Autumn 2022: An online course on Radical Women, 1914 to 1978
In the autumn I will be teaching an online course using Zoom on Radical Women, 1914 to 1980. I am a freelance historian and have been researching and writing about radical women for many years and have been running online courses using Zoom since March 2020.
My published work includes “Up Then Brave Women” : Manchester’s Radical Women 1819-1918 and “For the sake of the women who are to come after:” Manchester’s Radical women, 1914-1945
The course will last 10 weeks and will be held in the evenings, starting on Monday 3rd October 2022. The course fee will be £60.
The format is that I speak about the evening’s topic and we then have a discussion. Afterwards I will send out a handout and suggest some further reading. Sometimes I suggest a video for course members to watch beforehand.
For more information or to reserve a place, please email me, Michael Herbert : redflagwalks@gmail.com
Course outline
The course will include the following
The First World War
- Response of suffragist and suffragette organisations to the declaration of war
- Effect of war on women’s employment
- Campaigns for the rights of women war workers
- The Christmas letters between British and German women
- The International Women’s Congress in the Hague in 1915
- The No Conscription Fellowship
- The Women’s Peace Crusade in 1916 and 1917
- The end of war and the Treaty of the Versailles.
The 1920s
- What happened to women workers after the end of the war ?
- Women in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
- Campaigns for equality and the Equal Rights Procession, July 1926
- Women’s International League
- Peacemakers’ Pilgrimage, 1926
- the campaign to make birth control available
- The General Strike
1930s
- Women and mass unemployment
- Women in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement
- Women and the fight against the fascist Blackshirts
- Women and the Spanish Civil War
The Second World War
- Evacuation, September 1939
- Women war workers
- Woman and the ATS
- Ellen Wilkinson’s war
- The Women’s Parliaments 1941 and 1942
Post-war 1945-51
- Ellen Wilkinson’s peace
- The Equal Pay Commission
- Women and work after the war
- The squatting movement 1946
- Bessie Braddock and Barbara Castle
The 1950s
- Women and work
- Leisure
- Sex and Marriage
- Equal pay
- Peggy Duff and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
- Claudia Jones
- Ann Jellicoe and Shelagh Delaney
The 1960s and 1970s
- Social and cultural change
- The Permissive Society
- The Underground
- The women strikers at Ford and Equal Pay
- Patricia Veal and the United Nurses’ Association
- The Leeds Textile Workers strike, 1970
- Women’s Liberation movement, 1969 to 1978
Radical Women History course: from Mary Wollstonecraft to the Suffragettes.
Online History course: Radical Manchester in the C19th
Sarah Parker Remond
I will be teaching 10 week course this autumn, starting on the evening of Tuesday 28th September, conducted via Zoom.
This course will be an introduction to the radical political ideas and movements in Manchester in the C19th. Manchester and the surrounding district was at the centre of the upheavals of the Industrial Revolution which gave birth to a number of important radical working class social and political movements.
The course will include the following:
1. The Radicals of the 1790s. Inspired by the radical political ideas outlined by Thomas Paine in his hugely popular book The Rights of Man groups of radicals emerged in 1792 calling for reform of the Constitution, including universal suffrage. They came under sustained legal attack by the government.
2. The Luddites. In 1812 groups of workers in Nottinghamshire, Yorkshire and Lancashire attacked the machinery they saw as taking away their work. There were also outbreaks of food rioting. The government responded by sending thousands of troops into the North. In the trials that followed many were imprisoned, while some Luddites and rioters were hanged.
3. Peterloo. On 16th August 1819 armed cavalry and soldiers attacked a peaceful meeting in Manchester held to call for the reform of Parliament, resulting in at least 18 deaths and hundreds of injuries.
4. Richard Carlile and the Manchester Republicans of the 1820s. Inspired by ideas in Carlile’s publication The Republican (which he edited from prison), groups met in Manchester to support Carlile, discuss radical politics and hold dinners to celebrate Thomas Paine’s birthday.
5. Owenite Socialism. From the late 1820s groups of working women and men set up Co-operative Societies. inspired by the ideas of Robert Owen. They began to call themselves “Socialists.”
6. The Anti-Poor Law Agitation/ Factory Reform/1832 Reform Act. In the 1830s there were campaigns against the punitive Poor Law amendment of 1834 which set up Workhouses; for a limit on the excessive working hours in factories; and for the reform of Parliament.
7. Chartism. Chartism was a mass movement, at its height between 1838 and 1848, which called for the implementation of the People’s Charter whose proposals included universal suffrage, secret ballots and payment of MPs. The movement organised three mass petitions to Parliament which were rejected. Instead the government responded with mass arrests and prison for many of the leaders.
8. Karl Marx and Frederick Engels in Manchester. Frederick Engels worked in the family firm – Ermen and Engels – in Manchester for 20 years, sending money to support Karl Marx and his family in London whilst Marx worked on Capital. Marx visited Engels in Manchester on a number of occasions.
9. Black radicals in Manchester. We will look at the visits of black Americans camapigning against slavery such as as Henry Brown, Frederick Douglas, Charles Lennox Remond and Sarah Parker Remond.
10. The Irish in Manchester. There was substantial migration from Ireland which led to the establishment of an Irish community in the New Cross and St Michael’s area. The Irish took part in trade unionism and Chartism, as well as organising movements for the independence of Ireland such as Fenianism.
The course consist of a weekly lecture by myself followed by a discussion amongst course members. I will be providing handouts and suggestions for further reading and a guide to online resources.
The cost of the course will be £60 payable in advance. It will take place in the evening starting in the autumn. To book a place or for more information, please email me : redflagwalks@gmail.com
About me
I have been researching and writing about radical history of Manchester for many years and have an MA in History of Manchester. My published work includes:
Never Counted Out! the Story of Len Johnson, Manchester’s Black Boxing Hero and Communist (1992)
”The Wearing of the Green, ” a political history of the Irish in Manchester (2000)
Up Then Brave Women : Manchester’s Radical Women 1819-1918 (2012)
For the sake of the women who are to come after”: Manchester’s Radical Women 1915 to 1945 (2019)
In 2020 I took part in this BBC Sport item on Len Johnson (filmed in my back garden !)
Michael Herbert
The English Civil War of 1968: my review of “The Day The Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting”by Arthur Wise (1968)
“When Johnny comesMarching home again
He’s coming by bus or underground
A woman’s eye will shed a tear
To see his face so beaten in fear
An’ it was just around the corner in the English civil war
It was still at the stage of clubs and fists
When that well-known face got beaten to bits
Your face was blue in the light of the screen
As we watched the speech of an animal scream
The new party army was marching right over our heads
When that well-known face got beaten to bits
Your face was blue in the light of the screen
As we watched the speech of an animal scream
The new party army was marching right over our heads
There you are, ha ha, I told you so
Says everybody that we know
But who hid a radio under the stairs
An’ who got caught out on their unawares?
When that new party army came marching…”
Says everybody that we know
But who hid a radio under the stairs
An’ who got caught out on their unawares?
When that new party army came marching…”
“The English Civil War”, The Clash (1979)
For a traumatic event which led to tens of thousands of deaths and the destruction of much of the North of England, and whose aftermath – political, social, constitutional – continues to be felt right up to the present day, the English Civil War of 1968 has left virtually no trace in popular memory. The song by the punk rock band The Clash quoted above is one of the few references that can be found – and that was written over forty years ago. (A live performance can be seen here)
It is as though the people of both parts of the divided country – the victorious South and the defeated North – took a decision to forget, a collective amnesia aided and abetted by the curious lack of histories of the conflict. The leaders of the North are either dead or have disappeared, while the politicians and generals of the South have barely referred to the Civil War, if at all, in their memoirs. No official history was ever issued as it was not considered an official war in the sense of the First or Second World World Wars.
In this context Arthur Wise’s The Day The Queen Flew to Scotland for the Grouse Shooting (the meaning of the title will become apparent later), is unique, written as it was just months after the end of the war (indeed, at the time of its publication in Ireland, Wise was in Cell 4, Debtors’ Prison, York).The book was banned for a number of years in England under the Sedition Act, one of a series of very repressive measures passed by the Southern government in 1969 known as “The Ten Acts” . Never reprinted, it remains very hard to get hold of (second hand copies reputedly change hands at high prices) but it is well worth seeking out for its unique account, including a number of episodes for which this is the only source.
Although the author called it “a document,” he adopted the form of a novel, explaining in his introduction :
This document is an attempt to piece together the disastrous events of the past year, from existing reports and from personal interviews. Where it has seemed to me the most effective way of giving the reader a clear undertanding of the situation, I have simply set down the bald facts. In other places, where I have had supporting evidence from interviews, I have attempted to reconstruct actual conversations and events in such a way as to convey the total feeling of them…
In one or two places I have to suppress some of the facts, simply to make my own position, and that of my friends in the North, still tenable during the present period of occupation. This suppression in no way affects the general accuracy of the report.
Wise sets the scene at the outset, trying to convey to the reader the perceptible change in atmosphere at the beginning of 1968 that a native returning to a Northern town in Lancashire or Yorkshire after a period of absence might have sensed:It was there in the faces of people in the bus queue. If he could put it into words, what would he say? He might tell you there was certain assurance about the place. Arrogance, he might call it. Here is a town, he might tell you, that seems at last to have grasped an indentity, that has come to terms with what it is, that sees itself as a unique identity with life different from that of any other place on earth. A town rising up out of the filth and rubble and exploitation of the nineteenth century and opening its eyes for the first time. Self-conscious and aware. Critical and dissatisfied. Bitter, perhaps. Certainly determined to find a place for itself in the sunlight, and in the eyes of God…for there was revolution in the air.
The revolution began, as they often do, with a relatively trivial event, the turning down by the Westminster government in May 1968 of an application to rebuild theatres in York and Manchester, while at the same time greenlighting a similar application from High Wycombe.
The issue was taken by up the Northern Development Council, a committee set up by the Westmintser government to advise on planning, a typical 1960s toothless body with no powers. But it began to acquire power, as Wise outlines:
It had been brought into being as a means of containing the unrest in the North. Instead, it became a rallying point for the area, canalising feelings and aspirations that had previously been mere subterraneans rumblings. As it grew in power and authority, it clamoured for autonomy and power…It could, conceivably, have been declared an illegal organisation, but no government dare have taken such a step as long as it was so effectively identified with the Northern spirit.
The five members of the Central Committee were Sir Felix Brunton, the driving force behind the Steller Orchestra in Leeds; Colonel Douglas Fitzwallace, a retired army colonel; Albert Rubinstein, chair of Granada television in Manchester; Sidney Olsen, a pop impresario; and Sir Brian Wordsworth, a landowner with extensive interests in textiles.
Later that month the Cup Final at Wembley between Newcastle United and Chelsea erupted into mass violence between opposing supporters from North and South, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries
The Cabinet met on 13th May to discuss what had happened and decided to send a civil servant , Robert Paine, to speak to the NDC’s Central Council.
He met them in Darlington on 19th May. At the meeting the NDC decided to support the theatre project from its own funds, but then Wordsworth told Paine; “For two hundred years we have been a depressed race. We still live in conditions that are a scandal in any country claiming to be civilised- conditions in which no southerner would keep their dog. We’ve produced the wealth of this country and it’s been stolen from us. But we’re going no further with you. This is where slavery ends.”
The NDC presented an ultimatum to Paine that is worth quoting in full:
1. That the six Northern counties of Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Northumberland, Durham and Yorkshire, shall be designated in future as “the North”.
2. That the City of York, as the ancient capital of the North, shall be given the status of the second city of England.
3. That the Northern Development Council be redesignated The Council of the North.
4. That the Central Committee of the Northern Development Council..shall become the executive body of the Council of the North.
5. That the Council of the North shall have the authority to design and implement its own consitution, without reference to Westminster.
6. That, under the final authority of Westmintser on matters of foreign policy, The Council of the North shall have power to govern in the North.
The NDC made it clear that if these demands were not accepted, they would break off all contact with London.
The demands were, of course, completely unacceptable to the Westminster government (whose Prime Minister was a pipe-smoking Northerner as it happens, not that it made any difference). But rather than negotiate some degree of increased autonomy for the North he took the fatal step of ordered the NDC to be arrested and taken to the Tower of London. But nothing happened, the order was ignored by the police in the North, a sign of how rapidly the situation was developing.
Northern students marching
On 26th May the Council of the North issued a Declaration of Separatneess, repeatedly broadcast on the Northern independent television networks and the Pirate Radio ship Radio 38, while a song commissioned by Olsen from the pop group The Harlequins, “Free to Live, ” became the Northern independence anthem. (This song remains bannned by the way and the fate of the group is unknown). Young people took to the streets of the North in same way that their counterparts were doing in Northern Ireland, France, Germany, Mexico, the USA etc…
In Manchester, Leeds, Bradford and Hull, university students, students from the Colleges of Education, the Schools of Arts, the Colleges of Technology, and in some cases the schools marched through the towns with banners shouting their support and breaking into the chorus of the new song “Free To Live”. In the University of York, with its large numbers of students from the South, there was some limited violence. A counter-march by Southern students down Tower Street and Clifford Street, was broken up in Nessgate by students from the Technical College and from St John’s College of Education.
The Southern government (as we must now call it for a time) responded by declaring a State of Emegency on 27th May and the following morning dispatched an armed detachment of Household Cavalry (all Southerners, of course) northwards to arrest the Council of the North and convey them to the Tower. It seems London believed that the secessionist movement could be snuffed out with one bold move. How ill-informed they were!
Online history course : Radical Women: 1914-1980
I will be teaching 10 week online course on Radical Women: 1914-1980 using Zoom, starting on 8th February 2021. It take place on Monday evenings at 7pm. The fee will be £60 payable in advance.
For more information and/or to book a place on the course please email me (Michael Herbert): redflagwalks@gmail.com
The course will include the following:
The First World War
We will look at how the war affected women in terms of work and home and also at the activities of women appalled by the carnage of the war who wanted to make sure that it never happened again. They held a Congress in 1915 in Holland which established the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.
1920s
We look the post war-war world: work and unemployment; the activities of women’s organisations now that women had the vote eg NUSEC, Six Point Group, Open door Council. We also at the Women Delegation to Ireland and the role of women during and after General Strike in may 1926.
1930s
Britain was plunged into an economic slump after 1929, creating mass unemployment. We look at the role of women in the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement; womenwho fought Mosley’s fascist Blackshirts; and the experiences of women who went to Spain during the Spanish Civil War.
The Second World War
We examine at the profound impact of the war on women’s lives in terms of home and work and how they discussed the war and the future in the Women’s Parliaments. We also look at the work of Labour MP Ellen Wilkinson during the war.
Post war 1945-1951
We look at the career of Ellen Wilkinson as Minster of Education in the Labour government; the housing crisis which led to a squatting movement; and the Royal Commission on Equal Pay.
1950s
We look at the role of women in the developing consumer society; Equal pay; Mary Stott and the Guardian’s women’s page; Peggy Duff and the Camapign for Nuclear Disarmament ; and the career of writer Shelagh Delaney.
1960s
The Pill, mini-skirts, the Permissive Society; but just how much did things really change for women in the 1960s?
Women’s Liberation Movement
We look at the emergence of the Women’s Liberation Movement, firstly in the USA, and then in Britain, including the Ruskin Conference in 1970s and the first WLM march in March 1971.
A bit about me…
I have been researching writing and teaching the history of radical women for many years ; my pulished work includes Up Then Brave Women”; Manchester’s Radical Women 1819-1918 (2012) and “For the sake of the women who are to come after: Manchester’s Radical Women 1914-1945 (2019)
This is a short item I filmed some years for the BBC televison programme The Culture Show
More information on my work here;
Some comments from previous course members
I attended this course on 19th Radical women and found it both informative and enjoyable. An excellent course for anyone wanting more information on womens/social history at this time. Jane
Michael’s online course on the history of working class women in the 20th century was one of my early lockdown highlights. The sessions themselves were fun and fascinating with plenty of time for discussion and responses. In between sessions Michael sent out lots of supplementary resources so that we could read, watch and listen in advance, and follow up on the women and events which most interested us. I loved learning about women I’d vaguely heard of and others who were completely new to me – it’s largely a forgotten history which I’m so pleased I now know a bit about. Shereen
I found the course very interesting and enjoyable. It sheds light on the role played by radical women in the 19th century, with particular focus on the North of England, and the challenges they faced. The sessions provided a wealth of information and back-up documents which served as pointers for further research, and identified wider patterns. There was also time for discussion.
Women Republicans in Manchester in the 1820s
In the 1820s there was an active group of Republican women,, followers of Richard Carlile who together with his wife and sister spent five years in prison for his political writings and challenge to the political and clerical establishment.
Carlile was born in Devon, the son of a shoemaker who died in 1794, leaving Richard’s mother struggling to support her three children on the income from running a small shop. At the age of six he was sent for free education to the local Church of England school: at the age of twelve he left school for a seven-year apprenticeship to a tinsmith in Plymouth. In 1813 he got married to Jane, and shortly afterwards the couple moved to Holborn Hill in London where he found work as a tinsmith. Jane Carlile gave birth to five children, three of whom survived, probably an average for this period.
Carlile became interested in radical politics during the economic slump that followed the end of the Napoleonic war and heard Henry Hunt speak. He himself was put on short-time working. He says “I shared the general distress of 1816 and it was this that opened my eyes.” In 1817 he went into partnership with William Sherwin, setting up a printing business and opening a shop in Fleet Street where he sold the works of Thomas Paine, split into pamphlets so that the working people could afford them. He also sold the Black Dwarf when many feared to do so because of the government crackdown on radical ideas and prosecution of booksellers. Carlile then began publishing his own radical paper, Sherwin’s Weekly Political Register.
Carlile was present at the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester on 16th August 1819 and wrote the first published account of the murderous attack on the peaceful crowd.
In the wake of Peterloo the government cracked down radical publishers, shutting down Sherwin’s Political Register and seizing the newspapers and pamphlets.
Undaunted, Carlile immediately started publishing a new journal, The Republican, which survived until 1826. He says “The Habeas Corpus Act being suspended … all was terror and alarm, but I take credit to myself in defeating the effect of these two Acts upon the Press… Of imprisonment I made sure, but I felt inclined to court it than to shrink from it”.
The government prosecuted Carlile for blasphemy and for selling seditious writings such as the writings of Thomas Paine. He was jailed for three years in October 1819, being sent to Dorchester gaol, but because he failed to pay a fine of £1500 Carlile actually served 6 years in total. He was not finally released until November 1825. In March 1820 a letter from “a few friends” in Leeds arrived with a subscription of 8 shillings. In July he received £20 from a group of journeyman flaxspinners in Leeds
When Jane visited her husband in prison in December 1819 she could scarcely speak for exhaustion, yet within a matter weeks she re-opened the shop and starting publishing the newspaper again, although under constant monitoring by the authorities Jane was t was charged with publishing a libel in The Republican on 16 June 1820 and tried on 19 January 1821. In court the Solicitor General said he regretted that a female should be the object of prosecution “but should not complain, after continuing to give to the world the mischevious work in question, after the warnings which she had received from previous prosecutions.”
Jane was found guilty and on 3rd February she appeared in court for sentencing. She said
I have acted entirely from a sense of conjugal duty without consulting my own interest, or my own ideas, of right and wrong…I must be content to share his suffering, as I have shared his prosperity. For better or worse is the motto of the altar and I am happy in giving my husband this instance of my regard and affection. I have already suffered that can befall of wife and mother and I have to entreat your Lordships will not further agonize my mind by separating me from both husband and children,
She was sentenced to two years in Dorchester Gaol, joining Richard in a cell.
Carlile’s sister Mary now took over the publishing business until she too was jailed in July 1821 on charges of blasphemy for having published an Appendix to the Theological Works of Thomas Paine and also on charges of seditious libel for selling an essay by Carlile on the British constitution which he compared unfavourably with that of Spain..
Carlile, his wife and sister shared a prison cell. Carlile gave some details of their life in prison in the course a very long letter written to Henry Hunt on 20th February 1822. (Hunt also in prison in Ilchester, by the way.)
Here we are self, wife, and sister locked up in one room in which we have no alternative but to attend to every call of nature in the presence of each other, or by drawing a curtain across our little water-closet, and at dusk in the evening my sister is removed to a distant part of the Prison, where she is locked up in a small cell with an iron-bedstead to lie on, that is a fixture, and there is no room for another, and there she remains until nine o’clock the next morning, not being allowed to walk in the female felons’ yard for fear of corrupting them; such is the alleged precaution, and during this absence of hers from my apartment, the water-closet is closed up and unlocked when she returns.
Republican Women’s Support for Jane and Mary-Ann
Groups of women Republicans rallied to the cause of the imprisoned women.
The Female Reformers of Ashton wrote to Jane Carlile in September 1821, the letter being signed by Elizabeth Higson from the Flash Hall area of the town. She had hosted in her home a celebration of Hunt’s birthday in November 1820, Paine’s in January 1821 and Hunt’s again in November 1821. In her letter she expressed sympathy for Jane as “the first female victim of superstition and despotism” andnoted how the women “were forced to put our infant children to the drudgery and unhealthy employment of the cotton manufactory” in order to make ends meet, and even then they were left with “little more than necessaries”. She enclosed a £1 contributed by a number of fellow Republican
On 20th April 1822 the Female Republicans of Manchester wrote to Jane and Mary-Ann Carlile:
We the undersigned Females, possessing liberal principles and hearts of humanity towards our fellow females in the cause of liberty, now suffering confinement in Dorchester Gaol for advocating truth and reason, beg you to accept both our condolence and congratulations: to Mrs Carlile for doing what every honest and virtuous considers to be he duty, namely, to obey the voice of her husband, according with what every married women promises in her marriage ceremony, we offer our thanks for her good example…
It is the wish of the undersigned females, by subscribing their mites together, as far as their situation in a land of oppression and taxation will permit, first to shew a token of humanity and respect towards you; and in the second place, to convince our enemies that we approve of your conduct, and glory in your spirit, we are not ashamed to come forward and prove to the people of England that there are yet women possessed of common sense of reason. We abhor with detestation and protest that is injustice to persecute, imprison and rob under pretence of fine, any person for publishing his or her principles on any subject. We believe that free discussion on all subjects, both political and religious, is the right of every creature living; and every effort to destroy free discussion is oppressive and tyrannical.
The small trifle of £2 2s enclosed, we wish you to accept it as token of our regard to you for your past conduct; and also with our sincere wishes that Mrs Carlile may be brought through her approaching natural pain and sorrow with safety; and that you may rise triumphant over all your enemies, is the sincere wish of your Friends, signed on behalf of subscribers, Mary Ann Walker 9 Back-Piccadily Manchester
PS The Female Committee of Manchester received from the Friends of Bolton the following articles to forward to Mrs Carlile.The Republican,
The items included frocks and silk. Mary Walker was the leading light in this Manchester group and worked as a boot-closer along with her husband, William.
Jane and Mary-Ann Carlile replied to the women on 4th May:
Noble-minded women
Your comforting address, with the very pleasing presents that accompanied it, have been duly and thankfully received, and have added much to the satisfaction we previously felt in knowing that though imprisoned, we had done nothing to disgrace ourselves as females.
Mrs Carlile felt an expressible delight at the provision which you, in conjunction with her friends, the Republican Weavers of Bolton, have made for her yet unborn infant and pledges herself that each article of dress shall always have the preference to any she has provided herself, and shall be first worn…
Would you believe that if either of us walk out alone, during the hour we are allowed to walk, a man is appointed to watch us and dog us until we are locked up again. We are not only denied the satisfaction of sympathising with or relieving any poor female in this place, but we are forbidden to speak or give a compassionate look to any of them, and to effect this object we are always, when unlocked, under the watching of a sentinel.
The two women said that they wished the prison chaplain would attempt to convert them:
…as a matter of amusement for everything is a dull, and often painful sameness here. We find nothing to relieve that powerful curiousity which is not unjustly attributed to our sex….Were we to say we like imprisonment we should not speak the truth ; and being incessantly locked up with Mr Carlile, whose affairs and duties often require a sort of silence that is not most agreable to us, makes us feel it more than we otherewise would.
Elizabeth Gaunt from Manchester wrote to Jane on 29th April 1822. (Elizabeth had been arrested at Peterloo and imprisoned for a time.) In her letter Elizabeth explained that she was :
…one of those who witnessed the blood-stained field of Peterloo and suffered eleven days incarceration in one of the Boroughmongers’ Bastiles because I was exposed to the sabres of a ferocious Yeomanry Cavalry, whilst I was performing what then conceived and now conceive to have been my duty; and even after this, I anticipate the day that will free you from the trammels of our tyrants….
I beg your acceptance of this small present enclosed, being the work of my own hands, which I flatter myself will be more acceptable to you than if they were diamonds from a tyrant.
Jane replied to Elizabeth on 4th May:
My warmest thanks accept for the very handsome little Pair of Shoes you have been so kind to send me, of your own manufacture, and be assured that they shall be the first on the feet of my daily-expected infant, whose birth shall be announced to tye Female Republicans of Manchester as early as possible, if everything passes off as well as i hope.
My spirits and constitutional strength are good, or I should have everything to dread in such a place as this where humanity is marketable commodity, and where, what is worse, I am one of those excluded from the market place at any price.
My very close confinement has greatly augmented the sufferings of pregnancy, by my humane and very Reverend keepers have nothing but inveterate prejudices for my accommodation. Up this moment we are locked in one room and such seems likely to be the case at the momnet of my labour.
For the small presents of Cotton and Needles, which accompanied the Shoes, my thanks are offered wherever they came from.
The pleasure which is derived from such acts of kindness and affection from Females to whom I can only be known by name, is a complete balance to the mind from the pain of imprisonment… I was neither a politician nor theologian before my imprisonment, but a sentence for two years has roused feelings in me that I might never have otherwise possessed. I have been made to feel the neccessity of reforming the abuses of government; as ia am sure , that under a Representative System of Government no Woman would have been sent to Prison for Two Years, for publishing an assertion that tyrants ought to be treated as dangerous and destructive beasts of prey. I have been made to think it, as well as to publish it.
Jane gave birth on 4th June 1822 to a daughter, whom she named Hypatia after the Greek philosopher murdered by Christians in Alexandria in 415AD. Carlile later wrote “The season was particularly hot and with the addition of a nurse, and a constant fire, though we had two rooms by this time, made our situation very painful. We had no current of air and the rooms faced the sun.”
Jane was released in February 1823 and went to her father’s cottage near Southampton to collect her children.
On 17th February 1823 the Female Republicans in Manchester wrote again to Jane on her release:
Much esteemed sister
WE the undersigned Female Republicans of Manchester; in behalf of the whole, congratulate you on the expiration of the vindictive sentrenc eof imprisonment; and your liberation from the Christian Bastile of Dorchester after the lapse of 3 years imprisonment to your imprisonment to your brave husband, 2 years to yourself and 1 year to your sister; and after the blessings of Christianity which have since been bestowed on Rhodes, Boyle, Holmes, Tunbridge, and lastly our brave Mrs Wright, who has made such noble stand against the friends of kingcraft, priestcraft, superstition and delusion. After the comforts which you have received from the supporters of the humble Jesus; the members of those little Holy Alliances the Bridge Street Gang and the virtuous Vice Society, with the Bishop of Clogher at its head; after they had entered your house, seized upon everything that was calculated to male life comfortable, and left you and your new-born infant to languish and perish, for what they cared; after your frequent arrests, long imprisonment, and the inevitable dispersion of your infant family, to support what is blasphemously called the will of God; where is the person of common sense who will say, that Christianity is calculated to make people honest and happy ? …
The Female Republicans of Manchester have viewed, with an irrepressible delight and joyful sensation, the bold and heroic part which you have performed in encountering the band of Christian man-tigers and they hope as soon as you have settled your domestic affairs and can make it convenient, that you will bestow upon them the greatest honour you have in their power, viz. to visit Manchester where you will be welcome to the best that their humble situation in life will admit, luxuries are withheld from us for the consumption and gratification of our Tyrants, but if you will oblige us we hope to partake of something better than luxuries, a mental enjoyment, such as is preferred by every honest and considerate mind, and at all times agreeable to the virtuous female.
Mary Barlow, Rachel Thomson, Mary Walker, Ellen Bottomley, Martha Naseby, Mary Ann Telford, Nancy Wheeler, Ann Bottomley, Jane Gratrex, Abigail Longbottom, Mary Marshall, Ann Betty, Mary Williams, Mary Ann Rhodes
Jane replied from London on 24th February
I have read your address with pleasure and with grateful feelings, and respond to all its sentiments with approbation. I have returned to London from my family prison and am not ashamed to look any one of my persecutors in the face; conscious that the cause of my imprisonment was disreputable to none but those who enforced it.
I thank you for the invitation you have given me to visit Manchester, being fond of travelling, I should cheerfully accept it, did not my little family form an obstacle to my wishes. However, should I find it possible, in the course of the approaching spring or summer, to make arrangements for that purpose, I will not fail to apprise you of my capability and intention. I should feel it a pleasure to put my infant, Hypatia, into the hands of those who were so kind as to anticipate her birth by so many useful presents, and to return them thanks in person. At no period of my life did I ever fell so much delight as in unfolding the parcel which contained them, and I feel satisfied, that it could only be again equalled by the welcome I should find in stepping into each of your houses.
I think but little of luxuries, and much less of formalities and ceremonies; if I can come into the North of England, I shall not come as a stranger, but with the familiarity of a friend, a neighbour and an every day acquaintance.
A few months after her release, Jane Carlile set off for the north, accompanied by her four children, Richard, aged 12, Alfred, aged 11, Thomas Paine, aged 2, and baby Hypatia, aged 11 months.. She arrived in Manchester on 1th b9 May. A week later she went on to Leeds, then to Huddersfield and Liverpool. She had to return to Manchester after two of her children caught measles and ended up spending a month there.
She also went to Bolton where on 2nd September she was given 4 guineas by local Republicans “to assist in the herculean undertaking of cleaning the more than augean stables of Priestcraft and Statecraft” as wrote John Cameron to Carlile, adding:
I cannot conclude without expressing satisfaction at the pleasure we enjoyed from the company and conversation of Mrs. Carlile. We are extremely sorry that she could not stop longer with us, for in fact, Sir, she gained the affection and esteem of all parties who had the opportunity of being in her company – and to be plain with you, Sir, I think you have never done Mrs. Carlile that justice which she is intitled to, by her merit, for, from what we have seen, instead of a passive, she must have been a very active agent.
Jane finished her northern tour in Salford in early September where she met with the Salford Reading Group who gave her a sovereign raised from subscriptions which were listed in a letter published in The Republican on 30th September. Joseph Lawton wrote that they had given her the money as “ a small tribute of esteem for your having been as Mr Carlile observed a greater sufferer in your mind than himself for the cause of liberty and free discussion and who still bears with great fortitude the heart rending idea of being so far separated from your husband...”
“An Appeal against Female Suffrage,” June 1889
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“An Appeal Against Female Suffrage” was published in the Nineteenth Century magazine in June 1889. It was apparently organised by the best-selling novelist Mary Augusta Ward and signed primarily by women from the upper classes, a good few with titles. Some 2000 women eventually signed. The suffragists responded with their own appeal in favour of suffrage in Fortnightly Review which also attracted 2000 supporters. The Women’s Penny Paper commented tartly that the anti-suffrage appeal was based on the premise that “man is a superior being” and signed mostly the “wives of men eminent for intellectual attainments and high character..if only their bit of the world were a sample of the whole, instread of being an exception to the whole, their views might possibly be sound…”  Mary Augusta Ward The editor of the Nineteenth Century supported the anti-suffrage appeal: “In furtherance of the Appeal – which has hithero only been seen privately by a few persons – the accompanying propsed protest is laid before the readers of the Nineteenth Century, with the request that the ladies among them as agree with it will be kind enough to sign the opposite page, and return it, when detached, to the Editor of this magazine.” “The difficulty of obtaining a public expression, even of disapproval, about such a question from those who entirely object to mixing themselves up in the coarsening struggles of party political life, may easily become a public danger. Their silence will be misinterpreted into indifference or consent to designs they most dislike, and may thus help to bring them about.” “It is submitted that for once, and in order to save the quiet of Home life from total disappearance, they should do violence to thier natural reticence, and signify publicly and unmistakably their condemnation of the scheme now threatened.” “The deliberate opinion of the women readers of the Nineteenth Century may certainly be taken as fair sample of the judgement of the educated women of the country, and would probably receive the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of their fellow countrywomen. “ |
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Autumn 2020: Online course on Radical Women: from Mary Wollstonecraft to Votes for Women
Mary Wollstonecraft
This 10 week online course will be an introduction to the history of radical women in Britain. I usually teach this course at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford but until the public health situation improves it will be held online, using Google Meet/
I will be teaching the course on Monday evenings from 5th October at 7pm. I will speak about the topic for about 50 minutes, followed by a discussion amongst course members on the issues. No previous knowledge is neccessary for this course.
The fee is £60 which is payable in advance.
It will include:
Mary Wollstonecraft and the radical politics of the 1790s, Mary’s book Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), written against the backdrop of the French Revolution, is a key text in the story of radical women.
Women’s particpation in popular disturbances in 1812 . Against a background of economic depression, the north of England saw an outbreak of organised attacks on mills and food rioting.
Female Reform Societies and the Peterloo massacre of 1819. In the summer of 1819 women formed themselves into Female Reform Socities calling for the reform of Parliament and issued addresses to the public. Women were present on the field of Peterloo in Manchester on 16th August 1819 and were among the dead and injured
Women Republicans in the 1820s. Women were active in the Republican movement which was inspired by the political writings of Richard Carlile who was jailed for five years along with his wife and sister.
Women and Owenite Socialism. Women were active as particpants and lecturers in the socialist movement of the 1830s whose key theorist was Robert Owen. A number of women such as Eliza Martin were also active in the cause of atheisem.
Women and the Chartist movement, 1838-1848. Chartism was a mass movement which called for the wholesale reform of the political system in favour of working people. Women were active in dozens of Female Chartist Societies.
Women and trade unionism. In this section we look at the activities of the Women’s Trade Union League and the Manchester Women’s Trades Union Council.
Votes for Women, 1866-1928. In the final part of the course we will look at the long campaign for Votes for Women which began with a petiton to parliament in 1866 and lasted for sixty years. It will include both consitutional suffragists in the National Society for Women’s Suffrage and militant suffragettes in the Women’s Social and Political Union.
Some comments from previous course members
I attended this course on 19th Radical women and found it both informative and enjoyable. An excellent course for anyone wanting more information on womens/social history at this time. Jane
Michael’s online course on the history of working class women in the 20th century was one of my early lockdown highlights. The sessions themselves were fun and fascinating with plenty of time for discussion and responses. In between sessions Michael sent out lots of supplementary resources so that we could read, watch and listen in advance, and follow up on the women and events which most interested us. I loved learning about women I’d vaguely heard of and others who were completely new to me – it’s largely a forgotten history which I’m so pleased I now know a bit about. Shereen
I found the course very interesting and enjoyable. It sheds light on the role played by radical women in the 19th century, with particular focus on the North of England, and the challenges they faced. The sessions provided a wealth of information and back-up documents which served as pointers for further research, and identified wider patterns. There was also time for discussion. Myriam
About me
I have been researching and writing about the history of radical women for many years. My published work includes: Up Then Brave Women : Manchester’s Radical Women 1819-1918 (2012) and “For the sake of the women who are to come after”: Manchester’s Radical Women 1915 to 1945 (2019). You can find more information on these books here
This is a short item I filmed some years for the BBC televison programme The Culture Show
For more information and/or to book a place on the course please email me : redflagwalks@gmail.com
“Rise up women”…Some suggestions on documentaries and drama by or about women to watch during Lockdown
These are some suggestions on things to watch whilst at home…
A four part documentary series presented by Amanda Foreman which covers role of women in society from 10,000 Bc to present day
A heartbreaking song written by Frank Higgins and based on real testimony given to a Parliamentary Commission in 1842 by Patience, a young woman, who worked down a coal mine.
Shoulder to Shoulder, BBC 1974 drama series about the WSPU fight for Votes for Women. Most episodes are not available on the net anymore, but this is a snippet about Annie Kenney from episode 2. Annie is played by Georgia Brown who, along with Midge Mackenzie and Verity Lambert, created the series. It has never been issued by the BBC as a DVD.
Fascinating collection of television and radio clips about the suffragette movement.
A documentary made by Jill Craigie about the rebuilding of Plymouth after WW2. Jill was a documentary filmaker and sceen writer.
A documentary made by Jill Craigie in support of equal pay for women and narrated by the actress Wendy Hiller.
A Girl Comes To London. (1956)
Robert Reid reports on the growing trend of young girls who leave their industrial cities or rural villages behind in search of a better life in London.
The Liver Birds live on Beat Club, 25/9/65
Largely forgotten all women beat group (from Liverpool, of course).
Written by Nell Dunn and directed by Ken Loach. this was a controversial and mould-breaking TV drama, watched by an audience of nearly 10 million on first transmission. A record 400 viewers complained to the BBC, mostly about the programme’s bad language and depiction of sexual promiscuity – and its results.
Actresses Sarah Miles and Eleanor Bron are among a wide range of women offering views on marriage, relationships and the family.
The Wednesday Play : The Bond By Dawn Pavitt and Terry Wale (1965)
Directed by Mary Ridge one of a number of women directors working in British television in the 1960s, the play features Hannah Gordon as Sally, whose disappointment about married life following her marriage to Chris is told very much from her point of view, with several still image sequences at key points illustrating her growing sense of disillusionment.While the structure makes the play seem rather fragmented, especially early on, the feminist theme – how independent women are forced to give up their freedom after marriage – comes across clearly, not only in Sally’s fantasies of subservience but in her long, rousing speech at the end of the play, in which she refutes the suggestion that young people have it easy today. “It’s not so easy when you’ve been conditioned to act out a role”, she argues in a monologue which occupies the final four minutes, recorded in two long takes
This programme is from a series looking at the lives of the inhabitants of Gibson Square in Islington, north London. Some of the families it follows have working mothers and it explores how they cope with combining their housewifely duties with the demands of employment. We meet an actress, an office cleaner and a mother who chooses to stay at home to look after the children and hear from the narrator about how it is beginning to ‘look like a woman’s world’.
Man Alive: Consenting Adults: The Women (1967)
A documentary in which lesbians openly discuss their sexuality and lives, something very rare at this time.
Man ALive: Marriage Under Stress, 1: Children Male A Difference (1967)
A documentary in which young couples talk openly about the difference children have made to their marriages
Man Alive: Marriage Under Stress: 2: Breaking Point (1967)
Desmond Wilcox interviews couples whose marriages have gone wrong for various reasons.
Desmond Wilcox interviews various men and women who are coping with divorce in 1960s Britain.
One Pair of Eyes: Who Are The Cockneys Now? (1968)
Actress Georgia Brown returns to where she grew up in the Jewish East End which was changing as new migrants from East Pakistan were settling into the same area.
One Pair of Eyes: Margaret Drabble (1968)
Margaret Drabble narrates this documentary about her own life. The cameras follow her as she revisits the places where she grew up and was educated and ponders the events that have led to her present situation. The conflicts and the choices that women, in particular, must make between the freedom to create and the practical need to care for a family are at the centre of this self-portrait of the life of a young author.
Second Wave Feminism: BBC archive.
A collection of clips on the emergence of the Women’s Liberation movemnet in late 60s/early 70s.
Miss World : Beauty Queens and Bedlam. (2020)
A documentary about the feminist protest at Miss World in November 1970.
A vivid account by Sally Alexander of her role in the Miss World protest. She is now a Professor of History.
A documentary made by Sue Crockford on the first Women’s Liberation conference in 1970 and the first Women’s Liberation march on 8th March 1971.
A television piece on the progress of Women’s Liberation with a number of interviews, including May Hobbs who led a campaign to unionise cleaners with the support of a number of Women’s Liberation groups.
Take Three Girls (1969-1971)
A drama series about three single girls sharing a London flat between the end of the ‘swinging’ sixties and the start of the ‘glam’ seventies. Initially they were cello-player Victoria Edgecombe (Liza Goddard), failed actress Kate (Susan Jameson) and Cockney art student Avril (Angela Down).
Each week the story concentrated on the ups and downs of one girl in particular. These are the four episodes available on Youtube at present.
Series 1, episode 1 “Stop Acting” about Kate , written by Hugo Charteris
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QvEPubul-E
series 1, episode 2 ” Devon Violets”, about Avril, written by Julia Jones.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbwpoTuox4A
series 1 episode 10 “Keep Hoping” about Kate , written by Hugo Charteris
www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD2_Ozlmt0Y&list=PLTLZ1lg0P-EQvh_pSvBpzndaKarMm4F5m&index=9
series 2, episode 2 “The Private Sector ” about Lulie, written by Carey Harrison.
www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAX06xDF_ZE&list=PLTLZ1lg0P-EQvh_pSvBpzndaKarMm4F5
Take Three Women (1982)
A four-episode sequel, Take Three Women, broadcast in 1982, shows the original three characters later in their lives. Victoria is a widow with a young daughter, and Avril an art gallery owner, while Kate is sharing her life with her son and his teacher.
Kate (Susan Jameson) written by Huy Meredith
www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYcxOsb5MqI
Avril (Angela Down) , written by Julia Jones
www.youtube.com/watch?v=AMQSin5gNNs
Victoria (Liza Goddard) written by Charlotte Bingham and terence Brady,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PUPylVJK9o
Victoria, Kate and Avril, written Lee Langley
www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGRf5hZXLEU&list=PLTLZ1lg0P-EQvh_pSvBpzndaKarMm4F5m&index=8
Man Alive: Women in Prison (1972)
The first documentary about women in prison. It was produced by Jenny Barraclough and won a BAFTA Award for best documentary.
Play for Today: Leeds United (1974)
A drama written by Colin Welland which is based very closely on the events in Leeds in 1970 when thousands of low paid women textile workers went on strike to to the dismay of the bosses…and their union….
A drama series in which Margaret Lockwood plays a barrister, then still quite rare. Dated in places and in some attitudes, but many strong story lines. and a fantastic performance by Margaret.
Play for Today: A Sudden Wrench by Paula Milne (1982)
Paula Milne’s first single drama came after ten years writing for popular series such as Crossroads (ITV, 1964-88), Angels (BBC, 1975-83), Coronation Street (ITV, 1960-) and Juliet Bravo (BBC, 1980-85). ‘A Sudden Wrench’ has a double meaning, referring to the effort bored housewife Christine makes to get herself out of the domestic rut in which she finds herself, and also to the new career – plumbing – on which she embarks, at the age of 43, in an attempt to reinvigorate her life. Paula went on to write many other plays and tv series.
Red Flag Walks 