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Essay on Sonya Rose
The objective of this paper is to show how the upper, middle, and lower class women's roles were changed in society after the industrialization in, England, and as a result its effects on masculinity in each class. Women, like Boucherett in the Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, continued to see gender as the basis of solidarity and maintained their hostility toward state intervention in the lives of working women. As liberals, they believed that women should have the right to work as they pleased without state interference. Other women, like Dilke and Tuckwell in the Women's Trade Union League, disavowed that position, seeing an alliance with working men and state intervention as the only viable options for the improvement of women's working conditions. Convinced by the sensational reports and medical theory that women were peculiarly susceptible to the disease and steeped in the dominant social ideal of protecting women, they automatically endorsed the prohibition of women as the means to eliminate sickness and death.( Anna Davin, 1978)
According to Sonya Rose, as working men campaigned for the Nine Hour Movement during the 1870s, there was a shift in the rhetoric as married women's work and infant mortality became the key issue. This "maternal" discourse emphasized the neglect of women's duties towards their children with resulting increases in infant mortality. A shorter work day was seen as the solution to high infant mortality. Working men who wanted the nine-hour day themselves astutely couched their demands in those terms because of the real concern about high infant death rates in factory districts. Local medical Officers of Health presented graphic reports, government officials added staggering statistics, and medical journals devoted numerous pages to the issue.
Several M.P.s responded by sponsoring provisions to reduce married women to half-time work or excluding them altogether after childbirth. Laissez-faire principles defeated those proposals but, as Margaret Hewett has argued....
