Browsing by Subject "Britain"

The purpose of this thesis is to examine the representations of women in the activism of 19th-century freethinking feminists and the underlying motives thereof. I analyse the representations offered by Harriet Martineau in her writings on the Contagious Diseases Acts – legislation regulating prostitution – consisting of the four letters to the London Daily News in 1869, electoral placards and personal letters written c. 1871. In examining the different representations of women, I use content analysis to categorise Martineau’s rhetoric in her writings on the middle-class activists and lower-class sex workers. The three key concepts for this thesis are freethought, gender, and representation. By freethought I refer to the ideology of the organized 19th-century secularist movement that lobbied for the separation of political, cultural, and moral life from religion. I use the term gender as theorized by Joan Scott, conceptualising it as a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences and as a way of signifying relationships of power. In utilizing the term representation, I use Stuart Hall’s definition of representation as “the process by which members of a culture use language to produce meaning”. The representations of women in Martineau’s writings on the Acts are varied and conflicting. I identify three representations of middle-class women: self-sacrificing patriots, moral guardians, and intellectual educators. Each is used to justify women’s move into politics. The emphasis on self-sacrifice and moral guardianship employs the dominant ideology of femininity in which women were passive but at the centre of the morality of the nation. However, at the same time Martineau challenges the dominant idea of femininity in presenting the female activists as active agents and intelligent educators. I identify three representations of lower-class sex workers: passive victims, sinners, and fellow English women. In the victimizing rhetoric, Martineau utilizes the common idea of the sex worker’s fallenness to evoke sympathy. However, she never differentiates between the sex workers by virtue, presenting all as victims of society. Most radically she portrays them as English women, equal subjects of the British law. This egalitarian representation challenges the hierarchical structure underpinning the victimizing rhetoric. I suggest Martineau’s representations draw from two distinct aspects: her middle-class background and her freethinking mission of bettering society through education. Her moral background explains the more traditional depictions of women. However, I argue that her belief in necessarianism motivates her egalitarian view of sex workers as fellow Englishwomen. I suggest that Martineau’s over-arching agenda was to educate the public. This is apparent in her appeals to the duty of citizens to learn and enlighten others.