The presence of women in intellectual culture has formerly been overlooked or incorporated into conservative narratives of the functions of gender ideology in the nineteenth century. The object of this thesis is to establish the presence of women in institutions of intellectual culture in Nottingham and Sheffield during the second half of the nineteenth century, and to begin an alternative narrative of the meaning of female participation in the culture of knowledge. This study covers the period between 1850 and 1890. For the urban centres of Nottingham and Sheffield all institutions dealing in the promotion or the dissemination of knowledge have been analysed within the limitations of surviving records. Having provided the ideological context of gender and the uses of knowledge, both quantitative and qualitative approaches are used in handling the empirical material. Databases of membership and of mass biography have been constructed using institutional records and census returns. These have then been analysed at the mass level before becoming the focus of studies of individuals and of groups in determining the size of female presence and the meaning of this in its context. The major contributions of this study are to research on intellectual association which has been hitherto gendered male, and to central issues in women's history concerned with ideologies of gender and of the culture of urban women.