Gender Ideology & Separate Spheres - Victoria and Albert Museum

Changing patterns of patriarchal authority fell within a wider scenario of expanding rights and diminishing subservience for many people, including employees and young people. In some ways resistance to change in gender relations thus represented a symbolically concentrated reaction against general democratisation. Early Victorian gender prescriptions featured men as industrious breadwinners and women as their loyal helpmeets. Reinforced by social philosophers like Auguste Comte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Ruskin, this developed into a mid-century doctrine of 'separate spheres', whereby men were figured as competitors in the amoral, economic realm while women were positioned as either decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls. From the 1860s, to this social construct the Darwinian theory of 'survival of the fittest' added a pseudo-scientific dimension which placed men higher on the evolutionary ladder.

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'The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is for speculation, and invention; his energy for adventure, for war, and for conquest... But the woman's power is for rule, not for battle - and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision... She must be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wise -wise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation: wise, not that she may set herself above her husband, but that she many never fail from his side.' (John Ruskin, Sesame and Lilies, 1865, part II)

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From infancy onwards, gender inequity permeated all aspects of British life. 'Think what it is to be a boy, to grow up to manhood in the belief that without any merit or exertion of his own ... by the mere fact of being born a male he is by right the superior of all and every one of an entire half of the human race,' wrote John Stuart Mill in his 1867 polemic against 'The Subjection of Women'

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Whereas in 1800 the majority of Britons had a predominantly practical education, acquired at home and at work, by 1901 formal learning at primary level was universal, with higher instruction available to the better-off. It is worth noting that girls were beginning to move on to university study by the 1860s.

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the classicist Jane Harrison (1850-1928), who trenchantly observed how scholarship was dominated by 'that most dire and deadly of all tyrannies, an oligarchy of old men'

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Nationally (which in this period included the whole of Ireland as well as Scotland, England and Wales), male employment shifted from agriculture to heavy industry, manufacturing and transport, with an accompanying increase in clerical and professional occupations. Men also left domestic service, which remained the largest category of female employment throughout the period (employing 10 percent of the female population in 1851, for example, and over 11 percent in 1891). Women also worked in textile mills, potteries, agriculture and garment-making, as well as in seasonal or unrecorded employment, especially laundering.

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Compared to the 20th century, there was indeed some contraction in the work open to women, as protective legislation barred their employment underground or overnight.

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Generally, male workers strove to secure wages that enabled wives to be full-time mothers - an aspiration in tune with bourgeois notions of orderly domestic bliss. The organised labour movement was overwhelmingly male, with a few trade union activists such as bookbinder Emma Paterson (1848-86)

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It is calculated that while most men worked, only one-third of all women were in employment at any time in the 19th century (as against two-thirds in 1978, for comparison.)

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From the mid-century, educated women began to prise open certain professional and clerical occupations, partly in response to the powerful Victorian 'gospel of work' that castigated idleness, partly to provide for the perceived 'surplus' of single women, and partly for the sake of self-fulfilment. As a result of these struggles, by 1901 here were 212 female physicians, 140 dentists, 6 architects and 3 vets. Over a quarter of professional painters (total 14,000) and over a half of musicians (total 43,230) and actors (12,500) were female.

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Women ran the house, undertaking domestic work and child care themselves, as well as supervising the servants employed to cook, clean, carry coal and run errands. Moreover, almost from time immemorial, with a 'work-basket' to denote her tasks, each girl and woman was a needleworker, responsible for making and mending clothes and household linen. One major change in the period was the invention in the 1850s of the domestic sewing machine, which greatly assisted both private and commercial dressmaking. By 1900 ready-made garments were increasingly available in shops.

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All women are likely, at some period of their lives, to be called on to perform the duties of a sick-nurse, and should prepare themselves for the occasion when they may be required,' noted Mrs Beeton. Professional nurses might be hired, but in many homes 'the ladies of the family would oppose such an arrangement as a failure of duty on their part'.

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