Women and power in an age of mass politics

The Anti-Corn Law League meeting in Exeter Hall, London
in 1846. Women were prominent in the meeting.

The nineteenth century saw the introduction of mass politics, a significant move towards democracy. Political parties expanded and representative assemblies were elected on a widening franchise. With the development of manhood suffrage, the criterion for the vote increasingly became masculinity rather than property. The new politics provided less scope for women. There was no longer a place for the powerful woman ruler and the professionalisation of politics reduced the ability of women to play political roles. However the rise of education and the growth of a mass media provided women with a new role as campaigners – a trend that was especially marked in Britain.

Women and anti-slavery

In 1787 the Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was set up. The following year saw a flood of abolitionist literature, much of it written by women. You can read Hannah More's Slavery here. The consumer boycott was another weapon in the campaign. From 1792 some women were refusing to buy West Indian sugar.

The slave trade was abolished in 1807 but slavery continued. In 1823 the Anti-Slavery Society was set up. The committee was all-male. But in 1825 Lucy Townsend, the wife of a Birmingham clergyman, set up the first Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. A network of other societies followed and some argued for immediate rather than gradual emancipation. The women were more radical than most of the men.

Queen Victoria: the waning of power (2)

Queen Victoria's official
Diamond Jubilee photograph
Public domain
The matriarch of Europe -
but how much political power did she hold?

The loss of Albert

In the last years of Victoria's relatively short married life, Albert’s dominance had become total. He had personally drafted all her official correspondence and she simply copied it out. In 1857 she wrote to King Leopold, 

You cannot think … how completely déroulee I am and feel when he is away, or how I count the numerous children as nothing to me when he is away. 

She had now convinced herself that women were not meant to rule and that she could not be able to fulfil her duties without him. 

Her whole life had been one long pattern of reliance on others. Deprived of Albert, she gave way to unending grief. This was almost certainly a form of clinical depression, but it was also an escape from responsibilities she did not wish to shoulder alone. She punished her children by making them share in her grief. They were not allowed to mourn their father in their own way.

A recluse on the throne

When the Privy Council met, the Queen sat in one room, the councillors in another, with Arthur Helps, the secretary to the council, acting as intermediary. The Times chose 1 April 1864 to write a spoof leader asserting that the Queen would soon resume her public duties. Doctors kept a constant watch on her mental health, fearing that she might go mad like her grandfather, George III.

At the end of 1864 The Times stated: 

It is impossible for a recluse to occupy the British throne without a gradual weakening of that authority which the Sovereign has been accustomed to exert.

By 1867 republican sentiment was mounting. She was hissed and booed on the way to the state opening of Parliament.

Queen Victoria: the waning of power (1)

Queen Victoria: the coronation portrait
by George Hayter
Royal Collection
Public domain

Victoria's reign is long and complex. Rather than consider every aspect, this and the following post have one main theme: the slow draining away of power from the monarchy in the nineteenth century. Victoria resented this development, but the growth of political parties and the widening of the franchise made it inevitable.

The 'Kensington system': a restricted childhood

In November 1817 Princess Charlotte, the daughter of the Prince Regent, died in childbirth. This unexpected death threw the succession open and the Regent's brothers made haste to acquire wives and legitimate children. Edward, duke of Kent, the fourth son of George III, proposed to Victoire of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld. She was the thirty-year-old widowed elder sister of Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, Princess Charlotte's widower. She already had two children, Carl, Prince of Leningen, born 1804 and Fedora, born 1807. In May they were married at the Ehrenburg Palace in Coburg. A second marriage took place at Kew Palace in July.

When Victoria was born at Kensington Palace on 24 May 1819, her birth went virtually unnoticed. It was by no means certain that she would inherit the throne, as her father had three elder brothers and her parents’ next child might be a son. She was baptised Alexandrina Victoria after her godfather, Tsar Alexander I of Russia, and her mother, and in her early childhood was known as ‘Drina’. For a while both names were thought unacceptably foreign. 

Events brought Victoria closer to the throne. The Duke of Kent died in January 1820, and the Duke of Clarence’s infant daughter died in the summer. On the death of George IV in 1830 and the accession of the childless William IV (Clarence), Victoria became heiress presumptive.

Behind her angelic looks lay a fiery temper and pronounced likes and dislikes. When she was older her tutor, the Revd. George Davys, who worked hard to obliterate her German accent, wrote in his journal, ‘She seems to have a will of her own’. Her early years were dominated by a sense of powerlessness. She had a fraught relationship with her mother and resented her attempts to control her and in particular the influence of Sir John Conroy, the controller of the duchess's household. There were unfounded rumours that the duchess and Conroy were lovers and it has even been speculated (though without evidence) that Conroy was Victoria’s father.

The Duchess of Kent and Princess Victoria
by Henry Bone
Public domain
The portrait suggests a
harmony that did not exist.

The duchess and Conroy followed ‘the Kensington system’ designed to keep the princess’s education entirely in her mother’s hands and to keep her away from court. Victoria later blamed this system for her unhappiness as a child. However it enabled the princess to be presented as an unspoiled child, in no way associated with the extravagance of the court.

Women and the law: a brief outline

This post owes a great deal to Olwen Hufton's excellent The Prospect Before Her. A History of Women in Western Europe, Volume 1, 1500-1800 (HarperCollins, 1995).

'The Emperor Napoleon in his
study at the Tuileries'
by Jacques-Louis David,
showing the Code Napoléon
National Gallery of Art, Washington DC
Public domain

In pre-Revolutionary western Europe there were two systems of law. In Italy, Spain and France south of the Loire, Roman law prevailed.  North-western Europe, including northern France, England and the Netherlands was an area of customary law.
But whatever the different systems, a person’s legal status depended on gender, and women were defined in relation to men as wives, daughters or mothers. The male heads of their families were responsible for their conduct. The law recognised that men had the right to inflict ‘reasonable chastisement’ on their wives. In Roman law a woman taken in adultery by her husband could be killed on the spot.

Property

In most of western Europe property was transmitted through male primogeniture. In some systems, daughters could inherit where there were no sons, but more generally, daughters did not inherit landed estates and instead were provided with dowries. When a woman married, her property was handed over to her husband.

Marriage and divorce

The Catholic Church insisted that marriage was indissoluble, though annulment could provide a way out. The Church also allowed separation ‘from bed and board’, though the couple were not then free to remarry.

The Calvinist Church allowed for divorce under certain circumstances, almost invariably the adultery of the wife. In England an aristocratic husband could obtain a divorce by act of Parliament.

Women and the French Revolution (2): Mary Wollstonecraft and Madame de Staël

(There are a number of good biographies of Wollstonecraft that I have consulted for this post. Some can be found here and here. For Madame de Staël, I have used Maria Fairweather's biography and all quotes are from her book.

Mary Wollstonecraft

At about the same time as Olympe de Gouges was arguing for the rights of women, Mary Wollstonecraft took up the same cause. Like de Gouges, she was spurred into action by the events of the French Revolution. By coincidence, they were both in Paris at the same time and mixed in similar circles, but they never seem to have met.

Mary Wollstonecraft, by John Opie
Tate Britain
Public domain

Mary Wollstonecraft was born in London on 27 April 1757, the second child and first daughter of a master silk-weaver, who squandered his inheritance. Her father was tyrannical and her mother submissive. She grew up in a household where girls did not matter. The second great influence on her early life was her sentimental friendship with Fanny Blood, whom she met in 1775. For a while, this friendship was the ruling passion of her life, but too much should not be read into it. Such friendships were common at the time and were not necessarily lesbian.

Wollstonecraft knew she would have to earn her living and that the options were limited. In 1778 she left home to become a paid companion to Sarah Dawson, a widow living in Bath. The post did not suit her rebellious temperament. In 1782, following the death of her mother, she went to live with Fanny Blood and her family.

In 1784, with Fanny Blood and her sister, Eliza, she set up a school in Newington Green, north of London. There she came into contact with the radical clergyman, Dr Richard Price, and the community of ‘Rational Dissent’. Two disasters then struck her: in 1785 Fanny Blood died in childbirth in Portugal, where Mary had gone to nurse her; in 1786 the school failed.

After an unhappy experience as a teacher in Ireland, Wollstonecraft published Thoughts on the Education of Daughters in 1787, a plea for girls' education to be rational rather than ornamental. 

After this, her publisher, the radical, Joseph Johnson, employed her to write on a regular basis for the Analytical Review. In 1788 she published Mary. A Fiction, a semi-autobiographical novel of female friendship.

Wollstonecraft and the Vindication

It was the French Revolution that was to make Wollstonecraft famous. In 1789 the Bastille fell. In 1790 Edmund Burke published his Reflections on the Revolution in France, an attack on the Revolution that infuriated radicals. Wollstonecraft responded immediately with A Vindication of the Rights of Men. She criticised Burke for his reactionary politics and also for sentimentalism.

She followed this up in January 1792 with A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a ground-breaking work that called for 'a revolution in female manners' so that women 'by reforming themselves' can 'reform the world'.

A wild wish has just flown from my heart to my head. I will not stifle it though it may excite a horse-laugh. —I do earnestly wish to see the distinction of sex confounded in society, unless where love animates the behaviour. For this distinction is, I am firmly persuaded, the foundation of the weakness of character ascribed to woman; is the cause why the understanding is neglected, whilst accomplishments are acquired with sedulous care: and the same cause accounts for their preferring the graceful before the heroic virtues.

How many women thus waste life away the prey of discontent, who might have practised as physicians, regulated a farm, managed a shop, and stood erect, supported by their own industry, instead of hanging their heads surcharged with the dew of sensibility, that consumes the beauty to which it at first gave lustre? How much more respectable is the woman who earns her own bread by fulfilling any duty, than the most accomplished beauty… Yet I sigh to think how few women aim at attaining this respectability by withdrawing from the giddy whirl of pleasure, or the indolent calm that stupefies the good sort of women it sucks in.

In spite of the severe rationalism of the Vindication, Wollstonecraft had been in love for the past three years with the married Swiss painter, Henry Fuseli. She planned to travel to France with him in order to see the Revolution for herself, but when Fuseli's wife threw cold water on the scheme, she decided to travel there alone, and she arrived there in December 1792 - just as preparations were afoot to put the king on trial. 

Women and the French Revolution (1)

The French Revolution represented
as a woman.
But how far did allegory
represent reality?

Gender and the French Revolution

The debate over the Revolution was bound up with issues of gender. It appeared at the end of a century in which women increasingly participated in a widening public sphere. During the Revolution many women became activists, but this was controversial and the revolutionary governments eventually restricted their activities. Later French historians, such as Jules Michelet, approved of this development, as they did not believe that women were suited, either by intellect or temperament, for politics.

On 26 August 1789 the National Assembly issued the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. It set out the doctrine of the inalienable rights of man, and did so, using well-established female iconography. So were women included in these rights - or were they not?

The Declaration of the Rights of Man
surmounted by two female figures
representing Liberty and Victory

The Bread March of the Women to Versailles on 5 October 1789 was a demonstration of working women that turned violent. The result was the removal of the royal family from Versailles to the Tuileries Palace in Paris, making it one of the most significant events in the Revolution. 

But were the women to be praised or condemned? Two British polemicists disagreed over this. To Edmund Burke, they were 'the vilest of women', comparable to 'the furies of hell'. But Mary Wollstonecraft defended them as women trying to earn an honest living by selling vegetables or fish and engaging in a justifiable protest. Either way, they were controversial - as was the whole issue of women's engagement in politics.

Prelude: a widening public sphere?

By the time of the French Revolution, some women had found a new source of power through the print culture. The growth of literacy and the expansion of education generated a wider reading public, and authors and readers were drawn from a wider social spectrum than ever before. Women as well as men read magazines, newspapers and books. In Britain the circulating library made books available for readers of comparatively modest income. From the mid-seventeenth century, women were becoming not merely readers but also successful writers. These included the novelist Madeleine de Scudéry and the playwright (and government spy), Aphra Behn.

At the same time, elite women continued to exercise power through the salon, a model going back to the Renaissance courts of Isabella d’Este at Mantua and Elisabetta Gonzaga at Urbino. The salon was a meeting place for cultivated people at the house of a woman of rank for the purpose of conducting witty and well-informed conversation, and it flourished in particular in late-seventeenth and eighteenth-century France.

Catherine the Great

Catherine, b J. B. Lampi, 1780s
Kunsthistorisches Museum
Public domain

The century of the empresses

Russia in the eighteenth century saw four reigning empresses. This was made possible because of a degree of Peter the Great in February 1722 in which he overturned the traditional laws of succession and decreed that the tsar would have absolute right to choose his successor. The crown thus became a piece of personal property that the tsar could dispose of at will. 

Catherine I: In 1724 Peter signed a decree bequeathing the crown to his second wife, Catherine, a Lithuanian of very obscure origins, who was then crowned in the Dormition Cathedral in Moscow. But later in the year Peter learned of her affair with the court chamberlain. He was executed and Peter tore up the succession decree. He died in January 1725, without naming his successor. Catherine was then proclaimed empress. She died in 1727 and was succeeded by Peter’s grandson, Peter II, who died without naming a successor in 1730. 

Anna: The Supreme Privy Council offered the throne to Peter the Great’s niece, Anna Ivanovna, a childless widow, who became the first female sovereign to rule in fact as well as in name. She died in 1740.

Elizabeth: After a complicated transition period, in which the unfortunate  child tsar Ivan VI was overthrown and then imprisoned for life, Peter the Great’s daughter, Elizabeth seized power in November 1741. 

A year later she named as her heir her nephew, Peter the Great’s grandson, Duke Peter of Holstein. She brought him to Russia, made him convert from Lutheranism to Orthodoxy and began to search for a bride for him. Her choice fell on his second cousin, a German princess Sophie Auguste Fredericke, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst. 

Grand Duke Peter,
later Tsar Peter III

Catherine in Russia

Sophie was born in Stettin (now Szczecin, Poland) in Pomerania in 1729, the daughter of the reigning prince, Christian August of Anhalt-Zerbst, who was in the service of Frederick II. Her mother, Joanna, was the sister of the prince-bishop of Lübeck. The marriage to Peter was promoted by Frederick, who wished to cement his relationship with Russia and to prevent an alliance between Russia and Austria.

Sophie and her mother arrived in St Petersburg in February 1744. She learned Russian quickly and was received into the Orthodox Church in June 1744 where she was given her Russian name Ekaterina Alekseyevna in honour of the Empress Catherine I. On 21 August she and Peter were married. By this time Peter had already been ill twice – first with measles and then with smallpox.

 Grand Duchess Ekaterina Alekseyevna
around the time of her wedding,
 by George Christoph Grooth, 1745
Hermitage Museum
Public domain

The court at St Petersburg was presided over by Elizabeth and her lover, Alexei Razumovsky, whom diplomats privately called ‘the night emperor’. She then took a lover eighteen years her junior, Nikita Beketov, who founded Moscow University, a newspaper and the Academy of Arts. He gradually became the real power in Russia.