Women's Roles in the Early Nineteenth Century.
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Back then women had a lot of pressure to get married. That was really the only way they could make a life in the world. However if the didn't get married they could sometimes to get jobs, but they were extremely limited in what they could do. "Lower-class women could be servants, domestic help, factory workers, prostitutes, etc. Middle- and upper-class women could help, in some cases, with a family business, but generally, the economy and the society dictated that women should work in the home, taking care of home and hearth. They could be educated and could study, as long as it did not interfere with their housework. Any serious or passionate study of any subject was seen as harmful to the family, unless that serious and passionate study dealt with a social or religious issue, or to the woman, herself. Physicians believed that if a woman became too scholarly, her uterus would become dysfunctional, possibly leading to madness" (Radek).
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In the early nineteenth century
women’s roles were quite a bit different than they are today. Back then they
believed that a woman’s “sole purpose was to marry and reproduce” (Wojtczak). “Among
the rich, family wealth automatically passed down the male line; if a daughter
got anything it was a small percentage. Only if she had no brothers, came from
a very wealthy family, and remained unmarried, could a woman become independent”
(Wojtczak). “A woman who remained single would attract social disapproval and
pity. She could not have children or cohabit with a man: the social penalties
were simply too high. Nor could she follow a profession, since they were all
closed to women” (Wojtczak). “Barred from all well-paid work women were forced
into a very small range of occupations. Half were in domestic service and most
of the rest were unskilled factory hands or agricultural laborers. Almost the
only skilled work for women was in the bespoke clothing trade, but even that
was ill-paid and low-status” (Wojtczak). Even “women's clothing symbolized
their constricted lives. Tight lacing into corsets and cumbersome multiple
layers of skirts which dragged on the ground impeded women's freedom of
movement” (Wojtczak).
People back then thought that “women’s
God-given role, was as wife and mother, keeper of the household, guardian of
the moral purity of all who lived therein” (Hartman). In fact “most lived in a
state little better than slavery. They had to obey men, because in most cases
men held all the resources and women had no independent means of subsistence”(Wojtczak).
“Most women had little choice but to marry and upon doing so everything they
owned, inherited and earned automatically belonged to their husband. This meant
that if an offence or felony was committed against her, only her husband could
prosecute. Furthermore, rights to the woman personally - that is, access to her
body - were his” (Wojtczak). “Every man had the right to force his wife into
sex and childbirth. He could take her children without reason and send them to
be raised elsewhere. He could spend his wife's inheritance on a mistress or on
prostitutes” (Wojtczak). However, “If a woman was unhappy with her situation
there was, almost without exception, nothing she could do about it. Except in
extremely rare cases, a woman could not obtain a divorce and, until 1891, if
she ran away from an intolerable marriage the police could capture and return
her, and her husband could imprison her. All this was sanctioned by church,
law, custom, history, and approved of by society in general” (Wojtczak).
Women's Roles and Vanity Fair
The book shows how there was a
lot of pressure on a women to marry and a lot of the times it was handled of
who she would marry by her mother. However if they didn’t have a mother to do
that then they had to do it themselves. “I don’t think, ladies, we have any
right to blame her; for though the task of husband-hunting is generally, and
with becoming modesty, entrusted by young persons to their mammas, recollect
that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange these delicate matters for her,
and that if she did not get a husband for herself, there was no one else in the
wide world who would take the trouble off her hands. What causes young people
to “come out,” but the noble ambition of matrimony? What sends them trooping to
watering-places? What keeps them dancing till five o’clock in the morning
through a whole mortal season? What causes them to labour at piano-forte
sonatas, and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a guinea a
lesson, and to play the harp if they have handsome arms and neat elbows, and to
wear Lincoln Green toxopholite hats and feathers, but that they may bring down
some “desirable” young man with those killing bows and arrow of theirs? What
causes respectable parents to take up their carpets, set their houses
topsy-turvy, and spend a fifth of their year’s income in ball suppers and iced
champagne? Is it sheer love of their species, and an unadulterated wish to see
young people happy and dancing? Psha! They want to marry their daughters; and,
as honest Mrs. Sedley has, in the depths of her kind heart, already arranged a
score of little schemes for the settlement of her Amelia, so also had our beloved
but unprotected” (Thackeray 20). Even when they went to school, it wasn’t
school of what we think of today, it taught them what they needed to know to
make a good wife. “In the course of a year turned a good young girl into a good
young woman—to be a good wife presently, when the happy time should come”(Thackeray
112). Women back then were also supposed to pretty faces and basically to be
put on a pedestal. “Woman in
the abstract was as radiant as an angel, as dainty as a fairy - she was a
picture on the wall, a statue in a temple, a being whose physical processes
were an inscrutable mystery. She was wrapped by the Victorians in folds on
folds, and layers on layers of clothes, as though she were a Hindu idol. She
was hidden in the mysteries of petticoats; her natural lines were hidden behind
a barricade of hoops and stays; her dress throughout the century emphasized her
divorce from reality” (Wojtczak). However in the book the roles of the men and
women are kind of reversed. “While there is life, there is hope, my dear, and I intend to make
a man of you yet. Who sold your horses for you? Who paid your debts for you?’
Rawdon was obliged to confess that he owed all these benefits to his wife, and
to trust himself to her guidance for the future” (Thackeray 316). Becky was
more of the strong one and Rawdon was more of the follower than the leader.