Answer:
The recent historiography of the constructions of the nineteenth-century genre focuses on the different spheres in which men and women lived. Mary Shanley notes that "The husband and wife occupied separate spheres, and each had different but complementary roles to play. In addition to procreating, the woman of the middle class ran, while the working class woman executed, the work involved in the maintenance of the house, as was the care of children, sewing, cooking and cleaning. The men earned the money to buy the necessary goods and debated issues of public interest. " Historian Catherine Hall has observed that women in the domestic sphere did more than simply sew, cook and clean. They functioned as moral and religious guides for their spouses. The "division between the masculine and feminine worlds had a religious connotation, since the market was considered dangerously amoral. The men who operated in this field could only be redeemed through constant contact with the moral environment of the home, where women acted as bearers of the purity of values, in order to counteract the destructive tendencies of the market. " This construction that firmly placed women in their family residence and men in the market, developed within the middle classes. Low-class families that depended on two incomes for their subsistence could not adjust in any way to this structure. Hall argues that, while working-class families could not cope with the middle-class family model, they accepted many of the ideas of the middle class. The notion that the home was a moral center and a comfortable place for the husband was particularly popular among working-class families.