A professional career was almost impossible, and despite Britain’s ruler being female for most of the nineteenth century until 1901 when Queen Elizabeth died, women were second class citizens. In 1870, Queen Victoria had written, ‘let women be what God intended, a helpmate for man, but with totally different duties and vocations.’ Trint, S. History Learning Site 2010-2011. Women’s Rights. www.historylearningsite.co.uk [accessed 07122011] Women’s subordination to men meant that their prime duty was domestic. Children were an economic responsibility for women - providing food, housing and clothing until the child was independent and could go out to work to provide for the family themselves.
As the nation of England moved swiftly toward industrialization, however, many single and married women were forced to work to help provide for their families. This redefinition of labor promoted much controversy throughout the Victorian era. Women began demanding greater freedom in public settings and less division between femininity and masculinity. For Lord Alfred Tennyson, who lived from 1809 to 1892, during the heart of the Victorian feminist movement, the gender role controversy was worth discussing through poetry. Written in 1832 and published in final form in 1842, Tennyson’s alluring poem, The “Lady of Shalott,” describes, in symbolic detail, the issue of feminism.
Middle class women, in the Victorian era, were subordinate to their husbands and maintained a special role in the household and in the marriage. George Egerton wrote “A Cross Line” which details the adventure of a sexually liberated woman. In K. Douglas King’s “Lucretia,” Lucretia, a middle class housewife, feels unappreciated by her husband and leaves him for another man. In George Egerton’s and K. Douglas King’s short stories the main female characters are empowered to break free of the social and sexual norms and roles of Victorian era society, by doing this the characters liberate themselves and take control of their own lives. Lucretia, the housewife of husband John Burnett, feels unappreciated and taken for granted while she maintains the house and raises their children.
She is the second daughter of a country gentleman who risks poverty if she does not find a husband who can provide for her as her father cannot pass on his estate or the house to her. Getting a job and supporting herself is not really an option for a proper young lady at that time. However, as being highly independent and intelligent, Elizabeth opts to make her own marriage decision in looking for love and companionate marriage. Undoubtedly, it is being in opposition to the common reality during the early 19th-century England that women who lack of fortune need to marry ‘well.’ By ‘well,’ it means wealthy. For example, turning down Mr. Collins may demonstrateher as a no-brainer woman among the society at that time.
Austen was first published in the early nineteenth century, in a time where social status was of paramount importance within society. Status was recognised by the amount of land a person owned, as well as the wealth one inherited. Women were not entitled to inherit, so for women, marriage was crucial for financial security. This key point is highlighted often within the novel. Charlotte's acceptance of Mr. Collins’ proposal is a prime example; “marriage had always been her object; it was the only honourable provision for well-educated young women of small fortune, and however uncertain of giving happiness, must be their pleasantest preservative from want” (p105)1.
As the Industrial Revolution set in between 1750 to 1850, many families required a fortune in trade, and rose up into the aristocracy, as shown through the Bingley and the Lucas family in the text. Women were still considered unequal to men, and their only way of gaining a fortune was to marry above their social class. However this way of life for women was changing with the rise of reformists and feminists, such as Wollstonecraft, she believed that women should speak out and think independently of men. By 1793 Britain was again at war with France, and as Napoleon’s fleet waited across the channel, the local militia marched back and forth, camped and danced at balls. The army had grown from thirteen thousand men at the outbreak of war to two hundred thousand in 1807.
IAH 201: U.S. & The World (D) The Women’s Rights Movement Starting In the early 1800s women began to question their general role in society and how it is unjust and unfair. Interestingly the educated radicals and working class women in early 1800s were still concerned with the roles and rights of women, they did not classify suffrage as being the prominent issue. The idea of women’s suffrage did not become the primary goal of the Women’s rights movement until around the 1850s, and then remained the primary goal up until 1920 when women finally achieved the right to vote. Further, there were many significant male and female figuresthat played crucial roles in the Women’s rights movements that eventually led to, but didn’t stop at, the achievement of women’s right to vote in 1920. It was in the early 1800s when women began to question various issues such as their roles in society and their rights as a woman, or their lack of rights and unjust inequality in comparison to males.
Indeed, those concepts of sexual behavior have different views according to the historical context. On one hand, it may be taken into account the ideal way of living of the Victorian Era. The imperious obsession with recreating virginity borderlines the way men used to inscribe it onto women. On the one hand, “Angel of the house” was one of the terms which aimed to promote an image of innocence and chastity indispensable in a woman, especially in a wife-to-be. T the term “fallen women” was the antonym.
The morality of women, and the sympathy of mothers for other mothers, such as slave mothers, is essential to Stowe’s anti-slavery approach. Throughout Uncle Tom's Cabin there is an underlying theme of the importance of the role of women in the mid-nineteenth century plantation culture. Instead of encouraging the belief that women are less than that of men she promotes the idea that they are more than a homemaker. This idea is that, as wives and mothers, women have the ability to shape the morals, values and actions of the men around them, and the power to influence the world as they know it. During the nineteenth century women were considered inferior and expected to be submissive to men; their place is meant to be in the home raising the children and managing the plantation.
As antiquities archaeologist Robin Lane Fox says, while literature cannot stand in lieu of archaeological evidence, it must be taken seriously into account as it must have rung true in the society in which it was written to have been accepted. Therefore literature can give guidelines to the roles women had in more remote eras. Women have been spoken of since Biblical times as running private businesses, managing large pools of domestic servants and making significant contributions to society. In fact, Fox speaks of inscriptions at Delphi that identify women as the authoritarian and financial sponsors for grand and culturally important civic buildings in antiquity. In Beowulf, Wealhtheow may not have had legal power, but she had personal power and authority.