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This article explores the relationship between working-class women and Chartism, focusing chiefly on Nottingham. It argues that the opportunities for women to participate in the movement were much more varied and enduring than previous historians have often supposed. One of the reasons why women were so prominent by the time of Chartism in the 1840s was because of a tradition of political participation. Even by the period of late Chartism (post-1842), women were still participating in popular politics, and nowhere more so than in the Land Plan, a scheme to resettle urban workers on the land. Drawing on a database of some 2,300 Nottinghamshire members of the Land Plan, the evidence suggests that the region's women were more likely to join, and on their own volition, have their own jobs and possess a degree of independence that was not the case elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the geography and culture of machine breaking in Nottinghamshire, home to the Luddite framework knitters. Earlier accounts have shed some light on why Luddism broke out in 1811 to 1812; but they have had much less to say about why it assumed the form and the geography that it did. By situating Luddism in a longer chronological and broader historiographical context, the article suggests that it makes more sense when viewed as one of the last episodes in an older style of traditional and largely rural popular protest. Luddism in the region was a lot less moderate than previous accounts have argued, a reflection of the ‘rough’ culture of the knitters that thrived in the villages, a culture that has remained largely unexplored by historians. By utilizing a range of sources that have been neglected in previous studies, notably parish and court records, and through a careful re-combing of the Home Office and Treasury Solicitors’ files, this article recreates aspects of the day-to-day lives of the knitters, paying attention to poverty, life-cycle and crime. Luddism was about more than wages and working conditions; it was also a response to contractions in the ‘makeshift economy’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]