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The roles and responsibilities of women
Woman life in the Victorian period
A essay about the victorian era in england
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The Victorian era in Britain was one of great dependency upon the women employed in domestic service. Domestic service was a very popular line of work for women in this period, in fact “about 40 percent of all women in Victorian Britain were employed…and a majority were domestic servants,” which showcases both the popularity and dependency upon domestic servant jobs. Many of the servants during this period were considered maids of all work, and it was this type of servant who ensured the efficient running and maintenance of many middle class households. This was because “the average middle class household did not usually have a valet, footman, or butler, but a cook, housemaid, and a maid of all work were essential.” Thus, revealing the reliance on a maid of all work to ensure that all duties of the household were completed.
As will be discussed, becoming a domestic servant in the nineteenth century witnessed a dramatic change in viewpoint from the previous century, as the role was no longer considered a calling from God . During this period, writers who produced household manuals to be used as a guidebook within a household, such as Isabella Beeton, also became a popular resource for servants lucky enough to have been employed to serve in a servants position within a household. These household manuals have helped to reveal that the job of being a maid of all work was a labour intensive job which was only made more complex by ensuring that her duties were completed in a way that was least disruptive to her employers, meaning she must be unobserved in her work.
According to Heycks’ text The People of the British Isles 1699-1870, “the demand for servants generated by the middle class, was a rapidly growing industry, the second lar...
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...yearly Sum, and from one Day to one Year. The Whole containing great Variety of curious, useful, instructive, and important Articles, for the Use and Benefit of Servants in general, never before published. London, [1764]. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. UNIV OF PRINCE EWDARD ISLAND. 19 Feb, 2014. 87.
Secondary sources:
Burton, Elizabeth. The Early Victorians at Home 1837 - 1861. London: Longman Group Limited, 1972.
Flanders, Judith. Inside the Victorian Home A Portrait of Domestic Life in Victorian England . New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2004.
Heyck, Thomas William. The Peoples of the British Isles From 1688 to 1870 Third Edition. Chicago: Lyceum Books, Inc., 2008.
Higgs, Edward. "Domestic servants and households in Victorian England." Social History. no. 2 (1983): 201-210. http://www.jstor.org/stable/4285250 (accessed March 22, 2014).
Women in this era had just begun to secure some freedom from their typical cultural expectations. They were expected to take care of the children, cook, clean, sew and be presentable to society. As jobs were made available to women, only a low percentage of these women started to work outside of the home. This means that many women had chosen to stay inside the home to remain in the role of “house keeper”. Even though the woman attained some freedom they were still considered inferior to men. Men still had the most authority in the household and
Peterson, M. Jeanne. “Gentlewomen at Work.” Family, Love, and Work in the Lives of Victorian Gentlewomen. Indianapolis : Indiana University Press, 1989. 132-161.
As a Victorian woman of the 20th century, the housewife had to manage her family’s
In the article, Cult of True Womanhood, the underlying theme is of what society thought was the ideal woman. Women of that time where thought of as homemakers “deeply shaped by the so called “cult of womanhood” a collection of attitudes that associated “true” womanhood with home and family.” Women were supposed to stay home and clean and take care of the children while men worked and provided for their families. The misconception that housework was not hard and that even these women didn’t work as hard as paid labors was a strong opinion of the time. “With economic value calculated more and more exclusively in terms of cash and men increasingly basing their claims to “manhood” on their role as “breadwinners,” women’s unpaid household labor went largely unacknowledged.” Many married women ran their households and took on extra work to support their families and many in underpaid positions. Many of these were even in the service of other’s houses working in “true womanhood”
It was rare for man and woman to be equal in the days of Eliza Washburn. Being ten years of age she would perform all the activities an average housewife would perform. At 6 o’clock every morning Eliza and her mother would wake up and cook a meal for her father Charles and three brothers James who was six, William nine, and John fifteen. Her father would wake up expecting the meal to be hot and ready the minute he woke up. Her brothers would wake up soon after to devour the rest of the meal they prepared. Her mother Mary would stay home all day cleaning clothes in a bin and preparing food. Everyday they would go pick the ripe vegetables out of their garden cut them into thin slices and set them out to dry, this took up most of the women’s day.
This time period marked the ending of the Victorian Age, when women were usually considered the caretakers of the family and stayed at home to do tasks like raising their children, entertaining guests, and decorating the house, but the home gradually became the concern of both women and men. For example, male doctors and educators published manuals that gave advice on childbirth and parenting, subjects that before were exclusively studied by women. Also, both single and married women were also beginning to work at jobs that tended to reflect the domestic roles that women traditionally adopted; in The House of Mirth, Lily Bart is given a job in a hat-making shop with the help of her friends. The number of American women working almost doubled from about fifteen percent to almost thirty percent of the workforce between 1880 and 1910 (Moss and
Robson, Catherine, and Carol T. Christ. "The Victorian Age." The Norton Anthology English Literature. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. 9th ed. Vol. E. New York: Norton &, 2012. 1130-137. Print.
Mary Poovey, “Domesticity and Class Formation: Chadwick’s 1842 Sanitary Report,” in Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation, 1839-1864 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 115-131
“Men inhabit the public sphere, and women, the private” (231) . With that in mind the men and women of the Victorian Era lived in two different worlds. “…Males were active and independent, whereas females were passive and were dependent on males…”(231) Women were to be skilled in the home and men were to be out at work. Men in the public’s eye were to be strong, independent, dominant, and in control (232) . As the reader will observe Mr. James Windibank fits that description perfectly. Women at home were to be quiet, subordinate, and over all viewed as weak by men (233).
The industrialization of the nineteenth century was a tremendous social change in which Britain initially took the lead on. This meant for the middle class a new opening for change which has been continuing on for generations. Sex and gender roles have become one of the main focuses for many people in this Victorian period. Sarah Stickney Ellis was a writer who argued that it was the religious duty of women to improve society. Ellis felt domestic duties were not the only duties women should be focusing on and thus wrote a book entitled “The Women of England.” The primary document of Sarah Stickney Ellis’s “The Women of England” examines how a change in attitude is greatly needed for the way women were perceived during the nineteenth century. Today women have the freedom to have an education, and make their own career choice. She discusses a range of topics to help her female readers to cultivate their “highest attributes” as pillars of family life#. While looking at Sarah Stickney Ellis as a writer and by also looking at women of the nineteenth century, we will be able to understand the duties of women throughout this century. Throughout this paper I will discuss the duties which Ellis refers to and why she wanted a great change.
Wikipedia contributors, "Women in the Victorian era," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Women_in_the_Victorian_era&oldid=52384111 (accessed May 10, 2006).
“Current views concerning Victorian femininity continued to be dominated by the 19th century concept of domestic purity and the association figure of the ideal woman, the ‘angle in the house’, carrying out her mission as wife, mother and daughter” (Swisher). During this era men had ...
Ellis, Sarah Stickney. “The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits.” The Longman
It was just about 40 years before Elizabeth Gaskell published Mary Barton that Great Britain was primarily a rural, agricultural society. Many people grew their own food, and clothes and household materials were usually made within the home. Any specialized occupation almost always centered on the home and family, with children and parents both contributing to the family business. Three inventions, however, swiftly changed this system. The invention of the spinning mule and spinning jenny allowed mass production of woven cloth, which was ...
Conclusively, the definition of what constitutes as ‘housework’, as well as who is responsible for completing it, has changed throughout modern history and differs from culture to culture. Domestic work is arguably a terribly complex concept and by no means a natural gendered process. The work of feminists as well as changes in social policy have indisputably made for a more equal in terms of reproduction work and whose responsibility it is, yet it is still considered by some that it is the woman of the house who is ultimately responsible for ensuring that the household is kept in an acceptable condition.