Family Structure And Gender Roles In The 19th Century

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Ben Briones Mr. Allen AP European History: Period 5 March 10, 2014 Family Structure and Gender roles in the late 1800s The rise of the middle class is one of the main subjects that had characterized the 19th century. The middle class underwent enormous expansion in the 19th century as a consequence of the Industrial Revolution. The middle class had consisted of three levels: the upper middle class, the middle middle class, and the lower middle class. Wealth and job title determined which class a person would belong to. The upper middle class was composed mainly of the most successful business families from banking, industry, and commerce. Below the wealthy upper middle class was a much larger, much less wealthy, and increasingly diversified…show more content…
Earlier in Europe, mothers had avoided strong emotional ties to newborn children because of the constant risk of infant death. As the emergence of the family as an important institution grew, so did a growing emotional attachment to children. Women started to begin breastfeeding their own offspring rather than hiring a wet nurse to do so for them. Love and affection was also focused on older children and adolescents, as they too were involved in the strong bonds of emotional attachment to their mothers. Families often had less numbers of children as a cause of the reduced rate of the rates of mortality of infants, and also often strove to provide their children with opportunities in the world that they themselves never had, which is a concept that modern families have too. Married couples increasingly used contraceptive devices such as condoms to so that they can reduce the possibility of any unwanted pregnancies. At times, the care and concern of parents for their older children became very obsessive, so much so that children began to feel confined and began to have a need for greater independence. Prevailing biological and medical theories had led parents to think that their own emotional traits that they exhibited to be passed on to their children; therefore, they began to think that they were personally responsible for any abnormality that their children presented. This preoccupation of…show more content…
The home and workplace before the industrial revolution had been virtually the same; however, both had begun to separate. Male and female spheres had separated along with the separation of home and workplace as well. While the men were gaining their income from their jobs in the public sphere, women, still viewed as the primary care takers for the children, were primarily put into the private or “domestic” sphere. To explain why the separation of men and women in the work force was necessary, the ideology of separate spheres was created; it had defined innate characteristics of women. Women were deemed incapable to work and function in public because these traits were thought to make women less capable to do work that the men did. Women were thought of as weaker and unable to do things that men did, but still thought to be morally superior to men. Mid-nineteenth century religious views had reinforced this thought to be true. It was because of this that people had thought that women were best suited for the domestic sphere because of their moral superiority. Women were also expected to teach the next generation the necessary moral virtues to ensure the survival of the
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