Concetti Chiave
- The Victorian era, known as "The Victorian Compromise," was marked by progress and strict morality alongside widespread social injustice and corruption.
- Religion, particularly Evangelicalism, played a significant role, while philanthropy grew with women's voluntary efforts tackling poverty.
- Respectability, a blend of morality and hypocrisy, was a key societal value, masking issues like poverty and social decay.
- Women were seen as morally superior and guided family life, despite being considered physically weaker, demanding men's respect.
- The era's approach to sexuality was repressive, with female chastity emphasized and sexual topics avoided in public and private discourse.
The Victorian Compromise
The Victorian age was an age of contradiction, also called “The Victorian Compromise” because it was both an age of progress and improvement and an age of injustice through the working classes, with strict moral values but at the same time corruption and vices. Religion had an significant role, especially Evangelicalism, and Philantropy began to gain importance with the creation of societies which addressed poverty and voluntary efforts of women.
The main word of the Victorian Age was respectability, because it was a mixture of morality and hypocrisy shared by middle and working classes.
It was also important the role of the woman: men had the duty to respect her, physically weaker but morally superior, a guide and an inspirer for men because she controlled the family budget and the growth of the children.
The attitude towards sex was crucial: there was female chastity (a single woman with a child was called a fallen woman), repression of sexuality both privately and publicly, and moralising prudery (pretending to be shocked by sexuality) that led to a rejection of words with sexual connotation, the denunciation of nudity in art and the veiling of sculptured genitals
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