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Women in an Industrializing Society
England 1750-1800

Penny Rendall (Author), Jane Rendall (Author)

9780631153030, Wiley

Paperback / softback, published 6 December 1990

120 pages
21.6 x 14 x 0.9 cm, 0.17 kg

This book examines the experiences of women in an industrializing society, not only in their paid employment, but also in the home. Both are vital to understanding the role women played in the industrial revolution in England. Jane Rendall draws upon the most recent work on the social history of the nineteenth century to consider the economic changes that brought new divisions of labour between the sexes in the working-class family and the growth of the ideal of 'separate spheres' for middle-class men and women. She shows how, by the end of the period, domestic labour, both paid and unpaid, and the responsibilities of motherhood has become the expected occupation of the majority of women.

Acknowledgements vi

Introduction 1

1 Women's Paid Employment 1750-1830 11

Women in the Countryside 13

Urban Women: The Old Trades and the New Industries 26

2 Women, the Family and Economic Change 1750-1830 33

The Working-Class Family: Conventions and Change 36

Middle-Class Women and the Shaping of the Pre-Victorian Family: Domestic Ideology 44

Domestic Practice in the Middle-Class Family 49

3 Women's Paid Employment 1830-1880 55

Women in the Textile Trades 58

Women's Trades and the Growth of the Sweated Trades 64

New Jobs for Women 71

4 Domestic Life and Labour 79

Housing in an Industrial Age 81

The Labor of Housework 85

Motherhood 90

Domestic Service 98

References and Further Reading 103

Index 108

Subject Areas: Sociology & anthropology [JH]

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