Breaking Conventions
Five Couples in Search of Marriage-Career Balance at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century
Author(s)
Auspos, Patricia
Collection
ScholarLedLanguage
EnglishAbstract
This rich history illuminates the lives and partnerships of five married couples – two British, three American – whose unions defied the conventions of their time and anticipated social changes that were to come in the ensuing century. In all five marriages, both husband and wife enjoyed thriving professional lives: a shocking circumstance at a time when wealthy white married women were not supposed to have careers, and career women were not supposed to marry.
Patricia Auspos examines what we can learn from the relationships of the Palmers, the Youngs, the Parsons, the Webbs, and the Mitchells, exploring the implications of their experiences for our understanding of the history of gender equality and of professional work. In expert and lucid fashion, Auspos draws out the interconnections between the institutions of marriage and professional life at a time when both were undergoing critical changes, by looking specifically at how a pioneering generation tried to combine the two.
Based on extensive archival research and drawing on mostly unpublished letters, journals, pocket diaries, poetry, and autobiographical writings, Breaking Conventions tells the intimate stories of five path-breaking marriages and the social dynamics they confronted and revealed. This book will appeal to scholars, students, and anyone interested in women’s studies, gender studies, masculinity studies, histories of women in the professions, and the history of marriage.
Keywords
relationships;gender;marriage;profession;letters;journals;autobiography;social dynamics;masculinity;womenDOI
10.11647/OBP.0318ISBN
9781800648357, 9781800648364, 9781800648418, 9781800648401, 9781800648388, 9781800648371Publisher
Open Book PublishersPublisher website
https://www.openbookpublishers.com/Publication date and place
Cambridge, 2023Classification
Gender studies: women and girls
Family law: marriage, separation and divorce
Dating, relationships, living together and marriage: advice and issues
Sociology: family and relationships
History
History and Archaeology
c 1500 onwards to present day
North America (USA and Canada)
United Kingdom, Great Britain