The following paper consists of the first two chapters of my MA thesis. It begins with the description of the social and economical background of the 19th century, taking the most crucial changes and inventions under consideration. This part ends with the characteristics of Victorian morality. The second chapter focuses on the image of the woman which emerges from the publications of physiologists, evolutionists and sociologists of the 19th century. I quote inter alia Charles Darwin, Cesar Lombroso and Richard von Kraft - Ebbing to show essentialist theories on women and femininity. The whole thesis is a theoretical reconstruction of the ways in which the woman has been described in the scientific and academic discourses. At first she was discussed as an object; from the moment new social sciences emerged, she has gained her own subjectivity and eventually denied it, as the postmodern feminist thought shows. Due to the fact that the process of constructing and forming of the feminine over the last 150 years cannot be summarized so briefly, I decided to provide a more detailed characterization of the nineteenth century only, adding a brief summary of the most important directions for change characterizing the century that came after. As a result, the question of the twentieth century, especially when it comes to psychoanalytic theory, has not been raised in the article.