Gender, Knowledge and Power in Radical Culture
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POETESSES AND POLITICIANS: GENDER, KNOWLEDGE AND POWER IN RADICAL CULTURE, 1830-1870 HELEN ROGERS submitted for the degree of D.Phil University of York History Department and Centre for Women's Studies September 1994 CONTENTS PAGE Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction - Poetesses and Politicians: Rethinking Women and Radicalism, 1830-1870 1 I Poetesses and Politicians 2 II Rethinking Women and Radicalism, 1830-1870 12 Chapter One - The Politics of Knowledge in Radical Culture, 1790-1834 25 I Reason, Virtue and Knowledge: Political and Moral Science in the 1790s 27 II "Union is Knowledge": Political and Moral Economy in the 1820s and 1830s 37 Chapter Two - "The Prayer, The Passion and the Reason" of Eliza Sharples: Freethought, Women's Rights and Republicanism, 1832-1852 51 I The Making of a Republican, 1827-1832 i The Conversion 54 ii "Moral Marriage": A Philosophical Partnership? 59 iii The Forbidden Fruit of Knowledge 64 II "The Lady of the Rotunda" 72 III "Proper Help Meets for Men": Eliza Sharpies and Female Association in Metropolitan Radical Culture, in the Early 1830s 81 IV "The Poverty of Philosophy": Marriage, Widowhood, and Politics, 1833-1852 94 Chapter Three - "A Thinking and Strictly Moral People": Education and Citizenship in the Chartist Movement 102 I Chartist Debates on Education as Politics 111 II "Sound Political Wisdom from the Lips of Women": Chartist Women's Political Education 120 III Chartist Women and Moral and Physical Force 130 IV Conclusion "What Power has Woman...?" 138 Chapter Four - "The Good Are Not Always Powerful, Nor the Powerful Always Good": The Politics of Women's Work in the London Needle Trades, 1841-1864 145 I Conditions of the Needle Trades 147 II Social Investigation and the Needlewomen i The Parliamentary Commissions and the Dressmakers 152 ii Henry Mayhew and the Slopwomen 159 III The Politics of Needlework i Tory Philanthropy 167 ii Chartism, Trade Unionism and Christian Socialism 171 iii Women's Rights 179 Chapter Five - From "Monster Meetings" to "Fire-side Virtues": Domesticating Politics 192 I Unitarian Radicalism in the 1830s 195 H "Perfecting Men and Women": The "Practical Morality" of Mary Leman Grimstone 203 III An Alliance of "Science" and "Sentiment"? Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mill 216 Conclusion 226 Chapter Six - Writing for the People: Radical Women and Cultural Politics in the 1840s and 1850s 228 I The Popular Journals: "A Combination of Utility and Amusement" 229 II "The Rights and Wrongs of Women" 240 III "Intellect Manifests itself in Action" 248 IV Serving the Cause of Labour 257 Conclusion 270 Chapter Seven - "I Have a Past to Think of, too...": Education, Writing and Identity in the Lives of Mary Smith and Marianne Farningham 271 I "A Child's Education Begins Early...": Childhood, Education and Identity 275 II "A Woman can be a Lady without Money" 288 HI "Helpers of Women": Politics and Community in the Lives of Smith and Farningham 302 Conclusion "The Good Time Coming": Autobiography, History and Progress 315 Conclusion 322 Bibliography 331 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council for funding my research. I very much appreciate assistance from the staff at the following libraries and archives: the University of York, the British Library at Bloomsbury, Colindale and Boston Spa, Nottingham Public Library and Record Office, Leicester, Bolton and Salford public libraries, Manchester Central Library, the London School of Economics and The Co-operative Union Library, Manchester. Many thanks as well to all the staff and students in the History Department and Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York who encouraged my research and professional development. Eileen Yeo introduced me to the world of radical culture and continues to share her enthusiasm and ideas. I am indebted to my supervisors Jane Rendall and Joanna de Groot for their support, criticism and interest and for believing in me when I didn't believe in myself. Brainstorming sessions with Joanna were productive and good fun. By sharing her work with me, Jane has taught me a great deal about the Scottish Enlightenment, political economy, middle-class radicalism and about being a historian. Her advice has been invaluable. Many thanks to my thesis advisors Treva Broughton and Chris Clark for their firm guidance, incisive questions and for firing me up, just when it was needed. The following research seminars afforded intellectual excitement, companionship, inspiration and sympathy:- the women's history group; the post-graduate history group; the contemporary theory group, the research seminar 1700-1850 and the staff-graduate seminars in History and Women's Studies. Margie Fraser, Sue Grace, Kate Watson, Dave Peacock, John Arnold and Joe Bristow have been especially supportive over the years. I am thankful to Women's Studies for providing me with office space and equipment and to Ruth Symes and Ann Kaloski who put up with my untidy and colonising habits. They have helped me talk through many problems and have provided an inexhaustible fund of amusing and instructive stories. Jean Wall and Krista Cowman came to my aid on numerous occasions when the word-processor defeated me. Many friends kept me going through the ups and downs of research. In particular, Alison Twells, Mandy Morris, Clare Hemmings, Cath Stowers and Jane Rowley have laughed and cried, debated and danced with me. Above all, Claire Eustance and the "patio garden" at Cycle Street got me through it. My family have supported me generously and with good-humour. My sisters Anne and Sarah and my grandma Marion Craig have been almost entirely responsible for my wardrobe in the last four years. My parents Pat and Peter have always encouraged my education and taught me to value myself. Even if they didn't intend it, they gave me my first lessons in feminism. The women of this thesis would have approved! Thank you for everything. ABSTRACT This thesis examines how questions of knowledge and power were of major concern to women in different radical communities in the years 1830 to 1870. It contests the view that radical women saw themselves primarily as auxiliaries to men and compares their understandings of their "rights" and "duties", their "power" and "influence" in the following radical cultures: freethought in London in the early 1830s; the Chartist movement; the Unitarian radicalism of the South Place Chapel in the 1830s and 1840s; and the literary, reforming and women's rights circles from the late 1840s to the early 1860s. The thesis explores the different ways in which women shaped new ideas of education and politics and how they remade themselves by becoming "poetesses" and "politicians". While identifying women's intervention in particular political and intellectual traditions, I suggest that these alone cannot explain women's politicisation. By focusing on women's autobiographical writing in political addresses as well as formal memoirs, I explore the successes and failures of women to politicise their experience of family, social position, work, religion, education and desire. The difficulties of and resistances to making individual experience the basis for a collective practice is an important theme. The thesis investigates issues of silence and marginality as well as of self- representation and empowerment. By exploring the debates about work in the London needle trades, I examine the exclusion of working-class women from formal political organisations at the mid-century. By contrast, I suggest that some middle-class radicals like Mary Leman Grimstone and Eliza Meteyard attempted as writers to forge a new cultural politics and yet could not conceive that lower-class women might also act for themselves. The reformation of relations between the sexes was of crucial importance for these radical women and as "poetesses" and "politicians" I suggest that they participated in the construction of mid-Victorian liberalism. Introduction POETESSES AND POLITICIANS: RETHINKING WOMEN AND RADICALISM, 1830-1870 ...to break through the trammels of custom and become poetess or politician... Sophia of Birmingham, 1841. The axiom "Knowledge is Power" was a guiding principle for many radicals in Britain in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. From the late eighteenth century political radicalism, which attacked the privilege of exclusive government, had frequently been associated with campaigns for freedom of conscience, speech and the press. By the 1830s some radicals were extending their criticisms of monopolistic power to the organisation of industry and advocated the principle of union as an alternative to competition. Other radicals held that men's monopoly over education and knowledge secured their power over women. They suggested that female education was the key to equalising the sexes. Radical politics offered its adherents ways of understanding and thereby changing their social position. Women's use of radical knowledge, their attempts to bring their own experience to radical movements, and their creation of new forms of knowledge and power form the themes of this thesis. While women committed themselves to particular radical programmes, they stretched the definitions of radicalism and invented their own. We shall begin, therefore, by examining how Sophia, an upper-middle-class Chartist writing in The English Chartist Circular, believed women needed to become poetesses and politicians. Her attempts to outline what Chartism meant for women highlight some of the problems and opportunities afforded