478 Chapter 24
private business, while feminists have questioned the
different treatment of men and women as paternalistic.
Another controversial form of liberal legislation in-
volved the emancipation of the religious minorities—
everyone who was not a member of the established
Church of England. In 1815 only Anglicans could be
elected to Parliament, command in the army, or enroll
at Oxford; this intentional discrimination was created
by a series of laws called the Test Acts. Unlike the
French, who had promised religious freedom in the
Constitutional Charter of 1814, or the Belgians, who
provided a model of toleration in their Constitution of
1831, the British relaxed religious discrimination so
slowly that it survived into the late nineteenth century.
Parliament granted nonconforming Protestants (“dis-
senters,” such as Methodists and Presbyterians) equal
opportunity in 1828. In the same year, County Clare
(Ireland) forced a larger reconsideration by electing
O’Connell to Parliament, although Catholics were still
excluded. Many conservatives considered Catholic
emancipation to be a “suicidal measure” and fought bit-
terly against it, but after a conservative hero, the duke
of Wellington, accepted the idea, the Tories made it
law in 1829. The Catholic Emancipation Act did not
end religious discrimination in British laws. The new
oath of office still required M.P.s to swear “on the true
faith of a Christian.” This excluded Quakers (who
would not swear), plus Jews and Atheists (who were not
Christians). Parliament debated Jewish emancipation,
but four separate bills failed between 1830 and 1836.
Even when a London constituency elected a Jewish
M.P in 1847 (Lionel Rothschild, of the famous banking
family), Parliament refused to seat him. The debate on
Jewish rights showed how far Britain remained from the
liberal ideal: A majority still believed in such anti-
Semitic clichés as Jewish collective responsibility for
the crucifixion.
Another reform debate introduced Parliament to
an issue that would demand attention for more than a
century—women’s rights. Although Queen Victoria sat
on the throne, the women of her nation had no legal
identity apart from their husbands or fathers. The law
treated them as minor children and in some cases
lumped them together with criminals and the insane.
Husbands owned and controlled their property. Hus-
bands exercised legal control of children. A father sen-
tenced to prison could specify that his children be raised
by his mistress instead of the children’s legal mother.
Cultural attitudes sustained this treatment, and most
women accepted it. In a best-selling book of 1842, for
example, a woman tried to teach young women “to be
content to be inferior to men” (see document 24.6).
DOCUMENT 24.6
A Conservative Woman’s View of
the Role of Women, 1842
Sarah Ellis was the devout wife of an English missionary to
Polynesia who later served as secretary of the London Mis-
sionary Society. She wrote extensively on women and founded
a school for girls to apply the principles in her books and
teach them to the lower classes. The following excerpt is taken
from her book entitled The Daughters of England, pub-
lished in London in 1842.As women, then, the first thing of importance is to
be content to be inferior to men—inferior in men-
tal power, in the same proportion that you are in-
ferior in bodily strength....
For a man it is absolutely necessary that he
should sacrifice the poetry of his nature for the re-
alities of material and animal existence; for women
there is no excuse—for women, whose whole life
from the cradle to the grave is one of feeling rather
than action; whose highest duty is so often to suf-
fer and be still; whose deepest enjoyments are all
relative; who has nothing, and is nothing, of her-
self.... For woman, who, in her inexhaustible
sympathies can live only in the existence of an-
other, and whose very smiles and tears are not ex-
clusively her own....
Our moral worth or dignity depends upon the
exercise of good taste.... It is strictly in subser-
vience to religion that I would speak of good taste
as being of extreme importance to women....
Love is woman’s all—her wealth, her power,
her very being. Man, let him love as he may, has
ever an existence distinct from that of his affec-
tions. He has his wordly interests, his public char-
acter, his ambition, his competition with other
men—but woman centers all that in one
feeling.... In woman’s love is mingled the trusting
dependence of a child, for she ever looks up to a
man as her protector, and her guide... would she
not suffer to preserve him from harm?
Ellis, Sara. “The Daughters of England” (London, 1842). In
Patricia Hollis, ed., Women in Public, 1850–1900. Documents
of the Victorian Women’s Movement.London: 1979.