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The emerging middle-class norm for women was separate spheres, whereby women avoid the public sphere – the domain of politics, paid work, commerce, and public speaking. Instead, they should dominate in the realm of domestic life, focused on the care of the family, the husband, the children, the household, religion, and moral behaviour. [ 75 ]
Victorian morality is a distillation of the moral views of the middle class in 19th-century Britain, the Victorian era. Victorian values emerged in all social classes and reached all facets of Victorian living.
The social structure of the United Kingdom has historically been highly influenced by the concept of social class, which continues to affect British society today. [1] [2] British society, like its European neighbours and most societies in world history, was traditionally (before the Industrial Revolution) divided hierarchically within a system that involved the hereditary transmission of ...
Services became marked by decorum and the ministry increasingly professional. The dress code was dropped in 1828 and preaching became more urban based. The community's values were more in line with middle-class respectability: Parkinson Milson reported that local preachers and class leaders were offended at his plain speech.
As middle-class women rose in status, they increasingly supported demands for a political voice. [102] [103] There were numerous organisations which did their work quietly. After 1897, they were increasingly linked together by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) led by Millicent Fawcett.
Companies provided their employees with welfare services ranging from housing, schools and churches, to libraries, baths, and gymnasia. Middle-class reformers did their best to assist the working classes' aspirations to middle-class norms of "respectability". There was a spirit of libertarianism, says Porter, as people felt they were free.
As the third quarter of the century drew to a close, the essential bastions of Victorianism still held firm: respectability; a government of aristocrats and gentlemen now influenced not only by middle-class merchants and manufacturers but also by industrious working people; a prosperity that seemed to rest largely on the tenets of laissez-faire ...
British economic historian Gregory Clark has controversially claimed, in his book A Farewell to Alms, on the basis of extensive research, that Britain may have been where the Industrial Revolution began because the British people had a head start in "evolving" – through a combination of cultural and possibly even genetic changes – a critical mass of people with middle-class values.