Abstract
In December 1832, the borough of Ripon in Yorkshire was contested for the first time for over one hundred years. In the aftermath of the Reform Act expectations were high that the proprietorial influence of the Aislabie family of Studley Royal could be thrown off and that the election would launch a new era of democratic politics.2 The Liberal candidates centred their campaign on the unnatural and illegal influence of the owner of the Studley Royal estate and proprietor of many burgage plots in Ripon. However, this traditional claim of ‘old corruption’ was given an alternative spin because it was a woman, Elizabeth Sophia Lawrence, who had sole control of the estate and therefore could influence borough politics. In a series of speeches, one of the Liberal challengers, Richard Crompton Staveley, utilised a particularly evocative image to draw attention to the role of this female, political power:
At your request, I now stand before you (ladies, I am sorry to say it) to do away with petticoat influence. Men could no longer bear it, that one immense blue petticoat should cover the whole town of Ripon and exclude from its inhabitants those bright rays of light and liberty which are now shining forth in all their glory from one end of the borough to another.3
The petticoat as a metaphor for women’s authority over men had been a favourite symbol in political propaganda from the early eighteenth century.
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Notes
For further detail on this election contest see Sarah Richardson, ‘The Role of Women in Electoral Politics in the West Riding of Yorkshire during the 1830s’, Northern History, 32 (1996), pp. 133–51, and her ‘Independence and Deference: a Study of the Electorate of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1832–1841’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Leeds, 1995).
J. Dunton, Petticoat Government (London, 1702), p. 70.
Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 363–5, and R. Bucholz, ‘“Nothing but Ceremony”: Queen Anne and the Limitations of Royal Ritual’, Journal of British Studies, 30 (1991), pp. 288–323.
Kathleen Wilson, Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 213–27; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 1992).
Gilbert Burnet, History of My Own Time, 2 vols (London, 1724), vol. i, p. 83.
Morning Chronicle, 9 May 1832, cited in J. R. M. Butler, The Passing of the Great Reform Bill, 2nd edn (London: Frank Cass, 1964), p. 379.
A Secret History of the Late Petticoat Plot Against the Liberties of the People by an Officer of Her Majesty’s Household (London: W. P. Chubb, 1832?).
Cited in Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995), p. 254. The ballad goes on to say, ‘we’ll settle the men, and let them know that now the Queen reigns that petticoats is master’.
William Cobbett, Rural Rides in the Counties of Surrey, Kent, Sussex …, 2 vols (London: William Cobbett, 1830), vol. i, p. 365.
Cited in Juliet Gardiner, The New Woman: Women’s Voices, 1880–1918 (London: Collins & Brown, 1993), p. 12.
Cited in Kathryn Gleadle, ‘British Women and Radical Politics in the Late Nonconformist Enlightenment, c. 1780–1830’, in Amanda Vickery (ed.), Women, Privilege and Power: British Women and Politics, 1780–1998 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, forthcoming).
Ruth and Edmund Frow, Political Women, 1800–1850 (London: Pluto Press, 1989), p. 64.
The clothing of the Duchess of Devonshire attracted much attention. See Amanda Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: HarperCollins, 1998), pp. 76 and 218.
Malcolm I. Thomis and Jennifer Grimmett, Women in Protest, 1800–1850 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), p. 100, and Maria Luddy, Women in Ireland, 1800–1918: A Documentary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1995), p. 250.
Wilson, Sense of the People, pp. 212–28; Colley, Britons, for example p. 341; Nicholas Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), p. 221.
See, for example, Vicky Randall, Women in Politics: An International Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987).
Mary Ann Elston, ‘Women and Anti-Vivisection in Victorian England’, in Nicolaas Rupke (ed.), Vivisection in Historical Perspective (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 259–94; Hilda Kean, Animal Rights: Political and Social Change in Britain since 1800 (London: Reaktion Books, 1998); Leah Leneman, ‘The Awakened Instinct: Vegetarianism and the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Britain’, Women’s History Review, 6 (1997), pp. 271–88; Susan E. Cayleff, Wash and Be Healed: The Water-Cure Movement and Women’s Health (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1987); Jane B. Donegan, ‘Hydropathic Highway to Health’: Women and Water Cure in Antebellum America (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); Matthew Hilton, ‘The Politics of Consumer Society’, History Workshop Journal, 45 (1998), pp. 290–6, and see also Chapter 7 in this volume.
The thesis of women’s increasing exclusion from the world of politics has been discussed extensively. See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987); Catherine Hall, ‘Private Persons versus Public Someones: Class, Gender and Politics in England’, in Catherine Hall, White, Male and Middle-Class. Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), pp. 151–71; Joan Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY, 1987); see also Eileen Janes Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity: Women’s Self-Representation in the Public Sphere (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), introduction.
See Chapter 1; Frow and Frow, Political Women, 1800–1850, pp. 3–15; and Susan Staves, ‘Investment, Votes, and “Bribes”: Women as Shareholders in the Chartered National Companies’, in Hilda L. Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 259–78.
See, for example, Brian Harrison, Prudent Revolutionaries: Portraits of British Feminists between the Wars (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); Mary Cullen and Maria Luddy (eds), Women, Power and Consciousness in 19th-century Ireland (Dublin: Attic Press, 1995) and Margaret Forster, Significant Sisters: The Grassroots of Active Feminism, 1839–1939 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986).
Barbara Caine, Victorian Feminists (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Sandra Stanley Holton, Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women’s Suffrage Movement (London and New York: Routledge, 1996).
Sally Alexander, ‘Women, Class and Sexual Difference in the 1830s and 1840s: some Reflections on the Writing of a Feminist History’ (1984), reprinted in Sally Alexander, (ed.), Becoming a Woman: And Other Essays in 19th- and 20th-century Feminist History (London: Virago, 1994), p. 125.
G. E. Maguire, Conservative Women: A History of Women and the Conservative Party, 1874–1997 (London: Macmillan Press, 1998); Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), p. 204; a brief consideration of the influence of politicians’ mistresses and royal consorts may be found in P. J. Jupp, ‘The Roles of Royal and Aristocratic Women in British Politics, c. 1782–1832’, in Mary O’Dowd and Sabine Wichert (eds), Chattel, Servant or Citizen: Women’s Status in Church, State and Society (Belfast: The Institute of Irish Studies, The Queen’s University, 1995), pp. 103–13.
K. D. Reynolds, Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
Elaine Chalus, ‘“That Epidemical Madness”: Women and Electoral Politics in the Late Eighteenth Century’, in Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (eds), Gender in Eighteenth-Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York: Longman, 1997), pp. 151–78. See also B. J. Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England’, Historical Journal, 33 (1990), pp. 259–81.
Quoted in William Thompson, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, To retain them in Political and thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery, ed. Dolores Dooley (Cork: Cork University Press, 1997, first published 1825), p. 61.
John Bohstedt, ‘Gender, Household and Community Politics: Women in English Riots, 1790–1810’, Past and Present, 120 (1988), pp. 88–122; E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present, 50 (1971), pp. 76–136; Clark, Struggle for the Breeches.
This is implicit in Catherine Hall, ‘The Early Formation of Victorian Domestic Ideology’, in Hall, White, Male and Middle Class, pp. 74–92, and F. K. Prochaska, Women and Philanthropy in Nineteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992). See also Louis and Rosemary Billing-ton, ‘“A Burning Zeal for Righteousness”: Women in the British Anti-Slavery Movement, 1820–1860’, in Jane Rendall (ed.), Equal or Different: Women’s Politics, 1800–1914 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), pp. 82–111.
Kathryn Gleadle, The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement, c. 1831–51 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995); Gleadle, ‘British Women and Radical Politics in Late Nonconformist Enlightenment’, and Ruth Watts, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760–1860 (London and New York: Longman, 1998).
For an overview of approaches to the historical community see Alan Macfarlane, Reconstructing Historical Communities (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), Chapter 1.
For discussion of the electorate as a community, see J. Clyde Mitchell (ed.), Social Networks in Urban Situations: Analyses of Personal Relationships in Central African Towns (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1969); and A. C. Mayer, ‘The Significance of Quasi-Groups in the Study of Complex Societies’, in M. Banton (ed.), The Social Anthropology of Complex Societies (London and New York: Tavistock Publications, 1968). For illustrations of women’s role in the electoral process see Chapters 1 and 8 below.
See, for example, Blanche Weisen Cook, ‘Female Support Networks and Political Activism: Lilian Wald, Crystal Eastman, Emma Goldman’, Chrysalis, 3 (1977), pp. 43–61; Philippa Levine, Feminist Lives in Victorian England: Private Roles and Public Commitment (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990).
This is an approach pursued in Angela V. John and Claire Eustance (eds), The Men’s Share? Masculinities, Male Support and Women’s Suffrage in Britain, 1890–1920 (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Gleadle, The Early Feminists; and Caine, Victorian Feminists.
See, for example, Chapters 2 and 3, and also Marjorie Reeves, Pursuing the Muses: Female Education and Nonconformist Culture, 1700–1900 (London: Leicester University Press, 1997).
Among recent contributions one might cite Bridget Hill, The Republican Virago: The Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); Wendy Gunther-Canada, ‘The Politics of Sense and Sensibility: Mary Wollstonecraft and Catherine Macaulay Graham on Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France’, and J. G. A. Pocock, ‘Catherine Macaulay: Patriot Historian’, both in Smith (ed.), Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition; Miriam Brody, ‘The Vindication of the Writes of Women: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment Rhetoric’, in Maria J. Falco, Feminist Interpretations of Mary Wollstonecraft (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), pp. 104–23.
Gary Kelly, Revolutionary Feminism: The Mind and Career of Mary Wollstonecraft (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); see also his Women, Writing and Revolution, 1790–1827 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Another example of a woman who combined political and educational practices is Anna Laetitia Barbauld. See Grace A. Ellis, A Memoir of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, 2 vols (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1874).
Anne K. Mellor, ‘Joanna Baillie and the Counter-Public Sphere’, Studies in Romanticism, 33 (1994), pp. 559–67.
For example, Ann Shteir’s fascinating survey of botany in Georgian and Victorian Britain has highlighted how even women’s botanical writing may be scrutinised for its gendered and political meanings. Ann B. Shteir, Cultivating Women, Cultivating Science: Flora’s Daughters and Botany in England, 1760 to 1860 (Baltimore, MD, and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996).
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© 2000 Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson
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Gleadle, K., Richardson, S. (2000). Introduction: The Petticoat in Politics: Women and Authority. In: Gleadle, K., Richardson, S. (eds) Women in British Politics, 1760–1860. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62989-3_1
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