ABSTRACT
From the late eighteenth century onwards, in Britain and other countries of western Europe, gender definitions were sharpened and heightened as a result of social and industrial change. The spheres of women and of men, of public worlds and private lives, of political economy and domestic morality, and of experience and innocence, were increasingly more carefully distinguished. Gendered polarities were of course not new, but they were gradually to take a novel form: in the nineteenth century their form is most characteristically associated with the growth, assertiveness, and self-definitions of the middle ranks. At the same time the economic functions of the middle-class household were also transformed, as women of that class withdrew from personal participation in the family enterprises. Even women’s memoirs and journals underwent a complex self-censorship. Still, there has been uneasiness about the picture presented, of a sexually repressive and morally hypocritical society.
