Home > Feminism > Women in the 19th Century - Estelle B. Freedman And Erna Olafson Hellerstein (Essay Date 1981)
Women in the 19th Century - Estelle B. Freedman And Erna Olafson Hellerstein (Essay Date 1981)
ESTELLE B. FREEDMAN AND ERNA OLAFSON HELLERSTEIN (ESSAY DATE 1981)
SOURCE: Freedman, Estelle B. and Erna Olafson Hellerstein. Introduction to Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women’s Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, pp. 118-33. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981.
In the following essay, Freedman and Hellerstein examine the domestic, sexual, and mothering duties of Victorian women in France, England, and the United States, citing first-hand accounts to show that women responded in a variety of ways to the often contradictory nature of their idealized and actual roles in private life.
The doctrine of the separate spheres, as elaborated in literature, law, medicine, and religion, prescribed that women’s personal lives center around home, husband, and children. The traditional separation between the male public sphere and the female private...
[The entire page is 10026 words long]
Navigate
- Introduction
- Representative Works
-
Primary Sources
- Charles Fourier (Essay Date 1808)
- Nellie Weeton (Journal/Letter Dates 26 January 1810 And 15 September 1810)
- Emma Willard (Address Date 1819)
- Parisian Garment Workers (Petition Date August 1848)
- Elizabeth Cady Stanton (Speech Date 1848)
- The Sibyl (Letter Date February 1857)
- Louisa Bastian, Mary Hamelton, And Anna Long (Petition Date July 1862)
- Harriet H. Robinson (Report Date 1883)
- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (Essay Date 1893)
- Overviews
- Early Feminists
- Representations Of Women In Literature And Art In The 19Th Century
- Further Reading
- Copyright
