Abstract
The nineteenth-century woman has been subject to exhaustive historical scrutiny over the past two decades. The dichotomy between the realities of her iniquitous legal and social standing on the one hand, and the cultural worship of the womanly nature by contemporaries on the other, has made her a fascinating object of study. Moreover, it was during that century that women first began to organise themselves into campaigns to demand reforms in their status. Indeed, historians have now delved beyond the suffragettes’ battles to argue that from the 1850s onwards, a small, but vocal group of middle-class women started to agitate for better education, improved legal rights (especially within marriage), employment opportunities and the right to vote.1
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Notes
See for example, Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property. Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1983);
Philippa Levine, Victorian Feminism 1850–1900 (Hutchinson, 1987);
Diana Mary Chase Worzala, ‘The Langham Place Circle: The Beginnings of the Organized Women’s Movement in England 1854–1870’, (PhD thesis, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1982).
The principle studies which mention the existence of these early feminists include Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism. A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), pp. 30–1;
Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent The Monthly Repository 1806–1838 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1944), pp. 284–96;
Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth Century England (Routledge, 1989), pp. 212–13;
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum, 1985), pp. 114–16, 247, 309–10.
Carl Ray Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1952), p. 115;
Richard Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox. Public Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786–1864 (John Lane, 1909), pp. 118–19, 158–70;
F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan. William James Linton 1812–1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), pp. 11–17.
See also Ann Blainey, The Farthing Poet: a Biography of Richard Hengist Horne 1802–1884. A Lesser Literary Lion (Longman, 1968), pp. 58–68 in particular.
J. F. C. Harrison has examined the work of some of these radicals in Learning and Living 1790–1960. A Study in the History of the English Adult Education Movement (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961).
E. K. Helsinger, R. L. Sheets and W. Veeder, The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), p. 9. For discussions of the early feminist literary milieu see Holcombe, Wives and Property, Chapter 4;
Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel. Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading, 1835–1880 (Bowling Green: University Popular Press, 1981).
See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle-Class 1780–1930 (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 454;
Sheila R. Herstein, A Mid-Victorian Feminist, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 44–7; Worzala, The Langham Place Circle’, Chapter 1.
Gail Malmgreen, Neither Bread Nor Roses: Utopian Feminists and the English Working Class, 1800–1850 (Brighton: John L. Noyce, 1978);
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Virago, 1983);
R. K. P. Pankhurst, William Thompson, 1775–1833, Britain’s Pioneer Socialist, Feminist, and Co-operator (Watts and Co., 1954).
Carol Smith-Rosenberg, The Female World of Love and Ritual: Relations Between Women in Nineteenth Century America’, Signs 1 (1975), pp. 1–29; Lilian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men. Friendship and Love Between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (Women’s Press, 1985).
Jane Rendall, ‘Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1891) and Bessie Raynor Parkes (1825–1925)’, in Jane Rendall and Susan Mendus (eds), Sexuality and Subordination. Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 1989), pp. 136–70.
Bertha Mason, The Story of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Sheratt and Hughes, 1912);
Florence Balgarnie, ‘The Women’s Suffrage Movement in the Nineteenth Century’, in B. Villiers (ed.), The Case for Women’s Suffrage (T. Fisher Unwin, 1907), p. 12.
However, Ray Strachey, The Cause, A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain (Virago: 1988, first published 1928) does take a more balanced approach.
Kenneth Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women 1760–1930 (Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 41–67;
F. B. Tolles (ed.), Slavery and the ‘Woman Question’, Lucretia Mott’s Diary of Her Visit to Great Britain to Attend the World’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1840 (Friends’ Historical Society, 1952), p. 49.
Lee Virginia Chambers-Schiller, ‘The CAB: A Trans-Atlantic Community, Aspects of Nineteenth Century Reform’, (PhD thesis, University of Michigan, 1977), passim.
In addition to the standard works on the women’s rights movement, as cited above, the following works, among others, also point to this relationship: Margaret Bryant, The Unexpected Revolution. A Study in the History of the Education of Women and Girls in the Nineteenth Century (University of London Institute of Education, 1979), pp. 65–6;
J. A. Banks, Victorian Values. Secularism and the Size of Families (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 35.
Olive Banks, Becoming a Feminist. The Social Origins of ‘First Wave’ Feminism (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986), p. 15; Levine, Feminist Lives, pp. 30–1.
Ruth Watts, ‘Knowledge is Power — Unitarians, Gender and Education in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, in Gender and Education, Vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 42–4;
John Seed, ‘Theologies of Power: Unitarianism and the Social Relations of Religious Discourse, 1800–1850’, in R. J. Morris (ed.), Class, Power and Social Structure in British Nineteenth Century Towns (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1986), pp. 137–9.
Edward Royle, Radical Politics 1790–1900. Religion and Unbelief (Longman, 1971), pp. 51–3, considers the Reasoner,
R. G. Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–1845 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 219, refers to the Spirit of the Age;
David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (Allen Lane, 1975), p. 97, mentions the Republican.
The word ‘feminism’ does not appear to have entered into the English language until the 1890s. Richard J. Evans, The Feminists. Women’s Emancipation Movements in Europe, America and Australasia 1840–1920 (Croom Helm, 1977), p. 39n.
MLG, ‘Sketches of Domestic Life’, Monthly Repository (hereafter cited as MR), Vol. IX, 1835, p. 560. Mary Leman Grimstone married William Gillies in the late 1830s or early 1840s, thus becoming Mary Leman Gillies. She often wrote for the same publications as William Gillies’s daughter, Mary Gillies. Therefore, to avoid confusion, Mary Leman Gillies will be known as Mary Leman Grimstone throughout, although her correct name will be cited in the notes.
Helen Blackburn, Women’s Suffrage. A Record of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the British Isles (Williams and Norgate, 1902), pp. 12–13; Mason, The Story of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, pp. 18–22.
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© 1995 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (1995). Introduction. In: The Early Feminists. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26582-4_1
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