Essay Questions

How does Webster paint the portrait of young single womanhood in Victorian England as a Catch-22?

In her essay, “Husband-Hunting and Match-Making,” Webster takes on the subject of looking for love and settling for marriage in the age of Victoria. Beneath the ironic distancing of advisory commentary on setting one’s sight on just one bird rather than spreading buckshot around and the wisdom of the convenience that fathers take little interest in match-making lies the brittle outrage against a patriarchal system in which marriage has been designed as just another part of the system intent on limiting choices for women. Added to this long-standing convention of the patriarchy is the peculiarly intense focus on manner and etiquette fostered during the Victorian era which has further complicated things for women by creating a situation in which they are damned if do or don’t:

“People think women who do not want to marry unfeminine: people think women who do want to marry immodest: people combine both opinions by regarding it as unfeminine for women not to look forward longingly to wifehood as the hope and purpose of their lives, and ridiculing...women of their acquaintance whom they suspect of entertaining such a longing.”

What has been occupation to which English women had for so long been educated at the cost of teaching them how to make a living by any other means?

The subject of “The Dearth of Husbands” is the realization that simple arithmetic applied to demographics results in the conclusion that there must be an ungainly number of unmarried women in England. The arithmetic suggests that each generation produces roughly an equivalent amount of both men and women so how did it come to be that there were so many more unmarried women than unmarried men in England? The answer is mind-numbingly obvious: because men are offered an almost unlimited opportunity to learn trades, they are also offered an inequitable opportunity to leave England. Thus, it is not that there are more unmarried British women than unmarried British men, but that the unmarried British men are not actually in England. The disparity is inevitable because with few exceptions England has “educating our daughters to the occupation of waiting till somebody came for them, and education them to no other occupation.”

According to Webster, who is responsible for creating most of the sins in the world and what does she mean?

Webster begins the essay “Creating Sins” by yielding to the point that nobody knows who is responsible for creating sin. And she also is wiling to admit that those greatest sins which have been deemed worthy of often harsh punishment throughout history are to be considered a separate realm. Her focus is on the recent invention of sinful behaviors or, “sins which need not have been wrong” and the blame for this exponential explosion of behaviors determined to be sins is placed not upon the devil or even the sinners themselves, but the “good people” of the world. By “good people” she means the moralists, evangelists, the self-righteous, the judgmental and all those people who find temptation everywhere and in everything and the failure to resist it not merely an individual character defect, but a sinful act for all. Webster’s final, closing solution to this state of affair? A call for her readers actively refrain from abstaining in these sins as a collective act of freedom and an assertion of truth.