Anne Knight and the Radical Subculture

ANNE KNIGHT AND THE RADICAL SUBCULTURE By Gail Malmgreen* Most of the standard histories of the women's suffrage movement include a brief reference to Anne Knight as the supposed author of the first leaflet calling for votes for women.1 Distributed in 1847, this "leaflet," really a sort of miniature broadside, declares : NEVER will the nations of the earth be well governed, until both sexes, as well as all parties, are fully represented and have an influence, a voice, and a hand in the enactment and administration of the laws.2 The anonymous author goes on to speak of "us men," but this was probably a ruse. Certainly the characteristic tone of Anne Knight can be detected in the closing lines, which assert that women "might contribute as much to the good order, the peace, the thrift of the body politic, as they severally do to the well-being of their families, which for the most part, all know, is more than the fathers do." The suffrage historians tell us nothing about Anne Knight except that she was a Quaker abolitionist from Chelmsford in Essex, and in fact they have slightly misled their readers as to her significance . The subject of women's suffrage had been actively discussed in the British radical press long before 1847. Indeed, the Owenite socialist William Thompson had published an entire book *Gail Malmgreen is Assistant Professor of History at Indiana State University at Terre Haute. 1.See, for example, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Mathilda Gage, History of Woman Suffrage, Vol. Ill, 1876-1885 (Rochester , N.Y., 1886), p. 837; Helen Blackburn, Record of Women's Suffrage (London, 1902), p. 19; Ray Strachey, "The Cause": A Short History of the Women's Movement in Great Britain (London, 1928), p. 43; Constance Rover, Women's Suffrage and Party Politics in England, 1866-1914 (Toronto , 1967), p. 4; and Marian Ramelson, The Petticoat Rebellion: A Century of Struggle for Women's Rights (London, 1972), pp. 71-73. 2.A copy is preserved on a letter, Anne Knight to Hannah Webb, 6 April 1847, Boston Public Library (hereafter, BPL). Courtesy of the Trustees of the Boston Public Library. 100 Anne Knight and the Radical Subculture101 on the subject as early as 1825.3 Many of Anne Knight's coworkers in the abolitionist movement on both sides of the Atlantic shared her views on female enfranchisement. So it is as a representative early feminist, rather than as a lone pioneer, that she should attract our interest.4 Thanks to the recent rediscovery of a large unsorted and uncatalogued bundle of Knight family papers (mostly letters from Anne herself) we now know a good deal about her Ufe and ideas.5 Though hers was a life given over almost entirely to politics, she was neither influential nor even very widely noticed. She never held an elected or salaried position and she published no substantial work. But in many respects she was typical of that small body of female radicals who, despite the formal disabilities and informal constraints imposed upon their sex, did something toward expanding the sphere of women's activity in the first half of the nineteenth century. Her experience is instructive as an illustration of both the range and the limitations of female political activism before the suffrage movement. Anne Knight was born in 1786 in Chelmsford. Her father, William Knight, was a prosperous wholesale grocer, who had settled there in 1781 at the age of twenty-five. In 1782 he married Priscilla, daughter of William Allen, a London brewer well known in radical and nonconformist circles. Eight children were born to William and Priscilla Knight, three boys and five girls, of whom 3.William Thompson, Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, Against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men, to Retain Them in Political , and Thence in Civil and Domestic Slavery (London, 1825; rpt. New York, 1970). 4.For a detailed study of early feminism in England and France, see Gail Malmgreen, "The Intellectual and Social Origins of the Women's Suffrage Movement in England: 1792-1851" (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of Rhode Island, 1972); and for American feminism and...