english 6175 - victorian literature @ east carolina u.

Mini-lecture 08: "The Working-Class Woman"

Mini-lecture 08: "The Working-Class Woman"

Scope: The vast contrasts in Victorian life are apparent when we move from the privileged minority to consider the lives of working-class women, the majority. These women were often aware of the ideal woman’s existence, to which the middle and upper classes could aspire, but they were unable to live according to it, because they, and their families, lacked the money. Instead, they were forced to work from an early age. nearly always at the worst jobs. Pay for working-class women was always lower than men’s (even when the work was identical), and they suffered an array of diseases from overwork, malnutrition, too-frequent childbirth, and contaminated workplaces. Their home lives were usually scenes of hard domestic work, overcrowding, and poor diet. No wonder some working-class women joined the ranks of prostitutes. of whom there were thousands throughout the Victorian era. They could earn more money, more easily, than their laboring sisters. Some took to the life from choice; others, from economic necessity. Moral reformers, including Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. tried to “rescue” these “fallen women” and, by the end of the nineteenth century, purity crusaders, such as William Stead and Josephine Butler. had begun to drive the prostitutes’ world out of sight.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

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Outline

I. Economic necessity forced many working-class women to work outside the home; such work began when they were vety young.

A. Large numbers of women worked as domestic servants.

B. Women and children comprised a large part of the landless agricultural work force.

C. Girls and women worked hard in the “sweated trades” too, doing textile piecework at home.

D. In the industrial cities, women were in high demand for factory work.

1. The hours were long; the unskilled work, monotonous.

2. Conditions were often unhealthy.

3. Women would be paid less than men, even for identical work.

4. Men often resented wonien working in factories, because it weakened their bargaining positions.

E. Mid-century legislation prohibited women from working in coal mines and restricted their hours in some factories.

F. Some working-class women became small-scale entrepreneurs.

G. Work that is easy today, such as laundry. was then physically exhausting.

H. In the later nineteenth century. many new job opportunities for upper working-class women developed.

1. Florence Nightingale made nursing a respectable option.

2. Growing numbers of unmarried women became schoolteachers when universal preliminary education was required after the I 870s.

3. Shop assistants, secretaries, librarians, and typists were mainly women by 1900.

II. Working-class women faced challenges at each stage of the life cycle.

A. Family poverty often made work a necessity.

B. Overcrowding and dependency on parents made work or marriage seem attractive alternatives.

C. Factory work sometimes provided young working women with comradeship and fun.

1. They enjoyed practical jokes.

2. They had a limited social life in pubs and clubs.

D. Working-class marriages often followed, rather than preceded, pregnancy.

1. Parish guardians sometimes forced reluctant swains to wed.

2. Abandoned pregnant women often faced social censure and acute poverty.

3. Infanticide was widespread.

E. Combining motherhood with work created child-care challenges.

F. Poor and adulterated food added to working women’s difficulties.

III. Prostitution was common, as ajob or as a supplement to low wages in other work.

A. We know a great deal about Victorian prostitution from the anonymous My Secret Life.

B. Some skillful young women chose the life as a route to riches.

1. King William IV had ten children by his mistress.

2. Catherine “Skittles” Walters was a famous and beautiful courtesan.

C. Others were forced into the life if abandoned or widowed or if sickness prevented the family breadwinner from working.

1. Prostitution paid better than any other working-class occupation.

2. It was hazardous to women’s health and safety.

D. Brothels were common, and many cafes and pubs provided beds. A survey from 1838 estimated that there were 5,000 brothels in London alone.

E. The government experimented with legal regulation of prostitution. but a purity crusade tried to prevent it.

1. In 1864, Parliament passed the Contagious Diseases Act, to ensure regular VD inspection of prostitutes in military towns.

2. Josephine Butler led a protest campaign against the act.

3. Parliament condemned brothels in 1885 and repealed the Contagious Diseases Act in 1886.

4. The Salvation Army tried to rescue “fallen” women.

5. Religiously motivated individuals, including William Gladstone. also sought to rescue “fallen” women; he flagellated himself when he realized that he enjoyed the work.

Essential Reading:
Trevor Fisher, Prostitution and the Victorians.
Joan Perkin, Victorian Women.

Supplementary Reading:
John Benson, The Working Class in Britain.
Stephen Marcus, The Other Victorians.

Questions to Consider:
1. What were the most difficult aspects of Victorian working-class women’s lives?
2. Why was prostitution so widespread in Victorian Britain?

Important quotes from Mini-lecture 08: "The Working-Class Woman"

A girl from the county of Lincolnshire on joining a traveling farm work gang that worked 14 hours per day:

“For four years, summer and winter, I worked in these gangs, no holiday of any sort, with the exception of very wet days and Sundays. At the end of that time, I felt it was like heaven to me when I was taken to the town of Leeds and p~ to work in a cotton factory.”

Becky Usedale, a child knitter in Yorkshire:

“We knit as hard as we can because the one who knits the slowest gets well thumped.”

Francis Place, a tailor interested in reform projects of the time:

“Nothing conduces so much to the degradation of the woman than her having to eat and drink and cook and iron and transact all her domestic concerns in the room in which she and her family also work and in which they sleep.”

An unscrupulous Lancashire textile boss giving evidence to Parliamentary commission in 1844:

“I have a decided preference for married females, especially those who have families at home dependent on them for support. They are attendant, (more so than unmarried females), and are compelled to use their utmost exertions to procure the necessities of life.”

Harry Pollitt, leader of the Communist Party in England in the early 20th-century, remembers when he went to work as an apprentice in a Lancashire cotton factory:

"Teenage girls, grabbed hold of me, pulled my trousers down, and daubed my unmentionable parts with oil, then packed me up in cotton waste."

Lord Ashley, who was one of the most severe and upright of the Victorian evangelical reformers, told Parliament in 1844:

“Fifty or 60 females, married and single, form themselves into clubs, ostensibly for protection, but in fact they meet together to drink, sing, and smoke. They use, it is stated, the lowest, most brutal, and most disgusting language imaginable.”

Marriage customs among the working classes were very different from those among the upper classes, as we looked at before. There were regional variations in this as in everything. It was quite common for the marriage to follow the announcement of a pregnancy rather than to precede it. We know that premarital sexual activity was quite common. For example, historian Joan Perkin recounts a Cumberland girl getting pregnant and realizing that now she is pregnant she has to get married and she has this conversation with her aunt.

The aunt says “Anna, that has been tasting the soup before it was ready.” Anna says, “Yes, and I found a carrot in it.”

An early Victorian vistor from Germany describing what it is like at the London Theaters:

“The higher classes rarely visit their national theater. The reason for the absence of decent families is the attendance of several thousand Jules de joie (in other words, prostitutes) from the kept lady who devours six thousand pounds sterling a year, and has her own box at the theater, down to those who bivouac on the streets under the open sky. During the intermissions they crowd the fairly large and elaborate foyer where they put on all air of effrontery, unrestrainedly on show. It goes on to such an extent that often in the theater one can hardly ward off these repellant priestesses of Venus, especially when they are drunk, which is not infrequently the case, at which time they always beg in the most shameless fashion.”

Anonymous author of My Secret Life:

“I was tired of the prostitutes’ lies, their tricks and the dissatisfied money-grabbing, money-begging style. I wanted a change. So I began to look out for a nice fresh servant. I have now had many servants in my time and know no better companions in amorous amusements. They have rarely lost all modesty. A new lover is a treat and a fresh experience to them, even when they have had several, and few have had that. They only get a chance of copulating once a week or so. They are clean, well fed, full blooded, and when they come out to meet their friend or give way with a chance man on the sly, they are ready. So, I longed for a servant and soon I found my chance. I suppose all men do if they set their mind upon a woman.”

Josephine Butler speaking to the royal commission in 1871:

“We claim that laws should not be made which teach in an indirect but subtle, most effectual manner that impurity of life is not a sin, but a necessity. Neither can our moral objections to these acts be met by assurances that a certain number of women are reclaimed by their operations. I ask where are the men who are reclaimed by them? As mothers of sons, we demand to know what the influence of these acts is on young men. It is vain to restore fallen women to virtue on the one hand while on the other you stimulate the demand for these victims. Prove to us if you can that these acts promote chastity among men. That is what we are concerned about.”

She goes on:

“Men of every class go to the prostitutes and they ought not to. All legislation hitherto had been directed against one sex only, but we insist that it should be directed against both sexes. Whereas it has been directed only against the poor, we insist, and the working men insist, that it also apply to the rich profligate. It cannot be said that there is no such thing as seduction of young girls by gentlemen of the upper classes. It cannot be said that there is no such thing as patronage of houses of ill fame by rich profligate men.”

Mini-lecture 09: "Domestic Servants"

Mini-lecture 09: "Domestic Servants"

Scope: More women worked as domestic servants than in any other job in Victorian Britain. In an age before electricity and labor-saving devices. servants were essential to anyone who wanted to be well dressed, live in clean surroundings. and enjoy their luxuries. A family's first claim to middle-class (or even upper-working-class) status was its ability to employ a maid. A handfull of wealthy and aristocratic families employed dozens of male and female servants, within whose ranks a strict status hierarchy prevailed. The vast majority of domestics, however, were employed in ones, twos, and threes, often beginning between the ages of 10 and 13 as a “tweeny.” Employers expected domestics to live in their homes, which were commonly designed with servants’ working areas in the basement and their sleeping areas in the attic. Potential benefits of being a domestic included living in grander conditions than would otherwise have been possible and gaining the help and patronage of sympathetic employers. Disadvantages included a total lack of privacy, employers’ discouragement of "followers" (boyfriends and suitors), extremely long working hours and arduous labor, and the hazard of sexual exploitation by male members of the household. By the end of the Victorian era, the opening up to women of such jobs as secretary and shop assistant had led to the familiar employer’s lament: “Good servants are so hard to find nowadays.”

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

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Outline

I. Service was one of the relatively few employment options available to working-class women.

A. Women and girls worked in textile factories, dressmakers’ and milliners’ shops, or as servants.

1. Mid-Victorian reformers tried to get women out of factory and uhine work.

2. As standards of social decorum rose in the later Victorian era. the need for servants increased, as well.

B. Girls were usually recruited between the ages often and thirteen after elementary schooling.

1. In working- and lower-class districts, most would live at home but work six-day weeks for their employers.

2. They were expected to be able to read, write, and count money.

C. Flours of work were long and leisure was limited.

D. Pay was low. Most servants were given board and lodging and a small money allowance.

E. The job had many disadvantages.

1. Servants were under constant scrutiny, yet subject to a rigid form of apartheid.

2. Some had to rebuff (or accept) the sexual advances of their employers.

3. In families only just able to afford a servant, the domestic help was likely to be underfed.

4. Living-in made social lives difficult and kept servants remote from family and friends.

F. The job could have advantages, including:

1. The chance to live in grand surroundings

2. A sense of membership in the family

3. Patronage and protection from the employer.

II. Servants were required to undertake many jobs.

A. Food shopping and preparation was helped by the fact that many bakers, grocers, and butchers delivered food to the door.

B. Laundry work all had to be done by hand.

C. Fires had to be laid and grates had to be cleaned and blacked, usually before dawn.

D. Servants were required to sweep, clean, and polish regularly.

E. Nursery maids’ principal job was childcare.

III. Large households had a strict hierarchy of servants.

A. The butler and housekeeper, in tailcoat and black silk dress, respectively, were the principal servants.

1. Variations in lower servants’ uniforms denoted their ranks.

2. Ladies’ maids often trained first as milliners’ apprentices.

3. Lowest were the scullery maids, who had to scrub floors, wash dishes, and black the grates.

B. Indoor male servants were more expensive than women and confined mostly to elite households.

1. They were less tractable.

2. They flirted with the female servants.

3. Male gardeners and stable boys were more common.

IV. Middle- and upper-class Britons struggled with unsatisfactory servants.

A. Most required a “character.” or reference, from new servants.

B. Dishonest servants had opportunities to steal from their employers or let thieves enter their houses.

C. Philanthropists tried to help friendless servants who had come from workhouses.

1. The Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants (Mabys) was founded in the 1870s.

2. Mrs. Townsend created the Girls’ Friendly Society.

3. Arthur Munby, a barrister, took photographs of servants at work, interviewed them, and secretly married his own servant, Hannah, after an eighteen-year courtship.

Essential Reading:
Frank V. Dawes, Not in Front of the Servants: A True Portrait of Upstairs— Downstairs Life.
E.S. Turner. What the Butler Saw: 250 Years of the Servant Problem.

Supplementary Reading:
Derek Hudson. Arthur Munby, Man of Two Worlds.
Nigel Temple, Seen and Not Heard.

Questions to Consider:
1. What were the benefits and drawbacks of life as a servant for working-class women?
2. Why were so many servants needed by the Victorian upper and middle classes?

Quotes from "Mini-lecture 09":

Rose Asthon, a Lancashire girl who was a servant on a farm nearby, and described to a historian in the early 20th Christmas day.

“We had a nice Christmas dinner, and I washed up all the dishes, and then she come out to me and said, ‘Are you finished, Rose?’ I said

‘Yes, madam.’ She said, ‘Well, there is a bowl of string there, and there is a big needle and a heap of papers. I want you to go down to the paddock (The paddock was their toilet.) and sit there and tear those pieces of paper into pieces like you have on a toilet roll.’

Then I used to thread them and hang them on the back of the toilet door. I think I shed a bucket full of tears. That was my Christmas day.”

My Secret Life, the 11-volume series by the great sexual adventurer in Victorian England. He explains how he was initiated into sex as a teenage boy himself by the servants in his family’s middle-class home and how most of them liked it, he says. Later on, he says,

“I have now had many servants in my time, and know no better companions in amorous amusements. They have already lost all modesty, and a new lover is a treat, a fresh experience for them.”

Later on, he himself gets married but hates his wife. Some of the bitterest passages are the intense conflict between he and she. He says,

“It was the mistress’s custom to coax the facts from the poor devils in a kind way, but then to kick them out mercilessly. Middle-aged married women are always hard upon the young in matters of copulation.”

A historian called Frank Dawes wrote Not in Front of the Servants, an oral history book. In the book, a lady called Elsie Raum, said to him:

“I always respected my employers. In fact, if I had despised them, it would have been degrading to work for them. At the risk of being called old-fashioned, we all had our place, and we knew it. As a result, the world seemed a happier place.”

A speech that Prince Albert made to an organization called the “Servants’ Provident and Benevolent Society”:

“Who would not feel the deepest interest in the welfare of their domestic servants? Whose heart would fail to sympathize with those who minister to us in sickness, receive us upon our first appearance in this world, and even extend their cares to our mortal remains, who lie under our roof, form our household, and are part of the family?”

The employer of a servant who died in the 1880s named Elizabeth Gaye had a headstone engraved:

“In memory of Elizabeth Gaye, who, after a service of 40 years, finding her strength diminished, with unparalleled disinterestedness, requested that her wages might be proportionately lessened.”

Servant Arthur Law whose job was to pluck the poultry delivered to the house:

“I had to pluck a dozen or so pairs of poultry every week sent in from the home farm, chickens, ducks in gaming season. The chickens were usually alive with fleas, and so would I be by the time I had finished them.”

A list to you of the servants at Welbeck Abbey; this was the home of the Duke of Portland:

“The kitchen staff consisted of a steward, wine butler, under butler, groom of chambers, four royal footmen, two steward’s room footmen, master of the servants’ hail, two page boys, the head chef, the second chef, the head baker, the second baker, the head kitchen maid, two under kitchen maids, sundry vegetable maids and sculleiy maids, the head still room maid, the hail porter, two hall boys, the kitchen porter, and six odd job men. The Duke also employed a head housekeeper, a valet, a personal maid for the duchess, his daughter’s personal maid, the head nursery governess, the tutor, the French governess, the schoolroom footmen, and fourteen housemaids. There were six engineers and four firemen to look after the steam heating, a telephone clerk and assistant, a telegrapher, and three night watchmen.”

A quote from you now from a butler’s handbook written in the 19th century:

“Like the footman, the butler has to perform many duties in small families not generally considered as belonging to his position in the large establishments, in all establishments it is his duty to rule and in large establishments, more particularly, a judicious power will be greatly required for under servants who are never even comfortable, much less happy, under lax management.”

A valet called Francis Courvoisier murdered his master, Lord William Russell, in 1840 and was hanged for it. That sent a great shock of horror through the whole of the upper and middle classes. Everybody who hired servants was faced suddenly with the possibility that the servant might murder you. From the sermon that was preached the Sunday after the hanging by the Reverend George Clayton. He took a text from Psalm 19: "Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins.” Here is part of the sermon:

“These words have been selected with a view to the instruction and improvement of a numerous and interesting body of persons in society, those whom divine providence has placed in the condition of servants. Some are exemplary, but there are those who are a grief and a disturbance to the families where they live, and they are often a means of bringing disgrace upon themselves and dishonor among their employers by their censurable and unworthy conduct.”

Another favorite biblical passage was from Ephesians 6:

“Servants, be obedient to them that are your masters according to the flesh, with fear and trembling, in singleness of your heart, as unto Christ; Not with eye-service as men-pleasers; but as the servants of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart.”

MABYS (Metropolitan Association for Befriending Young Servants.) The girls themselves nicknamed it:

Mind and Behave Yourselves.

From the Sphere magazine of 1890:

“The present condition of friction between mistress and maid is one totally destructive of domestic peace. Home is rapidly becoming the place that one seeks only when it is impossible to go elsewhere. The servant who takes an interest in her work seems no longer to exist, and in return for high wages, we get but superficial service. Where is the maid to be found who takes pride in the brilliance of the glass used upon the table or remembers of her own initiative to dam the damask? Every sort of contrivance now lessens her labour, carpet sweepers, knife machines, bathrooms, lifts. But in spite of these, the life of a housewife is one long wrestle and failure to establish order.”

03 Illuminated Context Report Assignment - "Victorian Women, Sexuality, and Gender Report" (35 pts)

Due Wed. 21 Sep.

Review the assigned reading from last week: "Perspectives: Victorian Ladies and Gentleman" (la 1600-1602) and Cobbe, Ellis, Bronte, Bronte, Newman, Norton, Hughes, Martineau, Beeton, Queen Victoria, Kingsley, Newbolt (la 1602-29). Please also review Richard Altick's Chapter 2, Section 6: "The Weaker Sex" (50-59) in Victorian People and Ideas from week 03.

Then review the following on-line lectures:

• Mini-lecture 06: "The Upper- and Middle-Class Woman"
• Mini-lecture 07: "The Working-Class Woman"
• Mini-lecture 08: "Domestic Servants"

Please also read the following from Mermin and Tucker's Victorian Literature: 1830-1900 (2002):

• "Gender and Sexuality" [Introduction] (81-83);

• Ellis - "[from] The Women of England" (83-85);

• Bodichon - "[from] A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws of England Concerning Women" (87-90);

• "The Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act" (94-95);

• Hughes - "[from] The Manliness of Christ" (96-97);

• [from Criminal Law Amendment Act] "Labouchere Amendment" (98);

• Symonds - "[from] Memoirs" (98-103)

Finally, review the following entries in Sally Mitchell's Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia (1995): "Womanhood" (863-64); "Women's Employment" (886-88); "Governesses" (337-38); "Women in Art" (864-66); and "Women's Friendships" (868-69).

For more see - Guidelines for 'The Illuminated Context Report' - Overview

This Week in English 6175 (19 - 23 Sep.)

Week 05
(19 - 23 Sep.)

Mon. 19 • Bronte, Jane Eyre (Chapter 18-23, pp 206-277)

Due: Assignment 05 - Bronte DSIR (5 pts)

Wed. 21 • Bronte, Jane Eyre (Chapter 24-28, pp 278-378); "Chapter 4: The Utilitarian Spirit" (vpi 114-164)

• Mini-lecture 08: "The Working-Class Woman"
• Mini-lecture 09: "Domestic Servants"

Due: 03 Illuminated Context Report - "Victorian Women, Sexuality, and Gender Report" (35 pts); Assignment 06 - Reading Quiz on Jane Eyre (30 pts)

Fri. 23 • Bronte, Jane Eyre (Chapter 29-34, pp 379-456)

Classes Cancelled, Wed. 14 September

Due to Hurricane Ophelia, classes at ECU are cancelled for today, Wed. 14 September. Please keep up with the reading and assignments as set out on the schedule. We will begin discussing Jane Eyre on Friday.

Trollope's Barchester Towers and the Uses of Comedy

In Friday's class, we began with some further review of comedy as a genre. 

• Comedy, like tragedy, grew out of rituals, revels, feasts, and kindred practices connected with fertility and harvest celebrations.
• Comedy, however, emphasizes an innate reverence for material being.
• The mode of comedy is historically, psychologically, and metaphorically grounded in the physical experiences of laughter, sex, and eating.
• When people are experiencing the hilarity of the comic moment, they feel free of restraint; it is that sense of freedom and vitality that the makers of comic forms often strive to capture.

But for all these advantages to comedy, there is a strong desire for authorities to control comedy -- to suppress its celebration of the physical world in favor of reaching beyond the physical world through the celebration of physical suffering as the means to salvation.  Take Ecclessiastes for instance:

• "I said of laughter, It is mad: and of mirth, What doeth it" (2.2)
• "The heart of the wide is in the house of mourning; but the heart of fools is in the house of mirth" (7:4)

Ridicule can threaten elites, can be distruptive, and the pursuit of pleasure can upset the principle of deferred gratification upon which developing societies depend in order to grow strong.  But even Ecclessiastes cannot suppress the comic core of faith in the essential goodness of the physical world:

• "Then I commended mirth, because a man hath no better thing under the sun, than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry" (8:15)

With these preliminaries in mind, we practiced some close-reading of the Trollope's comic novel, reflecting on the "comic church" Trollope attempts to build with his fiction.

This Week in English 6175 (12 - 16 Sep.)

Week 04
(12 - 16 Sep.)

Mon. 12 • Trollope, Barchester Towers (Chapter 43-53, pp 2.173-2.271)

Wed. 14 • Bronte, Jane Eyre (Chapter 1-8, pp 13-87); (optional) "Perspectives: Victorian Ladies and Gentleman" (la 1600-1602) and Cobbe, Ellis, Bronte, Bronte, Newman, Norton, Hughes, Martineau, Beeton, Queen Victoria, Kingsley, Newbolt (la 1602-29).

• Mini-lecture 07: "The Upper- and Middle-Class Woman"

Due: 02 Illuminated Context Report - "The Rise of the Novel" (35 pts)

Fri. 16 • Bronte, Jane Eyre (Chapter 9-17, pp 88-205)

Mini-lecture 07: "The Upper- and Middle-Class Woman"

Mini-lecture 07: "The Upper- and Middle-Class Woman"

Scope: Today, we emphasize the similarities of men and women. The Victorians emphasized the differences between them and believed that they had distinct and complementary roles to play. Men, according to the Victorian ideal, were physical. rational, and sexually domineering, the opposite of emotional, spiritual, and sexually passive women. For upper- and middle-class women who did not work, courtship. marriage, and motherhood were the central issues of life. Marriage contracts, while not excluding love, often contained a distinct business element too, as families jockeyed for financially advantageous matches. The London “season” became highly formalized in the Victorian era, offering debutantes maximum opportunities to locate suitable husbands.

Once married, women faced the hazards of childbirth, which was often fatal. Middle- and upper-class women eager for careers found it difficult to overcome traditional rules of exclusion but those with sufficient deteriii ination showed the possibilities: Florence Nightingale in nursing, the Bronte sisters and George Eliot as novelists, Ada Lovelace as a mathematician.

Click here for a printable, PDF version of the following outline.

Download mini_lecture_07_upper_and_middle_class_woman.mp3

Outline

I. Ideas about gender relations and the nature of women, published by men and women, emphasized women’s inferiority.

A. Popular writers, male and female, emphasized women’s natural inferiority and submissiveness.

1. They said that women were physically and mentally inferior.

2. They added that the inferiority was biological.

3. These writers asserted that women’s inferiority was underlined by biblical texts.

B. They treated home as a sanctuary away from the rough world and woman as morally and religiously elevated.

II. The upper- and middle-class woman’s principal interests were courtship. marriage, and motherhood.

A. Marriage contracts specified the details of the union. which was a business transaction, as well as a personal one.

1. Dowries, allowances, and pin money ensured the financial security of the wife.

2. The husband gained control of’ the wife’s property and legal interests.

3. The “banns of marriage’ and the request for "just cause or impediment” publicized forthcoming weddings in the Church of England.

4. Dissenters, Catholics, and Jews needed a civil license for their weddings outside the state religion.

B. A well-organized and closely policed marriage market was based on the London “season” and the debutante ritual. Debutantes, usually seventeen or eighteen years old, were officially presented at court to the queen and declared to be of marriageable age.

C. Women were expected to be virgins at marriage and to have little knowledge of sex but to be sexually available at their husbands’ demand thereafter.

1. Lack of knowledge about contraceptives meant that frequent pregnancies and regular childbearing were common.

2. Death in childbirth was also common.

D. Victorian writers attributed great moral and spiritual power to mothers and sanctified the role of motherhood.

E. Women were more attentive to religion than men, despite their lack of leadership roles, and were expected to create a religious home atmosphere.

F. Divorce was extremely rare and required an individual act of Parliament until 1857.

III. The designs of clothes for upper- and middle-class women emphasized the fact that they could not be worn without the help of servants and that their owners did not work.

A. Elaborate dresses, crinolines, and hustles were deliberately impractical.

B. To keep out of the mud and horse manure in the streets, women wore “pattens,” miniature stilts attached to their shoes.

IV. Women with middle-class careers were exceptional but not unknown.

A. The classic career for an educated but impoverished young woman was that of governess. Emily Bronte’s Jane Eyre is the most famous example.

B. Several eminent Victorian writers were women.

1. Mary Ann Evans wrote as George Eliot.

2. The Bronte sisters also used male pen names

3. Rachel Beer was editor of the Sunday Times and the Observer in the l890s.

4. Mary Somerville (after whom one of the first Oxford colleges for women was named) published a series of books on astronomy and the interconnections of the physical sciences.

5. Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter, was an outstanding theoretical mathematician.

C. Women played an important role in reform projects.

1. Florence Nightingale made nursing a respectable profession for young women.

2. After the 1867 Second Reform Act expanded the vote for men, women began to campaign for the vote and for enhanced legal rights.

3. Two widows, Millicent Fawcett and Emmeline Pankhurst, led the moderate and radical wings of the suffrage movement later in the century.

D. An intellectually ambitious minority complained about the lack of better education and career opportunities for women. Harriet Martineau. Charlotte Bronte, and many others lamented their stifling upbringings and laid the foundations for feminist reform.

Essential Reading:
Joan Perkin, Victorian Women.
W.D. Rubinstein, Britain's Century: A Political and Social History, chapter 19.

Supplementary Reading:
Gertrude Himmelfarb, Marriage and Morals among the Victorians.
Penny Kane, Victorian Families in Fact and Fiction.

Questions to Consider:
1. How did social and economic changes contribute to changing gender relations in Britain between 1830 and 1900?
2. How did ambitious women find ways to overcome restrictions to their careers?

02 Illuminated Context Report Assignment - "The Rise of the Novel" (35 pts)

Due Wed. 14 September

Please review last week's reading assignment: "Chaper 2: The Victorians - Actor and Audience" (vpi 17-72), paying particular attention to Chapter 2 (section 8), "The Power of the Press" (64-72).

Please also read: Chapter 1 "Realism and the Novel Form" and Chapter 2 "The Reading Public and the Rise of the Novel" from Ian Watt's famous study The Rise of the Novel (Berkeley: U. of California P, 1958). Finally, look over the book review of Michael McKeon's Origins of the English Novel 1600-1740 and scan the book at the library (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1987).

Instructions for Report to the Class:

You are responsible for assembling your readings and critical interpretations into a coherent and cogent summary of the relationship between the Rise of the Novel and Victorian culture. For the presentation to the class, students should perform their subject. Costumes, play-acting, food, games, and other 'Illuminating' devices are expected. The group presentation should be designed to give classmates useful information on a subject that they might otherwise have had to research themselves -- and to do so in an entertaining and engaging fashion. Finally, the presentation should also reflect the continued influence of the "rise of the novel" with the "rise of film" and other contemporary media. Be clear, brief, and inventive!

Click Here for Illuminated Context Reports - Overview

Class 05 - Trollope DSIRs and the Uses of Comedy

In class on Wed, we will begin with a discussion of the following DSIR responses: