ABSTRACT
The unmarried middle-class woman is by now one of the better- known figures of Victorian social history. Recognized by Victorians as a social and often moral problem, and frequently sensationalized in contemporary literature, the plight of the young, genteel spinster has rivaled the women’s suffrage movement as a traditional focus for the study of women in history. The main features of the problem are fairly clear-cut. Middle-class female education was governed by expectations of marriage, yet the increasing percentage of women over men during the nineteenth century put marriage beyond the reach of thousands of women. For the middle-class victims of this process, particularly those whose families had suffered a serious decline in fortune, the need for another respectable source of support was frequently urgent but rarely fulfilled. The result was the “distressed gentlewoman,” judged by her society to have “failed in business” 1 and forced to demean herself by seeking employment for which she had little or no training. One of the few ill-paid outlets available to her was teaching, and this remained so for many years after the feminists began their campaign for wider employment opportunities in the late fifties. Consequently we owe most of our knowledge of the distressed gentlewoman to discussion of the governess; apart from marriage and motherhood Victorian society offered little in the way of a realistic alternative.
