In line with much recent work on nineteenth-century women, Simon Morgan's A Victorian Woman's Place is concerned with challenging “separates spheres.” According to proponents of this influential historical model, which will be familiar to most, as middle-class men embraced and came to dominate a new, aggressive economic and political world in this period, their womenfolk became increasingly dissociated from public life and retreated into a strictly domestic setting. An emerging social ideology of female domesticity was encapsulated in the notion of separate spheres and dictated that women and men were naturally suited to different spheres. In the new moral worldview of the middle classes, femininity became equated with the “private” sphere of the home, family, and emotion, while masculinity was linked to the public worlds of work, politics, and power. This model, at its most basic, conflates ideological precept and analytic category, so that prescriptive ideologies have been described by historians as fact and the experiences of actual women have been obscured.

Morgan's book is at its most convincing tackling this issue concerning the gap between the ideological spaces occupied by middle-class women and the reality of female involvement in the public sphere. Through a detailed case study of the northern English industrial town of Leeds between the 1830s and 1860s, Morgan charts the activities of middle-class women in a variety of public arenas, including voluntary associations, political organizations, and civic demonstrations. Here, he demonstrates, we can find evidence of the complex involvement of middle-class women in the public sphere. Though much of this is familia—the involvement of women in philanthropy and antislavery campaigns, for example—he also covers less well-trodden ground in terms of female anti–Corn Law activity and the appearance of women at civic rituals.

In many ways, as Morgan himself acknowledges, this book is a direct response to R. J. Morris's Class, Sect and Party (Manchester, 1990), also based on mid-nineteenth-century Leeds. Morris's earlier book described the “making” of the English middle class in compelling terms, but with very little reference to women. A Victorian Woman's Place seeks to rectify this apparent oversight by challenging Morris's “masculine narrative” (7) and exploring women's contributions to some of the same institutions that Morris placed at the heart of his analysis. Here, Morgan argues, is evidence that women of the middle classes also had a “civic role” and participated in the public development and expression of middle-class identity in a local context. Thus, although contemporary gender ideologies justified the exclusion of women from full citizenship, we still find women making a substantial contribution to associations and projects that historians have seen as key to the construction of middle-class identity. Though he admits the many limitations placed on middle-class women, Morgan argues that they were able to develop identities based around notions of civic virtue and public service and suggests that their participation was essential in shaping a view of British society centered around a dynamic, progressive middle class.

This book is at its most engaging when it describes the activities of individual women, such as Fanny Heaton or Elizabeth Gott. Morgan uses material gleaned from diaries and correspondence to present rich and engaging vignettes of elite middle-class women such as these, although—as is often the nature of such sources—he struggles to describe the activities of those lower down the middling social scale for whom evidence is more sparse. Morgan is not, of course, alone among historians of the nineteenth-century British middle class in his focus on its more elite membership. What is more surprising is his apparent conflation at several points of women with gender. He is right to take Morris to task for largely ignoring women in Class, Sect and Party (something, it is worth noting, that Morris does not do in his most recent monograph, Men, Women and Property in England, 1780–1870 [Cambridge, 2005], as its title suggests). But, arguably, Morgan needed in his own account not just to put the women back into nineteenth-century Leeds, but also to consider in rather more detail how class and gendered identities affected men as well as women.