ABSTRACT
In mid-Victorian Britain, a woman of the middle or upper class was not expected to earn her own living; she was supposed to remain forever dependent upon a man – first as a daughter and then as a wife. After she married, her economic dependency was enforced by law, for prior to the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870, 1874 and 1882, a married woman was not permitted to own property in her own right – her estate passed to her husband on marriage. * Victorian women could not easily change the property laws, or any other laws affecting their lives, since they could not vote in parliamentary elections, and thus were governed by laws made by men alone.
