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Nineteenth Century Stereotypes of Women Relative to
The New England Victorian Woman
the Female Lead Roles in Show Boat
The New England Victorian woman reveled in her domestic sphere and particu-
larly in her role as moral guardian of the family. Purity established a woman’s reputation
in New England society. Marie Richmond-Abbott outlined the stereotype of the Victo-
rian “good girl” model as “one who is moral, pure, chaste, modest and without much
sexual desire,” summarized as “Ladies don’t move.” 31 Sexual repression has become a
cliché of the Victorian era, but the reality was that sex was discussed openly and that
women took pleasure in it. Carl Degler proposed that New England Victorian women
shaped family dynamics and used the façade of abstinence “in pursuit of their own
interests” through the cult of domesticity. He described the so-called patriarchal
“ideology” of chaste wives and daughters with limited libidos as actually a feminine
creation that reduced the number of pregnancies by allowing women to control the
frequency of sexual relations. 32 New England women were “overtly political,” according
to S. Jay Kleinberg. 33 Their need to influence man’s self-control and to protect women
from abuse was also the driving force behind the civic reforms of sanctioned prostitution,
31 The American Woman, 74.
32 At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (1980); quoted
in Lasch, 163-164. Lasch remarked that Victorian-era medical statements that seem to deny women’s
sexual appetites were actually prescriptive of a new morality to protect women from rape and abuse, 164.
33 Women in the United States, 178.
46