Increase of material ease and comfort was re-shaping the course of domestic life. As household arrangements were improved, new appliances invented, and the general conditions made smoother, woman’s position changed. She was less completely occupied with the means of living, and more open to outside influences. That she invariably made a good use of her liberty is not so clear. The prosperous, well-housed citizenesses of the eighteenth century probably spent much of their spare time in idle chatter—it was a great period for gossip—and in tricking themselves out to imitate the fine ladies of whom they got glimpses at church and in the public gardens. They rose late because it was fashionable, leaving their servants to do the work that their grandmothers would have shared. There is as much lost as gained in the uprooting of social habits while the people are still unripe for changes. And the women of the eighteenth century were unripe. There was more material than intellectual improvement. The literary movement hardly touched women in every-day life; the philanthropic movement had not made any headway, and as for politics, it was only the great ladies, with relatives and friends among statesmen, who concerned themselves with public affairs. Middle-class women seldom read the newspapers. It was in the coffee-houses that men learned and discussed the news of the day; they did not buy the papers and bring them home in London. In the country a weekly news-letter was handed from neighbour to neighbour, or discussed at village inns, but the women-folk usually gathered their news by hearsay, not finding much to interest them in the curiously composed, ill-printed medley that called itself a newspaper.
The women of the middle classes did not keep pace with the men in enlarging their sphere of interests. Among the aristocracy women were naturally drawn more into the current of life by their connection with leading men of the time, by their intercourse with distinguished foreign visitors, by their opportunities of travel and of contact with the best thought of the day. But the women of the trading classes were removed from all these influences. Their rôle was a domestic one. The education which they received was not calculated to inspire them with any idea that their minds needed enlarging. It was seldom thought that women required anything beyond a few accomplishments.
In Scotland—
“domestick affairs and amuseing her husband was the bussiness of a good wife. Those that could afoard governesses for their children had them, but all they could learn them was to read English ill and plain work. The chief thing required was to hear them repeat Psalms and long catechisms, in which they were employed an hour or more every day, and almost the whole day on Sunday. If there was no governess to perform this work it was done by the chaplan, of which there was one in every family. No attention was given to what we call accomplishments. Reading and writing well, or even spelling, was never thought of. Musicke, drawing, or French were seldom taught the girls. They were allowed to rune about and amuse themselves in the way they choiced, even to the age of women, at which time they were generally sent to Edinburgh for a winter or two to lairn to dress themselves, and to dance and see a little of the world. The world was only to be seen at Church, at marriages, burials, and baptisms. These were the only public places where the ladys went in full dress, and as they walked the street they were seen by everybody; but it was the fashion when in undress all-wise to be masked. When in the country their employment was in color’d work, beds, tapestry and other pieces of furniture; imitations of fruits and flowers with very little taste. If they read any it was either books of devotion or long romances, and sometimes both.”
These are the words of an Ayrshire lady, whose reminiscences date back to the early years of the eighteenth century. She lived up till 1795, during which time she witnessed a great change in girls’ education. Reading, writing, music, drawing, geography, history, even French and Italian were added gradually to the curriculum.
In former periods women were producers as well as distributors, each household being like a little township, dependent on itself. But in the eighteenth century, although domestic industries had not been revolutionized as they have since been, there were factories and shops, and all sorts of hawkers, who vended goods of various kinds in the streets. In London and in the large towns there was no need for each family to produce its own necessaries, though in country districts the domestic arrangements were more stationary. Baking, brewing, and salting were still carried on in the larger houses occupied by the gentry, but in small households most of the things required for daily use were bought. The domestic rôle of the eighteenth-century woman among the middle classes was not so absorbing as to leave her no time for mental recreation. But books, like politics, were, for the most part, left to the men. There was so little circulation of literature that in London much of the reading was done standing at a bookseller’s stall, a method obviously impossible to women. With such scanty education as was considered appropriate to the weaker sex, with no books but of the most dreary kind, written for young people, it was little wonder that the generality of girls grew up without any habit of reading, or of regarding literature as an essential element of their daily lives. We cannot think of the average woman in the last century as finding much of her pleasure in any intellectual occupation. She had been neglected, her mind allowed to rust. The awakening that had taken place two hundred years before had been succeeded by a reaction, and there was a general apathy with regard to women’s education.
A writer in the second quarter of the century, who is vaunting the superiority of men over women, says England is
“the place in the world where the fair sex is the most regarded, and, perhaps, deserves most to be so.... Nor is it easy to comprehend how it is possible to raise them higher with any show of reason, considering their natural incapacity for everything above the sphere they actually move in.”
Foreigners were always struck by the freedom enjoyed by married women. One observes that
“among the common people the husbands seldom make their wives work. As to the women of quality, they don’t trouble themselves about it.”