women

Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century, women were encouraged to aspire to marriage. In The Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, Sarah Stickney Ellis, a best-selling author, maintained that women were “clothed in moral beauty,” which was best applied to raising virtuous children and keeping men, the rightful holders of “worldly aggrandizement,” on the straight and narrow (Harrison 30). Unlike Tennyson, Ellis professed that young ladies should be well versed in “domestic ideology,” because …

…prevalence of these ideas is apparent in Money, by Lord Lytton, in which Sir John Vessey says to his daughter Georgina: [I never] stuffed your head with histories and homilies; but you draw, you sing, you dance; you walk well into a room; and that’s the way young ladies are educated nowadays, in order to become the pride of their parents and a blessing to their husbands – that is, when they have caught him (233).