Silent Sisterhood

Middle-class Women in the Victorian Home

Patricia Branca

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136243066
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

This perceptive book studies the Victorian woman in the home and in the family. One of the central purposes is to rescue Victorian woman from the realm of myth where her life was spent in frivolous trifles and instead to show how she had a major part to play in the practical management of the home.

The author makes judicious use of domestic manuals and other material written specifically for middle-class women. With statistical data to quantify the image as well, this book presents a better understanding of what it was like to be a middle-class woman in nineteenth-century England. Looking at the middle-class woman's problems as mistress of the house, her problems with domestics, her problems as mother and her problems as woman we can begin not merely to characterise the middle-class woman but to define her as an element of British social history and as a silent but significant agent of change.

The book was first published in 1975.

Part I The Outer Woman

DOI: 10.4324/9780203103135-1

1 The Victorian Woman – Off the Pedestal and into History

DOI: 10.4324/9780203103135-2

The middle-class woman in the Victorian period was a new phenomenon, in a sense the first modernized woman. Her social situation was certainly new, in that she was part of the rising middle class of the nineteenth century – the urban, professional and business class. Her working-class counterpart, also new to industrial urban life, played a vital role as well, but she strove as much as possible to preserve the traditional family structure during most of the century.¹ Traditionalism played an important part in the middle-class woman’s life also, but on the whole her functions were new, for she had to mediate many of the changes that developed as the family moved into the urban middle class. In economic terms, she was responsible for much of the early transformation of the family from a unit of production to a unit of consumption. Yet, despite her novelty, the Victorian woman has not been directly studied – often characterized, but never closely examined.

Modernization is an admittedly vague term, and its application to women’s history is new. We will develop a fuller outline of the applicability of the concept after we have established the areas of life in which modernizing change can be seen to occur. For in seemingly prosaic activities such as the running of the household or care of personal health women were coming to believe in change, in the relevance of new technology, and in the desirability and possibility of improved well-being. Albeit within a family context, they were coming to think of themselves as individuals. All of which fits the general modernization model, and justifies the nineteenth century as the era in which to seek the bases of the emergence of the modern woman. This is not of course to imply that previous centuries were stagnant. We know that in many respects British economic practices and politics had departed from purely traditional models long before industrialization began. We have been recently reminded that some popular values, relating even more closely to women, might change as well. But there is little evidence that the world from which middle-class women emerged had been greatly altered by forces of modernization prior to the nineteenth century. At the top of society, eighteenth-century salons had little effect in spreading new ideas to this middle sector; while changes influencing lower-class behavior definitely stopped once one reached the property-owning classes from which the new middle class would come.² However the traditionalist tone of most literature available to new middle-class women well into the nineteenth century, the evidence of continued traditional behavior (as in birth rates and marriage ages) suggests that pre-industrial modernization in other sectors had not deeply touched the women in what was to become the new middle class. Hence our use of the terms ‘modern’ and ‘traditional,’ to describe a transitional period that might seem belated if applied to other groups (principally male) and forms of activity in Britain. Hence also the high probability that modernization as a process involved women with greater suddenness than was the case with men, causing confusion, sometimes even despair, in a group whose material circumstances might seem to assure relative flexibility in response to change. Long sheltered by the domestic circle from strangeness and change,³ women now faced change with a vengeance, possibly carried further from tradition in the modernization process than was the case with men.⁴ It is precisely toward the middle of the nineteenth century, after symptoms of modernity were well-established, such as urbanization and commercialization, that we can begin to capture the distinctive female response.

The discussion thus centres on the period between 1830 and 1880, when the new middle class rapidly expanded its ranks. From 1803 to 1867, when precise data are available, its rate of increase was 223 per cent compared to the 206 per cent growth for the general population.⁵ The mid-century decades saw not only the development of the Victorian woman, as the product of a particular age, but also the beginnings of more enduring changes in the woman’s situation. We are dealing, in other words, both with a distinctive historical type and with the transition to the first modern woman.

To be sure, the term Victorian can be chronologically misleading. It has been shown quite convincingly that ‘Victorianism’ began well before 1837, the year the Queen, who gave her name to the age, assumed the throne.⁶ The association of this period with the stodgy, old, black-draped queen is regrettable, especially for the women of the period. The Victorian Age was a dynamic age, and this study deals principally with the theme of change. Among the important developments which profoundly altered the life of the middle-class woman were industrialization, urbanization, and the impact of science. For the majority of women in this study there were traumatic changes associated with moving from the rural and lower classes into the urban and middle class. Too many of our images of Victorian women assume a settled state, a complacency, whereas in reality the dominant problem was assimilation to a very new life-style.

Married women were chosen as the subject of this study because marriage provided the most typical role for the middle-class woman in the nineteenth century. There has been some tendency to focus on the plight of the single girl, as if her situation became increasingly important for women’s history. If anything, this only reflects urbanization, which partially disrupted traditional functions for the single woman; it does not represent a real statistical change. Marriage still constituted the normal pattern of life for most women – indeed for a higher percentage than in earlier centuries. Admittedly the clearest figures apply to the general population and not the middle class specifically, but the following table on the marital status of women from 1851–1901 demonstrates the overall pattern.

Table I Proportions of Unmarried, Married, and Widowed in 1,000 Females In Various Age Groups

Age and Condition		Years
As to Marriage		1851	1861	1871	1881	1891	1901
15 to 20	Unmarried	974	970	968	975	981	985
	Married	25	30	32	25	19	15
	Widowed	0	0	0	0	0	0
20 to 25	Unmarried	687	664	652	665	701	726
	Married	308	331	343	331	296	272
	Widowed	28	28	30	26	21	17
25 to 35	Unmarried	329	305	294	293	326	340
	Married	643	667	676	681	653	643
	Widowed	28	28	30	26	21	17
35 to 45	Unmarried	163	159	156	153	164	185
	Married	757	762	762	765	761	751
	Widowed	80	79	82	82	75	64
45 to 55	Unmarried	122	119	120	119	124	136
	Married	716	720	717	711	706	705
	Widowed	162	161	163	170	170	159
55 to 65	Unmarried	115	109	109	109	110	117
	Married	589	589	589	581	573	569
	Widowed	296	302	302	310	317	314
Source: Census of England and Wales, 1911, General Report, Table XXI, p. 90.

Marriage frequency did not change fundamentally in the second half of the nineteenth century, as the previous table confirms. Professor D.V. Glass has made the same observation, reporting that in 1850–52 out of girls who were unmarried at the age of 15, 859 could expect to have married at least once by the time they reached their 50th birthday In 1860–62, the probability was 848 in 1,000. In 1870–72, it was 866. The census data for the years 1881–1901 did not allow for a comparably accurate computation but in 1910–12 the rate was still relatively similar at 818.⁷ Thus the plight of single girls, though it may have become more visible with urbanization, did not rest on a dramatic demographic increase relative to the whole population. And certainly the history of women becomes distorted if it focuses primarily on this group.

However, it has been claimed that the situation of single women in the middle class was both particularly anguished and extremely common. The statistical basis for this latter claim is very shaky; one author holds that twenty-five out of every hundred women lacked husbands during the second half of the century,⁸ which is doubtful in view of the general demographic evidence cited above. But because of the lack of class-specific statistical data, a problem we will encounter throughout much of this study, it is impossible to refute this claim precisely. Nevertheless, there is little reason to believe that the middle-class woman’s marriage opportunities differed so drastically from those of the general female population, save that they may have been better than average. It has been noted that the opportunities for...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Tables
• Part I The Outer Woman
• Part II The Inner Woman
• Part III Conclusions
• Selected Bibliography
• Index