Thanks for relating my Churchill memory.
I note his description of the Victorian era was without reference to the exaggerated sexual repression–or fakery thereof–associated with the term. Did furniture really have….LEGS? Shocking.

Churchill’s definition would last likely until 1914.

A friend who’d read The Last Lion said that the repression was for the middle classes, particularly the mid and upper sections. The Upper classes lived pretty large.

So for the uppers, it was never the “victorian” age wrt the whole sexual repression and whatever it might be called whose stereotype has come down to us.

Accept it.

The Victorian Era was a cultural thing and hardly limited to the UK. In fact, the US partook of the mores of the Victorian Era as well, and Jennie was raised in that time. This was especially true among the wealthy, and Jennie’s family was wealthy. On the other hand, most people are not really aware that the stereotypes of the Victorian Age were not quite as repressive as popularly thought. And Jennie Jerome and many other people among the “elites” lived a much bolder life than those stereotypes would indicate.

Jennie moved to the UK in 1874, just about smack in the middle of the Victorian Age. She was born in 1854, so she was only about 20 when she moved to Britain. She married a Lord and was very much a part of the society there. The Victorian Age was definitely not ending when Winston was born in 1874 (less than 9 months after his parents were wed) and he was raised in that milieu. What’s more, he started riding horses as a young child – as did most wealthy people in that society:

Churchill had a particular love of horses, even though his very first riding experience, when he was four, ended with his being thrown unceremoniously by a donkey. The little chap put that experience behind him and at the age of seven he was riding around Blenheim Park on his pony Rob Roy.

His grandfather, the 7th Duke of Marlborough, was the owner of this gigantic palace of quite un-English size and assertiveness. Good riding skills were generally expected from a member of the British aristocracy, if only to take part in fox and deer hunts.

When Churchill was a child, he adored his mother, but mostly from afar:

As a child, it has been recognised that Churchill was widely neglected by both his parents. Lord Randolph was fixated on his career and Jennie’s active social life meant she had little time for her two sons. The vast majority of the Churchill children’s care was entrusted to their nanny, Elizabeth Everest. Despite this, even at a young age, Churchill admired his mother. In his memoirs, My Early Years, he wrote; ‘She shone for me like the evening Star. I loved her dearly but at a distance.’ [Winston Churchill, My Early Years (London: Eland Publishing, 2000), p.4.]

Here are Churchill’s own words in that memoir which he wrote in 1930:

I was a child of the Victorian era, when the structure of our country seemed firmly set, when its position in trade and on the seas was unrivalled, and when the realization of the greatness of our Empire and of our duty to preserve it was ever growing stronger. In those days the dominant forces in Great Britain were very sure of themselves and of their doctrines. They thought they could teach the world the art of government, and the science of economics. They were sure they were supreme at sea and consequently safe at home.

And I believe that this is the passage to which you refer. Churchill is describing something when he was very young, and still with his nursemaid Mrs. Everest:

My mother took no part in these impositions, but she gave me to understand that she approved of [these tedious early lessons from the Governess] and she sided with the Governess almost always. My picture of her in Ireland is in a riding habit, fitting like a skin and often beautifully spotted with mud. She and my father hunted continually on their large horses; and sometimes there were great scares because one or the other did not come back for many hours after they were expected.

My mother always seemed to me a fairy princess: a radiant being possessed of limitless riches and power.

The perspective of a young child with a beautiful, charismatic, but distant mother, and definitely during the Victorian Era.

It was baked in the Woke cake, the outcome was pre-determined is my guess

I don’t think the Victorian female ideal was “soft and doughy.” No one looks soft and doughy when in a corset. And Churchill was born in 1874, whereas Victoria died in 1901. He was raised in the Victorian age and whatever childhood memories he had of his mother were from that time.