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Gender and the Work of Words
Author(s): Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

Source: Cultural Critique, No. 13, The Construction of Gender and Modes of Social Division (
Autumn, 1989), pp. 229-278
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Gender and the Work of Words
Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse
The political and social processes by which the Western Euro-

pean societies were put in order are not very apparent, have
been forgotten, or have become habitual. They are part of
our most familiar landscape, and we don't perceive them any-
more. But most of the once scandalized people.
-Michel Foucault, 1982
U pon first approaching Birmingham in 1741, William Hutton

was surprised by "the prodigious number of blacksmith
shops upon the road." Writing some years later, he recalled,
In some of these shops I observed one, or more females,

stript of their upper garment, and not overcharged with the
lower, wielding the hammer with all the grace of'the sex. The
beauties of their face were rather eclipsed by the smut of the
anvil; or, in poetical phrase, the tincture of the forge had
The authors would like to acknowledgethe RockefellerFoundation'ssupport

for Nancy Armstrong'sresearch on this project. We thank the Center for the
Humanities, Wesleyan University, for providing the intellectual environment
where we drafted this essay. We especiallythank Henry Abelove, MichaelDen-
ning, and Catherine Hall for their scholarlyadvice on our historical research,
and Rey Chow, Lisa Lowe, George Mariscal,and Masao Miyoshi for their valu-
able comments on the manuscript.
o 1990 by Cultural Critique. 0882-4371 (Fall 1989). All rights reserved.
229
230 Nancy Armstrongand Leonard Tennenhouse
taken possession of those lips, which might have been taken

by the kiss.
Struckwith the novelty, I enquired, "Whetherthe ladies
in this country shod horses?"but was answered, with a smile,
"They are nailers."'
This well-known scene provides a piece of cultural amber, pre-
serving what would otherwise be for us an unimaginable con-
fluence of social elements: a literate man traveling through the
industrial Midlands, there to wonder how "the county could sup-
port so many of the same occupation"-to wonder and to ponder
the second curiosity that many of the blacksmiths were women.
The historical significance of the relationship frozen in this scene
is condensed further in the joke, "They are nailers." Told as if at
his own expense, the one-liner actually superimposes a more
modern perspective upon that of a cultural locale where labor was
not sex-determined. Just as Hutton finds it inappropriate for
blacksmiths to be women, his informant, wise in the ways of Bir-
mingham forges, finds it inappropriate for nailers to shoe horses.
In the forty years intervening between Hutton's first encounter
with the female blacksmiths and his writing of the account, how-
ever, history had begun to tip the scales in his direction. His view
of work soon prevailed over the local brand of knowledge, forever
identifying the blacksmith, in her ignorance of polite behavior,
and not the intellectual, in his ignorance of artisanal practices, as
the butt of the joke.
It is our contention that the relationship of these phenom-
ena-the visibility of work, the consciousness of its gender, and
the compulsion to represent people in terms of the kind of work
they do-cannot be understood apart from one another or from
the class relations they reproduce. Work makes an exalted entry
into words, we will argue, but it does not do so in order to glorify
those who labor with their hands. Hutton's tableau reveals how
gender and labor in combination instantly and irrevocably differ-
entiate a class engaged in so-called "productive labor" from one
which works primarily with words. The production of this differ-
1. William Hutton, An History of Birmingham(1783; reprint, West Yorkshire:

Ilkley, 1976), 82*.
Gender and the Work of Words 231
ence between productive labor and intellectuallabor prepares the

cultural ground for the joke whose internal dynamics are immor-
talized in Freud'sjoke book.2 One class, embodied only in a voice,
represents another as a body, only a body, standing mutely naked
before the observing eye. By casting what he sees into words, the
modern intellectualnot only bodies forth work, he also genders it.
The modern joke is a sexualjoke. Hutton's "poeticalphrase"sets
up a triangulated relationshipamong the teller, his audience, and
the object of the joke, a relationship that empowers the first two
positions as it feminizes the other. Produced for a literate au-
dience, Hutton's use of the sentimental aesthetic works to subor-
dinate not only women workers, but also a whole class of people
whose women work. It subordinates this class of men to men
whose women are fully clothed, stay clean, and radiate femininity.
Hutton's appreciation of the working women's beauty is coun-
tered by his sense that there is something wrong with women
working alongside men, their bodies "striptof the upper garment
and not overcharged with the lower." In a single sentence the
near-neoclassicalbeauty of the laboring body loses face and be-
comes something potentially pornographic. If being female can-
cels out the virtues of being a blacksmith,then the reverse is true
as well. Women at work lose the "graceof the sex" along with an
identity that has been "eclipsed by the smut of the anvil." In
contrast with the speech he once aimed at his informant, Hutton's
written account obviously addresses a readership that shares this
feminine standard of beauty.
We may consider his observationsas the tentative beginnings
of a kind of documentation that would flourish during the follow-
ing century as countless bureaucratsand social scientists together
produced an amazingly intricate social classificationsystem based
on the kinds of work people did and the physical and moral
conditions under which they performed it. During the next sever-
al decades-that is, the 1780s to the 1850s-readers learned to
view such scenes of ungendered labor with less wonder than con-
tempt. Perceiving difference as deficiency, they saw the working
2. Daniel Cottom has addressed the cultural politics of Freud's analysis of

jokes in "The Enchantment of Interpretation," Critical Inquiry 11, no. 4 (June
1985): 573-94.
woman as a female who looked and behaved-grotesquely-like

a male. They saw the man who lived, loved, or worked with such a
woman as insufficiently gendered in his own right. The stage was
set for men of opposing classes to agree that economic depen-
dence was desirable in a woman. As the gendered representation
of labor grew more scientific and the categories and statistics that
calculated its value became increasingly complex, the aesthetics of
gender remained the standard for measuring what was called "the
moral condition of the working class." In a world where the edu-
cated classes understood labor in terms of man-hours and male
bodies, women who performed productive labor were automat-
ically out of place-in a manner of speaking, "loose." The physi-
cal appearance of such women thus supplied signs of the "moral
condition" of an entire class.3 Once the problem of poverty had
been so embodied, moral pressure came from all directions to
remove women from jobs that "should" be filled by men.
In an effort to understand both the moment when gender
and labor became visible in and through one another and the
power exercised by their conjunction, we will bring together three
strands of cultural history which the modern division of knowl-
edge tends to disentangle and keep apart. We will look, first, at
the gendering of labor during the eighteenth and nineteenth cen-
turies to consider how this information factors into scholarly ac-
counts of the modern period-that is, from the beginning of the
Enlightenment to the present day. In pursuing this line of in-
quiry, one encounters at every turn much the same problem con-
fronting William Hutton-a problem with classifying the object of
analysis. In our case, however, to seek out the relationship be-
tween gender and labor as it changes during the modern period is
to encounter words. So much slippage occurs within the catego-
ries of "women" and "work" whenever they combine to form an
object of representation that one cannot grasp the history of the
practices so classified before looking at the terms themselves.
Thus we turn to "work" in the second section of this essay, and to
3. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, FamilyFortunes:Men and Women

of the English Middle Class, 1780-1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1987), for an account of the division of domestic practice from the workplace
during the early nineteenth century and how the practices of a social minority-
the respectable classes-came to be the norm.
the discourse that emerged in the years following the English

Revolution. This discourse sought to equate the notion of work
with the health and wealth of the nation, and that of the nation
with the work performed by its citizens.
But again, in pursuing the notion of work that was embodied
in the common Englishman, we confront the problem that work
did not retain a stable meaning or value when it passed into the
language of social theory and finally into reports on the condition
of the working class. The concept of work underwent a form of
slippage that changed its whole political thrust as it was infused, in
the manner of Hutton's blacksmiths, with moral value. We shall
examine but a small sampling of the printed material that at-
tached moral value to the performance of certain forms of work.
Our analysis should suggest how "work," so moralized, em-
powered some people and subordinated others. This investiga-
tion of "work" in relation to gender prepares us to question the
power exercised by those who described or represented work, as
Hutton said, "in poetical phrase." Our third section argues that
discursive strategies which gender labor constitute a form of
agency in their own right. We turn to Milton's Paradise Lost as the
protomodern example of a gendering process that is at once aes-
thetic and political.
The purpose of plotting the complex interrelationship
among divergent kinds of historical information is actually quite
simple. We want to resituate our object on the plane of writing
where one can see how gendered labor established the conditions
for the joke. It is our contention that writing produced a specific
conjunction of work and gender which empowered those who
bought, managed, and represented work-much as it empowers
us today. In saying this, we are proposing to turn literary histor-
ical analysis upon itself. Certain anthropologists have, of late, re-
opened the question of the participant-observer in order to con-
sider the imperialism of writing about another culture.4 We are
calling for a similar reexamination of literary historical pro-
4. See, for example, James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing
Culture: The Poetics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1986) and George E. Marcus and Michael M. J. Fischer, An-
thropology as Cultural Critique: An Experimental Moment in the Human Sciences
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
cedures: what are we doing when we use contemporary theory to

gain access to cultural moments other than our own? What politi-
cal project compels new literaryhistories?Such self-awareness,we
believe, requires any literary scholar to acknowledge the political
power exercised through his or her interpretive performance.
This, in our estimation, entails understanding one's power, not as
that of individual intellectuals competing for institutional re-
sources, but as the power a group of experts possesses by virtue of
its specialized knowledge and the textualizing procedures this
qualifies its members to perform. Thus, one might imagine this
power as that of a class within a class. The very heart of middle-
class culture, we believe, this class of intellectuals,experts, authors
of all kinds, and, yes, academics,characteristicallyattributespoliti-
cal agency to individualsand groups of individualsoutside of and
other than itself.
Women at Work: 1741-1848
William Hutton was first "struckby the novelty" of female

blacksmithson the outskirts of Birmingham about the same time
the pattern of employment in England was beginning a distinctive
though heretofore unnoted change.5 Statistics garnered from
rural settlement examinations for the south of England between
1690 and 1860 suggest that seasonal unemployment for women
between 1690 and 1750 followed exactly the same pattern as for
men (though, to be sure, more women than men sought unem-
ployment settlements).6 Contrary to widely held assumptions
about the gender of work, such data make clear that, while it is
probably always a factor in determining what task an individual
performs, gender is neither a necessary nor a natural way of
organizing work. Prior to the eighteenth century, writes Alice
Clark, guild records show that "manytrades which in later times
have become entirely closed to women were then so dependent on
5. See K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the LabouringPoor: Social Change and Agrarian

England, 1660-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 17-49.
6. Ibid., 21-22.
their labour that sisters are mentioned specifically in rules con-

cerning the conditions of manufacture."7 Quoting from the char-
ter of the Armourers and Brasiers granted in 1620, Clark reveals
their lack of concern for sexual difference in addressing "'the
Master and Wardens and Brothers and Sisters of the frater-
nity.' "8 That women's admission into such fraternities was some-
what restricted can be inferred from directives drawn up by the
Glovers, Leathersellers, Girdlers, and Merchant Taylors to pro-
hibit the employment of anyone who had not been apprenticed,
with the exception of "'the wife or daughter'" and the "'brothers
son or daughter."'9 On the other hand, it cannot be said such
restrictions constituted the rule. The charters of the Merchants,
Mercers, Grocers, Apothecaries, Goldsmiths, Drapers, Uphol-
sterers, and Embroiderers simply addressed the "free brother or
sister."10 Natalie Zemon Davis has suggested that "female wage-
earners emerge as a much larger sector of the preindustrial econ-
omy than Clark imagined, part of the female labor force making
up, together with unskilled males, a kind of preproletariat."11
Evidence indicates this practice of female apprenticeship in the
trades extended well beyond London, as O. J. Dunlop noted some
time ago: "From the indentures which are preserved, and from
7. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982), 183.
8. Quoted in ibid., 184.
9. Ibid., 184.
10. In the introduction to Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, ed.
Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), Lindsey
Charles reminds us that "many gilds had social and religious functions which
were as important as their role in regulating and protecting trade. Women might
participate fully in the religious and social aspects of a gild while having only a
limited role in its economic life" (10). No doubt there is some truth in this, as
Clark herself acknowledged, but the fact remains that early charters usually
address the "free brother or sister" without qualification. The later charter
amendments that specifically excluded women would hardly seem to have been
necessary if female participation had only been confined to participating in
religious or social events. For an account of the gradual exclusion of women
from French guilds, see Natalie Zemon Davis, "Women and the Crafts in
Sixteenth-Century Lyon," in Womenand Workin Pre-IndustrialEurope, ed. Barba-
ra A. Hanawalt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 167-97.
11. Natalie Zemon Davis, "'Women's History' in Transition: The European
Case," Feminist Studies 3, nos. 3-4 (Spring-Summer 1976): 86.
the enrollment and minute books of towns and guilds, it is appar-

ent that both in the country and in provincial towns girls were
bound to men in all kinds of trades throughout the sixteenth,
seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries."12Ivy Pinchbeckcontends
that until several decades into the eighteenth century women
were still serving apprenticeships in trades ranging from stone-
mason to goldsmith, as well as the retail trades, food distribution,
and catering businesses.'3 Most conclusively, on the basis of sev-
enteenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century parish appren-
ticeship registers in the southern counties, K. D. M. Snell reports,
"Over the three centuries (and the nineteenth-century figures
virtuallyall end by 1834), of the total apprenticeships as many as
34 per cent were for girls."14
From 1751 to 1792, seasonal unemployment began to di-
verge according to a new principle of gender. Men applied for
settlement during the spring when women were performing pas-
toral activities associated with calving and spring haying. Then,
during harvest season the situation reversed itself. "So," Snell
concludes, "from an environment with a relativelyhigh degree of
sexually shared labour, in which gender differences appear to
have been almost a matter of indifference to employers, we have
moved to a situation indicating an unprecedentedly marked sex-
ual specializationof work."15Although increased employment for
women in certain sectors was partly responsible for the division of
labor, division on the basis of gender brought with it the devalua-
tion of women's labor in relation to that performed by men. While
male wages rose, "female real wages were falling from about
1760."16This pattern-which we shall call feminization-was not
limited to agricultural labor but emerged throughout a whole
range of occupations related to manufacture, mining, and trade.
12. Quoted in Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 273. On this point Snell
comments, "While such female apprenticeship to the elitist London Companies
can readily be documented, their involvement was probably more extensive
outside these Companies, and in nbn-gildated towns and elsewhere" (fn. 6).
13. Ivy Pinchbeck, Women Workersand the Industrial Revolution, 1750-1850
(London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1930), 282-305.
14. Ibid., 278.
15. Ibid., 22.
16. Ibid., 137.
Such a pattern clearly spelled doom for the world of work that
William Hutton encountered in 1741 with a peculiar mixture of
surprise, erotic interest, and moral disapproval. His account was
published in 1781. Fifteen years later, Hutton's counterpart
David Davies saw a problem with the decreasing employment of
women. Much to his consternation, he writes, the "whole burden
of providing for their families rests upon men," producing a
sharply "increased number of dependent poor." Poised at an his-
torical crossroads, Davies can still see two ways of remedying the
situation, "viz. that of raising wages, and that of providing employ-
mentfor women and girls," but history had already decided on the
first course and was eliminating the second.17 Within fifty years,
"providing employment for women and children" no longer
seemed an obvious or appropriate way to curb increasing poverty.
As various industries hired women and children instead of
men, wages fell, and owners and workers eventually agreed that
the practice of hiring women and children was a major part of the
problem. They began to deal with the problem of poverty by
increasing dependency for women and children and increasing
wages for men.'8 This is not to say that women simply dropped
their hammers and forsook the smut of the anvil for the sanctity
of the home; indeed, the occupational census for 1841 shows
there were still at least 512 female blacksmiths in Britain. Nor was
such labor thought to inflict more suffering on women than on
men who did the same work. As late as 1843 a report on the
Birmingham region tells us "the effects of early work, particularly
in forges, do them no special harm" but "render these girls per-
fectly independent."'9 To understand how such information sup-
ported reforms that removed women and children from certain
areas of work, thereby thwarting attempts to use women and chil-
dren to lower the price of labor, we must return to the domain of
aesthetics. The evidence strongly suggests that aesthetic judg-
ments (of the kind we see in Hutton's portrayal of working wom-
17. Quoted in Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 56.

18. By the early 1840s two arguments appeared that were commonly used
against the employment of women in factories. See Catherine Gallagher, The
Industrial Reformationof English Fiction: Social Discourseand Narrative Form, 1832-
1867 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 123-24.
19. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 298.
en) both shaped and fueled the moral rhetoric characterizing lat-
er reports on the condition of the working classes.
While conducting the 1842 survey for Parliament on the
moral and physical conditions of children working in the mines,
authors expressed disgust with such regularity that we must re-
gard it as a characteristic trope of the documentary style. Given
the conditions under which miners worked until well into our
century, it may initially strike us as only human for nineteenth-
century investigators to feel revulsion. But revulsion, however
human, takes on a culture- and class-specific form when it is ver-
balized. A parliamentary report by the well-known reformer J. C.
Symons on the working conditions for children in the mines pro-
vides a case in point. In the following passage, we can see a well-
established poetics of gender guiding his pen to much surer moral
strokes than we find in Hutton's earlier and more tentative eval-
uation of female blacksmiths:
Whilst I was in the pit the Rev. Mr. Bruce, of Wadsley, and
the Rev. Mr. Nelson, of Rotherham, who accompanied me,
and remained outside, saw another girl of ten years of age,
also dressed in boy's clothes, who was employed in hurrying,
and these gentlemen saw her at work. She was a nice-looking
little child, but of course as black as a tinker, and with a little
necklace round her throat.20
Like Hutton, Symons is clearly struck with the novelty of the

scene. But instead of being merely ignorant, in the manner of his
predecessor, as to the nature of the tasks performed by this girl,
Symons seems unable to see any relationship between what such a
girl wore and what she had to do in order to survive. He can only
see what this girl lacks in the way of middle-class femininity. She
appears "nice-looking," even though she wears "boy's clothes" and
is "black as a tinker," because her gender is not only concealed by
clothing and coal dust but also marked "with a little necklace." By
way of contrast, he goes on to describe two girls who strike him as
"indecent" and "revolting." It is worth noting how he compares
20. Children'sEmployment Commission, First Reportof the Commissioners.

Mines
(1842; reprint, Shannon: Irish UniversityPress, 1968): 24.
the mine in which they labor to a brothel in a way that suggests the
children have sullied the mine, not the other way around:
In two other pits in the Huddersfield Union I have seen the

same sight. In one near New Mills,the chain, passing high up
between the legs of two of these girls, had worn large holes in
their trousers; and any sight more disgustingly indecent or
revolting can scarcelybe imagined than these girls at work-
no brothel can beat it.21
Moral revulsion displaces whatever sympathy the reader may

have harbored for children who labor most of their abbreviated
lives under unimaginable conditions. Such revulsion earned Sym-
ons respect with the literate classes at the expense of those people
whose children worked in the mine. We did so by positioning the
reader in the relation of a voyeur to his feminine object. Freud's
joke dynamic is fully in place.
Indeed, we find inordinate concern for the moral condition
of the underclasses rearing its head in discourse just where we
might expect a polite readership to be overwhelmed with a sense
of national shame. This concern transformed socioeconomic rep-
resentations so that problems accompanying industrialization
could be relocated in those who worked for little pay under such
conditions. Of equal significance for purposes of our argument,
however, is the pressure gender brings to bear on the laboring
poor when their conditions appear to be relatively tolerable.
Painting a rather different picture from Symons's, an 1843 report
on working conditions in Birmingham describes female black-
smiths in this manner: "They often enter the beer-shops, call for
pipes, and smoke these pipes, like men;.indeed there seems little
difference in their circumstances from those of men."22 The
statement does not suggest that economic independence is good
for women, but rather that they become economically indepen-
dent at the cost of their womanhood-an ugly picture indeed.
Aesthetics intervenes in the economic report to produce a contra-
diction whereby a female is not female if she works. It might have
21. Ibid., 22.

22. Quoted in Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 298.
been easier to contest such representations and the economic pol-

icies they justified had the underlying assumptions concerning
gender been spelled out in so many words. But there was appar-
ently no resisting these assumptions when writing embodied them
as women who were both grotesquely masculine and lewdly femi-
nine, the object of no one's desire, and the butt of a massive
conspiratorial joke. So embodied, the power of the contradiction
is such that one cannot think of work without thinking of gender,
or of gender without thinking of work.
Testimony to the power of this contradiction is the relative
lack of historical information concerning women's work until the
period of industrialization.23 True to the categories of nine-
teenth-century discourse, contemporary literary and historical
scholarship tends to regard women's work as a separate and sec-
ondary category of both labor history and history per se. There
have been, of course, some quite remarkable studies, several of
which have been noted above, from those of Alice Clark and Ivy
Pinchbeck to those of Natalie Zemon Davis and Joan W. Scott and
Louise Tilly, all of which battle against an aesthetics that natural-
izes and universalizes a postindustrial configuration of gender
and labor.24 These studies suggest that, while gender was a factor
in the organization of work prior to industrialization, it did not
cut across the whole field of economic practices to shape certain of
them into an autonomous masculine sphere. While it is not our
place to question the data of such pioneers as Clark and Pinch-
beck or their recent interrogators, we do feel qualified to remark,
from a perspective within literary studies, on how little informa-
tion there is on women's work in preindustrial England, how sel-
dom it enters into major political accounts of either the early
23. By way of contrast to the nineteenth century, women's work in prein-

dustrial England is a relatively neglected area of research. Although sixty to
seventy years old, the books by Alice Clark and Ivy Pinchbeck have remained
until very recently the most substantial and important research to date on this
subject (see Lindsey Charles, "Introduction," in Womenand Workin Pre-Industrial
England, 8).
24. Natalie Zemon Davis, Societyand Culturein Early ModernFrance: Eight Essays
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) and Louise A. Tilly and Joan W.
Scott, Women,Work,and Family, 2nd ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1978).
modern or modern periods, and how much of what there is seems

more ideology than anything else.
By "ideology" we refer to the two-pronged feminist argu-
ment that women 1) worked hand in hand in partnership with
men prior to the time when industrialization split domestic econo-
my off from political economy, or else 2) worked in a subordi-
nated position to men because they have always worked under
conditions of universal patriarchy.25 The two sides of this argu-
ment about the relationship between gender and labor disagree
absolutely over the fact and possibility of change in the gendered
distribution of work. But they nevertheless presuppose a single-
postindustrial-concept of work. Both positions define "work" as
productive labor and assume that work, so defined, is a masculine
practice.26
Scott and Tilly's 1978 study of women's work appears at first
to update the feminist argument conducted in these terms. They
agree with some traditional feminists that women's work did not
change all that profoundly with industrialization, but they do so in
order to reject the entire debate over how well the past performed
according to our modern middle-class understanding of equity
and emancipation for women. They argue that while women's
work did not change all that profoundly with industrialization,
25. It is worth noting that an earlier political tension between Clark and
Pinchbeck collapses within the problematic of contemporary feminism. Clark
employed the idea of an earlier working partnership in an argument for socialist
utopianism, and Pinchbeck insisted, to the contrary, that industrialization not
only gave married women an autonomous domestic sphere, the better to enjoy
the work of raising a family, but also opened to single women a wider range of
jobs at which they could earn a living.
26. Maxine Berg suggests the limitations of the entire debate conducted in
these terms. While she is convinced that the distribution of labor according to sex
changed markedly over the centuries, she also debunks the notion of an egalitar-
ian past where women worked side by side with men. The transition from an
early modern family economy to a modern family household system was neither
a simple linear process nor a continuous subordination of women to men.
Rather, it was a complex process involving elements of both. Thus, to take up
either side of the liberal feminist argument is, in Berg's view, to ignore the
implication of gender in "the complex character of the contract between market
and custom, individual and community that developed during the industrial
period" ("Women's Work, Mechanisation and the Early Phases of Industrialisa-
tion in England," in The Historical Meanings of Work, ed. Patrick Joyce [Cam-
bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987], 96).
men's work did. Moreover, men's work changed in a way that

subordinated women's work to it. If with this move Scott and Tilly
seem to carry the whole issue of gender from the marginalized
domain of women's work into the mainstream of labor history, the
preface to the second edition of their book makes this point ex-
plicit. There Scott and Tilly identify a need that arose during the
years between the first publication of the book and that of the
second edition in 1987, a need to rethink certain categories:
The three terms, women, work, and family, stand for the
analytical framework of the book, but each requires defini-
tion and explanation. We had a clear set of definitions when
we first wrote the book. Since that time discussions among
scholars (social historians and feminists) have raised new
questions about the relationshipof economic processes to cul-
ture and ideology and have introduced some new theoretical
frameworkswithin which to examine the relationship.27
A feminism that considers the history of the terms "gender" and

"work" necessarily not only challenges the essentialist ground of
liberal feminism, but also takes the feminist project directly into
the sacred domain of masculinist conceptions of work, politics,
and ultimately history itself. Feminism, Scott and Tilly imply,
must examine the language that defines "work" as productive
labor and assumes that labor, then, is a masculine practice.
In a recent critique of Gareth Stedman Jones's study of the
"languages of class," Scott contends that although Chartists op-
posed the privileges of property (in negotiating with those who
owned the means of production), they "did this by pointing out
the affinity of their constituents-as propertied citizens-with
those already enfranchised."28 To accomplish the political objec-
tive of placing themselves within the political body despite certain
differences, "Chartists drew on formulations which claimed that
27. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work,and Family, 3.

28. Joan W. Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-ClassHistory,"Inter-
nationalLaborand WorkingClassHistory,no. 31 (Spring 1987): 8. The critique is
directed at the introduction and "RethinkingChartism,"in Gareth Stedman
Jones, TheLanguageof Class:Studiesin EnglishWorking-Class
History,1832-1982
(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1983), 1-24, 90-178.
the fruits of one's labor or labor power itself were property."29

They thus produced a framework of common manhood within
which working men could agree to disagree about the distribution
of wealth and power and still negotiate their wages and the condi-
tions under which they worked. But if their power to sell labor
positioned working men within the framework of propertied peo-
ple, how was their class inferiority to be understood?
Scott demonstrates that gender supplied this (concealed)
principle of otherness: "The Chartists' demand for universal
manhood suffrage accepted the idea (clearly formulated in
Locke's Second Treatise)that only men concluded and entered the
social contract; indeed the identity Chartists claimed with those
already represented was that all were male property holders."30 It
requires but a simple turn of the cultural logic we have been
articulating to argue that when laboring men were included in the
body politic a new principle of exclusion took hold. The body
politic came to be legally identified with the body economic, and
this body was the symbolic embodiment of productive labor. The
masculinization of the laboring body excluded not only women
and children from that body but also-and this is the final para-
dox of gendered labor-anyone who occupied a position depen-
dent upon productive labor. Unemployed and otherwise depen-
dent men were subject to feminization too.
Work in Words: 1621-1690
Having suggested how gender and labor became visible to-

gether during the modern period, we would like to consider the
relationship between this image and the emergence of the mod-
ern bureaucratic state. To this point, we have sought to establish
that labor became visible in certain forms of writing well before it
did in any other way and that a tradition of writing continued up
through the Chartist negotiations and beyond to provide the basis
for enfranchising some and excluding others from the body poli-
tic. From this it follows that changes in political identity do not
29. Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," 9.

30. Ibid.
necessarily coincide with changes in the economy or the institu-

tions of state. Such a change can also arise from a struggle for the
symbols of power, and certainly does so when, for whatever rea-
son, a whole new social iconography supplants the established
symbols of power. To be successful, Marx and Engels remind us,
political conquest of any kind remains incomplete unless the
group who seizes power alsd acquires control over "the ideas of its
dominance."31 For their domination to appear necessary and
true, if not desirable and right, an emergent class has to seize hold
of the means of both intellectual and material production.
We do not feel we are contradicting ourselves by accepting
these premises and, at the same time, asking whether the distinc-
tion between material and intellectual production, as well as the
priority granted the one over the other, is not itself what Marx
and Engels call "a ruling idea." Our motive is a simple one. We
feel compelled to grant priority to the means of intellectual pro-
duction and the concrete relations arising therefrom because we
find it is all too easy to let ourselves off the hook-and, as scholars
and intellectuals, speak as passive witnesses to political history.
What else if not this is accomplished by denying the power inher-
ing in representation and the cast of people who control it? We
hope to expose the politics of such denial by explaining how cer-
tain authors infused the idea of work with new value nearly a
century before the new middle classes gained control of the Brit-
ish economy.
To demonstrate the kind of agency we think certain kinds of
writing acquired during the late seventeenth century, we will com-
pare the procedures proposed for dealing with the plague after
1665 to procedures that had been employed for the previous two
hundred years. We have found that whenever the body seemed
about to perish on a mass basis, the dominant conception of that
body suddenly became very clear. In examining solutions to the
problem of contagion over time, then, we will be able to demon-
strate how the dominant conception of the social body changed.
Indeed, we will argue, the onset of the modern period in England
was marked by the emergence of quarantine procedures that de-
31. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The GermanIdeology:Part One, ed. C. J.
Arthur (New York: International Publishers, 1985), 64-65.
fined the social body as a body at work. The claim we are making
for a relationship between visitations of the plague and the valor-
ization of work is hardly a new one to historians. On the basis of
precisely this relationship, a well-known argument singles out the
plague of 1348 as the cause for the 1349 Ordinance of Labourers,
contending that the depletion of the work force was an important
factor in a breakdown of the feudal relationship between land and
labor that marks the beginning of the early modern period.32 Not
so well examined is the relationship in writing between plague
and the idealization of manual labor marking the end of that
period.
To suggest the change that occurred when work assumed a
prominent place in writing, we would like to move back in time
for a moment and offer a few demonstrations of how early mod-
ern Europe dealt with the plague. The plague of 1348, rather
than a number of other events troubling Florence in the same
32. The plague increased the availability of land, killed off approximately
twenty-five percent of the landlords, and destroyed between one-third to one-
half of the labor force. The Ordinance of Labourers (1349) was intended to deal
with the labor crisis that followed. It declared that men and women under the
age of sixty had to work when required, and they must accept wages paid at the
rates of 1346. But the statute failed to hold down wages, to prevent the move-
ment of laborers, and thus to maintain the traditional patterns of landholding.
On this point, see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, "A Reply to Robert Brenner," in
The Brenner Debate: Agrarian Class Structure and Economic Development in Pre-
Industrial Europe, ed. T. H. Aston and C. H. E. Philpin (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1985), 103; Robert Brenner, "The Agrarian Roots of European
Capitalism," in ibid., 270; Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death: Natural and
Human Disaster in Medieval Europe (New York: Free Press, 1983), 94-98; Pauline
Gregg, Black Death to IndustrialRevolution:A Social and EconomicHistoryof England
(London: Harrap, 1976), 81-88; and Bertha Haven Putnam, The Enforcementof
the Statutes of Labourersduring the First Decade after Black Death, 1349-1359 (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1908). Even among historians who argue that
declines in the population and the work force had begun earlier in the four-
teenth century than the onset of the plague, most seem to hold the view of M. M.
Postan that "[t]he part the Black Death played was greatly to aggravate the
mortality in the late 1340's, and to delay the recovery from the demographic
decline in a subsequent century or century-and-a-half" (The Medieval Economy
and Society:An EconomicHistory of Britain in the Middle Ages [London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1972], 38). See also Ian Kershaw, "The Great Famine and Agrar-
ian Crisis in England, 1315-1322," in Peasants, Knights and Heretics: Studies in
Medieval English Social History, ed. R. H. Hilton (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1976), 85-132.
decade-the dictatorship of the Dukeof Athens,the recentinsurrection

of the populominuto,or the devastatingfamine of 1346-provided
the occasion for Boccaccio'sDecameron. The reason for Boccaccio's
choice is clear enough. The plague, as he imagines it, represents
the single greatest threat to the aristocraticcommunity and thus
to the Florentine social body. Boccaccio thinks of the disease in
carnivalesqueterms-as producing inversions of the social order.
When she goes out into the streets, he tells us, one woman finds
"the scum of our city ... prancing and bustling about"and "sing-
ing bawdy songs that add insult to our injuries."33Monasteriesare
said to foster lasciviousnessunder these conditions, and a home in
the city offers little sanctuary with no faithful servants around.
Those of worth who remain in the city do not experience fear of
death, in this account, so much as a pervasive sense that it is no
longer their world. Of this, another abandoned woman com-
plains, "No one possessing private means and a place to retreat to
is left here apart from ourselves."34
To solve the problem posed by the plague, The Decameron
removes seven women and three men, all of whom are either
friends or kin, to the countryside. To wile away the time, they
move en masse between their various country estates, where they
eat expertly prepared meals, drink the best of wines in modera-
tion, walk in the well-groomed gardens, sing, dance, and tell
clever tales. If in the process of their story telling these characters
resemble scattered bits and pieces of a single body, it is because
Boccaccioimagines them so. By novelisticstandards,these are not
well-individuated characters-all equally intelligent, carefully
bred, full of grace, and fair to look upon-because plague, for
someone of Boccaccio'sepoch, is not a problem that can be solved
by individuation. He deals with it by reinstatingsumptuarycodes,
mating rituals, and kinship ties among the gentlefolk. Thus, his
erotic tale about the telling of erotic tales reunites the fragments
of the elite community into a single social order, self-enclosed and
pure.
Although Boccacciodoes not write as a member of the ruling
33. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Harmo-

ndsworth: Penguin, 1972), 60.
34. Ibid.
elite, he represents that community as the appropriate setting for

telling artful tales of desire. One of his accomplishments as a
writer-perhaps we should say the responsibility he feels as an
intellectual of fourteenth-century Florence-is to represent the
noble body as the only true object of desire. Erotic art is in this
case no less political than in William Hutton's description of
female blacksmiths. In early modern cultures, however, eroticism
generally affixes itself to the aristocratic body, as if the reproduc-
tion of that body were the sole guarantee of the nation-state's
survival. This was no less true of England than Florence. Long
before 1621, when the The Decameronwas first published in En-
glish, individual tales were translated and even adapted for the
theater. And there is ample evidence to suggest the plague posed
much the same kind of threat to the literate classes of Tudor and
Stuart England as it did for Boccaccio's original readership. In-
deed, his imaginative solution to the problem posed by the plague
bears striking resemblance to the procedures actually used to con-
trol epidemics.
When plague raged in England during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, people of birth and wealth fled the cities
much as they did in Boccaccio's fantasy. Infected houses were
shut up by order of the Privy Council, and all tht members of the
household, whether healthy or sick, were confined. During peri-
ods when contagion was at its worst, law terms were adjourned
early, fairs were canceled, markets were closed, and vagabonds
were persecuted.35 During these periods, the English court did its
best to wall itself off from infection. Confronting the plague of
1625, the Privy Council on May 17, 1625, ordered that no strang-
er may come to court to present suits or petitions.36 By October of
35. Although the plague orders drawn up by the Privy Council were largely
unchanged from 1578 to 1625, it was not until the Act of 1604 that violations of
quarantine were made felonies punishable by hanging. For a fuller account of
the plague orders, see Paul Slack, The Impactof Plague in Tudorand StuartEngland
(London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985), 207-16.
36. See James F. Larkin, ed., Stuart Royal Proclamations:Royal Proclamationsof
King CharlesI (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 2: 35; see also proclamation 29.
For an example during the reign of James, see the proclamation issued 1
November 1606, "forbidding all Londoners and other inhabitants of places in-
fected, to resort to the Court" (James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes, eds., Stuart
Royal Proclamationsof James I, 1603-1625 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973], 1:
151-52).
that year, the plague had worsened, and members of court were
prohibited from passing through infected areas.37 The court con-
stituted itself as an enclosed and restricted community, shut off
from the city and unavailable to people of the lesser sort.
Thomas Dekker's description of the plague in A Rodfor Run-
Awais focuses on the social elements from which members of Boc-
caccio's elite community detach themselves. Dekker addresses
these elites as if they were Boccaccio's storytellers: "To you that
are merry in your Country houses, and sit safe (as you thinke)
from the Gun-shot of this Contagion, in your Orchards and pleas-
ant Gardens; into your hands do I deliuer this sad Discourse."38
Another fate sharply contrasting with this pastoral existence is
imagined for those left behind in the city. How these people deal
with the plague can be discerned, according to Dekker, if one will
simply
looke into Tauernes, looke into Ale-houses; they are all merry
all iocund; no Plague frights them. In the Fields they
are. .walking, talking, laughing, in the Streets, blaspheming,
selling, buying, swearing. In Tauernes, and Ale-houses,
drinking, roaring, and surfetting: In these, and many other
places, Gods Holy-day is their Worke-day;the Kings Fasting-
day, their day of riot.39
Here we see something resembling what Bakhtin calls the "mass

body" in its "carnivalesque" phase, embodying inversions of all
the principles of hierarchy and moderation that organize the
court.40 It is important to note that gender operates in Dekker's
world, as in Boccaccio's, to differentiate the two. Each body has its
own vitality imaged forth in contrasting sexualities. Gender is not
something that cuts through both to identify the humanity of all.
Gender is a form of differentiation that preserves the boundaries
37. Such practicewas rare and nearly unenforceable. See Charles F. Mullett,
TheBubonicPlague and England,an Essayin theHistoryof Medicine(Lexington:
Universityof KentuckyPress, 1956), 142-52.
38. Thomas Dekker, ThePlaguePamphletsof ThomasDekker,ed. F. P. Wilson
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925), 145.
39. Ibid., 151.
40. See MikhailBakhtin,RabelaisandhisWorld,trans. Helene Iswolsky(Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1984).
between court and populace. If within the framework of their

own moment in history the two bodies seem to disagree as to what
the bodyis, then, in retrospect, we can see how this is one of those
contradictions that actually bind a culture into a meaningful
whole.
Neither side questions the fact that the life of the social body
depends on that of an aristocratic body. Indeed, the riot and
excess of carnival authorize an aristocracy which enforces hier-
archy and moderation, an aristocracy whose absence has, in Dek-
ker's words, "left your disconsolate Mother (the City) in the midst
of her sorrowes."41 Conditions that threatened to destroy the bar-
rier separating those belonging to the privileged classes from
those who did not provided the occasion to reestablish the autono-
my of the elite body. Differences within the city itself during time
of plague make this especially clear. Records show the disease
visited urban areas already marked by poverty and left the better
sections of town mysteriously untouched. In the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, Paul Slack explains, the disease had a social
topography: "Plague was spread by beggars, migrants and strang-
ers, and most of the casualties were 'in the families of poor peo-
ple.' By 1631, these assumptions were so prevalent that when the
disease entered a noble household in Yorkshire it went unrecog-
nized because 'no man could suspect a lady to die of the
plague."'42
Given the apparent ubiquity of this pattern, we must be star-
tled by the terms of a proposal written after the plague of 1665,
one of the most devastating ever to strike England. Where for
centuries collective festival had reigned, there appeared to be
strict division and isolation of urban dwellers; where there had
been two social bodies each with its own integrity and mode of
desire, one finds concern for individual bodies; and where there
41. Ibid., 145. In a letter of 10 September 1625, Joseph Mead quotes a letter
from a doctor describing the condition of the city abandoned by its most promi-
nent inhabitants: "'The Want and Misery is the greatest here ever any man
living knew; no trading at all; the rich all gone; housekeepers and apprentices of
manual trades begging in the streets, and that in a lamentable manner as will
make the strongest heart to yearn'" (Thomas Birch, The Court and Times of
Charles the First, ed. Robert F. Williams [London: H. Colburn, 1848]), 1: 48.
42. Slack, Impact of the Plague, 195.
had been quarantine for the sick and flight for those of influence
and wealth, we encounter a single policy for the entire popula-
tion. Dated October 7, 1667, William Petty's "Of Lessening of
Plagues" testifies to the presence of a new political imaginary. A
few lines will show how completely an older social body has given
way to one composed of households that are understood to be
units of work:
1. London within ye bills hath 696th people in 108th houses.

2. In pestilentiall yeares, (which are one in 20), there dye
1/6th of ye people of ye plague and 1/6th of all diseases.
3. The remedies against spreading of ye plague are shutting
up suspected houses and pest-houses within 1/2 a mile of ye
citty.
4. In a circle about ye center of London of 35 miles semi-
diameter, or a dayes journey, there live as many people and
are as many houses as in London.
5. Six heads may bee caryd a daysjourney for 20sh.
6. A family may bee lodged 3 months in ye country for 4 sh,
so as ye charge of carying out and lodging a family at a medi-
um will be 5sh.
7. In ye greatest plague wee feare, scarce 20th families will
bee infected; and in this new method but 10th, ye charge
whereof will bee 50th pounds.
8. The People which ye next plague of London will sweep
away will be probably 120th, which at ?7 per head is a losse of
8,400ths, the half whereof is 4,200ths.
9. So as 50 is ventured to save 4,2000, or about one for
84....43
According to Petty's figures, the next plague to hit London would

kill 120,000 and cost the state 70 pounds per person in lost work.
For a small fee, however, the government could remove a family
or group of six people the distance of 35 miles-one day's coach
ride from London-and lodge them at a house in the country for
three months. His plan to save half of the people destined to die
under earlier quarantine procedures would, in his calculation,
43. William Petty, The EconomicWritingsof Sir WilliamPetty, ed. Charles Henry
Hull (Cambridge:CambridgeUniversity Press, 1899), 1: 109.
save the nation ?4,200,000. Unlike anything of this kind pro-

duced in an earlier culture, Petty's plan is grounded on economic
value. Preserving England in the face of plague entails, above all
else, preserving its capacity to work.44 Diseased bodies cost time.
Time is money. And England is an economic entity.
If the question posed by the plague is not a matter of how to
preserve an elite community but how to minimize the loss of
money, the procedures for dealing strictly with the problem will
be radically different. Ideally they isolate each and every house-
hold as if it were an elite community in its own right. Thus Petty
seizes on a strategy-namely, flight-that had previously applied
to elites alone, and he incorporates this strategy within the
quarantine procedures for dealing with the urban masses.45 With
his one act of bricolage,flight no longer provides a way of separat-
ing an aristocracy from the masses. Flight extracts as many inde-
pendent modules as possible out of the mass body. At every turn
the plainness and practicality of Petty's style seem to insist that to
keep England alive is to keep it working. Those at the very top
and bottom of the social ladder fade from view as the distinction
between them ceases to matter. By some uncanny property of
discourse itself, the author of this plan seems to be looking out for
the welfare of virtually everyone.
Having said this, we must quickly stress the fact that Petty
44. Petty's understanding of the power of the state in terms of its capacity to
work is perhaps best demonstrated in his VerbumSapienti, written in 1665 and
published in 1691. A chapter entitled "The value of People" begins with the
following calculation: "Now if the Annual proceed of the Stock or wealth of the
Nation, yields but 15 millions, and the expence be 40. The labour of the People
must furnish the other 25; which may be done, if but half of them, viz. 3 millions
earned but 8 7.6 s.8.d. per annum, which is done at 7d. per diem, abating the 52
Sundays, and half as many other days for accidents as Holy days, sickness,
recreations, &c" (EconomicWritings of Petty, 1: 108).
45. Of considerable importance in Petty's calculations is the fact that the poor
are more likely to die in greater numbers than any other victims of plague. This
was clear from the bills of mortality. Anonymous writers of three different
plague pamphlets that appeared in 1665 argue for the first time against quaran-
tine because it seemed to breed disease among the poor. See The Shutting up of
InfectedHouses as it is Practiced in England; Golgotha;or, a Looking-Glassfor London
and the Suburbsthereof.Withan humbleWitnessagainst the CruelAdvice and Practice of
Shutting up unto Oppression;Directionsfor the Prevention and cure of the Plague fitted
for the Poorer Sort.
was hardly unique in imagining a world where power did not

begin and end with the aristocratic body. Natural and Political
Observationsupon the Bills of Mortalitywas written in 1662 by John
Graunt, the only tradesman in the Royal Society. Graunt's pro-
posal refines and clarifies the presuppositions underlying the new
concept of the social body, arguing for a census that will divide the
population into laboring and nonlaboring bodies.46 Thomas
Sprat's History of the Royal Society offers yet another view of the
same phenomenon. Opening Sprat's book brings the modern
reader face to face with a new mode of figuration, presupposing a
self who prides himself, as Petty does, on rationality, economy,
clarity, and usefulness. In his depiction of London after the Great
Fire of 1666, Sprat embodies these elements of discourse in a
highly idealized tribute to the English artisan:
Nor was their courage less, in sustaining the second calamity,
which destroyed their houses, and estates. This the greatest
losers indur'd with such undaunted firmness of mind, that
their example may incline us to believe, that not only the best
Natural, but the best Moral Philosophy too, may be learn'd
from the shop of Mechaniks.It was indeed an admirable thing
to behold, with what constancy,the meanest Artificers saw all
the labours of their lives, and the support of their families de-
vour'd in an instant. The affliction 'tis true, was widely spread
over the whole Nation: every place was fill'd with signs of pity,
and commiseration:But those who had suffer'd most, seem'd
the least affected with the loss: no unmanly bewailings were
heard in the few streets, that were preser'd: they beheld the
Ashes of their Houses and their Gates, and Temples,without the
least expression of Pusilanimity. If Philosophershad done this,
it had well become their profession of Wisdom: if Gentlemen,
the nobleness of their Breeding, and bloodwould have requir'd
it. But that such greatness of heart should be found amongst
46. Both Graunt and Petty argued that statisticswould make tax collection
more efficient. David Quint has written that this argument "restsupon the idea
of economic rationalitythat governs king and subject alike" ("David'sCensus:
Milton'sPoliticsand ParadiseRegained,"in Re-membering Milton:Essayson theTexts
and Traditions,ed. Mary Nyquist and MargaretW. Ferguson [New York: Meth-
uen, 1987], 140).
the poor Artizans,and the obscure multitudeis no doubt one of

the most honourable event, that ever happen'd.47
Several changes quickly become evident when we compare the

nature of this devastation to the cities of Boccaccio, Dekker, and
others writing before 1667. First, we must note that desirable
features from the pantheon of aristocratic virtue-"undaunted
firmness of mind," "constancy," and "greatness of heart"-have
been detached from their seats in traditional learning and blood
and are embodied instead in the homely artisan. We must also call
attention to the fac.t that other unattractive features are simulta-
neously detached. As Sprat declares, "no unmanly bewailings were
heard in the few streetsthat were preser'd; they beheld the Ashes
of their Houses and their Gates, and Temples, without the least
expression of Pusilanimity." Where despairing men and wanton
women had filled the plague-riddled streets of Elizabethan and
Jacobean cities, a new manly form arose from the ashes of a Res-
toration London destroyed by fire. This figure transfigured that
ground. The absence the city experienced was no longer that of
an aristocracy who had fled to the country; this city was a modern
city stricken by the loss of property and labor power.
After 1667, the healthy qualities of the artisan were imag-
ined to animate city life, qualities thatJohn Locke's Second Treatise
on Governmentextended to the nation as a whole. Arguing against
the metaphysics of blood authorizing the argument of Sir Robert
Filmer's Patriarcha, Locke described the power of the nation as a
form of power originating in labor.48 A well-known passage from
the Second Treatisestates,
Whatsoeverthen he removes out of the state that Nature hath

provided and left it in, he hath mixed his Labourwith, and
47. Thomas Sprat,Historyof theRoyalSociety,ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold

WhitmoreJones (St. Louis: WashingtonUniversity Press, 1958), 121.
48. As James Tully explains, Locke "seesthe laboureras makingan objectout
of the materialprovided by God and so havinga propertyin this product,"much
the way God makes the world. "Labour,"writes Tully, "transformsthe earthly
provisionsprovidedfor use into man made objectsof use"(ADiscourseonProperty:
John Lockeand His Adversaries [Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1980],
116-17).
joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his

property.It being by him removed from the common state
nature placed it in, it hath by this labour something annexed
to it, that excludes the common right of other men.49
Locke thus more fully articulated the same logic of labor that
Sprat invoked to describe a city made up of individual artisans
and tradesmen, and that Petty used to imagine England as an
economic entity whose population can be calculated in shillings
and pounds. Ideally this logic divided the body politic into en-
closed spaces that insured the physical and moral inviolability of
all individuals. Such a compartmentalized spatial image indeed
emerges if one visualizes the endless suburbs that would arise
were Petty's proposal actually put into effect, just as it does were
one to imagine a city of streets lined with artisan households that
have been exhumed from the ashes of the London fire. As the
final section of our essay will show, gender was everywhere pres-
ent in this political fantasy-everywhere present but as yet no-
where apparent in the self-enclosed household that became the
basic unit of social thinking as well as a necessary good.50
Although the twin figure of male artisan and urban land-
scape enabled certain intellectuals at the dawn of the modern
period to rethink the system of relationships which produced
their identity, this process did not at the same time empower
artisans. In describing the emergence of the artisan at the center
49. John Locke, Two Treatiseson Government,ed. Thomas I. Cook (New York:
Hafner Publications, 1947), 134.
50. Published in the same year Petty drew up his proposals for the plague and
Paradise Lost first appeared- 1667-Thomas Willis's Essay on the Brain and Ner-
vous Stock located a physical source within each individual's body for something
he calls sensus communis,by which he means the perception of experience that
affected fantasy, imagination, and memory. Among other things, he argues, it is
this sensus communiswhich arouses desire by a process of the nervous system for
which he coined the term "psycheology." What Willis had discovered would
become the essence of the modern individual, and that was a gendered essence.
Klaus Doerner has pointed out that although Willis was the first to invent the
nervous system, "the only disorders Willis took over into his nerve theory almost
in toto were hysteria and related complaints, removing them from their vener-
able site in the uterus, and turning them into 'nervous' diseases" (Madmenand the
Bourgeoisie,A Social History of Insanity and Psychiatry,trans. Joachim Neugroschel
and Jean Steinberg [Oxford: Blackwell, 1981], 25).
of discourse, we are not describing the rise of the artisan class.51 It

is important, we think, to remember that artisans were indeed a
major force in the political and economic life of medieval and
Renaissance cities and towns. For at least a century prior to Sprat's
celebration of this fact, certain families in small villages and net-
works of people in larger towns controlled the various trades
within their region. Even larger networks of kinship and clientage
influenced the way guilds regulated trade in the cities. They had a
great deal to do with the quality of goods and services, the stability
of prices, the number of people allowed to practice a given craft,
and the flow of goods from one place to another. The artisan's
household included apprentices (often from other artisan fam-
ilies) and journeymen, as well as the master craftsman, his kin and
servants, all of whom were involved one way or another in the
production of goods. Yet when members of this powerful social
group made their appearance in the dominant discourse of the
early modern period, they did so with little of the nobility that
Sprat attributes to them.
Shakespeare was not alone in casting artisans as such charac-
ters as Bottom and the Mechanicals who can easily be lumped
together with the populace. And, if not clowns, they were likely to
be aristocrats in mean disguise. In either role, they were familiar
figures up through the early Jacobean period and then, with one
or two exceptions, largely disappeared from the stage.52 During
51. We are not arguing that artisanswere a monolithicgroup. There are data
to suggest that artisansdid not, in fact, constitute a class in the modern sense.
Artisans were often internallydivided as a group, their economic and political
interestsoften at odds with one another. For a modern example of this phenom-
enon with regard to French labor history, see Jacques Ranciere, "The Myth of
the Artisan: Critical Reflections on a Category of Social History,"International
Laborand WorkingClassHistory,no. 24 (Fall 1983): 1-16, and the responseswhich
follow by WilliamH. Sewell,Jr., ChristopherH. Johnson, Edgar Leon Newman,
and Nicholas Papayanis,as well as Ranciere'sreply to his critics (no. 25 [Spring
1984]: 17-46).
52. Laura Stevenson has surveyed the materialsand finds few examples of
artisan life after the early years of James's reign. We have drawn upon her
findings in Praise and Paradox:Merchantsand Craftsmenin ElizabethanPopular
Literature(Cambridge:CambridgeUniversityPress, 1984). Mentionof the litera-
ture dealing with domestic economy, animal husbandry, and various kinds of
practicallabor is notablylackinghere. This is because we assume we are dealing
with a culture where "work"has not yet become a meaningfulcategoryas such or
the first sixty years of the seventeenth century, however, artisans

retained their prominent positions in the cities, and they were an
important factor in the upheavals marking those years. This
should give us cause to wonder why they are seldom in evidence
in our literary and historical records of the period. A second fact
concerning artisans is perhaps still more perplexing. The prepon-
derance of historical evidence suggests that precisely when this
figure emerged in discourse during the years after the Interreg-
num, the power of the artisan went into slow but inevitable de-
cline.
Obviously, much more can be concluded from this double
paradox than we can develop in an essay such as this. The in-
ferences we draw are simply those that can help us come to some
understanding of the modern concept of work and its tendency as
a gendered concept to empower a specific social group. We think
it is significant that a discourse celebrating artisans not only chal-
lenged the metaphysics of an aristocratic culture but also gained
authority over those who worked with their hands. We have used
the Historyof the Royal Societyto show how the artisan provided the
metaphor for a social body composed of private property. Al-
though certain artisans would remain part of the class whose
power came from property supported by their labor, others
would be booted out.53 But there is another, less noted dimension
to this conflict that is more central to the process we are tracing.
More central for purposes of this essay than the conflict between
those who worked and those who became paupers during the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is the conflict between
those who worked with their hands and those who performed
intellectual labor. To illustrate this particular turn of the historical
screw, there is perhaps no better example than William Hutton,
observer of female blacksmiths and historian of Birmingham.
The son of a wool comber who was also a victim of poverty
a way of organizing social relations. Indeed, by lumping them together as

"work," middle-class culture would eventually erase the important distinction
between the tasks described in practical advice books and the privileged knowl-
edge passed down from artisans to their apprentices.
53. One of the clearest examples of this phenomenon is the fate of the Lud-
dites, which E. P. Thompson has discussed at length in The Making of the English
WorkingClass (New York: Vintage Books, 1966).
and drink, Hutton came from the very class whose habits and
accomplishments he documented. Having reluctantly completed
an apprenticeship and taken up work as a journeyman stocking-
maker, he moved to Birmingham and, in 1749, managed to open
a bookseller and stationer's shop. From there, he went on to be-
come one of the thriving elite of the rapidly expanding manufac-
turing town. It is from this position, at once profoundly loyal to
and completely estranged from his artisan origins, that he wrote
An History of Birmingham from which we excerpted the quotation
opening this essay. The contradiction between these two kinds of
labor, and the power as well as the humility Hutton obviously
experienced in taking on the mantle of author, may be detected in
this characteristic statement from his preface: "IF GRANDEUR
should censure me for sometimes recording the men of mean life,
let me ask, Which is preferable,he who thunders at the anvil, or in
the senate? The man who earnestly wishes the significant letters,
ESQ. spliced to the end of his name, will despise the question; but
the philosopher will answer, 'They are equal."'54
This section of our essay suggests that the conflict shaping
Hutton's discourse began long before the artisan class was broken
down into crafts that were not considered manual labor, on the
one hand, and those that were performed by the new working
class, on the other. It began, paradoxically, in the exaltation of
artisan culture. Among other things, Sprat's History of the Royal
Society illustrates how work as embodied in the artisan provided
the metaphor for a new body of knowledge based upon mental
rather than material labor. The members of the Royal Society
declared themselves dedicated to "the promotion of natural and
useful knowledge."55 Sprat's History begins as a paean to such
practical knowledge, declaring that the Royal Society members
would devote themselves either to writing histories of trade or to
performing experiments. Flushed with a sense of the power of
their knowledge, he predicts that the new history of trade "will be
found to bring innumerable benefits to all the practical Arts"and
the knowledge gained from experiment will lead to progress "of
54. Hutton, History of Birmingham, xv.

55. Charles Richard Weld, A History of the Royal Society with Memoirs of the
Presidents (London: J. W. Parker, 1848), 1: 138.
Manual Arts ... either by the discovery of new matter, to imploy

mens hands; or by a new Transplantationof the same matter,or by
handling the old subject of Manufactures after a new way."56 Al-
though Sprat invokes a belief in the value of artisanal labor, his
statement does not simply pit what was a residual cultural belief
against the dominant practices of courtly life. The statement in-
vokes artisanal labor in order to subordinate it to another, oppos-
ing concept of work; it casts scientific knowledge as the agent of
change and identifies the "manual arts" as the cultural material
that must undergo a transformation. The logic exalting the ar-
tisan ultimately empowers intellectual labor over manual labor by
means of a cultural logic that Hutton's personal history itself so
clearly dramatized.57
The Work of the Metaphor, 1667-
Writing was crucial to the project. As Sprat recounts it, the

Royal Society "exacted from all the members, a close naked and
natural way of speaking . . . bringing all things as near to the
Mathematic plainness, as they can: and preferring the language
of Artizans, Countrymen, and merchants, before that, of Wits and
Scholars."58 By espousing this anti-aesthetic position, members of
56. Sprat, History of the Royal Society,310, 381.

57. Julia Wrigley has shown how the attempt to prevent the division of labor
by teaching the new scientific knowledge to artisans actually divided mental from
material production and gave greater economic rewards to the intellec-
tual/professional/managerial classes. Mechanics' institutes were founded in the
early nineteenth century in order to train artisans in the sciences underlying
trades. As the century wore on, however, these institutes focused more narrowly
on training artisans only in technical skills. Once the institutes "abandoned the
aim of teaching manual workers science," Wrigley writes, educational policymak-
ers "urged that Britain concentrate on teaching managers and foremen scientific
principles" ("The Division between Mental and Manual Labor: Artisan Educa-
tion in Nineteenth-Century Britain," in Marxist Inquiries: Studies of Labor, Class,
and States, ed. Michael Burawoy and Theda Skocpol, [Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1982. AmericanJournal of Sociology88 [Supplement, 1982]: S32).
58. Sprat, Historyof theRoyal Society, 113. Writing in 1671 on the virtues of what
he calls "Political Arithmetic," William Petty declares he wishes to "express my-
self in terms of number, weight or measure; to use only arguments of sense; and
to consider only as causes as have visible foundations in nature, leaving those
that depend on the mutable minds, opinon, appetites and passions of particular
the Royal Society were not out to challenge the monarch's author-
ity. Indeed, it is fair to say that where their prerevolutionary
counterparts served monarchy by producing exalted images of its
power, these intellectuals, nearly all men of privilege, sought to do
much the same thing by purging English of "all the amplifica-
tions, digressions, and swellings of style" that had marked an aris-
tocratic tradition of letters. It is in this conservative spirit that
Sprat thus condemns courtly rhetoric: "When I consider the
means of happy living, and the causes of their corruption, I can
hardly forbear .... concluding that eloquenceought to be banish'd
out of all civil Societies as a thing fatal to Peace and Good Man-
ners."59 Opposing eloquence, then, another voice emerges-
moral where there had been corruption, conciliatory where there
had been internal division, reasonable where excess and self-
display had dominated. This ineloquent rhetoric identifies itself
as "the only Remedy that can be found for this extravagance."It is
Sprat's hope that, through the works of the Royal Society, English
can "return back to the primitive purity, and shortness, when men
deliver'd so many things, almost in an equal number of words."60
The historical significance of a new language of purity and
danger comes more clearly into focus with the theory of language
that Locke develops, a theory which, like that of property itself,
presupposes a fiction of origins. The opening of the third book of
An Essay ConcerningHuman Understandingposits the existence of
an unfallen language. God created man, he writes, to be a "socia-
ble creature."61 To that end, he endowed this creature with lan-
guage "which was to be the great instrument and common tie of
society" (ECHU III.i. 1.). In its natural state, according to this ar-
men to the consideration of others" (EconomicWritings: 1, 244). The theological

counterpart to Petty and Sprat's economy was provided by another member of
the Royal Society, Sir Joseph Glanvill, who attacked the rhetorical excesses of
divines in his influential An Essay concerningPreaching: Writtenfor theDirectionof A
YoungDivine (1678). Glanvill called for a new style of preaching that "ought to be
plain, practical, methodical,affectionate"(l1). On the rise of the plain style in the
later seventeenth century, see Wilbur Samuel Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in En-
gland, 1500-1700 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1956), 364-97.
59. Ibid., 112.
60. Ibid., 113.
61. John Locke, An Essay ConcerningHuman Understanding(New York: Dover
1959): III.ii.3. All further references appear in the text as ECHU.
gument, language linked words iconically to things so that words

could stand in place of things without falsifying their nature; God
created language, like heaven and earth itself, in the plain style.
Or so Locke writes: "What liberty Adam had at first to make any
complex ideas of mixed modesby no other pattern but by his own
thoughts, the same have all men ever since had. And the same
necessity of conforming his ideas of substancesto things without
him, as to archetypes made by nature, that Adam was under, if he
would not wilfully impose upon himself, the same are all men ever
since under too." (ECHU III.vi.51.) Of necessity, then, any other
use of language constitutes a falling off from the original source
of meaning:
And hence we see that, in the interpretationof laws, whether

divine or human, there is no end; comments beget comments,
and explications make new matter for explications; and of
limiting, distinguishing, varying the signification of these
moral These ideas of men's making are, by men still having
the same power, multiplied in infinitum.Manya man who was
pretty well satisfied of the meaning of a text of Scripture, or
clause in the code, at first reading, has, by consulting com-
mentators, quite lost the sense of it, and by these elucidations
given rise or increaseto his doubts, and drawn obscurityupon
the place. (ECHU III.ix.9.)
The befuddlement that comes with accumulated usage is simply

part of the human condition. Among the misuses of language
Locke identifies, the most serious are "abuses" which occur when
words obscure, the nature and value of things. Of these abuses,
however, "rhetoric" alone calls forth his moral invective. It is as if
those artists and intellectuals who would continue in the Caroline
tradition were violating a boundary. What had been the means of
exalting state power produced the opposite effect. And "rhet-
oric," curiously, took on certain properties of the grotesque Oth-
er. Of the intellectuals who join in this discourse on linguistic
pollution, Locke was the first we know to introduce gender as a
figure of figurative language. "Eloquence," he writes, "like the
fair sex, has too prevailing beauties in it to suffer itself ever to be
spoken against. And it is in vain to find fault with those arts of
deceiving, wherein men find pleasure to be deceived" (ECHU

III.x.34).
Petty and Sprat identified the domain of rational truth with
the artisan-his city, his nature, his body, his discourse-in addi-
tion to work itself. Locke completed the gendered representation
of discourse when he represented rhetoric as not only corrupt but
also female. Hutton's plain style began here, we think, with a
discourse that renounced rhetoric in order to lay claim to a mas-
culine truth told in an accurate object language.62 So defined, the
domain of the rational observer took shape and flourished under
the mantle of "work." Appearing more method than metaphor, it
contested writing that was rhetorically inflated, on the one hand,
and unlettered, on the other.63 And it extended this power of
naming reality into cultural territories that educated people had
not bothered with before. As in Hutton's view of the Birmingham
blacksmiths, figurative language thoroughly infused the discourse
on labor with gender. The power of the new poetics depended
upon its ability to maintain the appearance that politics and poet-
ics occupied different worlds of meaning, a difference which was
itself produced, as we have said, by forging an aesthetic link be-
tween masculinity and rationality, on the one hand, and feminity
and figuration, on the other. One cannot understand how "work"
displaced a noble lineage as the basis for one's political identity
without some examination of the change occurring simultaneous-
62. In his preface, Hutton proudly declares, "I have never seen Oxford,"for
"instead of handling systems of knowledge, my hands at the early age of seven,
became callous with labour," (An History of Birmingham, ix-x). Raymond
Williams, in The Long Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961),
has convincingly argued that the creation of this new literacy was instrumental in
the rise of the new middle classes.
63. See John Barrell, English Literature in History, 1730-80: An Equal, Wide
Survey (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983), 110-76. Barrell discusses the histor-
ical irony of creating a new standard of English that subjugated "varieties of
provincial English, and the modes of expression of different classes, to the
norms of the elite." The modern tendency to remove linguistic and cultural
matters from those of state has obscured the equation deliberately drawn by
various Enlightenment intellectuals between "the laws of England and the rules
of good English, with the aim of revealing that the language community could be
structured as a political community" (112).
ly within the arts. In art, we will argue, gender underwent a

change as abrupt and irrevocableas the transformationof politi-
cal power because the two were in actuality aspects of the same
event.
If any generalization can be made about the aesthetics of
early modern England, it is that art acknowledged the power of
the nobility for whom the reigning monarch provided the sym-
bolic source and literal embodiment. Obviously aware of the
power inhering in her body and capable of manipulating that
power to her ends, Elizabeth I went to great lengths to control
reproductions of her image.64 Her portraits consequently identi-
fied the condition of the country with the condition of her body.
It is fair to say that Renaissance art helped to empower the no-
bility by locating the source of title, land, and wealth within the
monarch's body. Manor house poetry identified the lands, trees,
fruit, and streams of the estate with the lord of the manor whose
name referred at once to a title and to the household that in-
cluded all those immediately dependent upon that name for sus-
tenance. To look at Appleton House or Penshurst was to recall the
name in both senses. In composing "To Penshurst," Ben Jonson
observed a poetics that represented the estate, its architecture,
family members and dependents, grounds, copse, river, sheep
and kine, fruitful orchards, teeming ponds, as well as the table
overloaded with the bounty of these, as laudatory features of Sir
Robert Sidney.
By suggesting that Renaissance art reproduced a single ide-
ology, we do not mean to detract from the ingenuity with which
various monarchs imprinted their image on the tradition. As the
center of culture, a monarch's self-presentation necessarily modi-
fied a whole system of symbolic practices to make it his or hers.
64. In 1563 a proclamation was dratted calling for one painter, and one
painter only, to have access to the queen "to take the natural representation of
her majesty," and "to prohibit all manner of other persons to draw, paint, grave,
or portray her majesty's personage or visage" (Tudor Royal Proclamations: The
Later Tudors 1553-1587, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin [New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1969], 2: 240). Though we have no evidence this statute
was enforced, we do know it was typical of measures taken to protect her image
from being deformed. On this point, see Roy Strong, Portraitsof QueenElizabethI
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 5.
Thus where Elizabeth thought it advantageous to see herself as

Astrea or the Virgin Queen, James I preferred to display himself
in the midst of his immediate family.65 In this way, he announced
that, in contrast with Elizabeth's crown, his came to him according
to the strict rule of primogeniture and guaranteed in turn a cer-
tain line of descent. Charles I chose to memorialize his father with
a mural on the ceiling of Whitehall portraying him in the godlike
posture of passing a sentence on those beneath. No less taken with
idealization than James, Charles often preferred to display him-
self with his queen, Henrietta Maria. As Roy Strong has noted,
they were "the first English Royal couple to be glorified as hus-
band and wife in the domestic sense."66 Hardly domestic in the
modern sense, however, Caroline painting and literature empha-
sized the supernatural quality of Charles and Henrietta's love and
placed them among the great lovers of earlier art and legend.
Rubens painted the king as St. George rescuing a princess who
bore the distinctive features of Henrietta Maria. Honthorst's
painting of "Buckingham presenting the Liberal Arts to Charles
and Henrietta" cast the couple as Apollo and Diana perched high
upon a cloud. Jonson's 1630 masque Love's Triumph through
Callipolis identified theirs as the purest form of love that could be
had on earth. In CoelumBrittanicum, Carew had the gods vow to
reform heaven according to the example set by Charles and his
queen, and the pair themselves became divinities of love in D'Ave-
nant's Templeof Love. Representations of the monarch were prob-
ably more elastic than one can infer from so brief and sweeping a
glance at the received tradition, but even so the point remains that
Renaissance art and literature invariably exalted monarchy in dis-
tinguishing a particular monarch.
The attack on rhetoric and the deep distrust of eloquence
65. Jonathan Goldberg has discussed the politics of both the Jacobean and the
Caroline representations of the royal family in James I and the Politics of Literature:
Jonson, Shakespeare,Donne, and Their Contemporaries(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1983), 85-107. See also Graham Parry, The GoldenAge Restor'd:
The Cultureof the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981), and
R. Malcolm Smuts, Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early
Stuart England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).
66. Roy Strong, Van Dyck: Charles I on Horseback (New York: Viking Press,
1972), 70.
voiced by Petty, Sprat, and Locke, among others, was an attack on

the last generation of pre-Civil War intellectuals, all of whom
were products of a humanist education. These intellectuals au-
thored much of Renaissance art and, along with the nobility,
made up the audience for whom it was produced. But perhaps
none more fully embodied the kind of education qualifying one
for such a role than John Milton. His humanist training at St.
Paul's and then at Cambridge consisted not only in reading Latin
and Greek but also, and more to the point, in directing that read-
ing toward mastery in disputation and oration.67 This education
was supposed to produce the people who would serve the state-
whether by moving from the Inns of Court into government or,
as Milton originally intended, by taking orders and serving God
and king in the state church. He apparently felt no conflict be-
tween this intention and his ardent ambition to write the kind of
poetry for which his education had prepared him. Indeed, the
young Milton produced poetry resembling that of his Cavalier
contemporaries in its rhetoric and verse form.68 Events took an
unexpected turn in the years following Cambridge, however, and
his religious convictions forced Milton to join the debate on
church discipline. While this polemical writing opposed the posi-
tion maintained by the king and the bishops as well as the cavalier
poets who supported the Laudian church, it in no way qualified
his poetic ambitions.69 His well-known opening to the second
book of The Reason of ChurchGovernment(1642) expresses an un-
flagging resolve to do for the English language what Ariosto did
for Italian: "What the greatest wits of Athens, Rome, or modern
67. On Milton's education, see William Riley Parker, Milton, A Biography (Ox-
ford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 1: 13-115; Donald Lemen Clark,John Milton at St.
Paul's School, a Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1948); Harris Francis Fletcher, The Intellectual
DevelopmentofJohn Milton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1956-6 1), 2 vols.
68. Richard Helgerson has shown the degree to which Milton shared a poetic
language with his contemporaries in Self-CrownedLaureates:Spenser,Jonson, Mil-
ton, and the LiterarySystem(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), 185-
282.
69. Leah S. Marcus has demonstrated convincingly the extent to which various
Cavalier poets supported the Laudian church so hated by Puritans who sought to
continue the reformation of the English church (The Politics of Mirth: Jonson,
Herrick,Milton, Marvell and theDefense of Old Holiday Pastimes[Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1986]).
Italy, and those Hebrews of old did for their country, I, in my

proportion, with this over and above of being a Christian, might
do for mine."70 These contradictions did not survive the revolu-
tion.
It is fair to say that because Milton's writing so fully embod-
ied the contradictions dominating prerevolutionary British cul-
ture, the revolution produced a revolution in his writing.71 When
he became Secretary of Foreign Tongues to the Council of State
in 1649, the middle-aged Milton abandoned the kind of verse
dominating the Poems of Mr. John Milton (1645). Most of that col-
lection had been written according to the fashion of the Caroline
court. When the restoration of Charles II in 1660 made it danger-
ous to write polemics against monarchy, Milton devoted himself
again almost fully to poetry. But this did not mean that the old
poet had abandoned politics. His later poetry offered a critique of
the entire universe of meaning that a humanist education pre-
pared one to reproduce. We will go so far as to suggest that in
writing Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained, and Samson Ago-
nistes (both published in 1671), Milton entered directly into a
struggle through which the values he held as a Protestant reform-
er and political activist eventually triumphed. This was a struggle
for the signs and symbols of political reality itself. If his career can
be read as a revolution in writing that helped to change irreversi-
bly the way people understood their relation to a political reality,
then Paradise Lost can be regarded as the pivotal moment in this
process. The fall of man, from our historical perspective, is noth-
ing more or less than a means of transforming the poetics exalting
one political body into another.
In his Edenic passages, Milton portrays the unfallen Adam
and Eve as the sacred couple celebrated by Caroline art. In this
way, what had been a rather worn political cliche in the years
leading up to the English Revolution emerged in the years after
70. John Milton, The Reason of Church Government,ed. Ralph A. Haug, in

CompleteProse WorksofJohn Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe (New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Pres, 1953), 1: 237.
71. Typical of the contradiction is the fact that in the antiprelatical pamphlets,
Milton argued that support for the bishops undermined loyalty to the king. On
this point see Don M. Wolfe, Milton in the Puritan Revolution (New York: T.
Nelson and Sons, 1941), 46-47.
the Interregnum as the instrument of a revisionary poetics. The

sacred couple represents the original aristocratic body and, after
God himself, that of the patriarch of patriarchs. All the earth
belongs to them by divine entitlement: "Godlike erect, with native
Honor clad/In naked Majesty," the pair "seem'd Lords of all" (PL
IV, 289-91).72 The couple provides Milton with an emblem of
the fruitful land they rule, but Eve, more so than Adam, epito-
mizes the beauty of unfallen nature. Resembling the idealized
female of manor house poetry in this respect, she sums up the
bounty of the estate and testifies to the generosity of the lord of
the manor. We see this equation drawn in the well-known account
of her creation:
Under his forming hands a creature grew,

Manlike, but different sex, so lovely fair,
That what seem'd fair in all the World, seem'd now
Mean, or in her summ'd up, in her contain'd
(PL VIII, 470-73)
More so than any other of God's creations, Eve embodies his

creative power. Thus we find no distinction between her body and
its reflection in the pool or between that image and her self-
knowledge. As God explains, "What there thou seest fair Creature
is thyself" (PL IV, 468).
Milton uses the Fall to destroy this iconicity. He strips the
defeated angel of all the powers that inhere in him as part of an
elite community-all the powers, that is, except for eloquence.
Craven with the desire for his patron's power and thus with envy
for those who can enjoy that bounty, Satan speaks with the voice
of a Renaissance courtier. The splendor of Eve's body and the
erotic gratification that she and Adam enjoy invariably inspire the
pain and envy which Satan expresses in Petrarchan cliches:
Sight hateful, sight tormenting! thus these two

Imparadis'tin one another's arms
The happier Eden, shall enjoy thir fill
72. John Milton,ParadiseLost:A Poemin TwelveBooks,ed. MerrittY. Hughes

(New York: Odyssey Books, 1962). All further references appear in the text as
PL.
Of bliss on bliss, while I to Hell am thrust,

Where neither joy nor love, but fierce desire,
Among our other torments not the least,
Still unfulfill'd with pain of longing pines
(PL IV, 506-12)
Issuing from Satan's mouth, courtier rhetoric may take on a re-

freshingly literal meaning, but it is nonetheless cliched. The
choice of such Petrarchanisms to express the most profound re-
sentment that could be felt for divinely ordained patrilineage is an
important one, especially since Milton gives this language a kind
of agency in his rendition of the Fall.
Far from concluding with God's political victory over Satan,
the battle within the elite community becomes a battle in and
through the signs and symbols of political power-the Edenic
landscape and the human body. The struggle ultimately detaches
these symbols from their creator and puts the source of their
meaning into question. But though it speaks from a position out-
side the elite community and from envy of it, poetry expressing
the pain of exclusion from that community observes the same
ideological imperative underlying poetry written in celebration of
aristocratic generosity. Capable of acknowledging but one source
of power, Satanic rhetoric does nothing to curtail God's power-
nothing, that is, until it operates within and through a woman.
Milton's gendering of rhetoric bears curious similarity to Locke's
account of the fall of language. First personified as an ambitious
and excluded male (Satan), the figure of rhetoric undergoes a sex
change and becomes a wanton woman (Eve).
The disintegration of her iconicity begins as Satan whispers
in Eve's ear "discontented thoughts/Vain hopes, vain aims, inordi-
nate desires" (PL IV, 807-9). He tells her a story of a tree that
requires "Thy utmost reach" and of all the creatures around it
"with like desire/Longing and envying they stood" (PL IX, 591-
93). He claims to have enhanced his own status by "vent'ring
higher than my Lot" (PL IX, 690). And soon Eve imagines that
forbidden knowledge will do the same for her: "render me more
equal, and perhaps,/A thing not undesirable, sometime Superior"
(PL IX, 823-24). To imagine herself as better than she is, Eve has
to imagine herself in a position other than and inferior to Adam,
and this is precisely what she accomplishesby eating the fruit. She
ceases to embody aristocraticvirtue and becomes the unruly wom-
an, leveler of hierarchies,as the fruit fills her body with a garden-
varietydesire. Once "greedilyshe ingorg'd without restraint,"Eve
is "hight'n'das with Wine,jocund, and boon" (PL IX, 793). She is,
in a word, separated from Adam by the same principle that sepa-
rated Boccaccio'selite community from the carnival of death or-
ganizing the city under plague. She persuades him to eat the fruit
so "thatequal Lot/Mayjoin us," lest "different degree/Disjoin us"
(IX, 881-84). Adam's fall-at once sexual and political-repeats
hers in all its excess:
As with new Wine intoxicated both

They swim in mirth, and fancy that they feel
Divinity within them breeding wings
Wherewith to scorn the Earth: but that false Fruit
Far other operation first display'd,
Carnal desire inflaming, hee on Eve
Began to cast lasciviouseye....
(PL IX, 1008-14)
Herein collapse the differences between the symbols of God's

creative power and the state of craving that marks those excluded
from his bounty. The Fall of Man effectively drains sexual play of
all its former spirituality;eroticism becomes the language of mis-
directed desire; and the excesses of an aristocratictradition serve
as signs of the fallen condition.
The turn of Milton's poetry against itself offers an interest-
ing insight into the twofold question raised by the emergence of
Enlightenment discourse in 1667: Why did men who occupied
such politicallyhostile positions as Milton and Petty or Milton and
Sprat all renounce the world created by Renaissanceart and imag-
ine the world as a world of work?;what role did poetry play in the
construction of this prosaic politicalworld? The data suggest that
disputation has divided the ruling elite against itself and has torn
the country apart. Yet they also suggest that the collapse of the
elite community has irreparably compromised the tradition of
letters celebrating it. Locke felt the pleasures of figurative lan-
guage were seductively misleading. But for Milton, the turn
against courtier rhetoric was the fall of the whole tradition of
poetry in which he was trained, and he represents it as such.

Elegiac conventions declare the end of the poetic tradition in lines
like these: "Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat/Sigh-
ing through all her Works gave signs of woe" (PL IX, 783-89);
from Adam's "slack hand the Garland wreath'd for Eve/Down-
dropp'd, and all the faded roses shed" (PL IX, 892-93). The
materials of aristocratic culture pass out of the domain of truth, at
once political and spiritual, and into that of mere rhetoric. The
poet who uses these materials resembles the unsuccessful courtier
who foolishly mistakes fashion for a noble bearing, when in fact
no value resides
...in the bought smile

Of harlots, loveless,joyless, unindear'd,
Casual fruition, nor in Court Amours,
Mixt Dance, or wanton Mask, or Midnight Ball,
Or Serenade, which the starv'dlover sings,
To his proud fair, best quitted with disdain.
(PLIV, 765-70)
Milton invokes the carnival of night to describe Restoration so-
ciety and the poetry that caters to it. This, then, is what poetry
does that cannot be done in the rational discourse of the Royal
Society: consign whole worlds of writing to obsolescence.
As the difference between the elite and popular bodies col-
lapse with Eve's corruption, a new opposition takes hold of the
poem's materials and reshapes them according to a recognizably
modern aesthetic. Milton made Eve of two potentially contrary
kinds of cultural material. He composed her body from the kind
of material that celebrated the aristocratic body. But he composed
her thoughts and speech out of material drawn from domestic
economies and Puritan handbooks that adamantly opposed the
luxury of aristocratic display. It being the very language associ-
ated with artisans, her frugal talk strikes a note that must have
been familiar to the readership of 1667, though one con-
spicuously out of tune with the luxurious terms in which Milton
describes her body. To prepare for Raphael's visit, Adam asks Eve
to "pour/Abundance fit to honor and receive." She responds with
a statement that clearly places the practical value of objects over
both their immanent value as God's gifts to mankind and their
aesthetic value as signs of man's supremacy over the other things

of creation. Contrary to the aesthetics of the aristocratic body, she
claims that
.. small store will serve, where store,

All seasons, ripe for use hangs on the stalk;
Save what by frugal storing firmness gains
To nourish, and superfluous moist consumes.
(PL V, 322-25)
Having said this, to be sure, Eve turns dutifully to assembling a

feast to demonstrate "that here on Earth/ God hath dispenst his
bounties as in Heav'n" (PL V, 329-30). Even so, a perspective has
been established from which to see the patron's displays of gener-
osity as wasteful and therefore short of aesthetic perfection. It is
against this notion of the pleasure principle that Eve sets an alter-
native reality principle when she coaxes Adam to divide their
labor. Because they take so much pleasure in each other's com-
pany, she reasons, "Our day's work brought to little, though be-
gun/Early, and th' hour of Supper comes unearn'd" (PL IX, 224-
25). In capitulating to a sexual difference in their gardening,
Adam inadvertently authorizes a practical standard that defines
the plenitude of the unfallen world as unruly excess in contrast
with heavenly perfection. The fallen world is organized by pre-
cisely this opposition between the luxury of the Renaissance art
world and an economy where aesthetic pleasure is earned
through labor and canceled out by extravagance. Nor does the
poet exclude himself from this radical change in the means of
intellectual production. Where he once-as a young man-
approached his role of poet with patriotic enthusiasm, Milton
represents his later poetry as a voice in the wilderness, singing
"with mortal voice, unchang'd/To hoarse or mute, though fall'n,
and evil tongues;/In darkness, and with dangers compast
round,/And solitude" (PL VII, 23-28).
Having arrived at this turning point in the history of letters,
we would like to pause momentarily and explain why our argu-
ment only indirectly engages a rich and complex debate over
Milton's treatment of women that has been commanding the at-
tention of Milton scholars for at least fifteen years.73 For purposes

of this essay, we have to position ourselves outside an argument
between feminist and literary historical criticism that can be con-
tained within contemporary liberal humanism. We are interested
in the dialectical relationship between two humanisms, one that
produced the ruling ideas of an early modern (patronage) cul-
ture, and another that produced the gendered universe of mean-
ing characterizing modern (industrial) culture. To take up the
argument over Milton's attitude toward women would contradict
these categories of argument. We would be using a concept of
"woman" to discuss the poet and the poem that Milton begins to
develop within Paradise Lost. This would necessarily prevent us
from tracing the very behavior of cultural categories that allowed
"woman" to become meaningful as such and a topic of literary
critical concern today. To use that category as a category of critical
analysis, we would have to suppress the conflict between two dif-
73. One cannot read Milton without considering a rich and diverse body of
feminist criticismthat has read Miltonas literature.We owe many of our insights
to this work, even though our own attempt to situate Miltonat the beginning of
the modern period does not engage this feminist argument directly. Among
those articlesand books making up the debate concerning Milton'streatmentof
women are MarciaLandy, "Kinshipand the Role of Women in ParadiseLost,"
MiltonStudies4 (1972): 3-18; Barbara K. Lewalski,"Miltonon Women-Yet
Once More,"MiltonStudies6 (1974): 4-20; Sandra M. Gilbertand Susan Gubar,
TheMadwomanin theAttic:The WomanWriterand theNineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination(New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 1979), 187-308; David Aers and
Bob Hodge, "'RationalBurning':Miltonon Sex and Marriage,"MiltonStudies13
(1979): 3-33; Joan Webber, "The Politics of Poetry: Feminism and Paradise
Lost,"MiltonStudies14 (1980): 3-24; ChristineFroula,"WhenEve Reads Milton:
Undoing the Canonical Economy,"CriticalInquiry10, no. 2 (December 1983):
321-47, and her response "Pechter'sSpector: Milton's Bogey Writ Small: or,
Why Is He Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" CriticalInquiry11, no. 1 (September
1984): 171-78; Diane Kelsey McColley,Milton'sEve (Urbana:Universityof Illi-
nois Press, 1983); MaryNyquist,"Gynesis,Genesis,Exegesis, and the Formation
of Milton's Eve," Cannibals,Witches,and Divorce:EstrangingtheRenaissance,ed.
MarjorieGarber (Baltimore:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 146-208,
and her "The Genesis of Gendered Subjectivityin the Divorce Tracts and in
ParadiseLost,"in Re-membering Milton:Essayson the Textsand Traditions,99-127.
For an effort at recasting the debate in a historical perspective, see Joseph
Wittreich'ssurvey of women readers'responses to Milton, 1700-1830, in Femi-
nistMilton(Ithaca: Cornell UniversityPress, 1987).
ferent cultural moments and thus the process by which gender

emerged as the basis for a new political identity.
The historical importance of this aesthetic revolution may
best be understood if we consider the relationship that a voice of a
poet so alienated from the materials of an aristocratic tradition of
letters establishes between himself as an author, his readership,
and "woman" as the object of discourse. ParadiseLost itself offers a
particularly telling point of comparison. In their unfallen state,
the angel Raphael visits the sacred couple to tell them (and the
reader, of course) just where they stand among the emblems of
God's power and how they shall live at their patron's pleasure; it is
His knowledge and power they both embody. Satan and his
legions represent the consequences of exclusion by displaying a
body as grotesque as unfallen man's was classical in nature: "all
transform'd/Alike, to Serpents all as accessories/To his bold Riot"
(PL X, 519-21). Withdrawal of God's bounty further afflicts this
monstrously writhing mass with a "scalding thirst" and "hunger
fierce" that resemble the endless hunger of the grotesque body in
Bakhtin's account of Rabelaisian culture. Once the sacred couple
have taken on features of this other body, the angel Michael
comes to tell them what they are and who they will become with
the dissolution of the elite community.
To demonstrate what kind of power dominates this new set-
ting, we have chosen the part of the angel's narrative where the
daughters of Cain entice the sons of God:
... by thir guise
Just men they seem'd, and all thir study bent
To worship God aright, and know his works
Not hid, nor those things last which might preserve
Freedom and Peace to men: they on the Plain
Long had not walkt, when from the Tents behold
A Bevy of fair Women, richly gay
In Gems and wanton dress; to the Harp they sung
Soft amorous Ditties, and in dance came on....
(PL XI, 576-84)
Let us observe what happens to the "Bevy of fair Women" as the

dialogue between man and angel proceeds. "Soon inclin'd to ad-
mit delight," Adam jumps to the conclusion that with their ap-
pearance history has suddenly taken an upward turn (PL XI,

596-602). Not so, according to the angelic historian, who admon-
ishes him, "Judge not what is best/By pleasure, though to Nature
seeming meet" (PL XI, 603-4). These women may resemble
"Goddesses, so blithe, so smooth, so gay," but they are "empty of
all good wherein consists/Woman's domestic honor and chief
praise" (PL XI, 615-17). This is indeed a new development in the
poem-a body whose beauty as an object indicates its deficiency as
a subject.
When morality displaces eroticism as the standard of beauty
in the poem, the female body ceases to be an icon of political
power and becomes instead the sign of an invisible essence that
requires interpretation. Though gendered, this essence does not
belong to women alone but inheres in every individual. Again
beguiled by the images of earthly beauty, Adam assumes that the
"Bevy of fair Women" has a fixed meaning in the fallen world,
though one inverting that of unfallen beauty: "But still I see the
tenor of Man's woe/ Holds on the same from Woman to begin"
(PL XI, 632-33). And again, the angel intervenes to correct man's
misreading, thus by error effecting a significant transformation of
the centerpiece of aristocratic poetry-the female body: "From
Man's effeminate slackness it [man's woe] begins" (PL XI, 633-
34). Michael's moral interpretation of the scene hollows out the
female body and then relocates it within man as a sign of his
"effeminate slackness." His visit thus allows us to witness the
transformation of female beauty from a sign of birth and a fea-
ture of the aristocratic body to a sign of immorality and a feature
of individual psychology.
With this in mind, let us return to the scene of instruction
itself and identify the relationships established by this historical
change. The poetry of the fallen world is didactic poetry. It does
not celebrate the patron's bounty, but it does identify human
deficiency and does establish a standard for man's future perfec-
tion. Bearing witness to human history gives men the knowledge
of human progress required to produce such interpretations. Par-
adoxically, this knowledge-committed to rationality, delayed
gratification, frugality, and the division of labor-distinguished
Eve's practical view of the couple's role as gardeners from Adam's
extravagance. It is her sensibility that Adam must acquire in order
to survive in the new world. Where practicalknowledge had been

represented as feminine during the reign of an aristocratictradi-
tion of letters, paradoxically,the same knowledge acquires a mas-
culine identity after the Fall. This is the punishment for human
disobedience. This particularshifting of differences indicates the
emergence of a minority discourse-that of domestic economies
and Puritan marriage manuals. For this reason, the poem can be
said to offer something like an allegory for the changes that mark
the onset of the modern period.
Michael'sdiscourse condemns man to productive labor, and
woman to reproductive labor and household management. Ac-
cordingly, Eve never reappears in the poem as an erotic body.
Nor has she any use for the knowledge Michaeldispenses, and he
puts her to sleep during Adam's history lesson. Thus a division of
knowledge accompanies the gendered division of labor, together
producing the political relations we have identified as those of
Freud'sjoke book. The female body exists strictly as a topic of
discourse having the peculiar capability to create an affiliation
between men. This is an affiliation made on the basis of
masculinity-a class-and culture-specificbasisof affiliation. Mod-
ern masculinity bridges the gap between those who mix their
labor with the objects of the material world and the disembodied
voice of those who interpret such labor so as to determine its
value. This identification depends upon the slumbering woman.
She is not only the object of their discourse but also the sign of a
weakness ("effeminate slackness")in their contract; they define
themselves in opposition to her. According to this logic, she
threatens the bond among men (just as she once disrupted the
bond between man and God) whenever she crosses over from the
household into the domain of history and mixes her labor with
theirs.
Despite the fact that it has been orchestrated by God, this
dialogue between man and angel seems to eschew political power
along with the other temptations of this world. But such an at-
tempt to purify the work of words, of course, constitutes an ex-
tremely powerful political gesture in its own right. The politics of
the move can be seen in the relationship between the last two
books of ParadiseLostand a new humanism that lives on in our
own educational system-particularly in the humanities. There
one learns that poetics and politics do their work along separate
historical trajectories. One also learns to read history as the cause,

if not the ground, of literary meaning, and literature, in turn, as
the opposition and antidote to political power. To do this, one
acquires the more primary ability to read through the materials
out of which the truth of our bodies, our minds, and our collective
endeavors are made-through to an essence concealed in and yet
revealed by these materials, an essence both gendered and moral.
This division of knowledge and the interpretive skills that repro-
duce it are the birthmarks of a particular kind of literacy-that of
a modern ruling class. For better than a century now, academics
and intellectuals much like ourselves have reproduced this model
of interpretation in the classrooms of our finest universities and
colleges. In no danger of disappearing despite what educators
periodically claim, this peculiar form of literacy is currently being
defended in all its orthodoxy at the level of the federal govern-
ment.
Another Starting Point: Reflections on the

Class-Gender-Race Nexus
This essay has sought to provide a place where three differ-
ent strands of information can be brought together and under-
stood as a single cultural phenomenon. In doing this, paradox-
ically, we have tried to show that such information did not
originally come packaged in discretely intelligible units. To the
contrary, historical analysis requires us to produce separate
"strands" out of materials that are, at every turn, as mutually
dependent for meaning as they are mutually empowering. We
will consider ourselves successful if we have done something not
only to situate gender in political history but also to demonstrate
an aesthetic basis to class. Gender issues have always been part of
the literary domain. Until recently, however, literary criticism had
done little to ground these issues in political history. In contrast,
issues of class have always been already politicized, but even
though figuration provides their ideological charge the poetics of
class remain relatively unexplored. Where overturning the op-
positions of rational discourse can make us more aware of their
power, it does not do much to undo that power. Such power
comes as much from suppressing other categories of identity as
from reproducing separate domains for personal and economic

experience, art, and history.
If we return for a moment to our examples from William
Hutton's eighteenth-century account of the history of Bir-
mingham and the nineteenth-century government report on the
condition of women and children working in mines, we can quick-
ly identify signs of racial difference in the same "poeticalphrase"
that tarnished the moralityof working women. This dimension of
the gendered object produced by liberal intellectuals becomes
more apparent through time. Where the female blacksmith'sgen-
der was simply "eclipsed by the smut of the anvil" and kissed by
the "tinctureof the forge" in Hutton's eighteenth-century imag-
ination, her nineteenth-centurycounterpart, as represented by J.
C. Symons, has grown both precociously female and "blackas a
tinker" from laboring in the mines. Skin color and sexual pre-
cocity are but two implicitlyracial features of this "other"woman
incorporated in the laboring body during the period of England's
greatest imperial expansion. What must be noted, however, is the
apparent ease with which we could discuss the operations of class
and gender in this materialwithout ever mentioning race-or for
that matter, age, religion, or any other cultural difference-until
now. The suppression of all other signs of subordination from
such a discussion marks the kinship between these earlier repre-
sentations of work and the power we ourselves exercise in repre-
senting social groups other than our own. We are not suggesting
that academics should stop representing what is culturally other
than themselves-we are simply calling for a greater awarenessof
the power such representation entails.
Of late, significant strides have been made to theorize the
relationships intellectuals of various sorts "construct"in repre-
senting either dominant or subordinated groups. The class-
gender-race nexus constitutes, we feel, the most powerful attempt
to articulate cultural phenomena of this order that have been
broken up and scattered among the disciplines.74Here and there
74. Though it is very much in the air of late, our use of the term "class-gender-
race nexus" is particularly indebted to a talk delivered by Hazel Carby entitled
"The Black Woman as Text." In this lecture, Carby takes issue with those who
break down the information inscribed on the body of the black woman into
discrete part objects.
throughout the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, one can

find new research under way to contest the division which sepa-
rates these areas of knowledge. Such work has the potential to
unite men and women from the humanities and social sciences in
a single political project. Even so, we feel it is important to recog-
nize a problem with the model of difference in terms of which
much of this work proceeds, a problem that inevitably limits its
effectiveness. The gender-class model we have been using (even
as we questioned it) tends to reproduce the very gender differ-
ences we are trying to historicize. The traditional division between
literary and historical knowledge surfaces in various ways, such
that we cannot help but distinguish literal from figurative mean-
ing or text from context. So, too, the class-gender-race nexus
contains within itself the very divisions of knowledge it is contest-
ing. The differences among sociology, psychology, and an-
thropology make their uncanny reappearance in the composite
objects we make of knowledge drawn from these fields.
This is to suggest that no model offers a simple way to over-
come the divisions and exclusions produced by modern human-
ism. If one simply proceeds to introduce either gender or gender
and race into the field of information concerning class, or vice
versa, the results will be much the same. By assuming this infor-
mation came in such bundles, we will have extended the reach of
our own cultural categories and the power of divided knowledge
farther still. Yet it is, we believe, possible to shift attention away
from the objects themselves and onto this classificatory behavior.
One can at least attempt to work simultaneously within and
against analytical discourse, the better to understand what is ac-
complished by the peculiar way it divides knowledge. Rather than
accede to the additive logic of the model, it is possible to question
the relations suppressed by hyphenating class, gender, and race.
To examine the "nexus" itself is to question what relations of
power are constituted by writing, even-and especially-when
writing appears to speak on behalf of oppressed groups.
No one who reads the kind of prose we write, indeed no one
who writes the kind of prose we read, can speak of political rela-
tions from the position of the sullied daughter of the working
classes or of the listener/reader who comes to understand his own
identity in opposition to hers. Our position is neither one of those.
Neither coming from the working class nor being female guaran-
tees the two of us any affiliation with the child laborer. After all, as
we sought to demonstrate in the first section of this paper, being
workers may have allowed the Chartists to regard the interests of
their women as their own, but being men allowed them to over-
look the conflict between class interests and gender interests with-
in their culture. The same principle holds true, of course, for the
relationship between academic feminists and women from other
social and cultural groups. Yet, neither can we occupy a position
outside and independent of theirs-that of a politically neutral
observer.
As people who write about the cultural past, and specifically
the past as experienced by individuals who were subordinated by
the very power we have inherited, we cannot evade the fact we
occupy a position potentially analogous to that ofjoke-teller in the
triadic relationship of author, audience, and object of discourse.
So positioned as intellectuals and academics in a hegemonic dis-
course of class and gender, we inevitably subordinate one facet of
individual identity to the other as we describe it-as we describe
any such relationship, that is, without at least considering the
power of our classification system. We would go so far as to sug-
gest that to use the power of discourse to lay claim to a position of
powerlessness is the cruelest joke of all. Until we have recon-
sidered the history of our own intellectual labor in relation to
other modes of production, however, the joke is arguably one we
are all destined to retell.

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Gender and the Work of Words

Author(s): Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

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Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse

The political and social processes by which the Western Euro-

U pon first approaching Birmingham in 1741, William Hutton

In some of these shops I observed one, or more females,

The authors would like to acknowledgethe RockefellerFoundation'ssupport

taken possession of those lips, which might have been taken

1. William Hutton, An History of Birmingham(1783; reprint, West Yorkshire:

ence between productive labor and intellectuallabor prepares the

2. Daniel Cottom has addressed the cultural politics of Freud's analysis of

woman as a female who looked and behaved-grotesquely-like

3. See Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, FamilyFortunes:Men and Women

the discourse that emerged in the years following the English

cedures: what are we doing when we use contemporary theory to

Women at Work: 1741-1848

William Hutton was first "struckby the novelty" of female

5. See K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the LabouringPoor: Social Change and Agrarian

their labour that sisters are mentioned specifically in rules con-

7. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century (London:

the enrollment and minute books of towns and guilds, it is appar-

17. Quoted in Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor, 56.

Like Hutton, Symons is clearly struck with the novelty of the

20. Children'sEmployment Commission, First Reportof the Commissioners.

In two other pits in the Huddersfield Union I have seen the

Moral revulsion displaces whatever sympathy the reader may

21. Ibid., 22.

been easier to contest such representations and the economic pol-

23. By way of contrast to the nineteenth century, women's work in prein-

modern or modern periods, and how much of what there is seems

men's work did. Moreover, men's work changed in a way that

A feminism that considers the history of the terms "gender" and

27. Tilly and Scott, Women, Work,and Family, 3.

the fruits of one's labor or labor power itself were property."29

Work in Words: 1621-1690

Having suggested how gender and labor became visible to-

29. Scott, "On Language, Gender, and Working-Class History," 9.

necessarily coincide with changes in the economy or the institu-

decade-the dictatorship of the Dukeof Athens,the recentinsurrection

33. Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron, trans. G. H. McWilliam (Harmo-

elite, he represents that community as the appropriate setting for

Here we see something resembling what Bakhtin calls the "mass

between court and populace. If within the framework of their

1. London within ye bills hath 696th people in 108th houses.

According to Petty's figures, the next plague to hit London would

save the nation ?4,200,000. Unlike anything of this kind pro-

was hardly unique in imagining a world where power did not

the poor Artizans,and the obscure multitudeis no doubt one of

Several changes quickly become evident when we compare the

Whatsoeverthen he removes out of the state that Nature hath

47. Thomas Sprat,Historyof theRoyalSociety,ed. Jackson I. Cope and Harold

joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his

of discourse, we are not describing the rise of the artisan class.51 It

the first sixty years of the seventeenth century, however, artisans

a way of organizing social relations. Indeed, by lumping them together as

54. Hutton, History of Birmingham, xv.

Manual Arts ... either by the discovery of new matter, to imploy

The Work of the Metaphor, 1667-