ABSTRACT
Beverley Skeggs identifies respectability as a powerful signifier of class, one that informs how people speak, carry themselves, and relate to others. She points out that respectability is above all a female burden:
Respectability embodies moral authority: those who are respectable have it, those who are not do not.…At the core of all articulations of the working class [at the end of the nineteenth century] was the discursive construct of the modern, that is middle-class, family in which the behaviour of women was interpreted in relation to their role as wives and mothers and based on their responsibility, their control of their sexuality, their care, protection and education of children and their capacity for the general surveillance of working-class men. Observation and interpretation of the sexual behaviour of working-class women on the basis of their appearance was central to the production of middle-class conceptualizations. 1
