Discrimination between male and female in the Victorian period in England?

Introduction

During the Victorian era, women were viewed as the very opposite of what a man ought to be. In the words of John Stuart Mill, who published a criticism of the way society differentiated between males and females “The female sex was brought up to believe that its ‘ideal of character’ was the very opposite to that of men’s ‘not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others…to live for others; to make complete abnegation of themselves, and to have no life but in their affections.”

Basically, women were expected to be sweet, docile, innocent, virtuous, submissive, and man’s perfect helpmate. Women were seen as pure and clean. Because of this view, their bodies were seen as temples which should not be adorned with jewelery nor used for physical exertion or pleasurable sex. The role of women was to have children and tend to the house, in contrast to men, according to the concept of Victorian masculinity.

Mistresses of households

The first mention of a woman being described as the mistress of a household was in 1861 by Isabella Beeton in her manual Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management. Here she explained that the mistress of a household is comparable to the Commander of an Army or the leader of an enterprise. To run a respectable household and secure the happiness, comfort and well- being of her family she must perform her duties intelligently and thoroughly.

Marriage

At the beginning of the Victorian period for example, when a woman married, her property and any money she might earn or inherit automatically belonged to her husband, who was also liable for her debts. She could not divorce her husband, though he could divorce her for adultery, and in the event of a divorce, he would automatically get custody of the children.

Married Woman's Property Act 1887

It was a hypocritical period when relationships were quite artificial. Until late in the century in 1887 a married woman could own no property. Then in 1887 the Married Woman's Property Act gave women rights to own her own property. Previously her property, frequently inherited from her family, belonged to her husband on marriage. She became the chattel of the man. During this era if a wife separated from her husband she had no rights of access to see her children. A divorced woman had no chance of acceptance in society again.

Education

The range of activities Victorian women could do was limited. The middle class ideal was a life in idleness. “Apart from bearing children, the social function of bourgeois woman was to be a living testimony to her husband’s social status. Accordingly, her virtues were chastity and a sense of propriety. Women were being prepared for their lives of domestic angels from their childhood and their education reflected it. Consequently, girls were taught proper manners and delicacy to be able to represent their future husbands; they learned to play a musical instrument and to sing; they had lessons of needlework.

Work

In the early Victorian era, most working class women worked, mainly in domestic service, in factories, in the garment industry (sewing clothes, a badly paid job then as now), or in laundries. Women ought to stay at the hearth and not think about having a kind of what we now call career. For them, marriage was their major goal in life. Women were seen as instable, fragile beings that were unable to make decisions as to which meal to cook and how to spoil their husbands to exempt them from the stress they built up during their hard day in industrial Britain .Women had to keep home a place for family to call secure and harmonic.

The Family Wage

Moreover, because women were restricted in the jobs they could choose, they made about half what men earned. Because women were young, temporary, and had little training they found it difficult to command high wages. But there was another factor that prevented women from earning as much as a man could, even when they were doing exactly the same work, THE FAMILY WAGE.

Economic Restrictions

The gender roles that divided work in the family carried over into the world of work outside the home. Rarely did women perform the same work as men. Indeed, in jobs where both men and women were employed, the men were almost always on the way out. Many male workers resented women workers, and condemned them for taking work needed by men. But in fact technological change made direct conflict rare. Employers liked to reserve the growing number of unskilled jobs for women, who were mostly young, temporary workers. They hired men, on the other hand for the higher paying, heavier, and more highly skilled jobs. Overall, upward of 90 percent of all wage-earning women worked in jobs where women workers were heavily concentrated, and where, therefore, the values of the family claim tended to be re-imposed