Feminism (10 page)

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upper ranks – constitutionally qualified by the possession of
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property (and, I may be permitted to add, naturally qualified by education and intelligence at least up to the level of the ‘‘illiterate’’

order of voters) are still denied the suffrage’. She was always profoundly conservative, though her disapproval of the radical wing
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of the Conservative Party led her to resign from the emerging
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suffrage movement in 1867.

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Emily Davies was another staunch conservative, in everything
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except her recognition that education was central to any
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improvement in women’s lot. ‘It is no wonder,’ the young Davies wrote, ‘that people who have not learned to do anything cannot find anything to do’. When she had to go to nurse her brother, who had fallen ill in Algiers, she had the great good fortune to meet Barbara Leigh Smith, who encouraged her, and reassured her that there were many other women who would sympathize with her longings and dissatisfactions. Back in England, Davies (along with her friend Elizabeth Garrett) visited Langham Place, which had become the headquarters of both the
English Women’s Journal
and a Society for Promoting the Employment of Women. She felt inspired and, when she returned to her home in the North, formed a Northumberland and Durham branch of the Society, as well as writing a series of letters to her local paper arguing the importance of increased 61

employment opportunities for women. She was scathing about the meagre intellectual training available to girls like herself: ‘Do they go to school? No. Do they have governesses? No. They have lessons and get on as well as they can.’ And she described, with great personal feeling,

the weight of discouragement produced by being told, that as women, nothing much is ever to be expected of them . . . that whatever they do they must not interest themselves, except in a second-hand and shallow way, in the pursuits of men, for in such pursuits they must always expect to fail.

Women know how this kind of attitude ‘stifles and chills; how hard it is to work courageously through it’.

But Davies was also encouraged by the growing recognition among the Langham Place group that education was all-important. In London, the recently established Queen’s College and Bedford
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College were offering something like an adequate schooling to
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(some) middle-class girls, and in 1862 Davies managed to form a committee to further the prospects of women taking the University Local Examinations, which had been established in 1858. It took a great deal of slow, careful organization and negotiation before Cambridge agreed, as an experiment in 1865, that women could attempt the same exams as men. Though Davies was always a realist, she never retreated from her belief that girls must be offered exactly the same education as men, at both school and university level. Her book on
The Higher Education of Women
, which appeared in 1866, is careful not to state the claims too strongly.

Davies admitted that women will probably ‘never do as well as men

. . . But that does not seem to me a reason for not doing their best and choosing for themselves what they will try.’ She managed to raise money (Barbara Leigh Smith contributed generously) to found a women’s higher education college, which was set up at Hitchin in Hertfordshire with, initially, just five students. In 1873, it moved to Cambridge and became Girton College; this was followed 62

in 1879 by Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford. But for all Emily Davies’s radical ideas – she insisted from the start that women students take the same exams as men – she certainly did not want women to enjoy the same freedoms as male students. She expected that her students would always behave decorously, with the utmost propriety; unconventional and ‘unfeminine’ behaviour might, she believed, jeopardize the whole project.

Emily Davies’s pioneering work was crucially important, though, perhaps inevitably, it was a long time before women achieved anything approaching real equality in higher education. In London, Queen’s and Bedford Colleges began awarding degrees to women in 1878. But Oxford women became full members of the University
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only in 1919, and, paradoxically, though Cambridge granted women
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‘titular’ degrees in 1921, they were not recognized as full members of the University until 1948.

Elizabeth Garrett (later Garrett Anderson) also received support
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from the Langham Place group in her prolonged and courageous
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efforts, in the face of what now seems the most extraordinary opposition, to train as a doctor. She was often the butt of crude
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jokes. Some male students announced their disapproval of ‘the
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impropriety of males and females mingling . . . while studying
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subjects which hitherto have been considered of a delicate nature’, while the
Lancet
journal dismissed her efforts to train as ‘morbid’.

Nothing shook Garrett in her determination. For one thing, she believed that women doctors would be a great boon ‘to many suffering women’. Moreover, the work interested her deeply, and she knew that she would be good at it.

She was encouraged by the example of Elizabeth Blackwell, who had managed to graduate in medicine at a small college in New York State in 1849, and had opened a dispensary for women and children in the New York slums. But when Blackwell visited London, she was sometimes greeted with harsh criticism: ‘it is impossible that a woman whose hands reek with gore can be 63

possessed of the same nature or feelings as the generality of women’, one columnist remarked. Elizabeth Garrett had to struggle hard to convince her own mother that her patient determination to work in medicine was not wrong, or morbid, but the ‘result of a healthy, active energy’. Fortunately, her father was more supportive, and Garrett herself quietly, patiently persisted. She studied midwifery in Scotland, then won her M.D. diploma in Paris. Even the
British
Medical Journal
, which had been consistently hostile to the idea of women in medicine, admitted that ‘everyone must admire the indomitable perseverance and pluck which Miss Garrett has shown’. By 1870, when she was persuaded to stand for election to the London School Board, she had obviously become a highly respected and popular public figure, and she received more votes than any other candidate.

One of the most important and far-reaching campaigns in the later part of the 19th century was also one of the most unexpected: the agitation against the Contagious Diseases Acts which dramatically
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exposed the cruel hypocrisies of the double sexual standard. The
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first of the Acts had been passed in 1864; in certain ports and garrison towns, police were given the authority to arrest any woman who was merely
suspected
of being a prostitute, subject her, sometimes brutally, to an internal examination, and if there were any signs of venereal disease, to confine her to hospital. There were extensions to the Act in 1866 and 1869. Women soon began protesting; they included Elizabeth Garrett, Florence Nightingale, and Harriet Martineau, who argued that ‘the regulation system creates horrors worse than those which it is supposed to restrain’.

By 1869, a Ladies National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts had been set up, a number of eminently respectable women forming the first real, and effective, pressure group. In the first instance, their campaign launched an attack on specific laws that bore very brutally on prostitutes or suspected prostitutes; but they soon extended the argument to dramatize the workings of the double sexual standard, with its disastrous effects 64

on both men and women all through society. Josephine Butler soon became the group’s leader. The well-educated daughter of a Liberal family, she was beautiful, devout, and eminently respectable – hence a superbly effective propagandist for what many people regarded as a highly unrespectable cause. She had already begun working with prostitutes when, after the tragic death of their only daughter, she and her husband moved to Liverpool. ‘I became possessed with an irresistible desire to go forth and find some pain keener than my own’, she remarked. She took some unhappy ‘fallen’ girls into her own home, and raised money to establish a small ‘House of Rest’ that would care ‘for dying Magdalenes’.

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Butler had already displayed a keen interest in the problems facing
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women. A pamphlet on
The Education and Employment of Women
, published in 1868, made the argument, familiar by then, for better education, and also – given the number of unmarried women in England – for adequate training to enable them to support
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themselves. In 1869, she and other sympathetic women formed a
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Ladies National Association; Butler made a superbly effective figurehead and leader. Her speeches and writings effectively
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combine cool, clear argument with passionate feeling. In a
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pamphlet written in 1871, and based on her own experience with
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prostitutes, Butler argued that the Contagious Diseases Acts amounted to a suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. They ‘virtually introduce a species of villeinage or slavery. I use the word not sentimentally but in the strictest legal sense.’ The issue, and her protest, kindled the imagination and feelings of women all through the country. In an 1870 letter to the Prime Minister, a member of the Ladies National Association had insisted that there is not one of the mothers, wives, sisters, or daughters whom you cherish with proud affection who dare safely assert that, had she been born in the same unprotected, unfenced position, in the very jaws of poverty and vice . . . she, too, in the innocent ignorance of her unfledged girlhood, might not have slipped, like them, into that 65

awful gulf from which society at large has long done its best to make escape hopeless.

Josephine Butler and her rapidly growing band of highly respectable supporters soon became a remarkably effective pressure group; their campaign exposed, dramatically, a brutal double sexual standard that long custom had made virtually invisible. And, crucially, they argued it was a double standard that oppressed, not just prostitutes, but most women, in all kinds of subtle ways, that spread through almost every aspect of their everyday domestic and working lives. Later, giving evidence to a Parliamentary Select Committee, Butler pointed out the indirect but disastrous effects of the Act on men as well as women. When she had visited Chatham, ‘I saw there evidence of the degradation of the young soldiers who first join the army . . . There were boys who appeared to be not more than thirteen . . . it was as solemn as hell itself.’ The real villains, the real exploiters, were in her view the pimps, the people who made money by ‘setting up a house in which
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women are sold to men’.

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In the 1880s, Annie Besant tackled a different, and perhaps even more urgent, form of exploitation. Discovering the truly terrible conditions in which women worked at the Bryant and May match-making factory in East London, she sent a deeply, and effectively, emotional letter to the many shareholders who happened to be clergymen:

let there rise before you the pale worn face of another man’s daughter . . . as she pulls off her battered hat and shows a head robbed of its hair by the constant rubbing of the carried boxes, robbed thereof that your dividends might be larger, Sir Cleric . . . I hold you up to the public opprobrium you deserve . . .

Her charges were widely publicized, and aroused great public concern. The match girls led sizeable protest marches in London, and were eventually allowed to form their own union.

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Progress on all these issues facing women was now underway. But women – as well as a few male champions like Thompson and Mill

– had been arguing for votes for women all through the century; in its closing decades, the demand would become urgent, and suffragists – and later, militant suffragettes – would take centre stage.

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Chapter 6

Fighting for the vote:

suffragists

In the course of the 19th century, the vote gradually became central to feminist demands. It was seen as important both symbolically (as a recognition of women’s rights to full citizenship) and practically (as a necessary way of furthering reforms and making practical changes in women’s lives). But winning the vote proved a complicated struggle, and one that lasted for decades. The determination and the persistence with which women argued, and increasingly demonstrated, for the right to vote makes an inspiriting story; all the more so given the equal determination, and at times the virulence, with which their claims were opposed. And opposed, often, by women as well as men.

There had been some early demands for women’s suffrage: William Thompson, influenced by Anna Wheeler, had eloquently made the case for their representation as early as 1825. Marion Reid, writing in 1843, dismissed current clichés about woman’s proper ‘sphere’, as well as the notion that woman’s supposed influence over man gave her everything she needed. She went on to stress the importance, not just of the vote, but of even a token presence in parliament.

Perhaps ‘a few women among the constituents of members of parliament’ might induce that body ‘to pay some little attention on the interests of women’. In 1847, an elderly Quaker, Anne Knight, issued a pamphlet arguing for women’s right to be represented.

Harriet Taylor, who became John Stuart Mill’s wife, argued for ‘The 68

Enfranchisement of Women’ in the
Westminster Review
in 1851; while in 1869, Mill himself made the case eloquently and at some length in
The Subjection of Women
. Women, he conceded, are not likely to differ from men of the same class; but ‘if the question be one in which the interests of women as such are in some way involved’, then they ‘require the suffrage, as their guarantee of just and equal consideration’.