Abstract
As women’s economic functions altered, their roles in the family changed, with domesticity replacing domestic manufacturing as the central female role. Middle-class married white women in particular came to be associated with consumption, family care, and the private world of the home. Men, by contrast, moved outside the household to take waged employment and had less direct involvement with family matters. A specific set of economic and demographic circumstances gave rise to the mid-nineteenth-century cult of domesticity, accentuating female responsibility for home and family and male obligations for economic support. Domesticity and the separation of spheres turned the household into a haven from the increasing disorder of the urban, industrial world and sought to keep women within the home in order to protect them from the chaos and impurity of public life.
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Bibliography
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© 1999 S. J. Kleinberg
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Kleinberg, S.J. (1999). Family and Migration in the Era of Domesticity. In: Women in the United States, 1830–1945. American History in Depth. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27698-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27698-1_3
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