Victorian Women's Role In Society

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Women’s role in society

The Victorian era seems like another world to us. Yet the late Victorians were very familiar with many of the things we use everyday. The one thing that was different was the place of women in society. There were of course perceptive women of independent original thought, but for the huge majority life was easier if they accepted that a woman's place was in the home. The status of Women in the Victorian Era is often seen as an illustration of the striking difference between England's national power and wealth and what many, then and now, consider its appalling social conditions. Women were seen as pure and clean. The role of women was to have children and tend to the house, in contrast to men.

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The accepted reasoning was that the career for women was marriage.  To get ready for courtship and marriage a girl was groomed like a racehorse.  In addition to being able to sing, play an instrument and speak a little French or Italian, the qualities a young Victorian gentlewoman needed, were to be innocent, virtuous, obedient, dutiful and be ignorant of intellectual opinion. 

Large numbers of working class women worked in factories, in the garment industry or in laundries. From the mid-1850s nursing became a respectable occupation for women. Large numbers of women worked as nurses in the American Civil War, ...

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