Protection or Restriction? Women's Labour in Mary Barton

 

Protection or Restriction? Women’s Labour in Mary Barton, The Gaskell Society Journal, 7, 1993 pp.50-66

Kristine Swenson

‘from which they might slip below the line of domestic respectability into the degradation of prostitution and alcoholism represented by Mary’s Aunt Esther.’ P.50

‘Her first novel, Mary Barton, demonstrates that Gaskell took the unusual position of thinking work a positive experience for young women.’ The factory girls in the novel’s first chapter are striking for their ‘acuteness and intelligence of countenance’. Contrary to the stereotype of factory girls as ‘loose’, Gaskell stresses that they ‘held themselves aloof, not in a shy, but rather in an independent way, assuming an indifferent manner to the noisy wit or obstreperous compliments’ of the younf men around them.’ 56

Chapter 2 Prostitution and the Working Woman

‘As Patsy Stoneman has pointed out, working women in Gaskell’s fiction ‘exercise responsibility’ and ‘confront real crises’ with ‘good sense’, while non-working, middle-class women are ‘infantilised’ p.54

Acton Prostitution 1857 was a proponent of the Contagious Diseases Act and the sanitation of prostitution he ‘asserted that these women were a ‘transient population’ that, after a few years of prostitution, often re-entered respectable society through marriage. They rarely faced, he said, the sort of destitution and death that Gaskell shows through Esther.’ P.54

‘Prostitution, then, is predominantly an economic rather than a moral problem in Mary Barton, caused by social evils rather than the woman’s sexual perversity.’ P.55

Vagrancy laws

‘It is difficult to know precisely which ‘model’ of prostitution Gaskell would have agreed with… We do know that Gaskell was aware of the conditions of prostitution through her own experience and through that of Thomas Wright, who like his fictionalized character in Mary Barton spent his time visiting prisoners, ‘endeavoring to work upon them morally and religiously.’ P.55

‘Most significantly, Esther turns to prostitution not as a direct result of her sexual involvement with a soldier – an act which Gaskell treats with surprising sympathy – but because she cannot support herself after he deserts her.’ P.55

‘Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly assert that in the early nineteenth century lower-middle-class fears of ‘pauperism, crime, prostitution, drunkenness, and other “diseases”’ brought about an efficient system of preventive policing’ by which the homeless could be imprisoned and put to hard labour. To Gaskell, such imprisonment appeared futile: Esther’s month-long term does not reform her, it merely makes it impossible for her to warn Mary of impending danger.’ P.55

Aina Rubenius suggests that Gaskell’s best answer for the problem of prostitution is education: ‘in Mary Barton [Gaskell] drew attention to the pernicious effect of such ignorance [of evil] in young girls’. P.56 SIMILAR TO OPIUM GASKELL’S REFORM WAS EDUCATION.

William Hogarth, Harlott's Progress Plate 2, 1732, Royal Collection Trust, [accessed 12 August 2022].