Sexism In Victorian Era Essay

"Nature intended women be our slaves. They are our property" - Napoleon Bonaparte, 1769 -1821 . Napoleon, Emperor of the French, lived to say this before the Victorian era had even begun, showing that sexism was already part of social life. In Victorian Britain, sexism had turned into culture; women would be expected to be mothers, work in the home and be quiet and "feminine" . This concept of an ideal women was strict, and women who didn't act "like a woman" would be punished and put in an asylum for the mad. And in the asylum also, women were treated unfairly compared to the men of the mad asylum. Doctors understood the health and illness of their female patients through established Victorian social customs. Thus, the treatment of unmarried mothers, lesbians and difficult wives reveals the ways in which mad doctors based their medical treatments on restoring the

The thought of unmarried women was a dreadful concept, and when Charles Dickens introduced Oliver Twist's mother as being unmarried in the book Oliver Twist, readers were astounded. Being an unmarried women was a shameful idea and women in the Victorian era avoided this. This concept of being an unmarried mother was very unethical because it wasn't shameful for a father to be unmarried. Furthermore, being a unmarried mother meant that you would need a job to pay for your child, and a female's pay in the Victorian era was nearly half as much as a male would get . In asylums, if you were an unmarried mother, you would be classified as having hysteria. The treatment an unmarried mother would get is to find a husband. This is intensely biased as a male wouldn't need to go to an asylum for being unmarried. In modern times, being an unmarried mother would be considered normal, thus the fact that unmarried mothers would have to get treatment is directly connected to Victorian social belief and not to mental