Questions

• What were the connections between domesticity and politics in this period?
• Could radical working-class women participate in politics? If so, how? Was their role limited?
• Were middle-class women more able to take part in politics than working-class women?

 

Key reading

• Anna Clark, 'The rhetoric of Chartist domesticity : gender, language and class in the 1830s and 1840s', Journal of British Studies, 1992
• David Jones, 'Women and Chartism', History, 1983
  
• Helen Rogers, 'From "monster meetings" to "fire-side virtues"? Radical women and "the people" in the 1840s', Journal of Victorian Culture, 1999 

Further Reading

• Lydia Becker, 'The rights and duties of women in local government' reprinted in Patricia Hollis Women in Public and in Jane Lewis, Before the Vote was Won
• Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History
• Anna Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches
• Kathryn Gleadle, Borderline Citizens
• Patricia Hollis, Ladies Elect
• Michelle de Larrabeiti, 'Conspicuous before the World: the political rhetoric of Chartist women', in Eileen Yeo (ed.), Radical Femininity
• Simon Morgan, 'Women and the Anti-Corn Law League', in Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson (eds), Women and Politics
• Simon Morgan, A Victorian Woman's Place
• Mary O'Dowd, 'Women and O'Connellite Politics', History Ireland, 2014
• Paul Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, The People's Bread
• Sarah Richardson, The Political Worlds of Women
• Helen Rogers, Women and the People
• Jutta Schwarzkopf, Women in the Chartist Movement
• Jonathan Schneer, 'Politics and feminism in "outcast London" : George Lansbury and Jane Cobden's campaign for the first London County Council', Journal of British Studies, 1991
• Barbara Taylor, Eve and the New Jerusalem
• Dorothy Thompson, 'Women and nineteenth-century Radicalism' in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Olakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women