The View from the Ladies' Gallery

Organised by

• Department of History

This talk draws on Susan Pedersen's current book project on the changing relationship between marriage and high politics in Britain from the 1880s to the 1920s. It focuses on two women – Lady Frances Campbell, daughter of the whig landed magnate and politician, the 8^th Duke of Argyll, and Lady Betty Lytton, daughter of the Earl of Lytton, Viceroy of India – who married into the elite and conservative Balfour family in 1879 and 1887. Frances and Betty expected to play a role as political wives in a still-dynastic order; instead, as both allies and rivals, they became significant political actors in their own right. This talk briefly recovers their colorful and consequential lives, arguing that we might understand late-Victorian and early twentieth-century politics better if we attended more closely to its entanglement with family, sexual, and intimate life.