Interview: Madge Dresser on Women in the City

Dr Madge Dresser is an associate professor in social and cultural British history at the University of the West of England. Recent projects include co-editing the book Slavery and the British Country House for English Heritage and appearing on various BBC broadcasts on slavery and black history.
Madge has recently completed editing and co-writing Women and the City: Bristol 1373-2000, which documents “the expanding channels of female influence on the city’s economic, cultural and political life since medieval times”.

What have been the key periods of developing female influence in Bristol history?
Well, it’s not a simple story of unalloyed progress. But, for example, the labour shortage after the Black Death arguably improved conditions for women in terms of wages and possible trades.
Women also played a vital role as market traders and in training apprentices, but it was mainly as widows that they had more autonomy. Alice Chestre, for example, was a prominent merchant in Bristol in the late 1400s. Further forward, the Civil War in the 1640s was a time of change when people like Dorothy Hazzard played a public role in the defence of the city and help found the Baptist movement in Bristol.

During the era of the slave trade in the 18th century, there were new opportunities for enterprising women as shopkeepers, actresses, teachers, printers and philanthropists. Women played a role in the new religious groups – Quakers, Baptists, Unitarians, and later Methodists. At times of unrest, women also featured prominently in riots, strikes and social reform. 

And were there any periods where female empowerment seemed to take a step back?
Victorian notions of female propriety put a dampener on what women could respectably achieve in the public arena. So as the city got more ‘polite’, although it was in some senses more female-friendly in other ways it became more restrictive.
Frankly, any time before the 20th century was pretty rough. Without birth control, education and rights to your own property after marriage, women’s prospects were limited. That said, throughout the last 600 years women with money, family connections and initiative might – despite the legal and religious obstacles, the constant childbearing and lack of education – make their presence felt beyond the kitchen and bedroom.

Introduce us to a couple of influential Bristol women with whom we may be unfamiliar.
Everyone knows about Hannah More and Mary Carpenter, but many others have overcome traditional restrictions to make their mark on Bristol. In the eighteenth century there were also women gunsmiths, clay pipe manufacturers and businesswomen. Two of Bristol’s major newspapers, meanwhile, were run by women in the mid 1700s. 
Sarah Guppy – inventor, social reformer, lobbyist – patented a new construction method for suspension bridges, promoted railways, invented various domestic appliances including the prototype of a teasmade, lobbied against animal cruelty, wrote a children’s book – and had kids. And Ann Yearsley (pictured below), the ‘milkmaid poetess’ who crossed Hannah More, has a particular place in my affections as an anti-slavery poet and challenger of the Bristol elite. She wrote at least one staged play and ran a circulating library in Hotwells that stocked radical books.
In the twentieth century, Jesse Stephen’s career – journalist, Councillor, trade unionist, birth control advocate – spanned the suffragettes and the early women’s liberation movement.

Can we begin to compare Bristol with other UK cities in terms of its record on women’s empowerment?
Yes: because of its relative commercial wealth, Bristol had a section of women (including widows) who had property and who could endow charities, help to fund schools or act as patrons. Bristol also had a very strong non-conformist tradition in terms of religion, and women also played unsung roles in the growth of conservation and the alternative arts scene, as well as in literary culture.

Have women flourished in roles involving ‘traditional’ female aptitudes like communication and empathy, rather than traditional male preserves such as physical labour?
Because of their domestic responsibilities, women were generally over-represented in more empathetic/supportive activities. These have traditionally been seen as more marginal than mainstream economic activity, but what emerged for me during this research was how even unwaged work – charities and the like – was actually crucial for social progress. We need to recast our ideas of what constitutes work, political activity and meaningful public engagement to include the ‘shadow’ work that women do.

Women in the City: Bristol 1373-2000 is published this month by Redcliffe Press. For more info, visit www.redcliffepress.co.uk
Dr Madge Dresser will launch the book at M Shed on March 12. For more info, visit www.redcliffepress.co.uk/news/madge-dresser-to-launch-book-at-international-womens-day-mshed-bristol/