Finished Family Fortunes

I've finished the first major activity of my MA: reading Family Fortunes. The book traces the development of an ideology prevalent among the emerging middle classes and influenced by evangelical Christianity that there were two spheres: the domestic sphere inhabited by women and the public world inhabited by men. The authors explore the roots and development of this ideology, how it was manifested and its various contradictions, focusing on the city of Birmingham and villages in Essex and Suffolk .

I read the first 160 pages properly but have to admit that I skimmed the rest. While I respect the amount of work - particularly archival - that the authors put into researching and writing the book, a page-turner it is not. I fell asleep twice reading the first 160 pages. Luckily, from what I can pick up on the course forum, I'm not the only one found it a bit if a turgid read. My fear now is the first TMA is focused on the book; albeit - fortunately - on its reception (and significance) rather than the book itself.

The thing that I found most useful from reading the book was (ignoring the turgid prose) the structure of how they presented their findings, which generally went:

* Make a general claim (referenced through general works);

* Illustrate with statistics or material from reference works, novels, contemporary sources and/or;

* illustrate with own findings.

This was reassuring as it is what I'm used to in the social sciences (claim - evidence/illustrate), although the nature of the evidence is different. The next stage for me, once this dreaded TMA is out of the way, is to look more into gathering and analysing this kind of evidence. Tomorrow I'll start to read the commentaries and plan my essay