Significant Sisters

by Margaret Forster

  But at least Emily Davies could understand these common fears. What she found it almost impossible to understand was why women could not see what higher education would do for them. It seemed so obvious to her. In 1866 she wrote a book entitled The Higher Education of Women in which there was a chapter called “Things as they Are”. In it she wrote “There is no point on which schoolmistresses are more unanimous and emphatic than on the difficulty of knowing what to do with girls after leaving school.” The point of higher education was that it gave an intellectual training which was needed for all worthwhile purposes in life, for all kinds of work – social, philanthropic as well as professional. It was, she wrote, “the best corrective of the tendency to take petty views of things and on this account is specially to be desired for women on whom it devolves to give the ‘tone’ to society.” The effects of higher education would be immediate and dramatic and she was impatient with those who failed to appreciate this and with those who mistakenly thought she wanted women in some way to replace men. Quite the contrary. She explained in a letter once, “Probably they will never do as well as men. I mean to say that very likely there will always be some man in every field who will do better than every woman. But that does not seem to me a reason for hindering women from doing their best and choosing for themselves what they will try. It is not likely that they will ever want to be soldiers or sailors as hobbies. If they do attempt things for which they are unfit they will be taught their folly by failure . . .”56 The great point was that, if higher education became a reality, women would actually have the opportunity to find out what in fact they could do. It was the intellectual equivalent of the franchise and in her opinion much more important. “The scoffers don’t see how much is involved in improving education . . .”57 she complained.

  But the leading educationalists of the day were well-aware of how important Emily Davies was in setting the target in their movement. Some naturally found her a menace with her perfectionist attitude but they respected her and gave her credit for raising the sights of female education at a crucial time. Henry Sidgwick, who worked with Anne Jemima Clough to found the Lectures for Ladies in Cambridge and the residential home which later became Newnham College, was extremely irritated by Miss Davies who made him into an arch-enemy quite unnecessarily. She was for many years a thorn in his side and he grew to dread even the sight of a communication from her. But later, after Girton had been founded and Newnham also, he worked with her to get women formally admitted to degrees and he came to like her better. Her absolutely unshakeable faith in the ability of women to obtain everything, to have all doors opened, impressed him. What Barbara Bodichon called her “attacks of audacity” took his breath away and, as one of the first Girton students had remarked, “her pluck was contagious.” When she announced she was “ready to go round a corner and garotte somebody”58 if she could not get what she wanted everyone smiled but also trembled.

  It became Sidgwick’s job to make Emily Davies contain her admittedly fierce temper. When she sent Sidgwick her pamphlet “Women in the Universities of England and Scotland” before publication he told her “your tone seems to me dangerously aggressive and challenging” and she altered the wording accordingly. She knew herself how violent she could sound and was always anxious to restrain herself. “Men cannot stand indignation,”59 she told Barbara Bodichon and she tried not to be publicly indignant. Not only did she approve of masking true anger but she also actually advocated disguise of every sort. “I think there must be truth . . . as to the peculiar fitness of women for fighting – I cannot help enjoying it,”60 she wrote to Helen Taylor but at the same time she once told the young Elizabeth Garrett off for being “cheeky”. She also packed the front rows of many a vital meeting with the most docile, pretty, demure looking women she could find so that men would not be scared of them. Anybody dressing in “masculine” clothes infuriated her. It was playing into the hands of the enemy who went about saying higher education would unsex women and make them battleaxes. The students at Hitchin and Girton were bullied constantly by her to be at all times emphatically ladylike in appearance and actions.

  In that attitude, as in some others, Emily Davies was not feminist enough. There were strict demarcation lines within her progressive ideas. What she called “radical looking women” earned her scorn and she was as hard on them as the worst of male chauvinists. “It is a great relief to me to get away from uncongenial companionship,” she wrote in her Family Chronicle (after attending a dinner party full of “radical women”) “and to abandon the vain attempt to work with radicals. Heaven protect me from trying it again. The more I hear of them the worse they appear qua Radicals. No doubt some of them have the domestic virtues.” She loathed “fast” and “masculine looking” women and resented any suggestion that highly educated women could be as objectionable. In an article in the Victoria Magazine she defended intellectual women saying “. . . the masculine women are not those who sit down to their books and devote themselves to an orderly course of study.” But what was more serious was her rigid moral attitude. The Victoria Magazine, which she edited for a year in 1863, had as its slogan “Our watchword is Liberty and our motto Let every woman do that which is right in her own eyes.” But only, it then transpired, if it was also right in Emily’s. The proprietor of the magazine, Emily Faithful, was referred to in a divorce case and was obliged to withdraw from society. “I, and others, ceased to be associated with her,”61 announced Emily Davies coldly.

  Emily Davies was, after all, a victim in some respects of her own culture and it was that “fear of failure” which made her force conformity on her students. Feminism had come only so far by the time Girton was established – it was still anxious to embrace conventional outward notions of “femininity” because it was so busy attacking the much more important and injurious inward notions of it. Emily Davies was absolutely in step with this stage of feminist history in her overwhelming desire to reassure society that far from wanting to banish the differences between the sexes she wanted to maintain them so long as doing so did not hinder woman’s development as a person. The suggestion that not being able to wear the clothes she wanted came under that heading would have been frivolous then. And the schoolteachers agreed with Emily Davies. From Girton (and Newnham, and Somerville and Lady Margaret Hall in Oxford, all founded at roughly the same time) the new generation of highly educated college women went out and ploughed back into the female educational field all they had been taught. Just as Emily Davies had hoped, they were inspired by the sense of mission which had created their colleges in the first place. They went to schools throughout the country where they set a new pace, a new standard, which in itself revolutionized girls’ education. There were still, of course, not nearly enough good schools for middle-class girls (the educational pioneers at this stage did nothing about the working-class girls) and the reluctance of parents to educate girls as well as boys was still deeply ingrained. The Report of the Taunton Commission believed that this was “so deeply embedded in human nature” that it would never die out. It would just have to be acknowledged and allowed for.

  What the Report did not also comment upon was the reluctance of girls themselves to take the opportunities before them and use them to the full. In the nineteenth century, this was hardly a problem. Middle-class girls were dependent on the permission and the wealth of parents to obtain the new education as well as on their own brains. However desperately they might want to go to college it was not an ambition they could realize, in the period when women’s colleges opened, without parental co-operation. But from 1870, after Forster’s Education Act, the sights of all girls, from whatever class, were at least theoretically raised and by the middle of this century, with the entry of working-class girls as well as boys into the grammar schools, the sky was the limit. Neither lack of money nor lack of opportunity could stop any girl who had the brains to go onto higher education. But then a “LOA” (Lack of Ambition) factor began to emerge. Girls appeared not to want t
o avail themselves of all the different forms of higher education. Many of those who were able chose not to continue their education beyond school. The fact that, nevertheless, thousands availed themselves of the system Emily Davies and her contemporaries inaugurated is no comfort to the feminists. There is the suspicion abroad that girls do not actually choose to forgo higher education, that they are discriminated against in all sorts of subtle ways during their scholastic careers. And the attitude the Taunton Commission noted is still prevalent: girls do not get encouraged to stay on and go further. Parents still suffer from LOA on their daughters’ behalf.

  But the tide may at last be turning. In 1982 statistics showed that for the first time in Britain more girls than boys sat for “A” level examinations.62 Girls may at last be seeing higher education as Emily Davies wished them to see it and, if this prompts them also to use it as she wished them to use it, then at long last there will be a basic and highly significant change in how women see themselves in relation to society.

  SEXUAL MORALITY

  Josephine Butler

  (Josephine Butler Collection, Fawcett Library, at the City of London Polytechnic; photo by John Freeman & Co, London)

  Josephine Butler

  1828–1906

  THERE WAS ONE kind of equality, one sort of liberation, about which nineteenth-century feminists found it embarrassing to speak. Higher education for women, better employment opportunities for women, protection at law for women – these were all good, clean, decent issues. Nobody was afraid to voice opinions upon them, nobody ashamed to sign their name on a petition. But the attack on that infamous “double-standard” which so bedevilled relationships between the sexes in Victorian times did not attract such eager support. Even the bravest of self-confessed feminists trembled at the implications of involving themselves in this particular fight. Signing the petition of the Moral Reform Union as late as 1884 was still thought of as a courageous thing to do in spite of the fact that what was demanded was couched in the most sober and discreet terms: “That having before them the fact that women are constantly annoyed and imperilled by the solicitation of profligate men in the streets and elsewhere, your Petitioners humbly pray that your Honourable House will, in justice, make the male offender in the matter of solicitation equally punishable with the female offender against whom laws now exist; and that in all future legislation the same principle of equality between the sexes shall be observed.” At the time of this wistful request a great battle to establish “the same principle of equality” had just been won and yet there was no confidence among those who had won, nor among those for whom it had primarily been won, that the victory was anything but hollow.

  The parliamentary battle in question saw the end (in 1883 during Gladstone’s second ministry) of the twenty-year fight to get the Contagious Diseases Acts repealed. These Acts had amounted to wholesale anti-feminist legislation, the very first of the kind in Britain. In other ways the law had worked against women negatively, by excluding them from privileges and denying them protection, but the CD Acts worked against the female sex in a much more dangerously positive way, specifically singling them out for punishment. There were three of these Acts, passed in 1864, 1866 and 1869, all under different Liberal ministries. They made it obligatory for any woman merely suspected of being a prostitute in the areas where the laws operated (ports and army towns) to have to report to the police station for a medical examination to inspect her for venereal disease. If diseased she was then obliged to enter a lock hospital until declared clean when she would be issued with a certificate guaranteeing this. All three Acts were thought of as part of a general cleaning-up operation, part of the wider reform of the British Army which would improve the health of soldiers. The campaign against them was led by Josephine Butler, a woman who had worked among prostitutes in the workhouses and prisons of Liverpool and who had come to see prostitution not only as a moral evil but as a form of male persecution. It seemed clear to her that all women were debased by these Acts, that the very notion of womanhood was viciously attacked. In them the buying and selling of the female body was sanctified by statute law and the whole position of women in society was degraded. Women were declared to exist for the gratification of male lust which was acknowledged to be a “natural” urge. Her campaign was, she declared, “one of the most vital movements of Christian times.”1 In the history of feminism it was crucial.

  Yet Josephine Butler did not see her mission in purely feminist terms. Like all the best feminists she was concerned not just with the position of women in society but with the position of men in relation to them. She insisted that she fought for men as well as women. God’s voice, she wrote, called upon her to “combat the double violation of principles . . . as a citizen of a free country first and a woman secondly I felt impelled to come forward.”2 She kicked the “double standard” in its most private parts and was hated and despised for doing so. She brought to feminism a strong concept of “womankind” which had barely existed before (and was not sustained afterwards) and her greatest triumph was to cross class barriers and make middle-class women identify themselves with a form of sex persecution from which they did not themselves suffer.

  Under the CD Acts it was working-class women only who suffered. They were the ones going about the streets of poor areas in the proscribed districts who could be arrested by plain-clothes policemen and forced to submit to a shameful and brutal examination. Without an upper middle-class champion like Josephine Butler, one woman who was prepared to expose herself to unbelievable abuse, State Registered Vice might have become an accepted part of the social fabric and nobody, least of all respectable women, would have thought that it mattered that it was. The CD Acts seemed so obviously “good”, an excellent hygienic measure, protecting men as they surely must from unclean women. It took Josephine Butler to point out that if the women were unclean they had not become unclean by themselves and yet those who had helped them become unclean got off scot-free. She said it would not do: men and women must be accused together – either both must be punished or neither. She maintained that all legislation on the subject was useless. Women as a class, she declared, were being denied their constitutional rights and the outlook for society as a whole was perilous if this continued. She said that sex was a subject women could no longer be officially supposed to know nothing about, that women, ladies, must acquaint themselves with unpleasant facts and wake up to how all women were being abused by what some had to suffer. She was quite right. The repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts was as significant for feminism as any of its more respectable victories.

  * * *

  Josephine Elizabeth Butler’s life was far removed from that of the working-class girl upon whose behalf she initially became involved in the campaign against the CD Acts. She was born on April 13th, 1828 in a remote part of Northumberland, the seventh of eight surviving children. Her father was John Grey, descendant of Border Barons and a cousin to Earl Grey of Reform Bill fame. Her mother was Hannah Annett, of Huguenot descent. The estate at Milfield which was Josephine’s home until she was seven when the family moved to Dilston, also in Northumberland, was a model of its kind. John Grey’s chief interest was in agricultural reform and when, in 1833, he was appointed to take charge of the Greenwich Hospital estates in the north he was able to put into practice on a grand scale all his own theories. He was in charge of 34,356 acres covering 290 tenancies stretching the length and breadth of Northumberland and Cumberland and he supervised them all himself. Riding about on his big, black horse he was known as “The Black Prince” because of his dark, handsome appearance and authoritative bearing. His whole life, wrote Josephine, “was a sustained effort for the good of others.”3 Every kind of liberal reform interested him and he would, said his daughter, have become an MP if his loathing of London had not been so great. But as it was he stayed in the north, managing the Greenwich estates with enlightened and successful methods.

  The family home at Dilston over which he presided was spa
cious and beautiful. Josephine grew up, with her sisters and brothers, used to being allowed a great deal of freedom. John Grey taught all his children to ride when they were very young and Josephine developed a healthy respect for this form of exercise. “I can do with any amount of spirit,” she once wrote, “but I like a businesslike horse who does not make a flourish and a splash and a curvette and coquette as park horses do.”4 She and her closest sister Hatty actually dreamed of a future as circus girls and practised for hours riding in circles standing on their bare-backed mounts. But there was another side to their upbringing. John Grey read the Bible to them every Sunday afternoon and in addition insisted that they become familiar with Coke and Blackstone as well as the Blue Books studied so secretly by Florence Nightingale. The six girls as well as the two boys were taught languages and grounded in the classics and history. They were expected to take part in an intelligent fashion in discussions with the many visitors on topics of the day. But they also had fun. “My father used to drive Aunt Hatty and me from Dilston to Milfield, “Josephine once wrote to a nephew, “in a high, small, open gig . . . Alnwick we knew well of course. We used to go to the great annual County Ball there and always stayed at the Swan . . . Aunt Hatty and I were great belles in our snowy book muslin frocks and natural flowers wreathed in our heads and waists and skirts . . .”5 They were both very beautiful and lively and when they were sent for two years to school in Newcastle took occasional advantage of the not very strict discipline. Yet by eighteen, her brief schooling over, Josephine had been troubled by very much the same kind of doubts about the future as her much less privileged contemporaries. Unlike Emily Davies she had had an excellent education; unlike Florence Nightingale she had had a great deal of freedom and parental encouragement; unlike Elizabeth Blackwell she had never had to work; unlike Caroline Norton she had not been trapped into early marriage; but, like all of them, she experienced feelings of terror when she looked ahead and thought about herself. Brought up by her parents to an awareness of the world she lived in, and to a feeling of social responsibility, she agonized over what she should do with her life and this drove her into a religious crisis: what did God want her to do?