and Arthur Helps. It represents a certain paternalism, challenging the cutoff between public and private spheres, freedom and responsibility, workplace and family life, trying to define a balance in relations between employers and workers. Through Margaret and her father, Gaskell criticises the autocratic model which infantilises workers and is defended by Thornton (who does not feel accountable to his workers for his actions or decisions). She advocates for an authority which takes into account the needs of workers, a social and economic contract as advocated by John Locke in Two Treatises of Government, where masters and workers are in solidarity. After the strike, Thornton finally acknowledges that "new forms of negotiation between management and labor are part of modern life"; the strike, which ruined him, was "respectable" because the workers depend on him for money and he depends on them to manufacture his product. In the class struggle which victimises some (such as Boucher and Bessy), Gaskell does not offer definitive conflict resolution: Thornton's hope for strikes, for instance, is that they no longer be "bitter and venomous". He and Higgins reach a level of understanding beyond a "cash nexus" through Margaret's "ongoing involvement in the process of social change" by urging communication between masters and workers. If the holders of economic power agree to talk to their workers, to consider them as human beings (not tools of production), it may not eliminate social conflicts but will reduce their brutality. The protagonists experience personal transformations which unite them in the end, what Stoneman calls a "balanced emancipation". According to Catherine Barnes Stevenson, Gaskell may have found women doing factory work problematic; she often referred to "masters and men" and used one dying factory worker (Bessy) to represent women workers, who constituted more than half the factory workers at the time. Stevenson wrote that Gaskell's relative silence on female factory workers may reflect her struggle with the "triumph of the domestic ideology" by the middle class of the mid-1800s. Gaskell hints at the difficulties families such as the Hales have keeping female domestic workers (like Dixon) in their proper – subordinate – place and becoming like members of the family (blurring class differences), a scenario facing industrial workers as well. Adaptations Television and literature In the first television adaptation (in 1966), Richard Leech played Mr. Thornton and Wendy Williams played Margaret Hale. In the second television adaptation (in 1975), Patrick Stewart