Borderline Citizens: Women, Gender, and Political Culture in Britain, 1815-1867

Abstract

Studies of women and politics in this period start with the statutory and common-law barriers to their participation. The statutory ones were the male qualification for electors inserted into the 1832 Reform Act for England and Wales and the Municipal Corporations Reform Act of 1835, and the ending of the practice whereby the freemen's franchise could be passed on like a piece of property through a daughter to her husband. There were some statutory opportunities for women to take part in elections through the rate-paying qualifications set up under general Acts relating to the poor law and public health (‘Words importing the Masculine Gender shall include Females’, 11 and 12 Vict. c. 63 s.2), and a trawl through local Acts might reveal more. But not for all, or even for many; the Jus mariti or common-law rule that a wife's property and earnings belonged to her husband stood in the way. Time and again Kathryn Gleadle returns to the point that the women who could take part in politics were those with an income or property of their own, single women—spinsters and widows—together with a minute number of married women whose husbands made money over to them through a trust. That said, we should not underestimate the number of middle-class spinsters living independently, who (inspired perhaps by Harriet Martineau and evangelical perceptions of usefulness) participated in politics by delivering anti-revolutionary and teetotal tracts to working men. Nor, Gleadle suggests, should we overlook widows living in more expansive circumstances who succeeded in carrying on the businesses which had ruined their husbands’ health. But the majority had to wait until the Married Women's Property Act of 1882 gave married women too a right to their own income and property.