The members of the Crinoline Academy are critical to ushering in this new day, clearing the path of obstacles like Lord Compton, and paving the way for the reformers who would ultimately achieve passage of the Married Women’s Property Act. To me, this prelude period felt more interesting to research and write about. It’s a stage of political action where those toiling know they may not see the fruits of their labors, but they toil on just the same, laying the groundwork for the generations of women to come. It’s truly heroic work, I feel, and perfectly suited for the dauntless heroines of Miss Corvus’s Academy.

Women and Self-Defense in 1860s England

In Rules for Ruin, the students at Miss Corvus’s Academy receive a thorough education in self-defense. To modern readers, this may not seem like anything very revolutionary. To denizens of mid-Victorian London, however, it was exactly that.

In the first half of the century and entering the early 1860s, it was widely believed that the job of physically defending a woman fell to a man. Women, by contrast, were viewed as the gentler sex: hothouse flowers whose role was to be protected and admired, rather than resourceful individuals capable of defending themselves in their own right.

During the time when Rules for Ruin is set, these kinds of beliefs were just beginning to be challenged. In her 1858 book, A Woman’s Thoughts About Women, Victorian author Dinah Maria Mulock Craik declares:

The age of chivalry, with all its benefits and harmfulness, is gone by, for us women. We cannot now have men for our knights errant, expending blood and life for our sake while we have nothing to do but sit idle on balconies, and drop flowers on half-dead victors at tilt and tourney. Nor, on the other hand, are we dressed up dolls, pretty playthings, to be fought and scrambled for—petted, caressed or flung out of the window, as our several lords and masters may please.

Instead, according to Craik, women had to learn to depend on themselves. For women moving through overcrowded Victorian cities like London, this meant learning to deal with all sorts of assaults and encroachments. Popular publications of the day, including etiquette manuals, would have women believe that simply dressing modestly and adhering to social rules—like refusing to acknowledge impertinent men—would be enough to protect them. But rational Victorian women realized that etiquette and drab dresses weren’t enough. They required a familiarity with self-defense.