Womanhood in the Victorian Age

> The Angel in the House

> The Fallen Woman

> The New Woman

> The Femme Fatale

Private sphereVSPublic sphere

Sir Edwin Landseer, Windsor Castle in Modern Times (1841-45)

John Calcott Horseley, A Portrait Group of

Queen Victoria with Her Children

(c. 1865)

“It is the part of a woman to lean,

it is the part of a man to stand”.W.E.H. Lecky, “The Position of Women” in

History of European Morals, 1869.

George Elgar Hicks, Woman's Mission:

Companion to Manhood

(1863)

John Ruskin Of Queen's Gardens (1865)

The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest, wherever war is just, wherever conquest necessary.

But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle, — and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement and decision. (…) By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation.

The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial: — to him, therefore, the failure, the offense, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued, often misled, and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this; within his house, as ruled by her, unless she herself has sought it, need enter no danger, no temptation, no cause of error or offense. (…)

And wherever a true wife comes, this home is always round her. (…) home is yet wherever she is. (…) This, then, I believe to be, (…) the woman's true place and power. But (…) to fulfill this, she must — as far as one can use such terms of a human creature — be incapable of error… So far as she rules, all must be right, or nothing is.

She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good;

instinctively, infallibly wise — wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she may never fail from his side:

wise, not with the narrowness of insolent and loveless pride, but with the passionate gentleness of an infinitely variable, because infinitely applicable, modesty of service — the true changefulness of woman.

JOHN RUSKIN 1819-1900

“The glory of woman is to be tender, loving, pure, inspiring in her home; it is to raise the moral tone of every household.”

Frederic Harrison, “The Emancipation of Women”, Fortnightly Review, 1891.

A Life Well SpentCharles West Cope

1862

Richard Redgrave, The Outcast (1851)

George Frederic Watts, Found Drowned (c. 1849-50)

She can swim, she can dance, she can ride: all these she can do admirably and with ease herself. But to run, nature most surely did not costruct her.

She can do it after a fashion, just as the domestic hen will on occasions make shift to fly; but the movement is constrained and awkward – may we say it without disrespect? A kind of precipitate waddle with neither grace, fitness nor dignity.

The Globe, 1890s

The Corset Controversy

The anti-corset movement

“From the sixteenth century to our own day there is hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on girls, and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an unreasonable and monstrous Fashion”.

Oscar Wilde, “Slaves of Fashion”,The Woman’s World, 1888

“Women’s Emancipation”, Punch 1851

“Dress of the Future”

The Rational Dress

Association1883

The Bicycle

“Bicycle Suit”Punch 1895

Gertrude: My dear Jessie, what on earth is that bicycle suit for?

Jessie: Why, to wear, of course!

Gertrude: But you haven’t got a bicycle!

Jessie: No; but I’ve got a sewing machine”

“The New Woman”Punch 1895

Punch 1896

The New Woman

Wash Day1901

“All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will and government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others. What is now called the nature of women is an eminently artificial thing: the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others”.

John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women, 1869

ShaftsA Paper for Women

and the Working Classes

1892-1900

'Light comes to those who dare

to think'

LEGAL MILESTONES:· 1882 Married Women's Property Act: married

women could keep all personal and real property acquired before and during marriage.

· 1884 Third Reform Bill extended suffrage to rural male householders, to virtually all men over 21 (a male field hand could vote, but not a middle-class woman who employed him).

· 1884 Matrimonial Causes Act: a wife deserted by an adulterer could petition for divorce immediately, rather than waiting the two years previously required.

· 1918 Women's Suffrage: women age 30 and over could vote and stand for Parliament.

· 1928 Women's voting age lowered to 21.

The Suffragettes

Emmeline Pankhurst

(1858-1929)

Leader of the Suffragette Movement

-Founder of WSPUWomen’s Social

and Political Union

One of Pankhurst’s

arrests in London

Suffragettes’ tactics and protest action:

Civil disobedienceViolence on propertyVoluntary arrestHunger strike

WSPU demonstration

in London

Hunger StrikeWSPU - 1909

Forcefeeding of suffragette

through nasal tube

-Holloway

Prison, London1911

WestminsterVictoria Tower

GardensStatue in honour

ofEmmeline Pankhurst

(erected in 1930)

Satire against the New Woman in the popular press

Punch 1894Mrs.Blyth (newly

married): I wonder you never married, Miss Quilpson!

Miss Quilpson (author of Caliban dethroned, etc.): “What I marry! I be a man’s plaything! No, thank you!”

Punch 1895

“The Woman who wanted to”

parody of The Woman Who Did,

novel by Grant Allen 1895