Describe the lives of upper-, middle-, and working-class women in English-speaking countries between 1850 and 1914
What will be an ideal response?
ANSWER:
Women in English-speaking countries were subjected to the rules of behavior and ideology of the Victorian Age. Upper- and middle-class women were supposed to occupy a sphere separate from men. They were supposed to refrain from wage work, improve the family's social status, maintain the household, and rear the children. As household technology improved, women were held to increasingly higher standards of cleanliness. The only education available for those women?usually music, drawing, and embroidery?was intended to make them better prospects for marriage and to showcase their social talents. At the end of the nineteenth century, women began to be accepted in some professions, most notably teaching. Working-class women, however, had almost no prospects for higher education or entrance into the professions; they remained in low-paid and menial jobs. Furthermore, they were restricted by arcane Victorian codes to jobs that were deemed within women's proper sphere. Such jobs, particularly those in domestic service and in the textile trades, also paid the least. In addition, Victorian morality controlled married women with children, forcing them to remain home with their families. Yet these women still had to contribute to the family income, most often by taking in boarders or piecework. Piecework was often shared by children, thereby perpetuating in the home some of the worst abuses of the factory system.
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