Women were prominent in early Chartism, the climacteric of open-access protest on the streets. As the movement developed a more organized and structured form, however, women were marginalized, leaving the routine (and drink-assisted) organizational management of the NCA localities to the men. In accordance with the new cultural style promoted by the (indooor) middle-class organizations in which 'respectability' was displayed by welcoming the passive attendance of women and family groups at orderly meetings and festivities, women were still encouraged to join the NCA. However, it was increasingly unusual for them to act as officers or committee members other than in specific female localities, which diminished in number in the early 1840s along with other purely female radical and democratic societies.

In programme and methods, organized Chartism conformed to the hegemonic ideology of separate spheres. The movement made no formal demands for female suffrage, although many Chartists favoured votes for unmarried women and widows on the assumption that such women would not be represented by a male household head. From this position, Chartists were able to manipulate the dominant discourse of domesticity to arouse middle-class guilt about female factory work. Such rhetorical appropriation was of dubious and temporary advantage, failing to advance the cause of political reform. In subsequent formualtions of the 'Condition of England Question', Chartism was designated as a symptom of the degredation of women, a problem to be solved by special legislation for women and children. Unable (or unwilling) to reject the dominant ideology, Chartists offered no alternative to domesticity, the best in a narrow range of unhappy options for working-class married women. Subscription to the Land Plan, however, offered some connection to a wider sphere, causing an upsurge in female membership as Chartist women dreamt of joining the lucky allottees on the first estates - 'With their freehold for their empire / And their fireside for their throne'.

John Belcham