Uncontrollable Women by Sloane Nan;

Author:Sloane, Nan; [Sloane, Nan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited
Published: 2021-11-02T00:00:00+00:00

‘Two noted female Reformers, of the names of Partington and Killer (sic), left their homes at Eccles, along with their husbands, on the morning of the rebellious meeting at St. Peter’s. They stopped at a public house by the way; and whilst drinking there, Partington stood up before the whole company with a glass of liquor in her hand “hoping to God she might never go back again alive, if they (the Reformers) did not carry their point that day”.’36

A month later, a ‘Manchester resident’ refuted this in The Morning Chronicle, saying that the women had never been into ‘any public house on the way, nor did they hear any such expression anywhere from Mrs Partington’.37 But, by then it was too late, the story had been repeated by loyalist papers around the country.

With the exception of Richard Carlile, pro-reform reporters and artists tended to portray the women as helpless victims rather than active participants, to minimize their involvement in the political aspect of the day. Anti-reformist loyalists, on the other hand, continued to characterize women who had attended as morally lax, socially disreputable and displeasing to men. Even Henry Hunt felt obliged in his memoirs (written in prison after his conviction at his trial in early 1820) to justify the presence of Mary Fildes on the carriage, saying that as she was ‘a married woman of good character, her appearance in such a situation by no means diminished the respectability of the procession, the whole of which was conducted with the greatest regularity and good order’.38 The dividing lines on how political women should be represented in the press as well as in wider society were thus set, and unfortunately they had serious implications for women’s activism in radical movements in particular. The reformers chose to defend women by characterizing them as helpless, innocent, respectable, victimized and weak. Cartoons and engravings designed to portray the horror of what had happened often showed women as the prey of male violence, crushed by the cavalry and assaulted by sabres. Most famously at the time, perhaps, George Cruikshank, whose cartoon of the Blackburn Female Reformers not six weeks earlier had attacked political women as sexual, venal and drunk, now produced ‘Britons Strike Home!!!’, which had at its centre a kneeling woman trying to protect her child from a corpulent, red-faced cavalryman brandishing a sabre. This image of woman as the weaker sex to be defended was now baked into the radical view of women’s place in reformist movements, and would have consequences when both the next wave of reform campaigns and the later Chartist movement came into being. In the meantime, the Female Reform Societies continued to exist, but much reduced and largely without their public role on platforms.

Richard Carlile, on the other hand, was very forcibly struck by the audacious courage of the women he had seen, and by Mary Fildes in particular. When he returned to London, he commissioned an unknown artist to produce a picture that he dedicated to Henry Hunt and the Female Reformers of Manchester.

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