Male and Female
IN LONDON, NEW YORK and Berlin, the working-class districts were full of drinking places. The London pub was often a Gothic palace, rivalling the parish church as the most conspicuous local landmark, whereas the New York saloon or the BerlinKneipe tended to lie at the bottom of a block of tenements, and was often reached by descending a flight of stairs. All alike were strongholds of the working-class male. 'There were so many pubs in Berlin in earlier times,' one elderly woman recalls, 'there was a pub in every building. And when things perhaps got too boring for father upstairs, he would pop downstairs to play the fool. There were always people down there.' 1 Mother, meanwhile, would be left upstairs with the children and the sewing-machine.
The pub was the most vivid symbol of the separation of male and female worlds. It represented a freedom that most men could enjoy, at least for a few hours in the evening, but which was much less often available to married women. The atmosphere of the pub tended to be aggressively masculine—though, admittedly, there were men who had a drink with their wife on Saturday or Sunday, and some pubs had a corner reserved for women drinking with other women. Apart from the usual card-playing, chatting, storytelling and joking, pubs could also provide a meeting-place for all-male friendly societies, trade unions, political organizations or singing clubs.
But if men saw their evening in the pub as well-earned relaxation after a long day's toil, their wives often saw it as money squandered that was desperately needed for food and clothing. Observers of working-class life in all three cities noted the tendency for husband and wife to grow apart under the strain of life on very tight budgets. 2 Ellen Ross has described the sexual division of labour operating in working-class families in London. Nearly all tasks were the exclusive province of one sex or the other—the only area of overlap being the upbringing of children. This was primarily a job for the women, but some men also made a significant contri