A month later a bill was introduced on The Reform of the Marriage and Divorce Laws. There was a debate during which Caroline Norton’s words were quoted. In 1857 the Bill finally became law, with her influence directly seen in four clauses: clause 21, which said a wife deserted by her husband could keep her earnings; clause 24 which empowered a court to direct payment of separate maintenance to a wife; clause 25 stipulating a wife might inherit and bequeath property; clause 26 saying a separated wife could sue, and be sued, and make contracts. It amounted to a relatively small reform but a more comprehensive bill was introduced in 1867 and passed in 1870 once Lord Westbury’s objection (that if wives could freely dispose of their property they would sell it and spend the money on “diamonds, racehorses and lovers”) was overcome. In 1882 the Married Woman’s Property Act at last enshrined the sought-after principle: married women should have the same rights as unmarried women. It had only taken twenty-five years to bring about the start of the greatest re-allocation of property in English history since the dissolution of the monasteries in Tudor times.
This came, of course, too late for Caroline Norton who died in 1877, but her last two decades were made happier by the knowledge of her contribution to the changes now definitely in view. She knew that in the process of helping to change the law she had made herself notorious and rather resented her image. She was seen, she wrote, as a cross “between a barn actress and a Mary Wollstonecraft.” What she wanted to be seen as was a writer. Her beauty and reputation as a hostess did not matter. The historian Morley reported when she was over fifty that “it would have required a very powerful telescope to discover she had passed thirty” and that her teeth alone would have made the fortune of an ordinary face. The compliments she still received in late middle-age were nothing to Caroline. “I remember the day,” she wrote, “when I was an intelligent being – but very vaguely. Also when I was cheerful and good company – but all is evaporated. I am fierce, sullen – and rather vulgar. I hunch my shoulders and say ‘What?’ when I am spoken to if I do not immediately catch what was said from sulky abstraction of mind.”79 But neither her family nor her friends ever found her sullen – she was always entertaining even when disconsolate. The death of Fletcher in 1859 laid her low for a long time but she found some consolation in caring for her grandchildren, Richard and Carlotta. Brinsley had married an Italian girl who, when he then fell ill, could not support her two babies, born in 1855 and 1856. Grandmother Caroline took charge of them and relished fulfilling the role denied her for so long twenty years earlier. They were very much the comfort of her later years. She allowed Grandfather George to visit them whenever he wished which was surprisingly often. George died in 1875, his brother a few months later. Caroline, released at last, married Sir William Stirling, an old friend, a few months before her own death in June 1877. She would have, she hoped, “an existence separate from the writs and shall be remembered and dreamed of when the gossiping women of my day have ceased to talk and are but a handful of dust.”80
* * *
Caroline Norton represented in her day a minority of women. Most married women did not have recourse to the law. They married and stayed married. They had children and never realized these could be taken from them if a husband so wished. Therefore it could be argued that changes in the law hardly affected the vast majority of women and were not as significant as changes in other spheres. But in fact changes in the law, both then and now, are vitally important for feminism. They provide the framework without which there can be no progress worth having, no security worth winning. They put the firm stamp of authority on what are recognized as needs. The gap between those needs being felt and being responded to is often long. Protest has to be first registered, then organized, then approved by public opinion, then advocated by some strong person or persons. Where changes in the laws concerning marriage were at a disadvantage was in lacking for so long a champion who would feel strongly enough to call attention to the situation by exposing, in the full glare of the courtroom, what was being suffered. Caroline Norton was that champion even if the cause was thrust upon her.
What Caroline Norton discovered was that women within the last century had become chattels, things to be disposed of as men willed once a marriage had taken place. The only time a woman had any power was at the moment of marriage when she could agree or not agree. A girl of fifteen or sixteen, as Caroline pointed out, was thought capable of making this tremendously important contract but thereafter her opinion on anything else within the marriage became mysteriously valueless – “in the matter of maternal right she is no more considered than stock or stone.”81 Why women had gone on putting up with this iniquity was because “the boundaries of duty, religion and social necessity are walls round a woman’s heart and light fences round a man’s.”82 Her four novels are full of the bitterness of married women, tricked and cajoled into what was little better than a pleasant servitude if they were lucky and a hideous form of slavery if they were not. But Caroline did not blame either men or the laws alone: she blamed women themselves. Her insight into how women contributed to their own condition was more truly feminist than any of the openly feminist tracts of her day. She had such contempt for feebleness, for the supine, docile role she saw women playing everywhere – “feeble natures respecting even exaggerated energies; the contrast strikes them as a superiority.”83 How could her sex be so stupid, she asked, as to equate physical strength and a domineering character with superiority? But they did. Even worse, women were proud of inspiring blind adoration – “There are women,” wrote Caroline, “who think it sublime to be loved with this sort of passion”84 and were horrified when, the passion assuaged, the men lost interest. Women made themselves into pathetic creatures and reaped the consequences. They were afraid it was unfeminine to voice opinions or show independence. Caroline knew how she was despised for doing both. She herself was proud of being able to hold her own in any conversation and of being brave enough to go about alone and unchaperoned. She was proud too of her earning power – the ability to earn made her feel triumphant and she saw nothing sordid about it. Nor did she see why earning money should in any way make her either less feminine or less of a good wife.
In a letter to Gladstone (with whom she had had an interview the day before, on March 26th, 1854) Caroline said she was not interested in “greater facility of divorce”. Those who thought she was had misunderstood her. “To me,” she wrote, “the ceremony of marriage in our church seems utterly indissoluble and though in earlier life I might at one time have wished my marriage dissolved according to the laws of men it would have been with a strict conviction that no law could really annul it or make me the wife of any other man.”85 Her argument was that men who were brutal to their wives were making nonsense of the marriage contract and must be brought to respect it. It was only gradually that Caroline realized her faith in coercing men to protect their wives properly was not enough. Half the fury with which she fought for protection was inspired by shame at going into a partnership where, because of what the law said, she needed it. She knew perfectly well that even if George had protected her it would not have prevented her feeling a fool for falling into the trap marriage represented. She, like other women, had married because marriage was an essential part of womanhood, an essential passport in their world to its rewards. Like it or not, Caroline Norton was asking for marriage to be re-shaped as an institution. This became one of the most important feminist goals. Marriage had to become based on something more realistic than protection, something less materialistic than property of one sort or another. Unless it did, women would be forever mercilessly exposed to exploitation.
After 1839 child custody, always the most heartrending area of any marital breakdown, was still difficult for a wife to gain. The Lord Chancellor could grant custody only if the children were under seven and only if the wife was indisputably innocent. It was quite easy for an unscrupulous husband to throw doubts successfully on his wife’s innocence. In 1873 things improved
slightly when the age of the child under dispute went up to sixteen but it was not until 1886 that the actual welfare of the child was considered, which made a big difference. Yet the father was still, in law, the sole guardian of the child whoever had custody. This state of affairs, with a few minor alterations, continued until the Guardianship Act of 1973 when the mother was given exactly the same legal authority over a child as the father. She was also made as responsible as the father for supporting the child which has opened up a whole new set of complications in which women are again at a disadvantage. But in historic terms progress has been dramatically quick and complete. Caroline Norton would have been more than satisfied.
She would also have hailed as a total victory the changes in divorce laws and property rights. In her day it was almost impossible for men to divorce their wives and absolutely impossible for women to divorce their husbands. An Act of 1857 created a single new matrimonial court, instead of the cumbersome system of ecclesiastical courts plus Parliament, which was an enormous step in the right direction even if it was not until 1923 that women could obtain divorce on the same grounds as men. As for married women’s property rights, these were finally secured in 1882. So the position now is incomparably better than when Caroline Norton began her battle. If her pamphlets and Barbara Leigh-Smith’s are contrasted with a similar résumé today the difference is staggering. The incessant pressure which began in the 1830s has been magnificently productive. The fact that it does not satisfy many contemporary feminists cannot obscure this fact. But progress in this sphere is always towards a target which recedes: laws which would have given Caroline Norton more than she asked for do not content disaffected wives today because they are a different species. Women have changed, marriage has changed, society has changed and laws must go on changing to keep pace with the enlarging feminist experience. New Caroline Nortons, in fact, are necessary all the time to be that “example on which a particular law shall be reformed.” Unless they are forthcoming, unless individual women are prepared to stand up to be counted as bravely as she did, feminism will lack the drive it must have to maintain hard-won gains.
THE PROFESSIONS
Elizabeth Blackwell
(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)
Elizabeth Blackwell
1821–1910
CAROLINE NORTON FOUGHT for rights, basic legal rights, for women. Elizabeth Blackwell fought for options. She was the world’s first trained, registered woman doctor and her entry into the professional sphere monopolized by men, through obtaining exactly the same qualifications as the men in exactly the way they had to obtain them, was of enormous significance for feminism. When Elizabeth Blackwell graduated in January 1849 the news spread with amazing speed throughout the entire western world. There was a sense of excitement about the future of women, about their new role in society, which had never been felt before. Yet Elizabeth Blackwell was part of no movement. What she did, she did on her own. Nor did she herself see her achievement as part of any general movement. On the contrary, she saw herself as special, as being peculiarly suited to following a career which she decidedly did not want all women to try to follow. Most women were meant to be mothers in her opinion. Motherhood, not any other career, was woman’s highest calling, and women should apply themselves to it with diligence. The embryo Woman’s Rights movement of her day found little support with her. She wrote refusing to speak at a Woman’s Rights convention because “I believe that the chief source of the false position of women is the inefficiency of women themselves – the deplorable fact that they are so often careless mothers, weak wives, poor housekeepers, ignorant nurses and frivolous human beings. If they would perform with strength and wisdom the duties which lie immediately around them every sphere of life would soon be open to them . . .”1
This was both arrogant and patronizing of her and those who had invited her were deeply hurt. They were also astonished. How could a woman who had broken a monopoly, who had cleared the way for other women to claim some other sphere apart from the domestic, now turn round and say women should stay at home and be good little wives and mothers? It did not make sense. Did Elizabeth Blackwell want to be the only woman doctor in the world? Was she saying only she was allowed to enter the professional world? There was consternation and anger in the new movement at her attitude as well as deep disappointment. Men had tried to keep women in the home: if those fortunate women who had managed to leave it were also going to try to keep them there what hope could feminism have? It began to look as though a far worse enemy of feminist progress than man was the pioneer woman herself.
But in fact Elizabeth Blackwell’s feminism was, like Caroline Norton’s, the product of her own confusion. She wrote to one of her sisters: “I cannot sympathise fully with an anti-man movement. I have had too much kindness, aid and just recognition from men to make such attitudes of women otherwise than painful; and I think the true end of freedom may be gained in another way.”2 What frightened her into apparent opposition was this anti-man basis to the Woman’s Rights movement. She felt “perplexed” at the need for it. “My head is full of the idea of organisation but not organisation of women in opposition to men”3 she wrote. That way, she saw only disaster. What she most passionately wanted – every bit as passionately as any Women’s Rights supporter – was change for women but only through society changing too. She disliked intensely the existing state of relationships between men and women. Why could they not be friends without society’s strictures on morals and sex colouring the friendship? Why was there not a healthier attitude towards male/female relationships? Her dream, she wrote, was not of gaining “rights” for women – these would only be “the foolish application of plasters” – but of “radical action” which would “redeem the rising generation.”4 This was why motherhood was so important. Far from being reactionary she saw herself as being progressive. Women had this power to mould and influence the next generation in a way they had never appreciated and that was why motherhood was the highest and most demanding of callings, far more so than being doctors or any other professional calling.
What was even more significant was her opinion that those women like herself who were not actual mothers were only a different kind of mother, that they simply carried their mother instincts into medicine or whichever profession they entered. She gave many addresses to female students in which she told them categorically that far from trying to be like men they must strive not to be like men. They were both female and feminine and their true value to their profession lay in that combination. “The true physician,” she told her audience at the opening of the winter session of the London School of Medicine for Women in 1889, “must possess the essential qualities of maternity.” She believed firmly that woman had “inherited tendencies” of gentleness, sympathy and sensitivity which ought to be fully used and she dreaded above all else any suggestion that women were not different from men or that they ought to make themselves the same. It was in this that Elizabeth Blackwell separated herself from the Woman’s Rights movement. She told women to treasure their female nature, to believe it existed, to make more and not less of it, to realize that “rights” in themselves were nothing.
But nevertheless Elizabeth Blackwell was a feminist. No one believed more than she did in gender not being an obstacle to achievement. The only thing which branded her as not quite feminist enough was her belief that choice was implicit in a woman’s life, that she had to choose between being a wife and mother and having a career. It was a choice she wished to be available, which is what made her a feminist, but self-sacrifice would always in her opinion be necessary. The way was long and hard if a woman wished to take on a man’s role, or what until her own breakthrough had been commonly held to be a man’s role. Dedication and unremitting toil were part of the choice – there were no shortcuts, no exemptions. And for the majority of women she believed it was a way they would simply find too hard, which was, she thought, not something they should feel guilty about. No woman should feel a
failure because she stuck instead to the time-honoured role of wife and mother: it was just as praiseworthy and potentially fulfilling as being a doctor or anything else. This was not what the feminists of her day, led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, wished to hear, of course. They were busy trying to rouse women to get out of the home and did not want anyone telling them they were just as well-off there. So Elizabeth Blackwell was not popular even though she was regarded as a heroine. Her philosophy was too contradictory. She wanted some women to follow her into medicine but refused to urge all women to do so or to have equivalent careers. Her limit was set at the existence of the choice to have a career which is what she had spent her long life achieving. But expecting this choice to be made was unfair and often impossible. It was a verdict much too sophisticated for her kind of feminist to make but it should not be allowed to invalidate her contribution to feminist history.
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