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4 - Critics of the hearth
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
There is a great demand made now for more work for woman, and wider fields for her labour. We confess we should feel a deeper interest in the question if we saw more energy and conscience put into the work lying to her hand at home,… What we want to insist on now is the pitiable ignorance and shiftless indolence of most middle-class housekeepers; and we would urge on woman the value of a better system of life at home, before laying claim to the discharge of extradomestic duties abroad.
Elizabeth Lynn Linton, ‘What is Woman's Work?’ (1868)By the early 1870s., the sort of girl suggested by Robertson's Cecilia Dunscombe had roused flurries of dismay. As defined by Elizabeth Lynn Linton in a series of unsigned articles for the Saturday Review (1868), ‘The Girl of the Period’ personified the fallen standards of an acquisitive, pleasure-mad society and challenged the feminine ideal, ‘neither bold in bearing nor masculine in mind; a girl who, when she married, would be her husband's friend and companion, but never his rival, … a tender mother, an industrious housekeeper, a judicious mistress’. Mrs Linton spoke for all women ‘of home birth and breeding’ when she castigated the modern type who cared little for maidenly duty, indulged in ‘slang, bold talk, and fastness’, pursued money instead of love and happiness and, when she married, was bored by her domestic confines: ‘Love in a cottage, that seductive dream … is now a myth of past ages.’
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- The Making of Victorian Drama , pp. 94 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991