Abstract
In the official records of the organisations formed by middle-class radicals in the early years of Victoria’s reign, women are most notable by their absence. This is particularly striking, given that many of the radicals concerned in middle-class Chartist activity and in the promotion of European nationalism professed an ambitious feminism.1 This chapter, by focusing upon two reforming communities — the radicals associated with the Ham Common Concordium and the Ashurst circle — considers how we are to understand this apparent inconsistency and asks how middle-class women might themselves have perceived the seemingly restricted nature of their political involvement. Central to such a discussion is an understanding of how contemporary radicals variously negotiated with Victorian discourses on gender, most notably the ubiquitous notion of ‘separate spheres’.
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Notes
This was especially true of those connected to Unitarianism and Owenism. See Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, 1831–1851 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995).
See A. J. Vickery, ‘Golden Ages to Separate Spheres: a Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal, 36 (1993), pp. 383–414. For a consideration of the limitations of such concepts when applied to aristocratic women, see K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago, 1983).
For the influence of Saint-Simonism and Fourierism on British feminism, see Gail Malmgreen, Neither Bread Nor Roses: Utopian Feminists and the English Working Class, 1800–1850 (Brighton: John L. Noyce, 1978); Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 28–9, 45–6, 168–9 and Gleadle, The Early Feminists, pp. 48–52.
Claire Goldberg Moses, French Feminism in the 19th Century (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984), Chapters 3–5.
See Dolores Dooley, ‘Anna Doyle Wheeler’, in Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (eds), Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th-century Ireland (Dublin: Attic Press, 1995), pp. 19–54.
Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, pp. 167–72 and J. Saville, ‘J. E. Smith and the Owenite Movement, 1833–4’, in Sidney Pollard and John Salt (eds), Robert Owen, Prophet of the Poor: Essays in Honour of the 200th Anniversary of His Birth (London: Macmillan, 1971), pp. 115–44.
The Crisis, 3, no. 12 (16 November 1834), p. 6; R. K. P. Pankhurst, The Saint Simonians, Mill and Carlyle: A Preface to Modern Thought (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1957), p. 114.
Details of the relationship between Chichester, Welch and Smith may be found in William Anderson Smith, ‘Shepherd’ Smith the Universalist: The Story of a Mind, Being a Life of the Rev James E. Smith (London: Sampson Low, Marston and Co., 1892), pp. 165, 191, 198–9, 205–7.
It was thanks to their financial aid that Carlile was able to set off on an ambitious lecture tour of the provinces, issue several pamphlets from Manchester during winter 1837–8, and establish a new weekly journal, The Church in 1838. Joel H. Weiner, Radicalism and Freethought in Nineteenth Century Britain: The Life of Richard Carlile (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), pp. 225–30, 239.
Greaves had been a disciple of the educationist Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi in Switzerland. Greaves’s own interpretation of infant development placed a considerable emphasis upon the individual’s innate and spiritual capacities. A memoir of Greaves was composed by one of his followers: A. F. Barham, ‘A Memoir of the Late James Pierrepont Greaves Esq’, in An Odd Medley of Literary Curiosities (London, 1845). Useful insights may be gained from Letters and Extracts from the MS Writings of fames Pierrepont Greaves, 2 vols (Ham Common, Surrey: Concordium Press, 1843).
F. B. Sanborn, Bronson Alcott at Alcott House, England and Fruitlands, New England (1842–4) (Cedar Rapids, IA: Torch Press, 1918), pp. 29ff. Philip McCann and Francis A. Young, Samuel Wilderspin and the Infant School Movement (London: Croom Helm, 1982), pp. 264–5. An attempt to elucidate the school’s educational philosophy was made in Mr and Miss Wright, Retrospective Sketch of an Educative Attempt at Alcott House, Ham Common, Near Richmond, Surrey (London: V. Torras, 1840).
The Phalanstery; or Attractive Industry and Moral Harmony: Translated from the French of Madame Gatti de Gamond, by an English Lady (London: Whittaker, 1841).
Details on this community may be found in W. H. A. Armytage, Heavens Below: Utopian Experiments in England, 1560–1960 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), pp. 171–83; Sanborn, Bronson Alcott, passim; Odell Shephard, Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott (Boston, MA: Little Brown, 1937), pp. 320–6. See also Thomas Frost, Forty Years’ Recollections: Literary and Political (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1880), p. 41ff., and Harriet Jay, Robert Buchanan: Some Account of His Life’s Work and His Literary Friendships (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1903), p. 10. For a recent study of vegetarianism among contemporary reformers see John Belchem, “Temperance in All Things”: Vegetarianism, the Manx Press and the Alternative Agenda of Reform in the 1840s’, in Malcolm Chase and Ian Dyck (eds), Living and Learning: Essays in Honour of J. F. C. Harrison (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1996), pp. 149–62.
Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem, p. 338; Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 60–1.
Eliza Meteyard, Nine Hours Movement: Industrial and Household Tales (London: Green and Co., 1872), p. xi. Many of Greaves’s outer circle — including Barmby, Wheeler and Home — moved in radical unitarian circles during the 1840s.
For women’s attempt to put domestic issues on the political agenda in the later period see C. Rowan, ‘Women in the Labour Party, 1906–20’, Feminist Review, 12 (1982), pp. 74–91, and Alistair Thomson, ‘“Domestic Drudgery will be a Thing of the Past”: Co-operative Women and the Reform of Housework’, in Stephen Yeo (ed.), New Views of Co-operation (London and New York: Routledge, 1988), pp. 108–27.
For brief discussions of the National Association see I. J. Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past and Present, 44 (1969), pp. 76–105; F. Goodway, London Chartism, 1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), pp. 40–2; J. T. Ward, Chartism (London: B. T. Batsford, 1973), p. 150.
Further details on this group may be found in Gleadle, The Early Feminists, passim. See also the excellent biographical accounts by Eugene Rasor in J. O. S. Baylen and N. J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1979).
The young George Eliot, who mixed in these circles, attended such functions — Gordon S. Haight (ed.), The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954), vol. i, pp. 91–2. See also Chapter 3 in this volume.
See Kathryn Gleadle, ‘Caroline Stansfeld’, in the New Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming); J. W. Mario, The Birth of Modern Italy (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), p. 87.
Elizabeth Adams Daniel, Jessie White Mario: Risorgimento Revolutionary (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1977), p. 36. In 1859 she also wrote a letter to the Newcastle Guardian on the issue of women’s suffrage; see Rasor in Baylen and Gossman, Biographical Dictionary.
Harriet E. King, Letters and Recollections of Mazzini (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1912), p. 126. Mazzini himself was highly critical of Utopian and communitarian theories.
E. F. Richards (ed.), Mazzini’s Letters to an English Family, 1844–54, 3 vols (London: John Lane, 1920–2), vol. i, p. 25.
Barbara Hammond and J. L. Hammond, James Stansfeld: A Victorian Champion of Sex Equality (London: Longmans, Green, 1932), pp. 58, 71; see also the biographical accounts of the sisters by Rasor in Baylen and Gossman, Biographical Dictionary; Daniel, Jessie White Mario, p. 38; Cowen papers, A871, 476, 634.
King, Letters and Recollections, p. 12 (King, who had not then reached her majority, was prevented by her father from fulfilling her ambition); Josephine E. Butler, Memoir of John Grey of Dilston (Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas, 1869), pp. 296, 392.
Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 160.
See ibid. and also Alan Ruston, ‘Clementia Taylor’, Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society, 20 (1991), pp. 62–8.
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© 2000 Kathryn Gleadle
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Gleadle, K. (2000). ‘Our Several Spheres’: Middle-class Women and the Feminisms of Early Victorian Radical Politics. 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_8
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