Abstract
Historians have assumed that the relationship between women’s legal status and their inability to vote was not forged by feminists until the 1860s. Shanley’s work, for example, is firmly in this tradition. She maintains that it was only in the 1860s and 1870s, when the movement to reform the legal status of married women was under way, that feminists made the connection between, ‘women’s legal subordination to their husbands in marriage and the lack of the vote’.1 However, a study of radical literary circles demonstrates clearly the inaccuracy of such assertions. Women were slaves, Justitia affirmed, precisely because she was ‘Subject to laws which she has been carefully excluded from all participation in forming’.2 The Leader (a newspaper founded by Thornton Hunt, G. H. Lewes and Linton) was one of many radical publications which echoed such sentiments, proclaiming, ‘we are not willing that laws should arbitrarily declare woman to be the mere slave of man without a voice of her own’.3
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Notes
Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–95 (L. B. Tauris, 1989), p. 47.
Rosamund and Florence Davenport Hill, The Recorder of Birmingham. A Memoir of Matthew Davenport Hill With Selections from his Correspondence (Macmillan, 1878), p. 115;
Bertha Mason, The Story of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (Sheratt and Hughes, 1912), p. 22;
Ralph E. Turner, James Silk Buckingham 1786–1855 (Williams and Norgate, 1934), p. 329.
W. J. Linton, ‘Universal Suffrage. The Principle of the People’s Charter’, Republican, Vol. I, 1848, p. 166.
‘A Political and Social Anomaly’, ibid., Vol. VI, 1832, p. 641. For arguments concerning the need for female qualities in the legislature see Helen Blackburn, Women’s Suffrage. A Record of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the British Isles (Williams and Norgate, 1902), pp. 19 and 44;
Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain, 1860–1914 (Routledge, 1990, first published 1987), p. 58.
Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres. The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (Croom Helm, 1978), p. 33; MLG, ‘On Women of No Party’, MR, Vol. X, 1836, p. 79. See also, L. D., ‘Principles Before History’, ibid., Vol. II, 1837, pp. 282–3; ‘Study of Political Economy Made Pleasant’, Tatler, Vol. IV, no. 435, 24 January 1832, pp. 78–9.
Miriam Williford, ‘Bentham and the Rights of Women’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol 36, January-March 1975, pp. 167–76;
Ruby J. Saywell, ‘The Development of the Feminist Idea in England, 1789–1833’, (MA thesis, King’s College, London, 1936), p. 184.
William Thompson, Appeal of one Half of the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain them in Political and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (Cork: C. P. Hyland, 1975, first published 1825); Part One considers the views of Mill and Dumont.
Brougham’s speech to the House of Commons, 2 June 1818, cited in John Bowring (ed.), The Works of Jeremy Bentham (New York: Russell and Russell, 1962, first published 1843), Vol. IV, p. 568.
John Forster to W. J. Fox, cited in Richard Garnett, The Life of W. J. Fox, Public Teacher and Social Reformer, 1786–1864 (John Lane, 1909), p. 288.
Edward Youl, ‘The Breadfinder’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 45, 6 November 1847, p. 294.
D. J. Rowe (ed.), London Radicalism 1830–43. A Selection from the Papers of Francis Place (London Record Society, 1970), pp. 120, 220.
David Jones, Chartism and the Chartists (Allen Lane, 1975), see p. 115 especially.
William Lovett, The Life and Struggles of William Lovett (Trübner, 1976), pp. 322–3, 409, 424.
An excellent survey of these radical educational theories is to be found in W. A. C. Stewart, Progressives and Radicals in English Education. 1750–1970 (Macmillan, 1972), pp. 42ff.
MLG, ‘Social Melodies’, Halfpenny Magazine, no. 7. 16 June 1832, p. 45; no. 14, 4 August 1832, p. 105. For an example of their use, see ‘Festival at Local Infant School’, Star in the East, Vol. II, no. 72, 27 January 1838, p. 148. For Fox’s role, see Margaret Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox and the Monthly Repository circle of 1832 to 1836’, (PhD thesis, Australian National University, 1979), p. 109;
Parry’s work is mentioned in J. T. Ward, Chartism (B. T. Batsford, 1973), p. 167; Lovett, Life, p. 274.
TS letter from William Shaen to his sister, 7 June 1848, Leeds Archives, Symington Papers, Box 19; F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan. William James Linton. 1812–97 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 26.
William Lovett and John Collins, Chartism: A New Organisation of the People (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969, first published 1840), p. 61.
I. J. Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past and Present, no. 44, 1969, pp. 76–105; F. Goodway, London Chartism 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 40–2. See also Ward, Chartism, p. 150.
Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Macmillan, 1991), pp. 61–2. For the role of women in radical movements see, for example,
Malcolm I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest, 1800–1850 (Croom Helm, 1982), see especially pp. 113, 132–4;
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum, 1985), pp. 238–43.
Gail Malmgreen, Neither Bread Nor Roses. Utopian Feminists and the English Working Class, 1800–1850 (Brighton: John L. Noyce, 1978), p. 31;
Dorothy Thompson, The Early Chartists (Temple Smith, 1984), Ch. 7.
cited in D. Jones, ‘Women and the Chartists’, History, Vol. 68, 1983, pp. 1–21, see pp. 2, 8–9.
MS letter from Harriet Taylor to Algernon Taylor, n.d., British Library of Political and Economic Science, Mill-Taylor Papers, Vol. 27, no. 101; H. Taylor, ‘Enfranchisement of Women’, Westminster Review, Vol. 55, July 1851, p. 152.
‘Address by Goodwyn Barmby in the “Cheltenham Free Press”’. Reprinted in Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Virago, 1983);
Ruth Watts, ‘The Unitarian Contribution to Education in England from the Late Eighteenth Century to 1853’ (PhD thesis, Leicester University, 1987), p. 440.
W. J. Linton, ‘Universal Suffrage: The Principles of the People’s Charter’, Republican, Vol. I, 1848, pp. 165–8.
Joseph Barker, The Life of Joseph Barker, Written by Himself, edited by John Thomas Barker (Hodder and Stoughton, 1880), p. 281;
Betty Radeland, Abolitionists and Working Class Problems in the Age of Industrialisation (Macmillan, 1984), p. 144.
Gail Malmgreen, ‘Anne Knight and the Radical Subculture’, Quaker History, Vol. 71, 1982, p. 108.
John Stuart Mill to Harriet Taylor, 22 March 1849, quoted in F. A. Hayek, John Stuart Mill and Harriet Taylor: Their Correspondence and Subsequent Marriage (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), p. 141;
Graham Wallas, William Johnson Fox. Conway Memorial Lecture (Watts, 1924), pp. 29–30.
For details of the Whittington Club, see Chapter 5 below. For the Friends of Italy and its policy towards women, see J. O. S. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern Radicals (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979), pp. 60–1.
Sally Alexander, Women’s Work in Nineteenth Century London (Journeyman Press, 1976), p. 31; Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism, p. 161.
W. J. Linton, ‘Universal Suffrage. The Principles of the People’s Charter’, Republican, Vol. I, 1848, pp. 165–8;
Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property. Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), p. 163.
Paul Bell, ‘Heads and Tales of Families’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Vol. V, January-June, 1847, p. 40; Kate, ‘Conversations of Jane and Eliza’, NMW, Vol. V, no. 10, 29 December 1839, p. 149. Worral was Taught to be Respectable’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Vol. V, January-June 1847, p. 258.
Carl Woodring, Victorian Samplers: William and Mary Howitt (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1952), pp. 107–8. For examples of the poem’s reception in the radical press, see ‘Alfred Tennyson and His Poems’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. IV, no. 196, 10 May 1852, pp. 20–1; Panthea, ‘Tennyson’s Princess’, Reasoned Vol. IV, no. 91, 1848, pp. 175–6; E. T., ‘Tennyson’s Poems’, Truth-Seeker and Present Age, 1849, p. 58; MS letter from Bessie Raynor Parkes to Barbara Leigh Smith, 28 January 1848, Girton College, Cambridge, Parkes Papers, BRP V 20.
Judy Lown, Women and Industrialisation. Gender at Work in Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), see esp. Chapter 12;
Angela V. John, By the Sweat of Their Brow. Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984, second edition), p. 24 in particular.
Lovett, Life, p. 430; William Lovett, Woman’s Mission (Simpkin and Marshall, 1856), see pp. 14, 16, 19.
‘Relations of Great Men to Women’, in George Dawson, Shakespeare and Other Lectures, ed. George St Clair (Kegan Paul, Trench, 1888), p. 301. This was an important theme,
see also Mrs Phillips, ‘On the Importance of Female Educational Establishments’, People’s Press, Vol. II, no. 19, June 1848, p. 85; MLG, ‘Acephala’, MR, Vol. 8, 1834, p. 771.
‘Extract from “The Rights of Woman” by R. J. Richardson’, reprinted in Dorothy Thompson (ed.), The Early Chartists (Macmillan, 1971), p. 122.
P. N. Backström, Christian Socialism and Co-operation in Victorian England. Edward Vansittart Neale and the Co-operative Movement (Croom Helm, 1974), p. 148; Leader, 16 November 1850, pp. 809–10.
Pat Thane, ‘Women and the Poor Law in Victorian and Edwardian England’, History Workshop, Vol. 5, Autumn 1978, pp. 29–51; Lown, Women and Industrialisation, pp. 180–1;
Margaret Hewitt, Wives and Mothers in Victorian Industry (Rockliff, 1958), see pp. 31, 49.
See, for example, ‘On the Spirit and Purpose with which the Establishment of a National Education Should be Attempted’, in W. J. Fox, Reports of Lectures Delivered at the Chapel in South Place, Finsbury (Charles Fox, 1860) Lecture 1, p. 9; FL, ‘Wrongs of Englishwomen’, Eliza Cook’s Journal Vol. III, no. 75, 9 October 1850, p. 353.
Mrs Percy Sinnett, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Women’, People’s Journal, Vol. IV, no. 83, 31 July 1847, p. 60.
W. J. Fox, ‘Lectures on the Morality of the Various Classes’, quoted in NMW, Vol. II, no. 55, 14 November 1835, p. 24; S. Smiles, ‘The Condition of Factory Women — What is Doing for Them [sic]T, People’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 45, 7 November 1846, pp. 258–60, and Vol. III, no. 56, 23 January 1847, pp. 50–2;
G. L. Lewes, Dr Southwood Smith. A Retrospect (William Blackwood and Sons, 1891), p. 153.
‘The Relations of Great Men to Women’, in Dawson, Shakespeare and Other Lectures, p. 301; Catherine Barmby, ‘The Organisation of Labour for Women’, People’s Press, Vol. II, no. 19, June 1848, p. 122.
See also the review of R. H. Home in Westminster Review, Vol. 41, 1844, pp. 379–80.
See E. K. Helsinger, R. L. Sheets, and W. Veeder, The Woman Question. Society and Literature in Britain and America 1837–1883. Volume 2, Social Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 120–33;
Ruth Watts, ‘Knowledge is Power — Unitarians, Gender and Education in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Gender and Education, Vol. I, no. 1, 1989, pp. 44–5.
Mary Gillies, ‘Associated Homes for the Middle Classes’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 20, 15 May 1847, p. 270; Alexander, Women’s Work in Nineteenth Century London, p. 14.
B. Taylor, ‘“The Men are as Bad as their Masters”: Socialism, Feminism, and Sexual Antagonism in the London Tailoring Trade in the early 1830s’, Feminist Studies, Vol. V, Part 1, Spring 1979, pp. 8–40.
For the broader picture, see Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes. Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (Hutchinson, 1987), pp. 312–13.
Examples abound; see, for example, ‘A National Gallery’, MR, Vol. VIII, 1834, p. 842; ‘Women and Wood Engraving’, National Association Gazette, no. 33, 4 June 1842, p. 186; ‘Woman’s Mission and Woman’s Position’, in Anna Jameson, Memoirs and Essays. Illustrative of Art, Literature and Social Morals (Richard Bentley, 1846), p. 236.
Mrs Percy Sinnett, ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Women’, People’s Journal, Vol. IV, no. 83, 31 July 1847, p. 60;
Mrs Phillips, ‘On the Importance of Female Educational Establishments’, People’s Press, Vol. II, no. 19, June 1848, p. 85.
Camilla Toulmin, ‘The Orphan Milliners’, Illuminated Magazine, Vol. II, 1846, pp. 278–85.
M. L. G., Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Vol. IV, July-December 1846, pp. 440–57; Mary Leman Gillies, ‘The First and Second Marriage’, People’s Journal, Vol. IV, no. 83, 31 July 1847, pp. 63–76.
Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier. The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), see p. 209 in particular.
Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, ‘Women and Work’ (1857),
reprinted in Candida Ann Lacey, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), pp. 36–73, see p. 4L
Mrs Epps (ed.), Diary of the Late John Epps (Kent, 1875), p. 377.
GEJ, ‘How Agnes Worral was Taught to be Respectable’, Douglas Jerrold’s Shilling Magazine, Vol. V, January-June 1847, p. 250.
Frederika Bremer, The Home or Life in Sweden, trans. Mary Howitt (G. Bell and Sons, 1913, first published 1843), pp. 330, 94, 96.
Compare Catherine Barmby’s essays, ‘Woman and Domestics’, People’s Journal, Vol. III, no. 55, 16 January 1847, pp. 37–8; ‘The Organisation of Labour for Women’, People’s Press, Vol. II, no. 19, June 1848, pp. 121 – 3; ‘Women’s Industrial Independence’, Apostle and Chronicle of the Communist Church 7, no. 1, 1 August 1848, repr. in J. Saville and J. M. Bellamy (eds), Dictionary of Labour Biography (Macmillan, 1982), Vol. VI, pp. 16–17.
R. H. Horne, A New Spirit of the Age (Smith, Elder, 1844), p. 198.
Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (Virago, 1983, originally published 1877), Vol. II, p. 225.
Silverpen , ‘Lucy Dean; the Noble Needlewoman’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 48, 30 March 1850, pp. 340–4.
Mary Leman Gillies, ‘Associated Homes’, People’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 2, 10 January 1846, p. 26.
See R. G. Garnett, Co-operation and the Owenite Socialist Communities in Britain, 1825–1845 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1972), p. 47; see also Chapter 1 above.
Mary Gillies, ‘Associated Homes for the Middle Classes’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 20, 15 May 1847, p. 272.
Mary Leman Gillies, ‘A Happy New Year to the People’, People’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 3, 17 January 1846, p. 39.
Mary Gillies, ‘Associated Homes for the Middle Classes’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 20, 15 May 1847, p. 273;
Mary Leman Grimstone, ‘Homes for the People’, People’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 5, 31 January 1846, p. 68.
Selma B. Kanner, ‘Victorian Institutional Patronage: Angela Burdett-Coutts, Charles Dickens and Urania Cottage, Reformatory for Women, 1846–58’ (PhD thesis, University of California, 1972), p. 307; JR, ‘Domestic Arrangements of the Working Classes’, Westminster Review, Vol. 25, 1836, p. 466.
Mary Leman Gillies, ‘An Appeal to the Better Order of Men in Behalf of the Women of the Factory Districts’, People’s Journal, Vol. II, no. 36, 5 September 1846, pp. 131–4.
Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, p. 13; J. A. Banks, Victorian Values. Secularism and the Size of Families (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), p. 35.
Patricia Branca, Silent Sisterhood. Middle-Class Women in the Victorian Home (Croom Helm, 1975), see p. 133.
See for example, Robert Dale Owen, Moral Physiology, or, a Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question (E. Truelove, 1831), especially p. 50 and appendix.
Mary Gillies, ‘Associated Homes for the Middle Classes’, Howitt’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 20, 15 May 1847, p. 270; Shaen’s words are cited in Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe by Herself (Boston and New York: Riverside Press, 1894), Vol. I, pp. 548–9.
Silverpen , ‘The Xmas Angels’, Eliza Cook’s Journal, Vol. 1, no. 34, 22 December 1849, pp. 116–21;
Ruth Watts, ‘“Knowledge is Power” — Unitarians, Gender and Education in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Gender and Education, Vol. 1, no. 1, 1989, pp. 35–50; Margaret Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox and the Monthly Repository’, pp. 439–40.
MS letter from M. L. Gillies, 31 July 1846, University College, London, Wilderspin Collection, MS 917; MS letters from Mary Leman Gillies to W. J. Linton [n.d.], Biblioteca Archivio G. G. Feltrinelli, Archivio Linton, Vol. 2–43. Parnaby, ‘William Johnson Fox’, pp. 375–436. See also P. McCann and F. A. Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement (Croom Helm, 1982).
For a fine treatment of the mainstream Unitarian position, see R. Watts, ‘The Unitarian Contribution to the Development of Female Education, 1790–1850’, History of Education, Vol. 9, no. 4, 1980, pp. 273–86.
W. J. Linton, ‘Mr. Cooper and the French Divorce Bill’, Reasoner, Vol. V, no. 121, 1848, p. 267;
W. J. Linton, ‘Universal Suffrage. The Principle of the People’s Charter’, Republican, Vol. I, 1848, p. 167.
‘Declaration’, Promethean, Vol. I, no. 1, January 1842; H. Spencer, Social Statics (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1969, first published London 1851), p. 161; Holcombe, Wives and Property, p. 155.
Mary Leman Gillies, ‘A Happy New Year to the People’, People’s Journal, Vol. I, no. 3, 17 January 1846, pp. 38–9.
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© 1995 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (1995). ‘The Stream of Freedom’ — Democracy and Domestic Mores. In: The Early Feminists. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26582-4_4
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