Characteristic of the Victorian era is the striking discrepancy between the nation's power and richness and its appalling social conditions. The ones who suffered the most from this situation were children and women.
Women belonging to the lower or working class had to work very hard (12 hours a day, six days a week) and for those who could not find a job or were abandoned by their husbands prostitution was often the only possibility to survive. Women of the middle or upper class had to try hard to live up to the high expectations society imposed on them and had only little time to themselves.
The unjust conditions changed slowly in the course of the women's suffrage movement, driven forward by people like Emmeline, Christabel and Sylvia Pankhurst, the authors Mary Wollstonecraft and George Eliot or the politician and philosopher John Stuart Mill and his wife Harriet.
Image of the ideal woman
In the 19th century many felt that there is only one truly unselfish feeling that exists on this earth and that is placed in a woman’s heart: maternal love. Women have the mission to establish peace, love and unselfishness and this is to be achieved by any means and at any cost to themselves.
Women were considered to be naturally disposed to worship, to reverence and to self-sacrifice, which leads them to minute devotional practices, to the unlimited indulgence of religious sensibility and even unintelligent obedience.
They are to be regenerators of society and must therefore be Christian women, Christian wives and Christian mothers.
The influence on their children was considered very important; it is said that most great men have had extraordinary mothers.
The ideal home in Victorian times was to be a place of peace, the shelter from all terror, doubt and division. While men had to face danger and temptation in the public sphere, the woman, the 'Angel in the house', was protected against all of this in her private sphere.
The man’s duty was to assist in the maintenance, in the advance and in the defence of the state while the woman’s duty was to assist in the ordering, the comforting and the beautiful adornment of the home.
Marriage: rights and duties
The law regarded a married couple as one person. The husband was responsible for his wife and had to protect her. She belonged to him and he had the right to enforce this by a writ of habeas corpus.
The personal property the wife brought into the marriage was then owned by the husband, even in case of a divorce.
The income of the wife belonged completely to her husband and the custody of children belonged to the father as well. He was able to refuse any contact between the mother and her children.
The wife was not able to conclude a contract on her own. She needed her husband’s agreement.
In addition, the married woman could not be punished for certain offences, such as theft or burglary if she acted under the command of her husband.
It was impossible to charge the wife for concealing her husband and for stealing from her husband as they are one person in law.
Victorian women's duties in general
‘The Household General’ is a term coined in 1861 by Isabelle Beeton in her manual “Duties of the Mistress of the House”. Here she explained that the mistress of a household is comparable to the Commander of an Army or the leader of an enterprise. In order to run a respectable household and secure the happiness, comfort and well-being of her family she must perform her duties intelligently and thoroughly. For example, she has to organize, delegate and instruct her servants which is not an easy task as many of them are not reliable. She is expected to organize parties and dinners to bring prestige to her husband, also making it possible for them to meet new people and establish economically important relationships.
At the same time she must make sure she devotes enough time to her children and towards improving her own abilities and cultural knowledge.
Another duty described by Beeton is that of being the “sick-nurse” who takes care of ill family members. This requires a good temper, compassion for suffering and sympathy with sufferers, neat-handedness, quiet manners, love of order and cleanliness; all qualities a woman worthy of the name should possess in the 19th century.
A woman in Victorian times was also obligated to take care of her parents in case of illness, even if this stretched over months and years and often implied a great sacrifice of self-interest on her side.
A very special connection existed between women and their brothers. Sisters had to treat their brothers as they would treat their future husbands. They were dependent on their male family members as the brother’s affection might secure their future in case their husband treated them badly or they did not get married at all.
‘Redundant’ women and job opportunities
Due to the fact that many men emigrated to the colonies or the United States, died in wars or simply decided to stay bachelors, there a great number of single, so called ‘redundant’ women in 19th century Great Britain. Because of the widespread idea that educated women working in academic jobs were abnormal and monstrous, the only jobs open to middle class women were governess, servant, teacher at boarding schools or author, although novels at the time had a bad reputation and did not offer a secure income. Feminists fought hard to extend the existing job opportunities for women, allowing them to engage freely in all occupations suited to their strength
The Body of a Victorian Woman
In Victorian times man and woman become one flesh by the institution of marriage. There were many forms of anxiety about the vulnerability of the female body. Ideally the body of the middle or upper class woman was delicate and refined and as these women spent most of their time at home their bodies were subject to privacy where they remained impervious to economic and social violation. The body of the working-class woman on the other hand was traditionally considered coarse and robust. As she spent a lot of time out on the streets her body was regarded as publicly accessible.
Education and women
The attitude towards women and education was that education of women needn’t be of the same extended, classical and commercial character as that of men. Women were supposed to know the things necessary to bring up their children and to keep house. That’s why subjects as history, geography and general literature were of extreme importance, whereas Latin and Greek were of little importance. Woman who wanted to study something like law, physics, engineering, science or art were satirized and dismissed. People thought that it was unnecessary that women went to university. It was even said that studying was against their nature and that it could make them ill. They should stay more or less an “Ornament of Society” and be subordinate to their husbands. Obedience was the only requirement.
Prostitution and 'fallen women'
Prostitution was a hotly debated topic in the Victorian era. In 1839 there were about 80,000 prostitutes living in London, including children and juveniles.
The attitudes to prostitution were “toleration without acceptance”.
The puritans achieved the closing of some brothels but this was not the solution to the problem.
A call for legalisation and regulation came from William Acton. He protested against the ignorance of most Victorians.
Keith Nield pointed out that prostitutes were humiliated and treated even worse than negroes. Their situation was deadlocked and they were not able to escape their status as ‘fallen women’. According to Nield, ‘Fallen women' were often women who were born and brought up by prostitutes and had never experienced a different way of life. They were the victims of circumstances. Then there were those who enjoyed their work at first and did not realize that it had lead too far. There was no justification for these women. The last category was made up by women who voluntarily and deliberately sold themselves to men to gain riches. No plea could be offered to them either.
In fact, prostitution was mainly caused by poverty and an insufficient accommodation situation.
Attempts at reform
Custody of infants and divorce
Great changes in the situation of women took place in the 19th century, especially concerning marriage laws and the legal status of women. The situation that fathers always received custody of their children, leaving the mother completely without any rights, slowly started to change. The ‘Custody of Infants Act’ in 1839 gave mothers of ‘unblemished character’ access to their children in the event of separation or divorce, and the ‘Matrimonial Causes Act’ in 1857 gave women limited access to divorce. But while the husband only had to prove his wife’s adultery, a woman had to prove her husband had not only committed adultery but also incest, bigamy, cruelty or desertion. In 1873 the ‘Custody of Infants Act’ extended access to children to all women in the event of separation or divorce. In 1878, after an amendment to the ‘Matrimonial Causes Act’, women could secure a separation on the grounds of cruelty and claim custody of their children. Magistrates even authorized protection orders to wives whose husbands have been convicted of aggravated assault. An important change was caused by an amendment to the ‘Married Women’s Property Act’ in 1884 that made a women no longer a ‘chattel’ but an independent and separate person. Through the ‘Guardianship of Infants Act’ in 1886 women could be made the sole guardian of their children if their husband died.
Prostitution
The situation of prostitutes -- and as was later demonstrated women in general -- was actually worsened through the ‘First Contagious Diseases Prevention Act’ in 1864. In towns with a large military population women suspected of being a prostitute had to subject themselves to an involuntary periodic genital examination. If they refused they were imprisoned immediately; if they were diagnosed with an illness they were confined to hospitals until they were cured. This law applied to women only since military doctors believed that these shameful examinations would destroy a man’s self-respect, another indication of the double standard of Victorian society. Because the decision about who was a prostitute was left to the judgement of police officers, far more women than those who were really prostitutes were examined. After two extensions of the law in 1866 and 1869 the unjust acts were finally repealed in 1886. A crusader in this matter was Josephine Butler who helped to form a society who worked to repeal these acts.
Medicine and Education
Three medical professions were opened to women in the 19th century: nursing, midwifery, and doctoring. But it was only in nursing, the one most subject to the supervision and authority of male doctors, that women were widely accepted. Victorians thought the doctor's profession characteristically belonged to the male sex and a woman should not intrude upon this area but stay with the conventions the will of God has assigned to her. In conclusion, Englishmen would not have woman surgeons or physicians; they confined them to their role as nurses.
Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) was an important figure in renewing the traditional image of the nurse as the self-sacrificing, ministering angel -- the 'Lady with the lamp', spreading comfort as she passed among the wounded. She succeeded in modernizing the nursing profession, promoting training for women and teaching them courage, confidence and self-assertion.
Sources
- Prof. Dr. Vera Nünning’s Seminar “Angels and Wh---s: Women in the 19th century” at the English Department of the Ruprecht-Karls University of Heidelberg, Germany, winter semester 2004/2005.
Notes and further reading
- Bodichon, Barbara Leigh Smith. Married Women and the Law (1854) in Murray, J. Strong-minded women and other lost voices from nineteenth-century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 118-29.
- Beeton, I. The Household General (1861) in: Murray, J. Strong-minded women and other lost voices from nineteenth-century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 83-88.
- Gred, William Rathborne. Why are women redundant? (1862) in Murray, J. Strong-minded women and other lost voices from nineteenth-century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 50f.
- Michie, Helena. Under Victorian Skins in Tucker, Herbert F. (ed). A Companion to Victorian Literature, 407-24.
- Ryan, Michael Dr. Prostitution in London (1839) in Fisher, T. Prostitution and the Victorians, 2-5.
- Adams, James Eli. Victorian Sexualities in Tucker, Herbert F. (ed). A Companion to Victorian Literature, 125-38.
- Stone, Lawrence. The Road to Divorce. Oxford: Oxford University Press 1992, 153-65.
- The Contagious Diseases Acts in Murray, J. Strong-Minded Women, 424-37 and Fisher, Trevor. Prostitition and The Victorians. 80-94.
- Woodham Smith, Cecil. Florence Nightingale, 1820-1910 (London: Constable, 1950), 77f.
- Nightingale Florence, Advice to Young Women 1868 in Murray, J. Strong-minded women, 303f.
- Nünning, Vera. Der Englische Roman des 19. Jahrhunderts. Uni-Wissen Anglistik/Amerikanistik. Stuttgart: Klett, 2000
- Sewell, Sarah. Against higher education for women (1868) in Murray, J. Strong-minded women and other lost voices from nineteenth-century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 213f.
- Lewis, Sarah. Woman's Mission (1839) in Murray, J. Strong-minded women and other lost voices from nineteenth-century England. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984, 23-25.
