Victorian Women — Social and Economic Status: Class and Occupation

[Victorian Web Home —> Political History —> Social History —> Gender Matters]

General

• Victorian Working Women: Sweated Labor
• Clara Collet and women's work
• Margaret Harkness: A Late Victorian New Woman and Social Investigator
• Marthe Josephine Besson, an important Victorian businesswoman
• The invention of the “housewife” and the previctorian role of women

Upper Clases

• Royalty — the Queen
• Nobility
• The Aristocracy and Gentry
• Ladies of the Uplands and the Lawn — an Example from a Seaside Town
• Lady Charlotte Guest, Industrialist and translator (Data Wales site)
• Families of new capitalists, millowners
• Florence Nightingale
• Nurses in the Franco-Prussian War, the Serbo-Turkish War, and Battles with the Chairman of the British Red Cross (UK site)
• The United Kingdom Centre for the History of Nursing & Midwifery (UK site)

Middle Classes

• Families of professionals — physicians, attorneys, writers, engineers —
• Women writers and doctors (these last only near the end of the century)
• Member of religous order (later nineteenth century)

Lower Middle Classes and Ambiguous Classes

• Hoteliers
• Publicans
• Tradeswomen
• Lodging house keepers
• Governess or teacher
  • Schoolmistresses and Governesses
  • The Figure of the Governess (based on Pearsall's Night's Black Angels
  • The Governess and Class Prejudice
  • Punch and Brontë on Training the Ideal Governess
  • The Position of Middle Class Women
  • The Victorian Governess: A Bibliography
  • Donald Clarke's A Daisy in the Broom: The Story of a School, 1820-1958

Lower Classes

• Women of the upper working class
• Girls and Women at Work in Victorian Mines, Quarries, and Brickworks
• Miscellaneous occupations
• Seamstresses, Milliners
• Farm, factory, and mine workers
  • Ruskin's sympathetic description of Women Iron Workers
  • The Omission of Women Factory Workers from Victorian Fiction
• Washerwomen
• Domestic servants
• Introduction
• Domestic servants in Victorian Hastings
• "On the Side of the Maids" — an 1874 account of a maid's hard life
• "Maid in England" — the life of the Victorian domestic servant (Public Record Office exhibition)
• Women of the 'lower' working class in Hastings

Underclasses

• Deserving poor: unemployed, underemployed, victims of injury and illness
• Undeserving poor, criminal classes: Prostitution
• Women of the underclass
• Magistrates Court reports from Hastings

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Last modified 27 May 2018