'Embarrassed circumstances': gender, poverty, and insanity in the West Riding of England in the early-Victorian years.

Abstract

Gender assumptions in early-Victorian England held that men derived their identities from work, while women were dependent beings for whom employment was not a central component of identity. Yet just as the New Poor Law positioned women ambiguously, sometimes emphasising women's dependency and other times stressing women's ability to work, so too do asylum records reveal complicated relationships between gender, poverty, and employment. Patient case notes from the West Riding Pauper Lunatic Asylum suggest that employment was a central component of poor women's identities. Female insanity was sometimes attributed to a lack of work, and both medical practitioners and female patients expected poor women to be employed.