538 Ch. 14 • The Industrial Revolution
a separate room or quarters for children. Most working-class and peasant
children had to begin work as soon as it was physically possible for them to
do so. Many children who were apprentices did not live with their families,
but with the masters of their chosen trade.
Because children, too, were an investment—and much more, of course—
parents had to prepare them to take over family responsibilities, passing on
self-discipline and self-reliance to their offspring. Germans called it Bil
dung, the training of cultivation and character, the subject of many
nineteenth-century novels.
Separate Spheres and the Cult of Domesticity
To the nineteenth-century middle class, the family was the basis of order,
what the English called the “nursery of virtue.” Many men considered
women “virtuous” when they remained in their domestic sphere, “angels”
whose obligation was to provide comfort, happiness, and material order
to their families. However, although many bourgeois insisted that women
should work only when dire necessity left them with no alternative, many
middle-class women worked in commerce, as unpaid clerks in their hus
bands’ shops or as receptionists and secretaries in their spouses’ law, med
ical, or notarial offices.
At the same time, the cult of domesticity also became increasingly funda
mental to concepts of masculinity: men were to provide for and assure the
future of the family. Yet during the middle decades of the nineteenth century
the concept of British “manliness” came to emphasize physical strength.
Men increasingly joined sports clubs. Oxford and Cambridge Universities
evolved into defiantly masculine spaces that privileged athletic prowess. This
trend perhaps reflected a response to the perceived threat of gradually
increasing possibilities for women in British society, as well as a homosexual
subculture at universities and in Britain’s burgeoning urban world.
A woman’s status remained closely tied to that of her father and her hus
band. In France, the Napoleonic Code made all men legally equal but left
each woman subordinate to her husband’s (or father’s) will. On his acces
sion to the throne in 1820, King George IV of Britain (ruled 1820-1830)
tried to prevent his wife, Caroline, from becoming queen by blocking her
return from Italy under threat of prosecuting her for adultery. But the king
was forced to abandon his plan and accept his queen when women—
particularly middle-class women—petitioned on her behalf, denouncing the
king for promoting a double standard, since his own liaisons were notorious.
A ballad urged women to rally behind Caroline:
Attend ye virtuous British wives
Support your injured Queen,
Assert her rights; they are your own,
As plainly may be seen.