CFP: Martyrs, Mobilisation and the Chatterton Massacre (1826)

Nineteenth Century Gender Studies Special Issue – Spring 2027

In the spring of 1826, weavers and their families facing increasing poverty and starvation set out to break power looms installed in mills across east Lancashire, with the intention of disrupting use of the invention that was usurping their livelihood. When the weavers reached Chatterton Old Lane, they were met by local magistrates and soldiers. It was not long before they began to shoot into the crowd.

The Chatterton Massacre or the Power Loom Riot has important resonances to our current political contexts. In the UK, a recent amendment to the Terrorism Act (2000) has resulted in protest groups being added to the list of proscribed organisations. The US has also seen increased mobilisation of the working classes and ethnic minorities under the Trump presidency, including the LA riots in June 2025. Protests have centred around the cause of political martyrs, including George Floyd, Heather Danielle Heyer and Sasha Johnson. In addition to this febrile political context, questions surrounding the threat of livelihoods based on innovations are present in the context of the AI boom.

This issue aims to examine the connections between gender and martyrdom and how the lives and afterlives of women who engaged in industrial and political mobilisation in the long nineteenth century have been recorded. In doing so, we seek to interrogate the historiography of relevant events and the politics of their subsequent definition. We are interested in discussions of agency and livelihood, shifting perceptions of gender and public space, and particularly women’s responses to industrial innovations and the subsequent reactions to their presence and actions. We invite responses which explore this in relation to notions of the innocent bystander, the politicisation of the body, the figure of the child and the mother, and through intersections of age, race and class.

Potential topics may include:

• Mobility – Access to transportation; safety and security; economic empowerment; political consciousness; separate spheres rhetoric.

 • Political knowledge and activity – Women’s political agency beyond the vote, activity in rural towns and villages; trade union efforts; gendered exclusion from organisations and planning.

 • Narratives of acceptable femininity – The ‘True Woman’, framing of other women involved in protests e.g., the Molyneux sisters and the Luddite Movement (1812), Mary Fildes and Elizabeth Gault and the Peterloo Massacre (1819), Sarah Williams and the Rebecca Riots (1843) and Fanny Sellins and the Allegheny River Valley picket (1919); visual materials and propaganda.

• Characterising political violence – Targeted attacks on women at protests; newspaper depictions; state definitions of legal force; accountability; language of protest; defining mass killing; reframing and silencing.

 • The industrial workplace – Unequal pay; health and safety reform at work; working class voices and agency; ‘family wage’ arguments; women and precarious employment.

Articles should be 5000-8000 words. Complete articles will be due October 2026. We are requesting a title and a short (250 word) abstract with a deadline of 31st March 2026.