The women in the nineteenth century in the fight for equal rights

Women and politics, women?s rights, emancipation. Women in the 19. century Women - in the fight for equal rights For over hundred years women in Britain, as in many other countries, have been fighting for an equal place in society. From the start, they saw the need to change the law.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, woman in Britain had few, if any, legal rights. They belonged to their fathers and husbands almost like farm animals, and could be forced into unhappy marriages for money. They could not vote or sign contracts. If they owned any money or property it became their husband s on marriage. They had no rights over their own children, or even their own bodies. Husbands could, and did, beat their wives and force them to have sex.

Middle-class women were kept in their homes with little real work to do - they had servants to cook and clean. The wife s role was to be the angel in the house. She was expected to provide her husband with a comfortable place of escape from the wicked world outside.

Middle-class women had the time and the energy to think about their position in society and to try to change ist. They began to fight for the right to an equal education with their brothers and to a useful life. They were tired of doing their embroidery, painting and playing the piano a little.

Secondary schools and colleges for girls were opened from the 1850s, and a few brave and clever women managed to study at un medical schools. The few women who managed to become academics, secondary-schoolteachers and doctors opened the door for their daughters and granddaughters.

Working-class women, if they weren?t badly-paid servants in middle-class homes, were forced into badly-paid, dirty and dangerous jobs in factories, mills and mines.

Working-class girls, like their brothers, were lucky to receive any education at all befor the 1870 Education Act which gave all children the right to elementary schooling. Elementary education was designed to fit the working classes for lives of hard work and obedience in other people?s houses or the factories of the new, rich businessmen. For many working-class women the right not to go out to work was their main aim. Then, as now, working-class women had two jobs, and the comfortable life of a middle-class wife was the working girl?s dream.

Family life In spite of the greater emphasis on the individual and the growth of openly shown affection, the end of the eighteenth century also saw a swing back to stricter ideas of family life. In part, the close family resulted from the growth of new attitudes to privacy, perhaps a necessary part of individualism. It was also the result of the removal, over a period beginning in the sixteenth century, of the social and economic support of the wider family and village community, which had made family life so much more public. Except for the very rich, people no longer married for economic reasons, but did so for personal happiness. ...