heroine justifies leaving her husband by quoting a passage from Mill's On Liberty (1859). She might have quoted another work by Mill, The Subjection of Women (1869), which, like Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), challenges long-established assumptions about women's role in society. Legislative measures over the course of the nineteenth century gradually brought about changes in a number
of areas.
The Custody Act of 1839 gave a mother the right to petition the court for access to her minor children and custody of children under seven (raised to sixteen in 1878). The Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 established a civil divorce court (divorce previously could be granted only by an ecclesiastical court) and provided a deserted wife the right to apply for a protection order that would allow her rights to her property. Although divorce remained so expensive as to be available only to the very rich, these changes in marriage and divorce laws, together with the Married Women's Property Acts, began to establish a basis for the rights of women in marriage.
In addition to pressuring Parliament for legal reform, feminists worked to enlarge female educational opportunities. In 1837 none of England's three universities was open to women. Tennyson's long poem The Princess (1847), with its fantasy of a women's college from whose precincts all males are excluded, was inspired by contemporary discussions of the need for women to obtain an education more advanced than that provided by the popular finishing schools such as Miss Pinkerton's Academy in William Makepeace Thackeray's Vanity Fair (1847?48). Although by the end of the poem Princess Ida has repented of her Amazonian scheme, she and the prince look forward to a future in which man will be 'more of woman, she of man.' The poem reflects a climate of opinion that led in 1848 to the establishment of the first women's college in London, an example later recommended by Thomas Henry Huxley, a strong advocate of advanced education for women. By the end of Victoria's reign, women could take degrees at twelve universities or university colleges and could study, although not earn a degree, at Oxford and Cambridge.
There was also agitation for improved employment opportunities for women.
Writers as diverse as Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and Flor
ence Nightingale complained that middle-class women were taught trivial
accomplishments to fill up days in which there was nothing important to do.
Had they been aware of such complaints, women from the majority lower-
class population might have found it hard to show sympathy: the working lives
of poor English women had always been strenuous, inside and outside the
house, but industrial society brought unprecedented pressures. Although the
largest proportion of working women labored as servants in the homes of
the more affluent, the explosive growth of mechanized industries, especially
in the textile trade, created new and grueling forms of paid employment.
Hundreds of thousands of lower-class women worked at factory jobs under
appalling conditions, while the need for coal to fuel England's industrial devel
opment brought women into the mines for the first time. A series of Factory
Acts (1802?78) gradually regulated the conditions of labor in mines and fac
tories, eventually reducing the sixteen-hour day and banning women from
mine work altogether; but even with such changes, the lot of the country's
poorest women, whether factory operatives or housemaids, seamstresses or
field laborers, was undoubtedly hard. Bad working conditions and underem
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99 2 / THE VICTORIAN AGE
ployment drove thousands of women into prostitution, which in the nineteenth century became increasingly professionalized?and the subject of an almost obsessive public concern, whose manifestations included frequent literary and artistic representation.
For the most part, prostitution was a trade for working-class women, but there was considerable anxiety about the possible fates of what contemporary journalists called the 'surplus' or 'redundant' women of the middle classes? that is, women who remained unmarried because of the imbalance in numbers between the sexes. Such women (of whom there were approximately half a million in mid-Victorian England) had few employment opportunities, none of them attractive or profitable. Emigration was frequently proposed as a solution to the problem, but the number of single female emigrants was never high enough to significantly affect the population imbalance. The only occupation at which an unmarried middle-class woman could earn a living and maintain some claim to gentility was that of a governess, but a governess could expect no security of employment, only minimal wages, and an ambiguous status, somewhere between servant and family member, that isolated her within the household. Perhaps because the governess so clearly indicated the precariousness of the unmarried middle-class woman's status in Victorian England, the governess novel, of which the most famous examples are Jane Eyre (1847) and Vanity Fair, became a popular genre through which to explore women's roles in society.
As such novels indicate, Victorian society was preoccupied not only with legal and economic limitations on women's lives but with the very nature of woman. In The Subjection of Women, John Stuart Mill argues that 'what is now called the nature of women is eminently an artificial thing?the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others.' In Ten- nyson's The Princess the king voices a more traditional view of male and female roles, a view that has come to be known as the doctrine of 'separate spheres':
Man for the field and woman for the hearth: Man for the sword and for the needle she: Man with the head and woman with the heart: Man to command and woman to obey.
The king's relegation of women to the hearth and heart reflects an ideology that claimed that woman had a special nature peculiarly fit for her domestic role. Most aptly epitomized by the title of Coventry Patmore's immensely popular poem The Angel in the House (1854?62), this concept of womanhood stressed woman's purity and selflessness. Protected and enshrined within the home, her role was to create a place of peace where man
