ABSTRACT
Writing in 1861 about the need for a realistic understanding of women’s lives in Victorian England, the author of ‘Facts Versus Ideas’ for the English Woman’s Journal listed a series of ‘stereotyped phrases’ that she thought had become overused and meaningless:
The word ‘domestic’, she notes, is used to describe the home as a sphere dedicated solely to emotion; consequently, the domestic sphere had become enshrined and deified as a realm of womanly self-sacrifice and unassailable virtue through unthinking repetition by the self-satisfied male householder. Her particular problem with this sentimental idealisation of the domestic is that in limiting the function of domesticity it restricts women to the inanity of the middle-class household existence and denies the possibility:
Remaining in the domestic sphere, this author argues, is not a necessary constituent of a domestic identity.
