A Victorian Woman's Place: Public Culture in the Nineteenth Century (International Library of Historical Studies)

"While the image of bourgeois Victorian women as 'angels in the house' isolated from the world in private domesticity has long been dismissed as an unrealistic ideal, women have remained marginalised in many recent accounts of the public culture of the middle class. Simon Morgan aims to redress the balance. By drawing on a variety of sources including private documents, he argues that women actually played an important role in the formation of the public identity of the Victorian middle class. Through their support for cultural and philanthropic associations and their engagement in political campaigns, women developed a nascent civic identity, which for some informed their later demands for political rights. "Middle Class Women and Victorian Public Culture" offers numerous insights for the reader into the public lives of women in this fascinating period."--Bloomsbury Publishing.

While the image of bourgeois Victorian women as 'angels in the house' isolated from the world in private domesticity has long been dismissed as an unrealistic ideal, women have remained marginalised in many recent accounts of the public culture of the middle class. Simon Morgan aims to redress the balance, by drawing on a variety of sources including private documents he argues that women actually played an important role in the formation of the public identity of the Victorian middle class. Through their support for cultural and philanthropic associations and their engagement in political campaigns, women developed a nascent civic identity, which for some informed their later demands for political rights. Middle Class Women and Victorian Public Culture offers numerous insights for the reader into the public lives of women in this fascinating period.

Annotation While the image of bourgeois Victorian women as 'angels in the house' isolated from the world in private domesticity has long been dismissed, as an unrealistic ideal, women have remained marginalised in many recent accounts of the public culture of the middle class. By drawing on a variety of sources including private documents, Simon Morgan argues that women actually played an important role in the formation of the public identity of the Victorian middle class. Through their support for cultural and philanthropic associations and their engagement in political campaigns, women developed a nascent civic identity, which for some informed their later demands tor political rights Drawing on a variety of sources, including private documents, this work argues that women actually played an important role in the formation of the public identity of the Victorian middle class. It offers numerous insights for the reader into the public lives of women in this fascinating period The social role of women in the mid-nineteenth century was surrounded by ambiguity and uncertainty; an ambivalence increasingly acknowledged by historians who have long since abandoned the simplistic notion of the Victorian 'Angel in the House'.