Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940 - Hardcover

Behlmer, George K.

9780804733137: Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0804733139 ISBN 13: 9780804733137

Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr, 1998

This work seeks to explain what a reverence for family values meant in practice for the Western world s most family-conscious culture. Victorian England can be credited with inventing the ideal of the home inviolate, an ideal best condensed in the notion that an Englishman s home is his castle. It was during this period that the family emerged as a subject of continuous discussion by politicians and of intervention by middle-class reformers. The discussion tended to address specific problems domestic violence, juvenile criminality, and the fate of illegitimate children, among others rather than focusing on the family as a whole. The reformers not only set the agenda of family-focused debates but also supplied the leadership for a vast array of interventionist groups philanthropists, civil servants, magistrates, medical practitioners, educators, and child psychologists whose common goal was to save the family, especially the working-class family, from itself.

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Review:

An Englishman's home may well be his castle, but even before the development of the modern welfare state, plenty of outsiders held the castle keys. Victorian reformers poked their way into the homes of the poor--and, later, the middle classes--hoping to regulate everything from child welfare and marital discord to public health and education. George K. Behlmer's Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians, 1850-1940 examines the history of these reforms and regulations and the philanthropy behind them.

Although many historians (notably Ferdinand Mount) see in these reforms the machinations of an overintrusive state, Behlmer's six linked essays provide insight into the reformers' varied goals and reveal that this policing of the Victorian family was in fact "not a social discipline designed to penetrate private life and subvert parental authority." Nor does Behlmer believe, � la Gertrude Himmelfarb, that Victorians both rich and poor embraced and practiced "Victorian values" such as respectability, cleanliness, obedience, and self-sufficiency. Indeed, Behlmer argues that the reformers were "trying to make people more responsible, and not principally by shaming them." Behlmer stands out as a voice of reason amidst the recent moral panic about decaying family values, arguing that this golden age of domestic bliss never happened, and that the family "has never been able to meet the expectations placed upon it." Refreshingly low on jargon, exhaustively researched, and filled with illustrative examples, Friends of the Family is a well-written contribution to the ongoing debate on domestic morality. --C.B. Delaney

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