Gender and Class in Victorian England, Part II

Jane Lewis. Women in England, 1870-1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Joan Perkin. Victorian Women. London: John Murray, 1993.

Judith Walkowitz. Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, class, and the state. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1980.

Part II: Lewis and Perkin

But were working-class women that emancipated? While Jane Lewis maintains they did not suffer from domestic violence as Clark argues--mainly because working-class men were restrained by notions of respectability--she nevertheless argues that they were usually trapped within the home, barely able sometimes to make ends meet. [1] Furthermore, the quality of female health care did not improve all that much during the Victorian period and birth control methods aside from illegal abortions were not widely available. [2] While Lewis does not share Clark's negative assessment of the treatment of working-class women in Victorian society, she also does not share Walkowitz' notion of there being many opportunities for negotiation and compromise. For working-class women, Victorian and Edwardian England were exceedingly patriarchal.

For the most part this was true in the middle classes as well, where the ideal of domesticity was particularly strong. Yet, paradoxically, Lewis maintains that this ideal, far from necessarily limiting middle-class women's freedom, actually enabled many of them to emancipate themselves through volunteer and philanthropic work. [3] While the strict separation of public sphere/private sphere was maintained throughout the entire period of Lewis' book, middle-class women gradually gained "greater mobility, increased legal freedom and probably increased sexual pleasure." [4] Just as Walkowitz argues that working-class prostitutes gained some emancipation from their otherwise societal roles, middle-class women, through their volunteer and philanthropic endeavors gained some emancipation as well.

Yet did this amount to emancipation or was it just an expression of middle-class womens' subservient role in society? Compared to the other two classes--Joan Perkin argues--middle class women were often the most restricted in society. [5] They were among the only ones restricted by the ideal of domesticity and patriarchal authority. Upper-class women possessed a great amount of freedom which enabled emancipation, and while many working-class women were not emancipated from the rigors of their daily lives, there was a sort of emancipation in the fact that many working-class households were matriarchal, rather than patriarchal in form. [6]

Yet, because of the restraints imposed by marriage and property laws, middle-class women were at the forefront of efforts to change these laws. This, Perkin demonstrates, was maintly because upper-class women did not feel they "needed" these rights, and working-class women were too busy with the business of maintaining their households to actively participate. Thus, many of the feminist struggles during the twentieth century were middle class causes, "for the simple reason that [they] needed the reform, and they were articulate, affluent and informed enough to do something about it." [7]

Go To Page: 1 2