George K. Behlmer, Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850–1940. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1998. 1 + 324 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Abstract

These three very different books address the longstanding dialogue about domesticity and labor, work and home, in nineteenth-century England. British history has a strong tradition of empiricism and it is particularly evident in Meg Gomersall's Working-Class Girls in Nineteenth-Century England: Life, Work and Schooling. The title is misleading in that the book is not about working-class girls per se. Rather, it examines the education working-class girls received with particular attention to how the gendered division of labor shaped expectations and experiences for girls' education. Significantly, Gomersall's evidence reveals important regional differences before 1870. In agricultural districts, girls were more likely to remain in school longer even than boys compared to urban, industrial districts, where girls' domestic or waged labor had value from a very young age and education was not seen to improve a girl's earnings. Gomersall concludes that the “operation of gender divisions of labour rather than ideology was the key determinant on girls' access to schooling” (97).