The Crippled Nutmeg Seller: Gendering Disabled Bodies (Part 3)

This piece uses a primary source about a disabled nutmeg seller as a launchpad to explore concepts of the worthy and unworthy poor in the 19th century. Part1, part 2 is Sensationalistic Voyeurism and part 3 is the Gendering of Disability

Disability in the nineteenth century can be argued to have a gendered component. Indeed, the push for independence and to be a breadwinner which were gendered, were evident in Mayhew’s interview with the Nutmeg Seller. The concept of able bodiedness under the New Poor Law was based off the male worker and their physical norm. Therefore, the male body and breadwinner status was associated with ideas of independence and respectability, this meant that for men there was a direct connection between being able to work and being able bodied, especially as,  “the law proclaimed that men were solely responsible for the economic welfare of families.”[1] In comparison, for women under the New Poor Law, they were seen as the dependents of men, with a few exceptions such as the mothers of ‘bastard children’ or widows. The dependence of women on men was based of the comparison of their physical bodies, because women were considered fragile and strange due to their reproductive capabilities[2][3][4].

In the nineteenth century numerous medical theories thought that women’s bodies were physically weaker than that of male bodies, Ryan, an expert on women’s diseases concluded,

“It has long been a medical axiom, that women are more sensitive, weak, more influenced by moral and physical causes, and more liable to diseases than the other sex. The constitution is more feeble, and peculiarly influenced by the mysterious process of reproduction, pregnancy, parturition, the puerperal state and lactation, as well as by the other function peculiar to it [menstruation]”[5]

Women were therefore, always potentially on the verge of becoming ‘disabled’ and thus their womanhood put their status as able bodied at risk[6]

However under the New Poor Law, a person’s body – that of an able bodied person – was seen as suitable for employment. The Poor Law’s approach to bodies, both female and disabled contrasted with some of the views of social reformers, as well as many in the labouring poor who viewed women in roles of female domesticity and emphasised the male breadwinner role, this approach placed women outside of the world of work which didn’t equate with the push of the New Poor Law that viewed an able bodied person as an asset to the means of production in the labour market. This created two opposing discourses that of respectable domesticity in which a household contained an able bodied male breadwinner, and a female dependant.

Therefore the domesticity ideology and the New Poor Law placed women in a trap, they had to juggle the contradiction of being dependent and domestic with being independent and working outside of the domestic sphere.[7] This was especially problematic when the women were mothers, especially as the New Poor Law authorities,

“remained… uncertain above all as to whether the primary role of the unsupported working class mother was motherhood or work”[8]

Women and the sick made up a huge proportion of those in the workhouse as well as those who sought outdoor relief. The New Poor Law, according to M. W. Flinn, had an “obligation to treat the destitute sick” however, despite this it didn’t extend its sympathy to people who were sick that were seen as independent or able bodied, potentially distinguishing between visible and invisible disabilities due to a focus on the physical body when considering a person’s able bodiedness. Therefore,

 “’independence’ in regard to sickness meant membership in a sick club which, through the payment of weekly subscriptions, provided for medical attention and hospitalisation in a voluntary hospital. The destitute that remained would then be cared for”[9]

The sick clubs were not a panacea to the reduced eligibility of the poor law, families weren’t always covered as a whole and many workers were unable to afford to contribute to a subscription, those that did were nearly always the male breadwinner leaving the rest of the family exposed and vulnerable to sickness. This meant that the consequences of the New Poor Law reinforced the ideology of manliness and independence and femininity and dependence and therefore contrasted starkly with the intentions of the Law.

This meant that pauperism as a whole was viewed as a male problem, because men were associated with independence, work and able bodiedness. This meant that being disabled had feminine connotations, and it explains why many male disabled people such as the Nutmeg seller would strive to remain independent, not only to be viewed as the worthy poor but due to the overall gendered connotations with being a dependant to someone else, indeed, any aid they receive is part of the a plan to rejoin the workforce more fully in future, reflecting the want to delineate between worthy and unworthy not only by the laws of the land, but by those most impacted by them,

“I strive hard and crawl about till my limbs ache enough to drive me mad, to get an honest livelihood.  With a couple of pounds I could, I think, manage to shift very well for myself.  I’d get a stock, and go into the country with a barrow, and buy old metal, and exchange tin ware for old clothes, and, with that, I’m almost sure I could get a decent living.  I’m accounted a very good dealer.”[10]

[1] Sonya Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (Berkely: University of California Press, 1992), 53

[2] Nancy F. Cott. “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790-1850” Signs 4, no.2 (1978) 219-36

[3] Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860-1914 Princeton, N.J. Princeton University Press, 1987

[4] Sara Delamont and Lorna Duffin eds. The nineteenth century woman: her cultural and physical world. NY Barnes and Noble books, 1978

 

[5] Michael Ryan, A Manual of Midwifery, and Diseases of Women and Children, 4^th ed. London: published by author in 1841, pg. 325

[6] Elaine Showalter, The Female Malady: Women and Madness in English Culture 1830-1980 NY Penguin 1985.

 

[7] Joan Burstyn, Victorian Education and the ideal of womanhood. New Brunswick, N.J. Rutgers University Press 1984

[8] Pat Thane, “Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England” History Workshop 6 91978): 29-51, pg36

 

[9] Flinn, M.W., 1976. Medical services under the new poor law. In The New Poor Law in the Nineteenth Century (pp. 45-66). Palgrave, London. Pg57-58

[10] Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work  Vol. 1.  The London Street-Folk.  London:  Office, 16, Upper Wellington Street, Strand, 1851. Pages 329-332.  Available online at archive.org through Google Books.