Industrialization and the growth of modern cities also brought great changes to the lives of women and families. After 1850 the work of most wives continued to become increasingly distinct and separate from that of their husbands. Husbands became wage earners in factories and offices, while their wives stayed home to manage households and care for children. As economic conditions improved, only women in poor families tended to work outside the home. The ideal became separate spheres (see “The Sexual Division of Labor” in Chapter 23), the strict division of labor by sex. This rigid division meant that married women faced great obstacles if they needed or wanted to move into the world of paid employment outside the home. Well-paying jobs were off-limits to women, and a woman’s wage was almost always less than a man’s, even for the same work.

Because they needed to be able to support their wives, middle-class men did not marry until they were well established in their careers. Some never married at all, because they could not afford it. The system encouraged marriages between much older men and younger women, who had little experience with adult life. Men were encouraged to see themselves as the protectors of their fragile and vulnerable wives. Working people often entered the labor force or left home when they reached adolescence, so they had greater independence in their personal lives and in decisions about whom to marry.

As the ideology and practice of rigidly separate spheres narrowed women’s horizons, their control and influence in the home became increasingly strong throughout Europe in the late nineteenth century. The comfortable home run by the middle-class wife was idealized as a warm shelter in a hard and impersonal urban world. By 1900 working-class families had adopted many middle-class values, but they did not have the means to fully realize the ideals of domestic comfort or separate spheres. Nevertheless, the working-class wife generally determined how the family’s money was spent and took charge of all major domestic decisions. The woman’s guidance of the household went hand in hand with the increased emotional importance of home and family for all social groups.

Ideas about sexuality within marriage varied. Many French marriage manuals of the late 1800s stressed that women had legitimate sexual needs, such as the “right to orgasm.” In the more puritanical United States, however, sex manuals recommended sexual abstinence for unmarried men and limited sexual activity for married men. Respectable women were thought to experience no sexual pleasure at all from sexual activity, and anything vaguely sexual was to be removed from their surroundings; even the legs of pianos were to be covered. (See “Listening to the Past: Stefan Zweig on Middle-Class Youth and Sexuality.”)

Medical doctors in both Europe and the United States began to study sexual desires and behavior more closely, and to determine what was considered “normal” and “abnormal.” Same-sex attraction, labeled “homosexuality” for the first time, was identified as a “perversion.” Governments seeking to promote a healthy society as a way of building up their national strength increasingly regulated prostitution, the treatment of venereal disease, and access to birth control in ways that were shaped by class and gender hierarchies. The British Contagious Diseases Acts, in force between 1864 and 1886, exemplified this trend, requiring suspected prostitutes to undergo biweekly medical exams and subjecting them to incarceration and treatment if they showed signs of venereal disease. Masturbation, termed the “secret vice,” became a matter of public concern in this era of growing nationalism because doctors and officials worried that it would weaken young men, making them incapable of defending the nation or engaging in industrial work. Medical science also turned its attention to motherhood, and a wave of specialized books on child rearing and infant hygiene instructed middle-class women on how to be better mothers.

Ideas about sexuality and motherhood were inextricably tied up with ideas about race. As European nations embarked on imperialist expansion in the second half of the nineteenth century, the need to maintain the racial superiority that justified empire led to increased concerns about the possible dilution or weakening of the European races. Maintaining healthy bodies, restricting sexuality, preventing interracial marriages, and ensuring that women properly raised their children were all components of racial strength, in the eyes of many European thinkers.

Social reformers, some of them women, attempted to instruct working-class women in this new “science of motherhood,” but, often working at a “sweated” trade or caring for boarders within their own homes, poorer women had little time for new mothering practices. Similarly, when Europeans established colonial empires, the wives of missionaries and officials sometimes tried to change child-rearing practices of local peoples. They were rarely successful, and different child-rearing practices became yet another sign of colonial people’s inferiority in European eyes.

Women in industrializing countries also began to limit the number of children they bore. This revolutionary reduction in family size, in which the comfortable and well-educated classes took the lead, was founded on parents’ desire to improve their economic and social position and that of their children. By having fewer youngsters, parents could give those they had advantages, from music lessons to expensive university educations. In opposition to this trend, imperial propagandists called for women to have more babies to provide settlers for the colonies and do their duty to propagate the European races.

The ideal of separate spheres and the rigid gender division of labor meant that middle-class women lacked legal rights and faced discrimination in education and employment. Organizations founded by middle-class feminists campaigned for legal equality as well as for access to higher education and professional employment. In the late nineteenth century middle-class women scored some significant victories, such as the 1882 law giving British married women full property rights. Rather than contesting existing notions of women as morally superior guardians of the home, feminists drew on these ideas for legitimacy in speaking out about social issues. European feminists also adopted the ideas of racial and cultural superiority inherent in the imperial civilizing mission (see “Impact on African Societies” in Chapter 20). For example, female British reformers pledged to bring uplift to Indian women, whom they depicted as helpless and oppressed, a mirror image to their own growing empowerment.

Socialist women leaders usually took a different path. They argued that the liberation of working-class women would come only with the liberation of the entire working class. In the meantime, they championed the cause of working women and won some practical improvements. Like other socialists, they were more critical of imperialism than middle-class reformers were, yet they still broadly accepted racial hierarchies that placed Europeans on top. These different approaches to women’s issues reflected the diversity of classes and political views in urban society.