It is a favorite thing to look back at some of the reforms which have long been an accepted part of our life, and to examine the opposition, usually bitter and very strange, sometimes dishonest but all too often honest, which had to be countered by the restless advocates of 'grandmotherly' legislation. The reforms treated in this book are not the well-known measures--like the abolition of slavery, the reform. of Parliament, the vote of women--which are recorded in the standard history books. Here are some of the less familiar struggles which, with one or two exceptions, social historians have tended to dismiss briefly. Yet these old controversies give no less revealing an insight into the minds of our grandfathers than do the major issues of the last century. The pulse of a generation can be taken just as effectively by considering its attitudes to the marrying of deceased wives' sisters, to the fetching of father's beer or even to the sweeping of chimneys. Some of the reforms dealt with were carried out within living memory none is older than the nineteenth century. They have been selected for the variety of their background and for the fertility and stimulus of the opposition leveled against them. Misguided and completely unreasonable though some of this opposition now appears, it is doubtful whether it will seem any more peculiar, one hundred years hence, than some of the reasons we produce today for continual hardship and injustice. Our ancestors thought it absurd that wives should wish to keep their own earnings our descendants may be astonished at our system which forces a man to maintain a woman, sometimes for life, after a hopeless marriage has been disrupted. It is likely that our descendants will derive as much heartless fun from consideration of our divorce laws, and the reasons we use to defend them, as from the arguments we put forward to excuse the disfigurement of the countryside ( 'the poster is the poor man's art gallery'). They may also think that the indifference of the nineteenth century to death and suffering in the mills was fully matched by that of the twentieth century to death and suffering on the highways. The author says of the reforms that we take for granted that ______.