A Pair of Silk Stockings

During the era in which Chopin lived and wrote, the legal doctrine of coverture—where a married woman’s identity was joined with her husband’s—meant that, once married, a woman had few personal rights. It was assumed that her husband would act for her, and so, in a sense, his legal identity “covered” hers. Women could not vote, and married women could not own property; any property a woman might have owned prior to marriage became her husband’s. In the mid-1800s, people began to criticize coverture, in part because it deterred women from earning their own money. In short, coverture compelled women to submit themselves to their husbands as property. This often prevented married women from developing contacts, skills, and experiences on which to rely if their husband died or was otherwise unable to support the family financially.

The model of the ideal wife and mother had been established by Coventry Patmore’s poem, “The Angel in the House” (1854). Although the poem had been overlooked on publication, it became hugely popular and influential by the end of the century, when Chopin was writing. In this poem, Patmore portrays a middle-class wife and mother as completely self-sacrificing to the needs of her family and utterly loving and submissive to her husband. This woman was based on his own wife. In short, she was the Victorian feminine ideal: the “angel” that a woman ought to be.

This is the context in which Mrs. Sommers must face a great deal of social pressure to conform to societal expectations of women. In addition to loving her children, she has an obligation as a woman to provide and care for them in a society that is set up, legally, to render her relatively powerless to do so. A woman such as Mrs. Sommers would not have had a job, nor any income under her own control unless she was a widow. Widows usually relied on very small pensions or savings.