Victoria, Wife, and Empress
Queen Victoria, who succeeded the often unpopular and sometimes dissolute Hanoverian rulers, made a purposeful decision to incorporate the morality and style of the upper and middle classes into her reign. This was due in part to her own personal style – she was emotionally devoted as a child to a middle-class governess, she lived in a separate sphere from the royal court, she had a religious upbringing, and she adored her austere and respectable husband, whom she considered her superior. Victoria established a bourgeois and royal family to administer the world’s largest empire, combining English domination with unparalleled riches, inequality, racism, and misogyny.
The tremendous expansion in the nation’s riches – resulting from the profits of slavery, enclosure, and agriculture, industrialization, and empire – fueled everyone’s prosperity except the poor and excluded, while expanding the middle class. Working people moved out of poverty and into higher-paying jobs, farmers became affluent as agriculture improved, and industrialists profited. The ‘elite’ class grew less exclusive as the middle classes continued their centuries-long growth, merging with the upper gentry who were marrying into the aristocracy, all investing or actively participating in the empire, trade, church, administration, industry, and landowning.
Minute social divisions distinguished old families’ money from new, old titles from new, and the established from the newcomers.
However, the newly awakened middle classes did not provide a bridge to the destitute. They saw poverty as a shameful situation from which they or their parents had successfully escaped. They adopted elite practices such as hiring poor people at low wages, charging high rents for substandard housing, and supporting either the church, which stayed in the old established parishes and ignored the slums, or the evangelical wing, which entered the slums bringing God, hygiene, snobbery, sexism, and racism. The people they labelled as “deserving poor” received advice and charity, while the rest – paupers, beggars, addicts, the insane, criminals, the hopeless, social outcasts, protesters, prostitutes, people of other races and religions – were watched from a distance, regulated, and punished. By 1850, over a quarter of the population might be classified as middle class; their numbers would double over the next 20 years.
Although Queen Victoria was an active and domineering monarch, arguing with prime ministers, quarrelling with her husband, ruling for 40 years as a widow, and putting her children on most European thrones to ensure Great Britain’s continued position of power, she portrayed herself as a deferential and adoring wife. She may have been a reigning queen and subsequently an emperor, but she was keen to demonstrate that her husband was the patriarchal head of a perfect family, portraying Prince Albert as the family and empire’s father, and herself as a subservient wife and, later, grief-stricken widow.
‘Let women be what God intended, a helpmate for men, but with entirely distinct responsibilities and vocations,’ she wrote.
She hired governesses and tutors to educate her daughters: Vicky, Alice, Helena, Louise, and Beatrice were given educations that included physical exercise and practical skills suitable for their future careers as wives to monarchs, guiding their countries towards a British-style constitution and middle-class lifestyle. Vicky, the first child, and her parents both grieved that she had not been born a boy because she showed more promise than her brother, Prince Edward. Vicky always took on boy roles in family plays, disguising up as a boy on the stage with her parents’ approval. Their desire for her led them to allow her to pick her own royal spouse and her engagement at the age of 15 to a man nine years older than her, with the intention that the young couple would establish a British-style constitution in his native country of Prussia. Victoria, like all middle-class mothers, believed in exporting her home’s standards and elegance, even to families (or entire nations) that did not want it. All of the princesses advocated for women’s education and nursing training. The girls followed their royal mother’s example, attempting to improve women’s behaviour rather than changing their surroundings. Princess Louise, the second youngest, was an excellent artist. The queen permitted her to attend the National Art Training School, where she specialised in sculpture. Louise supported girls’ education, but her husband believed she should not speak in front of an audience.
The princess educationalist sat silently as he ascended the platform to read her feminist speech.
Queen Victoria struck one outstanding blow for the freedom of women from pain when she accepted chloroform for the birth of her last two children, Leopold (1853-84) and Beatrice (1857-1944), against the advice of churchmen, ending centuries of a tradition of female suffering based on the Christian belief that pain in labour was a God-given curse on women for Eve’s sin, as written in Genesis: Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception;
In 2188, Queen Victoria evaded the suffering associated with Eve’s punishment for sin. Other punishments meted out to women were the desire for a husband and the dominance of husbands over wives. If the three curses are viewed as one, Victoria’s victory over agony during childbirth implies that a woman may be able to avoid the other two curses: chastity for wives and male dominance. This was innovative, but nobody mentioned it.
Despite having nine children in 17 years of marriage, Victoria, like many aristocratic women, was distant from her children, refusing to breastfeed and leaving them in the care of nannies and governesses. She may have suffered from untreated post-partum depression, speaking of lowness and a predisposition to cry… it is what every lady suffers with, more or less, and what I suffered severely with during my first confinement.
She was closest to her youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, and intended her to remain single and serve as her companion and secretary for the rest of her life. However, Beatrice became engaged in secret, and her mother could not talk to her for six months, eventually recovering enough to insist that the young married couple live with her so that she could see Beatrice every day.
The princess obeyed and stayed with her mother during her marriage and later, during her own widowhood. Beatrice, like any other middle-class daughter, was expected to work as a companion and assistance in the family business without being recognised or compensated.
Victoria’s opposition to the women’s rights campaign was known, but not publicly voiced. Her often-quoted comments of the’mad foolishness of women’s rights’ were delivered in private. However, her position as ruling queen created the paradox of one woman signing the laws while her married female subjects were barred from doing so.
Caroline Norton, no supporter of women’s suffrage, whose own divorce resulted in agonising separation from her children, said it was a grotesque anomaly that married women were legally non-existent in a country governed by a female sovereign: ‘The signatures of married women are legally worthless; where they cannot lay claim to the simplest article of personal property – cannot make a will – or sign a lease – and are held to be non-existent in law.’
Victoria, as a woman who concealed her hard work and was not publicly compensated, served as a model for the middle-class wife who, too, was not compensated for all of her hidden labour. In that way, Victoria was like so many other women: an inadvertent feminist who modelled womanly subservience while consistently exhibiting talent.
