Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688-1928

Matthew McCormack

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351386609
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688–1928 explores the history of citizenship in Britain during a period when admission to the political community was commonly thought about in terms of gender.

Between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the Equal Franchise Act of 1928 the key question in British politics was what sorts of men – and subsequently women – should be admitted to citizenship, particularly in terms of parliamentary suffrage. This book makes new links between the histories of gender and politics, and surveys exciting recent work in these areas. By examining central topics such as political masculinity, electoral culture, party politics and women's suffrage through this lens, it expands not only the remit of gender history but encourages the reader to rethink how we approach the history of politics. It explores the close connections between gender, nation and class in Britain, and advocates a new cultural history of politics for the period between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries.

Citizenship and Gender in Britain, 1688-1928 is essential reading for students of early modern and modern British history, gender history and political history.

1 The state and the public sphere

A citizen is a member of a political community. This chapter will outline the nature of that community, in order to provide a context for the discussion of citizenship in the chapters that follow. It will begin by thinking about the formal structure of politics, including the state and key offices within it. The starting point for this discussion is the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which codified some of the citizen’s rights and defined the political order thereafter. The chapter will then consider the nature of the political community in a more informal way by exploring the new phenomenon of the ‘public sphere’, an arena outside of the official structure of politics in which political activity was increasingly taking place. Although this concept has been widely debated by historians, we will see how it can provide a useful framework for thinking about what politics is and how it is experienced, as well as linking it to changes in social and cultural life. Gender historians in particular have debated the extent to which this public sphere was a male arena, and we will see throughout this chapter how gender had an important influence on the shape of the political world.

The Glorious Revolution and the making of Britain

The 1680s was a politically fraught decade in the four nations that would later make up the United Kingdom. Since 1603, England and Wales had a joint monarchy with Scotland, and the issue of the succession had become hugely contentious. Charles II’s heir was his brother James – who was to become James II of England and James VII of Scotland – but many people opposed his succession because he was a Catholic. England and Scotland were Protestant countries that were proudly independent of Rome and of Catholic powers on the continent, and Catholics were a persecuted minority who did not possess the full range of rights enjoyed by members of the state church. James was a threat to all this. After he took the throne in 1685 he put pressure on parliament to overturn Catholic disabilities and purged any officials of the Crown who opposed him

This contention over the succession created the ‘first age of party’, which drew the political battle-lines for the following century and even gave us one of the party labels that we still use to this day. The ‘Tories’ (named after Irish, and therefore papist, outlaws) were those who upheld the divine right of kings and the legitimate succession. Their loyalty to the monarch and his successors even trumped their commitment to a Protestant Church of England. By contrast, the ‘Whigs’ (also named after criminals, tellingly, but this time Scottish and therefore Protestant ones) were committed to Protestantism and the rights of parliament. They attempted to exclude James from the succession and, when this failed, they sought an alternative line of succession. They opened negotiations with the Dutch Stadtholder, William of Orange, who was married to James’s daughter, Mary. In November 1688, William landed with a Dutch army in the West Country. Amid widespread anti-Catholic rioting, James’s regime collapsed and he fled to France. After a struggle between the Commons and the Lords, parliament declared that James had ‘abdicated’ his throne and that William and Mary would rule instead in a unique joint arrangement.

The events of 1688–89 acquired the label ‘the Glorious Revolution’ and it long had pride of place in Whig histories, which told a rather self-congratulatory story of Britain’s unique path to liberty and greatness. One reason it was ‘glorious’ was its supposed bloodlessness, but that was hardly true. William’s military invasion of England was resisted, and it set in motion three years of brutal civil war in Ireland, which left thousands dead and established the ‘Protestant ascendancy’ over a predominantly Catholic island. The battles and sieges of this war are etched in the consciousness of Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland, where the political ramifications of this period are still felt to this day. In eighteenth-century England, however, the revolution was widely celebrated as the foundation of the nation’s liberties. Kathleen Wilson has shown how this was not merely an aspect of elite political discourse, but that it permeated popular political culture. The Glorious Revolution was at the centre of popular understandings of representative institutions, political liberties and the role of ‘the people’ in politics.¹ It is therefore an appropriate place to start a survey of the history of citizenship.

The Glorious Revolution changed the political game. The monarch remained the head of state and was still divinely appointed, albeit now a Protestant God’s instrument of deliverance rather than an all-mighty patriarch with an indefeasible succession. But the monarch could no longer impose its arbitrary will on the people: the primacy of parliament was established and the new joint monarchs and their successors were shackled. A new coronation oath required monarchs to swear that they would govern ‘according to the statutes in parliament agreed on, and the laws and customs of the same’.² The revolution was codified in the Bill of Rights of 1689, which listed the misdemeanours of James II, declared the throne ‘vacant’ and settled the succession thereafter. More importantly, it also asserted certain ‘ancient right and liberties’. Some of these concerned the rights of parliament, asserting that monarchs could not interfere in the laws or collect taxation without their approval, but around half of its provisions concerned the rights of the individual. The Bill of Rights used the term ‘subject’ rather than ‘citizen’, but we would recognise them as citizenship rights. These included political rights such as the right to petition and the right to free and frequent elections, as well as civil rights such as the right to bear arms, freedom of speech and due process under the law.³

Strikingly, the political debate around the Glorious Revolution was often conducted by means of a family analogy, so it has attracted the attention of feminist scholars. Sir John Filmer had presented the case for absolute monarchy and Divine Right in his Patriarcha, Or the Natural Power of Kings (1680). He argued that the king’s power in a state was equivalent to that of a father in a family, so his opponents had to engage with the position of men, women and children in society. In response to Filmer, John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government (1689), which is often regarded as the key philosophical justification for the revolution. In the first treatise he took Patriarcha apart line by line, contesting the view that absolute monarchy had a biblical basis, and refuting Filmer’s familial model of the state by arguing that the patriarch’s power is contractual rather than total. Modern feminists have debated the implications of this: on the one hand, Locke presented marriage as consensual; on the other, his separation of state (public) and family (private) arguably rendered women invisible and reinforced domestic patriarchy.⁴ In the second treatise Locke developed his vision of government. He used history in a different way to Filmer: rather than tracing a line of kings back to the Old Testament, Locke argued that man had existed in a ‘state of nature’ before the institution of society. In his natural state, man had rights to life, liberty and property, and he only agreed to be governed in order to protect those rights. Government is therefore contractual, and citizens reserve the right to have a revolution if the government fails to act in their interests. We will see how Locke’s ideas proved to be hugely influential among radicals, reformers and feminists in the century that followed.

The direction that government took in the 1690s had a similarly lasting impact. In terms of foreign policy, William III was committed to the defence of European Protestantism, so he hugely expanded the army and commenced a century of almost continuous war with France. In order to pay for this, he imported financial innovations from Holland in the form of the Bank of England and the National Debt. War finance could now be quickly and reliably acquired and some military historians have argued that this ‘fiscal-military state’ was at the root of Britain’s spectacular military success in the eighteenth century.⁵ Ironically, William was now able to raise more tax for war and have larger standing armies than his predecessors had done, and was less reliant on parliament to do this. William’s critics perceived the growth of the state with alarm, arguing that this led to a multiplication of paid functionaries who consumed taxation and had to do the government’s will. Increasingly this was perceived to be a threat to liberty itself since it unbalanced the constitution and corrupted public morals. From this period, critics of government positioned themselves as ‘independent men’, who were able to speak truth to power because they had not been bought off.⁶

A key military threat after 1689 was James himself, since he and his successors did not give up their claim to the throne. The Jacobites set up an alternative court in France, which gave them financial and military assistance for decades and helped them to mount two significant rebellions. They had high hopes of a successful return, since they enjoyed support among many Catholics, Tories and Scots. The Whig establishment were terrified at this prospect and Jacobitism was ruthlessly put down, so it largely existed as a secret underground movement. Jacobitism was long derided by historians as an anachronistic and cranky movement, but scholarship in recent decades has rehabilitated it as a potent and relevant political force. Historians such as Paul Monod have highlighted its rich political culture of songs, toasts and tokens, and the intense emotional loyalty of its followers to ‘the king over the water’.⁷ Far from being backward-looking, Jacobitism was commonly a focus for critiques of the ruling establishment and the emerging fiscal-military state, so should form part of our understanding of the development of modern opposition politics.

The extent of support for the Jacobites in Scotland also had an important bearing on the creation of the British state. The Act of Union of 1707 that created Great Britain is a hugely contentious issue in Scottish historiography in particular. Although England and Scotland had been drawing closer together for years in economic and political terms, security considerations were to the fore. Scotland represented England’s only land border, and had a long history of cooperation with England’s enemy France that predated the Jacobite threat. The Union itself was a political fudge: the Scottish ruling class were bought off and Scotland retained its legal and religious independence. Nor was it popular: the Union was greeted with rioting on the streets of Scottish towns and cities, and the beginning of the Hanoverian dynasty with the coronation of George I in 1714 met with a similar response. As Linda Colley has argued, Britain was a state but it was not yet a nation: it was an administrative entity but it was not yet a cultural body that its people identified with or felt committed to.⁸ The process by which Britain came to be a nation is an important theme of this book, since it is a key context for the developing notion of citizenship.

The structure of politics

Another important context for the study of citizenship is the political system itself. Much of the British political system of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would be familiar to Britons today. Many of its institutions, offices and conventions still exist. But it is not safe to assume that, because we are dealing with something that appears the same, we have to approach it the same way. Although we have seen the dangers of Whig history, it is nevertheless true that much of the story of British political development is of gradual adaptation without existing arrangements. There are very few watersheds or efforts to redefine practices in a ‘modern’ way: even political settlements that might appear to do this – such as the First Reform Act of 1832 – turn out on closer inspection to be partly about continuity or compromise.

The nature of the British constitution typifies this. In most countries, the ‘constitution’ is a single written document setting out the nature of their political system and the rights of citizens within it. Citizens of the United States of America, for example, have a very clear idea of what their constitution is, and current political issues such as free speech or the right to bear arms are commonly discussed in relation to it. The constitution of the United States dates from the period of the American Revolution, when they were establishing a new political system and needed to define it. Having never had such a revolution, Britain has no such document: the nearest we get is probably the Bill of Rights, from the quasi-revolution of 1688–89. Because Britain’s political arrangements have developed gradually over the centuries, the constitution is the agglomeration of successive settlements, pronouncements and practices. Documents such as the Magna Carta, legal precedents embodied in the common law and the established procedures of government all collectively comprise the constitution.

Given the lack of clarity about what the British constitution is, a striking feature of politics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is that everybody was talking about it. Speeches at the hustings and in parliament pledged to uphold the constitution, Whigs and Tories alike warned that the constitution was in danger, and politicians and their critics all claimed to be acting in a constitutional way. Even most radicals had faith in the perfectibility of the constitution, and sought to restore it to its former glory rather than replace it with a new one. Constitutionalism was the central political discourse of the day, partly because of its very adaptability. Because the constitution was unwritten, its legacy was up for debate and all sides could claim to uphold it: conservatives could claim to protect tradition, whereas radicals could identify the ‘true’ meaning of the constitution in the progress of popular liberties. Since the British constitution is essentially a question of historical precedent, political argument often involved historical argument. This was the purpose of the great Whig constitutional histories. The huge, multi-volume histories of English political development by Macaulay, Maitland and Stubbs all sought to fix a particular interpretation of the constitution in line with their political beliefs.⁹ Even today, talking about the constitution requires historical knowledge and skills. The essentially historical nature of the British constitution is another reason why historians make good citizens.

Part of the meaning of ‘constitution’ is things as they are constituted so, in a sense, the structure of government was the constitution. Britain had an unusual form of government known as a limited monarchy,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: what is citizenship?
• 1 The state and the public sphere
• 2 Political masculinities, 1688–1837
• 3 The British electoral tradition
• 4 Patriotism and revolution, 1776–1819
• 5 Women and political campaigning
• 6 Reform, domesticity and citizenship, 1820–48
• 7 Feminism and citizenship
• 8 Popular politics in the age of mass party, 1837–1901
• 9 Citizenship, society and the state
• 10 Votes for women, 1865–1928
• Conclusion
• Index