I'm a Victorian-era housewife whose husband is, say, a doctor. What's my usual day like?

by chandlerjbirch

Literally any information on the topic would be great. Recently became fascinated with the whole Victorian era but I'm not sure what's reliable, where to start, etc.

Greater specificity:

  1. Based in London, just for simplicity's sake.

  2. How do I spend leisure time and how much do I have?

  3. How big is the house?

  4. What sort of societal pressures do I have? What's my culture's equivalent to Cosmopolitan, etc.?

  5. What level of education am I likely to have?

  6. What's expected of me? When will people start badgering me about my ticking biological clock and having kids?

chocolatepot

As the position of a doctor was firmly middle class, his wife's occupation would be less impacted by how wealthy he was - whether he worked among the poor in the slums or had a practice in Harley Street, his wife wouldn't have paid employment outside the home. Which part of the Victorian period they were currently living in would have more of an impact on her daily life, since the earlier years were significantly different in certain ways than the later years.

Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management gives a good look at what the mid-Victorian housewife was expected to do. The mistress of a home was to lead the domestic servants like the commander of an army, according to Isabella, partly through her orders and partly through her example of industriousness, cleanliness, and economy. She would keep household accounts - tracking the amounts paid to tradesmen and summarizing them every month to compare with the previous. She would personally interview prospective servants and investigate their references, and Mrs Beeton suggested that she check the kitchen and other places where the servants worked every morning, just to know what was going on. After that, she could teach her children or work on making them some clothing, and then go on to some kind of leisure activity (she suggests reading, gardening/sitting in a garden, or improving her music or artwork). After lunch, it was time for "morning calls", by or to friends for pleasure and acquaintances for courtesy, after having dined at their house or something like that. While taking calls, a woman was not supposed to be really engaged in reading, drawing, or playing music, but she could quietly continue doing some embroidery. Morning calls would go on until dinner, and evening calls could take place afterward (although Mrs Beeton also recommends evenings at home, spent with needlework, chess/backgammon, or reading aloud). It's difficult to classify calls as leisure or work - they were a necessary part of cultivating and maintaining acquaintances. Being a moral example to the servants and children was also seen as a kind of constant occupation, and is one of the societal pressures you'd face.

The book also gives instructions for what the cook, housekeeper, etc. were meant to do, which can give clues as to what women who didn't have a full complement of staff would be spending their time on. While a servant who cooked was a necessity, a housekeeper wasn't, and many middle-class women would have been performing those duties as well - dealing with tradesmen, making desserts and doing fancy cooking, preserving fruits and vegetables, and giving whichever servants she did employ their orders.

Periodicals you might read included The Englishwomen's Domestic Magazine and The Queen, both Beeton productions, as well as The Ladies' Monthly Magazine, The Ladies' cabinet, and The Englishwoman's Review. Wikipedia has a fairly thorough list of 19th century periodicals along with the dates in which they were active. Women's magazines were generally pretty serious - you might have a fashion plate with a couple of outfits on it and a description of what the clothes were, but most of it would be fiction, articles about historical or current events, recipes and household tips, the answers to questions that readers had sent in, etc. You can usually find full volumes of these on Google Books.

Your education depends on when you were young, and what social level you'd been born into. It was most likely that you'd been educated at home, by your mother or possibly a governess.

It was very much Not Done to discuss pregnancy, so you would likely not have a lot of explicit questions about having a baby, especially from people outside the immediate family. It was common for women to get pregnant within the first few years of marriage, and the assumption if you didn't would be that you were perhaps barren or miscarrying, not that you were deliberately holding off on having a child.

sinfunnel

For follow up, what class are you describing (because 'husband is a doctor doesn't particularly donate a class). This will change your answers pretty dramatically as lower/middle class women likely worked, where upper class women were rarely allowed to do work outside the home.