Women's Roles as Wives

Brit

I found Elizabeth Langland’s Nobody’s Angels very interesting and useful.  As I was reading it, I kept thinking back to our reading from Veblen, and how they correlate to one another.  According to Veblen, the wife acts more as a servant to her husband, running the estate and taking care of everything.  Life is structured in an important way for the leisure class so as to display their social standing.  The women play a pivotal role in maintaining that social standard, but Veblen dictates the role of the wife to that of a servant, downplaying their role as a whole.  Langland gives women a far more important role in her book, indicating that a woman’s role is just as important as a man’s in maintaining social standing.  “This, the story of the working-class wife for the middle-class man became non-narratable because a mid-Victorian man depended on his wife to perform the ideological work of managing the class question and displaying the signs of middle class status, toward which he contributed a disposable income” (9). 

The importance of women’s roles is furthered in the chapter that focuses on Elizabeth Gaskell.  For example, “The house, as base for social organization, represents not bourgeois woman’s isolation but her class privilege and economic power” (115).  Women held power within their homes, especially because they constructed the importance of their home within society.  The household was the space for women to further their social standing, and it was their job to do so.  Langland also points out that Gaskell “grasped what the political economists failed to see: the way women’s domestic economy—process-oriented and focused on control of social signs and signifiers—intersected with a political and product-oriented economy, focused on controlling the means of production” (132).  Women play an important role in what is purchased and what is used, as a way to emphasize their status in society, which in turn affects production and so forth.  So, although women’s roles are sometimes reduced to that of servants, they play an important role in society as a whole. 

The role of the wife as someone who dictates social standing is also seen through Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, where Mrs. Gibson tries, and succeeds, in positioning her daughters in good marriages.  “This difference is an enormous one, and it reveals how the social importance of the middle-class mother and wife, the semiotician of the middle class, has been consolidated in the fluid and shifting society of Victorian England” (133).  A wife that is able to procure good marriages for her daughters is not only succeeding in furthering the status of her daughters, but she is also furthering the status of her husband.  The wife is creating and maintaining connections that help solidify her family’s role in society, most importantly, her husband’s role in society.  It is through the work of the wife that the husband looks good and is socially respected.  So, despite the fact that women are identified as either wives or daughters in Victorian England (which is better than wife as servant), their importance is demonstrated through their work in maintaining the home and social standing.