Normal women, p.42
Normal Women, page 42
Working women, as always, were prominent in riots, especially those trying to keep food in the neighbourhood, and prices down. In Gloucestershire, after a poor harvest and a cold winter, five women were accused of ‘having riotously and tumultuously assembled, with divers other persons, on the 24th of June instant, within the parish of Tewkesbury aforesaid, to the terror of his Majesty’s subjects, and in breach of the peace’.155
It was a typical food riot, led by women to stop wheat flour going out of their town to a more profitable market. The judge at their trial, Sir Alexander Thomson, reported to the home secretary that a crowd of people demanded that the local corn factor Richard Jenkins tell them what he was doing with a barge, loaded with flour, moored in the middle of the river, out of their reach. Jenkins told them to disperse and spoke to the woman leader, 21-year-old Helen Macmaster. He said, ‘She was hollering.’
Local JPs arrived and called on the crowd – now about 200 people – to disperse. The Riot Act was read but had no effect. By four o’clock, the crowd got hold of the barge and were helping themselves to flour. Helen Macmaster and Anne Mayall, two young wives with hungry children, spoke to the corn factor. They ‘dammed him, and said he was as great a rogue as the next’.
Sarah Kinson and Mary Aldridge, both aged 16, ‘were not mere spectators, but taking an active part in the disturbance’. Another young woman, Haptia (Happy) Fielder said ‘she wished she could leap over the bridge into the barge, and she would throw the flour into the water’.
One witness caught Helen Macmaster carrying flour away, held in her apron, and warned her of the consequences. She replied, ‘Never mind that, will you give me a dobbin?’ He gave her one and a halfpence to go home but she said ‘she would have her bit of flour . . .’
The five young women were arrested and sent to the borough jail – away from the town of Tewkesbury, where there might have been a rescue attempt. They were found guilty of rioting and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment, which they served in the Bridewell division of the Gloucester jail – isolated from other women, who were mostly confined for debt.156
Women led by Margaret Boulker attacked a steam-powered corn mill at Snow Hill, Birmingham, after a woman customer complained her loaf was illegally undersize. They stoned the mill and got into the counting house. The Yorkshire Yeomanry were called out and working men joined the riot. Two men were shot dead,157 and Margaret Boulker was hanged at Warwick.158
In 1795, a ‘little MOB OF WOMEN’ was said to have held up a miller’s cart at Bexley, Sussex, and in Brighton that year a crowd of 200 women and girls paraded with a loaf of bread on a stick – symbolising the threat of bread or violence. The local authorities usually understood this pantomime of unrest. One magistrate was prosecuted for helping a women’s riot at Somerton, Somerset, in 1795, when he supported the women preventing a load of corn from leaving the town.159
In the town of Seaford, Sussex, members of the Oxford Militia looted a mill, shops and inns, commandeered a ship laden with flour, and sold bread and food to local families at a ‘fair price’. Soldiers Edward Cooke and Samuel Parrish told the tribunal that they had stopped the food being sent out of the county when their families were starving. They were shot for mutiny and others were sentenced to execution, transportation and lashings.160 In 1799, another bad harvest and a downturn in the economy led to more rioting by poor and hungry people. Again, women were in the lead of the rioters. In Bath an old woman overturned a large basket of overpriced potatoes, which were quickly collected by women and children. In the riot that developed all the sacks at the market were raided and the potatoes stolen. The crowd then marched to nearby Walcot and found potatoes hidden by a farmer; they assaulted him and stole the potatoes.161 In Nottingham, women attacked the baker’s shop, sampled the bread and showed that he had been mixing chalk and alum with the flour. A mob in King’s Lynn – ‘chiefly women’ – only gave up an attack on the miller’s house when the Riot Act was read.
The government attempted to resolve the high price of wheat by persuading the poor to eat other grains. The Brown Bread Act, commonly known by sceptical housewives as ‘the Poison Act’, banned millers from making anything but wholemeal flour in 1800.162 In Horsham, Sussex, a women’s riot went to the windmill:
A number of women proceeded to Gosden wind-mill where, abusing the Miller for having served them with brown flour they seized on the cloth with which he was then dressing meal, according to the directions of the Bread Act, and cut it into a thousand pieces; threatening at the same time to serve all similar utensils he might in future attempt to use in the same manner. The Amazonian leader of this petticoated cavalcade afterwards regaled her associates with a Guinea’s worth of liquor at the Crab Tree public house.163
Bad harvests and shortages triggered riots until 1801, and in many cases the authorities – whether gentry in little market towns or the government itself – responded to the demands of hungry people by distributing food, setting up relief for the poor and ordering profiteers not to export food from local markets or increase the price.164 The Bread Act would be repealed two months after the protest at Gosden windmill.165
A letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1795 made it clear that some of the elite understood that their own survival depended on not leaving the poor to starve: ‘Many plans are laid, and schemes proposed to keep our poor from perishing for want of bread; but alas! . . . I doubt whether it be any charity, except to ourselves – to prevent their rising and knocking us on the head.’166
Already frightened by rising radicalism at home and in France, the government tried to reduce the price of food, especially wheat. The use of grain for distilling was banned, as were exports of wheat, while imports were allowed and a new system of poor relief was introduced in some areas, forcing the parish overseers to pay a supplement to a father’s wages if the price of bread rose above an agreed level. Punishments increased: people could be arrested without charge or trial; ‘treason’ was redefined as bringing the government into contempt; and crowds were banned – any gathering of more than 50 people had to be licensed by a magistrate.167
It did not stop women joining and leading food riots, nor demonstrations to protest enclosure: grazing animals or gathering food or kindling on land that had been held in common. One woman, denied her right to glean in a farmer’s field in Easthorpe in 1799, obeyed the farmer and left the grain that had fallen on the ground after the harvest, but returned the following night with 30 other women.168
Women were specifically summoned in Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1795:
To Give Notice
To all Women and inhabitants of Wakefield they are desired to meet at the New Church . . . on Friday next at 9 o’clock . . . to state the price of corn.
By desire of the inhabitants of Halifax
Who will meet them there.169
A wagon with sacks of wheat and flour was intercepted at Handborough, Oxfordshire, in 1795. Women climbed aboard and threw the sacks on the roadside, setting the price at 40 shillings a sack for flour, ‘. . . and they would have it at that, and would not give more, and if that would not do, they would have it by force. The owner (a yeoman) at length agreed: “If that must be the price, it must be the price.”’170
Working-class women led other riots too: against turnpikes which charged travellers on the road, against local taxes and against the new machines in the cloth trade – rightly predicting that the machines would put them out of work.
In Shepton Mallet in 1776, women spinsters and male weavers attacked the town workhouse, where a spinning jenny had been set up to demonstrate the benefits of the new machine.171 Later machinery-breaking of 1811–12 and the ‘Plug Riots’ – the destruction of factory boilers by pulling out the plugs in 1842 – was mostly carried out by small associations of men, supported by crowds of rioters including women. In the 1830 attacks on threshing machines, in the country around London women were charged with arson and sending threatening letters.172
Some rioting men dressed as women, probably as a form of disguise that was less likely to draw a punishment than going masked, and echoing the costumes of skimmington rides. West Country rioters against the new charges for use of the road frequently dressed in skirts and women’s high crowned hats. Further west, in Wales in the 1830s, the cross-dressed attacks on tollgates and turnpikes were known as ‘Rebecca Riots’, a reference to sisterhood – from the blessing given to Rebecca in Genesis: ‘Thou art our sister, mayst thou increase to thousands of thousands, and may thy seed possess the gates of their enemies.’173
In London riots, women were estimated to represent about 39 per cent of the crowd.174 Robert Southey complained in 1807: ‘Women are far more likely to be mutinous, they stand less in fear of law, partly from ignorance, partly because they presume upon the privilege of the sex, and therefore in all public tumults they are foremost in violence and ferocity.’175
The ‘privilege of the sex’ was probably more visible to an upper-class man like Robert Southey than to the poor women rioting for food. Hannah Smith of Manchester led raids by men, women and children on potato carts and shops in 1812 and boasted that she could ‘raise a crowd in a minute’. She was captured in a food riot but charged with highway robbery, which carried a death sentence. Hannah Smith was hanged. Not much privilege of sex there. The working-class women were said to be ‘the backbone of protests, as they were the backbone of their communities, patching up the wounded and covering up for those sought by the authorities . . . They were also the ones who had to carry on maintaining the family when male breadwinners went to jail.’176
In 1780, women were involved in London’s anti-popery protests known as ‘the Gordon Riots’, after Lord George Gordon who headed the Protestant Association to oppose the Papists Act of 1778, which had proposed more toleration for Roman Catholics. Calling 60,000 people together for a rally, claiming that Roman Catholics would undermine the British army and other British institutions, Gordon was supported by the ‘respectable’ working classes: tradesmen, clerks, apprentices of London. However, orderly protests turned into the most destructive riots in the capital’s history, including attacks on Newgate Prison and the Bank of England, only suppressed by sending in the army with brutal consequences: 300–700 people were killed. Of the 110 rioters prosecuted, 20 were women, some of them of African descent.177 Charlotte Gardner, an African woman, was hanged on Tower Hill for helping to tear down a publican’s house during the riots.178
Miss Sarah Burney, daughter of the composer Charles Burney, watched the attack on the house of a magistrate, Sir William Hyde, who had previously read the Riot Act and called out the army against the rioters. Despite her horror at the people she called a ‘Mob’ and ‘so many Furies’, she described a demonstration that followed community rules. Even in the heat of violence, the rioters brought a fire engine to hose down neighbouring buildings and prevent damaging the adjoining houses:
St Martins Lane, London, 8 June, 1780.
When Hyde’s house was emptied of all its furniture, the Mob tore away the windows & window Frames, & began to pull up the Floors, & the pannels of the Rooms, till some of the Neighbours, (Who had however hung blue Ribbons from their Windows the whole time to prove their Religion, & many of whom perhaps had particular reasons to rejoice in the Justice’s Disaster,) entreated them not to keep up so strong a fire before their Houses, as they had the greatest reason to fear they would soon catch, & that the whole street wd. be in a blaze notwithstanding the Engine – Upon this the Ringleaders gave the word, & away they all ran past our windows to the bottom of Leicester Fields, with lighted firebrands in their hands, like so many furies – Each carried something from the fires in our street, that nothing might escape – they made in Leicester Fields one Great Bonefire of them – the Women like the Furies were more active & busy in the business than the Men – & they continued pulling down Pannels, Doors, &c till between two & 3 in the Morning to keep up the Bonefire & totally destroy the Poor House.179
When the soldiers arrived, called out to quell the riots, they seem to have been in sympathy with the rioters:
Early in the Eveg. about 30 foot Guards wth. an Ensign at their Head marched into the street – but the daring Populace appeared not the least alarmed, on the contrary they welcomed them with loud shouts & huzza’s – The Ensign made some speach to them – but as I suppose he dared not oppose so many hundred People as were here assembled after a very short discourse wth. them, he turn’d round, & march’d out of the street as he came into it, the Mob shouting & clapping the soldiers as they pass’d on their back as they passed & one of these even joined in the huzza. This was more alarming than any thing – for if the Military power would not act, & was not fear’d by the Populace, what chance did there seem to be of an End to the outrages they might be disposed to commit.180
The ritual of the riot is clear, even in this London anti-Catholic riot of urban workers. The working-class people – mostly respectable tradesmen and their wives181 – enacted a protest; elite families, watching from their elegant drawing room windows, made no attempt or gesture to prevent or stop the riot, and actually performed their own theatre of support, displaying ribbons and shouting approving slogans:
While Mr. B: My sister & I stood at the Window, the Crowd being then greatly diminished, as Nos. had flown to attack other places – I saw about 10 men & women in a Groupe looking up at our Windows – ‘No Popery,’ cried they – & repeated this 2 or 3 times – but as Men, Women, & Children had been crying No Popery a thousand times during the Evening, & indeed all the day long, we had no idea that we were ourselves addressed at this time, till one of the Men sd. to the rest pointing to us, ‘They are all 3 papists.’ – ‘for God sake, cried poor Etty, Mr. Burney call out no Popery or anything’ – Mr. B- accordingly got his Hat & Huzza’d from the window – It went against me to hear him, tho’ it seem’d no joke in the present situation of things to be mark’ d out by such wretches, as Papists – God bless your Honour,’ they then cried, & went away very well satisfied.182
As Miss Burney’s account shows, a very small gesture from the elite satisfied these rioters. Like the weighing of loaves by the JP in the market, it was the assurance to the working class that the elite understood their demonstration, and agreed with them.
Women did not only protest through riot – as the eighteenth century went on they created formal associations, sometimes in writing. They set up friendly societies, for mutual support, insurance and as a place where members could share information about working conditions or the rate of pay. The increasing poverty of working families inspired workers to form new organisations, like early trade unions, called ‘combinations’. Some were co-ed but when women workers were excluded from men-only associations, they formed their own. Women spinners in Leicester formed the ‘Sisterhood of Leicester’ in 1780.183
Riots in the north of England centred around the textile mills when the new machines replaced handlooms. Handloom weavers had been the wealthiest of the craftsmen with their loom set up in their cottage, the family spinning to provide thread, and the weaver collecting raw wool or cotton and returning cloth on a regular schedule for good wages – a lifestyle that was ended by the invention of the power loom, which mill owners installed in huge buildings beside the rivers (for water power) in north-west England from 1780. As the Napoleonic wars and poor harvests brought starvation, and the power looms undercut craftsmen’s wages, violent mass protests broke out. Most of the machine-breaking riots were started by men, led by an imaginary mythical figure, ‘Ned Ludd’, and the rioters were named after him as ‘Luddites’. Some women rioted alongside the men, calling themselves ‘Ludd’s wives’, and in April 1812 some men wore women’s costumes and took the name ‘Ludd’s wives’ in an attack on a Stockport mill. A woman calling herself ‘Lady Ludd’ led a women’s food riot in Leeds that year.
On 20 April, four women – Alice Partington, Anne Dean, Ann Butterworth and Millicent Stoddard – were arrested for riot, tumult and breaking windows at Burton’s power loom mill, Manchester, and sentenced to six months in prison. Four days later, two young women led rioters into the steam-powered Westhoughton cotton mill at Bolton in Lancashire: ‘About fifty assembled near the mill . . . They smashed through the gates and started to break windows . . . led by two young women, Mary Molyneux, 19, and her sister Lydia, 15, who were seen . . . with Muck Hooks and coal Picks in their hands breaking the windows of the building . . . shouting “Now Lads” to encourage the men on.’184
The men set fire to the building, destroying all the machinery, the raw cotton and the woven cambrics. The women were arrested for ‘wilfully and maliciously & unlawfully setting Fire to and burning the Weaving Mill, Warehouses and Loop Shop of Messrs Rowe and Duncough at Westhoughton with intent to injure the said Messrs Rowe & Duncough’.185
As trade unions evolved in the nineteenth century, they based themselves around the old skilled male workers’ associations – mostly men-only and excluding women workers, who they blamed for bringing down wages. The London Corresponding Society, formulating policy for working men, had a men-only membership in 1792.
All radical voices were suppressed by the frightened government during the French Revolution but the recovery from 1815 proved more open to women. At an open-air public meeting in 1818, the radical weaver Samuel Bamford argued that women should be allowed to vote at such gatherings. He wrote: ‘This was a new idea and the women who attended numerously on that bleak ridge were mightily pleased with it – and the men being nothing dissentient when the resolution was put, the women held up their hands, amid much laughter; and ever from that time women voted at radical meetings.’186
Workers in Manchester and the surrounding areas had been meeting in small committees and then in larger public meetings since the early years of the nineteenth century, calling for an end to government corruption, free trade to lower the price of food especially bread, better pay and conditions, and votes for men. In July 1818, there was a strike of cotton spinners, in September a strike of weavers, and a march of 1,222 men and 355 women that won an increase in wages.187
