Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen (Essay Date 1981)

SOURCE: Olafson Hellerstein, Erna, Leslie Parker Hume and Karen M. Offen. "General Introduction." In Victorian Women: A Documentary Account of Women's Lives in Nineteenth-Century England, France, and the United States, edited by Erna Olafson Hellerstein, Leslie Parker Hume, and Karen M. Offen, pp. 1-3. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1981.

In the following excerpt, Hellerstein, Hume, and Offen argue that the social roles and expectations of French, English, and American women living during the Victorian era underwent fundamental and often contradictory transformations due to changes in the market economy, life expectancy, democratic institutions, state regulations, and gender polarization.

In the ferment about sex roles and the family that characterizes our own time, men and women still define themselves in terms of the Victorians, either living out ideas and defending institutions that came to fruition in the nineteenth...