Domestic revolution and cultural formation in nineteenth-century ontario,canada

Postwar consensus theory ensured that a middle-class cultural order was fated in North America. Its abandonment encouraged alternative perspectives, including close historical studies of the rise of the urban middle class family through the mid-nineteenth century. These studies located the core of middle-class formation in a virtual domestic revolution, among other changes. A review of recent, diverse evidence, focused on nineteenth-century Ontario, suggests alternatively that in some places the roots of the twentieth-century hegemony of middle-class family culture are more widespread, and are more deeply buried in the last century than current theory and research allows.     

REVIEWS

Readings in Faith and Suspicion

Jean Radford, Dorothy Richardson, Harvester Wheatsheaf, £9.95 pbk.

Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism Between the Wars, Routledge, £10.99 pbk.

Philosophical Passions

Margaret Whitford, Luce Irigaray: Philosophy in the Feminine, Rout‐ledge, £35 hbk, £9.99 pbk.

Margaret Whitford (ed.), The Irigaray Reader, Blackwell, £12.95.

Contested Sites

Marianne Hirsch and Evelyn Fox Keller (eds), Conflicts in Feminism, Routledge, $49.50 hbk, $15.95 pbk.

Writing Victorian Women and Victorian Women Writing

Christina Crosby, The Ends of History: Victorians and ‘The Woman Question’, Routledge, $49.95 hbk, $14.95 pbk, £10.99 pbk.

Anita Levy, Other Women: The Writing of Class, Race, and Gender, 1832–1898, Princeton University Press, $35 hbk, $9.95 pbk.

Thais E. Morgan (ed.), Victorian Sages and Cultural Discourse: Renegotiating Gender and Power, Rutgers University Press, $38 hbk, $15 pbk.

Ann Russo and Cheris Kramarae (eds), The Radical Women's Press of the 1850s, Routledge, $35.     

Domestic Violence and Female Genital Mutilation in Kenya: Effects of Ethnicity and Education

This paper investigates domestic violence against women, including definitions of ‘domestic violence;’ and investigates “Female Genital Mutilation.” Data for this paper are from three national household surveys in Kenya: ‘Demographic & Health Survey’ (2003), Afrobarometer (2003), and ‘Work, Attitudes, & Spending’ (2004). Previous research in many countries has found convincing evidence of a tendency for domestic violence to be less common in households where the respondent and/or spouse have more education. This paper adds a new factor: the respondent’s mother’s education also seems relevant to prevalence of GBV (perhaps because of childhood socialization). This pattern applies to both experience of violence, and attitudes to such violence. There also appears to be a strong link between ‘Female Genital Mutilation’ (female circumcision) and mother’s education level. In each case, more education is associated with less violence.