Melinda Koster 3/7/2002

The Status of Women in London and the Emergence of the Ideology of Separate Spheres

woman at the harp, from The Repository", London 1819 in Max von Boehn's Modes and Manners of the 19th Century, courtesy of http://www.costumes.org/pages/regentfashplates.htm

The history of the Englishwoman during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is a story of a gender deprived of the most basic of rights. It is the story of women like Mrs. Bennett of Pride and Prejudice who were forced to marry their daughters off to wealthy suitors in order to maintain a socioeconomic status that was tenuous due to the iniquitous nature of the entail system.1 It is the story of society’s glorification of women into an ideal that defined women solely as caretakers of the home and family and that left women no room to be autonomous. According to William Blackstone, an eighteenth century jurist, husband and wife were ‘one person, and that person is the husband.’2 Indeed, unmarried women seemed to occupy a preferable position to those married women. Married women were constantly being reminded by people like the popular etiquette book writer Mrs. Ellis that their "highest duty is so often to suffer and be still" whereas unmarried women, though considered by society to be "redundant,"3 were somewhat independent and at least had control over their earnings and their property. Finally in 1857 the difference between married and unmarried women’s property rights was resolved by parliament’s passage of the first Married Women’s Property Act, which allowed wives to handle their own property as they chose. It was not until 1918, however, that women of all classes were granted the vote.

Women were only beginning to be awarded legal rights in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the amount of freedom and power that women had within and outside the home did not follow a linear trend. Lawrence Stone shows that the change in woman’s status followed the "secular swings" that dictated the nature of the family: the family was characterized by "reinforced patriarchy and discipline" from around 1530 to about 1670; in response to this restrictive era, the next stage was an "era of individualism and permissiveness which was dominant in the upper middle and upper classes;" the backlash to this permissiveness beckoned in a "strong revival of moral reform, paternal authority and sexual repression, which was gathering strength among the middle classes from about 1770."4

The increasing restrictions on women during this third time period cultivated a frustration and desperation that led women like Mary Wollstonecraft to fight back and defy the society’s image of the Englishwoman as frivolous, foolish, and fragile. In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published her Vindication of the Rights of Women, which she had written when she lived in Store Street right off the Tottenham Court Road. Wollstonecraft presented women as foolish and sentimental and even brutish and conniving. Yet she still refuted Rousseau’s argument that women were not entitled to individual liberty due to their inability to reason like men. Wollstonecraft boldly asserted that society was responsible for women’s incompetence, since society had denied her the education necessary to elevate her to the same status as her husband or her father. Like the American slaveholder who kept his slaves illiterate, the Englishman ensured the obedience of his inferior, in this case the Englishwoman, by limiting her education to frivolous pursuits and rote work:

Wollstonecraft’s argument was practical, since a poor quality of education for women meant that mothers would be unable to properly instruct their sons in basic skills. Additionally, the validity of Wollstonecraft’s protest supported by the fates that many women suffered. Society condoned the teaching of "accomplishments," like playing the piano or drawing, but scorned female professionalism and discouraged women from developing a serious involvement even in acceptable pursuits. The eighteenth century witnessed a rise in literacy among women, creating a new audience for advice books and literature and making books by female authors relatively commonplace. Nevertheless, female authors were still burdened by a certain stigma because any role outside of the female was considered unrespectable. Jane Austen, for example, wrote her novels in secrecy and published Pride and Prejudice anonymously.6 In spite of the soundness of Wollstonecraft’s argument, people were still demanding the same educational reform for women more than a half century later. Charlotte Bronte, for example, voiced her disapproval of the iniquities of the educational system through Shirley Keeldar, the protagonist of her novel Shirley, written fifty seven years after the publication of Vindication.7 Society’s reluctance to implement these demands for equality of education reflects how ingrained their image of women was. Women like Wollstonecraft presented a threat to English society because they contradicted society’s conception of women as the "angel of the house." According to William St. Clair, ‘At the end of the entry [in the Anti-Jacobin Review] for ‘Mary Wollstonecraft’ the reader is cross-referred to ‘Prostitution,’ but the single entry under that heading is ‘see Mary Wollstonecraft.’"8 Flora Tristan, a Frenchwoman who observed London society, expressed her frustration at witnessing that even ‘progressive’ women disapproved of Vindication and would exclaim, ‘Oh that is a very wicked book!’9 Perhaps society refused to acknowledge the validity of Wollstonecraft’s demands because its current image of women as domestic angels offered a sense of stability and comfort that contrasted with the instability that accompanied the urbanization process. Englishmen were already experiencing social and political upheavals in the real world and certainly did not want a revolution within their home as well.

The phrase "the angel in the house" derives from Coventry Patmore’s poem and refers to the ideal of womanhood that arose during the Victorian times. Patmore’s The Angel in the House glorifies women by ascribing them values, such as love, grace, and virtue, but shows that these values arise from woman’s "cloudless brow." Like Patmore, Tennyson distinguished man’s aggression with woman’s passivity: "man for the field and woman for the hearth; man for the sword, and for the needle she…man to command and woman to obey; all else confusion." Carol Christ, in her analysis of Coventry Patmore and Alfred Lord Tennyson’s idealization of woman, explains that these poets chose to glorify women as tranquil and asexual beings in order to resolve their ambivalence towards their notions of manhood.10 Many women held a similar ideal of Englishwomen as well. Sarah Lewis, the author of the 1839 Woman’s Mission, claimed that "women have fewer worldly interests, and are by nature and education less selfish" and reasoned that it was suitable for women to abstain from men’s "intellectual kingdom" because women had the unique privilege of occupying "the moral world."11 This ideal held women up to a superhuman standard that was impossible to fulfill and contributed to the furthering of the gender separation.

Society considered women to be in possession of a power to exercise restraint over their husbands and to maintain order, yet this was an illusory power. John Gregory conveys his understanding of the Englishwoman’s bleak and lonely lifestyle in his 1774 A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter: "the intention of your being taught needle-work, knitting…but…to enable you to fill up…some of the many solitary hours you must necessarily pass at home."12 There was a strong contrast between the reality of a nineteenth century woman’s life and the vision of the ideal life articulated by penny magazines during the 1830s and 1840s. These appealed to the "forgotten women" of the time by showing them the gloriousness of the home life. For example, an 1843 article in the Family Herald claimed that women’s involvement in politics would be as ludicrous as for husbands ‘to turn us out of our kitchens, and take upon themselves to lecture us on the most approved method of flavoring a hash or manufacturing an apple-dumpling.’13 The truth, however, is that many women did not have such control over the affairs within their own homes, where they were supposed to rule. The increasing prosperity of the middle class during the nineteenth century due to modernization allowed for the expansion of domestic service into the middle class home, which in turn caused middle class woman to lose any power that they might have had within the home. Now servants and governesses could be placed in charge of the household and caretaking responsibilities that these women used to undertake themselves. Women were not even entrusted with the power to control their servants. Instead, women were encouraged ‘to appeal to your father or brother should you be unable to secure obedience from the servants.’14 Though women had little power in the home, they were defined solely according to this sphere. The definition of womanhood created gender segregation in leisure activities, since activities like shopping were considered ladylike whereas sports and physical recreations were considered masculine. The ideology of separate spheres also limited women’s employment opportunities and ensured gender discriminatory wages. One of the few acceptable professions for upper and middle class women was that of governess and those wealthy women who desired active lives often became active participants in respectable pursuits like church or philanthropic work. Working class women, on the other hand, did not have the luxury of pursuing activities that conformed to society’s notions of respectability. As economic providers of their family, they either worked as domestic servants or unskilled laborers. Working wives were automatically relegated to a status outside the ideal definition of womanhood because society believed that their work would inevitably lead to the neglect of their responsibilities as mother and wife and ultimately yield the deterioration of the home.15 The working woman’s economic straits afforded them the opportunity to lead an active life outside of the home, which bore a contrast to the idle and vacuous lives of their wealthier contemporaries.16 Yet, because such a large number of women were already confined to the home, it was not considered respectable or safe for a woman to be wandering around the city and a working woman’s morality was automatically called into question.

It was clear that the city was not a place where woman belonged. The content of the advice books that became popular around 1750 reflects society’s concern over the dangers of the city. According to Peter Ackroyd, the author of London: The Biography, many of these advice books glorified the rural wife over the urban wife, claiming that the city had the corrupting power of revealing the natural instincts that women could suppress in an agrarian setting. Perhaps society associated London’s unusually masculine layout with a power to bring out vices in people. Peter Ackroyd, claims that phallic symbols composed of copper alloy have been discovered beneath Leadenhall Street and Cheapside. Additionally, London’s river is commonly referred to as "Old Father Thames," which is unusual because most rivers are considered feminine.17 London’s masculine layout might have caused society to be overly concerned about the potential of the city to transform a woman into what is known as the "fallen woman."

A wealth of chapbooks, books geared towards the literate lower middle classes, and novels addressed the subject of the fallen women. Instead of offering a critique of those societal mores that led to the emergence of such vices as prostitution, this literature simply presented a warning about the potential of young girls to destroy themselves. One such warning is given in the moralistic story about Louisa Harewood: ‘beware of my fate too/once like you I was happy, like you I was blest/though now I am wretched with sorrow opprest.'18 The emphasis on criticizing the fallen woman rather than society reflects the hypocrisy of this puritanical time period. The rigid asexuality of the "angel of the house" could only be sustained by the vices of prostitution. Additionally, prostitution was barely ever a chosen profession, but instead was a last recourse for women living in an age of limited employment opportunities. In July of 1786, the Times demonstrated that prostitution was partly a result of the tax placed on domestic servants: "upon a very modest calculation, not less than 10,000 have been added to the number of common prostitutes by Mr. Pitt’s tax on maidservants."19 Society’s general attitude towards these fallen women reflects the double standard that permeated throughout this time period. They considered it possible to reform males guilty of vice and reintroduce them into society whereas they considered fallen women as incorrigible creatures.

When we think of the Victorian era, we automatically think of a period marked by the rise in the ideology of separate spheres, an ideology that confined women to their homes and bred the hypocrisy that caused the emergence of the image of the fallen woman. Perhaps we call Queen Victoria to mind and hold this standard bearer of morality responsible for what we assume to be an age of the enslavement of women. Yet to what extent are our assumptions about the Victorian period true? Jenni Calder, the author of Women and Marriage in Victoria Fiction, shatters our typical assumption that the Victorian family was of a surpassing size to previous generations.20 She explains that women of the Regency period bore as many children and would have bore even more than the women of the next generation had medical procedures been better. Many historians point to the Victorian society’s ideals about femininity and marriage to prove that women were becoming repressed during this time period. However, the surge of advice columns on these subjects can be viewed as a desperate act by society to maintain the status quo in the face of woman’s increasing power. Sally Mitchell, the author of Daily Life in Victorian England, suggests that it would be ludicrous for advice columnists to waste time on uncontroversial subjects. She explains that essays discussing Victorian women’s delicacy were often written by men who wanted to prevent young girls from engaging in activities reserved for men, such as studying Latin or playing sports.21 An 1851 census shows that 30 percent of all Englishwomen between twenty and forty were unmarried. The fact that there were six percent more Englishwomen in this category than men can certainly account for the existence of the numerous advice books that promoted the joys of marriage.22 While our assumptions about the Victorian era may not be completely true, it is clear that women had a limited voice. These women may not have lived up to society’s ideal of them as the "angel of the house," but that impossible ideal still existed. If women chose not to or were unable to conform to this ideal, they had to be tough enough to endure society’s scorn!

1 Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (London, 1813)
The iniquitous nature of the entail system is the driving force behind Austen’s novel, since it causes Mrs. Bennett to hatch schemes that will facilitate the marriage of her daughters to wealthy men.

2 Quoted in Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (London: Greenwood Press, 1996) p. 103
Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley Keeldar promoted women’s education and argued with her male guardian about this subject: ‘Keep your girls’ minds narrow and fettered-they will still be a plague and a care…cultivate them-give them scope and work-they will be your gayest companions in health; your tenderest nurses in sickness; your most faithful prop in age.’

3 Martha Vicinus (ed.) Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) p. x

4 Lawrence Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) p. 545

5 http://eserver.org/feminism/history/wollstonecraft-vindication.txt; website visited: 3/2/02

6 Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 20

7 Elizabeth Longford, Eminent Victorian Women (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981) p. 14

8 Quoted in Peter Ackroyd. London: The Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2000) pp. 620-621

9 Flora Tristan, Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1840 (Charlestown, MA: Charles River Books, English translation 1980) p. 200

10 Carol Christ "Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House" in Martha Vicinus (ed.) A Widening Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) pp. 146-162

11 Quoted in Janet Murray (ed.), Strong Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-Century England (Pantheon Books: New York, 1982) pp. 23-24

12 Quoted in Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 20

13 Sally Mitchell "The Forgotten Woman of the Period: Penny Weekly Family Magazines of the 1840’s and 1850’s" in A Widening Sphere (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977) p. 51

14 Quoted in James Walvin, English Urban Life: 1776-1851 (London: Hutchinson & Co., 1984) pp. 180-181

15 Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) pp. 73-75

16 Martha Vicinus (ed.) Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972) p. xi.
Vicinus quotes a conversation in Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley to convey the benefits that work would have provided those women of the upper and middle classes:
"Caroline," demanded Miss Keeldar abruptly, "don’t you wish you had
a profession- a trade?"
"I wish it fifty times a day. As it is, I often wonder what I came into the world for. I long to have something absorbing and compulsory to fill my head and hands, and to occupy my thoughts."
"Can labour alone make a human being happy?"
"No; but it can give varieties of pain, and prevent us from breaking our hearts with a single tyrant master-torture. Besides, successful labour has its recompense; a vacant, weary, lonely, hopeless life has none."

17 Peter Ackroyd. London: The Biography (New York: Doubleday, 2000) p. 614, 620

18 Sian Rees, The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts (New York: Hyperion, 2002) p. 19

19 Ibid. p. 6

20 Jenni Calder, Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976) p. 19

21 Sally Mitchell, Daily Life in Victorian England (London: Greenwood Press, 1996) p. 265

22 Janet Murray (ed.), Strong Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-Century England (Pantheon Books: New York, 1982) p. 48

Bibliography:
Ackroyd, Peter. London: The Biography New York: Doubleday, 2000

Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice London: 1813

Calder, Jenni. Women and Marriage in Victorian Fiction New York: Oxford University Press, 1976

Christ, Carol. "Victorian Masculinity and the Angel in the House" A Widening
Sphere, edited by Martha Vicinus, 146-162, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977

Longford, Elizabeth. Eminent Victorian Women New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1981

Mitchell, Sally. Daily Life in Victorian England London: Greenwood Press, 1996

____________ "The Forgotten Woman of the Period: Penny Weekly Family Magazines of the 1840’s and 1850’s" in A Widening Sphere, edited by Martha Vicinus, 29-51, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977

Murray, Jane (ed.) Strong Minded Women and Other Lost Voices from Nineteenth-Century England
Pantheon Books: New York, 1982

Rees, Sian. The Floating Brothel: The Extraordinary Story of an Eighteenth-Century Ship and its Cargo of Female Convicts New York: Hyperion, 2002

Stone, Lawrence. Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500-1800 Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1977 p. 545

Tristan, Flora. Flora Tristan’s London Journal, 1840 Charlestown, MA: Charles River Books, English
translation 1980

Vicinus, Martha. (ed.) Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972

Walvin, James. English Urban Life: 1776-1851 London: Hutchinson & Co., 1984

http://eserver.org/feminism/history/wollstonecraft-vindication.txt; website visited: 3/2/02

http://www.costumes.org/pages/regentfashplates.htm

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