Abstract
In recent years, the traditional view that women were excluded from politics in the late eighteenth century has been challenged.1 Amanda Vickery, Amanda Foreman and Linda Colley have shown women advancing into the public sphere, attending the theatre, canvassing for elections, making patriotic speeches, and establishing charitable institutions. They explain away admonitions to women to stay out of politics as reactionary grumbling at the unstoppable progress of women in public.2 However, it is important to differentiate between women’s public presence in public places and their power to change events, between women’s authority, influence, and rights, and between feminine images and women’s activities. Furthermore, it is impossible to claim that ‘women’ advanced in the public, because aristocratic, middle-class, and plebeian women participated in politics in entirely different ways.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
For a longer elucidation of many of the themes in this chapter, see A. Clark, Scandal: the Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).
A. Vickery, ‘Golden Age to Separate Spheres: a Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History,’ The Historical Journal 36 (1993), 383–414; see also her The Gentleman’s Daughter. Women’s Lives in Georgian England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998); L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1992); A. Foreman, Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (London: Harper Collins, 1998). For similar arguments, see H. Barker and E. Chalus, eds, Gender in Eighteenth Century England: Roles, Representations and Responsibilities (London and New York: Longman, 1997).
J. Brewer, ‘This, that and the other: Public, Social and Private in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries’, in L. Sharpe and D. Castiglione, eds, Shifting the Boundaries (Exeter: Exeter Univ. Press, 1995), 1–21.
C. S. Emden, The People and the Constitution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 12; J.A.W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property. The Process of Self-Recognition in Eighteenth Century Political Thought (Kingston and Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1983), 278.
For this debate, see J. B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1988); M. C. Jacob, ‘The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: a European Perspective’, Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, 1 (1994): ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+); N. Fraser, ‘Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to a Critique of Actually Existing Democracy’, and K. M. Baker, ‘Defining the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France: Variations on a Theme by Habermas’, in C. Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 129, 202; D. Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’, History and Theory 31, 1 (1992), ([0-9])–([0-9])0; D. Goodman, The Republic of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994); C. Hesse, The Other Enlightenment: How French Women Became Modern (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); For the public sphere in general, see J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, translated by T. Burger (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1989 [1962]). For a discussion of the distinction between the ‘private’ public sphere and the public public sphere, see A. La Vopa, ‘Conceiving a Public: Ideas and Society in Eighteenth-Century Europe’, Journal of Modern History 64, 1 (1992): ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+).
For its most recent reincarnation, see J.C.D. Clark, English Society ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For debates on influence, see J.A.W. Gunn, ‘Influence, Parties and the Constitution: Changing Attitudes, ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+)’, The Historical Journal 17 (1974), p. 318.
E. Chalus, ‘My Minerva at My Elbow: The Political Role of Women in Eighteenth-Century England’, in S. Taylor, et al, eds, Hanoverian Britain and Empire: Essays in Memory of Philip Lawson (Suffolk and Rochester: Boydell Press, 1998), pp. 210–228.
F. O’Gorman, Voters, Patrons and Parties: the unreformed electoral system of Hanoverian England ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 2, 10, 19, 179, 218; for a somewhat similar interpretation, see J. A. Phillips, Electoral Behavior in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982).
D. Gobetti, Private and Public. Individuals, households, and body politic in Locke and Hutcheson. (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 122. See also S. M. Purviance, ‘Intersubjectivity and Social Relations in the Philosophy of Francis Hutcheson’, in J. Dwyer and R. Sher, eds, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993), 28, 34.
G. Barker-Benfield. The Culture of Sensibility. Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); B. M. Benedict,’ service to the Public: William Creech and Sentiment for Sale’, in J. Dwyer and R. B. Sher, Sociability and Society in Eighteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Mercat Press, 1993), 133.
S. H. Myers, The Bluestocking Circle. Women, Friendship, and the Life of the Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 282; B. Hill, Republican Virago: the Life and Times of Catherine Macaulay, Historian (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 5.
M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge, 1996), 34
N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1998), 18; N. Rogers, Whigs and Cities. Popular Politics in the Age of Walpole and Pitt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 172; K. Wilson, The Sense of the People, 14.
J. Brewer, ‘Commercialization and Politics,’ in N. McKendrick, et al. The Birth of a Consumer Society. The Commercialization of Eighteenth Century England (London: Hutchinson, 1982), p. 383.
J. Smail, The Origins of Middle Class Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 121; see also N. Rogers, ‘The Middling Sort in 18th Century Politics,’ in J. Barry and C. Brooks, eds, The Middling Sort of People. Culture, Society and Politics in England ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+) (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 167.
For such an interpretation, see K. Gleadle and S. Richardson, ‘Introduction: the Petticoat in Politics: Women and Authority,’ in Gleadle and Richardson, eds, Women in British Politics, ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+). The Power of the Petticoat (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), pp. 1–12.
M. Thale, ‘Women in London Debating Societies in 1780,’ Gender & History 7 (1995) 5–24.
H. Jephson, The Platform. Its Rise and Progress (London, 1892), vol. 1 of 2, p. 280.
M. Thale, ‘London Debating Societies in the 1790s,’ Historical Journal 32 (1989) 84.
H. More, ‘Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education,’ Works (Philadelphia, 1832), vol. 1, p. 209.
William Roberts, Memoirs of Life and Correspondence of Hannah More, (New York, 1836) vol. 1, p. 238.
S. Pedersen, ‘Hannah More meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks, and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England,’ Journal of British Studies 25 (1986) 84–113; A. Stott, ‘Patriotism and Providence: the Politics of Hannah More,’ in Gleadle and Richardson, Women in British Politics, pp. ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+).
Clare Midgely, ‘Female Emanicipation in an Imperial Frame: English women and the campaign against Sati (widow burning) in India, ([0-9]+)–([0-9]+),’ Women’s History Review 9 (2000) 95–121.
B. Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem (New York: Pantheon, 1983), p. 186.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2005 Anna Clark
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Clark, A. (2005). Women in Eighteenth-Century British Politics. In: Knott, S., Taylor, B. (eds) Women, Gender and Enlightenment. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_37
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554801_37
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-230-51781-3
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-55480-1
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)