Lives in previous centuries for women are largely a matter of class. It would have been fun to have been a rich, privileged woman in the 18th century, but no fun at all to be her maid.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
She would have been a very remarkable woman, if she had not been an old maid.
One of the things that interests me about the Regency period is how women began to stir under the thumbs of men, wanting more and bigger freedoms.
Women in the post-Fifties world were appendages. They existed to serve men. Their lives and concerns didn't matter, except insofar as they impinged on Important Male Things.
But there were women in the world, and from them each of our heroes had taken to himself a wife. The good ladies were no strangers to the prowess of their husbands. and, strange as it may seem, they presumed a little upon it.
I think I'm living in the wrong century. I would have made a great courtesan. Not a mistress - I could never be kept - but a courtesan with my own rules.
For so many generations, a woman's only career path was to marry well and to marry up. Those days have changed.
Few women, I fear, have had such reason as I have to think the long sad years of youth were worth living for the sake of middle age.
Some readers tell me, 'We always treated our maid like she was a member of the family.' You know, that's interesting, but I wonder what your maid's perspective was on that.
A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid - the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else.
There is one type of ideal woman very seldom described in poetry - the old maid, the woman whom sorrow or misfortune prevents from fulfilling her natural destiny.
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