I am, sir, yours sincerely, A CREWE FACTORY GIRL Crewe, 1 May 1894
Editor's note: Our correspondent writes a most intelligent letter; and if she is a specimen of the factory girl, then Crewe factory proprietors should be proud of their 'hands.' We shall be glad to hear further from our correspondent as to the wages paid, the numbers of hours worked, and the conditions of their employment. Crewe Chronicle, 5 May 1894
1894
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THE 'WOMAN QUESTION' / 1581
THE 'WOMAN QUESTION': THE VICTORIAN DEBATE ABOUT GENDER
'The greatest social difficulty in England today is the relationship between men and women. The principal difference between ourselves and our ancestors is that they took society as they found it while we are self- conscious and perplexed. The institution of marriage might almost seem just now to be upon trial.' This assertion by Justin M'Carthy, appearing in an essay on novels in the Westminster Review (July 1864), could be further extended, for on trial throughout the Victorian period was not only the institution of marriage but the family itself and, most particularly, the traditional roles of women as wives, mothers, and daughters. The 'Woman Question,' as it was called, engaged many Victorians, both male and female.
As indicated in our introduction to the Victorian age, the Woman Question encompassed not one question but many. The mixed opinions of Queen Victoria illustrate some of its different aspects. Believing in education for her sex, she gave support and encouragement to the founding of a college for women in 1847. On the other hand, she opposed the concept of votes for women, which she described in a letter as 'this mad folly.' Equally thought- provoking are her comments on women and marriage. Happily married herself until the death of Prince Albert in 1861, Victoria was nevertheless aware of some of the sacrifices marriage imposed on women. Writing in 1858 to her recently married daughter, she remarked: 'There is great happiness . . . in devoting oneself to another who is worthy of one's affection; still, men are very selfish and the woman's devotion is always one of submission which makes our poor sex so very unenviable. This you will feel hereafter?I know; though it cannot be otherwise as God has willed it so.'
Many of the queen's female subjects shared her assumptions that woman's role was to be accepted as divinely willed?as illustrated in the selections from Sarah Ellis's popular work of 1839, The Women of England, a manual of inspirational advice now usually classified with more practical books like Mrs. Beeton's Book of Household Management (1861) as 'domestic conduct literature.' The required 'submission' of which the queen wrote was justified in many quarters on the grounds of the supposed intellectual inferiority of women. As popularly accepted lore expressed it: 'Average Weight of Man's Brain 3'/2 lbs; Woman's 2 lbs, 11 ozs.' In the minds of many, then, the possessors of the 'shallower brain' (to borrow a phrase from the speaker of Ten- nyson's 'Locksley Hall,' 1842), naturally deserved a dependent role. In reminding wives of their range of duties, another nineteenth-century conduct book available in many editions, The Female Instructor, recommended that a wife always wear her wedding ring so that whenever she felt 'ruffled,' she might 'cast [her] eyes upon it, and call to mind who gave it to [her].' In this climate it would follow that a woman who tried to cultivate her intellect beyond drawing-room accomplishments was violating the order of Nature and of religious tradition. Woman was to be valued, instead, for other qualities considered especially characteristic of her sex: tenderness of understanding, unworldliness and innocence, domestic affection, and, in various degrees, submissiveness.
By virtue of these qualities, woman became an object to be worshipped?an 'angel in the house,' as Coventry Patmore described her in the title of his popular poem (1854-62). In a similar vein John Ruskin insisted in his highly influential and much- reprinted essay 'Of Queens' Gardens' (1865) that men and women 'are in nothing alike, and the happiness and perfection of both depends on each asking and receiving from the other what the other can only give': the powers of 'a true wife,' he felt, made the home 'a sacred place.' A number of feminists as well as more traditional thinkers held this ideal view of woman's character, but, as George Eliot argues in her essay on Mary Wollstonecraft (see above), the exalted pedestal on which women were placed was one of the principal obstacles to their achieving any alteration in status.
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1 58 2 / THE 'WOMAN QUESTION'
That woman's position in society and in marriage was taken as a natural, and thus inevitable, state also stood in the way of change. Echoing the arguments of Wollstonecraft and John Stuart Mill, the feminist writer Mona Caird contended in 1888 that the institution of marriage was socially constructed and had a specific history: far from being a relationship ordained by God, marriage was an association that could and ought to be reinvented to promote freedom and equality for both partners.
Caird recognizes that the type of marriage she envisions is a distant ideal: to move toward it, she calls for a 'gradual alteration of opinion which will rebuild [established institutions] from the very foundation.' Earlier in the century those established institutions appear to have left some women, married and unmarried alike, dissatisfied and unfulfilled. It is commonly said that boredom was a particular problem for Victorian women, but generalizations about underoccupied females in this era need to be severely qualified. In the mid-Victorian period, one-quarter of England's female population had jobs, most of them onerous and low paying. At the same time other women earned their livings by working as prostitutes (the existence of this 'Great Social Evil,' as the Victorians regarded it, being one indication that the 'angel in the house' was not always able to exert her moralizing influence on her mate or her male children). While the millions of women employed as domestics, seamstresses, factory workers, farm laborers, or prostitutes had many problems, excessive leisure was not chief among them. To be bored was the privilege of wives and daughters in upper- and middle-class homes, establishments in which feminine idleness was treasured as a status symbol. Among this small and influential segment of the population, as the novelist Dinah Maria Mulock emphasizes, comfortably well-off wives and daughters found that there was 'nothing to do,' because in such households the servants ran everything, even taking over the principal role in rearing children. Freed from demanding domestic duties, such women could not then devote their unoccupied time to other labors, for there were few sanctioned opportunities for interesting and challenging work, and little support or encouragement for serious study or artistic endeavor. If family finances failed and they were called on 'to do' something, women from these classes faced considerable difficulties: their severely limited choice of respectable paid occupations meant that many sought employment as governesses. Frequently taken up as a topic in novels of the period, the complex and compromised social position of the governess is, for instance, a notable feature of Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Bronte's character, however, does not limit her criticism to her own impoverished plight when she expresses her frustration with the social attitudes that governed the behavior of women of her class more broadly:
Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow- creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.
