Victorian Era Women

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The Victorian Britain Era has played a prominent role in its efforts to eliminate double standards, promote equality and progress for women. Women took initiatives to come out of the “cult of domesticity” that had been put in society since the very beginning. Many women felt suppressed in the Victorian society. Men were superior, whereas women were undermined and bounded to restrictions. Women wanted to establish the same rights as men and not be seen as their husband’s “property.” During the Victorian period there were many reforms like the industrialization revolution that helped pave the way for women to go out in the workforce. There are so many factors that contributed women to recognize and enlighten their equivalence to men. Many of …show more content…

Many women were put in difficult situations when it came to divorce and separation. There were so many hurdles that came between divorce and separation. Women that were in unhappy marriages had no way out of them, divorce created more tension. In Victorian Britain men had dominance over their wives. In “Covered but Not Bound: Caroline Norton and the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act, Mary Poovey references back to Caroline Norton’s pamphlet English Laws for Women , “ She wrote: "I felt, as I looked for an instant towards him, that he saw in me neither a woman to be spared public insult, nor a mother to be spared shameful sorrow-but simply a claimant to be non-suited; a creditor to be evaded; a pecuniary incumbrance he was determined to be rid of." Norton's first response to this unsexing is to vacillate wildly between a man's "angry loudness" and a woman's frustrated speechlessness” (Poovey471). Poovey illustrates this excerpt from Norton’s writing to bring awareness to the conditions of married women by providing someone who has witnessed this first hand. These women had no voice and they were targeted through appalling actions by their husbands. Nothing mattered to men more than their superiority and personal gain from their

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