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Категория: Английский язык
It is difficult to summarize the situation of women between 1850 and 1914. Women's roles and experiences differed sharply according to class lines, and even within classes many of the relevant developments were contradictory. What generally unified
women's experiences during this period, as before, was their legal inequality to men, (heir lack of political rights, their economic dependence and inferiority, and their social restrictions. In an age in which liberal values-stressing individualism, political rights, and equality before the law — were becoming firmly established, women were still relegated to a secondary position or actually excluded from most aspects of public life. For middle-class women, the contradictions were greatest. The sexual division of labor, separating the woman's sphere from the man's sphere, was rigidified by the growing cult of domesticity. Accordingly, women were glorified as caring mothers, supportive wives, and religious beings. Their place was in the home, where they were in charge of the domestic scene. The wife was supposed to defer and cater to her husband and take personal responsibility for nursing and rearing the children. The children's education and the religious well being of the family was her realm. As domestic manager, she was supposed to have expertise as a consumer, and in turn she was the object of consumer advertising. She was also assumed to be interested in charity and willing to donate time for worthy causes. The middle-class wife was not expected to engage in paid occupations outside the home. The more successfully middle class family was, the less likely it was that the wife was engaged in paid work. Nevertheless, toward the end of the nineteenth century some professions such as school teaching, social work, and nursing were expanding and opening to even married middle-class women.
Within the working class, middle-class views about the separate spheres of women and men and the particular domestic nature of women hovered and had some important effects, but the actual experience of women differed. In general working-class women were much more likely to work for wages than middle-class women. A common pattern was for young women to take jobs as domestics before they were married-often moving to cities for this purpose. In addition to the more traditional jobs for women in textiles, food processing, and retail outlets, some of the newer occupations in nursing and secretarial work were opening to women, when jobs were unavailable. One of the main ways for working-class women to earn money was in "sweated industries", where they worked in small factories or at home, usually in textiles or decorating, and were paid by the piece. In all these occupations, women continued to be discriminated against; they received lower pay than men for the same work and were excluded from many jobs open to working-class men.
