Sewing, weaving, knitting, and spinning were an important part of domestic life for women of all ages, because they made clothing for themselves and other family members. If they could not buy domestic or imported cloth from a local shopkeeper, they could buy or make yarn for spinning cloth. Sewing and spinning were often the primary responsibility of the daughters or other girls in the house. This 1856 lithograph of an old woman making thread is by L. H. Bradford.  

One of the most pervasive ideologies of the Victorian age rested on the assumption that the ideal womanly virtues of sacrifice, moral purity, and services were best expressed in the vocations of wife and mother. To be truly feminine, a woman must fulfill these roles. She is like the angel in the house, pure and perfect, as the following description illustrates suitably:

Her disposition is devout

Her countenance angelical;

The best things that the best believe

Are in her face so kindly writ

The faithless, seeing her, conceive

Not only heaven, but hope of it.

(The Angel in the House: Book I, Canto IV, Preludes I)

In A Plea for Women (1843), Hugo Reid describes the gap between ideology and actuality:

"If all a woman's duties are to be considered so strictly domestic, and if God and nature have really so circumscribed her sphere of action-- what are we to think of the dreadful depravity of thousands upon thousands of of unprotected females, who actually prefer leaving their only proper sphere, and working for their own subsistence--to starvation?"

The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 made it easier for divorces to happen, and the Married Women's Property Act of 1870 helped enable wives to keep their own property and earnings. The Victorian societal ideologies of matrimony and female roles gave rise to "the Woman Question", where revolutionary expressions of discontent were heard from the ladies. As one of the female writers who took up the "woman question", Browning sought to rescue women from a purely relative existence to men.  Aurora is a perfect example of a revolutionist who can stand on her own feet, as woman and artist, without the dependence on a man. Her epic story provides a paradigm for the women poet's relationship to poetic tradition as long as the latter privileges the male voice, and the male as the dominant role in the household. At first she rejects Romney for his ignorance and failure to comprehend her visions, and the equality of genders.

You misconceive the question like a man,

Who sees a woman as the complement

Of his sex merely. You forget too much

That every creature, female as the male,

Stands single in responsible act and thought

As also in birth and death.

(Aurora Leigh, [Aurora's Rejection of Romney] Lines 434-439)

However, in the end, the two are joined together in love and complement each other in their own passions.

Aurora transforms the "old" perceptions of the women and their domestic role in society, and give a new identity to women as poets.  

John Bufford's lithograph, "Feeding the Pigs," from the mid-nineteenth century.