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Abstract

This dissertation sets out to examine the experience of working-class women and prostitutes in nineteenth-century Portsmouth, and the ways in which they manipulated agency. Drawing on methodologies presented by John Seed and Roxanne Rimstead, this study has taken a subjective approach and applied gender and class theory, in order to read primary sources against the grain and offer working-class women and prostitutes a voice. Despite being home to the Royal Navy and one of the most industrialised Dockyards in Europe, Portsmouth remained economically underdeveloped, and its community was made up mostly of the lower classes. This study has examined this naval community and the unique moral framework fostered that encouraged unconventional behaviour, external to traditional Victorian values. This moral framework influenced gender relations and created a liminality between developing Victorian gendered spheres. The introduction of the Contagious Diseases Acts in Portsmouth in 1864 witnessed a shift in the operation of women. Through the analysis of memoirs, parliamentary papers, and newspaper reports, this study will show how these women continued to sculpt agency despite regulations. Seminal historian Judith Walkowitz’s early work in 1980 reconsiders women and prostitutes, offering them agency and autonomy, rather than viewing them through a lens of victimisation and subjugation; her work is the basis for the considerations of this study. Whilst Walkowitz locates female autonomy through united multi-class discourse against the Contagious Diseases Acts, this study will depict informal female agency that women in Portsmouth exercised in their daily lives. However, the harsh realities that females operated in, demonstrate the ways in which working-class women and prostitutes manipulated their environment to survive. Despite offering gender and class historians a rich array of research areas, sailortowns and their communities remain under-researched. This reconsideration of womanhood in Portsmouth sailortown will attempt to address this gap in class and gender historiography. This dissertation concludes that working-class women and prostitutes sculpted agency in their day-to-day lives due to the moral framework fostered in nineteenth-century Portsmouth.

Course: History - BA (Hons) - C1087

Date Deposited: 2021-07-27

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis13700.html