Gender, Power, and Society in Western Europe, 1750–1914

The impact of Enlightenment thinking on gender difference was contradictory, and tensions between endemic views of masculinity and femininity and a vision of society based on equal rights characterized the period. The legacy for women and other disempowered groups, such as the landless, workers, and ethnic minorities, was contradictory. Across Europe, laws discriminated against women in terms of citizenship, property ownership, and access to work. Exporting the Revolution to continental Europe broke many ties with the past, while revolutions in 1830 and 1848, and wars involving Nordic, German, and Italian states remade political boundaries. From domestic arrangements to the energy and entrepreneurship of industrial capitalism and forces for representative democracy within consolidated European nation‐states, bourgeois values had a significant impact. Domesticity was a powerful construct and many working‐class men and women identified with its attractions especially in the last half of the nineteenth century when incomes improved.