Middle-Class Culture 539A woman’s separate sphere was inside the household and included
supervising children and servants.
Middle-class women cared for their children, planned and oversaw the
preparation of meals, supervised the servants, and attended to family social
responsibilities. They exercised great influence over the education of their
children, supplementing formal school instruction and taking responsibility
for providing some religious instruction.
Middle-class British feminists began to challenge female legal and politi
cal subordination, debating the issue of “separate spheres” for women and
men. Some women now demanded the right to vote. In The Enfranchise
ment of Women (published anonymously in 1851), Harriet Taylor Mill
(1807-1858) stressed the injustice of considering anyone inferior, and
therefore not deserving of the right to vote, by virtue of gender. Eighteen
years later, her long-time companion and future husband John Stuart Mill
(1806-1873) published The Subjection of Women (1869). Mill argued that
women, like men, should be able to compete as equals in a society defined
by market relations. Feminists demanded that married women be allowed
to continue to have control over property they had brought with them into
marriage. However, opponents of women’s rights identified feminist move
ments with the violence of the French Revolution, or with surges of working
class militancy. Many upper-class Britons continued to view feminism as
“unrespectable.”