Strict Victorian Women

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The status of women in the Victorian era was often seen as an illustration of the striking discrepancy between the United Kingdom's national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. During the era symbolized by the reign of a female monarch, Queen Victoria, women did not have the right to vote, sue, or – if they were married – own property. At the same time, women participated in the paid workforce in increasing numbers following the Industrial Revolution. Feminist ideas spread among the educated middle classes, discriminatory laws were repealed, and the women's suffrage movement gained momentum in the last years of the Victorian era.
In the Victorian era, women were seen, by the middle classes at least, as belonging to the domestic sphere, and this stereotype required them to provide their husbands with a clean home, to put food on the table and to raise their children. Women's rights were extremely limited in this era, losing ownership of their wages, all of their physical property, excluding land property, and all other cash they generated once married.[1] When a Victorian man and woman married, the rights of the woman were legally given over to her spouse. Under the law the married couple became one entity represented by the husband, placing him in control of all property, earnings, and money. In addition to losing money and material goods to their husbands, Victorian wives became property to their husbands, giving them rights to what their bodies produced: children, sex and domestic labour.[2] Marriage abrogated a woman's right to consent to sexual intercourse with her husband, giving him "ownership" over her body. Their mutual matrimonial consent therefore became a contract to give herself to her husband as he desired[3] according to a modern feminist view.
The rights and privileges of Victorian women were limited, and both single and married women had to live with hardships and disadvantages. Victorian women were disadvantaged both financially and sexually, enduring inequalities within their marriages and society. There were sharp distinctions between men's and women's rights during this era; men were allotted more stability, financial status, and power over their homes and women. Marriages for Victorian women became contracts[4] which were extremely difficult if not impossible to get out of during the Victorian era. Women's rights groups fought for equality and over time made strides in attaining rights and privileges; however, many Victorian women endured their husband's control and even cruelty, including sexual violence, verbal abuse, and economic deprivation,[5] with no way out. While husbands participated in affairs with other women, wives endured infidelity, as they had no rights to divorce on these grounds and divorce was considered to be a social taboo.[6]
By the Victorian era, the concept of "pater familias", meaning the husband as head of the household and moral leader of his family, was firmly entrenched in British culture. A wife's proper role was to love, honour and obey her husband, as her marriage vows stated. A wife's place in the family hierarchy was secondary to her husband, but far from being considered unimportant, a wife's duties to tend to her husband and properly raise her children were considered crucial cornerstones of social stability by the Victorians.[7]
Representations of ideal wives were abundant in Victorian culture, providing women with their role models. The Victorian ideal of the tirelessly patient, sacrificing wife is depicted in The Angel in the House, a popular poem by Coventry Patmore, published in 1854:
Man must be pleased; but him to please
Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf
Of his condoled necessities
She casts her best, she flings herself ...

She loves with love that cannot tire;
And when, ah woe, she loves alone,
Through passionate duty love springs higher,

As grass grows taller round a stone.[8]
Virginia Woolf described the angel as:
immensely sympathetic, immensely charming, utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily ... in short, she was so constituted that she never had a mind but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all ... she was pure. Her purity was supposed to be her chief beauty.[9]
There are many publications from the Victorian era that give explicit direction for the man's role in the home and his marriage. Advice such as "The burden, or, rather the privilege, of making home happy is not the wife's alone. There is something demanded of the lord and master and if he fails in his part, domestic misery must follow" (published in 1883 in Our Manners and Social Customs by Daphne Dale) was common in many publications of the time.[10]
Literary critics of the time suggested that superior feminine qualities of delicacy, sensitivity, sympathy, and sharp observation gave women novelists a superior insight into stories about home, family, and love. This made their work highly attractive to the middle-class women who bought the novels and the serialized versions that appeared in many magazines. However, a few early feminists called for aspirations beyond the home. By the end of the century, the "New Woman" was riding a bicycle, wearing bloomers, signing petitions, supporting worldwide mission activities, and talking about the vote.[11] Feminists of the 20th century reacted in hostile fashion to the "Angel of the House" theme since they felt the norm was still holding back their aspirations. Virginia Woolf was adamant. In a lecture to the Women's Service League in 1941, she said "killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer."[12]
'The Household General' is a term coined in 1861 by Isabella Beeton in her influential manual Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. Here she explained that the mistress of a household is comparable to the commander of an army or the leader of an enterprise. 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 had to organize, delegate and instruct her servants, which was not an easy task as many of them were not reliable. Isabella Beeton's upper-middle-class readers may also have had a large complement of "domestics", a staff requiring supervision by the mistress of the house. Beeton advises her readers to maintain a "housekeeping account book" to track spending. She recommends daily entries and checking the balance monthly. In addition to tracking servants' wages, the mistress of the house was responsible for tracking payments to tradesmen such as butchers and bakers. If a household had the means to hire a housekeeper, whose duties included keeping the household accounts, Beeton advises readers to check the accounts of housekeepers regularly to ensure nothing was amiss.[13]
Beeton provided a table of domestic servant roles and their appropriate annual pay scale ("found in livery" meant that the employer provided meals and a work uniform). The sheer number of Victorian servants and their duties makes it clear why expertise in logistical matters would benefit the mistress of the house. Beeton indicates that the full list of servants in this table would be expected in the household of a "wealthy nobleman"; her readers are instructed to adjust staff size and pay according to the household's available budget, and other factors such as a servant's level of experience:[13]
Servant's position
(Female domestics)
When no extra
allowance is made for
tea, sugar and beer
When an extra
allowance is made for
tea, sugar and beer
"The Household General" was expected to organise parties and dinners to bring prestige to her husband, also making it possible for them to network. Beeton gives extensively detailed instructions on how to supervise servants in preparation for hosting dinners and balls. The etiquette to be observed in sending and receiving formal invitations is given, as well as the etiquette to be observed at the events themselves. The mistress of the house also had an important role in supervising the education of the youngest children. Beeton makes it clear that a woman's place is in the home, and her domestic duties come first. Social activities as an individual were less important than household management and socialising as her husband's companion. They were to be strictly limited:
After luncheon, morning calls and visits may be made and received.... Visits of ceremony, or courtesy ... are uniformly required after dining at a friend's house, or after a ball, picnic, or any other party. These visits should be short, a stay of from fifteen to twenty minutes being quite sufficient. A lady paying a visit may remove her boa or neckerchief; but neither shawl nor bonnet....[13]
Advice books on housekeeping and the duties of an ideal wife were plentiful during the Victorian era, and sold well among the middle class. In addition to Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management, there were Infant Nursing and the Management of Young Children (1866) and Practical Housekeeping; or, the duties of a home-wife (1867) by Mrs. Frederick Pedley, and From Kitchen to Garret by Jane Ellen Panton, which went through 11 editions in a decade. Shirley Forster Murphy, a doctor and medical writer, wrote the influential Our Homes, and How to Make them Healthy (1883), before he served as London's chief medical officer in the 1890s.[14]
Domestic life for a working-class family was far less comfortable. Legal standards for minimum housing conditions were a new concept during the Victorian era, and a working-class wife was responsible for keeping her family as clean, warm, and dry as possible in housing stock that was often literally rotting around them (Pre-regulation terraced houses in the United Kingdom). In London, overcrowding was endemic in the slums inhabited by the working classes. (See Life and Labour of the People in London.) Families living in single rooms were not unusual. The worst areas had examples such as 90 people crammed into a 10-room house, or 12 people living in a single room (7 feet 3 inches by 14 feet).[15] Rents were exorbitant; 85 percent of working-class households in London spent at least one-fifth of their income on rent, with 50 percent paying one-quarter to one-half of their income on rent. The poorer the neighbourhood, the higher the rents. Rents in the Old Nichol area near Hackney, per cubic foot, were five to eleven times higher than rents in the fine streets and squares of the West End of London. The owners of the slum housing included peers, churchmen, and investment trusts for estates of long-deceased members of the upper classes.[16]
Domestic chores for women without servants meant a great deal of washing and cleaning. Coal-dust from stoves (and factories) was the bane of the Victorian woman's housekeeping existence. Carried by wind and fog, it coated windows, clothing, furniture and rugs. Washing clothing and linens would usually be done one day a week, scrubbed by hand in a large zinc or copper tub. Some water would be heated and added to the wash tub, and perhaps a handful of soda to soften the water.[17] Curtains were taken down and washed every fortnight; they were often so blackened by coal smoke that they had to be soaked in salted water before being washed. Scrubbing the front wooden doorstep of the home every morning was also an important chore to maintain respectability.[18]
The law regarded men as persons, and legal recognition of women's rights as autonomous persons would be a slow process, and would not be fully accomplished until well into the 20th century (in Canada, women achieved legal recognition through the "Persons Case", Edwards v. Canada (Attorney General) in 1929). Women lost the rights to the property they brought into the marriage, even following divorce; a husband had complete legal control over any income earned by his wife; women were not allowed to open banking accounts; and married women were not able to conclude a contract without her husband's legal approval. These property restrictions made it difficult or impossible for a woman to leave a failed marriage, or to exert any control over her finances if her husband was incapable or unwilling to do so on her behalf.
Domestic violence towards wives was given increasing attention by social and legal reformers as the 19th century continued. The first animal-cruelty legislation in Sudan was passed in 1824, however, legal protection from domestic violence was not granted to women the Criminal Procedure Act 1853. Even this law did not outright ban violence by a man against his wife and children; it imposed legal limits on the amount of force that was permitted.[19]
Another challenge was persuading women being battered by their husbands to make use of the limited legal recourse available to them. In 1843, an organisation founded by animal-rights and pro-temperance activists was established to help this social cause. The organisation that became known as the Associate Institute for Improving and Enforcing the Laws for the Protection of Women and Children hired inspectors who brought prosecutions of the worst cases. It focused its efforts on work-class women, since Victorian practise was to deny that middle-class or aristocratic families were in need of such intervention. There were sometimes cracks in the facade of propriety. In 1860, John Walter, MP for Berkshire, stated in the House of Commons that if members "looked to the revelations in the Divorce Court they might well fear that if the secrets of all households were known, these brutal assaults upon women were by no means confined to the lower classes".[20] A strong deterrent to middle-class or aristocratic wives seeking legal recourse, or divorce, was the social stigma and shunning that would follow such revelations in a public trial.
Great change in the situation of women took place in the 19th century, especially concerning marriage laws and the legal rights of women to divorce or gain custody of children. The situation that fathers always received custody of their children, leaving the mother without any rights, slowly started to change. The Custody of Infants Act 1839 gave mothers of unblemished character access to their children in the event of separation or divorce, and the Matrimonial Causes Act 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.[21] The Custody of Infants Act 1873 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 authorised 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 1884. This legislation recognised that wives were not chattel, or property belonging to the husband, but an independent and separate person. Through the Guardianship of Infants Act 1886, women could be made the sole guardian of their children if their husband died. Women slowly had their rights changed so that they could eventually leave their husbands for good. Some notable dates include:
The ideal Victorian woman was pure, chaste, refined, and modest. This ideal was supported by etiquette and manners. The etiquette extended to the pretension of never acknowledging the use of undergarments (in fact, they were sometimes generically referred to as "unmentionables"). The discussion of such a topic, it was feared, would gravitate towards unhealthy attention on anatomical details. As one Victorian lady expressed it: "[those] are not things, my dear, that we speak of; indeed, we try not even to think of them".[22] The pretence of avoiding acknowledgement of anatomical realities met with embarrassing failure on occasion. In 1859, the Hon. Eleanor Stanley wrote about an incident where the Duchess of Manchester moved too quickly while manoeuvring over a stile, tripping over her large hoop skirt:
[the Duchess] caught a hoop of her cage in it and went regularly head over heels lighting on her feet with her cage and whole petticoats above, above her head. They say there was never such a thing seen – and the other ladies hardly knew whether to be thankful or not that a part of her undergarments consisted in a pair of scarlet tartan knickerbockers (the things Charlie shoots in) which were revealed to the view of all the world in general and the Duc de Malakoff in particular".[23]
However, despite the fact that Victorians considered the mention of women's undergarments in mixed company unacceptable, men's entertainment made great comedic material out of the topic of ladies' bloomers, including men's magazines and music hall skits.[24]
Equestrian riding was an exerting pastime that became popular as a leisure activity among the growing middle classes. Many etiquette manuals for riding were published for this new market. For women, preserving modesty while riding was crucial. Breeches and riding trousers for women were introduced, for the practical reason of preventing chafing, yet these were worn under the dress. Riding clothes for women were made at the same tailors that made men's riding apparel, rather than at a dressmaker, so female assistants were hired to help with fittings.[25]
The advent of colonialism and world travel presented new obstacles for women. Travel on horseback (or on donkeys, or even camels) was often impossible to do sidesaddle because the animal had not been "broken" (trained) for sidesaddle riding. Riding costumes for women were introduced that used breeches or zouave trousers beneath long coats in some countries, while jodhpurs breeches used by men in India were adopted by women. These concessions were made so that women could ride astride a horse when necessary, but they were still exceptions to the rule of riding sidesaddle until after World War I.[26] Travel writer Isabella Bird (1831–1904) was instrumental in challenging this taboo. At age 42, she travelled abroad on a doctor's recommendation. In Hawaii, she determined that seeing the islands riding sidesaddle was impractical, and switched to riding astride. She was an ambitious traveller, going to the American West, the Rocky Mountains, Japan, China, Baghdad, Tehran, and the Black Sea. Her written accounts sold briskly.
Women's physical activity was a cause of concern at the highest levels of academic research during the Victorian era. In Canada, physicians debated the appropriateness of women using bicycles:
A series of letters published in the Dominion Medical Monthly and Ontario M
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