Socialism and feminism were creative responses to destabilization of the traditional patriarchal order, but they were not particularly popular ones.
Most people found it easier to reiterate the traditional moral division of labor and to condemn the indulgence of greed and lust everywhere except the masculine marketplace. Queen Victoria, who ruled the British Empire from 1837 to 1901, assumed a traditionally male prerogative but also encouraged the notion that women and men were essentially different.
Victorian values encouraged separate spheres for men and women that reflected contrasts between selfishness and altruism, the market and the family. This social cosmology offered men the possibility of inhabiting both worlds, buying their cake and having it homemade for them, too. It created a sacred space in which traditional moral values remained exempt from the demands of economic rationality.The concept of a sacred feminine sphere found expression in manuals of household advice and conservative denunciations of market society. Its legacy was stamped on the writings of Stanley Jevons and Alfred Marshall, the best known of the English neoclassical economists. Their world view presumed God-given differences between men and women that closely corresponded to the distinction between rational self-interest and moral obligation. Jevons and Marshall may have shared many of Adam Smith's basic views, but they lived in an era in which the boundary between the work of men and women was shifting rapidly. Perhaps as a result, they devoted more energy to boundary defense.