middle class girls needed a new kind of education for the new kind of life that they were leading once ideas about middle- class gentility start to take hold from the turn of the 19th century onwards clearly girls are leading a different kind of life um they are not helping their mothers with the housework they don't have servants to do that uh their father's business will be at several miles away from the home so they're not going to be helping there um they're at home all day um they need a new set of skills to prepare
them for the for the life ahead the sole aim really for middle class woman now is to get married to a man hopefully one who is solvent who's healthy um and who her parents approve of so she's got to make herself um attractive um and that means learning particular kinds of accomplishments the kind of accomplishments that upper class girls have always been taught but now middleclass girls are being taught too typically it's learning conversational French it's learning how to play the piano some dancing might be involved there's also more subtle things she's going to go
into a world where she has to learn how to how to behave and how to manage her physical presence how to stand up right not slouch how close do you stand to other people what happens when you need to be excused when you need the bathroom how do you ask for that as always with anything to do with the victorians it wasn't quite as simple as it seemed so middle class girls were certainly supposed to be educated in the sense that they were supposed to read to expand their minds but wo beti if they became
blue stock that was the the worst thing now a blue stocking is somebody is a is a young woman who simply knows too much stuff who reads too widely who cares too much about what she reads who starts to sort of take over the kind of role that expected of a young man in the sense of she wants to argue about politics at dinner um she suddenly wants to start reading the classics in the original languages Latin Greek and heaven forbid even Hebrew that's the kind of girl as far as middle-class victorians are concerned that
knows sensible man is going to want to marry um she's made herself masculine some doctors believe that quite literally the the more a girl read um the more masculine her appearance um she would start to look Hollow cheeked um something very unpleasant would happen to her ovaries she would start to become a kind of desiccated spinster um so the emphasis was on learning but not too much learning um of of of being able to speak to anybody in a in a kind of interesting and Lively way but to never touch too deeply on serious subjects
uh the tension also comes across of course with the with the whole kind of terrible double bind about being sexually attractive there's an immense emphasis on how a girl looks of course there is that's one of the main qualities she brings to the marketplace is she pretty that's terribly important but woe beti her if she thinks too much about her looks that heaven forbid you know they're starting to express a kind of sexual desire and I think you can see that very much work if you think of Jane Austin's Pride and Prejudice the two younger
sisters Kitty and Lydia who are held up I think for our if not our Judgment at least are s of pity uh in the sense that they have become foolish girls far too concerned with what they look like and as we know in the case of Lydia it it happens it comes to a very very sticky end fashion played in a very large part in defining what it meant to be a middleclass woman and interestingly at the point at which middle class women Retreat into the home um that and not involved in any kind of
profitable labor is the moment when women's Fashions become incredibly impractical so from uh the late 1840s onwards we see the development of the famous krinolin which is an extraordinary kind of hoop-shaped bell-shaped skirt that sticks out several feet all the way around around so that uh women make the most extraordinary shape as they walk along and of course if you're wearing a kralin you can't really do anything that's terribly useful you certainly can't go down on your hands and knees and scrub the floor um nor can you very easily get on it on a train
or on a bus um you know because basically you'll take up three seats the kralin is a kind of mechanism designed for keeping women in their place literally it's plenty of evidence that individual young Victorian women found this role that had been foed on them incredibly constraining um incredibly kind of suffocating indeed Florence Nightingale very very clever intelligent educated young woman uh suffered bouts of of near hysteria throughout her her teens and early 20s because she felt so constrained by the very well-to-do very loving home from which she'd come it was very nice but she
didn't have enough to do she longed to have um a more public theater in which she could do good works in which she could make a difference and so she recounts horrible experiences of not being able to eat in front of her family um you know just can't bear being looked at while she's eating uh a sense in which she she's sure that her tongue is too big for her mouth all the sort of classic signs of Hysteria um and then you have people like Elizabeth Barrett who who also very educated very clever young woman
in this case she doesn't want to go out and do good works she wants to write poetry she is the greatest female poet of the 19th century but where do you write poetry if you are from a again another very well-healed family you are expected as Elizabeth's sisters were to lead a kind of life where you're spending a lot of time um organizing the servants making morning calls looking after your widowed father so where is Elizabeth going to find time to write this extraordinary verse well what she does of course is she becomes ill uh
she becomes a sort of professional invalid she withdraws to a room at the top of the house in wimple Street where she lives with her family and she makes herself into somebody who's sort of outside the normal run of the household she's not expected to do the kinds of Duties that are expected of her sister um she has long hours where she can just please herself reading and writing and it works brilliantly for her um during that time she writes some of her best poetry and in a sense we we know that this was a
a sub diffus although it was probably unconscious she probably didn't realize what she was doing by the fact that when a very handsome young poet called Robert Browning strikes up a friendship with her um and persuades her to escape to Italy suddenly she has no problems walking at all she manages to sneak out of the household get married and then a few weeks later they're off to Italy and there's no sign of never being able to walk after that
