By Breda Corish
Edited by Becky Ross and Mark Potter
Nineteenth-century Britain functioned as a patriarchal society that privileged men and
constrained women. The status of women gradually improved over the course of the century,
but their opportunities varied across the boundaries of class, geography, marital status, and
age.[1] There was a greater degree of universality in having a female body when biological
determinism reinforced gendered expectations of roles and behaviour for all women. This
essay traces the qualified expansion of opportunities for women through the medium of the
female body, specifically changes in women’s reproductive capacity and challenges to the
ideology of separate spheres, the sexual double standard and the rights of married women,
which coalesced in the cause of female suffrage. Complementary perspectives from women’s
history and gender history are used to reflect the interrelationship between this material aspect of women’s lives and how female identity was constructed.[2]
The growth of the British population from 10.5 million in 1801 to 30.5 million in 1901 placed
a greater burden on women than men, given women’s ‘reproductive labour’ of menstruation,
pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.[3] While the average married woman had four to five children in the seventeenth century, she had nearly eight by the start of the nineteenth century.[4] Then, as now, pregnancy was a source of ambivalence, bringing both joy and despair. For a poor family, another child could be an economic burden and a future worker within the family unit. For all women, pregnancy and childbirth were common causes of ill-health and maternal death.[5] Women’s lives significantly improved from the 1860s to 1890s as the average number of children per married woman reduced to three to five, with a parallel increase in female life expectancy. Women in the middle and aspiring lower classes were, however, the main beneficiaries as large families prevailed in the working classes.[6] In the absence of reliable contraception, different factors enabled and limited women’s ability to control how many children they had.
Population growth was already the subject of public debate in early nineteenth-century Britain. The 1820s saw the first publications on birth control and advocacy of ’physical checks’ but the reproductive process was poorly understood.[7] Marriage and community sanctions against illegitimacy had been the traditional means of controlling women’s fertility. Analysis of the 1851-1911 census returns shows reduced birth rates were partly due to an increase in the age of marriage, but mainly due to a decline in marital fertility.[8] A compelling case has been made for population-wide adoption of a degree of sexual abstinence, including marriage delay and avoidance, as the cause of the drastic decline in population growth rate after 1870.[9] Women were reliant on male partners to engage with this culture of sexual restraint, where coitus interruptus was promoted as a preventative measure.
Women had greater autonomy using herbal or medicinal abortifacients, with varying degrees
of success, to ‘bring on’ an ‘interrupted’ period. Advertisements for these were plentiful
despite abortion being a common law misdemeanour.[10] It, however, became increasingly
difficult for women to avoid an unwanted pregnancy this way. The 1803 Lord Ellenborough
Act criminalised abortion and the 1861 Offences against the Person Act made life
imprisonment the punishment for procuring an abortion. These legislative changes were
ostensibly motivated by protection of female and foetal welfare, but the male medical
establishment championing these changes had a strong element of self-interest in closing down ‘irregular practitioners such as herbalists and midwives’.[11] The same medical profession was central to reinforcing the nineteenth-century gender ideology of ’separate spheres’, by pathologizing women’s bodies and minds as fit solely for ‘feminine’ and domestic pursuits.
The doctrine of separate spheres grew from its roots in the late eighteenth-century, with
nineteenth-century industrialisation amplifying gendered distinctions between the domestic
space as the natural environment for women and the public space for men.[12] Despite female biology largely remaining a mystery to doctors, it was designated the source of women’s physical and mental deficiencies.[13] The taboo-laden topic of menstruation catalysed a significant debate within the medical profession when Dr. Edward Clarke of Harvard College claimed in 1873 that higher education was damaging American women’s reproductive systems. Dr. Henry Maudsley drew on this to make his case that menstruation justified women’s exclusion from higher education in Britain. Dr. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was not alone in arguing against this attempt to promote biological determinism, with other medical writers also challenging Dr. Clarke. The Victorian medical profession was not uniformly endorsing this rationale for limiting women’s options to the domestic.[14]
Similarly, women were not uniformly confined to the domestic space, despite the pervasive
gendered views of what constituted respectable feminine behaviour. For the working-class
majority, the harsh reality was that a single income was rarely enough to support a family.
Being a mother did not remove the need for a working-class woman to find paid work but
doing paid work laid her open to the criticism of neglecting her children. The same financial
imperative did not apply to women in the growing middle class. For them, the evangelical
religious movement increased the pressure for their lives to be centred on the home and
childrearing.[15] Yet, the boundaries between their domestic space and the outside world could be remarkably permeable. The forces that defined women’s natural roles as maternity and homemaking also made them the moral centre of society. What was intended to confine women to the domestic space simultaneously empowered women to lead campaigns in the public arena on moral issues, from matters of Christian principle, such as the abolition of slavery, to that major theme of Victorian society, sexual morality.[16]
Nineteenth-century Britain was a sea of contradictions about sex and morality. The historical
view of women as sexually voracious creatures had been replaced from the eighteenth century by the impossible ideal of the ‘passionless’ woman. Medical pathologizing of female
reproductive capacity reinforced the Victorian ideal of a woman without sexual desire. This
idealised absence of female sexual desire could not be reconciled with the concept of female
same-sex attraction.[17] Lesbianism was medically pathologized as a form of female sexual
deviancy but simultaneously ignored by the 1885 Criminal Law Amendment Act which
criminalised male homosexuality.[18] While a woman who refused her husband’s conjugal rights was deemed to be suffering from a medical disorder, the male sex drive toward the opposite sex was deemed to be innate. Since masturbation was also pathologized, a different class of woman was needed to service the sexual needs of men and preserve the domestic space from pollution. This sexual double standard was enshrined in the 1863 Contagious Diseases Acts which prompted one of the major female-led campaigns of the nineteenth century.
Venereal disease was widespread across all classes, untreatable and a source of shame. The
1863 Contagious Diseases Acts aimed to reduce the incidence rate in the armed forces by
regulating prostitution in garrison and port towns. This meant any woman suspected of being a prostitute in designated areas could be arrested, subjected to forced internal examination with a speculum and incarcerated in a Lock Hospital to recover from suspected infection. The law did not require that men be checked for infection, and nothing was done to stop men infecting women, whether prostitutes or wives. Despite the gendered norms of separate spheres which required respectable women to be silent on such topics, the Acts were opposed by the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act under the leadership of the eminently respectable Josephine Butler.[19] Through the years of campaigning until the Acts were overturned in 1886, the oppression of all women by the sexual double standard was made visible. This became one of the many strands that made up the wider movement for women’s rights, especially those of married women.
The doctrine of coverture meant a single woman (femes sole) lost all her property-owning
rights on marriage (femes covert), her legal identity was subsumed into her husband’s and her body belonged to him.[20] Josephine Butler accordingly described marriage as ‘a species of legal prostitution’.[21] Slow legislative change led to the 1883 Married Women’s Property Act, celebrated by the Women’s Suffrage Journal as ‘the Magna Carta of women’s liberties’. While a married woman could now retain ownership of her property and income, she still did not have her own legal identity.[22] Other laws improving the rights of married women were similarly qualified. The 1857 Divorce Act improved access to divorce but reinforced the sexual double standard by making adultery alone grounds for divorcing a wife, but not a husband. The 1873 Infant Custody Act gave mothers greater rights to custody of their children but did not give them equal parental rights. The 1878 Matrimonial Causes Act protected wives who were the victims of male violence, but MPs would not back a Bill removing the presumption that a husband could not rape his wife.[23] These campaigns to increase married women’s autonomy over their bodies, children and property were central to the broader women’s rights movement which coalesced in the campaign for female suffrage.
Suffrage was the great cause of nineteenth-century reformist Britain, but the 1832 Reform Act was also the first time that women were explicitly disenfranchised. Biological determinism underpinned opposition to female suffrage, as illustrated by The Times editorial opining ‘[Women’s] destiny is marriage. Their function is maternity. Their sphere is domestic’ in response to John Mill’s failed attempt to amend the 1867 Second Reform
Bill.[24] Faced with such deeply embedded antipathy, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS) of 1867 was pragmatic in campaigning for female suffrage based on property ownership. However, the subordinate status of married women appeared such an insurmountable barrier for some campaigners that the NSWS fractured for a time over the strategic choice of prioritising votes for femes sole or femes covert. By the closing decades of the century and the failure of the 1888 Third Reform Bill, campaigners for women’s rights and bodily autonomy within marriage were all too aware of the state’s inability to legislate fairly for women.[25] As the suffrage cause dragged on into the twentieth century, militant suffragettes would go on to weaponise their female bodies in the fight for votes for women.
From the vantage point of 1900, women’s lives had undoubtedly changed for the better since
1800. Reproductive labour had reduced for some, but not all, women and female life
expectancy had increased. The doctrine of separate spheres had peaked and was increasingly
challenged. The sexual double standard enshrined in the Contagious Diseases Act had been
overturned but women still had to meet a higher standard of sexual probity than men. A married woman could own property but rape in marriage still did not constitute a crime. These shifts in nineteenth-century attitudes to women and their bodies were incremental and qualified, but nonetheless laid down critical stepping-stones for the path to female political, legal, and sexual equality in the twentieth century.
Notes
[1] Jane Purvis, ‘From “woman worthies” to poststructuralism? Debate and controversy in women’s history in Britain’, Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction, ed. Jane Purvis (London: UCL Press, 2008), pp. 1-20.
[2] Susie Steinbach, Women in England 1760-1914: A Social History (London: Phoenix, 2004), pp. 3-4.
[3] Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution: English Women, Sex, and Contraception, 1800-1975 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 11.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Barbara Harrison, ‘Women and Health’, Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction, ed. Jane Purvis (London: UCL Press, 2008), p. 145.
[6] Steinbach, Women in England 1760-1914, pp. 5-6.
[7] Hera Cook, The Long Sexual Revolution, pp. 53-61.
[8] A.M. Reid, S.J. Arulanantham, J.D Day, E.M. Garrett, H. Jaadla, M. Lucas-Smith, M. 2018. Populations Past: Atlas of Victorian and Edwardian Population, <https://www.populationspast.org/>[Accessed 5 Dec 2020].
[9] Hera Cook, "Sexuality and Contraception in Modern England: Doing the History of Reproductive Sexuality", Journal of Social History, 40:4 (2007), pp. 915-32.
[10] Susie L. Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, culture and society in nineteenth-century Britain (Oxford: Routledge, 2017), p. 253.
[11] John Keown, Abortion, Doctors and the Law: Some Aspects of the Legal Regulation of Abortion in England from 1803 to 1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 26-48.
[12] Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians, pp. 166-167.
[13] Harrison, ‘Women and Health’, Women's History: Britain, 1850-1945, p. 133.
[14] Elaine and English Showalter, ‘Victorian Women and Menstruation’, Suffer and Be Still: Women in the Victorian Age, ed. Martha Vicinus (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013)
[15] Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians, p. 168.
[16] Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women: Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain (Abingdon: Taylor & Francis Group, 2013), pp. 191-193.
[17] Susan Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain 1640-1990 (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2014), pp. 185-191.
[18] Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians, p. 249 and Lesley A. Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880, (London: Macmillan Education UK, 2012), p.21.
[19] Kingsley Kent, Gender and Power in Britain 1640-1990, pp. 197-200.
[20] Steinbach, Understanding the Victorians, p. 176.
[21] Hall, Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880, p. 14.
[22] Ibid, p. 31.
[23] Ibid, pp. 11-13.
[24] ‘Mr. MILL has redeemed his pledge...’ The Times, 21 May 1867, pp. 10-11, The Times DigitalArchive, <https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS168469685/TTDA?u=qmu_ttda&sid=TTDA&xid=c454aebd> [Accessed 16 Dec 2020].
[25] Laura E. Nym Mayhall, The Militant Suffrage Movement: Citizenship and Resistance in Britain, 1860-1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 14-24.
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