When Did the Victorian Period End? Questions of Gender and Generation

The controversy sparked by Richard Price's British Society 1680-1880 raises pressing questions about historical interpretation and periodization, and more particularly about the ways in which a new approach to periodization brings to the fore issues that have previously been hidden or ignored. ¹ In regard to the later nineteenth century, Price's insistence on the 1880s as a crucial transition point is one that many historians would accept as significant, not only in terms of the social, economic and political developments with which he is concerned, but also in relation to the intellectual, cultural and technological history of the period. What is more open to debate, however, is how one sees this transition as connected to earlier developments in the nineteenth century or to later ones that continue well into the following century. Evenif one accepts this as a key period in the making of modernity, isthis because it provides a culmination of the developments of the preceding decades, or does it involve developments that move in quite different directions? How that question is answered depends very much on the perspective of those who seek to ask it.

Although so far lacking in any extended reflection on gender, this current debate brings forcibly to my mind the widespread discussion amongst feminist historians in the early 1970s concerning the ways in which established historical chronologies and periods worked to reinforce the silence and invisibility of women. Feminist historians posited the need to establish alternative chronologies and ways of thinking about historical periods that reflected the continuities and changes in women's domestic and working lives that hitherto had been overlooked by accounts that were structured around a public world and economic and political developments from which women had largely been excluded. ² No entirely new chronology was ever established, of course, because women's lives could not be separated completely from those of the men with whom they lived or from the broader society to which they belonged. Nevertheless this feminist intervention insisted that the crucial developments for women in any particular period often diverged from those that dominated a largely masculine form of history and, conversely, that such developments could impact very differently on the lives of women and men. This generation of scholarship produced groundbreaking research on the significance of women's paid labour, providing new ways of understanding industrialization, while the interrogation of Enlightenment ideas about sexual difference served to explain why women were so emphatically excluded from eighteenth-century discussions of liberalism and natural rights.

Subsequently, women's history has expanded enormously as has interest in the social construction and significance of gender. The place of women in society, the changing constructions of masculinity and femininity, patterns of gender and sexual difference, and the meaning and implications of domestic ideology have found at least some representation in most of the standard histories of the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the earlier feminist concerns continue to be apposite when considering the end of either the Victorian period or the nineteenth century. Where previous discussions have concentrated on the emergence of particular understandings of class, political culture and the state, I want to throw light on the problem 'when did the Victorian period end?' by focusing firstly on gender and secondly on some of the insights suggested by individual lives and perspectives.

The question of women's history is one that Price addresses – and one that he sees as fitting easily with his chronological outline, while also supporting his argument about the continuities across the period 1680-1880. Indeed, his analysis reflects the ways in which many historians of nineteenth-century women have extended back in time beyond 1800 in their analyses of the social and ideological structures that were significant in establishing the framework for women's lives. Though the extensive public activity undertaken by many Victorian women has led some historians to jettison the model of 'separate spheres', few who see domestic ideology and separate spheres as a significant aspect of the gender relations in the nineteenth century would dispute their origins in the late- or even mid-eighteenth century...