The woman question

"The woman question" is a phrase usually used in connection with a social change in the latter half of the 19th century, which questioned the fundamental roles of women in Western industrialized countries such as the United Kingdom, the United States of America, Canada, and Russia. Issues of women's suffrage, reproductive rights, bodily autonomy, property rights, legal rights, and medical rights, and marriage dominated cultural discussions in newspapers and intellectual circles. While many women were supportive of these changing roles, they did not agree unanimously. Often issues of marriage and sexual freedom were most divisive.

"The woman question" originally referred to an academic debate in the 1530s as to whether women should be allowed to study in the universities. In the years that followed, many people took the opportunity to comment on the goodness of women in general, and also considered whether it was good for a man to marry. The academics decided that while men were not naturally smarter than women, women should not be allowed into the universities because they are not serious-minded enough. They lacked the grounding of a classical education and their temperament was not suited to serious study.

The debate over the nature and role of women can be understood in part as a development of the Romantic movement's exploration in fiction and drama (and opera) of the nature of 'man', of human beings as individuals and as members of society. In this, it is clearly prominent in such works as Die Walküre, Effi Briest, Madame Bovary, Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, A Doll's House, and Hedda Gabler. Each of these treats women's emotional, social, economic, and religious lives.

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