In Victorian times, were boys treated differently from girls?
When you think that before 1870 only the more fortunate children went to school, and a quarter of the women getting married couldn’t so much as sign their names; when you realise that before 1882 married women weren’t even allowed to own property (it all went to their husbands), it says it all. Girls were supposed to stay at home and perform menial tasks or else go into service and perform menial tasks for other people. The most common work for women was domestic service. In 1851, there were 752,000 female servants; in 1890, well over a million. In London, one person in 15 was in service. The usual age for leaving home and starting work as a maid was 12. Many women found the lifestyle, with its accommodation, food and regular wages, preferable to the grind of factory work. But where great industries were located, there were more jobs for factory workers than for domestic servants. The largest sector was textiles. In 1851, more than 600,000 women were employed in textile factories. By 1
