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.


The Quaker, Elizabeth Heyrick, was the leader of the Leicester Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society. She had already taken on the male establishment when she published anonymously her pamphlet, Immediate, not Gradual Abolition. Her call was taken up by other ladies’ societies until in 1831 it was finally adopted by the national Anti-Slavery Society.

The Anti-Corn Law League

The next great campaign in Britain was the Anti-Corn Law League, formed in 1838 to protest against tariffs on foreign corn. The leadership was male, but women were involved from the start in a matter that had great domestic implications as it concerned the price of food. Women attended the mass-meetings of the League. The later feminist campaigner, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon learned her activism through her work for the League.

The grown of expertise

Denied entry to the male professions, some women nevertheless acquired expertise in their chosen areas. The best-known example is Florence Nightingale. On her return from the Crimea in 1856 she secured after many setbacks the setting up of a commission to examine the causes of the Crimean disaster. She also wrote her own report, though it was never published. The reforms set in train as a result of the commission transformed the Army Medical Service.

She then concerned herself with the welfare of the British army in India and the Indian people as a whole. She sent out a questionnaire to 200 stations in India, which resulted in her paper 'How people may live and not die in India', which was read to the National Association for Social Science in 1863. In the paper she stressed the fundamental importance of irrigation and pure water and her recommendations led to a programme of sanitary reform in India.

Florence Nightingale's polar pie-chart. She used statistics
rather than emotion in her campaign to
improve conditions in India

Nightingale was not a feminist - she opposed women doctors, for example -  and she had to work through men in official positions. Not all her recommendations were taken up; she never succeeded in getting all her plans for the training of nurses carried out. But as her biography in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography points out, after her remarkable career it was difficult to deny the claim of women to a professional public life.

Josephine Butler and the Contagious Diseases Acts

In 1870 Josephine Butler began the ultimately successful campaign to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts that subjected women in garrison towns thought to be prostitutes to compulsory medical examination. The Acts could be justified on utilitarian grounds (preventing the spread of venereal disease among the military) but some women, most notably Florence Nightingale, were opposed from the start.

Parliamentary candidates who refused to support were challenged
to debate the issue with Josephine Butler.

Butler's campaign led her into the related issue of child protection as, though somewhat controversial methods it revealed that it was possible to buy a child for prostitution.

In August 1885 the Contagious Diseases Acts were repealed, largely through the actions of Butler and her followers. The same Act of Parliament raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen.

Women and politics

By the end of the nineteenth century the two great political parties were creating roles for women. In 1883 the Conservatives Lord Randolph Churchill founded the Primrose League. This was a political and social society designed to appeal to both sexes and all strata of society. It soon boasted almost 2 million members and became a formidable force, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of its female members. Lady Randolph Churchill was a member of the Ladies' Grand Council of the League.

The Liberals formed local Women’s Liberal Associations throughout the country during the 1880s and joined together in the Women’s Liberal Federation in 1887. The Bristol branch of the WLA, established in 1881 by Anna Maria Priestman and Emily Sturge, was especially feminist. But disagreements among Liberals came to a head in 1892 when Gladstone declared his opposition to women’s suffrage.

These women's associations played an ambivalent role. They involved women in politics but they did not mount an effective challenge to women's disenfranchisement. Lady Randolph Churchill actively campaigned against women's suffrage.

Conclusion

1. By the end of the nineteenth century it was no longer possible for individual women to wield power in the way Isabella of Castile and Catherine II had done.
2. The development of mass politics, the growth of political parties and the rise of male-only professions had the short-term effect of side-lining women.
3. Victorian domestic ideology also wished to confine women to the private sphere.
4. However, domestic ideology also opened the door for female philanthropy and female campaigning. It provided a way into the exercise of indirect power. Sometimes, this could lead to a change in government policy.
5. The long-term effect of the new politics was to allow women to exercise power on the same terms as men – though this can still be seen as work in progress!