Abstract
During the second half of the nineteenth century new opportunities emerged for female involvement in public and political affairs. In addition to the evolving philanthropic tradition, women gained access to local government office and direct involvement in party politics. The women’s rights movement also burgeoned, bringing with it the growth of a feminist sensibility which embraced notjust women’s rights, but such issues as temperance, social morality and peace. In all these areas, women’s confidence to engage with the ‘public sphere’ drew upon a complex mix of cultural influences. Evangelical, feminist, political, imperial and national discourses proliferated and diverged to produce enormous diversityin both women’s activities and their ideological motivations. Meanwhile, the consolidation of a female consciousness encouraged many female activists to seek cross-class collaboration — ambitions which frequently foundered upon the particularity of their own political visions.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
See Jessica Gerard, ‘Lady Bountiful: Women of the Landed Classes and Rural Philanthropy’, Victorian Studies, 30 (1987), pp. 183–211.
Pamela Horn, Victorian Countrywomen (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 46.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 144.
K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 118–19;
Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), p. 127.
Antoinette M. Burton, ‘The White Woman’s Burden: British Feminists and “The Indian Woman”, 1865–1915’; and Barbara N. Ramusack, ‘Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British Women Activists in India, 1865–1945’, in Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel (eds), Western Women and Imperialism: Complicity and Resistance (Bloomington and Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1992), pp. 144 and 19–36;
Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 163–4;
Nancy Fix Anderson, ‘Bridging Cross-Cultural Feminisms: Annie Besant and Women’s Rights in England and India, 1874–1933’, Women’s History Review, 3, no. 4 (1994), pp. 563–80.
The WPPL became the Women’s Trade Union League in 1891 (WTUL); the WIC merged with the Women’s Trade Union Association in 1897. Rosemary Feurer, ‘The Meaning of “Sisterhood”: The British Women’s Movement and Protective Labor Legislation, 1870–1900’, Victorian Studies, 31 (1988), pp. 233–60;
Eleanor Mappen, Helping Women at Work: The Women’s Industrial Council, 1889–1914 (London: Hutchinson, 1985);
Eleanor Gordon, Women and the Labour Movement in Scotland 1850–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), pp. 212–35.
Jane Lewis, Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England (Aldershot: Edward Elgar, 1991), passim but see especially pp. 33–4.
For the social purity movement, see Lucy Bland, Banishing the Beast: English Feminism and Sexual Morality, 1885–1914 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), ch. 3;
Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (London: Routledge, 1992), chs 3–4;
Frank Mort, ‘Purity, Feminism and the State, Sexuality and Moral Politics, 1880–1914’, in M. Langan and B. Schwartz (eds), Crises in the British State 1880–1914 (London: Hutchinson, 1985), pp. 209–25.
Olive Anderson, ‘Women Preachers in Mid-Victorian Britain: Some Reflections on Feminism, Popular Religion and Social Change’, Historical Journal, 3 (1969), pp. 467–84.
Lillian Lewis Shiman, ’“Changes are Dangerous”: Women and Temperance in Victorian England’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760–1930 (London and Sydney: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 193–215.
For some of the complexities of Booth’s view on the woman question, see Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Robin Lauterbach Sheets and William Veeder (eds), The Woman Question: Society and Literature in Britain and America, 1837–1883 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1983),3 vols,ii, pp. 180–3.
For further details, see Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). The following paragraphs draw heavily upon this work.
Maria Luddy (ed.), Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), pp. 289–96.
David Rubinstein, Before the Suffragettes: Women’s Emancipation in the 1890s (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 173.
Annmarie Turnbull,’“So Extremely Like Parliament”: The Work ofWomen Members of the London School Board, 1870–1914’, in London Feminist History Group, The Sexual Dynamics of History: Men’s Power, Women’s Resistance (London: Pluto Press, 1983), pp. 120–33; Hollis, Ladies Elect pp. 83–8.
Martin Pugh, Women and the Women’s Movement in Britain, 1914–1959 (Basingstoke: Macmillan–now Palgrave, 1992), pp. 226–30.
See, for example, Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985), p. 244.
G. E. Maguire, Conservative Women: A History of Women and the Conservative Party, 1874–1997 (London: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1998), pp. 16–21;
Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 72–80;
Reynolds, Aristocratic Women p. 189; Dorothy Thompson, Outsiders: Class, Gender and Nation (London: Verso, 1993), ch. 6.
Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 204, 98–9.
This discussion of the WLF relies upon Linda Walker, ‘Party Political Women: A Comparative Study of Liberal Women and the Primrose League 1888–1914’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 18001914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 165–91.
Cited in Beatrix Campbell, The Iron Ladies: Why Do Women Vote Tory (London: Virago, 1987), p. 28.
June Hannam, ‘“In the Comradeship of the Sexes Lies the Hope of Progress and Social Regeneration”: Women in the West Riding ILP c. 1890–1914’, in Rendall, (ed.), Equal or Different?, 1979, pp. 214–38;
Jill Liddington and Jill Norris, One Hand Tied Behind Us: The Rise of the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London: Virago, 1978), pp. 129–31.
For the SDF, see Karen Hunt, Equivocal Feminists: The Social Democratic Federation and the Woman Question 1884–1911 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 58.
Gillian Scott, Feminism and the Politics of Working Women: The Women’s Co-operative Guild, 1880s to the Second World War (London: UCL, 1998), p. 72;
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: Routledge, 1988), pp. 115–16.
For an overview of mid-Victorian feminism, see Barbara Caine, English Feminism 1780–1980 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), ch. 3.
See Martin Pugh, The March of the Women: A Revisionist Analysis of the Campaign for Women’s Suffrage, 1866–1914 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 8–10.
Cited in Susan Kingsley Kent, Sex and Suffrage in Britain 1860–1914 (London: Routledge, 1990, first published 1987), p. 14.
See also Sheila Jeffreys, The Spinster and Her Enemies: Feminism and Sexuality 1880–1930 (London: Pandora, 1985).
Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Leah Leneman, ‘The Awakened Instinct: Vegetarianism and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain’, Women’s History Review, 6, no. 2 (1997), pp. 271–87;
Mary Ann Elston, ‘Women and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England, 1870–1900’, in Nicholas A. Rupke (ed.), Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Croom Helm, 1987), pp. 259–94.
Full details of the campaign may be found in Judith R. Walkowitz, Prostitution and Victorian Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), particularly pt II.
For the use of melodramatic tropes in the campaign, see Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight pp. 86–93. For a full discussion of the relative importance of female and male networks of support and friendship and support in the movement, see Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), ch. 5.
See Lucy Bland, ‘Feminist Vigilantes of Late-Victorian England’, in Carol Smart (ed.), Regulating Womanhood: Historical Essays on Marriage, Motherhood and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 33–52.
For a bleak assessment of Mill’s role, see Barbara Caine, John Stuart Mill and the English Women’s Movement’, Historical Studies, 18 (1978), pp. 52–67.
Sylvia Strauss, ’Traitors to the Masculine Cause’: The Men’s Campaign for Women’s Rights (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1982), pp. 179, 199.
For useful debates on these issues, see Angela V. John and Claire Eustance (eds), The Men’s Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women’s Suffrage in Britain 1890–1920 (London: Routledge, 1997);
Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England; Olive Banks, Becoming a Feminist: The Social Origins of ‘First Wave’ Feminism (Brighton: Wheatsheaf, 1986), ch. 6.
For further details on the splits which beset the movement, see Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘Women and the Vote’, in June Purvis (ed.), Women’s History Britain, 1850–1945: An Introduction (London: UCL Press, 1995), pp. 280–7.
Sandra Stanley Holton, Feminism and Democracy: Women’s Suffrage and Reform Politics in Britain 1900–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 18.
See Frances Power Cobbe, ‘Why Women Desire the Franchise’ (1874) reprinted in Jane Lewis (ed.), Before the Vote was Won: Arguments for and Against Women’s Suffrage 1864–1896 (London: Routledge, 1987), pp. 179–83. This was a common argument.
Sandra Stanley Holton, ‘British Freewomen: National Identity, Constitutionalism and Languages of Race in Early Suffragist Histories’, in Eileen Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 149–71.
Sandra Stanley Holton, ’“Now You See It, Now You Don’t”: The Women’s Franchise League and Its Place in Contending Narratives of the Women’s Suffrage Movement’, in Maroula Joannou and June Purvis (eds), The Women’s Suffrage Movement: New Feminist Perspectives (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 15–36.
For an analysis of Dora Montefiore’s evolving positions on suffrage, see Karen Hunt, Journeying Through Suffrage: The Politics of Dora Monte- fiore’, in Claire Eustance, Joan Ryan and Laura Ugolini (eds), A Suffrage Reader: Charting Directions in British Suffrage History (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), pp. 162–76.
For anti-suffragism in this period, see Mrs Humphrey Ward, ‘An Appeal Against Female Suffrage’ (1889) in Lewis (ed.), Before the Vote was Won, pp. 409–17;
Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women’s Suffrage in Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1978); Pugh, The March of Women, pp. 145–67.
For an extended discussion of the links between feminism and empire, see Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women, and Imperial Culture, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).
Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London: Virago, 1989), ch. 2.
Margaret Ward, Unmanageable Revolutionaries: Women and Irish Nationalism (London: Pluto Press, 1989), chs 1–2; Luddy (ed.), Women in Ireland pp. 260–8, 297–304.
Luddy (ed.), Women in Ireland pp. 271–3; see also Rosemary Cullen Owens, Smashing Times: A History of the Irish Women’s Suffrage Movement (Dublin: Attic Press, 1984), ch. 2.
Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan, ‘From Temperance to Suffrage?’, in Angela V. John (ed.), Our Mothers’ Land: Chapters in Welsh Women’s History, 1830–1939 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1991), pp. 135–58.
Copyright information
© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Gleadle, K. (2001). Politics, Community and Protest. In: British Women in the Nineteenth Century. Social History in Perspective. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4039-3754-4_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-67630-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-4039-3754-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)