Today, talking about issues of Gender might bring up the #HeForShe campaign or the viral video “Riley on Marketing” but this discussion isn’t new to our time; Victorians were having it too.

Scholars like Marie-Luise Kohlke, Sally Shuttleworth, and others explore Childhood in conjunction with shifting familial tensions and societal influences on the construction of gender in Victorian Childhood.

In the subsection of Gender and Victorian Childhood, we’ll look at the different ways stories for children reinforce normative gender roles as we’ve come to understand them. From Kenneth Grahame’s “The Golden Age” to Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island to Welch’s “A Story for Children”, we can see the different constructions and negotiations of gender in this period. In this genre of Children’s literature that was just beginning to evolve, we can see how boys were meant to take charge, rule, and work as compared to girls who were supposed to care and be happy in the home.

These texts, I argue, lay out a foundation about how Victorians were reinforcing gender roles in childhood to help address societal anxieties of relationalities.

I would note here that it would be interesting to return to both of Oscar Wilde’s works here and here, included in an earlier section on Morality, to discover the ways in which gender is being addressed in both pieces. In light of Oscar Wilde being viewed as a gay man, his positionality complicated and enriches his work under a gendered lens.