Women in Victorian England

The paucity of criticism on the photographic evidence of Jack the ripper’s murders is striking and surprising, particularly given that these images amount to one of the  first visual documentations of what are now called sex crimes. Even Robert McLaughlin’s pioneering study The First Jack the Ripper Victim Photographs falls short of adequately decoding what’s really going on in the pictures themselves, in part because he seems less interested in the content of the photographs than in the biographical details of the photographers who created them. This essay hopes to address and correct this interpretive gap. Through a close analysis of the few ripper photographs that still survive, i seek to recover the representational codes governing the visual, spatial, and gender politics of these images. in the  first section i examine the postmortem portraits of the victims. in the second, i explore the continuities i see between the full-body mortuary photographs of the victims and a broader Victorian art aesthetic. in the third and  final section i study closely the single crime-scene photo- graph of the body of Mary Kelly (the ripper’s  fifth victim).

Αντικείμενο της παρούσας εργασίας αποτελεί μία από τις πιο ενδιαφέρουσες
περιόδους του γυναικείου κινήματος. Εκείνη της διεκδίκησης της ψήφου στην Αγγλία στο
πέρασμα από τον 19ο στον 20 αιώνα. Η περίοδος της ανάπτυξης της δράσης των σουφραζετών.
Αν και πρόκειται για ένα κίνημα κατά βάση αστικό, η διεκδίκηση της ψήφου αγκάλιασε πλατιές
μάζες γυναικών και αξιοποίησε μορφές πάλης που είχαν την προέλευσή τους στις
επαναστατικές παραδόσεις του λαού της Αγγλίας προκαλώντας την εντονότατη αντίδραση των
αστικών κυβερνητικών κύκλων.
Η προσέγγιση ξεκινάει με μια σύντομη παράθεση των εξελίξεων που καταγράφηκαν στην
Αγγλία πάνω στο ζήτημα της διεύρυνσης της ψήφου καθόλη τη διάρκεια του 19ου αιώνα
προκειμένου να γίνει αντιληπτή η σημασία και ο ρόλος της ψήφου, του βασικότερου αιτήματος
του κινήματος που εξετάζεται. Στη συνέχεια, γίνεται προσπάθεια να εξηγηθεί η βάση πάνω
στην οποία αναπτύχθηκε το κίνημα, το ποια ήταν τα ζητήματα που επιχείρησε να απαντήσει.
Ακολουθεί κωδικοποιημένη παράθεση των σημαντικότερων έργων που επηρέασαν την σκέψη
των υποστηρικτών της γυναικείας ψήφου αλλά και παράθεση των κυριότερων επιχειρημάτων
που αξιοποίησαν με σκοπό να πείσουν και να κινητοποιήσουν για την υλοποίηση του
αιτήματός τους. Η παρουσίαση του θέματος κλείνει με αναφορά στις οργανώσεις που
συγκροτήθηκαν με στόχο την διεκδίκηση της ψήφου και στις μορφές που κατά καιρούς
αξιοποιήθηκαν και υπηρετούσαν τον στόχο αυτό.

The conlicts that have marked the complex relationship between genders throughout the history of the nations make great women's pioneering leadership in the arena of international relations unacknowledged. Historical narratives of diplomacy kept mentioning female leaders only as daughters, friends or wives of male diplomats. And even the nineteenth-century case of Queen Victoria who reigned over the United Kingdom from 1837 to 1901 and who was honourably named Empress of India (1876-1901) did not spark an evolution in the status of Victorian women. In the mid and late Victorian period, liberal-minded women struggled for their right to vote. However, the global progress in the irst decade of the 21 st century shows that the role of women in the ield of diplomacy looks promising. Names of women diplomats, like the British diplomat Catherine Ashton (2010) and the Italian Frederica Mogherini (2014), epitomize a developed status of women. Nevertheless, this progress cannot be an indisputable proof of the estimated evolution given the sustained pervasive patriarchy-oriented culture that still raises thought-provoking issues of gender inequality. Therefore, this paper

Among the Kailyard’s catalogue of recognisable plots, morals and characters is the figure of the woman in the home. Indeed, she is the epitome of Kailyard values, and thus became a focus of contention for transitional writers who responded in complex and equivocal ways to the Kailyard between 1900 and the mid-1920s, and for virulently anti-Kailyard modernists. After introducing the Kailyard woman at home, this chapter will establish how transitional and modernist texts interacted with the trope. The final section will return to the Kailyard to explore how its manifestations were not all polarised against the dysfunctional interiors of modernist fiction. In contrast to the view presented in the anti-Kailyard tradition, J.M. Barrie’s and Annie S. Swan’s works ambivalently express many of the same frustrations of those writers most critical of Kailyard writing, while still ultimately committing to Kailyard values.

While ideal Victorian women were supposed to be " angels in the house " , female criminals were seen as " demons in the jailhouse ". As such, they were a disruptive force and had to be dealt with. Deconstructing and reconstructing these deviants to make them more " womanly " became a major issue in the late 19th century. Nowadays, female prisoners in England and Wales represent 5% of the prison population. Between 1995 and 2010, this number more than doubled. Because of this worrying trend, there has been much debate in Britain around the issue of rehabilitation. Such attempts at rehabilitating criminals are nothing new, but they took on a different dimension in the mid-Victorian and Edwardian eras. In a society that was fascinated with the criminal mind, 1 reconstructing the identity of the criminal for it to fit certain moral and gender-biased standards was key. The female criminal in particular was the focal point of reconstruction attempts. 1 It was fostered by and echoed in the press, penny dreadfuls as well as detective novels and the music-hall. From Sherlock Holmes to Jack the Ripper, fictional and real-life murders captivated a large audience.

Dickens wrote in times when women were officially possessions of their husbands, fathers or of any male who was acknowledged as the head of the family. Families forbade their girls to read novels whose heroines were contentious such as Anne Brontë's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. Although Dickens is widely attacked for his feeble female characters in line with the angel in the house doctrine, according to his great granddaughter Lucinda Dickens Hawskley, he is the fruit of the able women in his life aside from the Victorian ideals. Elizabeth Dickens, his paternal grandmother, was a housekeeper who inspired him with her kind nature and storytelling. It was his mother, Elizabeth Barrow, who taught him mathematics, literacy and Latin. According to Dickens, to be a complete human being, the masculine sides of men should be harmonized with the feminine traits of women. Similar to the influential women in his life, Dickens' weak, angelic female characters are, at the same time, the women who complete a lack in men and enable them to become ideal human beings via their feminine characteristics. In this respect, a new type of androgyny, which the paper names as the Dickensian androgyny, might be observed in Dickens' male characters. Accordingly, this paper aims to dwell on Dickens' concept of androgyny to grow into a complete human being through the harmony of male and female characteristics as mirrored in his character David in David Copperfield.

In the framework of contemporary ecocritical and posthumanist theories, this comparative analysis of works by Paolo Mantegazza, Ouida, and Vernon Lee focuses on the conflictual relationship of proximity and differentiation at stake in the human-animal distinction in a post-Darwinian context dominated by the rise of experimental sciences. A discussion of vivisection and animal taming prompted by anthropocentric works as Mantegazza's _Fisiologia del dolore_ and _Upilio Faimali_ in tension with pro-animal essays by Ouida and Vernon Lee shows how the animal, caught between pure inert materiality and idealization, emerges as an intrinsic lack that the human fills with contending rational, utilitarian, moral, and affective motivations.

Men and women have been treated almost everywhere from the holy texts through mythological tales to literary works, resulting in distinctions and definitions of men almost always outweighing women, and thus the identities of men having the say and authority in almost every field and women held secondary and subservient within the patriarchal system. It has been stated that almost all the women from Dinah in Old Testament through Eve in Bible and Pandora in Greek mythology are captured by the feelings of curiosity and ambition, but worse is the belief that they can cause destruction and catastrophe around them. This belief in the western societies is based on the right of rule given to man over woman by the Biblical verse that “he will rule over you” in particular, resulting in the fact that mand rules woman in every field and usually keeps her within home and gives an evi leye to the woman who goes out of the house and beyond the authority of man. In the 19th century, when male-female distinction was experienced most bitterly, three different labels were used to define woman in this context: The “Fallen Woman”, used to define the women who have a sexual intercourse before marrying or who have a sexual affair with someone else in marriage; “Angel in the House”, devoted totally to he husband and children within the boundaries of home and satisfied with the conditions afforded to her; and “New Woman”, originated towards the end of the 19th century. The present study gives a critical and comparative analysis of the poem “Angel in the House” by Coventry Patmore, who seems to be the originator of the title, also probing into the historical roots of the patriarchal view of woman from Eve, exiled from Eden, to Honoria, devoting herself totally to her home. Thus the aim is to seek to answer the question of why the woman has been keptaway from the formal education provided to man in patriarchal societies. It has thus been concluded that in emulation of God, who tries to shape and guide all human beings with the bans, warnings, suggestions and advice in the holy books, men attempt to shape the women to their own wishes, thoughts and desires through customs, traditions, bans and punishments and to educate them not as human beings but as women. The result is their portrayal of the ideal woman as the submissive and obedient woman at home.

The study shows how communal baking practices were used to establish a sense of community, and to establish and maintain feelings of mutual solidarity during the first half of the nineteenth century in the mill towns of northern England, taking the case of the Maudlands in Preston, Lancashire as an example. Two excavations of communal bakehouses set within terraced dwelling houses are presented, believed to be the first reported examples of this form of architecture. Combined with documentary evidence the study shows how food, and in particular baked bread, was deployed to ease the passage from rural to industrial life.
KEYWORDS
INDUSTRIAL ARCHAEOLOGY, FOOD, BREAD, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, COTTON MILLS, BAKEHOUSE, OVEN, SOCIAL HISTORY

It is common to see the suffragettes as an explosive unusual group,  whose activism melted away once their single grievance was met.  But protest was centuries old and always focused on more than the vote.  Male mastery and female servitude were written into the DNA of society.  It would take more than a single act of legislation, like the Representation of the People Act, to wipe them away.

Si la femme victorienne idéale était censée être une fée du logis, la criminelle, elle, était vue comme un démon des prisons. Les détenues, perçues comme autant de déviantes perturbatrices qu'il fallait domestiquer, devinrent un problème majeur à la fin du XIXe siècle. Elles firent l'objet de tentatives de déconstruction et reconstruction identitaires visant à les transformer en « vraies femmes ». Les détenues anglaises et galloises représentent actuellement environ 5% de la population carcérale. Entre 1995 et 2010, le nombre de femmes emprisonnées a connu une augmentation de 125%. Cette hausse inquiétante a relancé le débat sur la question de leur réinsertion. L'idée de réformer les criminels n'est pas nouvelle, mais elle se décline sous une forme différente à l'époque victorienne et édouardienne. Dans une société fascinée par l'esprit criminel 1 , remodeler l'identité des délinquants selon des normes morales genrées apparaît comme fondamental. La femme criminelle en particulier devient la cible de nombreuses tentatives de reconstruction. 1 Cette fascination était entretenue et relayée par la presse, les penny dreadfuls (récits inspirés de faits plus ou moins réels et caractérisés par un amour pour le macabre), les romans policiers ou même encore le music-hall. De Sherlock Holmes à Jack l'Éventreur, les meurtriers réels ou imaginaires captivaient un large public.