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Research
Paper on
Condition Of
Middle Class Women In 19th Century Europe
After a period of roughly a
century from 1750 to 1850 of anxiety and uncertainty in
families, due to the abrupt change of industry, a fresh stable
pattern emanated. In spite of the fact that the Middle Class is
still a minority, was beginning to have a deep impact on values,
even beyond the members of its own class. The new industrial age
had disassociated the home from the workplace. This galvanized a
more exact definition of the roles of women and men. While men
were assumed to be the breadwinners, the women were supposed to
care for the home and the children. It became a matter of
self-respect for a man to be efficient to support the family
sans his wife having to work. Women were not presumed to work
outside the home or to contrarily be intricate in public.
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Men were more probably to be distant, forbidding father figures
to the children. Women were more likely to be restrained and
confined by a home-confining value system. Children sometimes
were dismayed by the high anticipation their parents put upon
them. There was also a double standard in that men could have
affairs with other women and frequent houses of prostitution so
long as they were adequately careful, while women were counted
upon to maintain the purity of the family.
In Europe, out of need, women were an essential part to the
establishing and progress of this country. It refined their
status. In spite of the fact that they still had finite legal
rights, they were allowed to own property and operate their own
business. Class and social status was not a consideration, only
one’s abilities, initiative and resourcefulness mattered.
Victorian disposition toward sexuality loosened progressively
from the 1900s onward. Sexual respectability was still eminently
significant for middle-class women, but some men became more
open in their use of courtesans and indulgence of the sexual
practices. Silently, numerous middle-class-married couples
extended their use of artificial birth control devices and
recognized sexuality as pleasure, not only the basis for
producing offspring.
During the 19th century in Europe almost all women artists have
to resist the barriers of exclusionary education and patronage
systems, as well as restraining definitions as to what is
befitting subject matter for them. However, various women
artists emerged as important mainstream artists quilting became
increasingly a dominant media for women to express themselves
politically as well as from one’s own viewpoint.
George Gissing's ‘The Odd Women’ can perhaps best be indicated
by the note that accompanies the undated cover photo of women
operators working Glasgow's first multiple telephone
switchboard. While the novel makes no mention of the telephone
system as an employer of female labor, the reader is told, this
is `the kind of white-collar, public sector work that Rhoda Nunn
and Mary Barfoot see as the salvation of middle-class women in
the 1890's.' Gissing viewed the `Woman Question' with
intelligent sympathy: the odd women of the title are `odd' in a
demographic way, not in any pejorative sense.
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Gissing was always fascinated by contemporary social trends and
structured many of his novels around sociological observation.
In The Odd Women this tendency is particularly apparent, the
issues under examination including not only marriage, female
employment, and gender ideology, but also free love, genteel
alcoholism, and class relations.
During 19th century, European domestics were carefully thought
about as a dependent class, without the status accorded other
citizens. In both France and England servants and women were the
last civil groups to be sanctioned. The number of people in paid
domestic service reached its zenith in 19th century Europe. This
group of the servant class was, in part, an outcome of the
increase in the number of urban and middle class households that
could sustain to keep servants. The size of women laboring as
servants also grew in size.
Feminism poses key challenge to critical modernism. Feminism may
well be the most fundamental challenge ever to arise. For while
earlier challenges pronounced judgment upon beliefs or practices
by recourse to the primary tradition, numerous feminists assert
judgment upon the custom itself.
Endnotes
1. Kappler, Mary Ellen, “The Odd Women”, Arlene Young (Ed.)
George Gissing. University of Toronto Quarterly, Broadview
Press, P. 416 http://www.utpjournals.com/product/utq/691/women98.html
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