| Popis: |
Studies of the changing position of women among middle-class families in the nineteenth century have demonstrated the importance of cultural as well as structural factors to that process. This chapter focuses on four women Quakers from the middle class, members of a church, the Religious Society of Friends that saw a continuing struggle in the nineteenth century between its longstanding quietism and the newer forces of evangelicalism and rational religion. More particularly, all four women sympathised to a varying extent with reform politics. And all but one went further, and engaged actively in middle-class radical politics and in the campaigns for women's rights. The formation of the Women's Liberal Federation in the late 1880s provided Helen Clark with an organisation through which she increasingly pursued not only her radical politics, but also her commitment to women's rights. |
