WOMEN IN THE VICTORIAN AGE
The Double
Standard
Idealisation of women
Victorian Britain is associated with an idealised, prudish and unrealistic view of women. This was
the age in which even piano legs were covered, when doctors warned that sex more
than twice a week could lead to cancer and early death. Women were expected to
conform to an artificial notion of 'feminine delicacy' which excluded exercise
except for gentle walking, obliged them to wear tightly laced corsets which in
any case made exercise impossible, and often limited their education to refined
'accomplishments' like singing and drawing..
Angelic
figures
The idealisation
of women was evident in the worship of the mother and the young girl, often
compared in Victorian literature to angels
"I have been in heaven! I have stood in the smile, and lain in the
arms of one of God’s angels. I was the
happy child of a gentle and loving mother,' says the hero of William Smith's Thorndale (1851). Young
girls were also thought to be like angels, not
only physically, but morally too. Dickens presented his pathetic girl heroines
as saintly figures, and his readers worshipped them ecstatically :when
Little Nell, the heroine of The Old
Curiosity Shop (1840-1) was dying Dickens
received thousands of letters begging him to save her.
Different
conceptions of male and female nature
Many Victorians believed that the differences between men and
women were determined by nature.
“If they were born animals as men are, instead of angels as women are” then we could
forgive immorality in a woman as easily as in a man, argued one late Victorian
journalist. The novelist Thackeray wrote
that “women are pure, but not men”. Women were thought to be more innocent and
generous than men: naturally more disposed to sacrifice. William Gladstone, Prime Minister four times in the late 19th century,
believed that giving women the vote would endanger “their delicacy, their
purity, their refinement, the elevation of their whole nature”. Often, young
girls were not allowed even to read the newspapers, for fear of the evil
effects of contact with the real world. In a previous age, women had simply
seemed inferior to men; now they were said to be equal but different: less
active and less intelligent, it is true, but also superior in morality, in
taste, and in strength of feeling.
The double standard
The Victorians derived from these beliefs a double standard:
one rule of conduct for men, and another, more severe one for women. This was
most evident in married life. On her marriage, a woman's property passed
automatically into her husband's hands. In the middle of the century, no
married woman in
Prostitution
Though respectable women pretended not to know of their
existence, the huge number of prostitutes in Victorian Britain astonished
foreign visitors. The Frenchman Hyppolyte Taine commented on the 'abject, miserable poverty' of the
prostitutes he saw in the streets. “It seemed as if I were watching a march
past of dead women,” he wrote. Prostitutes were treated with extraordinary
contempt.* The most common euphemisms were 'outcasts'
or 'fallen women' but many newspapers referred to them as 'lepers'. The hatred
that prostitution inspired derived from the double standard: if women were
naturally pure, then 'fallen' or 'impure' women must be unnatural. Rather than
consider the environmental causes of prostitution, it was assumed that
prostitutes were perverted, lustful creatures, who deserved the misery of their
life.
Respectability
These unrealistic attitudes were not simply the product of
male egotism and female hypocrisy, however. The recently urbanised
middle classes were desperately unsure of their social position, and in
consequence obsessed with respectability. Religious doubt, and the anxiety
caused by rapid progress and change, led the Victorians to attach a high value
to traditional symbols of goodness and innocence. The sanctification of mother,
child, and home was an attempt to create a secular religion in the place of the
old one, and to find a place of innocence and peace, a refuge of certainty amid
growing conviction of man's innate depravity. “Home is the one perfectly pure earthly
instinct which we have” wrote the historian Froude in 1849. The idealisation of
innocent girls was a refuge from anxiety and religious doubt. Two poets of the
end of the century, James Thomson and Ernest Dowson, both fell in love with 14-year-old girls, and found in their passions the only convincing
reply to the materialistic arguments that tormented them.
The new woman
The end of the century saw a reaction against these ideas.
This is the period of the 'new woman', the campaign for women's rights, for
votes and education for women, for rational dress and equal standards in sexual
matters. Idealistic or emancipated experiments by believers in free love became
common. Much of the literature of the 80s and 90s focuses on the 'woman
problem' and the marriage laws, though almost all of these
novels end with the death of the free-loving heroine,
as if the writers recognised that free love needed an
apology.
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* It is not clear how many
prostitutes there were in
[Anthony Jennings, Stranger
than Fiction. Life and
Literature in the Late Victorian Age, Black Cat Publishing, 2001, pp. 12-15.]