ABSTRACT
In this chapter I look at another side of the gender/modernity nexus: the industrial revolution and the transformation of the family, with a view to examining the rise of both the ‘Moral Mother’ and her nemesis, the ‘New Woman’. In particular, I explore how women’s roles changed as production moved outside the home and into the factory in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Importantly, women did not enter the public sphere as free and equal ‘individuals’ (as citizens or workers); instead, a new and altogether amplified domestic role emerged inaugurating ‘difference’ rather than ‘equality’. As men left home women acquired a new sacred role within the home. I examine this intensification of gender roles with a view to illuminating the transformation of motherhood from practical ordinary labour embedded in household production to specialised emotion work undertaken alone at home. However, I examine both the sequestration of women to the home and their nascent (oftentimes subversive) movement out of the home and, more fundamentally, the relation between the two. In this sense, this chapter is not merely a review of the existing historical literature (although it is that too), but also a re-reading of that literature in terms of the duality of sequestration and individualisation that emerged for women with the separation of spheres. Following on from the previous chapter, I argue that these two phenomena are mutually constitutive and emerge from the same structural and ideological transformations.
