Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain (review)

Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain. By K. D. Reynolds (New York, Oxford University Press, 1999) 260 pp. $65.00

Reynolds develops her unsurprising findings that class rather than gender was the primary motivation for the political activities of aristocratic Victorian women. She uses autobiographies, published and unpublished archival letters, and diaries of nearly fifty aristocratic women, writing between 1830 and 1880, to make her point. Politics was the basic and all-encompassing business of British male aristocrats, and the wives of Victorian aristocrats were "incorporated" (Reynolds' term) into their husbands' activities, just as those in earlier centuries among the medieval landowning aristocracy had been. Reynolds distances herself from previous historians who studied Victorian women and political society (for example, Harrison, Jalland, and Pugh) who sought to find, in political hostesses, the forerunners of Victorian women concerned with gender and the quest for female suffrage. ¹

Reynolds distinguishes between the "aristocratic political wife" and the "political hostess." The former, according to Reynolds, was purely her husband's helpmeet in his country and urban constituency work. The latter was a grand presence in her own right and set the stage for her husband's party's political manoeuverings during specific social occasions, such as political salons, balls, or great dinners. "Hospitality served the fundamental political purpose of displaying the power and status of herself and her family" (164). Political hostesses included such women as Emily, Viscountess Palmerston; Elizabeth, Lady Holland; and Harriet, Duchess of Sutherland, who followed in the footsteps of her grandmother Georgiana, the celebrated Duchess of Devonshire earlier in the century.

Both political hostesses and aristocratic political wives, often made clerical, educational, and philanthropic appointments. They were so engaged either on behalf of their husbands or, occasionally, if they had the financial power in their own inherited right, in their own name. They presented and oversaw the gift of Church of England livings to vicars and curates, built schools for the poor, and appointed salaried teachers, occasionally even arranging for their own daughters to teach local village children. Moreover, they "influenced the politics of the nation as wielders of patronage, confidantes and go-betweens" (178).

It was valiant of Reynolds to attempt to disentangle the difference between the "political hostess" and the "aristocratic political wife" during the Victorian era, but this complex distinction is not so easily separated. Quite often the two overlapped. Some aristocratic women, like the daughter of the 8th Duke of Argyll, Lady Frances Balfour, were involved in women's suffrage, although Reynolds is correct in pointing out that most aristocratic women were either anti-suffragists or only active in their husbands' or family's party politics.

Throughout her close reading of these aristocratic women's personal writings, one idea is never considered. Did none of these intelligent, even brilliant, women ever question the fact that, as women, they were barred from official governmental activities and that only their fathers, husbands, brothers, sons, nephews, and assorted male cousins were able to become Parliamentary politicians? Such questions would have been especially galling when these male relatives were less astute than the women themselves. Apparently, this notion never surfaced in any of the documents that Reynolds has studied. Eventually, it was left to upper- and middle-class women to fight for women's political rights and to make the entry of aristocratic women into the House of Lords possible.

Susan Groag Bell
Stanford University

Note

1. Brian Harrison, Separate Spheres: The Opposition to Women's Suffrage in Britain (London, 1978); Pat Jalland, Women, Marriage and Politics, 1860-1914 (Oxford, 1986); Martin Pugh, The Tories and the People 1880-1935 (Oxford, 1985)

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