The author undertakes an analysis of how notions of gender shape ideology. Asserting that the organization of sexual differences is a social, not natural phenomenon, and that beneath the smooth veneer of Victorian society lay disturbing contradictions and inconsistencies, she focuses on the ways in which representations of gender were simultaneously, but unevenly, constructed, deployed and contested in five major institutions. In medicine, where controversy raged over the use of anaesthesia in childbirth; in law and the wrangle over the first divorce legislation; in literature and the struggle by literary men to enhance the prestige of writers; in education and work, which the figure of the governess brought together, and in nursing. Ranging across sources from David Copperfield to Parliamentary debates, Florence Nightingale's writing on nursing to Mrs Beeton's household management, this book provides insight into mid-Victorian culture and ideology by challenging both the isolation of literary texts from other kinds of writing and the isolation of women's issues from economic and political histories.