A very brief history of women... (Part One)

Hmm I tried to make this as short as possible but it's more like insufficient but still rather long, but oh well -- here goes:

*Industrial Revolution:
-prostitution flourished in 19th c/ cities (popular culture: Dumas’s La Dame aux Camelias and Verdi’s La Traviata)
-middle classes: gender and the cult of domesticity
-wives and mothers in a “separate sphere” --> beliefs about sexuality (women and men biologically different)
-paternal authority codified by law (e.g. Napoleonic Code – women, children and mentally ill classified together as legally incompetent)
-however, spiritual equality b/w men and women
-middle class values articulated in opposition to the aristocratic customs on one hand and the lives of the common people on the other
-outside the home, v. few respectable options for earning a living
-women: imp. role in the struggle to abolish the slave trade and slavery in the British Empire
-Queen Victoria as an example
-Victorian codes of etiquette and morality
-women’s alleged moral superiority believed to be literally embodied in an absence of sexual feeling or “passionlessness” (whereas male sexual desire = natural, even admirable)
-working women in the industry (caused public anxiety and outcry!)
-women and children = nearly half the labor force in some of the most modern industries, like textiles (paid less, less likely to make trouble as workers)

*Romanticism
-fiction --> best known work = Shelley’s Frankenstein
-stressed limits of reason and power of emotion
-defy conventionality (Shelleys, de Stael, George Sand)

*Imperialism:
-most of the Europeans who served as soldiers, officials, and administrators in overseas colonies = men, but women also traveled to the colonies (contradictory/complex position as unequals to men in their own societies but superior to colonized men and women – “inferior sex” within the “superior race”)
-for many, life in the colonies provided opportunities not found in Europe
-but, in their roles: wives of colonial officials (subordinated lives to male-centered administrative environment), educators of indigenous women (reproduced European notions of bourgeois or Victorian domesticity and female dependence), etc.