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Bread Winner An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy
Emma Griffin
Yale University Press, 2020 Hardcover. xi+389 pages. ISBN 978-0300230062. $35/£20
Reviewed by Erika
Rappaport University
of California, Santa Barbara
Emma Griffin’s new social history of the family uses autobiography
as a window into the working conditions, domestic economies and the gender
roles and expectations of working men and women in Victorian England. As such, Bread
Winner returns to many of the key issues that once animated British social
and women’s history between the 1960s and 1980s. In fact, the book’s themes and
the general portrait of the Victorian working class Griffin paints echoes that
of political economists, novelists, socialists, feminists, trade unionists and
social reformers writing since the early nineteenth century. Robert Owen,
Friedrich Engels, and Margaret Llewelyn Davies (one of the leading figures in
the Women’s Co-operative Guild), and so many others would have recognized the
experiences that Griffin recounts in Bread Winner. Like a late-Victorian and Edwardian social investigator, Griffin
asks why there was so much poverty despite growing wages and overall wealth in
the nineteenth century? She seeks the answer in the life writing of those who
lived through these times. Through a qualitative and quantitative analysis of
approximately 650 published and unpublished working-class autobiographies
written and collected largely in the mid-twentieth century, Griffin advances three
primary arguments. She contends that “through autobiographies we can see the
family as the motor by which wages and well-being moved through society, but we
are also able to grasp what a deeply inegalitarian and inefficient motor the
family was, riven with divisions of gender and age which determined who got
what” [23]. That is, Griffin argues that autobiography is an excellent source
for the study of family dynamics and domestic economies; that the family and
economy were not separate spheres; and that power and resources in the
working-class family were unequally structured by age and gender. These facts
shaped paid and unpaid work, notions of motherhood and fatherhood, marital or
other family relations, emotional expressions, access to politics and
citizenship, and the availability and nature of life writing. The nine chapters explore then how gender structured male and
female labor markets in rural and urban settings, mothers’ unpaid labor,
fathers’ leisure, and other topics that demonstrate the uneven distribution of
power and resources in the working-class home. At the heart of the book is the
way in which men, women and children expected the father to be the “bread winner,”
and the economic and emotional ramifications that followed from a father
failing to live up to such expectations. Yet, as Griffin acknowledges this was
only half the story. Women worked relentlessly to keep up the fiction of the
male bread winner. Indeed, Griffin is at her best when describing the
intricacies of housework, including long forgotten tasks such as crushing salt blocks
with a rolling pin, cleaning oven flues, making one’s own laundry soap and
fashioning toilet paper from old newspapers that then had to be threaded on a
piece of string [93]. There is less material here on the type of unpaid but
absolutely central economic tasks which Ellen Ross detailed in her study of
motherhood in Victorian London.(1) Likely because women did not write about such
things in their autobiographies, we learn less here about the skills involved
in shopping for bargains, being a good haggler, or how to obtain credit at the
neighborhood shop. We also learn little about prostitution, petty criminal
activities or other things that writers no doubt did not wish to make public. Griffin has a deep empathy for her subjects and a concern to
develop a comprehensive bibliography of working-class autobiography. She has an
eye for detail and a skill for building patterns in a way that makes the book accessible.
It will be widely read by non-specialists. However, the lack of direct engagement
with previous or much contemporary scholarship (often something pushed by
publishers these days) will undermine Griffin’s goal to encourage more
mainstream economic historians to take gender and the domestic seriously. They
simply won’t be able to see how the story she paints speaks to the issues they
are currently concerned with nor would reading Bread Winner introduce
scholars to the generations of historians of the family and gender
whose seminal works have reframed understandings of class, economy and
politics. Anna Clark, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Ellen Ross, Barbara
Taylor, Deborah Valenze, Judy Lown, June Purvis and so many others have explored
the gendering of working-class politics, industrial labor, categories of skill
and unskilled, the benefits and problems associated with the male breadwinner
model, and the way in which domestic ideology helped make the middle class and
unmake the working class. In my own work, I examine how the law, shop and
private home became places in which men and women worked out shifting notions
of class and property, agency and credit, money and goods.(2) Griffin is thus both right and wrong when she writes that women’s
historians succeeded in “establishing domestic life as a subject to be taken
seriously,” but failed to insert “the domestic into the mainstream [5].” What do
we mean by mainstream? The scholars mentioned above, and those Griffin does
cite have sought to challenge such terms and not just insert women into the
story. Their work nevertheless is often cited in key textbook and appears on many
a graduate reading list. The problem lies not with gender historians but with the
ongoing gender, as well as racial and class inequalities in the historical profession.
It also is in part a factor of the global turn, but there are excellent studies,
such as Sherene Seikaly’s Men of Capital : Scarcity and Economy in
Mandate Palestine (Stanford University Press 2015) that have demonstrated
how gender was central to the very invention of the idea of economy. Griffin’s
Bread Winner, along with numerous articles documenting how our current
global pandemic has accentuated women’s double burden around the world, have
reminded us however that the family and the economy are not separate spheres. So
too have several important “intimate” histories of the British economy, welfare
state, industrialization and imperialism. James Vernon’s Hunger : A
Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2007); Nadja Durbach’s Many
Mouths : The Politics of Food in Britain from the Workhouse to the Welfare
State (Cambridge, 2020) and Christopher Otter’s Diet for a Large Planet :
Industrial Britain, Food Systems and World Ecology (Chicago, 2020) reveal
how ideas about hunger and food shaped the modern British state,
industrialization, imperialism and the environmental problems currently
associated with the modern global economy. Also important is Priya Satia’s prize-winning
Empire of Guns : The Violent Making of the Industrial Revolution
(Penguin, 2018) which traces how family, religion, gender, race, empire and
violence were integrally connected to Britain’s so-called Industrial Revolution.
Finally, a number of current scholars have returned to a very old and yet
salient question of whether the profits from slavery shaped Britain’s
industrial and consumer revolutions.(3) These studies of food, commodities,
empire and racial capitalism have not neglected gender and the family, but we
would do well to heed Griffin’s call and remember that working men and women
fashioned if they rarely profited from transformations in the Victorian economy. ____________________________ (1) Ellen Ross, Love
and Toil : Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (Oxford University
Press, 1993). (2) Erika Rappaport, Shopping
for Pleasure : Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton
University Press, 2000), chapter two. For an imperial context, see Erika
Rappaport, “Marriage, Celibacy, or Emigration? Debating the Costs of Family
Life in Mid-Victorian England”. In
Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport, eds., Economic Women : Essays on Desire
and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture (Ohio University
Press, 2013) : 143-161; and “ ‘The Bombay Debt’ : Letter
Writing, Domestic Economies and Family Conflict in Colonial India,” Gender
and History 16/2 (August 2004) : 233-260. (3) Many are benefiting from new digital sources and databases such as The Legacies of British Slave Ownership Database.
☞ Illustrated version on The Victorian Web : http://victorianweb.org/economics/griffin.html
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