Masculinity and Popular Toryism in Urban Britain and Ireland (1867-1914)

The growth of the electorate from the mid-nineteenth century onwards created an urgent question for the Conservative party: how would it appeal to newly enfranchised and increasingly influential urban, working-class voters? This project uses gender as a main category of analysis to explore how the Tories tapped into

working-class communities in Sheffield, Glasgow, Swansea, and Belfast by constructing the figure of the Conservative working man and mobilising a rhetoric of masculinity in political and public spaces. It asserts the importance of masculinity and male sociability to Conservative popular politics in the wake of the Reform Act of

1867 and the string of franchise amendments that followed.