Feminism (9 page)

an intriguing novel,
Deerbrook
, which indirectly explores, not just her own fears, hopes, indecisions, but the doubts and problems that still plagued so many of her female contemporaries. She died in 1876.

By the middle years of the 19th century, a whole series of women were working quietly but impressively for specific reforms, and in the process opening up new areas to other women. Frances Power Cobbe, for example, bitterly recalled the expensive boarding school which she had attended in Brighton: it was, she claimed, totally inadequate. The pupils were crowded round tables in a single room with a ‘hideous clatter’; a piano would be pounding upstairs, and down below a roomful of girls reading and reciting their lessons to governesses. Her own experience, she came to realize, was typical.

Girls’ education was in urgent need of improvement; schools in her grandmother’s day, she speculated, had probably been better than contemporary ones. Despite her unpromising educational start, Cobbe went on to write vividly and thoughtfully, not just about
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education, but about other difficulties faced by both single and
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married women.

She was eloquent, for example, about the situation of wives trapped in miserable marriages. ‘We are used’, she wrote, ‘to tales of drunken ruffians, stumbling home from the gin-houses’ who assault their miserable wives. But ‘who could have imagined it possible that well-born and well-educated men, in honourable professions, should be guilty of the same brutality?’ She occasionally lapsed into conventional sentimentality:

we want [woman’s] sense of the law of love to complete man’s sense of the law of justice; we want her influence inspiring virtue by gentle promptings within, to complete man’s external legislation of morality . . . We want her genius for detail, her tenderness for age and suffering, her comprehension of the wants of childhood . . . .

But as a well-regarded journalist, she backed the idea of university 54

education for women and campaigned quietly for a Married Women’s Property Act. But she always insisted, rather too emphatically to be credible, that her feminism was nothing personal: ‘If I have become in mature years a ‘‘Woman’s Rights woman’’ it is not because in my own person I have been made to feel a woman’s wrongs.’

Marriage in the novel

Marriage remained a central and engrossing theme for
19th-century novelists, but relations between husbands and
wives were rarely seen as particularly fulfilling. In Charlotte
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e early 19th centur

Brontë’s
Jane Eyre
(1847), the heroine’s love affair with Mr
Rochester is a more sophisticated, and haunting, version of
Gothic melodrama, though she is allowed a happier ending –

once Rochester has been left crippled and helpless. Mrs
y:

Gaskell’s heroines all want, however vaguely, something
reformin

more than convention allows them. Mary Ann Evans – who,
interestingly, wrote as George Eliot – explores the often dif-g w

ficult relations between brother and sister in
o

The Mill on the

men

Floss
(1860). In
Middlemarch
(1871–2), the intelligent, ideal-istic Dorothea, seeking to devote her life to something – or
someone – worthy, is soon trapped in a miserable marriage.

Though she finally achieves happiness of a kind with another
man, she feels that there was something better that she might
have done. George Meredith’s
The Egoist
(1871) is a chilling
study of a marriage in which the woman is simply a status
symbol; his
Diana of the Crossways
(1885) offers a troubling
fictional version of Caroline Norton’s disastrous marriage.

George Gissing’s
The Odd Women
(1893) is a sympathetic
account of spinsters caring for an orphaned baby who, they
hope, will grow up to become ‘a brave woman’.

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Chapter 5

The late 19th century:

campaigning women

It was not until the second half of the 19th century that anything like a true women’s ‘movement’ began to emerge in England. This movement converged particularly around Barbara Leigh Smith and the group of friends who had become known – after one of their early meeting places – as ‘the Ladies of Langham Place’. The group initiated more organized campaigns around issues that had already been clearly defined: women’s urgent need for better education and for increased possibilities of employment, as well as the improvement of the legal position of married women.

The women came together, in part, as a reaction against what seemed to be a narrowing definition of ‘femininity’ and an increasingly conventional and constricting notion of a proper

‘womanly sphere’. A Victorian woman’s highest virtue seems to have been nervously, if frequently, equated with genteel passivity. A middle-class woman who had to earn her own living might be lucky enough to find a poorly paid position as a governess, even though she had probably been skimpily educated herself. Few other occupations were open to her. And there was still no way out for a woman who found herself unhappily married.

Sadly, even women with impressive achievements of their own, women who had written with great sympathy and insight about women’s lives and struggles, seem sometimes to have shied away 56

from an emerging feminism. Mary Ann Evans – George Eliot –

despite her remarkable understanding in
Middlemarch
(1871–2) of the way a woman’s intelligence and talents may be denied an adequate outlet, and despite the fact that she became a close friend and supporter of Barbara Leigh Smith, remarked in 1853 that

‘woman does not yet deserve a better lot than man gives her’. And she praised the way an ‘exquisite type of gentleness, tenderness, possible maternity’ may suffuse ‘a woman’s being with affectionateness’. In 1856, the novelist Mrs Gaskell, author of
Ruth
(1853) and
North and South
(1855), dismissed the very notion of women training as doctors:

I would not trust a mouse to a woman if a man’s judgement was to
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e lat

be had. Women have no judgement. They’ve tact and sensitiveness,
e 19th centur

genius and hundreds of fine and loving qualities; but are at best angelic geese as to matters requiring serious and long medical education.

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And in 1857 Elizabeth Barrett Browning argued in
Aurora Leigh
mpaignin

that:

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A woman . . . must prove what she can do

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Before she does it, prate of women’s rights,

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Of woman’s mission, woman’s function till

The men (who are prating too on their side) cry A woman’s function plainly is . . . to talk.

Barbara Leigh Smith (after she married, she broke with convention and simply added her husband’s name, Bodichon, to her own) was born into a family that was wealthy but untypical: her parents were not married. Her father had always encouraged her to read, and made her a generous allowance, which meant she could afford to travel widely. She spent time in Europe with Bessie Rayner Parkes, who went on to write
Remarks on the Education of Girls
, and who also insisted that single women would prove crucial to any improvement in the lot of all women. (A review at the time mocked 57

both Parkes and Leigh Smith, who had just published a pamphlet on
Women and Work
, sneering that ‘women are fatally deficient in the power of close consecutive thought’.)

In 1857, recuperating in Algeria after an illness, Leigh Smith met the man would become her husband, the physician Eugene Bodichon. They spent a year in America after their wedding, where, in Boston, New York, and New Orleans, she met women who were interested in education, as well as others who had trained as doctors. At Seneca Falls she had long conversations with Lucretia Mott, who was an activist both in the anti-slavery movement and in the emerging campaign for women’s rights. Leigh Smith would go on to work on the areas which seemed most urgent: the legal problems of married women, the urgent necessity for better education and training for women, as well as the need to extend the limited employment possibilities available to them.

In 1854, Barbara Leigh Smith had produced a pamphlet titled
A
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Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws of
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England Concerning Women
. She began by considering the contradictions limiting single women: they were allowed to vote at parish, but not, even if they were tax-paying property owners, at parliamentary elections. She moved on to the even greater disabilities facing married women: ‘a man and his wife are one person in law; the wife loses all her rights as a single woman, and her existence is entirely absorbed to that of her husband’. She discussed the question of marriage settlements, and the custody of children if parents separated; and even uncovered the curious and troubling legal fact that, once a couple were formally engaged, a woman could not dispose of her property without her fiancé’s knowledge and agreement. Her manifesto sold for a few pence; it was very widely read, and went to three editions. In December of the following year, she and a group of like-minded women –

including Bessie Parkes and Anna Jameson – formed a Married Women’s Property Committee (England’s first organized feminist group), which circulated petitions for law reform throughout the 58

country, and had soon had gathered some 2,400 signatures. The Committee’s intervention led to a series of amendments which alleviated the financial situation of married women, even if the changes still did not radically redefine their rights.

Leigh Smith had also produced an article, first published in the newly founded
English Women’s Journal
in 1858, in which she argued strongly against the view that middle-class women, because they were expected to marry, should be prepared for nothing else.

Large numbers would probably never marry, and might have to support themselves; but even those who did marry, she argued, should be equipped to educate their children, and, if necessary, to take on work outside the home. Moreover, she insisted on the value
The lat
of work for its own sake.

e 19th centur

To bring a family of 12 children into the world is not itself a noble vocation . . . To be a noble woman is better than being a mother to a noble man.

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She even invoked Queen Victoria, who was, after all, both a mother
and
a working monarch. At the same time, Leigh Smith insisted on
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greater recognition of the value of the very real work that women
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already did, looking after the home and raising their families. Leigh
en
Smith actually set up a primary school in London, which survived for nearly ten years. Boys and girls were taught together; and her own nieces and the children of her friends learned alongside the children of workers who lived in the neighbourhood.

The
English Women’s Journal
, which was at first largely funded by Leigh Smith, seems to have reached – and often inspired to action –

a reasonably wide audience. Even George Eliot, who had initially been very doubtful, wrote at the end of 1859 reassuring her friend that it ‘
must
be doing good substantially – stimulating woman to useful work and rousing people generally to some consideration of women’s needs’. But Leigh Smith and Bessie Parkes were soon confronted, at first hand, with the problems of women’s 59

employment. Readers of their
Journal
, desperate for work, began coming to their office, which had moved from Langham Place to Cavendish Square. They decided to keep an employment register –

only to discover how few opportunities were in fact available for women. Many men bitterly resented the prospect of women entering their trades; women, they argued, would lower wages for everyone, and their presence might well force men into unemployment.

Employment possibilities concerned other women as well. Earlier that year, Harriet Martineau – who was familiar with the work of the Langham Place group, and probably influenced by it, though she was never actually a member – had published, in the
Edinburgh
Review
, an article called ‘Female Industry’ which took a cool, hard-headed look at the few openings that were actually available to women. She saw clearly that the situation of women was changing; more and more women had no choice but to go out to work. The concept of ‘earning one’s bread’ was, she argued, a fairly recent one
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for men as well as women.

We live in a new commercial and industrial economy, but our ideas, our language and our arrangements have not altered in any corresponding degree. We go on talking as if it were still true that every woman is, or ought to be, supported by father, brother or husband.

Poor women might labour in the fields or in factories; apart from that, Martineau could see only two – equally low-paid –

possibilities: needlework or teaching. Like Barbara Leigh Smith, she insisted that women’s education must be extended and improved, and that a ‘fair field’ should be opened to their ‘power and energies’.

She praised Elizabeth Blackwell, who had trained as a doctor in America, and who was visiting England at the time. (Barbara Leigh 60

Smith and Bessie Parkes helped to organize the talks Blackwell gave, not just in London but in provincial centres as well.) But unlike many of these early feminists, and because she believed strongly that women should make no more than moderate and rational claims, she had little sympathy with the emerging demand for the vote.

Francis Power Cobbe, as noted in the previous chapter an advocate in the campaign for the Married Women’s Property Act and of education for women, did go on to campaign for women’s suffrage, believing that women could not necessarily rely on men to protect them or their interests. Her arguments to this end sometimes betray a hint of class arrogance: she was angry that ‘we women of the
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