19th Century Limitations For Women

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19th Century Limitations for Women
Before the 19th century, marriages were had out of convenience, rather than love or compatibility. During the 19th century companionate marriages, marriage based on romantic love and middle-class family values, came into popularity. While this idea of a loving marriage may seem nice, it came with the cost of women being limited in their sexuality and role in society because of “middle class family values” such as women being the homemaker and remaining virgins until marriage. These changing ideas female sexuality and gender roles during the 19th century created new constraints for women in prostitution, marriage, and development of personal sexuality.
The idea of actively seeking out sex as a woman was obscene …show more content…

In 19th century england, once women were married, they were expected to stay at home and be the homemakers. The woman was seen as the better half in a marriage because they were innocent childlike. This was even reflected in laws, with the legal age of consent for women in England being changed from twelve to sixteen. Women were limited in their home life because the strict expectations for them dictated by the “middle class family values” of the 19th century. Women were to be married by twenty-one and begin having children immediately. They were given the role of taking care of their husbands spirituality, and were called the "angel of the house" because of their supposed innate spirituality. A woman’s job was to ensure that the man understood and believed in the value of the family and its moral values, and steer him away from any natural instincts or sexual urges. This is a limiting expectation because it assumes that women are devoid of sexuality and sexual urges, when this is simply not true. For moral reasons, masturbation was seen as a bad thing and was highly discouraged in the 19th century. The evidence of female sexuality is in the fact that masturbation existed in the first place. Females had sexual desires, they were just conditioned to repress them. Marriage was also limiting because once married, women’s personal identities and property were taken away. By law the woman was under the control of her …show more content…

They lived in separate spheres, coming together only at meal times. This limited women in their sexual development because they were never exposed to men or any ideas of female sexuality. Most middle class women, when growing up, were not even allowed to speak to men unless there was a married woman present as a chaperone to supervise their interaction. Girls could grow up , get married, and still not know where babies came from until it was time for them to do it themselves. Sexual development and understanding of one's own pleasure in sex was completely absent in the development of 19th century middle class girls. Masturbation, one of the only forms of self sexual discovery a girl had at that time, was considered so horrible that it was classified as a mental disorder. In extreme cases, doctors took to mutilating female genitals to cure this so called “disorder”. Women were also taught from a young age that they were useless, and men believed that women had an innate desire to be a man. A famous quote from Sigmund Freud, a psychologist who specialized in sexuality, states “The personality development of the female centered upon her discovery in early childhood that she lacked a penis; penis envy created in the female child a lifelong dissatisfaction with her identity as a woman”. A girl born into a society where she was expected to envy being a man and not embrace being a woman limits her ability to accept and love

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