Abstract
The involvement of middle-class and elite women in politics and community affairs is one of the newest areas of historiographical inquiry. Until recently, treatments of these topics tended to focus almost exclusively upon women’s philanthropic contributions to the community. This activity was seen to reflect women’s preoccupation with religion and their internalisation of ideologies concerning their supposedly caring, benevolent natures. Such work was simultaneously interpreted as a ‘safety-valve’: a means by which elite women, frustrated by the circumscribed nature of their lives, might find fulfilment beyond the domestic hearth.
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Notes
The classic account is Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, (1979) reprinted in Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 75–93.
See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (London: Routledge, 1987), especially p. 19.
Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), pp. 254–62. The quotes are from pp. 254 and 261.
F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 36.
Ann Summers, ‘“’A Home from Home”: Women’s Philanthropic Work in the Nineteenth Century’, in S. Burman (ed.), Fit Work for Women (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 39.
Kathryn Sutherland, ‘Hannah More’s Counter-Revolutionary Feminism’, in Kelvin Everest (ed.), Revolution in Writing: British Literary Responses to the French Revolution (Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1991), pp. 27–63.
Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England 1760–1860 (London and New York: Longman, 1998), pp. 166–70.
Kenneth Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick: Radical Quaker’, in Gail Malmgreen (ed.), Religion in the Lives of English Women (London: Croom Helm, 1986), pp. 41–67.
See Martha Vicinus, Independent Women: Work and Community For Single Women, 1850–1920 (London: Virago, 1985), ch. 2.
K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), pp. 102–10.
Jessica Gerard, Country House Life: Family and Servants, 1815–1914 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 122–3;
Peter Mandler, ‘From Almack’s to Willis’s: Aristocratic Women and Politics, 1815–1867’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power: British Women and Politics, 1780–1998 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
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 and New York: Longman, 1997), p. 156.
Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society; Elaine Chalus, ‘That Epidemical Madness’; Amanda Foreman, Georgiana Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998).
Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 205.
P. J. Jupp, ‘The Roles of Royal and Aristocratic Women in British Politics, c. 1782–1832’, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: Institute of Irish Studies, Queen’s University, 1995), pp. 106–7.
Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society, pp. 132–9; Sarah Richardson, ‘The Role of Women in Electoral Politics’, Northern History, 32 (1996), pp. 133–51.
Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London: Croom Helm, 1973), p. 26;
K. D. Reynolds, ‘Politics without Feminism. The Victorian Political Hostess,’ in Clarissa Campbell Orr (ed.), Wollstonecraft’s Daughters: Womanhood in England and France (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 94–108.
Jane Robinson, Angels of Albion: The Women of the Indian Mutiny (London: Viking, 1996), p. 90. See also Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society p. 120.
Leonore Davidoff, ‘The Role of Gender in the “First Industrial Nation”: Farming and the Countryside in England, 1780–1850’, in Leonore Davidoff, Words Between, Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), p. 190; Davidoff and Hall, Family Fortunes pp. 135–7.
Elaine Chalus, ‘“’…& if I were in Parliament”: Women, Electoral Privilege and Practice in the Eighteenth Century’; and Matthew Cragoe, ‘“Jenny rules the roost”: Women and Electoral Politics, 1821–1868’, in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women and British Politics, 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat. (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 2000), pp. 19–38 and 153–68.
Ruth and Edmund Frow (eds), Political Women 1800–1850 (London: Pluto Press, 1989), pp. 2–15.
Helen Rogers, ‘“The Prayer, The Passion and the Reason” of Eliza Sharples: Freethought, Women’s Rights and Republicanism, 1832–52’, in Eileen Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 52–78. The quote is on p. 53.
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. 19–53.
Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century (London: Virago Press, 1983), pp. 72–3.
Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (Basingstoke: Macmillan - now Palgrave, 1991), passim.
Alex Tyrell, ‘Women’s Mission and Pressure Group Politics in Britain, (1825–60)’, Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library, 63 (1980), p. 221.
Corfield, ‘Elizabeth Heyrick’; the term ‘moral radicalism’ is developed in Louis and Rosemary Billington, ‘“’A Burning Zeal for Righteousness”: Women in the British Anti-Slavery Movement 1820–1860’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 82–111;
Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 10318.
Clare Midgley, ‘Slave Sugar Boycotts, Female Activism and the Domestic Base of British Anti-Slavery Culture’, Slavery and Abolition, 17, no. 3 (1996), pp. 137–62.
Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History (London: Verso, 1992), pp. 72–3.
This emerges clearly in the letters edited by Clare Taylor, British and American Abolitionists: An Episode in Transatlantic Understanding (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1974), passim.
Jill Liddington, The Long Road to Greenham: Feminism and Anti-Militarism in Britain since 1820 (London: Virago, 1989), ch. 1;
Tyrell, ‘Woman’s Mission’, p. 218; Elizabeth Isichei, Victorian Quakers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 108.
Jane Rendall, The Origins of Modern Feminism: Women in Britain, France and the United States, 1780–1860 (Chicago: Lyceum Books, 1985), pp. 254–6.
Lee Holcombe, Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in Nineteenth-Century England (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1983), pp. 58–62.
Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England. Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
Sally Alexander, Becoming a Woman: And Other Essays in 19th and 20th Century Feminist History (London: Virago, 1994), pp. 129, 139.
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© 2001 Kathryn Gleadle
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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_6
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