Suffer and Be Still (Routledge Revivals)

Women in the Victorian Age

Martha Vicinus

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135045265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

First published in 1972, this book contains a collection of ten essays that document the feminine stereotypes that women fought against, and only partially erased, a hundred years ago. In an introductory essay, Martha Vicinus describes the perfect Victorian lady, showing that the ideal was a combination of sexual innocence, conspicuous consumption and worship of the family hearth. Indeed, this model in some form was the ideal of all classes as the perfect lady's only functions were marriage and procreation. The text offers a valuable insight into Victorian culture and society.

1: The Victorian Governess

Status Incongruence in Family and Society

M. Jeanne Peterson

THE GOVERNESS IS A FAMILIAR FIGURE TO THE READER OF VICTORIAN NOVELS. Immortalized in Jane Eyre and Vanity Fair, she has made frequent appearances as the heroine of many lesser-known novels. And innumerable governesses appear as little more than a standard furnishing in many a fictional Victorian home. While twentieth-century acquaintance with the governess may come purely from the novel, the Victorians themselves found her situation and prospects widely discussed, frivolously in Punch, and more seriously in many leading journals of the time, so often in fact that one author on the subject of female labor in Great Britain suggested that readers were “wearied … with the incessant repetition of the dreary story of spirit-broken governesses.”¹ The governess’s life is described in what seem today to be over-dramatized accounts of pauperized gentle-women, “drifted waifs and strays from ‘the upper and middle classes,’” who find their way to the workhouse and insane asylum.² And there are condemnations of these accounts as “comic pathos” and “a perfectly preposterous quantity of nonsense.”³ Books on the subject of women as workers, published in growing numbers throughout the Victorian period, devote a large amount of space to the governess.

The Victorians’ interest in the governess went beyond that of entertainment or economic analysis. She was the subject of charitable endeavors, and at least one appeal reveals the sense that the dilemma of the governess was a problem that was expected to touch donors personally: “There is probably no one who has not some relative or cherished friend either actually engaged in teaching, or having formerly been so engaged.”⁴ Lady Eastlake spoke of “the cause of governesses” and urged in 1848 their “earnest and judicious befriending.”⁵ In London the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution and Queen’s College were founded to provide several sorts of assistance.

In terms of numbers alone, this attention to the governess seems somewhat excessive. There were about 25,000 governesses in England in 1851, but there were over 750,000 female domestic servants, not to mention women employed in industry.⁶ And when one moves from simple statistics to the conditions of employment of women in this period, the suffering of the governess seems pale and singularly undramatic when compared with that of women in factories and mines. Victorian interest in the governess could not have stemmed from her political importance, for she had none. As militant as women may have been by the turn of the century, there is no trace of militance in the ranks of mid-nineteenth-century governesses. Moreover, the governess had no social position worthy of attention. She was at best unenvied and at worst the object of mild scorn, and all she sought was survival in genteel obscurity.

Modern treatment of the Victorian governess, when it is not set in the framework of literary analysis, takes two forms: either it is a study of the occupation itself without reference to the larger social scene, or the role of the governess is considered within the context of the movement for women’s education and women’s rights.⁷ In our interest in later historical developments, we tend to ignore the immediate social context of the governess’s occupation and the ways in which the dilemmas and contradictions of her employment may have helped to drive women’s education and women’s employment out of the home. By examining the governess’s situation within the Victorian family, we may approach a better understanding of how the family functioned and of the values, problems, and fears of the Victorian middle class.

In mid-nineteenth century usage, the term “governess” could refer to a woman who taught in a school, a woman who lived at home and travelled to her employer’s house to teach (called a “daily governess”), or a woman who lived in her employer’s home and who taught the children and served as a companion to them.⁸ The subject of this study is the governess who lived with the family, sometimes referred to as the “private governess.” In considering her intimate position within the family, we may see most clearly the problems of the governess’s place in Victorian society.

The employment of a gentlewoman as a governess in a middle-class family served to reinforce and perpetuate certain Victorian values. But inherent in the employment of a lady was a contradiction of the very values she was hired to fulfill. The result was a situation of conflict and incongruity for both the governess and the family, a conflict which called forth a variety of responses from governess, family, and society.

From at least Tudor times the governess had been part of the households of the upper classes. In the nineteenth century, increasing numbers of governesses were employed by the English middle classes. The governess was a testimony to the economic power of the Victorian middle-class father, as were servants, carriages, and the other “paraphernalia of gentility.” Although the governess was often behind the scenes and not as conspicuous as other items of genteel equipage, there were ways in which the family could indicate her presence in the home and display her as a symbol of economic power, breeding, and station. Drawing room conversations about the governess served to bring her into public “view.” If she was foreign, her exotic history might be discussed. Even complaining about a governess was a way of “showing her off.”⁹

The governess was also an indicator of the extent to which a man’s wife was truly a lady of leisure. The function of the mother had traditionally been, in addition to housewifely duties, that of educator of the children. Both boys and girls in the middle-class family began their education with their mother. Boys were later sent to school or a tutor was hired for them, but girls continued to learn their roles as women from their mothers. Unlike cooking, cleaning, and scrubbing, the education of children was hardly classifiable as manual labor. For this reason the employment of a governess was even more a symbol of the movement of wives and mothers from domestic to ornamental functions.

Victorian parents sought a woman who could teach their daughters the genteel accomplishments which were the aims of female education. More important, they sought a gentlewoman. But the new ethos of the ideal woman was that of a woman of leisure and, no matter how occupied a lady might have been at home, an outside career was another matter – in Frances Power Cobbe’s words “a deplorable dereliction.”¹⁰ If work in the home was thought to “pervert women’s sympathies, detract from their charms,”¹¹ work for pay brought down the judgment of society and testified to the inferior position of both the wage-earner and her family. Sophia Jex-Blake’s father told her that if she accepted a salary she “would be considered mean and illiberal, … accepting wages that belonged to a class beneath you in social rank.”¹² Others put it more strongly: “Society has thought fit to assert that the woman who works for herself loses her social position.” The women of the middle classes were very consistent in their attitude toward being paid: “they would shrink from it as an insult.”¹³ The image of the lady as a creature of leisure, enclosed within a private circle of family and friends and completely supported by father or husband, was reinforced by the ban on paid employment – a ban so strong that many who wrote for publication, even though writing at home, did so under pseudonyms, or signed their work simply “By a Lady.”

The availability of “ladies” to teach the children of the middle classes depended on the one exception to the rule that a well-bred woman did not earn her own living – if a woman of birth and education found herself in financial distress, and had no relatives who could support her or give her a home, she was justified in seeking the only employment that would not cause her to lose her status. She could find work as a governess.¹⁴

The position of governess seems to have been appropriate because, while it was paid employment, it was within the home. The governess was doing something she might have done as a wife under better circumstances. She avoided the immodest and unladylike position of public occupation.¹⁵ The literature of the 1840’s suggests that there was a sudden increase in the number of gentlewomen without financial support in the years following the Napoleonic wars. Middle-class writers attributed the flood of distressed gentlewomen to “the accidents of commercial and professional life” to which the middle classes were subject.¹⁶ From the research of twentieth-century historians it is clear that the number of single middle-class women in need of employment was a product not only of the unstable conditions of business in those years but also arose out of the emigration of single men from England to the colonies, from the differential mortality rate which favored women, and from the tendency for men in the middle classes to marry later.¹⁷ But the Victorians’ belief that economic distress had led to the declining position of these women suggests that problems of social and economic uncertainty were of more immediate concern to them. The Victorian stereotype of the governess, which explained why a lady sought employment, was of a woman who was born and bred in comfort and gentility and who, through the death of her father or his subjection to financial ruin, was robbed of the support of her family and was driven to earn her own living.¹⁸

A word should perhaps be included here about the possibility of upward social mobility through occupation as a governess. There are a few suggestions in the literature of the period that such attempts at social climbing were in fact taking place. Harriet Martineau, in an Edinburgh Review article in 1859, noted the practice of “tradesmen and farmers who educate their daughters for governesses” in the hope of raising their station in society.¹⁹ There is no way of assessing the extent to which this took place, but it is clear that the Victorian middle class regarded such mobility as undesirable.²⁰ In the fiction of the period the governesses who were figures of evil or immorality were women of humble origins. Thackeray’s Becky Sharp, for example, was the daughter of a poor artist and a French “opera-girl” who, in order to find employment, claimed origins in the French nobility. The wicked Miss Gwilt, in Wilkie Collins’ Armadale, was an abandoned child whose origins were unknown and who was reared by a “quack” doctor and his wife. As will become clear later in this essay, the possibility of real upward mobility was a chimera. Indeed, employment as a governess was only of very limited use even in maintaining gentle status. It is sufficient here to note that however educated a girl from the “lower ranks” might be, she was still “ill-bred” in the eyes of those who made themselves judges of governesses. Conversely, however destitute a lady might be, she continued to be a lady.²¹

We have been looking at the governess from the point of view of the family that employed her. Her own viewpoint was very different, of course. Once it was clear that she had to seek a post as governess, the task of finding a situation was taken up through a variety of channels. The first source of aid was the help of relatives and friends who might know of a family seeking a governess. If such help was not available or effective, a woman was forced to turn to public agencies – newspaper advertisements or a placement service. Newspaper advertising was disliked, partly because of its public nature and partly because reputable employers were unlikely to utilize such a source. Experience with the falsification of letters of reference among servants obtained through newspapers had brought public advertising under suspicion.²² The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution, established in 1843, provided a registry for governesses seeking employment, and many seem to have used the service.²³

Pay was notoriously low. Governesses were, of course, housed and fed, but they were expected to pay for such expenses as laundry, travel, and medical care. They had to dress appropriately, and it was wise for them to make their own provisions for unemployment and old age. A governess often tried to support a parent or a dependent sister or brother as well. According to some estimates, pay ranged from £15 to £100 a year. The larger sum would only be applicable to the “highly educated lady” who could find a position in a very well-to-do family. The average salary probably fell between £20 and £45 a year. To give some meaning to these figures it will be useful to compare them with typical salaries of other groups. The fairest comparison is probably with that of other domestic employees since they were also paid partly by maintenance:

	Banks, 1848–52	Martineau, 1859
Housekeeper	no data	£40–£50
Cook	£15–£16	£12–£18
Housemaid	£11–£11/13	£10–£14
Nursemaid	£11–£12	£5–30

Mrs. Sewell, writing in 1865, equated the salary of nursery governess with that of lady’s maid, that of an informed but not accomplished governess with that of footman, and that of a highly educated governess with that of a coachman or butler.²⁴ If board was worth £30 per year, then governesses were earning £50 to £95 a year (not including the cost of housing). A minimum income for a genteel style of life may be estimated at £150-£200 for a single person.²⁵ It would seem that, under the best of circumstances, a governess’s income left her on the very edge of gentility, with no margin for illness or unemployment. Many governesses, between jobs, ill, or too old to work, turned to the “temporary assistance … afforded privately and delicately” through the Governesses’ Benevolent Institution.²⁶

The duties of a governess in a household were as varied as the salary she was paid. In some families, lik...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Perfect Victorian Lady
• 1: The Victorian Governess: Status Incongruence in Family and Society
• 2: From Dame to Woman: W. S. Gilbert and Theatrical Transvestism
• 3: Victorian Women and Menstruation
• 4: Marriage, Redundancy or Sin: The Painter’s View of Women in the First Twenty-Five Years of Victoria’s Reign
• 5: A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease
• 6: Working-Class Women in Britain, 1890–1914
• 7: The Debate over Women: Ruskin vs. Mill
• 8: Stereotypes of Femininity in a Theory of Sexual Evolution
• 9: Innocent Femina Sensualis in Unconscious Conflict
• 10: The Women of England in a Century of Social Change, 1815–1914: A Select Bibliography
• Notes
• Index