Bloody Brilliant Women

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: