In The Butcher’s Block, the second Dan
Foster Mystery, Bow Street Runner Dan Foster infiltrates a fictitious, extremist
branch of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) in Southwark, London. The LCS
was a radical eighteenth-century society dedicated to the reform of Parliament
and the attaining of universal male suffrage. The group in The Butcher’s Block receives a letter from the Female Patriots, a
women’s society based at 3 New Lane, Gainsford Street, Horsleydown. The women
ask their “brothers and friends in liberty” if they might be allowed to join
their society. Their request is scornfully rejected and the men swiftly move on
to discuss their own business.
The scene
was very much based on my own and other women’s experience of “first the revolution,
then the women” – the way in which women involved in reforming organisations often
find their concerns placed second to men’s. This is typically manifested in expectations
about the division of labour. Suffrage campaigner and Labour activist Harriet
Mitchell (1871-1956) summed it up when she recorded in her autobiography that after
her marriage she “soon found out that a lot of the Socialist talk about freedom
was only talk and these Socialist young men expected Sunday dinners and huge
teas with home-made cakes, potted meat and pies, exactly like their reactionary
fellows”.[1]
 |
| Thomas Rowlandson: Reform Advised, Reform Begun, Reform Complete (1793) |
In reality,
the official LCS’s attitude towards women was not as hostile as that of the branch
Dan Foster encounters. In August 1793, the Society’s General Committee approved
a motion presented by Division 12 calling for the formation of a female Society
of Patriots.[2]
By September, a government spy reported that there was a Society of Women meeting
in Southwark at 3 New Lane, Gainsford Street, Horsley Down, which was also the
meeting place of Division 14. (I used the Female Patriots’ address rather than
a fictitious address intending it as a sort of tribute – albeit a small one –
to their existence.) The LCS arranged to send two of its delegates to instruct them.[3] In addition, the LCS
counted amongst its members men like Dr William Hodgson who advocated political
rights for women.
Clearly,
the LCS’s willingness to send delegates to instruct the women is a vast improvement
on the response given by my fictitious ultra-radicals. But I’m not sure that means
we can altogether believe that the LCS took the question of women’s political
rights as seriously as it took that of the men’s. Female patriots were never
admitted as members to the LCS, and women are largely absent from the LCS’s
proceedings so far as I have been able to consult them. I have for example,
found very few references to women in Mary Thale’s Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society
1792-1799.
Yet the
women were there. Thomas Hardy, the founder of the LCS, had a wife and five
children; Mrs Hardy died in childbed and their sixth child was stillborn
following an attack upon their home by a royalist mob while he was in prison. Francis
Place married Elizabeth Chadd; only eight of the
fifteen children she bore him survived into adulthood. John Thelwall, who was
on trial for his life in 1794, married Susan Vellum. Thelwall
counted many women amongst his supporters; it was the author Amelia Alderson
(later Amelia Opie) who invited him to speak at Norwich. Alderson was a contributor
to the radical Norwich magazine, the Cabinet,
and attended her radical friend’s Horne Tooke’s treason trial in 1794. Maurice
Margarot’s wife, whose name I haven’t yet found in any of my books, joined him
in Australia when he was transported there.
However,
the two references to a Female Society of Patriots in the LCS records suggest
that the women were not only there as wives, sisters and daughters of the courageous
men they supported through grim days of harassment, imprisonment, and
transportation. In September 1795 the LCS General Committee read a letter from
“a female Citizen highly republican…[which] by innuendo advised the people to
rise”.[4] In March 1796 imprisoned
LCS speakers Jones and Binns were visited in their Birmingham prison cells by
women as well as men. One woman’s name rises briefly out of obscurity: Mrs Mary
Goodyear at Mr Jefferson Taylor’s, Old North Street, Red Lion Square who is a recipient
of letters for the LCS. Whether she really existed as a clandestine
post-mistress is impossible to say; the name may have been a false one.[5] Women turned out for major
LCS demonstrations, such as the gathering held at Copenhagen House in London in
1795.
But
the reality seems to be that while it was happy to call on women’s support, the
LCS showed little interest in women’s rights. The focus of the radical movement
was overwhelmingly on political rights for men. The spaces in which it met –
taverns and coffee houses – were predominantly male spaces. E P Thompson in his
magnificent The Making of the English
Working Class, notes that women’s rights were “championed within a small intellectual
coterie – Mary Wollstonecraft, Godwin, Blake (and later, Shelley).” Spence, he
adds, was rare in addressing his writing to working women.[6] And the French Revolution from
which the eighteenth century radicals drew much of their inspiration was hardly
ground-breaking in its attitude towards women’s political equality. Olympe de
Gouge was executed during the Reign of Terror in 1793-4 after she rewrote the Declaration
of the Rights of Man to include women.
 |
| The Coffee House: a male space? |
Later
history books have tended to reiterate the invisibility of women in the radical
movement. The index of Albert Goodwin’s The
Friends of Liberty: The English Democratic Movement in the age of the French Revolution
lists only five women. One of them is Amelia Alderson, described as a “hostess
and novelist”. Seven lines are devoted to Mary Wollstonecraft; we learn that
Godwin married her in spite of her “pioneering and systematic exposition” of
feminism, a topic for which Godwin had little sympathy. The marriage came
about, explains Goodwin, after she “became his pregnant mistress”, and she died
giving birth to “the daughter who later became Shelley’s wife”.[7] Even E P Thompson doesn’t
go into the question of women’s rights in any great depth: out of 944 pages, seventeen
are dedicated to women’s rights – though perhaps if Thompson had tackled the
subject in more detail the book might have been another 900 pages long.
So I
can’t help wondering exactly what the delegates who went to instruct the Female
Patriots at Horsleydown taught them. Was it a message of equality? Or was it
made clear to women that any freedoms they achieved were to be kept within
bounds defined by patriarchy? After all, it’s not unknown for an organisation
to trumpet equal rights in theory but behave very differently in practice.
What
I want to know is: where were the women and what were they doing? Where can I
find their voices? So here I go off on another historical (or herstorical) quest.
I’m busily adding books and articles to my teetering “to be read” piles. Now
all I have to do is find time to read them…
References
Goodwin,
Albert The Friends of Liberty: The
English Democratic Movement in the age of the French Revolution
(Hutchinson, 1979)
Mitchell,
Hannah, The Hard Way Up: The
Autobiography of Hannah Mitchell, Suffragette and Rebel (First published by
Faber and Faber, 1968; Virago History, 1977)
Thale,
Mary, Selections from the Papers of the
London Corresponding Society 1792-1799 (Cambridge University Press, 2009)
Thompson,
E P, The Making of the English Working
Class (First published by Victor Gollancz 1963; Penguin Classics, 2013)
‘A
Reformer’s Wife ought to be a heroine’:
Samuel Bamford in a letter to his wife from prison in 1819, quoted in Thompson,
The Making of the English Working Class,
p. 785.
[1] Hannah Mitchell, The Hard Way Up, p. 96
[2] Mary Thale, Selections from the Papers of the London Corresponding Society
1792-1799, p. 80.
[3] Thale, p. 83.
[4] Thale, p. 306.
[5] Thale, p. 356, n.
61.
[6] E P Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class,
p. 178.
[7] Albert Goodwin, The Friends of Liberty: The English
Democratic Movement in the age of the French Revolution, p. 477.
Images:
Thomas Rowlandson, Reform Advised, Reform Begun, Reform Complete, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Public Domain.
The Coffee Room, British Library on Flickr, No Known Copyright Restrictions
Comments
Post a Comment