Marriage in the Victorian Age

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Many people believe that marriage is important in this day and age, but it holds little significance compared to the importance of marriage in the Victorian era. In the Victorian era women were to get married to a man of the same or a better social status, be good wives, and be a mother to her husband's children. Very few marriages started with love, but a woman's life is not complete without being married. Over time, the role of married women has evolved a great deal and they now have rights and privileges. John Stuart Mill was one of the great thinkers of the Victorian era, and his essay The Subjection of Women tells how few privileges women had and that they were slaves to their husbands. He also says that women are their own people and should be free. This was an uncommon view for a man of this time to have. Mill provided a much-needed reality check for the ethical treatment of women, and also generated ideas for the women's rights movement which was quite uncommon for a man to do in this period. His essay On Liberty promotes how important it is to have the complete freedom to state one's opinion. Had someone else been as brave as Mill before the Victorian era the women's movement may be further advanced today than it is.

The Victorian era was a time of tremendous change in the lives of British people. Victoria became the Queen of England in 1837 at the age of eighteen. During her reign, Britain became the most powerful country in the world, as it had the largest empire that had ever existed. Victoria was ruling more than a quarter of the world's total population (Moore). Despite the fact that a woman was in power in Britain, the women of Britain had very little authority, dignity or rights when it came to marriage or ownin...

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Martin, Judith. Miss Manners' Guide to Excruciatingly Correct Behaviour. Crown Publishers; New York, NY, 1982.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2A. Ed. David Damrosch et al. New York: Longman, 2002. 1075-1086.

Mill, John Stuart. The Subjection of Women. The Longman Anthology of British Literature, Vol. 2A. Ed. David Damrosch et al. New York: Longman, 2002. 1086-1095.

Moore, Melissa and Melanie Ulrich. "Women's Issues Then & Now." www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~ulrich/femhist/marriage.shtml Date accessed: April 3, 2004.

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