Emotional Labour, Elite Women and the Eighteenth-Century Country House

Part of the York Georgian Society 2024/2025 Autumn Lecture Series.

In the 1760s Sabine Winn (1734-1798) wrote to her husband, explaining that it was ‘not in my power to get used to this life,’ when describing her difficulty adjusting to the duties and expectations placed upon her as mistress of Nostell Priory near Wakefield. Sabine was Swiss-French, spoke little English, and had next to no experience of running a household, and the pressure she felt to embody ideal elite femininity and domesticity dramatically affected her wellbeing and mental health. This talk discusses the emotional labour experienced by elite women in their role as mistress of the eighteenth-century country house and examines how their pursuit of domestic perfection often incurred painful and damaging consequences.

About the speaker: Ruby Rutter is a historian of emotion, lived experience, domestic spaces, and gender, with a specific interest in reconstructing how people in the past understood and felt about their daily lives. Her PhD, titled Elite Women, Emotion, and the Lived Experience in the Eighteenth-Century Country House, examined the lived experiences of women in the eighteenth-century country house by looking at their testimonies of mental and physical health, comfort and mortality. Ruby has also worked with the National Trust to develop emotions-led heritage interpretation that fosters stronger relationships between visitors and heritage sites by facilitating a shared sense of human experience and feeling.

All York Georgian Society lectures take place on a Saturday afternoon in the Medical Society Rooms in Stonegate, starting at 2.30pm, followed by tea. They are free for members of the Society. They are also free for students at the university; we suggest that other non-members make a voluntary donation of £5 to attend any given lecture.