A Woman’s Place is in the Home

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.