I was interested to read that Dr Helen McCabe, of Oxford University
To my surprise (although I probably shouldn’t be) they too
had Unitarian connections. These four “Mothers of Liberty” had clearly moved in
the Unitarian and Radical circles that pioneered women’s rights and universal suffrage.
Mary Wollstonecraft attended Newington Green Unitarian Chapel during the ministry of Dr Richard Price. You can still go and sit at a
Sunday morning service in the original box pew where she reputedly sat. Author
of “A Vindication of the Rights of Women” (1792) she is often described as the
“mother of feminism”. Dr Price, a Welsh radical dissenter, was a crucial
influence on her thinking between 1784 and 1786. As the recent edition of The
Inquirer (15 September 2012) shows he was a republican who supported the
American colonists in their War of Independence.
Harriet Martineau, was one of the first women writers and
journalists. She was brought up in a Unitarian family in Norwich . Her brother James, from whom she was
later famously estranged, emerged as the foremost Unitarian theologian of the
19th Century. She argued that apparent differences in intellect
between men and women were the product of educational discrimination.
She was best known as a populariser of political economy,
though her career spanned many other aspects of Victorian literary culture. She
shot to fame in 1832 as author of Illustrations of Political Economy -
twenty-four short stories showing how economic conditions impacted on the lives
of ordinary people in a variety of social environments.
She visited America
from 1834-6 and identified with the anti-slavery cause, which she promoted in
her journalism for the rest of her working life. She also wrote travel books on
America and the Middle East,
besides political analyses of conditions in India
and Ireland ,
and can be regarded as the first significant British woman sociologist.
Harriet Taylor Mill was a philosopher and women’s rights
advocate. Her second husband was John Stuart Mill and it is clear she
influenced much of his writing. She produced a number of essays including “The
enfranchisement of women” and a few articles for the Unitarian Journal “The
Monthly Repository”. She and her first husband John were active in Unitarian
circles and were friendly with William Johnson Fox, a Unitarian Minister and
early advocate for women’s rights
Barbara Leigh Smith, later Mrs Bodichon, was an
educationalist, artist and early feminist. She was the extramarital child of
Benjamin Leigh Smith, Liberal MP for Sudbury and
then Norwich . David
Bebbington believes that his domestic arrangements made active Unitarian
allegiance unlikely. Her grandfather,
however, was William Smith MP, the well-known abolitionist and dissenting and
Unitarian parliamentary leader. He was deeply devoted to her and his other
grandchildren from amongst the Nightingale and Bonham-carter families.
She and a group of friends met in the 1850’s in London to discuss women's
rights, and became known as "The Ladies of Langham Place". This
became one of the first organised women’s movements in Britain . They
pursued many causes vigorously, including their Married Women’s Property
Committee. In 1854 she published her Brief Summary of the Laws of England
concerning Women, which had a useful effect in helping forward the passage of
the Married Women's Property Act 1882. In 1857 she married an eminent French
physician, Dr Eugene Bodichon. She
helped establish what evolved into Girton
College , Cambridge . She was a Unitarian who wrote of
Theodore Parker:” He prayed to the Creator, the infinite Mother of us all
(always using Mother instead of Father in this prayer). It was the prayer of
all I ever heard in my life which was the truest to my individual soul.”
Four women, influenced by Unitarian thinking, who
contributed to social and political progress. They were truly “Mothers of
Liberty”.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment