Hardship

Job opportunities for women at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century are severely limited. A woman from a well-to-do background who needs to earn money will most likely become a governess. However, the pay that comes with that job is only just high enough to keep her from starvation.

Working-class women and girls make cloth at home and later toil in factories and coal mines. But by 1841, 700,000 women work as domestic servants, by far the most significant employment of women. Prostitution in Victorian England booms, because so many women are denied the opportunity to earn money in any other way.