Gender in the Marketplace: Contestation and Accommodation in Thackeray’s The Newcomes

Abstract

In the lead article of The Westminster Review, July 1851, Harriet Taylor Mill announced the dawning of a new era, one of ‘organized agitation,’ of ‘public meetings and practical political action’ aimed directly at:

the enfranchisement of women; their admission, in law, and in fact, to equality in all rights, political, civil, and social, with the male citizens of the community.

It will add to the surprise with which many will receive this intelligence, that the agitation which has commenced is not a pleading by male writers and orators for women, those who are professedly to be benefitted remaining either indifferent or ostensibly hostile: it is a political movement, practical in its object, carried on in a form which denotes an intention to persevere. And it is a movement not merely for women, but by them. (149)