Women in the Chartist Movement

Book excerpt: Towards the end of the 1830s, large numbers of British working men and women rallied round the People's Charter in order to improve their living conditions through universal suffrage. Women's wide-ranging support of Chartism encompassed everything from extensive lecturing tours to domestic servicing of politically active menfolk. In this first full-length study of women's involvement in Chartism, the author demonstrates that, in their struggle, which lasted for more than a decade, Chartist men and women enforced in their own ranks standards of respectable man- and womanhood that were to shape working-class gender relations well into this century.