Girl Trouble (6 page)
Authors: Carol Dyhouse
Nevertheless, accounts of girls' sexual experience before marriage in this period show a much more complex picture than purity workers often painted. Of course evidence isn't always easy to come by. There is fragmentary evidence from refuges, homes for âfemale penitents' and shelters for âfallen women'. These accounts were often shaped by a sense of what was required, and there were undoubtedly many situations in which girls needed above all to look penitent. The Salvation Army statement books mentioned above are a case in point: young women seeking shelter are likely to have framed their responses according to what they thought would yield the best result. Moreover, the responses to the questions will have been filled in â and so shaped by â Salvation Army workers. Answers to the question âCause of First Fall' show an unsurprising mixture of innocence, regret and, only occasionally, defiance. But there is very little high drama. âFlirting with a lad' was a common enough response. One suspects the reply âBad companions and natural depravity' to have come from interviewer rather than applicant. Undermining the stereotype of the ravaged innocent, one poor woman confessed that she had âfallen' after walking out with the same man for a full nine years.
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A richer source of evidence comes from an inquiry carried out in the early years of the First World War and published as
Downward Paths
in 1916.
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The study was introduced by the Anglican preacher and suffragist Maude Royden. It represented
the researches of a group of women medical and social workers (who judged it prudent to remain anonymous), who set out to consider the reasons why some women turned to prostitution. About 830 case histories went into the book, which maintained an intelligent, sympathetic and non-judgemental tone. Pre-marital sex wasn't always shameful and disastrous, the authors pointed out: there were parts of Britain where it was pretty much accepted as normal. Indeed, far from being passive victims of male lust, women might even take the initiative in sex. Girls could be just as sexually curious as boys, although the penalties for âgoing astray' were worse for the female sex. Young girls living in poverty often sought colour and adventure to perk up their lives: âTo girls, the temptations of curiosity and of the awakening sex-instinct go often hand in hand with the possibilities of gain, and money means so much to those who want variety, colour, life â¦'
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Girls' love of clothes and adornment should not be simply condemned as moral weakness, the authors insisted â it was self-respect that made many of them anxious to dress well.
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Equally, young working girls might be encouraged by attentions from men in uniform, or gentlemen of a higher social class, because they hoped to better themselves. Was this really such a crime? âGoing with a gentleman' might look like a safe option, and a well-dressed man might âthrow a glamour over the transaction' in the eyes of someone young and hopeful.
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This was all pretty radical, liberal stuff, and yet Royden and her co-authors went even further. Social workers dealing with the
casualties
of prostitution saw only part of the picture, they suggested. Some women undoubtedly did well for themselves and lived an independent lifestyle. Others married and settled down with men who were happy to keep them. Definitions of prostitution, and the borders
around respectable behaviour, were rarely as clear as moralists insisted. After all, Royden cautiously suggested, there was a sense in which marriage itself was a kind of economic bargain, with the wife being kept in exchange for sexual services. There were different ways in which women might profit from sex. One story in the book, for instance, referred to two enterprising girls who for a number of seasons had worked on a cruise ship running between England and America:
They were most popular girls, the life of the ship and the pets of all the old ladies; âwomen you could really make friends with', the men used to say. They would pick and choose their men, and a man might pursue them unsuccessfully during a whole voyage. By their earnings as prostitutes they supported a father and a brother who was at a University, while their family believed they were journalists. During the winter they dropped their profession, and the ship's officers would visit them as friends.
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Downward Paths
questioned contemporary stereotypes and unsettled assumptions at every point. Maude Royden argued that panic â based on ignorance â had too often governed policy, as in the case of the 1912 Criminal Law Amendment Act. Panic about white slavery had shaped public attitudes to sex. Citing Teresa Billington-Greig's researches and similar studies, she emphasised yet again that cases of forcible abduction were extremely rare, pointing out that âa weeping and reluctant girl is not an easily marketable asset'. Nonetheless
Incredible and even grotesque stories were told and believed on the slenderest authority, or on no authority at all. The only demand was that they should be sufficiently frightful. Newspapers and bookstalls were deluged with articles, pamphlets
and books narrating horrors and proposing remedies as preposterous â and sometimes as horrible â as the disease.
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None of this was to deny that procuring existed, Royden continued, still less that girls might be drawn into prostitution through poverty and despair. But procurers had no need for chloroform or syringes, their victims had usually been rendered âhelpless enough by poverty and misfortune and apply to him [the procurer] as they might to the foreman of a relief works'. The procurer was âless the orchard thief than the blow-fly settling on fallen fruit'. Were every procurer to be flogged to death, it was unlikely that prostitution would be exterminated.
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To Royden and her co-authors, the way forward was through education, social work and careful studies of the circumstances leading some girls into prostitution. Their own study is something of a landmark in understanding not just prostitution, but the sexual behaviour of young women of the day. The case histories in
Downward Paths
provide snapshots of the circumstances and options facing individual young girls in the 1900s. The girls in
Downward Paths
have agency: however difficult their circumstances, they are not just victims, and they do make choices in their lives. Their stories dispel the high drama associated with tales of âfalling' and âruin'. They are life histories seen not in moral terms of black and white, but in human terms, with many shades in between.
Maude Royden was equally well aware that the furore over white slavery owed a great deal to the rise of the women's movement. Women's groups dedicated to suppression of the white slave trade had mushroomed across Britain between 1900 and 1913, coinciding with the rise of militant suffragism. The image of a young girl enslaved by the predatory male could be central to feminism, especially when linked to ideas about
social purity. White slavery not only served as a metaphor for the sexual oppression of women by men. In the minds and writings of many this was
the
great social evil of the day, and one which could only be remedied once women obtained the vote. âVotes for Women' and âPurity for Men' were twin demands in Christabel Pankhurst's manifesto. Many feminists believed that once women had the vote there would be an end, once and for all, to prostitution.
But the image of the girl as victim had an altogether wider appeal. It was reassuring to anti-suffragists, who believed in feminine frailty and who contended that women and girls were vulnerable without male protection. Arthur Lee, proponent of the 1912 parliamentary bill against âWhite Slavery', had emphasised that staunch opponents of women's suffrage such as himself were under a special obligation to clamp down on âthose sinister creatures who batten upon commercialised vice, and who make a profitable business out of kidnapping, decoying and ruining ⦠unwilling girls'.
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Moreover the image of the girl as innocent, and as vulnerable, had undeniable erotic charge. Stead's highly coloured account of âThe Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon' had been shot through with near-pornographic descriptions of hardened rakes enjoying the helpless cries of panicked girl-children. A mixture of moral outrage and obsessive focus on the details of degradation has proved common in accounts of white slavery, even in more modern historical writing. Of course, publishers have not been slow to capitalise on this. In the 1960s, for instance, the paperback edition of the historian Charles Terrot's account of white slavery was presented as a shock-horror text about lust, depravity and the flesh-markets of Europe. The lurid blurb on the cover promised the reader âInnocent girls â completely ignorant of sex â captured by trickery â abducted
by force â compelled to submit to the corrupt and degraded desires of men sunk in vice and perversion â¦'
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And so forth, which presumably did no harm to the book's sales at the time.
With hindsight, then, it was no coincidence that the moral panic about white slavery coincided with the rise of the women's movement, and particularly with the militant campaign for women's suffrage. At a time when women were undoubtedly getting stronger, and becoming more assertive politically, it suited a range of interest groups, for very diverse reasons, to represent girls as frightened, as oppressed, or as victims.
2 | UNWOMANLY TYPES: NEW WOMEN, REVOLTING DAUGHTERS AND REBEL GIRLS
The British campaign for women's suffrage grew out of a new mood of self-assertion among women. This new mood was clearly evident in late Victorian society, and it was reflected in controversies over âthe woman question' and âthe new woman' in the 1890s. Part journalistic and fictional stereotype, part a reflection of social trends, the hallmark of the New Woman was that she rejected the mid-Victorian ideal of the Angel in the House. She would not be content with domesticity and self-sacrifice. She sought self-development instead.
This new era was heralded by the production of Henrik Ibsen's famous play
A Doll's House
, first performed in Britain in 1889.
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The play's heroine, Nora, is patronised and infantilised by her husband Torvald, who treats her as a plaything. Nora's realisation that without independence and self-respect she cannot be a good wife or mother leads her to walk out on her home and family. Into the waste basket went Ruskin's prescriptions for wifely submissiveness as Nora slammed the door of the doll's house behind her and strode into the world. Feminists were inspired. The more conventional in the audience were appalled.
The controversy over the New Woman was not just about marriage: much of it focused on education and girlhood. Middle-class daughters were seen to be getting restless, which generated a lively correspondence in the periodical literature of the time. In 1894, an article entitled âThe Revolt of the Daughters' by the majestically named Blanche Alethea Crackenthorpe contended
that there was a crisis in family relationships.
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Daughters hungered after education and travel, seeking wider horizons. But the wise mother, Mrs Crackenthorpe insisted, knew the importance of protecting her daughter's innocence and reputation, and hence her chances of marriage. The article provoked responses from like-minded mothers (such as the conservative literary hostess Lady Jeune)
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in addition to particularly spirited rebuttals from younger women and feminists, who were immediately dubbed the ârevolting daughters'. Alys Pearsall Smith (soon to become the first wife of philosopher Bertrand Russell) was hot in her defence of the daughters, who, she insisted, had a right to lives of their own. She thought that too many girls were forced to sacrifice themselves to household duty, frittering their lives away on trivialities. It was a form of mental starvation.
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Others agreed with her. The idea of caging girls up in conservatories, like hothouse plants or pet songbirds, was senseless, declared Gertrude Hemery, another rebel daughter. Confinement made girls vulnerable rather than protecting their âpurity', she argued.
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Another feminist, Sarah Amos, agreed but went further, emphasising the importance of social class. Whereas middle-class parents seemed obsessed by the need to protect their daughters' virtue by limiting their movements, most working-class girls went about independently by the age of fifteen or sixteen. A great deal of girls' ill-health or âdelicacy' was due to repression, she insisted. Boys, too, would be prone to âhysteria' if their lives were hedged in by so many constraints.
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There is a brisk tone about the writing of these ârevolting daughters'. Their arguments are robust and unapologetic. This in itself reflects the strength of the late Victorian woman's movement. About three decades earlier, a young â and desperate â Florence Nightingale had given vent to her feelings of frustration
and despair about the position of the middle-class daughter-at-home. She had similarly seen her life and the lives of girls in comparable circumstances as representing enforced passivity and intellectual starvation. Sacrificing girls on the altar of domestic duty was like crippling them, she had insisted. It was the mental equivalent of the Chinese practice of binding girls' feet.
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Florence Nightingale had been dissuaded from publishing her essay âCassandra' by contemporaries (largely male) who had found it too bitter and polemical. Her arguments had clearly anticipated those expressed by the revolting daughters of the 1890s. But the feminists of the 1890s sound altogether more confident. Florence Nightingale's essay reads like a howl of pain from an isolated individual. The tone of the revolting daughters conveys awareness that they are by no means alone in their views. The women's movement had given them the voice of confidence.
At the end of the 1920s, writing what was effectively the first general history of the Victorian women's movement (
The Cause
), Ray Strachey entitled the first chapter of her book âThe Prison House of Home'. She observed that âThe first stirrings of the feminist movement began through the awakening of individual women to their own uselessness.'
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According to Strachey, the growing realisation that many women shared similar views about the powerlessness of their social situation and what should be done about it brought âa freemasonry of understanding'. This was the base of a feminist movement, âthe Cause'. Much had been achieved in the second half of the nineteenth century. There had been significant progress in widening opportunities for both the education and the employment of women. Political agitation had centred on married women's property rights, child custody arrangements, the fight for a single standard of sexual morality, and of course demands for the vote.
Advances in education, in particular, fostered confidence in the girls and young women of the 1890s and 1900s. This increase in confidence marked them out as a new generation, enjoying opportunities which had not been there for their mothers. Around mid-century, provision for basic schooling had been patchy. Girls' secondary education had barely existed. Private establishments (ladies' academies) were mainly in the business of grooming girls for marriage. After the Education Act of 1870, most working-class girls received some kind of elementary education, however basic. In contrast, many middle-class girls stayed at home, where they devoted themselves to helping their mothers and to family duties. Well-off families would employ a governess, but it was comparatively rare to send girls away to school.
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The plight of those who failed to marry could be miserable. If the family was well off, unmarried daughters might spend long hours on the kind of pursuits derided by Florence Nightingale as pointless. These included every variety of fancywork such as crochet, beading and pokerwork (the scorching of designs on velvet). Seaweed and ferns could be pressed into albums. Flowers might be fashioned from wool, coloured wax or seashells. Seashells could be glued on to boxes. Bouquets fashioned from seashells could be arranged under glass domes,
ad infinitum
. Where money was lacking, and there was a limited budget for servants, daughters could take on domestic work, although too much of this would compromise the middle-class status of the family. The occurrence in a family of too many unmarried daughters, or a father's untimely death, could precipitate real crisis. Then, a spinster daughter might be farmed out to the household of other relatives, or have to face the terrifying fact that she would have to earn her own living. Here, very few options were available to middle-class girls, apart from governessing.
10
The often miserable fate of the down-at-heel governess was of course a standard theme of mid-Victorian literature.
The urge to widen the options available to girls who could not, or did not choose to marry was central to middle-class feminism. Improving education was crucial. One of the movement's most effective educational campaigners was Emily Davies.
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Uncompromising in principle, Davies was an intrepid opportunist in strategy, employing all manner of tactics and relentless pressure in pursuit of her goals. It was Emily Davies who made sure that a government inquiry into the state of middle-class education in 1864 inspected girls' schools, along with boys'. It was Emily Davies who saw the importance of girls taking the same public examinations as boys, in order to prove that their brains were up to it. And at a time when the very idea of a woman's college in the universities tended to be greeted âwith shouts', it was Emily Davies who successfully navigated the foundation of Girton College, Cambridge. This was the first residential college for women, beginning its life in a small house in the village of Hitchin in 1869. Emily Davies's skill in disarming opposition became legendary. For instance, she would counter any objection that brainy women were ugly and unwomanly by seating the prettiest girls on the front benches at examination times.
Emily Davies was one of the most persistent of those working to widen educational opportunities for girls, but the movement included many effective campaigners, both women and men. Between them they employed a wide range of strategies and approaches. Two of the earliest ventures designed to improve girls' education were Queen's College (1848) and Bedford College (1849), both in London. Queen's College came about through the initiative of Frederick Denison Maurice, an academic and Christian Socialist. Bedford's founder was a wealthy widow, Mrs Elizabeth
Reid, who was keen to ensure that her college, unlike Queen's (which was controlled by men) should be governed entirely by women. Two young women in particular, Frances Mary Buss and Dorothea Beale, both former students at Queen's, went on to distinguish themselves as headmistresses of new, academically achieving girls' schools, the North London Collegiate School, and Cheltenham Ladies' College respectively. These schools (and their headmistresses) were very different. Cheltenham was exclusive. Miss Beale, very class-conscious, welcomed applications from parents who were gentlefolk but drew the line at âdaughters of trade'. Miss Buss, on the other hand, was all in favour of widening access, especially for clever girls. The two schools became in effect templates for new kinds of institution.
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Education for middle-class girls began to lose its genteel domestic, drawing-room atmosphere. The newer girls' schools started to look more like the institutions we recognise as schools today. There were purpose-built classrooms and corridors; rulebooks, timetables, subjects and termly reports. In some cases there were even laboratories, sports fields and halls for gym. After 1872, founders of another new venture, the Girls' Public Day School Company (originally a limited liability company, later a trust) worked to establish a network of high schools for girls throughout Britain.
13
At the tertiary level, Josephine Butler and Anne Jemima Clough promoted university lectures for ladies in the North of England. Miss Clough, and the Cambridge academic Henry Sidgwick worked to establish Newnham College, Cambridge. Similar efforts in Oxford led to the foundation of Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall. An important milestone was passed in 1878, when the University of London became the first university in the UK to open its degrees to women. Others followed.
14
Women students
were often dubbed âundergraduettes' and housed in separate buildings and hostels. They were carefully superintended by Lady Tutors lest they should get too friendly with the men.
15
By the 1890s, intelligent middle-class girls had many more options than had been available in the 1840s and 1850s. If their parents were supportive (and willing and able to cough up around £16 per year â around £1,000 in today's terms), they might attend a good secondary school and even qualify for college or university. Opportunities for professional training were still limited, but teaching in an efficient secondary school was a much better prospect than becoming a governess in a private home. An ambitious girl could take inspiration from recent successes and role models. Feminists rejoiced, for instance, when Agnata Frances Ramsay from Girton College achieved an outstanding first in the classical tripos at Cambridge in 1887. None of the male candidates had achieved higher than the second class in that year. Even the satirical magazine
Punch
, normally quick to poke fun at feminism, was generous. It published a cartoon showing a woman being shown into a first-class railway carriage marked âLadies Only'.
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Three years later, Newnham College's Philippa Fawcett, daughter of the prominent suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, achieved a brilliant success in the mathematical tripos. Her score was considerably higher than that of the man who took the prize for being top (âsenior wrangler') that year. Women, however, were not eligible for the title. They were not even allowed to graduate in Cambridge until 1948. Nevertheless, successes of this kind helped to mark this restriction out as an injustice.
Girls who left home to spend time at college or university often recorded a sense of intoxication at their new-found freedom. There was the delight in arranging and decorating a room one
could call one's own.
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Letters home often brimmed with details about colour schemes, cushions, firescreens and potted plants. There was the pleasure of reading widely and having access to libraries and to other intelligent minds. There was time to exercise, to play team games or simply to explore the surrounding neighbourhood on foot or bicycle. Then there were cocoa parties, late at night, when girls could sit up talking about ideas, ideals and friendships. And there were the varied social and cultural activities associated with turn-of-the-century universities, literary and debating societies, and so forth. Before the First World War, many of these societies were single-sex, but outside the more traditional universities of Oxford and Cambridge there were more opportunities for female students to fraternise, daringly, with young men.
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Girls at college wrote enthusiastic letters home and reported on their new-found freedoms and privileges in articles which were published in school magazines. The word got around that even for the serious-minded, college could be fun.
