Women in Public, 1850-1900

Documents of the Victorian Women's Movement

Patricia Hollis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136247897
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Assembling a full and comprehensive collection of material which illustrates all aspects of the emergent women's movement during the years 1850-1900, this fascinating book will prove invaluable to students of nineteenth century social history and women's studies, to those studying the Victorian novel and to sociologists.

Women's pamphlets and speeches, parliamentary debates and popular journalism, letters and memoirs, royal commissions and the leading reviews, are all used to document the conflicting images of women: 'surplus women' and the issue of emigration; women's work and male hostility to it; the opening of education by Emily Davies; the claim to equity at law; the attack on the sexual double standard, led by Josephine Butler; women's public service from philanthropy – exemplified in a Mary Carpenter or Louisa Twining or Octavia Hill – to local government; and finally women's entry into politics led by Lydia Becker.

The contents range from Caroline Norton on her battle for child custody in the 1830s to Annie Besant's inspiration of the match-girl's strike in 1888, and from W. T. Stead on child prostitution to Mrs Humphrey War's Appeal against female suffrage in 1889.

The book was originally published in 1979.

Part One
Images of Women

Introduction

Behind parliamentary debates on law reform as it affected women; behind pamphlets opposing women’s suffrage; behind the articles which doubted whether girls’ health could stand the strain of higher education, lay an image or stereotype of Victorian womanhood, which deemed that ‘women in public’ were unwomanly (1.1.1). Most of the women who became publicly prominent were self-consciously ladylike, as an aid to disarm the opposition (1.1.2). Mary Carpenter, while careless about her clothes, and while bombarding ministers with memoranda, would refuse to chair a meeting and in her early days even to speak at one, as it was not respectable. Many an early public suffrage meeting concluded with resolutions congratulating the ‘lady speakers’ on their ‘heroism’ in mounting the platform. In part it was to give her students some privacy that Emily Davies was reluctant to build her college at Cambridge. Though it was an image which most constricted middle-class women (see below, W. R. Greg, 3.1.2), trade union organisers at the end of the century explained their failure to recruit women by describing the orthodox teaching for women as ‘submission’ whereas trade unionism ‘means rebellion’ (see below, 3.13.6).

At its simplest, the stereotype drew on three main bodies of ideas. The first was religious in orientation. Woman had been made from and was therefore dependent on man, and she should glory in her God-given weakness (1.2.1). Thoughtful women replied, as had Mary Wollstonecraft in 1792, that women like men had immortal souls and mortal reason, the responsibility for which could not be off-loaded even on to a husband’s shoulders (1.2.2). More practically, women like Harriet Martineau pointed out that there were too many ‘surplus’ women for all to be protected by and dependent on men (see below, Part 2); women must become self-dependent, in an economic as well as in a moral sense. The Saturday Review dismissed their arguments (1.2.3). Marriage was a woman’s business, and if a woman failed to marry, she had simply failed in business. An exception might be made of female servants, however, since like wives they ministered to men (1.2.4). Mrs Grey and her sister Emily Shirreff, later to found the Girls’ Public Day School Trust (see below, 4.5), pointed out that the lot of the single woman, bleak though it was, did not lack advantages compared with the continuous self-abnegation required of married women (1.2.5); and their Thoughts on Self-Culture mapped out a mental and moral education for women forced to be self-sufficient. Later writers like Clara Collett, Assistant Commissioner in 1893, emphasised the contribution that could be made by active socially aware single women (see below, 3.12). Engels was only summarising a view held by many women when he stated that marriage was for many women legalised prostitution (1.2.6) and the married state economic bondage.

A second source of the stereotype was socio-political. Society was a community of families and each family, in W. Cooke Taylor’s phrase, was ‘a sovereign commonwealth’. At the heart of the family, and therefore of social stability, was the patriarchal principal: any challenge to the husband’s rights, over his wife or his children, was represented as undermining all that was stable in the social order (see below, 9.2.5). And central to the family was its division of labour, the separate spheres of world and home. Mrs Ellis produced a series of best-selling moral etiquette books (1.3.1) which asserted that where man was an individual, woman was one of a social circle, whose life belonged to others and not to herself; and whose greater sensitivity, selflessness and religious sense made her the moral arbiter of her society, guardian of its moral health. Ruskin’s well-known romantic description of the home (1.3.2) pushed the separate spheres metaphor to absurdity, judged Emily Davies (1.3.3), for ‘men have no monopoly of working, nor women of weeping’. John Stuart Mill, and Mrs Catherine Booth (co-founder of the Salvation Army) denied that women’s ‘traditional’ characteristics of passivity rather than activity, feeling rather than thinking, being rather than doing, were innate, but were rather the artificial products of the economic and social educational arrangements of a society still appealing to feudal concepts of physical force (1.3.4). Mrs Lynn Linton defended the ‘womanly woman’ against the ‘shrieking sisterhood’ who claimed self-determination (1.3.5), and Beatrice Webb noted the prevalence of such views even among ‘chaffing’ colleagues (1.3.6).

Perhaps the most insidious (and third) source of the stereotype came from the new ‘science’, that woman’s biology was her destiny (1.4). Darwinian arguments were used to show that the greatest differentiation of male and female roles was to be found in the most advanced societies and therefore represented ‘progress’. Doctors were enrolled to show the baneful effect that emancipation in general and higher education in particular had on women’s menstrual rhythms and therefore on the health of the race as a whole (1.4.2). The novelist Grant Allen judged that the very existence of the race was being threatened by an obsessive attention to the claims of barren spinsters (1.4.3).

It was the unreality of the stereotype, given the number of women forced to be self-dependent, as well as its constrictiveness, that feminists deplored. But a more common note was struck by Mrs Josephine Butler in 1869: ‘We need the extension beyond our homes of the home influence.’ Just because women had distinctive traits and alternative perceptions to offer, they should enter public life. And, as the century progressed, just because government increasingly trespassed on the domestic dimension of health and education, housing and the relief of poverty, so women found their philanthropy politicised and themselves ‘in public’.

Suggestions for further reading:

M. Vicinus (ed.), Suffer and Be Still, 1973; The Widening Sphere, 1977; K. Thomas, ‘The double standard’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 1959; P. Cominas, ‘Late Victorian respectability and the social system’, International Review of Social History, 1963; L. Davidoff, Best Circles, 1973.

1.1 Respectability and Public Life

1.1.1 Impropriety of public life

It is averred that ‘public life’ is injurious to women; they are meant for the domestic … What is meant by it? Is there any woman living who does not go more or less into public … The work of a medical practitioner is scarcely more public than that of a district visitor … the business of a chemist and druggist is no more public than a confectioner … Fathers who would shake their heads at the idea of taking their daughters into their own counting-houses, allow them to stand behind a stall at a bazaar, or to lead off at a charity ball—far more public scenes, and, where indeed, publicity is essential to success.

Emily Davies, Letters to a Daily Paper, Newcastle, 1860

1.1.2 The Image of a Lady

Many people in the University disapproved strongly of the presence of women students in Cambridge, and probably most people looked upon them with some suspicion. If any inconvenience followed from their being there, or if any individual deviated in the slightest degree from the ordinary standards of society, it would be considered as a complete justification of this attitude … Miss Clough was keenly alive to these things … education should be kept quite apart from other questions and causes, and she meant to show that a desire for education, and even the possession of it, did not involve any departure from recognised customs and conventions …

I remember someone had been complaining that Newnham students went along the streets buttoning their gloves. The Principal gave us a sympathetic address on the subject. ‘I know, my dears, that you have a great deal to do, and have not much time; but I don’t like people to say such things about you, and so, my dears, I hope you’ll get some gloves that don’t want buttoning.’

B. A. Clough, Memoir of Anne Jemima Clough, 1897, pp. 195,240

Experience is modifying my notions about the most suitable style of dress for me to wear at the hospital. I feel confident now that one is helped rather than hindered by being as much like a lady as lies in one’s power. When my student life begins, I shall try to get very serviceable, rich, whole coloured dresses that will do without trimmings and not require renewing often.

Elizabeth Garrett to Emily Davies, 5 September 1860,
quoted in Barbara Stephen,
Emily Davies and Girton College, 1927, p. 59

It was evident that the audiences came expecting to see curious masculine objects walking on to the platform, and when we appeared, with our quiet black dresses, the whole expression of the faces of the audience would instantly change. I shall never forget the thrill which passed through us when, on one occasion, a Nonconformist minister assured the audience in his speech from the chair, that we were ‘quite respectable’—meaning to convey that we were people with some position, and not merely seeking notoriety or earning money by our speaking.

Lilias Ashworth on her West of England speaking tour
for the suffrage, 1872, quoted in Helen Blackburn,
Women’s Suffrage, 1902, pp. 110-11

1.2 Dependence and self-dependence

1.2.1 The strength of weakness

But let it be granted, for argument’s sake, that it is substantial power, and no mere shadow of additional influence, which a woman would gain by such a change [the franchise]; and we then ask, will the consequent result be an improvement in their position? We decidedly think that it would not. In all modern civilized communities, and especially in the most refined and cultivated portion of those communities, women are treated by men with peculiar deference, tenderness, and courtesy. Do they owe this treatment to their strength or to their weakness? Undoubtedly to the latter. The deference, the tenderness, the courtesy of man towards the other sex, are founded principally on the feeling that they need his protection, and can never question his power. But let women be made ostensibly powerful; let a sense of competition be introduced; let man be made to feel that he must stand on the defensive—and the spirit of chivalry, so eloquently described by Burke, will speedily cease; and it will be useless to expect a continuance of that feeling, to which women can now appeal with confidence, and which lends the most essential charms to the ordinary intercourse of civilized society. Women, as a class, cannot enjoy, at the same time, the immunities of weakness and the advantages of power.

T. H. Lister, ‘Rights and conditions of women’,
Edinburgh Review, vol. 73, 1841

Woman’s strength lies in her essential weakness. She is at this hour what ‘in the beginning’ the great Creator designed her to be—namely Man’s help; not his rival but his help. Sheltered throughout her earlier years from all polluting influences: accustomed from the first to ministrations of domestic kindness and the sweet charities of home: removed from the stifling atmosphere in which perforce the battle of life has to be fought out by the rougher sex—she is, what she was intended to be, the one great solace of Man’s life, his chiefest earthly joy.

J. Burgon, Sermon, 1884

1.2.2 The indignity of dependence

Woman is taught to believe, that for one half of the human race, the highest end of civilization is to cling upon the other, like a weed upon a wall.

Mrs Hugo Reid, A Plea for Women, 1843, p. 200

Our duty in this world is to try and make it what God intends it shall become: we are his tools … To do God’s work in the world is the duty of all, rich and poor, of all nations, of both sexes … Women must, as children of God, be trained to do some work in the world. Women may not take a man as a God: they must not hold their first duty to be towards any human being …

Fathers have no right to cast the burden of the support of their daughters on other men. It lowers the dignity of women; and tends to prostitution, whether legal or in the streets. As long as fathers regard the sex of a child as a reason why it should not be taught to gain its own bread, so long must women be degraded. Adult women must not be supported by men, if they are to stand as dignified, rational beings before God … Women must have work if they are to form equal unions.

Barbara Leigh Smith, Women and Work, 1856, pp. 6, 11

From that time [the emergence of a middle class] to this, the need and the supply of female industry have gone on increasing, and latterly at an unparalled rate, while 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 …

A social organization framed for a community of which half stayed at home, while the other half went out to work, cannot answer the purposes of a society, of which a quarter remain at home, while three-quarters go out to work.

Harriet Martineau,
‘Female industry’, Edinburgh Review, vol. 109, 1859

From babyhood women are given to understand that helplessness is feminine and beautiful … We women are, no less than men, each of us a distinct existence … accountable only, in the highest sense to our own souls, and the Maker of them. Is it natural, is it right, even, that we should be expected—and be ready enough too, for it is the easiest way—to hang our consciences, duties, actions, opinions, upon some one else—some individual, or some aggregate of individuals yclept Society?

… We must help ourselves by self-dependence … Marriage ought always to be a question not of necessity, but of choice.

Mrs Craik, Women’s Thoughts about Women, 1862, pp. 25-6

That women spend the best part of their lives in preparing for an event which may never happen—an event for which the very worst preparation is to hanker after it, while the very best is to be strenuously occupied with something different, is the result, not of God’s decision that one form of life should be happier than another, but of man’s invention that it should be deemed more womanly.

Julia Wedgwood, ‘Female suffrage’,
in Josephine Butler (ed.),
Woman’s Work and Woman’s Culture, 1869

What dignity can there be in the attitude of women in general, and towards men in particular, when marriage is held (and often necessarily so, being the sole means of maintenace) to be the one end of a woman’s life, when it is degraded to the level of a feminine profession, when those who are soliciting a place in this profession resemble those flaccid Brazilian creepers which cannot exist without support, and which sprawl out their limp tendrils in every direction to find something—no matter what—to hang upon; when the insipidity or the material necessities of so many women’s lives make them ready to accept almost any man who may offer himself? There has been a pretence of admiring this pretty helplessness of women. But let me explain that I am not deprecating the condition of dependence in which God has placed every human being, man or woman,—the sweet interchange of services, the give and take of true affection, the mutual support and aid of friends or lovers, who have each something to give and to receive. That is a wholly different thing from the abject dependence of one entire class of persons on another and a stronger class. In the present case such a dependence is liable to peculiar dangers by its complication with sexual emotions and motives, and with relations which ought, in an advanced and Christian community, to rest upon a free and deliberate choice,—a decision of the judgment and of the heart, and into which the admission of a necessity, moral or material, introduces a degrading element.

I cannot believe that it is every woman’s duty to marry, in this age of the world. There is abundance of work to be done which needs men and women detached from domestic ties; our unmarried women will be the greatest blessing to the community when they cease to be soured by disappointment or driven by destitution to despair …

Josephine Butler, Introduction, loc. cit.

1.2.3 Marriage, a woman’s profession

We say that the greatest of social and political duties is to encourag marriage. The interest of a State is to get as many of its citizen married as possible. The equality of the sexes demonstrates this to be law of nature. And we add that man, in European communities, ha deliberately adopted the view that, as much as possible, women should be relieved from the necessity of self-support. The measure of civilization is the maximum at which this end is attained in any give community or nation. Women labourers are a proof of a barbarou and imperfect civilization. We should be retrograding in the art and science of civilization were more women encouraged to be self-supporters. And the reason of this is plain enough. Wherever women are self-supporters, marriage is, ipso facto, discouraged. The factory population is proof of this. In the manufacturing districts women make worse wives and worse helpmates than where they are altogether depe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• PART 1 IMAGES OF WOMEN
• PART 2 SURPLUS WOMEN AND EMIGRATION
• PART 3 WOMEN AT WORK
• PART 4 EDUCATION
• PART 5 BIRTH CONTROL
• PART 6 LAW
• PART 7 THE SOCIAL EVIL
• PART 8 PUBLIC SERVICE
• PART 9 POLITICS
• PART 10 TWO MOVEMENTS, ONE CLASS