Girl Trouble (7 page)

The career of Sophie Bryant (née Willock) illustrates some of the new possibilities for women that were brought about by educational reform.
19
Bryant was born near Dublin in 1850. Her father, a mathematician, gave her lessons as a girl but she received no formal schooling. The family then moved to London, and at the age of sixteen Sophie won a scholarship to Bedford College. She married three years later, but her husband died soon afterwards: at twenty years old, she found herself a widow. In 1875 Sophie Bryant was appointed to teach mathematics by Frances Buss, headmistress of North London Collegiate School. She proved an inspirational and supportive teacher, encouraging a steady stream of pupils to go on to study mathematics at Girton. Bryant also worked for her own degree, and in 1881 was awarded a BSc from London University. In 1884 she distinguished
herself as the first woman to be awarded the university's DSc. Bryant succeeded Miss Buss as headmistress of North London Collegiate School in 1895. By then she was a well-known figure in educational circles, much respected and well-liked. One of the first women to take up cycling, she was also fond of rowing and climbing mountains. She was an ardent suffragist. In many ways Sophie Bryant was a perfect example of the New Woman.

An affectionate portrayal of the New Woman appears in George Bernard Shaw's play
Mrs Warren's Profession
(1894). Mrs Warren's daughter, Vivie, has studied at Girton: she is strong-minded, confident and self-possessed. She has a backslapping manner and a terrifyingly vigorous handshake. Shaw grounds his play in contemporary history. There are references to ‘Philippa Sumners' (Philippa Fawcett), and her distinction in being placed ‘ahead of the Senior Wrangler'. Vivie is shown as intellectually able and worldly to boot: she calculates whether the effort which must go into examination success is worth it from a monetary point of view. There is no sentimentality in her make-up. Eschewing personal relationships, she seeks her salvation in work. Literary and journalistic stereotypes of the New Woman tended to mock and to satirise as much as they reflected reality. ‘Girton Girls' were depicted as going bicycling in masculine tweeds or slouching in armchairs, sloshing whisky and brandishing latchkeys. Women writers bore some of the responsibility for this. ‘George Egerton' was the pseudonym of Mary Chavelita Dunne, whose short stories, particularly in a volume entitled
Keynotes
, became one of the literary sensations of the 1890s.
20
George Egerton's style owed much to her enthusiasm for Scandinavian writers: Ibsen, Strindberg and Knut Hamsun. Her stories set out to explore what she saw as the
terra incognita
of the female self, unadulterated by male imaginings. Her female characters are
‘good chaps', they use slangy expressions and are prone to broody silences, and to going fishing. The stories were an immediate hit in Britain and America. Their awkward modishness and lack of humour made them a gift to satirists.
Punch
responded with ‘She-Notes'
,
by ‘Borgia Smudgiton' (Owen Seaman), and cartoons and parodies multiplied.
21

In 1895 the minor novelist Grant Allen hit a cultural nerve with
The Woman Who Did.
22
The novel featured Herminia, the daughter of a clergyman, whose Cambridge education led to advanced ideas and a belief in ‘free love'. When her daughter failed to understand her, the miserable Herminia swallowed prussic acid and put an end to it all. Grant Allen declared himself a feminist, but many feminists were scornful and keen to distance themselves from both his ideas and his book. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, for instance, loftily declared that free love had nothing whatsoever to do with feminism.
23
Novels and plays and journalism about the New Woman fed on themselves, with a repertoire of well-rehearsed imagery and constant reference to each other – for example,
The Woman Who Did
,
The Woman Who Didn't
,
The Woman Who Wouldn't Do.
24
The historian exploring this literature can find herself in a hall of mirrors facing multiple distortions of reality. There were however some constants. The New Woman, even if not a Girton Girl, was likely to be highly educated and to have a mind – and a voice – of her own. For anti-feminists, this was part of the problem: in their view, womanliness required gentle submission. Vociferous critics of the New Woman genre saw its heroines as desexualised, victims of an overblown passion for learning. They condemned this literature as decadent, morbid and hysterical.
25

By the 1890s, the gains that women had made in education had unsettled many. There was growing unease about whether
education made girls unladylike. College photographs from the 1890s tend to show girls wearing stiff collars and ties over long tailored skirts. The fashion was manly and austere but practical. Few went so far as to espouse bloomers, or the bifurcated garments recommended for bicycling by advocates of Rational Dress.
26
Some college women were stylish and fashionable, taking great care over their appearance – sometimes deliberately to disarm criticism. In Newnham College, for instance, a young Mary Paley Marshall wore flowing Pre-Raphaelite gowns. In later life Mrs Marshall nostalgically recalled sitting dressmaking with classics scholar Jane Harrison. They were embroidering tennis dresses: Jane's decorated with pomegranates, Mary's with a design of Virginia creeper.
27
But women academics could also be deplorably dowdy. Student Winnie Seebohm wrote home from Newnham in the 1880s to complain about the appearance of her history tutor, Alice Gardner:

You
should
see Miss Gardner's get-up – droopy straw hat, Shetland shawl thrown on without any grace, and big heel-less felt slippers in which she shuffles along. Then she evidently uses no mirror for her toilet, for this morning she came down with the ends of her hair sticking straight out like a cow's tail – she drags it back tight, twists it, and sticks one hair pin through. The style of dress here is certainly
not
elegant.
28

Alice Gardner's disdain for fashionable clothing became legendary. Lecturing in Bristol during the First World War involved her in regular train journeys. On one occasion, she sat on a railway bench, took off her hat and nodded off. Passers-by, struck by her dowdy appearance, took pity on her and chucked their spare change into the hat.
29
Some women who went to college in this period reported a climate in which too much
attention to clothing and appearance was seen to indicate a lack of high-mindedness or serious purpose. But this could be misinterpreted. Both Emily Davies at Girton and Anne Jemima Clough, the first Principal of Newnham, laboured to persuade the girls in their charge to dress in a modest but feminine fashion, to stave off charges of pseudo-masculinity or eccentricity.
30

Allegations that higher education encouraged girls to dress and deport themselves like males led to controversy about what was meant by femininity. Was it feminine to be clever or ambitious? Those Victorians who judged womanliness to depend on self-sacrifice thought not. In 1890 a two-volume English translation of the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young girl who had been living in Paris, caused a sensation in literary London.
31
The beautiful and talented Bashkirtseff had died of consumption in 1884. When she died, she was only twenty-five years old. A gifted painter and writer, Marie Bashkirtseff had kept an intimate journal since her childhood. In this she had recorded every detail of her ambitions, fears and fluctuating emotions. These confessions enthralled readers across Europe. Those who cherished a view of girlhood as all sweetness and innocence were horrified. Photographs of Bashkirtseff show her looking demure and extremely pretty, but her views were strong-minded and staunchly feminist. She wrote of her ambition, above all, to avoid the domestic fate of the ordinary woman:

To marry and have children? Any washerwoman can do that … What do I want? I want GLORY.
32

The newspaper editor W. T. Stead, now widely seen as a champion of young girls' innocence and purity, was certainly unsettled.
33
Recognising Bashkirtseff's cleverness, he confessed that he found her writings ‘poisoned by egotism' and altogether
unwomanly. He claimed that in reading her journal, he was never quite sure whether she was posing, theatrically or melodramatically, or whether he was reading the ‘genuine outpourings of a girl's heart'. He judged her undisciplined, and blamed her parents for having ‘over-trained' and ‘overstrained' her, for having failed to teach her self-control. Stead judged that ‘Marie Bashkirtseff might have been a splendid woman if she had ever been broken in'.
34
George Bernard Shaw responded to Stead's review by taking up cudgels on behalf of Bashkirtseff, whom he saw as a kind of Ibsenite heroine.
35
Self-sacrificing women were always a drag, he insisted: Bashkirtseff was understandably rebelling against the phoney notion that womanliness depended on a capacity for self-obliteration.

Marie Bashkirtseff's writing raises basic questions about the nature of gender and femininity. ‘I have nothing of the woman about me but the envelope,' she asserted, ‘and that envelope is deucedly feminine. As for the rest, that's quite another affair.'
36
Was femininity merely a question of dressing up, then, nothing more than a performance?
37

To castigate clever young women as self-deluded egotists was common enough. But late Victorian anxiety about the ‘unsexing' effects of higher education extended further, into pseudo-science. From the 1870s onwards, doctors and evolutionary thinkers started to raise the possibility that higher education was damaging to women's bodies. One of the earliest to think along these lines was the sociologist Herbert Spencer, who suggested that high-pressure education might enfeeble women and render them unattractive to men.
38
In America, in 1875, Dr Edward Clarke fired a notorious broadside with the publication of
Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for
Girls
. In this he complained that higher education was destroying girls. It was directly responsible for a
whole catalogue of horrors, such as ‘leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, neuralgia and the like …'
39
He himself, he claimed, had seen many instances of girls who were excellent scholars but who turned into pallid, hysterical women. They were tic-ridden invalids begging for opium, chloral and bromides. Sometimes their brains rotted and as adult women they were frequently sterile. Schools encouraging women to perform intellectually were encouraging girls in ‘slow suicide' and threatening the continuation of the race.

Foremost in Clarke's defence in the UK was the psychologist Dr Henry Maudsley, of University College London, who aired his views in the journal
Fortnightly Review.
40
Feminists were deluding themselves because ‘They cannot choose but to be women; cannot rebel successfully against the tyranny of their organisation,' Maudsley asserted somewhat opaquely.
41
Like Clarke, Maudsley kept referring to ‘the woman's apparatus', meaning her reproductive system. Girls had to rest during adolescence in order to let their ‘reproductive apparatus' get started. If they insisted on study, their energies were diverted, and these bits might atrophy. Being female wasn't just a matter of dress, Maudsley pontificated, although some intellectual women with ‘wasted organs' might try to disguise this with ‘dressmakers' aids'.
42
This was a rather sinister insinuation. He probably meant padded bosoms.

In England several doctors fell over themselves to agree with Clarke and Maudsley. The President of the British Medical Association Dr Withers-Moore was one of them.
43
A number were specialists in gynaecology and obstetrics, such as John Thorburn, Professor of Obstetrics in Manchester, and Robert Lawson Tait, sometime president of the British Gynaecological Society. Both elaborated on Clarke's views and asserted that higher-educated
women were a danger to themselves and to the race. Others, such as the Edinburgh psychiatrist T. S. Clouston, wholeheartedly agreed.
44
A great deal of scaremongering followed. Thorburn, for instance, occupied the Chair of Obstetrics in Manchester just as women were being admitted as students. When one of the first female students to register, Annie Eastwood, died tragically of tuberculosis before completing her studies, Thorburn contended publicly that her death was caused by over-education.
45

The battle for women's medical education had been particularly hard-fought, but some gains were evident by the 1870s. The London School of Medicine for Women was founded in 1874, and after 1877, female medical students could complete their clinical training in London at the Royal Free Hospital.
46
Male doctors in Victorian times were insecure socially and professionally and there is no doubt that some felt threatened by women's determination to practise medicine. Obstetricians and gynaecologists might well have feared losing women patients who would feel easier with a female doctor. The idea that women were biologically unfit for study appealed to such men.

Women educators were forced to defend themselves. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman doctor to qualify in Britain. She became a member of the British Medical Association in 1873. A vote to exclude any further women members ensured that she remained the only woman on the register for the following nineteen years.
47
But Elizabeth's lonely position conveyed a certain status and strategic advantage. She was able to contest Maudsley's opinions in public, for instance. Urged by her friends Emily Davies and Frances Buss, she replied to his article in the
Fortnightly Review
with brisk common sense.
48
Morbidity and hysteria were less common in educated girls than in those bored to death by a lack of meaningful occupation, she
suggested. It was interesting that doctors emphasised the fragility of the middle-class girl, showing little concern for her working-class equivalents in domestic service. Girls were not necessarily enfeebled by menstruation, Garrett Anderson insisted. In any case, the burden of their intellectual work in higher education would become a lot lighter if men would stop opposing women every inch of the way.