by Ian Mortimer
It would be wrong to suggest that the British experience was typical of the Western world. While American states largely paralleled Britain in passing laws that allowed women to own their own property (in the 1840s), to manage it for their own benefit (in the 1870s), and to get divorced (most widely after the Civil War), most Catholic countries did not permit divorce until the twentieth century. Nonetheless, women everywhere campaigned for their rights. National Women’s Rights conventions were held annually in America from 1850. The General German Women’s Association was set up in 1865. The Society for the Demand for Women’s Rights started in France the same year, and the following year, the American Equal Rights Association was established to campaign on behalf of all American citizens, regardless of race, creed or sex. In 1869 the National Women’s Suffrage Association was established by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony specifically to demand the vote for American women. Two years later a Women’s Union started to agitate for equal rights in Paris. Anna Maria Mozoni founded the League for the Promotion of Women’s Interests in Milan in 1881. In 1888, at a meeting of the National Womens Suffrage Association, the International Council of Women came into existence. It was about this time that the word ‘feminism’ started to be used. The ideas of liberty and equality, which for the last hundred years had inspired reformers keen to transform the relationships between men and their governments everywhere, were now claimed by women in their own campaigns for recognition.
Arguably the most significant breakthroughs made by women in the nineteenth century were those allowing them to attend universities and to gain professional qualifications. Although a few women had qualified as physicians and surgeons in the late sixteenth century, society had grown more intolerant of women in professional roles in the seventeenth.18 No university, hospital or medical school anywhere in the world would admit a female student in 1800. This situation only slowly began to change. Oberlin College, a theological institution in Ohio, allowed women to attend classes from 1833 and awarded them degrees from 1837. In 1847 the wilful Elizabeth Blackwell managed to force her way into Geneva Medical College in New York, from which she graduated in 1849. Six years later the University of Iowa opened its doors as a co-educational university. In 1861 a 37-year-old journalist, Julie-Victoire Daubié, passed her baccalaureate at Lyons. In 1864 and 1865 two Russian women managed to pass the entrance examination to study medicine at the University of Zurich: one of them, Nadejda Souslova, successfully defended her doctoral thesis at examination in 1867. In Britain, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson educated herself privately and passed the examination to become a licentiate of the Society of Apothecaries in 1865. Subsequently she lectured at the London School of Medicine for Women, set up in 1874 by Sophie Jex-Blake. The first Frenchwoman to obtain a doctoral degree did so in medicine in 1875. Thus women gradually came to make the first significant breaches in the barricade protecting male-only higher education, mainly through the discipline of medicine. The first female colleges in Cambridge, Girton College and Newnham Hall, were founded in 1869 and 1871 respectively, although Cambridge University refused to confer degrees on women until 1948. University College London was the first British University to grant women degrees, in 1878, the same year that Lady Margaret Hall, the first Oxford women’s college, opened. Swedish and Finnish universities admitted women from 1870, New Zealand universities from 1871, Danish ones in 1875, and Italian and Dutch ones in 1876. By 1900 women accounted for 16 per cent of all students at British universities and 20 per cent of those at Swiss ones, most of the latter coming from Russia.19
This catalogue of breakthroughs should not be taken to mean that women were accepted as equals in professional circles in 1900. The Society of Apothecaries that granted Elizabeth Garrett Anderson her licence amended its rules afterwards to prevent any more women gaining the qualification. The British Medical Association did likewise, barring women from joining its ranks for 19 years. Female physicians found many wards and jobs closed to them. Thus it was a moment of the greatest importance when in 1903, the Nobel committee, which had proposed granting a Nobel Prize to Pierre Curie alone for the work on radiation he had jointly undertaken with his wife, correctly added her name to the award. Marie Curie went on to receive a second Nobel Prize in 1911, thus becoming the first person to have been given two such awards. There could be no better advertisement for the general benefit to society of women’s education. Ironically, the only reason Marie Curie had attended the University of Paris, and met her husband, was because the University of Krakow in her native Poland refused to accept female students.
While higher education was the essential proving ground for women, it has to be said that the women who made these breakthroughs largely came from privileged backgrounds and had received a good basic education. For many people, social reform was not about getting degrees: it was a matter of having a clean water supply and enough food to eat, and learning how to read and write. Of these, education was the least important. This is why in 1800, when writing had existed for approximately 5,000 years, more than half the population of the developed world was illiterate.
The model for compulsory, free education was the Prussian system, which had been established in 1717 by Frederick William I and then developed further by his son Frederick II in 1763. The Austro-Hungarian Empire adopted the model in 1774. Horace Mann introduced the system to America in 1843, and Massachusetts (where Mann was the Secretary for Education) became the first state to make primary education free and compulsory in 1852. Spain followed the American example in 1857, and Italy did likewise in 1859. England and Wales saw school boards set up across the country as a result of the Education Act promoted by W. E. Forster in 1870, but not until 1880 was it made compulsory for children aged between five and ten to attend school. In France, Jules Ferry promoted the legislation that made education compulsory in 1881. As a consequence, Europe and America both went from being largely illiterate to predominantly literate in the course of a generation. Some places such as Portugal remained a long way behind the pace, with 36.1 per cent male and 18.2 per cent female literacy in 1900, but France, whose male and female literacy rates had been about 47 per cent and 27 per cent in the late eighteenth century, reached 86.5 per cent and 80.6 per cent respectively in 1900. The comparable figures for the United Kingdom were a rise from 60 per cent in 1800 to 97.5 per cent in 1900 for men and from 45 per cent to 97.1 per cent for women. Literacy in the USA in 1900 stood at 89.3 per cent and 88.8 per cent respectively. This is a striking development – particularly as female literacy was almost as high as men’s by the turn of the century. Indeed, in Canada, more women could read and write (89.6 per cent) than could men (88.4 per cent) in 1900.20 There is no doubt that without the expansion of education, it would not have been possible even to entertain the notion of the equality of the sexes in legal, moral and financial contexts, or the equality of opportunity for all members of society, let alone set about trying to make these things a reality.
Conclusion
The nineteenth century presents us with an overwhelming tide of change. It contains within its temporal limits a whole series of astonishing transformations: from rural to urban living; from illiteracy to literacy; from agriculture to industry; from travelling on horseback to hurtling along a railway line at almost 100 m.p.h.; from sending a message from Britain to Australia in six weeks to sending a telegram in almost no time at all; from blind sexual prejudice to the ability for women to campaign for equality. So radical was the transformation of daily life that it is difficult to pick out any one major trend. If there is a single image that represents all the different factors, it is that of steam – steam trains and ships, mill and traction engines changed the world beyond recognition. But the most far-reaching change is that of social reform, or, as I described it earlier, the growing acceptance that one man is worth the same as any other.
One aspect of this shift that we have not yet discussed is the increase of leisure time. It is only when people stop struggling to feed and clothe
their families that they have the time to take up games or hobbies. In the late nineteenth century, per capita incomes in Britain suddenly shifted upwards. Men and women increasingly took time off work to watch or play organised sports in the daytime and go to the theatre, music halls, classical concerts or the opera in the evening. They read novels, played the piano and even went on domestic and foreign holidays. If you ever wonder why many of the world’s most popular team games – especially football, rugby and cricket – were invented in Britain, it is not just because so much of the world was ruled from London but also because British workers were the first to have sufficient leisure time to travel away from home to play regularly against other teams. By 1900 the working classes in many other parts of the Western world had enough time and money to down tools and kick a ball. If you cast your mind back upon the famine-struck centuries of the past, that is quite something in itself.
The principal agent of change
It is harder to select the principal agent of change for the nineteenth century than any other. Having discussed the matter regularly over the last few years, a shortlist of ten names has emerged: Alexander Graham Bell, Louis Daguerre, Charles Darwin, Thomas Edison, Michael Faraday, Sigmund Freud, Robert Koch, Karl Marx, James Clerk Maxwell and Louis Pasteur. Most people focus on the rivalries – between the inventors (Bell versus Edison), the medical researchers (Koch versus Pasteur) and the scientists (Maxwell versus Faraday). Mentioning Darwin’s name often provokes the response that Alfred Russel Wallace had similar ideas about evolution and we only remember Darwin with greater clarity because his book On the Origin of Species (1859) became the focal point for the ensuing discussions about religion, science and evolution. Daguerre also has a strong rival in Fox Talbot, whose contributions to the development of photography were arguably more important. Over the years, the plethora of nineteenth-century thinkers has led to animated discussions as to who was the most significant – to the point of table-thumping passion.
In my view, the two most deserving candidates are Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. My reason for considering Darwin relates to the matter of faith. As we observed in the chapter on the sixteenth century, whatever you believe, you believe in something – whether it’s the creative power of God or the evolution of the species from a chemical accident in the primordial soup. However, there is a fundamental difference between believing that your existence is the consequence of God’s will and believing that it is the result of a natural development unaffected by any spiritual force. You can pray to your Creator in good faith but not to an accidental conflux of chemicals in the aforesaid primordial soup. You can believe that a Creator requires obedience and worship; you cannot believe the same of the forces of evolution. If Darwin is to be credited with doing more than any other individual to destroy the belief that we can materially affect our circumstances on Earth through prayer to a spiritual power, then we should acknowledge his prime role in what is undoubtedly one of the biggest social changes of all time. But his agency in this respect is highly debatable. Church attendance in England had already dropped to 40 per cent by 1850 – nine years before On the Origin of Species was published. Moreover, readers were sufficiently sophisticated in their understanding of the Bible to realise that the inaccuracy of the Creation story in Genesis did not invalidate the other books, and especially not the New Testament. We should therefore see Darwin’s impact on religion in a similar light to that of the physicians in the seventeenth century. Just because it was a medicine that made you better, and not a miracle, it did not mean that God had no hand in it. Whether or not you saw the hand of God in the medicine – or natural selection – was down to a personal belief system that was far more complex than the acceptance of a single scientific theory.
Karl Marx is therefore my choice as the principal agent of change of the nineteenth century. This is not because I see history as the struggle of class against class, or that I believe capitalism to be doomed to fail and the ‘proletariat’ bound to succeed – quite the opposite, as the last part of this book will show. Nevertheless, Marx conceptualised industrial labour as a historical force and helped create a mass movement for working-class emancipation that dominated politics from the third quarter of the century. His thinking was more than philosophical or economic commentary: it underpinned actual revolutions. Marx drove forward socialism, which, as George Orwell put it, has a ‘mystique’ of its own – the idea of a classless society – for which people are prepared to fight and die.21 Marx’s ideas led to the political organisation of labour, to workplace rebellions and industrial conflicts; they also triggered social welfare legislation that governments hoped would stem the tide of revolution. His vision of history as a grinding together of economic forces is persuasive, and while we might disagree with his predictions, on that particular point he was undoubtedly right. Socially and economically, we are bound by rules as old as society itself. And that understanding had a far greater bearing on the way people in 1900 looked at society and set about changing it than the important but abstract question of whether mankind was created or evolved.
1901–2000
The Twentieth Century
Early-twentieth-century photographs of my great-grandfather John Frank Mortimer show him wearing a business suit very similar to those worn today. Thinking about him, I realise that he had far more in common with me than he did with his own great-grandfather in 1800, of whom there are no pictures. He voted in national and local government elections. He spent evenings at the ice-skating rink as a young man, liked to bet on the horses, collected stamps as a hobby, married a woman from another part of the country, and his children (born 1904–8) played with teddy bears and dolls. He owned a bicycle and a gramophone, had a telephone, indoor lighting, running water and a range cooker in his home. Unusually, he also had a washing machine with a mechanically driven rotating tub, as the family business was dyeing and cleaning cloth. The streets in his home town of Plymouth were lit at night and patrolled by policemen. He and his wife Catherine took foreign holidays by railway and boat, and enjoyed excursions on Dartmoor at the weekends. They read a lot of novels between them, visited museums and attended public lectures by prominent and fashionable people. He lived to the age of 72; she to 82. Of course, there are differences between his life and mine. I can’t skate, don’t go to church, don’t bet on the horses and have no interest in adding to his stamp collection. I haven’t got a clue how to dye cloth, don’t have any servants and my children weren’t looked after by a nanny when they were younger; but otherwise the differences in our lives are only variations on similar themes. As a recreational activity I play guitar rather than collect stamps. I go to the cinema rather than the ice rink. I send emails instead of telegrams. The balances of work and recreation, need and desire, freedom and responsibility, solitude and sociability, education and experience were all much the same then as they are today.
Bearing this in mind, we might ask what really changed in the twentieth century – what changed so much that for many people it is inconceivable that any other century saw more change? It is a moot point. There is the story of a gathering of retired farmers in Somerset in the early 1960s debating the question of which invention in their lifetimes had made the most difference to working on the farm. The tractor, livestock trucks, the combine harvester, fertilisers, pesticides, the electric water pump, the electric fence and grain silos were all discussed. But everyone agreed that it was Wellington boots that had had the biggest impact.1 It is not always the most dramatic changes that make a difference to our lives, nor do they necessarily represent the greatest achievements. More than that, in the twentieth century, the things that we thought really marked a difference were those that involved comfort, efficiency, speed and luxury.
This should not surprise us. As we have seen, many of the most important and fundamental changes that ensured our survival occurred in earlier centuries. It was in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that violence in society most rapidly diminished, and we have been
relatively safe since the mid eighteenth century, despite what stories of Jack the Ripper might lead you to believe. With regard to social reform, we saw at the end of the eighteenth-century chapter that a graph of the rights of the ordinary man in relation to his contemporaries in Western society would resemble an extended ‘s’ shape. Many social changes in the West follow a similar pattern: a slow gradient at the start, a rapid escalation in the middle and a levelling off as the whole of society is affected and further change becomes harder or impossible. The development as a whole might be termed a ‘civilisation curve’. We would see similar civilisation curves if we were to chart the growing proportion of society able to eat a balanced diet, the increasing percentage of people who lived in a town, and the proportion of the adult population that had access to a car. Its shape is clearly shown on the right, in a graph illustrating the construction of the railways. As you can see, although peak mileage was not achieved until the 1920s, the changes in the twentieth century were minimal compared to those of the nineteenth. Similarly, when we consider such phenomena as the food supply, urbanisation, literacy and homicide rates, while the zenith of the civilisation curve lies in the twentieth century, the steepest increments occur in earlier periods.
Miles of railway track in operation in UK and Ireland 1825–19402
Having said this, feeding a European population of 729 million in the year 2000 was very different from feeding 422 million in 1900. Being separated from your family on the other side of the Atlantic was much more of a concern in 1900 than it was in 2000, when planes could cover the distance in a few hours. Racial discrimination in Britain was a less significant political issue in 1900 than it was in 2000 because there were very few people who directly suffered from it and even fewer who spoke out against it. Even more obviously, not having had an atomic bomb dropped on your country by 1940 (when such things didn’t exist) was significantly different from not having experienced a nuclear conflict by the end of the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when it was a terrifyingly likely possibility. Context is everything when it comes to considering the twentieth century. It was not so much our lives that changed as the world in which we lived.