141 Quotes by Lucy Worsley

On the face of it, [Victoria] was deeply socially conservative. The idea of votes for women, for example, disgusted her. But if you look at her actions rather than her words, she was in fact tearing up the rulebook for how to be female.

What interests me - and indeed many others today, now women's contributions to history are better recognised - is [Victoria's] eventual return to fiery form. "While the Prince Consort lived," she told a visitor in the early 1860s, "he thought for me, now I have to think for myself.

It was a passage fitting for a Victorian heroine, submitting herself to the greater goodness of her man. She made herself comfortable with the unwomanliness of her actions by convincing herself that it was Albert who was making a sacrifice. Subsuming herself to him was how she justified, in her mind, the two opposing roles of queen and wife.

But Albert's physical strength and her physical softness seemed only right. They were well briefed about the respective roles of a lady and her Knight by their jointly admired Sir Walter Scott. "The fine delicate fragile form" of the female, as Scott put it, required "the support of the Master's muscular strength and masculine character.

It was a complete inversion of the natural order. It was a man's job to worry about wealth and wordly success, and a woman's merely to adorn him.

The papers were pleased. "She is kept by the nation as a spectacle," claimed the Penny Satirist, establishing a current of thought that would flow through Victoria's whole reign, "and it is right that she should be seen. In fact, it is her duty to come out and show herself, that we may have value for our money.

Victoria started to chafe against the immobility and inconvenience of being pregnant again so quickly: "men never think, or at least seldom think, what a hard task it is for us women to go through this very often." But Albert insisted. Not only was it a royal duty, he could perhaps see that having the babies occupied his wife, weighed her down and allowed him to assume more and more of her responsibilities.

Victoria came to understand that her depression was a distinct malady that came and went, but which affected her particularly during and after pregnancy. ... Yet Albert made sure the babies kept coming. "It is too hard and dreadful what we have to go through," Victoria complained. Men ought to "do every thing to make up, for what after all they alone are the cause of.

In talking so proudly about her "happy domestic home", Victoria was prefiguring the words of John Ruskin, the commentator who'd make the best-known pronouncement on the proper role of a Victorian woman. Home, he thought, was a "woman's true place and power". While a husband had to go to brave the rough world's perils, a wife should remain behind, in a private realm where her "great function is Praise" and her great opportunity the "sweet ordering" of her household.