Working Mother
The radical pamphleteer Susannah Wright does not fit neatly into the contemporary feminist imaginary. She is a woman these feminists would like to forget: a woman who understood her class allegiances and fought for the universalism of an objective, shared reality.
In 1822, at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, a radical Nottingham lacemaker named Susannah Wright appeared in court, acting as her own defense just after having given birth to a child. Wright was a nursing mother during her trial for “blasphemous libel.” She had been arrested for selling pamphlets defending universal (male) suffrage and freedom of speech. According to University of London Senate House librarian Tansey Barton, Wright “played an important role in providing access to books for the newly literate working classes; a very brave act when many were being sent to jail for either printing or publishing or distributing blasphemous and salacious books, and all during her pregnancy.”
At one point in her defense, Wright sought the court’s permission to retire to suckle “her infant child that was crying.” The crowd cheered her on, but the conservative press made her out to be a prostitute who had no womanly shame. She was already serving time in Newgate prison with her six month old when the court condemned her to another eighteen months of prison time. Newgate was one of the most notorious prisons in London: its squalor and pathos inspired prison reformers like Elizabeth Fry to demand separate quarters for women in order to prevent sexual violence against the female inmates. When Charles Dickens visited the prison in the early 1830s, he devoted an entire chapter of his first ever publication, Sketches by Boz, to a description of the pathos and poverty he saw there. In the women’s quarters, the inmates seemed to be “well provisioned,” but slept on mats on the floor in common rooms. It is likely that Wright slept in this way with her newborn during her trial.
If Wright had lived in our times, socially progressive people would certainly think of her as a “traumatized” person, whose private “trauma” and not her political convictions would form her political subjectivity. Derided by the bourgeois press as “wretched and shameless,” after being convicted of seditious libel, Wright remained fully committed to fighting for freedom and equality for the working classes. In prison, she must have survived circumstances of squalor, violence and deprivation, but after she was released from Cold Baths Prison in Clerkenwell where she served the rest of her sentence, she remained a staunch advocate for press freedom and equality and working class literacy.
