Women in a Cafe at the Olympia Skating Rink, Bramall Lane early 20th Century. Source: Picture Sheffield.
Women born or married into the Victorian middle classes were cushioned from the harsh realities experienced by working class women, but they could still be confined by social expectations. They were expected to marry, and once married, to devote themselves to husband, home and children. Ideally, a wife would be the ‘angel of the hearth’, providing respite and support for the man returning from his work in the world outside. Yet, in common with less financially fortunate women, the middle-class woman was likely to have many pregnancies, and equally likely to lose children in infancy to childhood illnesses or tuberculosis. Some women, with time to be interested in issues of the day, might lead more intellectually independent lives, and some widowed women might head up a business established by their late husbands, but for most, the husband and his life was necessarily at the centre of theirs.
You can read more about the lives of women buried in the Cemetery in the Sheffield General Cemetery Trust’s publication A Woman’s Place.
