ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how these understandings were themselves shaped by Chartist debates over moral and physical force. Women's support for universal manhood suffrage in Birmingham was first demonstrated at a public meeting, held at the Town Hall in April 1838 and attended; it was claimed, by 12,000 women. Salt's advice that women should be treated as 'friends', otherwise they might become enemies of the people, belied the familiar radical anxiety about the potentially conservative influence that women could exert over men. The moral- and physical-force opposition oversimplifies, however, the complexity of the debates that took place in 1838 and 1839 over the purpose of the Charter and how its objectives would be achieved. The fact that women in Birmingham and Nottingham were encouraged to join Chartism as a social, as much as a political movement, raises questions about recent characterisations of the Chartist movement.
