Science, technology, and management in the middle-class English home, c. 1800-1880

Abstract

The nineteenth-century English middle class was strongly influenced by science, industry, and capitalist managerial techniques. These trends also made their way into the domestic space, where women negotiated their application, particularly in the kitchen. This thesis examines domestic life in the context of the popularization of science and the history of technology and management to come to a fuller understanding of how middle-class women ran their homes between about 1800 and 1880, a period of broad industrialisation and business growth. The values of fact, precision, rationality, and order influenced the practice of cookery, the physical technologies in the home, and the management of people, time, and money. The middle-class male workspace celebrated the same values; women were the domestic counterparts of their husbands. Although the prescriptive literature was not always slavishly followed, adherence to these values, both at work and at home, could help cement the family’s social status.