rn among the English upper-middle classes, called for the separation of work and family life. It held that a woman's proper place was in the home and not in the workplace; a man's natural sphere was in the world of commerce--or, at any rate, at his job--and not at home (Reskin and Padavic 19).
Catherine generally accepts this role for herself, though in the course of the novel the way her gender marks her for exploitation and control chafes more and more.
Women like Catherine were controlled by fathers until given to husbands, and they had little choice in the matter. Virginia Woolf would later write about women of the period and state,
Imaginatively she is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant. She pervades poetry from cover to cover; she is all but absent from history. She dominates the lives of kings and conquerors in fiction; in fact she was the slave of any boy whose parents forced a ring upon her finger. Some of the most inspired words, some of the most profound thoughts in literature fall from her lips; in real life she could hardly read, could scarcely spell, and was the property of her husband (Woolf 43-44).
Clearly, one of the reasons why women were under-represented in social discourse was that they had been ill-prepared for such a role intentionally, as part of a societal plan to keep women in their domestic role. Women did not have access to the education that was offered to males. It was thought that they did not require an education, since their lot in life was not to go out into the world and compete for resources. They were instead expected to marry and raise a family, while their husbands would go out into the world and compete for resources. Education was not widespread in society until recent times in any case, but even at the highest levels of society, only the males were educated. Justification for this vi
...