John ToshReseñas

Lady Wombat says:

Tosh synthesizes a large body of previous historical work on masculinity and domesticity in the Victorian period, bringing abstract concepts to life by adding “case-studies,” information on the lives of seven Victorian men and their families taken from Tosh’s archival research. Tosh’s book was made possible by two recent scholarly developments: the opening up of women’s studies to include gender/masculinity studies, and the consensus in history studies that domesticity as an ideology is a key aspect of modernity, one that developed in the wake of alienation in response to industrial capitalism. Studying the ways that men were constructed by, and in turn constructed, domesticity is the goal of Tosh’s study: his book “reconstructs how men of the Victorian middle class experienced the demands of an exacting domestic code, and how they negotiated its contradictions” (1).

In his introduction, Tosh lays out the above justification for his project, suggesting that the concept of “separate spheres” ignores the fact that men could move at will between the public and private. He argues that the domestic sphere is “integral to masculinity. To establish a home, to protect it, to provide for it, to control it, and to train its young aspirants to manhood have usually been essential to a man’s good standing with his peers” (4). Traditionally, work and home were the same place. But during the Victorian period, men in large numbers began to work outside the home, often in places considered polluted and dehumanized. Thus, the home became constructed as a place of refuge from the ills of work: “It provided not only the rest and refreshment which any breadwinner needs, but the emotional and psychological supports which made working life tolerable” (6). The pull of domesticity for men competed, however, with two “longstanding aspects of masculinity”: homosociality, or “regular association with other men” (6), and the idea of masculinity as heroic and adventurous. Domesticity was also challenged by its own inner contradictions:
Expectation of a companionate marriage linked with strong investment in sexual difference;
The tendency “for fatherhood to be reduced to a providing role, since the relational nurturing aspects of parenting were deemed ‘feminine’” (7); and
Tensions regarding boys’ education and childrearing “since their gender identity seemed threatened by the attentions of the mother; this was one reason why a rising proportion of middle-class youth was educated away from home” (7).

The subsequent book is split into three parts: the first outlines the “pre-conditions” that led to the rise of domesticity in England; the second describes mid-Victorian domestic ideology; the third focuses on the challenges to domestic ideology in the late-Victorian period.

Chapter one describes changes in the middle-class household taking place during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: the shift from the family being a productive unit to being a nonproductive unit; the shift in the family’s purpose, from being an economic site to an emotional/sentimental site; the removal of the wife from the realm of work; the segregation of servants from the rest of the household; and the emergence of the house as a sign of status in a society in which class distinctions, particularly in the middle class, were more openly contested. The second chapter discusses the ideal of domesticity that emerged in the wake of these social and cultural changes. The rise of the companionate marriage was key to domestic ideology. Companionate did not mean equal, however; the husband was still in charge. Also important was the rise of sexual identity polarity. In the past, women had been conceived of as lesser than men, but during the Victorian period, they came to be seen as different rather than lesser. The rise of Evangelicalism, as well as changing ideas in the conception of childhood also contributed to the rise of domestic ideology as a “cultural norm” by the 1830s and 40s in England. Tosh concludes this chapter by discussing the key player in domestic ideology: the moral, passionless mother: “The elevation of the Angel Mother cut the moral pretensions of men in the home down to size, and their significance as parents was correspondingly diminished” (47).

The second section, which covers the period from 1830-1880, focuses on marital relations, father/child relations, the transition from childhood to adulthood for boys/men, and the growth of male associational groups in the period.

The final section, focusing on the period 1870-1900, discusses the reasons why domestic ideology began to lose its hold on the Victorian imagination.

I agree with James Eli Adams, who, in his Victorian Studies review of Tosh’s book (Summer 2001), praises it for its elegant writing, its synthesis of a wide range of scholarship, and, above all, its convincing challenge to the “received wisdom about the separate spheres” (658). I also find Adams’ one qualification – that Tosh ignores masculinities at odds with domesticity during the period, reading the public sphere as only a site of self-estrangement rather than as a place where a different, and equally (or more?) pleasurable aggressive masculine identity, could be performed – well worth exploring

Tosh investigates the theory and methods of history. One may regard this book as a history of historiography. He explores various schools of historical methodology, remarking the strengths and weaknesses of each.