The Women, Family, and Household of Pre-Industrial Europe Many of people today feel trapped inside their homes, just how the women of Pre-Industrial Europe felt. Working day in and day out inside the homes, just to keep the family together, and make a little money on the side, these women were an integral part of Pre-Industrial families. Not only were the women important to Pre-Industrial European families, but so were the households. Much of the money was made in the households, and this is where families either succeeded or failed. The household and women of Pre-Industrial Europe played an integral role in the economy of the families, and more importantly, the women of these households kept them running smoothly. Without either of these important aspects of life in Pre-Industrial Europe, it is safe to say that the families would have collapsed, due to a lack of organization and structures. Pre-Industrial Europe, in which the women and the household were “the factories” per se, due to the income they generated, was much different from the Europe we know today. Leading into the Industrialization of Europe beginning in the late 1700's and lasting through the early 1800's, the household played an integral role in the family’s income. Without the household, the families would literally collapse, due to a lack of organization and stability. Within these important family sub-units, there was one married couple, their children, the family’s servants, and in some cases, depending upon the region of Europe, there were grandparents, aunts and uncles. Not only did the father and servants of the house work, but also the women and children. Also, in the case of there being more than one generation of family in a single household, depending upon the region of Europe, the grandparents, aunts, and uncles would also work within the house. Once the children of these households reached a certain age, usually the early teens, they were sent off to work in a house as a servant. These servants were different then the servants of today, as they worked for room, board, and food, not waiting on the family. Once they started to generate income, the teens would save up the money necessary to begin their own family. However, there were the few exceptions; teens that did not work as servants, and ended up marrying into an existing household. This however,... ... middle of paper ... ...n everyday life. For example, because of the early marriages in Eastern European families, the new couples went back to their old home and lived there. However, in Northwestern European families, the newly married couples started their own households and families, because they had more time to gain the money necessary to start their own households. For these reasons, the families of Pre-Industrial Europe were very successful, and were able to produce enough money to keep the family thriving. Sources Cited Donald Kagan, Steven Ozment, Frank M. Turner. The Western Heritage. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2001. Patricia Ahmed, Rebecca Jean Emigh. Household Structure During the Market Transition in Eastern Europe. N/A.N/A. http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/soc/groups/ccsa/ahmedemigh.pdf Michael Mitterauer. Historical Family Forms in eastern Europe in European Comparison. N/A. N/A. http://dmo.econ.msu.ru/Data/mitterauer.html Richard Hooker. Women During the European Enlightenment. N/A. N/A. http://www.wsu.edu/~dee/ENLIGHT/WOMEN.HTM
Before the introduction of industrialization, the family and the household was the basic unit of manufacturing in Western Europe. The family members would work together in commerce, and agricultural...
...ultiple children which, as any parent will tell you, would’ve been more than a full-time job. One key point from “A Fourierist Newspaper Criticizes the Nuclear Family” that supports the assertion is the fact that not all women back then were fulfilled being a full-time homemaker, and desired more opportunities and rights than society allowed them to possess. Their desire to be more than a homemaker would often be completely ignored, though, so just like slaves of the period, they had no other option than to fulfill their societal role. One key point from “Woman in the Nineteenth Century” that supports the assertion is the fact that a women’s education would be primarily in the domestic and social spheres with only a minimal amount of proper education, showing that society considered them only to have enough intellectual capacity to be a domestic household servant.
In sections 190-193 of Georg Wilhelm Fredrich Hegel’s Phenomenology of Sprit, Hegel looks into the relationship between the lord and the bondsman. In this examination of the relationship, Hegel makes the move to find out what both the lord and bondsman offer to each other in terms of existence and or identity. The formulation that Hegel made in the selected sections is that the bondsman had more to gain in terms of intellectual growth than his lord who becomes intellectually dormant due to the bondsman acting in the likeness of his lord.
What if women never established rights? The world would not be the place it is today if that was the case. Women are able to do just as much as men are and even more. What if men were treated the same way as women were one thousand years ago? They would have felt just as the women did, hurt because the treatment between men and women was unfair. The fact that men and women were not treated equally was wrong in many ways, but that was the way of life during those times. In the British culture, from the Anglo-Saxon to the Renaissance time period, the men were respected on a higher level than women, and women were to always be subservient to men, which were demonstrated throughout many works of literature.
The role of women in the Early Republic is a topic mostly overlooked by historians when dealing with this era of American history. The triumphs of the Revolution and the early events of the new nation were done solely by men. However, women had their own political societies and even participated in the Revolution. Women's roles began to take a major turn after the war with Great Britain. This was due in part to their involvement in the war and female patriotism. Others believed it was due to the easier access to formal education for young women. Whatever the reason, it inspired women to challenge the social structure of the Early Republic. The roles of women were changing in the Early Republic. However, progress was slow and little change followed after the Revolution. This change in social structure elicited two questions. What caused this social change and what was the major setback for the progression of women's rights? These were the questions Linda Kreber's Women In The Republic: Intellect And Ideology In Revolutionary America, Caroline Robbins' review of Mary Norton's Liberty's Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, and Sheila Skemp's review of Lucia McMahon's Mere Equals: The Paradox of Educated Women in the Early American Republic attempted to answer. Each of the pieces of literature agreed that the social equality of women was changing, but each offer a unique aspect of what changed it, and what slowed progression of equality.
When Europe fell into its depression, many European peasants were struggling to live. It was not a struggle of providing good lives for their families, it was a strug...
History for Hegel is a rational process that cannot be knowing a priori. The conflicts that occur in society allow for the universal mind to work out its own ideas (788) . His thought of progress is done by dialectical reasoning, where opposition occurs, but the conflict leads to a synthesis of both sides. The world for him is a history of rational development, the end goal is achieving the currently unknown world mind. This reasoning is to be done at the rational level and it is something that is to be found out rather than just assumed (828) . The history of the world allows for these dialectic thoughts, by having conflict and synthesis a better society will continue to be produced. Hegel believes that to have a fulfilling life individuals will want to reach the universal mind; going against it would be a waste of a life. History is a rational process; it is the universal mind working out its own
In the article, Cult of True Womanhood, the underlying theme is of what society thought was the ideal woman. Women of that time where thought of as homemakers “deeply shaped by the so called “cult of womanhood” a collection of attitudes that associated “true” womanhood with home and family.” Women were supposed to stay home and clean and take care of the children while men worked and provided for their families. The misconception that housework was not hard and that even these women didn’t work as hard as paid labors was a strong opinion of the time. “With economic value calculated more and more exclusively in terms of cash and men increasingly basing their claims to “manhood” on their role as “breadwinners,” women’s unpaid household labor went largely unacknowledged.” Many married women ran their households and took on extra work to support their families and many in underpaid positions. Many of these were even in the service of other’s houses working in “true womanhood”
A house is not a home if no one lives there. During the nineteenth century, the same could be said about a woman concerning her role within both society and marriage. The ideology of the Cult of Domesticity, especially prevalent during the late 1800’s, emphasized the notion that a woman’s role falls within the domestic sphere and that females must act in submission to males. One of the expected jobs of a woman included bearing children, despite the fact that new mothers frequently experienced post-partum depression. If a woman were sterile, her purposefulness diminished. While the Cult of Domesticity intended to create obliging and competent wives, women frequently reported feeling trapped or imprisoned within the home and within societal expectations put forward by husbands, fathers, and brothers.
As mentioned before, sociologists Coontz and Hochschild further elaborate upon Parsons and Bales’ concepts of the American family, but they mostly critique the idea of the male-breadwinner family. One of the main arguments Coontz and Hochschild present is the decline of the male-breadwinner family due to the economic changes of the United States and the arising social norms of consumerism. Because Parsons and Bales never considered how the changes throughout society would affect family, they believed the male-breadwinner family would continue to be a functional type of family for everyone. However, within her text, “What We Really Miss about the 1950s,” Coontz specifically discusses the major expense of keeping mothers at home as consumption norms...
7 Donald Kagan, et al The Western Heritage Brief Edition Volume II: Since 1715 (Upper
Were the Witch-Hunts in Pre-modern Europe Misogynistic? The “YES” article by, Anne Llewellyn Barstow, “On Studying Witchcraft as Woman’s History” and the “NO” article by, Robin Briggs, “Women as Victims? Witches, Judges and the Community,” will be compared, and summarized.
Before the 1890s, females had no other options but to live with their parents before marriage and with their husband after marriage. They couldn’t work and if they did their wage was way lower than men. Today many women chose their own lifestyle and have more freedom. They can chose if they want to get married and have kids or not. Coontz said “what 's new is not that women make half their families living but that for the first time they have substantial control over their own income, along with the social freedom to remain single or to leave an unsatisfactory marriage” (98). When women couldn’t work, they had no options but to stay with their husband for financial support. Working is a new way of freedom because they can choose to stay or leave their husband and make their own decisions. It’s not like women couldn’t work before, they could but they didn’t have too much social freedom like to get divorce or not have children. Their voice wasn’t as important as men. Most of the time men had to decide everything in the family and had control over the family. Coontz believe that today women have more control over their own life and they can choose however they want to live their life. Kuttner also agree that “most Americans, after all, believe women should not be consigned to the nursery and the kitchen” (122). Women used to be the mother who
Industrialization prompted a change in life and working styles. Many people, including the young, left the farms to work in factories; this process led to the dissolution of many extended families. Instead of being forced to stay home because of the need to assist with farm work or family business tasks, young people had the freedom to explore their own paths. Women, instead of being relegated to domestic tasks were now granted an opportunity to earn an income, even if it was significantly less than that earned by male counterparts.
When applied to a family “the family works towards the continuance of social inequality within a society by maintaining and reinforcing the status quo” (Boundless). The family has become a sort of social arrangement that benefits the men more than women allowing the men to maintain positions of power due to the patriarchal nature of a family. By keeping the family in a caste system of sorts where women never have the opportunity to rise above the men inequality can persist in communities outside the family and thus on a greater scale as communities are built upon families. This leads to the perpetuation of the housewife