By Katherine Cornell
Edited by Tanya Mishra and Mark Potter
Between 1830 and 1867, a new paradigm was formed in Britain which continued into the
twentieth century as working-class women seized new opportunities to participate in
politics.[1] This redefinition of citizenship along gender and class based lines can be seen most clearly in the Chartist movement, which attempted to reconcile traditional working-class notions of femininity with the growing demand for greater female political involvement by extending the domestic sphere to encompass all matters relating directly to the home. Moreover, movements such as Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League can be seen as modes of pseudo-political campaigning for women that transcended a specific cause, whilst also providing a blueprint for later reform movements such as the women’s suffrage campaign. Finally, it is interesting to compare working and middle-class notions of femininity, and the impact of such ideas on female political involvement, using the examples of the Chartist movement and the Anti-Corn Law League respectively.
First, then, one needs to consider the Chartist extension of the domestic sphere in providing a justification for women’s increasing involvement in politics. Anna Clark has argued that
Chartists sought to secure women’s support for fear that, if they remained excluded from the
movement and confined within their roles in the home, they might discourage their husbands from participating in politics or even seek to undermine the campaign.[2] Where Clark’s argument falls short, however, is it that it fails to recognise that, although most Chartists favoured female political involvement, women were not expected to participate in the movement in the same way as men. Typically, women’s task was seen to consist in lending their male counterparts the support deemed indispensable to Chartism’s success. [3] The rhetoric of Chartism was couched in domesticity; in an address to the Northern Star, the Chartist women of Newcastle proclaimed to have “bonded ourselves together in union” to assist “the workingmen of England, Ireland and Scotland” so that they might “establish happy homes”.[4] Ironically, it was the Chartist ideal of domesticity which brought working-class women into the movement, albeit in a less overtly political role than Chartist men.[5] Indeed, to the working classes, the separation of the public domain from the private was all but unheard of. Although there still existed a case for separate spheres, the domestication of national politics made this increasingly difficult to justify. It was by dint of their experiences labouring for wages and participating in movements such as the campaign for factory reform that the political opportunities open to working-class women were somewhat greater than those open to their middle-class counterparts.[6]
Chartists were able to exploit women’s exposure to the public domain for their strategies of
petitioning, organising processions and strikes, and boycotting newly enfranchised
shopkeepers who refused to support the movement. Chartist women held dinner parties and
soirées, far more respectable alternatives to the public house, whilst processions and
demonstrations were often family affairs. Thus, Chartism provided its female members with
an opportunity to reconceptualise themselves as political activists.[7] Many Chartist women also acted of their own volition, establishing just under one hundred and fifty female Chartist
associations (FCAs) between 1838 and 1852. Often, FCAs modelled their methods of political
activism on those means employed by Chartist men. For example, Chartist demonstrations
were frequently attended by FCAs brandishing banners, which were often couched in religious terms, promoting working-class women’s interests. FCAs, however, could only operate within the parameters of women’s domestic responsibilities. The East London Female Patriotic Association, for example, held their meetings at eight o’clock on Monday evenings and finished no later than ten. This is indicative of the limitations imposed on Chartist women’s political activism, particularly with respect to working-class notions of female propriety.[8] Similarly, a fundamental part of the Anti-Corn Law League’s rhetorical strategy was to attribute political importance to women’s role in the private sphere, emphasising the link between domestic economy and financial policy.[9] Thus, both Chartism and the League facilitated women’s increased participation in politics by portraying their work as an extension of their domestic duties. Chartism’s emphasis on the importance of the family also provided a justification for women’s participation in the movement, albeit along heavily gender-based lines.[10] Thus, by reframing women’s domestic role along political lines, Chartism enlarged the political opportunities open to women without infringing upon their role in the home.[11]
Both Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League were modes of pseudo-political campaigning
for women that transcended a specific cause, providing a blueprint for later reform movements. Of the modes of political activism employed by Chartists, petitioning was arguably the most common, if not also the most effective. An average of sixteen thousand petitions were submitted every parliamentary sitting between 1838 and 1848, with 33,898 submitted in 1843 alone.[12] For the many who remained unenfranchised after the 1832 Reform Act, petitioning was a form of political activity that yet remained open to them. Paul Pickering emphasises the limitations to the strategies employed by the Chartists when confronted with the repudiation of their petitions by the House of Commons, as opposed to those methods open to the Anti-Corn Law League, such as political elections and national bazaars, by dint of its chiefly middle-class membership. As a means of asserting political influence, the petition was particularly significant to Chartist women who, as well as signing, were also heavily involved in the collection of signatures. Indeed, women constituted some of the movement’s most celebrated collectors of signatures.[13] Sarah Richardson furthers Pickering’s argument, challenging the school of thought that regards the period following the passage of the 1832 Reform Act as one characterised by the growth of an increasingly male-dominated public sphere and the development of a more standardised parliamentary system. Women, argues Richardson, were able to utilise their experiences of participating in royal commissions and select committees in order to make their voices heard in government.[14]
As a means of political activism, however, it was the presentation of petitions expressing
specifically female grievances to parliament, formerly by the anti-slavery movement, although such tactics were later adopted by movements such as the Anti-Corn Law League in the mid- nineteenth century, that ultimately validated women’s claim to political representation.[15] This claim, however, was often justified on the grounds that women were fighting for the right to represent their husbands and sons, rather than for their own political interests. Ambivalence to female political activism was reflected, too, in Chartist publications such as the radical Scottish Patriot which, whilst praising the members of the Gorbals Female Universal Suffrage Association for championing their male counterparts, lamented “the necessity that exists for drawing the female mind from employment more congenial to the close and retiring habits of the women of this country, than the arena of politics”.[16] Similar attitudes were expressed in Northern Star editorials, which endorsed women’s exclusion from the franchise so as to “preserve harmony” in the home.[17] Arguments such as these were maintained as late as 1846-47, and were characteristic of working-class attitudes towards female political involvement.
When considering the political opportunities open to women in the years leading up to the 1867 Second Reform Act, it is necessary to differentiate between working and middle-class notions of femininity, and the respective goals towards which these ideas were aimed. Whereas the ultimate end towards which middle-class notions of domesticity was directly related was social development, working-class Chartist women advocated for the mitigation of female employment in the public domain on the grounds that it would maintain domestic security. Chartist rhetoric was couched in domesticity, and it was towards the family that the
movement’s political activism was primarily aimed. The emphasis Chartists placed on
women’s role in the home necessitated a move towards a female lifestyle which was far less
politically active.[18] Paradoxically, however, it was Chartism’s emphasis on female domesticity that led to women’s increasing involvement in the movement.
Dorothy Thompson has challenged the view that Chartism enlarged the political opportunities open to its female members, arguing instead for a decline in female political participation from the mid-1840s onwards. Underlying this process, Thompson argues, was the growing influence of the temperance movement on working-class women. Whilst the latter grew increasingly hesitant to participate in political gatherings held at inns and taverns, due to a reduction in membership, fewer localities were able to support their regular meeting venues and so had to resort to the public house.[19] Although Chartism may theoretically have afforded its women members the opportunity to involve themselves more fully in the movement’s project, on a practical level this was often difficult to reconcile with Chartist notions of female respectability. Moreover, prior to the amendment of the Municipal Franchise Bill in 1869 which extended the vote to single women ratepayers in local elections, of the female committee members reported in Chartist publications, most were married. This would suggest that, by dint of having a husband, married women were afforded greater political opportunities within the Chartist movement than their single counterparts.[20]
To conclude, to look at this period as being one of either increased tolerance to, or growing
ambivalence towards, women’s participation in politics is too simplistic a view. Certainly,
movements such as Chartism and the Anti-Corn Law League were modes of pseudo-political
campaigning that afforded working and middle-class women a political education. Chartism, however, ultimately failed to reconcile women’s political activism with the movement’s domestic ideal and, as a result, many Chartist women rejected public politics altogether. The 1832 Reform Act, for the first time, explicitly excluded women from the franchise, and the more that politics focussed on the electorate, the less power that methods of campaigning such as petitioning, which had previously been exploited to great effect by working- and middle-class women alike, held in parliament. It was not until the late-nineteenth century that women re-emerged in the public sphere and even then, it was only ever within the confines of the now firmly established working-class ideal of female domesticity.
Notes
[1] S. Richardson, ‘Conversations with Parliament: Women and the Politics of Pressure in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Parliamentary History, 37/1 (2018), p. 35.
[2] A. Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’ Journal of British Studies, 31/1 (1992), pp. 73-74.
[3] J. Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991), p. 174.
[4] Address to the Northern Star from the Chartist Women of Newcastle (9 February 1839) in A. Twells (ed.), British Women’s History: A Documentary History from the Enlightenment to World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007), p. 164.
[5] Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, p. 65.
[6] Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, pp. 75-76.
[7] Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, pp. 76-78.
[8] Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, pp. 199-201.
[9] Richardson, ‘Conversations with Parliament’, p. 37.
[10] M. Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), p. 43.
[11] Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, pp. 177-178.
[12] P. Pickering, ‘“And Your Petitioners &c”: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics, 1838-1848’ English Historical Review, 116/466 (2001), p. 371.
[13] Pickering, ‘“And Your Petitioners &c”’, pp. 378-382.
[14] Richardson, ‘Conversations with Parliament’, p. 42.
[15] Pickering, ‘“And Your Petitioners &c”’, p. 382.
[16] Scottish Patriot (14 September 1839) in Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, p. 76.
[17] Northern Star (19 September 1840) in Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity’, p. 80.
[18] Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, pp. 278-280.
[19] Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, p. 280; D. Thompson, ‘Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension’ in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 134.
[20] Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement, p. 200.
Bibliography
Primary sources
Address to the Northern Star from the Chartist women of Newcastle, 9 February 1839
Northern Star, 19 September 1840
Scottish Patriot, 14 September 1839
Secondary sources
Clark, Anna, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the
1830s and 1840s’ Journal of British Studies, 31/1, 1992
Parry, Jonathon, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain. London: Yale University Press, 1993
Pickering, Paul, ‘“And Your Petitioners &c”: Chartist Petitioning in Popular Politics, 1838-
1848’ English Historical Review, 116/466, 2001
Purvis, June (ed.), Women’s History: Britain, 1850-1945: An Introduction. New York:
Routledge, 1995
Richardson, Sarah, ‘Conversations with Parliament: Women and the Politics of Pressure in
Nineteenth-Century Britain’, Parliamentary History, 37/1, 2018
Schwarzkopf, Jutta, Women in the Chartist Movement. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1991
Scott, Joan, ‘On Language, Gender and Working-Class History’ in Gender and the Politics of
History. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988
Steinbach, Susie, Understanding the Victorians: Politics, Culture and Society in Nineteenth-
Century England. Abingdon: Routledge, 2017
Thompson, Dorothy, ‘Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension’
in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds.), The Rights and Wrongs of Women. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976
Twells, Alison (ed.), British Women’s History: A Documentary History from the
Enlightenment to World War I. London: I. B. Tauris, 2007
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