How marriage constrained women's freedom in the Victorian era

In the Victorian era, women had limited rights, including the inability to vote or sue, and married women had limited property ownership, while more women entered paid work after the Industrial Revolution. What shaped women's freedom within marriage and other constraints, and how can we understand their lives through that tension? The lessons consider how social expectations and economic limits shaped women's choices.

1 article, 1 book · about 48 min of reading and viewing

The reading path

1. Read
   

   the lives of women in the victorian era · Wikipedia · 48 min read

   Needlework was the single largest paid occupation for women working from home, but the work paid little, and women often had to rent sewing machines if they could not purchase them. By 1906, sweated home-industry workers generally earned about a penny an hour. Victorian women's fashions demanded a narrow waist, achieved by constricting the abdomen with a laced corset. Physicians determined that corsets caused compression of the thorax, restricted breathing, organ displacement, poor circulation, and prolapsed uterus. For women in the Victorian era, Isabella Beeton coined "The Household General" in 1861 in her influential manual Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management. She compared a household mistress to an army commander or enterprise leader.

2. Book
   

   Fingersmith · Bookshop.org

   Fingersmith is a 2002 historical crime novel set in Victorian-era Britain, written by the Welsh novelist Sarah Waters. The book is notable for its eroticism and depiction of pornography.

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