by Bart Schultz
What they mean by a degree is a recognised stamp of the fact that the student
has successfully passed through a course of education at Oxford or Cambridge.
They cannot understand your action in refusing it. At first they do not believe it;
they do not believe when they are told that the students of Newnham and Girton
have passed through the same course as the undergraduate students pass through.
When they do believe it, they think the University is either absurd or unjust. You
will remove that impression throughout the country, I believe, by adopting the
recommendations of the Syndicate. (M –)
Perhaps it was good that Sidgwick did not live to see the further defeats
of the cause in the early twentieth century. As Richard Symonds has
observed, a year after Oxford admitted women (in ), when the question
again came before the Cambridge University Senate:
[O]nce more the dinosaurs staggered in from their rural dens to vote. The proposal
to give women full membership of the University was defeated by to . Many
of the clergy, who often had daughters at Cambridge or other universities, had
been converted. Much of the opposition now came from the medical profession
and the scientists who stressed the physiological and psychological differences
between men and women. Once more male students rioted and even damaged
the memorial gates of Newnham. Menaced by the possibility of interference by
a Royal Commission and by Parliament, the Senate now conceded that women
might write BA after their names. It was not until however that they became
full members of the University with the same standing as men in its governance.
Thus, Sidgwick’s feminist reformist work was to suffer a fate similar to
that of his reformist work with Symonds, with the medical and psychiatric
establishments proving to be as bad as the Christian Church when it came
to the disciplinary “normalizing” of sex and gender roles. No doubt he
would have recalled his experience with the scientific opposition to the
SPR, or how slow Cambridge had been to allow Fellows to marry.
If Sidgwick’s pessimism about what the university was ripe for turned
out to be all too apt, he could at various times have gone on record with
a more emphatic Millian statement. A planned article on “Women,” like
a planned article on Mill, apparently never got written, and consequently
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one must piece together his feminist views from various bits and pieces
of evidence. Like Mill and Taylor, he was much more than a “first-wave”
feminist calling for thin legal equality. The Sidgwicks came to appreciate
just how much was riding on changing the nature of the family, work, love,
and so on.
To be sure, as indicated, the Sidgwicks did evolve in their feminist
understandings over the course of their careers. Olive Banks, in The Bio-
graphical Dictionary of British Feminists, argues that:
Like that of her husband, Nora’s feminism developed slowly and when she was
first involved with Newnham she had doubted whether women were either in-
tellectually or physically fit for a full university education. These doubts were
eventually resolved, and by she was fully committed to equality in the higher
education of men and women. Nevertheless, she continued to believe that marriage
and motherhood was the natural career for a woman, and that most women would
choose marriage rather than a career if the opportunity came. By the s, how-
ever, she was an enthusiastic supporter of women’s suffrage and always presided
at pro-suffrage lectures given at the college. She was, however, never drawn into
sympathy for the militant movement, believing that it damaged women’s reputa-
tion for good sense.
As previously remarked, Henry, back in the days of the Initial Society,
had also had a somewhat limited view of the matter. Elaborating on the
theme of the inferior man, he had argued:
How can we assume that happiness is ‘intended’ to be the lot of all on earth –
The question arises here as so often, are we speaking of the few or the many.
The Few (for whom I have an unfeigned admiration) can find their happiness
in self-culture or some absorbing enthusiasm. But the many need domestic life.
Otherwise they become either selfish (the greatest misery) or they find, in spite of
the most conscientious efforts, a want of solid interest in the world. Is it practically any use telling the mass of women that when they can’t get married they must take
an interest in politics, speculation, poetry, music etc.? No doubt the best thing
for them is to get some active work of benevolence: but even this won’t fill the
void. (Holme Lee describes this well in one of her novels, Kathie Brande, I think).
As to ‘old maids’ I do not think that if they make themselves worthy of respect
they fail to obtain it: but we cannot blink the fact that for very many women the
only chance of proper development as well as happiness is matrimony: this alone
can give them depth: otherwise they remain frivolous and trivial to the end of
their days. I except of course the few whom society does not prevent embracing a
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profession. I confess that the more I think of it the less I can blame such women
for their much-satirized efforts to obtain a husband.
As he went on to explain, he did not think
celibacy a unique evil, considered in its effect on general happiness. . . . This being the case it always seems to me rather a noble thing for a person of great natural elevation not to marry, except under peculiar circumstances. If other human relations
develop in us an equal flow of love and energy (the primary and paramount branch
of self culture) there is no doubt that the greater freedom of celibacy, the higher
self denial of its work, the time it leaves for useful but unlucrative pursuits, the
material means it places at our disposal for the advantage of our fellow-creatures
ought to have great weight in the balance.
Sidgwick concludes that he entirely agrees with Elisabeth Rhodes “as
to the immense educational influence in the hands of single women, if
they are but trained to see and use it.” They could be the “leaven in the
loaf ” – as Mary Ward and Jane Addams, among others, would ultimately
demonstrate.
Sidgwick had also informed the Society:
Always argue with a man, if at all, in private: with a woman, if at all, in public.
A man wants not to convince so much as to conquer: he does not care so much
about the opinion you hold in your heart, but he wishes to prove the opinion you
express to be inferior to his own. By arguing in public you s
timulate his vanity
too much. A woman does not argue for conquest but for harmony: she does not
care about proving your statements absurd, she wishes you to surrender your
inner convictions to hers: her anxiety to do this may grow undesirably intense if
you argue with her in private; while in public this danger is lessened, as she will
most likely have one of the company on her side: finding the agreement she wants
somewhere, she will care not more than enough about finding it in you.
Yet it is not quite obvious just when Sidgwick took himself to be describ-
ing gender roles and when endorsing them. Certainly, his entire conception
of Apostolic inquiry weighed in against the masculinist view of argument
as “conquest,” as opposed to listening and sympathetically drawing out.
There was at least a Millian particle in his outlook even in the early s,
when it came to thinking of the potential of marriage as a school of sympa-
thy for the inferior person but also as something to which there ought to
be other options. And by the time Mill died, Sidgwick was quite willing to
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express just how much admiration he had for the more “radical” of Mill’s
writings:
On the other hand his essays on Liberty and The Subjection of Women, though somewhat less close and careful in argument than his larger works, have great
literary excellence, and were perhaps the most effective of his writings – perhaps
because the intense enthusiasm for human progress which the studied composure
of his philosophical style partly conceals was allowed freer expression in these
popular essays. This is not the place to speak of Mill’s public career; but our
notice would be incomplete if we did not dwell for a moment on the simple and
noble passion for the universal realization of a high ideal of human well-being
which burns like a hidden flame at the core of his social philosophy.
Shortly before he died, Mill had “come forward like a woman” to donate
money to Newnham for creating scholarships.
Early on in his reform efforts, Sidgwick discovers, as he wrote to his
supporter Oscar Browning, that “I am growing fond of women. I like
working with them. I begin to sympathise with the pleasures of the mild
parson.” (M ) By this point, in fact, Sidgwick could be very far from
mild – even fairly scorching – in his response to hypocritical opposition to
Millian feminism. In his review of James Fitzjames Stephen’s harsh attack
on Mill and all that Mill stood for, Sidgwick sarcastically countered that
Stephen
is unexpectedly checked by the consideration that any minute examination of the
differences between men and women is – not exactly indecent, but – ‘unpleasant
in the direction of indecorum.’ We should be sorry to encourage any remarks
calculated to raise a blush in the cheek of a Queen’s Counsel: but as the only
conceivable ground for subjecting women, as a class, to special disabilities, must
lie in the differences between them and men, it is obviously impossible to decide on
the justice – or if Mr. Stephen prefers it, the ‘expediency’ – of those disabilities, without a careful examination of these differences. And in fact Mr Stephen’s
sudden delicacy does not suffice to hinder him from deciding the question with
his usual rough dogmatism: it only renders his discussion of it more than usually
narrow and commonplace.
Arguably, when Symonds took his “scientific” turn, it was partly under
the influence of such arguments used on behalf of feminism (and Ellis was
insisting that they needed to address female as well as male inversion). At
least, Sidgwick was consistent across the board when it came to thinking
these subjects fit for impartial inquiry. He would have none of the stupid
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jokes that constituted most of the conservative opposition. As he wrote
of Courthope’s long poem “Ludibria Lunae,” an “ ‘allegorical burlesque’
intended to satirise the efforts of women to get rid of their Subjection,”
Courthope was “hampered by the nature of his subject,” since, although no
“topic offers more facilities to a satirist than the Emancipation of Women,”
the “fertility of the field has attracted reapers, and most of the quips,
gibes, and taunts that the subject affords have been already harvested
by the comic and semi-comic Conservative journals.” He was hopeful
about the prospects for women’s higher education, he wrote to his mother,
because “all of the jokes have been made.”
If Henry and Eleanor were not quite destined to go down in history
as on a level with John and Harriet, there was nonetheless a remarkable
degree of Millian friendship in their relationship. And it must be said that
there was a good deal of gender bending in the Sidgwick marriage. As
Ethel Sidgwick, her niece, described Eleanor:
Calculation, comparison, neat adjustment of means to ends, were her lifelong
habit. She liked fundamentals, the bones of things, and would, if she could, have
touched and handled materials. Miss Edith Sharpley described once how she came
on her in early days with Miss Clough, walking about planks and over builder’s
litter in the foundations of what would one day be North hall – only the air, at
present, overhead. Such surrounding would have suited her.
Mrs. Sidgwick was called over-critical, like her husband. She was ‘cold.’ In a
Victorian world of overflowing feelings, and ‘charming’ letter-writers, she thought
statistically, and wrote sparingly, with a kind of dainty precision – locking each
statement behind her as she went. But she loved the exercise of her art, whatever it
might be called: it was satisfaction and relief. After one of the most cruel sorrows
of her life, she confessed in private that to work out, in solitude, a problem in
mathematics relieved her heart more than any condolences. She gently pressed
her favourite study on others, teachers or learners whom she was asked to address;
and the only passage in her writing that might be called purple is in its praise.
Small wonder that Symonds could write to Mrs. Clough:
I saw Miss Balfour in London. She is very quiet, but impressive. A fine mixture of
intellect & birth & breeding & feminine bonté and self-composed personality. Of course I do not know her, & only record a first impression. But there seems to be a general consent that she is the right woman for H. S. He meanwhile is perfectly
happy & declares that now he comprehends emotion for the first time. Yet he has
written a book on Ethics!
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Symonds would remain impressed, going on record as admitting that Mrs.
Sidgwick was up to any challenge put to her.
Interestingly, Eleanor apparently regarded her marriage to Henry as
in some respects a liberation from the domestic bondage of looking after
her brothers, to whom she had become a substitute mother. When Henry
began courting her in the s, she slyly deployed one of the notes he
sent to her at Carlton Gardens. It “began: ‘My dear Miss Balfour’, and
finished, after some business, ‘I want sympathy, yours best of all, if you will
give it to me. . . . ’ Miss Balfour had laid this sheet open on the chimney
piece, for the brothers to see, ‘Hullo, what’s Sidgwick writing ‘my dear’
to Nora for?’ they asked in turn as they took it up.”
Again, to his credit, Sidgwick was always warmly supportive of
Eleanor’s intellectual, academic, and political interests. He was delighted
when Eleanor became principal of Newnham, ungrudgingly giving up
their privacy and their unhappy haunted house at Hillside to move back
into a college: “the more I think of it the more I feel that the position of
appendage to the Principal is one I was born to fit. . . . You will have all the responsibility for the entertainment and I shall have only the function of
free critic.”
Such modesty was somewhat false – Sidgwick was a very busy person
when it came to this work. As McWilliams Tullberg puts it: in “this era
of educational reform, young dons like Sidgwick undertook college lec-
tures, inter-college lectures, extension lectures, lectures to women outside
Cambridge, advanced classes and coaching to resident women, and in some
cases acted as correspondence tutors, as well as serving on various Uni-
versity Syndicates and College Committees.” And Sidgwick did more
than most, beavering away at everything from correspondence courses to
workingmen’s colleges to plans to set up an entirely new university. At
his best, he was nudging the reformism of Maurice and Mill toward the
reformism of Addams and Dewey, even establishing a Teacher’s Training
College.