Women in Austen’s Time(The Ones We Do Not See)

England 200 Years Ago

• Because people were so poor – most people – they would run, toil, and sweat all day and night to save themselves and their children from starvation. Kind of like India is today.

• If you are a child and your parents die, you live on the streets

• If you are a young woman and give birth out of wedlock, you would be judged a “moral imbecile” and sent to a lunatic asylum

• If you tried to commit suicide to escape such a life, you would be saved, and then hanged

• If you stole anything over five pounds you would be hanged – The age of criminal liability was seven

• If you were a maid, you could expect to work eighteen hour days, six and a half days a week, with one day off a month, and consider yourself lucky. Your duties included - but were not limited to - cooking, cleaning, washing clothes, carrying water etc.

• If you were not a maid, you were probably working the land: chopping wood, feeding the animals, milking the cows, planting, gathering hay

• Your reward for performing your duties - as stated in the Bible - is to go to heaven

• The rich therefore had a moral obligation to keep the poor in their place

Or

• You could become a prostitute

• Estimates reckon 70,000 out of the 475,000 women in London in 1801 chose this option

• Only 30% of women married

• The sense of sexual sin ran high: the fear of pregnancy was great – estimates claim around half the nation’s women remained virgins their whole life

• The average age of puberty in 1801 was 15 for girls and 17 for boys. In the 1960s, records show girls hitting puberty at 11, boys at 14. Present day statistics are 9 years 10 months for girls, 11-12 for boys.

• Marriage typically occurred between the ages of 25 to 28

• Jane Austen put on her cap when she was 30. That is, she announced by her mode of dress as being out of the marriage market

• Between 1650 and 1850 there were 250 divorces

• The fact that there was such rampant prostitution suggests that your husband was probably not virginal on your marriage night

• Chances were high he was diseased