Hoping this is allowed - I don't have a post to write today, but a link to share to a talk I'm giving tomorrow. It's about my research into the musical cultures of women who worked in the Scottish herring industry in the 19th and 20th centuries. Registration is free (£10 suggested donation optional). The talk is over Zoom and will be recorded, so it should appear on YouTube in a few weeks' time as well. Herring gutters and packers fought hard for improved working conditions and higher wages. The other two talks should be great as well!

Something I find interesting is the perception of women's rights vs. the reality in anglosphere cultures in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The baseline pop-culture-consciousness version is of course that no women had rights historically until the 1970s, but among people who are a few steps up on the ladder of knowledge, the gist is basically that women were not restricted to the home in the eighteenth century, then separate spheres ideology (men = public, women = private) came along with the Victorians and forced women to lead solely domestic lives - that women had more rights in the eighteenth century and fewer in the nineteenth. This is fascinating and annoying to me on a few levels.

For one thing, the impression people have of the rise and imposition of separate spheres ideology is ... off. It started in the late eighteenth century - it didn't come in with Victoria - and while there are some places you can clearly point to women being restricted (elite women who had previously participated more actively in politics being shamed out of it, for instance), in most instances it's just a reinterpretation/revaluation of what was already happening (women being expected to manage the home and rear the children) or had little effect on women's behavior (working-class women still worked, lower-middle-class women still assisted in the family businesses).

But the thing is that the organized women's rights movement started in and ran all through the nineteenth century, and achieved much more progress than the eighteenth! The idea that divorced women should have custody of any of their children, pushed into public discourse by Caroline Norton in the 1830s, was a massive shift from the previous standard that said "of course sinful divorced women shouldn't automatically have access to their children." In the Victorian era, women were more publicly positioned with charitable or reforming organizations than ever before. Yet sometimes it feels like people assume the legal changes they managed to get were needed to put women back on par with their Georgian ancestors rather than to achieve more stable positions than eighteenth century women would have thought possible.