Women in The 19th Century or Victorian Age

Women in the 19th century or Victorian Age
The Nineteenth Century is often called the Victorian Age, taking that name from England's
Queen Victoria who ruled for over 60 years (1837-1901).
The main person or woman who shaped the 19th century was Queen Victoria, who had ruled
England for about 63 years, in those years England was prosperous and peaceful.
Despite her outer appearance, Queen Victoria had been a great role model to all feminists
since her accession. Based on her unique position, the female sovereign gave women the
hope and strength to pursue higher educational and political aims. By the end of the 19th
century, the legal status had immensely improved for women: the opportunity of legal
divorce was now available, but only for well-off families; women eventually were able to
pursue higher educational goals, etc.
Queen Victoria was a very intelligent woman who knew how important it was to appear in
public in order to prove that she was able to govern a kingdom and its people. At the
beginning of her reign, she was stunning, because a woman as a Queen was someone the
Victorian woman could look up to, but after she married Prince Albert, her political presence
slowly vanished and after his death she took her time in returning as a proper head of Great
Britain, but even in her late years she managed to impress further generations.
It was an age where the impact of the industrial revolution caused a sharp differentiation
between the gender roles, especially of the upper and middle classes. Men and women were
thought to have completely different natures, owing largely to Darwin's work in biological
determinism, and people saw those differences as dictating separate and different functions in
society. Men were thought to have natures suited to the public world, women to the private.
The following chart illustrates some of the differences that were thought to exist biologically.
Stereotypes:
Men Women
Powerful Weak
Active Passive
Brave Timid
Worldly Domestic
Logical Illogical
Rational Emotional, susceptible to madness, hysteria
Individual Social/Familial
Independent Dependent
Able to resist temptation Unable to resist temptation
Tainted Pure
Ambitious Content
Sexual/Sensual Not sexual/sensual
Sphere: Public Sphere: Private
The stereotypical Victorian woman was well-mannered, reserved, modest, and overall
without passion. Her main role was to lover her husband, raise the children, and take care of
the household. She was home-school educated due to the social traditions in the Victorian
era. During that period women were not allowed to vote, sue or own property. It was
common for a young woman to marry in her early twenties, although it was not usual to
choose her husband by herself, that duty being bestowed to her parents. The Victorian
woman, to put it shortly, had no power or status in general, but she wasn’t unimportant, a
married woman possessed a socially respectable status.
Fashion
Fashion evolves to complement this view of sexuality and control. Women began to wear
long skirts with layers of petticoats and then crinolines, which made it both difficult for
woman to dress and undress by herself and time consuming. As corsets develop, the woman's
breathing becomes much more difficult. Fainting as a reaction to excitement or an "improper"
situation is acceptable and frequent, as it denotes that a woman is truly a lady.
Boning Corsets were used in women’s gowns for emphasizing the small waist of the female
body. They function as an undergarment which can be adjusted to bound tightly around the
waist, hold and train a person’s waistline, so to slim and conform it to a fashionable
silhouette. It also helped stop the bodice from horizontal creasing. With the corset, a very
small tight fitting waist would be shown. Yet, corsets have been blamed for causing lots of
diseases because of the tight waist bound. Ill condition examples were curvature of the spine,
deformities of the ribs and birth defects. As a result, people started to oppose the use of
corsets in later times.
Employment
Lower-class women could be servants, domestic help, factory workers, prostitutes, etc.
Middle- and upper-class women could help, in some cases, with a family business, but
generally, the economy and the society dictated that women should work in the home, taking
care of home and hearth. They could be educated and could study, as long as it did not
interfere with their housework. Any serious or passionate study of any subject was seen as
harmful to the family, unless that serious and passionate study dealt with a social or religious
issue, or to the woman, herself.
In a famous example of such limits on a woman, Robert Southey, the poet laureate of
England, wrote a response to Charlotte Bronte's request for advice on pursuing a literary
career, saying that "literature is not the business of a woman's life, and it cannot be." Upon
receiving this letter, Bronte suffered angst and depression, as her journal indicates, but
eventually, she did write, and became a successful novelist under an androgynous pen name.
Even when women wrote and were popular, they were not well-received by the critical
literary establishment. Nathaniel Hawthorne bemoaned the mass "of scribbling women"
whose works the popular culture preferred to his "serious" and "literary" works.
Wife and mother
At the heart of the domestic ideal were the mother and her children. Since early in the 19th
century the role of mother had been idealised. Motherhood was no longer simply a
reproductive function, but was imbued with symbolic meaning. Domesticity and motherhood
were portrayed as sufficient emotional fulfilment for women and many middle-class women
regarded motherhood and domestic life as a 'sweet vocation', a substitute for women's
productive role.
Marriage signified a woman's maturity and respectability, but motherhood was confirmation
that she had entered the world of womanly virtue and female fulfilment. For a woman not to
become a mother meant she was liable to be labelled inadequate, a failure or in some way
abnormal. Motherhood was expected of a married woman and the childless single woman
was a figure to be pitied. She was often encouraged to find work caring for children - as a
governess or a nursery maid - presumably to compensate her for her loss.
Criticism and legacy

Woman in the Nineteenth Century, which has become one of the major documents in
American feminism, is considered the first of its kind in the United States. Scholars have
suggested Woman in the Nineteenth Century was the first major women's rights work
since Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), beginning with a
comparison between the two women made by George Eliot in her 1855 essay "Margaret
Fuller and Mary Wollstonecraft". Even so, Fuller's work is considered mainly literary today
because oratory was more valued in the politics of her time. Oratory relied strictly on
masculine conventions and women's writing was generally sentimental literature. Sandra M.
Gustafson writes in her article, "Choosing a Medium: Margaret Fuller and the Forms of
Sentiment", that Fuller's greatest achievement with "The Great Lawsuit" and Woman in the
Nineteenth Century is the assertion of the feminine through a female form, sentimentalism,
rather than through a masculine form as some female orators used.

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Women in the 19th century or Victorian Age

Wife and mother

Criticism and legacy

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