s; she doesn't do anything. She has only her household and her children to take care of" (Hellerstein, Hume, & Offen, 1981, pp. 304-305).
The overriding point, however, is that the relative physical ease of domestic life led inevitably to a cult or an ideal of Woman as the inherently morally or culturally superior being. In England and America, this led to women's involvement outside the home in the area of social reform. But in France, the society was organized so that the Catholic Church was the principal agent of reform and philanthropy. For the women of France in the 19th century, therefore, the ideal of female cultural superiority was enacted in the form of the intellectual and cultural salon (Pope, 1977).
It is important to note that the cult of the salon in France was confined to the bourgeois classes and higher. Further, the salon was more or less a self-contained universe in France and did not reach into the institutional levels. To put it another way, this was the limit of women's participation and independence in society. At the wo
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