Gender Roles In The Victorian Era

The Victorian Era women was vastly different than the female we think of nowadays. Women during that time were expected to fulfill more of a domestic and motherly role, one that stayed at home and took care of the house. They were confined within the private sphere of the world while the men toiled away in the public sphere. The ideal Victorian women was described as:

In the 1800s, the U.S. became more industrialized and factories started to become more common. This was the beginning of the market revolution, where people buy and sell goods instead of making everything by themselves. People could trade the money they earn from working for the things they needed. As the market revolution thrust workers into new systems of production, it redefined gender roles of women in family and society. During the first half of the nineteenth century, the market revolution played a significant role in changes in gender roles.

Life in the early nineteenth century wasn’t so easy different gender roles were just starting to take place; where men did the dirty work and women were taught to do the house work. Some women cleaned; took care of children; and having a meal prepared for the children and husband. The American Industrial Revolution transformed daily life by creating a middle class, shifting from predominately rural home life, to urban head-quarters and reclassifying gender roles in the home life. The middle class had started to form a few years before the start of nineteenth century. By the time the Industrial Revolution had started children and women were seen as a different matter other than just property to the man or a new way to earn money.

“Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door,” said William F. Nolan… and society proved him right. The human race is terrified of what they do not understand. Whether centuries in the past, or right here in the present, women have rarely ever been, and still are not, afforded the opportunity of individuality and freedom. Victorian society in its time period took on an extremely conservative behavior. Sex and womanly freedoms were strongly controversial topics and thus, society encouraged an overall chaste and modest lifestyle.

Women in the Victorian society had two main goals which were to marry a respectable man and to have/raise children. The society had a vision of the “perfect woman” who did what she was told and did not question it. She did what her mother did before her, and her mother did what her mother did before her. They were constricted, as if they lived in a box. They couldn’t go too far forward or backward and they couldn’t tray too far off the sides. There were high standards and a true Victorian woman upheld those standards no matter how she felt about them. Victorian women were not their own; they were property-- property that was owned by their husbands or fathers.

Social standing, and moral values were vital elements in Victorian society, and the fundamental doctrine of establishing this ideology, began at home. The home provided a refuge from the rigour, uncertainty, anxiety, and potential violence of the outside world. (P, 341) A woman’s role was to provide a safe, stable, and well-organised environment for their husbands and families. However, change was on the horizon with an underlying movement of business and domestic changes both home and abroad, with industrialization, and the suffragist movement. Women were beginning to gain autonomy and began to grasp their opportunities, thus significantly curtailing male supremacy and the definable acceptable ‘role’ of the woman.

During the Victorian Era in 1837 the period that was ruled by Queen Victoria I, women endured many social disadvantages by living in a world entirely dominated by men. Around that time most women had to be innocent, virtuous, dutiful and be ignorant of intellectual opinion. It was also a time associated with prudishness and repression. Their sole window on the world would, of course, be her husband. During this important era, the idea of the “Angel in the House” was developed by Coventry Patmore and used to describe the ideal women who men longed. Throughout this period, women were treated inferior to men and were destined to be the husbands “Angel in the House”.

During the reign of Queen Victoria, everything in society from gender roles to even the Great Exhibition centered around family and the domestic realm. Even the design of furniture was focused on domesticity and ornament, rather than practicality. The world was separated into the private sphere and the public, with the woman’s place being firmly in the latter and the man’s place in the eye of the public. A woman was to derive all her satisfaction from being a doting wife and a dutiful mother. Thirdly, it is perhaps Victorian England which firmly rooted into place such ideals which have led to the toxic masculinity present in today’s world.

He believed such attitudes and symptoms of women to be caused by an abnormal shift of the uterus in a woman’s body. Unfortunately, these beliefs carried over into the Victorian era. A woman in Victorian society was to be the caretaker and nurturer of husband, child and household, all the while expected to remain active in women’s society. Many women’s clubs literary groups and associations became popular during this time because of this expectation. Women were thought to have no sexual desires and were told from a very young age that such thoughts were unnatural. Women and men played traditional roles and it was the popular (male) opinion at the time that there should be 2 separate spheres in which men and women operate. According to the Victorian male, a woman was to have no greater aspirations than motherhood and marriage this was the woman’s private sphere. The Public sphere which was the man’s domain included commerce, work outside the home and

There was no equality between man and woman in the Victorian era. “The patriarchic system was the norm and women usually led a more secluded, private life. Men, on the other hand, possessed all kinds of freedom” (“Gender Roles”). Moreover, “the man was naturally the head of the family and the guardian of family members. He was the protector and the lord.

Gender Roles In The 18th Century

women were supposedly restricted to an idealized private or domestic sphere, while men were free to move between this and the public and economic spheres” (p. 1). Victorian ideology of gender rested on the

The woman’s place was in the home, caring for the child and meeting the whims of her husband. “The cornerstone of Victorian Society was the family; the perfect lady’s sole function was marriage and procreation (the two, needless to say, were considered as one). All her education was to bring out her “natural” submission to authority and innate maternal instincts (Vicinus x).”

Despite being under the rule of a female monarch, women faced many inequalities and suffering during the Victorian age. Examples of these inequalities include not having the right to vote, unequal educational and employment opportunities. Women were even denied the legal right to divorce in most cases. As the Norton Anthology states, these debates over women’s rights and their roles came to be known as the “woman question” by the Victorians. This lead to many conflicting struggles, such as the desire by all for women to be educated, yet they are denied the same opportunities afforded to men. While these women faced these difficulties, there was also the notion that women should be domestic and feminine. There was an ideal that women should be submissive and pure because they are naturally different. The industrial revolution introduced women into the labor workforce, but there was still a conflict between the two identities; one of an employed woman, and one of a domestic housewife.

In the Victorian era, women were expected to fulfill specific gender roles. Women possessed feminine qualities such as being nurturing, pure and docile, while men were expected to be bold and independent.