I’ve been reading another of those random books I’ve acquired in lieu of payment for a book review, something I wrote about previously. This time I want to turn my attention to a book called ‘The Spectacle of Intimacy: a Public Life for the Victorian Family´, by Karen Chase and Michael Levenson. More specifically I want to look at one particular chapter, describing the life of Sarah Stickney Ellis (1799-1872), a woman of whom I’d never previously heard, although she was clearly famous and influential in her time. Her writings seem a bizarre mixture of ideas, encapsulating much of the confusion about domesticity and the place of women in the early Victorian period. As an apologist for the inferiority of woman she seems to have been right at the forefront in her day and yet, beneath this stated position she seems actually to have had a pretty poor opinion of men. She wrote a series of books with titles such as ‘The Women of England’ and ‘The Wives of England’ (she doesn’t seem to have noticed the rest of the UK) in which she put across her philosophy, as summed up in the following sentence:
It is quite possible you may have more talent [than your husband], with higher attainments, and you may also have been generally more admired, but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.
This is not a sentiment which is likely to be much admired now, or one which women in academia would consciously adopt. However, it may be one that somehow feeds into the medley of reasons why women opt out in greater numbers than men from careers and then can’t find their way back (as described here). Women, still, are statistically likely to be the trailing spouse, the one whose career is put on hold when the children are born (as I’ve discussed previously here and here) but who may never quite get back onto the fast track. I may be the exception that proves the rule, but on average it tends to be the man’s career which is nurtured at the expense of the woman’s, although I doubt anyone – male or female – would explicitly state the position as starkly as Stickney Ellis did these days.
What is more surprising about this attitude is that before she married, relatively late in life, she had had a perfectly successful career as an independent woman writing under her own name of Sarah Stickney (unlike, say, the Brontё’s who hid under male pseudonyms) and priding herself as able to make herself financially able to support herself and her dependent family members (her sisters’ children for instance) and warned her husband-to-be, the Reverend William Ellis (previously a missionary in the Pacific region), that
The kind of life I have led has tended very much to confirm a strength of will which, in my childhood, was, I believe, almost without equal. What will you do with such a companion?
In practice, what seems to have happened is that she adopted an apparently subservient position, albeit there is a degree of independence manifested by continuing to publish with her maiden name explicit even if rolled in with her husband’s. Yet, reading further about what she put down in her books, she appears to have seen men as poor deluded creatures, led astray by the call of Mammon. For the middle classes (for and about whom she was writing) she clearly felt that this false God was something of a recent phenomenon, but the fact that men got distracted by it was ‘the fault of the system’.
There is no union in the great field of action in which he is engaged; but envy, and hatred and opposition to the close of the day – every man’s hand against his brother, and each struggling to exalt himself, not merely by trampling upon his fallen foe, but by usurping the place of his weaker brother, who faints by his side, from not having brought an equal portion of strength into the conflict, and who is consequently borne down by numbers, hurried over and forgotten.
If that sounds like a description of life in the average university it is purely fortuitous; I suspect it is meant to refer to that dangerous and slightly dirty Victorian activity of ‘trade’, something with which the old-fashioned Aristocrat did not sully their hands.
She went further, spelling out the damage to the integrity of the typical male in a slightly superior female voice, despite her self-acknowledged inferiority as a woman:
We cannot believe of the fathers who watched over our childhood, of the husbands who shared our intellectual pursuits, of the brothers who went hand in hand with us in our love of poetry and nature, that they are all gone over to the side of mammon, that there does not lurk in some corner of their hearts a secret longing to return; yet every morning brings the same hurried and indifferent parting, every evening the same jaded, speechless, welcomeless return – until we almost fail to recognize the man, in the machine.’
So she is describing a situation where man has to work to earn his family’s bread, but does this in a brutal way whilst turning his back on the wife, the family, and the archetypal hearth over which the woman presides. The woman, in her inferiority, has to be content with organisation and ruling over her domestic sphere, but with precious little input from her partner. So we see set in train the middle class woman being given her place, where she must stay; indeed where, for the vast majority of women she did stay until after the 2nd World War. Remember it is only in the 1944 Education Act, for instance, that women were finally allowed to continue working as teachers after marriage. Many other professions similarly made women give up working upon marriage. In her domestic sphere all the Victorian middle-class woman might hope to do is influence her children (at least until the boys are sent away to some suitable public school such as Rugby or Marlborough) and train and oversee the servants, little more. Indeed the woman’s lot is summed up, by Stickney Ellis, as
[their] whole life, from the cradle to the grave, is one of feeling, rather than of action; whose highest duty is so often to suffer and be still; whose deepest enjoyments are all relative; who has nothing, and is nothing, of herself;
Somehow Stickney Ellis manages to convince herself that this is the right way to proceed. Her writings were clearly influential at the time and were contributory factors in the delay surrounding many advances for women, including laws regarding women’s property after marriage, child custody and divorce – topics discussed further in the book. I can only be grateful I am not a contemporary of hers, condemned to ‘suffer and be still’ and not pursue my intellectual pursuits just because I am married and must remain ‘inferior’.
