that the ‘woman question’ of the first half of the nineteenth century had important imperial dimensions, while assumptions of class and racial superiority that underpinned ‘imperial feminism’ had their roots in earlier efforts to raise the conditions of ‘native’ women. The book opens with a discussion of authors on the ‘woman question’, stressing their common emphasis on the superior position of white European/British women compared to non-European ‘others’. It foregrounds the influence of eighteenth-century stadial models of civilization that placed northern Europeans at the apex and South Sea islanders at the bottom. Midgley argues that the debate over the proper place of women in society drew on comparisons between the condition of Western women and that of Negro slaves, or the inhabitants of eastern seraglios. Moreover, stadial theory was adapted by Evangelicals who identified Christianity as a key marker of the superiority of Western civilization, undermining the inherent cultural relativism of the original model though keeping the optimistic Enlightenment emphasis on the possibility of improvement. It is here that Midgley's use of the term feminism becomes problematic. As Julia Bush demonstrates, later in the century many women who would have heartily approved of moral reform campaigns against slavery or sati would come to identify themselves as self-consciously anti-feminist, though arguably these same women would count as feminists under Midgley's ‘moral’ definition. Women against the vote suggests that the straight line Midgley draws between women's imperial reform activities before 1865 did not necessarily lead to support for imperial feminism in the late nineteenth century; indeed, Bush suggests that the empire loomed much larger for anti-suffragists, who were adamant that while women could play a valuable social role in the empire, that role should not extend to political representation.Footnote ¹⁶

Feminism and empire successfully demonstrates the imperial dimensions of the ‘woman question’, and there is a fascinating chapter on the role of the colonization movement in the thought and tactics of the Langham Place group, drawing on Barbara Bodichon's experience of French colonialism in Algiers. However, the book is limited by its concentration on public discussions in printed sources. It is therefore impossible to assess how far notions of cultural superiority or feminine difference were internalized and how they played out across the sites that Gleadle identifies as central to women's sense of self, such as the family or the parochial domain. These limitations are clearest in the fourth chapter, charting debates over whether women could be missionaries in their own right. Midgley argues that even before women were formally admitted as missionaries, they were active as missionary wives and educators, aided by the ambiguity of distinctions between ‘preaching’ (forbidden by St Paul) and ‘teaching’. She identifies a genre of feminine ‘missionary biography’, presented as evidence of the increasing acceptability of female missionary activity. Problematically, however, most such biographies were posthumously written, usually by men; we miss the voices of the women and thus any sense of how missionary activities contributed to their sense of self.

Fortunately, the gap is well supplied by Alison Twells's Civilising mission and the English middle class, 1792–1850. Focusing on Sheffield, Twells charts the rise of an Evangelical missionary identity, which was as concerned with the ‘heathen’ in urban slums as in Britain's empire. The role of missionary societies as a site of class formation is a central theme, and the second main chapter provides a fascinating account of their contribution to the development of the bourgeois public sphere in Sheffield from the 1790s onwards. Given the importance of women to the whole missionary endeavour, as fundraisers, organizers, district visitors, educators and missionary wives (missionaries in all but name), this necessarily foregrounds their institutional contribution to that process, something missing from the older literature on the middle class.Footnote ¹⁷ However, following a similar approach to Gleadle, Twells is quick to establish that this ‘missionary identity’ was not solely, or even primarily, expressed through public institutions in which women usually played a subordinate (if essential) role. Her study of the Reads of Wincobank Hall reveals a similar picture of familial action and opportunity. Although her identification of a specific form of ‘missionary domesticity’ owes more to Eileen Yeo's model of the feminine ‘social sphere’, Twells's account of the ramifications of missionary activity for women's public subjectivities converges with Gleadle's at key points. For instance, the centrality of the family in the construction of missionary identities, alongside the lack of opportunity to take a leading role in formal missionary activity, discouraged women from conceiving of themselves as fully autonomous subjects in the public sphere. This was compounded by the tendency of Evangelicals to see themselves as tools of divine Providence and their actions as expressing the will of God as revealed through the scripture, the centrality of which Twells rightly emphasizes. Twells also acknowledges the socially conservative attitudes of many of her subjects. As Gleadle argues, articulations of gender difference often simply reinforced hegemonic understandings of women's subordinate status, whatever their tactical value at the time.

The picture that Twells builds of the missionary movement as a distinct part of Victorian society, rooted partly in the domestic and familial and partly in a relatively discrete and autonomous area of the public sphere, reinforces its conservative nature. This insularity allowed missionary societies to persist in interpretations of poverty based on the supposed moral failings of the poor, despite growing recognition amongst social commentators and legislators of the role of environmental factors in perpetuating poverty; it also provided a platform from which to resist new racial theories of cultural difference that threatened the ‘civilizing mission’. Indeed, missionary societies would make an interesting case study for an examination of the tensions between traditional and modern constructions of the self more generally. Initial resistance to public religious meetings demonstrates that the gender issues Twells identifies were part of a broader set of contradictions around the conflict between Evangelical desire to subordinate the self to the will of God, promotion of a collective Christian identity in an imperial context, and dependency on socially powerful patrons, charismatic preachers, and heroic missionary role models to maintain interest and subscription rates: a dependency which from an early stage led to criticism of the annual May meetings at Exeter Hall in London as primarily social rather than religious occasions.Footnote ¹⁸

The works so far considered rather undermine Matthew McCormack's claim in Public men that, after two decades of debate, our understanding of the relationship between gender, identity, and the public sphere remains crude and uncritical.Footnote ¹⁹ On the other hand, there is plenty of justification for his opinion that we know relatively little about the complexities of masculine political subjectivities, and that this urgently needs to be addressed if we are to develop further our understandings of the relationship between gender and politics tout court.Footnote ²⁰ To this end, Public men provides a stimulating and valuable collection of essays in an underdeveloped field. Particularly interesting chapters include Francis Dodsworth's account of the attitudinal shifts required to accommodate the transition from policing based on relatively high-status amateur constables, whose claims to public respect rested on notions of masculine independence, to a paid force drawn from the working classes where the emphasis fell increasingly on professional standards of behaviour, including maintenance of character and a manly physique. Catriona Kennedy emphasizes the role of chivalric metaphors in Irish nationalist rhetoric, in which nationalists portrayed themselves as defenders of a vulnerable Erin brutalized by the unmanly British oppressor. Ruth Clayton Windscheffel, on the other hand, reveals the way that William Ewart Gladstone presented himself to newly enfranchised working men as an energetic woodsman, countering the representation of his younger self as a delicate aesthete.

One should be wary of judging edited collections by their omissions, which are often beyond editorial control. However, a few suggestions for themes for future research on political masculinity might be permitted. Public men's focus on British or colonial models of masculine politics (including Ireland) obscures the extent to which political masculinity was increasingly constructed in a trans-national context. In the 1840s and 1850s, British exemplars of political manliness ranged from American anti-slavery activists, William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass, to the bearded revolutionaries, Lajos Kossuth and Giuseppe Garibaldi.Footnote ²¹ By the same token, Gladstone's woodcutter image was anticipated by Abraham Lincoln's portrayal as the backwoods ‘rail-splitter’.Footnote ²² More fundamentally, despite its early promise to establish masculinity as the ‘central problematic’ of public political discourse, Public men fails to consider those for whom maleness alone was insufficient qualification to enable them to enter the lists as fully realized political subjects, with the result that the perspective is largely that of the leader rather than the led. A hero needs worshippers, as Thomas Carlyle recognized in his lectures on the theme, which were in part an argument for submerging one's own identity in that of another, more powerful and more autonomous individual.Footnote ²³ We know too little about men whose public empowerment came at second hand, let alone those mature, affluent but disenfranchised males Eleanor Gordon and Gwyneth Nair discovered living in female-headed households in nineteenth-century Glasgow.Footnote ²⁴ Maleness is too easily equated with access to political expression. Even Gleadle's assumptions about the feminine nature of political poetry ignore the huge volume of masculine doggerel that saturated the nineteenth-century press; men were equally likely to prefer penning a declamatory ode to writing a closely argued political tract.Footnote ²⁵ In fact, though it was designed primarily as a tool for understanding women's lives, Gleadle's framework may provide equally valuable insights into masculine subjectivities.

This brings us to the Gramscian concept of ‘hegemony’ and its application to gender categories and identities.Footnote ²⁶ The existence of a hegemonic discourse of gender difference is central to Gleadle's account of the construction of feminine subjectivities, with even progressive women such as Priscilla McLaren capable of taking refuge in the language of feminine subordination at moments of doubt or indecision.Footnote ²⁷ Indeed, it is essential to her micro-historical approach as a means of connecting her individual vignettes together and giving them a broader significance beyond themselves. In contrast, McCormack holds that the limitations of this tool for understanding nineteenth-century public masculinity are laid bare by Matthew Roberts's chapter in Public men on Conservative Leeds MP, W. L. Jackson.Footnote ²⁸ Roberts contends that Jackson's emphasis on physicality and the independence of the self-made man played better in West Yorkshire than in Westminster, where older notions of gentlemanliness prevailed and respect was earned through oratorical virtuosity (Jackson was not a ready speaker). However, McCormack's dismissal of hegemony simplifies Roberts's argument that hegemonic ideals were context or place specific, rather than that they did not exist at all, a point which also emerges in a different context from Siân Pooley's comparative regional study of parental authority in The politics of domestic authority.Footnote ²⁹ Such diversity is inevitable in a heterogeneous public sphere. Moreover, the existence of varieties of public masculinity does not preclude shared assumptions or characteristics with hegemonic status: chief among them the assumption that the public was a masculine province, and that even where women did take a role they should do so under male guidance. Hence, the conflicts that arose when men attempted to collaborate with women in public, whether to organize a missionary society or prevent women getting the vote.

One of the central contentions of Julia Bush's Women against the vote is that this basic assumption of masculine superiority was held by the ‘silent majority’ of women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, making this a powerful hegemonic idea. Bush's exhaustively detailed exploration of female anti-suffrage fills the gaps left by earlier accounts which focused on the movement's male leaders and the division lists of the House of Commons.Footnote ³⁰ She demonstrates the diversity and tenacity of anti-suffragism, while remaining alive to the paradoxes and inconsistencies that dogged a movement based on the acceptance of a very conservative model of fundamental gender difference, but which adopted many of its opponents' tactics. While suffragism remained a minority interest, this was not so problematic: antis could rely on suitably feminine and informal modes of expression, denigrating the idea of women's suffrage through works of popular fiction and by mobilizing friendship and professional networks, fortified by occasional demonstrations such as the 1889 ‘Women's Appeal’ against the vote. The difficulty came once an increasingly well-organized and vociferous suffrage campaign forced them to create permanent formal organizations. Bush skilfully charts the practical difficulties of organizing women who, by definition, often took a dim view of such activities. This was the central paradox of organized women's anti-suffragism: the mere existence of effective national anti-suffrage organizations risked undermining the case that women were unfit for participation in national politics.

The response was to argue that anti-suffrage societies were the last bulwark of women's ‘sphere’, which was quite large enough without adding the unwanted responsibility of the vote. Insofar as this argument was a defence of separate spheres, it was enthusiastically endorsed by male anti-suffragists. However, Bush is at pains to demonstrate that the antis' message was not wholly negative. Some, particularly Violet Markham, strenuously pushed a more progressive, ‘forward’ vision of true womanhood, which acknowledged opportunities opened to women by access to higher education and local government. It also acknowledged the changed realities of women's social reform activities, by the 1900s as likely to take place under the auspices of the local School Board or Poor Law Union as through voluntary philanthropy. By allowing such a strategy to be promoted, the Women's National Anti-Suffrage League managed to keep more conservative supporters on board, while holding on to its most talented women leaders. This became trickier when the League amalgamated with the ineffective Men's League for Opposing Woman Suffrage. The resulting National League (NLOWS) gained Lords Cromer and Curzon as figureheads, but amalgamation brought gender conflict. Cromer and Curzon both found it difficult to deal with female activists: Cromer had to be persuaded of the benefits of the forward policy, and was soon disabused of the notion that the women would knuckle under to male tutelage. The contradiction inherent in the women's position was unconsciously summed up by Lady Jersey during a dispute over responsibilities in the NLOWS office: ‘a first class man may be better than a first class woman – but a first class woman is better than a second class man!’Footnote ³¹ Cromer resigned in 1912; Curzon stuck it to the end, only to be castigated by the female leadership when, in the final debate over the suffrage bill, he urged the Lords not to precipitate a constitutional crisis by opposing the will of the Commons.

As hinted earlier in relation to Midgley's work, Women against the vote demonstrates the dangers of drawing lines between experience of public work and progressive political positions. Leading antis came from a similar milieu of public engagement as suffragists, with whom they continued to co-operate in social reform organizations such as the National Union of Women Workers. Instead, Bush stresses other influences: Anglicanism, family connection, friendship networks, and active pro-imperialism. However, although the anti-suffragists gave new life to conservative views of gender difference, they inadvertently contributed to the wider shift in attitudes to women's capabilities. This is plain in Violet Markham's vision of local government as essentially feminine, in contrast to the masculine business of the imperial parliament. Markham clearly recognized the challenges and opportunities of a changing landscape in which older forms of female voluntarism were subsumed by or became dependent upon the activities of local and national government. Her ‘forward policy’ is an example of the way that a hegemonic discourse can be subtly undermined by a combination of internal contradictions and external factors: in this case, the notion that women occupied a distinct and subordinate sphere of social activity separate from the activities of masculine legislators was challenged as some gained the trappings of citizenship at local level, while there was a clear need to counter the alternative vision presented by the suffragists. The result may have been ostensibly conservative, but Markham's model was more ‘separate tiers’ than ‘separate spheres’.

So far, we have focused on domesticity as a justification for or against public action and identity; however, our two final works focus on the domestic realm itself. Neither accepts any easy equation of ‘domestic’ with ‘private’. As Carolyn Steedman reminds us in her important monograph Labours lost: domestic service and the making of modern England, domestic service is a neglected area, raising vital questions of agency and identity in relation to this large but usually silent group. Even Edward Thompson seemed content to leave domestic servants to the ‘enormous condescension of posterity’, as essentially powerless, docile, and incapable of playing a role in his narrative of class formation.Footnote ³² Steedman sets out to rectify this omission in a study enlivened by a wealth of detail drawn from the papers of employers, court records, and a variety of philosophical, didactic, prescriptive, and imaginative literature. As her subtitle suggests, Steedman sees the domestic servant as a key figure in the eighteenth-century modernizing process, as a diverse array of philosophers, lawyers, and politicians, not to mention their employers, wrestled with them as the possessors (or otherwise) of labour power, parties to contracts, taxable luxuries, and general aids or impediments to the business of leading a comfortable and/or profitable life. Often these different perspectives collided: domestic service, generating no end product, failed to fit into eighteenth- or nineteenth-century conceptions of labour as property. John Locke saw servants as an extension of their masters: their labour represented the realization of their master or mistress's latent labour power.Footnote ³³ The true complexity of the employer–servant relationship was revealed to legislators and lawyers when taxes were introduced on domestic servants, as the line between domestic and agricultural service was often impossible to define. Magistrates, on the other hand, recognized the individual agency of servants when adjudicating on matters relating to breach of contract, rights of settlement under the Poor Law, or complaints of poor treatment by employers. The process by which servants became autonomous individuals in law was therefore part of the modernizing process, though Steedman is at pains to point out the agency of magistrates and judges in the absence of clear direction from statute.

The question of agency brings us back to Steedman's ideas on class formation. In a provocative passage, she links the infant murders committed by servants Ann Mead and Ann Vines during the hot and hungry summer of 1800 to specific pressures that year – high food prices and a drought that made basic tasks like washing baby linen particularly difficult – acting in the context of an already fraught and unequal relationship, to suggest that Mead's and Vines's actions might be read as ‘desperate, crazed reactions to a condition of labour and a class relationship, by immature young women driven beyond endurance during a social crisis in which not quite so desperate acts of anger and protest have been accorded significance and their perpetrators respect by their twentieth-century historians’.Footnote ³⁴ Whether we can read Mead's premeditated poisoning, apparently revenge for a personal slight by the victim's mother, or Vines's sadistic response to a child's soiled clothes (fatally dipping her in a copper of boiling water) in such terms is questionable. The nobility accorded by Marxist historians to protestors, revolutionaries, or even bread-rioters, comes from the supposition that even the more violent responses to oppression were perpetrated by those who consciously risked their own well-being for social benefits they might never enjoy: presupposing a capacity for empathy with fellow sufferers singularly lacking in either Vines or Mead. We can sympathize with their situations, but their actions remain despicable. Steedman uses these episodes to make the broader and more convincing point that domestic servants were capable of feeling their powerlessness, and of recognizing the injustice of their lot in life. This insight is developed in her concluding discussion of Mary Collier's ‘The woman's labour’ (1739), a poem which Steedman follows E. P. Thompson in reading as a social text, but where she goes beyond him in discerning elements of a nascent consciousness of class position and exploitation. Here, in a poem by a woman who had been herself in service, is perhaps the most surprising manifestation of servant agency, the servant as author: beneficiaries of what Steedman describes as the fashion for ‘maids who wrote poetry’.Footnote ³⁵

Steedman's insistence that servants were socially aware beings who must be incorporated into accounts of class formation is compelling. The fact that they have not been is testament to the ongoing difficulty of conceptualizing the domestic as a political site. This difficulty is addressed by Lucy Delap, Ben Griffin, and Abigail Wills's collection, The politics of domestic authority in Britain since 1800: a varied selection of essays covering over two centuries and representing a range of approaches. As with Labours lost, the early sections of the book are concerned with how relations of domestic life were constructed in relation to the law (specifically in Gail Savage's case with regard to domestic violence) and the intrusion of the state, through welfare provision and the treatment of orphans. The latter three sections focus on relations between members of the household, dealing with societal expectations and norms with regard to marriage and parenting, the use of space in the domestic socialization of middle-class children, and the complex power relations between householders and the domestic servants they employed.

The editors' introduction reiterates the seminal influence of Family fortunes in identifying the importance of domestic authority in the formation of class identity, and argues for a re-imagining of the home as ‘an arena of active negotiation, agency and remembering … a site of flux for some central social identities, rather than a realm of constraint and timeless domestic labour’.Footnote ³⁶ There are affinities with Gleadle's work in the emphasis on using micro-studies to illuminate how individuals negotiated and constructed their subjective identities in relation to a complex web of unequal power relationships and the pressures of hegemonic societal norms, though the editors are much happier than Gleadle to align themselves with the discontinuity theses of Davidoff and Hall and Wahrman with regard to class formation and notions of the self, and so with the overarching meta-narrative of modernization which also provides Steedman's framework.Footnote ³⁷ However, although they acknowledge the importance of domestic authority in the negotiation of social status, there is no systematic attempt to pursue Steedman's wider claims with regard to servants and class. As suggested by Margaret Beetham's chapter on the inability of employers effectively to police the reading habits of their domestics, the agency of servants was that of small victories, though many of the essays successfully contextualize the ‘micro-politics’ of the household against the broader currents of cultural debate.

The works considered here demonstrate a vibrant diversity of historical approaches and subject matter, but all add to our understanding of the complex relationship between domesticity and the public, the individual and wider society. All advance understanding of the way in which individual subjectivities and aspirations were constructed using available cultural tools: legal categories, literary archetypes, political positions, even hegemonic notions of the family. Arguably, Gleadle and Steedman press that understanding further than others and offer new ways of thinking about old problems of selfhood, citizenship, gender, and class. Several of the authors exemplify the recent historiographical trend of using micro-histories to explore the construction of individual subjectivities or power relations within the family, household, or local community. Such approaches demonstrate the effective inseparability of ‘public’ and ‘private’ realms, both in terms of discourse and lived experience, and it is surely essential that future studies of both political and domestic cultures will be premised on that mutual interdependence.