4 - Women and Family Health in the Mid-Victorian Family Magazine

Summary

THIS CHAPTER EXPLORES the role of women in the treatment of health, as represented in the Family Herald and Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper (later Cassell's Magazine) from the mid-1850s to the 1870s. These magazines were by their nature miscellaneous, serving both as a vehicle for fiction and as a source of advice on a range of domestic matters, including personal and family health. As such, they played multiple roles in their readers’ lives, offering working-class and lower-middle-class women assistance with the practical challenges of domestic management, as well as an imaginative escape from its prosaic realities. In fiction, advice features, and correspondence columns, treating illness and maintaining the family's health are defined as important facets of women's domestic responsibilities.

In 1857, Cassell's Illustrated Family Paper introduced a new column by a nononsense contributor called ‘The Matron.’ Writing to respectable working-and lower-middle-class women readers, she pours cold water on the flowery descriptions of domestic womanhood so popular at the time. She dismisses the typical paean to women's selflessness, moral courage, tenderness, and religiosity with the frank remark, ‘I can't say that I think it worth much’ (5 Dec 1857: 7). She warns against supposing that ‘the ability to “fetter males,” to “bind brows,” to “soothe dying moments,” and to “water turfs” with “choicest tears”’ will be of any help to wives and mothers who must take on the endless practical work of maintaining a household (7). Rather, she insists, women must practise the ‘prudence in marketing, skill in training children, and dexterity in domestic duties’ that make a good wife ‘for humble tradesmen, [and] for the large class of artizans and mechanics, who, above all others, require wives that shall be, indeed, help meets’ (7).

The Matron identifies a contrast shown elsewhere in Cassell's and other family magazines between the idealised Victorian woman, who holds the family together through her moral and spiritual power, and the unromantic domestic manager, who enacts the labour necessary for the home to function. According to both stereotypes, women are defined as working in the domestic sphere on behalf of their husbands and children, but they otherwise encode starkly different characteristics and capabilities.