Women, gender, and the nation primary sources

For period 1789-1833. Need to do week 6, think I left those notes at home

The Lancashire Collier Girl: A true story

• Hannah More, 1795 pamphlet

• Tells the story of Mary, an independent and virtuous girl beset by a terrible life

• Concludes on the importance of industriousness, faith in salvation, and not making moral assumptions from class respectability

The Cottage Cook; or, Mrs. Jones’ cheap dishes; shewing the way to do much good with little money

• Hannah More, 1792 pamphlet

• Fictional Mrs Jones learns that the most important philanthropy is giving time to teaching others

• Poverty primarily due to “bad management”

• Modern family in a degraded state, turned to convenience rather than quality

• Includes hearty, cheap recipes

A Vindication of the Rights of Women

• 1792 tract by Mary Wollstonecraft, responding to French debate

• Claims the current degraded state of women is due to inferior education keeping them in immoral and unnatural childhood

• Potential for intellectual equality

• Advocates national, merit based, education

Letters on Education

• Eliza Hamilton, published 1801

• Childhood education builds national character, and should be prescribed for all classes

• Politics deeply driven by sensibility, correct values must be cultivated young

• Advocates simple, egalitarian education

• Women should be educated for their own morality and as mothers of the nation

Advice to young ladies on the improvement of the mind

• Thomas Broadhurst, 1810 article in The Edinburgh Review

• Intellectual equality degraded by women’s restrictive social role

• Educated mothers key to the future of the nation

• Rejects youthful focus on marriageable accomplishments

The Unsex’d Females: A poem addressed to the author of the pursuits of literature

• Richard Polwhele, 1798 satire

• Attacks female education advocates as a source of moral corruption, particularly Wollstonecraft and Erasmus Darwin’s “botanising girls”

• Full of intertextuality, including untranslated Latin

• Praises More and female creatives, supporting a stricter gender demarcation

Memoirs of the late Hannah Kilham: chiefly compiled from her journals

• Published 1837 by step daughter Sarah Biller

• Missionary philanthropy in Sheffield, Ireland, and West Africa (Sierra Leone and the Gambia)

• Published in life, eg. Family Maxims, African Lessons

• All people have the potential for an enriching relationship with God, which should lead all human activity

Memoirs of British Female Missionaries; with a survey of the condition of women in the heathen countries

• T. W. S. Timpson, 1841 book

• Described cruelty pagan women experience, particularly in India

• Female infanticide, sati, total subordination and exclusion from education

• Islam’s polygyny and divorce degrades the status of wives, while British women are their husbands’ respected companions

• Miss Bird (1789-1834) goes to live with brother in India, partaking in unofficial mission

• Focus on her linguistic skill

Letter from the Rev. W. Ward, Missionary in India, to the Ladies of Liverpool, and of the United Kingdom

• Pub. The Times, London, 1821

• The woman in pagan counties is “despised as soon as she is born”

• Women constantly subordinate, never respected, educated partners

• Particular horror at the familial damage of sati

• British women must be responsible for the improvement of Indian

Debates on the burning of hindu widows

• Hansard, 1821, reporting on Parliament

• British non-intervention in cultural practices, but this one banned by Islam and other European powers

• Consider compromising by making the practice expensive or otherwise limits

• Legal limit likely less effective than cultural coercion and education

• Islam a religion of “conquest”, unlike Christian “persuasion”

Persuasion

• Jane Austen, pub. 1817

• Novel covers the failures of the effete aristocracy in comparison to the meritocratic naval men

• Women praised for rationality and intelligent companionship

• Marriage a highly pragmatic affair, Anne speaks of women’s confinement in comparison to their professional husbands

Autobiography of Mrs Fletcher

• Pub. 1878 by daughter Eliza Dawson

• Marries into Edinburgh Enlightenment social circle tinged with radicalism (Millar family leave for America due to their republicanism)

• Maintains close connection to father, visiting and leaving her children there

• Breastfeeding as a moral statement

• Participates in missionary/philanthropic work

• Describes 1819 visit to London, seeing Barbauld, Fry, Godwin

Immediate, not gradual abolition; or an inquiry into the shortest, safest, and most effectual means of getting rid of West Indian Slavery

• Elizabeth Heyrick, 1824

• Britons all complicit in this institution, and cannot reasonably pledge ignorance

• Gradual emancipation destabilising and ineffective

• Abolitionists should rely on divine principles, not human compromise

• Appendix by T. Clarkson surveys a copy of Jamaica Royal Gazette to demonstrate the immorality of slavery - runaway descriptions of scars, sale of collars, families broken up

A Practical View of the present state of slavery in the West Indies

• A. Barclay, 1826

• Slavery theoretically not ideal, but abolitionists are ridiculous, hysterical, and uneducated in how to actually help the West Indies

• Slavery a social contract with a civilising impact, its immediate abolition would result in anarchy

• Manumissions common enough, need to have some restrictions on them to prevent masters using them to neglect old/ill slaves

• Barclay notes that he has signed off on many manumissions (doesn’t mention the eight people he owned at abolition)

An address to the people of Great-Britain: (respectfully offered to the people of Ireland) on the propriety of abstaining from West-India sugar and rum

• William Fox, 1792 pamphlet published by the Fox - Martha Gurney collaboration

• consumption of bloodstained sugar cannot coexist with self proclaimed British love of freedom

• crashing demand for produce of slavery the best way to weaken the institution

• All born under British government should be citizens

• Slavery a corrupting, un-Christian institution which degrades the morals of the entire society

The Horrors of Slavery; exemplified in the life and history of the rev. Robert Wedderburn

• R. Wedderburn (maybe also George Cannon), 1824 pamphlet

• Complicated relationship to literacy and authorship

• Born free to enslaved Rosanna and abusive planter class James Wedderburn

• Covers his childhood and the mistreatment of his mother and grandmother Amy

• Written during feud with White half-brother A. Colville, who denies Wedderburn’s claims about their father

  • republishes their letters to Bell’s life in London, the editor supporting Wedderburn

The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, related by herself

• Mary Prince (ed. Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society), 1831 pamphlet

• Emphasis on Prince’s autonomy undercut by the framing of the text, Prince may have had limited literacy, pamphlet definitely directed at White audience

• Emphasis on cruelty of slavery, an institution against the Christian family, degrading mothers and wives

• Presents herself as respectable, or at least striving towards religious and educated respectability

  • Doesn’t mention seven year extramarital relationship with Captain Abbot exposed in 1833 libel case

Patriotic Sketches of Ireland, written in Connaught

• Sydney Owenson, Lady Morgan, 1807

• feminine accomplishment of ‘sketches’ does little to limit her direct political commentary

• “politics can never be a woman’s science; but patriotism must naturally be a woman’s sentiment”

• need to improve national spirit, as well as material suffering

• Poverty destructive to family values

• Magistrates inadequate, economy left behind England’s, national resources mismanaged

A poem on the African slave trade: addressed to her own sex. in two parts

• Mary Birkett Card, 1792

• Follows the narrative of a captured African man, torn from his family

• Compares to Egyptian enslavement of Jews

• deeply religious rhetoric, denying that all things are acceptable because ‘God has let them happen’

• Calls for women to lead boycott, praises Irish women for their action

An Address to the People of Ireland on the present important crisis

• Theobald Wolfe Tone, 1796 pamphlet

• Republican potential of French Revolution

• British claim to Eire based on illegitimate Papal decree, not consensual government

• British government has no shared interests with the Irish people, Commons a cesspit of bribery, particularly ‘Irish’ seats

• Calls for separation of Church and state, and cross-sect national solidarity

• Eire has no European enemies of its own, and in fact staffs Britain’s military

• Trying to create a unified rebellious national spirit

Ennui

• Maria Edgeworth, 1809 novel

• Follows the contested national parentage of Lord Glenthorn and his Irish ‘wet nurse’ Ellinor O’Donoghue

• Demonstrates precarity of Irish/English identity and power

• Glenthorn’s initial prejudice to the Irish changed by experience, realising their equal potential despite degraded material reality

• Companionate marriage the marker of mature masculinity, and representing the 1800 Union

• Wet nursing shifting moral position towards prostitution and corruption

King Henry VIII ‘how to get unmarried’

• 1820 satirical cartoon of George and Caroline as Henry and Catherine of Aragon

• Caroline recites Shakespeare’s lines, but cuts those on her chastity

• Magna Carta trodden underfoot, green bag of greed at the king’s side whilst the royal sceptre is closer to Caroline

• Wolsey played by Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh

The Rival Champion

• 1820 satirical cartoon of reformers voicing their discontent with the establishment with the Radical Wadd marching in a medieval knight

• John Bull, as a town crier, ironically praises the virtues of this government, and the king as a “proper Gentleman”

• Men, women, and children of the crowd call for financial reform, in phrygian caps

• Wadd’s horse blinkered, wearing ‘whitbread’s attire’

Royal Gambols!!! or the old oak in danger

• 1820 satirical cartoon of the king and his lovers swinging precariously while imps attack the roots of the English oak

• An agrarian John Bull/George III figure looks on in pity

• Sexual jokes and hubristic undertones of the swingers going up and around

• Soldiers look on unbothered or asleep

A Struggle for the horns

• 1820 satirical cartoon of George IV attempting to wrestle cuckold’s horns from John Bull

• Regardless of her innocence, the Brits in the background support “the Queen for ever” and refuse her husband what he wants

• Woman in the background is beating up the prosecution’s witnesses from Colton Gardens, one of whom cries ‘non me ricardo’

The Queen and Magna Charta, or, the thing that John signed

• Title page of a satirical poem depicting Caroline’s treatment as a constitutional crisis

• “dedicated to the ladies of Great Britain”

• Eye of God looks down on Britannia’s treatise with the king “to assert the rights of man; to avenge the wrongs of woman” by pen and sword

• Britannia sits with Union Jack, lion, phrygian cap

The Blanket Hornpipe

• 1820 satirical cartoon depicting George IV being thrown in the air by gaudily dressed women participating in vigilante justice for his bad conduct as a husband

• Outside his palace, cheered on by the soldiery

• the scene is received with “thundering and unbounded applause”, despite the women’s cartoonish appearance

• This punishment associated with wife beating

Petition of the two-needle frame-knitters

• 1819 petition to the Duke of Newcastle and other authorities

• Writing out of a “duty to ourselves and our families”

• Christian duty to meet each others’ needs contrasted with a picture of the starving family

• Want to live off decent wages, not charity

Letter on Nottingham frame-knitters

• September, 1819

• Describes public destruction of frames

• Police attempt crowd control, issuing anti-riot handbills

• Many manufacturers now renegotiating prices

Home office letters on 1811 trade unions

• Focused on Home Secretary Richard Ryder

• Claims rioters have very successfully kept their organisation underground

• Struggling to make arrests, then struggling to get any helpful information out

  • mechanics highly insular, distrustful of outsiders

An Address to the General Body of Mechanics

• 1818 handbill advocating working class empowerment

• Protests 1799 Combination Act as taking away the workers’ ability to bargain with labour, “the only species of property he has in his possession”

• State of working class family degraded

• Calls for unity, and fundraising for legal protection

To the journeymen and labourers of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland

• Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, November 1816

• Calls for respect to “the populace, the rabble”, whose labour produces all the material markers of civilisation

• Massive taxes to support the army do affect labourers, if indirectly

  • paper money has continued inflation past war

• Reform needed to prevent revolution

• Defends morality of the French Revolution, compares it to Moses killing the Egyptians

• Refutes morality of Malthusian approach, workers are not a disposable population

• All taxpayers should vote, creating a much more useful parliament

  • gender neutral language, not explicit in including women

• Resist divisions of religion or profession, calls middle class to join

  • their “fire-side virtues” must be turned into something more active

Report of the Leeds Reform Meeting

• September 1819, shadow of Peterloo

• Enter into Leeds in a peaceful, elaborate parade, fringed with mourners’ crepe

• Reformers insist on their patriotism, representing the nation’s interests better than the Commons

• Isabella Blackburn, leader of the Female Reformers of Leeds, presents the chairman with a phrygian cap and addresses the crowd

  • working class value industriousness

  • “worse than Egyptian bondage”; calls for “another Esther”

• Make a series of resolutions, calling for parliamentary reform out of economic crisis, and justice for Peterloo

  • special thanks to “our Sister reformer”

• Suffrage for “every sane person of the age of 21”

• British freedom contrasted with danger of foreign slavery

• Followed by a dinner of c.150 reformers, teetotal yet all behaved and “felt like men”

The Necessity of Speedy and Effectual Reform

• 1792 address from Geo. Philips to London members of ‘the Friends of the People’

• Everyone knows reform is needed, some are just selfishly slowing it

• Partial reform ineffective, eg. new MPs will soon be corrupted by the culture of bribery

• Calls for annual parliaments and truly universal suffrage, women “either single or married”, through regional registration

  • population too large to bribe

• Not class abolition, the superior resources of the rich will still empower them

  • Church and military, both fairly aristocratic, influential in government

• Goes through some particularly rotten boroughs, with 0-2 voters

  • this Commons cannot claim legitimacy

• Term limits, separation of ministers from legislative

• Scotland worse, going from 67 MSPs to 15 MPs