ヴィクトリア朝社会における中流階級の理想と女性解放運動 : 女子の教育の向上をめぐって

抄録

In this paper, how and why the movement to improve women's education was promoted after the mid-Victorian age is analyzed, considering the ideal of woman presented by the middle clsseses who were brought unprecedented wealth through the expansion of commerce and manufacturing in this age. In the middle class family, women earned respect from being idle and non-productive, while men idealized hard work and earned respect through their industry and financial success, on the grounds that respectability was valued though idleness was considered to be sinful under the strong influence of puritanism among the middle classes in the nineteenth century. This concept of separate spheres located women in the home and men in the marketplace. The middle classes desired to spread this ideal of separation of men's and women's lives even to the working classes so that society would be improved soundly. Physical separation and increased prosperity gave men access to authority in the public sphere and strengthened the dominance of men in society, but diminished women's activities and power there, thus increasing the dissonance between the power of men and women. And as the distinction between the work in a private place and that in a public place came to be made, the distinction between the amateur and professional came to be more rigorously drawn. Professional qualifications obtained through examinations and courses became necessary to gain employment. Women who lacked their formal higher education or occupational training were excluded from professional status. Furthermore, because of depressions which began in 1836 and 1873 and an increse of redundant women who remained single, many families were impoverished and men, as husbands, fathers, brothers or sons could not povide for a number of female relatives who were a financial burden. The number of gentlewomen of the upper and middle classes who needed to earn their own living increased in this century. Under these situations the need to expand those occupations appropriate for the middle and upper classes and the demand for a higher education or an occupational training increased.