1. 6HUM1012 Protest, Riot, Reform
Lecture 5: Gender and Political Action

2. Structure of the lecture
separate spheres?
Female involvement in C18 politics
Women in food riots
Female reformers from 1819

3. Women in food riots

4. Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire
‘The Queen of Clubs’, 1786, British Museum
Thomas Rowlandson, ‘The two patriotic duchess’s’, 1784

5. ‘Restoration Dresses’, 1789, British Museum

6. Source of the week: George Cruikshank, ‘The Belle Alliance, or the Female Reformers of Blackburn’, 12 August 1819, British Museum.

7. Warning no1
Women did not campaign for female suffrage in this period.
Even the writers whom some see as the founders of ‘feminism’ (e.g. Mary Wollstonecraft) saw women’s main role as educating their children to be future citizens.

8. Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (1849), chapter XXIV
At one of these meetings, which took place at Lydgate, in Saddleworth, … I, in the course of an address, insisted on the right, and the propriety also, of females who were present at such assemblages voting by a show of hand for or against the resolutions. This was a new idea; and the women, who attended numerously on that bleak ridge, were mightily pleased with it. The men being nothing dissentient, when the resolution was put the women held up their hands amid much laughter; and ever from that time females voted with the men at the Radical meetings.

9. Queen Caroline affair, 1820
Robert Banks, ‘The Manner in which the Queen
proceeded daily from Lady Francis's House,
St James's Square
to the House of Lords’, 1820, British Museum
Staffordshire plate, ‘Long Live
Queen Caroline’,
1820, British Museum

10. National Charter Association Membership Card, c. 1840-1 http://www