And as you say they couldn't be "Gentlemen" and actually have a job. Way back at school when we had to read the "classics" for exams. A penny sort of dropped when reading Dickens and Austin, how very different things were. Lots of characters had no work as such, relying on "income" and even more strange to me there appeared no stigma at …
And as you say they couldn't be "Gentlemen" and actually have a job. Way back at school when we had to read the "classics" for exams. A penny sort of dropped when reading Dickens and Austin, how very different things were. Lots of characters had no work as such, relying on "income" and even more strange to me there appeared no stigma at all to not working; whereas even in the 1970s rich and/or titled people (including the Royal family) were keen to suggest they "worked" rather than being ladies or gentlemen of leisure. Even then it struck me how different that society was in the past. A couple of years later at University I took an interest in some feminist lectures and writings (in those days we were encouraged to "broaden" our education by attending lectures from other Courses/Faculties.) And it struck me that much of the "evidence" was derived from old novels, as if these were reliable sources of sociological or even historical conditions. The more so coming from a working class background in the NW of England meant that were no examples in my family then or the previous generations where both sexes didn't work, in terms of paid work even if it was taking work into the home (sewing, washing, batch cooking "doing Avon"). The only people I knew where the mother didn't work were the Doctors and wives of Teachers and the wife of a "head Engineer" at GEC. I suspect this pattern wasn't universal (maybe women didn't work in mining towns as opposed to the Mill Towns) But I recall the economist Catherine Hakim pointing out that the proportion of women economically active in 2000 was the same as in 1900 (often in "service" or other industries now defunct (such as textiles and garments). Which reminds me Hakim's "Preference Theory" is as good an explanation as any of the increasing "gender segregation"in occupations observed in all developed nations as they increase in wealth. The basic being that as there is more and more choice of occupations open. Women, for rational reasons, choose a relatively narrow band of occupations to crowd into. Precisely the phenomena the Swedes got so concerned about a decade ago.
And as you say they couldn't be "Gentlemen" and actually have a job. Way back at school when we had to read the "classics" for exams. A penny sort of dropped when reading Dickens and Austin, how very different things were. Lots of characters had no work as such, relying on "income" and even more strange to me there appeared no stigma at all to not working; whereas even in the 1970s rich and/or titled people (including the Royal family) were keen to suggest they "worked" rather than being ladies or gentlemen of leisure. Even then it struck me how different that society was in the past. A couple of years later at University I took an interest in some feminist lectures and writings (in those days we were encouraged to "broaden" our education by attending lectures from other Courses/Faculties.) And it struck me that much of the "evidence" was derived from old novels, as if these were reliable sources of sociological or even historical conditions. The more so coming from a working class background in the NW of England meant that were no examples in my family then or the previous generations where both sexes didn't work, in terms of paid work even if it was taking work into the home (sewing, washing, batch cooking "doing Avon"). The only people I knew where the mother didn't work were the Doctors and wives of Teachers and the wife of a "head Engineer" at GEC. I suspect this pattern wasn't universal (maybe women didn't work in mining towns as opposed to the Mill Towns) But I recall the economist Catherine Hakim pointing out that the proportion of women economically active in 2000 was the same as in 1900 (often in "service" or other industries now defunct (such as textiles and garments). Which reminds me Hakim's "Preference Theory" is as good an explanation as any of the increasing "gender segregation"in occupations observed in all developed nations as they increase in wealth. The basic being that as there is more and more choice of occupations open. Women, for rational reasons, choose a relatively narrow band of occupations to crowd into. Precisely the phenomena the Swedes got so concerned about a decade ago.