Womanhood By Anna Clark Summary

555 Words3 Pages
In the beginning of Anna Clark’s essay, "Manhood, Womanhood, and the Politics of Class in Britain, 1790-1845," she describes to the reader how the British political system was set up before the Chartists were formed. The upper and middle-classes were the groups with the political authority and the working-class and peasants had nothing politically. The politicians of this time were all men and were looked down upon by the working-class men due to their namby-pamby homogeneous appearance. The working-class men styled themselves as "real men," hard working, strong men that knew their sexual identity, unlike, it seemed, those in political offices. With all of this manliness being flaunted everywhere, the women of this time were trying to find a niche in the political system along with these working-class men. Eventually both men and women of the working-class came together and were both in the Chartist movement together. Of course, at this time in history, it was looked down on for a woman to want to be in politics. The woman was supposed to stay in the…show more content…
For one of the first times in history, some men actually supported the right for women suffrage. This was another goal of the Chartists and all women. (Not just the working class, but that wasn’t discussed in this essay ,so…I’m not going to say anything about the Suffragettes in this paper.) After about ten years, the Chartists started to veer away from their grass-roots campaign. The men of the group started fixating their attention upon a narrow view of politics. No longer did they think of "the People", they were thinking about the men as a group. So where did this leave the women? They were pretty much back where they had started from over a decade before. The Chartists started thinking in a masculine way once again and seemed to have left the women out of the
Open Document