Coventry Patmore’s poem, published in 1854, extolling his wife’s great virtues, became an instant best seller and defined what a perfect Victorian wife should be. Her role was to support her husband and bring up his children, negating her independence and aspirations, concentrating on marriage, domestic duties and motherhood.
As Virginia Woolf described the perfect wife:
“She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly selfless. She exalted in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed daily … above all she was pure.” In “Professions for Women,” Virginia Woolf said that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.”
Education at that time for girls from the higher classes involved domestic skills to prepare them for marriage. They were instructed in sewing, embroidery, needlework, drawing, piano playing, conversation including in French, and most of all how to be a good wife to please and support one’s husband. They were not taught science or anything other than basic mathematics as it was considered that such an education would be too stressful for them because they were both physically and mentally too frail.
Not so for Ada Lovelace.
Ada Lovelace is credited as being the author of the first computer programme. She and Charles Babbage, inventor of his proposed Analytical Engine, had mutual mathematical interests. Ada’s Maths tutor, Professor Augustus De Morgan, wrote of her in a letter to Lady Byron in 1844:
“Had any young beginner, about to go to Cambridge, shewn the same power, I should have prophesied first that his aptitude at grasping the strong points and the real difficulties of first principles would have very much lowered his chance of being a senior wrangler secondly, that they would have certainly made him an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first rate eminence.”
Ada believed that intuition and imagination were needed in mathematical and scientific concepts. Unfortunately, she died of cervical cancer in 1852 aged only thirty-six. Ada, the ‘Enchantress of Numbers’ as Babbage described her, couldn’t continue with her mathematical investigations.
Ada was the daughter of Lord Byron and Annabella Milbanke. They were totally unsuited to each other. They had met in London. In a letter to Caroline Lamb on May 1, 1812, Bryon wrote that he had “no desire to be better acquainted with Miss Milbanke: she is too good for a fallen sprit to know, and I should like her more if she were less perfect.” However, Byron became a frequent visitor to Seaham Hall, the home of her parents. It has been suggested by some that Bryon’s friends urged him towards the relationship as she was the sole daughter and heiress of her father Sir Ralph Milbanke and that her fortune was the main attraction.
Annabella and Byron were engaged in Autumn 1814 and married in the drawing room at Seaham Hall on January 2, 1815. They honeymooned at the now demolished Halnaby Hall near Croft. Byron was right. Annabella was no good for a fallen spirit like him and when their daughter Ada was only one month old, Annabella left Bryon to live with her parents. They had been married for only just over one year. Byron would never see his wife or his daughter again.
Ada, who became Ada Lovelace was born on 10 December 1815. Her mother was convinced Byron was mad and her accusations of Byrons’ incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta and the birth of their daughter Elizabeth Medora as well as his supposed bisexuality was not believed by some but led to Byron leaving England in April 1816. Ada never saw her father as he died when Ada was eight years old.
Annabella wanted her daughter Ada taught in an unconventional way to, in her mind, eliminate the wildness and madness of Bryon, so Ada was taught mathematics and science from a very early age. Mary Somerville, a researcher and scientific author was involved as well as Augustus De Morgan who instructed her in advance calculus.
When older, Ada attended Babbage’s Saturday Night Soirées with her mother, Lady Byron and Mary Sommerville. These soirées were attended by the intellectual and social elite including people like Michael Faraday, Arthur Wellesley, Charles and Emma Darwin, Harriet Martineau and Charles Dickens. When she was eighteen, she had a working relationship with Charles Babbage, understanding the principle of his Difference Engine. Babbage was the father of computers, but Ada went beyond his ideas and had broader vision of a computer just being a machine involved with numbers but expanding the concept of the potential, thus leading her to the algorithm essential for calculating the first computer programme, the technology needed to go any further.
Ada Lovelace did not have the traditional education to become an ‘Angel in the House,’ and it is evident she and so many other women have achieved originality and greatness, by going beyond their whole existence being based around domesticity. Simply raising children and being a perfect wife so that their husband would support and protect them was not enough.
An ‘Angel’ transcends stereotypical ideas
There are those, even today who see a woman’s role as solely being an ‘Angel in the House’ and not getting involved in anything other than domestic duties. In America J.D. Vance considered the women without children were “miserable childless cat ladies.” He said of working women that they “shunt their kids into crap day care so they can enjoy more freedom.” He also has a hardline stance against abortion even when due to rape, incest or potential loss of life of the woman.
Donald Trump is also anti-abortion. He appears to want to return to a stereotypical traditional idea of womanhood. He announced that he would “protect women whether they like it or not.” But beware, if you are too clever his recent attacks on women reporters would get you called ‘stupid’, ‘incapable’, ‘ugly’ even ‘piggy’ or told like Kaitlin Collins that you never smile.
Here in the UK Nigel Farage is following suit by patronising reporters. “Listen love, you’re trying ever so hard” Mishal Husain was told. Camilla Tomaney of the Telegraph was accused of playing a “silly little game.” ‘Listen love’ female reporters are told you are ‘silly women,’ he tells them.
Silly women we are no longer. Women have escaped from a solely domestic existence. Men like that should remember that ‘sarcasm is the lowest form of wit’ but not in this case ‘the highest form of intelligence.’ Sorry Oscar Wilde, I’m sure in the case of these three gentlemen that you would agree with me.
