Copyright

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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright © Cathy Newman 2018

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Cathy Newman asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780008241674

Ebook Edition © October 2018 ISBN: 9780008241698

Version: 2020-09-01

Dedication

To John and our two bloody brilliant little women

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

1 Introduction: Education, Education, Education

2 Old Battles, New Women: 1880–1914

3 Of Soldiers and Suffrage: 1914–18

4 Between the Wars: 1918–39

5 Daughters of Britain: 1939–45

6 Remake, Remodel: 1945–61

7 It’s a Man’s World: 1961–81

8 What You Really, Really Want: 1981–2017

Acknowledgements

Selected Bibliography

Notes

Picture Section

Index

About the Author

About the Publisher

1

Introduction

Education, Education, Education

This is definitely one to file under You Wouldn’t Get Away with It Nowadays, but when I was at school studying for my History A Level, our teacher used to take select groups of pupils to visit the bomb shelter from the Second World War at the bottom of his garden. I think he’d just watched Dead Poets Society, which had recently come out, and decided to portray himself as an inspirational eccentric.

I was never invited; but I like to imagine the group sitting on the damp earth beneath the corrugated tin roof as Mr Dead Poet read to them in faltering torchlight, breaking off every so often to quote Churchill. Perhaps even my favourite Churchillism: ‘My education was interrupted only by my schooling.’

That’s how I feel about school too. The vagaries of the curriculum in the late 1980s meant I studied the Anglo-Saxons about three times. For years I knew all about the Venerable Bede but almost nothing about anything that happened after 1066.

To this day, I remain embarrassed by the holes in my knowledge. Throughout my adult life I’ve bought – though admittedly not read – every history book I can lay my hands on. ‘History of Britain’-type books promising a broad overview are my particular pleasure.

Recently, when I was fifty or so pages into one of these great tomes, I had a bit of a eureka moment. I noticed that, apart from Mrs Thatcher and Queen Elizabeth II, who are in a category of their own, not a single woman had so far been mentioned.* I read on, increasingly incredulous, until finally one appeared: Agatha Christie, in the context of something about her influence on the ‘national imagination’.

Perhaps I’m being unfair. A book like the one I was reading, whose opening chapters dealt with war and its management by male politicians, was always going to be light on women. Still, many accounts of modern British history are patchy when it comes to gender, celebrating the achievements of, say, the suffragettes in a burst of fluorescent righteousness, only to pack women away again in a cupboard marked ‘Lowly, Ancillary Roles; Housewives, etc.’ until the 1960s. At which point they are allowed out to be totems of the sexual revolution, burn their bras and go on strike at Dagenham’s Ford plant.

The truth had to be more nuanced. And the deeper I delved into the history of twentieth-century Britain, the more it appeared that the shape and extent of female influence was far greater than generally acknowledged. I’m not just talking about the arts or education, where talented women have long been celebrated, but in traditionally ‘male’ fields like medicine, politics, law, engineering and the military. Were it not for women, those significant features of modern Britain such as council housing, hospices and the humane laws relating to property ownership, child custody and divorce might not exist in the same form.

The more I read about these women pioneers, the more frustrated I became that so many are so little known outside academic literature. Not only did these women achieve remarkable things, but they usually had to battle hostility and discrimination as they did so. This book is my attempt to bring these women and their accomplishments to a wider audience; to tell their story – and ours.

One of its working titles was The Class of 1918, because that is how I thought of these women while I was writing: 1918 being, if not exactly a feminist Year Zero, then the year when the ball started rolling in the direction of equality. It was the year when the Representation of the People Act allowed women to vote if they were over the age of 30 and met a ‘property qualification’. At the same time, the Parliament (Qualification of Women) Act in 1918 gave women over twenty-one the right to stand for election as MPs. Which was momentous, although it did mean that between 1918 and 1928 some women were in the odd position of being able to stand for Parliament but unable to vote: Jennie Lee was twenty-three when she stood as the North Lanark Labour candidate in the 1929 by-election, just before the rules were changed.

The Class of 1918 are those women who either prepared the ground for or immediately benefited from the burst of empowerment which followed getting the vote. For Western women, 1918 is the start of the modern era. Just as historians use the term ‘the long twelfth century’ as shorthand for the period between 1050 and 1250 – a way of rationalising the massive changes that occurred in those two hundred years – so you can argue that, for women, the twentieth century started later than it did for everyone else and hasn’t yet ended. Not until 1928 was the voting franchise in Great Britain and Northern Ireland extended to all women over the age of twenty-one, finally giving them the vote on the same terms as men.

To make sense of the modern era, you need to understand the years which immediately preceded it. So my history includes women who predate even first-wave feminism – the activist Ada Nield Chew, for example, and Octavia Hill, whose National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty arose out of her campaigning for better quality housing for the poor.

-------------------------------------

That women have the same rights and opportunities as men is practically a given for my two young daughters. They watch Channel 4 News, see me interviewing what must seem like an endless procession of female politicians, bankers, lobbyists, CEOs, etc. The fact that a little over a hundred years ago most British women couldn’t even vote is scarcely credible to them. They have only the vaguest notion of what today’s modern, successful women have inherited from their forebears; of what they need to be thankful for; of how painfully slow the process of being taken seriously has been and, indeed, continues to be.

This is where the idea of ‘women’s history’ comes in. Do we still need such a thing? We certainly did – the first 1885 edition of the prestigious Dictionary of National Biography found room for only 3 per cent of women in its sixty-two volumes – and I would argue we still do.

Of course, the danger of gathering together the experiences of so many different women (black, white and Asian; straight or LGBTQ+) is that the specificity of those experiences to those particular women gets overlooked. They may have trodden similar paths and faced similar pitfalls. But oppression comes in many shapes and sizes.

Even primary-school children now learn that the kind of discrimination Florence Nightingale had to overcome as a wealthy, upper-middle-class, well-connected English woman was very different to that experienced by her fellow nurse Mary Seacole as a mixed-race woman (a ‘mulatto’, in the language of the day) who identified as both Scottish and Jamaican. I have done my best in what follows to bear this in mind.

This is not a textbook. I have tried to write about these remarkable women in an accessible and entertaining way. At its heart, though, are two basic questions: what were the sources of female power in the twentieth century? And what have women used this power to achieve?

The answers are complex because female power is complex. Even if we accept that, for much of human history, women have conducted their lives in a patriarchal bubble – subordinate in law, custom and religion to the men around them; not even wanting equality with men, so ridiculous did the idea seem – it doesn’t mean they lacked purpose and agency. And it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t celebrate their achievements.

As modern women, we are instinctively drawn to a certain species of trailblazer – the women it’s easy and satisfying to claim as proto-feminists. But not all of them would be pleased to wear the T-shirt.

Take the eighteenth-century writer and philanthropist Hannah More for starters. It was fine, she thought, to teach poor women to read so that they could understand the Bible; but she was shocked by women she had heard about in France who ‘run to study philosophy, and neglect their families to be present at lectures in anatomy’, and she loathed the sort of education reforms proposed by Mary Wollstonecraft: ‘How many ways there are of being ridiculous!’

When the explorer Mary Kingsley returned from the second of her expeditions to West Africa in October 1895, she distanced herself from the New Women then being discussed in newspapers, arguing that women’s suffrage was ‘a minor question; while there was a most vital section of men disenfranchised women could wait.’ The polymathic explorer Gertrude Bell – one of the cleverest, most remarkable British women of the early twentieth century – couldn’t understand why women wanted the vote. Believing the whole business to be a silly distraction from the grand imperial project to which she was committed, she became first secretary of the Women’s National Anti-Suffrage League.

Another modern feminist reflex – and I must plead guilty here – is to scoff at traditional ‘homemaker’ roles. It’s one thing to believe, as I do, that too many women remained trapped in them for too long, their intellectual freedom of movement curbed; but it’s quite another to claim that they have no value. The opposite is the case: it was domestic power that many of the women featured in this book harnessed.

High-born historical heroines wouldn’t have been doing the dishes, yet frequently their lot was to be also-rans: nearly-queens such as Matilda, daughter of Henry I, who just missed out on the throne in 1153; or queens who stood in for absent monarchs such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, who governed England while her son Richard the Lionheart was off fighting the crusades. In her brilliant book about these pre-Tudor queens, She-Wolves (2010), the historian Helen Castor notes that their power was perceived as ‘a perversion of “good” womanhood, a distillation of all that was most to be feared in the unstable depths of female nature’.1 It was a view promoted most famously by the Scottish reformer John Knox in his polemic of 1558, The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women: ‘For nature hath in all beasts printed a certain mark of domination in the male and a certain subjection in the female which they keep inviolate.’

Gems like this kept me entertained as I was writing. But how, I wondered in my ignorance, did Knox feel justified in writing this stuff in the sixteenth century when in many ways women had been bossing it for hundreds of years before that?

‘The history of England,’ wrote the historian and politician Macaulay, ‘is emphatically the history of progress.’ Not for women, it isn’t. In key respects, they were better off in 800 than they were in 1800. I didn’t notice this sufficiently when I was eighteen and studying history. (I barely noticed anything when I was eighteen. I was too busy bemoaning my curly hair and bottle-top glasses.) Now, in my forties, I found myself wondering what had gone wrong since Anglo-Saxon times, when women were accorded considerable respect.

Surviving evidence, some of which I’ll outline below, led the historian Doris Stenton to conclude that Anglo-Saxon women were ‘more nearly the equals of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age’.2 At this point the fake-news klaxon sounds in the back of my head. Some historians3 dispute Stenton’s ‘Golden Age’ thesis, so I should note that we have little concrete information about how women actually lived. Anglo-Saxon culture was mostly oral, so what we know comes from clerical and legal records and, least reliably of all, heroic poems.

Still, language tells its own story, and it’s significant that the Old English word mann can also be used of women. A charter from 969 that relates to a grant of land near Worcester concludes: ‘Aelfweard was the first man, and now it is in the hands of his daughter and she is the second man.’ As we in the twenty-first century tussle over gender-neutral toilets, our Anglo-Saxon ancestors might have wondered what on earth all the fuss was about.

Anglo-Saxon marriage, too, sounds almost progressive, especially compared to the bond of misery endured by many Victorian women. A husband had to pay his prospective wife a morgengifu or ‘morning-gift’, often a considerable amount of money or land, over which she had total control. Finances were the joint responsibility of husband and wife. According to the laws of Aethelbert, a woman could walk out on a marriage if she was unhappy, and if she took her children with her then she was entitled to half the marital home. How very equitable.

‘Cunning women’ had considerable power in Anglo-Saxon communities, practising folk magic, using their powers to heal, hex and hunt down stolen goods. Pendants, crystal balls, shells and other amulets thought to have magical properties have been found in the graves of female Anglo-Saxons. And although we might bridle when we read, in the tenth-century anthology of Anglo-Saxon poems and other literature known as the Exeter Book, that ‘the place of a woman is at her embroidery’, cloth-making and embroidery were in fact high-prestige occupations. In the households of large-estate owners, many of whom were women, the mistress of the house and her daughters would have worked making adorned gifts or, after the arrival of Christianity, church vestments. More mundane soft furnishings such as wall-hangings, table linen and bed clothes were handed down as heirlooms, and more commonly mentioned in the wills of women than men, suggesting they were thought of as female property.

The needle was by no means the only tool in women’s armoury. Female warriors wielded more traditionally masculine weapons to great effect. We know that a strong tradition of female warriors existed in pre-Anglo-Saxon Britain from Tacitus’ account of the Iceni queen Boudica’s rebellion against the Romans. He puts into her mouth a rousing speech in which she assures her troops that it is ‘customary … with Britons to fight under female captaincy’. Boudica rides in a chariot with her daughters in front of her and fights not as a queen but as a ‘woman of the people’ to avenge ‘her liberty lost, her body tortured by the lash, the tarnished honour of her daughters’.

High-born Anglo-Saxon women, too, could be every bit as blood-thirsty as the men. Queen Cynethryth, wife of Offa of Mercia, is a Lady Macbeth figure who not only had coins struck in her name, but is supposed to have encouraged Offa to kill Aethelberht II of East Anglia. Aethelflaed, daughter of King Alfred (of cakes infamy) assumed power after her husband Aethelred, Lord of the Mercians, died in 911. A formidable warrior who ‘protected her own men and terrified aliens’ (according to William of Malmesbury), she ruled for the next seven years, implementing an ambitious programme of fortification and fending off attacks from marauding Vikings and Danes.

The arrival of Christianity in the British Isles is usually dated to 597, the year Augustine became the first Archbishop of Canterbury and baptised the first Christian Anglo-Saxon king, Aethelberht of Kent. Many of the monasteries that subsequently dotted the landscape were ‘double monasteries’ where an abbess ruled over both monks and nuns, who lived in separate buildings.

Thanks to good old Eve, notions of female inferiority are hardwired into Christianity. Nevertheless, women emerge in this period as effective religious leaders, not least because of their apparent gifts for diplomacy and realpolitik. Medieval historian Henrietta Leyser thinks women adapted to Christianity more easily than men because they were better at reconciling new demands with old codes: ‘[Women] take up its challenges with alacrity and with evident success. They become saints apace, exercising power in life and in death: in life in positions of influence as abbesses, in death through miracles worked at their shrines.’4

Most of what we know about these abbesses comes to us via my old friend from the history class, the Northumbrian monk Bede, aka ‘the godfather of history’. His favourite seems to have been Hilda of Whitby, who founded Whitby Abbey and was famously wise: according to Bede, ‘not only ordinary people but also kings and princes sometimes sought and received her counsel when in difficulties.’ One of her most celebrated feats was her discovery and encouragement of the cowherd-poet Caedmon, composer of one of the earliest known vernacular poems, ‘Caedmon’s Hymn’.

These ‘brides of Christ’ could be flamboyant, glamorous figures, their celebrity an important source of local pride. St Edith, abbess of Wilton Abbey in Wiltshire, was famous for dressing in ornate, golden clothes (albeit with a hair shirt worn underneath). William of Malmesbury tells how, when she was ticked off for this by Aethelwold of Winchester, she retorted that this opulence didn’t matter because God could see through superficial trappings to the soul beneath: ‘For pride may exist under the garb of wretchedness; and a mind may be as pure under these vestments as under your tattered furs.’

After 1066, many (though not all) historians agree, a lot of that girl power withered on the vine, in the church and beyond. Freedoms taken for granted in Anglo-Saxon society were undermined by new canon (religious) law and the Normans’ insistence on making land ownership a condition of military service to a lord. From 1066, the number of female land-owners drops. Women can no longer make wills. Husbands are permitted to beat their wives. Primogeniture transforms inheritance law so that first-born sons are valued over daughters. If a woman kills her husband, it’s classed as treason and punished accordingly by burning at the stake.

The idea that women are second-class citizens, physically and mentally inferior to men, becomes a commonplace as medieval Catholic theology sets up new and troubling archetypes that remain with us – on the one hand, Eve; on the other, the Virgin Mary.

Consider the Bayeux Tapestry, the 230-foot long piece of embroidered cloth thought to have been commissioned by William the Conqueror’s brother. As all schoolchildren know, it tells the story of the Norman conquest, culminating in the Battle of Hastings. Although it was made by English women – women whose needlework skills were so famous throughout Europe that their work had a special name, Opus Anglicanum (‘English work’) – it depicts only three women: Queen Edith of Wessex, wife of Edward the Confessor and sister of the slain Harold; a mysterious figure called Aelfgyva, whose presence seems to be a reference to some unknowable contemporary sex scandal; and finally, an anonymous war refugee fleeing with her child from a burning building. Notice the way these women fall neatly into three categories: inheritors of and revellers in wealth and status; sources of gossip and intrigue; and helpless victims. Is the Bayeux Tapestry a precursor of the Daily Mail Online’s notorious ‘sidebar of shame’?

Still, our medieval sisters struggled on. They oversaw births and deaths as midwives and layers-out of bodies. Some ran businesses from their houses. If they were married they could and often did declare themselves unmarried in order to escape the common-law disadvantages of being wives. (Their husbands were happy to be complicit in this as it absolved them of liability for any debts.) This was known as trading feme sole and gave women a bit of economic independence, especially in areas like the silk trade; in trades less female-dominated they probably fared worse.

Alice Chester carried on her husband’s business after his death in 1473. She used her own ships to trade in cloth, wine and other commodities with Ireland, Spain, Portugal and Flanders and made enough money to afford a town house in Bristol and to lavish expensive gifts on her local church, which included elaborate carved figures and a new rood loft. Margaret Paston ran her lawyer husband John’s malt and wool business when he was away, as well as defending the family estates in Norfolk from armed bandits. When they were separated, Margaret kept in contact with John by letter, many of which have survived to provide us with arresting insights into life in England during the War of the Roses. In 1449 she wrote to John demanding crossbows, grappling irons and shooting bolts for use in defending the Paston castle at Gresham against an attack by Lord Molynes. Margaret and her twelve comrades-in-arms never stood a chance against Molynes’ thousand-strong army, and she was duly evicted and the castle sacked. But she didn’t lack courage or resourcefulness.

We learn a fair bit about the lifestyle of a bourgeois woman in a thriving provincial town from Margery Kempe, the Christian mystic whose dictated autobiography, dating from the 1420s and surviving in a single manuscript discovered in the 1930s, is one of the earliest known memoirs by a woman. Much of it relates to her spiritual journey, undertaken in the grip of what sounds like post-partum psychosis.

Among the religious revelations is the more fascinating one that Kempe ran a microbrewery in her home town of Norwich. The Book of Margery Kempe is pleasingly graphic about what ensued on the day a batch of ale became contaminated: ‘When the ale had as fine a froth on it as anyone might see, suddenly the froth would go flat, and all the ale was lost in one brewing after another, so that her servants were ashamed and would not stay with her.’5 Having only taken up brewing in the first place ‘out of pure covetousness’, Kempe interpreted this stalled fermentation as a punishment from God.

Less heavenly patriarchs intervened over the next century. A woman’s work was reduced to child-rearing and caring. Acquiring education, power, money? Not so much. There were exceptions such as the entrepreneur Katherine Fenkyll who, like Alice Chester, took over her husband’s business (he had been a draper) with huge success after his death in 1499. But apprentices to trades were usually male: only seventy-three women are known to have been enrolled as apprentices in sixteenth-century London, compared with thousands of men.6

Women weren’t thought to be worth properly educating, so they couldn’t acquire skills the blokes took for granted. In the early modern period, female education was generally a religious affair, designed to get round the fact that women were ‘born in sin’ as daughters of Eve, the ‘weaker vessel’; gossipy and obstinate, prone to idleness, volatility, hysteria – or any other vice which could be hurled at them.

Exceptions to this rule tended to be royal, or as good as. Sir Thomas More treated Margaret Roper and his other daughters to the same education as he had. Margaret could read Aesop’s Fables by the age of three and went on to study languages, history, philosophy, rhetoric and – her particular passion – astronomy. She married, as she was expected to do, but when More discovered that she and her husband William Roper were both studying astronomy, he wrote a bold, inspiring letter to her that sounds – sounds – as if it is legitimising her intellectualism: ‘I am ever wont to persuade you to yield in everything to your husband; now, on the contrary, I give you full leave to strive to surpass him in the knowledge of the celestial system.’

Yet there remained a sense that a woman’s mind was ‘naturally bad’; that Margaret was remarkable not in herself but because her education represented a triumph over women’s inherent defects – defects which, More conceded, ‘may be redressed by industry’.7

So it was that the future Queen Elizabeth I was tutored industriously by Roger Ascham between 1548 and 1550. Ascham was impressed by Elizabeth’s intellect: ‘Yea, I believe, that beside her perfect readiness in Latin, Italian, French, and Spanish, she readeth here now at Windsor more Greek every day than some prebendary of this church doth read Latin in a whole week.’ Aged eleven, she presented her stepmother with a translation from the French of Navarre’s Mirror of the Sinful Soul protected by a needlepoint canvas cover she had made herself. Truly, she possessed all the virtues!

But the adult Elizabeth justified her success by declaring that she was different from other women, possessing the (male) heart and stomach of a king. Pictures show her armoured, manly. But she was the exception which proved the rule. Edmund Spenser’s female knight Britomart in Book III of his epic Gloriana poem The Faerie Queene is supposed to represent Elizabeth. But as the poet makes clear: ‘virtuous women wisely understand/That they were born to base humility/Unless the heavens them lift to lawful sovereignty.’

Elizabeth Joscelin’s The Mothers Legacie (1624), a conduct manual written in the form of a letter to an unborn child, is revealing about prevailing attitudes towards female education. While it was vital that women be taught ‘good housewifery’, writes Joscelin, ‘other learning a woman needs not.’ She goes on: ‘Though I admire it in those whom God hath blest with discretion, yet I desired not much in my owne, having seene that sometimes women have greater portions of learning than wisdome.’

One female Restoration writer who bucked the trend for feminine modesty was Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. She craved reputation, recognition, visibility – all the markers of success men believed were their due, for, as she wrote in the preface to Poems, and Fancies, ‘they hold books as their crown, and the sword as their sceptre, by which they rule and govern.’ Not only was Cavendish prolific, but she refused to be restricted to a single genre, turning her hand to biography, poetry, science fiction, philosophical and scientific treatises – anything she felt like. Thanks to her talent for self-promotion – she designed her own extravagant, daringly masculine costumes and travelled with a full complement of carriages and servants – she became one of fashionable society’s must-see attractions.

When Cavendish visited London in 1667, Samuel Pepys became obsessed with obtaining a sighting of her. After several failed attempts, he finally caught up with her when she addressed the Royal Society on 23 May – the first woman ever to do so. Unfortunately, Cavendish was overcome with nerves, possibly because of the presence in the room of so many scientists she had been rude about in print, and she gave a poor account of herself. Pepys was scathing: ‘The Duchess hath been a good comely woman; but her dress so antic and her deportment so unordinary, that I do not like her at all, nor did I hear her say anything that was worth hearing.’

This was pretty unfair, especially as Cavendish had received ‘no formal education in even the most basic writing skills’.8 In fact, as an aristocratic woman, she had arguably received a worse education than her immediate social inferiors, who’d been trained up as governesses, ladies’ companions and teachers. Yet her instinct, as with so many latter-day women, was to blame her failings on herself, rather than an unjust society. ‘It cannot be expected I should write so wisely or wittily as men, being of the effeminate sex, whose brains Nature hath mixed with the coldest and softest elements.’

The sense that education for women might be genuinely important – because the lack of it isolates them from spheres of legal and political influence – doesn’t gain momentum until the end of the eighteenth century when radical ripples from revolutionary France cause turbulence in Britain.

‘Talents put a man above the World, & in a condition to be feared and worshipped, a Woman that possesses them must be always courting the World, and asking pardon, as it were, for uncommon excellence,’ wrote the aristocratic social-reformer Elizabeth Montagu to a friend in 1763. To help level the playing field, Montagu and like-minded ladies such as Mary Monckton turned their houses into salons where women and men could meet and mix as intellectual equals. The salon was a French import and the point was conversation, not debauchery – no drink was allowed, or card playing. Montagu’s function as hostess was to encourage and bestow patronage on writers she liked.

Salonieres became known as ‘bluestockings’ – not, at this stage, a pejorative term for a studious woman – after a male guest, Benjamin Stillingfleet, turned up to one wearing blue worsted stockings because he hadn’t been able to afford black silk ones. Exactly how the term came, by the late eighteenth century, to apply only to women isn’t clear – possibly because it was two women, Monckton and Elizabeth Vesey, who decided to ‘own’ it by calling their salon the Blue Stockings Society. James Boswell, biographer of Samuel Johnson (he of the Dictionary) went along to one of Monckton’s salons and noted that ‘her vivacity enchanted the Sage [i.e. Johnson], and they used to talk together with all imaginable ease.’ The novelist Fanny Burney was sceptical, describing Monckton in 1782 as ‘between thirty and forty, very short, very fat … [and] palpably desirous of gaining notice and admiration’, and Montagu as having ‘the air and manner of a woman accustomed to being distinguished, and of great parts’. So much for the sisterhood.

If Johnson was happy to drink tea and chat with educated women, he still thought of them as essentially decorative; still believed, like most of his kind, that ‘a man is in general better pleased when he has a good dinner upon his table than when his wife speaks Greek. My old friend Mrs Carter [a celebrated female linguist, who tutored her brother so that he, unlike her, could have the privilege of going to Cambridge] could make a pudding as well as translate Epictetus from the Greek and work a handkerchief as well as compose a poem.’

Some feminist historians go so far as to argue that the Enlightenment – the period from the late seventeenth to the late eighteenth centuries when intellectual discourse was dominated by thinking about human reason, science and our relationship to the natural world – didn’t benefit women at all: ‘Just as there was no Renaissance or Scientific Revolution for women, in the sense that the goals and ideas of those movements were perceived as applicable only to men, so there was no Enlightenment for women.’9

Certainly, its defining philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his people-power bible The Social Contract (1762), declared that educated women were ‘unpleasing and unnecessary’. His influential novel Emile (1762) promoted his belief in biologically determined difference between the sexes, even recasting wit, the salonieres’ stock-in-trade, as a harmful vice: ‘A female wit is a scourge to her husband, her children, her friends, her servants, to everybody.’ Even if timidity, chastity and modesty were not innate female attributes, he argued in Letter to D’Alembert (1758) that ‘it is in society’s interest that women acquire these qualities; they must be cultivated in women, and any woman who disdains them offends good morals.’

Passages such as this infuriated the English feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft – that ‘hyena in petticoats’, as the politician Horace Walpole called her. In just six weeks she bashed out the scrappy but momentous manifesto Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), its key goal the demolition of Rousseau’s arguments. ‘The first object of laudable ambition,’ she wrote, ‘is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction of sex.’ Once women were given the same education as men, they could go on to be doctors and lawyers or run complex businesses, just as men did. Why, she thought, liberating women in this way would even make them nicer to be around! As she put it: ‘Would men but generously snap our chains, and be content with rational fellowship instead of slavish obedience, they would find us more observant daughters, more affectionate sisters, more faithful wives, more reasonable mothers – in a word, better citizens.’

The process of intellectual stunting began in childhood, Wollstonecraft argued. Gender stereotyping had the effect of returning grown, mature women ‘back to childhood when they ought to leave the go-cart for ever’:

Every thing that they see or hear serves to fix impressions, call forth emotions, and associate ideas, that give a sexual character to the mind. False notions of beauty and delicacy stop the growth of their limbs and produce a sickly soreness, rather than delicacy of organs; and thus weakened by being employed in unfolding instead of examining the first associations, forced on them by every surrounding object, how can they attain the vigour necessary to enable them to throw off their factitious character?

By the 1790s, when Wollstonecraft was writing this, ‘bluestocking’ had become an insult and the fledgling women’s movement fatally associated with the ‘Jacobin’ values of revolutionary France. On 10 September 1797, at the age of just thirty-seven, Wollstonecraft’s chaotic, itinerant life ended after she gave birth to her daughter Mary, future author of Frankenstein, and developed septicaemia.

The light of progress flickered only dimly. Some dedicated girls’ schools had been founded in the early eighteenth century, endowed by merchants and livery companies, but as a rule they focused on ‘accomplishments’ such as needlework rather than the kind of learning laid on for boys. Between 1785 and 1786 (when the money ran out), Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra studied at the Abbey School in Reading, a boarding school run by a Mrs La Tournelle who had a cork leg and a passion for theatre.

It was probably similar to Mrs Goddard’s school as described in Austen’s 1815 novel Emma – ‘a real, honest, old-fashioned Boarding-school, where a reasonable quantity of accomplishments were sold at a reasonable price, and where girls might be sent to be out of the way and scramble themselves into a little education without any danger of coming back prodigies.’

The loss of ground in the mid to late eighteenth century was a real blow for women. Even if she had acquired a smattering of education, the most an intelligent, independent-minded woman could hope for was to be a governess or a teacher or a ladies’ companion. As their husbands ventured out into the world and were rewarded for their thrusting virility, they would stay at home being chaste and docile, reading the sort of novels Jane Austen would later parody in her mock-gothic Northanger Abbey. This so-called ‘cult of sensibility’ seems to have been a very British phenomenon. As the critic and historian Janet Todd remarks: ‘Foreigners marvelled at the idleness thrust on English women, whose business was little more than coquetry in youth and motherhood or fashion in later years.’10

For feminist academics Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser, the early nineteenth century ‘marked the nadir of European women’s options and possibilities’.11 Paradoxically, though, by embracing the most traditional female virtues, women acquired a moral authority as the ‘consciences of society’ that they later put to radical use.

The tradition of female radicalism and dissent ushered in by Mary Wollstonecraft would bear fruit in the new century – eventually. First, though, the relationship between men and women would have to become more equal as part of a broader process of social reform. Women would have to stop being virtuous and passive simply because it was expected of them. They would have to be able to divorce their husbands and seek legal redress in cases of abuse and rape.

This started to happen as early as 1837 when a woman called Caroline Norton fought for the right to have access to (though not custody of – that would be a crazy idea!) her three young sons after walking out on her drunken, abusive husband, the MP and failed barrister George Chapple Norton. Her fastidiously detailed list of the obstacles married women encountered in existing law makes for grim reading:

An English wife may not leave her husband’s house. Not only can he sue her for restitution of ‘conjugal rights’, but he has a right to enter the house of any friend or relation with whom she may take refuge … and carry her away by force …

If her husband take proceedings for a divorce, she is not, in the first instance, allowed to defend herself … She is not represented by attorney, nor permitted to be considered a party to the suit between him and her supposed lover, for ‘damages’.

If an English wife be guilty of infidelity, her husband can divorce her so as to marry again; but she cannot divorce the husband … however profligate he may be.

Sadly, Norton failed in her bid to secure formal access to her children. She was only allowed supervised visits after her youngest son, William, died after falling from a horse in 1842. But her campaigning blasted a path for transformative legislation like the Custody of Infants Act 1839, the Matrimonial Causes Act 1857 and the Married Women’s Property Act 1870.

Before long, a new generation of bluestockings was exploiting the zest for reform. They understood only too well that far-reaching change was required and that it was as important to improve the lot of working-class women as it was to lift restrictions on middle-class women looking for work.

Education was vital because of the insight it gave women into the way men controlled the world. At the end of the day, irrespective of whatever other rights they secured, it was education that would give women the keys to the kingdom and enable them to insert themselves into history in the way they deserved.

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On the morning of 7 April 1853 Dr John Snow, renowned at the time as Britain’s most skilful anaesthetist, took a cab from his home in Sackville Street in central London to Buckingham Palace. He made contact with Sir James Clark, Queen Victoria’s Physician in Ordinary, and Dr Charles Locock, Queen Victoria’s first Physician Accoucheur – from the French, meaning ‘one who is present at the bedside’ – and the three men waited in an anteroom next to the Queen’s bedroom to be summoned. In the early stages of labour, Victoria preferred to be attended only by her beloved Prince Albert and ‘monthly nurse’ (nanny-cum-midwife) Mrs Lilly.

At around midday, the Queen asked Snow to come to her bedside. He measured out 15 minims (0.9ml) of chloroform onto a handkerchief which he folded into a cone before placing it over the royal mouth and nose. It had taken six years to persuade the Palace that chloroform was safe, but finally, on the occasion of her eighth pregnancy, the Queen had decided to give it a go. Leopold’s proved to be her easiest birth so far. As Snow noted: ‘Her Majesty expressed great relief from the application, the pains being very trifling during the uterine contractions, whilst between the periods of contractions there was complete ease.’

Victoria had always hated pregnancy and childbirth, which she nicknamed the Schattenseite or ‘shadow side’ of marriage. She called her own pregnancies ‘wretched’ and when her eldest daughter Vicky fell pregnant for the first time and wrote to her mother in anticipation of sage advice, Victoria replied: ‘What you say of the pride of giving life to an immortal soul is very fine, dear, but I own I cannot enter into that; I think much more of our being like a cow or a dog at such moments; when our poor nature becomes so very animal and unecstatic.’

‘In the Christian tradition,’ the historian of anaesthesia Stephanie Snow points out, ‘suffering during labour provided a permanent reminder of Eve’s original sin in the Garden of Eden and opponents of anaesthesia were swift to draw on the Biblical admonition that “in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children”’.12 By agreeing to use chloroform during Leopold’s birth, Victoria had done something modern, dangerous and radical, horrifying one notable contemporary obstetrician, who admonished her for ‘a too-bold step’.13 She’d taken a huge medical risk, in the process scotching the centuries-old notion that pain during labour was natural and virtuous.

If Anaesthesia a la Reine was at first an option only for wealthy, fashionable ladies, it didn’t stay that way for long, becoming part of a portfolio of new medical techniques – for example, sterilisation with phenol; wearing gloves to perform internal examinations – which made childbirth not just less onerous for women but not as frequently fatal.

The Victoria who wrote so candidly to Vicky sounds nothing like the Victoria we think we know. Ditto the Victoria who, in 1860, is considering suitors for Princess Alice when she suddenly confesses: ‘All marriage is such a lottery – the happiness is always an exchange – though it may be a very happy one – still the poor woman is bodily and morally the husband’s slave. That always sticks in my throat.’

Does this mean Queen Victoria was a feminist? It’s possible, as Simon Schama has pointed out, that Victoria was familiar with early feminist writing, particularly Barbara Leigh Smith’s exposé of the harsh realities of marriage, Brief Summary in Plain Language of the Most Important Laws Concerning Women (1854). In 1862, in an act which could be interpreted as sisterly, she appointed the women’s-rights activist Emily Faithfull as her Printer and Publisher in Ordinary – ‘not a position she would have given to someone who had incurred her disapproval’.14

But Victoria had her limits. The idea that women might want to work; might want rights; might want, through suffrage, actual involvement in the running of the country – this enraged her. ‘It is’, she wrote, ‘a subject which makes the Queen so furious she cannot contain herself.’ The whole idea was a ‘mad, wicked folly … with all its attendant horrors on which her poor feeble sex is bent, forgetting every sense of womanly feeling and propriety.’

Two steps forward, three steps back.

The unnoticed contradictions here suggest a Queen and a society stumbling, blindfolded, through new territory. By the end of her reign, as we shall see, the way ahead would be rather clearer.

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One of the joys of writing this book was the numerous lively conversations with friends, family, colleagues and contacts I had along the way. So many people made inspired suggestions of women who deserved to be included. I thank them all at the back, but here at the front I want to pay tribute to two women, both dead now, who were incredibly important and inspirational to me when I was growing up. This book is their legacy.

In 1968, shortly after graduating from Oxford – the first person in her family to go to university – my mum joined the staff of the west London girls’ school Godolphin and Latymer as a chemistry teacher. Helping to run the department was a woman called Frances Eastwood. Frances was much older than my mum and only two years away from retiring, but she was helpful and welcoming and before long the pair had become firm friends. She lived with another Godolphin teacher, Dorothy Newman (no relation), who had been Head of Classics before retiring in 1961.

While I was growing up my parents’ relationship with their parents was always slightly tense and strained. As a result, Frances and Dodo (as we called Dorothy) became de facto grandparents to my sister Sarah and me; we regularly stayed at their house in Hythe where they would feed us hunks of bread they baked, topped with a thick layer of home-made cherry jam. But their gentle kindness and generosity never blinded us to the fact that they were fiercely clever, independent-minded women who had known hardship as well as opportunity.

Frances had read chemistry at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (and lived just long enough to see me win a place at the same college). Dorothy, meanwhile, had read Classics at Newnham College, Cambridge in the 1920s and remembered with fury how until 1948 – 1948! – women were not allowed to be full members of the university. Like many clever women of the period they never married or had children, blaming a lack of suitable men left alive after the First World War. It feels intrusive to speculate whether this was the whole story. Intrusive, but necessary, as the social historian Virginia Nicholson makes clear in Singled Out, her brilliant book about Frances and Dodo’s generation of what used to be called ‘spinsters’. They were known collectively as the Surplus Women after the 1921 Census revealed that there were 1.7 million more women than men in the population.

Remembering women like Frances and Dodo she encountered in her childhood, Nicholson recalls the questions that went unanswered because they were too rude to ask:

Why didn’t they ever marry? Did they mind? Did they harbour secret sadness? What did they do about the lack of love in their lives, and the lack of sex? Did they care that they had never had children? Did their spectacles and tweed jackets protect them from terrible vulnerabilities?15

As it happens, I don’t think Frances and Dodo were sad or loveless or vulnerable. The point for me is that they existed in an atmosphere of quirky female self-sufficiency and, while obviously bluestockings, were practical as well as cerebral. When Godolphin and Latymer was evacuated from Hammersmith to Newbury during the war – it shared a building with Newbury Grammar School – Dorothy as Senior Mistress helped to ensure its smooth operation and, with Frances’ help, ran one of the hostels for evacuated pupils.

I often wonder what Frances and Dodo would make of the way the modern world treats women. I think they would be horrified by the volume of abuse women are expected to soak up on Twitter – actually, they would be horrified by Twitter, full stop – but thrilled by such developments as the celebrity of historian Dame Mary Beard, Jane Austen’s appearance on a bank note and Laura Bates’ Everyday Sexism campaign.

I hope they would be proud of my journalism, especially my work on Channel 4 News – and of this book, which I humbly offer up to them in tribute.

* I am also discounting a glancing reference to Clement Attlee’s self-effacing wife Violet.

2

Old Battles, New Women

1880–1914

By the 1880s, when our tale roughly begins, a time-traveller from Britain at the start of the nineteenth century would have found much of the country unrecognisable. Its urban centres, linked by a sophisticated rail network, boasted street lighting, paved roads and – if you were lucky – state-of-the-art sewers. In the industrial north and Midlands, especially, these towns and cities were thrumming symbols of imperial pomp and civic pride. Just beyond them, in soon-to-be suburbia, the sort of houses many of us still inhabit were being thrown up at breakneck speed.

But one thing remained resolutely unchanged. Politics was still a game played almost entirely by men – and old men at that. Benjamin Disraeli was sixty-nine when he became Prime Minister in 1874. William Gladstone, who succeeded him in 1880, was seventy at that point – and eighty-two by the time he was elected for the fourth time in 1892. Queen Victoria was dismayed at the prospect of her precious empire being at the mercy of the ‘shaking hand of an old, wild and incomprehensible man’. But then she had always disliked Gladstone, once complaining of the esteemed orator: ‘He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting.’

Queen Victoria had to get along with ten British prime ministers during her reign, which gives you a sense of just how much change she witnessed.

The nineteenth century was a time of massive expansion, especially for London. The capital’s population rose from 960,000 in 1801, when the first national census was taken, to nearly 6.6 million by 1901 – roughly the same as the combined populations of Paris, Berlin, Vienna and St Petersburg.1 Cities swelled because of migration from rural areas: the aftershocks of 1873’s agricultural depression, triggered by a collapse in grain prices, didn’t ease until the 1890s.

Immigration was also a factor in this urban drift. Jews fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and Irish Catholics escaped from poverty and famine. In 1765, the Morning Gazette estimated there were 30,000 black servants in the country.2 After slavery’s abolition the numbers fell dramatically, though there would still have been a significant black presence in ports like Cardiff, Liverpool and Grimsby, as well as London, where, according to Peter Ackroyd, most former slaves and their offspring were absorbed into society’s underclass as beggars and crossings-sweepers and became ‘almost invisible’.3

This might be overstating it. You don’t have to look far to find examples of visible black Victorian Britons,4 but history books tend to have less to say about the women than the men. Or perhaps there were just fewer of them. Nurse-cum-hotelier Mary Seacole is now as well known among primary school children as her supposed rival Florence Nightingale (in fact, the two were on friendly terms), and was in many respects as effective a nurse on the killing fields of the Crimea. The African-American actor and playwright Ira Aldridge moved to London and had two daughters, Luranah and Amanda, who both became opera singers.5 Laura Bowman, the African-American star of the musical In Dahomey – so popular it was performed at Buckingham Palace on 27 June 1903 – settled in Wimbledon with her common-law husband and performing partner Pete Hampton. Jane Roberts, a former slave who also moved to London from America and lived in a quiet street off Battersea Park, died in 1914, aged ninety-five. She’s buried in Streatham cemetery: plot 252, class H, block F.6 Caroline Barbour-James and her five children moved from Guyana to west London in 1905. Upright Christians, they were always so smart and clean that local working-class youths thought they were millionaires.7

There was a fuss when the most recent BBC adaptation of E. M. Forster’s Howards End gave the Schlegel siblings a black maid. It was anachronistic, some said. Political correctness gone mad. But as Jeffrey Green’s fascinating Black Edwardians: Black People in Britain 1901–1914 shows, there were plenty of women of African descent in domestic service in Britain at this time, for example Ann Styles, a freed slave from Jamaica who moved to London in around 1840 with the white family she worked for. She continued in their service all her working life. Green’s own grandmother, Martha Louisa Vass, worked as a maid for a suffragette. Vass worked every day, often late into the night when the woman gave dinner parties. Every other Sunday she was allowed the afternoon off.

And then there’s Sara Forbes Bonetta, who deserves to be far better known. In 1850, at the age of around eight, Bonetta was delivered by a Captain Frederick E. Forbes to Queen Victoria as a ‘gift’ from King Ghezo of Dahomey, in what is now Benin in West Africa. Forbes named her after his ship, the HMS Bonetta, which had been patrolling the area with orders to intercept and destroy any slaving vessels.

Forbes worried about the ‘burden’ of bringing a child back on the ship but concluded he had no choice as Sara was now the property of the crown. He saw for the girl a future as a missionary and wrote her a glowing character reference:

For her age, supposed to be eight years, she is a perfect genius; she now speaks English well, and has a great talent for music. She has won the affections with but few exceptions, of all who have known her; by her docile and amiable conduct, which nothing can exceed. She is far in advance of any white child of her age, in aptness of learning, and strength of mind and affection … Her mind has received a moral and religious impression and she was baptised according to the rites of the Protestant Church.8

When Sara finally met Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle the queen was delighted with her, agreeing with Forbes that she was ‘sharp and intelligent’. ‘Sally’, as Victoria called her, became the queen’s goddaughter and for the next year was raised by the Forbes family like any other upper-middle-class English child. She visited the royal household several times and struck up a friendship with Princess Alice, Victoria and Albert’s second daughter, who was a similar age.

In 1851, however, Sara developed a persistent cough. Victoria’s doctors concluded that Britain’s wet climate was bad for Sara’s health and she was sent back to Africa to be educated at missionary school. But she was unhappy there and a few years later, when Sara was twelve, Victoria gave her permission to return to Britain.

She attended the wedding of Victoria, the Princess Royal, and in August 1862 was herself married at St Nicholas’ Church in Brighton to a Yoruba businessman, Captain James Pinson Labulo Davies. The couple returned to West Africa, where Sara gave birth to a daughter, named – you guessed it – Victoria. The queen became her godmother too, and when Sara brought the baby to meet her namesake, Victoria observed: ‘Saw Sally, now Mrs Davies, & her dear little child, far blacker than herself … a lively intelligent child with big melancholy eyes.’ Sara went on to have two more children. But she developed tuberculosis and died in 1880, the year our imaginary time-traveller arrives in Britain.

Sara Forbes Bonetta is fascinating because, simply by existing and behaving as she did, she debunked contemporary theories about race which held that anyone who wasn’t Anglo-Saxon was an example of a lower evolutionary form. John Beddoe, author of The Races of Britain (1862) and President of the Anthropological Institute 1889–1891, believed ‘Africanoids’ were related to Cromagnon man. But remember Captain Forbes’ extraordinary assessment: ‘She is far in advance of any white child of her age …’

It’s a shame neither Bonetta nor Seacole, who died in 1881, lived to see the new age that was dawning. Everywhere there was evidence of a rupture with the past, with everything known and familiar. The telegraph network made it possible to communicate quickly and reliably over huge distances. The first petrol-driven internal combustion engine was constructed in 1884 by Edward Butler. By the 1880s most new houses would have come with gas pipes and lamps as standard. Not surprisingly, the pace of development left many struggling to keep up.

Foremost among those left behind were the poor. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 meant that if you wanted help, you had to go to the workhouse to get it, with all the hardship that entailed. Disease, starvation and overcrowding were still widespread, though by the 1880s the middle classes had acquired a greater capacity to be shocked and/or titillated by them: books and pamphlets such as Andrew Mearns’ The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883) and George R. Sims’ How The Poor Live (1883) found a ready readership.

To a significant degree, the job of sorting this mess out fell into the laps of women, as if women alone had the necessary resources to make a difference. In most cases these sorter-out women were upper middle class. The respectable helped the ‘lowly’ – until the battle for suffrage turned serious, at which point factory workers and MPs’ wives suddenly found themselves members of the same team.

The virtuous militancy that had powered protest groups like the Chartists – who wanted greater political representation for the working classes – was still in the air in the 1870s and 1880s. But increasingly it was being harnessed by women like the social reformers Clementina Black; Rachel and Margaret McMillan; Beatrice Webb; and Lydia Becker, who founded the first national suffrage campaign group, the National Society for Women’s Suffrage (NSWS), in 1867. It was hearing Lydia speak at a NSWS meeting in 1872 which radicalised a young Emmeline Pankhurst.

What these women had in common was, mostly, determination; though sometimes hardship too.

Clementina Black certainly knew how tough life was for many women. Her mother had died from a rupture while attempting to lift her invalid father, leaving twenty-one-year-old Clementina to look after him and her seven younger siblings. That she managed to write her first novel, A Sussex Idyll, while doing this speaks volumes; though it’s for her work with the Women’s Industrial Council (WIC), which she founded in 1894, and the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) rather than her fiction that Black is remembered.

Rachel and Margaret McMillan had to overcome tragedy too. Born in New York in 1859 and 1860 respectively, they returned to their parents’ native Inverness with their mother after scarlet fever had killed their father and infant sister and left Margaret deaf. (Her hearing returned when she was fourteen.) Their conversion to Christian socialism in the late 1880s ignited an obsession with educational reform. They paid particular attention to working-class children, and their campaigning led to a change in the law to provide free school meals for children and the proper training of nursery teachers. They would go on to open school-cum-clinics like the Deptford Clinic, which acted as a medical centre for local children, and ‘night camps’ where children from deprived areas could camp outside as well as wash and obtain clean clothes.

Before activism dominated her life, home-schooled Lydia Becker had been an amateur scientist – specialist subjects: botany and astronomy – who published a book, Botany for Novices (1864), and corresponded regularly with Charles Darwin. Becker would send Darwin specimens of plants indigenous to Manchester and contributed to his work on plant dimorphism. In return, Darwin acted as her unofficial tutor and mentor and, when Becker asked if he had a spare paper she might read out at the inaugural meeting of her quietly radical Manchester Ladies’ Literary Society – ‘Of course we are not so unreasonable as to desire that you should write anything specially for us’ – he generously sent over three.9

Beatrice Webb is better-known. With her husband Sidney, she would go on to be a founding member of what is now Britain’s oldest political think tank, the Fabian Society and, in 1895, the London School of Economics. Her approach to social reform was to drip-feed socialist ideas into the minds of Britain’s ruling elite. As young, unmarried Beatrice Potter, however, she worked with the sociologist Charles Booth on his monumental study of the Victorian slums Life and Labour of the People in London, published between 1889 and 1903.

Webb didn’t call herself a socialist until February 1890, when she declared her conversion in her diary, but she wrote several years earlier of the ‘growing uneasiness, amounting to conviction’ she felt that ‘the industrial organisation, which had yielded rent, interest and profits on a stupendous scale, had failed to provide a decent livelihood and tolerable conditions for a majority of the inhabitants of Great Britain’.10

More and more women like these five were feeling that they had a role to play in improving society. They knew they could answer the question of what constituted a ‘decent livelihood’ or ‘tolerable conditions’ as capably as the men. But the late-Victorian expectation was that women would suppress their intellects, the better to boost men’s sense of their own superior brainpower.

All four parts of Coventry Patmore’s best-known poem, the sickly paean to marriage ‘The Angel in the House’, were first published together in 1863. By the 1880s this piece of sludge epitomised the Victorian ideal where women were concerned. ‘Man must be pleased,’ wrote Patmore, ‘but him to please is woman’s pleasure.’

For Patmore, women – being both altruistic and obedient by nature – were best employed in the home, making their husbands happy and looking after any children. Even if their husbands stopped loving them, they must continue to love these men out of loyalty: ‘Through passionate duty love springs higher, as grass grows taller round a stone.’

What became known as the doctrine of separate spheres – that women belonged at home while only men could cope with the demands of the workplace – found its most famous expression in an essay by the writer and art critic John Ruskin called ‘Sesame and Lilies’, published in 1865. The job of a woman, Ruskin argues, is to patrol the domestic front: her intellect, such as it is, is ‘not for invention or creation, but for sweet ordering, arrangement, and decision’:

By her office, and place, she is protected from all danger and temptation. The man, in his rough work in open world, must encounter all peril and trial; – to him, therefore, must be the failure, the offence, the inevitable error: often he must be wounded, or subdued; often misled; and always hardened. But he guards the woman from all this …11

Pity Ruskin’s poor wife! Indeed, his own marriage to Euphemia ‘Effie’ Gray was annulled after six years on the grounds of non-consummation. Supposedly the sight of her pubic hair and menstrual blood on their wedding night disgusted him.

If the ‘separate spheres’ doctrine sounds a bit barmy to us today, plenty of women at the time couldn’t get their heads round it either. The suffragist and campaigner for female education Emily Davies declared that ‘men have no monopoly of working, nor women of weeping’.12 She railed against a ‘double moral code, with its masculine and feminine virtues, and its separate law of duty and honour for either sex’.13

Nowhere was this moral code more obviously unfair than in the bedroom. If a man committed adultery, it was a regrettable but understandable lapse. (It was in men’s nature to have sex whenever they felt like it, so what could you do to stop them?) For a woman, however, it was catastrophic, unforgivable, life changing. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 ruled that a woman could be divorced on the grounds of their adultery alone, whereas a man needed to be found guilty of other additional offences. He’d have to have committed incest, or not only been unfaithful but also deserted his wife.

The Act had led to an explosion in the divorce rate because middle-class couples could afford to split. Before the Act and its creation of a dedicated Court of Divorce and Matrimonial Causes, a marriage could be dissolved only by an Act of Parliament, at massive expense. In 1858, its first year in operation, there were three hundred divorce petitions compared to three the previous year.

One of these three hundred was brought by the industrialist Henry Robinson and became notorious. Despite having several mistresses and two illegitimate children, Robinson sought to divorce his wife Isabella on grounds of her infidelity, even though the only proof was a diary in which Isabella had been unwise enough to confide her erotic fantasies; a diary which shocked the nation when it was read out in court and extracts from it printed in newspapers.

Letters sent to Isabella by the object of her lust, a married homeopath called Edward Lane, proved nothing; nor did the diary prove anything save the lively sexual imagination of its author. But it was used against Isabella in court to protect Edward’s reputation. Broken and humiliated, she was obliged to defend herself by claiming that the diary was a dream-vision, a hallucination, and that a uterine disorder she suffered from had induced ‘erotomania’.14

By 1880 the idea of a woman being imprisoned by an unhappy marriage was grimly commonplace. Though of course, it was hardly a new one. The heroine of Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1797 novel The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria: A Fragment is locked up by her husband, first in their home and later in a mental institution. In the asylum Maria writes a memoir for her infant daughter who has been taken away from her: ‘But a wife being as much a man’s property as his horse, or his ass, she has nothing she can call her own!’ she protests. ‘He may use any means to get at what the law considers as his, the moment his wife is in possession of it, even to the forcing of a lock.’15

Under nineteenth-century marriage law a woman’s legal identity was absorbed into her husband’s – a principle known as ‘coverture’. Without her husband’s consent a wife was unable to make a will, sue or be sued. All her property became her husband’s, including anything she had owned before and brought to the marriage. And her husband had custody of their children.

A change came in 1870 with the Married Women’s Property Act, which permitted women to be the legal owners of any money they earned and to inherit property. And in 1884 the Matrimonial Causes Act denied a husband the right to lock up his wife if she refused to have sex with him – although it wasn’t ratified until 1891 after an incident which became known as the ‘Jackson Abduction’.

On 5 November 1887, Emily Hall, a respectable solicitor’s daughter, married Edmund Jackson, the feckless son of an army officer. The couple never lived together and on their wedding night, before they had the chance to consummate their marriage, Edmund left for New Zealand, telling Emily he would send for her once he and his friend Dixon had established themselves there as farmers.

But Emily decided she didn’t want to go to New Zealand after all, feeling that ‘it would be impossible for me to hope to endure the rough life of a colonial settler’.16 So she wrote to Edmund telling him this, adding that she no longer wanted any contact with him. The begging tone of his letters to her from New Zealand worried her and she suspected he had married her for her money rather than out of love. Edmund’s angry reply asserted his husbandly rights in no uncertain terms:

Do not make any mistake. There shall be a perfect understanding between us, but I will make it, not you. It is most ridiculous for you to say you will have this or that; it depends on whether I approve or no.17

Four years passed. Then, without telling Emily, Edmund returned to Britain. Having obtained a decree for restitution of conjugal rights, he tracked Emily down to the Lancashire village of Clitheroe, where she had been brought up and her family still lived, and he kidnapped her as she was leaving church one Sunday. He bundled her into a waiting carriage with such haste that he knocked the bonnet off her head, drove her to a house he had rented in Blackburn and locked her in. Outside the house, to stop her trying to escape, he planted a team of hired heavies. Emily’s friends tracked her down and demanded entry. When this was refused they called the police, but to no avail.

A crowd gathered outside the house and watched as supplies were delivered. On the morning after the abduction, reported The Times, ‘milk and the papers were taken in by means of a string let down from one of the bedroom windows, and, later on, all kinds of provisions were obtained in the same way. At noon a box of cigars was hoisted up to the garrison.’ On 11 March 1891, Edmund was forced to leave the house after Emily’s sister filed a charge of assault against him for injuries she’d sustained trying to defend Emily during the abduction. Even as he left, though, his heavies swarmed around the house waving sticks.

Emily was fortunate to come from a legally literate family. They filed a writ of habeas corpus, which, if granted, meant Emily could be brought before a court which ought to declare her detention unlawful. But on 16 March, the High Court rejected the application on the basis that, while generally the forcible detention of a subject by another was ‘prima facie illegal’, where the relation was that of husband and wife, different rules applied.

Infuriated, Emily’s family took the case to the Court of Appeal – and, amazingly, got a sympathetic hearing. The Court agreed that Edmund had no right to force his wife to live with him: the very idea was uncivilised and derived from what Lord Halsbury, delivering the first judgement, called ‘quaint and absurd dicta’. The judges suspected that Edmund had married Emily for her money, displaying the sort of predatory behaviour to which men were prone and from which women needed protecting.

Lord Halsbury’s judgement was a landmark because, notwithstanding its reflexive sexism, it rejects the idea of the ‘absolute dominion of the husband over the wife’, calling Edmund’s counsel’s defence of wife-beating ‘outrageous to common feelings of humanity’ and ‘inconsistent with the rights of free human creatures’. This echoed the language of contemporary women’s-rights campaigners, though Lord Halsbury went on to specify instances in which husbands might be entitled to use limited, temporary powers of restraint, if, for example, a woman ‘were on the staircase about to join some person with whom she intended to elope’.18

But while the educated middle classes had the freedom and resources to use the courts in this way, for working-class women in 1880 it was a different story. Their lives, based around laundry and childcare – six or more children was the norm – were exhausting and terrifyingly unpredictable. Money trickled in uncertainly and there was no safety net if it ran out. Everything (clothes, furniture, cooking and cleaning utensils) was in short supply. Any meat was fed to the man of the house as the breadwinner. As a result, girls growing up in working-class households were undernourished, prone to tuberculosis and other diseases, and less able to withstand the ravages of pregnancy and childbirth.

Many working-class women went into service. By 1901, 91.5 per cent of all English servants were women.19 Some started young: as late as 1911, more than 39,000 13- and 14-year-olds were working as servants. The 1870 Education Act had theoretically opened up avenues for women by making education a matter of state provision rather than the whimsical, unregulated gift of charities, churches and other voluntary associations. But many girls were unable to take advantage of school places because their families were poor. A child in service, rather than in school, meant financial security, a situation that is portrayed in Flora Thompson’s semi-autobiographical Lark Rise to Candleford sequence of novels:

As soon as a mother had even one daughter in service, the strain upon herself slacked a little. Not only was there one mouth less to feed, one less pair of feet to be shod, and a tiny space left free in the cramped sleeping quarters; but every month, when the girl received her wages, a shilling or more would be sent to ‘our Mum’.20

Most middle-class families had at least one servant. As the feminist historians Bonnie Anderson and Judith Zinsser pithily observe: ‘For men, the dividing line between middle and working class was usually measured in income; for women, it lay in the difference between being a servant and being able to afford one.’21

Charles Booth estimated that 30 per cent of London families could not live on a man’s wages alone. In order to supplement their husbands’ earnings, working-class wives took on piecework – usually sewing or knitting – either at home or in attics or cellars supervised by a ‘sweater’. Abuse and malpractice in the ‘sweated work’ industry was rife, both at home and in factories. The extent of it was exposed by one of the late-Victorian period’s great whistleblowers and one of the most impressive activists of the era: Ada Nield Chew.

The second child in a family of thirteen, Chew was born on 28 January 1870 to William Nield, a brickmaker, and his wife Jane, in Audley, Staffordshire. At the age of eleven she left school to help look after her family, which included an epileptic younger sister; she fitted in paid work where she could.

After the family moved to Crewe in 1887, Chew found work in the Compton Brothers clothing factory. But it was miserable and exploitative, so in 1894 she sent the Crewe Chronicle a series of anonymous letters savagely criticising the pay and conditions of the women who worked at the factory, especially as compared to those of their male colleagues doing the same work.

This was a risky undertaking, but for Chew the alternative was unthinkable: ‘As long as we are silent ourselves and apparently content with our lot, so long shall we be left in enjoyment of that lot.’22 Bear in mind, when reading this extract from her second letter to the Chronicle, published on 19 May 1894, that Chew had no formal secondary education and taught herself to write by reading novels and magazines:

And now to take an average of a year’s wage of the ‘average ordinary hand’, which was the class I mentioned in my first letter, and being that which is in a majority may be taken as fairly representative. The wages of such a ‘hand’, sir, will barely average – but by exercise of the imagination – 8 shillings [approximately £42 in today’s money] a week. I ought to say, too, that there is a minority, which is also considerable, whose wages will not average above 5 shillings [approximately £26] a week. I would impress upon you that this is making the very best of the case, and is over rather than understating. What do you think of it, Mr Editor, for a ‘living’ wage?

I wish some of those, whoever they may be who mete it out to us, would try to ‘live’ on it for a few weeks, as the factory girl has to do 52 weeks in a year. To pay board and lodging, to provide herself decent boots and clothes to stand all weathers, to pay an occasional doctor’s bill, literature, and a holiday away from the scope of her daily drudging, for which even the factory girl has the audacity to long sometimes – but has quite as often to do without. Not to speak of provision for old age, when eyes have grown too dim to thread the everlasting needle, and to guide the worn fingers over the accustomed task.23

As well as paying for their own materials, women workers had to shell out for hot water to make the tea they drank. Their managers were so inefficient at apportioning labour that the only way the women could earn a living wage was by taking work home with them, which added another four or five hours to the working day – and this had to be fitted in, remember, around household chores like cooking, cleaning and looking after small children.

Once her identity as the author of the letters was exposed, Chew lost her job. But she had been talent-spotted by the Independent Labour Party – a precursor of today’s Labour party – and the burgeoning suffragist movement.

Plenty of other women shared Chew’s passion and panache. By the time Annie Besant helped to organise a strike of the female workers at Bryant & May’s match factory in east London in 1888, Besant was already well known for her part in a notorious obscenity trial. Besant and Charles Bradlaugh, head of the Secular Society she had joined in 1875, used the National Reformer magazine to promote a progressive agenda that included education, suffrage and, especially, birth control. The pair were arrested after they published a cheap book intended to educate poor women about contraception.

Although Besant and Bradlaugh were found guilty of obscenity, the verdict was overturned on a technicality. Bradlaugh went on to become an MP. Besant was, predictably, hit harder: the scandal of the trial cost her custody of her daughter. But the trauma of this loss seems only to have catalysed her activism.

She was moved to righteous fury when she learned at a Fabian Society meeting of the conditions endured by Bryant & May’s mostly female workers. As if the litany of industrial injustices (fourteen-hour working days, poor pay made poorer still by an unfair system of fines) wasn’t long enough, the ‘matchgirls’ had to endure a uniquely horrible side-effect of handling the white phosphorous used in match-making: ‘phossy jaw’.

Vapour from the phosphorous caused the lower jaws of workers to become distended and deformed – and even glow in the dark. Abscesses would form and over time the jaw bone would simply rot away. On 23 June 1888, Besant published an article in The Link, the newspaper she co-edited with the campaigning journalist W. T. Stead, exposing practices at the factory. A follow-up piece took the form of a letter to Bryant & May’s middle- and upper-class shareholders. It’s a masterpiece of campaigning rhetoric:

Do you know that girls are used to carry boxes on their heads till the hair is rubbed off, and the young heads are bald at fifteen years of age? Country clergymen with shares in Bryant & May’s, draw down on your knee your fifteen-year-old daughter; pass your hand tenderly over the silky, clustering curls, rejoicing in the dainty beauty of the thick shining tresses …24

Bryant & May’s response was swift and brutal: they tried to force their workers to sign a statement saying they were content with their lot. When one group refused and were sacked, 1,400 other workers went on strike in solidarity. With the help of trade-union pioneer Clementina Black, and Catherine Booth, who with her husband William co-founded the Salvation Army, Besant helped the women to organise and fight back. She became head of the Matchgirls’ Union and secured a significant climbdown. On 21 July 1888, stung by the bad publicity, Bryant & May agreed to end the fines system and re-hire the women it had sacked.

It was the first time a union of unskilled workers had got what they wanted from a strike. But it was in some ways a Pyrrhic victory as Bryant & May continued to use white phosphorous until 1901, despite knowing full well it was toxic. After Catherine Booth died in 1890, William honoured her memory by opening the Salvation Army’s own match factory where only the harmless but more expensive red phosphorous was used. ‘Remember the poor matchgirls!’ cried their adverts.

Not until the new century were other trades regulated in the same way. Part of the problem was that, while unions existed for men, they were reluctant to allow women to join them. Women were regarded as cheap rival labour, threatening men’s livelihoods. Frustrated by this, bookbinder Emma Paterson founded the Women’s Protective and Provident League (WPPL) in 1874. It soon represented women in a mass of industries, including making jam, tights and cigars.

The nail- and chain-making industry, based in the Black Country, was one of the most dangerous. In 1910 it became one of the first trades to be regulated when the Scottish trade unionist Mary MacArthur, who had become secretary of the WPPL after it turned into the Women’s Trade Union League (WTUL) in 1891, organised a strike of female chain workers at Cradley Heath. In a landmark ruling she secured for them a minimum wage, famously observing that ‘women are unorganised because they are badly paid, and poorly paid because they are unorganised.’25

In 1893 the WTUL’s treasurer May Abraham became one of the first two female factory inspectors. The other was Mary Paterson, who was based in Glasgow. Abraham’s Royal Commission on the Employment of Labour, focusing on the weaving industry, stresses the massive regional variation in women’s pay – 24 shillings a week in Lancashire compared with 18 in Yorkshire – and describes in horrifying detail the damp but boiling-hot conditions where the weavers worked. Adelaide Anderson’s 1922 study Women in the Factory is even worse. She describes how the dust inhaled by women spinning silk caused them to cough up silkworms.

Abraham and Paterson were paid salaries of £200 a year, much less than their male counterparts, but they achieved impressive results, including the early identification of asbestos as a health risk. Inspector Lucy Deane warned in a 1898 report of the ‘sharp glass-like jagged nature of the particles’, and pointed out that ‘where [the particles] are allowed to rise and to remain suspended in the air of the room in any quantity, the effects have been found to be injurious as might have been expected.’26 Her report was ignored until 1911 when clinical evidence linking asbestos to lung disease was finally gathered.

Thanks to these women’s efforts the Factory Act of 1895, which extended and amended previous Factory Acts, would place a much greater emphasis on workers’ ‘health and safety’ – a phrase coined, by the way, by a woman: Audrey Pittom, Deputy Chief Inspector of Factories in the mid 1970s.

The WTUL also claimed credit for later legislation such as the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1897, which established the principle that those injured in the workplace should be compensated, and was ultimately responsible for the Shops Act 1911. One of the great welfare reforms of Lloyd George’s Liberal government, this set a maximum working week of sixty hours and gave shop assistants a weekly half-day holiday. Happy days!

Being a shop assistant in one of the newfangled department stores springing up in towns and cities across the country or waitressing was now an option for working- and lower-middle-class women, who had previously had something of a Hobson’s choice of factory work or service.

At first, shop owners exploited the abundance of cheap, deferential labour with predictable cynicism. When assistants ‘lived in’ a store – a common practice at the time – their lodgings were often squalid. What’s more Thomas Sutherst, president of the Shop Hours Labour League in the 1880s, wrote: ‘the shop assistant in these days is obliged to submit to the intolerable fatigue of standing for periods, varying according to the locality, from thirteen to seventeen hours a day.’ We might bemoan twenty-first-century interning, but it was nothing to what women then experienced. They were often ‘apprenticed’ for several years during which they were paid pocket-money wages.

A young woman called Margaret Bondfield took a leaf out of Ada Nield Chew’s book when she wrote a series of pseudonymous articles for The Shop Assistant exposing shoddy, exploitative practices in department stores in Brighton and London. Living in, she experienced overcrowded, insanitary conditions and awful food as well as what she called ‘an undertone of danger’. Bondfield was expected to work between 80 and 100 hours a week for 51 weeks per year. Little wonder she had already become an active trade unionist by 1896, when the Women’s Industrial Council suggested she work as an undercover agent, reporting back to them – and the wider world, through a column in the Daily Chronicle – on the abuses she found.

Despite her limited education, Bondfield went on to enjoy a long, illustrious political career, founding the Women’s Labour League (WLL) in 1906 and becoming both the first woman to chair the general council of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) and the first female cabinet minister, as Minister of Labour in Ramsay MacDonald’s Labour government of 1929–31.

Decades before Bondfield made history in this role, the choice of work available to women was expanding. As early as the 1860s, Jessie Boucherett and Maria Rye had managed, through their Society for Promoting the Employment of Women, to secure jobs for women in banks and insurance companies. The booming communications sector offered other opportunities. In 1869, the year the Telegraph Act of 1869 handed the Post Office a monopoly on telegraph services, most of the 6.8 million telegrams sent in Britain would have been dictated to women. By 1914, 7,000 women were employed by the Post Office and 3,000 in other government services. But there were massive barriers remaining, not least that women had to give up their jobs once they married. And, of course, they were paid significantly less than men.

Actually, the gender pay gap was an issue in all white-collar clerical jobs. At the Prudential insurance company, male clerks earned up to £350 a year while few women made more than £60. Women had to shoulder the burden of dressing smartly on low wages or risk losing their jobs for being scruffy.

While equal opportunity at work was still a distant dream for late-Victorian feminists, there were plenty of battles to be fought at home. The nature of the middle class was changing. The difference between lower-middle and upper-middle was becoming more defined in terms of manners and outlook, and the number of servants a family could afford to hire: just a cook and a maid-of-all-work? Or an array of different kinds of help? At the top of the scale, what mattered was that the house was beautiful – and by extension the woman beautiful, for she occupied the centre of this world, holding its elements in genteel suspension.

Rooms in late-Victorian upper-middle-class homes grew cluttered as hoarding fine things became a moral prerogative – conveniently for those who wanted to be both genteel and righteous; to reconcile, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, ‘piety and worldliness, the nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass’.27 As the design historian Deborah Cohen notes: ‘Women’s sense of themselves seems from the 1890s onward to have been tied up increasingly in their décor.’28

The continuing popularity of Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management is revealing. It’s fair to assume most families read it aspirationally. Mrs Beeton, who died in 1865, four years after it came out, directs her advice to the manager of a large household whom she compares to the commander of an army, the assumption being that this woman has a team of servants at her beck and call to engineer show-offy dinner-party coups de théâtre, such as Service à la Russe, in which as many as fourteen courses are presented one after the other.

While husbands went off to work, middle-class ‘womenfolk’ remained at home as pampered dependents. Katharine Chorley grew up in the well-to-do Manchester suburb of Alderley Edge where ‘pheasants whirred out of copses, the crack of guns sounded through the winter, [and] cattle churned to a muddy porridge the good Cheshire soil at the entrance gates of fields.’29 Happily, this bucolic idyll existed a mere fifteen minutes’ train journey from the centre of Manchester. Chorley recalled in her memoir Manchester Made Them that once the 8.25, 8.50 and 9.18 trains had left in the morning the Edge became ‘exclusively female’:

You never saw a man on the hill roads unless it were the doctor or the plumber, and you never saw a man in anyone’s home except the gardener or the coachman. And yet it was a man-made and a man-lorded society.30

Businessmen using the trains travelled First Class. But if a wife or daughter needed to go into Manchester she would always travel Third Class because ‘to share a compartment with the gentlemen (we were taught never to call them just plainly “men”) would have been unthinkable’. In this situation ‘business trains’ were avoided if possible: ‘It was highly embarrassing, a sort of indelicacy, to stand on the platform surrounded by a crowd of males who had to be polite but were obviously not in the mood for feminine society.’31 Chorley’s less-deceived gaze is unsparing: women in such a society, she recognises, ‘existed for their husbands’ and fathers’ sakes and their lives were shaped to please masculine vanity.’32

Life for upper-middle-class women was, if anything, even stranger and more isolated. Privilege infantilised them: Gwen Raverat, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, wrote in Period Piece, her very funny memoir of her 1890s childhood, that at the end of the century there were thousands of British women like her Aunt Etty who had ‘never made a pot of tea … been out in the dark alone … travelled by train without a maid … or sewn on a button.’33

‘There were always people to do these things for her. In fact, in some ways, she was very like a royal person. Once she wrote when her maid, the patient and faithful Janet, was away for a day or two: “I am very busy answering my own bell.”’34

How had this situation arisen? Because the behaviour of ‘respectable’ women was governed by strict social rules. By the 1880s public transport was making it easier for women to get around, but there were still places where they needed to be accompanied. Women who walked the streets themselves were seen as ‘either endangered or dangerous’, as one historian puts it,35 and as a rule ‘a lady was simply not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets or eating alone.’36

Virginia Woolf’s The Pargiters, an early version of the ‘essay-novel’ that would become The Years, her last work to be published in her lifetime, is partly set in the 1880s, at which point the middle-class Pargiter sisters ‘could not possibly go for a walk alone’:

For any of them to walk in the West End by day was out of the question. Bond Street was as impassable, save with their mother, as any swamp alive with crocodiles … To be seen alone in Piccadilly was equivalent to walking up Abercorn Terrace in a dressing gown carrying a bath sponge.37

One middle-class woman who made it her moral business to walk the streets – admittedly with a companion for safety – was the social reformer Mary Higgs. The difference was that Higgs disguised herself as a homeless woman. In 1906, twenty-seven years before George Orwell went ‘on the tramp’ to write Down and Out in Paris and London, Higgs published Glimpses Into the Abyss, an extraordinary account of life on the streets, in lodging houses and the wards of workhouses.

Born in Wiltshire in 1854, Higgs (née Kingsland) was the daughter of a Congregational minister and in 1873 became the first woman to study for the Natural Science Tripos at Cambridge. She drifted into teaching, but after marrying Thomas Kilpin Higgs, a minister like her father, devoted much of her time to philanthropic works: helping to manage a home for destitute women in Oldham; and engaging in utopian brainstorming with Ebenezer Howard, founder of the ‘garden city’ movement.

Higgs considered poverty to be a sort of disease, more or less infectious – she talks about the ‘microbes of social disorder’ – which the right sort of ‘remedial treatment’ could eradicate. In her introduction to Glimpses into the Abyss, Higgs describes the Oldham cottage she converted into a lodging house as a ‘social microscope, every case being personally investigated as to past life, history and present need’.38 What had been done to these women? What had they done to themselves? Higgs admitted ignorance. But she was determined to learn. The only way to do this, she decided, was to explore ‘Darkest England’ herself in a spirit of rational, scientific enquiry.

And so Higgs wandered through West Yorkshire, Lancashire and, briefly, London. She studied the Poor Law in Britain and its equivalent in Denmark. She also undertook a ‘literary investigation into deterioration of human personality’ – a ‘necessary corollary to the acquisition of a wide collection of facts’. Her inquiries took on a eugenicist gloss, shocking to us now, though it would have shocked few people at the time:

In any given individual the whole path climbed by the foremost classes or races may not be retraced. Therefore numbers of individuals are permanently stranded on lower levels of evolution. Society can quicken evolution by right social arrangements, scientific in principle.39

Higgs’ sense that improving social conditions for the poor could transform them and set them back on the road to prosperity (or at least ‘evolution’ rather than ‘devolution’) sounds progressive. But for her, people could only retrace the path appropriate to their class or race; could only hope to reach a certain, pre-ordained level of attainment. Even with all the wind in the world behind her, a working-class woman could never hope to be as clever and accomplished as an upper-class woman.

Higgs brought along her own secret supply of provisions – sugar, tea, plasmon (a form of dried milk) – and tolerated the filthy bedding, fleas and lack of washing facilities. But the behaviour of the people she encountered baffled her:

A conversation sprang up about the treatment of wives, and it was stated that a woman loved a man best if he ill-treated her … All the conversation was unspeakably foul, and was delivered with a kind of cross-shouting, each struggling to make his or her observations heard.40

In a workhouse tramp ward, naivety blinded Higgs to the ever-present sexual threat. A male ‘pauper’, charged with the responsibility for admitting women, ‘talked to me in what I suppose he thought a very agreeable manner, telling me he wished I had come alone earlier, and he would have given me a cup of tea. I thanked him, wondering if this was usual, and then he took my age, and finding I was a married woman (I must use his exact words), he said, “Just the right age for a bit of funning; come down to me later in the evening.” I was too horror-struck to reply.’41

Learning that ‘single women frequently get shaken out of a home by bereavements or other causes, and drift, unable to recover a stable position once their clothing becomes dirty or shabby’,42 Higgs comes to understand the catch-22 of poverty. This led her, once she had returned to her own world of middle-class comfort, to campaign for such things as pensions for widowed mothers and family allowances – some sort of safety net that might break the cycle of destitution.

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At Windsor Castle on the night of 14 December 1861, Prince Albert died of typhoid at the age of forty-two. Victoria was inconsolable: his loss was, she said, ‘like tearing the flesh from my bones’. As she withdrew from the world, all that interested her was memorialising her husband and the miracle of their marriage through the likes of the Royal Albert Hall (opened in 1871) and the Albert Memorial (unveiled in 1872).

But however marvellous Victoria and Albert’s often stormy relationship had been, as an institution marriage was becoming less and less popular. By 1871 there were 3.4 million unmarried women over the age of twenty, an increase from 2.8 million in 1851 – a mixture of spinsters and widows. Whatever their circumstances, these were ‘surplus women’, considered a significant social problem in late-Victorian Britain, unless they lived lives of sainted purity.

Among this number we can count the single, celibate Florence Nightingale, who referred to herself as a nun, her only ‘sons’ the soldiers she cared for. Other less fortunate surplus women lived in special lodgings on small annuities, devoting themselves to good works because to work for money was socially unacceptable. Nightingale was scornful of these ‘lady philanthropists who do the odds and ends of charity’: ‘It is a kind of conscience-quieter,’ she wrote, ‘a soothing syrup.’43

For middle-class women who chose not to marry, options were limited. They could become governesses, educating the children of their social superiors but kept at arm’s length by the host families so that they felt no more valued or involved than servants. Writing was also acceptable, but to make a success of it you needed private means. Back in the early nineteenth century, the prolific social theorist Harriet Martineu had been able to make a living entirely by the pen. But she was considered a brazen oddity, which may be why the novelist Margaret Oliphant wrote that Martineu was ‘less distinctively affected by her sex than perhaps any other, male or female, of her generation’.44

In journalism, women’s inability to forge the necessary old-school-tie connections made the job doubly hard. As Charlotte O’Connor Eccles wrote in 1893, in an anonymous article for Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine:

One is horribly handicapped in being a woman. A man meets other men at his club; he can be out and about at all hours; he can insist without being thought bold and forward; he is not presumed to be capable of undertaking only a limited class of subjects, but is set to anything … Where a man finds one obstacle, we find a dozen.45

When women were employed at a senior level, it was often as a gimmick. In November 1903, the newspaper proprietor Alfred Harmsworth – later Lord Northcliffe – decided to launch a paper ‘for gentlewomen by gentlewomen’. Called the Daily Mirror, it would, Harmsworth announced in its inaugural editorial, arrange its stories so that ‘the transition from the shaping of a flounce to the forthcoming changes in imperial defence, from the arrangement of flowers on the dinner-table to the disposition of forces in the Far East, shall be made without mental paroxysm or dislocation of interest.’46 So far, so enlightened: in fact, it sounds rather like the UK edition of Marie Claire in its 1990s pomp.

To edit the Daily Mirror Harmsworth chose Mary Howarth, who had previously edited the women’s pages of his incredibly successful Daily Mail, launched in 1896 and a classic example of the so-called ‘ha’penny press’ which catered to the newly literate beneficiaries of the 1870 Education Act. All Howarth’s staff were women, and for a short time it looked as if Harmsworth’s gamble had paid off: the first issue sold a healthy 276,000 copies. Within weeks, however, circulation had plummeted to 25,000. Howarth and her team were sacked and the Mirror transformed into a picture-driven (and male-edited) paper which went on to be almost as successful as the Mail.

Harmsworth called the first incarnation of the Daily Mirror ‘the only journalistic failure with which I have been associated’: ‘Some people say that a woman never really knows what she wants. It is certain she knew what she didn’t want. She didn’t want the Daily Mirror.’47 Bafflingly, the conclusion Harmsworth drew from this catastrophe was not that he had misjudged women’s interests and catered to them poorly, but that ‘women can’t write and don’t want to read.’48 Oh dear.

Female journalists were consistently sidelined and belittled – a hazard of the job familiar to some in Fleet Street today. Emilie Peacocke, born in 1882, was the daughter of the editor of the Northern Echo, but even having journalism in the blood was of little help when she became the first full-time woman reporter on the Daily Express: she still wasn’t allowed to use the paper’s staff room.

Rachel Beer’s installation as editor of both the Sunday Times and the Observer in the 1890s owed more than a little to the fact that her family owned them: her husband Frederick Beer had inherited the Observer from his father. She was a socialite, the great-granddaughter of the Sassoon family patriarch Sheikh Sason ben Saleh, an Iraqi Jew born in Baghdad in 1750 – the poet Siegfried Sassoon was her nephew – and arguably the papers were her playthings. Beer worked from home, a telephone line connecting her west London villa to the Sunday Times’ office in Fleet Street.

Beer wrote copiously and was surprisingly hands-on as an editor. She had a weakness for puffery – she once altered George Bernard Shaw’s copy to insert some society gossip, to his noisy displeasure – and was denied the confidence even of politicians she counted as friends, such as Gladstone. But on the whole she used her powers thoughtfully and responsibly, supporting women’s causes whenever she could, although she thought equal pay and respect in the workplace more pressing issues for women than the vote.

Under her editorship the Observer achieved one of its biggest scoops: the admission by Count Esterhazy that he forged letters that had resulted in the false conviction of the Jewish artillery officer Captain Alfred Dreyfus for feeding military secrets to the German Embassy in Paris. But Beer’s final years were not happy ones. She had contracted syphilis from Frederick and, after he died from the disease in 1903, her grief escalated into a full-scale mental breakdown. She was declared insane by the controversial psychiatrist George Savage, who counted Virginia Woolf among his patients, and the papers were sold off.

Instead of being forced into an asylum, Rachel was installed in a mansion in Tunbridge Wells and looked after by three nurses. Her nephew Siegfried visited her and wrote, in a passage he later cut from the final version of his memoir The Weald of Youth, that Rachel was reduced to staring at him, ‘apathetic and unrecognising … a brooding sallow stranger, cut off from the rest of the world.’49 She died on 29 April 1927.

A similar fate befell another talented woman journalist of the period, Lady Colin Campbell, aka Gertrude Elizabeth Blood, the youngest daughter of Anglo-Irish landowners from County Clare, Ireland. She contracted an unspecified venereal disease – probably gonorrhea – from her philandering Liberal MP husband. After a humiliating show trial in 1886 that left her a pariah, Gertrude was not allowed to divorce him. The illness robbed her of her vitality and striking looks and led eventually to her death in 1911, by which time she was more famous for having once worn a live snake around her neck than for her books and witty contributions to the Pall Mall Gazette.

Gertrude Elizabeth Blood’s treatment showed that the sexual double-standard was alive and well relatively late in the century. It showed how little things had changed; how far, despite everything, women still had to go in their quest for representation and equality. For like it or not, the public sphere was still overwhelmingly male. Women who wished to make inroads into it were obliged to emphasise their homely, caring virtues, as the campaigner Josephine Butler did explicitly in 1869 when she wrote:

I believe that nothing whatever will avail but the large infusion of Home elements into workhouses, hospitals, schools, orphanages, lunatic asylums, reformatories, and even prisons, and in order to attain this there must be a setting free of feminine powers and influence from the constraint of a bad education, and narrow aims, and listless homes where they are at present a superfluity.50

Butler had grown up in a staunchly liberal, abolitionist family where women were treated as intellectual equals. Like Mary Higgs, she married a clergyman and became interested in philanthropy, befriending an unmarried mother who had been imprisoned in Newgate after committing infanticide and finding the woman work as a servant in the Butler family home in Oxford – an early example of her ‘rescue work’.

As with Annie Besant, personal tragedy turbo-charged her reforming zeal. In 1864 her five-year-old daughter Eva died after falling forty feet while trying to slide down a bannister. She had been rushing to greet her parents as they returned from a holiday in the Lake District. Josephine, who witnessed the event, wrote later that ‘for twenty-five years I never woke from sleep without the vision of her falling figure, and the sound of the crash on the stone floor.’51

The Butlers moved to Liverpool in 1866 to begin a new life. Josephine remained depressed, but knew the only solution was to ‘go forth and find some pain keener than my own … I only knew that my heart ached night and day and that the only solace possible would seem to be to find other hearts which ached night and day, and with more reason than mine.’52

At the suggestion of a local Baptist minister, she visited Liverpool’s docks where homeless women would gather to collect oakum, the untwisted fibres of old rope used to caulk ships – ‘hard and degrading work, thought fit only for paupers or convicts’.53 To their baffled amusement, Butler joined the women in their work and slowly won their trust and friendship. Many of them, she realised, were also prostitutes. They had to be, if they were to have enough money to live.

As before, Butler opened up her house, this time to the prostitutes she felt were especially deserving. One in particular became like a surrogate daughter: twenty-four-year-old consumptive Mary Lomax, a former under-maid in a grand house who had been raped by her employer and left pregnant, then drifted onto the streets after she was dismissed from service and then rejected by her own family.

Nothing summed up the sexual double standard quite like the Contagious Diseases Act 1864, which gave the police the power to arrest prostitutes and subject them to brutal, degrading internal examinations for venereal disease, on the grounds that they – not the men who used and abused them – were to blame for spreading it. Through her Ladies’ National Association, Butler mobilised opposition to the Act and finally achieved success in 1885 when it was abolished and the age of consent for women raised from twelve to sixteen.

What took her so long? Partly it was the inability of the political patriarchy to come to terms with any sort of female agenda. In 1896 Butler would remember a ‘fully sympathetic’ MP admitting to a female friend, ‘“Your manifesto has shaken us very badly in the House of Commons … We know how to manage any other opposition in the House or in the country, but this is very awkward for us – this revolt of the women. It is quite a new thing; what are we to do with such an opposition as this?”’54

It was a more uncertain opposition than the MP perhaps supposed. Some middle-class women struggled to cast off their shackles and adjust to their new public prominence. Conditioned to be servile and law-abiding, they showed perverse respect for the rules that kept women in second place: educational reformer Mary Carpenter, for example, refused to chair meetings as she thought it wasn’t respectable. Women who stood up at meetings were routinely praised for their ‘heroism’ – or treated as circus freaks. Suffrage campaigner Lilias Ashworth went on a speaking tour of the West Country in 1872 and noticed that audiences ‘came expecting to see curious masculine objects walking on the platform, and when we appeared, with our quiet black dresses, the whole expression of the faces of the audience would instantly change’.55

Many men were also uncomfortable seeing women as Poor Law guardians – a sort of early social work. The work was considered unsuitable because of the unsavoury things they would witness in workhouses and hospitals. The first female English Poor Law guardian, Martha Merrington, was elected in 1875.

The historian Steven King recently discovered the diary of a female Poor Law guardian from Bolton in Lancashire called Mary Haslam. This entry for 27 February 1894 gives some idea of the day-to-day routine:

Visited the Lying-in Ward again having tried to find out particulars of two of the women; one had left and the other had proved untruthful. Visited feeble-minded room. Saw lunatics in bed. Talked with Nurse Henry. Our Committee suggested to the guardians the possibility of brightening the lunatics’ surroundings by reversing a day and night room; we had some conversation as to whether occasional nurses could be provided.56

Many women took advantage of the 1894 Local Government Act, which granted them the right to stand for election to local councils. Henrietta ‘Nettie’ Adler, daughter of the Chief Rabbi, was a school board manager until 1910 when she became a Progressive councillor for Hackney Central. Susan Lawrence – tall, haughty and monocled, with a cut-glass accent to match – began her career in 1910 as a Conservative councillor for West Marylebone but underwent an improbable conversion to socialism in 1913, eventually becoming one of the first three female Labour MPs alongside Margaret Bondfield and Dorothy Jewson.

What unites many of the women of the era is a willingness to play the long game. The female-dominated Fabian Society, founded in 1884, wanted to effect change on a grand scale by proceeding slowly and carefully. (Hence ‘Fabian’, honouring the Roman general Fabius Maximus who favoured attrition as a strategy rather than direct conflict.) When we think of nineteenth-century sanitary reform we think of someone like Bazalgette and his sewers – large-scale infrastructure designed and built by men. But other big, though perhaps less ostentatious, projects in this field – like the provision of public baths and wash-houses, found in nearly every British town by the 1920s – were the work of women.

Derbyshire-born Hannah Mitchell, a seamstress who went on to become a leading suffrage activist and Labour councillor, was elected as a Poor Law guardian in the market town of Ashton-under-Lyne in May 1904. Years later she became a member of the Manchester Baths Committee and wrote with pride of the ‘really up-to-date little wash house’ she had helped to get built, where ‘a family wash could be done in a couple of hours, and the home kept free of wet clothes and steam’.57

From the 1850s onwards, a pressing social concern had been the woeful state of housing for the poor. One of Fabian-stalwart Beatrice Webb’s sisters worked as a rent collector for the housing scheme run by Octavia Hill – the woman Webb said taught her ‘the meaning of the poverty of the poor’. Webb first met Hill in 1886 at the home of their mutual friend Henrietta Barnett, the co-founder of Hampstead Garden Suburb and Toynbee Hall, the ‘settlement’ centre for the poor in London’s Tower Hamlets. ‘She is a small woman, with large head finely set on her shoulders,’ Webb wrote in her diary:

The form of her head and features, and the expression of the eyes and mouth, show the attractiveness of mental power. We talked on Artisans’ Dwellings. I asked her whether she thought it necessary to keep accurate descriptions of the tenants. No, she did not see the use of it … She objected that there was already too much windy talk. What you wanted was action … I felt penitent for my presumption, but not convinced.58

The regal hauteur is immediately evident. Still, more than any other woman of her era, Hill could see that grand schemes only worked if you combined clarity of ambition with an infinite supply of patience.

Octavia Hill was born in 1838 in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire. Her father, James Hill, was a corn merchant who had fathered six children and been widowed twice by the time he married Octavia’s mother, Caroline Southwood Smith – the family governess, hired after James was impressed by her writings on education.

In 1840 James Hill’s business collapsed and he fell into a depression. The family moved to London where Caroline found work as manager and bookkeeper of the Ladies’ Cooperative Guild. As soon as she was old enough, Octavia worked alongside her as her assistant and at fourteen began supervising the local ragged school children as they manufactured toys. But she was no callous ‘sweater’ – on the contrary, she took the children on regular trips to wide open green spaces like Hampstead Heath and noticed how much they valued and enjoyed them.

This sowed the seeds of a scheme for improving the working classes’ quality of life by improving their environment – principally their homes, which were cramped and run-down even when ‘well kept’. She wasn’t the only one to come up with the idea. A mass of so-called ‘model dwelling’ companies emerged in London in the middle of the nineteenth century. There were thirty or more operating by the 1870s, of which the oldest, the Metropolitan Association for Improving the Dwellings of the Industrious Classes, had been around since 1841. Their goal – and Hill’s – was solidly paternalistic, and at least one of their aims was the maintenance of the status quo, by nipping discontent in the bud. As Lord Shaftesbury put it: ‘If the working man has his own house, I have no fear of revolution.’59

In other respects, though, Hill was different. For one thing there was the unusual matter of her key investor. John Ruskin had taken an interest in her as a fifteen-year-old after seeing her sketches – she was a talented artist – and had offered his services as an art tutor. He invested money he had inherited from his father in Hill’s Charity Organisation Society for a 5 per cent dividend.

On the whole, as we know, Ruskin preferred his women to stay home by the hearth. But exceptions were permitted: if they were carrying out ‘public work or duty which is also the expansion of that [i.e. their domestic role]’ then they had his blessing, as such work was consistent with what Sheila Rowbotham calls Ruskin’s ‘organic vision of society as an interconnected household’.60

In 1865, Hill bought her first properties, close to Marylebone High Street in central London, but a million miles from the area as we now know it. She described her purchase a little later as ‘a row of cottages facing a bit of desolate ground, occupied with wretched, dilapidated cow-sheds, manure heaps, old timber, and rubbish of every description’:

The houses were in a most deplorable condition – the plaster was dropping from the walls; on one staircase a pail was placed to catch the rain that fell through the roof. All the staircases were perfectly dark; the banisters were gone, having been burnt as firewood by tenants. The grates, with large holes in them, were falling forward into the rooms.61

Most ‘model dwelling’ companies had rules and regulations designed to exclude tenants of ‘bad character’ and attract the respectable working classes. Octavia went one step further. She believed that if you enabled people to develop self-respect and self-reliance then they wouldn’t need charity. Any form of philanthropy which cultivated dependency was pointless and un-Christian. Reading one of her letters from 1890, I’m reminded of some of the twenty-first-century political rows over welfare reform:

We have made many mistakes with our alms: eaten out the heart of the independent, bolstered up the drunkard in his indulgence, subsidised wages, discouraged thrift, assumed that many of the most ordinary wants of a working man’s family must be met by our wretched and intermittent doles.62

Hill’s tenants were closely monitored by teams of lady volunteers who distributed forms in which they were expected to review their weekly conduct. Hill favoured cottages rather than the barrack-like blocks popular with other housing associations – ‘little houses’ where lower-class people could ‘get the individual feeling and notice which trains them in humanity’; though by the end of the century she was experimenting with maisonette-like ‘compound houses’, ‘two distinct cottages one on the top of the other’:

People become brutal in large numbers who are gentle when they are in smaller groups and know one another, and the life in a block only becomes possible when there is a deliberate isolation of the family, and a sense of duty with respect to all that is in common.63

Any profits from the scheme were spent on what Hill considered to be improvements – like playgrounds and gardens. By 1874 she ran fifteen housing schemes and had around three thousand tenants. Ten years later she began to manage properties for the Ecclesiastical Commissioners.

But housing wasn’t Hill’s only focus. She wanted her tenants to be immersed in culture, education and nature. So she campaigned for the opening up of closed-off public spaces and the preservation of areas such as Hampstead Heath. In 1876, she and her sister Miranda founded the Society for the Diffusion of Beauty, later rechristened the Kyrle Society. This mutated over time into a ‘holding trust’ in which the ownership of threatened land or buildings could be vested. Hill suggested it be called ‘The Commons and Gardens Trust’. But a colleague thought it should have a snappier title. What about ‘National Trust’? She agreed and the society was registered in 1895.

Hill accomplished a good deal, but it didn’t come easily to her. A workaholic perfectionist who hated delegating, she had several breakdowns triggered by a combination of overwork and a turbulent emotional life. But while she gave the world a blueprint for philanthropic property management, she worked on a small scale, smaller than her reputation perhaps suggests, and the housing crisis of the early twentieth century needed more far-reaching reform than she was able to provide.

Her influence on the debate about housing policy remains palpable. The historian and former MP Tristram Hunt writes that, as ministers ‘grapple with re-engineering the welfare state, it is not Keynes, Marx or Giddens who provide the inspiration, but Hill, the most versatile of late Victorian social entrepreneurs.’64

Hill died of cancer in 1912, the year a woman cut from similar cloth, Maud Pember Reeves, published Round About a Pound a Week, compiled from tracts she had produced for the Fabian Society, distilling four years’ worth of research into working-class housing. Reeves had established the Fabian Women’s Group, working alongside Beatrice Webb, who was involved in the Royal Commission considering Poor Law reform. Through this she became interested in studying the lives of working-class families in Lambeth, focusing particularly on the women who held those families together.

Despite living in well-to-do Kensington and being the wife of the New Zealand government’s Agent General, Reeves lacked Hill’s air of genteel condescension and compulsion to moralise. But her indignation was just as fierce. As she watched children playing on the streets, she was infuriated by the way the poorer ones had had their futures stolen from them. You can tell them apart, she wrote, by the way they are ‘comfortably dirty’ and have ‘the look of being small for their age’: ‘Had they been well housed, well fed, well clothed, and well tended, from birth, what kind of raw material would they have shown themselves to be?’65

What’s astonishing about Round About a Pound a Week is how many of its suggested solutions came to pass: free school dinners, free health clinics, child benefit. Not since Rowntree’s Poverty in 1901 had a book punched through so effectively, showing the middle classes and policy makers how the other half lived. It came at a time of general panic about the physical state of British men after the Boer War – concerns that would be raised again in 1914. Many were weakened by rickets and other diseases caused by poor nutrition.

Reeves and her helpers – including the anarchist Charlotte Wilson, who ran a Marxist debating society out of the Hampstead farmhouse she shared with her stockbroker husband – visited families trying to survive on a pound a week. She asked them to keep note of their outgoings and diaries detailing daily problems such as the struggle to heat their houses and keep vermin from disturbing children while they slept. Reeves was shocked by the way the families spent money they couldn’t afford on burial insurance to avoid the embarrassment of a pauper’s funeral for their children, few of whom lived to adulthood. The middle-class theory that the poor were ‘bad managers’ who squandered their money on drink was mostly not true. On the contrary, they did their best, living on bread with a scraping of dripping and sometimes potatoes. Once weaned, none of the children ever tasted milk again.

It is shocking that the families featured were by no means the worst off. A pound a week was a low wage, but not disastrously so.

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Keeping body and soul together was only half the battle. There was also the life of the mind to consider.

Thanks to the 1870 Education Act, 92 per cent of the population of England and Wales were literate by 1910. But women were still not thought worth properly educating. The assumption was that they would – and would want to – stay at home raising children rather than go out to work.

Helena Swanwick, an early feminist and suffrage campaigner, wrote of her childhood in the 1880s that she ‘could not help contrasting my condition with that of my three elder brothers, all at school and able to walk about freely in the daytime, while I was not allowed out alone and had to be content with some very poor piano lessons and a few desultory German lessons with two other girls who were quite beginners.’66

Slowly, this changed. The Girls’ Public Day School Trust was founded in 1872. It was inspired by North London Collegiate, the first independent school for girls, which had been opened in 1850 by Frances Mary Buss with the goal of enabling girls to study subjects usually thought of as ‘male’, such as science and mathematics.

Buss and her friend and associate Dorothea Beale, redoubtable members of the so-called Langham Place feminists, were the target of classic Victorian everyday sexism: ‘Miss Buss and Miss Beale/Cupid’s darts do not feel./How different from us,/Miss Beale and Miss Buss’, went one rhyme. Undeterred, they pressed on, and as schools opened, so did women’s colleges like Girton, founded in Hitchin in 1869 but relocated to Cambridge in 1873. By 1879 Oxford also had three women’s colleges: Lady Margaret Hall, Somerville and St Anne’s.

Helena Swanwick was in raptures remembering her time at Girton: ‘I had a study as well as a bedroom to myself … my own fire, my own desk, my own easy-chair and reading lamp … even my own kettle – I was speechless with delight … To have a study of my own and to be told that if I chose to put “Engaged” on the door, no one would so much as knock was itself so great a privilege as to render me from sleep.’67

But Girton was expensive, costing £35 per term for board and tuition, and, even once they’d been accepted, women were at a disadvantage. Philippa Fawcett, daughter of the suffragist campaigner Millicent Garrett Fawcett (of whom more later), attended Newnham College in 1890 and came top in the Cambridge Maths Tripos exams. But she couldn’t be named ‘senior wrangler’, the term for the university’s top maths undergraduate, because women were not listed and would in any case not become full university members until 1948. Only then did they receive proper degrees rather than patronising ‘certificates of achievement’.

Still, Fawcett had an easier time of it than her aunt Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, whose vocation to train as a doctor proved farcically hard to fulfil. Medical schools were rather conservative, and distinctly queasy about women attending classes in anatomy and physiology, as if the sight of a dead man’s penis might be too much for the poor delicate creatures.

Elizabeth’s father Newson Garrett, a successful but uneducated businessman, intended great things for his daughters – all that he had not had himself. After failing to get on with their governess, Elizabeth and her sister Louisa were packed off to the Academy for the Daughters of Gentlemen in Blackheath, where they were known as the ‘bathing Garretts’ because their father had instructed that they be given a hot bath once a week – an eccentric request in 1849. Elizabeth in particular hated its finishing-school atmosphere and the fact that she was not taught maths or science there.

At twenty-one, after a grand tour of the continent, Elizabeth found herself back at the family home in Aldeburgh, tutoring her numerous siblings; comfortable, but frustrated and intellectually restless. She became interested in the burgeoning women’s movement and read about Elizabeth Blackwell, the first American (though British-born) female physician, in the Englishwoman’s Journal. Anderson heard that Blackwell was visiting Britain and contacted Emily Davies, the educational reformer who co-founded Girton College, to arrange a meeting, after which she was more certain than ever that she wanted to train to be a doctor. With Davies’ and Blackwell’s encouragement, Anderson set about filling in the gaps in her education and talking her father round. Newson Garrett initially thought the idea ‘disgusting’ but changed his mind, writing to her:

I have resolved in my own mind after deep and painful consideration not to oppose your wishes and as far as expense is concerned I will do all I can in justice to my other children to assist you in your study.

So Anderson enrolled as a nursing student at Middlesex Hospital, where she won round doubters with her competence, learned what she could from those doctors who were prepared to teach her and sneakily attended classes intended for male students only. To earn a medical degree, however, Anderson had to find a university that would allow her to matriculate. She applied to numerous English and Scottish medical schools, only to be refused entry on bizarre gender grounds. Her rejection letter from Aberdeen is priceless:

I must decline to give you instruction in Anatomy … I have a strong conviction that the entrance of ladies into dissecting rooms and anatomical theatres is undesirable in every respect, and highly unbecoming. It is not necessary that fair ladies should be brought into contact with such foul scenes – nor would it be for their good, any more than for that of their patients.68

Frustrated, she spotted a loophole at the Society of Apothecaries, which didn’t specifically forbid women sitting their exams. As it happened, the Society changed its rules to exclude women shortly afterwards, but the licence Anderson acquired allowed her to apply to a medical school in Paris where women were accepted. She obtained her degree in 1870, teaching herself French in order to do so, and returned to England to take up the post of chief medical officer at a children’s hospital.

The following year, Elizabeth married James G. Skelton Anderson, the managing director of the Orient Steamship Company, in an unconventional ceremony in which she refused to say that she would ‘obey’ him. With his financial help she founded the New Hospital for Women in London, which had an all-female staff, and she worked there between 1886 and 1892, remaining the dean until 1902.

Several other Victorian female doctors went on to found hospitals after jumping through numerous hoops to qualify. Sophia Jex-Blake was one. A rival of Garrett Anderson’s, she founded both a hospital and a school of medicine for women in Edinburgh. But she did so in the face of quite extraordinary discrimination.

Born in Hastings, Sophia had been working without pay at Queen’s College, London as a maths tutor because her father, a proctor at a lawyers’ society, wouldn’t allow her to accept a salary. Deciding to train as a doctor, she went first to America, where she studied briefly with Elizabeth Blackwell in New York, before returning to England when her father died in 1869. But finding a British medical school to take her was harder than she expected. The University of London, ‘of whose liberality one heard so much’, rejected her, explaining that ‘the charter had been purposely so worded as to exclude the possibility of examining women for medical degrees.’ With the help of influential friends, she lobbied to be accepted by Edinburgh, which agreed to teach her only after she had personally advertised for more women entrants to make up numbers.

Sophia and four other women started their Edinburgh course in October 1869. Several curmudgeonly tutors refused to teach them, but they quickly proved themselves as capable as their male counterparts. One of them even won a prestigious Hope Scholarship, awarded to the top four students in the year, although Sophia later complained that it had been ‘wrested from the successful candidate and given over her head to the fifth student on the list, who happened to be a man’.

The bullying Sophia and her colleagues endured in Edinburgh has passed into feminist legend. In her autobiography Sophia described how, after a meeting with the Royal Infirmary’s management team, ‘a certain proportion of the students with whom we worked became markedly offensive and insolent, and took every opportunity of practising the petty annoyances that occur to thoroughly ill-bred lads – such as shutting doors in our faces, ostentatiously crowding into seats we usually occupied, bursting into horse-laughs and howls when we approached – as if a conspiracy had been formed to make our position as uncomfortable as it might be’.69

Sophia’s fellow Edinburgh medic Edith Pechey described the treatment she endured in a letter to the Scotsman:

If we happen to meet students on our way home in the evening … [they] find pleasure in following a woman through the streets, and take advantage of her being alone to shout after her all the foulest epithets in their voluminous vocabulary of abuse … I should be very sorry to see any poor girl under the care (!) of such men as those, for instance, who the other night followed me through the street, using medical terms to make the disgusting import of their language more intelligible to me.70

The more successful the women became in their studies, the more the violence against them escalated. Mud was thrown at them and fireworks attached to the doors of their lodgings. On 18 November 1870 the women arrived to sit an anatomy exam at Surgeon’s Hall, only to find a drunken mob blocking their entry and a live sheep wandering around the room. The none-too-subtle message was that a woman was as unwelcome there as a farmyard animal. ‘The unruffled lecturer advised his class to take no notice of the animal, saying that it had more sense than those who sent it in.’

To add insult to injury, on 8 January 1872 Edinburgh’s University Court decided the university would not, after all, be awarding the women a degree. But it was okay – they were still free to study there, ‘if we would altogether give up the question of graduation, and be content with certificates of proficiency’ (Sophia’s italics). The students tried to sue Edinburgh University for breach of implied contract. When this failed, they pursued the matter through Parliament and after three years of squabbling, during which Sophia founded the London School of Medicine for Women, achieved victory in the form of the Russell Gurney Enabling Act (1876), which obliged medical bodies to allow women to sit exams – except in surgery – and gave women the same rights as men to enter the profession.

Sophia Jex-Blake eventually sat her medical exams in 1877 at the Irish College of Physicians in Dublin. She set up her own practice in Edinburgh the following year and by the end of 1878 had treated 574 patients. From then on, women’s progress through the profession was unstoppable. In January 1882, 26 women in England were registered as having medical qualifications, rising to 477 by 1911. How absurd that it had been such a struggle.

In a sense, these clever, educated women couldn’t win. So-called New Women – with their bicycles, cheque books and eccentric desire to vote and hold down demanding jobs – were either shockingly erotic, in possession of a sex drive which was hard to control, or satirised as bluestockings: walking Punch cartoons, with their gaiters, loosely fitting skirts and, possibly, bloomers. They were in the curious position of knowing too much to be interesting to men, a position most of them enjoyed.

Elizabeth Blackwell had broken the news as early as 1881 that women had sex drives:

The radical physiological error, which underlies ordinary thought and action in relation to the evils of sex, is the very grave error that men are much more powerfully swayed by this instinct of sex than are women. From this radical error are drawn the false deductions that men are less able to resist that instinct; that they are more injured by abstinence from its satisfaction; and that they require a licence in action which forbids the laying down of the same moral law for men and women.71

This was incendiary stuff. One of the scandals of Gertrude Blood’s divorce trial in 1886 was her husband Lord Colin Campbell’s allegation that she had had four adulterous relationships, one of them with the Duke of Marlborough. Of course, only men were allowed in the public gallery to hear the details as the evidence was considered not fit for female ears. Lord Colin Campbell’s solicitor denounced her to the jury as ‘grossly sensuous, guilty of yielding to the gratification of her passions, guilty of indecency of the grossest character as to time, place and circumstances’.72

Sexually liberated women were rather more sympathetically drawn in the popular novels of the day. One of the most widely read was Anna Lombard (1901) by ‘Victoria Cross’ – a nom de plume used by Annie Sophie Cory, the Indian-born daughter of a British army colonel.

It was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day, selling an estimated six million copies, running through more than thirty editions and remaining in print until 1930, after which it mysteriously vanished from the nation’s book shops and shelves. On publication it was denounced by critics as ‘disgusting’ (Athenaeum) and ‘thoroughly impure’ (Academy) because its eponymous New Woman heroine, while engaged to be married to an assistant commissioner in the Indian Civil Service called Gerald Ethridge, sleeps with and then marries her servant Gaida.

Gerald finds himself in a quandary. Should he abandon Anna or persist with the engagement in the hope that she will come to her senses and overcome the physical obsession for which, Gerald concedes with extraordinary post-feminist empathy, she is ‘no more to be held responsible than she would have been for any physical malady’?

Adultery, interracial sex, infanticide … Cory took every Victorian taboo she could think of and moulded a bestselling novel out of them, complete with prose which cleverly (or not so cleverly, depending on your viewpoint) displaces onto the natural world the sex it would have been illegal for her to describe: ‘The purple sky above was throbbing, beating, palpitating … What a night for the registration or the consummation of vows!’73

Just as intriguing was Cory’s switching of gender roles – so that it is Anna who is the sexual adventurer and Gerald who nurtures and abstains. One contemporary reviewer who appreciated this was the journalist W. T. Stead, friend of Annie Besant, who wrote: ‘Never before in English fiction can I remember so clearly cut a representation of an embodiment in a woman of what, alas!, is common enough in a man.’74

The cultural reign of the New Woman was long – from the early 1890s to 1911, though establishment newspapers tired of her early: ‘Shall we never have done with the New Woman?’ asked The Times, reviewing Ella Hepworth Dixon’s only novel The Story of a Modern Woman in 1894. No one embodied her freewheeling sexual confidence like Amber Reeves – Maud Pember Reeves’ daughter and the model for Ann Veronica Stanley in H. G. Wells’ 1909 novel Ann Veronica – ‘a girl of brilliant and precocious promise … [with] a sharp, bright, Levantine face under a shock of very fine abundant black hair, a slender nimble body very much alive, and a quick greedy mind’.75 Educated at Newnham College, Cambridge, where she helped to found the Cambridge Fabian Society, Reeves read Moral Sciences and gained a double first in 1908.

Her affair with Wells was one of the great scandals of the day. When it was discovered, Wells was ostracised by many friends and obliged to resign from the Savile Club. But even though the relationship produced a child – a marriage of convenience to a lawyer called Rivers Blanco White followed hastily – there was never any suggestion that she was a victim. On the contrary, in the reckless, emancipated spirit of Anna Lombard, she had wanted sex with Wells as much as he had wanted it with her.

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On 22 January 1901, Victoria died at the age of eighty-one. She had ruled over a fifth of the land area of the world, a population of four hundred million people. But imperial confidence was starting to crumble. The empire was expensive to maintain and, besides, other countries were catching up with Britain’s technological invention, expansionist ambition and naval power.

As we saw earlier, Victoria had railed against the ‘mad wicked folly’ of women’s rights. The next twenty years would show her to have been on the wrong side of history. But many women, particularly aristocratic ones, agreed with her. In 1889 a petition in the Nineteenth Century magazine signed by over a hundred mostly upper-class women rejected calls for equality because of ‘disabilities of sex’ (menstruation) and ‘strong formations of custom and habit resting ultimately on physical difference, against which it is useless to contend’.76

Funnily enough, the first woman to vote did so accidentally. Lily Maxwell owned a crockery shop in Manchester and so met the property qualification that would have allowed her to vote had she been a man. Her name had been added to the electoral register in error. Encouraged by Lydia Becker, she voted in a by-election in 1867 (for her local Liberal MP, Jacob Bright), although her vote was subsequently declared illegal. ‘We are told that Mrs Lily Maxwell is an intelligent person of respectable appearance,’ the feminist Englishwoman’s Review reassured its readers. ‘It is sometimes said that women, especially those of the working class, have no political opinion at all, and would not care to vote. Yet this woman, who by chance was furnished with a vote, professed strong political opinions, and was delighted to have a chance of expressing them.’77

From the 1860s onwards there was constant fracturing and realignment of pro-suffrage groups; constant disputes over tactics and even goals. In 1897 another Women’s Suffrage Bill passed its second reading with a seventy-one-vote majority, only to collapse when the government refused to allocate further time to it. Some saw this as evidence of progress, others as the exact opposite.

The most obvious split was between the ‘suffragists’ – whose most famous figurehead was Millicent Garrett Fawcett – and the ‘suffragettes’ – led by the Pankhursts. The suffragists, represented by the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS), were committed to winning the vote by constitutional, non-violent means. Suffragettes, on the other hand, felt a defiant, militant path was the only appropriate one. They rallied to a different banner – that of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), formed by Emmeline Pankhurst.

The Pankhursts occupy a curious place in our culture. They’re synonymous with the fight for suffrage to the point where most people aren’t aware that anyone else was involved. Like Florence Nightingale and the Brontës, they are better known as a heritage brand than as actual people. Remarkable though their idealism and crusading zeal undoubtedly was, Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters could be, in their biographer Martin Pugh’s words, ‘ruthless, high-handed and self-righteous’; characters who on close inspection ‘come as a shock’.

The Pankhursts’ fame has overshadowed the contribution of Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who, in a quieter way, played a more effective role in acquiring the vote for women. She also found time to co-found Newnham College, Cambridge and, in 1901, travel to South Africa to investigate conditions in the concentration camps the British had set up there after the Boer War.

Pankhurst mania has also obscured fascinating figures like Sophia Duleep Singh, daughter of the last Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Maharaja Duleep Singh. (He married a chambermaid, Ada Wetherill, after Sophia’s mother died of typhoid, caught from ten-year-old Sophia who miraculously recovered.) Sophia was another of Queen Victoria’s goddaughters, but turned against the Empire after visiting India in 1907. Once back in England, she campaigned for both the Women’s Social and Political Union and Dora Montefiore’s Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL) – motto, ‘No vote, no tax’. And despite her aristocratic credentials she was happy to stand on street corners selling The Suffragette newspaper.

So how did the Pankhursts come to own the suffrage story? The answer lies, rather prosaically, in the political scene of the 1880s and 1890s.

Gladstone’s Third Parliamentary Reform Act of 1885 had massively expanded working-class suffrage for men, giving male agricultural labourers the vote but not women. As it happened, 1885 was also the year that a Manchester-based barrister and campaigner called Dr Richard Pankhurst stood for Parliament in Rotherhithe as a Liberal candidate, having tried his luck in Manchester a couple of years before. This time he won 45.7 per cent of the vote. Close, but no cigar. Still, his campaign experience was, his wife Emmeline reflected, ‘a valuable political lesson, one that years later I was destined to put into practice’.

Emmeline Goulden had been born in 1858 into a radical liberal Mancunian family. When Emmeline was still a child, the barrister and would-be politician Richard Pankhurst, already a key figure in the women’s suffrage campaign, was something of a hero. In 1870 he had drafted the first Women’s Suffrage Bill, a Private Members’ Bill which had passed its first and second readings in the House of Commons before being thrown out by Gladstone.

After a spell studying in Paris, during which she nearly married a French man, Emmeline returned to Manchester. On 31 April 1878 her father took her to an anti-Disraeli rally at Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, where she was charmed by the passion and erudition of Dr Pankhurst, who had a high-pitched voice, a red, pointy beard and a ‘tendency to go over the top in his determination to set the world to rights’ – a determination which would ultimately cost him a successful career.78

Richard and Emmeline married – he was forty-four, she twenty – and between 1880 and 1889 produced five children. Christabel was the eldest, followed by Sylvia, Frank, Adela and Harry. (Frank died aged four of diptheria.) In line with Richard’s marital declaration to Emmeline that ‘every struggling cause shall be ours’, the children were brought up to be agents of ‘social betterment’ – drilled into moral shape by their ambitious, disciplinarian parents, who treated them as little adults.

The Pankhursts flitted between a new house in London’s Russell Square and Manchester, Emmeline throwing herself into the role of political hostess while the children jostled for her attention which, when it was given at all, was usually lavished on confident, beautiful Christabel. Sylvia and Adela particularly suffered from this genteel neglect. Sylvia had poor eyesight, but since Emmeline disapproved of glasses she was never allowed a pair and so endured migraines for years.

In this charged environment, dysfunctionality reigned: the squabbles and more serious relationship breakdowns that blighted the Pankhursts’ adult lives were, says Pugh, ‘clearly foreshadowed in childhood’.79 During this time Emmeline was always exquisitely dressed in the latest Paris fashions, and despised women who looked shabby. She would always take ‘enormous trouble over her appearance in public’, as if to reassure doubters that suffrage-seeking women were not the mannish caricatures of satirical cartoons. Sylvia, by contrast, was a notoriously shabby dresser – ‘a proper scruff’, in the words of one former trade union leader.80

Emmeline’s involvement with the women’s suffrage movement was, to begin with, politely constitutional, conforming to the widely held view that only single, unmarried women should get the vote. This was partly tactical, as it was thought that pressing for full female suffrage when 40 per cent of men still couldn’t vote was pointless and unrealistic. Emmeline’s subsequent change of tack had two catalysts. One was her election as a Poor Law guardian in Chorlton in 1894, which saw her campaign successfully for workhouse inmates to have private lockers for their possessions, warmer clothing and better food. The other was the death in 1898 of Richard – aged sixty-four – from a perforated ulcer.

Christabel, meanwhile, had been drifting aimlessly, and in 1901 wrote to her mother: ‘Have you any ideas about me yet?’ She befriended two powerful, highly politicised women, Eva Gore-Booth and Esther Roper, both members of the North of England Society for Women’s Suffrage. They have sometimes been portrayed as a lesbian couple who drew Christabel into their relationship. The Pankhursts’ biographer Martin Pugh thinks this unlikely, but they had a warming, softening influence on Christabel. At Gore-Booth and Roper’s suggestion, she decided to study law. It would prove the perfect training for her quick, lively mind.

Emmeline seems to have been infuriated by Christabel’s political awakening. In 1903, perhaps jealous of Christabel for picking up the suffrage baton, she founded the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), an extension of an earlier suffrage society she’d founded in 1889, the Women’s Franchise League. The WSPU motto, ‘deeds, not words’, underwrote their manifesto of what Ray Strachey calls ‘moral violence’, which was born of impatience with Fawcett’s slow attempt to obtain reform by constitutional means.

Emmeline sought a close relationship with the Independent Labour Party (ILP), but the ILP was ambivalent about female suffrage, fearing that if property-owning women got the vote as the WSPU demanded, they’d be more likely to vote Tory or Liberal. They also feared that allowing women to work would be bad for wages.

In 1905 the ILP leader Keir Hardie, to whom Sylvia had grown close, tried to introduce a bill proposing suffrage for female householders. His failure bolstered the Pankhursts’ confidence and they vowed to turn the WSPU into an ‘army in the field’, recruiting key personnel such as Hannah Mitchell, Flora Drummond – a stout Scot nicknamed Precocious Piglet who liked dressing in military uniform – and Annie Kenney. Annie had met Christabel in Oldham in spring 1906 and pledged allegiance on the spot. The fifth child in a family of eleven, she had left school at thirteen and was needy and damaged – a naive dreamer looking for a good, brave cause. Sylvia Pankhurst would later write that ‘her lack of perspective, her very intellectual limitations, lent her a certain directness of purpose when she became the instrument of a more powerful mind’.81

That powerful mind belonged to Christabel. For her, militancy was important because of the message it sent that women were capable of such behaviour. On 13 October 1905 she was arrested and imprisoned for deliberately spitting at a policeman outside Manchester’s Free Trade Hall, an event which turned the suffragettes, as the Daily Mail called them, into martyr-heroes.

After the Liberals won the 1906 election, Christabel severed her links with the ILP, and the WSPU moved to London, its goal to attract fashionable, bourgeois women and acquire both a funding stream and (with Keir Hardie’s help) a treasurer. A newspaper, Votes for Women, was launched and was selling 22,000 copies by May 1909. A car was bought for Emmeline and a chauffeur hired – former actress Vera Holme, who wore masculine attire and was always called Jack.

Artistic Sylvia, once a prize-winning student at Manchester School of Art and the Royal College of Art in London, oversaw the WSPU’s visual branding – the flags, banners and a broad range of ‘official’ memorabilia – while Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, a wealthy philanthropist who was co-editor of Votes for Women, came up with the iconic colour scheme: purple (for dignity), white (for purity) and green (for hope). Members were encouraged to wear the colours ‘as a duty and a privilege’. Suffragette ‘uniforms’ were stocked by leading department stores like Selfridges and Liberty.

The WSPU fractured repeatedly over the next few years as new offshoots formed, such as the Women’s Freedom League. On 21 June 1908, a staggering 250,000 people attended a WSPU rally in Hyde Park, only for Asquith to dismiss its significance. Christabel was roused to violence once more and the suffragettes stormed Parliament Square in October 1908, after which Emmeline, Christabel and Flora Drummond were put on trial charged with incitement to rush the House of Commons. Lawyer Christabel scored another PR victory when she called Lloyd George and Gladstone in evidence and ran rings round them, controlling the courtroom ‘like a little singing bird’ (as the caricaturist Max Beerbohm put it). Jailed again, Christabel became a huge celebrity, and Madame Tussaud’s even commissioned her waxwork. But prison ground her down and the Liberal government, more distracted than ever by the effort of forcing through its radical programme under Lloyd George, continued to ignore female suffrage as an issue.

In the years leading up to the First World War, the WSPU continued to pursue its policy of seeking out violent conflict for propaganda purposes. When the suffragettes marched on Parliament again on 29 June 1909, Emmeline struck a policeman so that she would be arrested and tried for sedition. This ushered in a period of arson, chemical attacks and hunger strikes. The first imprisoned woman to refuse food was Marion Wallace Dunlop, who in July 1909 had been sentenced to a month in Holloway for vandalism. When she was denied political prisoner status, she refused food for ninety-one hours. Afraid that she would die and become a martyr, Gladstone released her early on medical grounds. This established a pattern other suffragettes would mimic – imprisonment followed by swift release. The government tried to break the pattern, first through barbaric methods of force-feeding (from September 1909), then later in April 1913 through the Prisoners (Temporary Discharge for Ill Health) Act, known as the Cat and Mouse Act. This enabled a hunger-striking prisoner to be released from prison when her health started to fail, then re-imprisoned when she had recovered so that her sentence could be served in full.

After 1910, Fawcett’s NUWSS became the main players as support for militancy crumbled. The WSPU had announced a cessation of hostilities in January 1910, but it didn’t last long. The eighteenth of November 1910 became known as Black Friday when Asquith’s quashing of the Conciliation Bill, which would have extended the vote to property-owning women, caused widespread protests. Around two hundred women were assaulted by police and the event gave rise to one of the suffrage campaign’s most famous photographic images: demonstrator Ada Wright lying on the ground, her hands covering her face while two men stoop over her.

By the end of 1911 there was still no real progress, despite Lloyd George being sympathetic to the cause. Asquith continued to voice his opinion that granting the vote to women would be a ‘political mistake of a very disastrous kind’. He simply didn’t understand why women would want to vote. After all, neither his wife nor his daughter did. He believed militancy – which he experienced personally when militants tried to tear off his clothes on the golf links at Lossiemouth in Scotland – was off-putting to the public and would kill popular support for the cause.

After the 1912 Reform Bill failed to give women the vote, Fawcett allied herself with the Labour Party, who agreed to vote against any future franchise bill that did not include women. The Pankhursts’ response was to go into furious overdrive – more window-smashing, more imprisonment, more force-feeding. Tiring of the melée, Christabel bailed out and moved to Paris, leaving Annie Kenney in charge. ‘Where is Christabel?’ asked the headlines. In fact, she had booked herself into a hotel under the name ‘Amy Richards’ and for a while continued to exert control remotely, for example issuing the order for the MP Lewis Harcourt’s house to be burned down. In practice, though, this was the beginning of her detachment from British politics. With Christabel out of the picture, Sylvia Pankhurst set up her own socialist-inclined suffrage campaign in the East End.

In January 1913 it looked as if women might win the vote at last, as the Franchise Bill was debated. But at the last minute the Speaker – Sir James Lowther, himself opposed to female suffrage – declared that any adoption of an amendment would so alter the bill that it would no longer be the same measure, so it would have to be cancelled and reintroduced in new form. The suffragettes took their anger out on Lloyd George, sending him sulphuric acid in the post and trying to burn down his country house.

The most notorious event in suffragette history was to follow: Emily Davison was trampled by the King’s horse at the Derby on 4 June 1913 and died four days later. The thinking now is that she was trying to attach a scarf to its bridle, not throw herself under it. Then again, as a devoutly Christian radical, she had on previous occasions been willing to damage her body for the cause. Over the course of seven hunger strikes, she was force-fed forty-nine times. At one stage her cell was deliberately flooded with ice-cold water.

On YouTube you can watch flickering footage of her funeral procession: a solemn, stately affair, though judging by the number of caps and straw boaters – removed out of respect as the cortège goes past – the crowds lining the streets contained far more men than we might expect.

But of course, many men supported female suffrage, not just as theorists (John Stuart Mill) and proud domestic cheerleaders (Millicent Garrett Fawcett’s blind husband, Henry) but as activists too. Frederick Pethick-Lawrence was imprisoned and force-fed alongside his wife, Emmeline, while George Lansbury MP, having resigned his seat to fight a by-election on the female suffrage issue, also found himself in a cell for defending the suffragettes’ arson campaign in a speech at a WSPU rally.

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It’s somehow fitting that the best photos of the suffragettes were taken by a resourceful, enterprising woman. Christina Broom was a self-taught photographer who emerged as one of the key image-makers of the early twentieth century and is now celebrated as the first female press photographer. With her daughter Winnie helping, she would carry her heavy glass-plate camera onto the streets and photograph what she found – straightforward views of Tower Bridge or Oxford Street; royal events and sporting tournaments; Lyons tea boys brewing up at Victoria Station; the 1905 Earl’s Court Exhibition, with its makeshift Red Indian village – turning the resulting images into postcards which she, her disabled husband and Winnie printed up at home in Fulham and sold in their thousands. She also submitted her photographs to agencies for publication in newspapers and magazines.

Broom’s photos of the WSPU on parade take you beyond the Pankhurst family psychodrama, beyond the arid accounts of who did what to whom, and show you these extraordinary figures as they flit across the drab Edwardian landscape like exotic birds. Some of her finest ‘suffragette’ photos were taken on 23 July 1910 at a Hyde Park rally to celebrate the Conciliation Bill being debated, where over 150 campaigners were due to give speeches. Walking at the head of the ‘Prisoners’ Pageant’ are three formerly imprisoned suffragettes: Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, Sylvia Pankhurst and, wearing her academic robes and looking stern, Emily Davison.

Christina stopped photographing the women’s suffrage movement in the summer of 1913. The following year, her health failing and increasingly confined to a wheelchair, she found a new subject: the military, especially soldiers before they left London for the Western Front.

Her photos of young men relaxing and on parade at their barracks are exceptionally moving – we know, as they do not, what fate has in store for them. But other more random pictures tell another parallel story. Among her First World War photos is a portrait taken in May 1916 that shows the direction of travel for women – a group of women police officers at a Women’s War Work exhibition in Knightsbridge. In their long black skirts, barely mustering a smile, they look austere and forbidding. At the centre, holding her gloves, staring down the camera as if she is about to arrest it, is a former suffragette called Mary Allen, now a police inspector …

An ambiguous, disturbing figure, Allen is the shape of things to come; a tidy emblem of the confusion many felt and would continue to feel as the twentieth century unwound; an example of what happens when a damaged personality grows convinced that the only meaningful solutions are extreme ones. But that is all in the future. For now, let us read the image as a celebration of female strength, solidarity and progress – a glorious summation of over thirty years of vigorous campaigning.

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