CONCLUSIONS
Women understood that the boundary between the home and the street was artificial. Middle- and working-class women recognised the constraints and the opportunities the idea of the home brought them.
Working-class women used their female consciousness nurtured in the community to fight for better living standards for themselves and their families. Middle-class women, on the other hand, initially used the strength they gained from the home to preach to those less fortunate. However, they soon came to understand the contradictory nature of their position. They preached one thing but were doing another. The language of female moral superiority could only be taken so far; it had little meaning for the female victim of a drunken or violent husband or for the prostitute forced to work on the streets during economic downturns. Those involved in philanthropy and reform movements, most especially in Britain and Germany, began to see that the moral reform of the private sphere was not the solution to poverty, brutality and vice. Indeed, it was middle-class women's own colonisation of public space in the form of voluntary associations and charitable organisations which created a feminine public sphere from which a broader vision of social and gender relations would be formulated. Calls for improved education and employment opportunities for middle-class women, for better working conditions and wages for working-class women, and eventually for legislative change and suffrage reform, emerged from what might be termed a feminine public sphere — an arena which, nevertheless, had been shaped and informed by women's association with the home and which would continue to be informed by the language of domesticity and motherhood.