Normal Women, page 41
Despite enthusiasm for Nature by Romantic writers and readers, the elite women avoided seeing the destruction of the lives of poor women in the countryside just as they avoided seeing the exploitation of poor women in the industries and in the towns. The enclosure of common land and the changing use of the countryside, the exploitation of rural workers and the particular cruelty to women are never mentioned in the novels, though authors and readers were of the landowning classes. There is plenty of maypole dancing, but no enclosures.
Even women radicals from the upper classes could not bridge the class divide. The daughter of Elizabeth Fry, the great Quaker reformer, was attending an anti-slavery meeting in Norwich in 1840 when it was disrupted by Chartist women calling for the vote for all men. She described the working-class women reformers in nightmarish terms: ‘I also saw some women who excited the men, and whose shrill voices out screamed the roar of the men. I heard they were three well known Socialist sisters, the vilest of the vile.’ Another woman radical, Elizabeth Pease, risked her status by supporting Chartism and said it was an ‘almost outrageous stance for a lady’.128
Class hostility went both ways. Working women publicly abused ladies wearing foreign silks and the new Indian calicoes that were spoiling the business of English textile workers at the end of the eighteenth century. In 1804, Worcester women glovemakers attacked ladies wearing silk gloves for choosing the new fashion over locally made leather.129
Another terrible divide opened up between women: that of race. English elite women abolitionists excluded ex-slaves from their committees. The only women of African descent to share a platform with English elite abolitionists were from America: the ex-slave and abolitionist Ellen Craft and the free woman and abolitionist Sarah Parker Redmond.
The famous anti-slavery token made by the Wedgewood pottery in 1787 entitled ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ was popular among abolitionists in England. But it would be 1838 before a coin was struck for enslaved women’s rights – ‘Am I not a Woman and a Sister?’ – and then it was made for the American Anti-Slavery Society and popular in America.
English elite women did not feel a sisterhood with women of a lower class or another race.130 Elite women called for political rights for their own class, not for anyone else. They even used the example of slavery to support their campaign – comparing their inequality to slavery. Mary Wollstonecraft, the philosopher and writer, wrote: ‘I called women “slaves” I mean in a political and civil sense.’131 Wollstonecraft defined white middle- and upper-class women as slaves to their husbands and fathers, and compared them to slaves in the sugar plantations, to emphasise her call for the freedom of elite women: ‘Is half of the human species, like the poor African slaves, to be subject to prejudices that brutalise them . . . only to sweeten the cup of man?’132
‘AM I NOT A WOMAN AND A SISTER’ – the 1838 American copper medallion shows a freed woman slave. There was no UK equivalent
[And Cover] ‘Am I not a woman and a sister?’, Copper medallion, United States, 1837 (New York Historical Society/Getty Images)
The tin-eared comparison of the life-threatening, violent enslavement of African women to the oppression of elite white women was a tragic failure of sisterhood in a woman who is rightly famous for her campaigns for women. Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Man to argue against monarchy and aristocracy, followed by her finest work, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Though passionate for women’s education and keenly aware that girls were groomed as companions for their future, more important husbands, Wollstonecraft never advocated equal rights for all women. She supported class – different and better lives for upper- and middle-class women to those of working-class women. She was in favour of education for poor girls, but only up to the age of nine, when they should be entered into a trade or unskilled work. ‘Rights for women’ meant for Wollstonecraft, rights for ladies – and this was true for almost all the active political radical women of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. The equality Wollstonecraft imagined was equality for elite women with elite men. She did not demand equal rights for working-class women, or enslaved women.
The expanding British trade and then the British Empire created a need for a racist narrative to justify oppressing indigenous people, destroying their lives and taking their lands. The racist theories caused a gulf between women, as white women supported the imperial adventure. Women missionaries and wives and daughters of missionaries committed themselves to converting people of Africa, India and Asia. Donations from women’s groups funded 70 per cent of English missionary work.133 Women medical practitioners formed a crucial part of imperial expansion, since only women could attend Indian women in seclusion, and women missionaries enter Indian homes. Middle- and upper-class women seeking husbands also travelled throughout the empire, especially to India. Once married, they reproduced as far as possible the ‘separate sphere’ home: classist, racist, permissive for men and exploitative of enslaved or servant women. Indian women lovers of English officers found themselves excluded from the elite white women’s social circle; even Indian wives were frowned on.
In 1857, the First War of Indian Independence broke out. It was known in England as the ‘Indian Mutiny’ – projecting an image of a ship with a crew sworn to obedience, rather than a land invaded by outsiders who imposed military rule. After the war it was impossible to maintain the fiction that the English had been welcomed or invited into the Indian kingdoms and the few social contacts between Indian and English women fell apart. Women knew that a fissure of class and race ran through the sisterhood of sex. As Sarah Ellis said in 1845, ‘What should we think of a community of slaves who betrayed each other’s interests or a little band of shipwrecked Mariners upon a friendless shore who were false to each other?’134
Elite Women Protests
The doctrine of separate spheres persuaded elite women that their proper place was inside their home and their best companions were other women. Excluded from politics and higher education, discouraged from money-making and steered into the home, forced together with nothing important to do, upper- and middling-class women met each other in the endless round of social events, and soon found causes to unite them.135 Energetic women could not be persuaded to live inside a domestic bubble for ever. Harriet Martineau wrote in 1832: ‘I want to be doing something with the pen since no other means of action in politics are in a woman’s power.’136
An early and exceptional woman politician was Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. As an extremely wealthy aristocrat in an unhappy marriage, she took up a life of political campaigning, holding salons in support of Whig policies and Whig politicians, against tyranny and monarchism. She even campaigned in public hustings for the Whig party in 1784 and 1788 – facing slander, condemnation and mockery for speaking out in the streets. Her private life was hailed as a contemporary scandal. She supported the limitation of royal power and the Whig agenda, calling for better governance: but not for democracy – and certainly not for votes for working men. She was not in favour of women of any class having a vote – she wanted influence, not a vote for women. She saw herself and all upper-class women as advisors and supporters to the male voters and politicians.
The defence of marriage proved a natural cause for women, the subject of the greatest women’s petition since the English civil wars, when in 1820 the king, George IV, tried to divorce his estranged wife Queen Caroline. At least 17 women-only petitions were sent to support the queen. One from London elite women alone bore nearly 18,000 signatures and was signed by ‘Married ladies of the metropolis’.137 The upper- and middle-class wives supported a fellow wife, whose arranged marriage had so spectacularly failed. Caroline of Brunswick had been married to George, Prince of Wales, in 1795, although he was widely known to be already secretly married. The royal couple separated shortly after the birth of their daughter, and he falsely accused her of adultery and immorality. Caroline was banned from seeing her child and moved abroad. In 1817, after learning of the death of her daughter in childbirth, Caroline returned to England to claim her position as queen. George IV’s attempts to divorce her publicly failed and, in 1821, he barred her from his coronation. There was an extraordinary scene when she hammered on the locked doors of Westminster Abbey for admittance. Luckily for him, she died shortly afterwards, leaving as her legacy the disturbing question as to how separate spheres benefited women if husbands took advantage of their freedom, and abandoned their dependent wives? If they chose to do so, there was no home for a woman to make into a separate sphere. There was no home for her at all.
High-status women still had some political rights. They could promote their preferred candidate for Parliament, and they might publicly campaign for him, especially if he was a relation, as a respectable part of their duty to their families. The 10 per cent of women who were landowners with tenants had the power to nominate a candidate for election and took it upon themselves to order their tenants to vote for him – that was their responsibility as landowners. But even though they could nominate the MP and order their tenants to vote, such women had no direct vote of their own in national politics. When the Chartist petitions demanded the widening of the vote to working men, the contradictions became more glaring. It seemed absurd to elite women that a poor uneducated man should demand the right to vote when his female social superior could not: it was the contradiction of the queen’s footman all over again. Of course a man was superior to a woman; but not when he was a footman and she was a queen? The anomaly prompted some women to argue that elite women must have the vote – and others that the vote could not be given to working-class men.
Elite women who had joined together, and even spoken in public for the abolition of slavery, pressuring some MPs and encouraging others, naturally started to wonder why they should not directly choose their MPs. If women could influence MPs, why should they not be MPs themselves? Some of the ladies-only anti-slavery committees developed into suffrage societies calling for votes for elite women and a place for elite women in public life. Suffrage societies in London, Manchester, Bristol and Edinburgh all sprang out of the anti-slavery movement.138
It was an elite single woman who first raised the issue that as a property owner she had a vote, but as a woman she did not. In 1832, Mary Smith, from Yorkshire, argued that since she paid the same taxes and rates as a male elector she should have a vote as he did. She persuaded her MP, Henry Hunt, to raise the matter in Parliament – but he was laughed down,139 and the Representation of the People Act of 1832 was passed to explicitly ban women from voting for Parliament. The language of the law was changed from ‘persons and people’ – implying women as well as men – to ‘men’ – clearly excluding women. The Act referred specifically to male voters and votes for men, removing ambiguity and solidifying the tradition of the male-only vote into law.140 Ironically, the bill that excluded women is known to history as the Great Reform Act as it abolished the small, often corrupt rural constituencies and redrew the boundaries so that the new growing towns had their own MPs. It widened the franchise to include more men of the middling classes like businessmen, shopkeepers, wealthy farmers and small landowners. This makes it a ‘Great Reform’ to parliamentary history – but not to women’s history since women were explicitly excluded, whatever their wealth or status, from voting in national parliamentary elections.
But in 1850, apparently reversing the ban on women voters, the Interpretation Act ruled that laws citing ‘men’ and ‘male’ should be understood as meaning ‘people’, so including women. Not so! Not so! The attorney general himself announced that was ‘really a most unaccountable supposition’!141 In response to this new law, thousands of elite women registered to vote. In 1867, a court case ruled that judges would look at the usual custom and practice of each individual area to follow local tradition; and were not obliged to allow women voters.142
Some philanthropic women who had worked together on the abolition of slavery campaigns tried to create social change directly. Secure that they were safely inside their ‘sphere’ if they concerned themselves with domestic life, they ventured into working-class homes. There they discovered the sexual abuse and violence endured by women. Their concern about this added to a national anxiety about marital violence, publicised by Caroline Norton, who could not obtain a divorce from her husband on grounds of his cruelty even though he had thrown books and an inkstand at her, scalded her with a tea kettle and may have caused her to miscarry.143 An imperial nation with a queen on the throne, priding itself on chivalry, was shocked by the reports of abuse, and the ensuing moral panic about domestic violence resulted in the passing of a bill against assault in 1853. MP Henry Fitzroy told the House of Commons: ‘No one could read the public journals without being constantly struck with horror and amazement at the numerous reports of cases of cruel and brutal assaults perpetrated upon the weaker sex by men who one blushed to think were Englishmen, and yet were capable of such atrocious acts.’144
Most of the nineteenth-century commentators felt that the appalling conditions of working-class homes were the failure of working-class wives and mothers to reproduce the virtues of middle-class family life. Advice books like William Cobbett’s Cottage Economy taught that a successful working-class home could only be created and maintained if a woman was full-time at home, not out at work making money.145 It proved a persuasive combination of the concept of separate spheres and the breadwinner wage. Wives should not compete for work and drive down wages but stay at home, in their separate sphere, while the husbands earned a breadwinner wage enough to support a family.
As the desire to improve the lives of the poor grew more urgent, more and more ‘improving’ and charitable committees and associations with separate female branches appeared and, by 1840, thousands of women volunteers.146 Urban elite women gathered together and divided up working-class areas for uninvited visits, dispensing advice and sometimes resources; while ladies in the rural areas continued the elite tradition of visiting and supervising tenants and rural poor, as landlords had always done.147
Visiting the poor, always part of aristocratic patronage and control of their poor neighbours, tenants and employees, now became a feature of middle-class life too, and visiting committees organised themselves into wards and locations, and inspected prisons, hospitals, orphanages and asylums. Men sat on the boards of charities and took the business and administration decisions; ladies raised the funds for the charities, especially with sales of the endless bits of tat of domestic arts and craft products. ‘Bazaars’ for charities gave elite women a chance to meet and organise, without political content or unladylike public appearance. All the philanthropic work was aimed at raising working-class women and their families to elite standards of cleanliness, health, safety – and discipline. Elite women wanted working-class women to create homes to a so-called respectable standard . . . and stay in them.148
Genteel women wanted to help but not be tainted by association. Donations to the Lock Hospital for Venereal Disease were made anonymously – sexually transmitted disease was taboo.149 But gradually, elite women became bolder in their public work, putting their names to causes, specialising in temperance, rescuing and reforming prostitutes, and improving the conditions of factory workers, especially women and children. In the course of their charitable work, ladies entered working-class homes intending to improve them and then realised that hardship and poverty were caused by inequality – the elite home and lifestyle rested on the exploitation of poor people, especially women. For some of the ladies – who would go on to campaign for public health, or for safety in mines and factories – it was a revolutionary insight.
Working Women Protests
Working women persisted in defending their families against hunger, the loss of their lands, the attack on their traditional lives, the undermining of local prices in local markets, and deteriorating wages and work conditions. In 1769, Benjamin Franklin wrote: ‘I have seen within a year, riots in the country about corn; riots about elections; riots about workhouses; riots of colliers; riots of weavers; riots of coalheavers; riots of sawyers; riots of Wilkesites; riots of government chairman; riots of smugglers, in which custom-house officers and exciseman have been murdered, the Kings armed vessels and troops fired at.’150
All of these disturbances were riots led or supported by women, working-class women. Gentry observers continued to describe working-class protest as dangerous riots; denying that they were a well-understood theatrical act by working people performed by women to appeal – over the heads of the merchants, profiteers and traders – to a traditional authority figure, the local justice of the peace. If he did not arrive, or if he did not judge in favour of the crowd – as he weighed the loaves, examined adulterated flour or set the price of grain – the protest continued to escalate, to violence against property or people.151
In 1766 Exeter, local men and women caught a cart leaving the town with a load of dry peas and brought the carter before the magistrate to insist that the peas be sold locally. When the magistrate refused to play his traditional part in price-setting, the situation grew more threatening. Other groups broke open stores around the town, taking the food they needed and preventing other food carts from leaving.152
War with France in 1793 blocked imports from Europe, and a bad harvest in 1794 caused a new and widespread outbreak of popular protest, with people out on the streets and soldiers in the markets. In 1815, the parliament – mostly wheat-growing MPs – ordered that no foreign wheat could be imported until the local price for English producers had hit a peak – set at £4 a quarter. Wartime prices of the previous decade and a half had fluctuated from £2.8s a quarter to an unaffordable £13.3d.153 This law – the Corn Law – was believed by many to ban cheap foreign wheat from the poor people of England, so that landlords could profiteer.154
