Women in Victorian England: Nothing More Than a Wife?

[A Review of Kay Boardman’s “The Ideology of Domesticity: The Regulation of Household Economy in Victorian Women’s Magazines”] 

 

     The stereotypical version of a household wife that occasionally holds true today, is especially present throughout the nineteenth century. The concept of ideology, in particular, the domesticity of a woman, is brilliantly highlighted in Kay Boardman’s journal article. While it is often easy to imagine the domestic ideals during the Victorian era, we must expand our perception to the many economic and political issues present during that time; specifically, the separation of societal classes and what future each class brought for those individuals. Boardman’s article not only does just that, but she also notes the many magazines and periodicals that were influential in societal views of females from the beginning. 

     The idea behind domestic duties only increased in development through the publication of many domestic magazines suited for the Englishwoman. Boardman analyzes several in her article, specifically, The Lady’s Treasury and The Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine. She writes that The Lady’s Treasury was “A good representation of the domestic ideal typically found in this type of magazine” (Boardman, 152). She importantly recognizes that this magazine and others are simply works of fiction, yet they address the topic of what a domestic wife is supposed to look like. Domesticity, however, is essentially a fragment of our imaginations, predominantly influenced by the many patriarchal desires and standards that controlled the way women were called to uphold. It is necessary to consider where this idea of the “ideology” initiated. After all, anything is fiction until it becomes someone’s fate. The domestic woman is undoubtedly an extremely complex notion, that examines the typical Victorian expectations both inside the house and out. 

     Boardman introduces several magazine titles written for the working, middle and upper audiences, and begins to explain how they created almost an imaginary boundary line that separated the duties of servants (typical in an upper-middle-class home) and the duties of a wife and mother in that same house. The emersion of the middle-class during the Victorian era was a massive shift for society in both economic and political ways and Boardman recognizes how this changed things. She writes, “…Make the distinction between the working-class woman who did all her own housework and the middle-class woman who would ideally have at least one hired help” (157). The help was a luxury that only financial status could provide, stemming from the work of a successful husband or father. Boardman also emphasizes that the class divide in Victorian England was a powerful force, one that highlighted that the “home and the management of it was central to their perceptions of themselves as a social group” (162). The role of women’s magazines during the formation of the ideology of domesticity notes that “Class is as significant a marker as gender, and the domestic ideal as represented in all types of Victorian women’s magazines was one mediated by class as much as by gender” (162). While many found the magazines to be helpful and perhaps even relaxing, they inadvertently caused the reader to constantly focus on their economic status and “the need to regulate the house, the family, and the servants in accordance with the domestic ideal” (154). It is necessary then, to consider the bigger perhaps disturbing implications hidden between the columns. 

     These domestic standards of the Victorian era were impossible to escape because of the literature that continued to get published throughout the years. Boardman identifies that the role of women’s magazines in the Victorian era was substantial in the formation of the domestic ideology overall, and thus, further calls us to investigate the gendered identity definitive of the century, that goes far beyond the nuclear family.

Bibliography: 

Boardman, Kay. “The Ideology of Domesticity: The Regulation of the Household Economy in Victorian Women’s Magazines.” Victorian Periodicals Review, vol. 33, no. 2, [Research Society for Victorian Periodicals, Johns Hopkins University Press], 2000, pp. 150–64, http://www.jstor.org/stable/20083724.