There was great benefit to men – especially incompetent men of all classes – in excluding women from profitable and interesting work. If women were regarded as irrational, they could be banned from universities and space left for men of less ability. If women were forbidden from the professions and from profitable work, there was less competition for men practitioners and more profit for them. If women were encouraged to spend and consume, they drove a market for the new goods of industrialisation. If wealthy women handed over their fortune to their husbands on marriage, the booming profits of enclosure, slavery and the industrial revolution could be banked by men. Whenever women are banned from the starting blocks, a man is bound to come first and if anger is banned from the ladylike behaviour, nobody is going to raise her voice in protest.

  Education

  Girls from poor homes were offered an education, though it was not the equal to that for boys. Every village school provided lessons in reading and writing for girls, and in towns and cities some schools catered exclusively for girls. Their studies were designed to give working-class girls minimum literacy: enough to follow instruction and to prepare them for a life of low-skilled work.

  Education for girls of the middle classes mostly avoided academic subjects, unlike that of their brothers, who were expected to go to university or law college as part of their development to male maturity. Elite and middling girls were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, perhaps a foreign language, and music, art, sewing, crafts and deportment to a level suitable for the drawing room. A small market town like Chester had about a dozen girls’ schools,107 some of them providing an academic education, others the most superficial of lessons. The growing publicity about the fragility of female bodies advised that scholarship and study might be too great a burden for elite girls.

  Some exceptional women managed to get a scholarly education, and some of them managed to publish and be recognised for their contribution to science. Margaret Bryan, an eighteenth-century schoolmistress, published A Compendious System of Astronomy in 1797. Lady Hester Stanhope identified an ancient Palestinian site from a medieval manuscript and excavated it herself. Palaeontologist Mary Anning discovered the first complete Plesiosaurus dinosaur at Lyme Regis, and in 1836 Etheldred Bennett was appointed a member of the Imperial Natural History Society in Moscow, a male-only institution so impressed by her collection of thousands of fossils and confused by her first name that they mistook her for a man and gave her a diploma. Two women – Mary Somerville and Caroline Herschel – were elected to the Royal Astronomical Society in 1835. Ada Lovelace invented an algorithm for a yet-to-be-built computer in 1843. Anna Thynne built the first self-sustaining aquarium, and Mary Anne Whitby – a Western pioneer in the cultivation of silkworms – worked with Charles Darwin on caterpillar genes. Mary Horner Lyell’s work as a geologist and expert on land snails in the Canary Islands is partly concealed by her more famous husband Charles Lyell, who is credited with work that may be hers.

  Health

  Despite the vaunted male expertise, the infant mortality rate and the deaths of women in childbed remained high: 7.5 per 1,000 births in 1750 and 5 per 1,000 births in 1850.108 As England expanded its empire overseas, soldiers and seamen, pioneers and administrators were needed for the growing empire, and there was increased concern at the infant death rate. Commentators blamed the easy target – the failure of working-class women as homemakers and mothers: ‘Whatever sanatory or architectural improvements may be made in artisans’ dwellings, it will still be found, while wives remain as they are, that . . . one will be a veritable little palace in point of comfort, while another will be a domestic Slough of despond.’109

  If only women would stay home all day, their presence alone would cure rising damp, filthy water, mouldy walls, infectious diseases, hunger and illiteracy!

  In fact, the high death rate from post-birth bacterial infections was mostly caused by busy male doctors going from one patient to another without sterilising their equipment, changing a gown or apron, or even washing. Epidemics occurred at lying-in hospitals; in 1770, at the 63-bed Westminster lying-in hospital, 19 women contracted puerperal fever, and only six survived.110 A breakthrough came in 1795, when a naval surgeon, Alexander Gordon, noted the pattern of infections during an epidemic in the Poor Hospital and came to the conclusion that midwives and surgeons were infecting their patients: ‘It is a disagreeable fact that I, myself, was the means of carrying the infection to a great number of women.’111

  The suggestion that an elite man might be responsible for infecting working-class women was so offensive to the elite doctors that Gordon was hounded from practice. Instead, people continued in their beliefs that ‘Doctors are gentlemen, and gentlemen’s hands are clean.’112

  The work of Louis Pasteur (1822–95) and Joseph Lister (1827–1912) finally proved the existence of bacteria and from the late 1800s practitioners started to use antiseptics, which reduced infection. Responsibility for public health was now understood to be a task for government, not just for working-class women who – until then – had been the only ones concerned with the cleanliness of slum houses, the only ones asking for clean water and working drains.

  Kitty Wilkinson (1786–1860) saved thousands of lives during the 1832 cholera epidemic by opening her Liverpool laundry to her neighbours

  [And Cover] Kitty Wilkinson, portrait from Herbert R. Rathbone (ed.), Memoir of Kitty Wilkinson, H. Young & Sons, 1927 (The History Collection/Alamy)

  One such working-class woman was Kitty Wilkinson, an Irish migrant in Liverpool who had been a cotton mill worker and a domestic servant. She opened up her laundry business to her poor neighbours for a penny a week, allowing them to use her boiler and bleach to disinfect their clothes during the 1832 cholera epidemic. She became known as the ‘saint of the slums’ and campaigned for public bathhouses for the poor. In 1842, she was appointed superintendent of the baths, her public service recognised with the gift of a silver teapot from Queen Victoria.113

  Separate Spheres

  The idea that women and men inhabited different worlds – ‘separate spheres’ developed from ancient Greek philosophers, glamourised by courtly love, restated during the Enlightenment and popularised by the Romantic movement – received a huge boost from the acceptance from the seventeenth century that there were only two sexes: men and women, and they were opposites. Different lives and activities were suited to the two different sexes. The male sphere comprised the active outer world: military conquest, commercial success, executive power and action suited to his logical, decisive brain and powerful body. The ladies’ sphere encompassed domestic, spiritual, emotional, maternal and wifely work in the home, suited to her emotional, sensitive nature, unreliable body and fragile health.114

  Sensitive beings, without logic, sexually frigid, bodies without power, domestic rather than worldly, easily persuaded even when temptation was fatal: of course, such a fragile being must be protected by someone stronger and kept somewhere safe. In time, men modified the world to make it suit them even more, creating men-only institutions: centres of learning and of sport, leisure activities and games for men, the clubs that only ‘gentlemen’ could join – on streets that were already declared unsuitable for ladies. Women took what power they could in their own sphere of the home: creating etiquette and morality rules and limiting entry. In time, women believed that they could take this elite home-making out into the world – that they were responsible for all homes: slavery homes, labouring class homes, poor homes – and it was the moral duty of ladies to teach poor women how to behave. A remarkable number of elite women transformed the separate spheres home from a fortress to protect and isolate women into a springboard to action in the world.

  Sex

  Chastity no longer had to be enforced by men policing women’s behaviour; every genteel woman was expected to police herself and reassure men with her complete self-control. The philosopher David Hume pronounced: ‘A female has so many opportunities of secretly indulging . . . that nothing can give us security but her absolute modesty and reserve.’115

  From the eighteenth century, ladies were said to be completely unlike their bawdy, earthy medieval foremothers. By the early nineteenth century, more and more experts were advising that gentry women were naturally frigid.116 ‘Woman seldom desires any sexual gratification for herself. She submits to her husband’s embraces, but principally to gratify him.’117 Doctors agreed that ladies never undertook heterosexual intercourse for pleasure but only as their duty to their husband and to conceive children.

  Maternal love predominated in ladies, and husbands were advised not to risk trying to arouse their wives.118 In 1850, the Westminster Review wrote: ‘With the exception of “fallen women”, nature had made sexual desire in women dormant “till excited by undue familiarities”.’119

  Upper-class women who felt sexual desire probably denied the feeling or concealed it. Anne Lister (1791–1840), an elite woman in Yorkshire, thought that she was a rarity. Her uneasy sense of uniqueness existed not only because she desired women, but that she felt any arousal at all. Lister described her feelings of desire as ‘manly’, as if she had no words for female desire.120

  Ladies who admitted they felt sexual desire and girls and ladies who were caught masturbating were diagnosed with ‘hysteria’ and ‘nervous excitation’ and treated with cold baths, rest and a restricted diet. But chaste virginity brought its own problems. According to one expert, R.J. Culverwell, in 1844, older celibate women were prone to nervous disorders: ‘as is truly attested by the miseries of hysteria and other nervous derangements, that pervade the junior and elderly maiden branches of every family, and constitute so formidable an enemy to domestic felicity.’121

  Hysteria was a disease unique to elite women, diagnosed by the doctors who specialised in elite women, in a self-fulfilling circle. Hysteria proved to be mysterious: it had no apparent physical cause, it was changeable, different in every patient, perhaps caused by the erratic movement of the womb, by female sensibility, even by inherited madness or masturbation. There were so many symptoms that it was easy for nineteenth-century doctors to diagnose more and more women as suffering from hysteria and, with this publicity, it became more widespread and more extreme. Patients could sink into passivity, even into something like a coma, or they could become hyperactive, with fits, faintings and sometimes violence.122

  As men and women were defined as complete opposites, the new belief that elite women were naturally frigid meant that their opposites – men – must be naturally lustful and driven to seek sexual satisfaction. The myth of the tyrannical male sexual drive – glamourised in the stories of courtly love – was revived to help shore up the contrasting natures of the two sexes. Women were frigid and men were lustful. But there was a problem. Male doctors felt certain that sexual frustration was hugely damaging to male health. Nobody had worried very much about this before but now there was a panic. Sexual restraint weakened male will and body and could lead to fatal disabilities and disease. But so too did masturbation. How to satisfy men whose health depends on them never hearing ‘no’?

  The solution was the exploitation of poor women to service elite male sexuality just as they did all the other disagreeable, tiring, low-skilled, poorly paid work. Nobody suggested that labouring women were so refined as to have lost sexual desire. Nobody suggested that they were so fragile that they should be protected from male lust. The double standard of sexual morality – where men are sexually active and women are not – allowed elite virgins to become frigid upper-class wives shielded from marital demands for sex, as elite husbands satisfied themselves on poor women that they could imagine as robust and sexually willing. One conduct book for servants warned that, while male servants would not be pursued by their mistresses, it was ‘very likely that maids would be attacked by their masters or fellow servants.’123

  Once it was understood that conception was not caused by female orgasm, and agreed that ladies did not orgasm, men were released from any expectation that they would give sexual pleasure to their partners – wives or anyone else. Female sexual arousal was no longer a male ambition. Now, sexual intercourse was defined as penile penetration of the vagina, best performed in the position recommended by the church: face to face, man on top. This put pace, pressure and duration under his control and the conclusion was his ejaculation. This upper- and middling-class definition of sexual intercourse was taught to the labouring classes and changed courtship traditions already under pressure from urban life.

  In pre-industrial villages and small country communities, the courtship rituals had involved the whole community, the young, the newly married and the older people who gathered for seasonal work or celebration and casually supervised the games and dancing. Young people paired up and changed pairings, and courtship took place in semi-public with other couples nearby. A young woman might enjoy light-hearted encounters with several partners before settling on one – or not settling at all. Hand-holding, kissing, mock-fighting and physical play were all part of a light-hearted approach to intimacy that took place in the safety of the community. Courtship traditions like ‘bundling’ – sexual touching without penetration ‘bundled’ up together – and courtship games where couples paired off and hid together, or kissing games where couples might seek each other out, were a light-hearted and easy approach to sexual desire and pleasure. Social condemnation, the church or the law would only be invoked if something went wrong – a pregnancy with a deserting father, an adulterous relationship or scandalous promiscuity. Sexual activity in many forms was permitted, even encouraged, inside community control. The phrase ‘to make love’ did not mean sex; it meant to court, to flirt, to engage and charm.124

  But communal courtship rituals of village life with lifelong friends, under the tolerant scrutiny of the entire community, could not be transferred to urban settings with strangers, and town life and industrial hours did not provide approved events or spaces for courtship. Novels publicised the idea of ‘falling in love’ as a rapid, even instant event, and described encounters that took place in the privacy of the upper-class home, in the presence of one other person – a chaperone – to prevent any sexual intimacy. A couple chose each other and were exclusive to each other, from the very start of the story. They progressed through shared experiences and conversation to marriage and from then – unspoken but understood – to elite sex: penile penetration, dominant male, male orgasm. The middle-class ideas about sex were preached from the pulpit, taught in the conduct books and retold in novels and scandal sheets. The sexual playfulness of the working classes gave way to the genteel taboo on intimacy before marriage; sexual touching became only a stage on the way to penetration, sexual intercourse meant only penile penetration, and female arousal and satisfaction became irrelevant.125

  Pornography drawings that had previously shown kisses and caresses in imaginative positions and combinations now depicted penetrative sex with men on top. Pornographic novels that had told stories of lustful women’s enjoyable progress through many experiences to a late repentance now told stories of female passivity and even victims. Any fictional women who engaged willingly in sex were either hypersexual or morally lost, or both.

  The trend to penetrative intercourse instead of ‘bundling’ and courting rituals is shown in the rise of pre-marital pregnancies. By the start of the nineteenth century, the proportion of pregnant brides and bastard children had both doubled. Women pregnant on their wedding day accounted for 33 per cent of all brides, and 5 per cent of live births were to unmarried mothers.126

  Not all men bought into the opportunities for sexual satisfaction on unenthusiastic partners. The Romantic movement promoted the ideal man with heightened feelings and awareness, and this combined with the evangelical enthusiasm to suggest male sexual self-denial before and even during marriage. Some couples promised highly spiritual unions with sex only for the conception of children. Some husbands – of all classes – practised restraint to avoid frequent pregnancies. At a time of unreliable contraception, when male accoucheurs did not provide abortifacients, like the earlier women midwives, middle- and upper-class couples could only prevent pregnancies by sexual restraint.

  Women Divided

  One of the least explored effects of separate spheres was the division of women from women: it created a massive gulf between the ‘lady’ of the elite and the ‘woman’ of the classes below her. Elite women were thought to be culturally and even biologically different from working women and were required to lead very different lives.127 A rift opened between the women who were encouraged to be weak in the drawing room and frigid in the bedroom and those who would only survive the fields, sweatshops, factories and streets if they were extraordinarily strong and resilient.

  Behind high factory walls without windows, deafened by the noise of the machines, exposed to danger and to assault, injured, ill and underfed, the mill girls were invisible to the ladies who bought the linen in the elegant draper’s shop. Warm bright fires in middle-class drawing rooms burned the coal that a woman collier had dragged, harnessed like a pit pony, through the mine, that the maid had laid in the fireplace where a child had swept the chimney. Ladies could nibble on delicacies because underpaid women grew the food, brought it to market, shopped for it, prepared it and served it, and cleaned up afterwards. A sweet-smelling lady of leisure, beautifully dressed, was supported by an invisible army of working women, carrying the hot water for her bath up the narrow back stairs, making the soap, washing her linen, even physically dressing her with the complicated fastenings on gowns that were changed several times a day for different events, braiding her hair into the elaborate styles that needed a hairdresser every evening.