THE role of women in the Chartist movement has often been neglected, even though they ruffled the Establishment’s feathers in their work as Hen Chartists and Lady Insurrectionists.

This year’s Chartism Day conference, at the University of Reading, succeeded in shining a spotlight on key figures including Helen MacFarlane, Frances Wright, Susanna Fearnley, Mary Grassby, Elizabeth Hanson, Mary Ann Walker and Sarah Theobald. 

The event, staged by the Society for the Study of Labour History (SSLH), platformed 16 speakers, although only two were women. The voices of long-dead female Chartists filled the room, thanks mainly to Dr Judy Cox, whose work has uncovered the tub-thumping speeches and excoriating quotes from the Hen Chartists, as they were dubbed by the press.

The conference also marked the birth, in 1923, of historian Dorothy Thompson, and Cox kickstarted her presentation with praise for the writer’s pioneering 1976 article, “Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics”: “This began the process of excavating the overlooked contribution of women to the Chartist movement. Thompson’s research prompted a sense among historians that women’s activism needed to be both unearthed and integrated into accounts of 19th century radicalism and the emergence of the working class.

“And here we are, nearly 50 years later, still engaging with her ideas and completing her project. I’m not sure whether it’s infuriating or brilliant that we’re still uncovering the contribution of women to the Chartist movement.”

Cox cited Thompson’s activism, which gave her a useful insight into what it meant to be a woman and a Chartist, and said: “I do aspire to be a Lady Insurrectionist, which is what the press called Sarah Theobald in 1848. If you are a political woman today, you are navigating many of the same issues as these women did. We are still juggling with strategies as to how we put our demands as women to the fore, whilst working in solidarity with men.”

The women of the Victorian age who stepped into the public arena had many of the same experiences as we do today with social media pile-ons, and the abuse women can get, she said. Yet they did step up, and asserted an “audacious and very bold public presence.”

They were fuelled, it seems, but an atavistic bravery. In 1848, the Chartist women of Bethnal Green issued an address, in which they referred to Mary Wollstonecraft writing A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, the Maid of Saragossa, who redeemed Spain (famously lighting a cannon to repel the French army in the Peninsular war), and Joan of Arc who saved France.

Taking up the baton, the women got stuck in to campaigning against the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834. This said that the destitute would get help only if they entered the workhouse.

In February that year, Hanson told a meeting that women in the workhouse had their hair cropped and were separated from their children. She argued that the only way to stop this was for women to unite and form political organisations.

She also led a group of women who ambushed several Poor Law commissioners outside a workhouse to “treat them with a roll in the snow.”

If we bring a modern-day lens to these female public speakers, we might think that their “lived experience” delivered sob stories so beloved of the mass media. This would not be the whole picture, despite the fact that a newspaper reported that a speech from Hanson had “melted the hearts and drew forth floods of tears.”

Susannah Fearnley, speaking at an all-women meeting early in 1838, advised women not to rely on others, certainly not the House of Commons, in campaigning to repeal the law. Instead, “you should assert the dignity and equality of your sex.”

Mary Grassby stood, and dealt with the old chestnut that women should not meddle in politics.

“You might be asked why women should interfere in public matters. It is a woman’s duty, as women have more to fear from the bill than men.”

There was extensive press coverage of the meeting, not all positive. The conservative Globe newspaper claimed that Grassby had such a capacity for scolding that they had to speculate whether she had driven Mr Grassby to drink.

Far from backing down, the women wrote to the Globe, tackling head-on a journalist’s patronising advice that the only solution to poverty was the expansion of trade and commerce.

Hanson told him: “You say, extend our commerce. We have ransacked the whole habitable globe. If you can find a way to the moon, we may, carry on our competition a little longer; but if you want to better the condition of the working classes, let our government legislate so as to make machinery go hand in hand with labour, and act as an auxiliary or helpmate, not a competitor.”

The more platforms the women took to, the greater the media coverage.

Said Cox: “In a way that perhaps will be familiar to some of you here, the publicity went with the same kind of slurs that political women always face: you’re unattractive, you’re probably a lesbian, you can’t get a man.

“Another strand of the way they were portrayed was that they were unsexed, [the press said] they were sexually deviant, or displayed masculine proclivities.”

Reporters also attacked them for being working class, one saying they had “taken a dislike to the washtub.”

Cox again: “Mary Ann used humour. When one heckler said that claiming women’s rights was too divisive (and we’ve all heard that one before), she retorted that she was all in favour of unity with her fellow man — nudge, nudge, wink, wink!”

One of the only women to be employed by the National Charter Association was Irish-born Sarah Theobald. In June 1848 she delivered a militant speech in Birmingham, which received positive press coverage, likening her to the revolutionary women elsewhere in Europe.

This, said Cox, was markedly different from the sneering levelled at the earlier “hen Chartists.” Theobald was taken much more seriously, partly as the Chartist movement had opened the door to more women.

As the baton was passed again, some of these women went on to sign the 1866 petition for women’s suffrage, widely seen as the start of that long battle.

The conference also heard from Dr Len Smith on the vibrant figure of Rev Humphrey Price, who threw himself into the cause of 2000 Kidderminster carpet weavers, on strike against a wage cut. Imprisoned for libelling the manufacturers, he emerged intent on parliamentary reform, and published pamphlets in favour of the Charter.

David Black, author of several books on Helen MacFarlane, spoke about her involvement in the anti-slavery movement in Glasgow, leading to her commitment to Chartism. She translated the Communist Manifesto, with Marx praising her “original ideas” and saying she was a “rara avis.”

As all the best hens are.

SSLH’s report of the conference is at sslh.org.uk.