Fellow Countrywomen - 1838 Until recently little research had been carried out in the history of Scottish women. This situation is slowly changing with more and more articles and books being published on Scottish women’s past. 2 During Queen Victoria’s reign, middle and upper-class women were supposed to stay in the home, as domesticity and motherhood were considered as natural for women; poverty often pushed working-class women onto the labour market (in 1839, two-thirds of the workers in the Scottish textile industry were female). Yet it was more and more thought that the public spheres of work, commerce and politics were the preserves of men. At the beginning of the Victorian period most women did not have aspirations to gain the vote. Female Chartists fought for universal manhood suffrage and not for female suffrage but this letter published in the Northern Star, one of the leading Chartist newspapers, demonstrates that not all women thought that it was natural fo...