ABSTRACT
Technological advances changed women’s social and economic roles in nineteenth-century England, and polarised the life experiences of working and non-working women. According to the ideal, home became a place where only women —mistresses of the household, servants, and daughters —spent their lives. The ideal of virtuous woman reigning supreme in the home, endowing it with peace and security, running the household with skill and efficiency, and rarely venturing into the world beyond, remained for a long while to inspire Victorian England. Faced with an increase in leisure and the need to behave with elegance in order to make the best possible marriage, many young women in the early nineteenth century sought an education in accomplishments not household skills. Those supporting the Victorian ideal of women claimed that universities provided a vocational education inappropriate for woman’s role. Men were accustomed to competing and measuring their ability against one another.
