Normal Women, page 44
There was a boom in prostitution in the eighteenth century, mostly women selling sex when other work could not be had or was paid so poorly that a single woman worker could not survive. Prostitutes were so widely used that philosopher Bernard Mandeville wrote A Modest Defence of Public Stews in 1724, arguing that there should be state-run brothels to allow men to satisfy themselves, safe from criminals and venereal disease. In London alone the police estimated there to be 7,261 prostitutes in 1851.220 By the 1900s, this had risen to 50,000,221 and to 80,000 by the middle of the century.222 The Westminster Review of 1850 reported even higher numbers – it claimed up to 360,000 prostitutes were working in the capital – a quarter of all the working women in the city.223 The Vagrancy Acts of 1822, 1834 and 1844 included a clause that forbade ‘soliciting’ for sex and living off ‘immoral earnings’; but while there was a belief in the imperative needs of men, there was little real determination to reduce the numbers of available women. The law against soliciting was largely used against homosexual men, and the ‘immoral earnings’ clause mostly directed against male pimps. Prostitution by women on the streets, in ale houses, bawdy houses and high-class brothels was tacitly allowed. Women apprehended on the streets were rarely arrested for soliciting – only if they were indiscreet, when they would usually be charged with being disorderly, drunk or vagrants: ‘Of the several hundred prostitutes who appear in the charge books of Saint James’ in London between 1733 and 1739 many give false names, the favourite being Miss Nobody.’224
Such women must have felt like ‘nobodies’. Social reformer and journalist Henry Mayhew called a meeting of needleworkers in London in 1849, and an anonymous older woman told him:
The most I can earn is about 3s 6d a week. I get my lodging only from the person that employs me. I’m sometimes obliged to work till twelve at night for my 3s 6d; and now in these short days I can scarcely earn anything. I’ve been obliged often to go to prostitution. These twelve years I haven’t been altogether on the streets, but have been almost as bad. I can scarcely earn, sir, what I eat. I think the small number of us present arises from the shame of the women to come . . . But I’m not ashamed to tell the troubles I’ve had through distress. Bad payment for the work obliges us to do wrong. It’s against our will to do such a thing. And now, for a woman of my years, it’s getting almost more than I can bear, sir.225
A guide to London prostitutes, published annually, was priced at 2s 6d a copy and sold around 8,000 copies a year for 18 years from 1757 until it fell out of fashion. It described up to 200 women working as prostitutes in such detail that the booklet may have been bought and used for masturbation – but the descriptions were often based on real women, and may have been accurate in the language of the time:
Sally Robinson Maiden Lane
The origin of this lady is a little obscure, but she sold sausages about the streets till above 15 years old, when the celebrated Mrs Cole had a casual sight of her maidenhead for thirty guineas, out of which she generously made Sal a present of five shillings, to cure her of the clap, which she got from her deflowerer. She is a tall fat girl, but not ungenteel, nor her face disagreeable but she is as mercenary as the devil, which lessens all her other good qualities.226
The list includes young women:
Miss – 44 Newman-street, Oxford St
This petite belle has not yet attained her sixteenth year, and to make amends for her deficiency of height, she is elegantly formed, nor does she lack beauty . . . Two guineas will bring you better acquainted with this charmer nor will you have cause for disagreeable reflections from her acquaintance.227
The list also includes a rare mention of a Jewish woman. I quote the misogyny and antisemitism for the benefit of accuracy:
Miss Lawr-e, No 6, Church- St. Annes Soho
The religion of the Jews will not permit them to eat pork, or feast with Christians; how strictly this lady may adhere to particulars in her articles of faith we cannot positively tell; but this we can say for truth, that she has not the least objection to Christian concupiscence, and will open her synagogue of love, even on the Sabbath, either to Jew, Turk or Infidel, if they think proper to call on her as above. This young Israelite renounced her Levitical friends for the sake of a Christian, who gave her inward proofs of a new faith, which were so convincing to her, that she has continued a thorough orthodox convert ever since. She is of a sprightly disposition, has good teeth, dark hair, black eyes, a Roman nose, a fresh colour, of a middle size, and is very wanton in her looks.228
A List of Covent Garden Ladies describing prostitutes and their prices was published by ‘Mr Harris’ for 30 years from 1760 as a guide for two generations of elite male customers. By the 1830s, there were too many houses to describe: 900 brothels and 850 houses of ‘ill fame’.229
A few full-time professional prostitutes made a good living from sex but most of the women on the streets were selling sex for food, or a bed for the night, alcohol or gifts. Their numbers boomed as the breadwinner wage for men forced down women’s wages. A child thief, Ellen Reese, stated that ‘she did not become a regular prostitute till shoplifting failed – was miserable both ways, but going on the street was more profitable’.230
Ann Illiard and her daughter, fined and imprisoned for keeping a brothel, were probably arrested and convicted in April 1809 – not for managing a brothel but because of the ‘vast number of disorderly women’ and the ‘indecencies’ – ‘within fifty yards of a charity-school for females, in Cavendish court, Houndsditch’.231 The parish officers applied to Mrs Illiard, a widow, to close her house but she refused, telling them she had ‘no other means to obtain a livelihood’. They arrested her and her daughter. The court found the women guilty and fined the mother, aged 60, £150, and the daughter, who was about 30, £50: ‘The daughter then begged to say a word or two to the Court, in which she declared her innocence; said she had only been to see her mother, whose line of life she lamented; and that she was unable to pay even 50s. She added that the names they went by were not their real names, and that the premises belonged to others, who let them to her mother at a weekly rent, and who had now abandoned her. She then retired, apparently overpowered by her feelings.’232
The problem of sick and poor prostitutes inspired some elite philanthropists to open the first ‘Magdalen Hospital’ in London in 1758. Named for Mary Magdalen, the penitent prostitute forgiven by Jesus, they were not designed to help prostitutes as much as prevent women from entering prostitution. Young women who had been seduced or raped once were preferred: regular prostitutes were thought to be too difficult to reform. Anyone pregnant or with a sexually transmitted disease was directed to the lying-in hospitals for pauper women or the Lock hospitals – jails for the diseased. The poverty of working-class women meant that there were always far more applicants than places available. They applied once a week, queuing up for interviews, which were intended to discover ‘whether they had a heart to reform or just a desire for relief from poverty’.233
The London Magdalen admitted nearly 4,000 young women in fifty years from 1758. Most were taught domestic skills and left to go into service or returned to their birth families, while about 15 per cent were expelled for ‘improper behaviour’. A further fifth of the women left early or died.234 The Magdalen was run by male governors; but upper- and middle-class women were patrons. Its chapel, with the Magdalen Choir, became a fashionable church to attend, and the girls at work could be viewed by appointment; but they could refuse to be exhibited to previous employers or acquaintances. By 1800, about 300 Magdalen houses had been created across England, increasingly specialising in laundry work. Some evolved into homes where unmarried mothers were set to work and their illegitimate babies taken from them for adoption.
For elite women in England, the abuse of working-class women for sex could no longer be a secret prop for the sex-free marriages of the elite. The crisis of confidence in English superiority caused by the 1857 First War of Indian Independence spread widely. The moral superiority of the elite English home financially supported by a breadwinner husband and ornamented with a wife in her separate sphere no longer seemed successful at home and compelling abroad. Prostitutes challenged the picture of white male moral superiority as much as rioting Indians, and the women represented a visible flaw in the master race, a vector for disease, a sign that men were not as they claimed: morally and socially superior. How could England claim to be a master race, moving outwards to conquer the world, if it could not demonstrate moral superiority at home?
Rape
The widespread belief that elite men could use working-class women for sex probably caused a rise in middle- and upper-class men raping and a reluctance to report. Only one elite man was accused of child rape in London. Sir John Murry was found not guilty in 1719.235 A man publicly known as the ‘Rape-Master General of Great Britain’, Francis Charteris, was convicted of raping his servant Anne Bond, but pardoned by the king in April 1730.236 Of 45 rape cases heard at the Old Bailey from 1770 to 1799, nine (20 per cent of the recorded rapes) were committed by an employer or his kinsman on a servant. Most London rape cases seemed to be lower middling-class rapists and lower middling-class women acquaintances, or fellow workers; in only 27 per cent (12) of these cases was the assailant a stranger – perhaps because it was thought too difficult to find a man who had not been identified by the woman.237
In Surrey between 1660 and 1800, a rape case was brought to the assize court once every year and a half. In the Sussex courts over the same period, this happened even less frequently, on average one case every four years.238 In Surrey, twice as many women brought charges of attempted rape to the courts between 1660 and 1802 than for rape itself – 86 to 42239 – which probably reflected the jury’s willingness to convict on a lesser charge. At the Old Bailey in London between 1770 and 1800, 43 rape cases involving women and girls over the age of 12 were tried, 7 per cent (3 men) were found guilty, while in 15 cases in the North-East Assize Circuit over the same period, 13 per cent (2 men) were convicted.240
If the victim of rape was under the age of nine, it was considered rape regardless of any argument brought by the accused.241 The death penalty for adult rape or for sex with a child under the age of ten was abolished in 1841; it had been in effect since 1540.
Local women had authority in rape and incest cases. Juries of matrons might inspect a victim for virginity or disease or pregnancy, report on her reputation and even recommend a verdict.242 A woman’s prior reputation was a deciding factor, and other women would attest to it. But in 1836, all defendants accused of all crimes were given the right to have a defence lawyer to speak for them, to interrogate witnesses and to challenge evidence against them.
Rape cases became a theatre in which qualified and highly educated men rehearsed explanations and excuses for an accused rapist. Upper-class lawyers questioned a poor woman complaining of rape about her character, history and reliability. The village women who knew her no longer made their contribution. This was devastating for women reporting a rape, who now found themselves facing a hostile interrogation as the prime witness of a crime done against them.243
Sport
In London in 1768, the greatest tennis player in England, Mr Tomkins, was beaten 2–1 by a 40-year-old French woman, Mme Bunel, who wore ‘a short skirt and an easy jacket, which placed no restraint upon the activity with which she flew from side to side of the Court’.
Furious gamblers who had backed Mr Tomkins called for a rematch. Mme Bunel accepted the challenge and played the champion again, for a considerable purse. It was an important political and social occasion, attended by the French ambassador and the nobility. Mme Bunel beat him again, this time 4–2.244
A woman horse rider, Alicia Meynel, challenged her brother-in-law, Captain Flint, to a race over four miles in 1804, and she led for most of the race on her mare, Vinagrillo, before she had to pull her horse up, lame. A reported 10,000 spectators watched the race, some carrying signs that read ‘PETTICOATS FOREVER’. A huge purse of £3,000 was offered in a return challenge, which was taken up by Mr Bromford, who withdrew during the race. The following year Alicia Meynel challenged the most successful jockey in England, Francis Buckle, three-time winner of the Derby, with a string of classic winners behind him. Before a crowd reported to be 30,000 strong, the two raced to an extremely close finale, with Alicia Meynel beating the champion by half-a-neck in a storming finish – and she was riding side-saddle.245
English rower Ann Glanville achieved national fame in 1842, becoming known as the champion female rower of the world, beating the ten best male crews in France. She raced pilot gigs with an all-female crew. Ann married John Glanville, who worked as a waterman on the River Tamar, raised 14 children and took on the job of waterman when her husband was ill.246
Defining Girls and Training Ladies
The Romantic movement opposed swaddling a baby on a board, preferring a freer, more tactile relationship. More babies were breast-fed as parents were warned that a baby might be morally corrupted or infected by a wet nurse. Attachment to the mother became fashionable even among the upper classes and endorsed the belief that women were not sexual but highly maternal.
From the 1700s, the availability of washable textiles – cotton, linen and muslin – meant that even working-class parents could afford to dress babies in white gowns until they started to crawl, when the gowns were hemmed up to make ‘short coats’, with no distinction between boys and girls. But the increasingly strident teaching that there were only two rigidly defined sexes with no variation meant that it became vital to identify the sex of a baby at birth and raise a child to suit his or her future. The state registration of births in 1837 required the father to decide the sex of his child at birth and register him or her (there were no other options) with the authorities. Behaviour appropriate to the defined sex was taught to children from an early age. Sarah Stickney Ellis wrote in 1843: ‘Boys were accustomed to a mode of treatment as much calculated to make them determined, frank and bold, as that of girls to induce the opposite extremes of weakness, artifice, and timid helplessness.’247
It was a struggle to teach healthy girls to restrain and repress themselves; but the elite clothes, with tight bodices and long skirts, crushed lungs and stomach and limited mobility. Women’s fashions disabled growing girls: ‘As women’s bodies were deformed from the age of two by metal stays that contracted their upper torsos (and rendered their health attractively delicate), so their minds were deformed by the injunctions to remain silent and silly.’248
This 1883 advertisement from Harper’s Magazine promotes matching ‘perfect health corsets’ for mother and child
[And Cover] ‘A Perfect Health Corset’, Harper’s Magazine, 1883 (Public domain)
The evangelical movement – a renewal of enthusiasm inside the Church of England – defined the middle-class home as the centre of moral virtue and women’s religiosity: ‘What can be found in the whole circle of fashionable pleasures that can produce such exquisite feelings of delight as the affectionate husband enjoys, when he returns home from the business and fatigue of the day, and finds his wife engaged in domestic cares?’249
The home was the best place for a lady; soon it was the only place for her. In the eighteenth century, the London streets that housed ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ became closed to elite women, who would not be seen in them, and by the nineteenth century only those streets designated as shopping streets were visited by ladies. Newspaper reports of rape cases in the early 1800s increased fear about the wider world, and soon it was widely believed that it was not safe for women on the streets.250
As women were idealised, impossible behaviour began to be demanded of them. Art critic and philosopher John Ruskin, disappointed first in his mother and then in his wife, fixed the blame fast: ‘There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice; but you women are answerable for it. Not in that you have provoked; but in that you have not hindered. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth; but the guilt of it lies with you.’251
The semi-enclosed lady of the house was the hallmark of the upper- and middle-class home. She became a model for aspirational middle-class families, who made their wives and daughters idle in order to qualify for entry to the upper classes. Even working-class families tried to demonstrate their prosperity and respectability by making wives and daughters unpaid. In 1849, Henry Mayhew, the great observer of the working people of London, said that: ‘The more respectable portion of the carpenters and joiners will not allow their wives to do any other work than attend to their domestic and family duties.’252
Young Victoria
The crowning of a young woman of 19 years old as queen of England in 1838 triggered an enthusiasm for the monarchy and offered a live model for the idealised elite woman. The doctrine of separate spheres designed to produce modest, delicate, semi-educated, non-productive girls had a prime example in the new queen. She had been raised in near-seclusion, protected by her strict mother from the loose-living royal court of her disreputable uncles. The emphasis upon her sheltered upbringing, her maidenly modesty and her dependence on her first prime minister, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, emphasised the subservience of all women – even a queen – as suggested by the theory of separate spheres.
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning imagined the young queen shedding tears on her coronation – because of her modesty as a girl, her innocence as a virgin and the overwhelming power of her emotions as a woman. Known as the ‘rose of England’, Victoria was contrasted with her unpopular predecessors – the Hanoverian kings: ‘England was sick of the coarse masculine vices of the Kings who went before her, of their greed for public money, of their gross bodies and grosser minds, their absurdities and want of decorum . . . The nation delighted to associate the ladylike manner, youthful freshness, and purity with the scepter and robes of state.’253
Such women must have felt like ‘nobodies’. Social reformer and journalist Henry Mayhew called a meeting of needleworkers in London in 1849, and an anonymous older woman told him:
The most I can earn is about 3s 6d a week. I get my lodging only from the person that employs me. I’m sometimes obliged to work till twelve at night for my 3s 6d; and now in these short days I can scarcely earn anything. I’ve been obliged often to go to prostitution. These twelve years I haven’t been altogether on the streets, but have been almost as bad. I can scarcely earn, sir, what I eat. I think the small number of us present arises from the shame of the women to come . . . But I’m not ashamed to tell the troubles I’ve had through distress. Bad payment for the work obliges us to do wrong. It’s against our will to do such a thing. And now, for a woman of my years, it’s getting almost more than I can bear, sir.225
A guide to London prostitutes, published annually, was priced at 2s 6d a copy and sold around 8,000 copies a year for 18 years from 1757 until it fell out of fashion. It described up to 200 women working as prostitutes in such detail that the booklet may have been bought and used for masturbation – but the descriptions were often based on real women, and may have been accurate in the language of the time:
Sally Robinson Maiden Lane
The origin of this lady is a little obscure, but she sold sausages about the streets till above 15 years old, when the celebrated Mrs Cole had a casual sight of her maidenhead for thirty guineas, out of which she generously made Sal a present of five shillings, to cure her of the clap, which she got from her deflowerer. She is a tall fat girl, but not ungenteel, nor her face disagreeable but she is as mercenary as the devil, which lessens all her other good qualities.226
The list includes young women:
Miss – 44 Newman-street, Oxford St
This petite belle has not yet attained her sixteenth year, and to make amends for her deficiency of height, she is elegantly formed, nor does she lack beauty . . . Two guineas will bring you better acquainted with this charmer nor will you have cause for disagreeable reflections from her acquaintance.227
The list also includes a rare mention of a Jewish woman. I quote the misogyny and antisemitism for the benefit of accuracy:
Miss Lawr-e, No 6, Church- St. Annes Soho
The religion of the Jews will not permit them to eat pork, or feast with Christians; how strictly this lady may adhere to particulars in her articles of faith we cannot positively tell; but this we can say for truth, that she has not the least objection to Christian concupiscence, and will open her synagogue of love, even on the Sabbath, either to Jew, Turk or Infidel, if they think proper to call on her as above. This young Israelite renounced her Levitical friends for the sake of a Christian, who gave her inward proofs of a new faith, which were so convincing to her, that she has continued a thorough orthodox convert ever since. She is of a sprightly disposition, has good teeth, dark hair, black eyes, a Roman nose, a fresh colour, of a middle size, and is very wanton in her looks.228
A List of Covent Garden Ladies describing prostitutes and their prices was published by ‘Mr Harris’ for 30 years from 1760 as a guide for two generations of elite male customers. By the 1830s, there were too many houses to describe: 900 brothels and 850 houses of ‘ill fame’.229
A few full-time professional prostitutes made a good living from sex but most of the women on the streets were selling sex for food, or a bed for the night, alcohol or gifts. Their numbers boomed as the breadwinner wage for men forced down women’s wages. A child thief, Ellen Reese, stated that ‘she did not become a regular prostitute till shoplifting failed – was miserable both ways, but going on the street was more profitable’.230
Ann Illiard and her daughter, fined and imprisoned for keeping a brothel, were probably arrested and convicted in April 1809 – not for managing a brothel but because of the ‘vast number of disorderly women’ and the ‘indecencies’ – ‘within fifty yards of a charity-school for females, in Cavendish court, Houndsditch’.231 The parish officers applied to Mrs Illiard, a widow, to close her house but she refused, telling them she had ‘no other means to obtain a livelihood’. They arrested her and her daughter. The court found the women guilty and fined the mother, aged 60, £150, and the daughter, who was about 30, £50: ‘The daughter then begged to say a word or two to the Court, in which she declared her innocence; said she had only been to see her mother, whose line of life she lamented; and that she was unable to pay even 50s. She added that the names they went by were not their real names, and that the premises belonged to others, who let them to her mother at a weekly rent, and who had now abandoned her. She then retired, apparently overpowered by her feelings.’232
The problem of sick and poor prostitutes inspired some elite philanthropists to open the first ‘Magdalen Hospital’ in London in 1758. Named for Mary Magdalen, the penitent prostitute forgiven by Jesus, they were not designed to help prostitutes as much as prevent women from entering prostitution. Young women who had been seduced or raped once were preferred: regular prostitutes were thought to be too difficult to reform. Anyone pregnant or with a sexually transmitted disease was directed to the lying-in hospitals for pauper women or the Lock hospitals – jails for the diseased. The poverty of working-class women meant that there were always far more applicants than places available. They applied once a week, queuing up for interviews, which were intended to discover ‘whether they had a heart to reform or just a desire for relief from poverty’.233
The London Magdalen admitted nearly 4,000 young women in fifty years from 1758. Most were taught domestic skills and left to go into service or returned to their birth families, while about 15 per cent were expelled for ‘improper behaviour’. A further fifth of the women left early or died.234 The Magdalen was run by male governors; but upper- and middle-class women were patrons. Its chapel, with the Magdalen Choir, became a fashionable church to attend, and the girls at work could be viewed by appointment; but they could refuse to be exhibited to previous employers or acquaintances. By 1800, about 300 Magdalen houses had been created across England, increasingly specialising in laundry work. Some evolved into homes where unmarried mothers were set to work and their illegitimate babies taken from them for adoption.
For elite women in England, the abuse of working-class women for sex could no longer be a secret prop for the sex-free marriages of the elite. The crisis of confidence in English superiority caused by the 1857 First War of Indian Independence spread widely. The moral superiority of the elite English home financially supported by a breadwinner husband and ornamented with a wife in her separate sphere no longer seemed successful at home and compelling abroad. Prostitutes challenged the picture of white male moral superiority as much as rioting Indians, and the women represented a visible flaw in the master race, a vector for disease, a sign that men were not as they claimed: morally and socially superior. How could England claim to be a master race, moving outwards to conquer the world, if it could not demonstrate moral superiority at home?
Rape
The widespread belief that elite men could use working-class women for sex probably caused a rise in middle- and upper-class men raping and a reluctance to report. Only one elite man was accused of child rape in London. Sir John Murry was found not guilty in 1719.235 A man publicly known as the ‘Rape-Master General of Great Britain’, Francis Charteris, was convicted of raping his servant Anne Bond, but pardoned by the king in April 1730.236 Of 45 rape cases heard at the Old Bailey from 1770 to 1799, nine (20 per cent of the recorded rapes) were committed by an employer or his kinsman on a servant. Most London rape cases seemed to be lower middling-class rapists and lower middling-class women acquaintances, or fellow workers; in only 27 per cent (12) of these cases was the assailant a stranger – perhaps because it was thought too difficult to find a man who had not been identified by the woman.237
In Surrey between 1660 and 1800, a rape case was brought to the assize court once every year and a half. In the Sussex courts over the same period, this happened even less frequently, on average one case every four years.238 In Surrey, twice as many women brought charges of attempted rape to the courts between 1660 and 1802 than for rape itself – 86 to 42239 – which probably reflected the jury’s willingness to convict on a lesser charge. At the Old Bailey in London between 1770 and 1800, 43 rape cases involving women and girls over the age of 12 were tried, 7 per cent (3 men) were found guilty, while in 15 cases in the North-East Assize Circuit over the same period, 13 per cent (2 men) were convicted.240
If the victim of rape was under the age of nine, it was considered rape regardless of any argument brought by the accused.241 The death penalty for adult rape or for sex with a child under the age of ten was abolished in 1841; it had been in effect since 1540.
Local women had authority in rape and incest cases. Juries of matrons might inspect a victim for virginity or disease or pregnancy, report on her reputation and even recommend a verdict.242 A woman’s prior reputation was a deciding factor, and other women would attest to it. But in 1836, all defendants accused of all crimes were given the right to have a defence lawyer to speak for them, to interrogate witnesses and to challenge evidence against them.
Rape cases became a theatre in which qualified and highly educated men rehearsed explanations and excuses for an accused rapist. Upper-class lawyers questioned a poor woman complaining of rape about her character, history and reliability. The village women who knew her no longer made their contribution. This was devastating for women reporting a rape, who now found themselves facing a hostile interrogation as the prime witness of a crime done against them.243
Sport
In London in 1768, the greatest tennis player in England, Mr Tomkins, was beaten 2–1 by a 40-year-old French woman, Mme Bunel, who wore ‘a short skirt and an easy jacket, which placed no restraint upon the activity with which she flew from side to side of the Court’.
Furious gamblers who had backed Mr Tomkins called for a rematch. Mme Bunel accepted the challenge and played the champion again, for a considerable purse. It was an important political and social occasion, attended by the French ambassador and the nobility. Mme Bunel beat him again, this time 4–2.244
A woman horse rider, Alicia Meynel, challenged her brother-in-law, Captain Flint, to a race over four miles in 1804, and she led for most of the race on her mare, Vinagrillo, before she had to pull her horse up, lame. A reported 10,000 spectators watched the race, some carrying signs that read ‘PETTICOATS FOREVER’. A huge purse of £3,000 was offered in a return challenge, which was taken up by Mr Bromford, who withdrew during the race. The following year Alicia Meynel challenged the most successful jockey in England, Francis Buckle, three-time winner of the Derby, with a string of classic winners behind him. Before a crowd reported to be 30,000 strong, the two raced to an extremely close finale, with Alicia Meynel beating the champion by half-a-neck in a storming finish – and she was riding side-saddle.245
English rower Ann Glanville achieved national fame in 1842, becoming known as the champion female rower of the world, beating the ten best male crews in France. She raced pilot gigs with an all-female crew. Ann married John Glanville, who worked as a waterman on the River Tamar, raised 14 children and took on the job of waterman when her husband was ill.246
Defining Girls and Training Ladies
The Romantic movement opposed swaddling a baby on a board, preferring a freer, more tactile relationship. More babies were breast-fed as parents were warned that a baby might be morally corrupted or infected by a wet nurse. Attachment to the mother became fashionable even among the upper classes and endorsed the belief that women were not sexual but highly maternal.
From the 1700s, the availability of washable textiles – cotton, linen and muslin – meant that even working-class parents could afford to dress babies in white gowns until they started to crawl, when the gowns were hemmed up to make ‘short coats’, with no distinction between boys and girls. But the increasingly strident teaching that there were only two rigidly defined sexes with no variation meant that it became vital to identify the sex of a baby at birth and raise a child to suit his or her future. The state registration of births in 1837 required the father to decide the sex of his child at birth and register him or her (there were no other options) with the authorities. Behaviour appropriate to the defined sex was taught to children from an early age. Sarah Stickney Ellis wrote in 1843: ‘Boys were accustomed to a mode of treatment as much calculated to make them determined, frank and bold, as that of girls to induce the opposite extremes of weakness, artifice, and timid helplessness.’247
It was a struggle to teach healthy girls to restrain and repress themselves; but the elite clothes, with tight bodices and long skirts, crushed lungs and stomach and limited mobility. Women’s fashions disabled growing girls: ‘As women’s bodies were deformed from the age of two by metal stays that contracted their upper torsos (and rendered their health attractively delicate), so their minds were deformed by the injunctions to remain silent and silly.’248
This 1883 advertisement from Harper’s Magazine promotes matching ‘perfect health corsets’ for mother and child
[And Cover] ‘A Perfect Health Corset’, Harper’s Magazine, 1883 (Public domain)
The evangelical movement – a renewal of enthusiasm inside the Church of England – defined the middle-class home as the centre of moral virtue and women’s religiosity: ‘What can be found in the whole circle of fashionable pleasures that can produce such exquisite feelings of delight as the affectionate husband enjoys, when he returns home from the business and fatigue of the day, and finds his wife engaged in domestic cares?’249
The home was the best place for a lady; soon it was the only place for her. In the eighteenth century, the London streets that housed ‘gentlemen’s clubs’ became closed to elite women, who would not be seen in them, and by the nineteenth century only those streets designated as shopping streets were visited by ladies. Newspaper reports of rape cases in the early 1800s increased fear about the wider world, and soon it was widely believed that it was not safe for women on the streets.250
As women were idealised, impossible behaviour began to be demanded of them. Art critic and philosopher John Ruskin, disappointed first in his mother and then in his wife, fixed the blame fast: ‘There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice; but you women are answerable for it. Not in that you have provoked; but in that you have not hindered. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth; but the guilt of it lies with you.’251
The semi-enclosed lady of the house was the hallmark of the upper- and middle-class home. She became a model for aspirational middle-class families, who made their wives and daughters idle in order to qualify for entry to the upper classes. Even working-class families tried to demonstrate their prosperity and respectability by making wives and daughters unpaid. In 1849, Henry Mayhew, the great observer of the working people of London, said that: ‘The more respectable portion of the carpenters and joiners will not allow their wives to do any other work than attend to their domestic and family duties.’252
Young Victoria
The crowning of a young woman of 19 years old as queen of England in 1838 triggered an enthusiasm for the monarchy and offered a live model for the idealised elite woman. The doctrine of separate spheres designed to produce modest, delicate, semi-educated, non-productive girls had a prime example in the new queen. She had been raised in near-seclusion, protected by her strict mother from the loose-living royal court of her disreputable uncles. The emphasis upon her sheltered upbringing, her maidenly modesty and her dependence on her first prime minister, William Lamb, Lord Melbourne, emphasised the subservience of all women – even a queen – as suggested by the theory of separate spheres.
Poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning imagined the young queen shedding tears on her coronation – because of her modesty as a girl, her innocence as a virgin and the overwhelming power of her emotions as a woman. Known as the ‘rose of England’, Victoria was contrasted with her unpopular predecessors – the Hanoverian kings: ‘England was sick of the coarse masculine vices of the Kings who went before her, of their greed for public money, of their gross bodies and grosser minds, their absurdities and want of decorum . . . The nation delighted to associate the ladylike manner, youthful freshness, and purity with the scepter and robes of state.’253
