What Were The Expectations Of Victorian Men?
It would depend to a certain extent on class. Upper class and middle class men would not expect their wives to work, and most of the wives wouldn’t have wanted to, since people were not generally as obsessed with work then as they are now. If you had enough money to live on without working, which many upper class people did, then you didn’t work. Working class men would mostly have expected their wives to work, because few men of that class earned enough to be able to support a family without a second income. Men of all classes were, in theory at least, the heads of the household, but in practice, then as now there were many women who were quite capable of getting their own way when they wanted it. What most English men of the Victorian era, whatever their class, would have had in common was a conviction that they belonged to the greatest, most poweful and most blessed race on earth: “To have been born english is to have won First Prize in the Lottery of Life” as Cecil Rhodes said. The
