Institutions of Engagement and Debate

Abstract

Abstract This chapter explores the origins of an organized women’s movement in the late 1850s and the changes in the institutional and intellectual context at this time that enabled it to gain a presence. It covers the pioneering work of Barbara Leigh Smith (later Bodichon) and Bessie Rayner Parkes, their emphasis on women’s work, and their creation of the English Woman’s Journal, Society for the Promotion of Employment for Women, and Victoria Press. This was the first organized women’s movement in Britain. At the same time the foundation of Lord Brougham’s Social Science Association, which admitted women on equal terms, provided them for the first time with a public forum in which to speak and debate. The other critical element of this institutional context was the print culture of weekly, monthly, and quarterly periodicals, increasingly liberal in tone and increasingly dominated, on the liberal side, by ‘broad church’ Anglican intellectuals.