CLARK, Anna (K.)

PERSONAL:

Female. Education: Harvard University, B.A.; University of Essex, M.A.; Rutgers University, Ph.D., 1987.

ADDRESSES:

Office—University of Minnesota, Department of History, 774 Social Science Building, 267 19th Avenue South, Minneapolis, MN 55455; fax: 612-624-7096. Agent—c/o Author Mail, University of California Press, 2120 Berkeley Way, Berkeley, CA 94720. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Author, historian, and educator. University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, professor of history; University of North Carolina, Charlotte, associate professor. Editor of Journal of British Studies.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Prize in the Humanities, North American Conference on British Studies.

WRITINGS:

Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845, Pandora (London, England), 1987.

The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, University of California Press (Berkeley, CA), 1995.

(Editor, with Sarah Richardson) History of Suffrage, 1760-1867, Pickering & Chatto (London, England), 2000.

Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Journal of the History of Sexuality and Eighteenth-Century Studies.

WORK IN PROGRESS:

Desire: A History of Sexuality in Europe.

SIDELIGHTS:

Two different aspects of English society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are the focus of Anna Clark's historical works Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845 and The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. The first of the two books traces the view of rape as an act of warning or punishment for women during the nineteenth century. Through the use of a variety of historical documents, including transcripts from rape cases, Clark points out that women were not supposed to know or to speak about sex, and that information about actual rape cases was suppressed. This enabled the myth to flourish that this crime happened only to women who went out alone, despite factual evidence to the contrary. Women's Silence, Men's Violence "examines the problems of sexual assault not through literary sources or the treatises of medical and legal authorities but through the actual words of the victims," explained Carolyn A. Conley in Victorian Studies. Reviewer R. E. Begemann, writing in Choice, concluded that this study "helps considerably in understanding contemporary attitudes toward rape and sexual assault."

In The Struggle for the Breeches, Clark maintains that changes in British society during the Industrial Revolution affected relationships between men and women. She examines a variety of aspects of society in relation to the new classes formed as a result of urbanization and industrialization, including work settings, home life, popular culture, politics, and sexual identity. The Struggle for the Breeches is "abounding with vivid examples and surprising detail," observed Deborah Valenze in the American Historical Review. Valenze added that Clark's "accounts are framed in terms of the gender conflict that characterized work and organizations within the working class," and that "her revision of the forging of a self-conscious working class arrives at profound, sometimes unsettling insights into the making of collective identities." According to Anna Davin in the Women's Review of Books, "This book is a model for historians. Anna Clark integrates deft critical synthesis of previous work with her own findings and weaves in her interpretive analysis with elegance and skill."

Clark's History of Suffrage, 1760-1867, edited with Sarah Richardson, traces the long and arduous struggle for the right of citizens at all levels to vote in Great Britain. Because voting had long been considered a privilege rather than a right, "For those Britons who did not enjoy that privilege the campaign to extend the franchise became something for which they were often victimized and forced to endure social ostracism as rabble-rousers, terms of imprisonment, financial hardship, and personal suffering," commented Michael T. Davis in Australian Journal of Politics and History.

The notion of universal suffrage emerged in Great Britain around 1647, the time of the Putney debates. Some historians suggest that philosopher John Locke favored extending voting privileges, and several radical Whig party members endorsed voting and electoral reform in the first half of the eighteenth century. By 1760, Davis wrote, "the call for reform became more vociferous and organised." Just as British radicals resisted the existing system and fought for its reform, those who favored the privileged voting system mounted heavy opposition to any changes, and the conflict raged for nearly 170 years. The fight for suffrage in Britain "is indeed an epic and compelling story that did not end until 1928 when universal suffrage was finally secured in Britain," Davis stated.

History of Suffrage, 1760-1867 at more than 2,000 pages, contains facsimiles of eighty-two contemporary tracts in support of suffrage. Davis explained that Clark and Richardson "have done an admirable job of selecting from a plethora of works that were published during the high tide of electoral reform activity in Britain from the mid-eighteenth century through to the mid-nineteenth century." The critic also noted that "the inclusion of an insightful general introduction and headnotes to individual texts makes this set particularly valuable to scholars of all levels with an interest in the subject."

In Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution Clark examines issues of sex and politics in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century Britain. During that time, she asserts, sexual scandals were commonplace. In the environment of the time deceit, bribes, cover-ups, and patronage were rampant, and sexual decadence and titillation found a willing audience among the upper classes and working classes. Sexual scandal "was used for political ends" in the years between 1770 and 1815 in Britain, and sexual misbehavior "was central to the issues of the day," morphing sexual scandals into symbolism representing larger political and social issues, commented Edwina Currie in New Statesman. Currie criticized the "plodding style" of the writing, and noted that "it doesn't help that [Clark] sees history entirely from a feminist view point." Whiel calling the work informative, Currie rejected Clark's ideas of the importance of sexual scandal to political affairs. "Sexual scandal never illustrated anything much, other than our enduring taste for it," Currie concluded. Other critics, such as Gail Benjafield in Library Journal, were more favorably disposed toward the book. Scandal is "interesting and informative" and "a serious and well-researched academic study of a 50-year period in British politics," Benjafield remarked.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

American Historical Review, February, 1989, Michael B. W. Sinclair, review of Women's Silence, Men's Violence: Sexual Assault in England, 1770-1845, p. 135; December, 1995, Deborah Valenze, review of The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, pp. 1513-1515.

Australian Journal of Politics and History, March, 2003, Michael T. Davis, review of History of Suffrage, 1760-1867, p. 110.

Choice, May, 1987, R. E. Begemann, review of Women's Silence, Men's Violence, p. 1454.

Library Journal, October 15, 2003, Gail Benjafield, review of Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution, p. 83.

New Statesman, June 23, 1995, Sheila Rowbotham, review of The Struggle for the Breeches, p. 41; January 26, 2004, Edwina Currie, review of Scandal, p. 53.

Victorian Studies, summer, 1988, Carolyn A. Conley, review of Women's Silence, Men's Violence, pp. 581-582.

Women's Review of Books, December, 1995, Anna Davin, "Before the Glass Ceiling," review of The Struggle for the Breeches, pp. 13-14.*