The home became the primary site of female identity in the nineteenth century.
Women's lives became structured by their relationship with the home, and their economic value was defined in relation to their domestic role. Relations with kin, with servants, and other women beyond their own social realm encountered through their charitable activity, were all informed by this family-centred model.
This also set a precedent for expectations of the working-class woman whose status and value in the labour market was affected. Paid work outside the home was given a value in accordance with the belief that a woman's place was within the home. Women were conceptualised as contained within and dependent on the family unit, in contrast with men who were regarded as self-sufficient and independent. Thus, the home assumed immense importance as a physical and symbolic space within which meaning and value was assigned to women's actions.The home is usually seen as synonymous with the concept of the private sphere. It is undeniable that the concepts of the private and the public sphere had ideological significance amongst the middle classes in the nineteenth century and that the idea of separate spheres was a convenient framework used to understand gender roles in a rapidly changing society. Yet beyond this conceptual value, separate spheres should not be used as a determinist framework to organise our understanding of the place of women and men in society. Women had an enormous range of experiences. Historians of women have, for some time now, been wary of universal theories, and the publicprivate dichotomy has come in for considerable revision.1 More useful, perhaps, is the position adopted by anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo who suggests that ‘woman's place in human social life is not in any direct sense a product of the things she does (or even less a function of what, biologically, she is) but of the meanings her activities acquire through concrete social interactions.’2 Rosaldo goes on to state that ‘the significances women assign to the activities of their lives are the things we can only grasp through an analysis of the relationships that women forge, the social contexts they (along with men) create — and within which they are defined.’ Thus we should examine women’s social worlds and social relationships not just in terms of what they did, but also taking into account the ideologies by which they and others made sense of their position and lives. Separate spheres ideology was used in powerful ways to police boundaries, but notions of gender polarity were utilised by women as a means of negotiating civil and political society.
In this chapter, the home is discussed both as a concrete place and as a concept which had tremendous power to influence women’s experience in nineteenth-century urban Europe. The home could be a constraining idea for women but, at the same time, women made the home a female space. They recognised that their status as homemakers and household managers could provide them with a power base for collective action outside the home. The home defined a woman: it conferred femininity as well as influence in the economic and political spheres.