HANNAH LAWRANCE AND THE CLAIMS OF WOMEN’S HISTORY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND

The historian, Hannah Lawrance (1795–1875), played an important role in nineteenthcentury public debate about women’s education. Like Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft, she argued that virtue had no sex and she promoted the broad education of women in order to increase their opportunities for employment. But unlike her bluestocking predecessors, she derived her argument from a scholarly reappraisal of women’s history. Whereas the Strickland sisters’ Tory Romantic histories celebrated the Tudor and Stuart eras in particular, Lawrance’s ‘ olden time ’ celebrated the medieval period. This is when she located England’s civilizational progress, driven by the education of queens and the wider state of women’s education, allowing her to evade the potential conflict of a feminine creature in a manly role. Using the condition of women to measure the peaks and troughs of civilization was a familiar approach to historical writing, 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. Above all, it appealed to other liberal reformers such as Thomas Hood, Charles Wentworth Dilke, and Robert Vaughan, who shared Lawrance’s commitment to social reform and helped to secure a wide audience for her historical perspective.