Excerpt from Chapter 1
THE STATUS OF WOMEN
The history of women is not adequately covered by books that focus on men
because, since records began, women were subject to special laws and social
customs which governed every part of their lives. History books usually
concentrate on the people with power and, as most women had none, they are
largely absent. Omitting to explain that women were straightjacketed at every turn
by legal disabilities and man-made social structures may lead readers to assume
that women’s absence from civic life, big business and the professions was
voluntary. It was not.
History books specifically about women are needed to rectify the omissions of
works which claim to be about people but are in fact only about men. Our
knowledge of women’s past has been obscured by most published social history.
When writers mention a farmer, a shopkeeper, a publican, or a philanthropist, for
example, they habitually cite men and the reader is led to believe that no women
existed in those categories, and to assume that they were all either housewives,
mothers or domestic servants. Even books specifically about women tend to
focus on royalty, not ordinary working people.
Owing to women’s near-absence from most local and national history books, we
are heavily dependent upon primary sources to discover our female
predecessors. However, even these can be misleading. For example,
the 1792 Sussex Directory seems to indicate that the county was devoid of
women. Not one female name appears; even the midwives were male! In fact,
women were the majority of the population; the illusion arises because the only
people listed were under the headings: corporation, magistrates, overseers,
jurats, freemen, clergy, physicians, and law, and women were barred from all civic
positions and all professions.
In 1831 Sussex was home to 135,325 males and 137,002 females. The latter
comprised 50.3% of the population. By 1851 the female majority had risen to
50.8%, with females outnumbering males by 5,300. Ten years later 53% of the
county’s inhabitants were female.* This figure was not uniform throughout the
twenty districts. In the eight where men predominated, it was by 1–2% but, in the
nine female-dominated areas, the difference was as great as 10.3%. There were
more men in rural areas, where the work available was mainly agricultural, and
many young women had left for the lively and exciting seaside towns, where
domestic work was plentiful. The most male-prevalent area was Horsham, where
men comprised 52.8%; the most female-prevalent area was Hastings, where
60.3% of the residents were women. Brighton was 60.2% female, Steyning 56%,
and Worthing 54%. In Hastings, women outnumbered men by 3,174; in Brighton,
by 9,202; in Steyning, 1,613; and in Worthing, 965.
There are several reasons why Sussex had a gender imbalance greater than the
national average. The county’s temperate climate and beautiful watering places
attracted rich spinsters and widows. Among the wealthy there were twice as many
females as males living in Brighton and Hastings, and these ladies employed a
large number of domestic servants, the vast majority of whom were female.
The districts in which two-thirds of the population was female were in Brighton,
central Hastings, and St Leonards where in one area (that encompassing Marina,
Caves Road, West Ascent and Gloucester Lodge) there were 554 males and
1098 females — and that included two boys’ boarding schools, which bolstered
the number of males!
In central Hastings in 1871 there were 831 females and 462 males, and women
comprised 80% of the residents of prestigious Wellington Square. The owner of a
millinery shop at 4 Castle Street was the sole male in a household of fourteen,
comprising his wife, five milliners, two saleswomen, two dressmakers, a mantle-
maker, a cook and a housemaid.
In St Leonards, the heads of fourteen of the sixteen households at Upland Views
and The Lawn were female, and only 10% of the villas’ residents were male.
Another factor that boosted the number of women in certain seaside towns was
the large number of institutions — such as schools and convalescent homes —
that were located there. As well as having many female inmates, female nurses,
orderlies, matrons, schoolmistresses and servants were employed in them, and
many had female proprietors.
Women were concentrated at each end of the social scale: in Hastings in 1851,
78% of the gentry, and 90% of the paupers were female.
The numerical superiority of women was obvious to the most casual observer, for
the streets were busy with servants on errands, and women served in most shops
and filled the churches. One visitor remarked in the
Hastings & St Leonards Chronicle:
To correct the numerical imbalance in the sexes, some wanted to send what were
called ‘surplus’ women* to the colonies, where many men lacked wives; indeed, in
1848 the Hastings & St Leonards News published a notice urging husbandless
women to emigrate, and the West Sussex Advertiser carried advertisements
offering female servants free or assisted passage to Australia.
WOMEN’S SPECIAL STATUS
Victorian England was a class-ridden society. Most of us are aware of the
‘Upstairs Downstairs’ image of social divisions, but popular history tends to gloss
over the other fundamental division in society: the huge gulf between
the social and legal status of women and men.
All women shared a special status as females, and all women suffered particular
disadvantages with regard to law, marriage, money, business and employment,
regardless of social class. It could be contended that women had no social class
on their own account, but derived it from fathers and husbands.
In 1887 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling wrote, ‘Women are the creatures of an
organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised
tyranny of idlers’. There is much powerful evidence to support that view. Men
established certain rules and customs that severely hindered women from
owning, earning or inheriting wealth, forcing most to be dependent upon men for
their survival, and therefore subservient to them. Although, owing to loopholes in
the system, a small proportion of women did inherit money or property, the odds
were stacked heavily against them, because fathers routinely bequeathed to
sons (partly because anything left to a daughter would later pass to her
husband). Sons also succeeded to hereditary titles and family businesses.
Positive discrimination is widely believed to be a modern idea; in fact Victorian
men practised it with great zeal, reserving for themselves every position of power,
authority or influence, with the single exception of monarch. Even then the system
was devised so that a woman succeeded to the throne only in the absence of a
male sibling. And when a woman did become monarch in 1837 it did not improve
the status of her female subjects. Queen Victoria chose to concentrate on being
a wife and mother and was, from 1861 until her death in 1901, in mourning for
her late husband. Worse, in middle age she emerged as a fervent and vocal
opponent of the up-and-coming women’s rights movement. When Lady Amberley
expressed her views on the emancipation of women, Victoria wrote:
Only men could be MPs, town commissioners, councillors, freemen, aldermen,
members of Boards of Guardians, judges, magistrates, overseers, coroners,
jurors, solicitors, police officers, journalists, civil servants, university professors,
physicians or clergy.* Every decision about public policy, every law and bylaw,
every rule and regulation was made by men without consulting women and only
men were permitted to interpret and administer the decisions of the men in power.
Until the twentieth century, only men could vote for members of parliament.
Entitlement to vote was, historically, based on property qualifications, yet an
educated female landowner such as Lady Frances Elphinstone of Ore Place — a
widow with 530 acres who employed fifteen men — was denied the vote, while
some of her own barely-literate labourers were enfranchised in 1867. Some
progress was made in 1869, when the Municipal Reform Act gave female
householders the vote in municipal elections — but only if they were spinsters or
widows.
Woman’s place in society was a battlefield upon which competing ideologies
strove for dominance. Some people challenged the narrow lives of women and
argued for greater opportunities; others believed vehemently that women should
be restricted to domestic work and child rearing. This subject (known as ‘The
Woman Question’) was discussed endlessly in newspapers, magazines and
journals, in parliament and at home. A single issue — that of women being
trained and employed as watchmakers — dominated the letters pages of one
Sussex newspaper for several months in 1857. Few jobs were performed by both
sexes and, where they were, women were paid about half the wages of men for
the same work — not because they were thought to be inferior workers, but
because they were deemed to need less to live upon.
Every aspect of women’s behaviour and personality was scrutinised, manipulated
and governed by rules and directives to a degree never attempted with men.
Frances Power Cobbe pointed out in 1869 that while men could be whatever they
turned out to be, women had to be moulded
into what men wanted them to be:
1850s entitled The Angel in the House, in which he presented the submissive wife
as the stereotype to which all women should aspire. Meek, humble and tranquil,
she lived only to please her husband. Women who fell short of this idealised
stereotype were heavily criticised.
Men regarded women as intellectually inferior to them and held this to be self-
evident. Women were expected to live contentedly in a state of perpetual
childhood, passively accepting the actions and decisions of men, to whom they
were supposed to be happily subservient. Many women accepted this. One, Eliza
Lynn Linton, reflected a view of women that was popularly held when she wrote in
her 1860s book, Ourselves:
in every aspect of public and private life, even in relation to fairly trivial matters. It
was deemed, for example, that female railway travellers needed women-only
carriages and waiting rooms; some hotels — notably the Queen’s at Hastings —
offered separate coffee rooms for men and women, while some churches — such
as Christ Church, St Leonards — had separate pews for each sex.
Cultured men pretended to defer to women, using gallantry and flattery, but this
was a matter of class not gender. As Marian Ramelson has pointed out: ‘The
same gentleman who would stoop to pick up a lady’s handkerchief would pass a
maid struggling to carry an over-loaded coal scuttle without a thought that he
should assist her.’
The only aspect of life in which women were expected to be superior to men was
morality, particularly with regard to sexuality. Women were supposed to be pure
of heart, mind and body, which entailed pre-marital chastity and marital
submission without enjoyment. While men fell easily into immorality, women were
expected to uphold moral standards. This expectation made it even more
shocking when women showed themselves to be human, too, and fell from grace.
Women’s poor status was not entirely the result of ancient legislation. For
example, an Act of 1835 ended the right of unmarried women who were qualified
(by property) to vote in parish-based elections (such as for Poor Law Guardians),
and an Act of 1857 reaffirmed that men, but not women, could obtain a divorce
solely on the grounds of adultery.
End of excerpt from Chapter 1. To continue reading this chapter
order your copy of Women of Victorian Sussex
Go on to an excerpt from Chapter 2
THE STATUS OF WOMEN
- The history of men has been palmed off on us as universal history.
Deirdre Beddoe
The history of women is not adequately covered by books that focus on men
because, since records began, women were subject to special laws and social
customs which governed every part of their lives. History books usually
concentrate on the people with power and, as most women had none, they are
largely absent. Omitting to explain that women were straightjacketed at every turn
by legal disabilities and man-made social structures may lead readers to assume
that women’s absence from civic life, big business and the professions was
voluntary. It was not.
History books specifically about women are needed to rectify the omissions of
works which claim to be about people but are in fact only about men. Our
knowledge of women’s past has been obscured by most published social history.
When writers mention a farmer, a shopkeeper, a publican, or a philanthropist, for
example, they habitually cite men and the reader is led to believe that no women
existed in those categories, and to assume that they were all either housewives,
mothers or domestic servants. Even books specifically about women tend to
focus on royalty, not ordinary working people.
Owing to women’s near-absence from most local and national history books, we
are heavily dependent upon primary sources to discover our female
predecessors. However, even these can be misleading. For example,
the 1792 Sussex Directory seems to indicate that the county was devoid of
women. Not one female name appears; even the midwives were male! In fact,
women were the majority of the population; the illusion arises because the only
people listed were under the headings: corporation, magistrates, overseers,
jurats, freemen, clergy, physicians, and law, and women were barred from all civic
positions and all professions.
In 1831 Sussex was home to 135,325 males and 137,002 females. The latter
comprised 50.3% of the population. By 1851 the female majority had risen to
50.8%, with females outnumbering males by 5,300. Ten years later 53% of the
county’s inhabitants were female.* This figure was not uniform throughout the
twenty districts. In the eight where men predominated, it was by 1–2% but, in the
nine female-dominated areas, the difference was as great as 10.3%. There were
more men in rural areas, where the work available was mainly agricultural, and
many young women had left for the lively and exciting seaside towns, where
domestic work was plentiful. The most male-prevalent area was Horsham, where
men comprised 52.8%; the most female-prevalent area was Hastings, where
60.3% of the residents were women. Brighton was 60.2% female, Steyning 56%,
and Worthing 54%. In Hastings, women outnumbered men by 3,174; in Brighton,
by 9,202; in Steyning, 1,613; and in Worthing, 965.
There are several reasons why Sussex had a gender imbalance greater than the
national average. The county’s temperate climate and beautiful watering places
attracted rich spinsters and widows. Among the wealthy there were twice as many
females as males living in Brighton and Hastings, and these ladies employed a
large number of domestic servants, the vast majority of whom were female.
The districts in which two-thirds of the population was female were in Brighton,
central Hastings, and St Leonards where in one area (that encompassing Marina,
Caves Road, West Ascent and Gloucester Lodge) there were 554 males and
1098 females — and that included two boys’ boarding schools, which bolstered
the number of males!
In central Hastings in 1871 there were 831 females and 462 males, and women
comprised 80% of the residents of prestigious Wellington Square. The owner of a
millinery shop at 4 Castle Street was the sole male in a household of fourteen,
comprising his wife, five milliners, two saleswomen, two dressmakers, a mantle-
maker, a cook and a housemaid.
In St Leonards, the heads of fourteen of the sixteen households at Upland Views
and The Lawn were female, and only 10% of the villas’ residents were male.
Another factor that boosted the number of women in certain seaside towns was
the large number of institutions — such as schools and convalescent homes —
that were located there. As well as having many female inmates, female nurses,
orderlies, matrons, schoolmistresses and servants were employed in them, and
many had female proprietors.
Women were concentrated at each end of the social scale: in Hastings in 1851,
78% of the gentry, and 90% of the paupers were female.
The numerical superiority of women was obvious to the most casual observer, for
the streets were busy with servants on errands, and women served in most shops
and filled the churches. One visitor remarked in the
Hastings & St Leonards Chronicle:
- Everyone knows that St Leonards has this similarity to Paradise: ‘that there
is neither marrying nor giving in marriage’, the female population
prepondering at the rate of about five to one.
To correct the numerical imbalance in the sexes, some wanted to send what were
called ‘surplus’ women* to the colonies, where many men lacked wives; indeed, in
1848 the Hastings & St Leonards News published a notice urging husbandless
women to emigrate, and the West Sussex Advertiser carried advertisements
offering female servants free or assisted passage to Australia.
WOMEN’S SPECIAL STATUS
Victorian England was a class-ridden society. Most of us are aware of the
‘Upstairs Downstairs’ image of social divisions, but popular history tends to gloss
over the other fundamental division in society: the huge gulf between
the social and legal status of women and men.
All women shared a special status as females, and all women suffered particular
disadvantages with regard to law, marriage, money, business and employment,
regardless of social class. It could be contended that women had no social class
on their own account, but derived it from fathers and husbands.
In 1887 Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling wrote, ‘Women are the creatures of an
organised tyranny of men, as the workers are the creatures of an organised
tyranny of idlers’. There is much powerful evidence to support that view. Men
established certain rules and customs that severely hindered women from
owning, earning or inheriting wealth, forcing most to be dependent upon men for
their survival, and therefore subservient to them. Although, owing to loopholes in
the system, a small proportion of women did inherit money or property, the odds
were stacked heavily against them, because fathers routinely bequeathed to
sons (partly because anything left to a daughter would later pass to her
husband). Sons also succeeded to hereditary titles and family businesses.
Positive discrimination is widely believed to be a modern idea; in fact Victorian
men practised it with great zeal, reserving for themselves every position of power,
authority or influence, with the single exception of monarch. Even then the system
was devised so that a woman succeeded to the throne only in the absence of a
male sibling. And when a woman did become monarch in 1837 it did not improve
the status of her female subjects. Queen Victoria chose to concentrate on being
a wife and mother and was, from 1861 until her death in 1901, in mourning for
her late husband. Worse, in middle age she emerged as a fervent and vocal
opponent of the up-and-coming women’s rights movement. When Lady Amberley
expressed her views on the emancipation of women, Victoria wrote:
- I am most anxious to enlist everyone who can speak or write to join in
checking this mad wicked folly of ‘Women’s Rights’, with all its attendant
horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent forgetting every sense of
womanly feeling and propriety. Lady Amberley ought to get a good
whipping.
Only men could be MPs, town commissioners, councillors, freemen, aldermen,
members of Boards of Guardians, judges, magistrates, overseers, coroners,
jurors, solicitors, police officers, journalists, civil servants, university professors,
physicians or clergy.* Every decision about public policy, every law and bylaw,
every rule and regulation was made by men without consulting women and only
men were permitted to interpret and administer the decisions of the men in power.
Until the twentieth century, only men could vote for members of parliament.
Entitlement to vote was, historically, based on property qualifications, yet an
educated female landowner such as Lady Frances Elphinstone of Ore Place — a
widow with 530 acres who employed fifteen men — was denied the vote, while
some of her own barely-literate labourers were enfranchised in 1867. Some
progress was made in 1869, when the Municipal Reform Act gave female
householders the vote in municipal elections — but only if they were spinsters or
widows.
Woman’s place in society was a battlefield upon which competing ideologies
strove for dominance. Some people challenged the narrow lives of women and
argued for greater opportunities; others believed vehemently that women should
be restricted to domestic work and child rearing. This subject (known as ‘The
Woman Question’) was discussed endlessly in newspapers, magazines and
journals, in parliament and at home. A single issue — that of women being
trained and employed as watchmakers — dominated the letters pages of one
Sussex newspaper for several months in 1857. Few jobs were performed by both
sexes and, where they were, women were paid about half the wages of men for
the same work — not because they were thought to be inferior workers, but
because they were deemed to need less to live upon.
Every aspect of women’s behaviour and personality was scrutinised, manipulated
and governed by rules and directives to a degree never attempted with men.
Frances Power Cobbe pointed out in 1869 that while men could be whatever they
turned out to be, women had to be moulded
into what men wanted them to be:
- That a woman is a Domestic, a Social, or a Political creature; that she is a
Goddess, or a Doll; the ‘Angel in the House,’ or a Drudge… all this is taken
for granted. But, as nobody ever yet sat down and constructed analogous
hypotheses about the other half of the human race, we are driven to
conclude … that she is made of some more plastic material, which can be
advantageously manipulated to fit our theory about her nature and office ...
We have nothing to do but to make round holes, and women will grow
round to fill them; or square holes, and they will become square. Men grow
like trees, and the most we can do is to lop or clip them.
1850s entitled The Angel in the House, in which he presented the submissive wife
as the stereotype to which all women should aspire. Meek, humble and tranquil,
she lived only to please her husband. Women who fell short of this idealised
stereotype were heavily criticised.
Men regarded women as intellectually inferior to them and held this to be self-
evident. Women were expected to live contentedly in a state of perpetual
childhood, passively accepting the actions and decisions of men, to whom they
were supposed to be happily subservient. Many women accepted this. One, Eliza
Lynn Linton, reflected a view of women that was popularly held when she wrote in
her 1860s book, Ourselves:
- No true-hearted woman that ever lived, who loved her husband, desired
anything but submission. It is the very life of a woman’s love – her pride,
her glory, her evidence of selfrespect.
in every aspect of public and private life, even in relation to fairly trivial matters. It
was deemed, for example, that female railway travellers needed women-only
carriages and waiting rooms; some hotels — notably the Queen’s at Hastings —
offered separate coffee rooms for men and women, while some churches — such
as Christ Church, St Leonards — had separate pews for each sex.
Cultured men pretended to defer to women, using gallantry and flattery, but this
was a matter of class not gender. As Marian Ramelson has pointed out: ‘The
same gentleman who would stoop to pick up a lady’s handkerchief would pass a
maid struggling to carry an over-loaded coal scuttle without a thought that he
should assist her.’
The only aspect of life in which women were expected to be superior to men was
morality, particularly with regard to sexuality. Women were supposed to be pure
of heart, mind and body, which entailed pre-marital chastity and marital
submission without enjoyment. While men fell easily into immorality, women were
expected to uphold moral standards. This expectation made it even more
shocking when women showed themselves to be human, too, and fell from grace.
Women’s poor status was not entirely the result of ancient legislation. For
example, an Act of 1835 ended the right of unmarried women who were qualified
(by property) to vote in parish-based elections (such as for Poor Law Guardians),
and an Act of 1857 reaffirmed that men, but not women, could obtain a divorce
solely on the grounds of adultery.
End of excerpt from Chapter 1. To continue reading this chapter
order your copy of Women of Victorian Sussex
Go on to an excerpt from Chapter 2
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Women of Victorian Sussex
Their Status, Occupations and Dealings with the Law 1830~1870