Professor Kathryn Gleadle: List of publications

This article argues for the importance of restoring girls’ aspirations and self-education to narratives of Victorian educational reform. Studies typically focus upon the efforts of professionals, politicians and campaigners in plotting the pioneering changes to girls’ education in the second half of the nineteenth century. Here it is contended that the success of these developments depended upon a new generation of girls with the confidence and ambition to take advantage of the new opportunities to sit examinations and attend university. To do this, the article excavates the neglected phenomenon of the manuscript magazine. It examines how young females used well-established periodicals to advertise their own amateur magazines. Inviting readers to contribute to their ventures, they constructed independent networks of collaborative cultural endeavour. Manuscript magazines, it will be suggested, need to be understood as part of a ‘magazine culture’ widely embraced by Victorian girls. To tease out the small but subtle ways in which magazine culture could enhance the aspirations of young women, the article focuses upon the extraordinary diary archives of Eva Knatchbull-Hugessen (1861–95). The educational career of Knatchbull-Hugessen, who was an early student at Newnham College in the 1880s, exemplifies the impact which engagement in girlhood culture could engender and the significant role played by magazines, both professional and amateur, in this process. Understanding teenage responses to educational reforms requires a recalibration of our analytical lens to focus not upon grand narratives of feminist awakening but rather upon the small subjective shifts which typically underlay young females’ decisions.

This ‘viewpoint’ assesses some recent approaches to the study of feminisms across the globe during the c. 1870–1930 period. At a moment when historians are working towards the commemoration of women’s partial enfranchisement in Britain in 1918, we consider the intellectual frameworks that most effectively celebrate this achievement whilst also situating the Act within its complex, global context. Reflecting on discussions held at a recent workshop at the University of Oxford, we advocate the effectiveness of a global and comparative methodological approach to question what ‘feminism’ meant to contemporary campaigners. The scrutiny of localised and national issues within comparative and global contexts illuminates the plurality of definitions, vocabularies, and categories relating to feminism that were being used (and rejected) during this era and raises broader questions for the study and practice of feminist history.

This article explores the enthusiastic reception with which many young Britons greeted the French Revolution. In some cases this sparked intense debate about the politics of family life, as children and youths sought to apply revolutionary principles of equality and democracy to their own lives. This was not an isolated phenomenon which sprang up simply in response to the revolution itself, however. Rather, it was the sharpest demonstration of what the article coins the ‘juvenile enlightenment’. The enlightenment has rarely been considered from the perspective of the child. This article argues that key features of the enlightenment had the potential to empower children and to encourage the articulation of distinct subjectivities. In places where this occurred in conjunction with other enlightenment practices, such as a vibrant urban culture with associated sociable activities, it could result in striking youthful engagement in a variety of civic and political affairs. The growing crystallisation of the category of ‘child’ was intrinsic to this process in some respects, but also significantly complicated it in others. Politicised young subjects might rebel against the constraints the subject position of ‘the child’ entailed, finding older more inclusive notions of ‘youth’ better conducive to political engagement. Examining these issues through the lens of a child’s manuscript diary enables close scrutiny of the shifting and complicated identities this context produced. More radically however, such an analysis reveals the extent to which juvenile subjects could themselves be significant political actors and actively contribute to the constitution of contemporary enlightenment culture.

The purpose of this collection is to bring together representative examples of the most recent work that is taking an understanding of children and childhood in new directions. The two key overarching themes are diversity: social, economic, geographical, and cultural; and agency: the need to see children in industrial England as participants - even protagonists - in the process of historical change, not simply as passive recipients or victims. Contributors address such crucial subjects as the varied experience of work; poverty and apprenticeship; institutional care; the political voice of children; child sexual abuse; and children and education. This volume, therefore, includes some of the best, innovative work on the history of children and childhood currently being written by both younger and established scholars.

Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture, edited by Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport, showcases the wide-ranging economic activities and relationships of real and fictional women in nineteenth-century British culture. This volume’s essays chronicle the triumphs and setbacks of women who developed, described, contested, and exploited new approaches to economic thought and action. In their various roles as domestic employees, activists fighting for free trade, theorists developing statistical models, and individuals considering the cost of marriage and its dissolution, the women discussed here were givers and takers, producers and consumers.

This volume provides a comprehensive analysis of women's involvement in British political culture in the first half of the nineteenth century. It is based on extensive archival research, but also engages with recent feminist theories in the social sciences, such as psychology and sociology. The volume looks at both rural and urban experiences of politics. The author throws new light on women's political activities and challenges many traditional assumptions about contemporary politics. The book gives fresh insights into the Reform Act of 1832, pays attention to continuities in political practice and ideas, and brings focus to the primary significance of parish politics within the day-to-day activities of the middling and gentry classes.

This article addresses the historiographical neglect of tory women in the early Victorian period. The existence of a vibrant culture of female conservative letters, combined with the widespread participation of women in ultra-Protestant pressure-group politics, is suggestive of the neglected contribution women made to the revival of grass-roots toryism during these years. In particular, it is suggested that a consideration of the distinctive features of premillenarian Evangelicalism enables a more discriminating approach to the impact of Evangelicalism upon contemporary women. By focusing upon the career of the prominent premillenarian Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, and her editorship of the Christian Lady's Magazine, it is argued that contemporary attitudes towards ‘female politicians’ were far more flexible, variable, and contingent than is frequently assumed. The associational activities with which many premillenarians were involved, combined with their attention to Old Testament models of publicly active women and the sense of urgency that distinguished their theology, frequently led its adherents to problematize and critique existing formulations of women's roles.

Combining the research of recognized young scholars, this book revisits Britain's much-studied "age of reform", before and after the Great Reform Act of 1832. It demonstrates that "reformers" hoped to reform not only parliament, government, the law and the church, but also medicine and the theater, among other entities. While the study focuses primarily on Britain, it also includes essays on Ireland, the Empire and continental Europe. A substantial introduction provides an overview of the period and its historiography.

This innovative text explains clearly the gendered dynamics of nineteenth-century Britain and the restrictions women faced, whilst affirming the enormous contribution women made to contemporary culture and society.

This groundbreaking volume examines women's political involvement from a variety of innovative angles.