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The Victorian era, coinciding with the long reign of Victoria I, between 1837 and 1901, represented the high point of a long movement of degradation of women as persons. Girls and ladies from the upper and upper middle classes were transformed into sickly and weak beings, incapable of living on their own, needing at all times the paternalistic but firm protection of a man. Their increasing dependence on male power had accelerated as capitalism developed. Walking vases, they helplessly witnessed the eclipse of any possibility of self-realization outside of the role of wife and mother.
The Victorian era represented the high point of a long movement of degradation of women as persons.
In the privileged strata, marriage became a business designed to ensure the transmission of assets to heirs. legitimate to continue the lineage. Since the belief in a future immortality, even in spirit, had long been failing, the elites clung to what they had left: the persistence of their descendants. Of course, that concern was a man’s thing. The woman was a luxurious test tube where the precious manly seed grew and bore fruit.
Such an obsession with the perpetuation of blood required rigorous control of the wives. One slip and bang!, an intruder had entered the very pure family line of Smith & Sons & Sons… It was essential that adultery – of the woman – became a crime of lèse majesté, theft and usurpation: a crime, in definitive. In 1857, the Matrimonial Causes Act determined that the slightest indiscretion of his constituted sufficient grounds for divorce. Not the husband’s, no matter how notorious it was, if it was not accompanied by direct humiliation. In the parliamentary debate, the Lord Chancellor defended the measure, arguing that “the wife’s adultery can be a means of foisting spurious children on the husband.” At least at the time, the political leaders were sincere. Today they would support it, arguing that infidelity attacks the husband’s freedom. Adultery or freedom, as some public figure would say.
But the law is one thing, and the flesh is quite another. Such a solid reality was not lost on Victorian society, and to reduce the dangers to a minimum it chose to go off on a tangent. The female libido and its desire for satisfaction were flatly denied. Let us quote William Acton:
There is no doubt that most women lack sexual passion […] The best mothers, wives and housewives know little or nothing about sexual matters. His only passions are home, children and housework. […] honest women almost never desire sexual gratification for themselves; They give themselves to their husbands only to please them, and if it were not for their desire for motherhood, they would prefer to be relieved of their role (The function and disorders of the reproductive organs, cit. in Eva Figes: Patriarchal attitudes).
After this allegation without any documentary evidence, the author finishes the task with this phrase for history: “No young man who wants to get married should be discouraged by an exaggerated idea of the duties he will have to fulfill.” The woman is denied any initiative or even erotic inclination, and the boy is also exempt from responsibility.
On the other hand, the noble ladies and gentlemen metamorphosed into beings of unhealthy sensitivity, perpetually languid and melancholic among flowery gardens, stylish furniture with a monarchical designation of origin, and walls full of mellifluous paintings. Men imposed and women ended up accepting a model that presented them as passive, unintelligent and overly emotional objects, lost in an endless childhood.
A wave of pusillanimity and prudery covered everything that concerned the body and its natural functions.
At the same time, a wave of pusillanimity and prudery covered everything that concerned the body and its natural functions. It became inconvenient to offer ladies thigh or breast at meals, the allusion to bodily organs was banned and numerous euphemisms were invented in order to avoid calling things by their name. Some endure, such as referring to pregnancy in terms of interesting status either of good hopesay members either limbs instead of legs or arms, or stomach when you want to mention the belly. The height of Puritan imbecility was reached with the habit of hiding the legs of tables and pianos with tablecloths and rugs. The fact that the word legs It was also used for humans, and in the repressed Victorian minds one thing led to another (Pearsall: The worm in the bud, cit. in Erika Bornay: Lilith’s daughters). This will not surprise us in these parts either when, in its day, a prominent court figure shouted angrily at a clothing proposal: “The queens of Spain have no legs.”
Motherhood was elevated to the greatest glory one could dream of. Goal and culmination of his career, giving descendants to his owner and lord became destiny and obsession, and the family became the only possible source of pride and satisfaction. Florence Nightingale, pioneer of war nursing and healthcare, wrote indignantly: “Women do not consider themselves human beings at all. For them there is no more God, no more country or more duty than the family.
Today the worst patriarchal and sexist atrocities reemerge with force. No right is earned forever
This continued to be the case in the privileged classes or those who aspired to be privileged until the day before yesterday, even when they had a solid academic training. The psychoanalyst of strict Freudian obedience Helene Deutsch says about wives hello good that “they are the most adorable and least aggressive companions and they want to continue fulfilling that role, they do not insist on their rights, quite the opposite. They are easy to handle in all aspects; it is enough to love them” (psychology of women). If an educated person with an intense professional life thought this in the 20th century, we can get an idea of where things were going in the 19th. Because, for even more derision, he adds that “the intellectual woman is masculinized, in her the warm intuitive knowledge has become a cold and sterile thought.” After a short interval in which many who shared these convictions and other worse ones have kept silent in the face of an adverse social environment, today the worst patriarchal and sexist atrocities reemerge with force. No right is earned forever.
The dream of delicacy and domestic bliss of the bourgeois lady that the new middle classes strove to imitate hid a terrible reverse. His ethereal imaginary personality of donna angelicata It drove men moved by compelling instincts to use and abuse mistresses and ladies of the night. Serious work estimates that at the peak of the Victorian period, the number of prostitutes in London hovered around 150,000. Since girls and ladies of high birth were strictly prohibited, predators of rancid ancestry pounced on the women of high birth with their paws. subordinate classes. The ancillary loves lived their August.
The dream of delicacy and domestic bliss of the bourgeois lady that the new middle classes strove to imitate hid a terrible reverse.
When the dalliances of the master or the gentleman whose favors they could hardly deny ended in pregnancy, the maids were unceremoniously expelled to the street. Single mothers in that prudish society had enough options to end up in the dark world of brothels or sidewalks. There they had the opportunity to meet all kinds of excluded, sick, unemployed or miserable marginalized people. Many of the women from the lower strata were subject to the carnal whims of the men of the ruling caste in one way or another.
Because working class women were especially poorly paid, many of them increased their salaries through prostitution. Chastity was a luxury of the middle and upper classes that they simply could not afford, no matter how many Bibles and pamphlets that the virtuous ladies of society distributed to them (Eva Figes op. cit.).
The lily-of-the-valley purity of the pompous bourgeoisie and aristocrats was borne by outraged lower-class bodies. This is how the homes of good society were kept immaculate, with their teas and their charming evenings. The chastity of the dolled-up ladies in gauzy dresses surrounded by very expensive flowers and exotic jewelry was preserved thanks to women reduced to a sink for the lust and semen of the rich and powerful. Shop assistants and dressmakers, the famous grisettessingle, widowed or married, became temporary darlings, with or without love involved, but, in any case, ready to be fired as soon as they posed the slightest inconvenience. La Fortunata de Galdós is an excellent example of a woman turned into a toy, at the time by a fool of the stature of Juanito Santa Cruz.
#law #flesh
