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The middle class was the frontrunner of British society in the nineteenth century, and middle-class women were the pioneers of the women's movement. Their domestic and social status directly reflected the distribution of power in British society, family culture, values and the development of social progress and civilisation. This book systematically examines the changing status, position and role of British middle-class women in the private and public spheres of the family within the context of the nineteenth-century British middle-class cultural model, analyses the characteristics and influence of feminist theory and the feminist movement, and provides a glimpse into the relationship between social development and changes in middle-class gender relations in nineteenth-century Britain, and the significance of gender equality for women's progress and social development.