1. What is the Woman Question?

2. Link 3. Link 4. Piety Purity Submissiveness Domesticity Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 5. Piety This focused on her religious values through which she assisted God in redeeming sinners, particularly men. Purity This focused on a woman's sexuality. It implied sexual purity, and its absence meant she was a "fallen angel." This was a part of the sexual double standard, which required the woman to demonstrate her morals. Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 6. Submissiveness This focused on a woman's role within society as a daughter, wife, and mother. It was assumed a woman was to submit to the head of the household (unless piety and purity were violated), to be passive, subservient, and dependent. Domesticity This focused on the role of women within the home. The home was to be the haven from the rest of the world, the "Home Sweet Home" typified by hand-stitched samplers. This was the place to which the man returned after enduring the rigors of the outside world. The woman was the comforter, and marriage and family were her jobs. The home was the woman's proper sphere. It was here that she cultivated moral and social virtue in her children, and here that she created a refuge for her husband. Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 7. The Industrial Revolution and all its technological innovations resulted in a major economic transition. The workplace and the home which had previously been the same, now began to separate. As the workplace moved outside the home, male and female spheres of activity also separated. Thus women, still the primary caretakers of the children found themselves assigned to the private, or domestic sphere, while men were forced to follow their jobs into the public sphere. Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 8. The ideology of Separate Spheres was developed to explain why this separation was necessary, by defining the 'inherent' characteristics of women. These traits supposedly made women incapable of functioning in the public realm. Women were classified as physically weaker, yet morally superior to men. This concept was reinforced by religious view of the mid-nineteenth century. It was women's moral superiority which best suited them to the domestic sphere. Women were also expected to teach the next generation the necessary moral virtues to ensure the survival of the society. Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 9. Definition: A set of ideas, originating in the early 19th century. These beliefs assigned to women and men distinctive and virtually opposite duties, functions, personal characteristics, and legitimate spheres of activity. Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 10. Defined women as "naturally" unfit for economic competition or political citizenship because of their delicate constitution and their more refined moral sense. Glorified women's domestic activities, particularly the rearing of children, as the cornerstone of social order. Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu 11. To men belongs the potent(I had almost said the omnipotent) consideration of worldly aggrandizement (1584). Mans vision of [womans] character, clothed in moral beauty, has scattered the clouds before his mental vision, and sent him back to that beloved home, a wiser and a better man (1584). The women of Englandhave obtained a degree of importance in society far beyond what their unobtrusive virtues would appear to claim (1584). 12. The nuptial contrasts are the poles / On which the heavenly spheres revolve (63-64). 13. The mans power is active, progressive, defensiveHis intellect is for speculation and invention (1587). the womans power is for rule, not for battle,-- and her intellect is not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision (1587). the womanmust be enduringly, incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly wisewise, not for self-development, but for self-renunciation (1588). 14. We come then to the conclusion that the present form of marriageis a vexatious failure (1630). The proposed freedom in marriage would of course have to go hand-in-hand with the co- education of the sexes (1632). When man and woman in an equal union / Shall merge, and marriage be a true communion (Morris qtd. in Caird 1634). 15. Reading Art Projects