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Chapter 3 examines leading public men’s stress on professionalism and dedication to “work” or “calling” in the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The charge of these political activists and thinkers was to lift work from its lowly status, as something that the lower classes and stigmatized groups like sex workers undertook, and raise it to the level of a national service, a calling. In this, they succeeded remarkably. However, the other side of the coin was a new ambivalence about their place in a domestic world that was rapidly changing, while continuing to be an inescapable part of their lives. The chapter explores what such men’s dedication to public service, often at the cost of time spent at home, meant for themselves and for others who inhabited and maintained their domestic worlds, and how this was reflected in the contradictions of their domestic lives.

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