Nineteenth-century woman was not born with her femininity; she had to learn it.
This was because codes of behaviour appropriate for a woman could differ between countries, cultures and classes. A peasant woman's language and demeanour might not be acceptable amongst the urban middle classes.
In turn, the ‘rough' language and physical violence displayed by some urban working-class women was considered unseemly in women from other communities. Yet, in a number of respects, the lessons in femininity taught to girls in the nineteenth century were surprisingly similar across the continent. Everywhere a girl learned to be a good wife and mother, a thrifty household manager, a willing worker, a chaste companion to her husband, and a dutiful mother to her children. A European woman of the nineteenth century was judged primarily by her role and deportment in her home.This ideology of domesticity and the related notion of separate spheres is most strongly associated with the nineteenth century. But it was not new. Both the rhetoric and the reality of gendered public and private domains was well established at least two centuries prior to the industrial revolution. Men in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were associated with the world of work and commerce whilst women were associated primarily with the home and children. This organisation of gender roles was as much practical as ideological. In precarious agrarian societies, family survival was dependent upon complementary tasks assigned to each sex. Women's reproductive role located them primarily in the home, and thus a woman's work tasks tended to be focused on the household and nearby. Urban women may have experienced a greater variety of occupations and often participated in artisan manufacture, trade and commerce, but even in the towns women were more likely to spend much of their lives working in their own or someone else's household. Across Europe the guilds, which controlled artisan production, became increasingly restrictive from the seventeenth century onwards.
Guild work was progressively seen as ‘a learned art and given to men alone'.1 The result was the marginalisation of women from some crafts and their consequent removal from this part of the worldly sphere. Even amongst the wealthier classes in the eighteenth century there was a degree of separation of spheres of activity in that women seldom engaged in the public world of political and commercial power. Yet, early modern society did not, on the whole, explicitly recognise the association of public and private spheres with gender difference. Rather, as historian Heide Wunder argues, before 1800 ‘“man” and “woman” were defined in relation to one another in terms of comparative differences as “stronger” and “weaker”... [This relationship] depended on the delicate balance of mutual obligations and reciprocity.'2 So, while the sexual division of labour is generally assumed to be commonplace in all societies, the means by which this is manifested is chronologically and geographically specific to time or place, and not always determined by sexual stereotypes.3However, there is little doubt that it was during the first decades of the nineteenth century that the notion of the woman's place in the home was most powerfully elaborated through discourses on femininity. These discourses were injunctions about ideal (and anti-ideal) behaviour for women, about what was appropriate and what not. It was in this century that such discourses became pervasive, distributed not only through the pens of intellectuals and the mouths of churchmen, but via popular tracts, romantic novels and a host of other media which were voraciously consumed by men and women. Hence, these discourses on femininity (and equivalent ones on masculinity) gradually found widespread acceptance amongst all classes of society owing to the rise of literacy and the spread of mass print culture, and the standards and norms of behaviour associated with concepts of womanliness began to be displayed in all sorts of social and cultural spaces. In this chapter we consider how European women both learned the lessons of femininity and experienced them in the home, the school and the community.