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Gender Ideology and Separate Spheres Jan Marsh
THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
GENDER AND POWER
The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety . . . It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different—then let them remain each in their own position. (Queen Victoria, letter 29 May 1870)
In terms of gender ideology, the accession of Queen Victoria of Britain, for whom the Victorian Era is named, was something of a paradox. Traditionally, women were defined physically and intellectually as the 'weaker' sex, in all ways subordinate to male authority. In private life women were subject to fathers, husbands, brothers even adult sons. Publicly, men dominated all decision-making in political, legal and economic affairs. But as monarch, Victoria—who in 1837 was only 18 years old—was socially and symbolically superior to every other citizen in Britain, all men being constitutionally considered her subjects.
Early Victorian gender prescriptions featured men as industrious breadwinners and women as their loyal helpers. Reinforced by social philosophers like Auguste Cornte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Ruskin, this developed into a mid-century doctrine of 'separate spheres', whereby men were figured as competitors in the economic realm while women were positioned either as decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls. From the 1860s, to this social construct the Darwinian theory of 'survival of the fittest' added a pseudo-scientific dimension that placed men higher on the evolutionary ladder.
The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is
THE VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
GENDER AND POWER
The Queen is most anxious to enlist every one who can speak or write to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of ‘Woman’s Rights’, with all its attendant horrors, on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety . . . It is a subject which makes the Queen so furious that she cannot contain herself. God created men and women different—then let them remain each in their own position. (Queen Victoria, letter 29 May 1870)
In terms of gender ideology, the accession of Queen Victoria of Britain, for whom the Victorian Era is named, was something of a paradox. Traditionally, women were defined physically and intellectually as the 'weaker' sex, in all ways subordinate to male authority. In private life women were subject to fathers, husbands, brothers even adult sons. Publicly, men dominated all decision-making in political, legal and economic affairs. But as monarch, Victoria—who in 1837 was only 18 years old—was socially and symbolically superior to every other citizen in Britain, all men being constitutionally considered her subjects.
Early Victorian gender prescriptions featured men as industrious breadwinners and women as their loyal helpers. Reinforced by social philosophers like Auguste Cornte, Arthur Schopenhauer, Herbert Spencer, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and John Ruskin, this developed into a mid-century doctrine of 'separate spheres', whereby men were figured as competitors in the economic realm while women were positioned either as decorative trophies or spiritual guardians of men's immortal souls. From the 1860s, to this social construct the Darwinian theory of 'survival of the fittest' added a pseudo-scientific dimension that placed men higher on the evolutionary ladder.
The man's power is active, progressive, defensive. He is eminently the doer, the creator, the discoverer, the defender. His intellect is