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Advice for Middle-Class Women

The adoption of steam-powered machines generated tremendous profits during the Industrial Revolution. Factory owners and managers enjoyed new wealth, and skilled male workers eventually began to hope for wages high enough to keep their wives and children at home. These social changes encouraged the nineteenth-century “separate spheres” ideology, which emphasized the importance of women’s role as caretakers of the domestic realm. Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, excerpted below, was one of a flood of publications offering middle-class women advice on shopping, housekeeping, and supervising servants.

“What shall I do to gratify myself — to be admired — or to vary the tenor of my existence?” are not the questions which a woman of right feelings asks awaking to the avocations of the day. Much more congenial to the highest attributes of woman’s character, are inquiries such as these: “How shall I endeavor through this day to turn the time, the health, and the means permitted me to enjoy, to the best account? Is any one sick, I must visit their chamber without delay, and try to give their apartment an air of comfort, by arranging such things as the wearied nurse may not have thought of. Is any one about to set off on a journey, I must see that the early meal is spread, to prepare it with my own hands, in order that the servant, who was working late last night, may profit by unbroken rest. Did I fail in what was kind or considerate to any of the family yesterday; I will meet her this morning with a cordial welcome, and show, in the most delicate way I can, that I am anxious to atone for the past. Was any one exhausted by the last day’s exertion, I will be an hour before them this morning, and let them see that their labor is so much in advance. Or, if nothing extraordinary occurs to claim my attention, I will meet the family with a consciousness that, being the least engaged of any member of it, I am consequently the most at liberty to devote myself to the general good of the whole, by cultivating cheerful conversation, adapting myself to the prevailing tone of feeling, and leading those who are least happy, to think and speak of what will make them more so.”

EVALUATE THE EVIDENCE

Source: Sarah Stickney Ellis, The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, in The Past Speaks, 2d ed., ed. Walter Arnstein (Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath, 1993), 2:173.