Dickens's England by R. E. Pritchard

what power? That is all the question. Power to destroy? . . . Not so. Power to heal, to redeem, to guide, and to guard. Power of the sceptre and the shield . . . Will you not covet such power as this, and be no more housewives, but queens? . . . queens to your lovers; queens to your husbands and your sons; queens of higher mystery to the world beyond, which bows itself, and will for ever bow, before the myrtle crown and stainless sceptre of womanhood. But, alas! you are too often idle and careless queens, grasping at majesty in the least things, while you abdicate it in the greatest; and leaving misrule and violence to work their will among men . . . There is not a war in the world, no, nor an injustice, but you women are answerable for it; not in that you have provoked, but in that you have not hindered. Men, by their nature, are prone to fight; they will fight for any cause, or for none. It is for you to choose their cause for them, and to forbid them when there is no cause. There is no suffering, no injustice, no misery in the earth, but the guilt of it lies with you. Men can bear the sight of it, but you should not be able to bear it . . . it is you only who can feel the depths of pain, and conceive the way of its healing.
    John Ruskin, ‘Queen’s Gardens’ (1864), Sesame and Lilies (1865)
    WOMAN’S IDEAL AND ACTUAL LIFE
    Passion, intellect, moral activity – these three have never been satisfied in a woman. In this cold and oppressive conventional atmosphere, they cannot be satisfied. To say more on this subject would be to enter into the whole history of society, of the present state of civilization.
    Look at the poor lives we lead. It is a wonder that we are so good as we are, not that we are so bad. . . . Mrs A has the imagination, the poetry of a Murillo, and has sufficient power of execution to show that she might have had a great deal more. Why is she not a Murillo? From a material difficulty, not a mental one. If she has a knife and fork in her hand for three hours of the day, she cannot have a pencil or brush. Dinner is the great sacred ceremony of this day, the great sacrament. To be absent from dinner is equivalent to being ill. Nothing else will excuse us from it. Bodily incapacity is the only apology valid. If she has a pen and ink in her hands during other three hours, writing answers for the penny post, again, she cannot have her pencil, and so ad infinitum through life. . . .
    A woman cannot live in the light of intellect. Society forbids it. Those conventional frivolities which are called her ‘duties’ forbid it. Her ‘domestic duties’, high-sounding words, which, for the most part, are bad habits (which she has not the courage to enfranchise herself from, the strength to break through) forbid it. What are these duties (or bad habits)? – Answering a multitude of letters which lead to nothing, from her so-called friends, keeping herself up to the level of the world that she may furnish her quota of amusement at the breakfast-table; driving out her company in the carriage. And all these things are exacted from her by her family which, if she is good and affectionate, will have more influence with her than the world. . . .
    The family uses people, not for what they are, nor for what they are intended to be, but for what it wants them for – its own uses. It thinks of them not as what God has made them, but as the something which it has arranged that they shall be. If it wants someone to sit in the drawing room, that someone is supplied by the family, though that member may be destined for science, or for education, or for active superintendence by God, i.e., by the gifts within.
    This system dooms some minds to incurable infancy, other to silent misery. . . .
    Marriage is the only chance (and it is but a chance) offered for women to escape from this death; and how eagerly and how ignorantly it is embraced! . . .
    That man and woman have an equality of duties and