Review

Reviewed Work(s): Growing up Poor: Home, School and Street in London, 1870-1914 by
Anna Davin
Review by: Nancy A. Hewitt
Source: Social History, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Oct., 1997), pp. 353-356
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4286451
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 October 1997 Reviews 353

Anna Davin, Growing Up Poor

(River Orams Press, London
Women's history and family hi
to gain the same scholarly atten
far more serious analysis than
exploration of childhood in th
change that. She analyses the e
the lives of labouring folk were
cational reform. In the proces
standing of the moral econom
A small but growing literature
Their Own Lives, Eileen Boris's
dren of the Poor, and now Davi
in the Anglo-American world
ness, social control and the sex
contours of working-class ch
being redefined by the bourge
Childhood, Davin argues, is re
poor and affluent families, and
dren and their parents, teacher
childhood and the assumptions
turn, relations at home, on th
panorama that captures the cu
girlhood, among the poor.
In pursuing this research, Davin is well aware of the hazards faced: scarce and fragmentary
evidence of children's own ideas and attitudes, the biases of middle-class observers and the prob-
lems of imposing present-day values on past practices. When discussing child labour, corporal
punishment and homework, Davin makes clear the pitfalls that await historians who combine
empathy and analysis in their studies of working-class life, but she proves adept at balancing the
familiar and the foreign.
Like the recollections of childhood that many of us hold, Growing Up Poor offers, on the one
hand, inviting images of loving families, friendly neighbours and lively adventures and, on the
other, frightening flashes of familial conflict, community antagonism and personal suffering.
Though Davin favours the more idyllic vision, she reminds us repeatedly of the acute crises
occasioned by disease, unemployment, eviction and death, and the chronic discomforts of
hunger, cold, overcrowding and overwork.
Even when describing the most mundane aspects of life - such as sleeping in crowded
quarters - Davin maintains the tension between poignant and painflil experiences and suggests
the ease with which one flowed into the other. 'Women's work', she notes,'often went on late
into the night. The drowsy child was lulled by sounds of continuing adult activity - washing
up perhaps, or the drone of the sewing machine.' But night could also be "'made hideous ...
by wife-beating, the return home of drunken men and women, occasional midnight flittings,
and the incessant barking of a number of dogs chained up"' (54-5).
Davin offers this rich layering of descriptions by employing an astonishing array of sources.
Though the evidence she gathers is fragmented, biased and almost always authored by adults,

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 354 Social History VOL. 22: NO. 3

she weaves it into a compeUing tapestry

girl, in working-class London. In some cases, Davin piles detail upon detail to capture a single
dimension of life. In a few short pages, for instance, she explores gender boundaries for school-
girls by examining family arguments over whether girls could wear hobnail boots, data on the
strikingly high proportion of schoolgirls with bad eyesight (most likely caused by household
confinement and needlework), the problems that accompanied attempts at achieving
'respectability' in rough neighbourhoods and commentaries on the memories of'tomboys'.
For Davin, common understandings of childhood among the poor are rendered meaningful
by locating them within larger institutional structures - patterns of housing, schooling and
employment. At the same time, the structures are made vivid by vignettes of particular cases.
For example, in linking employment and settlement in Battersea, Davin traces the changing
economic opportunities available in the district between the I85os, when it was 'dominated by
market gardens', and the I89os, when it emerged as an industrial and residential quarter. In just
a couple of paragraphs she shows how Irish women and men were joined and then displaced
by construction workers, who themselves moved on as artisans, railwaymen, laundrywomen and
factory hands moved in.
The descriptive power of Grouing Up Poor is complemented by its analytic insights and impli-
cations. Davin makes at least three important contributions to debates among, and between,
working-class and women's historians. First, she offers in the sexual division of childhood a
basis for the persistence of the sexual division of labour. Second, she complicates existing
interpretations of social control through her analyses of educational reform. And third, she
reconfigures the origins of class consciousness by analysing child labour through a feminist lens.
Davin agrees with earlier scholars that gender distinctions are relatively insignificant for
infants and very young children. Even at later ages, depending on the sex ratios in individual
families, some boys might take on 'girls' ' work like baby-minding or shopping and some girls
might embrace 'boys' ' clothing and street games. Nevertheless, as girls and boys grew up, dis-
tinctions of appearance, domestic responsibility and work increased. Of course, the very defi-
nition of 'growing up' varied by time period, law, custom, class, family composition, and ethnic
and racial background. Still, within any substrata of society, differences by sex emerged when-
ever 'growing up' began.
This sexual division of childhood was reinforced in nearly every sphere of life. In the family,
girls were expected to take on a full load of chores earlier than boys and, partly as a result, were
more often confined within the household. The range of work performed by girls was
immense, and much of it involved heavy lifting, close concentration and tedious repetition.
Baby-tending, laundry, hauling water, cooking, sewing, marketing, scrubbing floors and labour-
ing in a vast array of piecework occupations were commonplace activities for girls, starting from
the age of seven. Moreover, when legislators began to implement child labour laws, much of
'girls' 'work was exempted because it took place within households rather than shops and fac-
tories.

Fortunately for girls who sought the street, family business was often conducted on
sidewalks and in the markets. Out in the neighbourhoods, however, girls were usual
restricted in their movements by responsibilities for younger children, a lack of shoe
and popular notions of appropriate feminine behaviour that grew more burdensome
In middle-class writings from the mid-nineteenth century on, the representative poor
a 'little mother' or a streetwise peddler, both old beyond their years and bearing respo

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 October 1997 Reviews 355

that were supposed to be shou

as lower class by his independ
Domestic obligations and cu
They were likelier to arrive la
attention. When girls did atte
cating proper feminine behav
in arithmetic than boys, but
than mathematical, instruct
school hours devoted to secu
earning' subject in the I 88os;
though it was unclear whethe
Over time, schools intruded
division of childhood and adding a bourgeois twist. As truancy and child labour laws com-
bined to keep children in school longer, parents were exposed to visits of enquiry by truant
officers, to prosecution, to fines, and even, in some cases, to prison. Increasingly teachers were
seen and saw themselves as missionaries, and the 'education of working-class children was pre-
sented as their rescue from the abyss' (I34). These evangelical efforts were etched with gender
distinctions. Though girls were absent more often than their brothers, truancy was defined as
a boys' problem. On the other hand, it was girls, through the training they received in domes-
tic science, who were assigned the task of civilizing the working-class home.
By tracing the roots of the sexual division of labour to childhood, Davin makes clear that
its persistence was unlikely to be seriously undermined by laws that affected only adult women
and men. She demonstrates as well that access to education, while certainly important, also had
the potential to sharpen gender distinctions, through the disciplining of parents as well as chil-
dren. Moreover, extensive contact between teachers and working-class parents often reinforced
middle-class demands for more legislative 'protections' for children. Schools then served as one
of the main vehicles for implementing the new class-based regulations.
The relationship of childhood to the development of class consciousness was forcefillly con-
veyed by Carolyn Steedman in Landscapefor a Good Woman (I986). Steedman drew on her own
English childhood of the ig50S and her mother's experiences with an absent husband, a hostile
community, and health and welfare visitors to explain how her mother became a working-class
Conservative. For many feminist scholars, this compelling if depressing tale resonated with and
reinforced dissatisfaction with scholarly analyses that traced the origins of class consciousness
only to the shopfloor. Building on a generation of community studies of working-class women's
activism, feminist historians began to argue for the importance of neighbourhood and familial
networks to the success (or failure) of labour movements and the redefinition of those move-
ments to include such community-based actions as kosher meat boycotts and union label cam-
paigns.
Growing Up Poor suggests that these analyses be taken one step further. Using the expansive
definition of work introduced by women's historians in the I960s, Davin documents the range
and extent of children's labour as well as its division by sex. She shows in detail how schools
inscribed bourgeois class and gender hierarchies into working-class curricula and communi-
ties. And she demonstrates that even as child labour laws restricted wage-earning among chil-
dren, they did little to transform the unpaid domestic labour of girls. Taken together, these
findings suggest that the making of the working class began well before labouring women and

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 356 Social History VOL. 22: NO. 3

men reached the shopfloor. For adults, wage

work - served to modify a consciousness co
rather than to create one anew.
Anna Davin's Growing Up Poor opens up d
all-too-brief chapter on 'Children, national
dissertations. Some of her conclusions are
number of examples is overwhelming and,
ments. In part because of the topical organ
time seem forced. At least for girls, contin
education appear to offiet supposed transf
however, Growing Up Poor provides a crit
women and of the working class, one that
with childhood, but histories of the worki
to have a happy childhood; but, as Davin con
to have a better historicized childhood.
Nancy A. Hewitt
Duke University

Maurice Larkin, Religion, Politics and Preferment in France since 1890. La Belle Epoque and
Its Legacy (i995), xiv + 249 (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, ?30.00/$49.95).
In Religion, Politics and Preferment Maurice Larkin meticulously evaluates the conventional claim
that the French Third Republic, particularly in the pre-World War I decades, discriminated
against committed Catholics who sought civil service positions. This charge was voiced during
the Belle Epoque and is standard in most histories of the republic. As he did in his earlier study
of the Third Republic and the Catholic church, Larkin makes exhaustive and skilful use of
archival sources. He documents in some detail the historian's travails searching for documen-
tation of historical stereotypes. Ministerial archives, the obvious source, were of limited value
since civil servants' personnel files remain closed for IOO-i20 years after they become inactive.
Through perseverance and luck he was able to gather a sufficient sample of individual civil
servant dossiers. Larkin also turned to less direct but rich sources - the records of two promi-
nent Catholic secondary schools, the archives of the Jesuit and Assumptionist Orders, the
Vatican Archives, the papers of the monarchist pretenders, and the records of the Grand Orient
rite of the Freemasons.
The results of this impressive research underscore the complexity of the past and the chal-
lenges faced by historians analysing such complexities. (Surely Larkin intends some irony when
he entitles Parts I and II,'As it was?'.) Larkin poses three major questions. Did the republican
republic of I880-1914 discriminate against committed Catholics seeking civil service positions?
Did republicans have any basis for their often expressed fears that committed Catholics were
unreliable representatives of the state or even posed a serious danger to it? How have relations
between the republican state, Catholics and their civil service careers changed since 1914?
The question of Catholic attitudes and activities toward the republic is explored first.
Although there is nothing new in this story, by juxtaposing various elements - the Dreyfuis
Affair, Catholic educational institutions, Catholics and the army, the activities of particular
orders, Vatican policies - Larkin underscores an essential characteristic of French culture which

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