ABSTRACT
Wealthy women could exercise patronage on a wide scale: they controlled church livings, jobs on estates or in factories and mines. Wealthy women also controlled domestic jobs, employing governesses and nursery nurses, butlers, housekeepers, gardeners and grooms in their town and country establishments. The women were presented both before and after marriage, which was seen as a change of status both for men and for women. Political power reflected the ownership of property and, although women did not sit in Parliament, they expected to exert direct influence over their friends who did, and gain patronage for their proteges. The active involvement of influential women in the lives and careers of their husbands and children is documented in countless memoirs and diaries. The English upper classes were sexually permissive throughout the nineteenth century, not only in the Regency period; and women generally expected the same sexual freedom as men after they were married.
