Sacred to Female Patriotism

The women of the British aristocracy, living at the crossroads, as it were, of class and gender, are only beginning to receive the serious attention from historians that is warranted by their historic role. Fortunately, as a literate and self-conscious group, they created and preserved vast manuscript collections now available to historians. Relying heavily upon these works, this text makes a convincing case for the extensive power of females in the political system of late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Britain.
This book stands to fill a major gap in providing a broad overview of women in politics in late Georgian Britain, and in doing so, provides a significant amount of information about electoral politics generally in the eighteenth century. Through examining the history of dress in the period, the personal nature of political relationships, the history of ideas and political philosophy, and in the process of these excursions, we learn a great deal about a significant period in British history, and perhaps for the first time, a good deal about its women.