The Idealized View of the Victorian Woman
Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem, The Angel in the House is perhaps the best known of the Victorian images of ideal womanhood. Written to his wife, he lauds the virtues of a dependent wife who maintains a domestic haven with little interest or activity in the larger world outside her home, husband and children. Dependence was even seen as an indicator of social progress. Herbert Spencer, a social theorist, proposed that a society in which women did not have to work outside the home was of the highest order. John Ruskin’s essay Of Queens’ Gardens’ advocated for the education of women for self-renunciation, not personal development. Qualities such as self-sacrifice, passivity, patience and spirituality personified the ideal Victorian women. Not all thinkers and commentators of the time agreed. John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women (1869) argued that the confined position of women in the domestic sphere was akin to slavery. The notion of home and family as the only and true domain of women prevailed however, despite the reality, as Carol Dyhouse points out, “that large numbers of women in nineteenth-century England had no choice other than to seek work outside the home, in order to support themselves or their families…” (176).
The conventional view of the Victorian woman was reinforced at many levels. Queen Victoria, the ruler of the British Empire, arguably one of the most powerful political persons of the age, was first and foremost a model of marriage, motherhood, and domesticity. A popular song of the day, “Home, Sweet Home” that captured the domestic Victorian ideal, was so loved by Queen Victoria that she knighted Henry Rowley Bishop, the song’s composer, making him the first English composer to receive a knighthood. In 1861, Mrs. Beeton’s Book of Household Management was published offering, for the first time, a guide to running the perfectly managed home, with instructions on everything from fashion to childcare to managing servants. The book was a best seller for fifty years.
Education of the day for girls also reinforced their expected roles as wives and mothers in that it offered no opportunities to acquire skills that could be translated in employment outside the home to support themselves. Available education to middle and upper class girls was always provided in the home and included the basics of reading, writing and arithmetic but also the arts of drawing, singing and playing piano, skills highly valued in the well-educated young woman of the day. Reforms in education entered the public debate during the middle of the 19th Century and included advocates for more rigorous education for girls comparable to boys including access to formal schooling outside their homes. As for higher education, medical professionals warned against it because of the serious physical harm that girls would suffer if too educated.