Abstract :
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.
