Modernity and Bourgeois Life

by Jerrold Seigel

  Marx was far from blind to the changes coming about in the years when he struggled to complete his book. As modern industry developed an ability to produce a much expanded quantity of goods, it evolved economic relations no longer limited by the conditions of production that obtained earlier. The powers unleashed by modern industry were so great that “[t]he theft of alien labor time, on which the present wealth is based, appears as a miserable foundation in the face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself.” But the benefits of this change could not be reaped within capitalism, because the new form of wealth creation was in principle incompatible with it: “As soon as labor in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labor time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value.”31 This meant that by giving birth to modern industry capitalism prepared its own demise, bringing forth a system of production that did away with its very presupposition, the status of goods as commodities. Capital had not only an “organic composition” but a vital destiny, its eventual collapse prefigured by its fatal subordination of use-value to exchange-value.

  It is just this sense of historical closure that we escape by expanding Simmel’s notion of money as a social tool into an analysis that focuses on the development of networks of means and the ongoing liberation of human energies they make possible. The results of this emancipation are by no means all positive; on the contrary the problems faced by a form of life increasingly grounded in distant relations and the abstractions they require have grown more dangerous and threatening since Marx’s day. The open-ended perspective proposed here leaves us without any prospect of a passage to a higher order that might promise to resolve them. But there is little reason to put our faith in a solution rooted, like the theory of surplus value, in pre-modern conditions and relationships.

  9 Men and women

  Among the aspects of modernity whose relationship to bourgeois life have often been debated, none are more significant than the linked topics of relations between men and women, and the moral codes and attitudes that regulate them. In this chapter and the next I will try to show that the evolution of gender relations and the historical place of what is often called “Victorian” morality evolved in parallel between the middle of the eighteenth century and the end of the nineteenth: each began by entering a phase that gave a sharper and more defined quality or shape to attitudes and relationships that existed previously but that had been treated more informally and flexibly, and each ended by exhibiting a marked relaxation of the rigidities introduced in that initial moment. A major reason for this parallel was that both were similarly affected by the expansion and thickening of networks of means, and the two stages correspond, if somewhat imprecisely, to the successive moments in the development of modernity we have sought to distinguish in previous chapters. One reason the correspondence was imperfect was that impulses which only began to find significant realization in the second phase were already at work in the first, their push toward gender equality and moral flexibility having been introduced alongside forces that pressed in the opposite direction. This makes the story we try to tell in these two chapters complex; it is also necessarily incomplete, because the depth of the moral alteration whose prospects began to emerge toward the end of the nineteenth century only became widely visible after the middle of the twentieth, at which point it would prove far deeper than most people before 1914 were in any position to expect. But certain main lines of its later unfolding were becoming visible before the War. Tying the subject of this chapter to the one considered in the next is the institution that serves as the hinge at once between private and public life, and between male–female relations and morality, namely the family.

  Separate spheres and relations at a distance

  The feminist scholarship that blossomed in the second half of the twentieth century directed a powerful new light on gender relations in general and in particular on the “separate spheres” to which men and women were assigned and the contrasting public and private roles each were expected to play. A popular German publication of 1848 succinctly described the core division: “while the woman in the main lays the foundations for the ties that bind the family, the man is the link with the external world.”1 Numerous consequences followed from this distinction, among them limiting female education to subjects deemed relevant to the role girls would later fill as wives and mothers, excluding women from voting, restricting their freedom of movement in public, and imposing strict standards of modesty on the behavior and speech of “respectable” females. In practice a certain number of women escaped from the narrow bounds the schema projected, some by subtly evading or actively contesting them, others by finding ways to make an impact on public life as writers, moral reformers, or participants in business (sometimes visible, sometimes behind the scenes); recent historians have recognized the permeability of the enclosures by speaking of “connecting spheres.” Even among those who themselves broke free in this way, however, there were many who accepted the assumption that women as a whole were destined to fundamentally different lives than men; the exceptions still left the rule more or less intact. The question is: what was “bourgeois” about these assumptions and distinctions and what is their relationship to the evolution of bourgeois life?

  Although a number of historians have associated the establishment of a clear separation of spheres with the coming of bourgeois social and cultural relations, most of the elements of the system were clearly in place well before the late eighteenth century. Consider the schematic recipe for “A Godly Forme of Householde Gouernment” provided by two Puritan writers in 1614:

  The list seems to assume a family supported by some kind of middle-class occupation: the husband is not a manual laborer and female work is not explicitly mentioned, although the writers may have included some form of it in the “oversee and give order” of the last line. Divisions very close to the one it describes were evident where women’s work was assumed to be a part of family life, however. Feminine work was often arduous (although it usually did not include the heavy labor in field and forest assigned to men in rural settings), but the kinds of “Godly” expectations that assigned contact with the wider world to men were one reason why households were dominated by them.

  That the arrangements crystallized as separate spheres had long been in place has often been recognized. As a historian of France notes,

  The Romans venerated the woman who lived chastely and served the hearth. Medieval didactic treatises such as The Goodman of Paris (c. 1393) exhorted women to cultivate the home as a shelter (for both men and women) from the turbulence and strife of the outside world. The seventeenth century French writer, Pierre Le Moyne, although quite prepared to concede women’s moral equality with men and their equal aptitude for learning, repudiated the call for the extension of women’s public education on the grounds that “I respect too much the boundaries that separate us.”3

  Writing about Britain, Amanda Vickery throws a bracing bath of cold water on the notion developed by a certain species of feminism that earlier times represented a kind of “golden age” of work and public activity for women. Female participation in business and commerce appears to have waxed and waned with levels of prosperity in periods well before the nineteenth century; comments or complaints about women withdrawing from productive activity or losing opportunities to engage in it were rife in the 1600s too. The only important female occupation lost as traditional manufacturing gave way to modern industry was domestic production of textiles, a system in which the (male) “putting-out” merchants who organized it most often dealt with male heads of households, even where wives and daughters spun the thread. Metalworking, furniture building, shoe- or barrel-making hardly ever involved families in the same way; nor did women travel as commercial agents buying and selling goods. The chief occupations of women in the seventeenth century were already those where they would cluster in the nineteenth, namely “the so-called f
eminine trades: petty retail, food and drink, textiles. One would search long and hard for significant numbers of female goldsmiths, blacksmiths, curriers and so on at any point in British history.” The point holds for other countries: women contributed importantly to the economy, but in spheres that were specifically theirs; they stepped outside these limits when wives took over the businesses of deceased husbands (as they continued to do in the nineteenth century), but if they remarried, as many did, the headship reverted to a male. Guild offices and town councils (not to mention representative assemblies and administrative employments) were almost exclusively the preserve of men. As Vickery concludes, given that “separate spheres of gender power” have existed in many times and places (and in some degree persist), we should not appeal to them “to explain social and political developments in a particular century, least of all [as some historians have] to account for Victorian class formation.”4

  None of this means, however, that nothing altered in gender relations at the end of the eighteenth century. Both the general nature of the changes and the reasons for them are suggested by a recent study focusing not on bourgeois strata but on agricultural and rural life in Germany. Its author, Marion Gray, makes clear that male domination had been presupposed and recommended by a long line of writers from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth: at every moment men were described as “masters,” “sovereigns,” and “kings” in their households, ruling over children and women. The division of tasks was largely stable too, with men chiefly responsible for the fields, women for “household, kitchen, garden, and dairy.” Together the gendered spheres made up a universe of family production, an economy devoted as much to its own subsistence as to producing and selling a surplus. It was close to what Aristotle had called an oikos, a productive household, ruled over by men but in which women’s work constituted a substantial and necessary part. Germans called it the ganze Haus.5

  As the nineteenth century approached, this form of productive and family life began to retreat to the social margins; the reason was not that women lost their employments, but that those reserved for men were drawn into an evolving system of production in which the household as a whole did not participate. The new regime was based on an increased orientation toward market farming (stimulated by population expansion and urban growth), and with it the attempt to increase output; in Germany this goal was encouraged and nurtured by state governments, whose officials recommended improved tools and techniques, better fertilizers, rational organization of the land, and an end to such barriers to human effort and ambition as serfdom. “As the ideal of increased yields gained predominance over older systems based on morals and tradition,” the ancient model of a “hierarchical estate with interdependent components” gave way to one in which the male undertaking of growing crops that could be sold in the market gained a new and more powerful kind of predominance over the activities assigned to women.6

  Such an evolution gave the traditional division between male and female spheres, and even the longstanding principle of male dominance in the household, a new basis. The spheres had always been separate but the distance between them now widened. In this instance the widening took place among people who can be called bourgeois only if we stretch the term to include anyone drawn into market relationships. But a similar change took place in urban and middle-class contexts too, in both cases brought about by the shifting relationship between work and the expanding and thickening web of activities outside the family. Margaret Hunt notes its presence in eighteenth-century England:

  As the flow of both trade and information extended its reach, women traders and the neighborhood networks that formed their economic base became, in cultural terms at least, more marginal. The growing prestige of larger networks … spelled a corresponding loss of local systems, which often were small scale, retail, based on oral transaction, and not coincidentally, populated heavily by women, the lower reaches of the middling and artisanal classes, and the laboring classes.

  Theodore Koditschek describes a similar shift still proceeding half a century later: “the supremacy of men, which had hitherto rested on their patriarchal authority within the family, was now coming to depend in a more structured and less personal sense on the precedence that their sphere of capitalist production and market relations obtained over the female sphere of domestic consumption.”7 Economic change was not the only contributor to widening the distance between traditionally separate spheres; in Germany new forms of state employment, as we saw above drawing people out of local relations into more broadly territorial ones contributed too. More than one historian has noted that the earliest instances of the pattern whereby women’s work consisted solely in household management were found chiefly among the families of state officials and professionals (although some long-distance merchants resembled them), where cooking, sewing, and cleaning comprised most of what wives and daughters did to sustain a family’s material life.8

  The family as resource and network

  Focusing on the kinds of changes just noted gives an incomplete picture of what was happening to relations between women and men from around 1750; we will come in a moment to a development that pushed in a very different direction, namely Enlightened criticism of traditional gender relations. Although well known and debated, this critique had little practical impact, and we need first to recognize some of the circumstances that blunted its effect. Many of these lay in the central importance that family membership still played in individuals’ lives.

  In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as before and since, families provided all kinds of benefits to their members, launching them into the world and sometimes sheltering them from its dangers and affronts; in contrast to the world we know today, however, family membership then served as an indispensable vehicle for practical survival and advancement. The terms in which Sarah Hanley describes the worldly importance of family relations for seventeenth-century French lawyers and bureaucrats need only be slightly altered to apply to conditions two centuries later: if family membership no longer “provided the only means of human survival through networks of influence (marriage alliances, inheritance practices, patronage, and apprentice systems),” it remained a chief one. What was “the most pressing business of early modern times” was still an imperative under more developed conditions, namely “the maintenance and extension of family networks, which were agencies of both social reproduction and economic production.”9 This was true not only for most nineteenth-century bourgeois but for many peasants and artisans as well.

  There were, to be sure, differences between the ways early modern families served as vehicles for the worldly well-being of their members and those coming to be more prominent around 1800; the main shift has been pinpointed by David Sabean. Whereas social position had long depended chiefly on some kind of patrimony that passed vertically down a line of descendants, by late in the eighteenth century, and in a wide variety of social and geographical locations, it was coming to hinge more on people’s ability to mobilize and draw on resources distributed horizontally through society. Where people had once sought “to inherit, maintain, and pass on an estate, a monopoly, or a craft,” they now looked for ways to “manage the flow of property and resources,” creating concentrations of property or talent that gave greater power to carry out projects or influence those who had such power. Marriage strategies aimed at “the creation of dense transfer points coordinating interests, activities, and values along horizontal rather than vertical tracks.”10 But families remained crucial vehicles for this kind of coordination.

  One reason they did was what Jürgen Kocka calls “the low degree of institutionalization in the occupational and commercial realm” and Sven Beckert (in a study of New York City bourgeois) “a world of underdeveloped communication facilities and weak impersonal institutions.” As commerce expanded but in a situation where banks of a modern sort were not yet on the scene, family members provided a main source for capital, and before the age when advanced education beca
me an important qualification for managing large-scale firms based on increasingly complex technologies, they served as a chief supply of partners and associates too.11 Thus the networks of influence Sarah Hanley pointed to in the seventeenth century had important counterparts in the nineteenth. Webs of family connections provided people with resources for gaining access to the more extended and powerful networks of means through which distant resources could be coordinated and directed toward particular goals. In some cases families were themselves networks of means, since they were assemblages of capital, talent, and information, but it was as vehicles for inserting themselves or their members into outside economic, political, or cultural linkages that they aided individuals in developing their talents or fulfilling their aims and ambitions. Kocka notes that certain families built up these kinds of connection by way of systematic cross-marriages between sons and daughters, producing at once intricate personal ties and loose but often highly useful structures of connection between firms, “which at the time could be neither put together nor maintained in any other way.” Such bonds were often local to begin with, but as commerce expanded so did they, linking people in various cities or regions who had reasons to seek ongoing association with each other.12