ABSTRACT
In Victorian society women were, for the first time, valuable because they did not work. It was her status as a non worker that gave woman as Wife and Mother a very special ideological role. The single woman was society’s reject, for celibacy was not highly valued (so that the attempts within the Church of England to start religious orders for women could be seen as radical (Deacon and Hill 1972)) while the fallen woman’s lot was to be completely outcast (Basch 1974). Yet work had to be found for the army of surplus middle-class spinsters and to them fell the task of teaching their impoverished married sisters how to be better wives and mothers. So grew up a paradoxical situation that still marks social work today; whereby middle-class women with no direct experience of marriage and motherhood themselves took on the social task of teaching marriage and
motherhood to working-class women who were widely believed to be ignorant and lacking when it came to their domestic tasks.
