Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy, by Emma Griffin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy by Emma Griffin Sarah Winter (bio) Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy, by Emma Griffin; pp. v + 389. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2020, $35.00, £20.00. Emma Griffin's Bread Winner: An Intimate History of the Victorian Economy tracks the impact of the male breadwinner wage on the economic and emotional lives of Victorian and Edwardian British working-class families through a multifaceted analysis of 662 working-class autobiographies (443 written by men, and the rest by women), some published but many existing exclusively in archives or as recorded interviews. Griffin notes that the proportion of male and female autobiographers evened out among those born after 1890 (9–10). Revising her account of the Industrial Revolution's positive effects on male workers' personal freedom and economic opportunity in Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution (2013) through a focus on gender inequality, Bread Winner also expands Griffin's research on autobiographies to understand working-class Britons' economic lives in ways that quantitative methods cannot fully capture. She observes that, while working-class autobiographies have been intensively studied, they have not been used "to understand 'big' problems like the extent and meaning of economic growth" in the nineteenth century, or why this growth failed to eliminate widespread poverty (296). Griffin interprets the male breadwinner wage—"a bargaining concept that was successfully deployed by several campaigners and trade unions throughout the [nineteenth] century" (4)—as an ideology that disqualified women from entering the labor market; as a gendered structural element of the economy; and as a narrative scaffolding for working-class writers to organize their retrospective stories and assess the financial successes or struggles of their families (229). Bread Winner is constructive for its use of personal narratives as historical evidence that can generate new interdisciplinary methods of interpretation in economic history. The book's chapters study the structural effects of the breadwinner wage through a range of topics derived through close analysis of the autobiographies, including women's and girls' lifelong "drudgery" at housework and their restricted opportunities for employment outside the home due to lack of skills (86); the reinforcement of masculinity, agency, and financial independence gained by men and boys through work; the resulting family dynamics in which a working boy contributing income was "somebody" (82), while girls were "nobodies" (83); hunger and the distribution of food within the household by gender and work status, and in urban and industrial versus rural areas; autobiographers' judgments of their fathers as breadwinners and their mothers as caregivers and household managers; writers' reflections on their family's emotional life; changes over time in the autobiographical format and in writers' attitudes toward gender and self-expression; and men's growing access to political participation and citizenship versus women's mostly muted public lives. By extrapolating from her sources, Griffin shows how rising male wages in urban, industrialized areas limited wage growth for women, thus intensifying the economic gender inequality produced by the breadwinner model. These developments made women dependent on a male wage and reinforced a domestic power dynamic that maintained their social subordination. Griffin also adopts as an analytical tool the autobiographers' own benchmark of provision, used to evaluate their fathers as successful or inadequate breadwinners (110). [End Page 528] She highlights that almost half of the autobiographers' families lacked a reliable breadwinner (153). As many recounted, when fathers abandoned the family, became ill or disabled by work, or succumbed to alcoholism, mothers or wives who entered the workforce were often unable to earn a living wage and were still responsible for housework and childcare. The wage differential facilitated by the male breadwinner model also served as a gendered "form of control" within the family. For girls who hoped to attain secondary schooling but were retained by their parents at home to help with housework, "low female wages were thus an important structural element of society, playing a vital role in ensuring that all families had access to the unpaid domestic work that they required in order to function" (58). The autobiographies also provide Griffin with convincing evidence for a...