Feminism and the Family in England, 1880-1939

by D Y H O U S E (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  1989

  $3.42

  The history of feminism has tended to concentrate on women's struggle for education, employment and franchise. Yet changes in these areas inevitably raised fundamental questions about women's role in the family, encouraging reconsideration of the origins of family forms and their evolution through history. This book examines feminist ideas about the key institution of the family in late 19th- and early 20th-century England. Drawing upon a wide range of sources including diaries, autobiographies, pamphlets and novels the author explores women's experiences of family life, charting the ways in which the expression of individual discontents began to coalesce into a feminist critique. Many women chafed against the life of cramped domesticity, economic parasitism and sexual passivity that society often prescribed as the lot of the middle-class wife and mother. Carol Dyhouse considers how feminists endeavoured to secure economic independence for women; to restructure the organization of the household, especially housework and child care; and to reshape marital and sexual relations. Throughout, she emphasizes how differences in social class and political allegiance were both reflected in and influenced attitudes to the family.