Victorian murders: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher

[mariness]

Ah, Victorian England: prim, proper and also touched by the occasionally horribly gruesome murder of a three year old, as detailed in Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher, which I just finished and highly recommend

Comments

[esmeraldus_neo]

Somewhere in this blog http://catsmeatshop.blogspot.com/

...there is a post about women's employment in the Victorian era. It includes several female doctors. They weren't common, but they existed. It includes a link to the census data from which it came--that's in the sidebar.

I can't find it now, I have to go to work. But I thought you might find it interesting anyway.

[mariness]

The first page of that blog mentions women working as librarians, so, yes, my point again.

[houseboatonstyx]

Gaskell's North and South has quite a bit about the Servant Problem, focusing on the (ex-) servants' side: the poor girls who 'should' have gone into service, but prefer to go into factories instead.

[mariness]

That social/employment trend gets two sentences in this book - the local villagers hate the middle class guy because he's trying to enforce child-labor laws at local factories and get the factories to hire men, not women. It's not a big deal in this book at all (since it has nothing to do with the murder) but this tension was definitely in the background.

With Victorian literature in general, yes - Gaskell dealt with the issues of shifting opportunities for women, as did Anne Bronte and several other authors. Even Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno which I am combing through now and not enjoying, which has a vaguely misogynistic narrator who mostly only talks to the upper classes and one alien from outer space, and which in general is not at all interested in women's rights, has a number of working women, and its conversation about labor is relatively gender neutral.

(Since I brought it up I am stunned at just how boring a book that has a random space alien showing up for tea can be, but that's a separate post.)

[houseboatonstyx]

Chesterton did a satirical poem about a new mother whose baby was sent to a nursery so the mother could be 'liberated' from baby care and 'free' to go back to her factory job pulling a handle.

He did a prose essay about women home-making having more freedom (to do things their own way) than factory workers.

Somebody, maybe him, in an economic essay, talked about there being little difference in two daughters' jobs, one at the telephone exchange (privately owned) and one at the post office (socialism). Low class, mechanical, routine jobs.

[magnet5]

I've never heard anything good about sylvie and bruno other than the Gardener's Song.

[cardinalximinez]

I think the perception is not so much that women didn't work, but that women didn't do "men's" work, particularly high-paying factory work in large numbers.

I also think the perspective is colored because so many stories / movies / TV shows focus on the upper classes, where the women would be insulted if you suggest they get a job. Nevermind the female maids and cooks working their asses off in the background (at the moment, I'm thinking of Downton Abbey, but that's not even the right time period). I think that we take away "the female protagonist wouldn't work," and eventually make some mental shortcuts and end up at "Victorian women didn't work."

PS. I'm speaking with absolutely no authority here, as most of my reference knowledge comes from TV.

[mariness]

Oh, I totally agree about entertainment focusing on the upper classes and Downton Abbey and all that, and most of these tend to focus on the upper class not working. I mean, in Pride and Prejudice that excellent landlord Mr. Darcy writes some letters early in the book/adaptation and later he has some business with his steward, and that's supposedly an aristocrat doing his job. In Persuasion the baronet has not been doing his job at all (whatever it is) and he has to gasp, gasp, go and live in a luxury house in Bath where he still doesn't do anything as far as I can tell.

That said even in those upper class stories/movies/TV there's still women working - either in the background as servants or (more rarely) in the foreground doing stuff. Even Downton Abbey which has some of the most useless aristocrats around has Lady Sybil working as a nurse and Lady Edith doing journalism thingies, and Lady Mary is now going around the estate doing...I don't know what she's doing. Bad example

[landofnowhere]

Coming out of lurk because I find the discussion of professional women interesting.

I highly recommend /The Odd Women/ by George Gissing, an 1893 novel which explores the options then available to "respectable" women with little means of their own and little hope of marrying. It has a a large cast of women working in a variety of jobs, including business/secretarial work as well as the traditional feminine occupations of teaching and nursing. On the other hand, it has a lack of married women in the workforce -- the expectation seems to be that the husband will be able to support the wife financially. One couple (the only happily married couple in the book!) endures a 17-year engagement for this reason.

[mariness]

I will look it up, thanks! (Seventeen years????)

There's definitely an expectation in Victorian fiction, and probably in real life, that post marriage the women will either not work, or if they do work, will work inside the home - sewing, writing/editing, illustrating, or supporting whatever the respectable family business may be. But you still see a lot of working women called "Mrs" and not always as a courtesy title for the cook, either.

[landofnowhere]

(They're actually pretty minor characters, and are rather over the top... he's a stereotypical comic-relief absent-minded mathematician, and she's a teacher who has been supporting her blind sister, so not the most typical or realistic couple.)
Still, although there's talk of careers as a substitute for marriage, and critique of the Victorian concept of the women's sphere as it applies to married as well as single women, the book doesn't really explore the situations of married working women.