Aspects of Chartism: Chartism and Slavery 'distinction without difference 2

Emancipation as radical stimulus

The passage of the Emancipation Act in 1833 provided an ideal opportunity to contrast what was being done for black slaves with the neglect shown to ‘white slaves’. Two features of the Act provided Chartists with ammunition to attack the government: the payment of £20 million compensation to slave owners and the apprenticeship system set up to prepare slaves for full freedom. This let Chartists point out that the government was doing more for black slaves than for white workers and that what was being done for slaves was at the expense of British workers. The Whigs were the focus for their attack but the Chartists also accused anti-slavery societies and anti-slavery leaders of hypocrisy. As in the case of the Poor Law, the propaganda seemed to put Chartists and abolitionists on opposite sides of the argument.

As soon as the Emancipation Act was passed, the Poor Man’s Guardian declared that the compensation money would be ‘extracted from the bones of the white slaves’ of Britain[1]. J.R. Stephens took the view that it was the labouring children who were paying the £20 million compensation so that adult black apprentices in Jamaica could enjoy an eight-hour day. Abolitionists exerted themselves in seeking enforcement of the Emancipation Act but they were, in general, unwilling to limit the hours for working children at home. The radical press repeatedly pointed out the conditions in which British apprentices lived and worked; how men in the army and navy were flogged much as slaves were; and, that after 1833 West Indian slaves had the prospect of complete freedom but that British workers had no such expectation. The impact on Chartism is evident in the words of the National Petition in 1838: ‘Our slavery has been exchanged for an apprenticeship to liberty, which has aggravated the painful feelings of our social degradation, by adding to them the sickening of still deferred hope.’[2]

In their attacks on the Whigs for compensating slave owners, the Chartists found that they had many abolitionist allies who argued that it was the slaves not the slave owners who deserved compensation. Immediately after the passage of the Emancipation Act, a protest statement to this effect was signed by many prominent abolitionists including Joseph Sturge. In parliament, Daniel O’Connell objected to both compensation and apprenticeship. The Glasgow Emancipation Society passed a resolution saying that all parts of the act should be fully enforced before any compensation should be paid and there were similar expressions of opposition from anti-slavery societies across the country[3]. Abolitionists were as outspoken in their opposition to compensation as were Bronterre O’Brien, Richard Oastler and Henry Hetherington. It was clear on this issue at least that Chartists and many abolitionists shared common ground.

The widespread support for emancipation meant that Chartists could not go too far in attacking the anti-slavery movement‘s shortcomings since this invited the accusation of being pro-slavery. Their strategy was to outflank the abolitionists by demonstrating that they were opposed to all types of slavery everywhere. This was apparent in ‘A Hint to Mr Buxton MP’ that appeared in the London Dispatch and People’s Political and Social Reformer edited by Henry Hetherington and in the Northern Liberator where the editor said that he hated slavery as much as anyone and blasted the House of Commons for voting to continue it under the guise of apprenticeship. Bronterre O’Brien, in a letter to the editor of the Northern Star, commended Brougham’s stand on apprenticeship but went on the recommend that if his Lordship really wanted to end slavery, he needed to look closer to home[4]. The dilemma the Chartists faced was that to call for the immediate ending of apprenticeship meant diverting efforts away from demands for manhood suffrage: the Northern Star actually came close to apologising for this[5]. Chartist newspapers took much the same position in emphasising that the issue was not a choice between chattel and wage slavery: O’Brien put it well when he wrote that to contrast white and black slavery was to create a ‘distinction without a difference’[6].

Beyond emancipation

Once apprenticeship in the West Indies was ended, anti-slavery activists were free to champion a new cause, Chartists sought to gain their support. Richard Oastler’s appeal in the Northern Star called on abolitionists now to help British working men ‘our cause being one and the same—they must now help us’[7]. Oastler recognised that the political momentum of the emancipation movement should be capitalised on and that loosening the shackles of black slaves would inevitably help loosen the bonds of white workers. It was, however, Joseph Sturge, the Birmingham Quaker abolitionist and a central figure in the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society who was critical in moving the debate towards an alliance to try to attain the Chartist goal of manhood suffrage[8]. He, along with several other abolitionists, was at the centre of the political manoeuvring between 1838 and 1842.

It is important to recognise that many Chartists had long been abolitionists and like earlier radicals such as Cartwright and Cobbett were fully aware of the indivisible nature of the issues of black and white slavery. William Lovett and John Collins were among the first to spell out its meaning for Chartism. When Lovett spoke of ‘Tyrants [who] delight to crush the yielding, suppliant slave’, he conjured up in one sweeping phrase images of slaveholding planters, factory overseers and upper-class bureaucrats[9]. Lovett, along with Hetherington and others, organised the London Working Men’s Association in 1836 and its ‘Address to the Working Classes of Europe’ posed the question: ‘Where, but from the ranks of labour, have the despots of Europe raised their fighting slaves to keep their brother slaves in awe’.[10] While in its ‘Address to the working classes in the United States’, though bemoaning that democratic America could tolerate legal oppression, reasoned that ‘Surely, it cannot be for the interests of the Working Classes that these prejudices should be fostered—this degrading traffic be maintained.’[11] John Collins, speaking at a Chartist rally in Manchester, said that the one stain on the Star-Spangled Banner was slavery which, like the slavery of children in England, did not proceed from her democratic institutions but from vestiges of aristocratic rule, words that were to be repeated in his and Lovett’s Chartism: a New Organisation of the People published in 1841..

Other abolitionists appeared at meetings of the LWMA and as a result were connected with the beginnings of Chartism. Daniel O’Connell’s relationship with Chartism fluctuated. He certainly played a significant role in drawing up the Charter though he soon fell out with Lovett and Hetherington over his attitude to trade unionism and especially the Glasgow spinners prosecuted in 1837. Even so, O’Connell defended his credentials as a friend of Chartism and continued to speak and write on the issue of slavery. He wrote in the Northern Liberator, ‘Yes, you are slaves so long as the law allows a ‘master class’ to have political privileges’[12].

The Charter was published in May 1838 and then presented to public meetings to gain mass support. Newspaper accounts show that anti-slavery supporters attended and sometimes played a leading role in these meetings. For example, in Glasgow[13], the first Chartist meeting on 21^st May 1838 was chaired by James Turner of Thrushgrove, a long-time anti-slavery advocate. James Moir and John Ure, both member of the Glasgow Emancipation Society were also involved in planning meetings in the city. In the Midlands, August 1^st was deliberately chosen as the date for a local demonstration to coincide with Emancipation Day in the West Indies so that speakers could capitalise on the opportunity to denounce slavery at home. The main speech was given by Henry Vincent[14], another Chartist leader who ascribed his political motivation to early anti-slavery convictions. One of the most important Chartist meetings was held in London in September in Palace Yard opposite Westminster Hall where Parliament was sitting[15]. Apart from Lovett, other abolitionists including T. Perronet Thompson and the Sheffield poet Ebenezer Elliott[16] spoke in favour of the Charter. The meeting thrust George Julian Harney[17], another Chartist who had long been an abolitionist centre stage in the movement. His growing involvement coincided with the evolving debate between the ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ force wings of Chartism. Most abolitionists preferred the ‘moral force’ approach because of their strong religious feelings and this put them on a collision course with Feargus O’Connor and his supporters.

The religious sentiments of abolitionists were most clearly expressed by the Reverend Patrick Brewster of Paisley who, as early as 1820 had used his pulpit to proclaim his support for the working class and their political aspirations. In his Christian and Socialist Sermons, he revealed the sufferings of the poor and the power of the rich[18]. He declared that having dared to seek justice for African slaves in defiance of vested interests, it was equally the duty of the people to seek justice in their own country. He believed it was Christian influence that had banned both slavery and the slave trade and he denounced the British ruling class and the laws that maintained unfair privileges. The suffering of slaves, including the white slaves of ‘Christian autocrats’, was greater in total, he declared, than all the suffering that came from social convulsions and insurrections against despotism. Though suspended from his pulpit for a year, Brewster held Edinburgh Chartists to a ‘moral force’ position while Glasgow Chartists joined the camp of the Scottish O’Connorite, Doctor John Taylor. The ensuing contest for leadership left the Scottish Chartist hopelessly divided[19].

The O’Connorite wing of Chartism was increasingly concerned by the divisive effects of ‘Christian’ attitudes towards labour’s problems. They also began to interrupt Anti-Corn Law meetings. From the Chartist point of view, this was not interruption of a good cause but a method of carrying the cause further than the narrow platform of one issue. By 1840, their disruptive tactic was extended to all meetings that did not give priority to the Charter. The World Anti-Slavery Convention held in London in the summer of 1840 offered an excellent prospect because it led to local anti-slavery societies holding numerous meetings. There were attempts to take over anti-slavery meetings in Newcastle[20] and Norwich[21]: in Newcastle confrontation between Chartists and abolitionists was only avoided when the gas lights were put out but in Norwich the Chartists failed to substitute a resolution against slavery at home for one against black slavery in America. The largest disturbance took place in Glasgow in August 1840 when Chartists tried to take over the annual meeting of the Glasgow Emancipation Society[22]. These disruptions have been cited by historians as evidence of rivalry and antagonism with abolitionists though in fact Chartist disruption was a planned tactic used at public meetings of every variety. Certainly, this tactic alienated some abolitionists but the ensuing debates did result in other anti-slavery activists re-examining their views on and definition of oppression. Levels of hostility or sympathy towards Chartism co-existed within anti-slavery societies and families. For example, after the disruption of the Norwich meeting, the archdeacon acknowledged the necessity for anti-slavery societies to be aware of the needs at home as well as those abroad[23] while Anna Gurney sought to counteract Chartist influence by distributing bibles in the town.

Many abolitionists were torn between the competing appeals of Chartism and the Corn Law repeal. The middle class was especially concerned about direct action by Chartists and even Francis Place criticised Chartists for raising false hopes as they operated under the delusion that threats could move the government. Many abolitionists preferred to support the League or at least use it as an excuse for not backing Chartism. Repeal had the advantage of seeming less radical and more easily attained and was therefore a reasonable first step. Although many Chartists also favoured repeal, their conviction was that it would be only a half-way measure. Genuine improvement in working class conditions, they believed, would only come with political emancipation through manhood suffrage. It was from this position that Joseph Sturge sought to forge an alliance between abolitionists, Anti-Corn Law Leaguers and Chartists because he had no more fear of giving the vote to the people than he had of giving freedom to the slaves[24]. In reaching this conclusion, Sturge was influenced by what he saw as the need to defuse the growing tensions between middle and working classes in the wake of the Birmingham riots and the Newport rising in 1839 and as a result of his visit to the United States in 1841 on an anti-slavery mission. There he noted the relative comfort and prosperity of workers (other than slaves) and concluded that[25] ‘it is quite evident that the statesmen who would elevate the moral standard of our working population, must begin by removing the physical depression and destitution in which a large proportion of them, without any fault of their own, are compelled to drag out a weary and almost hopeless existence’. Sturge was afforded the opportunity of putting his ideas into practice with the publication of a series of letters on the necessity of bringing the classes into cooperation by Edward Miall[26], the editor of the London Nonconformist in the autumn of 1841[27].

Sturge’s chief rival in the competing anti-slavery societies, George Thompson, also decided in favour of coalition with the Chartists. Thompson was the leader of the British wing of the Garrisonians[28], while Sturge was affiliated to the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Their agreement in principle meant that both abolitionist factions were now influenced by sympathy for and cooperation with Chartism. It could be argued that Chartism was the catalyst bringing the two factions into a new, though temporary spirit of co-operation. Both Sturge and Thompson were members of the Anti-Corn Law League and, as early as 1839, Thompson had suggested that the three groups (the League, the anti-slavery societies and Chartism) were pursuing issues that were all part of a single larger question. By the autumn of 1841, the consensus of opinion was that the Anti-Corn Law League could not succeed without the working class though it was not until 1842 that Thompson, rather apologetically, publicly joined the Chartists. Both Sturge and Thompson recognised the importance of public opinion in pushing government reform and now, together with Richard Cobden and Charles Villiers agreed that they must now show the government ‘that the masses are with us, or they will defy and defeat us’[29]. The British Garrisonian radicals and many of Sturge’s supporters in the early 1840s had concluded that, whatever their personal anxieties, class legislation was a fundamental source of evil in society.

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[1] Poor Man’s Guardian, 6^th July 1833.

[2] Quoted in R.G. Gammage History of the Chartist Movement 1837-1854, 2^nd ed., 1894, reprinted Augustus M. Kelley, 1969, page 88.

[3] British Emancipator, 3^rd January 1838 and The Reformer, 19^th June 1835 both contain details of opposition among anti-slavery societies to compensation.

[4] Chartist attitudes were expressed in Northern Liberator, 17^th April 1838 but also in issues between April and June 1838 and in the Northern Star, 10^th March and 14^th April 1838 and 8^th November 1839.

[5] Northern Star, 26^th May 1838.

[6] Northern Liberator, 8^th November 1838.

[7] Northern Star, 5^th May 1838.

[8] Sturge became directly involved with Chartism in Birmingham in 1839. He strongly objected to the presence of Metropolitan police used in July to deal with the meetings in the Bull Ring and whose presence arguably led to rioting. Sturge’s public stand in support of Chartist rights made him the object of Home Office surveillance for the next four years.

[9] William Lovett The Life and Struggles of William Lovett…, 1876, page 107. He had been involved in the anti-slavery movement from the mid-1820s.

[10] William Lovett The Life and Struggles of William Lovett…, 1876, pages 129-134, reference to page 132.

[11] William Lovett The Life and Struggles of William Lovett…, 1876, pages150-158, reference to page 152.

[12] Northern Liberator, 28^th October 1837.

[13] Alex Wilson ‘Chartism in Glasgow’, in Asa Briggs (ed.) Chartist Studies, Macmillan, 1959, pages 251-253.

[14] William Dorling Henry Vincent: A Biographical Sketch with a Preface by Mrs Vincent, James Clark, 1879, pages 66-69 details Vincent’s experience as a youth in Hull where he heard a lecture by George Thompson that filled him with a ‘holy zeal’ to fight slavery and the slave trade and aroused his sense of personal responsibility for reform.

[15] On 16^th October 1834, most of the Palace of Westminster was destroyed by fire. Only Westminster Hall, the Jewel Tower, the crypt of St Stephen’s Chapel and the cloisters survived the conflagration. A Royal Commission was appointed to study the rebuilding of the Palace. The Commission decided that the Palace should be rebuilt on the same site and in 1836, after studying 97 rival proposals, it chose Charles Barry’s plan for a Gothic style palace. The foundation stone was laid in 1840; the Lords’ Chamber was completed in 1847, and the Commons’ Chamber in 1852 (at which point Barry received a knighthood). Although most of the work had been carried out by 1860, construction was not finished until a decade afterwards.

[16] Sheffield Iris, 8^th January 1839. Elliott later broke with the Chartists believing that repeal of the Corn Laws should have priority.

[17] On Harney’s anti-slavery credentials see A.R. Schoyen The Chartist Challenge: A Portrait of George Julian Harney, Heinemann, 1958, pages 3 and 8.

[18] Brewster’s references to slavery in his Christian and Socialist Sermons, 1844 are especially on pages 8-10, 20-21, 32-33, 48, 54 and 58.

[19] Bronterre O’Brien in The Operative, 14^th December 1838 blamed Brewster for the split and O’Connor in the Northern Star, 12^th January 1839 called him a ‘political priest’ whose actions had played into the hands of O’Connell and the ‘vile Whigs’.

[20] Northern Liberator, 15^th August 1840. The paper described the Anti-Slavery Convention as a ‘grand meeting of humbug’ representing the cant and insincerity of the ‘slave squad’.

[21] Northern Star, 26^th November 1840.

[22] Glasgow Argus, 12^th, 13^th August 1840.The paper described the meeting degenerating into a ‘constant howl’.

[23] Northern Star, 26^th November 1840.

[24] Birmingham Journal, 1^st February 1840.

[25] Joseph Sturge A Visit to the United States in 1841, London, 1842, pages 102-3 and 147.

[26] On Edward Miall, see David M. Thomson ‘The Liberation Society 1844-1868’ in P. Hollis (ed.) Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England, London, 1974, pages 210-238.

[27] The articles appeared in the Nonconformist 13^th October-1^st December 1841 and were collected together by Miall the following year in the pamphlet Reconciliation between the Middle and Labouring Classes, Birmingham, 1842 with an introduction by Sturge.

[28] Widespread rejection of the anti-slavery programme in the United States forced abolitionists to reconsider their moral persuasion strategy. Many followed the lead of the Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and abandoned the churches, believing them to be hopelessly corrupted by slavery. Garrisonians also counselled Northerners to refuse to vote as a way of expressing disapproval for the ‘pro-slavery’ Constitution. The Garrisonians also championed universal reform, including temperance, pacifism, and extension of women's rights. Under Garrisonian control, the American Anti-Slavery Society committed itself to non-resistant political protest and advocated the dissolution of the union with slaveholding states.

[29] John Rylands Library, Manchester: George Thompson Papers, Notebook, 7^th October 1841.

The Decline of the Family?

The impact of the industrial revolution and the employment of women caused considerable pessimism among many contemporaries like Richard Oastler and Lord Shaftesbury. According to Peter Gaskell the transition from domestic to factory system was nothing less than catastrophic: ‘a violation of the sacred nature of the home’. Leaving aside the polemic, two points are clear. First, the pessimistic critique stems from a contrast of the impact of factories with the presumed conditions of family life under the domestic system. Secondly, critics rarely went outside the textile industry in making comparisons. The problem was that the textile industry was not typical of work in nineteenth century Britain. It was highly mechanised and firmly based on division of labour. This significantly weakens the pessimist’s case.

The domestic system was based on an integrated family unit of reproduction, production and consumption. Patriarchal control and moral guidance were exerted over both wives and children. In this context the advent of the factory affected the ‘independent’ economic status of the family. Engels argued that it destroyed the pride and status of the breadwinner, now dependent on the factory earnings of his wife and children. Women were no longer able to carry out their domestic functions effectively and the family’s dietary needs suffered. Daughters were not instructed in the family virtues and were exposed early to sexual activity. The contrast was drawn, by Marx and others, between the artisan as an independent seller of his own labour and the slave-trader selling his own and his wife’s and children’s labour in the factory. Neil Smelser in his Social Change in the Industrial Revolution [1959] challenged this view of the breakdown of the family. He argued, on the basis of the Lancashire cotton industry, first that the separation of working class children from their families did not really begin until after the 1820s with the introduction of powered weaving. Secondly, technological changes between 1820 and 1840, especially the introduction of the self-acting mule[1] led to a redefinition of the economic functions of the textile family and sharply differentiated the roles of its members. Finally, mule spinning was very much a family affair with operative spinners hiring their own relatives as scavengers and piercers. This was codified in many early spinners’ trade union rules that attempted to limit recruitment to the kinship unit. As a result traditional family values were perpetuated. Smelser has not been without his critics but he raised an alternative view of the question of the family to the contemporary pessimism.

Assembling the basic features of family structure for this period may appear to be a straightforward task. There is much information in published census reports, social surveys and in descriptive and literary sources. The problem is that these sources do not always allow historians to answer the questions they want to ask. For example, we know that marriage was far more central to the matrix of family life than it had been in the early nineteenth century but we do not know why. We know that the average number of children born to each marriage between 1870 and the 1900s fell from just under six to just over three but we do not know precisely how far contemporary views of ‘the family’ were limited to parents and children[2].

Census information often equated ‘family’ with ‘household’. The number of household rose from just over 5 million in 1871 to fewer than 8 million in 1911. Average household size was about 4.75 persons, rising slightly between 1871 and 1891 and falling to 4.4 persons by 1911. At each census nearly 70 per cent of the population lived in medium-sized households of between three and six people. One-person households were rare throughout the period, though their number arose in the 1900s reflecting partly the new phenomenon of metropolitan ‘bedsitterland’ and partly the flight of younger people from the countryside. By 1914 nearly half the population lived in households where there was one occupant per room or less giving rise to the notion of ‘a room of one’s own’ as one of the touchstones of ideal family life.

Legitimate fertility

Census year	Per thousand women 15-44
1871	289
1881	281
1891	283
1901	221
1911	182
1921	126

 

Average family size

Census year	Family Size
1901	3.3
1911	2.98
1921	2.63

 

Working class family size remained high throughout the period. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century working class wives have often been characterised as fatalistic in their attitudes towards childbirth. The few working class women who have left a record of their conscious decision to limit their families usually mention the plight of their mothers as the decisive factor. It is not, however, sufficient to interpret the failure to limit fertility entirely to fatalism. The letters published by the Women’s Co-operative Guild in 1915[3] make it very clear that women with large families bitterly regretted it, chiefly because of the hard work necessary to sustain a large family. What comes across in the letters is an overwhelming ignorance about female physiology and sexuality; the difficulties of gaining access to information about contraception and family planning; and, a lack of privacy in their homes that would have made the use of female methods of birth control extremely difficult. The social taboo place on discussion of birth control and sexuality meant that little information was likely to be obtained by women.

Abortion was probably the most important female initiative in family limitation in this period, particularly among the very poor. In the 1890s and early 1900s the British Medical Journal traced the diffusion of abortion involving the use of lead plaster from Leicester to Birmingham, Nottingham, Sheffield and though some of the larger Yorkshire towns. By 1914 abortion was common in 26 out of the 104 registration districts north of the Humber. Among northern textile workers poverty and the need to work probably played the most important part in the decision to seek an abortion, but it is also important to recognise that working class women saw abortion as a natural and permissible strategy. Withdrawal was undoubtedly the main method by which the decline in working class fertility was achieved. One of the main reasons for this was the cost of sheaths: 2/- to 3/- for a dozen when the average weekly wage for labourers did not rise above 20/- a week. Withdrawal was a cheaper method. It also raises the issue of women’s sexual dependency and that some degree of male co-operation was necessary.

If there was a reduction in fertility caused by the introduction of successful methods of family limitation, was it the result of initiatives by men or women or through co-operation between them? J.A.Banks in Victorian Values. Secularism and the Size of Families [1981] rejected the argument that fertility controls resulted from economically rational behaviour. The introduction of compulsory elementary education following the 1870 and Education 1880 Acts may have led to a re-evaluation of the cost of children. This legislation seriously reduced the contribution children could make to the family budget. Generally, however, there is little evidence of a link between male wage levels and fertility. For example, the size of agricultural labourers’ families, one of the poorest paid occupational groups, remained high. Banks stresses the importance of the development of a meritocratic career pattern for men and a resulting future-time perspective on the part of all the mainly middle class occupational groups whose fertility rates fell fastest during the late nineteenth century. The fertility rate of railway workers declined rapidly following the expansion of promotion hierarchies after 1880.

Research suggests that it was the occupational status and attitudes of the husband that was the dominant factor. Sidney Webb observed in 1905 that the thrifty of all classes were limiting their families. However, in attributing prime importance to male decision-making on birth control, Banks is dismissive of the part women may have played. It is perfectly possible to accept that male co-operation was needed for fertility to fall, while also arguing that the opinions of wives may also have had an important effect on husbands. Precisely who made decisions within the family is difficult to investigate today, let alone in the past. Yet the process by which family size was negotiated by husband and wife is crucial, especially when evidence suggests that the couples who were most successful in controlling their fertility between the wars were those who discussed the issue and reached agreement. Diana Gittins concludes that couples, whose worlds increasingly centred on the home rather than on the culture of the workplace or on the spouses’ respective circles of friends, most frequently achieved their ideal family size. The critical factor in limiting fertility appears to have been role-relationships within marriage. Where role-relationships were segregated, fertility rates tended to be high. However, where role-relationships were more integrated and the husband spent a significant part of his non-working hours with his wife and children, fertility was negotiated and consequently lower.

Middle class women found themselves in a less favourable position. At least working class women engaged in paid employment and there was ambivalence on the part of politicians and policy makers as to their behaviour in this respect. The separation of spheres was much more rigid for middle class women. Lydia Becker, a leading Victorian feminist, compared the position of middle class women unfavourably with that of working class women: ‘What I most desire, is to see married women of the middle classes stand on the same terms of equality as prevail in the working classes and the highest aristocracy. A great ladies or factory women were independent persons, the women of the middle classes are nobodies, and if they act for themselves they lose caste.’ The comparison failed to take account of the burden borne by working class women but Becker was rebelling against the notion that middle class women should be ‘kept’ by their husbands or fathers, brothers or other male relatives.

The home was the centre of the middle class woman’s world and she bore sole responsibility for its management. The interests and concerns of middle class men and women were often profoundly different. Both lived in their own insulated worlds, segregated from the other: the breakfast- or morning-room served as the ladies’ sitting room and the drawing room was where ladies received calls and took tea; the library, the study and the billiard room were male territory. Nor only were their worlds separate they were also profoundly unequal for the majority of middle class women were financially dependent in their husbands. The domination of the Victorian husband was reflected in law, and in emotional and sexual relations.

The vast majority of middle class Victorian women led an isolated and limited existence within a tightly knit family circle. By the 1890s the isolation of suburban life was beginning to become a characteristic feature of middle class women. It is difficult to build an accurate picture of what middle class women did in their homes. The notion of the perfect Victorian lady certainly did not apply to most middle class women who needed to pay great attention to household budgeting and routine to survive on between £100 and £300 per year. Much was sacrificed, even in the less well off households, to provide the domestic help necessary to achieve a certain degree of gentility. Middle class couples began to limit their families in the 1860s but whether this was a decision by the husband or wife is a matter of some debate. Patricia Branca maintains that middle class women were asserting control over their lives both by seeking the assistance of doctors and by deciding to use birth control. J.A. Banks, by contrast, suggests that the lead in fertility control was taken by men in professional occupations who were concerned not about the burden of childbearing but about the cost of childrearing. It is unlikely that middle class women would have been able to procure birth control literature on their own initiative. Nor was the middle class woman’s ready access to doctors likely to be of use in the search for birth control information, as many doctors believed that it led to serious illness.

Clergymen, expressing public outrage during the trials of birth control propagandists in the 1880s, were nevertheless clearly limiting their own numbers of children. The motivation of middle class family planning was complicated. The age of marriage remained high as couples waited to amass resources to sustain the ‘paraphernalia of gentility’. It was the births in the later years of marriage, which seem to have been curtailed in particular. Concern with the health of wives was one factor. The growing cost of running a middle class household was another, making it difficult to afford large families. With the rise of corporate business there was less need for large numbers of sons and nephews who now required expensive schooling rather than informal apprenticeship in the family firm.

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[1] The ‘mule’ is a spinning machine. Samuel Crompton invented it in 1779-1780. It was called the ‘mule’ because it combined elements of two previous machines – James Hargreaves’ ‘jenny’ and Richard Arkwright’s ‘water frame’. It was, however, not until the early 1820s that Richard Roberts improved the efficiency and reliability of the mule.

[2] Jane Lewis (ed.) Labour and Love: Women’s experience of home and family 1850-1940, Blackwell, 1986 is a good starting-point on the experience of home and family. Penny Lane Victorian Families in Fact and Fiction, London, 1997 provides a novel analysis of the issues. Rosemary O’Day The Family and Family Relationships 1500-1900, Macmillan, 1995 takes a longer perspective. P. Branca Silent Sisterhood: Middle-class women in the Victorian home, Croom Helm, 1977 is an excellent study of middle class attitudes. J.A. Banks Feminism and Family Planning in Victorian England, Liverpool University Press, 1964 and Angus McLaren Birth Control in Nineteenth Century England, Croom Helm, 1978 are valuable studies on this contentious issue. J.A. Banks Victorian Value: Secularism and the Size of Families, Routledge, 1981 is concerned with the implications of changing gender-ratios in the late nineteenth century and continues the argument about birth control. J.R. Gillis For Better, For Worse; British marriages, 1600 to the present, OUP, 1985, Constance Rover Love, Morals and the Feminists, Routledge, 1970, and in Pat Jalland Women, Marriage and Politics 1860-1914, OUP, 1986. Carol Dyhouse Feminism and the Family in England 1880-1939, CUP, 1991 looks at the politics of the family.

[3] M. Llewelyn Davies Maternity Letters from Working Women, 1915, Virago, 1978 demonstrated the strain of repeated pregnancies on women’s health and lives.

Aspects of Chartism: Chartism and Slavery 'distinction without a difference' 1

In the 1820s and 1830s, working class newspapers and journals were highly critical of members of the anti-slavery societies who were dedicated to freeing black slaves in the colonies and yet were blindly insensitive to the exploitation of white workers at home. It was difficult for many middle class abolitionists to equate wage slavery with chattel slavery. Yet the more they publicised the appalling conditions of slavery, the more likely it was that British workers would see themselves as caught in similar conditions. By the early 1830s, the leaders of working class radicalism recognised that it would be to their advantage to capitalise on the achievement of the abolitionists in awakening sympathies for the downtrodden and to do this by copying abolitionist strategies. Workers’ cries of enslavement, in turn, forced abolitionist attention to miseries at home. Since the late 1960s, studies[1] of the anti-slavery movement have increasingly demonstrated the extent to which abolitionists and supporters of reform for workers recognised their causes to be philosophically and pragmatically inseparable. However, there is little that considers Chartism and anti-slavery[2]. It is with this issue that this chapter is concerned.

From hostility to sympathy

The response of middle class abolitionists to the political claims of Chartism and to the plight of workers in the 1830s was as varied as the attitudes of working class radicals towards them. Some remained unsympathetic; others were concerned but did little concrete; and, many were involved in extending charity to the poor. Yet a surprising number of abolitionists went much further than this even though their analyses of the causes of and solutions to working class distress varied considerably. Some abolitionists were confirmed Malthusians concerned with reducing over-population; other advocated assisted emigration and home colonies to make the surplus population self-sustaining on the land; while many were supporters of the repeal of the Corn Laws that, they believed, favoured producers over consumers. There were few prominent abolitionists who did not favour increasing educational opportunities for the working class. The most radical position for abolitionists was publicly to endorse the Chartist programme and a significant number adopted this stance. Chartism created a political climate in which the developing arguments about the relationship between black slavery and white wage slavery came to a head. There was even a national debate about whether a slave or a factory worker was more oppressed. The immediate result was an intensification of the hostility and rivalry between abolitionists and Chartists and there were many attempts by Chartists to disrupt anti-slavery meetings. However, it was out of these spirited and often hostile exchanges that sympathies and a sense of common purpose slowly, if temporarily developed.

This process was aided by abolitionists and Chartists sharing some common political roots. Around 1800, many of the active members of the society to abolish the slave trade were also involved in calls for parliamentary reform and an extension of the franchise. Granville Sharp, for example, was well aware of the connection between black slavery in America and white slavery at home. He argued that as long as slavery remained in the West Indies, working people in general ‘would inevitably be involved by degrees in the same horrid slavery and depression; for that is always the base whenever slavery is tolerated’[3]. His fear was that black slaves brought to England might create an unemployment problem that would threaten the jobs of free labourers that were already ‘approaching slavery’ because arbitrary legislation had gradually elevated property rights over personal rights[4]. Major John Cartwright was equally convinced that slavery in any form violated and degraded all humanity, a view expressed in a letter to Samuel Whitbread in 1814[5]: ‘Why the people of England should not stand forward with as much unanimity in defence of their own freedoms as that of the negroes, I must be slow to believe. It does not accord with my own experience and is contrary to reason’. Between the 1790s and the early 1830s, abolitionists had some success in obtaining support from the working class, largely though petitions and boycott campaigns and this provided a useful basis for cooperation between abolitionists and Chartists in the 1830s and 1840s.

Although radical writers such as William Cobbett talked of society in terms of ‘Masters and Slaves’ in the years after the end of the wars with France, it was not until the 1830s that ‘anti-slavery’ became a central feature of radical discourse. Richard Oastler[6] used the image of ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ when he confronted the issue of child labour in 1830: ‘The very streets which receive the droppings of an ‘Anti-Slavery Society’ are every morning wet by the tears of innocent victims at the accursed shrine of avarice, who are compelled (not by the cart-whip of the negro slave-driver) but by the dread of the equally appalling thong or strap of the over-looker….The nation is now most resolutely determined that negroes shall be free. Let them, however, not forget that Britons have common rights with Afric’s sons…’ The subsequent campaign for reform gained widespread support among working class radicals and among middle class humanitarians who recognised contradictions between calls for the end to slavery and the conditions under which many working people laboured. For example, on 6^th October 1831, the Huddersfield Short Time Committee sent out a circular to all trade unions, sick-benefit clubs and friendly societies in the district: ‘Is it not a shame and disgrace that, in a land called “the land of the Bibles”, children of a tender age should be torn from their beds by six in the morning, and confined, in pestiferous factories, till eight in the evening? Ten hours a day, with eight on Saturdays, is our motto - may it be yours. Gentlemen, let us rouse ourselves from lethargy and carelessness, and rally round the principles of humanity, with an irresistible voice, demand the immediate curtailment of the hours of factory labour.’

Brougham, Martineau and the 1834 Poor Law: fighting for and against

However, it was the agitation against the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act that provided a rallying point for those who believed that working people were indeed slaves and no better off than the slaves in the West Indies or the United States. One of the central arguments against the institution of slavery was that it allowed families to be torn apart. This was not lost on the opponents of the 1834 Act with its segregation of husbands, wives and children in separate wards in the workhouse. English workers, like slaves lost control over their own family life, an analogy that spokesmen for the working class used to considerable effect. At a meeting in Manchester in 1836, Joseph Rayner Stephens waved a document that, he said, illustrated the revival of slavery in Great Britain: a bill of sale for a whole family forced to move from their home to work in a factory, a situation only made possible by the Poor Law[7]. The Operative reported that a ‘Children’s Friend Society’ had taken English children to South Africa for sale[8]. The Birmingham Journal satirised the ‘liberty’ of an English labourer as the privilege of migrating from a parish where he was barely provided for to one where he would starve[9]. Michael Sadler pleaded with his fellow MPs to give English children at least as much consideration as they gave to adult West Indian slaves. At a public meeting in support of Sadler’s Ten Hours Bill, people carried placards with such slogans as ‘No white slavery’ and ‘Sadler and the abolition of slavery at home and abroad’[10].

Radical anger turned particularly on those anti-slavery leaders who were members of the Whig government and had a hand in creating the new Poor Law. Henry Brougham[11] as Lord Chancellor and Nassau Senior who had a major role in drafting the law, were prime targets along with Harriet Martineau who J.R. Stephens called ‘their female assistant’. As well as being abolitionists, all were well-known Malthusians who believed that the working class must limit its numbers if conditions were too improve and it seemed to many radicals that the decision to segregate men and women in the workhouse was an inept attempt to enforce birth control. Certainly it was Senior[12] who advised Brougham that conditions in the workhouses should be as disagreeable as possible and it was small wonder that they were promptly dubbed ‘Brougham’s Bastilles’. The Northern Star thundered that Brougham had now joined the ranks of those peers who lived on the venality and prostitution of the country[13]. The London Dispatch and People’s Political and Social Reformer, published by Henry Hetherington included a striking cartoon of the greedy Brougham eating a bowl of squirming little people, one of them impaled on the fork he lifted to his mouth[14]. There was little here to suggest any middle way between the anti-slavery movement and the growing power of Chartism and no doubt that the close association of well-known emancipationists with the passage and defence of the Poor Law did little to improve the abolitionist image in the eyes of working class radicals.

This is unfortunate since Brougham and especially Martineau saw more good in Chartism than they have generally been given credit for. Brougham had a long association with radical causes: his long support for working class education, his defence of civil liberties, attacks on the Corn Laws, opposition to flogging in the army and navy, his support for Queen Caroline in 1820 as well as his record of opposition to black slavery need to be seen in relation to his support for the Poor Laws. Harriet Martineau privately questioned the genuineness of his populist sympathies and pointed to his inconsistency on many issues. Yet on several occasions, Brougham gave the Chartists cause to be grateful. In 1838 and 1839, when the agitation for the Charter was at its height, Brougham was praised by the editors of The Charter and The Operative[15] for backing suffrage extension and the ballot and he did support their National Petition. He also submitted petitions for leniency on at least two occasions: one for the Glasgow spinners sentenced to transportation in 1837 and another for the Chartists arrested in the riots in 1839. However, on other occasions, Brougham’s opinion was more half-hearted and equivocal.

Ironically, the same thinking that led Harriet Martineau[16] to defend the Poor Law formed the basis of his Chartist sympathies. Her goal had always been to help the poor to help themselves, especially through education. Her Malthusianism was rooted in optimism that once the working class recognised that their fundamental problem was over-population and surplus labour, they would limit their own numbers[17]. This underpinned her support for the Poor Law. However, since many families were dependent on child labour to stay above the poverty line, she argued that the only way to end this situation was to pay men higher wages. Though unwilling to declare that English workers were slaves, Martineau’s attitude to their plight was much influenced by her growing involvement in the American abolitionist movement. She concluded that slaves could only be taught to use their freedom if they were actually free and similarly concluded that British workers could only become independent and self-respecting if they were allowed to exercise their own judgement. Given her views, it is not surprising that she saw Chartism as a legitimate protest movement, one that demanded reform if Britain was to escape violent social revolution. From her viewpoint, it was not O’Conner and the Chartists, who were to be feared but Whigs and Tories with their political complacency and unwillingness to countenance further reform. But while approving Chartist goals, she deplored the demagogy of such ‘Tory agitators’ as O’Conner, J.R. Stephens and Richard Oastler and the actions of those Chartists who led the Newport rising.

The attitudes of Brougham and Martineau to Chartism were grounded in support for the aims of the movement while opposing the worse excesses of those Chartists who saw direct action as the only effective means of achieving their goals. Neither was prepared to approve of threats to public order and to property. When Brougham characterised himself as a one-step-at-a-time reformer, he was restating the abolitionist position that the emancipation of the slaves would take time and, by extension that achieving the demands of the Chartists would also take time. In that respect, he had more in common with the artisanal radicalism of Francis Place and William Lovett than the proletarian, ‘mass platform’ radicalism of O’Connor.

There were, however, other prominent emancipationists who, using the slave comparison joined the Chartists in attacking the Poor Law. Edward Baines, editor of the Leeds Mercury attacked the separation of husbands and wives in workhouses. Samuel Roberts, one of the anti-slavery leaders in the Sheffield area asked, in letters to the editor of the Sheffield Iris wrote: ‘And is England come to this? Now is there a country in the world where SLAVERY like this was ever submitted to?’[18] Lord Morpeth’s campaign for election to Parliament from the West Riding included promises to amend the Poor Law (something radicals later criticised him for not doing) and once elected he presented a petition from Bradford spinners that asked for a reduction in working hours. Richard Oastler was the most prominent abolitionist fighting the Poor Law. His anti-slavery dated back to his youth and by the 1820s he joined the drive for complete emancipation in the West Indies. It led directly into his growing awareness that, when he pleaded for the far-off slave, similar evils existed on his own doorstep. Oastler was never officially a Chartist and Samuel Roberts and Edward Baines remained stubbornly anti-Chartist but their involvement in campaigns against parliamentary bills and government policies helped to build up public interest in what Chartism had to offer.

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[1] Howard Temperley British Antislavery 1833-1870, University of South Carolina Press, 1972 and Christine Bolt The Anti-Slavery Movement and Reconstruction: A study of Anglo-American Cooperation 1833-1877, Oxford University Press, 1969 mention that some abolitionists, notably Joseph Sturge, were not insensitive to working class interests but the relationship had yet to be studied in detail. Patricia Hollis ‘Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform’, in Christine Bolt and Seymour Drescher (eds.) Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform, Dawson Press, 1980, pages 294-315 restates the traditional argument of working class antipathy to the anti-slavery movement. David Turley The Culture of English Antislavery 1780-1860, Routledge, 1991, pages 182-187 and 190-194 makes clear links with Chartism

[2] G.D.H. Cole Chartist Portraits, Macmillan, 1940 included a portrait of Joseph Sturge in his biographies.

[3] Letter from Sharp to Mr Lloyd (Gray’s Inn) for Dr Drummond, the Archbishop of York, 30^th July 1772, Granville Sharp Letterbook, York Minster

[4] This view was expressed in Granville Sharp An Appendix to the Second Edition of Mr Lofft’s Observations on a Late Publication entitles “A Dialogue on the Actual State of Parliaments”’, 1783 and The Legal Means of Political Reformation, 8^th ed., 1797.

[5] Cartwright to Samuel Whitbread, 30^th August 1814, printed in Frances D, Cartwright (ed.) The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright, two volumes, 1826, volume II, pages 80-83.

[6] Cecil Driver Tory Radical: A Life of Richard Oastler, OUP, 1946, pages 36-48. J.T. Ward  The Factory Movement 1830-1850, Macmillan, 1962 is the most detailed study though it has, in part, been superseded by R. Gray The Factory Question and Industrial England 1830-1860, Cambridge University Press, 1996

[7] Alfred [Samuel H.G. Kydd] The History of the Factory Movement from the Year 1802, to the Enactment of the Ten Hours’ Bill in 1847, two volumes, 1857, reprinted August M. Kelley, 1966, volume 2, pages 67-72 and 88-89.

[8] The Operative, 5^th May 1839.

[9] Birmingham Journal, 13^th January 1838.

[10] Alfred [Samuel H.G. Kydd] The History of the Factory Movement from the Year 1802, to the Enactment of the Ten Hours’ Bill in 1847, two volumes, 1857, reprinted August M. Kelley, 1966, volume 1, pages 198-199 and 254-255 and volume 2, pages 60-61.

[11] Brougham has been ill-served by biographers and historians have to rely on Brougham’s posthumous autobiography The Life and Times of Henry, Lord Brougham, Written by Himself and edited by his son, three volumes, London 1871-72. Chester New The Life of Henry Brougham to 1830, Oxford University Press, 1961 and Ronald K. Huch Henry, Lord Brougham: the later years, 1830-1868: the ‘great actor’, Edwin Mellen Press, 1993 are of variable quality. E.P. Thompson in his The Making of the English Working Class, Gollancz, 1963, page 604 saw Brougham as playing a ‘ritual role’ in the radicalism of the period.

[12] ‘Letter of 14^th September 1832, to Lord Chancellor Brougham on Poor Law Reform’, in Leon S. Levy Nassau W. Senior 1790-1864, David & Charles, 1970, Appendix X, pages 247-254.

[13] Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 31^st March 1838.

[14] London Dispatch and People’s Political and Social Reformer, 23^rd April 1837.

[15] The Chartist, 19^th May 1839; The Operative, 23^rd December 1838 and 30^th June 1839.

[16] On Martineau, see Vera Wheatley The Life and Work of Harriet Martineau, Fairtown, New Jersey, 1957, pages 103-105 and R.K. Webb Harriet Martineau: A Radical Victorian, Heinemann, 1960, pages 130-132.

[17] On this issue see: Elaine Freedgood ‘Banishing panic: Harriet Martineau and the popularization of political economy’, Victorian Studies, volume 39, (1995), pages 33-53.

[18] Sheffield Iris, 4^th September 1838 and 11^th December 1838.

Working-class Women

The extent to which the nature of work for labouring women changed has two dimensions that are historically and ideologically important. First, to what extent were changes in the nature of work, especially the development of the factory system, if significance in allowing women into the labour market as independent wage earners? Secondly, how far did this employment alter women’s role in the ‘domestic sphere’ and what impact did this have on the family?

Opportunities or marginalisation?

Ivy Pinchbeck, in her classic study of women workers first published in 1930, argued that economic changes between 1750 and 1850 transformed women’s employment opportunities. There was an increase in the availability of employment outside the home, improving women’s status and conditions and acting as a vital element in the destruction of the notion of the ‘family wage’. Valuable though Pinchbeck still is, several qualifications can be made to her basic thesis. The notion that the industrial revolution increased the participation of women in general outside the home is difficult to sustain. After 1820 female participation rates in the productive economy declined. In rural areas participation rates probably declined even earlier. The replacement of the sickle with the scythe played an important part in this process. The scythe was never used by women and led to them being reduced to the lower-status, lower-paid jobs of weeding or stone picking. The long-term depression in farming after 1815 and the high levels of male unemployment or under-employment exacerbated this situation. By contrast, however, in pastoral areas women’s participation did not decline and there may even have been an increase in real wages for women specialising in livestock, dairying or hay-making. In the north-eastern coalfields women ceased to work underground in the eighteenth century and none had worked below ground in Staffordshire, Shropshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire for some time before they were forbidden to do so by the Mines Act of 1842.

Levels of female activity varied according to area and occupation. The wives and daughters of migrant Scottish farmers astonished East Anglians in the 1880s by doing work that had been done exclusively by men there for almost a century. But few women found themselves emancipated in terms of having sufficient income to make themselves independent of either their parents or husbands. Contemporaries may have been impressed by the ‘freedom’ of the lasses of the mill towns who secured a reputation for flashy dressing and an undeserved one for sexual promiscuity. But they were not typical. In 1851 domestic service accounted for 37.3 per cent of female occupations [aged 15 or over], textiles 18.5, dressmaking 18 and farming 7.7 per cent. Most of these occurred in the home where constraints on emancipation were very real and where women’s wages were at a level that was assumed to be supplementary.

Male attitudes

Male exclusiveness largely explains why changes in social attitudes to women’s employment had remained largely unaltered by 1850. Traditionally, manufacturing skill had been associated with men and this had created a sense of male solidarity that extended beyond the workplace into community and home. Men’s struggles to maintain their skilled place in the workforce against machinery and against the encroachment of unskilled women was an important part of their efforts to maintain their social status within the community and their families. The sexual division of labour was a familial, customary and social construct rather than one largely determined by technical considerations. It was part of the social hierarchy established among activities: in male dominated society women’s tasks were considered inferior simply because they were carried out by women. The division of labour was an effect of the social hierarchy dominated by men, not its cause.

This patriarchal ideology was used to justify keeping women away from the new technology, as in a petition from the Staffordshire potters in 1845: ‘To maidens, mothers and wives we say machinery is your deadliest enemy ... It will destroy your natural claims to home and domestic duties....’ It also limited men’s incomes, as cotton spinner pleaded in 1824: ‘The women, in nine cases out of ten, have only themselves to support, while the men generally have families ... The women can afford their labour for less than men.... Keep them at home to look after their families.’ These contemporary criticisms of working women were based on an ideological consideration of a proper women’s sphere, not on a proper investigation of actual working conditions. With the exception of skilled artisans, whose status generally ensured an income sufficient to support a wife and family, most women in the working class worked not merely to ‘top up’ the family budget but to ensure basic levels of family subsistence.

Middle class women

The emergence of the middle classes has been treated as male and the account of middle class consciousness structured round public events in which women have generally been seen as playing little part[1]. The place of women in conventional historiography lay at the heart of middle class notions of family and home; their role was essentially domestic, dependent and private while the male role was one of having dependants and public. Was ‘the separation of spheres’ and the division between the public and private a given or was it constructed as an integral part of middle class culture and self-identity? Catherine Hall maintains that[2] ‘But one of the ways in which the middle class was held together, despite many divisive factors, was their ideas about masculinity and femininity. Men came to share a sense of what constituted masculinity and women a sense of what constituted femininity.... masculinity meant having dependants, femininity meant being dependent ... the idea of a universal womanhood is weak in comparison with the idea of certain types of sexual differentiation being a necessary part of class identity.’ She argues, from the experience of Birmingham between 1780 and 1850, that women were increasingly defined as economically dependent. This dependence was an important influence for the ways in which industrial capitalism developed, though she does not suggest that it would not have developed without these growing sexual divisions.

Dependence and ‘marginalisation’

The centrality of the notion of dependence in marriage had been given a legal basis. Married women’s property passed automatically to their husbands unless a settlement had been made in the courts of equity. Married women had no right to sue or be sued or to make contracts. Until the Infants’ Custody Act 1839 women could even be denied access to their children. There was no middle class equivalent to the working class idea of the ‘family wages’ that encapsulated the notion of economic dependence. The middle classes took on the aristocratic notion of patrilineal rights to property even though they broke with them at many other points.

The Birmingham Trade Directories demonstrate clearly the growing dependence of women after 1780 and their increasingly marginal economic role. In the 1790s there were women brass founders; in 103 a bedscrew-maker and coach-maker; in 1812 several women were involved in different aspects of the gun trade; in 1821 there was a female iron and steel merchant; and women plumbers and painters can be identified in the 1830s. By the 1840s, however, dressmaking, millinery, school teaching and the retail trades were the focus of women’s work. They were no longer engaged as employers in the central productive trades and had been marginalised to the service sector. Women were increasingly seen as without the necessary forms of knowledge and expertise to enter into business: jobs were being redefined as managerial and skilled and therefore masculine. Women could manage the home and the family but not the workshop or the factory.

A new ‘public’ world

By the mid-nineteenth century a whole new public world had been created in which women had little part. As organisations became more formal women could be successfully marginalised. They had either no role or a severely limited one in the formation of political organisations. The Birmingham Political Union, the Complete Suffrage League, dissenting organisations fighting the established church and the Anti-Corn Law League were predominantly male bodies. Middle class women were not defined as ‘political’. Their role was largely supportive.

Middle class women were, however, involved in several political campaigns in the first half of the century. They participated in the Anti-Slavery movement but their activities appear to have been restricted to fund-raising. As late as 1853 the Bristol and Clifton Ladies Anti-Slavery Society appealed for gentlemen to organise their public meetings since this was not considered as a suitable activity for a lady. Middle class women were also involved in the Anti-Corn Law League but their activities went beyond fund-raising. The female secretary of the National Bazaar Committee wrote to working men urging them to ‘stand forth and denounce as unholy, unjust and cruel all restrictions on the price of food’ and assured them that ‘the ladies are resolved to perform their arduous part’. Other women campaigned for legal changes in child custody, divorce and with regards to married women’s property. This activity took place throughout the 1850s and 1860s but it was not until the 1870s that a clear link emerged between the political activity of middle class women and feminism emerged. This fusion can first be seen in Josephine Butler’s campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts.

Their membership of new social organisations and institutions was also limited. They could not be full members of the libraries or reading rooms, or of the literary and philosophical societies. Women were used by philanthropic societies as visitors, subscribers, tract distributors or collectors of money, but they were given no formal powers of decision making. Jabez Bunting, a leading Wesleyan Methodist, told the ladies at a meeting of the Methodist Missionary Society in Leeds in 1813 that women subscribers were preferable to women speakers. Men held all the positions of power and women were often excluded from meetings. The Protestant Dissenting Charity School in Birmingham had a ladies’ committee responsible for the daily running of the school, but membership could only be achieved through recommendation of the men’s managing committee to which all important decisions were referred.

Women and philanthropy

The contribution of women to institutional charity -- whether under male control or not -- increased markedly after 1830[3]. The reason lies partly in the piety and need for ‘good work’s’ implicit in evangelicalism but also in the decline of middle class female occupations. Throughout this period much of their work was paternalistic and conservative in character, concerned with the perennial problems and vices -- disease, lying-in and old age, drink and immorality. But some areas of female concern, like anti-slavery and the cause of the ‘climbing boys’ diminished in importance, while other problems in which women did not have a role became more prominent. In addition the increase in government inspectors after the 1830s provided formal institutionalisation of problems and resulted in a marginalisation of women’s roles. For example, in the 1820s women like Elizabeth Fry turned their attention to prison visiting but their influence waned with the emergence of the prison Inspectorate in the 1830s.

What was distinctive about women’s philanthropic enterprise was the degree to which they applied their domestic experience and education, their concerns about family and relations to the world outside the home. It was a short step from the love of family to the love of the family of man, a step reinforced by the stress on charitable conduct by all religious denominations. The Evangelical concern with the importance of a proper home and family life can be seen as a move towards the more formal subordination of women that took place even in the more radical sects like the Quakers. Service and duty were implicit in both philanthropy and family life.

‘Separate spheres’

Definitions of masculinity and femininity certainly played an important part in marking off the middle classes from other social groups. The separation of the sexes existed at every level within society: in manufacturing, the professions and the retail trade, in the churches and chapels, in public life of all kinds and in the home. Nonconformists, Anglicans, conservatives and radicals and the different strata of the bourgeoisie could agree on the subordinate position of women if nothing else and created a homogeneous ideology between the disparate groups within the middle classes.

How were women represented in Victorian and Edwardian England? The concept of ‘respectability’ was a complex combination of moral, religious, economic and cultural systems. It was a concept of the public world of the middle classes that helped defined the individual’s proper relationship with their worlds. Ethics and aesthetics were part of the definition of respectable values and of the categorisation of acceptable and unacceptable social codes[4]. The notion of respectability was defined for women in terms of dependency, delicacy and fragility. Independence was unnatural, it signified boldness and sexual deviancy. Female dependency was secured through economic, legal, medical and cultural discourses. Dependency should not be seen in terms of a repressive exercise of power but as a natural and gratifying part of respectable femininity. Male veneration, it was argued, upheld the delicacy and purity of women and, far from oppressing them elevated them to a superior position. Baptist Noel, an evangelical writer stated that[5] ‘Women deserve all tenderness; and, made of a more delicate organisation, and of less strength, they need respect and courtesy, protection in danger, the supply of their wants, and above all affection to repay affection.’

The characteristics of ideal femininity were a part of a woman’s normal biological development. This representation of the fragility of middle class femininity was set up in opposition to an image of working class women who were defined as inherently healthy, hardy and robust. This myth served the interests of the medical profession and of many middle class men.

The definition of female respectability was part of the wider formation of the domestic ideology[6] and the development of home and family values. A cult of domesticity developed with the separation of the home and the workplace during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Rather than the home being above the business in the two centre with the women of the household involved in both commercial and domestic activities, businessmen began to move out of cities, investing in suburban housing and travelling daily into the city to the place of work. This had important implications for how the middle classes perceived the city. It was defined as a dangerous and threatening place into which a population of working class and casual poor could easily turn into a riotous mob and, by definition, not the place where middle class women should go.

The separation of work and home led to a reconstruction of gender identities. Women were defined ‘naturally’ as domestic beings, suited to the duties of the home and children. Men were associated with a public sphere, the world of work and politics. The home, for the middle classes, was emptied of its association with work and became defined around notions of recreation, leisure, privacy and shelter. The home became a shelter or haven from the speculation, competition and conflicts of business and public life. It was ‘domesticated’. It was, however, much more than that[7] ‘The Home is the crystal of society -- the very nucleus of national character; and from that source, be it pure or tainted, issue the habits, principles and maxims, which govern public as well as private life. The nation comes from the nursery; public opinion itself is for the most part the outgrowth of the home.’ Regulation, control and peace in the home ensured national security and prosperity. The breakdown of domestic order was understood in terms of a total social disintegration.

The power of the dominant stereotype can be measured by its hold in areas totally inappropriate to the objective conditions. Economic and social conditions made it impossible for the working class woman to attain the ideal of the Perfect Lady and there was rarely a separation between work and home. Yet many members of the working class admired the ideal. Young girls could not be as innocent and as ignorant as a middle class girl. But the better off embraced premarital chastity and the family even more ardently than their social superiors in the middle classes. Middle class writers who were popular among the working class wrote about the moral purity of the reputable working class and the deserving poor. Dickens, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot portrayed the sanctity of the working class home in the face of the moral carelessness of upper class men who thought they could freely dally with women beneath them.

In summing up the Perfect Lady, it must be restated that in many respects she represented only a very small minority. But there is little doubting the influence of the ideal. The idea of the wife at home to look after the house and family became increasingly desirable. This copy of the Perfect Lady could not afford servants or idleness but she could be respectable, chaste and virtuous. Women who did not live up to these standards would be cast off by affronted husbands and be socially ostracised.

The really important point is that the Perfect Lady stereotype was gradually rejected by women -- by women who felt themselves suffocated by its cloying image. Middle class women launched the attack on the inactivity and economic dependence that was expected of them. They demanded control over property, economic independence, and admission to education and to the professions, wider employment opportunities and the franchise[8]. There were several economic and social reasons why feminism emerged and why it often focused on the Sex Question. Some historians suggest that feminism emerged because of the break up of the old productive family unit, consequent on industrialisation that left single women redundant. Others pursue the sex ratio theory, showing that a ‘surplus’ female population existed in this period [in 1851 there were 1042 women to every 1000 men and by 1901 this had risen to 1068] and stating that these surplus, unsupported spinsters broke down the barriers to entry into the professions. The emergence of a distinct middle class effectively closed many of what would previously have been middle class female occupations. It was this group of middle class women, dissatisfied with their lot as defined for the Perfect Lady sought to redefine women’s social position. They provided the overwhelming majority of feminists or New Women. It was these bourgeois women whom John Stuart Mill had in mind when he pleaded for equality of the sexes in The Subjection of Women in 1869 and it was they who took up the challenge. The rising standards of living in the lower middle class and the labour aristocracy after 1870 that resulted in rising social aspirations.

The new women were in part the product of changed socio-economic conditions and in part the result of the efforts of individual women who suffered social ostracism for their beliefs. The suffrage movement, educational reform, the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and the fight to distribute birth control information all contributed to the decline of hypocrisy and rigidity. By the 1880s the Perfect Lady could no longer hold her own unchallenged. Women increasingly demanded and gained constructive and useful roles in society. Job opportunities were opening to every class and the typewriter and telephone had a profound impact of work for women. Social attitudes were beginning to change: in the 1880s and 1890s W.S. Gilbert was far softer in his satire of middle aged spinsters than his predecessors in the music halls and in popular literature independent women became heroines for the first time. But this was a slow process. The pages of Punch, a journal renowned for its anti-feminism, provide historians with the popular caricature of the New Woman. Her aspirations to education were derided in its pages throughout the 1890s. The entry of women to the professions was similarly a great joke. The New Woman was lampooned and shown in a variety of unladylike postures such as playing golf and riding bicycles. On the women’s campaign for the vote, Punch was equally biting: Suffragettes were uniformly old, ugly, butch and bespectacled. Despite the more sensitive nature of serious literature, the warnings were still there. In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure [1896] there can be no happiness for Sue Bridehead: she recoiled from marriage to a good man, Jude; her children die horribly and she finally breaks down. George Gissing’s portrayal of spinsters in The Odd Women [1892] showed the unhappiness to which their course had led them.

The images that are most frequently presented of the New Woman were cruel, mocking and hostile. In 1914 women were still largely excluded from circles of power, authority and prestige; marriage was still held out as the prime goal of every young woman. The ideal of the Perfect Lady was in the process of being replaced by the middle class notion of the New Woman, an ideal that condemned women to a less than equal position in society. It was the First World War and its immediate aftermath that, for a time, provided women with a significant degree of emancipation but by the mid-1920s feminism was in retreat.

It is difficult now to evaluate how satisfied women were with their lot. A woman who was discontented would seek an individual rather than a group solution to her predicament. Clearly the limited choice of employment, especially before the 1890s, and low pay for all classes of women meant that marriage was the most attractive option. But the very fluidity of Victorian England meant that women could not remain within a static role of domesticity. Even the most contented could not help but be affected by the intense debate on the position of women that swirled about them. By the 1860s middle class women in particular were taking on an increasingly large number of tasks that required public agitation. A small number of activists hoped to broaden the definition of women’s ‘proper sphere’. This expansion proceeded unevenly and was based on assumptions that could not always be reconciled. Respectability was the goal of outsiders, from actresses to shopkeepers, and its possession the prize of even the most militant feminist.

---

[1] On the emergence of the middle classes L. Davidoff and C. Hall Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English middle class 1780-1850, Hutchinson, 1987 is a major contribution to women’s history.

[2] C. Hall Gender ‘Divisions and Class Formation in the Birmingham Middle Class 1780-1850’, in R. Samuel (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory, Routledge, 1981, page 165.

[3] F.K. Prochaska Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth Century England, OUP, 1980 is an interesting study of a major area of female concern.

[4] Lynda Nead Myths of Sexuality, Blackwell, 1988 examines the issues that surround the representation of femininity in Victorian art. High culture in the form of publicly exhibited paintings carried very high stakes in Victorian England. It was the arena in which class and national identities were proposed and where definitions of normality and deviance were shaped.

[5] Baptist Noel The Fallen and their Associates, 1860, pp. 7-8.

[6] Catherine Hall ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in her White, Male and Middle Class, Polity, 1994, pp. 75-93 provides a valuable discussion of the development of this central concept between the 1790s and 1840s. It provides a fundamental context for later developments.

[7] Samuel Smiles Self-Help, 1859, p. 274

[8] Philippa Levine Victorian Feminism 1850-1900, Hutchinson, 1987 looks at feminist protest before the Suffragettes and provides a valuable examination of the emergence of the ‘New Woman’.

Re-presenting Women: 4

Representing 'separate spheres'?

How were women represented in this period? The concept of 'respectability' was a complex combination of moral, religious, economic and cultural systems. It was a concept of the public world of the middle classes that helped defined the individual's proper relationship with their worlds. Ethics and aesthetics were part of the definition of respectable values and of the categorisation of acceptable and unacceptable social codes[1]. The notion of respectability was defined for women in terms of dependency, delicacy and fragility. Independence was unnatural; it signified boldness and sexual deviancy. Female dependency was secured through economic, legal, medical and cultural discourses. Dependency should not be seen in terms of a repressive exercise of power but as a natural and gratifying part of respectable femininity. Male veneration, it was argued, upheld the delicacy and purity of women and, far from oppressing them elevated them to a superior position. Baptist Noel, an evangelical writer stated, [2] “Women deserve all tenderness; and, made of a more delicate organisation, and of less strength, they need respect and courtesy, protection in danger, the supply of their wants, and above all affection to repay affection.” The characteristics of ideal femininity were a part of a woman's normal biological development. This representation of the fragility of middle class femininity was set up in opposition to an image of working class women who were defined as inherently healthy, hardy and robust. This myth served the interests of the medical profession and of many middle class men.

The definition of female respectability was part of the wider formation of the domestic ideology[3] and the development of home and family values. A cult of domesticity developed with the separation of the home and the workplace during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Rather than the home being above the business in town centres with the women of the household involved in both commercial and domestic activities, businessmen began to move out of cities, investing in suburban housing and travelling daily into the city to the place of work. This had important implications for how the middle classes perceived the city. It was defined as a dangerous and threatening place into which a population of working class and casual poor could easily turn into a riotous mob and, by definition, not the place where middle class women should go.

The separation of work and home led to a reconstruction of gender identities. Women were defined ‘naturally’ as domestic beings, suited to the duties of the home and children. Men were associated with a public sphere, the world of work and politics. The middle-class home lost its association with work and was increasingly defined around notions of recreation, leisure, privacy and shelter. The home became a shelter or haven from the speculation, competition and conflicts of business and public life. It was ‘domesticated’. It was, however, much more than that[4] “The Home is the crystal of society -- the very nucleus of national character; and from that source, be it pure or tainted, issue the habits, principles and maxims, which govern public as well as private life. The nation comes from the nursery; public opinion itself is for the most part the outgrowth of the home.” Regulation, control and peace in the home ensured national security and prosperity. The breakdown of domestic order was understood in terms of a total social disintegration.

The ideologies of the home and of the separate spheres were fundamental elements in the formation of an ideal for middle class Perfect Lady. Both male and female writers, secular and clerical, sang its praises. How representative of nineteenth century womanhood was it? The existence of Perfect Ladies presupposes the availability of a plentiful supply of money, provided by working husbands, to create the cosy sanctuary, the home. However, the vast majority of women in Britain belonged to the working class for whom the ideal did not correspond to the reality of their lives. In trying to find Perfect Ladies historians have to look to the middle and upper classes, so we are already dealing with a small minority. The economic realities of life for the great majority of the middle classes meant that they had insufficient income to employ a legion of cooks, maids, nannies and governesses. The lot of many, perhaps most, middle class women was often one of hard work and making ends need, whilst helped in the house often by a single young maid-of-all work. Most middle class women could not afford the idleness or other trappings of the Perfect Woman stereotype. In reality, there are doubts whether many women indulged in the hypersensitivity with which the Perfect Lady is usually accredited. Ill health among lower middle class women was far more likely to arise from overwork and from non-stop childbearing than from inertia. Yet, this sickly facet of the Perfect Woman stereotype is important. Many novels provide evidence to this invalid image and one thinks of Elizabeth Barrett Browning kept as an imprisoned invalid by a possessive father. The view of women as consumptive weaklings could not have been projected without the active support of the medical profession that attempted to exert social controls over women’s lives by producing medical arguments in favour of the ‘traditional female role’. Their views on the health of women actually differed enormously according to class. Working class women were not dubbed as delicate invalids. Middle class women were regarded as inherently sick if they tried to step outside their prescribed role; working women, on the other hand, were themselves health hazards, who harboured the germs of cholera, typhoid and venereal disease, and who bore numerous unfit and inferior working class babies. The operation of a dual standard between the women of the middle and the working classes is quite striking.

The power of the dominant stereotype can be measured by its hold in areas very inappropriate to the objective conditions. Economic and social conditions made it impossible for the working class woman to attain the ideal of the Perfect Lady and for them there was rarely a separation between work and home. Yet, many members of the working class admired the ideal. Young girls could not be as innocent and as ignorant as a middle class girl. But the better off embraced premarital chastity and the family even more ardently than their social superiors in the middle classes. Middle class writers who were popular among the working class wrote about the moral purity of the reputable working class and the deserving poor. Dickens, Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot portrayed the sanctity of the working class home in the face of the moral carelessness of upper class men who thought they could freely dally with women beneath them.

In summing up the Perfect Lady, it must be restated that in many respects she represented only a very small minority. Nevertheless, there is little doubt of the influence of the ideal. The idea of the wife at home, the ‘angel in the house’, to look after the house and family became increasingly desirable. This copy of the Perfect Lady could not afford servants or idleness but she could be respectable, chaste and virtuous. Women who did not live up to these standards would be cast off by affronted husbands and be socially ostracised. The important point is that the Perfect Lady stereotype was gradually rejected by women -- by women who felt themselves suffocated by its cloying image. Middle class women launched the attack on the inactivity and economic dependence that was expected of them. They demanded control over property, economic independence, and admission to education and to the professions, wider employment opportunities and the franchise[5]. There were several economic and social reasons why feminism emerged and why it often focused on the Sex Question:

Some historians suggest that feminism emerged because of the break up of the old productive family unit, consequent on industrialisation that left single women redundant. Others pursue the sex ratio theory, showing that a ‘surplus’ female population existed in this period (in 1851 there were 1042 women to every 1000 men and by 1901 this had risen to 1068) and stating that these surplus, unsupported spinsters broke down the barriers to entry into the professions. The emergence of a distinct middle class effectively closed many of what would previously have been middle class female occupations. It was this group of middle class women, dissatisfied with their lot as defined for the Perfect Lady sought to redefine women's social position. They provided the overwhelming majority of feminists or New Women. It was these bourgeois women whom John Stuart Mill had in mind when he pleaded for equality of the sexes in The Subjection of Women in 1869 and it was they who took up the challenge. The increasing standards of living in the lower middle class and the labour aristocracy after 1870 resulted in rising social aspirations.

The new women were in part the product of changed socio-economic conditions and in part the result of the efforts of individual women who suffered social ostracism for their beliefs. The suffrage movement, educational reform, the campaign against the Contagious Diseases Acts and the fight to distribute birth control information all contributed to the decline of hypocrisy and rigidity. By the 1880s, the Perfect Lady could no longer hold her own unchallenged. Women increasingly demanded and gained constructive and useful roles in society. Job opportunities were opening to every class and the typewriter and telephone had a profound impact of work for women. Social attitudes were beginning to change. In the 1880s and 1890s, W.S. Gilbert was far softer in his satire of middle-aged spinsters than his predecessors in the music halls and in popular literature independent women became heroines for the first time. However, this was a slow process. The pages of Punch, a journal renowned for its anti-feminism, provide historians with the popular caricature of the New Woman. Her aspirations to education were derided in its pages throughout the 1890s. The entry of women to the professions was similarly a great joke. The New Woman was lampooned and shown in a variety of unladylike postures such as playing golf and riding bicycles. On the women’s campaign for the vote, Punch was equally biting: Suffragettes were uniformly old, ugly, butch and bespectacled. Despite the more sensitive nature of serious literature, the warnings were still there. In Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure, 1896 there can be no happiness for Sue Bridehead: she recoiled from marriage to a good man, Jude; her children die horribly and she finally breaks down. George Gissing’s portrayal of spinsterhood in The Odd Women, 1892 showed the unhappiness to which their course had led them.

The image with which we are most frequently presented of the New Woman was cruel, mocking and hostile. In 1914, women were still largely excluded from circles of power, authority and prestige; marriage was still held out as the prime goal of every young woman. The ideal of the Perfect Lady was in the process of being replaced by the middle class notion of the New Woman, an ideal that condemned women to a less than equal position in society. It was the First World War and its immediate aftermath that, for a time, provided women with a significant degree of emancipation but by the mid 1920s, feminism was in retreat and women had been restored to what men saw as their place in the home.

The degree to which attitudes towards women changed during this period is one of some debate. Womanhood was an ideal to which most women were compelled to conform. Only the very bottom of society was immune to so pervasive a model. Women were educated to believe that they were, on the one hand, morally superior to men in their lack of sexual drive and, on the other hand, inferior because of their weaker nature. The chaste woman was seen as exerting an all-pervasive moral influence within the home and more generally in society. The woman who broke the family circle as prostitute, adulteress or divorcee threatened society’s very fabric. If society condoned these individuals then its very life was imperilled, though seemingly heaven and the colonies would welcome some fallen women. Women themselves were the greatest enforcers of standards of moral behaviour defined in purely sexual terms: Grundyism was a powerful force in the service of duty over passion and obedience over independence.

It is difficult now to evaluate how satisfied women were with their lot. A woman who was discontented would seek an individual rather than a group solution to her predicament. Clearly, the limited choice of employment, especially before the 1890s, and low pay for all classes of women meant that marriage remained the most attractive option. Nevertheless, the fluidity of Victorian England meant that women could not remain within a static role of domesticity. Even the most contented could not help but be affected by the intense debate on the position of women that swirled about them. By the 1860s, middle class women in particular were taking on an increasingly large number of tasks that required public agitation. A small number of activists hoped to broaden the definition of women’s ‘proper sphere’. This expansion proceeded unevenly and was based on assumptions that could not always be reconciled. Respectability was the goal of outsiders, from actresses to shopkeepers, and its possession the prize of even the most militant feminist.

---

[1] Nead Myths of Sexuality examines the issues surrounding the representation of femininity in Victorian art. High culture in the form of publicly exhibited paintings carried very high stakes in Victorian England. It was the arena in which class and national identities were proposed and where definitions of normality and deviance were shaped.

[2] Baptist Noel The Fallen and their Associates, London, 1860, pages 7-8.

[3] Catherine Hall ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in her White, Male and Middle Class, Oxford 1994, pages 75-93 provides a valuable discussion of the development of this central concept between the 1790s and 1840s. It provides a fundamental context for later developments.

[4] Samuel Smiles Self-Help, London, 1859, page 274

[5] Philippa Levine Victorian Feminism 1850-1900, London 1987 looks at feminist protest before the Suffragettes and provides a valuable examination of the emergence of the 'New Woman'