, Victorian social values dominated ideas about family life and in turn, influenced the structure of families. These values, linked to the powerful society-shaping institutions of church and state, strongly maintained that the man should be head of a household and that ideally, his wife should not work, but take responsibility for the domestic (private) aspects of life, caring for husband and children, while the man engaged with the working (public) world. The idea of distinct and rigidly limited roles for men and women was developed with the rise of the middle classes, as their values became established as mainstream through increased political and social influence. Gittins comments on these class-based values: "The middle classes promulgated the ideal that 'a woman's place is in the home'...it is helpful...to remember how recent it is, and that it was, and is, an ideology specific historically to the rise of the middle classes." She al
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