Age of Empire 1875-1914 by Eric Hobsbawm

Author:Eric Hobsbawm [Hobsbawm, Eric]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: non.fiction, history
ISBN: 9780297865292
Publisher: Hachette Littlehampton
Published: 2010-11-25T00:00:00+00:00

II

In retrospect the movement for emancipation seems natural enough, and even its acceleration in the 1880s is not very surprising at first sight. Like the democratization of politics, a greater degree of equal rights and opportunities for women was implicit in the ideology of the liberal bourgeoisie, however inconvenient and inopportune it might appear to patriarchs in their private lives. The transformations within the bourgeoisie after the 1870s inevitably provided more scope for its women, and especially its daughters, for, as we have seen, it created a substantial leisure class of females of independent means, irrespective of marriage, and a consequent demand for non-domestic activities. Moreover, when a growing number of bourgeois males were no longer required to do productive work, and many of them engaged in cultural activities, which tough businessmen had been inclined to leave to the females of the family, the gender differences could not but seem attenuated.

Moreover, some degree of women’s emancipation was probably necessary for middle-class fathers, because by no means all middle-class families, and practically no lower-middle-class families, were sufficiently well-off to keep their daughters in comfort if they did not marry and did not work either. This may explain the enthusiasm of many middle-class men, who would not have admitted women to their clubs or professional associations, for educating their daughters to envisage a certain independence. All the same, there is no reason at all to doubt the genuine convictions of liberal fathers in these matters.

The rise of labour and socialist movements as major movements for the emancipation of the unprivileged unquestionably encouraged women seeking their own freedom: it is no accident that they formed one-quarter of the membership of the (small and middle-class) Fabian Society – founded 1883. And, as we have seen, the rise of an economy of services and other tertiary occupations provided a wider range of jobs for women, while the rise of a consumer economy made them into the central target for the capitalist market.

We need not, therefore, spend much time in discovering reasons for the emergence of the ‘new woman’, although it is as well to remember that the reasons may not have been quite so simple as they appear at first sight. There is, for instance, no good evidence that in our period woman’s position was much changed by her increasingly central economic significance as wielder of the shopping basket, which the advertising industry, now entering upon its first age of glory, recognized with its usual ruthless realism. It had to focus on women in an economy which discovered mass consumption even among the fairly poor, because money was to be made out of the person who decided most household purchases. She had to be treated with greater respect, at least by this mechanism of capitalist society. The transformation of the distributive system – multiple shops and department stores gaining on corner shop and market, mail-order catalogues on pedlars – institutionalized this respect, through deference, flattery, display and advertisement.

However, bourgeois ladies had long been treated as

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