Petticoat politics in eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain : female citizenship revealed by the Digital Archive

Analysing the extent of female citizenship in early modern Britain has always been a difficult task. The mass digitization of the established records for political history has enabled an evidence base to be systematically established in order to reveal the extent of women’s participation. The ability to search hitherto inaccessible sources such as newspapers or parliamentary papers has demonstrated that women regularly performed roles as electors or public officeholders, that they attended sittings of Parliament, and that they utilised strategies such as petitioning for political purposes. Digitization also allows the interrogation of sources which, on the face of it, appear less promising for an assessment of the roles women played in the public sphere in this period. An understanding that sites such as the household provide evidence of a burgeoning female political culture has led to the reassessment of female literary outputs. The large-scale digitization of these texts, coupled with the advance of web-based lexical analysis tools, has allowed for a more nuanced interpretation of women and public life. This paper will use the case studies of local newspapers and domestic economy texts to demonstrate methodologies for uncovering evidence of female citizenship in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries