From ‘kicking districts’ to Andy Capp: wife-beating and working-class masculinities Crime and Legal History Research Group, (5 March 2014)

Dr Joanne Bailey, Oxford Brookes

Contemporary stereotypes of working-class wife beaters• Frances Power Cobbe deployed the link between working-class

men and marital violence in ‘Wife Torture in England’ (1878)

• Lady Margaret Bell’s At the Works (1907) an account of life in the iron-working community of Middlesbrough, discussed how often marital violence occurred:▫ ‘Another woman whose husband was not a model of the conjugal

virtues said that, at any rate, she was thankful that he did not beat her. Another said with pride, when relating the virtues of hers, that he had never so much as laid a finger on her’

• Thus Bell concluded that wife-beating was fairly widespread among the working-classes.

Historians of marital violence in the working classes• Excellent work on violence in 19c working-class

marriage exists (e.g. Ellen Ross, John Carter-Wood, Anne-Marie Hughes) but far less about the negative stereotype of w-c wife beaters

• Court records and press reports show that there were no class boundaries where violence against wives was concerned, but, as Elizabeth Foyster shows in Marital Violence in England , wife-beating was increasingly perceived as class-based in the 19c: ▫ middle- and upper-class men identified with emotional

and mental abuse of their wives▫ working-class men with extreme physical violence

• Why?

The power of stereotypes of working-class wife-beaters• Did ‘cultural’ work- negative stereotyping functions through

‘othering’ as a means to form national, class and gender identities▫ Used to construct class-identity: middle-class men could use the stereotype

to construct themselves as different and superior types of manhood. ▫ Used by working men seeking to define themselves as respectable and

worthy citizens and thus gain the franchise • Demonstrated a ‘civilising process’ – that England was

progressive and modern by tackling this savage social problem ▫ Had racial and ethnic elements – for example Irish men were often

identified as wife-beaters. ▫ In the language of scientific Darwinism supposedly violent working-class

men labelled as uncivilised, primitive and brutish. Cobbe, referred to the evil of ‘passion’ which ‘rude men and savages share with many animals [and] … consists in anger and cruelty’.

• Shaped social investigators’ thinking and formed part of their rationale and motivation for surveillance and intervention in poorer people’s lives

Stereotypes of both spouses

• So far it is the stereotypes of working-class victims of wife-beating that have been unpicked: 2 forms -

• Passive un-provoking wife• Strident, provoking nag

• I will focus on the stereotypical wife-beater using three broad categories to raise interesting questions: industry, regionalism, and masculinity.

• Objective – inspire research to explore:

• When the stereotype began • Its form • Regional variation• Its tenacity

(1) Industry & Wife-beating•Wife-beaters often described as belonging

to specific categories of industrial worker- ▫Cobbe identified them as ‘Colliers,

“puddlers”, and weavers’ •Often jobs which symbolised heavy

indstury that were tagged to wife-beating: mills/mines/iron working

•Particularly the manufacturing town that was seen to constitute domestic and other forms of violence

Cobbe naming ‘typical’ areas for wife-torture

Industry & Wife-beating• Cobbe deployed the cultural vocabulary of

industrialisation to explain the connection:

• What historians of marital violence need to know:• Did these ideas start with industralisation? • How extensive were they? • Why do they have predominantly industrial

connotations? • Was there a discourse of rural labouring wife-

beaters? (or is the idyllic counterpart?)

(2) Regionalism & Wife-beating

• Some degree of regionalism is also evident • The industrial regions most firmly associated with brutal

working class marital violence were the North-West; the North-East; and London

• For example, Cobbe used the Parliamentary Reports on brutal assaults to estimate the proportion of wife-beaters to population, concluding that London and Durham had the highest number. The other places she included were Liverpool, Lancashire, Stafford, and the West Riding of Yorkshire

• My guess is that this spatial identification of stereotyped wife-beating did not originate with her publication, but this needs testing

• I want to suggest that it is possible to see how ingrained the regional dimension was in the way that it came to be conveyed through material culture

Hobnail Boots and Clogs• Working shoes – cheap, heavy, protective,

durable – associated with marital violence• Kicking Districts identified by Cobbe, as

regions where men kicked their wives with their clogs:▫ A letter to the Editor in the Spectator, Dec 1877

complained of a series of northern men who had killed their wives recently: such as ‘Alfred Cummins, tailor, Moor Street [Blackburn], was charged with knocking his wife down and kicking her head and face so violently as to deprive her of sight in one eye’.

▫ 1874, article about epidemic of violence in the north stated: ‘The Rough who kicks an inoffensive passer-by to death, or who tramples, with his hob-nailed boots, on the body of his senseless wife, is often maddened with drink, but he is never, or hardly ever, quite irresponsible’.

Flat Caps and Andy Capp

•According to Eric Hobsbawm the flat cap marked a proud working-class identity: ▫the ‘headgear which virtually formed the

badge of class membership of the British proletarian when not at work’

•Perhaps it is not surprising the flat cap became associated with the stereotype of wife-beating.

Andy Capp• Hobsbawm claimed the

cartoon ‘gently’ satirized the traditional male working-class culture of the old industrial area of Britain

• Surely a derogatory vision of w-c? Won’t work [andicap], spends money on leisure, fights with Flo, beats her for fun

• ‘Gentle’ satire? First cartoon, 1957 British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent

Cartoons sourced from British Cartoon Archive, University of Kent, 4 Oct 1957, 24 Oct 1957

I’m interested in the way that the flat cap could be both part of working-class self- identity as well as a negative stereotype. Was this identification chronological, was it class-specific’ or did it overlap?

(3) Working-class Masculinities

•A. Manly Independence: the breadwinner

•A positive version of working-class masculine identity was as breadwinner

•The working-class wife beater figure was frequently the failed breadwinner – typically described as either unemployed and/or lazy

(3) Working-class Masculinities

•A. Manly Independence: the breadwinner•The wife-beater was also often the ‘rough’

• I’m interested in when this ‘rough’ came into common discussion and was associated with wife-beating. So Charles Dickens’ Bill Sykes has all its hallmarks -beats Nancy to death – so the link was in place in 1838.

• How far was it seen as a product of industrial lives and conditions?

• London roughs often seen as unwaged – so was this man also the failed breadwinner?

(3) Working-class Masculinities• B. Manly self-control• A key features of manliness is

the control of passion – anger. • Shaped ideas about working-

class men and wife-beating - assumption that men were marked by an inherent tendency towards brutality and inability to control themselves

• This Liverpool rough is seen as unable to stop himself (by permission of Punch Limited ww.punch.co.uk)

(3) Working-class Masculinities• B. Working-class men’s bodies• Physical strength was how working men earned

a living (what they sold in the labour market) and the way that they resolved disputes with other men.

• Fist fights seen as reasonable, decent way to sort out conflict between friends and co-workers.

• Was there tension between toleration of employing physical strength in working and leisure arenas, but not in domestic arenas?

• Did the stereotype help work through this tension for men by insisting that it was not possible to use violence in a restorative way within the home?

• And what does that say about the timing of society’s tolerance of men’s use of corrective discipline against dependents?

Dissemination of the stereotype• Some of the images of shocking marital violence

were made cute – like Punch & Judy which became popular children’s toys/entertainment.

• Andy Capp became a global phenomenon – widespread in America and Europe: He’s known as Tuffa Viktor in Sweden, Charlie Kappl in Austria and and Willi Wacker in Germany

• When the strip’s cartoonist, Reg Smythe, died in 1998, the strip was syndicated to 1,700 newspapers – 1,000 in America alone – translated into 14 languages and read by a combined audience of 250 million people in 52 countries round the world http://www.planetslade.com/andy-capp-reg-smythe-v3.html

In conclusion: a final question•When did the stereotype

end?•De-industrialisation?

Is this trajectory shown in Reg Smythe’s Andy Capp cartoon?In its early version from 1957– numerous wife-beating references. According to a fan’s site: ‘Andy continued to treat Flo badly well into the 1970s – he was still giving her black eyes as late as 1975 – but by then it was very much a battle of equals. Often, Flo is as eager to get her dukes up as Andy, and will agree to fight him for reasons as trivial as warming him up before a pub brawl (1966), trying to get his watch started (1968) or simply to help him relax (1971’). There were only three Andy-on-Flo violence between 1976 and 1990 – while there are a dozen that show Flo punching Andy off his feet. http://www.planetslade.com/andy-capp-reg-smythe-v3.html.