ABSTRACT
It has been argued that the association of the woman with the domestic sphere and her role in the nuclear family was a modern invention dating approximately from the eighteenth century.2 However, it became a popular idea which defined what a woman was and which directly related to her being female. The solidification, most notably of the bourgeois family, developed concomitantly with the consolidation of industrial capitalism, and by the turn of the century it was a key institution in the ‘social mythology that helped to keep women relatively powerless’.3 The underlying assumption about the family as the ‘natural unit’ existing in separation from the total social formation was an intrinsic part of a system of patriarchy with which many women colluded, bound up as it was with ideas about family arrangements, gender identities, sexual mores and women’s biological, psychological and moral characteristics.
