Beyond the park pale: elite women and the agricultural landscape, 1700-1830

My book project, 'Beyond the Park Pale: elite women and the agricultural landscape, 1700-1830', investigates the role played by elite women in managing large agricultural estates, paying particular attention to their involvement in estate management, enclosure, landscaping and agricultural improvement. As Amy Erickson and others have recently demonstrated, female landowners controlled significant amounts of property as heiresses, widows and even occasionally as wives. Yet we know next to nothing about how they managed those parts of their estates which lay beyond the park pale; that is, the farms, woodlands, cottages and other property which lay outside the fence or bank encircling the park, pleasure grounds, gardens and house. The existing literature on elite women focuses almost exclusively on their role in household management, country house design and gardening, while histories of agricultural improvement and enclosure have largely ignored women as a category of landowners and improvers. This is all the more surprising, given the growing body of literature on aristocratic, gentle and middle class women's participation in the economy, politics and the anti-slavery movement, all arenas until recently seen largely as the preserve of men.

Drawing on archival materials from across Britain, this project demonstrates that landowning women were actively involved in a bundle of related practices - including parliamentary enclosure, estate rationalisation, agricultural experimentation and major landscaping projects - which together remade the rural landscape in the century and a half after 1700. Thus, for example, Jane Ashley of Ashby St Ledgers (Northamptonshire) doggedly lobbied for the necessary Parliamentary Act and carefully calculated the profits she expected to make from enclosure, while her near-neighbour Elizabeth Prowse of Wicken experimented with new agricultural machinery and new crops on her recently enclosed estate. Further research on Scotland, Wales and Ireland - conducted under the AHRC fellowship - will investigate women's landownership and estate management outside England, providing comparative material with which to assess elite women's contribution to the making of the British landscape as a whole.

In revealing these women's hidden histories, the book offers a carefully nuanced critique of recent thinking on women's lives and spaces. It argues that rather than universally retiring into domesticity in the eighteenth century, elite women actually played a key part in shaping agricultural landscapes. At the same time, it investigates how gender roles and identities nevertheless impacted upon the opportunities available to landowning women. In doing so, the book explores important questions about propertied women's role in Georgian society, as well as contributes to wider cultural debates about women's place in the environmental, social and economic history of Britain.

At the same time as conducting the new research and producing the monograph, the AHRC fellowship will include a programme of impact activities designed to maximise the public value of my research. This will include writing short articles for various newsletters and magazines, and making open-access materials available to the general public through the dedicated project website. I am also committed to developing additional knowledge exchange opportunities in relation to National Trust and English Heritage properties like Canons Ashby (Northamptonshire) and Wrest Park (Bedfordshire), both previously owned by landowning women I have researched on the project.

In addition to the identified academic beneficiaries, I strongly believe there is considerable scope for this research to have impacts far beyond academia. As an explicitly feminist project, the work has potential social, political and public-policy impacts. It is highly original and very relevant to ongoing debates about women's rights, gender identities, social justice and public history. In the first instance, I will focus on fostering engagement with my research amongst the general public, and thereby increasing public knowledge about elite women's role in the making of the British landscape. My impact activities during the fellowship will centre on three key groups.

1. Non-academic history groups and amateur historians including local history and archaeological societies, family historians and archive users. Much local history and archaeology focuses on the rural landscape and especially the houses, gardens and estates of the aristocracy, in part because relevant sources are easily accessible in local record offices. My project will draw attention to some of the hidden histories of landed estates, helping local historians to reassess the respective roles of the lord and lady of the manor in shaping the early modern landscape. In doing so, it will encourage local and family historians to take account of wider gender perspectives in their research.

2. Archive professionals, heritage workers and other public historians including the managers of National Trust and English Heritage properties. My book will be a solid point of reference on elite women's contribution to the history of the British rural landscape, as well as provide a methodological blueprint for those researching women's histories. It is anticipated that archive professionals will steer service users to my book, as well as to my articles in public history magazines. One of these pieces will focus on how to research women's history using widely available archival sources like account books, wills and pedigrees. It will thus provide a framework for further research, identifying ways of doing gender histories in the absence of specialist women's history collections.

My research will also increase local research capacity within public history organisations like the National Trust and English Heritage. I plan to send summaries of my research findings to the managers of National Trust and English Heritage properties including Canons Ashby in Northamptonshire and Wrest Park in Bedfordshire, both previously owned by women examined in the project. This material will be used to write display panels and guidebooks, and will thus underpin public engagement activities at these sites. Both the National Trust and English Heritage have successfully used the 'life below stairs' theme in recent years to tell alternative histories of the country house, and so engage new audiences in public history. The 'Beyond the park pale' project provides another perspective from which to tell such alternative histories, this time focusing on elite women's contribution to country houses, gardens and parks, as well as the wider agricultural estates on which landed families depended.

3. The general public including visitors to National Trust and English Heritage properties, users of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the readership of popular history magazines like History Today and the BBC's History Magazine. Telling stories about particular people and places will provide a hook with which to engage members of the public in the bigger research project and so prompt visitors and readers to think about wider gender issues including contemporary debates about gender roles and identities within the British countryside. Impressive visitor numbers make heritage sites like Canons Ashby and Wrest Park particularly important locations to do this.

For more information on the concrete steps through which I will deliver these impacts, see the pathways to impact document.