But, if the army of nurses was nothing like as vast as Florence Nightingale had envisaged it would be, it was an influential force. In a letter written in 1867 she had said, “The whole reform of nursing both at home and abroad has consisted of this; to take all power over the nursing out of the hands of the men and put it into the hands of one female trained head and make her responsible for everything . . .”60 This is, to a large extent, what happened. Nightingale-trained Matrons sought and gained positions of great power in hospitals where previously men had ruled supreme. They became greatly respected, even feared, by men who until their advent had attracted all respect for themselves as doctors. And, since the spread and reform of hospitals was greatly accelerated in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, this bid for power on the part of women came at exactly the right time. Because of Florence Nightingale’s strategy women claimed nursing for their own, as soon as it started to become professional. “There comes a crisis in the lives of all social movements,” she wrote in 1892. “This has come in the case of nursing in about 30 years. For nursing was born but about 30 years ago. Before, it did not exist, tho’ sickness is as old as the world.”61 In that crisis, women triumphed, for good or bad. It became as odd to think of a man as a nurse as it had once been to think of a woman as a doctor.62
To grab a profession for women and claim it for them was no mean achievement particularly in the context of the struggle for emancipation then going on. But Florence Nightingale did more than that: she made paid employment a thing to be desired. She herself was rich but she understood the significance of money for services rendered. Women as nurses must not be exploited. Her anxiety was intense when she discovered that because of the nature of the agreement signed, St Thomas’s Hospital was actually using trainee nurses as an underpaid workforce. Women had put up with this too long. Greatly as she admired the work of Elizabeth Fry and all the various sisters of Charity she did not want nursing to be founded on notions of voluntary contribution. Certainly she saw nursing as a vocation, certainly she thought no nurse should think of the money first, but at the same time she wanted wages for nurses and did not in the least think that money changing hands would taint the calling. If nurses were not paid, which was part of nursing being professional as opposed to amateur, then they would go on being regarded as a superior kind of maid or companion. They would not, in short, be valued for what she wanted them to be: skilled people. If she was adamant that nursing was a vocation she was equally adamant that it was a skill. Nothing roused her formidable anger so much as any misunderstanding on this point. “I am always asked,” she wrote, “to send a nurse because the friends of the patients are ‘worn out’ with ‘sitting up’ – or to save the servants ‘running up and down stairs’. I am never asked to send a nurse that the patient be better nursed. I do believe this is the root of it all.”63
Inevitably, her success at making nursing a skilled profession had its own pitfalls – people came to believe only a professional nurse could nurse at all which had never exactly been her intention. By the end of the century a letter from one indignant lady appeared in the nursing press saying, “Will you allow me to protest against the modern ridiculous fad for calling in a professional Nurse on the very smallest provocation? A few years ago we were considered quite capable of nursing those nearest and dearest to us and excepting in cases of acute delirium etc where great muscular strength is required I maintain that we are so still.”64
By the turn of the century there were 64,000 nurses and midwives of whom 10,000, the élite of the profession, were fully trained. Nursing had become one of the great professions for women, far more accessible than doctoring. And yet this was not as satisfactory for feminism as it appeared. Florence Nightingale had laid down too firmly the need for self-abnegation. It was a curse called down on feminism which took half a century to lift. Florence Nightingale saw nothing wrong with “choice” – she only regretted which side most women came down upon. She herself loved babies – her correspondence is littered with instructions to “kiss any babies for me” – but she could manage without having any of her own. The cruelty of it does not seem to have distressed her. She never challenged the necessity of having to deny this side of her nature – it simply seemed to her obvious that a woman could not be everything. She accepted (if reluctantly) that some women could not resist the temptations of domesticity with all it implied and also accepted that therefore they must give up their careers. Matrons resigned upon marriage. How could they avoid doing so? Work was for unmarried ladies in the main (or for widows). It was for women who had chosen to deny half their natures because there was no other way. It became the greatest quest in feminist history to find that other way.
EDUCATION
Emily Davies
(The Mistress and Fellows of Girton College; photo by John Edward Leigh, Cambridge)
Emily Davies
1830–1921
THERE WAS ONE topic upon which both feminists and anti-feminists were in perfect agreement in the nineteenth century and that was the education of girls. It was a disgrace and must be reformed. As early as 1730 Mary Anstell had pointed out that if there was a difference in intellect between men and women (a point by no means conceded) a great deal of it must be due to training. If girls were given the same education as boys it might then, and only then, be possible to discover if there was any innate difference between them in mental abilities. This argument was repeated over and over again for the next hundred years and meanwhile the state of girls’ schools in Britain grew worse and worse until, by 1830, Frances Power Cobbe judged that they had reached a new nadir. Schools in her grandmother’s day had, she swore, been much better. The harm had been done, in her opinion, by the rising passion for “accomplishments”. However bad the schools for boys (and no one denied that they too were in urgent need of reform) they were not bedevilled by these dreadful accomplishments.
Frances Power Cobbe herself went to school in Brighton where by 1836 there were a hundred establishments calling themselves girls’ schools. They were all outrageously expensive. Frances went to a school at 32 Brunswick Terrace, where her parents paid £1,000 for two years’ doubtful education (including board). “The din of our large double schoolroom was something frightful,” she wrote. “. . . four pianos might be heard going at once in rooms above and around, us while at numerous tables scattered round the rooms there were girls reading aloud to governesses and reciting lessons in English, French, German and Italian. This hideous clatter continued the entire day.”1 Yet this was one of the better schools. At the other end of the scale were the shocking places like the School for Clergymen’s Daughters at Casterton in Yorkshire, upon which Charlotte Brontë based Lowood Hall. In between were hundreds of establishments many of them with under forty pupils and all of them staffed by totally untrained teachers. These teachers were mostly impoverished gentlewomen who had been driven into these schools as an alternative to private governessing. There was, in any case, no training available except for the Home and Colonial Training Scheme where teachers for the National schools were trained, and no gentlewoman expected to put herself through that nor did the sort of establishment she taught in regard it as a qualification. No woman could possess a University education which, even if not a training to teach in itself, was regarded as such by boys’ schools.
It was ironic that a working-class girl was much better off in this one respect. Since 1830 girls as well as boys came under the care of the two great voluntary societies, the National and the British and Foreign, which set up schools for the working classes all over England, aided by a government grant. These were staffed by certificated teachers and were infinitely superior to the great mass of middle-class girls’ schools that sprang up everywhere as part of the answer to genteel poverty. This state of affairs was on the one hand well-known and on the other a great secret. The true nature of middle-class girls’ education was not exposed for the sham it was until the Taunton Commission made its report in 1868. This proved
to be the greatest indictment of girls’ education there could possibly have been and was invaluable to those who wished to see it reformed. And yet the Commissioners had the greatest difficulty finding out anything at all because “. . . the advances of the Commission were received with unrelenting hostility.” One self-styled headmistress sent back the inspector’s eight sheets of questions with a note saying “I am sincerely sorry to find that ministers have nothing better to do than to pry into the ménage of private families, as I consider my establishment, which has been in existence 30 years and always held the highest position.”2 Another replied “I think, sir, you have entirely mistaken the character of my establishment which is not so much a school as a home for young ladies.”3
That was precisely the trouble: the emphasis everywhere was on domestic virtues plus accomplishments. Mr Giffard, inspector for Surrey and Sussex, reported to the Commission that although piano playing was the accomplishment “it was not thought worthwhile to tune practising pianos or those which are used by junior girls who usually get the broken down . . . It would be an act of mercy to a child with a musical ear to take out the wires.”4 Needlework, another vital accomplishment, concerned itself with the decorative rather than the useful. Inspectors expressed contempt at the bits of embroidery brandished as proof of skill while straight seam sewing and the ability to cut out a garment were unknown. But, if piano playing and needlework were inadequate in spite of the prominence given to them, academic subjects hardly existed. “I never expected,” wrote Mr Fearon of the Metropolitan district, “to find young ladies of 16 and 18 whose parents were paying £100 to £150 a year for their education ignorant of the inflections of the most common irregular verbs . . . and unable to turn simple sentences into French without blunders.”5 He, with other inspectors, was distressed and surprised to find the premises of girls’ schools so very much worse than the worst of the boys’. “A classroom is supplied,” he reported, “with nothing but a bench round the wall on which the pupils sit while the teacher occupies a chair in the middle and if the pupils write at all they do so on little scraps of paper held in the hands . . .”6 Mr Stanton, reporting on Devon and Somerset, echoed his concern. “I remember,” he wrote, “entering a country school room ill ventilated and redolent of hair oil and apples where great girls . . . were diligently learning the mysteries of ‘tatting’ who had no idea of writing a simple piece of English.” But their English was brilliant compared with their arithmetic. That subject was hardly taught at all. One report commented “A young lady of 20 years of age . . . was perfectly startled when I pointed out to her that three halfpence are 1½d . . . she could not with any degree of fluency count by twos, such as 1, 3, 5 etc – 2, 4, 6 she did better. And yet the same young lady was an expert on the piano . . .”7
The report concluded that “the general deficiency of girls’ education can be stated with absolute confidence.” Those who had been saying this for years were gratified but they waited suspiciously to see what would now be done. About that, there was no agreement. On the one hand were those who said that, now girls’ education has been shown to be appalling, let us reform it to make it as good as but different from boys; and on the other were those who said let us reform it so that it is as good as boys and the same in all essentials. Between these two fiercely opposing points of view there was a great gulf. In addition, the issue was complicated by feminists dividing on both sides so that there was not even solidarity in the feminist ranks. This division was particularly acute over the prospect of Higher education for girls – those who wanted girls to have exactly the same education as boys particularly wanted to secure for them colleges and degrees on a par with them. In their opinion, “different” could only mean “inferior”. The person who believed this most fervently of all and who fought hardest of all to make sure “different” was not allowed to become “inferior” by refusing to accept it was Emily Davies, the founder of Girton College, Cambridge. She believed that there was no sex in intellect and that there should be none therefore in the training of the intellect. She wanted an end to the outrageous assumption that girls were “by nature” intellectually inferior to men. She wanted an end to any role being pre-supposed by virtue of the training available for it: education and employment were in her opinion inextricably linked. Girls could do so little in life because they were educated to do so little. Change their education and their prospects were immediately changed, their horizons automatically widened. Take them, educationally, to the top and you would take them to the top eventually in all walks of life. So she took them to what was commonly held to be the top: to the oldest universities where they studied with the men. When Emily Davies was born there were four universities in England, none open to women; when she died there were twelve, all open to women. Within her lifetime she spanned the greatest upheaval in girls’ expectations there had ever been.
* * *
Sarah Emily Davies was herself no scholar, nor were her interests primarily scholarly. Her own education was strictly in accordance with what was usual for a clergyman’s daughter . . . “Do they go to school? No. Do they have governesses? No. They have lessons and get on as well as they can.”8 In her own case this was nothing like as well as she desired, but then she was singularly unfortunate in being excluded from the teaching her father could have given her if he had wished and in having an out of London upbringing. London, when Emily Davies was of school age, was the centre of exciting educational developments in girls’ education and she was three hundred miles away.
She was born in Southampton on April 22nd, 1830, the fourth child and second daughter of the Rev. John Davies and his wife Mary. Her father was a clever, highly-strung man who was out of place as the headmaster of a small boys’ boarding-school. He was almost made a professor of moral and political philosophy at London University just before Emily was born but withdrew his candidature when he found the stipend of £300 a year was not guaranteed. There was no doubt that in this post he would have been a much happier man. His wife would also have been a much happier woman. She desperately wanted to move to London and reprimanded herself for her “carnal heart” in wanting it. By the autumn of 1832 John Davies’ health was deteriorating rapidly so the whole family, by then enlarged to five children, went to Normandy for a year. Then they returned, this time to another boys’ school at Chichester. For three years John Davies struggled to do his job but in 1836 he again approached complete collapse and had to retire once more. This time the family went to the Isle of Wight. There, they rented an extremely small cottage. John Davies liked the isolated cottage very much but the children were less pleased. They longed for the social intercourse their father dreaded and for some of the hustle and bustle of a town which was so bad for him. Mary Davies too was unhappy. She had “shooting pains” in her teeth and found it burdensome to be solely responsible for the entertainment of five small children. She was not sorry when her husband’s convalescence came to an end and they once more returned to Chichester.
But they were not there long. In 1840 John Davies was offered, and accepted, a living in Gateshead. Emily remembered vividly the excitement of the arduous journey from Chichester to Gateshead, by a devious route to make the most of the new railways. In Gateshead, a town then of some 15,000 people, they moved into a large, rambling, slightly depressing rectory which Mary Davies knew at a glance was going to be hard to run. She had brought a maid-of-all-work with her and found she had inherited a gardener, who also obligingly cleaned shoes, but that left a great deal for herself and her two young daughters to do. On the other hand, the Rev. John Davies was much better suited. There were three churches to look after but he had two curates to help and did not find the work anything like as gruelling as teaching. One of the curates, a Mr Bennett, also ran a small Foundation school called the Anchorage which took girls as well as boys. Emily recorded years later, relishing the irony, that one of her father’s first actions was to restrict the school to boys “under the belief girls lowered the status.”9
Emily was ten when she arrived in Gateshead and had reached the stage of finding what her mother could offer her in the way of education insufficient. She was particularly attracted to languages, especially Italian, and science. Mary Davies knew no science and was weak on languages. Just before Emily left Chichester she had begun attending a small girls’ day-school but once in Gateshead she was back again to having lessons with her older sister Jane from an increasingly hard-pressed mother. The only help offered by John Davies was the supervision of a weekly composition for which he set a theme. These became the highlights of Emily’s existence. She put her heart into the “themes” and competed eagerly with her brother William for her father’s praise. William was two years older than she and her favourite companion. Together they began writing a newspaper, all laboriously copied out in narrow columns to imitate exactly The Times. Emily put in an advertisement for a governess for herself, warning applicants that they must possess “firmness and determination as the young lady who is to be the object of . . . care is rather self-willed. Phrenologically speaking she has the organ of self-esteem rather largely developed.”10
Until her brothers left home Emily survived on the intellectual stimulus with which they provided her, but once all three had gone off (two to Repton and one to Rugby) she began to suffer from acute boredom. She became increasingly restless as she did the ironing in the basement with Jane and tried to interest herself, after the household chores were done, in private study. But there was no spur, no incentive and she felt herself falling into a stupor from sheer lack of intellectual companionship. The only breaks in the monotony of her existence were visits to friends – the kind of lengthy visits girls were allowed to make because they had no education to be interrupted. Emily made one such visit when she was sixteen to Torquay and stayed six months. The only bit of luck she had came rather late in her early life – an interesting family moved to Gateshead in 1848 with four congenial daughters of just the right age. This was the Crow family and in Jane Crow, who was exactly her age, Emily found a stimulating companion. Jane had been to school at Blackheath and knew all kinds of lively girls with many of whom she kept in touch and to whom she introduced Emily. (One of them was Elizabeth Garrett whom Emily first met in 1854.) Yet in spite of this valuable new friendship Emily felt there was little real change in her prospects. A visit to Geneva with her parents and sister in 1851 only seemed to emphasize how narrow her life was compared to her brothers’. She felt this particularly when William went to Cambridge where Llewelyn, the eldest son, was President of the Union. She and William had been, once upon a time, equal scholars. Now William was allowed a University education while hers had come to a full stop unless she counted her own pathetic attempts to instruct herself. What had made this all the harder to bear was what William had proceeded to do with his privileged education. In 1849 he went sadly astray – he drank, fell in with cardsharpers and inevitably into debt. When he found himself in the hands of a moneylender he had to throw himself on his father’s mercy. He was extricated from this disgrace but it made a deep impression on Emily. The waste of William’s chances not only distressed but angered her. Young men like William threw away what she would have given anything to have and it was monstrously unfair.11
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