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Victorian Women's Writing - Breaking Down the Boundaries between the Private Sphere and the Public Sphere

This essay tries to show how two Victorian women confined in the private sphere came to realize the harshness of their gender reality and got over it through writing. In fact, the way toward respectable positions in the public sphere was almost blocked to women of every class in the Victorian period. Only after mid-19th century could women earn their livings through writing. However, the allowed space was so narrow and having a job was not recommended for women from honourable status. Writing, for women, was more than an outlet emotions. It was an activity to escape from fixed role division and search for self-identity as a human being. That naturally led to the recognition of gender reality and gave a momentum to the beginning of the 19th women’s rights movement. In her essay "Enfranchisement of Women", Harriet Taylor analyzes social prejudices, which cause women to be excluded from the public life. The prejudices, like phantom, haunt the entire society more powerfully because they do not have any real fixed forms. That is why sexual discrimination still persists after democratic revolution in the 18th century. Florence Nightingale criticizes unequal values set on men's time and women's time in "Cassandra". She ascribes women's lack of systematic knowledge and abilities to 'domestic duties', which make women's time not hers but other's. As a husband's appendage, a woman has to give up herself for everyday family trivialities. Taylor and Nightingale objectified gender realities, found out key contradictions there, and explored the solutions through writing.