Women's Rights and Victorian Literature

Middle-class Victorian women lacked basic legal rights: until the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 and its extension in 1882, a married woman's property automatically passed to her husband's legal control, and women were entirely excluded from parliamentary suffrage, most of the learned professions, and formal university education for most of the period. Barbara Bodichon and Emily Davies founded Girton College at Cambridge in 1869, the first university college for women in Britain, while Elizabeth Garrett Anderson became, in 1865, the first British woman to obtain a formal medical license. Florence Nightingale transformed the nursing profession through her pioneering work during the Crimean War (1854-56) and her founding of the first modern professional nursing school in London in 1860.