An examination of how women's writings, over two hundred centuries, shaped public opinion and morality

Many women wrote philosophy in nineteenth-century Britain, and they wrote across the full range of philosophical topics. Yet these important women thinkers have been left out of the philosophical canon and many of them are barely known today. The aim of this book is to put them back on the map. It introduces twelve women philosophers - Mary Shepherd, Harriet Martineau, Ada Lovelace, George Eliot, Frances Power Cobbe, Helena Blavatsky, Julia Wedgwood, Victoria Welby, Arabella Buckley, Annie Besant, Vernon Lee, and Constance Naden. Alison Stone looks at their views on naturalism, philosophy of mind, evolution, morality and religion, and progress in history. She shows how these women interacted and developed their philosophical views in conversation with one another, not only with their male contemporaries. The rich print and periodical culture of the period enabled these women to publish philosophy in forms accessible to a general readership, despite the restrictions women faced, such as having limited or no access to university education. Stone explains how these women became excluded from the history of philosophy because there was a cultural shift at the end of the nineteenth century towards specialised forms of philosophical writing, which depended on academic credentials that were still largely unavailable to women.

This groundbreaking history challenges traditional assumptions about the development of British democracy and the struggle for women's rights.

An examination of how 'public opinion' functioned as a concept in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.

In this comprehensive study, Elizabeth Crawford provides the first survey of women’s suffrage campaigns across the British Isles and Ireland, focusing on local campaigns and activists. Divided into thirteen sections covering the regions of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, this book gives a unique geographical dimension to debates on the suffrage campaign of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Through a study of the grass-roots activists involved in the movement, Crawford provides a counter to studies that have focused on the politics and personalities that dominated at a national level, and reveals that, far from providing merely passive backing to the cause, women in the regions were engaged in the movement as active participants Including a thorough inventory of archival sources and extensive bibliographical and biographical references for each region, including the addresses of campaigners, this guide is essential for researchers, scholars, local historians and students alike.

Based on extensive new research investigating the range of women’s involvement in early nineteenth-century popular politics, mid-Victorian reform and the women’s movements of the late century, Women and the People makes an original intervention in the historiography of the radical tradition by exploring the interconnections of populism, liberalism and feminism. Attending to authorship, the study argues that the representational forms adopted by radicals were as important as the content of what they said in shaping their self-perception, their construction of others, and the reception of their ideas. In fiction, poetry and autobiography, as well as in political writing, speeches and journalism, women reworked radical conventions and imagined new models of political identity, participation and authority. Though, in general, radicals appealed to ’the people’, women were often positioned as the suffering objects of reform rather than as the agents of change. By showing how they challenged or reinforced these conceptions of ’women’ and ’the people’, the book contends that radical women invoked alternative communities of sex, class and nation, and helped to remake and discipline the political sphere, as they strove to make it their own.

How could Victorian capitalist values be harmonized with Christian beliefs and concepts of public morality and social duty? This book explores ideas about citizenship and public virtue and how public morality was reconciled with the market.