CONCLUSIONS
Learning to be a woman in nineteenth-century Europe was not a one-way process in which women uncritically absorbed the messages imparted in the home, the school and in their reading matter.
However, the uniformity of the message and the sheer volume of literature in this period indicates that lessons in femininity were extraordinarily pervasive and mutually reinforcing. Although the prescriptive ideology of domesticity for women and the concept of separate spheres had been around for at least a century or so, it was undoubtedly in the course of the nineteenth century that this set of ideas was elaborated and deepened so that by mid-century the construction of femininity was taking place on several different levels and in many different places, but all were singing from the same hymn sheet. The similarities in the lessons taught to girls of all social classes and in different parts of Europe are remarkable, although the ways in which the messages were interpreted and acted upon were dependent on the constraints or opportunities determined by social class, relative stages of industrial growth and individual determination.We should remain sceptical of the degree to which the ideology of domesticity was internalised. Passive acceptance of what may have been interpreted as bourgeois values seems unlikely, although it is clear that girls were receptive to the lessons in femininity incorporating cleanliness, piety, orderliness and so on, especially if they aimed for a better life than that of their parents. Interestingly, women who made their way in public life were often closer to their father than their mother. Fanny Lewald was devoted to her father who encouraged her to develop her intellectual interests, whilst her relationship with her mother, the archetypal middle-class Jewish woman in Fanny's eyes, was always difficult. Similarly, Helene Lange, who was to become one of Germany's leading feminists, regarded her father as her saviour in that he permitted her to defy conventional expectations of a middle-class girls' upbringing and education.88 Formal schooling, especially at secondary level, reached few girls before the final decades of the century and in eastern and southern Europe girls had to wait even longer. Female literacy rates, though, were certainly improving and the reach of prescriptive literature and popular novels expanded rapidly.
Those who did read women's periodicals or domestic novels could interpret their messages in a number of ways — admiring the tragic heroines of popular novels for instance, or finding in domestic advice books and even some literature a platform for women's power within the home and a recognition of women's skill. The authors ofFrench literature for middle-class women often portrayed maternity as a source of strength and inspiration which provided a spiritual foundation for self-discovery.89 Neither should we assume that the seemingly uniform and pervasive lessons in femininity produced a shared notion of what it was to be feminine. The etiquette advice proffered in ladies' magazines served to distinguish a particular social class from other women; the domestic education provided in elementary girls' schools similarly identified the femininity of working-class girls as founded upon practical domesticity.
Self-sacrifice and service to others were the watchwords of nineteenthcentury teachings on femininity but, at the same time, the identification of the woman with the home suggested that the domestic sphere could, and even should, be a centre of female power — a space where the special female qualities could be used to positive effect as the evangelicals had proposed in the 1780s. Women themselves began to realise that their role in the home was a springboard to participation in public life, that the qualities they exhibited in the domestic sphere might be transported outside. Women's moral superiority and religious vocation provided a platform for their public action beyond the family in ways that did not compromise their femininity.