Ann McClintock

“’Massa’ and Maids”

Articulation

• Articulation of class, gender, race• Gender: an articulated category, constructed through and

by class (feminine women vs masculine women), just as gender is used as a regulatory discourse to manage class (working class women unrefined, not at home)

• Class and sexuality managed and policed by discourse on race

• Analogue b/w working-class women and black men; b/w prostitutes and blacks (dangerous criminality); b/w slum and colony

East End

TriangulationGender/Class/Race

Class structure of the household

• class anxieties• construction of binary types of womanhood• middle-classness possible only because of

female labour• social formation of Victorian middle-class life:

imperialism integral to middle-class-ness• Imperialism and the cult of domesticity

Social history of the family through a psychoanalytic framework

• Figure of the nurse/mother: unwaged upper class woman vs waged working class woman

• Female domestic workers, largest category of workers outside of agriculture (late 19th c)

• Complex power relations—with the children (emotional dependence; sexual and psychological dominance); with the employers

• Doubled image of Victorian womanhood—not just an aesthetic feature, but based in psycho-social reality (critique of Gilbert and Gubar) domestic work carried on mostly by women (largest labour category after agriculture)

• Family as site of a sexual economy; class structure of the household; material division of women by labour and class

• Social power relations: maid/child/adult• “threshold figure”: site of anxiety

Freud’s nanny

• Freud’s elision of his nanny, a shadowy figure (theory); ousted from his theory of Femininity

• Yet played a formative role; intimate functions (memory)

• The historical role of working class women• Women seen as object choices, not in terms of

social identification

City/body

• the city; mapped as feminine space/body• city full of women/working class: nursemaids,

milkwomen, streetsellers, prostitutes• Munby as flaneur; fluid identity, assured through

power• walking as imperial genre (mastery); optics of truth:

empiricism cf. museum and exhibition hall;• spectacle of the poor working woman in the city,

those who did menial work• rustic contrast to surrounding urban elegance