History from Below
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| Mary Poovey |
Writing “history from below” became
popular in the 1960’s following the publication of The Making of English Working Class by the British historian Edward
Palmer Thompson.1 Looking at the past from the perspective of
the oppressed as Marx suggested, several women historians made unique
contributions to the study of women’s history and the increasingly complex
topic of gender theory. Mary Poovey, an
American literary critic specializing in the Victorian Era, questioned general
assumptions about traditional gender roles in Victorian England and concluded that,
“the middle-class ideology we most often associate with the Victorian period
was both contested and always under construction; because it was always in the
making, it was always open to revision, dispute, and the emergence of
oppositional formations.”2 Poovey claimed that while the
professional achievements of English women were omitted from most historic
accounts of the Victorian era, the virtues of motherhood were idealized to such
an extent that they became synonymous with the English character. “Despite the fact that women contributed
materially to the consolidation of bourgeois wealth and political power, their
economic support tended to be translated into a language of morality and
affection; their most important work was increasingly represented as the
emotional labor motivated (and guaranteed) by maternal instinct.”3 As a professor of English, Poovey drew upon
feminist critical methods of literary analysis and inspired feminist historians
to explore the use of literary analysis in the production of history.
