ABSTRACT
J. M. W. Turner own politics were unclear, but his choice of subject during the Reform Bill crisis must have been deliberate. He was depicting the elective process in action, leading to the triumphant re-election of a leading supporter of the movement to reform the franchise. A political perspective can shed light on chronologies in the history of gender. The dominant narrative of British women’s history was the emergence of ‘separate spheres’. Since the 1990s, a key way that gender historians have challenged this narrative has been by exploring the place of women in the political life of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the history of masculinity, a key narrative concerns the rise of domestic notions of masculinity in the nineteenth century, apparently replacing forms of masculinity – such as the ‘polite’ man – that were more publicly validated. Social class has also been an important perspective for historians of modern British politics.
