ABSTRACT
The ladies of Cranford belong to a class of propertied gentlewomen who represented something of a problem for Victorian social classification. They are the 'holders of houses' above £10 denied the vote by the 1832 Reform Act; the 'jointured widows and rich single women', some 170,000 of them, according to Barbara Bodichon, excluded from the franchise on the one hand and without influence in the patriarchal family on the other (Lacey, 1987, p.138). The cause of these forgotten women was taken up in the 1860s and 1870s by the feminist campaign for female enfranchisement. Their property qualified them for the vote, it was argued, and because they were unmarried there could be no objection that they were 'directly influenced ... by men' (p.120), or that they would be in any danger of sacrificing the 'subtle, indirect influence' on public affairs
(p.116) that wives supposedly exercised over their husbands. This campaign was confounded, however, by the almost complete invisibility of this class of women, and by their confusion with the vast numbers of 'surplus' middle-class women, poorly educated and unemployed, whose growing presence contested the sexual ideology of the protected, dependent woman and provoked 'moral panic' (Lovell, 1987, p.96).2
