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Giving women a voice is one of the main goals of the Feminist Movement nowadays. Throughout the centuries women have been the oppressed gender and many of them have even risked their lives to try and exert some form of female equality

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Jane and Bertha represent a sort of double-figure. Madness in the Victorian period was used to define a multitude of conditions and behaviours (including adultery by a woman), and was often used as a means of social control or repression: once a woman allowed her-self to reveal her passion and rage, it was better to keep her hidden, or, as in the case of Bertha, locked in the attic. Despite the fact that Bertha could appear as the bad character, the whole story reveals us how she could be considered as the alter-ego of Jane in matter of expressing her deepest and secret desires. She cannot be categorised either as an angel or a monster; she actually is a heroine. Her way of acting, burning down Thornfield Hall for example, is an own way of deliberating herself feeling able to exercise freedom over her husband, allowing Jane to marry him too. In this way: Bertha is the extravagnt, rebellious and violent woman who cannot constrain herself anymore while Jane is the perfect example of social control and repression.

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The Duke of Wellington suggests that women are like swans, graceful in the water, but when they presume to leave their natural element, the home, they have an ‘unseemly waddle’ which entitles everyone ‘to laugh till their sides split at the spectacle’

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"Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel; they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do."

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The question of the role of women is absolutely the centre of all of Charlotte Brontë’s novels and particularly with Jane Eyre and it's an important time in the history of English literature, because it's in the 19th century that women start to take on such a dominant role within literature. Jane's a very assertive heroine: she's the person who speaks the truth against powerful figures and there's often these very powerful dominant male figures, against whom Jane has to find her own voice and her own identity and so it's a very important text for asserting the value, the independence and the depth of women's lives.

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Women were obliged to stay at home so they have a plenty of more time to dedicate to reading literature. Since they were not able to express their capabilty in writing, they usually had to publish works with a male name. Infact Charlotte Bronte chose Curre Bell.

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What's so interesting in this very complicated relationship between expressing your desires and passions and constraining or restraining them, is that often the two aren't exactly opposites. It's like somehow that the moments of greatest passion are moments when you're most restrained, so Jane Eyre is often trying to restrain herself, but it's exactly in that moment that she's most passionately expressive.

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Jane Eyre works as a governess and governesses really matter in 19th-century fiction and in 19th century society. They're one of the very few jobs that respectable middle-class women can do, but it's paid badly and they're often unpleasantly treated. In Jane Eyre, what you get is a figure who is socially quite marginal, the governess, just like an orphan in a way. She is depicted as poor and underpaid, the uncommon and unexpected condition for heroines at the time, who usually were portrayed as rich and beautiful. The voice of a woman who speaks with perfect frankness about herself is a new feature of the novel. Jane Eyre described passionate love from woman’s standpoint in a way that shocked many readers: she falls in love with a man married to a mad wife.

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In industries such as textiles whole branches of an industry were reliant upon the labour of women. Even after 1842, women were still involved in coal mining, but only above ground. In agriculture and domestic service women were an essential part of the workforce.

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There was a view that women should not work. A few middle class women worked before they got married. However, once married, whatever they had earned became property of their husband, just like them. The ideal woman was to be 'the angel in the house' and support her husband. Whilst divorce was very unfashionable in general, it was possible for men to divorce their wives for a variety of reasons, like them failing to look after their needs properly or committing adultery.  Once they divorced they were lifelong recognized as “fallen women” with a loss of that known and common respectability of the Victorian period.

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Women and men were not equal in the 19th century. Politics and government were matters for men. Women supposedly did not have the brain capacity to understand such things and so they were entirely excluded from the process. Women could not vote, no matter who they were, there were certainly no women in Parliament.