Abstract
The important role that women played in the agitation against the collection of protectionist legislation known as the Corn Laws has been a neglected area in the historiography of nineteenth-century women’s politics. This is despite the views of those early women’s rights campaigners who agreed with Helen Blackburn that ‘the Anti-Corn Law agitation was the nursery in which many a girl of that generation learned to know how closely public questions concerned her’.1 Moreover, the sheer scale of women’s participation marks out the Anti-Corn Law campaign as an important historical subject in its own right. At the height of the agitation tens of thousands of women signed petitions to the Queen on the subject, while thousands of others attended political meetings in Manchester, London and elsewhere. Hundreds more supported tea parties and bazaars, whose profits helped to fund the Anti-Corn Law League’s huge propaganda effort and paid for the expenses of registering voters and fighting elections.
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Notes
Helen Blackburn, Women’s Suffrage: A Record of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the British Isles with Biographical Sketches of Miss Becker (Oxford and London: Williams & Norgate, 1902), pp. 15–18, esp. p. 17. Later historians have reaffirmed the importance of the League in the origins of early feminism without examining women’s activities in great detail. For example, Constance Rover, Women’s Suffrage and Party Politics in Britain, 1866–1914 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1967), esp. p. 61; Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985), pp. 244–5; Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘From Anti-Slavery to Suffrage Militancy: The Bright Circle, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the British Women’s Movement’, in Caroline Daley and Melanie Nolan (eds), Suffrage and Beyond: International Feminist Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 217 and 229.
Alex Tyrrell, ‘“Woman’s Mission” and Pressure Group Politics (1825–1860)’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63, no. 1 (1980), pp. 194–230.
This view of the importance of the Corn Laws is described in Robert Stewart, The Politics of Protection: Lord Derby and the Protectionist Party, 1841–1852 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), esp. pp. 4–8. More recently it has been argued that protection was part of a more nuanced Conservative ideology: ‘conceived as a way of representing and re-balancing interests in a tariff which could identify propertied interests with a constitutionally conservative state. In this way it was considered to be a mechanism which could preserve the virtual representation of interests within the reformed constitution’. Anna Gambles, ‘Rethinking the Politics of Protection: Conservatism and the Corn Laws, 1830–52’, English Historical Review, CXIII (1998), p. 949.
The standard history of the League is Norman McCord, The Anti-Corn Law League, 1838–1846 (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1958). See also Archibald Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Frank Cass, 1968).
See, for example, the account of the sugar boycotts in Clare Midgley’s Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 60–2.
Prentice, History of the Anti-Corn Law League, vol. i, pp. 194–230.
Ibid., pp. 296–301.
Ryland Wallace, ‘Wales and the Anti-Corn Law League’, Welsh History Review, 13 (1986), pp. 8–9.
Biographical sketch of J. B. Smith, in J. B. Smith, Corn Law Papers vol. 1, pp. 21–2, Manchester Central Library. The role of women in elections more generally is examined in Elaine Chalus, ‘“That Epidemical Madness’: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London: Longman, 1997), pp. 151–78.
Anti-Bread Tax Circular, 1 July 1841. The League registration committees could prove contentious where they upset the balance of existing political alliances and arrangements. See, for example, F. M. L. Thompson, ‘Whigs and Liberals in the West Riding, 1830–1860’, English Historical Review, 74 (1959), pp. 214–39.
Catherine Hall, ‘Private Persons Versus Public Someones: Class, Gender and Politics in England, 1780–1850’, in Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), p. 152.
‘We have tickets for the monster meeting at Covent Garden Theatre on Wednesday, when all the great heroes of the League will meet. It is a noble battle that they have fought. And now, thank Heaven! they are just on the eve of their great glorious, and bloodless victory’ (Margaret Howitt (ed.), Mary Howitt, An Autobiography, 2 vols (London: W. Isbister, 1889), vol. ii, p. 36). Also quoted in Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism, p. 353, n. 48.
Anti-Corn Law League Bazaar Gazette, no. 8 (London, 1845), pp. 3–6.
See Toshio Kusamitsu, ‘Great Exhibitions before 1851’, History Workshop Journal, 29 (1980), pp. 70–89.
See R. J. Morris, ‘Voluntary Societies and British Urban Elites 1780–1850’, Historical Journal, 26 (1983), pp. 95–118. The ideas expressed here are elaborated in his book Class, Sect and Patty: The Making of the British Middle-Class, 1830–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), esp. Chapters 7 and 8.
Some of these implications have been explored by S. J. D. Green, ‘The Death of Pew Rents, the Rise of Bazaars, and the End of the Traditional Political Economy of Voluntary Religious Organizations: the Case of the West Riding of Yorkshire, c. 1870–1914’, Northern History, 27 (1991), pp. 198–235. The social and financial implications of bazaars have been described in F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Chapter 2.
The tactic of ‘selective shopping’, or exclusive dealing, was a further manifestation of the politicisation of household duties, and was practised in particular by Chartist women. See M. Thomis and J. Grimmet, Women in Protest, 1800–1850 (London and Canberra: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 131.
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Morgan, S. (2000). Domestic Economy and Political Agitation: Women and the Anti-Corn Law League, 1839–46. In: Gleadle, K., Richardson, S. (eds) Women in British Politics, 1760–1860. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62989-3_7
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