3. What is the
“Woman
Question”?

4. Link

5. Link

7. Piety
Purity
Submissiveness
Domesticity
Slide developed with material from aovaice@students.depaul.edu

8.  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

9.  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

10.  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

11.  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

12. 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

13.  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

15.  “To men belongs the potent—(I had almost said
the omnipotent) consideration of worldly
aggrandizement” (1584).
 Man’s vision of “[woman’s] 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 England…have obtained a degree
of importance in society far beyond what their
unobtrusive virtues would appear to claim” (1584).

16.  “The nuptial contrasts are the poles / On
which the heavenly spheres revolve” (63-64).

17.  “The man’s power is active, progressive,
defensive…His intellect is for speculation and
invention” (1587).
 “the woman’s 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 “woman…must be enduringly,
incorruptibly good; instinctively, infallibly
wise—wise, not for self-development, but for
self-renunciation” (1588).

18.  “We come then to the conclusion that the
present form of marriage…is 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).

19. Reading Art
Projects