2 - Hannah Lawrance and the claims of women's history

Summary

Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875) was a well-known contemporary of Anna Jameson but her life has been forgotten for the most part, despite her prolific career as a journalist and historian. In her own time, however, she was a wellknown and highly respected figure who used history to show how the right sort of public education would turn British culture into a potent means of individual moral improvement and social cohesion. Like Jameson, she positioned herself as an empowered successor to the culture of eighteenth-century bluestocking women, arguing that virtue had no sex and that the broad education of women was an indispensable part of Britain's broader civilisational progress. In this way Lawrance's public moralism went well beyond single-issue campaigns such as women's right to a wider range of public employment, because her reimagination of English medieval history played a decisive role in reshaping the standard Whig narrative of British history to include women as powerful agents of social change both in the past and present.

Lawrance's belief in the gender-neutral basis of private and public virtue followed the arguments made by bluestocking historians such as Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, but unlike them she derived her argument from a scholarly reappraisal of women's history. Anna Jameson had used history in this way in the Memoirs of celebrated female sovereigns (1831) but in the late 1830s Lawrance developed a more sustained and scholarly historical narrative of medieval England, in contrast to Jameson whose career moved on to literary moralism, travel writing and art history. Whereas other contemporaries, including the Strickland sisters, romanticised the Tudor and Stuart periods in their histories, Lawrance's ‘olden time’ of medieval England was where she located the first moment of England's civilisational progress. She argued that this progress was driven by the education of England's queens as well as the wider state of women's education, which provided her with a new way of evading the potential problem of a woman in a manly role. Using the condition of women to measure the peaks and troughs of civilisation was a familiar approach to Whig historiography but Lawrance's radical argument was that women were often responsible for England's progress, rather than passive bystanders. Her emphasis on women's contribution to public life complemented the Whig nationalist narrative and secured her a high reputation across a range of political periodicals.