Female vulnerabilites and coping strategies in the poor neighbourhoods of three colonial port districts : Corfu, Malta and Gibraltar, 1815-1870

Abstract

Women's centrality in the daily and long-term management of their poor households and community during the modern period has now been ascertained by a large corpus of historical literature. From this still growing research field, a stream of social historians - reacting against conventional histories that viewed women as recipient subjects whose life of poverty was entirely shaped by unshakable economic and political structures - have come up with the view that during the nineteenth century, with the development of the capitalist market economy, common women in Europe acquired a fresh individual agency. With this background, the present work actually starts by exploring the physical-spatial and social terrain (the excessive overcrowding, dilapidated housing, lack of space and unsanitary conditions) of the poverty-ridden neighbourhoods under review, and the economic and health vulnerabilities which these produced in their female residents. A thorough understanding of the nature of this general female condition of vulnerability requires the use of Pierre Bourdieu's notion of the habitus (Bourdieu, 1990, pp. 52-80). This provides us with a spatially-bound conceptualisation of the body, which is seen as literally embodying the surrounding spatial and social landscape, and through which a measure of practical social agency is acquired. While this approach contrasts with the Foucaultian vision of the body as rather passive, Foucault's essential thesis on the disciplining of the body through the structuring, ordering and regulation of space (Foucault, 1977) critically informs our comparative analysis of the power strategies operated by the state in the fortified colonial ports of Corfu Town, the Malta harbour district and Gibraltar, and the effects these left on their urban female populations.