The Victorian Era

What Was Life Like for a Victorian Wife

Article · Society & Daily Life · The Victorian Era, 1837–1901

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The legal, economic, and social position of a Victorian wife was defined by the doctrine of coverture, the common-law rule that a married woman’s legal personality was “covered” by that of her husband. Under coverture, a wife could not own property in her own name, could not enter into a contract, could not sue or be sued, could not make a will, and could not keep her own wages. Her earnings, her inheritance, and even the children of the marriage were, in law, the property of her husband. The Victorian period was, however, the period in which these disabilities were gradually dismantled: by the Married Women’s Property Act 1882, a woman could own, earn, and inherit in her own right; by the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857, she could petition for divorce; and by the Infant Custody Act 1839, she could obtain custody of her children under seven, rising to sixteen in 1873. The life of a Victorian wife therefore varied enormously by class, by region, by decade, and by the temperament of her husband; but it was always, in some sense, a life lived in the shadow of the doctrine of coverture.

The common law of coverture came under sustained attack from the 1830s onwards. The Infant Custody Act 1839 gave a separated wife the right to petition the Court of Chancery for custody of her children under the age of seven, “such application being made within six calendar months after the decree of separation.” The Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 established the new Divorce Court in London, which for the first time allowed a wife to petition for divorce on the ground of her husband’s adultery combined with cruelty, desertion, bigamy, or incest; between 1861 and 1900 the number of divorces in England and Wales rose from 1 in 200 marriages to 1 in 130. The Married Women’s Property Act 1870 gave a wife the right to keep her own earnings and to inherit and bequeath personal property up to a value of £200, and the Married Women’s Property Act 1882, the decisive statute, gave her the right to own, control, and dispose of all property, real and personal, in her own name. The Acts of 1870 and 1882, and the amending Act of 1893, were the work of a small but determined band of reformers, including the Married Women’s Property Committee of 1871 (chaired by the Liberal MP Russell Gurney), the women lawyers of the new Incorporated Law Society, and the campaigning newspaperwoman Lydia Becker, the secretary of the Manchester National Society for Women’s Suffrage.

The legal age of marriage was also a matter of statute law. Until the Age of Marriage Act 1929, the common-law rule held that a girl of twelve (with parental consent) or sixteen (without) and a boy of fourteen (with consent) could be married; in practice, the age of marriage in the working class was around 23 for the bride and 25 for the groom, and in the middle class it was 25 to 28 for both. The right of the wife to refuse the sexual advances of her husband was not established in English law until the case of R v. Clarence (1888) and the more general principle of marital rape was not recognised until the late twentieth century.

The Domestic Life of the Victorian Wife

The domestic ideal of the Victorian wife was codified in the conduct books of the period. The most influential of these was Sarah Stickney Ellis’s The Women of England, their Social Duties and Domestic Habits (1839), which ran to sixteen editions in twenty years; Isabella Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861); Mrs Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888) and her other novels of the domestic vocation; and the immense literature of the “Angel in the House,” the title given to Coventry Patmore’s poem of married love published in four parts between 1854 and 1862. The ideal wife was pious, modest, and self-sacrificing, the centre of the household, the guardian of the children’s morals, the support of her husband’s career, and the manager of the servants, the linen, the larder, the accounts, and the social calendar.

The middle-class wife of the period was in practice the manager of a small kingdom. She was responsible for the engagement and discipline of the servants; the planning and supervision of the meals; the care of the children, their clothes, their health, their early education, and their moral and religious instruction; the maintenance of the linen, the silver, the plate, the glass, the porcelain, the pictures, and the wine; the keeping of the household accounts; the entertainment of guests; the calling, the calling-cards, the visiting, the letter-writing, and the social calendar of the London Season, the country house party, the seaside holiday, the christening, the confirmation, the wedding, the funeral. The social life of the period centred on the wife’s drawing room, and the wife’s morning calls, her visiting list, and her “at homes” were the basis of the social life of the neighbourhood. The work of the wife was unending; the most able of the period managed it with a system of bell-pulls, card-indexes, and despatch books that is the subject of any number of household manuals of the period.

The Working Wife

The working-class wife had a very different life. According to the 1851 census, some 40 per cent of women over the age of 20 were in the paid labour force, of whom half were married; in the mining and textile districts of the north of England, in the Lancashire cotton mills, in the hosiery and lace trades of the Midlands, and in the chain-making and nail-making industries of the Black Country, the wife was commonly a wage-earner as well as a housekeeper. The Mines and Collieries Act 1842 had forbidden the employment of women and girls underground, but the work of the pit brow women of Lancashire, who sorted coal on the pithead surface, was a feature of the mining districts until the 1880s. Outside the factories, the working wife took in washing, did needlework, took in lodgers, kept a small shop, sold milk or eggs, or worked as a charwoman, a laundry maid, a dressmaker, or a milliner; the typical labouring wife of the period was working a sixteen- to eighteen-hour day between the home and the outside job.

The working wife of the period was, of course, the principal subject of the social-reform campaigns of the period. The Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 gave her the legal right to keep her own earnings; the Infant Custody Act of 1839 gave her the right to her children; the Factory Acts of 1844 and 1847 gave her some protection in the mills; and the Education Acts of 1870, 1880, 1891, and 1902 lifted the burden of infant schooling from her shoulders. The new trade unionism of the 1880s and 1890s, with the Women’s Trade Union League founded in 1874 by Emma Paterson, brought the working wife into the labour movement for the first time.

The Cultural Ideal and Its Discontents

The cultural ideal of the “Angel in the House” was, of course, contested. The great Victorian novelists, from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–72) and Daniel Deronda (1876) to Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), to George Gissing’s The Odd Women (1893), were engaged in a sustained examination of the limits of the marriage bond; the “new woman” novelists of the 1890s — Sarah Grand, Mona Caird, George Egerton — wrote a series of polemical novels against the institution of marriage; and the “Wife-torture” controversy of 1888, which began with an article by the social reformer Frances Power Cobbe in the Fortnightly Review, brought the domestic violence of the marriage bond into the open. The Married Women’s Property Acts and the Infant Custody Acts were the legislative responses to a sustained movement of opinion; the women of the late Victorian period were no longer content with the legal personality of the wife of 1837.