Victorian Women

Most women in the victorian era were considered to be housewives.  A small amount of women would have certain occupations, but majority of the women would stay at home.  They would tend to their families and carry out household chores.  For the small percentage of women that worked, there jobs would have been maids, nurses, teachers, psychiatrists or social workers.  Other women would work from home as farm wives, selling produce from the farms such as milk and butter.

Women were required to obey men,  in most cases men would be in charge of all the finances.  Wealthy widows and spinsters were an exception and single women were left vulnerable for social disapproval and often pity.  Girls received far less education and their purpose was to marry and reproduce.  A lot of women lived in a state little better than slavery.  Women were left with not much of a choice but to marry, when they married, everything they owned and/or inherited would automatically belong to their husbands.  Even the rights to a women's body were given to the husband through law and the consecration of marriage, with women verbally agreeing to the vow of obeying her husband.   It wasn't until the late 20th Century that women had the right to omit that promise from their wedding vows.

In 1890, Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1935), a midwife turned journalist, described women's positions succinctly:

Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held...under the arbitrary 

domination of another's will, and dependant for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master.  (From a speech to the National Liberal Club)

If women were not happy with their situations, there was almost nothing, without exceptional circumstances that they could do about it.  Divorce was not made legal for women until 1891.