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Fellowship and family: oddfellows' lodges in Preston and Lancaster, c. 1830-c. 1890

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 February 2009

Shani D'cruze  and
Jean Turnbull
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Abstract

Oddfellows' lodges in mid-nineteenth-century Lancaster and Preston offer fresh perspectives on affiliated friendly societies. These societies combined fraternal good fellowship with a hierarchical organization which operated on the assumption that members were breadwinners supporting dependants in nuclear family households. Despite the skilled or artisan occupational status of many oddfellows, their domestic economies often relied on more than one wage and complex household structures. Since oddfellows' households also clustered in certain neighbourhoods, social associations established by lodge membership overlapped with local networks. By considering these lodges less as bounded institutional entities and more as focuses for intersecting social networks where mores of respectablity and social identity were worked out, relations of gender and community as well as class, can be brought to bear on a historical appreciation of this topic.

Type
Research Article
Information
Urban History , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , May 1995 , pp. 25 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1995

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