During the Victorian time period that both The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and A Study in Scarlet were written women were universally viewed as the weaker sex. Women of this time enjoyed none of the privileges that women in modern society receive the benefits of. For instance freedoms such as property rights and voting rights were positively unheard of in those days, and women were seen merely as an extension, of or worse the property of, the males in their lives. The same attitudes toward the female gender that prevailed in Victorian society are also prevalent in the literature written during this time period. In each of these novels the roles of women are very insignificant and serve to reinforce the attitude that women have a value that is substandard to men. Both Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle employ techniques such as constructing anonymous female characters that occupy low or subservient stations in life, representing women as victims and forbidding the central scientific figure to have a wife that indicates each author prescribed to the collective belief of the late Victorian era that women were inferior members of society.
             In Stevenson's Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde female characters play a very insignificant role. The only female characters that are present in the work are nameless characters who are often in positions that are associated with a lowly status. A perfect example of this are the maid characters. In the present day and age the occupation of maids may not be viewed as derogatorily as they were in the time period that the novel was written. In Victorian England they were viewed as servants and nothing more. This subservient view of these women can be reflected in the fact that Jekyll's maid refers to him as her mast saying that "Hyde had only once visited her master..."# In the case of the maid that witness the murder of Sir Danvers Carew Stevenson c...