EXPORTACION PERUANA

The Victorian era is associated with the ideal of domesticity and separation of male and female spaces into the public and the private respectively in the contemporary cultural imagination. These ideals were rooted in legal, socio-political and literary constructions of masculinity and femininity, and have subsequently reached us in different textual records and testimonies that are steeped within a male bourgeois frame. The political and legal status of women altered during the Victorian period and women’s social status changed slowly as the century progressed. The aim of this section is to cover a wide scope of time and themes ranging from legal conditions to medical interpretations of the female sex to give a panoramic view of the Victorians’ apprehension of the public and the private as gender-biased. Rather than providing an in-depth analysis, my intention is to settle the basis of the key tenets of the public/private dichotomy to later narrow down my analysis in subsequent sections to specific urban figures who challenged this ideology-infiltrated norm. First, I will take a look at women’s legal status and how this circumscribed her socio-political role. Then, I will argue that women’s role was both reflected in and rooted in literature of some renowned authors as John Ruskin and John Stuart Mill. Finally, I will consider the nineteenth-century view on female sexuality.

Considering the nineteenth-century woman in English legal history is to consider her as somebody with hardly any voice within the domain of patriarchal supremacy.

According to the common law, married women had no identity apart from their husbands, and a popular saying went: “husband and wife are one person, and the husband is that person” (Holcombe 4). Nevertheless, the socio-political underpinnings of the English common law rested on patriarchal values rooted in the ideology of domesticity. Thereby, the inequality in educational opportunities for men and women

was a fact as women’s access to higher education was limited. Women could not take a university degree until late 1870s and consequently, they were declined access from legal, medical and political professions. In other words, women were excluded from any public or official exercise of power and male values permeated the legal system as they dictated the law.

During the first half of the century women had no influence at all in the legal apparatus, and the lack of women’s rights was a reality inscribed in the legal code of coverture. The English common law regulated the status of woman to an inferior rank as she was always covered by a male superior, either father or husband. Lee Holcombe remarks that the law inflicted practical hardship on women because they were regarded as possessions of her husbands, and thereby deprived of independence, identity and self-respect (3). In fact, married women had the same legal status as criminals, lunatics, and minors—in other words “legally incompetent and irresponsible” (Holcombe 7).

According to the legalese of coverture, an adult unmarried woman was defined as feme sole in contrast to the feme couvert.¹⁷ Single women could manage their private property and sign documents. While women were minor or remained unmarried they would be kept under the family’s protection, and when married they would pass onto the hands of the husband. Women held a spousal inferiority in relation to their men and legal regulations placed wives under total control of their husbands. All her belongings, legal rights and even the children were considered as male possessions. According to the code of coverture, a man gained legal rights over his wife’s property at marriage as well as any property she acquired afterwards. Although, a husband could not “alienate his wife’s real property entirely”, he subsumed legal control over it and any other income deriving from her possessions belonged to him (Shanley 8). Subsequently,

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

17 The legal terms Feme sole and Feme couvert derive from French legalese and mean literally

“woman alone” and “covered woman” respectively. The latter implies that woman is under the legal

patriarchal legal regulations allocated women under male authority, depriving her of voice and independence. Instead, as Judith Walkowitz notices, “[women] lacked the cultural and political power to shape the world according to their own image. Although they tried to set the standards of sexual conduct, they did not control the instruments of state that would ultimately enforce these norms” (City 7).

The legal system rested on patriarchal constructions of femininity and sexual puritanism reinforced the subjection of women. For instance, during the first part of the nineteenth century, men could divorce their wives accusing her of adultery whereas women lacked this legal right until the Matrimonial Causes Act was passed in 1857.

However, this law did not put the spouses on equal terms. While the husband only had to prove his wife’s adultery with the help of a witness, the wife had to prove her husband’s guilt in combination with incest, bigamy, cruelty or neglect. Moreover, a divorced woman would lose all her possessions and the custody of the children. The divorce case of Codrington v Codrington and Anderson caused sensation in Victorian London when Admiral Henry Codrington accused his wife for adultery with Colonel Anderson. In her defence, Mrs Codrington denounced her husband for neglect and attempted rape on a friend to the family (the feminist Emily Faithful). In fact, this was the first time in English legal history that a wife took advantage of a new legal rule to make counter-charges at her husband’s suit for divorce (Roulston 2).

The writer and social reformer Caroline Norton (1808-77) had paved the way years before when she fought for the legal guardianship of her children. Mrs Norton suffered from an abusive and cruel husband and when she separated from him, he responded with denying her any contact with their children. However, the marital dispute of the Nortons had started further back in time when Mr Norton suspected his wife of having an affair with Prime Minister Lord Melbourne. Norton charged

Melbourne for engaging in criminal conversations with his wife—a legal euphemism for sexual relations in the Victorian period. It was a complex case that involved Caroline Sheridan (the granddaughter to Richard Sheridan), her husband George Norton (an honourable Member of Parliament) and the British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne.

The underlying political motives on behalf of Norton, a Tory, to overthrow Melbourne, and with him the Whig government, were obvious and they did not prevent him from going public with their private lives.

Nevertheless, if Caroline Norton lacked a voice within the legal system, she was able to make her voice heard other ways. She was a skilful writer and she spent the rest of her life campaigning for women’s cause publishing pamphlets, books and other writings. To her horror she discovered that her husband, still after being separated, had the right to her earnings. Since they were still legally married Norton was in charge of his wife’s possessions and according to the doctrine for coverture her income was attached to her husband. Caroline Norton’s legal struggle for the right to see her children led to the passing of the Infant Custody Act in 1839. Karen Chase refers to this act as the first attempt in English legal history to reform family law (40). Although children were considered to be the natural property of the father, this act altered the exclusive rights of the father to mutual offspring as children under seven would remain in custody of the mother in case of separation and children out of wedlock were considered as a purely maternal responsibility. Chase claims that this was the first step towards the legal reform that would take place during the Victorian period concerning matters as married women’s property, divorce and custody of children (40). As the century evolved, the legal status of women was being called into question and several acts were passed in an effort to improve spousal equality in the English common law.

Yet, it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that married women’s

legal status changed thanks to the passing of several laws such as the Matrimonial Causes Act and Infant Custody Act. Between 1870 and 1893, a series of acts concerned with married women’s property were passed. The struggle to improve married women’s status is, according to Holcombe, one of the earliest airings of the women’s-rights question (14). Married women’s property law was a heated debate in Parliament between 1868-70, and the press followed it closely as it “attracted widespread comment” (Holcombe 14).

The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 is often referred to as a magna carta for women as it reduced the power of the husband. Shanley highlights that this act granted married women the legal capacity of acting as independent legal personages, which consequently underscored the notion of coverture (115). As married women were able to handle her own economic issues the act ensured her an increased spousal equality. Earlier acts had been criticised for diminishing men’s post-marital obligations towards their ex-wives on the cost of women’s rights. Married Women’s Property Act stipulated that married women had the right to the control their own property and liable for her own debts.¹⁸ At the same time as she could handle her own income and property, she could also be sued and held responsible for her legal acts, as she was her newly gained rights implied legal accountability. Although several advancements were made, women were still inferior to men in the eyes of the law. To understand the female legal status thoroughly it is important to be familiar with the feminine ideal that the upper and middle classes promoted. The law and cultural codes of masculinity and femininity were entwined since both were circumscribed by social normativity. Women were

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

! ¹⁸ One of the legal defects of the Married Women’s Property Act of 1870 was that a husband was freed from liability to his wife’s premarital debts albeit he acquired her property upon marriage.

However, an act passed four years later restored a husband’s liability for his wife’s premarital debts (Holcombe 20-22).

legally discriminated in the sense that the law upheld restraints on women that were rooted in culturally inscribed gender differences.

Traditional interpretations of the public/private dichotomy as gender-biased associate the private, the home, with women. Whereas the public sphere was the realm of production and consumerism, the private sphere was a safe retreat of domestic harmony. This dual apprehension of space as divided into separate and gendered areas can be traced back to the eighteenth century. Griselda Pollock states that the nineteenth-century socio-cultural division is a continuation and development of “the eighteenth-century compartmentalization of the public and the private” (Vision and Difference 67).

She notices how the public sphere was defined as the world of productive labour, political decision, public service and justice and became increasingly exclusive to men (Pollock, Vision and Difference 67). In turn, the private sphere, or the home, was the place for wives, children and servants. The Victorian family was organised according to this division between the public and private. In the same lines as Pollock, Shanley notices how women presided over the home while men “sallied forth into the public realm” (3). Thus, the Victorians tended to view the home as a retreat of female nurturing from a public male-dominated world of capitalist enterprise and fierce entrepreneurial rivalry. More so, according to the normative apprehension of separate and gendered spaces, the home was a safe haven for women in opposition to the streets that were socially, morally and sexually dangerous.

Judith Walkowitz insists on the vulnerability of women in her study of Victorian London entitled City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (1992). The scholar notices how especially women were targets of sexual harassment and crime when moving around unprotected in the streets (City 50).

The public/private dichotomy often makes contemporary readers wrongfully associate

women with a total exclusion from the public realm. On the contrary, women did move around the city, yet in a limited manner as they held a much more exposed position than men. For instance, bourgeois ladies who went shopping would sometimes venture out in the commercial districts unchaperoned. Their physical aspect and rich apparel made them visually different from prostitutes. Yet, these fallen women soon adapted strategies of disguise wearing expensive clothing to pass as middle-class ladies and thereby avoid the police. Parallel to this, shopping ladies were sometimes confounded with prostitutes and therefore also sexually harassed by men (Walkowitz, City 50-51).

In this sense, in opposition to the streets that were socially and morally dangerous for women the home was seen as a safe place from corruptive forces.

The notion of nineteenth-century society as publicly and privately separated imbued the domestic culture at large. Nevertheless, Victorian ideology was not restricted into a spatial crystallisation of a male public world of the streets and a female private ambience of the home. Instead, this binary ideology rested upon a whole system of divisions and subdivisions with permeable limits. Judith Flanders has carried out a thorough exploration of the Victorian home and draws the conclusion that the house was divided into different public and private areas depending on the function of each room. As an example she points out that the drawing room was a public space within the private sphere as it was aimed at display (9). Thus, this room exhibited an outward representation of the family in a double sense. First, it was the largest and best-furnished room decorated with exclusive and expensive furniture to indicate the family’s wealth. Its principal aim was to be a showroom, both of the financial success of the husband and the good taste of the wife. Second, it was a space of social reception where the accomplished ladies of the house were supposed to receive and entertain visitors. Therefore, the Victorian drawing room was situated on the ground constituting

the core of the house where the private met the public. In this sense, the public/private dichotomy permeated the whole of bourgeois society; the home opposed to work, the internal division of the family, the spatial division of the house and the different functions of the rooms.

Nevertheless, the domestic circle was in general a woman-centred space.

Walkowitz, for instance, remarks that the home was a female domain as wives and mothers managed household issues (City 55). Even though the man was seen as the head of the family, the internal relationships of the family attributed women certain domestic responsibility and control of household matters. However, women were subsumed under male juridical authority (Shanley 4). Hence, within certain limits, women were able to negotiate a certain degree of power and independence as long as they responded to the domestic ideal. Another fact that points at a central role of women within the home are the widely-spread domestic manuals, conduct books and popularity of women’s magazines at the time. Victorian impresarios were well aware of women’s position of being in charge of the household budget. The rise of consumer society can be traced back to this period, and Lori Anne Loeb remarks that there was a shift from production to consumption in mid nineteenth century (33). The scholar refers to Victorian middle-class wives as “consuming angels” arguing that the husband was supposed to acquire money while his wife was in charge of investing them in objects that indicated her “superior understanding of taste, status, or utility to the domestic sphere” (Loeb 34).

Several critics, Walkowitz, Loeb and Lynda Nead among others, stress the liminal position of the female shopper in Victorian consumer society.¹⁹ Middle-class

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

19 In The City of Dreadful Delight Walkowitz notices how shopping ladies moved around late-Victorian London and consequently represented a female presence in the public sphere. For more information on shopping ladies see Lynda Nead’s Victorian Babylon (2000) and chapter 2 in Lori Anne

ladies and women belonging to the nouveau riche had money and transport means at their disposal to venture out into the city to the shopping districts. Loeb highlights that shopping was an activity in which bourgeois women were able to “exercise a considerable degree of free choice” (34). Nevertheless, these “consuming angels” also formed the target audience of the majority of trademarks. The domestic status of women as the managers of the household economy placed her in the focus of marketing strategies and often addressed female consumers directly. As mentioned above, Flanders claims that the Victorian home was not exclusively a private realm and the public routinely invaded the domestic circle. In her study of Victorian advertisement, Loeb points out that the inside world of the Victorian private life was constantly penetrated by commercial campaigns (129). At the same time as the house was an outward showplace of social standing the home was also invaded by stereotyped imagery of the Victorian family and a heavily romanticised imagery of female roles and feminine behaviour.

Nineteenth-century advertising techniques reinforced the public/private dichotomy in several ways reaching its fullest expression at the turn of the nineteenth century (Loeb 26). The prevailing imagery of domesticity in adverts relied heavily on idealised picture of woman as the angel of the house. Peaceful and homely settings where women and children were in focus where common and men, on the other hand, were likely to be represented as marginal characters. Men were also symbolically placed in the centre of the picture alluding to the idea of man as the head of the family. Loeb notes that Victorian advertisers were anxious to represent the view of the home as a private and isolated sphere in which women recreated a separate sphere of casual warmth in their role as protective wives and mothers (21-23). In other words, Victorian commercial interpretations of domesticity engaged with the cult of true womanhood.

According to the Victorian cult of domesticity women were expected to represent four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Self-sacrifice and grace were other characteristics a woman was supposed to fulfil and her mild nature and maternal instinct made her the angel of the house. This concept makes direct reference to Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem The Angel in the House (1854), which was dedicated to his wife. In this poem woman is described as the moral and spiritual centre of the home and as a figure wholeheartedly devoted to husband and children, “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf /Of his condoled necessities / She casts her best, she flings herself” (Canto IX: I). This acclaimed ideal granted women the power of moral guidance and spiritual superiority within the domestic realm “as long as she ministered to the comfort of her husband, tended the children, managed the household, all was well. However, when she began to

According to the Victorian cult of domesticity women were expected to represent four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness and domesticity. Self-sacrifice and grace were other characteristics a woman was supposed to fulfil and her mild nature and maternal instinct made her the angel of the house. This concept makes direct reference to Coventry Patmore’s narrative poem The Angel in the House (1854), which was dedicated to his wife. In this poem woman is described as the moral and spiritual centre of the home and as a figure wholeheartedly devoted to husband and children, “Man must be pleased; but him to please / Is woman's pleasure; down the gulf /Of his condoled necessities / She casts her best, she flings herself” (Canto IX: I). This acclaimed ideal granted women the power of moral guidance and spiritual superiority within the domestic realm “as long as she ministered to the comfort of her husband, tended the children, managed the household, all was well. However, when she began to