Double Standards In The Victorian Era

The Victorian era maintained a double sexual standard with both women and men: repressive rules for women’s sexuality and sexual freedom for men. The ideology of moral values only served to provoke rampant prostitution. The idea of double standards was based on the division between Madonna and whore, between the “respectable” or the “fallen.” Women were viewed as either controlling or enhancing male sexual behaviour. As a result, their sexual identity was an implication on determining whether they were viewed as respectable members of society or as undignified. W. R. Greg had exposed the fear felt by the middle class society by the thought of unfettered female sexuality and he distinguished between the dynamic male sexuality and passive female …show more content…
This change is marked by a steady progress from the structure of patriarchal male supremacy and female dependence to the contemporary structure of gender equality in legal, personal, and professional affairs by a substantial increasing number of educated and liberated women. One of the indicators of this movement was the emergence of the “New Woman” ideology. The “New Woman” was coined by the public speaker and prominent writer, Sarah Grand in 1894, who claimed the New Woman did eventually “solved the problem and proclaimed for herself what was wrong with the Home-is-the-Women’s-Sphere and prescribed the remedy.” The New Woman of the fin de siècle became a significant cultural icon which proceeded from the stereotypical Victorian and soon became popular an aphorism in literature and newspapers. The New Woman consisted of multiple identities and portrayed controversial behavior. She was independent, emancipated, self-supporting, educated and intelligent. The New Woman ideology was not only influential with the middle-class female activists, but also the working class females, as well. The social developments during the Victorian era gave women the opportunity to work in the industrial trade and to get a higher education, which attracted many women and had constituted one of the primary causes of what Edwin Pratt called “the woman movement.” According Edwin Pratt, the woman movement “was steadily increasing necessity for a widening of the sphere of women’s employment that enforced in the first instance, the need of both technical training and higher education came broader views, increased capacity, and a larger participation in the active concerns alike of business and public life.” Queen Victoria established Queen’s College in 1848, and later in the century, Somerville and St. Hilda’s College, soon followed. As a result of growing