In a social and cultural study of nineteenth-century bourgeois
women in northern France, Bonnie Smith shows how the advent of
industrialization removed women from the productive activity of the
middle class and confined them to a largely reproductive
experience. Out of this, she suggests, they created their own
world, centered on domesticity, family, and religion. To understand
these women, the author argues, it is necessary to examine their
world on its own terms as a coherent whole. Professor Smith draws
on demographic, psychoanalytic, anthropological, linguistic, as
well as historical insights and uses a variety of evidence that
includes personal interviews, photographs, letters, genealogical
records, and traditional archival sources. Part One outlines the
transition from mercantile to industrial manufacturing that
terminated the relationship between home and business and that
separated the sexes according to their respective functions. Part
Two concentrates on the lives of the women following their
acceptance of an exclusively reproductive function and shows how
the interdependence and fusion of household chores, religious
values, and social conscience fostered a unified cultural system.
Part Three, then, explores the propagation of this domesticity by
the convent, as the primary educational system, and by the
sentimental novel, as the vehicle most suited for an ideological
expression of domestic life.
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