Home and Away: The Flight from Domesticity in Late-Nineteenth-Century England Re-visited.

MEN; VICTORIAN Period, Great Britain, 1837-1901; HISTORY of masculinity; SINGLE men; NINETEENTH century; HISTORY; HISTORIOGRAPHY

This paper offers a critical reappraisal of an interpretation about men and domesticity which has been current in nineteenth-century British historiography since the 1990s. Domesticity was the Victorian shorthand for how the ties of gender and generation should be ordered in family life. The ‘flight from domesticity’ – especially the growing trend of postponing marriage – signalled men’s growing impatience with these ties in the late nineteenth century. Recent scholarship has questioned both the validity of ‘flight’ and the equation of domesticity with familial relations. These debates are here reviewed, focusing in turn on the emotional economy of the bourgeois family, the homosocial conditioning of boarding education, the changing representation of women in public and the occupational choices of middle-class men. The paper concludes that ‘flight’ only fully works in relation to a restricted segment of the upper middle class, but the social and cultural prominence of that segment endowed its ambivalence about domesticity with a disproportionate significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]