Adventurous, headstrong, liberated and motivated: today these are traits applied to both men and women. However, in the Romantic and Victorian periods being a woman with these characteristics was frowned upon. Women were encouraged to marry quickly and were taught, from a young age, “skills” that would help them find a husband. They were to be the angel of the house, and only fulfill duties that were suitable for their frailty. Once married, women had no right to their money, land or even their own children. According to Dr. Aşkın Yildirim, “Victorian ideology of gender rested on the belief that women were both physically and intellectually the inferior sex” (46). Women were severely limited in the variety of jobs available to them with governess,
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Aurora was taught by her aunt all the common female skills as she grew up, but she was also educated in real subjects too. “I learnt a little algebra, a little / Of the mathematics,–brushed with extreme flounce / The circle of the sciences, because / She misliked women who are frivolous” (403-406). Aurora’s aunt gives her the chance to truly become educated, by allowing her to learn math and science as a child. The traditionally male subjects allowed aurora to be more independent and well rounded when she grew up. This helps aurora shed the common “frivolous” female …show more content…
Men were supposed to earn the money and women were to be servants to their husbands and children. This way of life was further perpetuated by Queen Victoria who was an enthusiastic supporter of mans sovereignty. The Queen was quoted saying, “Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for a man – but with totally different duties and vocations” (Ekev Academic Review 46). Wollstonecraft describes how some women wanted to be married so badly that they would rather be in a bad marriage than be alone.
I own it frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day. But they might as well pine married as single—and would not be a jot more unhappy with a bad husband than longing for a good one. (228)
These women were convinced that they needed a husband and children to be fulfilled, when in reality, like Wollstonecraft suggests throughout the essay, they are casting themselves into
Aurora was taught by her aunt all the common female skills as she grew up, but she was also educated in real subjects too. “I learnt a little algebra, a little / Of the mathematics,–brushed with extreme flounce / The circle of the sciences, because / She misliked women who are frivolous” (403-406). Aurora’s aunt gives her the chance to truly become educated, by allowing her to learn math and science as a child. The traditionally male subjects allowed aurora to be more independent and well rounded when she grew up. This helps aurora shed the common “frivolous” female …show more content…
Men were supposed to earn the money and women were to be servants to their husbands and children. This way of life was further perpetuated by Queen Victoria who was an enthusiastic supporter of mans sovereignty. The Queen was quoted saying, “Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for a man – but with totally different duties and vocations” (Ekev Academic Review 46). Wollstonecraft describes how some women wanted to be married so badly that they would rather be in a bad marriage than be alone.
I own it frequently happens that women who have fostered a romantic unnatural delicacy of feeling, waste their lives in imagining how happy they should have been with a husband who could love them with a fervid increasing affection every day, and all day. But they might as well pine married as single—and would not be a jot more unhappy with a bad husband than longing for a good one. (228)
These women were convinced that they needed a husband and children to be fulfilled, when in reality, like Wollstonecraft suggests throughout the essay, they are casting themselves into