Re-thinking Victorian Women at West Norwood Cemetery

The Friends of West Norwood Cemetery is a charity dedicated to the care and preservation of this extraordinary cemetery. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Re-thinking Victorian Women at West Norwood Cemetery

The Victorian period (1837-1901) saw the emergence of distinct gendered spheres for men and women―the woman’s sphere of influence being entirely domestic, an innately caring role supporting her husband and children (this, in a nutshell, was ‘woman’s mission’). Such patriarchal attitudes underpinned matrimonial law, so that married women had no legal identity: men had absolute rights over their wives’ property, earnings, their children, even their bodies. Yet, decades before the Suffragettes called for equal voting rights, Victorian women in all walks of life resisted the idea that only marriage and motherhood offered fulfilment. Perhaps the most famous Victorian woman in West Norwood Cemetery is Isabella Beeton, whose Book of Household Management (1861) provided married women with household advice, recipes and menus, yet for Florence Nightingale making dinner into ‘a sacred ceremony’ prevented women from having the time to develop other spheres of action (‘If she has a knife and fork in her hands during three hours of the day, she cannot have a pencil or brush’).

We have tended to think of women like Nightingale, who transformed military and civilian nursing, as remarkable, one-offs who went against the grain. ‘Re-Thinking Victorian Women’ reminds us that there were in fact many women who contested the ways in which women’s lives were constrained by social attitudes of the day and whose careers took them into the public sphere. Highlights of this tour include the graves of a Pre-Raphaelite model-turned-artist, a working-class business woman (the ‘Watercress Queen’), Florence Nightingale’s most trusted nurse during the Crimean War, a pair of pioneering mountaineers, the most famous ceramic designers employed at Doulton’s Lambeth Art Pottery, and of course Isabella Beeton herself.

Your Guide: Dr Jane Jordan is a writer and academic who specialises in Nineteenth Century women's history. Jane gives introductory tours of West Norwood Cemetery on the first Sunday of every month and she is also a Lambeth Tour Guide.

Please meet by the entrance archway in good time for a prompt start at 2.30pm.

How to get here:

West Norwood Cemetery and Crematorium SE27 9JU is next to St Luke's Church and West Norwood Library

Buses: 2, 68, 196, 315, 322, 432 and 468 (several of these routes go via Brixton Tube Station: 2, 196, 322, 432). Robson Road stop

Train: West Norwood Station (trains to and from London Bridge/Victoria)

Host or Publisher Friends of West Norwood Cemetery