Queen Victoria Middle Class Essay

In Great Britain during the nineteenth century, there were significant developments and the widespread questioning of where women fit in English society. Women were facing the dilemma of challenging the privileges of more legal and political rights and the idea of more economic and social opportunities. The period also saw an enormous expansion of women evolving into the domestic sphere. During the reign of Queen Victoria from 1837-1901, women in Great Britain were influenced by her traditional views on the role of wife and mother and various debates concerning a woman’s place in society, and her opposing views of women having educational, economic and political opportunities in society as well. Queen Victoria believed that a woman’s proper place was in the home caring for her family. Upon Queen Victoria’s ascension to the throne in 1837, the status of women, and domesticity plays a major role in the image of femininity, especially by the middle class in Victorian culture. In fact, Queen Victoria served as “a resource for the metaphor of …show more content…
According to the historian Leonore Davidoff, “the late- eighteenth and early nineteenth- century middle class flourished partly because the institutions it created, produced vast material resources and social confidence in a period when the nation was poised to reap the benefits of an overseas empire.” Victorian values were developed by the middle class and were highly beneficial during the last half of Queen Victoria’s reign. Because the middle class was so influential, their behaviors and attitudes were adopted by other social classes both above and below. Kent eloquently sums up her argument about gender-based hierarchy, its ideology, and the structure it upholds in the following