Changing the Rules: Women and Victorian Marriage,Jennifer C. Kel

We often hear that gaining the vote was the first major legal change for women in this country; the subject is now included as a part of our national curriculum. We have undoubtedly come a long way; women today lead very different lives to ones they led in the past. But how did we get here? Do you know what actually happened between the time when a wife was expected to be submissive to her husband, treated as a second-class citizen and confined to her domestic sphere, and the liberating time when women finally achieved the financial and legal independence that could be so easily taken for granted? This had to be achieved before the vote was even won! Western women today have the privilege of a relatively equal footing, but all around us, we hear stories of women in other cultures who are in the process of obtaining this freedom, or who are still desperately fighting for it. We have been there - the parallels are obvious, we only have to look back. Changing the Rules looks at how chil.