The Disruption of Victorian Class and Gender Norms

Abstract

During the late-nineteenth century, discussions surrounding female shop assistants permeated British society and culture appearing in newspapers, popular romance novels and political literature. Ultimately, through romantic literary and cultural texts “the shopgirl” emerged as a social construction, obscuring and shaping the experiences and identity of “ordinary” female shop assistants. While Victorian gender norms attempted to restrict women to the domestic sphere, the study of shopgirls illuminates the social anxieties and gender discourses that emerged alongside shifting consumption practices in Britain, resulting in the breakdown of separate gendered spaces. This paper will argue that the emergence of female shop assistants and the socially constructed “shopgirl” in the latter half of the nineteenth century transformed pre-existing Victorian class and gender norms in British society. Not only did shopgirls embody fantasies connected to consumer culture, but disrupted class and gender norms resulting in a variety of social anxieties, pertaining to the loss of female domesticity, social mobility, morality, as well as the dangers of London for women.