The Subjection of Women

The Victorian ideal of womanhood was crystallized in an 1854 long narrative poem entitled The Angel in the House by Coventry Palmer. The phrase evoked the ideal Victorian woman: submissive to her husband, with only his and their children’s needs at the forefront of her mind, her thoughts and desires never venturing beyond the home that she imbued with calm and goodness by dint of her own purity. Victorians felt such “angels” must be protected from the harsh, corrupt world outside of domesticity, which was their justification for preventing women from voting, entering politics, or venturing into the workplace.

Palmer’s portrayal of a submissive woman whose sole reason for living is to please her husband came under attack by writers like John Stuart Mill, who understood that this conception of womanhood was based on the extent to which a woman’s husband could control and isolate her: “All women are brought up from the very earliest years in the belief that their ideal of character is the very opposite to that of men; not self-will, and government by self-control, but submission, and yielding to the control of others” (27). In learning to be docile and passive to attract a husband—a primary avenue for securing financial stability—women come to embrace the very ideologies and institutions designed to oppress them: