VICTORIAN AGE.

Morality and respectability.

Compared with the country in the 18th century,Victorian Britain was a highly moral society.Great importance was attached to decency, sobriety and virtue.There was no great symbol of these values than the pious Victorian family, and no greater icon of that family than Queen Victoria herself, the virtuous life of Prince Albert and mother of a large family.

After her husband’s death, she became his devoted widow and, in the collective imagination,mother of the whole nation.

While this moral outlook encouraged the spread of good behaviour and greately increased the civility and the gentility of life, it also encouraged intellectual narrowness and climate of conformity.

Women at work.

In the industrial areas, the factory system displaced the domestic system which had enabled women to work in their homes. Women often work in the factories but this interfered with the upbringing of young children.

Nevertheless, working women begun to achieve a degree of economic independence, though limited, which was often denied to women of higher social rank.

Women of strong character begun to start or expand professions. They became writers and journalists, as the remarkable succession of women novelists in the century shows.

For educated women, teaching became an expanding profession after the middle of the century.

In April 1867,John Stuart Mill, in one of the debates about the Reform Bill, argued that it was time to give women equal rights at the ballot-box.

Two years later, in May 1869,Elisabeth Stanton founded the radical National Woman’s Suffrage Association.