Abstract
The radical unitarian debate with the Chartist movement illustrated the former’s desire to create a just legislature and also highlighted the emphasis they placed upon the marital relationship in establishing an equal and harmonious society. These dual concerns were given full expression in the early feminists’ discourse on the unjust laws facing women. The law, they believed, was the cultural reflection of privileging physical power over reason or intellect. The consequence was a system of ‘legal barbarism’.1 This was most clearly expressed, they maintained, in the laws relating to women and marriage. While a minority in the feminist camp, such as Eliza Meteyard and R. H. Home, were sceptical of placing too much emphasis on legislative change (preferring to emphasise more profound cultural factors),2 for the vast majority, the desire to reform iniquitous laws formed a central element in their struggle to redefine the bases of both the marital relationship and women’s position in society.
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Notes
Allen Horstman, Victorian Divorce (Croom Helm, 1985), p. 41.
Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (L. B. Tauris, 1989), p. 29.
P. Mallet, ‘Woman and Marriage in Victorian Society’, in E. M. Craik (ed.), Marriage and Property (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1984), p. 163.
Olive Banks, Faces of Feminism. A Study of Feminism as a Social Movement (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1981), p. 16; Mallet, ‘Woman and Marriage’, p. 180.
See the entries in J. O. S. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979).
Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (Faber and Faber, 1977), pp. 119, 123–4. References to Milton’s views on divorce amongst nineteenth-century radicals are ubiquitous. See for example, ‘Milton on Divorce’, National, 1839, pp. 133–4; ‘Milton on Divorce’, NMW, Vol. V, no. 33, 8 June 1839, pp. 295–6.
R. Acland Armstrong, Henry William Crosskey, His Life and Work (Birmingham: Cornish Brothers, 1895), p. 31.
see Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property. Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth Century England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 93–6.
See, for example, Fraser Harrison, The Dark Angel (Sheldon Press, 1977), p. 218.
A rare, albeit cursory acknowledgement of the radicalism of this work may be found in Patricia Thompson, George Sand and the Victorians. Her Influence and Reputation in Nineteenth Century England (Macmillan, 1977), p. 147.
E. Lynn Linton, My Literary Life (Hodder and Stoughton, 1899), see esp. pp. 11–26.
Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot and John Chapman, with Chapman’s Diaries (Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1969, second edition), p. 174;
Susanne Howe, Geraldine Jewsbury, her Life and Errors (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1935), p. 125.
Eliza Lynn, Realities. A Tale (Saunders and Otley, 1851), Vol. I, see pp. 149, 154, 178–9, 103.
Charles Dickens to Fanny Burnett, 6 December 1844, Dickens House Museum, Burnett Notebooks, XA524; Francis E. Mineka, The Dissidence of Dissent. The ‘Monthly Repository’ 1806–1838 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), p. 267.
W. J. Linton (and possibly James Hill too), it seems, had married his wife’s sister, technically an illegal move. F. B. Smith, Radical Artisan. William James Linton. 1812–1897 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), p. 36, For the relationships of W. J. Fox, Eliza Flower, Thomas Southwood Smith and Margaret Gillies, see Chapter 2.
For the relationship between J. S. Mill and Harriet Taylor, see Alice S. Rossi, Essays on Sexual Equality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), esp. pp. 28–9.
Lynn Linton, My Literary Life, pp. 22–3; Thompson also makes such a claim in George Sand and the Victorians, pp. 42–3. For a more circumspect approach see Hock Guan Tjoa, George Henry Lewes. A Victorian Mind (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), p. 16.
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. 41–2; ‘Marriage and Protest’, Christian Reformer, Vol. II, 1835, p. 60;
Richard W. Davis, Dissent in Politics 1780–1830. The Life of William Smith, M.P. (Epworth Press, 1971), p. 210.
Emily Bushrod, ‘The History of Unitarianism in Birmingham from the Middle of the Eighteenth Century to 1893’ (MA thesis, University of Birmingham, 1954), p. 35.
Harriet Martineau, Society in America, ed. M. Lupset, (Gloucester, Mass.: Peter Smith, 1968, first published 1837), p. 296;
Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Macmillan, 1991), p. 51.
Mrs Leman Grimstone, Woman’s Love (Saunders and Otley, 1832), Vol. III p. 354;
Hope Malleson, Elizabeth Malleson, 1828–1916. Autobiographical Notes and Letters (Printed for Private Circulation, 1926), p. 36, p. 81.
Rossi, Essays on Sex Equality, pp. 145–6; Henry Solly, These Eighty Years, or, the Story of an Unfinished Life (Simpkin, Marshall, 1893), Vol. II, p. 46. See also Harriet Martineau, ‘The Conciencious [sic]’, National, 1839, pp. 342–3; Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, p. 18.
John Halkett, Milton and the Idea of Matrimony (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 8;
Matilda M. Hays, Helen Stanley. A Tale (E. Churton, 1846), Letter to Reader, p. 333.
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 33.
G. S., ‘The Rights and Wrongs of Woman, II, Marriage Laws and Prostitution’, Star in the East, Vol. III, no. 148, 13 July 1839, p. 365; John Stores Smith, Social Aspects (John Chapman, 1850), pp. 243–4.
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (Virago, 1983), p. 211.
Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988, first published 1846–8), pp. 473, 856.
Junius Redivivus, ‘On the Condition of Women in England’, MR. Vol. VII, 1833, p. 218.
Sally Mitchell, The Fallen Angel. Chastity, Class and Women’s Reading, 1835–80 (Bowling Green: University Popular Press, 1981), pp. 57–8;
R. D. Sell, ‘Dickens and the New Historicism: the Polyvocal Audience and the Discourse of Dombey and Son’, in J. Hawthorn (ed.), The Nineteenth Century British Novel (Edward Arnold, 1986), pp. 71–2.
Anna Jameson to Ottilie van Goethe, quoted in Clara Thomas, Love and Work Enough. The Life of Anna Jameson (Macdonald, 1967), p. 127; Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. VI, February 1839, pp. 69–81.
MR, Vol. VIII, 1834, pp. 548–9; Graham Wallas, William Johnson Fox 1786–1864. Conway Memorial Lecture (Watts, 1924), p. 28.
H. T. Mill, ‘Enfranchisement of Women’, Westminster Review, Vol. 55, July 1851, p. 152.
E. P. Hurlbut, Essays on Human Rights and their Political Guarantees (Edinburgh: Maclachlan, Stewart, 1847), p. 57; Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, no. 46, 29 May 1847, p. 660.
MS letter from Bessie Raynor Parkes to Barbara Leigh Smith, 21 April 1847, Girton College, Cambridge, Parkes Papers, BRP V 8; B. Leigh Smith Bodichon, A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women: Together with a Few Observations Thereon (1854),
repr. in C. A. Lacey (ed.), Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon and the Langham Place Group (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), p. 34.
Quoted in C. E. Robinson, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Dramatic Success; A Legend of Florence’, in R. A. McCowen (ed.), The Life and Times of Leigh Hunt (Iowa: Friends of the University of Iowa Libraries, 1985), p. 551.
Goodwyn Barmby, ‘Mine is Thine’, Douglas Jerrold’s Weekly Newspaper, Vol. IV, July-December, 1846, p. 119; Charles Dickens to Rev. W. J. Fox, [6 February 1846],
Kathleen Tillotson, The Letters of Charles Dickens. Vol. 4, 1844–6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), p. 491.
Roy and his work were greatly admired among the Unitarian community at large — who found his ideas very akin to their own. For example, ‘Death of Rammohun Roy’, Manchester Guardian, 5 October 1832, p. 2. S. D. Collet wrote a biography of Roy, published in 1913. For an example of the reception of his ideas on women among Unitarians, see L. Aikin to Dr Channing, 23 October 1833 in P. H. Le Breton (ed.), Memoirs, Miscellanies and Letters of the Late Lucy Aikin including those addressed to the Rev. Dr Channing from 1826 to 1842 (Longman, Green, Roberts, 1864), pp. 288–95.
Harriet Martineau to W. J. Fox, 13 May 1837, Valerie Saunders (ed.), Harriet Martineau. Selected Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), pp. 44–5; Martineau, Society in America, p. 297.
MS transcript by James Martineau of a letter from Harriet Martineau, 6 March 1838, transcribed from Martineau’s shorthand by William S. Coloe, July 1958, Manchester College, Oxford, MS J. Martineau (1)., p. 154; Harriet Martineau, Autobiography (Virago, 1983, first published 1877), Vol. II, p. 104.
Margaret Forster, Significant Sisters. The Grassroots of Active Feminism 1839–1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), Ch. 1; Holcombe, Wives and Property, pp. 53–4.
Quoted in Harriet Martineau, A History of the Thirty Years Peace 1816–1846 (George Bell and Sons, 1877), p. 17.
Mary Lyndon Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England, 1850–1895 (L. B. Tauris, 1989), p. 79.
Dorothy M. Stetson, A Woman’s Issue. The Politics of Family Law Reform in England (Greenwood, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), p. 25. Regarding the society prior to the 1850s, Shanley notes simply that in 1848 the society asked for changes in the divorce law. Stetson argues that its position on this matter was conservative.
B. and J. L. Hammond, James Stansfeld. A Victorian Champion of Sex Equality (Longmans, Green, 1932), pp. 9–10.
Details of the collaboration between Chadwick and Adams emerge in MS letters from Edwin Chadwick to William Bridges Adams, University College, London, Chadwick papers, Copybook IV, pp. 96–7, 154. For Smith’s reform work see G. L. Lewes, Dr Southwood Smith. A Retrospect (William Blackwood and Sons, 1891).
Shanley, Feminism, Marriage and the Law, p. 117; Jane Grey Perkins, Life of Mrs Norton (John Murray, 1909), p. 154.
For Stansfeld’s contribution to the later cause, see J. O. S. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals (Hassocks: Harvester Press), 1979, p. 480.
E. M. Sigsworth and T. J. Wyke, ‘A Study of Victorian Prostitution and Venereal Disease’, in Martha Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 80;
Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society. Women, Class and the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), pp. 35–7.
Eric Bristow, Vice and Vigilance (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1977), p. 71.
Selma B. Kanner, ‘Victorian Institutional Patronage: Angela Burdett-Coutts, Charles Dickens and Urania Cottage; Reformatory for Women, 1846–58’, (PhD thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1972), passim;
John P. Frazee, ‘Dickens and Unitarianism’, Dickens Studies Annual, 18, 1989, pp. 116–43.
P. T. Cominos, ‘Late Victorian Sexual Respectability and the Social System’, International Review of Social History, Vol. 8, 1963, pp. 18–48, 216–50.
Joan Perkin, Women and Marriage in Nineteenth Century England (Rout-ledge, 1989), p. 18.
For a full consideration of women’s attraction to the anti-slavery cause, see L. and R. Billington, ‘“A Burning Zeal for Righteousness”: Women in the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1820–1860’, in J. Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different. Women’s Politics 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 82–111.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980);
Ann Summers, ‘A Home from Home — Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century’, in Sandra Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (Croom Helm, 1979), pp. 33–63.
Jane Rendall, Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum, 1986), pp. 254–75; Banks, Faces of Feminism, p. 16.
MS letter from Bessie Raynor Parkes to Samuel Blackwell, Girton College, Cambridge, Parkes Papers, Vol. IX/16. Also cited in Jane Rendall, ‘Friendship and Politics: Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon (1827–1892) and Bessie Raynor Parkes (1829–1925)’, in J. Rendall and Susan Mendus (eds), Sexuality and Subordination. Interdisciplinary Studies of Gender in the Nineteenth Century (Routledge, 1989), p. 156.
Two writers greatly influenced by the radical unitarians, Charles Dickens and Elizabeth Gaskell, proved instrumental in effecting such a shift. Geoffrey Watts, The Fallen Woman in the Nineteenth Century English Novel (Croom Helm, 1984), p. 9;
Eric Trudgill, Madonnas and Magdalenes. The Origins and Development of Victorian Sexual Attitudes (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1976), p. 289.
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© 1995 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (1995). ‘Merely a Question of Bargain and Sale’: Law Reform and the Union of the Sexes. In: The Early Feminists. Studies in Gender History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-26582-4_5
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