Abstract
The two previous chapters concerning women’s contribution to economic and political life have illustrated that middle-class and elite women enjoyed far richer experiences than traditional historical accounts often suggest. Nevertheless, the lives of most women (particularly those of the middle classes) remained structured primarily around domestic concerns. Historians have emphasised the extent to which, by the early Victorian period, such activities had become strongly influenced by the Evangelical project.1 Yet, we must question how far most women would have cast themselves unproblematically in the wholly dependent and subordinate domestic roles exhorted of them in Evangelical discourses of domesticity. Women could attach very diverse meanings to the home and to their role within it.
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Notes
For a classic treatment of these themes see Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, (1979) in Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 75–93.
Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990, first published 1977), especially chs 6, 8–9.
F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the Nineteenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1963), p. 100.
Judith Schneid Lewis, In the Family Way: Childbearing in the British Aristocracy, 1760–1860 (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1986), ch. 1. See also
Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), ch. 4.
Amanda Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven, Connecticut and London: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 39–58; see also
K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), passim.
Stana Nenadic, ‘Middle-Rank Consumers and Domestic Culture in Edinburgh and Glasgow 1720–1840’, Past and Present, no. 145 (1994), pp. 122–54.
Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 219–22. See also pp. 99–106 for the importance of religious communities.
John Hawkins Miller, ‘“’Temple and Sewer”: Childbirth, Prudery and Victoria Regina’, in Anthony S. Wohl (ed.), The Victorian Family: Structure and Stresses (London: Croom Helm, 1978), pp. 23–43.
Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood: Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (London: Croom Helm, 1975), p. 85.
For an initial consideration of how radical women might attempt to encourage progressivism in their children, see Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Women and Politics in the British Nonconformist Enlightenment, 1780–1830’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power: British Women and Politics, 1780–1998 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
See Theodore Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban-Industrial Society, Bradford, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 188–9.
Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973), p. 53.
Pat Jalland and John Hooper (eds), Women from Birth to Death: The Female Life Cycle in Britain 1830–1914 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), pp. 304, 275; Vickery, The Gentleman’s Daughter p. 98.
Barbara Caine, Destined to be Wives: The Sisters of Beatrice Webb (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 31.
Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbachs Sheets and William Veeder (eds), The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983), 3 vols, ii, pp. 136–40.
For a critique of the historiography see A. J. Vickery, ‘Golden Ages to Separate Spheres: A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36, no. 2 (1993), pp. 383–414.
Henrietta Twycross-Martin, ‘Woman Supportive or Woman Manipulative? The “Mrs Ellis” Woman’, in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 109–20.
Joanna Trollope, Britannia’s Daughters: Women of the British Empire (London: Pimlico, 1994, first published 1983), p. 46.
Caroline Cornwallis, Selections from the Letters of Caroline Frances Cornwallis (London: Trubner and Co, 1864), p. 20.
Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, c. 1831–51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan–now Palgrave, 1995), pp. 21–32.
See Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth-Century England (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1989), pp. 89–94.
In Scotland divorce was easier to obtain. R. A. Houston, ‘Women in the Economy and Society of Scotland 1500–1800’, in R. A. Houston and I. D. Whyte (eds), Scottish Society 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 132. The Act was never passed in Ireland, see
David Fitzpatrick, ‘Divorce and Separation in Modern Irish History’, Past and Present, 114 (1987), pp. 172–96.
Mary Landon Shanley, ‘“’One Must Ride Behind”: Married Women’s Rights and the Divorce Act of 1857’, Victorian Studies, 25 (1982), p. 364.
Michael Mason, The Making of Victorian Sexuality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 195–205.
Jill Liddington, Land, Gender and Authority: The Ann Lister Diaries 1833–36 (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1998); Gleadle, The Early Feminists pp. 11213;
T. Wemyss Reid, The Life of the Right Honourable William Edward Forster (London: Chapman Hall, 1888), 2 vols, i, pp. 47–8;
Elizabeth Mavor, The Ladies of Llangollen: A Study in Romantic Friendship (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971).
Matthew Cragoe, ’“Jenny Rules the Roost”: Women and Electoral Politics, 1832–1868’, in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 2000), p. 158;
Elaine Chalus, ’“But His Wife Governed”. Women and the Politics of Influence in Eighteenth Century Politics’, paper delivered at the conference, ‘On the Town: Women and Urban Life in Eighteenth Century England, 1660–1820’, University of Leicester, 29 May 1999.
For an outline of middle-class female education, see Carol Dyhouse, Girls Growing Up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), ch. 2.
For full details of married women’s legal position, see Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1983), chs 2 and 3.
Melanie Tebbutt, Making Ends Meet: Pawnbroking and Working-Class Credit (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1983), p. 42.
Margaret Forster, Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939 (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1984), ch. 1.
Maxine Berg, ‘Women’s Property in Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 2, no. 24 (1993), pp. 233–50, quote from p. 234.
Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes, pp. 209–13, 275–9; Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in Mid-Victorian England (London and Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), pp. 71–2.
Margot Finn, ‘Women, Consumption and Coverture in England, c. 1760–1860’, Historical Journal 3, no. 39 (1996), pp. 703–22, the quote is p. 707.
Pat Jalland, Death in the Victorian Family (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), ch. 11.
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© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (2001). Families, Relationships and Home Life. In: British Women in the Nineteenth Century. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_7
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