"In The End of Domesticity, Charles Hatten offers a provocative theory for this seminal shift which even now shapes literary depictions of the family. Discussing works by Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Henry James, Hatten shows how these major writers anticipate the modernist preoccupation with domestic alienation while responding to their own historical context of changes in, and controversies about, gender roles and the family. Most originally, Hatten argues that these writers' representations of gender and domesticity are strongly influenced by anxieties about capitalism and the marketplace." "Beginning with Dickens, Hatten traces how such early fictions as Barnaby Rudge and Dombey and Son diagnose familial dysfunction as evidence not only of individual moral failure but of the negative effects of the marketplace on family life, effects that Dickens believed could be counterbalanced by an idealized model of domesticity that relies on maternal nurturance and feminine self-sacrifice. Yet even in such apparently triumphant celebrations of the family as David Copperfield. Dickens becomes disillusioned with his own model, showing the high cost of domesticity for women, while increasingly blaming failed families on women's unwillingness to fulfill their proper duties." "In a radical revision of traditional domestic narrative, Eliot, in The Mill on the Floss and Daniel Deronda, revises Dickens's conservative gender politics to emphasize the inevitability, and the desirability, of women modifying their social roles in response to historical change, even while she too is anxious about women's ability wholly to transcend the materialist values of the age. Finally, Hatten shows how in James's late work, most notably The Wings of the Dove, darkly ironic narratives of courtship and marriage symbolize the destructive effects of economic coercionon human values and the obsolescence of traditional gender roles, themes that anticipate the pessimistic and alienated reading of family life in many modernist texts." "Demonstrating a sophisticated awareness of the interconnectedness of economic pressures and changing gender roles on late Victorian literary culture, The End of Domesticity contributes significantly to Victorian studies by offering a persuasive reading of how, within a few decades, Victorian writers paved the way for the sharply unsentimental and ironic view of marriage and the family in modernist fiction. Situating major texts of Victorian domestic fiction in the context both of writers' lives and their complex historical moment, The End of Domesticity shows how the corrosive effects of economic forces on courtship, marriage, and family life become the foundation for a literary critique of the negative effects of the market on the individual, a critique that also increasingly underscores tensions within traditional forms of gender and domesticity." --Book Jacket.

An investigation into the societal impact of intelligent, high-achieving women who are honing traditional homemaking skills traces emerging trends in sophisticated crafting, cooking and farming that are reshaping the roles of women.

The book that changed the consciousness of a country—and the world. Landmark, groundbreaking, classic—these adjectives barely describe the earthshaking and long-lasting effects of Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. This is the book that defined "the problem that has no name," that launched the Second Wave of the feminist movement, and has been awakening women and men with its insights into social relations, which still remain fresh, ever since. A national bestseller, with over 1 million copies sold.

This novel was the major inspiration for the Women's Movement and continues to be a powerful and illuminating analysis of the position of women in Western society___

"Stephen Vider considers how the meanings of domesticity shifted for gay men and lesbians from the late 1960s to early 1980s, from a site of supposed isolation or deviance, to a source of identity, community, and pleasure. His manuscript reveals the multiple uses, appeals, and limits of domesticity for LGBTQ people in the post-World War II period, in their efforts to make social and sexual connections, and to appeal for expanded rights and freedoms. For example, the 1970s witnessed an efflorescence of gay communal households that proved to be seedbeds for alternative modes of domesticity, using the privacy of domestic space to achieve broader social and political changes. Vider brings a novel perspective to gay identity and culture, examining domesticity as a meeting point between practices and discourse, the local and national, the private and the public"--