The Status of Women in Great Britain

Abstract

The emergence of women in general and married women in particular from cloistered domesticity into the full glare of public life has taken place within the last hundred years, and has involved changes in both custom and legislation. Discrimination against unmarried women has always been more a matter of custom than of law. It was custom that limited them to a few occupations which were either degrading or rewarded by a mere pittance. But it was the law that conveyed all a woman's personal property to her husband by the wedding ceremony, and deprived her of all authority over her children and of any contractual capacity during his life. When Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837 the status of women in England was probably as low as it had been throughout the whole of recorded history. The wife of Bath of Chaucer's England was a robust and resourceful human being, wise in the ways of the world. Her nineteenth century counterpart emptied her mind of knowledge and opinions on all but emotional relationships within the home; busied herself with household tasks to the exclusion of all others and sought in every way to submerge her human personality. The advent of gentility in the Victorian age led to even narrower outlets for the ladies who were no longer necessarily the wives or daughters of the peerage or the Knights, but were characterized by idleness tempered by good works. However, while this picture was true of the middle or leisured classes, it never accurately represented the vast mass of the working people. On the farms, the farmers' wives might restrict their activities to the household and perhaps the keeping of some chickens, but the farm laborer's wife worked beside him in the fields. Women as well as men worked in cottage industries. When from the latter part of the eighteenth century these were replaced by factories, women and children flocked into the mills and down the mines until restricted or barred by legislation from 1833 onwards. The spread of the more authoritarian forms of evangelical religion which accompanied the spread of literacy may also have played its part in depressing the status of women. In 1857 Florence Nightin-