This tutorial will illustrate some of the different ways in which, between 1780 and 1870, a few women in Britain claimed a positive role for themselves, in their social and political communities. One aim will be to illustrate the history of feminism in Britain, although that word was not itself in use in this period. That history will be continued into the twentieth century in the second part of the tutorial. A second aim will be to place the claims of different women in the context of the diverse political movements whose goals they also shared: the response of British radicals to the French Revolution, the campaign to end slavery in the West Indies, movements for manhood suffrage and utopian socialism, and the liberal politics of the mid-nineteenth century. Thirdly, it will be argued throughout that the history of women's politics is also part of the history of gender relations and the ways these are thought, argued about, and used in any society; differences of gender interacted in complicated ways with other differences, such as those of class and race.
Historians hold very different views on whether or not the term feminism should be used at all to describe the nineteenth-century women's movement, and on how to define it if they do. Nineteenth-century writers tended to use terms like 'the woman movement' or 'the woman question'. Nancy Cott has argued that it is inappropriate to use the term at all, since it distorts the real differences between nineteenth- and twentieth-century movements. But many historians writing about eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women have found the word just too useful to discard. Barbara Taylor has written, in her study of women and the Owenite movement, that:
But it is also true that the term has been given very different emphases. Writing in 1976, Gerda Lerner stressed 'the quest for autonomy', for individual self-definition, as the most significant characteristic of the feminist movement. Others have argued that the common bonds of gender united women in 'a critique of male supremacy', and that these bonds were more significant to them than the individualist goals of masculine politics, the 'rights of man' or universal male suffrage. It has been suggested that throughout the nineteenth century it is possible to trace two strands of feminist thinking, the one rooted in the pursuit of equality and individual rights, the other drawing upon a strength rooted in accepting and deploying the essentially different experiences and resources of women, wives, and mothers. This approach has been very useful, in stressing the significance to nineteenth-century women of claims to citizenship which could rest on their unique contribution to society. Yet it is by no means clear that this is the only way to categorize or describe the complex arguments used.
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Two strands of feminist thinking
Nineteenth-century women drew upon their own experiences but also upon the political languages available to them, languages which might also shape their own sense of identity, whether they came from the radical middle classes, from the landed gentry, or from artisan communities. We shall find women from all these backgrounds expressing their claim to citizenship in this period. These claims could be a part of a broader political challenge or of a wider reforming movement. And they could also raise significant questions about the relationship of the women who made the claims to the women in whose name they were made.
So, white British women, developing new patterns of political organisation as they campaigned against slavery, defined their own aspirations in contrast to those of black women, free and unfree. Middle-class women claimed the right to vote partly to carry out their mission as 'social housekeepers', to help to shape the domestic lives of the nation. It has been suggested that we need to go 'beyond the search for sisterhood' in writing the history of feminism - or feminisms - and to pursue these different layers of loyalty and interest. In doing so, we shall uncover conflicts and diversities among women.
Beyond the search for sisterhood?
Increasingly, historians have come to study 'women's politics' in the context of much broader studies of gender relations, as they examine the changing meanings given to sexual difference in particular historical moments. Sally Alexander, for instance, sets the situation of women in early nineteenth-century radicalism in the context of changing definitions of working-class masculinity. Gender differences could be used as signs or symbols in political debates. Mary Wollstonecraft's first intervention in the British political debate was prompted by the way in which Edmund Burke used the beauty and feminine weakness of Queen Marie Antoinette of France to illustrate those illusions which he believed sustained political order and authority, in the state as in the family.
- Text ResourcesFew historians have yet applied this kind of approach to the politics of gender in Britain. Thinking about gender differences may lead also to a constant questioning of the meaning of the term 'women': though that may seem obvious, it can be argued that it will always have a particular - though often unspecified - meaning. Denise Riley has argued that in the course of the nineteenth century sexual differences in Britain and other western societies were more sharply polarised. The collective term 'women' was redefined through new fields of study, including sociology, anthropology, economics, psychology, psychiatry, which carried with them the weight of authority of their disciplines. 'Women' were located by the new human sciences within the 'social' realm. It can also be suggested that the term 'women' was frequently used as shorthand by western feminists, in the twentieth century as in the nineteenth century, where they meant, more precisely, white, middle-class, Anglo-Saxon, or Western women. In each context, the use of the collective term 'women' or the generic 'Woman', needs to be examined closely for its implicit meanings, its inclusions and exclusions. Studying gender differences can help us to expand our definitions of 'women's politics' beyond more formal political histories into conflicts over, for instance, the control of sexuality, or access to knowledge.
This tutorial will aim to draw upon all these approaches to the writing of the history of women's politics in Britain, though it will do so selectively, to illustrate what may be possible rather than to survey the subject. You may wish to use it in a number of different ways:
- if you work on it in conjunction with June Hannam's tutorial on Women and Politics 1870-1939, you will gain a continuous perspective on the growth and variety of feminist activities in Britain from the 1790s;
- if you are interested in the ways in which women of different classes at the end of the eighteenth and throughout the nineteenth century commented on and participated in individual political debates and campaigns, such as the anti-slavery movement, or Chartism, you can use it quite selectively;
- if you want to work with source-materials of different kinds, this tutorial uses visual and literary materials as well as women's political writing, and can be used for discussion of how interdisciplinary approaches can help us to understand the history of feminism.
From the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries, the intellectual horizons of western Europe, among the educated and influential shapers of opinion, came to be shaped by a movement of optimism about the potential of human reason for a fuller understanding of the natural world, including both the environment and human behaviour itself. That movement was known as the Enlightenment. To achieve that understanding, the right of the individual to freedom of speech, religion, and ultimately, a political voice, was asserted against the restraints of the hierarchical structures of monarchy and privilege across Europe. Once a fuller knowledge of the political and social behaviour of individuals was reached, it was believed that it would be possible to reshape the political order to be founded on rights grounded in the natural world, rather than inherited from the past.
So the constitution of the new United States after 1787, the Revolution in France after 1789, and the Rights of Man of which the British radical Thomas Paine wrote in 1791-2 were all justified by an appeal to natural rights. Such rights were, however, almost universally before the 1790s identified as belonging only to men, and especially men who were heads of households, who were thought to enjoy an autonomy of reason, opinion and judgement through independence from any external authority. The work of Mary Wollstonecraft can be seen as set within such a framework, as a claim for the rights of woman which extended and followed that for the rights of man, and which was directed against the hierarchy of familial relationships as against monarchy and aristocracy.
Yet the legacy of the Enlightenment was more complex. Mapping the natural world could also mean charting what were the 'natural' relationships of the sexes, and giving, therefore, a 'scientific' rather than a religious or customary justification for the authority of men over women. The writers of eighteenth-century France known as the 'philosophes' tended to stress the natural differences between women and men. In particular, the educational writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau was to attract much critical attention, from Wollstonecraft and others. In Emile (1762) Rousseau had written of the ways in which the right kind of educational environment might develop the best natural instincts of the boy, Emile. Yet his future female companion, Sophie, was to be educated with her future role as Emile's partner very much in mind and her natural instincts included such female characteristics as weakness, cunning, superficiality and vanity.
At the same time, many writers were increasingly aware of the geographical worlds and different societies around them, and of family structures and gender relations which were very different from those of the west. In trying to construct a universally applicable approach to human societies, they imagined an evolutionary ladder of stages, through which different social institutions, including the family and the situation of women, would pass in order to reach, ultimately, the highest stage, of European civilization. The Scottish writer, John Millar, in his essay 'Of the Rank and Condition of Women in Different Ages' (1771) put forward a view of the situation of women as steadily improving with material and intellectual progress.
An enlightened view of women's progress
Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman has to be set in its immediate context, the impact of the news of the French Revolution of 1789 in Britain. It was initially generally welcomed by all favouring some kind of reform, and especially among those who were already dissenters from the religious and political establishment, among whom 'enlightened' ideas were circulating. However, although in France there were some opportunities to raise the question of the political rights of women and legislative changes, like divorce, which might indirectly help them, in England there were no women's clubs or petitions as there were in Paris. Wollstonecraft's Vindication emerged from her own situation within a relatively small group of middle-class radical women and men, who through their imaginative and political writing reflected on the ways in which women might secure a greater degree of autonomy in their lives. Her work addressed the ways in which women might secure 'rights', but it also and perhaps more fundamentally spoke to the debate about woman's nature and education, and considered how a transformation in the situation of women manners' might contribute to a new and more just society.
The circumstances of Wollstonecraft's life illustrate the limited options for employment and survival which a middle-class woman of the late eighteenth-century enjoyed, and also shaped her work. She came from the middling classes of the urban environment. Her grandfather, from humble beginnings, rose to leave his family capital, land, and a share in an East Indian merchant ship. Yet her father lost those resources through failed investments in farming, so that Mary Wollstonecraft, who had herself enjoyed only a brief period of formal education, was forced in 1783 together with her two sisters to consider how to support herself. The only realistic option lay within the field of education, to take up posts as governesses or to set up a small shop or school. Wollstonecraft's experiences, especially those as a governess with the aristocratic family of the Earl and Countess of Kingsborough in Ireland in 1786-7 were unhappy ones, and she drew upon these in her early work Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1786).
Wollstonecraft's early ideas on education
Only through her own determination, and good fortune in finding a sympathetic publisher was Mary Wollstonecraft able to support herself in London as a woman of letters. There, she lived among a circle of liberal and radical intellectuals, some of whom were already greatly interested in the situation of women. Catherine Macaulay, who had already achieved fame as a historian, was in her Letters on Education of 1790 to write a plea for equal moral standards in the education of boys and girls. Thomas Holcroft, radical and playwright, like a number of other writers, both men and women, used the novel to plead the cause of women, as he did in his Anna St Ives (1792).
- Text ResourcesWollstonecraft published her first political work, Vindication of the Rights of Men, which was among the first replies to the conservative Edmund Burke, in 1790. Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in November 1790, had initiated an important debate on the nature of the revolution in France. Wollstonecraft was by no means the only woman to contribute to that debate; Helen Maria Williams, Anna Letitia Barbauld, and Catherine Macaulay were also active opponents of Edmund Burke. Burke's account of events in France was exaggerated, sensational and inaccurate, intended to warn the British to repudiate the example of French liberal reformers. His aim was to defend the existing social order, in Britain as well as France, through his appeal to the importance of custom, habit, and tradition in politics. He deliberately chose to do so, and to illustrate the significance of illusion and of emotional appeal in the maintenance of political authority, through his chivalric portrait of the beauty of Queen Marie Antoinette, under threat by the crowds of the French Revolution.
Women and the debate on the French Revolution
Gender and political conflict - a portrait of Queen Marie Antoinette
Wollstonecraft's response was concerned less with a defence of the revolution, than with a direct attack on Edmund Burke, whom she attacked for considering the poor as 'only the live stock of an estate' (Vindication of the rights of men, in Collected Works ed. Janet Todd, Vol. 5, p. 17), with no sympathy for those who suffered under the poor law or the press gang, or even the slave trade. She contrasted Burke's sorrows over the downfall of queens with his treatment of 'the distress of many industrious mothers' (p. 15). Her language in this Vindication looked forward to the second Vindication, as she saw in Burke's courtly style the corrupting effects of his acceptance of sexual difference.
In the Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Wollstonecraft drew together her hostility to privilege and inequality in Britain, her sense of the corrupting effects of unequal education and expectations on women, and her vision of the possibility of a new political and moral order, in which women too were equal citizens. These themes cannot be separated. First, Wollstonecraft expressed in this as in her first Vindication her sympathy with the principles of the French Revolution and her hostility to the power exercised by the established authorities of Church and State in Britain. Her work was dedicated to the Abbé Talleyrand, in the hope that it might influence legislation on education in France. Her language here was often that of eighteenth-century republicanism, a language which stressed the corrupting effects of power itself, as well as of the wealth and luxury of court life. And she drew parallels between 'tyrants of every denomination', whether the arbitrary monarch or the despotic father of a family. Wollstonecraft called for a much simpler and less corrupt social and political order than that of late eighteenth-century Europe.
Yet at the same time it has been argued that she also identified with the optimism of so many Enlightenment writers, rooted in their belief in the use of human reason and the diffusion of knowledge and that she shared their sense of the progress of European civilization, though women might not yet have achieved their share of its benefits. She specifically addressed the Vindication to the women of the middle class 'because they appear to be in the most natural state', rejecting both the luxury of the wealthy woman, and the drudgery of the life of the poor woman as less 'natural'. It is possible to argue that the 'women' for whom Wollstonecraft wrote here were drawn very much from those sections of the middling classes with which she was most familiar.
The greater part of the Vindication focuses on the education of women. Wollstonecraft attacked a number of earlier writers - Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Dr James Gregory, George Fordyce - who had written on the education of girls in a way which subordinated their interests to those of boys, and suggested that girls were incapable of reaching the same level of virtue. Throughout her work Wollstonecraft challenged such assumptions. She is in many ways very critical of her own sex.
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She accepted the common contemporary view that women had been corrupted and degraded by the general expectations that they would be governed by their feelings, their vanity, their pursuit of accomplishments to attract men. She condemned the way in which their lives were dominated by a sense of 'sexual character', by the denial of reason and judgement to them; Wollstonecraft here put the case for subduing the feelings and the passions, through moderation and reason. She believed that individual character was shaped by the way in which the mind received impressions from the external world, and that only the right kind of education, bringing with it the right association of ideas could transform the character. She planned for the future a new system of national education, in which all, rich and poor, girls and boys would be educated together to the age of nine. Yet such a system could clearly only be achieved in a very different political environment.
The Vindication and the education of women
And the further, underlying, theme of the Vindication was that 'a revolution in female manners' would help to transform the political and moral world for all, and not only for women. It called for the political representation of all as citizens, recognising that the great majority of men in late eighteenth-century Britain also enjoyed no political rights. Tentatively and very briefly, Wollstonecraft suggested the possibility of a political role for women. Her hopes of citizenship drew upon the republican idea that the state or republic had not only a negative role to play in the maintenance of order, but a much more positive one in allowing individuals and a society to fulfil a higher moral purpose. It was, ultimately, for Wollstonecraft, a religious purpose. She believed that, in God's design for a more perfect world, women would ultimately have a part.
The Vindication and a political role for women
The Vindication did not suggest how such a transformation was to be achieved, though it does offer to us a very powerful, and still relevant, discussion of the complex relationship between an oppressive environment and the shaping of human personality. It was surprisingly well received by reviewers, who saw it as one contribution to a more general debate on education in the early 1790s.
Wollstonecraft subsequently visited France, and, as she watched the events of the Terror in 1793-4, came to feel less optimistic about the possibilities of radical political transformation. There she had an affair and lived with an American adventurer, Gilbert Imlay, and gave birth to her first daughter, Fanny. Though Imlay left her soon after, Wollstonecraft's writing was becoming more sensitive to the exploration of feeling and of passion. In her last work, Maria or the Wrongs of Woman, set in an asylum to which the heroine was confined by her husband, she was to explore both the oppressive conditions of marriage for the middle-class woman, and the situation of the poor woman through her depiction of the life of the servant in the asylum, Jemima. Maria, however, was never finished, and its ending remained ambiguous. It was posthumously published, after Wollstonecraft's death in childbirth in September 1797, by her husband, William Godwin.
Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of "The Rights of Woman" (1798) courageously told the story of Wollstonecraft's private life, yet associated her name indelibly with sexual freedom and notoriety. In the conservative climate of the 1790s, and in the reaction against French revolutionary ideas, Mary Wollstonecraft's life, and her later challenge to sexual orthodoxy, provided a weapon against, and a means of ridiculing, feminist ideas and writing throughout the following century. One conservative clergyman, Richard Polwhele published the satirical poem, The Unsex'd Females (1798), in which he described Wollstonecraft as 'ripe for every species of licentiousness'. Nineteenth-century feminists found it hard to appeal to Wollstonecraft, with this lasting reputation, as their predecessor, although this emphasis on the Wollstonecraft of the late 1790s in many ways misrepresented the original intentions of the writer of the Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
Historians and literary critics have recently begun to recover
the significant part played by women in the movements to end Britain's
participation in the international slave trade, and to end the
existence of slavery itself, both in the British West Indies and
in support of the abolitionist movement in the United States of
America. This recovery is helping to rewrite both the history
of the anti-slavery movement, and our understanding of gender
roles in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
The British slave trade dated from the sixteenth century and
was at its peak in the second half of the eighteenth century.
The movement against it began in the history of slave resistance
on West Indian plantations; in Britain, members of black communities
in major cities found support and sympathisers first among religious
dissenters, especially Quakers. In the 1760s and 1770s a series
of court cases finally succeeded in making slavery illegal within
Britain and in securing the freedom of individuals deported from
Britain. In these early years there is evidence of women writers'
interest in the issues - and the feelings - raised by the existence
of slavery, in sentimental novels by women which stress the benevolence
of West Indian planters, sometimes contrasting their humane masculinity
with figures of feminine corruption and ignorance.
The Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was set up
in 1787 with an exclusively male membership. Yet within their
literature the qualities of femininity, and the power of feminine
influence, played a significant part. Pamphlets highlighted the
moral rather than the political importance of the cause, and drew
upon common images of the civilising, improving and moralising
powers of femininity. These themes appear too in the extensive
body of antislavery poems written by women from very different
religious and political backgrounds to support the cause from
1787 to 1792. Josiah Wedgwood, the pottery manufacturer, produced
a famous abolitionist cameo, from 1787, rapidly taken up by fashionable
women from 1788. And although they were formally excluded from
the campaign to send petitions to Parliament, groups of women
in Newcastle and Manchester actively encouraged it.
After 1792, when a bill introduced into the House of Commons
by William Wilberforce failed, the extra-parliamentary campaign
gathered strength and women were urged to "abstain"
from slave-grown sugar, in an appeal to their control over the
consumption of households, and the possibility of a morally informed
consumption. Many anti-sugar pamphlets were addressed directly
to women, and those who were called the "anti-saccharites"
were derided by satirists and caricaturists for showing a humanity
and sensibility here associated with women. But by 1793, Britain
and France were at war, and the campaign became much more controversial,
with women's anti-slavery verse viewed as an indulgence in sensibility,
rather than as contributing to a moral campaign. Nevertheless,
even more conservative women writers continued to comment on the
condition of the slave, through didactic novels or moral tales.
The trade itself was abolished in 1807.
In the 1820s a campaign against British colonial slavery itself
developed, with the foundation in 1823 of the Society for the
Mitigation and Gradual Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British
Dominions (the Anti-Slavery Society). Its efforts were partially
successful in 1833, with the passing of the Emancipation Act,
which granted a modified freedom only, and in 1838, when all forms
of partial freedom were abolished. Women, though not members of
national committees, nevertheless played an extensive and active
role throughout these years, in anti-slavery ladies' associations,
through involvement in widespread national petitioning, and in
their writing and campaigning.
The growth of a network of ladies' associations, alongside
all-male local associations, was an entirely new development;
between 1825 and 1833 at least seventy-three such ladies' associations
were active. The first such group, the Female Society for Birmingham
was established by two women, the evangelical Anglican, Lucy Townsend,
and the Quaker, Mary Lloyd, building on their joint interest in
interdenominational and evangelical philanthropy. The Birmingham
society saw its role very clearly as the promotion of such ladies'
associations throughout the country. Though at first they were
greeted with some hostility by some male leaders, like William
Wilberforce, there was increasing support in the Anti-Slavery
Society throughout the 1820s for their extra-Parliamentary campaigning.
Such associations had as their models middle-class pressure
groups, and philanthropic and charitable societies. They had an
organisational structure similar to male associations, with officers,
including a treasurer, and a committee. The Birmingham society
appointed its own paid agents, all men, as travelling anti-slavery lecturers. Raising
money was an important part of the work of these associations;
though they contributed significantly to the funds of the national
Anti-Slavery Society, they had their own priorities in the causes
which they supported. Women's associations supported relief and
educational work - Sunday Schools, female refuges, the purchase
of books, benevolent societies - among the black population of
the British West Indies. They also gave funds to help individual
slaves and free black men and women. Their work was often linked
to missionary activity, although they were anxious also to maintain
their primary aim, the abolition of slavery.
One of the outstanding activists in this period was Elizabeth
Heyrick, a Leicester Quaker, and District Treasurer for the Female
Society for Birmingham. She was deeply involved in the renewal
of the campaign to abstain from sugar, and urged ladies' associations,
since women were the controllers of domestic consumption, to promote
abstention from sugar and force planters to move from slave to
free labour. Women were being extensively enrolled in direct action
for the cause. But Heyrick did more, in that she directly intervened
to shift the policy of the leadership of the Anti-Slavery Society,
which had since its foundation called for the gradual abolition
of slavery. The title of her pamphlet, Immediate, not Gradual
Abolition; or, an Inquiry into the Shortest, Safest, and Most
Effectual Means of Getting Rid of West-Indian Slavery (1824),
called for immediate action through mass abstention, attacking
the leadership for placing political expediency ahead of Christian
principle and the natural rights of all. Many of the ladies' associations
followed her call, and finally, from 183O, national policy shifted.
In the early 1830s women for the first time signed petitions
to Parliament, to call for immediate abolition of slavery. Before
1830, petitioning had been seen as an entirely masculine activity.
Yet on this issue, and in a renewal of activity, women organised
their own petitions from their towns, and cities, and churches
and chapels, as well as signing many mixed ones. This movement
culminated in a national female petition, organised by the London
Female Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, with 187,157 signatories.
Again, in 1838 this was followed by a women's petition (to the new monarch
Queen Victoria) against
the apprenticeship system introduced in 1833. Although the number of female petitions was not
very high, women represented almost a third of the signatories
to anti-slavery petitions in 1833, and two-thirds of the signatories
to anti-apprenticeship petitions in 1838.
In these years many women continued to write poetry, short
stories, and powerful tracts in the anti-slavery cause. When the Female Society for Birmingham made its report in 1828, it was headed by Susannah Watt's poem, 'The Slave's Address to British Ladies'. Mary Anne
Rawson of Sheffield, who led the Sheffield Female Anti-Slavery Society, edited a collection of anti-slavery poetry, The Bow in the Cloud, in 1834. Many women, from different dissenting and evengelical backgrounds, Methodists, Quakers and Unitarians, contributed. Poetry, hymns,
and tracts were all actively distributed by ladies' associations,
sometimes in workbags sewn from East Indian (and therefore not
slave-grown) cotton or silk.
Such writing drew heavily upon the religious and moral impetus
of the movement; if antislavery was represented as a philanthropic
cause, it could be seen as entirely compatible with active intervention
and organisation by women. As in so much middle-class philanthropic
activity, there was considerable stress on the harshness of the
treatment of slave women. Josiah Wedgwood's new cameo, of 1828,
"Am I Not a Woman and a Sister" echoed the concerns
of a growing literature. The brutality of the flogging of women
was a recurring theme, and so too was the situation of the black
mother, whose child was likely to be taken from her. Such portraits
also challenged the stereotype, drawing on an older literature
and conveyed by the planters, of the black woman as sexually promiscuous.
Yet they were written also from a position of cultural superiority,
of an assumption that black women too might be shown the advantages
of a Christian society built upon a domestic and familial life.
The benefits of a Christian and civilizing imperialism were here
stressed.
These years saw also the publication, in the interests of the campaign in 1831, of the only
narrative by a black slave woman from the British West Indies,
Mary Prince. Her story, told
while she was a domestic servant in the house of the secretary
to the Anti-Slavery Society, Thomas Pringle, illustrated the separation
of her family, and the brutal punishments to which she was subject.
Yet that story can be read also for signs of the ways in which
Mary Prince herself, not only a victim, might exercise her own
powers of resistance to slavery.
The relationship between women's participation in anti-slavery
movements and the growth of feminist ideas is not a simple one.
Much of the rhetoric and imagery of the movement drew upon a dynamic
and expanding view of the strength of women's familial roles.
On the other hand, the idea of "woman's mission" as extending far
beyond the confines of the household, had become a powerful one.
Yet the campaign drew also, as Elizabeth Heyrick had done, upon
the principle of the natural rights and liberty of the individual.
It could draw also upon a political economy which, appealing to
a middle-class public, stressed the advantages of free wage-labour
over slave-labour, as Harriet Martineau did in her tale, 'Demerara'.
There could be conflicts between these different viewpoints.
The women who led the anti-slavery movements were almost entirely
middle-class, and from very similar backgrounds to the male leadership.
There were many families, like the Wedgwoods of Staffordshire
and the Peases of Darlingon where male and female members were
closely involved. Many leading activists came from the families
of leading industrialists, merchants, or bankers, although others
were from a professional or lower middle-class background. The
anti-slavery cause drew upon many different religious groups,
though Quaker involvement was particularly strong; but almost
all participants shared a strong evangelical and philanthropic
commitment. Leaders tried to mobilise working-class women, not
as equal participants and colleagues, but for particular purposes.
Large numbers of working-class women signed petitions, though
they could also react with some hostility to attempts by middle-class
women to persuade them to abstain from slave-grown produce.
The women's anti-slavery movement did allow a distinctive
voice to emerge, though in the service of a cause which was often
represented as a philanthropic duty. Yet at the same time it allowed
middle-class women to organise together, as part of a reforming,
extra-Parliamentary movement. They were able to build on existing
networks, especially among the radical members of an urban, middle-class
elite. The movement for the abolition of slavery continued in
Britain after 1838, directed against the existence of slavery
in the southern United States. In the United States, American
women abolitionists had by the 1830s claimed the right to lecture
in public, and organised their own Anti-Slavery Convention. Harriet
Martineau had observed and written of such developments in her
Society in America (1837), ostensibly a travel work, but in effect
a political tract. British women campaigners corresponded with
American reformers like the sisters Sarah and Angelina Grimké.
The specific issue of the role women should play in such a
movement was raised in an international context, at the World
Anti-Slavery Convention, held in London, in 1840. In the Convention
held in London in 1840 American women were sent as delegates by
one wing of the American movement, those who supported William
Lloyd Garrison. The British Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (B.F.A.S.S.) refused
to allow them to take their seats, and British women were silent
onlookers of these debates. For the first time, the issue of accepting
or rejecting women was raised, a few men actively defending the
rights of female delegates, and women's rights more generally. British women were able to meet and discuss these issues
with American reformers. Some - like Elizabeth Pease, Mary Howitt,
Elizabeth Reid - were later to be active as radical and feminist
reformers.
Throughout the 1840s and 1850s abolitionist groups in Britain
were split on this issue. Those groups who looked to Garrison
in the US, often more radical Unitarians and Quakers, were opposed
by the stronger evangelical majority which dominated the BFASS
and was opposed to women's public involvement. A few societies,
like the Bristol and Clifton Ladies Anti-Slavery Society,which
in 1851 left the conservative BFASS, and the Leeds Female Anti-Slavery
Association, founded in 1853, maintained their commitment to women's
involvement. Women continued to play a major role in the consumer-oriented
free-produce movement, which continued to encourage the boycotting
not only of slave-grown sugar, but slave-grown cotton. They also
gave assistance to fugitive slaves who had fled to Britain.
Support for black slaves could however focus attention on
black-white relationships, relationships which still drew upon
the vocabulary of philanthropy and of mission. The enormous success
in Britain in 1852 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's
Cabin, which drew upon both the sentimental novel, and evangelical
religion, in many ways reflected the prevalence of such a vocabulary,
and of representations of black passivity and suffering. Campaigning
by women was stimulated by the novel: the most immediate result
was a massive petition, the "Affectionate and Christian Address
of Many Thousands of the Women of England to Their Sisters, the
Women of the United States of America". That petition, which
called for gradual abolition, was signed by over 500,000 women;
but one which amended the wording to stress the immediate need
also received around 200,000.
By the late 1850s many of those who had been committed to
abolition and other radical causes were becoming involved in campaigns
to improve the educational, legal and political position of women.
The two movements had close connections. One such woman was Barbara
Bodichon, who used the periodical, the English Woman's Journal,
founded in 1858, to give publicity to the cause. She herself visited
the southern United States; the Journal published extracts from
her diary, and from anti-slavery fiction. And in 1859 the black
abolitionist, Sarah Parker Remond came to Britain from the US
to campaign for the abolitionist cause, and to gain an education.
She lectured throughout Britain from 1859-61. The Journal gave
her lectures publicity, and she attended one of the new colleges for
women, Bedford College for Ladies, with the support of its founder,
Elizabeth Reid.
Sarah Remond belonged also to the new London Ladies' Emancipation
Society, the first national female anti-slavery society, founded
in 1862 with the outbreak of the American Civil War. Members,
many of them active in the women's rights movement also, produced
a number of tracts, like Frances Power Cobbe's The Red Flag in
John Bull's Eyes. But from 1863-8, the major concern of women
abolitionists was raising assistance for the newly freed slaves,
though their work in the Freedmen's Aid Societies tended to be
practical rather than organisational. There were parallels between
this work and that of missionary and educational societies devoted
to African education.
The links between the anti-slavery movement and the growth
of feminist activity in Britain are complex. It is clear that
the British movement never provided the same explicit ground for
the claiming of women's rights as the American movement. Nevertheless
it was from the networks of women formed in the abolitionist campaigns
and Freedmen's Aid campaigns of the 1860s that the leadership
of the movement for women's suffrage and many others was to come.
These networks drew particular strength from the Quaker and Unitarian
religious denominations, and can be identified in Britain's leading
cities, in London, Birmingham, Bristol, Edinburgh, Manchester.
Such leadership - of women who spanned both movements like Mary
Estlin of Bristol or Eliza Wigham of Edinburgh - could offer long
experience of organisation, and of public political activity,
as well as correspondence and friendship with American activists.
Yet in Britain, unlike the United States, slavery was not
an immediate domestic issue. It could be placed rather in the
context of the gradual spread of that Christian civilization with
which feminists, as well as anti-slavery campaigners, identified.
It could be seen in parallel with missionary activity across the
world. Abolition, like philanthropy, could provide white British
feminists with the objects of their mission; though it also provided
them with a collective and energetic political culture.
Although, in the 1790s, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication
had raised the possibility of a political role for women, women
had not participated in the movement of corresponding societies
set up across Britain from 1791 to campaign for universal male
suffrage and political rights. They had not, as they had in France,
formed their own clubs and debated political rights. Though the
movement among male radicals in Britain was in many ways inspired
by Thomas Paine's Rights of Man, it also appealed to older notions
of citizenship. These could include those associated with eighteenth-century
republicanism or civic humanism, or with the idea of "the
free-born Englishman", whose right to vote had a long history,
rooted in the English past, perhaps appealing to an Anglo-Saxon
democracy. Both views of political participation depended on the
independent and autonomous male head of household. In practice,
political clubs and associations also drew upon patterns of male
sociability linked to an artisan culture, rooted in the clubs
and friendly societies of skilled working-men, from which women
were entirely excluded.
After 1800, as Britain continued at war with France, and the
political ideas associated with the French Revolution were subject
to repression and censorship, the demand for citizenship to be
extended to all men did not disappear. During the Napoleonic Wars
much radical activity went underground; Iain McCalman and Anna
Clark have argued that in these years it was maintained in London
in subcultures drawing on networks of booksellers and distributors,
profiting from pornography as well as radical politics, and on
the world of bachelor journeymen. Both could link radicalism with
a literature of misogyny and libertinism. But radical politics
survived elsewhere also.
There is little sign of any formal involvement of working
women in such a politics before 1815. Yet there are many indications
that women took part in different kinds of less formal collective
and community protest. Throughout the eighteenth century and earlier,
working women had been in evidence in, and sometimes led, crowd
action to get bread at a fair price, to express hostility to hoarders
and speculators in grain, and in desperation to attack mills and
millers and carry away sacks of flour. Such riots had their procedures,
even their rituals. Historians differ on whether the role women
played in bread riots can be attributed to their domestic responsibilities,
or to their identification with the interests of their community,
inseparable from those of family survival. It has been difficult,
from the sources, to measure the extent of their participation.
But women can also be found in crowds rioting against the introduction
of new machinery, such as cotton power-looms, or against the enclosure
of common land.
Around the end of the Napoleonic Wars, the movement for radical
political reform revived, in London and provincial cities, and
in the northern textile districts. In the north, radicalism clearly
drew upon community traditions of action and protest. And, probably
for the first time, women were not only a part of the crowd but
had a particular role in a kind of radical politics which was
also a local event, a theatrical spectacle. Women might have a
symbolic role. Drawing on the imagery of the French revolution,
dressed in white, and wearing caps of liberty they might lead
the procession to the platform on which universal manhood suffrage
and annual Parliaments was to be claimed, as they did in August
1819, at the meeting at St Peter's Field Manchester known as Peterloo.
Yet they also organised in their own right, forming associations,
such as the Blackburn Female Reformers, established in 1819 or
the Manchester Female Reformers. Though these societies were set
up to claim male political rights, the women who participated
also suggested that politics was a matter for family and domestic
concern; their language challenged exclusively masculine definitions
of what was public and political. The history of working-class
political movements in the first half of the nineteenth century
sees a continuous tension in the relationship between familial
and political concerns, as ideas of masculinity and femininity
also shifted, influenced both by material changes and by changes
in class relationships. In the rest of this section, we shall
look at women's participation in two major, but very different,
working-class movements for political and social change, Owenism
and Chartism.
The Owenite movement was founded by Robert Owen (1771-1835),
who as a successful industrialist with philanthropic inclinations,
became the leader of an anti-capitalist movement based on a vision
of a "new moral world". In the 1820s, his interest in
developing forms of co-operative trading and manufacturing began
to attract disciples. Among his early disciples were William Thompson,
and Anna Wheeler, both from the Anglo-Irish gentry. Thompson,
an early writer on co-operation and socialism, was greatly influenced
by the radicalism and originality of Anna Wheeler, who had left
her husband and family to lead an independent life, and in France
had encountered the ideas of utopian socialism through Saint-Simonian
circles and her meetings with Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier.
French utopian socialists in the 1820s and 1830s were engaged
not only in a critique of economic progress but in arguing that
the liberation of men, and, equally, the liberation of women,
must depend on the liberation of the passions.
William Thompson in 1824 dedicated to Wheeler his Appeal of
One Half the Human Race. Women, Against the Pretensions of the
Other Half, Men, To Retain Them in Political, and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery. In this work, Thompson
argued against middle-class radicals who in claiming democracy
believed that women's interests should simply be identified with
their husbands. He argued that only a society based on co-operation
and the collective possession of property could make equality
possible, and end the condition of slavery in which women currently
existed. He frankly attacked the double standard of morality between
men and women, and the tyranny exercised by men in marriage.
Thompson's arguments were echoed by Robert Owen himself, who
in his Lectures on the Marriage of the Priesthood in the Old Immoral
World (1835) identified the existing system of indissoluble marriage,
regulated by state and clerical authority, as distorting and degrading
natural sexual instincts and relationships. The Owenite programme
was for the transformation of social and personal relationships
through releasing them from isolated anti-social households into
the wider bonds of membership of a community. The plans for such
communities prescribed that all domestic labour and the care of
children would be communally undertaken. Although in its early
years the Owenite movement was confined to a small number of radical
intellectuals, by the 1830s and 1840s its support was broadening
across the countryside, finding receptive audiences, and creating
Owenite Halls of Science. By the 1840s, as the Rational Society, it
had sixty-five branches across the country, with schools, libraries
and meeting-places. Its newspaper, the New Moral World, had a
readership variously estimated at between 100,000 and 400,000.
In this setting, women from the upper working class and lower
middle class were able to participate, in public speaking, attending
at lectures, contributing to the New Moral World and in the new
communities. Nevertheless those active in the cause of sexual
equality were still a small minority. They included, for instance,
Frances Morrison (1807-1898), who lived with, then married, the
house-painter James Morrison and shared with him an active interest
in Owenite politics and in trades unionism. She contributed to
the newspaper he edited, The Pioneer, and became a paid lecturer
for the Owenites, travelling throughout the north to speak on
women's rights and marriage reform, in public debates at often
crowded meetings. There are many reports of such meetings, in
the New Moral World, advertised with titles like 'Marriage and
Divorce' or 'Robert Owen's Marriage System Defended'.
Like other Owenite women lecturers, Morrison looked forward
to the transforming of personal relations, but, at the same time,
and unlike Robert Owen, she never celebrated the freeing of sexual
desire in such romantic and libertarian terms. In her lecture,
The Influence of the Present Marriage System upon the Character and Interests
of Females Contrasted with that proposed by Robert Owen . . .(1838),
she criticised Owen's position, and, with others like Margaret
Chappelsmith, forced him to withdraw his earlier position. She
still insisted on the importance of enforcing the requirements
of marriage in the old immoral world, for the protection of
poorer women, aware of their material insecurity. What was to
be encouraged in the future were partnerships between women and
men based on monogamous affection, and mutual respect, within
a communitarian framework.
The Owenite movement had much to offer women from the upper
working-class. It offered them what was often a shared social
and cultural programme, in branch meetings and Social Festivals,
often held deliberately away from public houses to encourage women's
participation, though also to encourage their own temperance as
well as their husbands'. Women were also encouraged to take part
in all the educational activities of Owenism, in their Sunday
and Day Schools, for adults and children. They could take part
in mixed classes and in separate classes held for women, at a time
when they were normally excluded from, for instance, the Mechanics Institutes
set up for working men. The New Moral World provided a forum for
discussion of Owenite views on women's education. At the same
time, such separate classes might well focus narrowly on domestic
skills and housewifery. Owenite women might, however, organise
their own much broader educational programme as the Ladies Class
of the London A1 branch did in 1844.
Yet there were serious limitations on the participation of
women. Though they were expected to play an equal role in governing
the movement, in practice there were very few female officials,
and only one woman, Mary Wiley, secretary of the Finsbury branch,
ever attended the annual Congress of the movement. Many contributors
to the New Moral World, like 'Astrae', as well as Mary Wiley,
pointed out the absence of women from the governing body of the
movement. And though women joined the seven Owenite communities
established between 1821 and 1825, with high aspirations towards
collective living, their frustration played a major part in the
collapse of these communities. Communal housework among women
does seem to have been introduced, and women did take part in
varying degrees in agricultural and manufacturing work. But the
assumption of women's primary responsibility for housework seems
to have been unchallenged. The amount of work they had to do,
the loss of individual domestic space and male dominance in decision-making
all caused disillusionment among women members, as it did at Queenwood,
the leading community in Hampshire. Though the aim was to put
new marriage relations into practice, most members came already
married, and when, at one of the smallest communities, Manea Fen,
the male leader declared his intention to put sexual freedom into
practice, the community soon collapsed.
There are parallels to the Owenite movement, and women's participation
in it, in other western countries in the 1830s and 1840s. In many
ways its communitarian aspects indicated the appeal of collective
attempts to retain control over both working and household lives,
by artisan and skilled working men and women, threatened by new
ways of organising production and labour. The participation of
women in the movement, and its attention to domestic life and
personal relationships, reflected the ways in which changes in
production could influence and be influenced by gender relations.
Yet Owenism still remained a minority movement, in which the authoritarianism
of Robert Owen himself played a part in its ultimate decline.
It had significant legacies, however, to free-thinking and politically
radical circles.
The most extensive working class movement of the first half
of the nineteenth century was the Chartist movement, named for
the Charter of 1838, with its six aims: universal male suffrage,
annual parliaments, equal electoral districts, secret ballot,
the payment of MPs, and the absence of property qualifications
for office. In one sense the political goals of the movement were
clearly inherited from the radical politics of the 1790s. Yet
at the same time the language and concerns of Chartism related
directly just as much to the disruptive effects of rapid economic
growth on communities and families. To an earlier generation of
historians women were largely absent from Chartist politics; yet
over the last twenty years the extensive participation and formal
organisation of Chartist women in the movement has become apparent.
That rewriting of the historical record has recovered evidence
for women's role in a wide range of social, cultural and political
Chartist activities. It has also focused attention both on the
gendering of the claims for citizenship, and on the ways in which
this movement responded to the impact of industrialisation on
family roles. Yet in the short term, female Chartism had few direct
legacies to women's politics. In 1976 Dorothy Thompson asked why
working-class women withdrew from political activism towards the
end of the 1840s. Historians are still trying to give answers
to that question.
The Chartist movement had particular strength in manufacturing
districts of the North, but was also strong among the artisans of London, and in areas
of smaller scale production such as Birmingham and the West Midlands.
From 1838 onwards large numbers of women were forming Female Political
Unions, Female Chartist Associations, Female Democratic Societies.
Just under 150 of these have been found to exist in England between
1838 and 1852, about one-ninth of the number of working-men's
associations. Sometimes they were due to the initiative of male
leaders, sometimes the result of women coming together in the
street or workplace. The latter was most common where a longer
tradition of female involvement in radical politics existed. The
majority were formed in the years 1838-9, directed against the
New Poor Law as much as to the campaign for Chartism. By 1848
there were only half as many. The average association had between
25 and 75 members, though Birmingham at one point claimed 1300.
These Associations had a formal structure, with a committee, a
President or Chairwoman, a secretary and a treasurer. Members had
to pay weekly subscriptions. There were weekly, quarterly and
general meetings. A number of the male Chartist leaders paid these
associations much attention, playing on their own heroic qualities.
The associations supported the main aims of the Charter in a variety
of ways.
At the same time, the language of Chartism was also highly
gendered and increasingly drew upon a claim for domesticity. Anna
Clark has argued that male Chartist leaders responded to the impact
of capitalism and industrial development in a defence of family
life and the different roles of men and women within it. They
looked back to an imagined past of domestic harmony, in contrast
to a world which exploited the labour, outside the home, of women
and of children. They looked forward to a reformed world of the
future in which the possibilities of domestic life in a different
setting would be available to all, a world in which
the rewards for men's labour supported their families. Such a
reformed world offered women too the prospect of a better life,
even better husbands. Chartist newspapers and Chartist novels
offered a prospect of that different future.
Many of women's activities within Chartism reflected their
family roles. When they raised money for the cause, it was often
for the families of imprisoned men. Many Chartist children were
named for Chartist leaders. A tactic in which it was assumed that
women had a special advantage was that of exclusive dealing. Some
Female Chartist Associations pledged themselves to purchase only
from shopkeepers with sympathy for their cause. Women participated
also in the Chartist Land Plan, which aimed to ensure a plot of
land for as many of its members as possible, appealing to the
rural population as well as those in industrial areas. Over 1800
women were listed in their own names as subscribers, though this
was only around 4% of the whole. Many of these may have been acting
on behalf of their families, hoping for a small plot of land to
help the family economy, and many more would have participated
through their husbands.
Most centrally, Chartist leaders saw women as above all the
educators of their children. The commitment of mothers to the
cause was essential for the creation of a changed world. It was
their task to shape the character of the next generation. It could
also mean of course a greater awareness of the importance of women's
own education, given their part as both mothers and as teachers
in the upbringing of the young. Some Chartist men, like William
Lovett, might believe that they themselves should act as the instructors
of their wives, partly because of a sense that their wives were
not their equals either in education or political commitment.
Many leading women Chartists took up and developed this stress
on education and were especially active in the organisation of
Chartist cultural and social life. They founded and taught in
Sunday Schools, actively backed Chartist Churches, and helped
to develop temperance and teetotal Chartism. Some, like the woman
who wrote in Chartist periodicals as "Sophia", pointed
out the conflict of interests which could arise if women pursued
their own educational interests.
There was indeed potential for conflict throughout the Chartist
movement. Chartist leaders needed to appeal to women workers and
gain their support, especially in northern industrial areas. At
the same time, they were asking for the vote in order to protect
women from the exploitation of employment in factories and mines,
and to recover the domestic harmony of an imagined earlier world.
Although sometimes male and female Chartists co-operated in strike
action, Chartists were for the most part calling for the exclusion
of women from the work force. The Chartist demand for citizenship
was not based on the right of property or of heads of households;
Chartists would not, for instance, exclude the rights of sons.
It could be based on the natural rights argument. Women's political
enfranchisement was however a matter of some interest among Chartist
leaders, and the issue had been raised when the Charter was first
drafted. The view that this demand would be ridiculed and would
delay male suffrage had prevailed But Chartists could also recast
the older arguments to claim the vote on the basis of property
in the skill of the worker, and those who did so tended to assume
that skill was a masculine monopoly. Nevertheless there was considerable
support for women's rights and some leaders, like R. J. Richardson
and Ernest Jones continued to defend women's suffrage throughout
the 1840s and 1850s. They did not however always find it easy to
reconcile women's suffrage with the language of domesticity. Women
Chartists were never nominated for any local or national committees,
and played no part in the direction of the movement.
For some women Chartists, the movement allowed them to develop
from being supporters of the demand for universal male suffrage
to the claim for a public political role for themselves. They
too might stress their domestic role, but that role carried the
potential for what Anna Clark has called 'militant domesticity'.
Their view of domesticity tended not to carry the often sentimental
rhetoric of male Chartists. Some working women, like the Glasgow
weaver who described herself in 1838 as 'a plain working woman,
or the Ashton female Chartists, did demand the vote for themselves.
A few outstanding Chartist women - and these tended to come from
middle- or lower middle-class backgrounds - did write and lecture
on a political role for women. Susannah Inge and Mary Ann Walker
of the City of London Female Chartist Association were both accomplished
speakers and defended their own right to participate in the movement.
Addressing a mixed audience was still a novel undertaking.
The number of women involved in Chartism after 1848 declined
rapidly. Exceptionally, however, the Sheffield Female Radical Association, founded in
1839, remained in existence until 1851. Its members were approached
in that year by Anne Knight, a Quaker activist in the antislavery
movement who had, after watching events at the London World Convention
of 1840, become committed to women's enfranchisement. Anne Knight
and the Sheffield women adopted a petition to be submitted to
both houses of parliament for the enfranchisement of women, and
published an address to the women of England which appeared in
the Chartist periodical, the Northern Star. It was seen and welcomed
by French women active in the revolution of 1848 in France. In
1852 they founded a National Woman's Rights Association and attempted
to build links with surviving associations elsewhere.
Chartism mobilised men and women together as they sought to
create a working class consciousness. Yet although their political
objective was universal male suffrage, their struggle has also
to be related to the shifts in the world of work. The Chartist
stress on the languages of family and domesticity reflected its
appeal to the artisan and to the skilled working man. Such a message
was difficult to combine with any recognition of equal political
rights for women. Nevertheless for many of the women who participated,
Chartism did appear to offer a way forward to a different prospect
of society. But only for a few, and those few mainly the better
educated, did it provide a base from which the different needs
of women in an industrialising society could be explored. Radical
movements of the 1850s and 1860s, and campaigns for extension
of the franchise in those years, paid little attention to the
possibility of the franchise for women. Nor did they encourage
the active formation of women's associations as Chartism had done.
The focus had shifted to patterns of organisation rooted in the
workplace rather than the community. In spite of the strength
and the radicalism of some women within the Owenite and Chartist
movements, the first organised feminist activity came from other
patterns of dissent.
Nineteenth-century Britain was a society still governed, at
its centre, by representatives of the landed classes. Nevertheless,
governments recognised the strength of the provincial manufacturing
classes, particularly in the major provincial cities. They were
aware, too, of the significance of the professional middle classes
as opinion-shapers and as experts. The political history of the
nineteenth century is partly a history of challenges to older
political forms, challenges at first extra-parliamentary through
specific pressure groups, and then through the reform of representative
politics. The history of nineteenth-century feminism, as of British
politics, can be considered as linked to such challenges. Middle-class
women too drew upon a radical political culture which placed itself
in opposition to a political regime dominated by inherited power,
patronage, and landed wealth. They were likely to share, in different
degrees, an individualistic politics, radical or liberal, and
a form of political economy which encouraged the creation of wealth
through a free market in labour and capital. They were a part
of a highly literate culture which employed many different forms
of expression: newspapers, periodicals, novels, poetry. Britain
in the first half of the early nineteenth century saw many campaigns
which drew upon such a politics; anti-slavery was only one. Middle-class
women also played a part in the campaigns for the repeal of the
Corn Laws, for peace, and for temperance. Such campaigns worked
for specific legislative changes, and developed sophisticated
organisational frameworks and their own kind of moral language.
Another aspect of the development of middle-class culture
was the particular form of gender relations adopted. Where aristocratic
women and those from landed families had some political rights
and influence, derived from family and property, and working-class
women were likely to be oriented towards both family and community,
prescriptive writing aimed at the middling classes contrasted
the increasingly private world of the family and household with
the public sphere of market-place and state. Much of the prescriptive
literature addressed to middle-class women in the early Victorian
period stressed the separation of the worlds of home and work,
and the contrasting if complementary qualities of masculinity
and femininity. It is important of course not to see such advice
as necessarily constituting the way individual women lived their
daily lives. The relationship between families, the economy and
forms of political association was never so simple and clear-cut.
Nevertheless the rhetoric of 'separate spheres' was a powerful
one, and could be experienced as such, as many middle-class young
women found. It could mean the very stark contrast between the
strict limits placed on young women's movements, reading, and
aspirations for the future, and the liberal ideals of individual
and personal fulfilment so characteristic of the culture. Friendship
between women experiencing similar frustrations could be encouraged
by such limits, and could provide a way of focusing on their own
situation, and analysing forms of masculine power, as Bessie Rayner
Parkes and Barbara Bodichon, the founders of the English Woman's
Journal found.
Yet the language of the private sphere could also be turned
in positive though not always radical directions. That language
carried within it the potential for 'woman's mission' which we
have already seen working within the anti-slavery campaign. Women
were thought to be especially well qualified by their greater potential
for benevolence and purity, supposedly nurtured within a family
setting, to carry such qualities into a wider world. That belief
could be sustained by evangelical religious commitment, and by
the parallel between religious and secular missions. Women's contributions
to philanthropic activity, especially that directed towards their
own sex, had steadily grown from the 1790s onwards. They raised
funds, organised committees and tried to spread knowledge of cleanliness,
order and domesticity. They gained skills and an occupation for
themselves, one inseparable from a certain sense of superiority.
They believed they had something unique to offer to fellow women,
in helping them to come to terms with the conditions of urban
life in an industrial society. They visited the homes of the poor,
and increasingly the new institutions established through the
growing powers of central and local government: workhouses, prisons,
hospitals (see Helen Meller's discussion in her tutorial on Women
and Cities for a much fuller discussion of these developments).
In doing so they could come into conflict with, and even question,
male authority.
Who were the feminist activists of mid-Victorian Britain?
In 1990, Philippa Levine's study of Feminist Lives in Victorian
England examined 194 nineteenth-century feminists, reconstructing
their lives, and their networks of family, friendship, religion
and politics. Her survey of the occupational background of the
194 suggested a middle-class preponderance, with 14% of the fathers
of her sample in business of some kind, followed by 8% in the
church and the law respectively, and 4% the daughters of military
or naval personnel. A significant minority also came from landowning
families. It is not, however, sufficient simply to identify feminist
backgrounds as middle- or upper-class, especially since ascribing
class status to women through the occupations of their fathers
and husbands may be misleading. Many women came from dynasties
of the radical reforming families prominent in the politics of
major British cities, like the Brights of Manchester, the Cadburys
of Birmingham, or the Peases of Darlington. In party terms, radicals
and Liberals were far more numerous than Conservatives although
there was certainly a small minority of the latter. Such families
were drawn from the upper levels of the urban elites, already
by the 1850s upper-middle-class, often enjoying a gentrified lifestyle
yet retaining a questioning view of the established political
order, and a profound social commitment.
In the early 1850s, a few middle-class women were broadening
the scope of their activities. Two issues in particular were the
focus of their campaigning interest: the nature of women's work, and the legal situation of women in marriage. The
census of 1851 was the first to record women's occupations separately,
and it revealed, especially, the glut of women employed in a very
small number of occupations, including needlework and governessing.
Philanthropists had already identified both as forms of women's
work which were exceptionally poorly rewarded, because of the
numbers seeking paid work. Lively and frustrated young women from
the middle classes, from a culture which stressed work as a means
of individual fulfilment, called for the expansion of employment
for women. They did not necessarily demand equality of occupations
between women and men; but they did suggest that Britain as an
expanding industrial society needed women to do tasks for which
they were particularly well suited. Nursing, teaching, staffing
the growing number of new institutions, hospitals, prisons, asylums
- and entry into the kinds of manufacture which required delicate
skills were all identified as such tasks, and compatible with
expectations of a separate role for women. The much publicised
journey to the Crimea of the upper-middle-class Florence Nightingale
in 1855, when she led groups of nurses to offer relief to the
stricken British army, has to be seen in the context of these
changing and contradictory expectations of work for women (Florence
Nightingale's work is discussed further in Helen Meller's tutorial
on Medicine, Biology and Women's Bodies).
Heightened expectations of women's domestic lives and of motherhood
could also fuel analysis and understanding of the oppressive nature
of the law on marriage. In Britain, single women over the age
of 21 were legal persons. Married women, however, under the provisions
of the common law, had no civil existence. They owned no personal
property, and could neither sue or be sued, though some protection
could be given to wealthier women through legal trusts. They could
claim no rights over their children. There was no possibility
of divorce, except through the expensive machinery of the House
of Lords. Separations could be achieved only through the outdated
procedure of the church courts. Such harshness seemed increasingly
at odds with the importance attached to women's maternal role.
When Caroline Norton had called for the reform of the law, in
1837, to recognise the bonds between mothers and children, she
met much sympathy, and from 1839 the process of reform was to
begin. By the 1850s Barbara Leigh Smith, shocked at the inability
of married women to control their own earnings, or to leave violent
or abusive husbands, formed a committee to promote reform of the
laws on marriage. The committee included many of those later to
be prominent feminists. It sent a petition, headed by the names
of some of the most distinguished women authors of the period,
to the House of Commons. The committee's demands were overtaken
by the passing of the Divorce Act in 1857, inspired by a movement
within the legal profession, which made divorce legal, though
imposing a different moral standard for men and women. Though
not immediately effective, this committee had brought together
for the first time those who were to carry on the work of organisation.
The Journal wrote of the need to enlarge the areas of employment
open to all middle-class women, and of the kinds of manufacturing
employment which working-class women might undertake. Many articles
offered accounts of different kinds of philanthropic work, by
Mary Carpenter in industrial and ragged schools, by Louisa Twining
on the management of workhouses, and by Frances Power Cobbe on
the mission to working women, directed against prostitution, in
Bristol. Though the editors were determined not to avoid the issue
of prostitution, they were criticised by many for writing of the
conditions of a penitentiary for fallen women. They were also
interested in the movement for 'sanitary reform' which they interpreted
as a secular mission to carry the word of domestic laws of health
and cleanliness to the homes of the poor. The Journal had a political
message which is not always easy to interpret. It defended women
against the power of male domination, notably in its unceasing
denunciation of the condition of the law. Yet it also clearly
grew from the philanthropic interests of many of its writers,
and shared many of the liberal assumptions of the culture from
which its founders came.
The logical accompaniment of the argument for expanding employment
and activity lay in improving education and training for women,
and especially for middle-class women, for whom there was very little apart from the haphazard provision
of private, and often educationally very poor, female academies.
Feminists were deeply committed to the improvement of education
at all levels, but especially that of middle-class girls. In the
1840s, the recognition of the absence of any formal instruction
for governesses had already led to the establishment of two new
colleges for women, Queen's College and Bedford College, both initially
set up to train teachers. Pioneering schools, both day-schools
and boarding-schools, were established from the 1850s onwards,
drawing upon the commitment of leading headmistresses like Frances
Buss at the North London Collegiate School from 1850, and Dorothea
Beale at the Cheltenham Ladies College from 1854. A minority of
middle-class parents were actively interested in how their daughters
might receive a better education, and supported the Girls' Public
Day School Company, founded in 1872, which set up 30 feepaying,
boarding schools by 1900. The Taunton Commission of 1866-8, set
up to examine the ways in which old established endowments were
being used for educational purposes, was persuaded by the leading
campaigner on women's education, Emily Davies, to extend its interests,
and the use of local endowments, to the education of girls, and
between 1869 and 1895 founded over 90 schools for girls, still
only less than a quarter of the endowed provision for boys.
There were differing views on the kind of education girls
should receive at the secondary and higher level. Emily Davies
believed that it should come about through an education which
was intellectually equal to that received by men. By 1865 she
had been successful in getting the University of Cambridge to
admit girls to sit the recently established University Local Examinations
on the same basis as boys. Girls' abilities were confirmed although
there was anxiety over their performance in mathematics By 1869,
Davies had set up Hitchin House, the forerunner of Girton College,
though at Hitchin in Hertfordshire rather than Cambridge, partly
because of the perceived perils of Cambridge. Others argued that
women were still so inadequately prepared that they needed special
provision, and that the male model, which was still dominated
by the prestige of subjects such as classics and mathematics,
itself required reform. In the 1860s much work was done by local
Ladies Educational Associations, who supervised the taking of
local examinations and promoted extension lectures for women as
a way of gaining access to higher education. In Edinburgh the
Edinburgh Ladies Educational Association worked closely with the
University to arrange special lectures for women students. Anne
Clough, who was prominent in developing extension lectures through
the North of England Council for Promoting the Higher Education
of Women, helped to found Newnham College in 1871. Gradually,
women won admission to other British Universities, though they
were still often excluded from their medical schools. The University
of London was the first in 1878 to admit women to its degrees,
and by 1900 all British Universities except Oxford and Cambridge
did so.
The interest of feminists in occupations for middle-class
women, in philanthropy, and in the ways in which women experienced
marriage and motherhood, came together for those determined to
open up the medical profession to women. These women saw a medical
career not simply as an occupation or profession but as a means
of relieving the suffering of women forced to rely on a male medical
profession, an argument which could draw upon conventional models
of femininity while also subverting them. Much was changing in
that profession in the mid-nineteenth century; the establishment
in 1858 of the General Medical Council meant the keeping of a
medical register, which allowed the exclusion of all those who
had not followed a recognised course and gained an acceptable
qualification. Women could not gain access to medical courses,
and at first gained entry either through qualifications gained
abroad or through the long-established Society of Apothecaries.
Elizabeth Blackwell, a British woman whose family had emigrated
to the US, had graduated in 1849 from Geneva College, New York
State, and, in 1859, because of this, was accepted on to the Medical
Register. But Elizabeth Garrett, a friend of Emily Davies was
to have much more difficulty. She attended lectures Blackwell
gave in London. Refused entry by all the London teaching hospitals,
she was finally examined by the Society of Apothecaries, and secured
her registration in 1865. Her difficulties were echoed by those
of Sophia Jex-Blake, who faced even violent hostility at the University
of Edinburgh from 1869. Many British women were forced to study
abroad in the 1860s and 1870s, and only twenty women were on the
medical register by 1880. It was a struggle reflecting not only
medical perceptions of an appropriate role for women, but also
the anxiety of doctors at the competition this represented. (Helen
Meller's tutorial on Medicine, Biology and Women's Bodies discusses
this struggle in more detail).
The case for women's suffrage was not strongly made in the
early years of women's organisation. Nevertheless, the political
debates on reform in previous decades had certainly occasionally
raised the possibility of suffrage for women. A few women, and
men, had raised the issue when the Reform Act of 1832, which enfranchised,
very approximately, 20% of adult men, was passed. In 1843 Marion
Reid, in her A Plea for Women, had made the case for equal political
and civil rights for women. Among radical Unitarians, in particular,
there was much discussion of a political future for women. From
these circles, in 1851, Harriet Taylor Mill, inspired by the conventions
on women's rights held in the United States in 1850, called, in
the Westminster Review for absolute political equality for women,
all women, on the grounds of their rationality and their humanity.
Those active in the English Woman's Journal chose, cautiously,
not to address the issue in the early years of the Journal. A
widespread movement for the enfranchisement of women did not emerge
until the debates about the suffrage which preceded the passing
of the Reform Act of 1867. In 1865 the Kensington Society, formed
from the Langham Place Circle, and from those involved in campaigns
for women's education, initiated a discussion about the parliamentary
franchise. Drawing on the example of the women's movement in the
United States, on their earlier experiences of campaigning and
on their knowledge of the case for a much broader expansion of
the male franchise, Barbara Leigh Smith and Emily Davies, on behalf
of a newly formed committee, asked John Stuart Mill to present
a petition for women's suffrage, signed by 1499 women, to the
House of Commons in June 1866. Mill's amendment to the Reform
Bill, to substitute 'person' for 'man' in 1867, was however defeated.
The defeat of Mill's amendment did not end the campaign. After
the passing of the main reform bill, committees were set up in
Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh and Bristol, as well as in London
to work for women's suffrage. The Manchester committee, led by
Lydia Becker, took the lead. The case for women's suffrage could
be made in different ways. The argument could be for equality
within the existing framework of the law. The existing franchise
for men was based on a property qualification. Married women,
who could own no property of their own, could not qualify. Equality
could simply mean the vote for single women and widows, who might
own or rent property and pay their own taxes. After the Reform
Act of 1867, which was gradually to extend the franchise to approximately
60% of adult men, including virtually all urban householders,
this could include all women who paid rates, taxpayers if not
voters. Lydia Becker led a vigorous campaign for qualified women
to vote in the election of 1868, suggesting that historical precedents
should give them the right to do so. However, many feminists were
unhappy at the conservative implications of limiting enfranchisement
to single women alone.
There were other ways of putting the argument. The case for
enfranchising all women and men, on grounds of their equal humanity
and natural rights, was heard, though more often in private than
in public. Many feminists shared the views of the liberal John
Stuart Mill, who in his works On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection
of Women (1869) had written of citizenship as a means of self-development,
offering the chance to develop one's fullest potential, for both
women and men. Mill stressed the role of the intelligent, rational
and educated citizen, man or woman, in a developed western civilization.
He feared, however, the destructive effects of democracy, and
called for educational qualifications, and for forms of representation which safeguarded the power of the educated. Some
middle-class suffragists, whether married or single, from the
liberal elite, found Mill's ideal of citizenship one which offered
them ways of expressing their own need for fulfilment in an active
and committed life. These arguments could rest, explicitly or
implicitly, upon the exclusion of others, whether the uneducated
poor, or those still termed 'uncivilized', beyond the western
world. White British women claiming suffrage could use the language
of contrast, comparing their own progress to the drudgery and
oppression of women in the rest of the world, a progress which
could be carried even further if they were allowed their rightful
place.
From 1868, the newly founded National Society for Women's
Suffrage was to co-ordinate the work of local committees, though
there was not always agreement between national and local bodies.
In 1870 Lydia Becker founded the Women's Suffrage Journal, which
monitored the progress of the suffrage movement. Meetings were
held across the country, drawing upon the current of liberal strength
which was to return the government of William Gladstone in 1868.
It became increasingly common for leaders of the movement to speak
in public, often supported by male radical and liberal sympathisers.
A particularly powerful and successful speaker was the young Millicent
Garrett Fawcett, sister of Elizabeth Garrett and married to Mill's
friend and associate, Henry Fawcett, who was to maintain her prominent
position in the movement throughout the century. Though regular
parliamentary bills for the enfranchisement of women were introduced,
and one passed its first reading in 1870, it had become clear by
1874, that there was much hostile opposition and that the battle
would not be easily won.
Many women engaged in campaigns for women's suffrage, for
the improvement of girls' education, and for the expansion of employment, were also strongly
interested in sexual politics, and committed to challenging the
double moral standard. This was evident in the interest of all
feminist periodicals in the struggle to reform the laws of marriage,
directed against domestic violence and sexual abuse as well as
to issues of property. The membership and executive committee
of the Married Women's Property Committee, set up in Manchester
in 1868 overlapped with the Manchester Women's Suffrage Society.
But it was most of all evident in the storm of protest which greeted
proposals to extend the Contagious Diseases Acts to civilians
in the north of England. These Acts had been passed in 1864, 66
and 69 in an attempt to control the spread of venereal disease
among the armed forces. The police in eighteen garrison areas
were given powers to arrest women they suspected of being prostitutes,
who were then forced to undergo a medical examination. If they
were found to have a sexual disease, they could be forcibly detained
for medical treatment. The case for extending the acts took them
far beyond their original military purpose, and was recognising
as potentially extending the power of the state, and the role
of the police, in the supervision of the lives of the poor - but
especially of working-class women. The campaign against the Acts
united many groups, but it was the feminist revolt against the
double standards so forcibly invoked against poor women which
gave it such momentum.
In December 1869 after the foundation of a National Association
to campaign for the repeal of the Acts, Elizabeth Wolstenholme
Elmy and Josephine Butler together planned a women's campaign.
Josephine Butler became the outstanding leader of the Ladies National
Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts (LNA),
which had, by 1871, not only an executive committee, but a periodical,
The Shield, and 57 local branches. The LNA drew, as the feminist
movement generally did, on the commitment of Quakers and Unitarians,
and the experience of previous campaigns. There were fears that
the raising of such issues could be harmful to the suffrage cause,
and some, like Millicent Garrett Fawcett, though supporting the
aims of the LNA, chose to limit their energies to the campaign
for women's suffrage.
Campaigning, and speaking in public on sexual issues was new
to middle-class women, who met much hostility. Josephine Butler
faced personal violence on public platforms on several occasions.
Middle-class women involved in the campaign came to learn much
more of, and to analyse, the conditions of prostitution, as they
helped to defend working-class women through the courts. Some,
like Josephine Butler, were able to extend their understanding
to the economic causes of prostitution and its roots in local
patterns of employments. Others limited their commitment to the
moral rescue and redemption of prostitutes, and were in subsequent
years to extend their campaigns for social purity, in directions
which may be seen also as extending the regulatory and repressive
powers of local and national authorities. Ultimately, the campaign
for repeal was a successful one, drawing
on considerable support from working-class men, from nonconformists
and evangelical churches and from liberal politicians. Butler
regretted how difficult it was to attract working-class women into
active involvement in the LNA, though they were often present
at meetings and could still influence their husbands' views. The
Acts were suspended in 1883 and repealed in 1886. The LNA continued
to exist as a group, campaigning against regulated prostitution
on the European continent and elsewhere in the British Empire,
most clearly in India. There, Butler emphasised the powerlessness
of Indian women, in the face of the oppression of British military
and imperial strength, yet also the 'mission' of those in a position
to redress such oppression.
By the 1870s, the feminist movement encompassed a variety
of different groups and individuals, many of them overlapping.
The numbers involved were still small and mainly from the middle
classes, though growing in numbers. A few working women, like
Mary Smith of Carlisle, and Jessie Craigen, participated actively
in the suffrage movement. There was anxiety among leaders that
they should be drawn in, and, if necessary, aided with financial
support, as Jessie Craigen was by the National Society for Women's
Suffrage. New initiatives to help working women were taken when,
in 1874, Emma Paterson formed the Women's Protective and Provident
Society, essentially a friendly society, though with some trade
union aims, and later the Women's Union Journal. The Society,
later the Women's Trade Union League, was to recruit mainly among
women in small workshops in trades like bookbinding, and millinery.
Yet feminist beliefs could come into conflict with the working women
they sought to help. Many, like Millicent Fawcett, remained strongly
committed to the free market in labour and the abolition of all
protective legislation limiting women's hours of work, legislation
gradually introduced since the 1840s. Here, differences in class
could very clearly divide women. For working-class women the protective
legislation introduced by governments could provide the only control
over the hours they worked. By 1875 Paterson was able to attend
the Trades Union Congress, and the League began a long career
of representing the interests of working women there. And from
the 1870s, women's increasing involvement in textile unions in
the textile districts of northern England and Scotland was to
see greater political activity among working women on different
fronts.
This tutorial has set the beginnings of an organised feminist
movement in Britain in the context of a selective discussion of
the variety of women's public activities in the preceding eighty
years. We have noted the problem of preconceptions about such
activities. Easy assumptions about the boundaries of public and
private worlds, or about the goals of feminist politics, can mislead
us to underestimate both the possibilities for women's action,
and the complexity of the political judgements they had to make,
and the strategies that had to be employed. Feminist activities,
and those of male supporters, do have to be seen in the light
of the changing political and social situation and class relationships
in Britain. Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of
Woman in some respects may be seen as an echo of the response
of British radicals, from both the middle and working classes,
to the French Revolution. Women Chartists identified with the
aims of the movement for manhood suffrage. Similarly, the feminists
of the 1860s and 1870s shared the goals of the men of their class,
for a greater share in political, social and cultural authority
in their own society, and for a civilizing mission, to other
societies.
At the same time, women could, and did, rewrite the script. They
analysed the structures of masculine power, as did women Owenites
and those who sought to reform the law of marriage and disclosed
the extent of domestic violence. Middle-class women sought to enter
and influence the new institutions of an industrialising society,
with their own commitment to the education, health and improvement
of the women and children of the labouring majority, just as they
also sought to influence the governing of the British Empire.
They challenged men's control over women's bodies, as did those
women who sought to enter medicine, and who campaigned against
the Contagious Diseases Acts. The tensions which have been traced
here within these different strands within nineteenth-century
feminism were bequeathed to later nineteenth and twentieth-century
campaigns. They are outlined in June Hannam's tutorial on 'Feminism
and Women's Politics, 1870-1939', in which you will find that
the meaning, and breadth, of political activity for women continues
to be explored. If you have enjoyed this tutorial and found it
helpful, you may want to read further in that tutorial on the
continuities, and the new directions, in first-wave feminism in
twentieth-century Britain.
Nineteenth-century views of Mary Wollstonecraft
Bibliography - Part II: Mary Wollstonecraft's Claims
PART III WOMEN AND THE MOVEMENT AGAINST SLAVERY
23. Reinterpreting the anti-slavery movement
24. Women's interest in the early anti-slavery movement
25. Feminine influences in anti-slavery literature and art
- Worksheet Resources26. The anti-slavery movement in political context
- Worksheet Resources27. Anti-slavery Ladies' Associations
28.The Birmingham Ladies Society for Relief of Negro Slaves
Hostility to women's political activity
29. The Activities of Ladies' Associations
30. Elizabeth Heyrick's Intervention
The case for Immediate not Gradual Abolition
31. Women's Petitions
32. Anti-slavery Poetry, Stories, and Tracts
33. Christian and imperialist influences in anti-slavery literature
Representations of black women slaves
34. A Woman Slave's Narrative
35. The different languages of anti-slavery
Political economy and the moral tale
36. Class backgrounds of the anti-slavery leaders
37. The British movement's links with abolitionism in the United States
Society in America
Correspondence with American reformers
38. The World Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840
39. Splits in the British Movement
40. The influence of Uncle Tom's Cabin
- Worksheet Resources41. Links between the anti-slavery and early women's movements
The English Woman's Journal and the anti-slavery cause
The work of Sarah Parker Remond
42. The London Ladies Emancipation Society
The work of the London Ladies Emancipation Society
43. Links between anti-slavery and the growth of feminism
44. Anti-slavery: Christian mission and political culture
Bibliography - Part III: Women and the Movement Against Slavery
PART IV: WOMEN, CLASS AND COMMUNITY: RADICAL AND SOCIALIST POLITICS,
1800-1850
45. Women's exclusion from early radicalism
46. The repression of radical politics
47. Women's involvement in community protest
48. Gender tensions in radical politics
- Worksheet Resources49. The Owenite movement
50. The work of William Thompson and Anna Wheeler
Thompson and Wheeler's view of the tyranny of marriage
51. The growth of Owenite socialism
52. Women's participation in Owenite politics
53. The views of women Owenites
54. Owenite social and educational activities
- Text Resources Owenite views on the education of women
55. Limits on women's participation in the Owenite movement
Women in the government of the Owenite movement
56. Owenism in historical context
57. Rewriting the history of Chartism
58. Women's involvement in the Chartist movement
59. Women's Chartist Activities
In the early years of the movement women were especially active
in mass demonstrations and street activity among the Chartists.
The solidarity built up in campaigns against the New Poor Law
and for the limitation of factory hours carried through into Chartism.
In Bradford, for instance, women had agitated against the New
Poor Law, and in August 1839 women radicals marched in procession
through the streets, with banners at their head. Their membership
included women working in the worsted mills, as well as the wives
and daughters of male Chartists in other trades, and there was
some overlap between their commitment to industrial action and
to Chartism. Thousands of women attended mass meetings, Chartist
processions. Women signed petitions and helped to gather names.
In 1842 nearly 11,000 women in Merthyr Tydfil alone signed a petition
for the reprieve of those who had been the leaders of the rising
in Newport. And though women's participation is often thought
to have died away after 1842, there was clearly still much continuing
activity, and a revival of female associations in the years 1847-50.
The politics of women Chartists
60. The gendered language of Chartism
Chartism and the Wrongs of Woman
61. Chartism and family roles
62. Chartism and education
- Text Resources63. Gender tensions in the Chartist movement
A Chartist on the Rights of Woman
64. Militant domesticity
- Text Resources65. Women's rights and Chartism
Women's rights and Chartism: a verdict in 1851
66. Chartism in historical context
Bibliography - Part IV: Women, Class and Community: Radical and Socialist Politics, 1800-1850
PART V THE POLITICS OF BRITISH FEMINISM c. 1850-1880
67. Contexts for the beginnings of organised feminism in Britain
Most accounts of an organised feminist movement in Britain
begin in the 1850s. In that decade a group of women campaigned
to reform the marriage laws, set up, in 1858, their own periodical,
the English Woman's Journal, and began formally and informally
to demand better education and an expansion of employment, and
to criticise the double moral standards applied to men and to
women. The women who did so came mainly from the middle classes
though by no means all were wealthy. Their actions can be set
in different contexts. They tended to come from families sympathetic
to middle-class liberal and radical politics, sometimes though
not always closely linked with religious nonconformity. They were
experiencing constraints and frustrations in their personal lives,
as the boundaries and contrasts between the separate lives of
women and men came to be felt more acutely in mid-Victorian Britain.
And at the same time such women were aware, not only of the politics
of Wollstonecraft, and of Owenite and Chartist claims, but also
of an international context. In 1848, the first women's rights
convention in the United States met at Seneca Falls. And across
Europe, the revolutions of 1848 had stimulated, though revolutionary
leaders paid little attention to, the demands of urban women for
education, employment and even citizenship. British feminism was
to develop its own specific character, but it has, nevertheless,
to be viewed as part of an international movement.
1848 and the movement for women's rights
68. Links between feminism and other nineteenth-century political challenges
69. The Rhetoric of Separate Spheres
Personal lives and wider aspirations
70. Women and philanthropy
- Text Resources71. The backgrounds of feminist activists
72. The religious backgrounds of feminist activists
The religious roots of the women's movement in Britain still
await further analysis. Of Levine's sample of 194, 21% of the
total were known to be Anglicans, though the true figure was probably
higher. Only a very small number came from the major evangelical
nonconformist denominations such as Methodism. However, a quite
disproportionate number of activists in the women's movement came
from two very small Protestant nonconformist groups, the Quakers
and the Unitarians. Levine found 9% of her total were Quaker,
11% Unitarian, at 20% almost as many as from the established Church.
That figure needs to be set against the minute membership of both
groups, of approximately 15,000 Quakers, and 50,000 Unitarians
in England and Wales in 1851, in a population of 18 million. The
significance of these groups, and their association with challenges
to established authority, has already been established, in Wollstonecraft's
links with rational Dissent, and in the role of both Quakers and
Unitarians within anti-slavery and abolitionist campaigns. By
the mid-nineteenth century both groups were affected by the evangelical
current within Protestantism. Unitarians and Quakers formed a
small but prominent minority within the radical elites of the
provincial middle classes.
73. Campaigns over the nature of women's work
74. Campaigns to reform the laws on marriage
75. Early Feminist Periodicals
The English Woman's Journal (See 41. 'Links between the anti-slavery and early women's movements) emerged from this committee,
yet also from the network of female friendship centred on Bessie
Rayner Parkes and Barbara Leigh Smith. It was, from the beginning,
seen as a campaigning journal, linked to the work of other associations,
such as the Society for the Employment of Women, and the Ladies
Sanitary Association. There were many practical problems for these
young women from the protected world of the Victorian upper-middle
classes, in dealing with the practical problems of running a feminist
periodical, as in finding a collective way of working. They established,
in Langham Place in central London, a reading room and a women's
club. Though the periodical was never a financial success, after
its failure in 1864 it was succeeded by the Englishwoman's Review,
edited by Jessie Boucherett, and by many other periodicals with
specific commitments to particular campaigns.
The problems of the feminist periodical
76. Employment and philanthropy in the English Woman's Journal
77. New developments in women's education
The English Woman's Journal on the education of girls
78. Equality and Difference in Women's Education
The case for a different education
79. Women in medicine
Women studying medicine in the 1860s
80. Early Suffrage Activists
The presentation of the petition
Early arguments for women's suffrage
81. The campaign for franchise equality within existing laws
Women in the election campaign of 1868
82. Liberal ideals of citizenship
83. Arguments for suffrage based on women's different qualities
Others could and did draw upon the language of 'separate spheres',
maintaining that the different qualities which women possessed,
and the concerns which arose out of domestic and philanthropic
responsibilities, for children, for public health, and for the
poor, were needed in public life, locally and nationally. This
was a language frequently heard, as women were gradually admitted
into some areas of local government, though it also rested on
the existence, and the implicit exclusion, of those - the poor,
the married working-class woman - on whose behalf such responsibilities
were claimed. In 1869, women ratepayers gained the vote at the
local level, although a ruling of 1872 permitted only unmarried
women to exercise that vote. In 1870 women were allowed to vote
and stand for local School Boards, and in 1875, as Poor Law Guardians.
Local government qualifications were complex and confusing, but
a small number of middle-class women were to make a significant
contribution to the extension of the powers of local authorities
before 1900 (see June Hannam's tutorial on Feminism and Women's
Politics 1870-1939 for further discussion of this).
Different arguments for women's suffrage
84. Growth of the suffrage movement and obstacles to its success
85. The Contagious Diseases Acts
86. The Ladies National Association
87. The outcome of the campaign
88. Working-class women's involvement in feminist campaign.
Mary Smith and the women's movement
Bibliography - Part V: The Politics of British feminism
CONCLUSION
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