Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840-1920

(Jacob Rumans) #1

6 Gender and Space in Rural Britain, 1840–


women were also present as designers and artists shaping out cultivated spaces of
rurality, as in the case of Gertrude Jekyll (explored in Christen Ericsson-Penfold’s
essay), and these gardens inspired other writers such as Virginia Woolf, taken up
here by Karina Jakubowicz. Masculinity was also far from static and the shift s
in women’s position in the countryside had ramifi cations for such delineations
of masculinity: the rural worker was oft en conceptualized as epitomizing typical
masculine qualities of power and strength, heightened by the dirt and grime of
their toil. Yet the changing demands on the agricultural labour force and resulting
unemployment of many rural workers unsettled this notion of masculinity as a
stable construct; as Barry Sloan’s essay in this collection demonstrates, rural men
such as the labourer and the carter are left ‘stranded “between two civilizations”’.^23
As this overview begins to make clear, rural environments were sites of active
and dynamic change, yet, while this has been acknowledged in historical and
geographical accounts of rurality, in literary analysis rural environments have
oft en been understood only in relation to their urban counterparts – as spaces
where traditional values and codes were upheld and, in the case of discussions
of modernity and gender relations, typically overlooked by a focus on cities as
the sites of active and progressive change. Th e political writing and action of
suff ragists was located in urban centres, and the fi gure of the New Woman that
took hold towards the end of the century as a model of independent feminin-
ity is located as an urban fi gure.^24 Yet the divisions between town and country
women are not so easily asserted: Sayer notes, for example, that the Langham
Place women’s group, campaigning for women’s right to work and own prop-
erty, advocated farming ‘as a fruitful and potentially respectable occupation’
for wealthy women, two of the group’s members themselves having agricultural
connections.^25 During the First World War, while there were more opportuni-
ties in urban areas for women to take over traditionally masculine roles, in rural
parts of the country some women did also take up jobs as farm labourers and
miners. Farming and mining were reserved occupations but, as Lynne Mayers
explains, some men still signed up for service and so women were oft en called
upon. Mayers provides an example of the china clay pits of mid-Cornwall where
‘young women were sometimes called on to do very heavy manual work’ and
a ‘Miss A Langley, from Lanner, [in Cornwall, who] managed the Magdalen
Mine near Ponsanooth’.^26 Th e relationship between town and country in female
experience is taken up in Samantha Walton’s essay in this collection, which chal-
lenges the ways in which we might typically perceive this binary, arguing that in
the early twentieth-century writing of the Findlater sisters in Scotland, it is the
rural, rather than the urban, environment that comes to provide a space in which
modern forms of selfh ood can be articulated.
Despite these identifi able nuances, the more stereotypical conceptualiza-
tion of the urban–rural relationship is still as culturally salient as it was when

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