Victorian Rules for Sex, Marriage and Being A Good Wife
Why can’t you ask a question? Why is your husband cheating? Hush! Ladies don’t ask questions.
The Victorian era was a time of chivalry and romance. Right? Lovely ladies wearing silk and lace, petticoats and kitten boots, batting their eyelashes at a dark-eyed Heathcliff.
Romantic love filled the pages of novels by Jane Eyre, the Brontë sisters, Virginia Woolf, John Keats, Leo Tolstoy and even Charles Dickens.
I wish you to know that you have been the last dream of my soul.
— A Tale of Two Cities, by Charles Dickens
I read a book about being a woman in the Victorian era. Omg.
It’s filled with all sorts of delights. Cold pee under the bed. Crotchless underwear. Arsenic in your face cream. Horse poo in the streets. But the real gold?
The chapters on being a married woman.
Yeah. No.
No thank you very much.
Here’s the book I read…
Here’s the Amazon description. It was all I needed…
Have you ever wished you could live in an earlier, more romantic era? Ladies, welcome to the 19th century, where there’s arsenic in your face cream, a pot of cold pee sits under your bed, and all of your underwear is crotchless. Why? Shush, dear. A lady doesn’t question.
So let’s talk about the rules for being a happily married women in the Victorian era and we can all have a good laugh afterward.
The quotes, incidentally, are from a series of “guide-books” for married women, written by doctors and dinguses, as published during the Victorian era.
1. Your marriage will be happier if you do not have aspirations, especially outside the home
“However much men may admire the public performance of a gifted woman, they do not desire that boldness and dash in a wife.”
You might have talents. You sing like a nightingale, or you’re wonderful at writing, teaching, or dressmaking. That makes you bad marriage material. Hide those aspirations, honey, and heaven forbid, do not even think of a job, much less a career. No, no, no.
Good wives don’t have careers. That’s an insult to your husband. A very, very grave insult. First, it implies you think he isn’t competent enough to provide. Secondly, it indicates you’re not 100% invested in him and the family you create together. And that’s what you were born for, silly.
2. Good wives do not complain, nag or whine.
“Luckily, it’s scientifically proven that scolding shortens a woman’s life. So, Nature will soon have mercy on both her soul and yours, leaving the weary husband a great deal wiser the second time around!”
Whining and complaining are the side effect of feeling powerless. That’s why children whine. But you’re not a child. You’re old enough to know better. And you should. A book called “Duties of A Married Woman” published 1837, has an entire chapter about the different types of “scolds” a woman can be.
There’s the outright scold, the internal scold, the intermittent scold, and even the woman who scolds according to the moon phases. lol. Suffice to say it leads to ruination of the marriage. And it’s your fault.
3. Do not complain about feeling unequal, that is the fault of your own gender.
“Women must not complain, even if there’s reason to, because the man’s authority is the consequence of sin, the sin of your own sex.”
You are not equal and you’re never going to be. You have to do what he says, no matter how absurd, tyrannical or misguided. You will be told what you can and can’t do and what you can and can’t have. And it’s your own fault. Because you have the same chromosomes as Eve, who brought sin into the world. So there you have it. That’s why men are superior.
4. Good wives don’t go out alone. Not even to the grocer’s. It makes you look like a streetwalker.
“Young married ladies cannot present themselves in public without their husband or an aged lady. They are, however, at liberty to walk with young married ladies”
We all know what a streetwalker is, right? No. No, you do not. A streetwalker is any woman walking the streets by herself in the Victorian era. If you read my underpants story, you know ladies wore crotchless underpants. If you go out alone, you are virtually indistinguishable from a beggar or a whore. So go with him. Or find an old crone to accompany you. Or a bunch of married women. Moral safety in groups, dearie.
5. A good wife understands the importance of a well cooked and timely meal
“A man who partakes of a badly cooked dinner is sure to be dyspeptic, quarrelsome, snappish and unamiable. Take warning, oh ye wives! and look to the dinners of your husbands, and know how dinners ought to be cooked.”
Food had to be coaxed from the earth or chased down and killed. You could buy canned food, but there was no FDA, no regulation, and Louis Pasteur didn’t teach the world about bacteria until 1864. Ketchup was tinted with rust to make it redder, and bakers increased the weight of their bread by adding chalk or grit. I wish I was kidding. Also, no refrigeration, and it’s up to you to ensure that your family doesn’t get food poisoning because, honey girl, food poisoning tends to make men very grumpy.
6. Modesty should be removed along with your petticoats, and likewise put back on
“Many men find their energies palsied by the frigid conduct of their brides… the woman who goes to bed with a man must put off her modesty with her petticoats, and put it on again with the same…”
Ladies, all that modesty men want you to have? That’s not for the bedroom. No. That’s just for the rest of the house. He wants a cook in the kitchen, a lady in the drawing room and a harlot in the bedroom. Don’t mix those up, because if you’re frigid, he’s going to spend all the grocery money purchasing shame and disease in some nasty red-light district. And it will be your fault.
7. Don’t have sex for pleasure
“Having intercourse for carnal reasons alone is like allowing your husband to use you like a prostitute. A full three-fourths of diseases in women are the result of engaging in non-reproductive sex.”
Doing so led to diseases like cancer, or at least that’s what some Victorian-era experts thought. It’s perfectly fine if pleasure is a side effect of the attempts to procreate. After all, it’s good for your husband’s ego and prowess. But you’re not a prostitute or harlot, so you shouldn’t be seeking marital relations for pleasure alone. If you do, you’re going to get cancer. Or something worse.
8. Do not attempt to conceive when under the influence of alcohol
“Do not have relations while either partner is drunk because idiocy and numerous nervous maladies are liable to appear in the offspring of an intoxicated mother or father.”
If you ever thought wow, people are dumb, you might not be wrong. Know why? Clearly, it’s because our parents were drunk. Wow. I feel so educated.
9. Do not attempt to avoid conception. Bearing children is what women are made for.
“Having children under proper circumstances never ruins the health and happiness of any woman. In fact, woman-hood is incomplete without them. She may have a dozen or more, and still have better health than before marriage.”
Having children is an investment. You finance your retirement with mother’s milk. Not only that, by the time your oldest daughter is seven, she’ll be doing a quarter of the housework. Plus, childbearing is the only real fulfillment of our womanhood. That’s why God gave us uteruses. So we could go forth and procreate and fulfill our destiny. Sigh.
10. Do not confront your husband if he is cheating with some pretty little thing.
“Caring more about your husband’s happiness than your own isn’t just prudent, it’s biblical. Godly heroines like Sarah, Leah and Rachel all gave the most beautiful of their maids for their husbands’ use.”
Alexander Walker, in his 1840 book Women, Physiologically Considered, As To Mind, Morals, Marriage, Matrimonial Slavery, Infidelity, and Divorce tells the story of a woman who discovers her husband has a mistress.
She found that the girl, who was poor and thus easily seduced, was living in a shabby apartment. So she arranged to have it nicely decorated, as befitted a woman worthy of her husband’s taste. Ladies, that is what you do with a cheating husband. Men have their foibles. After all, you are the one he has to support. Because he owns you. Besides, it’s pious and Godly to understand that men have their needs.
Aren’t you glad you live in the present?
Me, too. And I didn’t even talk about being called a slattern, or walking through horse poo as a preferable option to lifting one’s skirts. Better a little poop on your gown that people think you’re a harlot for showing your ankles.
I have to warn you, the book is hilarious in small doses. But, don’t try read it all at once. It has the opposite effect. If I didn’t put it down often enough, it started to make me really angry. Too many parts that still sound a little too familiar.
“Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
― Virginia Woolf
Yeah, pretty terrible. Not to mention women couldn't divorce men, even if they were unfaithful or abusive, but men could divorce women, which left women, especially working class women, with few opportunities. Many "respectable" jobs were cut off to them. Many had to prove "destitution" to get government assistance, which required some women to enter the dreaded workhouse. That imprinted yet another stigma. A husband leaving his wife was essentially a social death sentence for her.
When I said "Another gem," I meant the book you read AND your article about it!
You should gather all your articles about women into a book! I'd be thrilled to proofread it for you to catch typos, agreement--all the pickies--no charge! I'll buy the first copy! Aim for 150 pages. More articles? Another book!
You're an amazing writer! Books would reach a lot more appreciative readers!
Hugs and love,
Linda