Women and the People

Authority, Authorship and the Radical Tradition in Nineteenth-Century England

Helen Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315318004
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

Based on extensive new research investigating the range of women's involvement in early nineteenth-century popular politics, mid-Victorian reform and the women's movements of the late century, Women and the People makes an original intervention in the historiography of the radical tradition by exploring the interconnections of populism, liberalism and feminism. Attending to authorship, the study argues that the representational forms adopted by radicals were as important as the content of what they said in shaping their self-perception, their construction of others, and the reception of their ideas. In fiction, poetry and autobiography, as well as in political writing, speeches and journalism, women reworked radical conventions and imagined new models of political identity, participation and authority. Though, in general, radicals appealed to 'the people', women were often positioned as the suffering objects of reform rather than as the agents of change. By showing how they challenged or reinforced these conceptions of 'women' and 'the people', the book contends that radical women invoked alternative communities of sex, class and nation, and helped to remake and discipline the political sphere, as they strove to make it their own.

1 Women and the People: Re-making the Radical Tradition

In her essay on the 'Enfranchisement of Women', published in the Westminster Review in 1851, Harriet Taylor identified the political claims of women with the pursuit of popular rights by the liberal, democratic movements within English politics. By doing so, she laid claim to a radical political tradition. Women and the People investigates the attempts of women to appropriate and make use of that tradition, both as individual reformers and as organised bodies of women. Yet, as Taylor argued, radical politics rarely spoke directly to women as political subjects in their own right. 'In England', she regretted, 'the wife's influence is usually on the illiberal and anti-popular side: this is generally the gaining side for personal interest and vanity; and what to her is the democracy or liberalism in which she has no part - which leaves her the Pariah it found her?'¹ If, as Taylor asserted, radical politics generally ignored the interests and opinions of women, why did so many seek to intervene in the radical movements? By exploring women's identification with a variety of radical causes in the nineteenth century, Women and the People assesses the attractions and the limitations of radicalism for women, and considers how they reshaped the meanings and practices of the radical tradition as they struggled to make it their own.

Over the last three decades the politics of female reformers, radicals and feminists in the nineteenth century has been the subject of extensive research. Much of this work has been preoccupied with the questions of how, and under what circumstances, women came to identify their shared interests as women and began to organise, as women, to advance their rights as a sex. The failure of the radical movements to actively promote the rights of women has been used to explain the ephemerality of female political organisation and the absence of a continuous feminist tradition. But women did not always, or only, identify themselves as 'women'. Radical women were motivated by a fervent commitment to the rights of 'the People', and their conceptions of women's rights and duties need to be examined in relation to their constructions of 'the People'. Some historians have contended that the appeal to 'the People' and its Constitution formed the meta-narrative of popular politics in the nineteenth century, and have sought to reassess the meanings of the radical tradition in the light of the pervasive use of this 'populist idiom'.² It is remarkable, therefore, that there has been almost no analysis of the ways in which radical women and feminists perceived or utilised the populist idiom.³ Women and the People seeks to re-examine the relationship between radicalism and feminism by investigating the efforts of women to speak as members of 'the People' and in 'the People's' name.⁴

Since the publication in 1963 of The Making of the English Working Class, Edward Thompson's study of the role of radical culture in the formation of a working-class consciousness, the development and the meanings of the radical tradition have been the focus of on-going reinterpretation. For Thompson, the success of the radical movements lay in their appeal to a deeply entrenched popular belief in the political and civil rights of freeborn Englishmen, and in their ability to extend the political language of radicalism to articulate the class experience and the social rights of the labouring poor.⁷ More recently, experience itself has been seen as the product of radical discourses which offered their subjects ways of understanding their world and their place within it. Thus, people are seen to acquire their sense of political selfhood and agency through their engagement with a political tradition. Many of the women examined in this book self-consciously educated themselves in what they saw as a body of radical knowledge that would enable them to change themselves and their world. However, political traditions do not exist in and of themselves; rather they are produced by political activists, writers and historians who categorise, select, discard, interpret and order into sequence ideas, texts, and events that do not have any necessary or intrinsic relationship to each other.⁸ The analysis of women's use of, and effect on, the radical tradition, depends therefore on how we, as well as they, define the radical tradition.

This chapter introduces new ways of reading the radical tradition and political subjectivity. Part I assesses recent interpretations of the radical tradition by examining how one famous radical and feminist, Josephine Butler, appropriated the populist idiom and narrated a radical past. In authoring their own radical narratives, reformers like Butler worked within, and sometimes against, the representational forms of radicalism, that governed the ways in which people articulated, received and responded to political ideas, and the ways in which they imagined themselves as political subjects. Part II outlines the vexed questions about the relationships between 'language' and 'experience' and between 'discourse' and 'power' that have troubled debates over the formation of political subjectivity. These questions are considered in Parts III, IV and V through an examination of women's intervention in the reform movements of the late 1810s; an intervention that precipitated debates over, and inaugurated new forms of, radical representation that had to be negotiated by the women studied in this book.

In 1818 and 1819, female reformers tended to invoke their own experience as a source of authority. While narrative has been examined recently as a source of power, the effectiveness of narrative cannot be explained simply in terms of the narrative itself, for women, like many radical subjects, did not have equal means of disseminating their claims. This raises questions about the organisation of power that have been central to feminist investigations of the radical and the women's movements of the nineteenth century. Part VI of this chapter considers how women's capacity to act effectively within politics was structured, and often limited, by a complex web of power relationships both inside and outside radical culture. The following chapters, outlined at the end of this chapter, suggest that political identification and activism were also dependent on the peculiarities of various radical traditions; by the wider field of political contest and negotiation; and by the contingencies of women's lives.

I The meanings of the populist idiom

Josephine Butler's Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusade, published in 1896, examined the origins and significance of a political movement, and offers a starting point for re-evaluating the radical tradition.⁷ The book was more than an autobiographical collection of memories of the movement to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts, implied by the title. Butler presented a historical interpretation that challenged what she saw as the widespread misconception that the repeal or 'abolitionist' movement was synonymous with the contemporary movements for women's rights. Introduced in the 1860s, the Contagious Diseases legislation provided for the compulsory detention, examination, and treatment of women suspected of engaging in prostitution and of carrying venereal disease.⁸ For Butler, the Acts 'legalised vice' and constituted a flagrant abuse of the civil rights of women, in respect of their rights of privacy and of habeas corpus. During the campaign, Butler repeatedly underlined the fact that this iniquitous legislation had been passed by a Parliament of men, and that until women were represented in Parliament their constitutional rights would remain under threat.⁹ Yet, in Personal Rernzmscences, Butler declared that, 'It may surprise some of my readers to learn that the first great uprising against legalised vice had much less the character of the "revolt of the sex" than has often been supposed.' By way of correction, she attested that:

I never myself viewed this question as fundamentally any more a woman's question than it is a man's. The legislation we opposed secured the enslavement of women and the increased immorality of men; and history and experience alike teach us that these two results are never separated. Slavery and License lead to degradation, political ruin, and intellectual decay, and therefore it was that we held that this legislation and the opposition to it were questions for the whole nation at large.¹⁰

For Butler, the repeal campaign was both a political and a moral crusade, and the two aspects of the campaign could not be separated.

We arose - we women as well as men, in defence of the grand old principles which happily have prevailed and constantly been revived in the Constitution and Government of our country since very early times until recently. It is to those principles, and to the successive noble struggles for their preservation, that England owes, in a large measure, her greatness; if indeed we may venture to use that word. Those principles, I have ever believed, and continue to believe, have their foundation in the Ethics of Christ; and therefore it is that they have endured so long, and prevailed against repeated and violent attacks.¹¹

By appealing to the constitution as the guarantor of the rights of the people, Butler drew self-consciously on a long and predominantly radical tradition of popular constitutionalism that was shared by many other women examined in this book.¹² In the absence of a written constitution, radicals appealed to the rights of citizenship that they believed were exercised by the Anglo-Saxons, and that later were inscribed in the Magna Charta. These rights were sanctioned by God, if not encoded in law, and had been upheld by the customs and struggles of the people.¹³ It was to 'the People' that Butler turned for justice in 1870 for, by flouting the constitution, Parliament had trampled on the liberties of the English people, and not just those of the female 'outcast'. In her Appeal to the People of England on the Recognition and Superintendance of Prostitution by Governments, Butler remonstrated:

What! have the rulers of England altogether forgotten that there is a truth in the familiar words 'Vox populi vox Dei?' Have they forgotten that we are supposed to be governed by a Parliament representing the people, and is it possible that they are able to assert with one breath that the Act will probably be obnoxious to the people of England, and yet that it is desirable to impose it, and for the good of that people? ¹⁴

But if in 1870, Butler appealed explicitly to the tradition of popular constitutionalism, this was not a stable and immutable tradition. In 1896 Butler claimed that the people's rights were once again in jeopardy. The 'present tendencies', she contended, were moving towards a 'Socialistic State-Worship'. With 'sorrowful' heart, she wrote that the principles of English and Christian liberty, that had underwritten the repeal campaign, were being lost gradually; 'All political parties ... now more or less regard these principles as out of date, old-fashioned, impossible as a basis of action.' Personal Reminiscences was as much a call to the people to renew their defence of 'the worth of the individual, the sacredness of the human person, and of liberty' as it was an attempt to fix the meanings of the 'Great Crusade'.¹⁵

The recognition of the importance of the populist idiom in radical politics has thrown into question earlier assessments of radical culture, and particularly the central role it was seen to play in the 'making' of both the working and the middle class.¹⁶ The anti-slavery and anti-Corn Law movements, for example, were often seen as reflecting the values and interests of a rising middle class and gave that class a national voice and character.¹⁷ Although the early movements for political reform had united all the 'useful' or 'industrious classes' in the demand for universal manhood suffrage, this popular alliance was fractured by the property qualification introduced by the 1832 Reform Act and, henceforth, radicals tended to see the interests of the middle and working classes as distinct, and often in conflict with each other. Thus, although the demands of the Chartists were for political reform, the movement was perceived as fundamentally working-class in character, in that it spoke primarily for and to the working classes. With the defeat of the militant and purportedly class-conscious mass platform of the Chartists in 1848, working-class radicals increasingly sought co-operation with middle-class reformers in order to pursue piecemeal reforms from the state, as in the campaigns for permissive trade union legislation and the gradual extension of the franchise. The mid-Victorian decades were seen, therefore, as marking a period of negotiation and accommodation between working-class politicians, middle-class reformers and the State, before the return to a more class-conscious and confrontationalist working-class politics in the shape of New Unionism and the rise of labour in the 1880s.¹⁸

More recently, the populist appeal of most radical movements has led some historians to emphasise the continuities in the radical tradition rather than the sharp swings between the politics of class confrontation and class mediation identified by previous generations of historians. For the revisionists, political reform rather than the advancement of the rights of a class, was the over-riding preoccupation of nineteenth-century radicals.¹⁹ Radicals, they contend, favoured demotic and extra-class forms of identity. Instead of appealing to any one class, or social group, radicals endeavoured to create a mass platform, open to all those who proclaimed the rights of the people and who opposed political exclusivity, oppression and corruption. The prevalence of this populist idiom has prompted some historians to question the relevancy of 'class' to an understanding of radical identification.²⁰ Radical populism, they argue, tended to be universalistic and moralistic in tone, pitching justice, fairness, and common decency against tyranny, monopoly and self-interest. The rhetoric of patriotism and the nation was as important as, if not more important than, 'class'.²¹ If it was invoked at all, therefore, the language of class did not simply reflect 'interests' or 'identities' that were already present in the social world, but rather was the product of political discourse. Consequently, it has been argued that the articulation of a language of class cannot be attributed, in any straightforward sense, to an original, and pre discursive social experience.²²

As well as sharing a political vocabulary, it has been claimed that radicals also deployed similar political tactic...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Women and the People: Re-making the Radical Tradition
• 2 A Leader of the People: Eliza Sharples and the Radical Platform, 1832-52
• 3 Women of the People: Influence and Force in the Chartist Movement, 1838-48
• 4 Serving the People: Feminist Writers and the Politics of Improvement, 1830-50
• 5 The Daughters of the People: Representing the Needlewomen, 1841-64
• 6 The People and the Outcast: The Repeal Movement and the Battle for Liberalism, 1870-74
• 7 Of the Common People: The Dimensions of a Radical Life, Mary Smith, 1822-89
• 8 Beyond the People? Reconfiguring the Radical Tradition
• Bibliography
• Index