Women in Protest 1800-1850

Malcolm I. Thomis, Jennifer Grimmett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415628204
• eBook ISBN: 9781000155594
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

There is still much uncertainty about the role of nineteenth-century British women in social and political protest. As politics was a man's world virtually all official accounts and statistics of popular protest deal only with the men involved. It is well known that women participated in food riots and mobilised support for Chartism, and as the dramatic changes in the economy during this period greatly increased the demand for women's labour, this stimulated their widespread involvement in political and social agitation, particularly the parliamentary reform movement of 1819.

First published in 1982, this book provides a descriptive account of the part played by women – mainly working class women – in a variety of social and political activities that can broadly be categorised as protest. It establishes the basic outlines and offers an interpretation of the course of events.

1 WOMEN'S WORK AND WOMEN'S PROTEST, 1800 — 1850

Women have never held such professional interest for historians as they have in recent years. Since history was first written men have almost monopolised the attention of historians, and this has inevitably left many gaps to be filled and certain sensitivities amongst those whose predecessors have been so badly neglected. It is not the purpose of this text to help to correct the injustices that have been perpetrated by historians and others over the centuries; nor is it the intention to create some theoretical framework within which aspects of women's history can be studied. Its main purpose is simply to suggest that in the area of social and political protest women of nineteenth-century Britain might well have had a significant role that has not yet been fully described and explained; if this is so, then here is a matter worthy of investigation. Full descriptions, let alone full explanations, are still premature, for reasons which will be explained, but partial ones should at least facilitate the task of those who will eventually impose order and meaning upon this little-known subject.

It is possible that most prominent writers on the question of social protest have not said as much about women as their role warrants. If an incomplete account of the past has resulted this is to be regretted, for its own sake and not primarily because it has done an injustice to women. If historians who have looked at this issue are to be criticised for their deficiencies, these must be identified in terms of conclusions which do not follow from the evidence they have examined or of the incompleteness of their evidence; they must not be condemned because women have emerged from their writings with less glory than some people suppose is their due.

The two leading historians of British social protest, George Rude and Edward Thompson, are both vulnerable to criticism for their treatment of the role of women. Rude's recent work on 'Protest and Punishment' suggests that out of 3,600 convicts transported for social protest only 120, or 1 in 30, were women and that all but two of these belonged to his fringe group of 'marginal protestors', who were mainly Irish arsonists. ¹ His index of 572 identified pro testors contains only 4 named women; though 1 in 30 of the total was a woman, only 1 in 143 has been identified and given a specific mention. These figures give rise to such speculation as to the apparently very minor role that women played in protest, the possible partiality of the law in dealing with them, or the possible partiality of the historian in his treatment of them. The English female arsonists sent to Van Diemen's Land, 1840-1853, were 46 in number, but they receive no discussion, and even the intriguing possibility that arson is revealed as the characteristic form of women's protest is undermined by the explanation that the female arsonists were largely intent upon joining their husbands, lovers and brothers in Australia. Food riots, for long associated with women's protest, evidently failed to produce convicts, though transportation sentences were occasionally handed out for food rioting; and Rude's earlier discussions of food rioting identified socio-economic, rather than gender, groups and associated women's participation with France rather than Britain, despite the known higher incidence of the price-fixing 'taxation populaire' in England. ² It could safely be concluded that British women play no prominent role in George Rude's account and explanation of social protest.

Edward Thompson, on his own claim the attempted rescuer of failed minorities (who, by no stretch of the imagination, could be said to include women) from the condescension of posterity, has been berated for treating 'female radicalism with untypical circum spection' and ascribing to women the role of moral supporters of their more active men. ³ This is somewhat surprising criticism of the historian who produced the classic statement on eighteenth-century food rioting in 'The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century', which demonstrated how and why women played a particularly prominent role in food riots. ⁴ Perhaps the offence of commission there was greater than the earlier one of omission, for it helped to reinforce the image of the stereotype, concerned with matters domestic, especially food prices, and placed women firmly in the market-place, if not exactly beside the kitchen sink. There is evidently a greatly felt need to establish that women's presence in the market-place concerned pamphlets and politics as well as prices, and a more complete account is now being sought.

Setting the limits of an enquiry is not easy, especially with a topic such as social protest, which some would wish to embrace all forms of crime that arise from the failure of society to make proper provision for its members. This study is not concerned with acts of personal gain but with collective action, peaceful and violent, for the achievement of social and political ends carried out usually within what are known as 'popular movements'. Protest will be interpreted broadly to include those actions, often crimes in the law of the times, to change the status quo in politics and in industry; although such movements as parliamentary reform and trade unionism were later to become the epitome of constitutional behaviour, they originated none the less in discontent and protest in the period under consideration.

Any attempt to establish the significance of women's role in popular protest must beware of fulfilling its own prophecy that there is a particular role to be identified. It has been suggested, for instance, that whilst their part can be described and even given an emphasis that has previously been lacking, it would be a mistake to suppose that theirs was different and separate from that of males in protest. Their activity, it is said, went well beyond the familiar issue of bread rioting and into matters of greater political content, in the same way that male protest extended over a wide range of subjects and for much the same reasons. ⁵ It is desirable to know how much women contribute towards 'the changing face of protest' during the first half of the nineteenth century, whether generalisations that have been made about primitive forms of protest, such as food rioting, being superseded by more sophisticated and mature forms, such as political organisation, are true for women in particular;⁶ whether women whose involvement in Welsh corn riots in 1793-1801 has been explained in terms of their concern with matters affecting the daily lives of the people broadened their concern to include matters of long-term interest such as the acquisition of political power for the remedy of social ills; ⁷ whether the vision changed as well as the tactics.

The part of it that remained fairly constant was the continued readiness of most women to see politics as a man's world. When women mobilised support for Chartism, they did so, it has been suggested, in support of working-class interests rather than to raise questions related to women, ⁸ and they were supported in their political activities by men because they were perfectly happy to perpetuate the status quo between the sexes. When men felt them selves threatened, as they sometimes did over jobs and wages, they for their part reacted as men and not as workers and thereby allowed their concern for the primacy of their sex to undermine working-class solidarity over issues on which, it is alleged, they would have been better served by adopting a class position.⁹

Another perspective is that offered by R. S. Neale, who suggests that women were as a whole so restricted in their employment opportunities, so badly paid, so scattered in their places of work, and possessed such an ingrained subjection to authority that they were unable to emerge as a political class. Like the rest of the unskilled they found that their interests as wage earners were not served by working-class organisations and they found it difficult to believe that their interests were those of the working-class move ment in general. ¹⁰ This view is not in conflict with the findings of John Foster in Oldham that the leadership of the labour move ment, which generated class consciousness, contained not one single woman. ¹¹ This seems a more scholarly and empirically based conclusion than the somewhat romantic view that 'recent historical research has documented working women's early and widespread involvement in the class struggle' and the demand to drop the charge that 'nineteenth century working class women were apathetic regarding class action' .¹² Their role in social and political protest can be described; their contribution to the class struggle is a matter of judgement.

If indeed there is no such thing as a specifically female kind of protest, it may be that there is a women's perspective to be observed on particular issues, perhaps a women's slightly different approach to the tactics to be employed in staging a campaign. At all events, it is important to attempt to consider how far women's behaviour in social protest, bread rioting, industrial action or political activity, derives from the fact that participants were involved as women and not simply as people.

In so doing it seems hardly necessary to state that the world of the first half of the nineteenth century was a man's world. The practical consequences of this for a study of women's protest are many. It means for a start that almost all the sources for study are those prepared or collected by men. Not only did men alone speak in Parliament, pass laws and govern, centrally and locally; they also owned and wrote the newspapers of the day, signed requisitions for public meetings, wrote letters to the Home Secretary in their roles as magistrates, mill owners, or in some private capacity. They controlled the content of the material that has been handed down for study and the manner in which it was compiled and presented. Their assumptions about women and their place were fundamental to the way they behaved and expressed themselves, and have, of course, influenced the record as it was compiled.

The terminology of source material presents some problems. It can be taken for granted that almost everyone who used the term universal suffrage meant manhood suffrage, and the unsatisfactory nature of the former term occasionally elicited hostile comments from those who knew that women were not intended and believed they should be. On the other side were those who suggested that women must be comprehended within the term and believed that this made the whole concept a ludicrous one. ¹³ Descriptions of crowds often cause confusion. The commonly encountered claim that crowds contained large numbers of women and children might mean what it says, but confidence in its literal truth is shaken by the knowledge that writers who sought to play down the size or importance of a gathering chose to do so by alleging that women featured prominently. Reports of women's presence can be cases of accurate reporting or simply disparaging comment. When a report claims that there were large numbers of females at a public execution who would have been better at home attending to their domestic duties, the attitudes of the writer are quite explicit and his reporting less open to question. ¹⁴ But what of the occasions when accounts speak of large bodies of men in attendance at public meetings and make no specific reference to women? This was a common practice right into the Chartist period when women were almost certainly attending all public meetings in large numbers, but even speakers who were accustomed to addressing women's meetings, men such as John Fielden or Richard Oastler, would frequently treat a mixed audience as though it were composed entirely of men.

With accounts of riots, the tendency was similarly to describe their composition in terms of the number of men involved, unless women were particularly prominent and commanded attention and a mention. And so determining the composition of riot crowds presents some difficulties. Accounts of Swing riots which reached the Home Office in 1830 - 1 usually employ some blanket term such as 'mob' or 'lower orders' or the more helpful one of 'labourers', but they frequently specify that the people whose activities are being described are men. This leads to the not surprising inference that women played very little part in the riots; ¹⁵ yet it is possible that the evidence is misleading, that writers describe only the activities of men because these are the only ones which they consider to be important and that women are present who do not merit a mention. If the intention of the writer is to emphasise the seriousness of the riots he is describing he would be inclined to talk about the men who were present, for to identify women as participants was the standard means of playing down an event and suggesting that it need not be taken seriously.

The same problem arises in the study of trade disputes within occupations and industries where women are known to have been present in large numbers. Strikes within such contexts are frequently described without any reference to women's support or involvement, yet it frequently seems reasonable to assume that strikes would not have been possible if female as well as male employees were not participating. It is also true that addresses to 'fellow-workmen', which contain not a single reference to women, might none the less have been intended to embrace both sexes, just as the language of the crafts and guilds in the eighteenth century implied a totally male membership when this was not in fact the case. ¹⁶

The identification and the counting of women are difficult exercises. Usually women are simply names, and press accounts are unlikely to indicate whether they are paupers or possessors of vast fortunes, employed or not in work, married or single. Occasionally a little more is learned about a woman if her public appearances cause her private life to come under scrutiny. It was the fate of Mrs Grassby of Elland, prominent campaigner against the New Poor Law and on behalf of Chartism, to have her marital relations discussed in the popular press because these were thought to be an area where she was vulnerable to attack. She countered the abuse by setting the record straight, at the same time telling more about herself than is usually known of the women activists.¹⁷ Fuller exposure was usually the consequence of arrest, indictment and trial, but even there the resulting information is very thin. An investigation of Scottish protestors was hampered by the fact that women were described in terms of their relationship to a named male and that it was his occupation that was 1stated rather than that of the women themselves. ¹⁸ Apart from any injustice caused to the women through failure to judge and record them for what they were, this left a very incomplete record and would inevitably frustrate future attempts to analyse the women in terms of occupational status.

Even where some quantification is possible, and the same Scottish women permitted some calculation of their contribution to the totals of people...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Dedication
• 1. Women's Work and Women's Protest, 1800-1850
• 2. Women in Food Riots
• 3. Women in Social Protest
• 4. Women in Industrial Protest
• 5. 'Petticoat Reformers'
• 6. Chartist Women
• 7. Postscript: Rebecca and Her Sisters
• Notes
• Index