The Political Worlds of Women

Gender and Politics in Nineteenth Century Britain

Sarah Richardson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135964931
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Traditional analyses of nineteenth-century politics have assigned women a peripheral role. By adopting a broader interpretation of political participation, the author identifies how middle-class women were able to contribute to political affairs in the nineteenth century. Examining the contribution that women made to British political life in the period 1800-1870 stimulates debates about gender and politics, the nature of authority and the definition of political culture.

This volume examines female engagement in both traditional and unconventional political arenas, including female sociability, salons, child-rearing and education, health, consumption, religious reform and nationalism. Richardson focuses on middle-class women's social, cultural, intellectual and political authority, as implemented by a range of public figures and lesser-known campaigners. The activists discussed and their varying political, economic and religious backgrounds will demonstrate the significance of female interventions in shaping the political culture of the period and beyond.

PART I The Home

1 Politics at Home

DOI: 10.4324/9780203383612-1

One sunny afternoon in 1833 a young girl sat playing with her kittens on the road outside her house in Lasswade on the outskirts of Edinburgh. There is nothing remarkable about this scene except perhaps that she had named the kittens Lord Brougham and Lord Grey after the heroes of the recent Reform Act demonstrating a precocious awareness of current political issues. The five year old grew up to be the prolific novelist, Margaret Oliphant Wilson Oliphant. Her autobiography was constructed by her literary executors after her death from fragments and disjointed memories left by the author. In one piece Oliphant, renowned during her adult life as anti-feminist and conservative, remembered herself as a child as ‘tremendously political and Radical.’ ¹

The political child, the radical parent, and the turbulent, opinionated household are frequently overlooked in analyses of nineteenth-century British politics. Indeed, much of the prevailing scholarship privileges the growth of the masculine public sphere and the development of more formal, regulated political structures and institutions. Even where the home is recognised as a space for political activities and interactions, it is viewed as a place (like the ‘public sphere’) regulated by men. Women, children, and servants are relegated to mere observers and largely excluded from participation in public affairs. ² In contrast, from the 1970s literature on women in early nineteenth-century century America emphasised the home as a location where women made use of the dominant ideology of domesticity for their own ends: in particular as a source of power and community. ³ Shirley Samuels, in a review of the historiography on American women and politics, outlined the expanding literature in this area detailing the efforts ‘to explain the “female world” in terms of its relation to other worlds—a family world; a world of architecture; of cooking and housework; of industrialisation and the marketplace; of reform movements such as temperance, abolition, and suffrage; a sexual world that involves the conceptualisation and treatment of the body; a world of education and law; and, finally, a literary world involving the production and consumption of novels and magazines.’ ⁴ Recent scholarship focusing on the British context has sought to rectify this lacuna in the literature on women and politics. For example, Clare Midgley’s ground-breaking analysis on women and the anti-slavery movement considered the organised boycotting campaigns and the politics of consumption within the household. Kathryn Gleadle has also contributed to the scholarship on reform in a domestic setting with her assessments of early medical reform movements. ⁵ These examples typify the diverse range of recent scholarship which develops the notion of the political household but they also illustrate the fragmentary nature of such work. The idea of the home as a site for political activism is often tangential in the broader studies of reform movements, pressure groups, or of individuals committed to achieving social and political change. Yet the early nineteenth-century domestic environment was a key space where political identities were forged. The household was where interest in politics was constructed, nurtured, and developed. The home was a female-dominated and managed space and this applied to political conversations or activities as well as those concerning childcare and cookery. Thus the terms and conditions of debate were not controlled by men. The recent re-evaluation of Victorian patriarchy and fatherhood has supported this assessment by casting doubt upon the model of the stern, authoritarian, and sovereign middle-class father presenting a more complex figure. John Tosh’s categorisation of the absent father, the tyrannical father, the distant father, and the intimate father presume the household to be more egalitarian, more contradictory, and more contested than previous analyses. ⁶ Thus a consideration of the development of children’s political knowledge; the intellectual milieu of the domestic environment; the importance of religion in shaping political identities; the role of correspondence, kinship networks and salons; politically-inspired ‘life style’ choices in areas such as consumption, health and diet are all important factors in understanding the character of the political woman in nineteenth-century Britain.

* * * * *

Political scientists agree that basic ideological creeds are established at a young age. ⁷ A recent study on the attitudes and prejudices of pre-school children in Northern Ireland for example made clear that children are the products of their education, their communities, and their schools. Radical parents breed radical children. ⁸ In the nineteenth century, progressive child rearing practices encouraged children to be more willing to debate, to lead, and to be creative. Whilst the educational context was important, the early political socialisation of children took place within the family, encouraged by conversation, reading, and debate. The radicalism of ‘political children’ may have faded in adulthood, as happened with Margaret Oliphant, but political awareness and outlook was usually retained. Recent re-assessments of Oliphant’s work which included ninety-eight novels, twenty-five works of non-fiction, short stories, reviews, and over three hundred periodical articles reveal her politics to be complex and contradictory. Melissa Schaub for example, described her as neither feminist nor anti-feminist but anti-idealist. Ann Heilmann emphasised Oliphant’s ambiguity considering that her fiction with its roll call of strong central female figures challenges Oliphant’s presentation of herself as rabidly opposed to women’s rights. Penny Fielding examined Oliphant’s short stories from the point of view of their engagement with the difficulties of modernity. ⁹ A review of Oliphant’s troubled life which involved the juggling of her literary career with managing her wayward family and a variety of ‘hanger’s on,’ financial insecurity, and travel abroad support the appraisal of her as a woman of firm political views and considerable independence. Thus the advanced views and political engagement of the child—casually displayed in the naming of her kittens—were extended into adulthood.

A similar trajectory was taken by the writer Eliza Lynn Linton. Linton was self-educated, her mother dying when she was very young. Although she was one of twelve children she was alienated from her family and especially from her father who was the vicar of Crosthwaite in the Lake District. She later wrote that she felt ‘so isolated in the family, so out of harmony with them all, and by my own faults of temperament with such a little Ishmaelite and outcast, that as much despair as can exist with childhood overwhelmed and possessed me.’ ¹⁰ Linton rebelled against her conventional family, rejecting Christianity, and supporting radical and republican politics, including Chartism. She wrote two versions of her autobiography towards the end of her life. The Autobiography of Christopher Kirkland, where Linton adopts a male persona, was a semi-fictionalised, perceptive account of the diverse religious, philosophical, psychological, and political crises she faced in her life. The second, My Literary Life, published after her death was an acerbic assessment of many leading figures in literary and political circles leading her companion, Beatrice Harradan to regret that Linton had not ‘toned down’ some of her harsher evaluations. She became the first salaried female journalist and key themes in her works of fiction and non-fiction were politics, religion and social rights. From the late 1860s she turned against the ‘new woman’ and the ‘girl of the period’ becoming a vociferous opponent of women’s rights. Her conflict with the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ led Walter Besant, to write in an obituary, ‘She fought for Women; yet with women fought.’ ¹¹ Both Oliphant and Linton then retained their political commitment all their lives, replacing youthful radicalism with extreme conservatism later in life. Their lives and careers demonstrate the enduring impact of their early politicisation shaped by the turbulent and formative politics of the 1830s and 1840s.

The commitment and consciousness of parents was a significant factor in the political socialisation of children. Linda Kerber analysed the concept of republican motherhood in revolutionary America identifying the connections between women and citizenship via the mother’s role in raising patriotic children. ¹² Rosemarie Zagarri later demonstrated how the idea of the political mother had transatlantic origins with important contributors to the debate including enlightenment thinkers in Britain such as Hume and Adam Smith. ¹³ There have been disputes about whether Mary Wollstonecraft’s, Vindication of the Rights of Woman also enshrined the concept of republican motherhood in the section on the importance of educating children with notions of civic virtue and patriotism. Barbara Taylor, for example, argued that to ‘assign it a key role in Wollstonecraft’s thought . . . is unjustified.’ ¹⁴ Whatever the origins of the concept, many nineteenth-century mothers (and often fathers) took the political education of their children very seriously. Sources such as juvenile letters and diaries, autobiographies, and even novels reveal the significance of progressive child-rearing practices in shaping the development of political ideas and practices. A letter such as this one from Frances Smith, a Unitarian, to her daughter Julia is typical: ‘At half-past six I was this morning an active citizen . . . ’ ¹⁵ Children were exhorted to spend their waking hours dedicated to education, self-improvement, and philanthropic work. In conjunction with evidence from these private sources, many women contributed, in a variety of guises, to the public debates about the education of children as future citizens. Mary Hilton, in a wide-ranging study of women’s theoretical writing on education in the century after 1750, describes such work as ‘a particular and powerful strand of female authority in the public realm.’ ¹⁶

Oliphant, for example, ascribes her youthful radicalism to the politics of her mother who read everything that she could get her hands on and was ‘Radical and democratic and the highest of aristocrats all in one.’ ¹⁷ Oliphant’s mother, also called Margaret, was herself firmly established in literary and political circles in Scotland. Among her friends were David Macbeth Moir, contributor to Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and Janet Aitken Wilson. Janet Wilson, assumed control of the political, and also the scientific, education of her children acting as a key role model for the young Margaret. Margaret Oliphant remembered Janet Wilson as an ‘exceedingly bright, vivacious, ugly, old lady, a universal devourer of books, and with that kind of scientific tendency which made her encourage her boys to form museums, and collect fossils, butterflies, etc . . . she was all culture, intellect, improvement of the mind and so forth.’ Janet’s children: George, Daniel, Jessie and Jeanie established a Juvenile Society for the Advancement of Knowledge. One activity of the Society was to write poetry, and Jessie remembered one poem running to hundreds of heroic couplets on the subject of woman which ‘embodied some fresh and original views on the subject.’ ¹⁸ At the age of seven the Wilson children renounced taking sugar in their tea after their mother, a poet herself, read them anti-slavery passages from Cowper:

Both George and I, in a fit of youthful enthusiasm, renounced sugar in our tea as a practical protest against the slave-labour to which it was due. An acquired taste soon rendered the sugarless tea preferable; but we were not sufficiently logical enthusiasts to feel at all aggrieved in conscience by the bargain we made that we were still allowed sugar with apple-dumplings! ¹⁹

Cowper’s poem The Negro’s Complaint had been circulated widely under the title ‘A Subject for Conversation at the Tea Table’ and was clearly successful in prompting radical families, such as the Wilsons, into taking direct action. The aftermath of the French Revolution, the abolition of the slave trade, Reform, and the repeal of the Corn Laws were all momentous public events that were to influence the later activities of many women who had grown up in the early decades of the nineteenth century. When Martha (Patty) Smith, the daughter of William Smith, a Unitarian, and MP for Norwich looked back on this period she remembered it as ‘the era . . . when the French sought not merely to destroy privileges but to acknowledge and sanction rights—a time of youth, enthusiasm, pride, of generous and sincere passion, which in spite of its errors will live in the memory of man and disturb those who seek to corrupt or enslave them!’ ²⁰ Her father had visited Paris in July 1790 to observe the course of the revolution for himself. The family’s enthusiasm for events in France may be summed up by a letter that Frances Smith wrote to her husband whilst he was in Paris, ‘a Kingdom, now more than our sister, after so great, so happy a revolution.’ ²¹ Marianne Thornton, daughter of the banker and Clapham Sect Evangelical, Henry Thornton was also a child during the French wars:

As soon as I could do so intelligently I had to read the Morning Chronicle every morning whilst my father and mother breakfasted. Those were days of great interest, when we were all in hourly fear of invasion, owing to Bonaparte’s successes, and as children we were all taught to care much about public events. My father wrote a paper on the duty of interesting young people in such matters, in the Christian Observer. He even tried to make me understand a little about paper-credit and the bullion question. ²²

This passage demonstrates a number of aspects of the political socialisation of children in the nineteenth century: the importance of so-called ‘flashbulb’ memories in the shaping of children’s emerging political identities; the growth of didactic and educative literature encouraging active citizenship; and the role of radical parenting as a formative influence on their children’s behaviour.

Flashbulb memories of dramatic public events stand out as vivid episodes in many autobiographies of the period because they formed part of a ‘community memory’: a linkage between...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Routledge Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Political Worlds of Women in Nineteenth-Century Britain
• PART I The Home
• 1 Politics at Home
• 2 Useful Soup for Benevolent Purposes: The Politics of Domestic Economy
• PART II Community and Neighbourhood
• 3 Philanthropic Economy: Radicalism, Women, and Charity
• 4 Women and the Politics of the Parish
• PART III The National Stage
• 5 Female Petitioning: The Multiform Warfare of Political Life
• 6 From the Ventilator to the Ladies’ Cage: Women and the Houses of Parliament
• PART IV International Politics
• 7 Encounters with Imperial and International Affairs
• 8 British Women and the Rosewater Revolution
• Conclusion: Spheres and Spaces; Borders and Frontiers
• Notes
• Index