Category Archives: History

Books Feminism Politics Women's history

Victorian (and later) citizenship – inclusion and exclusion

Notes from Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the Reform Act of 1867 by Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall (2000)

From the Introduction, pp. 1-70
Quoting Margaret Mylne, writing in the Westminster Review 1941: “In my younger days it was considered rude to talk politics to the ladies. To introduce [the topic’ at a dinner party was a hint for us to retire and leave the gentlemen to such conversation and their bottle. But the excitement that prevailed all over the country at the prospect of the Reform Bill of 1832 broke down these distinctions, while the new, and it seemed to us, splendid idea of a ‘hustings at the Cross of Edinburgh’ drove its inhabitants, both male and female, half frantic with delight.” (p. 29)

From “The citizenship of women and the Reform Act of 1867” (Rendall, pp. 119-178)

p. 121 – “The reform crisis of 1830-2 prompted some consideration of women’s claim to the franchise. The Tory landowner from Halifax, Anne Lister, regretted in her diary that women of property were unable to exercise the vote, though they might, as she herself did, strive to influence the electoral process. In August 1832 a petition to the House of Commons from Mary Smith of Stanmore asked for the vote for ‘every unmarried woman having that pecuniary qualification whereby the other sex is entitled to the said franchise’. Matthew Davenport Hill, a radical Unitarian, endorsed women’s suffrage in his election campaign in 1832 in Hull. BUt the Reform Act for the first time defined the voter as ‘male'”

“In October 1865 the death of Lord Palmerston signalled the possibility of a renewal of interest in parliamentary reform, as Lord Russell, who was strongly committed to moderate reform, formed a new ministry. In November 1865 the Kensington Ladies Debating Society put on their agenda for discussion: Is the extension of the parliamentary suffrage to women desirable, and if so under what conditions?”

“p. 158 “The Education ACt of 1870 for England and Wales provided that women who were municipal and parish voters could also vote in school board elections. Any woman, married or not, could stand as a candidate… as Elizabeth Garrett and Emily Davies in London and Lydia Becker in Manchester did successfully in 1870, setting important precedents for the holding of public office. In Wales, Rose Mary Crawshay, wife of the Merthyr ironmaster, Robert Thompson Crawshay, and an active supporter of the women’s suffrage campaign, was elected a member of the Merthyr School Board in Match 1871…. In England and Wales, single or widowed women ratepayers were qualified to vote for and to become Poor Law Guardians, though none stood for office until 1875, when Martha Merrington was elected … in Kensington… But a high property qualification meant only the affluent were able to serve.”
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Books Feminism Women's history

Meeting Dora Russell and Margaret Oliphant

Reading Rosemary Dinnage’s Alone! Alone! Lives of Some Outsider Women, I was pleased to meet Dora Russell, one of the exes of Bertrand.

On English public schools she said: “I don’t see that you can get anywhere in creating a new society without getting rid of them. I’m not hostile to them; they do magnificent work in their field. But the you have it, in the heart of our society, a masculine hereditary tradition for generation aft generation; out of those schools come me , men who expect to take the highest posts in our society; and against that I don’t see how democracy, or women, are going to have any influence whatsoever.” (P86)

And on conservation and the natural world, for which she was a campaigner….” I wrote a review of a book recently on man’s responsibility for nature,and I said now that we’ve had a look at the cold moon, and our own earth in contrast, we realise what a precious thing we have here. We should be taking care of it, and enjoying it loving it; and to me this is worth everything else in the world that anybody could invent.” (P 283)

Also found interesting the life of Margaret Oliphant, forced by circumstance to be a journey woman writer when she might have been much more. Her second novel Margaret Maitland, “was unconventionally the story of a sturdy Scottish spinster – “we are not aware that the Maiden Aunt has ever before found so favourable representation in print” said the Athanaeum.” (P 245)

Books History Politics

Co-operative history

Notes from Nicole Robertson’s The Co-operative Movement and Communities in Britain: 1914-1960

p. 52 “Co-operative society membership gave an entitlement to the dividend – a cash return from the members’ local society at the end of every quarter or half-year. For Beatrice Potter, one of the main motives ‘that impels the rank and file of members … is the ‘divi’…. her criticism of these ‘dividend hunters’ who failed to engage with the ideology of the movement has contributed to the establishment of a ‘dominant narrative within labour history of the limited appeal of consumer co-operation’.”

p. 136 A pamphlet for the Co-operative Women’s Guild “attempted to ‘bring home to every woman the power and danger of the Capitalist Combines’ and to inform its members how ‘sometimes the separate capitalist firms in an industry join together in one great firm, as in the Soap Trade. When a Combine is supreme, it constantly restricts production in order to keep up prices’.(Indeed a 1921 survey found Co-op soap was consistently cheaper than that of the Soap Manufacturers’ Association members, even though its production was lower.

p. 154 “The movement was founded in the 19th century on a commitment to sell pure and unadulterated food at fair prices, and this remained of central importance to its work in the arena of consumer protection during the 20th century. The co-operative movement was involved with … food safety and testing, the problems caused by profiteering, and ensuring an equitable supply of food during periods of work … During the Second World War … it provided advice to civilians on a range of consumer issues. In the 1950’s, the cooperative movement actively supported the BSI’s Kite-Mark scheme, and in 1960 it was responsible for sponsoring and publishing the first book that explained to consumers their legal rights.

p. 179 “Co-operators were continually reminded that an alliance with the Labour Party was necessary, as independent representation on local councils and in general elections would involve ‘tak[ing] on all comers, including the Labour candidates … That would be political folly.’ However, this in no way meant that relations were always amicable. Sidney Pollard argues that, in the period immediately preceding the First World War, the ‘natural groundswell which drove the Co-operative movement into the arms of the Labour Party seemed to be irresistible’. However, an exploration of relations between the two parties at a grassroots level during the period 1914-60 challenges any assumptions of this being a wholly ‘natural’ or ‘irresistible’ alliance.”

p. 216 “Peter Gurney in his study of the movement from 1870 to 1930, argued that ‘just as there were historical alternatives to mass production, so too were there alternatives to mass consumption’ and the co-operative movement was one of these…. He argues however that whatever revolutionary potential the cooperative movement did posses, was lost by 1930, and during the interwar period the fact that the movement could not complete with the shopping experience offered by stores like Marks and Spencer and Lewis’s (‘the stress on utility meant that cooperative stores did not usually stock the latest fashionable designs’) is evident.

Books History Women's history

A imaginative exploration of First Wave feminism – The Sealed Letter

First published on Blogcritics

When we think about the first wave of feminists, we tend to be thinking not so much of the first pioneers, but of the later, radical women, the suffragettes and the truly freethinking women Sheila Rowbotham portrayed in Dreamers of the New Day. Yet in the 1860s there was an initial, cautious flowering of women saying what were then radical things, like married women should have some rights of their own – to their bodies, their property, their children – but still very cautious, and trapped within the framework of mid-Victorian thinking in which simply not being a doormat made them very nearly beyond the pale.

It’s in this milieu that Emma Donoghue has set her latest novel, which is based, very closely we learn from an informative postscript, on a famous divorce case of 1864, Codrington v Codrington, in which a pillar of the British establishment, Vice-Admiral Codrington, set out to prove his wife guilty of adultery, and thereby secure a divorce, while also showing that he hadn’t connived in her actions, or allowed them to run so that he could secure the said divorce.

This is a dense, gripping tale, by the end of which you’ll know a lot about Victorian divorce law, and a lot about the central character, not either of the main legal protagonists, but Emily Faithful, “Fido”, a leading early feminist who established a printing press, training women typesetters in the face of sometime violent industry resistance, and was at the heart of an early feminist core. She’s a fascinating character, as Donoghue presents her, and I’m pleased that she’s been rescued by this book from historical oblivion.
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Books History

A romp through a millennia of British home life

First published on Blogcritics

How do you romp through a millennia or so of British history, painting a picture of life, events and characters? Heading away from the usual lists of kings and queens, or thematic examination of classes and groups in society, Lucy Worsley’s gone for the purely domestic in If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home.

And an entertaining, comfortable read it makes. She strolls from medieval great halls to 1970s Habitat bedrooms, with their wonderful innovation of the duvet, a far stretch from the domestic drudgery of the Victorian bedmaking – which as Worsley explains she’s tried out, hands-on, for herself as a television presenter.

If you’ve encountered a fair bit of social history there won’t be a lot of surprises here – the explanation for medieval and early modern people apparently sleeping half-sitting being sapping bed ropes I’ve read many times before, also that it was normal for ladies to go “commando” (as Worsley puts it – her casual modern language is sometimes entertaining and sometimes a bit grating) in the 16th-18th centuries, when huge skirts made any other arrangement hopelessly impractical.

But I did learn plenty of new things – including the fact that evening sleep was expected for many centuries to be in two parts, first and second sleep (which particularly made sense in long winter evenings). Worsley notes that a 17th-century French doctor recommended that between the two was the best time to conceive children – because then couples would have “more enjoyment” and “do it better”.

And that a garderobe was so called because the ammonia-rich environment would kill the fleas in robes hung there. (I already knew about the laundry use of urine, but did rather enjoy the 19th-century account of wealthy foxhunters having their red coats so douched by their servants, probably, as Worsley notes, without their knowledge.)

There were some errors of fact that did give me cause for concern – the heroine of The Women’s Room didn’t run off to Harvard to study literature to avoid housework, but was divorced and forced out of that role, and it wasn’t the class difference between the Earl of Castlereagh and his valet that scandalised peers enough to have him executed, but the act of sodomy. I wouldn’t rely on this work for any academic purpose.

As you’ll gather there’s rather a lot about sex in this book – Worsley’s clearly learned what sells books and television shows – and you do sometimes wish for a little more social analysis and explanation, but that’s perhaps not quite fair. This is clearly signposted as an entertaining read that will add to your trivia knowledge rather than your historical understanding, and it delivers on those terms.

Nonetheless, there’s an interesting conclusion which ventures on to very different ground – with a broad consideration of how the past can teach us about the necessarily low-carbon future, when homes will again need to use much less energy and be far more environmentally sensitive. Worsley notes: “I myself live in a tall glass tower, built in 1998, and must agree with Francis Bacon, who condemned the great, glass-filled palaces of the Jacobean age. In a house ‘full of Glass’, he wrote, ‘one cannot tell where to become to be out of the Sun or Cold’.” (p. 322)

Books History Politics

Book Review: A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 by David Rollison

Consider a traditional child’s history book view of the England since the Norman Conquest and what you find is pretty simple: centuries of endless, unchanging feudalism, with uncomplaining peasants held down by church doctrine toiling uncomplainingly in the fields, while the nobles fought wars among themselves, against foreign kingdoms and went on crusades. Then around Elizathan times you get the arrival of the gentleman adventurer, who starts, almost accidentally, to set the foundation for the empire on which the sun never sets. The comes the Industrial Revolution, that rapidly changes a farm-based society to a manufacturing one.

Read A Commonwealth of the People: Popular Politics and England’s Long Social Revolution, 1066-1649 by David Rollison, however, and you’ll conclude that all of that is absolutely wrong, and a great deal more that you’ve been taught as “historical fact” beside. You’ll never look at a manuscript drawing of a serf at work in a fields, or read an Elizabethan account of the weaving trade in the same way.

It’s well worth the slog – but it does require some patience; this is a brilliant book of a length of about 250 pages buried in 460 pages of sometimes dizzying detail (and an awful lot of long quotes in Middle English that require lots of time for the non-expert to deceipher). An academic review referred to it as “vertiginously ambitious” and at times I did feel like I was teetering on a tottering pile of complex detail.
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