Gender, Savings Culture Provident Consumerism

Gender, Savings Culture & Provident Consumerism -Patterns, Practice & Research Opportunities [1] Beverly Lemire Workshop, York, 23 May 2008 Today I will synthesize some of my findings concerning gender, savings culture and provident consumerism, focusing on the long nineteenth century. And I’ll conclude with thoughts on the sources available for future research and the potential of this area of study. To begin I would like us to meditate on patchwork quilts and consider the rise and significance of this artefact, at the time of the last stages of the material economy. Quilt Culture & the Material Economy: [2] Frugality, as an ideal, has always been in vogue, most particularly as applied to the lower social orders; but thrift takes historically contingent forms and involves gendered practice. In this context, I would ask you to consider the patchwork quilt as an illustration of both the changes and continuities that characterize the experience of the working and lower middling families from 1800 onwards. As you are well aware, the centuries-long process towards modernity involved the shift from what we could call a material to a monetized economy. In the first instance, there was a widespread reliance on barter, the translation of goods from objects of functional utility to cash, credit or other items of value. During this long transition, women of all social classes were significant arbiters of this material economy; for women of the lower social classes the negotiation of domestic budgets and the maintenance of small trades through the pawning, selling and bartering of goods like textiles and clothing 1 represented critical skills. For centuries, textiles and clothing were the commonest and most easily negotiated alternate currency. The fluidity of these goods remained an important element of their domestic life, one that continued within the labouring populations even as it was being abandoned among the wealthier middle and upper ranks. Indeed, many within the labouring classes were still dependent at least in part on truck and perquisite payments through the 1800s. Thus during the nineteenth century, labouring people still functioned to a considerable degree within a hybrid space that blended the material and monetized economy. The value squeezed out of their complex material negotiations ensured survival or even modest pleasures. The increasing wellbeing of common people can be traced in part through the proliferation of cheaper furnishings and the spread of common comforts like quilts. Part of the shifting agenda of working families over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to accumulate these comforts and, if possible, to hold on to them. [3] Patchwork quilts arose first through the aegis of the trade in Indian cottons, cotton being the most democratic of commodities. These less expensive adaptations appear sporadically through the eighteenth century, with greater numbers as the century ends. With the industrialization of cotton production, and the continued celebration of female needlework, the patchwork quilt comes to epitomize domestic artistry and economy. The nineteenth century is the quintessential era of the patchwork quilt, a material idiom that accumulates complex cultural meanings tied to regions and households. Patchwork was always the resort of needlewomen negotiating between thrift and utility. Pants, jackets and gloves were routinely patched to extend life, as necessity demanded generating the parti-coloured beggarly clothing associated with the poor. But patches were an essential 2 utility and in many cases were deftly applied to bed hangings and bedding, as well as to clothing, in virtually all social classes. Most people including the labouring poor bought at least some new textiles or ready-made clothing from at least the mid seventeenth century1 and the volume of textile purchases increased with the spread of affordable textiles. Patchwork and cotton textiles are inextricably linked. The exigencies of life were more sternly enforced on the poor with greater penalties for failure; but these demands were by no means exclusive to one segment of society. The deft patch epitomized the social and fiscal discipline enjoined on women of all ages. But inspiration and invention could also be part of this process. [4] Women working within prudent constraints refigured patches in complex ways that challenged simple notions of plenty or want, as they styled discarded or used fabric, along with new factory calico, into attractive objects that modelled ingenuity and skill in equal measure. Cotton became the fabric of choice; with industrialization it became an essential democratic textile recast through womanly inventiveness. Patchwork quilts reflected the attention to material savings so central to the ethos of the successful housewife; they also speak to a long tradition of thrift that only gradually came to embrace monetized systems of saving and expenditure. For the working poor, the ebb and flow of personal possessions continued to be a feature of life in the nineteenth century. Items were frequently bought with an eye to their future value when pawned or resold. And their consumer practices did not reflect improvidence, but were a defence against penury. Without access to banks, working men and women needed a material investment that could be liquidated as needed. The introduction of savings banks, and the enculturation of working women into monetized 3 thrift, represented one of the most profound changes in the cultural practice of this complex community. Savings Banks and Gendered Thrift: [5] Given their significance, savings banks have received relatively little study compared to other nineteenth century institutions and social movements; rather works today focus largely on institutional histories.2 None has addressed the broad effects of the savings bank movement, nor the significant cultural implications of this phenomenon, as the formalization of saving and the nineteenth century culture of consumption disciplined and rewarded common people. Savings banks were set up in a type of social movement from 1800 onwards, springing up in cities, towns and villages across the nation, in communities in every part of the country. [6] This savings movement offered incentives to potential savers, to encourage this practice. Moreover, saving was not presented as an end in itself as. For the first time, the social discipline of saving was linked with what I call provident consumerism. Saving, as a facet of general economical behaviour, was matched by a theory which approved and even encouraged careful plebeian consumerism C material accumulation would be the reward for diligent savers. Consumer spending among the wage-earning classes was no longer condemned; on the contrary, careful expenditures were now recognized as a stimulus to Britain=s industries. Monetized saving already flourished as an element of respectable practice among the middle classes. The challenge was to spread this practice among the working population. The pleasures of consumerism followed the exigencies of saving as day followed night and the propaganda heralding this ordered structure may have figured in the growing acceptance 4 of industrial capitalism by the wage-earning classes, as standards of living rose over the nineteenth century. Savings banks mushroomed in the midst of heated public debates about the character of working people, the appropriate collective and personal responses to rising population and new work situations, plus the policies best suited to ensure national stability. Marriage became the idealized template for social harmony, with the breadwinner wage one of the mediums through which the working class family could achieve domestic and political harmony.3 Comfortable domesticity was redefined as the rightful aim of working men and savings accounts praised as a tool to take best advantage of male wages. Sexual probity outside marriage was an equivalent facet of masculine self-control encouraged by working class and middle class theorists. Combined, they reflected the domestic and bodily discipline, to which respectable men were called, disciplines which promised material, marital and social rewards. Savings was never simply an end in itself. It was as well a means to enable provident consumerism. Proponents hoped that cumulative purchases and an improved material standard of life among the working population would cement their acceptance of industrial capitalism. Savings, in the words of a Liverpool partisan, 'would enable the lower orders to acquire a taste for the comforts of civilized life, and thus promote industry, contentment, and tranquillity.'4 The whole formed a sequential process with discipline at the core, but occasional indulgence as a counterpoint C first save, and then spend. Plebeian spending had been a fraught topic for generations and until the second half of the eighteenth century there was general unanimity among elites that the labouring classes should buy only bare necessities. But 'necessities' by their nature changed with 5 time and what had once seemed superfluous was ultimately accepted as essential.5 An increasing number of writers also argued for careful plebeian spending as a means to ensure the security and prosperity of the nation. In 1816, Charles Taylor prophesied that the working class would accept the political and economic structure of the country 'in proportion as the possessor ... has a stake in his country, which makes his country=s tranquillity his own prosperity C his country=s good, his own benefit C his country=s security, his own safety.'6 The creation of a general savings culture, as a precursor to material improvement, was judged the best prescription for a peaceful and thriving nation.7 As savings were encouraged, so consumerism was approved. National statistics alone cannot adequately reflect the broad miscellany of people who turned to savings banks as part of a new financial rhythm. A large, weighty signature book survives from one of the early savings organizations, the London Provident Institution, which drew clients from Essex, Kent and the surrounding Middlesex villages, plus various parts of London.8 [7] Figure 1 summarizes a sample of occupations taken from the first signature book of depositors over two years of entries, which yielded status information on 211 people. While the summary is useful, the details of individual occupations are subsumed under the aggregate headings, masking the miscellany of savers from this great city and its outlying precincts, ranging from porters and watermen to glove maker and printers; the carter, milk-woman, laundress, nurse and bricklayer were convinced of the benefits of this new institution, along with the engineer, warehouseman, millwright, jeweller, druggist, hairdresser, river pilot, shopkeeper, clerk and teacher. 6 [8] The example of the London Provident Institution illustrates the occupational ratios of its depositors ― Figures 2 and 3. In 1842, one of the largest categories of savers were 'Mechanics, Artisans and Handicraftsmen,' numbering nearly six thousand. These depositors averaged about ,19 per person in their accounts, suggesting that this group included better paid skilled workers C although they averaged several pounds less than the average among tradesmen and small shopkeepers or soldiers and policemen. Among women savers, however, the largest group were domestic servants. One of the longstanding charges for the insignificance of savings banks was that few industrial workers joined these institutions. This claim was raised first by Neil Smelser and reiterated by Albert Fishlow on the basis of figures from Manchester, where Smelser calculated that factory workers never made up only 15 per cent of depositors between 1821 and 1839. In comparison, domestic servants ranged from 17 - 29 per cent of depositors with the Manchester and Salford Savings Bank.9 Smelser argued that the prominence of domestic servants showed that savings banks were irrelevant to the working class during the industrialization process.10 Relatively simplistic conclusions such as this cannot be sustained today, not least because of the more complex analysis of industrialization, including work on women and the gender politics. This has reshaped the historiography of the industrial era.11 Both men and women saved: labourers, artisans and those from the complex middle ranks. The numbers of male and female savers sometimes varied from institution to institution and the full local and regional histories have not been written; secondary evidence suggests that motivations may also have varied and gender tensions between couples were routinely addressed by propagandists for savings banks. Among married couples, there were doubtless pressures regarding the apportioning of 7 resources with the household, including the moneys saved. It is indisputable, however, that men and women, boys and girls saved in greater numbers over the course of the nineteenth century, including those in industrial trades, incorporating the doctrine of saving and provident consumerism into the public and private settings of which they were part. Respectability required relative comfort and the capacity to avoid either the need for poor relief or the humiliation of crippling debt or pauperism. Although there have been many studies of nineteenth-century respectability, in most cases these focused on the work culture of elite male workers.12 Brian Harrison concludes that an exclusively 'work-centred approach to respectability ignores the crucial importance of both housewife and cultural context.'13 The husband=s wages and his engagement with respectable aspirations were essential; but the drive toward respectability also required the active intervention of the housewife, as it was typically through her mediation that the husband=s wage was stretched to best advantage. She balanced needs and expenditures. The high proportion of domestic servants with savings accounts, many of whom went on to marry, carried the tenets of diligent savings and careful spending into newly created families. [9] Many domestics recognized the benefits from setting something aside prior to married life. Although the relative prominence of this group declined over the nineteenth century, the records for 1830 suggest that domestic servants were among the most prominent groups of savers.14 If marriage followed, the domestic politics of savings, along with consumer priorities, would then be hers to balance in a new milieu. This scenario defined the lives of many working couples, in Scotland as well as England. as Ian Levitt and Christopher Smout note that: 8 working-class women … learnt their thrift as young domestic servants saving for their wedding day and maintained the good tradition as housewives [of working men]. … Without savings banks such women would not have enjoyed even the small degree of financial independence and security that was theirs in early Victorian Britain.15 The managers of the Yorkshire Penny Bank were very mindful of the priorities of their clients and used a commemorative volume to recount the savings and spending patterns observed over decades. Young men and women saved for marriage. Children were also involved in the annual cycles of saving and spending. And more contentiously, one manager revealed how he helped the wives keep small savings out of the reach of notoriously drunken husbands. The moral failure of the male householders was offered as justification to actions clearly outside existing marital laws.16 [10] Savings banks of all sorts offered the means for social advancement and material amelioration 'of every class.'17 That was the intent of their founders. The bank book on the dresser, like the hand-stitched quilt on the bed, exemplified hard-won material gains. In 1901 a Mothers= Union address offered a further reminder that 'it is our duty as Christian women, as well as our profit as reasonable beings, to learn to spend well and to spare well.'18 From Sunday schools, to primary schools, the culture of savings became a major feature in the working class landscape. Savings culture and provident consumerism became the benchmark of respectability and the cornerstone of female domestic management. 9 1 Margaret Spufford, “Fabric for Seventeenth-Century Children and Adolescents’ Clothes” Textile History 34:1 (2003) pp. 47-63. 2. For example, Commemoration of the Centenary of the death of the Rev. Henry Duncan, founder of savings banks, (1910, reprinted 1946); Robert Eadon Leader, A Century of Thrift: An Historical Sketch of the Sheffield Savings Bank, 1819-1919 (Sheffield, 1920); Charles Eason, The Trustee Savings Banks of Great Britain and Ireland from 1817 to 1928, (1929); Oliver Horne, A History of Savings Banks, (Oxford, 1947); C. Donald Hebden, The Trustee Savings Bank of Yorkshire and Lincoln, (1981); M. Moss and A. Slaven, From Ledger Book to Laser Beam: A History of the TSB in Scotland from 1810 to 1990 (Glasgow, 1992); M. Moss and I. Russell, An Invaluable Treasure: A History of the TSB, (1994). The significant exception being Paul Johnson, Spending and Saving: the working-class Economy in Britain, 1870-1939 (Cambridge, 1985). 3. Clark, Struggle for the Breeches, chapters 10 & 11. The search for political recognition and authority by working class men, who defined their political status in domestic terms as heads of households, is examined by Keith McClelland in Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall, Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 (Cambridge, 2000). 4. Liverpool District Provident Society, p. 8. 5. Necessities were redefined from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, with demand for goods from cooking pots to shoe buckles firing many small trades. This redefinition effected the common people as well as the middle classes and has been the focus of considerable scholarship. Joan Thirsk, Economic Policies and Projects: The Development of a Consumer Society in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1978); Neil McKendrick, John Brewer & J. H. Plumb, The Birth of a Consumer Society: The Commercialization of Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1983); Margaret Spufford, The Great Reclothing of Rural England: Petty Chapmen and their Wares in the Seventeenth Century (London, 1984); Lorna Weatherill, Consumer Behaviour & Material Culture in Britain, 1660-1760 (London, 1988); Beverly Lemire, Fashion=s Favourite: The Cotton Trade and the Consumer in Britain, 1660-1800 (Oxford, 1991) and Dress, Culture and Commerce: the English Clothing Trade before the Factory (Basingstoke, 1997); Lori Loeb, Consuming Angels: Advertising and Victorian Women (Oxford, 1994); Maxine Berg and Helen Clifford, (eds), Consumers and Luxury: Consumer culture in Europe, 1650-1850 (Manchester, 1999); Bill Lancaster, The Department Store: A Social History (London, 1995); Erica Rappaport, ?>The Halls of Temptation=: Gender, Politics, and the Construction of the Department Store in Late Victorian London' Journal of British Studies 35:1 (1996); Steven King, 'Reclothing the English Poor' Textile History 33:1 (2002). 6. Charles Taylor, A Summary Account of the London Savings= Bank: Including its Formation, Progress, and Present State..., (1816) p. 6. 7. Jonathan White has traced a shift in elite policy toward popular consumerism to the second half of the eighteenth century, discerning clear changes over this period, as commentators recognized the boost to British industry from the collective consumer demand. Jonathan White, 'From Unruly Appetites to Rational Wants: Changing Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England', unpublished paper presented at the New Researchers= Session II, Economic History Conference, Bristol, 2000. A fuller elaboration of these points can be found in 'Luxury and Labour: Ideas of Labouring-Class Consumption in Eighteenth-Century England' unpublished PhD thesis, University of Warwick, 2001. 8. TC/75/a/22, Signature Book, London Provident Society, Lloyds TSB Group Archives, London. 9. Smelser, Social Change, p. 374, Table 14. 10 10. Fishlow confirmed Smelser assessment concluding that there was a disappointing level of involvement by industrial labourers. 'The Trustee Savings Banks', pp. 36-8. 11. Among the works which examine the interaction of gender and the industrialization process with household, community and worksplace are: Anna Clark, Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley, 1995); Maxine Berg, The Age of Manufactures, 2nd edition (1994) and 'Women=s work, mechanisation and the early phases of industrialisation' in Patrick Joyce, (ed), The Historical Meaning of Work, (1987); Pat Hudson, The Industrial Revolution, (1992); Pamela Sharpe, Adapting to Capitalism: Working Women in the English Economy, 1700-1850, (1996) and Pamela Sharpe, (ed), Women=s Work: The English Experience 1650-1914 (London, 1998); Sonya Rose, Limited livelihoods : gender and class in nineteenth-century England, (1992); Beverly Lemire, Dress, Culture and Commerce: the English Clothing Trade before the Factory (Basingstoke, 1997); Katrina Honeyman, Well suited: A History of the Leeds Clothing. Industry, 1850-1990 (Oxford, 2000). 12. The concept of the aristocracy of labour captured the attention of historians in the 1960s and 1970s. Thereafter, respectability was assessed from a broader class and gender perspective. Examples of these historiographies include: E. J. Hobsbawm, 'The Labour Aristocracy in Nineteenth-century Britain' Labouring Men, (1964) and A. E. Musson, 'Class Struggle and the Labour Aristocracy, 1830-60' Social History 3,1976; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes; Koditschek, Class Formation. 13. Harrison, Peaceable Kingdom, p. 157. 14. Fishlow, 'Trustee Savings Banks', pp. 28-30; Horne, History of Savings Banks, p. 97. Horne notes that the relative proportion of domestic servants declined over the nineteenth century. In London, for example, domestic servants initially made up twenty-four per cent of savings bank depositors in 1816 and only twelve per cent of savers by 1850. Horne, History of Savings Banks, p. 97. 15. Levitt & Smout, State of the Scottish Working-Class, p. 135. 16. The Yorkshire Penny Bank: A Narrative with an Introduction by Edward Akroyd, MP, (London, 1872) pp. 30, 32, 34-5, 38-9, 50, 56. What R. W. Connell terms, 'calculative, rational and regulated' masculinity was expressed in many contexts. R. W. Connell, 'The big picture: Masculinities in recent world history' Theory and Society 22:5 (1993) p. 609. 17. The Penny Magazine 15 October 1836, p. 407. 18. Pinhorn, Spending and Saving. Pinhorn also taught evening classes on this subject. H. M. Poynter, Thrift. An Address to the Mothers= Union at Aspley Guise (Oxford, 1901) p. 11. 11