19th-Century Men and Women: Romantic and Familial Bonds While men and women occupied separate spheres in
the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century, those spheres
overlapped in important ways. The heterosocial preoccupations of
schoolteacher and diarist Francis Paine and the romantic correspondence
of Emma Hart Seymour and Philip Battell offer two illustrations
of men’s and women’s fascination with each other. Paine’s
appreciation for the physical charms of his female students, as
well as his close relationships with female family members, are
documented in his diary of the 1840s. Seymour and Battell’s
intimate correspondence, in which they communicated mutual devotion
but also anxiety, reflects the value nineteenth-century men and
women placed on romantic love and affectionate companionship.
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