The term fallen woman was used to described a woman who has "lost her innocence", that is, fallen from the grace

Grace (Christianity)

In Christian theology, grace is God’s gift of God’s self to humankind. It is understood by Christians to be a spontaneous gift from God to man - "generous, free and totally unexpected and undeserved" - that takes the form of divine favour, love and clemency. It is an attribute of God that is most...

 of God. In 19th century Britain especially, the meaning came to be closely associated with the loss or surrender of a woman's chastity. Its use was an expression of the belief that to be socially and morally acceptable a women's sexuality and experience should be entirely restricted to marriage, and that she should also be under the supervision and care of an authoritative man. Used when society offered few employment opportunities for women in times of crisis or hardship, the term was often more specifically associated with prostitution

Prostitution

Prostitution is the act or practice of providing sexual services to another person in return for payment. The person who receives payment for sexual services is called a prostitute and the person who receives such services is known by a multitude of terms, including a "john". Prostitution is one of...

 which was regarded as both cause and effect of a woman being "fallen". Today, as a result of greater understanding of women's sexuality, changing attitudes to women's role, greater employment opportunities and an acceptance that theologically, men as well as women are capable of falling from grace, the term is considered to be anachronistic although it retains strong literary associations and historical importance.

Theological links

The idea that Eve, from the biblical story in the book of Genesis, was the prototypical fallen woman has been widely accepted by academics, theologians and literary scholars, yet crucially, such a reading overlooks that Eve was not expelled from Eden

Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden is in the Bible's Book of Genesis as being the place where the first man, Adam, and his wife, Eve, lived after they were created by God. Literally, the Bible speaks about a garden in Eden...

 because she had sex outside of marriage; rather she fell from a state of innocence because she ate forbidden fruit

Forbidden fruit

Forbidden fruit is any object of desire whose appeal is a direct result of knowledge that cannot or should not be obtained or something that someone may want but is forbidden to have....

 from the Tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That is, Eve and then Adam reached for knowledge, and in gaining it, they lost their innocence. The consequence was that they gained an understanding of the consequences of their actions, which they did not have before. The temptation offered to Adam and Eve in the story was to know what God knows and to see what God sees. It was a temptation based on desire, not sexual desire, but envy and a desire to be like God. In the context of fallen women, the metaphor of falling from innocence in sexual matters was more understandable when advice and reliable information about sex were lacking and sexual knowledge primarily depended on personal experience. Theologically, the metaphor is also related to the Fall of Man from a state of grace as well as to the expulsion and subsequent fall of Lucifer

Lucifer

Traditionally, Lucifer is a name that in English generally refers to the devil or Satan before being cast from Heaven, although this is not the original meaning of the term. In Latin, from which the English word is derived, Lucifer means "light-bearer"...

 from heaven.

Social situation

The term “fallen” was nevertheless most often conflated with sexual knowledge, particularly for women at a time when their sexual innocence was socially highly valued, indeed insisted upon. As the term narrowed to imply any socially unauthorised sexual activity, including pre-marital or extra-marital sex, whether initiated by the woman or not, it concealed the different reasons for such a "falling" out of God's and society's favour. “Fallen” was therefore an umbrella term that was applied to a variety of women in a variety of settings: she may have been a woman who had had sex once or habitually outside the confines of marriage; a woman of a lower socio-economic class; a woman who had been raped or seduced by a male aggressor; a woman with a shady reputation; or a prostitute. Furthermore, prostitution was defined in a range of ways and the "reality was that hard economic times meant that for many women, prostitution was the only way to make ends meet. Many ... were only transient fallen women, moving in and out of the profession [of prostitution] as family finances dictated." In some cases, a woman may have been regarded as fallen simply because she was educated, eccentric, or elusive. Whatever the case may be, female fallenness as it appears in each of these renderings was the result of a woman’s deviation from social norms, in turn strongly linked to moral expectations. In the mid 19th century, for example, "For middle-class men seeking to establish a different basis for authority, from that which had been used by the nobility, moral authority became the key issue, evident in the power exercised by a man over the nuclear or bourgeois family and in his ability to regulate women's sexuality through her protection and containment in the domestic sphere."

Rescue and rehabilitation

One of the effects of the rapid urbanisation resulting from the Industrial Revolution

Industrial Revolution

The Industrial Revolution was a period from the 18th to the 19th century where major changes in agriculture, manufacturing, mining, transportation, and technology had a profound effect on the social, economic and cultural conditions of the times...

 in England was that a large number of prostitutes were working in the capital, London

London

London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...

. The problem for the city and for the women themselves was very evident and it prompted many rescue and rehabilitation efforts, especially by middle-class women inspired by religious conviction or feminist principles or both. Some people worked on changes to legislation or served on committees to raise funds for charitable initiatives. Others, like Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

, and most famously, the Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone

William Ewart Gladstone FRS FSS was a British Liberal statesman. In a career lasting over sixty years, he served as Prime Minister four separate times , more than any other person. Gladstone was also Britain's oldest Prime Minister, 84 years old when he resigned for the last time...

 worked directly with fallen women to try to rescue them from their circumstances. At considerable risk to his political career, Gladstone spent a great amount of his own money and time on this effort, assisted by his wife, Catherine Gladstone

Catherine Gladstone

Catherine Glynne Gladstone was the wife of British Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone for 59 years, until his death in 1898.-Family:...

. "There are more entries in Gladstone's diaries about prostitutes than there are about political hostesses, more recorded visits to the fallen women on the streets of London than recorded attendances at the balls and soirées of the grandes dames of polite Victorian society."

Rescue work among prostitutes was also part of the missionary work done by the Woman's Christian Temperance Union

Woman's Christian Temperance Union

The Woman's Christian Temperance Union was the first mass organization among women devoted to social reform with a program that "linked the religious and the secular through concerted and far-reaching reform strategies based on applied Christianity." Originally organized on December 23, 1873, in...

 (WCTU), who also petitioned against alcohol and opium. What "amounted to conventional Victorian 'rescue work' for 'fallen' women" was carried out in the Philippines during the Philippine–American War on behalf of the United States Government as part of a much broader "social purity" campaigns to prohibit prostitution and alcohol and other "social evils".

Fallen women in art and literature

As a genuine social concern as well as a metaphor for artistic explorations of vice and virtue, the theme of the fallen woman has a notable place in art and in literature. In some cases, such as Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 and William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

, the artist/author has produced companion pieces in both forms.

John Milton

Aside from the Bible, it was John Milton

John Milton

John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...

's famous and influential poem Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost

Paradise Lost is an epic poem in blank verse by the 17th-century English poet John Milton. It was originally published in 1667 in ten books, with a total of over ten thousand individual lines of verse...

, (1667) that communicated the story of the Fall and its consequences most powerfully. The idea of the fallen woman is most closely related to those sources which represent the fallen woman as an agent, as opposed to a passive receptacle, in the act of her undoing. For example, in “longing to reign rather than serve” Eve is ambitious for knowledge. The difference between these religious renderings of the iconic figure and the fallen woman presented in most 19th century texts is that the latter is suppressed/ disempowered/ silenced in her representations: “[T]he Victorian fallen woman is usually depicted . . . as a mute, enigmatic icon . . . who sleeps through the poem that probes her nature”

Lord Byron

Lord Byron uses the idea of the fallen woman to relate vice and virtue and consider the effects of infidelity and inconsistency in his poem Mariano Faliero, Doge of Venice.

William Blake

William Blake

William Blake

William Blake was an English poet, painter, and printmaker. Largely unrecognised during his lifetime, Blake is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age...

's series of poems Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of...

 (1789-1794) contrasts the two states in the context of industrialising England, the context in which women became more likely to "fall" as a result of great social change. Blake's poetry explores his deep concern about poverty and its effects as well as the relations between those in authority with those who are controlled by it, including moral generalities and the relations between the sexes. The connections between the Fall of Man and societal restrictions on sexual love are part of those broader concerns.

Pre-Raphaelite painters

The theme of the fallen woman was becoming increasingly popular at the time that Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was an English poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement,...

 began his picture Found. Conceived in 1851, it was described by Helen Rossetti as follows: "A young drover from the country, while driving a calf to market, recognizes in a fallen woman on the pavement, his former sweetheart. He tries to raise her from where she crouches on the ground, but with closed eyes she turns her face from him to the wall."

William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt

William Holman Hunt OM was an English painter, and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.-Biography:...

, like Rossetti a member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti...

, spent some time searching for a 'suitable' subject for his painting The Awakening Conscience

The Awakening Conscience

The Awakening Conscience is an oil-on-canvas painting by British artist William Holman Hunt, one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which depicts a young woman rising from her position in the lap of a man and gazing transfixed out of the window of a room.Initially the painting...

 and he "found it after reading about Peggotty

Peggotty

Clara Peggotty is a fictional character in Charles Dickens's 1850 novel David Copperfield.Referred to as 'Peggotty' so as not to confuse her with David's mother, who is also called Clara, Peggotty is the housekeeper of the family home and plays a big part in David's upbringing. Peggotty is the...

 and Emily in Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

's novel David Copperfield

David Copperfield (novel)

The Personal History, Adventures, Experience and Observation of David Copperfield the Younger of Blunderstone Rookery , commonly referred to as David Copperfield, is the eighth novel by Charles Dickens, first published as a novel in 1850. Like most of his works, it originally appeared in serial...

, and after frequenting the London streets where fallen women could usually be found."

Elizabeth Gaskell

The character of Esther, who becomes a prostitute in Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Gaskell

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, née Stevenson , often referred to simply as Mrs Gaskell, was a British novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era...

's novel Mary Barton

Mary Barton

Mary Barton is the first novel by English author Elizabeth Gaskell, published in 1848. The story is set in the English city of Manchester during the 1830s and 1840s and deals heavily with the difficulties faced by the Victorian lower class.-Plot summary:...

 (1848) is an example of a fallen woman being used to illustrate the social and political divide between rich and poor in Victorian England. The novel is set in a large industrial town in the 1840s and it "gives an accurate and humane picture of working-class life ... Esther is presented as something other than merely a bad girl; the abyss into which she falls is the same gulf that separates Dives from Lazarus".
In terms of the construction of the novel, the conventions of the time required that sexual actions took place offstage or not at all. Readers (particularly female readers) were encouraged to imagine and condemn the actions that caused the character's fall but as with other authors concerned about the effects of poverty on people at the time, especially women, Gaskell's "conscious aim is to bring Christian principles as a mediating force within class antagonisms."

Charles Dickens

Aside from the well known critiques of society in his novels such as David Copperfield, (1850) Charles Dickens also set up and managed a home for homeless women, called Urania Cottage. He disagreed with the prevailing idea that once corrupted, especially by prostitution, and therefore fallen, a woman could not be uncorrupted or redeemed. Rather he wanted to treat them well and train them for other employment but he needed to convince his benefactor that it was possible for fallen women to return to mainstream life.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, OM was an English novelist and poet. While his works typically belong to the Naturalism movement, several poems display elements of the previous Romantic and Enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural.While he regarded himself primarily as a...

's novel Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented, also known as Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman, Tess of the d'Urbervilles or just Tess, is a novel by Thomas Hardy, first published in 1891. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British...

 (1891) explores the consequences for a heroine who became a fallen woman as a result of a casual wrong. This is a key point because the author is trying to show that the consequences are independent of the heroine's actions or intentions.

Fallen women in film

In cinema, the fallen woman is one of the earliest representatives of the female prostitute, and the theme had great appeal during the silent era

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

. By the mid 20th century, when women had access to a variety of jobs and their sexual activity was no longer necessarily associated with moral corruption, the fallen woman as a theme was no longer relevant. The films sometimes intended to convey a moral lesson; sometimes they were a social commentary on poverty; sometimes they explored the idea of redemption or the consequences of coercion; and sometimes they were about self-sacrifice. These contrasts, such as innocence and experience; sin and redemption; vice and virtue, as well as ideas about corruption, class, exploitation, suffering and punishment, build on themes in earlier literature. Some films, such as The Red Kimono (1925) in which the fallen woman was allowed to live happily at the end, were subject to severe censorship. The Road to Ruin (1928) was banned. Protect Us (1914)
The Primrose Path (1931) ; and are films that emphasise the fault of the woman. The Jungle (1914) and Damaged Goods (1919) consider the element of coercion, whereas poverty is important in Out of the Night (1918) and The Painted lady (1924) and Die freudlose Gasse (Joyless Street) (1925).