Separate Spheres and Victorian Stereotypes

When I ask the average person to imagine a stereotypical Victorian woman, I suspect what comes to mind will be a woman with a strict hourglass form (corset, of course), perhaps a bustle, who lounges around the home or makes social calls and is supported by her husband. Any children are cared for by servants and a nanny or governess. Some people will perhaps mention a character or two from Downton Abbey, or mention something from a steampunk book or TV program. A proper Victorian woman was underemployed, domestic, depended on men, and had no rights because “society” and the male-dominated political system refused to grant her any rights. Any woman who stepped out of line got chased back into line.

The problem with stereotypes is that often they are based on what a few prolific writers (or critics) at the time declared to be good or bad. A very little digging in period sources or later biographies shows that the powerless, happily dependent Victorian woman . . . was a rare avis indeed. But that image is what later feminists grabbed onto, and what still pops up when “Victorian” is used as short-hand for hypocritical, stuffy, repressed, patriarchal, and so on.

So where did it come from?

Women have always worked to some degree. This was in the household, or a family business or farm. Only very, very aristocratic women were secluded, and even that was only if the head of the household chose to restrict her activities. Russia was different, but again, only for the very rich and the upper nobility. Otherwise? Women were out and about, even if they didn’t have official legal rights to conduct business (sign contracts, buy real property, and so on). Men also worked, again in the household and family property. Then along came the industrial revolutions, and labor moved outside the household and off the farm to factories and cities. It was in this setting that “separate spheres” really took hold.

To have the women in a household not have to work was an ideal that developed during the late 1700s, as best it seems. Women were always viewed as more domestic, physically weaker, more home-focused (children, church, household), and occasionally as more moral and less corrupt. For a man to earn enough that his wife and daughters did not have to work outside the household, or at all, was a good thing. Why? Because she could focus her attention and creating a welcoming haven of calm and comfort away from the conflicts of the world. She would be a beacon of goodness, a reminder of why he too should be moral and upright. He would defend, support, and shelter her from the corruption and ills of the world.

OK, so this is starting to sound just as bad as modern people take the separate spheres idea to be. Well, no one has ever accused Victorian moralists and preachers of being subtle and restrained. “Separate spheres” was just that, and ideal, something middle and working class families aspired to. The reality was rather different. Even with servants, women had to manage the property, oversee education (which often took them outside the home) and so on. The idea of women being secluded, pampered, put on pedestals and venerated (and cheated on), helpless, delicate flowers raised in the sheltered home by an overprotective patriarch . . . never really happened. A few times, yes, but this was an ideal, not the reality. Sort of like the fragile Southern belle who . . . slaughtered hogs, nursed the sick, cooked, and a lot of other tasks we call “hard work.”

A prosperous man could afford for his wife not to work outside the home. As more men worked outside the household in offices and factories, the idea of “separate spheres” took form. The world-of-work was male, the world-of-home was female. Note that this is urban. No farmer would look at this without laughing.

Some religious leaders, and eventually others, took to this idea. In a time of incredible cultural and economic change, going “back to the Bible” and “The way it should be” and “proper roles” is a common response. The industrial revolutions were that sort of change, and urging women to remain home as a touchstone with the calmer (?), greener past fed into the new economy as well as the “good old days.” The home was a respite from “the dark Satanic mills”, as William Blake called them.

Later reformers, suffragettes, proponents of “the New woman” and others took the ideal as “what actually happened.” Add in the later disdain for Victorians as stuffy hypocrits who oppressed everyone, including themselves, and locked women away from the world, keeping women from voting, owning property, and so on. And so the stereotype grew.

For an academic take: https://etwasetous.wordpress.com/2013/03/17/women-in-victorian-britain-separate-spheres/

The Doctrine of Separate Spheres: Why a Woman’s Place Was In the Home

Note that this second article draws in non-western examples, which shifts things a little.

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