Abstract
The years 1860–1900 witnesseda remarkable number of changes in the premises and discourses of family life. Women’s growing access to employment opportunities and increased involvement in philanthropic and political life meant that traditional understandings of gendered roles within marriage were potentially threatened. In this light, the continuing acceptance of traditional structures of family life in most sectors is striking. Nevertheless, women do not appear to have simply acquiescedin patriarchal modes of family life. Middle-class and elite women demonstrated an ability to accommodate their own needs, as well as new ideas concerning relationships, mothering and consumer needs, within conventional formulations of married life and family responsibilities.
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Notes
F. M. L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Victorian Britain, 1830–1900 (London: Fontana Press, 1988), pp. 105–11.
Barbara Caine, Destined to be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 92;
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The phrase is Cicely Hamilton’s. See Juliet Gardiner (ed.), The New Woman: Women’s Voices 1880–1918 (London: Collins and Brown, 1993), p. 65.
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Simon Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain, 1860–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Cited in Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 276.
Pamela Horn, High Society: The English Social Elite, 1880–1914 (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1992), p. 97.
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Deborah Gorham, The Victorian Girl and the Feminine Ideal (London: Croom Helm, 1982);
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See also Anne Digby, ‘Women’s Biological Straitjacket’, in Susan Mendus and Jane Rendall (eds), Sexuality and Subordination: Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 192–220.
Florence Nightingale, Cassandra reprinted in Ray Strachey, The Cause: A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (London: Virago, 1978, first published 1928), p. 402.
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Eileen Janes Yeo, The Contest for Social Science: Relations and Representations of Gender and Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1996), pp. 122–4.
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Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985); Bland, Banishing the Beast pp. 168–71.
Janet Howarth, ‘Mrs Henry Fawcett (1847–1929): The Widow as a Problem in Feminist Biography’, in June Purvis and Sandra Stanley Holton (eds), Votes for Women (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 84–108.
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© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (2001). Families, Relationships and Home Life. In: British Women in the Nineteenth Century. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_13
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