Reasons Why I'm in Love with England: #30 The Duchess

Georgiana Cavendish, the Duchess of Devonshire, has been called the "political hostess" of London, who launched herself into the foray of the 1784 Westminster election by supporting Whig candidate Charles James Fox. These actions earned her the modern title of an "aristocratic supertramp" due to her over zealous engagement in political life, far outside the acceptable 'female sphere.' In that way, she was revolutionary: a woman in 18th century England, using her social stature and popularity to personally sway political processes.

Furthermore:

"Yet those who argue that this period witnessed an actual contraction in women's public role in Britain as elsewhere and an unprecedented confinement of women to the private sphere confuse . . . angry polemic and symbolic gestures with what was happening in fact. Yes: the House of Commons excluded women from listening to its debates after 1778. But only a very few patrician women had listened to them before that date; and those who wanted to eavesdrop on Parliament thereafter seem to have found ways of doing so. Yes: the Reform Act specifically prohibited women from voting in 1832. But even before this formal veto women had been unable to vote. And yes: the Duchess of Devonshire was savagely treated in 1784. Yet what is surely striking is that she was active in the Westminster election in the first place, as, incidentally, were many other fashionable women who attracted far less fire than she did. The very stridency of the opposition that greeted the duchess was itself a give-away. It demonstrated - more eloquently that anything else could do - that in Britain the boundaries supposedly separating men and women were, in fact, unstable and becoming more so."

From Linda Colley's Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837.

Also, this is a really good movie...

Georgiana: "We love each other."

Duke of Devonshire: "I do not doubt it. He is a dreamer, like yourself. You both dream of another world that does not exist, and it never will. As for reality, allow me to enlighten you. If you do not give him up at once, I will see to it that every home and every checkbook in this country is closed to him. He will be welcomed neither in the halls of government, nor in its back rooms of power. His dream of becoming Prime Minister and your mutual fantasy of a changed world will be dead as ash. And you will never see your children again."

So dramatic!!