Preliminary Programme

The years 1800 to 1845 in Ireland were marked by agrarian unrest, the campaigns for Catholic emancipation and to repeal the Union of 1801, increasing social control, seen in the expansion of policing and the broadening of the uses of the court system, and increased literacy, which led to not only a growing number of local newspapers but increased reportage of Irish affairs. Growing populations and urbanisation led to increasing contests over the uses of urban space, while increasing wealth amongst the middle-class challenged the traditional seats of power. Ideas of Irishness, manliness and political power were being openly contested and the court offered a space for meaning to be negotiated.

This paper analyses the use of space in the Irish court room in men’s negotiations over the meanings of manliness and political power. While explorations of the dialogue of court proceedings are the stock and trade of historical analysis, the physical uses of court space during court proceedings have only recently been placed under analysis. This paper looks at how men used the physical space of the court to portray different types of manliness, particularly focusing on the differences between urban and rural forms of manly identity, which in turn fed into claims to political citizenship and authority. (Show less)

In 1849, the Danish Constitution, among other things, meant political citizenship for a large group of men. Democracy and the potential of political influence made it important to define who did have access to the political field and who did not. The Constitution defined the political citizen who could be trusted with the right to vote. But the male identity as a political citizen and the role of the political citizen in local society still had to be defined in the years to follow. This practical definition of the political subject also helped to defend and maintain the border between those inside and those outside of political citizenship. To be a political citizen was not just a question of rights, but also of obligations and not least deeds. This paper will explore how these men, who gained the right to vote, reacted on their new identity as formal political subjects. As a starting point, it will explore how the male identity of the political citizen was defined nationally in the constitution. Pointing at the ability to ‘provide’ as an important part of this identity, the paper will move on to explore how private philanthropy in the town of Aarhus, Denmark, became part of an active political citizenship and discuss how active male citizenship influenced establishing social institutions in the town. (Show less)

This paper comes within the scope of the Gender in the European Town network. One of the main research questions of this project is to analyze in what ways men and women articulated their relationship to the urban economy. My research seeks to understand the role of women throughout the urban economy by analysing their activities in one specific sector, the food trade, which was an essential, and thus highly regulated, market. It focuses on the second half of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth in order to analyse the impact of ‘colbertism’, that is of corporatization, on women. My method consisted in comparing traditional source materials for the urban economy with specific documentation on practices and repression in the market for food. Three major aspects are examined. The first relates to the role played by women in the regulated market: often not mentioned in source materials or relegated to a minor role by the guilds, women were nevertheless omnipresent in the retail food trade, whether within the guilds’ bailiwick or outside the official marketplace (in particular, selling or hawking). A second section reviews the lives and activities of women involved in three types of illegal activities: hoarders, sellers of meat during Lent, and thieves. Detailed descriptions of their activities offer useful insights for understanding the dynamics of the black market. Finally, because of their legal status, women were often de facto actors in the food trade by playing the role of intermediary between the official market and a parallel market where certain illicit forms of trade were more or less tolerated. (Show less)

Two important developments contributed to the way that towns operated and how their self-perceptions altered. First was the continued importance of guild structures and traditions, and the second was the growth of polite and commercial society. These are central to understanding the ideas that came together to construct gendered notions of skill and status. They had specific purchase in corporate communities where economic roles and understandings of reputation were closely linked to political power and standing, and where workplace culture was clearly gendered. For women, like men, economic and social roles were closely linked, so that how they interacted with urban culture reflected their opportunities for creating a position in the corporate community.
This paper will explore how women negotiated the changing economic and metaphorical spaces of late eighteenth-century towns drawing examples from Northern Europe, e.g. Scotland, Denmark and Finland in particular. It will focus on the ways they positioned themselves in medium-sized corporate communities world, looking at experiences of trade and commerce with a particular focus on the gendered relationships within those physical and ideological spaces. It will examine the masculine guild traditions and how the growing mercantile community overlaid this system, reshaping the urban world in the context of business. Then, it will turn to the ways women established themselves as businesswomen, through physical position and use of language. (Show less)