scholarly journals Women and Children First: Appropriated Fiction in the Ten Hours’ Advocate

2021 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 63-74
Author(s):  
Rob Breton

This article examines interclass strategies to bring about reform in mid-nineteenth century England. It specifically explores the way the Ten Hours’ Advocate, a paper written for the working classes, looked to present itself as a middle-class periodical in order to further the argument for factory reform. In reproducing fiction filched from middle-class periodicals, the Advocate performed its argument for the Factory Bill: that the Bill would ease social tensions, dissipate the Chartist or radical threat, and ensure a “return” to traditional gender roles. The appropriated fiction is mild, rather bland; the non-fictional argument for reform is direct and unapologetic. That the Advocate was opportunistic in the way it made the case for reform is an example of the advantages provided to reformers by the absence of strict copyright laws and by Victorian periodical culture in general. But it also contextualises the debate over the family-wage argument and the working-class role in hardening the Victorian sexual division of labour.

1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (S5) ◽  
pp. 25-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sara Horrell ◽  
Jane Humphries

The transition from a family economy in which incomes were democratically secured through the best efforts of all family members to one in which men supported dependent wives and children appears as a watershed in many otherwise very different histories of the family. It looms large in both orthodox economic analyses of historical trends in female participation rates and feminist depictions of a symbiotic structural relationship between inherited patriarchal relationships and nascent industrial capitalism. Both camps agree, as Creighton has recently put it, about “the out-lines of [the] development” of the male breadwinner family. Where they disagree is in “the factors responsible for its origins and expansion”. Why did families move away from an asserted “golden age” of egalitarian sourcing of incomes, which involved husbands, wives and children, to dependence on a male breadwinner who aspired to a family wage? Neo-classical economic historians emphasize the supply conditions, concentrating on income effects from men's earnings, family structure variables and alternatives to women's employment in terms of productive activities in the home. In contrast, dual systems theorists emphasize demand conditions in terms of institutional constraints on women's and children's employment exemplified by the exclusionary strategies of chauvinist trade unions, labour legislation which limited the opportunities of women and children, and the legitimation of men's wage demands by references to their need for a family wage. Our view is that systematic empirical investigation of the male breadwinner family has been lacking, even the timescale of its appearance and development remains obscure. Unless we fill in the outlines with more empirical detail we will never discover the reasons for its origins and expansion.


Author(s):  
Bolette Frydendahl Larsen

On the way to parenthood - (re)productions of gender, ethnicity, race and class in midwife consultations.The premise of this article is that subject positions, which parents-to-be hold during pregnancy, influence their future parenthood. The article examines how such subject positions are produced in midwife consultations. It shows how the man in a heterosexual couple is positioned as peripheral while the woman is assigned the responsibility for the construction of the family by means of documents, architecture and midwife practices. At the same time, the article illustrates how midwife practices reproduce hierarchies of a superior white, majority ethnic, middle class norm which equals respectability, opposed to inferior non-white, minority ethnic, working class deviations.


Author(s):  
Susan Honeyman

When we generalize about children, we are often also implicitly generalizing about their care, from within a "middle-class" view of "nuclear" family. These as sumptions rely on anorm that few of us actually fit. Yet it is very difficult to talk about children from completely outside of such an assumed model of support in the private or "islanded" sphere. In contrast, children in literature are just as often disconnected from family in order to have greater adventures in more public spaces. They must leave the confines of the private family to for gean other sphere in which to grow. But the real experiences of children at tempting public connection or freedom to roam are farmore complicated, ranging from captivity and containment to escape and self-reliance. Utilizing both fictions of child adventure and accounts of experiences by actual children, Honey mandemonstrates that childwelfare depends upon not just protection, but also participation. How can protection, which sounds so comforting, do harm? Perils of Protection will trace how the best of intentions to protect children can none the lesshurt them if leaving them unprepared to acton the irown behalf. Each chapter will center on this perilous pattern in a different context: "women and children first" rescue hierarchies, geographic restriction, abandonment, censorship, and illness. Analysis from adventures real and fictionalized will offer the reader high jinx and heroism at sea, the rush of risk, finding new families, resisting censorship through discovering shared political identity, and breaking the pretences of sentimentality.


1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (S5) ◽  
pp. 65-86 ◽  
Author(s):  
Samita Sen

In Western Europe, industrialization brought far-reaching changes in the family-household system by separating the household from the workplace. Factories, especially, took work away from home and eroded the integrity of the household. The spatial separation between the household and the workplace became the foundation for a conceptual separation between the community and the market. Families were separated from trades, consumption from production, women's activities from men's. These separations, often expressed in the generalized formula of a “private-public” divide, have underscored a thoroughgoing gender division of labour far beyond the original divisions supposed to be rooted in biological reproduction. In industrialized Europe, the working-class household's needs could not be met from the combined economic activities of its members: men, women and children. Rather, the daily bread was to be “won” by individual wage earners and clearly the breadwinners were to be men. In contrast, the home became the site of women's reproductive activities devoid of assignable exchange value. Wives' and daughters' unpaid work was increasingly underwritten by family ideology and was eventually to be covered by the “family wage” paid to husbands and fathers.


1997 ◽  
Vol 42 (S5) ◽  
pp. 129-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Hanagan

Exploring issues of the family wage, this paper examines labour markets, family employment patterns and political conflict in France. Up to now, the debate over the family wage has centred mainly on analysing British trade unions and the development of an ideal of domesticity among the British working classes, more or less taking for granted the declining women's labour force participation rate and the configuration of state/trade union relations prevailing in Great Britain. Shifting the debate across the Channel, scholars such as Laura Frader and Susan Pedersen have suggested that different attitudes to the family wage prevailed. In France, demands for the exclusion of women from industry were extremely rare because women's participation in industry was taken for granted. But a gendered division of labour and ideals of domesticity remained and made themselves felt in both workforce and labour movement.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (11) ◽  
pp. 18
Author(s):  
Dr. Indu Goyal

Marriage is an important thing in the life of a woman. The importance that our society attaches to marriage is reflected in our literature and it is the central concern of Shashi Deshpade’s novels. In our society where girl learns early that she is ‘Paraya Dhan’, and she is her parents’ responsibility till the day she is handed over to her rightful owners. What a girl makes of her life, how she shapes herself as an individual, what profession she takes up is not as important as whom she marries. Marriage is the ultimate goal of a woman’s life. This paper attempts to probe into the problems of marriage through the protagonists of her novels where one enjoys the freedom of marriage and the other accepts the traditional marriage. Shashi Deshpade highlights the problems of marriage faced by middle-class people in finding suitable grooms for their daughters. This problem is well-illustrated through the characters of her novels. Since the girl’s mind over her childhood is tuned that she is another’s property, she tries to attach a lot of importance to it. it is indeed a tragedy that even in the modern age, Indian females echo the same sentiment where it was marriage which mattered most of them but not to the men. It is a beginning of females sacrifices in life that marriage brings to her. Shashi Deshpande encourages her female protagonists to rise in rebellion against the males in the family matters, instead she wants to build a harmonious relationship between man and woman in a mood of compromise and reconciliation.  


2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-54
Author(s):  
Jowita Gromysz

Summary Disease in the family is a literary motif used by many authors. The article contains a description of various ways of representing the disease in contemporary texts for young children. Pedagogical context of reading literary narratives refers to the way the rider repons to the text ( relevance to the age of the reader, therapeutic and educational function). The analyzed texts concern hospitalization, disability of siblings, parent’s cancer. There always relate to the family environment and show the changeability of roles and functions in family.


Author(s):  
P. C. Kemeny

Protestants criticized prostitution because it threatened the family and ultimately civil society, and the Watch and Ward Society devised a campaign to shut down Boston’s red-light districts. These Protestant elites espoused traditional gender roles and Victorian sexual mores and endorsed the “cult of domesticity.” In the late nineteenth century, a number of reform organizations turned their attention to the “social evil,” as it was popularly called. The Watch and Ward Society’s quest to reduce prostitution placed it squarely within the larger international anti-prostitution movement. Moral reformers resisted all forms of policy that officially sanctioned or tacitly tolerated prostitution, instead arguing for its abolition. Their attempt to suppress commercialized sex eventually collapsed because of the lack of public support.


Author(s):  
Nicola Clark
Keyword(s):  
The Core ◽  
Made In ◽  

While there were clear strategic aims in the way that marriages were made in the Howard dynasty during this period, the family was only unusual in that it operated at the very top of the aristocratic hierarchy and was therefore able to use marital alliances to successfully recover and bolster both status and finances. Where they were different, however, was in the experience of some of these women within marriage. By and large, the marriages made by and for members of the family, including women, seem to have been as successful as others of their class. However, three women close to the core of the dynasty experienced severe marital problems, even ‘failed’ marriages, almost simultaneously during the 1520s and 1530s. The records generated by these episodes tell us about the way in which the family operated as a whole, and the agency of women in this context, and this chapter therefore reconstructs these disputes for this purpose.


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