Sarah Stickney Ellis (1812-1872)
(text copied from http://athena.english.vt.edu/~jmooney/3044biosa-g/ellis.html)
Many times described as the typical middle-class Englishwoman, Sarah Stickney Ellis represented the privileged elite in her writings yet was not a member of that class. Born in 1812, the daughter of a tenant farmer, she wrote over thirty fictions, histories, poems and conduct guides in order to contribute to the family’s income.
A very conservative women’s writer, she covered many subjects including the social obligations of women, the power of the middle class, and explanatory guides to the household. Her belief that women should stay home and care for their families and be subservient to their husbands was declared and defended in all of her writings. The defense of her position was that women were the educators of men therefore they had no need for intellectual education but rather they must have a sturdy nature. As she expresses in Women of England, she believed that domestic duties “call forth the best energies of the female character."
Compounded with the ideal of the family restricted woman, Ellis stressed that moral education and high social ethics were the prevention and cure for the troubles of the culture at that time. Because women were the educators of men, they had a religious duty to provide positive influence to society. She also believed that men did not have the capacity to facilitate righteousness in people therefore it was the middle-class woman’s work to perfect and protect their society.
Overall, Ellis believed that the middle class was the “pillar of [the] Nations strength” (Women of England) and women were the pillar of the middle class thereby women held the culture of the nation on their shoulders.
--Rachel Parker