The Victorian Era: Women's Suffrage

Victorian Women, and what did they achieve through the first Women’s movement? The place of women in society and their struggle over the centuries for getting gender equality has been in the spotlight of history. Victorian women’s lives were differed significantly by its uniqueness, and with the women’s movement, they managed to sign crucial adjustments in the history of whole feminism.

The day when Alexandrina Vitoria became the queen of the United Kingdom, a new era began in the history of Britain and it continued for 63 years and seven months. Undoubtedly, it was one of the crucial periods of history not only in Britain and her colonies but also in some countries like the United States. These years are distinguished by many phenomena in Britain like the Industrial Revolution, numerous inventions, political reform and growth in the economy, developments in educational and literary fields, new steps toward human rights, the first women's movement, and many others. The Victorian society was a class-based society and it was divided into the upper class which was formed by the prosperous families of the time, Aristocrats, Nobles, Dukes, the middle class which was the second in social ranking, and were included by businessmen, shopkeepers, merchants, also bankers, doctors, etc. and finally the working class that was the lowest class of the period and it consisted of many unqualified workers, who were working in very harsh conditions and getting the lowest wages of time. So, life was not so easy for everyone who lived in the Victorian era. Another problem except for class discrimination in 19th century Britain was gender inequality.

There is no doubt that the life of Victorian women was not similar to today’s women’s lives. Who were the Victorian women, and how they were seen from the eyes of society and law? This question must be answered in order to grasp the main ideology behind the whole women’s movement of the 19th century.

Because of class inequality, the lives of women were also different. But in general, the Victorian women were seen as weak, incapable, powerless creatures; they have no right to decide for their own lives, they were a subjugation to men, their main role in life to marry, take care of their husbands, children, and deal with household. Coventry Patmore’s poem 'the Angel in the House' formed the widespread Victorian image of the ideal woman (wife) which has dedicated their lives and be obedient to their husbands. The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all pure. This persona has been supported by society and domesticity and servility to the husbands were propagated by several books and journals. The books like “Household Management” by Isabella Beeton and “Home Words for Heart and Heath” by Charles Bullock advised women on how to become the perfect housewife. So, women were believed that the only respectable career for a woman is marriage, and they don’t need to be educated and experienced in significant fields of science. Consequently, “Strong-minded” was one of the most abusive terms that could be applied to a woman, and even the most dedicated feminists strove to avoid being so labeled, although men never actually claimed that they preferred their women feeble-minded.

Although the lives of women were akin to “slavery” ; being a single, unmarried woman and a married woman were distinct in Victorian society, even in the same social class. Single woman and childless woman’s position was ambiguous for they did not belong to any rightful status. A single woman was fated to suffer; her inability to give birth to children owing to her single status estranged her from the familiar notions of femininity. They became masculinized hags; they were seen as the transgressor of the Victorian norm and were considered low. The fear of being marginalized made women embrace Marriage since the sexual partnership was believed to make partners happy.

The Victorian era was a period of inequality in genders and definitely giving absolute freedom to men. Women were seen as subordination to men, and it was not only from the eyes of ordinary people but clergymen and Christianity were also confirming it as well. “Wives should be subject to their husbands as to the Lord… Christ is the head of the church and saves the whole body, so is a husband the head of his wife; and as the church is subject to Christ, so should wives be to their husbands, in everything.” In his essay “The Subjection of Women”, English philosopher John Stuart Mill writes: “All women are brought up from their very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of man; not self-will and self-government by self-control, but submission and yielding to the control of others”. Queen Victoria’s devotion to her husband and dedication to her family made her the icon of 19th-century middle-class femininity and domesticity.

There were many issues that proved to us the inequality of genders in 19th century Britain. In fact, married women had no independent legal identity in the eyes of the law: husband and wife were deemed to be one person, and that person was the husband. Once a woman married, she became the de facto property of her husband. Her goods became his. He could beat her and rape her without fearing the law, provided he did not kill her. There was another law “Rule of Thumb” which allowed husbands to beat their wives with a stick no thicker than a man’s thumb and to lock them in a room if they wished, which was legitimate until 1891.

The hurdles the women faced were captured by the editor of The Times in 1868 when he wrote: “No woman has yet pretended to be on a level with men in physical strength. The fact is that physical strength has a good deal to do with politics in innumerable ways, and, for that reason alone, women are not capable of holding their own in the rough contests of the world. If they attempted to do it, they would sacrifice that delicacy, that gentleness, that submission that are now their most potent charms. They have at present the privileges and the protection of the weak. Let them undertake to defend themselves, and they must be content with the bare rights they can enforce. Instead of gaining any additional rights, they would risk some of the rights they possess; and they would inevitably lose the peculiar influence which is now derived from their very subordination”.

Ultimately, Victorian women were the people who lived between the years 1837-1901, deprived of many human rights and seen as weak, but didn’t obey this belief, fought back, and acquired many legal rights.

We observe substantial progress in 19th century Britain in many fields and the social status of women. The women who were already exhausted from the gender inequality and cruelty of male domination gradually demanded greater economic and social opportunities, and more political and legal rights, which triggered the women’s movement. The women’s movement was expanded during the 19th century but, even in the 18th century, there were advocators of women's rights and Mary Wollstonecraft was one of them and founding feminist philosophers, who was the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) that influenced her successors. She refused the common view which accepted the women’s subordination to the men and demanded gender equality.

Just from the 1830s women managed to get results for their demands. One of the most important acts of the Victorian period, which was directly concerning women and became a landmark in women’s rights was the Infant Custody Act of 1839. It happened when the writer Caroline Norton, wanted to divorce her husband in the 1830s and searched for legal amends which let her divorce his husband and have custody. At first, she got custody of her 7 years old boy, later she was allowed to get the custody of the other two boys.

Years of the 1840s succeed in the field of education of women. Most families from the middle and upper classes considered the education of their daughters as a needless expense, and for them, it was more important to get some income by making their daughters work in factories and other places. In the 1830s there were few girls’ schools worthy of the name, as opposed to establishments that taught deportment, dancing, French, and how to manage servants. Until the late 1840s, there was nothing for women that resembled higher education. Florence Nightingale was one of the women of the period who struggled for being a nurse and became the founder of modern nursing. Although she was coming from a wealthy background, she took part in the Crimean War as a trainer of nurses and contributed to the establishment of the nursing school at St Thomas' Hospital in London. And the first institution for the higher education of women in Great Britain-Bedford College was founded by the British social reformer Elizabeth Jesser Reid in 1849.

There were several attempts in the 1840s and early 1850s to bring in a divorce law that would treat women fairly. In 1854 a bill was suggested by the lord chancellor to the House of Lords about widening the scope of divorces, but it was delayed for the next year. However, Matrimonial Causes Act finally passed into law in 1857. As a result, while there were three divorce cases in 1857, in 1858 it reached 300.

The first women's suffrage organization of the United Kingdom Sheffield Female Political Association was established in February 1851 by several Sheffield women under the leadership of Anne Kent and Anne Knight. In the same year, they presented a petition in support of the suffrage of adult women to the House of Lords, which became unsuccessful.

Another feminist activist association that was supporting women's right to employment and education, was The Langham Place Circle which was formed in the late 1850s by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, Bessie Rayner Parkes, Emily Faithfull, and other talented, active, young women. With the help of the Circle “English Woman’s Journal” began publication in 1858. The Journal had paramount importance at the beginning of the women's movement. It quickly became the major organ of publicity and propaganda for the cause, the first real form for the discussion of women's problems.

In the 1860s Britain gave the extension to male suffrage, and it raised the feminists for female suffrage. John Stuart Mill had tried unsuccessfully to push the point by organizing petitions to be presented to parliament in 1866, 1867, and 1868. In 1867 the National Society for Women's Suffrage was established by Lydia Becker, but it was not effective. And in May 1870 Jacob Bright presented a bill demanding votes for women and drew attention to the unfairness of their pay: “There is not a male and female rate of taxation, but there is a male and female rate of wages and earnings. Women everywhere, with a few remarkable exceptions, are getting far less money than men; they have to work much longer for the same money, and they are even paid much less when they are doing precisely the same work”. Unfortunately, his bill was rejected by the MPs of the parliament.

In 1870 women come down with another success, The Married Women's Property Act that allowed married women to be the legal owners of the money they earned and to inherit property. A wider campaign was already underway for property rights for women, led by Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, the leading feminist of the 1850s. She was an educationalist and women's rights activist and worked hard to reform the married women's property laws.

The years of 1870-1880 has a particular significance in the women’s movement. Many women like Millicent Garrett Fawcett and Jane Ronniger organized meetings throughout whole Britain and managed to collect 200,000 signatures a year to support votes for women. Millicent Fawcett was a political leader of Britain's largest women's rights organization, the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, who wanted to get a female franchise via legal ways. Due to the lobbying of women and their supporters, the subject was debated in the House of Commons every year (excluding 1874) from 1870 to 1879. The debates continued beyond this time, although with less frequency. From 1886 onwards every vote taken showed that the majority of MPs favored women’s suffrage. In spite of this, it was still not permitted to become law.

Although women were getting new achievements every year, they were not supported by their female monarch. In a private letter of 1870, Queen 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. Were women to unsex themselves by claiming equality with men, they would become the most hateful, heathen and disgusting of beings and would surely perish without male protection.”

There were many arguments against women’s suffrage at those years, like:

• Women are by nature and also according to God and the Bible meant to be subordinated to men
• Men are made for public life, women for private
• It was a Trojan Horse: if you let them vote then soon, they’d demand to become MPs, which, it was self-evident, would be absurd
• Men are logical, stable, thoughtful and strong-minded; women are ornamental, quick-tempered, illogical, fickle and emotional
• If women had votes they would outnumber male voters, parliament would become feminised and Britain the laughingstock of the world.

In 19th Britain, most working-class women labored in manufacturing works, or in domestic service for richer households or in family industries in order to support their families. However, the incomes of women were vital in the life of the family’s existence their work was often thought of as minor and less important, and they were getting less salary than men. But two strikes that took place in the 19th century, Dewsbury woolen weavers (1875) which later led to the formation one of the early trade unions, and the Byrant and May match factory strike (1888) which got some support from the London Trades Council and all their demands were met, improved many minds, and women get more and more attention and succeeded the changes.

Women’s movement towards their rights and women’s suffrage increased and got encouragement for over the years, and finally, in 1918, during the reign of King George V, an act was passed giving women over the age of 30 the vote. And only in 1928, 60 years after campaigning began, parliament finally equalized the voting age between men and women.