How will these resources help you?

The caricature of women as the weaker sex, confined to the private sphere of the home where politics was absent, has long been discredited. However, until recently, historians writing about women have tended to focus upon women’s campaigns for education, for local and parliamentary participation, for marital justice, for an improvement in economic and legal rights, for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and for franchise reform. These resources not only offer a new perspective on women’s activism but enrich our understanding of wider political movements in the 19th century. They also provide a good starting point for students researching local history.