Introduction

The central question posed by this book is not whether women were able to engage in politics in the nineteenth century—the debate has now moved on, with most historians now acknowledging some level of female activism— but rather what were the nature and extent of their political worlds? The nineteenth century was a period of reform and innovation for women’s engagement in public life. In this period women were able to participate in politics at many levels—from the intensely domestic to the wider international sphere—and they developed strategies for interacting with the largely male political world. Far from finding women excluded from the public life of the nation, this analysis uncovers the vast extent of their participation. It presents the positive evidence of female agency in a counter-narrative to that which focuses on the restrictions and exclusions women faced. That women were able to find strategies and negotiate methods of contributing to established political systems demonstrates that the rhetoric surrounding their ‘proper’ sphere bore little resemblance to the reality of female public life. Women were also able to exercise their own opinion and authority on issues that mattered to them, and thus the notion that politics was largely, if not entirely, a masculine affair is to overlook issues in which women took ownership or those that were adopted equally by both sexes. In 1845, the Morning Chronicle attempted to summarise the part women should play in public life:

That, on the one hand, the active participation of women in political agitation and debate is, generally speaking, decidedly undesirable; that, on the other hand, there are, from time to time, certain public questions of a quasi-political character on which the expression of female opinion and feeling is both natural and graceful—are safe truisms. . . . Nor have we any wish to map and mete out the wide space of debateable ground which lies between these two extremes, and say which, of all the questions of the day—political, semi-political, charitable, moral, and mixed—are fit or unfit for female interference . . . When any considerable number of the women of Great Britain testify, by active public co-operation, their interest in a public question, it is a 2tolerably strong presumption that the question really and legitimately belongs to them. ¹