Technology, Literacy, and the Evolution of Society

5

Culture and Gender in European Bourgeois Society 1870–1914^*

E. J. Hobsbawn

Regular compendia about people in public life, or otherwise in the public domain, began to be published in Britain in the middle of the 19th-century. The best-known of them, and the direct ancestor of the present Who’s Who, which is in turn the ancestor of most other such biographical reference books, was Men of the Time. I begin this survey of the problem of public and private relations between the sexes in bourgeois culture between 1870 and 1914 with this small but not insignificant editorial change.

I hope it has some relevance to the wider problems, both of family and marriage in general and property and inheritance, to which Jack Goody devoted so much profitable ...