“The Ideas Are in the Air”: From Drone Bees to Honey Women, Cultural Paradox in the Democratic Rhetoric of British Chartism and Colonial Australian Suffragism

Honeybees have long held a literal and figurative position in political representations of the social body. This chapter presents a comparative analysis of the divergent use of honeybees in the literature of two nineteenth-century political movements: the male-dominated working-class political movement known as Chartism and the colonial Australian women’s suffrage movement. An analysis of the literature produced by early radicals like William Cobbett and Henry Hunt, along with later Chartists like Feargus O’Connor and Peter McDouall, indicates that scientific developments in the natural history and comparative zoology of male drone bees were used by working-class men to establish a narrative solution to the existence of political and economic inequality that was ambiguous enough to communicate to the convergent ideologemes drawn into male working-class radicalism. Alternatively, colonial literary representations of New Women as beekeepers in Mary Gaunt’s Kirkham’s Find (1897) and Ada Cambridge’s “A Sweet Day” (1897) avoided associating the asexuality of female working bees with their female protagonists in order to deescalate patriarchal concerns that industrial and political enfranchisement would render the feminine body undesirable. Both narratives romanticise and eroticise the activity of beekeeping by pairing the economic and political autonomy women achieve through it to the romantic codes of heteronormativity.