Abstract
In pre-industrial society the father ruled over the family. However, women had a definite work role within the family, and hence also in society. Women’s moral inferiority may well have been widely acknowledged but they were seen as physically capable of hard work. All members of the family helped to produce their means of subsistence. In working-class families the Industrial Revolution brought a decline in the fathers’ control along with the possibility of a life outside the family for women. This brought a kind of ‘freedom’ for working-class women but in so doing it deprived them of a definite work role and status, enforcing a new kind of dependency which made it necessary for them to sell their labour power outside the family.
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Notes
H. Land (1980) ‘The Family Wage’, Feminist Review 6, p. 60.
A. Davin (1979) ‘Mind that you do as you are told: reading books for Board School girls’, Feminist Review 5, p. 90.
N. Osterud (1978) ‘Women’s work in nineteenth-century Leicester: A Case Study in the Sexual Division of Labour’, unpublished paper, now available in A. V. John (ed) (1986) Unequal Opportunities. Women’s Employment in England 1800–1918 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
Some of the material and ideas contained in this chapter are from L. Davidoff and B. Westover (eds) (1986) Our Work, Our Lives, Our Words, (London: Macmillan).
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© 1989 Shelley Pennington and Belinda Westover
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Pennington, S., Westover, B. (1989). A Woman’s Place is in the Home. In: A Hidden Workforce. Women in Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19854-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19854-2_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-43297-6
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19854-2
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