A Comparison of Middle-Class Perceptions of Poor Women and Poor Men

How Separate a Sphere? Poor Women and Paid Work in Late-Victorian London

Journal of Family History ◽

10.1177/036319909401900305 ◽

1994 ◽

Vol 19 (3) ◽

pp. 285-309 ◽

Cited By ~ 12

Author(s):

Andrew August

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Married Women ◽

Late Nineteenth Century ◽

Paid Work ◽

Household Economy ◽

Separate Spheres ◽

The Poor ◽

Poor Women ◽

Late Nineteenth ◽

Excluded Middle

The essay traces patterns of poor women's employment in late-nineteenth-century London. It shows that employment was common among single, married and widowed women, except among mothers of young children. Unpaid domestic work and paid employment dovetailed into a constant burden of work facing poor women. This challenges the prevalent argument that married women earned wages only at moments of severe crisis in the household economy. It reveals a culture of women's work among the poor that contrasts sharply with the ideology of separate spheres that excluded middle-class women from employment.

Download Full-text

Solidarity in Falling Apart

Lateral ◽

10.25158/l10.1.9 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 10 (1) ◽

Author(s):

Alyson Spurgas

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Sexual Violence ◽

Diverse Populations ◽

Women Poor ◽

Poor Women ◽

Associated Symptoms ◽

Trans Women

In this essay, I reconceptualize feminized trauma by utilizing a queer crip feminist disability justice framework. This reconceptualizing allows for an intervention in both historical psychoanalytic and contemporary biomedical framings of the experience of gendered and sexual violence, pursuant or sequelic trauma, and associated symptoms. Both historical and contemporary psycho-logics too often imagine gendered and sexual violence as abnormal or exceptional events (e.g., “stranger rape”) which can be treated and cured individually, thus delimiting them within a white, wealthy or middle-class, cis- and hetero-feminine register. As a corrective, within the framework of everyday emergencies, insidious traumas, and cripistemologies of crisis, I position feminine fracturing and falling apart as chronic, and consider abolitionist strategies for survival, care, and solidarity beyond traditional medical frameworks for recovery. This further provides a way to understand dissociation or rather dissociative-adjacent symptomology as real, legitimate, and painful, yet also as sociopolitical products experienced differently across diverse populations—and as mundane, banal, and even expected for some. Here, feminine fracturing is symptom, method, and potential avenue for change or liberation. What does “recovery” look like when feminized trauma is endemic to the point of being so normalized and unexceptional as to be a thoroughly unremarkable part of our everyday cultural backdrop? How is this exacerbated when we examine the experiences of trans women, poor women, and immigrant and BIPOC women and femmes? I posit that there is promise in embracing a fracturing, in falling apart—as antidote to the normative and neoliberal logic of keeping it together.

Download Full-text

Poor Women in Psychological Research

Psychology of Women Quarterly ◽

10.1111/j.1471-6402.1993.tb00440.x ◽

1993 ◽

Vol 17 (2) ◽

pp. 133-150 ◽

Cited By ~ 73

Author(s):

Pamela Trotman Reid

Keyword(s):

Middle Class ◽

Empirical Study ◽

Feminist Theory ◽

Psychological Research ◽

Psychology Of Women ◽

Poor Women ◽

Diverse Groups ◽

As If

For the most part, theory and empirical study in the psychology of women have failed to recognize many distinctions among women. Indeed, the focus of feminist theory and research has been directed to the explication of women's essential experience of gender, as if this could be separated from the confounds of class and race. This presentation raises the issue of the diversity among poor women, the need to disentangle ethnicity and class, and the limitation of adopting a middle-class White perspective. In addition to racism, other possible causes of exclusion are explored. Silencing of poor women is also discussed in terms of causes and impact on the discipline of psychology. We have not provided sufficient mechanisms to allow diverse groups of women to tell their own stories; instead, we have felt comfortable in making assumptions and drawing parallels that may be inappropriate and incorrect. Suggestions for achieving feminist goals are provided.

Download Full-text