The Long Eighteenth Century

by Frank O'Gorman

  The place of women in society during the long eighteenth century, however, may best be illuminated from their actual conduct, not from theoretical discussions about it. While there was a massive corpus of prescriptive literature exhorting women to cling to their domestic sphere, it is always dangerous to argue from the precept to the reality. Why was there so much exhortation if women were obediently keeping to their sphere? Why were eighteenth-century women, many of them well read and well educated, prepared to submit to patriarchy? The beginnings of an answer to such questions may be found in the fact that most careers in political, commercial and professional life were still closed to them. Inevitably, women in the second half of the century continued to derive their identities largely from their domestic role. Yet it would be a mistake to conclude from this that women’s lives were consequently of little account. After all, the family was of vital significance in commerce, in farming, in production and in retailing. Women may have occupied a domestic role but their very domesticity might well have enabled even quite humble women to run small enterprises such as shops and taverns either before or, frequently, after the death of a husband or father. Such considerations applied to all orders in society. Their birth and rank and their relationships as daughter, wife and mother enabled many women to expand their sphere beyond that laid down in the prescriptive literature of the time. There are many examples of women energetically expressing themselves by skilfully operating their domestic roles to their own advantage.

  Their preoccupation with domesticity should not, however, be exaggerated. Domesticity could easily be accompanied by increasingly important social roles, especially in philanthropic and religious concerns. In any case, the ‘private’ sphere could not be completely disassociated from the ‘public’ sphere. Ironically, it is the consideration of gender which most directly challenges the sexuality of spaces into male and female spheres. As Michele Cohen argues, the images and activities of women could not be restricted to a private sphere, synonymous only with domesticity. Male politeness, including qualities such as self-effacement, were also characteristic of the feminine ideal.42 Many women enjoyed a social life which was punctuated at many points, charitable, educational, philanthropic and even political, with essentially non-domestic concerns. Women’s periodicals exemplify a breadth of such concerns, not least political interests, which do not obligingly fall into a ‘separate spheres’ theory. By the end of the century, teaching was becoming one of the few acceptable careers open to women. As the practice of sending middle-class girls to school became popular, a surprisingly large number of private establishments were established to receive them. Furthermore, there are a remarkable number of instances where women chose to occupy spheres traditionally male, such as writing. Women novelists became common during the eighteenth century, tending to write social rather than political satire. In the early decades of the century, the term ‘novel’ implied a story of romantic love. Most came to be written for women. Indeed, women were closely involved in the explosion of print culture which occurred during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth century. Hundreds of women poets and novelists were published during the long eighteenth century. As writers, subscribers and readers, women participated in the newer cultural ferments of the age. Although women continued to be excluded from most clubs and societies, except some mixed music societies, female benefit clubs and the occasional social or literary society, during George III’s reign women began to participate more widely, especially in the new subscription and humanitarian societies, particularly after 1800.43 Debating societies had existed in London since the 1720s; by the 1780s many women attended them and over half of the societies regularly debated women’s issues. Indeed, the participation of women itself became a major attraction. Consequently, although the formal roles of women in political and commercial bodies were confined to supporting rather than organizing activity they could not be ignored. Women became active in a host of philanthropic societies, some of them owing to the initiative of the Anglican church, others to their own, notably foundations and associations for poorer women. Middle-class women threw themselves into the cultural, moral and political societies of the time while upper-class women, on the whole, indulged themselves in more personal initiatives.44

  Indeed, many aspects of the extra-domestic roles of women had been anticipated in the Methodist movement where women, finding new opportunities, had taken a leading part as teachers, preachers and organizers. In the last two decades of thee eighteenth century, the reformist impulse which saw the number of Congregationalists double, Baptists triple and Methodists quadruple gave rise to an impressive number of philanthropic initiatives. By 1801, for example, over 223,000 Sunday schools had been established, mostly run by committees of one or other of the churches, in many of which women were active.45 The same impulse was the driving force behind the extraordinary dynamic which drove so many women to join in the movement for the abolition of the slave trade. Although some historians continue to emphasize the limited role played by women, this cannot encompass or explain the zealous, missionary force which carried Evangelical salvation to many parts of the empire. By the 1820s thousands of female societies, often with overlapping memberships had come into existence.46 Of the seventy-three female associations active in the anti-slavery campaigns between 1825 and 1833, thirty-one were totally independent of male organizations.47 By 1830 there were female anti-slavery societies everywhere.

  The political activities of women were not confined to philanthropic and reformist causes. After all, women had for centuries been active in riots and protests, by no means always under male control and direction. Indeed, during the Gordon Riots, no fewer than eighty women were prosecuted for various felonies, twenty-four were convicted and seven were hanged. Some of these women had not only encouraged male rioters but also had attacked Catholic houses and intimidated holders. The years of the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars found women active in demonstrations, processions and, not least, riots. Indeed, women are to be found urging men on to violence, for example, during the Snow Hill riot at Birmingham in 1795. Such activities were by no means extraordinary or unnatural, as was claimed by some contemporaries. They arose from attitudes emanating from family networks, community support and knowledge of local information. Women in these situations may be viewed as repositories and exponents of community values and traditions. Nevertheless, although Nicholas Rogers, along with other historians, notes female participation in riots, not least in the nationwide rioting of 1757, he continues to see them as ‘a marginal if not invisible presence’.48 It is doubtful if such a description could fittingly be applied to the situation after 1815.

  The political activities of women were not confined to rioting. Much interest has been devoted to the experiences of a number of women, largely from the upper classes, during parliamentary elections. This activity was found acceptable to contemporaries only if their participation was seen not to challenge the assumption of ultimate male superiority. In a society which rested on complex networks of personal and familial relationships in seeking patronage and dynastic promotion, women could, and did, play a variety of roles in electioneering. These could range from the entire management of an electoral interest, perhaps acquired through inheritance, especially in the absence of a senior male. Such upper-class women as have been studied were able to intervene forcefully in elections. In Huntingdon, Lady Sandwich commanded local electoral affairs. In Ripon Ann Lister used her position as a landowner to instruct her tenants to vote. Such women could use their property, money and ambition to promote their electoral interests as well as any man on occasion. More familiar, and of enormous recent interest have been the activities of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, at the general election of 1784. In fact, the support given by women to Charles James Fox at that election was more widespread and more effective than the ‘votes for kisses’ antics of the Duchess of Devonshire and a few other Whig ladies. Less exciting, but more important, is the legal position of some women dur
ing elections. In some freeman boroughs the daughters, and sometimes even the widows, of freemen had the right to make their husbands freemen. In burgage and freeholder boroughs, moreover, the ownership of a burgage bestowed the right to vote. Those who had inherited or who had purchased a burgage, technically also had the right to vote and even to influence the electoral choices of dependent voters. More commonly, however, the mass of women had to rest content with more decorative functions, most commonly adding respectability, interest and perhaps glamour to a canvassing party, obediently wearing party colours as part of a set-piece party tableau, taking their places in a splendid procession or parade, or, at the very least, swelling the size of an election crowd or other audience.

  It would be unwise, however, to make too much of the admittedly limited role of women in elections. In political life more generally they were normally a regular, if insubstantial, force to be reckoned with. Of course, women were an essential presence in the official ceremonies of the period, in particular during royal birthdays and ecclesiastical commemorations. They were active celebrants, representing the health of the nation, especially when decked in the garb of Britannia, epitomizing patriotism. On other occasions, upper- and middle-class women were prepared to dress in the colours of the Whig and Tory parties, resplendent in their respective liveries. In the increasingly commercialized politics of the day, a range of commodities could be used to exhibit an individual’s or a family’s political loyalties: cockades, silks, garlands and flowers. Such items, for example, a white rose worn on a woman’s dress, could be powerful representations of Jacobite sympathies.

  We can be on much firmer ground, however, when we recognize the considerable political and other roles played by women during the years of war against revolutionary France. As Linda Colley observes, ‘War work took women out of the house and taught them how to lobby, run committees and organise ... allowing them to demonstrate that they enjoyed a measure of economic power.’49 Women were in evidence among reforming societies, but they were also extremely active in the loyalist societies and played a considerable role in the literary counter-revolution. Women were the authors of no fewer than over fifty anti-Jacobin novels written before 1804 which flooded the circulating libraries. Although women could not become full members of the literary and philosophical societies, nor even full members of reading-rooms, they played a formidable role in the world of print culture in the 1790s. The loyalist cause owed much to the tireless and unceasing activity of middle- and upper-class women, of whom Hannah More and Sarah Trimmer were role models.50 More widely, women in general were becoming tired of being mere spectators. They, too, wished to play a part in the struggle against the French Revolution and Napoleon. In doing so they began to find a larger political role for themselves. In every community they did much to aid the war effort, perhaps by sending warm clothes to troops abroad and volunteers at home, providing the families of soldiers with food and other forms of assistance during the hard years and raising subscriptions for countless causes, both local and national. Domestic virtue and Christian philanthropy were now being channelled into public as well as private channels to effect a powerful and influential role for women. Indeed how can the efforts of the thousands of women who organized the movements against the slave trade in the 1780s and 1790s and who joined in the national struggle against France be consigned to a private sphere? Indeed, many women maintained and even expanded this model for political action. In the struggle to abolish slavery, achieved in 1833 by the Whig government of Lord Grey, they were even more active than they had been in the campaign for the Abolition of the Slave Trade up to 1807. As Linda Colley has remarked, ‘By 1830 there were Ladies anti-Slavery societies in almost every British town, the biggest in Birmingham distributing some 35,000 items of propaganda every year.’51

  Indeed, by the early nineteenth century there are clear signs that women from all sections of society were prepared to involve themselves in politics. Many lower-class women in particular were drawn to the activities of the early reform societies. In some places, indeed, Female Reform societies were established, notably in Lancashire and Yorkshire. In many places women were beginning to participate at the meetings of open vestries, at which all residents of a parish could vote. They did so, however, not as harbingers of a new, feminist politics but as wives and mothers, falling back upon a supportive tradition of femininity which was more than sufficient to enable them to claim an interest in politics. Although women appear to have played no more than a peripheral, if still a supportive, role in the Luddite agitations of 1811–12, their presence in the future was to be much more important in sustaining middle- and working-class agitation.

  Yet the political activity of women was to be underlined most spectacularly by the nationwide agitation in support of Queen Caroline. George IV’s desire in 1820 to divorce his wife, Queen Caroline of Brunswick, which would deprive her of her position as Royal Consort was the trigger for an enormous swell of feeling and opinion among women of all classes. This apparent affront to the rights of even the most powerful woman in the land precipitated a torrent of addresses, petitions, speeches, mass demonstrations and processions on a totally unprecedented scale. One particularly significant method of generating support for the queen was for women to sign addresses and petitions completely independent of their menfolk. Tens of thousands of signatures were procured in this manner from towns and villages across the country. Arguably, popular female sympathy for Caroline was a symptom of the simmering hostility of many women to the restricted public roles in which they continually found themselves. These gestures of female independence certainly alarmed the powerful loyalist societies of the periods, which set themselves to re-establish female obedience to patriarchal authority. The agitation is important, however, for politicizing countless thousands of poor women and awakening them to the humiliations of patriarchal restrictions and male misogyny in their own lives. The craft unions and radical societies of the early nineteenth century may have been the heroes of traditional narratives of the history of the working class, but in the history of gender they were unsympathetic to the interests of women. Many battles lay ahead for women from the middle and working classes.

  The increasing scope for the participation of women in literary, religious, philanthropic and reformist activity in this period was a social development of far-reaching significance, but it must be qualified in two ways. First, while women did much of the work in these religious, charitable and reform bodies, men took most of the decisions and did most of the organizing.52 Second, women were welcomed into these areas of activity but only so long as social constraints of femininity did not threaten the superior position of men in the power relationship between the sexes. Indeed, these activities may even have strengthened the prevalence of traditional perceptions of the female sex.53

  Within the overall context of feminine acceptance of patriarchy, however, there can be little doubt that some women experienced a widening of social opportunities during the long eighteenth century. This depended, to a very large extent on the opportunities generated by the expansion of towns in the period. (The amount of anxious moralizing about the possibly harmful effects of urban life upon the morals of women is most instructive.) In most towns by the end of the eighteenth century women were in a numerical majority because of male military service and the currency of itinerant male occupations. Indeed, female emigration out of the more patriarchal countryside, where there might be few outlets for female skills and ambitions, into the more socially diverse and economically dynamic towns was a feature of eighteenth-century life. In manufacturing, in retailing and even in service there were more opportunities for women in the towns than in the countryside. The recent work of Hannah Barker (on towns in the north-east), Nicola Phillips (on London), Elizabeth Sanderson (on Edinburgh) and Christine Wiskin (on the West Midlands) has pointed out the danger in exaggerating the exclusion of women from participation in the economy. In towns, for example, single women and widows were better abl
e to make ends meet, given the greater range of economic activities and opportunities. Furthermore, women may well have benefited from the social climate of the towns that was receptive to novelty, fashion and innovation. To many women the facilities in the towns must have been a blessing: shops, libraries, theatres, music, cultural societies, lectures, gardens, entertainment, fashion – the list is endless. And innovation introduced other kinds of benefits and advantages. For example, a more enlightened procedure for the delivery of babies, with a trained doctor replacing the traditional midwife, with the use of surgical instruments in place of old wives’ tales and with a delivery room open to air and light in place of the darkened and womb-like chamber of past practice, all signified a more humane and civilized attitude both to childbirth and to women. At the same time, the greater value placed upon children – what Plumb termed the ‘new world of children’ – betokened a softening of traditional patriarchal attitudes.54