This is a bit late in coming, but Cathy Burke's original "Birthday!" posting
also raised a number of questions for me, some of which I'd like to pose here.
Cathy, you say that the Ittman book shows how "the middle classes
spearheaded a campaign around parental neglect--but especially poor
mothering--to underline the argument of the separate domestic sphere as the
space which women and children should occupy."
My questions:
1) to what degree did this campaign also address the issue of male (and
household head) unemployment or underemployment? An argument often made in
respect to early English industrialization is that the frequent preference
for female and child labor relegated adult males to a marginal economic role
(as househusbands, chronic alcoholics, or some combination thereof). To
what degree does Ittman's work (or other recent local studies) demonstrate
this generalization? To what degree had the world of industrial labor
already been more "masculinized" by, say, the 1850s? To what degree was
this masculinization the function of labor market dynamics (more or less
"private" processes), to what degree was it prompted and prodded by
moralizing campaigns concerning "family values," middle-class Victorian
style? That is, more or less via appeals to public opinion and moral
sanctions?
Did this nineteenth-century campaign continue unabated into the twentieth
century; to what degree was it modified by actual shifts in female (and
child) employment patterns?
I speak as a complete novice in respect to English/British social history,
but I'm very much struck how much the extant literature on industrialization
and its social consequences remains wedded to English experience. Certainly
nineteenth-century English debates over industrialization appear to have
been saturated with moral argument, in which the family, idealized gender
roles, and an emerging concept of childhood innocence were central. To what
degree was this also the case in other countries? In France, for example,
women seem to have hardly less vital to early industrialization. To what
degree did the political discourse over industrialization in France parallel
that of Great Britain? And of course the same question could be raised in
respect to other national experiences.
regards,
John Abbott
University of Illinois, Chicago
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