This text examines the many different ways in which women achieved public standing and exercised political power in England from the middle of the eighteenth century to the present. It shows how rank, property, and inheritance could confer de facto power on privileged women, and how across the centuries the arrogance of birth and title empowered aristocratic women to overawe enfranchised men of lower social standing. The essays contribute to an ongoing rethinking of the political, a consequence in part of the rediscovery of the work of J rgen Habermas by political and social historians. For Habermas, the public sphere included print media and voluntary associations, and the contributors stress the extent of female engagement in political culture broadly conceived. However, they extend this definition of the public sphere further still to include the private world of family connections and friendship networks, within which political ideas were debated and new social practices played out.
