11. Marriage in the Victorian Age
32. THE VICTORIAN AGE
The institutions of slavery and monarchy, both up held by the church, now began their crumbling process, and with that, began the cry for better moralistic behaviour. The Victorian Age had come. Women were very troubled and insistent that men look to their consciences. The natural division of labour and the freedom of men made it difficult, and men were not going to let women be the guardians of the moral perspectives and keepers of souls. However with the open discussion about the subject, and the prevailing mood, many men did try to tackle their problems and family life became more important, at least on the surface. They tried to be pure and tender and faithful, and to instil these values into their sons. Children were to be protected from unpleasantness at all costs and now for the first time in history, the monogamy argument was based on the good of the child.
33. THE FACTORY ACTS
The age of innocence, the value of learning experiences, children's vulnerability were all taken up and were a powerful weapon towards alleviating the terrible barbarity and damage endured by children and women in the nineteenth century, in the mines and the factories and the in the chimneys, work for which tiny children were eminently suitable. Any study of the Factory Acts of the nineteenth century will show how women and children worked in perilous, brutal systems, belted and chained, often in water, and such discomfort for long shifts, that rendered them unable to do home chores, (or fulfil their wifely duties), to brutalising husbands and fathers who expected home comforts for themselves, after hard days at work. Intellectuals could not fail to see the failures of the church on slavery, industrialised slavery, poverty, and the brutalisation of women and children, when the women rose up as abolitionists, targeting one issue after another. Obtaining the vote for themselves in England which came in 1928 for women over 21years, it came at great personal cost. It is recorded that of 400 women arrested in 1911, over 100 were assaulted and raped. Parliamentary seats, now available to women, brought great reforms. What began in 1820 was not realised until a hundred years later, (well after women in many churches could have an ekklesial vote). They inspired an army of conspirators, led by men like Lord Shaftsbury, who rose in Parliament, to change the laws and bring relief. Our own John Thomas was only over the Thames doing his medical studies, at this time and could easily have watched these parliamentary debates.
In 1850, in Britain there were 50,000 more women than men. By 1890 there were one million women more than men in London alone, and about two and a half million in the country. Enter the Genteel Spinster. Was the man shortage caused by the need for sailors, colonialists, war and convict deportation?
Many of us will remember these genteel spinsters. They were taken into homes as helpers, nurses, child carers, domestics, etc. Some of them had better prospects than those of the previous century, and could run shops and little businesses, but some without family support or education could only manage semi starvation in little unfurnished rooms. There were no pensions, or safety nets. The Bronte sisters, and many other writers, brought the plight of these women to the fore. They wrote about married and single women with great personal feeling. Charlotte Bronte's heroines married and demanded physical fulfilment, respect and intellectual equality in that union, natural today, but revolutionary for that time. Her "Jane Eyre" brings graphic pictures of the schools of the time. She had two sisters, who, it was said, died of T.B., but really, we know now, as the result of ill treatment at a charity school for clergymen's daughters. Some may find her undertone of sexual cruelty and masochism disconcerting, but her novels shocked Victorian England enough to want to re-invent the institutions of marriage and family life.
34. THE CONTAGIOUS DISEASES ACT
Of the million or so women in London about 80,000 were prostitutes, an increase of 10,000 over 100 years. The arguments about prostitution are as old as civilisation, but from the time of Augustine on, they were considered an evil necessity in Christian society.
Prostitutes were comfortably ignored and seen as temptresses, with men as the victims. They were later known as women of pleasure, which gave them an element of glamour. The terrible dislocation caused by the industrial revolution and the great poverty of some, and the riches of the other, once more caused the trade to flourish, and was the cause of moral degradation.
The novels by Dickens should not have been denounced as they were at the time of writing, for they told the true story. Innocence could no longer be protected, and refined living could hide no longer, as the public cried out for protection from the contagious diseases that were rife in the community. In 1860 the terrible Contagious Diseases Acts were formulated to control the prostitute. There was a double standard here, for no one could expect the married soldiers to remain chaste, and so these laws brought about unspeakable brutalities all over the world, wherever they were copied from the Crimea to Cambodia, wherever colonialism and war ravaged the world's populations. The brutalities and expectations of the colonists tore at the defenceless, the poor, the homeless, and in many cases the very young, for in many places they specialised in virgins and children. We know that these practices flourish in the third world today, and now we are painfully aware that India seems powerless to control such practices.
Any, not necessarily single, woman who lived near an army establishment was termed a common prostitute and had to be regularly medically examined. The Act rested on two pivots that men could not be chaste, and that healthy and orderly prostitutes were required for army service. This is borne out with the recent cases of compensation for conscripted comfort women supplied for the Japanese army during the Second World War. It is the crux of the argument for the women of Greenham Common, who organised one of the first Peace Movements. The movement believed that it is immoral to keep men at the frontline using the wonderful monogamous ideal, and then, within that rigid military discipline, supply the men with something other than the ideal family model. The immoral practices of the upper class show that this was not an issue stratified by class.
Josephine Butler led the push for abolition of that act. Her clerical enemies termed the prostitutes "a class of sinners whom she had better leave to itself". They were undeserving poor, and their chosen status showed they were unloved by God, and therefore there was no reason to love or respect them. Of course, there were obvious reasons why the flow of prostitutes should not be staunched.
Butler pursued the idea of complementary roles for women and men and did not want women on pedestals (nor consigned to hell). Progressive and creative women brought their reforms to the church and the old idea of Eve as sinful and Mary as exalted began to wane. “Healing”, not “harming”, began to be considered within religious frames, but the novelists and poets took it up as well. Jane Austin and Florence Nightingale are some of those compassionate women who filled their pages with grief, and death, and floods of tears. The social justice for all, in the twentieth century in the Christian context, is in complementary roles in Christ, and was set by these forces in the nineteenth century. There was often a death to the first marriage as well, after which so many wanted a second go. The failure to elevate marriage to its full sacramental role as the model of Christ and his Bride, where both take both roles, has led to so many failures when divorce follows.
Tolstoy once wrote of family groups, that happy families are all the same, whereas an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion. They are all unique. This gives those in unhappy situations a dignity and meaning and sympathy so that we can more easily help. We can remember the unhappiness of Sarah, and the unloved Leah, and the discarded Dinah and in the case of struggling Tamar, even to prostitution, to heal her desire for credibility and a child.
Now the rising expectations for something better has harmed the very goal to which they aspire, so that it may not be declining morals, that have led to more divorce. We are now confronted with people, who are not willing to battle in marital discord and something has to be done, not about divorce, but discord, and what produces it. Marriages were more stable in the mid twentieth century than ever in all history, and with the decline of the mortality rate and continuing good health the strain of the relationship lasting so long, has begun to show.
However, the AIDS epidemic in this century and in some countries has again shown up the price women must pay for the erroneous thinking of some men that sex with a virgin will cure AIDS.
