by Dark Days of Georgian Britain- Rethinking the Regency (retail) (epub)
Mary Fildes was not the first female radical. Alice Kitchen was president of Blackburn Female Reformers, who were constituted for the first time on 5 July 1819. At a large meeting called by the men of Blackburn, Kitchen made a speech supporting political liberty and parliamentary reform and promised that female reformers ‘pledged themselves to instil in the minds of their children a hatred of civil and religious tyranny’. She went on to say: ‘Our homes … which once bore ample testimony of industry and cleanliness are now alas, robbed of all their ornaments. Behold our innocent children! How appalling are their cries for bread!’
Her speech suggests a lot about the female reformers. None of the women involved actively supported votes for women. Whatever their private thoughts might have been, they saw their public role as supporting their husbands and providing a kind of ‘radical childcare’ for their family – it was very much the traditional role of the wife, but slightly modified by the economic and political crisis they now found themselves in.
Despite couching her radicalism within the traditional division of labour, Kitchen was known to the establishment as an enemy of the system. She was dangerous enough to be satirised. One example is a piece of heavy handed anti-radical propaganda of 1820 by George Buxton, based loosely on the story of Don Quixote in which every British reformer receives a satirical assault, Alice is the only female radical mentioned by name.1 She is portrayed as the ‘Lancasterian Thalestris’ – the Queen of the Amazons in Greek philosophy – thus suggesting her as the pre-eminent female radical of the Regency period.
In what looks like a fear that women’s rights would lead to role reversal, ‘Dame Alice’ beats up her husband. The husband, in his powerlessness, interprets this as an indication of love and a sacrifice for the greater cause. The ‘happy husband considered it a trifle of matron-like attention in comparison to the blessings we might expect under the auspices of radical reform’. Later in the story, Dame Alice suggests that she has sex with the radical hero Don Dwarfino to produce children that, in an echo of Kitchen’s Blackburn speech, might ‘instil a hatred of religion, of nobility, of royalty, and of all rulers’. In the view of the establishment, radicalism produced promiscuity; her desire to bring down governments includes the government of men and the rules which respectable women follow. It was a completely inaccurate interpretation of Kitchen’s ideas but an accurate representation of men’s anger, fear, and lack of understanding.
George Cruikshank, often a friend of reform in his other caricatures, also took a hostile line in his satirical print ‘The Belle-alliance, or the female reformers of Blackburn!!!’ The women on the hustings lift their dresses to show breeches underneath; some female reformers on the platform are large, armed, and aggressive while others are pretty and demure, and the object of the male crowd’s condescension and lust. One woman winks towards the men below, saying, ‘we are some of the right sort my lads!’ The appreciative audience are poor and chaotic – suggesting the same poverty and chaos that would happen under a government ruled by women.
The Nottingham Review of July 1819 made a little joke about petticoat government, while their radical husbands would ‘damn’ the constitution, it was implied, the best the women could do was ‘darn’ it.
The Bath Chronicle of 22 June 1819 despaired of Alice:
Another Female Union Society has been formed. Some wretched creatures who disgrace their sex at Stockport, have followed the example of Mrs Alice Kitchen and her associates at Blackburn.
She disappears from the political records at this point. It would be hard to blame her.
Another early organisation, the Stockport Female Reform Society, was led by a Mrs Hallsworth. Her first name has not been discovered, partly due to the lack of coverage and partly because many newspapers made it a deliberate policy to simply use the title ‘Mrs,’ with the implication that they should be elsewhere as they were married. On the very morning of Peterloo, the Morning Post had some acid words for these ladies. Perhaps, instead of republican toasts, the ladies should take notice of what the women in the USA toasted on the previous Fourth of July: ‘The Rights of Women – Innocence, Modesty and Prudence – may she be satisfied with those, without investigating any others.’
The article also names Mrs Hodgson and Mrs Hambleton as leaders and it is known that Hallsworth was in charge of one meeting where she suggested that the women meet separately. This had clearly rattled the newspapers, which saw female political independence as an aberration and a terrible precedent. Mrs Hallsworth went on to say that they were meeting separately because the women were new to the idea of political discussion and did not want to embarrass themselves; but it is still true that women were meeting and talking independently about radical politics for the first time since the civil war in the 1640s.
The newspaper also pointed out that a proclamation of Henry VIII in 1547 ordered that ‘women should not meet together to babble and talk, and men should keep them in their houses.’ On the basis that the establishment only make laws forbidding what people do, rather than do not do, this was a real political change, even if it did not last.
The Stockport women radicals were present at Peterloo. We do not know if Alice Kitchen was there too, although there was a contingent from Blackburn on that August afternoon. There were processions from the Stockport and Oldham Female Reform Unions, and this clear message from the women of Royton: ‘Let us die like Men, and not be sold as slaves.’ It is a great pity that the names of most of these brave women have been lost to history.
The chapter opened with Mary Fildes, another important female radical present at Peterloo. Mary and four others were members of the Manchester Female Reform Society (formed in July 1819, a month after the Female Reform Union in Blackburn). The women stayed in a barouche – a fourwheeled horse-drawn carriage – while Mary, as president, was on the hustings with her friends Henry Hunt and Richard Carlile, a radical reformer, a republican, and a deist who rejected the divinity of Christ and made Hunt look like a moderate. Carlile also had a history of working with women reformers such as Mary Fildes.
Mary had a drum and a large standard, with a figure of a woman holding a flag in her hand, surmounted by a cap of liberty – ‘Joan of Arc could not be more interesting’ thought Richard Carlile, slightly condescendingly. Mary was calm. We know this as Carlile, next to her, reported as such. He was impressed by her bravery, even if he did imply that it was particularly courageous considering that she was a woman. The women in the crowd were calm too – the radical Archibald Prentice noticed many young women marching in step from all parts of Manchester. When he asked them if they were apprehensive they all replied: ‘What have we to be afraid of?’ Many of the commentators, both sympathetic and hostile, thought that the large number of relaxed looking women and children in the crowd guaranteed a safe and orderly outcome and good behaviour by both sides. Henry Hunt began his address with the one word – ‘Gentlemen!’ and then stopped. He perhaps looked at all the women and children in the crown and started again with ‘Fellow Countrymen’. Within minutes the forces of law and order were launching themselves towards the hustings to arrest everybody on it.
When Mary Fildes was truncheoned by Joseph Nadin’s constables, she refused to let go of her flag. She tried to leap to the ground, but a protruding nail caught her dress, leaving her suspended in mid-air. One of the mounted yeomanry slashed at her and seized her flag but miraculously she avoided serious injury and escaped.
Mary Fildes continued in her struggle in the years after Peterloo. She went on to be an activist for women’s contraception and supported the Chartists in the 1840s in the fight for the vote once more. In later life she became the owner and landlady of a public house in Chester; an occupation that gives some clue about strength of character.
Nancy Prestwick was another well known female reformer who was at the head of about 300 women at Peterloo, and like many of the female groups, she seemed to have been deliberately put near the hustings. Nancy was 64, the mother of a woo
l worker, Henry Tully, and both gave evidence at the later trial for conspiracy of Henry Hunt in 1820. She was a rather frail 64-year-old, and according to her own evidence, she went to Peterloo with her son and his wife, attracting a dozen or so female supporters on the way.
The organisers placed Nancy at the head of a group of about 300 women near the hustings and made her the leader – partly due to her age and partly due to the fact that she was well known, although it perhaps needs to be remembered that Hunt was also trying to establish beyond doubt the peaceful intentions of the meeting. She missed Hunt’s opening remarks as she had gone to buy herself a gill of beer – a half pint – on this very hot August afternoon. She did see the yeomanry cavalry assaulting people when she returned. Hunt, at his later trial, asked Prestwick: ‘did you and the 300 women attempt to take the cavalry prisoners?’ in a sarcastic attempt to show the asymmetry of power between the two sides.
Other female radicals were taken prisoner. Elizabeth Gaunt was arrested after the hustings were broken up. Her own report, accepted by the prosecution, was that she was lifted up after feeling unwell, fainted during the yeomanry attack, and suffered some blows from a sabre. She was removed with the other people on the hustings (all except Carlile and Fildes) and spent twelve days at the Salford New Bailey gaol. The newspapers described her as a ‘thin pale woman of about 45, wife of a shoemaker’, but this rather understated her condition. The radical Thomas (‘TJ’) Wooler, a supporter, described her as ‘almost fainting with weaknesses, after the wounds she had received and the subsequent solitary confinement’.2 She was the only one of the prisoners who was allowed to sit on a chair during the proceedings. The use of solitary confinement suggested an indictment for treason; but three days later Gaunt was free. She was discharged through lack of evidence on 27 August. The conditions she endured can only be inferred; the Leeds Mercury of 8 November reported that one male prisoner, after also being released without charge, tore off his filthy vermin-ridden clothes as he left the New Bailey.
Gaunt was still a friend of the Carlile family in 1822 and still active in the radical movement. While Carlile was imprisoned in Dorchester gaol for libel, his wife Jane continued to edit their newspaper The Republican. When Jane was imprisoned, her sister continued the struggle. Jane was pregnant in prison and Gaunt sent her a letter, a present for the baby, and a message: ‘I was one of those who witnessed the blood stained fields of Peterloo and suffered 11 days imprisonment in one of the borough mongers bastilles because I was exposed to the sabres of the ferocious yeomanry cavalry.’3
Gaunt went on to hope that the ‘God of Nature’ (a deist view of God) would protect her from the awful disease (‘an inflammation of the bowels’) that had, according to the authorities, been the cause of death of all the people slashed and trampled at Peterloo.
Like Mary Fildes, Gaunt’s reputation was attacked by a ditty produced at the time of Peterloo, in which she is described as ‘Hunt’s Whore’ in a loyalist song. She had been in Hunt’s carriage but that is all; Henry Hunt however, had left his wife a decade earlier and openly toured the country with his mistress. In this case it was Gaunt’s reputation that suffered, as the link between political protester and unladylike behaviour seems to have been a fixed idea for the political establishment.
Another woman, Sarah Hargreaves, was arrested but her treason charge was dropped after a few days too. Female reformers Ann Coats and Mary Waterworth (‘a profligate Amazon’ – Manchester Courier) were also questioned by the authorities. Louisa Hough, her daughter Sarah, and husband Thomas, pleaded not guilty to publishing treasonable material about the soldiers and the Prince Regent.
It wasn’t just satirists who knew about the female reformers and felt the need to be horrible to them. On 6 November 1819 the Morning Post published a breathtakingly rude satire about Henry Hunt and the amount of money he was making by publishing appalling stories about the victims of Peterloo. It presented ‘pen pictures’ of people such as Weavers, Irish protesters – and two women in particular. One was ‘Squintalina Goggle’, the one-eyed woman (presumably Irish) who had spent the morning in the ‘Cat and Bagpipes’ with her friend Dermot O’ Wriggler, left ‘perfectly sober’ and went to Peter’s Field to see her sweetheart and accidently had most of her body cut off by the yeomanry cavalry.
Squintalina was not a reformer, and she was being attacked for being poor, feckless and stupid, but there was a pen portrait of someone who was presented as an even greater monstrosity of female nature:
Mrs Dorothea Tear-Sheet (a female Reformer), had both her legs blown [off] by a bomb, which was fired on the 16th at an unarmed and defenceless people, at the very moment that that unarmed and defenceless people were singing ‘God save the King,’ and ‘Rule Britannia.’ Her husband being in the turnery line, and she working at her business, and having occasion to turn a lathe with her feet, great distress has fallen on the family in consequence of their inability to raise a sufficient sum of money (which cannot be enacted without a subscription) to purchase a couple of wooden legs, to enable her to resume her industrious labours for the benefit of her children.
It is not clear which woman is being referred to, but her fictional name, Tear–Sheet, tells us a lot. Although she is married, she does not represent the traditional virtues of women of the time. Most people reading the newspaper would recognise the reference to a women of debatable virtue from Shakespeare’s Henry IV. Dorothea works at a lathe – a masculine occupation – and of course her claim to have had her legs blown off is ridiculous, her real aim is to take the money of a gullible population in the form of a subscription.
In reality, Hargreaves and Gaunt were given £10 for their trouble, and the other injured people in the crowd mostly less than £3, and none of that was from public funds; but the newspaper was clearly resentful and frightened of independent women radicals. In real life, most of the female radicals mentioned, as well as others like Susannah Saxton and ‘Mrs Wroe’, worked within the context of their husband’s greater involvement. Mrs Wroe’s first name has been hard to locate, despite her suffering and sacrifices for reform, but a Jane Eckersley married a James Wroe in Manchester around the correct time in 1813.
Female reformers were also out in force in Wigan in early November 1819. As the speeches started, reported the hostile Morning Chronicle, the crowds began to hurry away, having seen a few men on horseback and feared a repeat of Peterloo. The paper reported that it was the women who had noticed that they were harmless civilians on horseback – they shouted ‘Be firm – remain where you are.’ Once order was restored, a resolution written by the Female Reformers of Wigan was read out – by a man.
The Manchester Female Reform Union continued into the 1820s, despite less favourable political conditions and a continuing attack by the political establishment. Their Committee sent greetings to Henry Hunt in 1822, who was in his second year in prison for his ‘conspiracy’ after the Peterloo Massacre – ‘our tyrants have immured you in a dungeon, and we have enshrined you in our hearts.’ It was signed by six members of the committee, headed by Mary Fildes.
Susannah Saxton, the secretary, was the second name on the list. She was a journalist and present at Peterloo. She wrote pamphlets supporting the vote for men and condemning the present state of distress, laying the fault firmly at the politicians. Many of her pamphlets have been lost, but there is a very famous one with the title: ‘Dear Sisters of the Earth’. She described the abject poverty and then showed her radical credentials:
We are convinced that under the present conditions, the day is now at hand, when nothing will be found but luxury, idleness, dissipations and tyranny on the one hand, and abject poverty slavery, wretchedness, misery and death on the other.
She condemned war against France, the treatment of veterans and the selfish laws that had lowered taxes for the rich and raised food prices for the poor. She declared that the poor could not ‘bear the ponderous weight of our chains any longer’, and that they were left with no choice ‘but
to tear them asunder and dash them in the face of our remorseless oppressor’. However, just like Kitchen and Fildes, she makes it clear that the female radical reformer was meant to work with men to get them the vote, not to fight for it themselves.
Many of the other names on the list, Mary Black, Ann Thompson, Nancy Wheeler, Mary Jackson, and Mary Thornber are hard to investigate due to the lack of sources, but we do have evidence of their importance from those who hated and feared them. George Buxton’s heavy-handed satire of 1820, ‘The political Quixote of Don Blackibo Dwarfino and his squire Seditiono’, which had contained such unflattering remarks about Alice Kitchen, also made anonymous comments about the other female reformers. There were six from Manchester; all given the title Donna, they are ‘Rapina’, ‘Sanguina’, ‘Maloventa’, ‘Deista’, ‘Atheista’, and ‘Desolata’. They go on to have a vicious row about what gift to offer to their ‘Spa Fields Orator’. When Henry Hunt arrives at the inn, they row equally furiously about who is to have the honour of emptying his chamber pot. Then there were the usual innuendoes that radical reform and promiscuity were linked. One of the Donnas is found in Hunt’s room, such a poor and wretched creature that she seems to have no clothes on. Hunt’s ego is gratified, while women behave in a chaotic, dangerous and unladylike way. That was the establishment view of the female reformers.
It seems that a disproportionate percentage of the injured at Peterloo were women. Of the 654 recorded casualties, at least 168 were women, four of whom died on the day, or later as a result of their wounds. It has been estimated that only ten per cent of the crowd were female, so the number of casualties suggests that women were at significantly greater risk of injury than men. This may have been due to the central position of the women – which was precisely where the yeomanry cut a path through to the hustings; some have attributed malice to the soldiers, claiming they showed less mercy to the women, whose radical protest was all the greater for them being the ‘frail sex’. Archibald Prentice believed that many of those injured avoided medical help as they feared that this news would filter back to their employees. One of the reasons for a public subscription was that the injured could not expect help from the Poor Law authorities if the basis of their claim was injuries sustained at Peterloo. Prentice reports that Margaret Booth received £3 after being crushed by the crowd and being unable to work nine weeks later.