ABSTRACT
When looking for examples of transgressive or ‘unruly’ women it suddenly came to me that such women had always been there. I did not need to forage back through history or the literature books for the ‘Lady Macbeths’, the ‘Medusas’ or the ‘cackling matriarchs’; such women had been part and parcel of a working-class culture. The women I refer to may not have constituted a major political or revolutionary force, or even for one moment envisaged themselves as transgressive or unruly; but they did play a significant role in the constitution and enforcement of working-class gender norms and boundaries while, as Davis (1965, p. 131) observes, providing a ‘multivalent image’, a ‘widening’ of ‘behavioural options’ for transgressing those very same boundaries.
