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.