Some women wanted to work on causes they felt very close to, involving the rights and issues of women. In the mid 19th Century, new acts of Parliament concerning divorce and women's property laws, gave women the opportunity to create lives separate from their husbands. But it was the individual women, who, in the mid 19th Century, started the ball rolling.
Emily Davis worked on women's education and she founded Girton College Cambridge in 1869.
Francis Cobbe demanded that women could study for a university degree in 1862.
Josephine Butler and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, so humiliating in its treatment of women.
The campaigning that led to Elizabeth Anderson becoming the first British licensed female doctor and the setting up of the London School of Medicine for women.
(Information from Intriguing History)
Couples were now having fewer children, for the middle classes it became increasingly expensive to buy things that made them 'middle class' and so having fewer children meant money could be stretched further.
The need to buy things was fueled during the later Industrial Revolution. The Great Exhibition of 1851 brought goods to the attention of over 6 million visitors. Goods that most people never thought they needed, now became must have items for the growing middle classes. By 1900, suburbia had grown.
Husbands commuted and wives stayed at home separated from their husbands lives. It became obvious that some sort of occupation was needed to fill the long days and volunteering served that purpose.
VOLUNTEERING
Churches supplied the social services in the early 20th Century society. The churches and related charities were, by and large, headed by men who oversaw an immense army of female volunteers. With the responsibility of volunteering, women found a new confidence. They began to mix with a wider spectrum of people and they began to take an interest in political work. Women's political work was kept separate from the politics of men, largely involving organizing money raising events and campaigning but for some women this was never going to be enough.
Life for women in the 19th Century followed a well worn track. The poorest woman in society had little choice in the pattern their lives would take. It was struggle enough to feed and clothe oneself but maintaining a family was an all consuming process and so it continued as the Century turned the corner. By the turn of the 19th Century though, there were many changes in the lives of middle class women.
The statistics tell us that one in ten married women, at this time, were in paid employment. Most of these women were from the poorest backgrounds. It was not considered suitable for a woman from the middle or upper classes to be in paid employment.
Women were seen as a family's possession, to be groomed for marriage, the richer the better, have and raise children, run a household, not much changed from the Medieval perception of women. All of these assumptions of what a woman could or would do were based on the principle that a woman would marry.
What if a woman did not marry ? In 1901, 14% of women under the age of 45 years, did not marry. The 'suitability' of husbands was a key issue, not able to marry beneath them left some women on the margins, either living within the confines of their immediate family or possibly becoming companion to an older woman.
When the First World War broke out, marks of the lavish Edwardian period began to fade. With shocking speed, the old traditions --- and traditional manners with them --- became things of the past.
Although interactions in England had been governed by these rules for centuries, the total social upheavals caused by war and industrialization wiped them away.
As country houses in England fell into financial straits and were demolished or abandoned, the old, formal ways of life they represented were replaced by modern norms determined by a new and daring generation.
(Info from the Driehaus Museum)
For the wealthy Edwardians, marriage was a practical arrangement. Rather than love, the reason for marriage often had to do with the acquisition or preservation of land. Land was the life blood of aristocratic wealth and secured one's high station in society. For the same reasons, marriage may also be a pairing of two important families. Whether for practicalities or love, marriage was eagerly awaited by young women, it represented their only chance for independence and a home of their own.
However, courtship was not permitted among the servants. Even the architecture made sure of it, as there were no rooms for a couple to live in and work in the same house together. To marry, a woman had to leave domestic service, a kind of forced independence that set her to work on her own household.
Young women in high society were introduced to "Society" in their mid-to-late-teens, after completing their education and being deemed ready for marriage. The aristocratic debutantes would apply to appear in a Royal Court presentation as her official entrance into society. Wearing a white dress with a three-yard train and adorned with the required three feathers, the young woman carried a bouquet and curtsied before Queen Alexandria, Edward VII's Queen.
After her debutante event, the young lady would attend "The Season," a round of London mansion parties beginning after Christmas and ending in mid-summer. These affairs, with their abundance of married chaperons, provided appropriate places for men and women to meet one another without causing scandal. After the Edwardian period, the significance of the debutante season waned, and austerity forced many wealthy families to relinquish their "Town" houses in the big city.
In Downton Abbey, Lady Edith commits a bold indiscretion when she dines unchaperoned with (married!) magazine editor Michael Gregson. She defied some of the most stringent rules of all, those which governed the interactions between men and women.
Young single women could also not receive male guests in her own home, dine out, go to the theatre, go motoring for a significant distance, or go to a party without a chaperone present.
