Other individual reformers
Other voluntary associations pressing for reforms were mobilised by women, like the Ladies' Sanitary Reform Association of Manchester and Salford, founded in 1862. Women were without the vote, but there were two women, in particular, who were as outstanding in influencing Parliament as Shaftesbury - Josephine Butler (1828-1906) and Octavia Hill (1838-1912). The former fought a long (and still controversial) battle to repeal the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869, which regulated women working in brothels. The Acts were totally repealed after a long agitation, which had international ramifications, in 1886. Octavia Hill, housing reformer, supported by John Ruskin, was more interested in voluntary than in state action. She wanted affordable working-class houses to become real 'homes'.
Josephine Butler was a reformer who was concerned not with new legislation but with repeal. And so had been Ashley's Parliamentary political leader, Sir Robert Peel (1788-1850), who earlier in the century reformed the Metropolitan Police and carried Roman Catholic emancipation (giving Roman Catholics civil rights) before Ashley, who had little in common with him, entered Parliament. Peel, along with Wellington, had opposed the Parliamentary Reform Bills introduced by the Whigs in 1831 and 1832, but he appreciated the need to adapt to change; and while he opposed most of the social reforms that Ashley supported, it was he who as Prime Minister carried the repeal of the corn laws. The part that he played in securing repeal - and his motivations - have been assessed and re-assessed. So, too, has the role of the Anti-Corn Law League, founded in Manchester in 1838, a largely middle-class organisation, extremely well organised under the leadership of Richard Cobden (1804-1865) who won a seat in Parliament in 1841. This enabled him to confront Peel directly across the floor of the Commons. They both believed in 1846 that repeal would benefit both working-class consumers (through cheap food) and industrial employers (through the opening of foreign markets), but Peel, unlike Cobden, refused to try to exploit repeal politically. Indeed, in carrying repeal he broke up his own divided party.
Published: 2001-02-01
Bookmark with:
What are these?