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THE NS ESSAY
Founding
mothers
Victorian society was full of intelligent women going mad
with frustration. Then the fightback began
By Simon Heffer
30 | NEW STATESMAN | 11-17 OCTOBER 2013
Until the late 1840s there was nothing for
women that resembled higher education.
Once a woman married she became the
de facto property of her husband. Her goods
became his. He could beat her and rape her
without fearing the law, provided he did not
kill her. Divorce required an act of parliament;
and men who violated the rules of marriage
were regarded as a tiresome inevitability
while women who did so were regarded as
harlots. Women could not vote, let alone
stand for parliament. They were barred from
the law and medicine. Some were considered
such a danger to soldiers and sailors that
the Contagious Diseases Act was passed to
allow the forcible medical examination of
any woman in certain dockyard and garrison
towns who was thought to be a prostitute, to
see whether she might be carrying venereal
disease; and, if she was, the act allowed for her
confinement on secure premises until such
time as she was better.
At the start of Victoria’s reign, workingclass women still worked down coal mines,
doing heavy work, often half naked, and frequently when pregnant or within days of
having given birth. No wonder John Stuart
Mill, one of the great feminists of the 19th
century, described in his essay The Subjection
of Women the condition of females in Britain
in that era as akin to slavery.
To most of the men who ruled Britain in
the 19th century what Mill called “slavery”
was simply the natural order. And, because
they saw it as such, they saw no imperative
to change things, and saw equality as an absurdity. Not all were so blinkered. Lord Ashley – later the Earl of Shaftesbury – led the
campaign to get women out of coal mines,
to restrict their heavy manual labour, and
to limit the hours they could work in factories. When the writer Caroline Norton, who
wished to divorce her cruel husband in the
1830s, began a national campaign on the question, several MPs and peers tried to further
her cause by seeking legal reforms that would
allow a woman to be rid of a cruel, adulterous
or neglectful husband.
Norton’s first battle was to secure the
passage of the Infant Custody Act in 1839.
This was a landmark in women’s rights. If a
woman had not had adultery proven against
her in a court of law, she could have custody
of any child under seven – hitherto they had
been the husband’s property, irrespective of
his character. Only one of her three sons was
sufficiently young, and her husband, whose
vindictiveness knew no bounds, moved
t
So effective were the suffragettes that we
think of them as the founding mothers of
women’s emancipation. Their cause was just
and their achievement considerable: but Edwardian women, in pursuing equality, picked
up the baton from an earlier generation – a
generation that achieved what it did in the
face of even greater odds, and partly with the
help of men.
When in 1837 the United Kingdom of
Britain and Ireland acquired its first queen
regnant in 123 years, Victoria was the only
woman in the realm with no legal impediment because of her sex. As queen, she enjoyed the same rights as her predecessor as
monarch, her uncle William IV. For all other
women existence was strictly controlled by
men. Until married – unless heiresses of independent means – women were subject to
their fathers. Most men from the middle and
upper classes regarded the education of their
daughters as an unnecessary expense. Most
fathers from the working class wanted their
daughters in a mill or a factory as swiftly as
possible to make a contribution to the household’s income. In the 1830s there were few
girls’ schools worthy of the name, as opposed
to establishments that taught deportment,
dancing, French and how to manage servants.
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Daughters of the revolution: early feminists struck a blow for freedom by taking to their bicycles. Their motor-riding successors won women the vote
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them to Scotland, where the act did not
apply. It was not until her youngest son died
of lockjaw in 1842 that she was allowed custody of the other two boys – then aged 13 and
11 – for half the year.
There were several attempts in the 1840s
and early 1850s to bring in a divorce law that
would treat women compassionately. A wider
campaign was already under way for property rights for women, led by Barbara Bodichon, the leading feminist of the 1850s. Lord
Cranworth, the lord chancellor, laid a bill in
the House of Lords in 1854 to make divorce
more widely available. It was sidelined over
the next year. Only when Palmerston, the
prime minister and a legendary womaniser,
adopted the idea – in the teeth of attritional
opposition from Gladstone, citing religious
objections – that the measure finally passed
into law in the summer of 1857.
By then, however, 10,000 clergy had signed
a petition against divorce. It demanded: “Remembering also, that it is declared in the Word
of God, that marriage with a divorced woman
is adulterous, we fervently pray that the
Clergy of this realm may never be reduced
to the painful necessity of either withholding the obedience which they must always
desire to pay to the law of the land, or else
of sinning against their own consciences, and
violating the law of God by solemnising such
marriages as are condemned as adulterous in
His Holy Word.” Such objections were to no
avail. There were three divorce cases in 1857,
but 300 in 1858, the act coming into force on
1 January that year.
T
he first stirrings of the feminist
movement came in the field of education. Some radical families allowed their daughters to cultivate
minds of their own and it was the
products of such families who sought, in the
1840s, to found a college for women to provide a higher education such as men of the
upper classes could take for granted. Victorian literature – as with Victorian reality –
abounds with intelligent women going mad
with frustration, denied the means to sate
their intellectual curiosity and the opportunity to pursue a career. The embittered Mrs
Transome, in George Eliot’s Felix Holt, the
Radical, is virtually imprisoned in her gloomy
Midlands mansion. Florence Nightingale, by
force of character, ensured her parents could
not stop her training as a nurse; her elder sister Parthenope was so frustrated by her own
lack of opportunity, and so envious of Florence’s success, that she became, for a time,
a chronic hysteric.
Ladies’ colleges began in London with
support from the Christian Socialist Frederick Denison Maurice and his disciple Charles
Kingsley, the author of The Water Babies. In
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1849 Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a Unitarian philanthropist, founded what came to be known
as Bedford College, the first institution for
the higher education of women in Great
Britain. By the 1870s, colleges offering something like a university education were at last
available to women at the ancient universities, even if Cambridge – the first of the old
institutions to agree to allow women to attend lectures – still refused to award them
degrees (and, to its shame, continued to refuse until 1948).
Emily Davies was a pioneer of the movement that stormed Oxbridge and she brought
with her feminist views that followed the
idea of education of women to a logical conclusion: women should also have the vote,
There were three divorce
cases in 1857 but 300 in
1858, after the act came in
and should find none of the professions
barred to them. Davies was born in 1830, the
daughter of a clergyman, John Davies, who
consigned her to a life of assisting with the
family needlework and, when old enough,
doing good works in Gateshead, his parish.
Davies resented this; in her twenties, she
met two women who inspired her to campaign for women’s education and suffrage.
One was Elizabeth Garrett, six years her junior, who would become the first female doctor in Britain; the other Barbara Bodichon,
three years her senior.
Bodichon was known for her campaign
to reform women’s property rights, which
succeeded in the early 1870s. She was also
one of the most prominent members of the
Langham Place circle of feminists and a first
cousin of Florence Nightingale: but Barbara
was illegitimate and much of the family refused to know her. She was educated by private tutors and at various schools; and when
“It’s an idea, Ted, but I don’t think we should
offer loyalty points at a funeral director’s”
she came of age in 1848 her father gave her
shares and property to provide a private
income, allowing her the independence to
pursue her main career interest (which was
to become an artist) and to engage in political
campaigning. That led her into close associations with Mill, through his stepdaughter
Helen Taylor, and George Eliot. She regarded
her money as “a power to do good . . . a responsibility we must accept”.
Visiting London in 1859, Davies and Garrett
attended lectures given by Elizabeth Blackwell, an Englishwoman who had become the
first female doctor in the United States, and
who inspired Garrett’s campaign in Britain.
Blackwell had been urged to come to Britain
by Bodichon, to help Garrett’s campaign.
Davies also joined the Society for Promoting
the Employment of Women, and joined
Garrett’s movement to persuade London
University to award degrees to women. She
edited the English Woman’s Journal, which
Bodichon and others had founded in 1858 as
an organ of feminism. One of her campaigns
was to allow girls to take the Cambridge local
examinations, in which she had the support
of Matthew Arnold, who wanted female
teachers to have a recognised qualification.
When it succeeded, Davies found 83 girls in
just six weeks to take the exams, 25 of them
from Frances Buss’s North London Collegiate
School. It was also thanks to one of Davies’s
campaigns that the Taunton commission of
inquiry into endowed schools considered the
education of middle-class girls as well as that
of middle-class boys. When she gave evidence
to it in 1865 it was the first time a woman had
ever appeared in person as an expert witness
before a royal commission.
D
avies was determined to found
a women’s college at Cambridge
that would award degrees: Oxford
was deemed too hostile. A committee including eminent dons
met in December 1867, under Davies’s direction, to set about raising the £30,000 needed.
Bodichon, who had financed a secular coeducational school in London from 1854 to
1863, gave much of her time, and some of her
money. What Davies sought for her college
was subtly, but radically, different from what
another group with similar ambitions hoped
to achieve at Cambridge. Henry Sidgwick
and Anne Clough had obtained the university’s agreement to establish special examinations for female students: these would not
lead to a Cambridge degree, not least because
of Sidgwick and Clough’s belief that the inadequacies of girls’ education made such an aspiration unrealistic. Davies despaired of this
outlook, describing the proposed diluted examination as “devised to suit struggling governesses”. She wanted her students to follow
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the same courses, attend the same lectures,
and take the same degrees as men.
She took out newspaper advertisements to
promote the scheme and ask for money. The
shock to the unthinking man was profound.
“Our age has been so prolific of absurdities,
that we cannot well be expected to feel any
very great surprise at the incubation of one
foolish project more,” steamed the Imperial
Review. It went on to condemn “this preposterous proposal of a University career for
the potential wives of Englishmen”, which
was “calculated to unfit women for the performance of the very duties to which . . .
women only are intended and adapted”.
Davies and her supporters were, inevitably,
hardened to their task by such bigotry. Girton was founded in 1869; Newnham soon
followed, under Clough.
With the extension of the franchise to
working men in 1867, it was natural that the
more reform-minded should turn their attention to the franchise for women. John Stuart
Mill had tried unsuccessfully to push the
point by organising petitions to be presented
to parliament in 1866, 1867 and 1868. A bill
to effect this was introduced in May 1870 by
Jacob Bright, younger brother of John and of
Priscilla Bright McLaren, an early campaigner
for women’s suffrage. Bright argued “on the
grounds of public justice and of practical necessity”. The householder franchise had led
to men in an astonishing degree of ignorance
being allowed to vote. Yet women who paid
taxes, and who rendered valuable service to
the nation – he invoked the name of Florence
Nightingale – were not. The men who had
demanded the vote before 1867 had argued
that to be denied it was “tantamount to a declaration of our moral and intellectual inferiority”. He emphasised what he felt should
be the link between taxation and representation and, even more boldly than demanding
votes for women, highlighted the unfairness
of their pay: “There is not a male and female
rate of taxation, but there is a male and female
rate of wages and earnings. Women everywhere, with a few remarkable exceptions, are
getting far less money than men; they have
to work much longer for the same money;
and they are even paid much less when they
are doing precisely the same work. Taxation
must, therefore, fall somewhat more heavily
upon women than on men.” There were, he
protested, “inferior men in every rank of life”
who “have no objection to degrade women
and keep them in degradation”.
The opposition to Bright was led by John
Scourfield, the Tory MP for Pembrokeshire.
He quoted Dr Johnson’s insulting line about
a woman preaching being like a dog on its
hind legs. He was clear about their purpose:
“Their vocation is to make life endurable,” he
said, and he simply wished them to continue
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being “admirable, amiable, and delightful”.
William Fowler, the MP for Cambridge, said
that if women were given the vote there was
no logical reason why they should not sit
in the Commons, and therefore he was profoundly opposed to the bill. Women had duties – of educating their children, of having
“to adorn the sphere in which they live” –
that would be impeded by allowing them to
become involved in politics.
By the 1870s, having won rights to divorce
and to own property, and having established
places of education, women at last had the
confidence to take on the men who would
keep them down. None did it better than
Elizabeth Garrett’s sister Millicent Fawcett,
who shredded the arguments against femi-
“There is not a male and a
female rate of taxation . . .
but one of wages”
nism of one of the most reactionary political
thinkers, James Fitzjames Stephen. She questioned his belief in the submission of women,
as the weaker sex, to their husbands as a precept of the common law, asking:
“Is the wife to obey the husband when,
in obeying him, she does something she
believes to be wrong? If the answer is ‘yes’,
the possession of a husband may become
the screen of all kinds of iniquity, from
murder and robbery downwards. If the
answer is ‘no’, everything is conceded
that the advocates of equality in marriage
demand, for many wives may and do think
it wrong to encourage a spirit of despotism
in their husbands by invariably allowing
the husband’s authority to be supreme.”
of indignation, at the leniency with which
some of our judges treat offences of this kind.”
The article had concluded, with deep disapproval, that an Englishman, “within certain
limits, may beat his wife as much as he
pleases”. Fawcett quoted the same newspaper, four months later, observing that “recent
trials have revealed a prevalent indifference
to the maltreatment of women, which is a
heinous disgrace to English nature”.
She noted that, among the better classes,
women had small favours shown them – “being ‘seen home’ from evening parties, being
helped first at dinner, having chairs offered,
doors opened, umbrellas carried and the
like” – but that they more than returned the
compliment “by sewing on buttons, working slippers, and making puddings for the
mankind of their domestic circles”. However,
she said, “It is a small consolation for Nancy
Jones, in Whitechapel, who is kicked and
beaten at discretion by her husband, to know
that Lady Jones, in Belgravia, is always assisted in and out of her carriage as if she were
a cripple.” The tide of history was with Fawcett; the era of women as ornaments, appendages or full-time mothers was, thanks to her
and others like her, nearing extinction. l
Simon Heffer’s book “High Minds: the
Victorians and the Birth of Modern Britain”
is published by Random House (£30)
F
awcett ridiculed Stephen’s premise
that, in return for submission,
women received protection. “That
is to say, in return for submission
married women get the protection
of losing all control over their own property;
they also have the inestimable advantage of
possessing no legal right to the guardianship
of their own children even after the death
of their husbands.” Twisting the knife, she
pointed out that “in return for the submissiveness of women, little girls of twelve years
old are, for the purposes of seduction, legally
regarded as women – a most noteworthy
instance, this, of the kind of protection the
present state of the law affords”.
She quoted an article in the Times from
April 1872: “Every day the reports of our
police courts and of our criminal tribunals
still repeat the tale of savage and cowardly
outrages upon women: and every day we
have reason to marvel, not without a mixture
11-17 OCTOBER 2013 | NEW STATESMAN | 33
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