Only ten years ago it was fashionable to argue that women were considerably more excluded from political life in the early and mid-Victorian eras than they had been in the eighteenth century. Recent scholarship has cast so much doubt on this premise that one is tempted to conclude that domestic ideology—with its emphasis on the relegation of well-to-do women to private, familial roles—simply does not work as a way of understanding the gender dynamics of the Victorian polity. Kathryn Gleadle's excellent book makes clear that there is still much explanatory power in domestic ideology, but this explanatory power largely stems from the stresses and contradictions embedded within the concept. Far from being shut out from or only episodically involved with the political realm, Gleadle argues, a good many gentry and middling women engaged in a broad range of day-to-day political activity that was “predicated within a richer, more highly variable, landscape of opportunity” (10) than scholars have hitherto suggested. That much said, the “enduring role of embedded gendered inequalities” (12) still did much to circumscribe their activity. So while there were “manifold political sites available to women, their location within them was never secure,” they were only “borderline citizens” in the Victorian polity because their “rights as citizens were continually in the process of construction and were always vulnerable to challenge and dismissal” (17).

Gleadle makes three especially important points. The first is that the right of middling and gentry women to act along a broad political front was frequently “evoked and sanctioned” in this era, but it was no less frequently “dismissed and undermined” (25). The MPs who explicitly excluded women from the parliamentary franchise in the 1832 Reform Act for England and Wales, for instance, did not explicitly exclude them from voting in local elections under the Select Vestries Act (1831) and Poor Law Amendment Act (1834). Propertied women's ability to participate in a variety of local political contests (over schools and hospitals, for instance, as well as poor relief) was by no means entirely closed off but remained utterly dependent on local acquiescence, which could never be taken for granted. Well-connected women who developed an expertise, as Louisa Twining did on workhouse practices, could exert significant influence on MPs’ opinions but privately worried that their political activities might not be compatible with female decorum. Twining and other gentlewomen were able to rub elbows with elite politicians in the House of Commons women's gallery, but they were concealed from the debating MPs by a metal grille, the so-called ventilator, which “required them to rehearse bodily” their “gendered exclusion” (58) from the floor of the House. Thus, women's presence was broadly and deeply felt in the Victorian polity. But the shape and extent of their political agency was widely contested, frequently attenuated, and deeply contingent.

Gleadle's second main point is that the “parochial” sphere of political activity offered well-to-do women a good deal more scope for political action than did the broader public sphere. Women did indeed make their presence felt at large-scale public events such as election dinners. But they usually participated in ways that underlined their marginal status—rarely if ever invited to eat at election dinners, for instance, but often invited in after the meal was over to listen to the speeches. Within their own communities, however, propertied women could and did act as authoritative public figures. Thus, for instance, while the ardent protectionist Mary Ann Gilbert did not participate in the national campaign to preserve the Corn Laws, she was a formidable presence in east Sussex, where she inherited broad acres from her bachelor uncle and led the agitation against the New Poor Law in Eastbourne. An avid scientific agriculturist, she used the family printing press to gain national attention for her extensive allotment experiments.

Gleadle's third important point is that family connections afforded many well-to-do women scope for political action, even as their political identities were often overshadowed by the patriarch. She provides an especially vivid example in the family of the influential colonial reformer Thomas Fowell Buxton. Buxton's family was a veritable progressive think tank, combating slavery and other forms of colonial oppression through painstaking investigative work and a bevy of pamphlets and public addresses. Buxton heavily relied on his family research team, notably on his eldest daughter, Priscilla, and his cousin, Anna Gurney. But while they wrote much on his behalf, it went without saying that he as the public man and patriarch would get sole authorial credit for the fruits of their labors. Still, as Gleadle makes clear, this was no straightforward effacement of female influence. Priscilla and Anna were themselves loath to speak in their own voices on behalf of so conspicuously “public” a cause as antislavery. Like other elite women who were disinclined to draw much attention to their broader political activities, however, they played expansive roles as public agents in their own localities—Priscilla as a self-assured philanthropist, Anna as the originator of a lifeboat service that plied the dangerous stretch of Norfolk coast where she lived.

Gleadle's account of well-to-do women's political agency is compelling not simply because it is theoretically well informed but because it is exceptionally well researched. The depth and breadth of her engagement with the published and manuscript sources of the era is remarkable. Because her conclusions emerge from such a wealth of evidence, there is precious little to quibble with. It is true that this evidence is meatiest for the 1830s and 1840s. Thus, one is left wondering a bit about the extent to which the contours of affluent women's political agency might have changed in the mid-Victorian era. After the midcentury, Britain became manifestly more urban—rather to the detriment of the rural communities in which the landed women prominently featured here were most influential. The discourse of political rights (at the national level, at least) likewise came to focus less on property and more insistently on the dignity of “honest” and “respectable” labor, which was often sexed as masculine. One would like to learn more about Gleadle makes of such developments. But this is merely a counsel of excellence.