‘the majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled by sexual feelings of any kind’: from William Acton’s medical text, The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, 1857

Women had no stance in a marriage and in this book it explains how women were not able to speak to their husbands or men if not spoken to first. The figure of the governess was unsettling, especially in books because it gave attention to the fact that not all women in the victorian age were sexless like Dr Acton had suggested.