Ideologies on Women in Nineteenth Century Britain, 1850s-70s

Thinkers in Victorian England addressed themselves to the myriad and complex queries which the on-going women's movement of today poses for Marxists and non-Marxists alike, concerning the place of women, family and home, This paper is confined to the period 1850s70s which saw the publication of major ideological statements concerning women by Mill, Darwin and Ruskin which together helped to identify the parameters of the conflict of ideologies in this period, parameters which are counterpointed by the socialist thinking on the woman question which had emerged earlier. The ideological positions of Mill, Darwin and Ruskin did not arise in a vacuum; they were embattled positions taken in the wake of social changes brought on by industrial capitalism and the emergence of a women's movement. The author deals with this process in the first part of the paper and in the second with the ideologies, both feminist and anti-feminist, and their absorption within the movement.