The Struggle for the Breeches. Gender and the Making of the British Working Class

Linking the personal and the political, Anna Clark depicts the making of the working class in Britain as a “struggle for the breeches.” Working people faced a sexual crisis, she claims, as men and women faced confusing moral choices in courtship, fought over love and power in marriage, and competed for jobs in factories and workshops. Clark shows how working people in Glasgow, Lancashire, and London created distinctively gendered strategies to overcome these conflicts.
Many artisans sought solidarity in a bachelor journeymen’s culture that nurtured trade unions but also fostered misogyny and libertinism. Male textile workers, however, seem to have cooperated more with women at work and at home, gaining power in the factories when women vigorously supported their strikes.
By integrating gender into the analysis of class formation, Clark transforms the traditional narrative of working-class history. Radicals eventually abandoned both artisan misogyny and textile workers’ cooperation, instead adopting a rhetoric of domesticity that solved the sexual crisis but narrowly defined the working class movement as masculine.
Anna Clark is Associate Professor of History at the University of North Carolina. She is the author of “Women’s Silence, Men’s Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845” (1987).