Abstract
Nineteenth-century women did cross the boundary that separated private and public life, for a variety of reasons. Exploration of these reasons should help us to establish how far such ventures came to be undertaken on behalf of women themselves, even though they may have originated in women’s identification with their community, their class and their church. Women clearly supported the political ambitions of their men and their communities in this period, though they may have seen their own role as auxiliary to those who might properly take part in public life. They might be drawn by their religious principles to go to meetings, join associations and even speak in public, as they were in the abolitionist campaign. Both working-class and middle-class women might support the issues most immediately relevant to their class, where they identified with it. All these sources of political action could provide a vocabulary, a language, which was not relevant to the world of men alone: the language of slavery and natural rights, of citizenship and representation, of individualism that was both religious, in emphasising the responsibility of the individual soul, and economic, in stressing the laws of the market-place. Such language could provide a very powerful set of images which women could adapt to their own struggle for political recognition.
Confusion has seized us, and all things go wrong, The women have leaped from ‘their spheres,’ And instead of fixed stars, shoot as comets along, And are setting the world by the ears!…
They’ve taken a notion to speak for themselves, And are wielding the tongue and the pen;.
They’ve mounted the rostrum; the termagant elves, And — oh horrid! are talking to men!
Maria Weston Chapman ‘The Times that Try Men’s Souls’ (1837)1
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© 1985 Jane Rendall
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Rendall, J. (1985). Politics, Philanthropy and the Public Sphere. In: The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860. Themes in Comparative History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-17733-2_8
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