CHAPTER XI

Reaction and the Rise of Modern Feminism

A genuine revolution of many women supported by many men was necessary before any effective change in the legal and social position of the mass of women could be secured. The complete dependence of the married woman on her husband, the impossibility of divorce, the scorn of the foolish at the woman who did not marry, the impossibility of a woman entering any learned profession were barriers to achievement which only the most exceptional woman would surmount. In moments of despair those who were trying to enlarge the opportunities of women must have felt that they were fighting a hopeless struggle against the general indifference of their own sex and the active hostility of many men. All through the nineteenth century and, indeed, on into living memory, a considerable body of feminine opinion satisfied with things as they were, hampered the movement towards greater freedom in which other women spent their lives. It was by no means only the women of poor intelligence who would not join in the battle. The very success of some outstanding women made them singularly obtuse when it came to considering the position of women in general. Hannah More, who had been a complete success as a school teacher, much praised as a dramatist and poet, highly successful as a writer in more than one vein, and busy in the work of teaching the poor could declare that ‘they little understand the true interests of woman who would lift her from the important duties of her allotted station, to fill with fantastic dignity a loftier but less appropriate niche’¹. She accepted without question that for other women than herself ‘their knowledge is not often like the learning of men, to be reproduced in some literary composition, nor ever in any learned profession; but it is to come out in conduct’².

She wrote these words in 1799, seven years after Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) had published her famous book, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. This book was already in its third edition in 1796 and found many admirers among women of the middle class, who lacked the protection of the aristocratic marriage settlement and could never hope for divorce from a bad husband. Harriet Martineau, born in 1802, remembered that the book had been much admired in her parents’ Unitarian circle in Norwich when she was a child¹. But Hannah More in 1793 wrote to Lord Orford, ‘I have been much pestered to read the Rights of Women, but I am invincibly resolved not to do it. Of all jargon, I hate metaphysical jargon: besides there is something fantastic and absurd in the very title. How many ways there are of being ridiculous ! I am sure I have as much liberty as I can make good use of, now I am an old maid: and when I was a young one, I had, I dare say, more than was good for me’. This contemptuous rejection of Mary Wollstonecraft’s plea on behalf of all women by one who had, as she admits, always enjoyed a high degree of liberty, shows a crass indifference to the possibility of other women’s sufferings. ‘Old maids’ who were well enough off to live in comfort and intelligent enough to find something to do were, of all women save perhaps widows, those who suffered least from the attitude of the law and the Church to women.

Hannah More was sufficiently intelligent to realize that in writing thus she was betraying her own sex; for she admitted that if she had still been young she might perhaps have written differently. Nevertheless, she continued in the same letter ‘so many women are fond of government, I suppose, because they are not fit for it. To be unstable and capricious, I really think, is but too characteristic of our sex; and there is no animal so much indebted to subordination for its good behaviour as woman’². It is suggestive to compare this lamentable generalization with Catharine Macaulay’s words written in 1790: ‘The great difference that is observable in the character of the sexes as they display themselves in the scenes of social life, has given rise to much false speculation on the natural qualities of the female mind’³. The follies of women came, she was convinced, from their physical and moral education as girls. She took a very different view of female subordination from that of Hannah More. ‘Though the situation of women in modern Europe’, she wrote, ‘when compared with that condition of abject slavery in which the women have always been held in the east may be considered as brilliant, yet if we withhold comparison, and take the matter in a positive sense, we shall have no great reason to boast of our privileges, or of the candour and indulgence of the men towards us. For with a total and absolute exclusion from every political right to the sex in general, married women, whose situation demands a particular indulgence, have hardly a civil right to save them from the grossest injuries; and though the gallantry of some of the European societies have necessarily produced indulgence, yet in others the faults of women are treated with a severity and a rancour which militates against every principle of religion and common sense’¹.

Catharine Macaulay’s ‘warmth in the vindication of female nature’², to use her own phrase, has been forgotten, for her arguments, clear and cogent though they were, were never widely read, She wrote as a scholar writes who does not try to appeal to a large audience. But there can be no doubt that her words inspired Mary Wollstonecraft to write A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. ‘When 1 first thought of writing these strictures’, she recorded, ‘I anticipated Mrs. Macaulay’s approbation, with a little of that sanguine ardour it has been the business of my life to suppress; but soon heard with a sickly qualm of disappointed hope; and the still seriousness of regret—that she was no more’³. After Mary Wollstone-craft’s death in 1797, her husband, William Godwin, author of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice, wrote a brief account of her life. He declared that the Vindication ‘was begun, carried on, and finished in the state it now appears, in a period of no more than six weeks’⁴. This haste accounts for the uneven character of the work and may also account for the note of rough eloquence which rises from time to time.

Both Catharine Macaulay and Mary Wollstonecraft had been moved to indignation by Burke’s Reflections on the French Revolution and had printed an immediate reply. Catharine Macaulay addressed her Observations to Lord Stanhope, almost the only peer to welcome the revolution. Mary Wollstonecraft called her work A Vindication of the Rights of Man and, indeed, it became an impassioned plea for human rights in general. The evils of the slave trade, the greed of great landlords, the misery and degradation of unemployment are set out in this tract with an explosive violence of rhetoric remote from Catharine Macaulay’s cool argument that the French people have the right to choose their own form of government. ‘If the French people’, wrote Catharine Macaulay, ‘therefore should be so capricious as to fling off their new constitution, and subject themselves to more unequal forms of government, or even to tyranny, it will be agreeable to the course of past experience: but such an exertion of power can not injure their right; and whatever form or complexion any future government in France may bear, it can have no legitimate source, but in the will of the people’¹. This is the voice of the historian and contrasts sharply with Mary Wollstonecraft’s concluding paragraphs: ‘Why is our fancy to be appalled by terrific perspectives of a hell beyond the grave?—Hell stalks abroad;—the lash resounds on the slave’s naked sides; and the sick wretch, who can no longer earn the sour bread of unremitting labour, steals to a ditch to bid the world a long good night—or, neglected in some ostentatious hospital, breathes his last amidst the laugh of mercenary attendants. Such misery demands more than tears—I pause to recollect myself; and smother the contempt I feel rising for your rhetorical flourishes and infantine sensibility’².

In similar fashion when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Woman her quick intelligence and command of words enabled her to drive home the fact of woman’s subjection and the folly of her education, which neglected her understanding while providing her with accomplishments. It was the emphasis of the writing which impressed the book on the public mind. She attacked the sentiments expressed by those who had written about women. Most girls were given a copy of Dr. Gregory’s Legacy to his Daughters. ‘I respect his heart’, wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, ‘but entirely disapprove of his celebrated legacy to his daughters’³. Mrs. Piozzi was quoted scornfully for her arch letter of advice to a newly married man urging him never to let his wife know if, and when, his love for her grew less. ‘All our attainments, all our arts, are employed to gain and keep the heart of man’ were sentiments which displeased Mary Wollstonecraft¹. The Vindication was written at a white heat of passion. As thoughts rose in her mind she put them on paper, without weighing them and considering all their implications. She had no reserves and her very generosity of spirit meant that she wrote with a force shocking to many who would have agreed wholeheartedly with the same ideas more moderately expressed. She herself clearly felt that she was writing to Mrs. Macaulay’s text and she inveighed against the foolish treatment given to women without formulating her claims for them more definitely than Catharine Macaulay had done. ‘Let woman share the rights and she will emulate the virtues of man; for she must grow more perfect when emancipated, or justify the authority which chains such a weak being to her duty’ are the opening words of her penultimate paragraph. She continued ‘If the latter, it will be expedient to open a fresh trade with Russia for whips: a present which a father should always make to his son-in-law on his wedding day, that a husband may keep his whole family in order by the same means’². Beyond this, she never defined emancipation or set out the rights women should share.

Some of the bitterness in this book which offended milder people was due to the harsh experiences of the author’s own life. Her father was a spendthrift, who dissipated his inheritance, drank, and beat his wife. He moved his household every few years, so that as a girl Mary lived sometimes in Essex, sometimes in Yorkshire, and for a little time in Wales. She had no proper education and was only taught to write neatly and spell correctly when she was sixteen by a friend, two years older than herself, named Fanny Blood. It was evident to Mary that she would have to get her own living, and when she was nineteen she became a companion to the widow of a London merchant living in Bath. She kept the post two years, but was called home to nurse her mother, whose dying words, ‘A little patience, and all will be over’, haunted her daughter through life³. Her mother’s death in 1782 left her physically exhausted, but she went on to nurse her married sister through a dangerous illness. In 1783, with her friend, Fanny Blood, and her two unmarried sisters, she started a school at Newington Green. In the next two years her school prospered and she made friends with several men and women of liberal tendencies, among them the Nonconformist preacher and writer on economics, Dr. Price, who also lived at Newington Green. She met Dr. Johnson not long before his death. But by 1785 Fanny was far gone in consumption and was ordered to Lisbon. An Irish merchant living there proposed marriage to her. Mary persuaded her to accept him and herself followed Fanny to Lisbon to nurse her, borrowing money for her fare. Fanny died before the year was out and Mary returned to find most of her pupils had left the school. At the suggestion of a friend she turned to writing for a living and sold her first book, Thoughts on the Education of Daughters, to Joseph Johnson, in 1787¹.

J. Johnson’s imprint often appears on women’s books; both Maria Edgeworth and Mrs. Barbauld were among his authors. He gave Mary ten guineas for her tract which contains sensible advice on the upbringing of daughters, but no hint of the tempestuous mind which was later to produce the vindications of the rights of man and woman. The fact that the tract was pirated in the next year by a Dublin printer and put out by him in the same volume with Fénélon’s instructions to a governess and an address to mothers confirms the absolute propriety of its contents². Mary’s employment for about a year as governess to the daughters of an Irish peer shows that she was not yet regarded as a revolutionary. Encouraged by Johnson she gave up her post in 1790 to engage in literary work in London. He invited her to stay in his own house until she had found herself a lodging and employed her as a reader and translator. In his house she met his liberal friends, Thomas Paine and William Godwin among them. It was in these years that her best work was done. At the end of 1792 she went alone to Paris, possibly, as her friends said, to free herself from her love for the painter, Fuseli, who was a married man. There she met Gilbert Imlay, an American in business, and agreed to live with him as his wife. Her daughter by him was born in 1794 called Fanny. Imlay’s business called him often from home and Mary began to mistrust his fidelity. She followed him to England in 1795, but agreed to undertake a journey for him to Norway. When she returned before the end of the year she found him living with another woman and tried to drown herself by jumping off Putney Bridge. She was saved by a passing boat and returned to her literary work for Johnson. In the course of 1796 she became friendly with William Godwin, and the friendship ripened quickly into love. In his most famous work Godwin had set out his considered reasons for disapproving of the institution of marriage¹, but when Mary became pregnant he married her. She died in childbirth at the age of thirty-eight. Her daughter by Godwin has a place in literary history as the wife of Shelley rather than for her own talent as a writer.

Mary Wollstonecraft will always hold an honoured place in the history of the movement by which women threw off their age-long subjection, but she is often credited with more than the Vindication will bear. ‘In this book the whole extent of the feminist ideal is set out, and the whole claim for equal human rights is made’². This statement can only be accepted in the most vague and general sense. Mrs. Macaulay, whose words, already quoted, inspired Mary Wollstonecraft to write this book, was the first woman to draw attention to the ‘total and absolute exclusion from every political right’ suffered by all women³. Mary Wollstonecraft was a creature of emotion, as her own sad story shows. Her generosity was boundless, and her friends were the founders of the English socialist creed. Her personal conduct offended rigid moralists, although as Godwin records, she maintained her circle of friends until she married him, for people could affect to believe that she was Imlay’s wife. In her simplicity she thought that when she married Godwin she would regain the respect which her previous conduct may have lost her, but she found the reverse was the case. Some women, among them Mrs. Siddons, refused to continue her acquaintance⁴.

After her death Godwin assuaged his grief by writing an account of Mary Wollstonecraft which was already in its second edition by 1798. It appeared under the title Memoirs of the Author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. It is possible that it stimulated interest in Mary Wollstonecraft’s writings, for Godwin concealed nothing. Mary’s love for Fuseli, her association with Imlay, the birth of her first child and her attempted suicide were all disclosed. Nor did Godwin conceal the fact that only her pregnancy persuaded them to marry. Those women, like Elizabeth Carter, who shrank from the violence of the Vindication must have been confirmed in their dislike by the appearance of this book. But in 1803 there appeared a defence of Mary Wollstonecraft written by a man in the form of a series of letters to a lady. He tried as ‘an advocate and a friend’ to vindicate one whom he regarded as ‘an incomparable woman’¹. ‘On the correctness of her judgment in certain cases, most men will probably be disposed to demur;’ he wrote, ‘individual parts of her private conduct lie still more open to the disapprobation of the systematic moralist; but the purity of her intentions, both in her private and public concerns, must be considered as unimpeachable. More genuine benevolence, more enlarged philanthropy, more solicitude for the interests of her fellow creatures, and more deference to the dictates of duty, as far as she could make a clear discovery of them, never warmed a human breast’². He could only palliate her attempted suicide by stressing the misery of her situation. ‘My surprize is not at all excited by her hurrying into an act of desperation; but rather that her whole mental economy was not totally and for ever disarranged’³. To the writer she ‘was much too intelligent, too independent, too good, and too great’ for a world which ‘was not worthy of her’⁴.

The irregularity of Mary Wollstonecraft’s own life inevitably reduced the effectiveness of her teaching. The reaction of contemporary liberal opinion produced from Thomas Gisborne An Enquiry into the Duties of the Female Sex in 1797, which had reached its ninth edition by 1810. For almost a generation after the Vindication appeared there was little more deliberate propaganda for the liberation of women. Two books which fall within this period were each written, as the authors state in their Prefaces, some years before publication. The woman who wrote An Appeal to the Men of Great Britain on behalf of Women, published by Johnson in 1798, laid aside her own work when a friend sent her Mary Wollstonecraft’s book. Afterwards she took it up again, hoping that ‘by managing and sympathizing with the prejudices of mankind’ she would make the cause of women more acceptable to men. This appeal fell on deaf ears, for the author lacked fire. When in 1825 a man again took up the cause of women he referred to ‘the timidity and impotence of conclusion accompanying the gentle eloquence of Mary Hays, addressed about the same time that Mary Wollstonecraft wrote, in the shape of an “Appeal” to the then closed ears of unreasoning men’⁵. Nothing more about Mary Hays can be discovered⁶.

Mary Hays’s anonymous Appeal was followed in 1799 by The Female Advocate or an Attempt to recover the Rights of Women from Male Usurpation written seven years before publication by Mary Anne Radcliffe¹, who was deeply concerned with the fate of women driven by poverty to vice. She pointed out in her Introduction that since the advantages of education were in Britain ‘monopolized by the male sex’ it was surely the duty of men to protect women, who ‘are so perfectly tamed, either through custom or compulsive submission, that, let but the lenient hand of protection be stretched out to their aid, and, doubtless, content and happiness will resume their seat’². The first part of the book dealt with ‘the fatal consequences of men traders engrossing women’s occupations’, in particular, ‘what can be said in favour of men-milliners, men-mantua-makers, and men-stay-makers, besides all the numerous train of other professions, such as hair-dressers, etc., etc.; all of which occupations are much more calculated for women than men’³. The author dated her Preface from Kennington Cross and undoubtedly knew what she was writing about when she stressed the large numbers of women, uneducated for earning their own living, who were driven to poverty by the death of their husbands or fathers. Since begging was forbidden by law it was not surprising that such women, often brought up in a luxurious home, fell into a vicious way of life. The second part of the book ‘demonstrates that the Frailty of Female Virtue more frequently originates from embarrassed Circumstances, than from a depravity of Disposition’⁴. It is a sign of a developing social conscience that one of their own sex has at last come forward to take up the cause of the unfortunate women who have not been trained for the honest labour market and therefore have been forced into the market for vice.

The first book which set out a coherent argument for the full emancipation of women and for their admission even to the legislature, appeared in 1825. Its author was William Thompson, of Cork, an important figure in the early history of modern socialism. He was moved to write by resentment at a passage in the article on Government contributed by James Mill to the Encyclopaedia Britannica in 1820. The title of his book, Appeal of one half of the human race, Women, against the pretensions of the other half, Men, to retain them in political, and thence in civil and domestic, slavery; in reply to a paragraph in Mr. Mill’s celebrated ‘Article on Government’, is contentious. Thompson printed James Mill’s offending paragraph on his title-page: ‘One thing is pretty clear, that all those individuals whose interests are indisputably included in those of other individuals may be struck off from political rights without inconvenience. In this light may be viewed all children up to a certain age, whose interests are involved in those of their parents. In this light also women may be regarded, the interest of almost all of them is involved either in that of their fathers, or in that of their husbands’. As his frontispiece, Thompson inserted a picture of Mrs. Anna D. Wheeler, who appears to be beautiful and is dressed in the height of fashion. To her he addressed a long introductory letter beginning ‘Honoured with your acquaintance, ambitious of your friendship, I have endeavoured to arrange the expression of those feelings, sentiments, and reasonings, which have emanated from your mind. In the following pages you will find discussed on paper, what you have so often discussed in conversation—a branch of that high and important subject of morals and legislation, the condition of women, of one half of the human race, in what is called civilised society’¹. Thompson hoped that Mrs. Wheeler would write the book. ‘Anxious that you should take up the cause of your proscribed sex, and state to the world in writing, in your own name, what you have so often and so well stated in conversation and under feigned names in such periodical publications of the day as would tolerate such a theme, I long hesitated to arrange our common ideas.… Anxious that the hand of a woman should have the honour of raising from the dust that neglected banner which a woman’s hand nearly thirty years ago unfolded boldly in the face of the prejudicies of thousands of years, and for which a woman’s heart bled, and her life was all but the sacrifice—I long hesitated to write’. He thought that ‘narrow views … too often marred Mary Wolstonecroft’s pages’. Since Mrs. Wheeler lacked the ‘leisure and resolution to undertake the drudgery of the task’ Thompson undertook it himself, declaring that ‘A few only of the following pages are the exclusive property of your mind and pen, and written with your own hand. The remainder are our joint property, I being your interpreter and the scribe of your sentiments².

The elegant Mrs. Wheeler (born in 1785) belonged to the family of Doyle of Bramblestown, Kilkenny. Her husband, Francis Massy Wheeler, a grandson of Lord Massy, had seen Anna Doyle at the local races and fallen in love with her. She was fifteen and her husband nineteen when they married. Wheeler drank and neglected his estate and his wife, who turned to reading as a refuge from unhappiness. She found her own thoughts reflected in the work of the socialist thinkers and poets. In 1812 she left her husband, taking her two daughters with her¹. One of them, Rosina, later became the wife of Edward Bulwer-Lytton. For a few years Mrs. Wheeler lived with her uncle, Sir John Doyle, then Governor of Guernsey. In 1816 she went to London and thence for a time to Caen, before returning to settle in London. Wherever she went, her beauty, charm and revolutionary ideas made an immediate impression. Thompson’s violent championship of women was the result of his friendship with Mrs. Wheeler, who, like him, was an ardent believer in the early form of communism which they knew as ‘Co-operation’. In his history of the co-operative movement, G. J. Holyoake referred to Mrs. Wheeler as ‘a familiar name in co-operative literature of a lady who very sensibly advocated the usefulness of women taking part in public affairs’². Again, when describing the early advocates of co-operation, he states: ‘Mrs. Wheeler attracted considerable attention by well-reasoned lectures, delivered in 1829 in a chapel near Finsbury Square’³. Thompson’s Appeal was printed by Longman and his partners, ‘and sold at the London Cooperative Society’s offices, 18 Pickett-Street, Temple Bar’.

Co-operation was a new idea in 1825. To its founder, Robert Owen, it seemed the means by which social justice could be secured, and William Thompson was one of the early adherents to this view. He had resided for some years with Jeremy Bentham, of whom he spoke with reverence in the introductory letter to the Appeal. If James Mill had complied with Bentham’s request that he should remove the offending words about women from his article on government Thompson might never have written this book. He wrote with the fervour of a man who is teaching his countrymen a new religion. Godwin, in his consideration of political justice, had rejected the institution of marriage, but he had not gone on to consider the place women should fill in society. In demanding for them absolute equality with men, Thompson pointed out that women must have equal political rights to be assured of their civil rights. It was unfortunate for his cause that he could see no way of securing for women the rights he was convinced were their due save in a co-operative form of social order, in which, apparently, marriage should not exist. It seemed to him that in the present form of society men could not allow women equal opportunities with men, for ‘men dread the competition of other men, of each other, in every line of industry. How much more will they dread your additional competition’¹. He looked hopefully towards a happy state: ‘Large numbers of men and women co-operating together for mutual happiness, all their possessions and means of enjoyment being the equal property of all.… Here no dread of being deserted by a husband with a helpless and pining family, could compel a woman to submit to the barbarities of an exclusive master. The whole Association educate and provide for the children of all: the children are independent of the exertions or the bounty of any individual parent: the whole wealth and beneficence of the community support woman against the enormous wrongs of such casualties: they affect her not’².

Such words as these, implying that English family life must be abandoned to secure the chimera of equality for women, offset the argument for emancipation which might have been based on the achievements of women in the recent past. The support of the feminist cause by the new socialism imported a dangerous element of fear into the instinctive reaction against new ideas felt by the great mass of ordinary people. All the generosity of Mary Wollstonecraft weighed as nothing in the balance against the irregularities of her life. The unpractical idealism of Thompson and his kind confirmed in their doubts those whose friendship to the cause of women had already been shaken by her story. Nothing could keep exceptional women from the public work for which they were fitted and nothing could prevent women who could write from publishing their books. But for every one of them the way was harder because of the preaching of those who felt themselves their best friends. A massive force of opposition moved originally by fear lay behind the repression of women by virtuous and kindly fathers and husbands in the reign of Queen Victoria.

But this was still in the future when the distinguished group of women born in the 1760’s were reaching maturity. Joanna Baillie, born in 1762, Mary Berry in 1763, Maria Edgeworth in 1767 and Jane Marcet in 1769 were a brilliant quartette of woman writers, each in a different vein. They all lived long and carried the eighteenth-century tradition into the heart of a new age¹. Mary Berry and her younger sister, Agnes, brightened the declining years of Horace Walpole with their company when they were in England and with their letters when they were abroad. They had little formal education, for their mother died when Mary was four and to save expense, Robert Berry, their father, did not engage a successor to their first governess when she married in 1775. Through sheer weakness of character Robert Berry had lost his chance of inheriting a fortune. Mary Berry was conscious both of her own ability and of the weakness of her father and sister. ‘I soon found’, she wrote in old age, ‘that I had to lead those who ought to have led me; and that I must be a protecting mother instead of a gay companion to my sister; and to my father a guide and monitor, instead of finding in him a tutor and protector’². Neither sister married, though each was for a time engaged. Horace Walpole, who had succeeded to the earldom of Orford in 1791, is said to have desired to marry one of them in order that the rank of a countess and the jointure of £2,000 a year for one would make the future of both secure. When he died he left each of them £4,000 and, jointly for their lives, Little Strawberry Hill, the house they were then occupying, with its furniture and the garden and the meadow in front of it. To Robert Berry and his daughters jointly Lord Orford left all his printed works and manuscripts to be published at their discretion and for their benefit.

This bequest started Mary Berry on her literary work, for the five-volume edition of Horace Walpole’s works which appeared under the nominal editorship of Robert Berry in 1798 was prepared for the press by her. She tried her hand at play-writing, but without success. She had for some time studied Latin and Greek with private tutors and she read everything that came her way. In a letter written in 1798 she expressed the pleasure she had derived from reading Malthus’s Essay on the Principles of Population¹. In 1810 she published in four volumes the letters of Madame du Deffand which had come into her hands with Walpole’s papers. Most of the letters were addressed to Horace Walpole, but some, addressed to Voltaire, had been bequeathed to Walpole with the rest of her manuscripts by their writer. Miss Berry wrote an Introduction and identified in footnotes the people whose names are mentioned in the letters². The work was well received and Professor John Playfair, on 1 January 1811, wrote assuring Miss Berry that her work would meet with ‘great commendation’ in the Edinburgh Review³. At his suggestion she turned her attention to social history. In 1828 she published A Comparative View of the social life of England and France from the Restoration of Charles II to the French Revolution.⁴ A second volume continuing the history to the fall of Charles X in 1830 appeared in 1831. Before she began these books, which she regarded as her most important works, she had issued a volume containing the letters of Rachel, Lady Russell, which were in the possession of the Duke of Devonshire, together with a few letters, also in the duke’s possession, written by Lady Sunderland—Waller’s Sacharissa—to Lord Halifax. In a long Introduction to this book Miss Berry ‘endeavoured to develope and hold up to the admiration of her countrywomen’ the character of Lady Russell, ‘a character whose celebrity was purchased by the sacrifice of no feminine virtue, and whose principles, conduct and sentiments, equally well adapted to every condition of her sex, will in all be found the surest guides to peace, honour, and happiness’⁵. A collected edition of Mary Berry’s works appeared in 1844.

When in 1865 Lady Theresa Lewis published in three volumes selections from Miss Berry’s journals and correspondence, she described her as a woman who ‘longed to be great; she was fired with ambition in the best sense of the word, but there was no career. To the merely vain woman there is in every country a large arena for display, with its rich harvest of triumphs chequered by mortification; but to the ambitious woman, in this country at least, there is rarely the power of earning distinction but as a reflection of the stronger, greater light of man. Miss Berry was amongst the few who would have received that light, and would have shone by it: she was fitted to be the partner of greatness, and she missed a participation in the serious realities of life’¹. This observation of one who knew Miss Berry in her old age deserves respect. But even if Miss Berry felt that as a spinster she was shut out from affairs she must have realized that she had won an unusual position in society. Lady Theresa makes the point that Miss Berry ‘owed not the position she occupied to the distinction of birth or of wealth, but to the result of personal character, of peculiar social habits, of literary tastes and pursuits, and of a modest but generous hospitality’². Although in 1819 Miss Berry referred to herself as ‘fast sinking to the grave that must shortly close for ever on an insignificant existence’³, she lived until November 1852, and was privately presented to Queen Victoria a few months before her death. To Harriet Martineau, going every evening to at least one party, ‘the Miss Berrys and their inseparable friend, Lady Charlotte Lindsey (the youngest daughter of Lord North), whose presence seemed to carry one back almost a century, were the main attraction of these parties. While up to all the modern interests, the old-fashioned rouge and pearl-powder, and false hair, and the use of the feminine oaths of a hundred years ago were odd and striking, e.g.: a footman tells his mistress that Lady So-and-so begs she will not wait dinner, as she is drying her shoes which got wet between the carriage and the door. The response is “O! Christ! if she should catch cold ! Tell her she is a dear soul and we would not have her hurry for the world” etc., etc. My mother heard an exclamation at our door, when the carriage door would not open, “My God ! I can’t get out”.’ The earnest young Harriet Martineau felt that ‘they were all three so cheerful, so full of knowledge and sympathy for good ideas, and so evidently fit for higher pursuits than the social pleasures amidst which one met them that though their parties were rather blue they were exceedingly agreeable’⁴.

Miss Berry’s friend, Joanna Baillie, lived until 1851 and her elder sister lasted ten years longer and reached her hundredth year. Most of Joanna’s working life was passed in London, but she came on both sides of learned Scottish families. Her mother was a sister of William Hunter, whose name is preserved in the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow, where Joanna’s father was professor of divinity from 1769 until his death in 1771. When she was ten Joanna was sent to a good school in Glasgow and she was bred in the cultivated society of a university city. When William Hunter died in 1793 he left his London house to Joanna’s brother, Matthew, whose mother and sisters went to live with him. After Matthew’s marriage, Mrs. Baillie and her daughters moved to Hampstead, where Mrs. Barbauld was a neighbour. In 1798 Joanna published a volume of plays anonymously. She had written a comedy and a tragedy on each of the stronger passions of the human mind. The work was reviewed as that of a man and was extravagantly praised, but her plays were not successful on the stage. Joanna sent a copy of the plays to Miss Berry, without disclosing her name. ‘This winter the first question on everybody’s lips’, wrote Miss Berry in March 1799, ‘is “Have you read the series of plays?” Everybody talks in the raptures I have always thought they deserved of the tragedies and of the introduction as of a new and admirable piece of criticism’¹. Miss Carter of Deal, now an old woman, saw ‘more of the genuine spirit of Shakespeare revive in the tragedies of Miss Joanna Baillie than has inspired any author since his time’². Joanna Baillie, wrote Harriet Martineau, ‘had enjoyed a fame almost without parallel, and had outlived it. She had been told every day for years, through every possible channel, that she was second only to Shakespeare,—if second; and then she had seen her works drop out of notice so that, of the generation who grew up before her eyes, not one in a thousand had read a line of her plays:—yet was her serenity never disturbed, nor her merry humour in the least dimmed’³.

Maria Edgeworth, too, had to some extent outlived current taste when she died in 1849, but her stories influenced greater writers in her own time and retain a faint vitality today. Mrs. Jane Marcet, the last of this group of women writers, is more remarkable because she is the first woman who attempted to understand something of the contemporary movements of scientific thought and transmute them into simple language for the young. She was the only daughter of a Swiss merchant, Anthony Haldimand, who lived in London and had married an English wife. Alexander Marcet, Jane’s husband, was born and brought up at Geneva, and after studying at Edinburgh set up as a doctor in London. The Marcets had a house in Russell Square where they staged theatrical performances, with foreign professional actors, for the amusement of London society. Jane Marcet survived her husband for thirty years and died in 1858. To the end of her long life she was writing children’s books on a variety of topics, history and grammar, as well as stories and simplified science. Her first book, Conversations on Chemistry intended more especially for the Female Sex, appeared in 1806 and was in its sixteenth edition in 1853. Her most famous book, Conversations on Political Science, was described by J. R. McCulloch in 1845 as ‘on the whole the best introduction to the science that has yet appeared’¹. It was Mrs. Marcet’s book which suggested to Harriet Martineau the possibility of writing a series of stories to illustrate the truths of political economy.

Jane Marcet was not a scholar and cannot be called a scientist, but her work facilitated the great expansion in scientific knowledge which marked the nineteenth century. Her books stimulated the curiosity of children who became the scientists of the next generation. Michael Faraday himself bore witness to the effect of her Conversations on Chemistry on his own mental development: ‘at the height of his fame he always mentioned Mrs. Marcet with deep reverence’². This is recorded in her own autobiography by a woman who may fairly be described as the first woman scientist in English history. Mary Somerville’s long life (1780–1872) covered a period of intense scientific activity and excitement, in which she herself shared both as an investigator and as a popularizer. Her autobiography was written in extreme old age, but her struggles to win a knowledge of mathematics were still fresh in her memory. She was born at the manse at Jedburgh, the home of her uncle and future father-in-law, Dr. Thomas Somerville, but most of her girlhood was spent at Burntisland, on the coast of Fife, opposite Edinburgh. She was not taught to write until after she was eight, though she already enjoyed reading. A vear at an expensive school at Musselburgh did little except supply her with the rudiments of writing and a little French and English grammar. Her mother let her read as much as she liked, despite a maiden aunt’s complaint ‘I wonder you let Mary waste her time in reading, she never sews more than if she were a man’³.

But Mary acquired all the feminine graces. She could cook, sew, paint and play the piano. She was called ‘the rose of Jedwood’ for her delicate beauty when she was a girl, and was still beautiful in old age. Her uncle, Dr. Somerville, encouraged her desire for knowledge and, when she stayed at Jedburgh, read Latin with her before breakfast. At home she read Latin and Greek with her younger brother’s tutor, and through him obtained textbooks of algebra and geometry. She rose early and studied these subjects before the household stirred. In 1804 she married Samuel Grieg, son of a Scottish sailor who became a Russian admiral. Her first husband ‘took no interest in science or literature, and possessed in full the prejudice against learned women which was common at that time’¹. His death after three years meant that his widow returned with two little boys to her father’s house. She was more free to pursue her studies as a widow than she had been as a girl. She started on Newton’s Principia, which she found ‘extremely difficult’, but she persisted. She began to work out the problems which appeared in a mathematical journal published from the Royal Military College at Great Marlowe, where William Wallace, later professor of mathematics at Edinburgh, was a teacher. With his advice she was able to provide herself with ‘an excellent little library’ by the time she was thirty-three. She no longer concealed her interests. ‘I was considered eccentric and foolish, and my conduct was highly disapproved of by many, especially by some members of my own family…. As I was quite independent, I did not care for their criticism’².

As a charming widow she had several suitors, one of whom ‘whilst he was paying court to me, sent me a volume of sermons with the page ostentatiously turned down at a sermon on the Duties of a Wife, which were expatiated upon in the most illiberal and narrow-minded language. I thought this as impertinent as it was premature; sent back the book and refused the proposal’³. In 1812 she married her cousin, Dr. William Somerville. Although marriage interrupted her studies for a time, she was able to take them up again with her husband’s full sympathy. He was appointed a member of the Army Medical Board in 1816 and they moved to London. Through Professor Wallace, the Somervilles were put in touch with ‘the illustrious family of the Herschels’⁴. Sir William Herschel was born in Hanover in 1738 and entered the Hanoverian guards as an oboist, but came to England in 1757. After some years of struggle he became organist at the Octagon chapel at Bath. He earned his living by music, but mathematics and astronomy were his recreation. In 1772 he was joined in England by his sister, Caroline, who had been trained as a musician, but was diverted to astronomy by helping her brother. He set himself to construct his own instruments and discovered the planet Uranus by means of his own reflectors. The king settled £50 a year on Caroline Herschel as her brother’s assistant in 1787. When Mrs. Somerville first visited the Herschels Caroline was abroad, but she met Sir William’s son, later Sir John Herschel, whom she described as ‘my dear friend for many years’. Sir William died in 1822 and Caroline went back to Germany, where she lived in great honour until the age of ninety-eight. It is possible that her skill and ability as an astronomer made Sir William and his son the readier to welcome a woman scientist into their friendship. Mrs. Somerville persisted in her studies despite the recurrent births of children and the long illness and death in 1823 of her eldest girl. She never allowed her work to keep her from a full social life, and she remembered Mary Berry’s luncheon parties with strawberries and cream at Twickenham across the gulf of years.

In 1827, to use her own words, ‘the whole character and course of my life was changed’. On 27 March Lord Brougham wrote to Dr. Somerville asking him to persuade his wife to translate a famous French book about the structure of the universe, the Mécanique Céleste, of Laplace, for publication by his new Society for Diffusing Useful Knowledge. Brougham followed up the letter by a visit and, in spite of her diffidence, Mrs. Somerville agreed to undertake the task. She rose early to deal with household matters so that she could spend the day in writing. She was subject to many interruptions. Her own little room had no fireplace, so that in cold weather she worked in the drawing-room and she learned to concentrate so closely on her work that she was oblivious to what was happening around her. When a visitor came she hid her work so that no one should discover what she was about. When the book was finished she ‘was equally surprised and gratified that Sir John Herschel, our greatest astronomer, and perfectly versed in the calculus, should have found so few errors’. He wrote to her saying that he had read her manuscript with ‘the highest admiration. Go on thus and you will leave a memorial of no common kind to posterity’¹. Mrs. Somerville’s book appeared in 1831 under the title Mechanism of the Heavens, and the whole first printing of 750 copies was sold at once, chiefly at Cambridge. ‘I was’, she wrote, ‘astonished at the success of my book’. The Royal Astronomical Society elected her an honorary member together with Miss Caroline Herschel, and the Royal Society unanimously voted that Mary Somerville’s bust, which they commissioned Chantrey to execute, should be placed in their great hall. She recorded that ‘our relations and others who had so severely criticized and ridiculed me, astonished at my success, were now loud in my praise’¹.

The publication of Mary Somerville’s first book coincided in time with the foundation of the British Association for the advancement of science. An intelligent public without technical knowledge was stimulated by the scientific achievement of an attractive woman, who was playing her full part as a wife and mother. Cambridge laid itself out to do her honour. In April 1834 she and her husband were entertained for a week at Trinity by the Master, and Adam Sedgwick arranged a series of parties. Her second book, The Connexion of the Physical Sciences, came out in that year. It was a summary of research into physical phenomena, lucidly set out. Its appearance was followed by public recognition of her achievement. In March 1835 Sir Robert Peel wrote to inform her that ‘to encourage others to follow the bright example which you have set, and to prove that great scientific attainments are recognized among public claims’ he was advising His Majesty to grant her a pension on the civil list of £200 a year. This was later increased to £300. The loss of her husband’s private fortune made this pension of particular value. After 1838 Dr. Somerville’s health compelled him to spend the winter in a warmer climate and the delay caused by journeys abroad meant that Mrs. Somerville’s Physical Geography did not appear until 1848. Dr. Somerville died in 1860 and his widow turned to her work for solace. She prepared a summary of recent discoveries in chemistry and physics, under the title Molecular and Microscopic Science in 1869, the year in which she reached the age of eighty-nine. She died in Italy in 1872 at the age of ninety-two. Her daughter recorded that ‘it was with intense delight that she pursued her intricate calculations after her ninetieth and ninety-first years’. She repeatedly said ‘how she rejoiced to find that she had the same readiness and facility in comprehending and developing these extremely difficult formulae which she possessed when young’².

Two of Mary Somerville’s four major works passed through many editions. The Connexion of the Physical Sciences was in its ninth edition in 1858 and Physical Geography in its sixth in 1870. Nor were new editions mere reprints of the first. In the Preface to the new edition of the Physical Geography which appeared in 1849 the author informed her readers that she had corrected many inaccuracies in the first edition and collected much new information ‘from the scientific periodicals of Europe, America, and India’. All her work was of the highest order. There is the authority of Adams himself for the statement that it was her prediction of a planet to be discovered by calculation from the motions of Uranus which set him upon the investigations afterwards confirmed by the discovery of the planet Neptune’¹. A masterly popularizer of acquired knowledge, she might, under other conditions, have been one of the few who in any generation have changed the atmosphere of a subject. The greatest scientists of her day saw in her their peer.

Mary Somerville was the only woman born before the French Revolution who took part in the movement for the political enfranchisement of women. She signed the petition presented to the University of London in 1862 praying that women might be allowed to sit for degree examinations. Although it was rejected, George Grote, then treasurer of University College, told those who organized it that the name of ‘Mrs. Somerville was the one that made the greatest impression’, and he went on to urge ‘that women should do things, showing their capacity’². Writing in her eighty-ninth year Mrs. Somerville recorded that she had ‘frequently signed petitions to Parliament for the Female Suffrage, and have the honour now to be a member of the General Committee for Women Suffrage in London’. When John Stuart Mill published The Subjection of Women in 1869 Mrs. Somerville wrote to him expressing her gratitude for his exposure of the ‘iniquity and injustice’ of the laws for women in England. In his reply J. S. Mill described her praise of the book as ‘the approbation of one who has rendered such an inestimable service to the cause of women by affording in her own person so high an example of their intellectual capabilities’. ‘Age’, wrote Mrs. Somerville, when she was approaching her eighty-ninth year, ‘has not abated my zeal for the emancipation of my sex from the unreasonable prejudice too prevalent in Great Britain against a literary and scientific education for women’³.

The years between the first fully argued appeal for the complete emancipation of women set out by William Thompson in 1825 and the publication of The Subjection of Women in 1869 had seen a change of opinion about the place of women in English society. Women themselves were slow to follow up William Thompson’s arguments with their own demands, for they realized the danger of associating themselves with his eccentricities. Nor did many go all the way with him in his description of the ideal relationship between men and women. Moreover, the sympathy with women shown by the early Socialists tended to alarm even the ultra-Radicals. Some of the skilled craftsmen, who resented their own exclusion from any political influence and formulated a charter of their demands, sympathized with women’s aspirations, but dared not go farther in their charter than ask for universal male suffrage. But the question of female suffrage did not entirely drop out of view and in 1831 a motion was proposed in Parliament by the formidable Radical, Henry Hunt, that ‘every unmarried female possessing the necessary pecuniary qualifications should be entitled to vote for Members of Parliament’¹. The stream of propagandist literature began to flow freely in the eighteen-forties, and in 1848 the young Disraeli, in supporting a motion to extend the vote to all householders, said ‘In a country governed by a woman, where you allow women to form part of the estates of the Realm—Peeresses in their own right, for example—where you allow women not only to hold land but to be ladies of the manor and to hold legal courts—where a woman by law may be a churchwarden and overseer of the poor—I do not see, where she has so much right to do with State and Church, on what reasons, if you come to right, she has not the right to vote’².

More urgent matters affecting the welfare of women than their admission to the polling booths agitated their friends during these years. The inequality of the law which governed the relations between husband and wife had been exposed by a lawyer more than two hundred years before³. His advice to wives to appeal to Parliament for relief was premature in 1632, but it remained the fact that only legislative action could correct the law’s injustice to married women. The exposure by Caroline Norton (1808–77) of her own sad story was hardly necessary to make plain the need for action, but lawyers would perhaps have moved more slowly if Mrs. Norton had born her troubles in silence. She was one of the three beautiful and highly gifted granddaughters of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and had married George Chappel Norton, a brother of the third Lord Grantley. The contemptuous rejection by the jury of his action of criminal conversation brought against Lord Melbourne in 1836 left Mrs. Norton still tied to her husband by the unbreakable marriage bond and unable to get access to her own children. She had begun her literary career in 1829, two years after her marriage, with the publication of a volume of poems. Its success meant that she could earn a handsome income by contributing to and editing the literary annuals popular in the nineteenth century. She said that in one year she made as much as £1,400. Her husband withheld her allowance and claimed the money she earned by writing. Their financial arrangements were complicated by a trust fund which had been created for Mrs. Norton and her children, and her husband’s attempts to raise money on it. Norton wrote to The Times setting out his side of the case and Mrs. Norton replied in a pamphlet entitled English Laws for Women, published in 1854¹. In the next year she published a tract in the form of A Letter to the Queen on the Lord Chancellor Cranworth’s Marriage and Divorce Bill².

Mrs. Norton’s social position, her popularity as an author, and the fact that Lord Melbourne had been implicated made her case famous, but it was by no means the only one in which the hard usage of a wife caused public scandal in the first half of the century. Two other instances of cruelty to married women in these generations may be quoted here. John Paget, the Lord Chancellor’s secretary, was moved to take up the case of Mrs. Talbot, against whom her husband had obtained, on perjured evidence, a divorce in the consistorial court of Dublin. The case of Mrs. Talbot, who had lost her reason in the course of the proceedings, was treated by Paget in a series of pamphlets which called public attention to the whole practice of ecclesiastical courts in matrimonial causes³. The second instance is that of the Marchioness of Westmeath, who published an account of her own case in 1857 while the Divorce Bill was going through Parliament. It was then an old story, which Lady Westmeath deliberately brought up at this time as material to be used by the supporters of the Bill. In dedicating her work to the Lords Lyndhurst and Brougham, she expressed the hope ‘that exertions they are disinterestedly making to obtain justice for a suffering class, may be further stimulated by this Narrative, published with a view to the exposure of such cruelties, legal and personal in my own case, as may, I trust, lead to a mitigation of persecution against others, by providing a remedy for all’¹. As a conclusion to her long and confusing narrative, Lady Westmeath wrote: ‘If I shall have assisted the spirit of enquiry now aroused, as to the dreadful state of the laws, respecting married women in this country in any degree, my object is answered’².

Lady Westmeath’s case illustrates most clearly the fact that a divorce from bed and board granted to either husband or wife by an ecclesiastical court left the parties still married in law. This situation had given rise to the most celebrated matrimonial case of the eighteenth century. The Duke of Kingston married in March 1769 Elizabeth Chudleigh, who had been his mistress for about ten years. She had made a secret marriage in 1744 with the second son of Lord Hervey and had a child by him in 1747. Just before Elizabeth Chudleigh became the duke’s mistress she had gone to the trouble of establishing the fact of her former marriage by causing a record of it to be entered in the register of the chapel where the marriage had taken place. She did this because her husband’s elder brother, by this time Earl of Bristol, was in poor health and she wished to make sure of becoming a countess. Her connection with the Duke of Kingston opened to her the opportunity of becoming a duchess and, since her husband was also anxious to be free, she instituted proceedings against him in the consistory court and sentence was given in her favour. After her marriage to the duke she was accepted as his wife, although her conduct did not commend itself to ladies. The duke died in 1773 leaving all that he could leave to her as his widow. It is possible that no action would have been taken against her had the duke been less generous. As it was, the duke’s nephew, Mr. Evelyn Medows, caused a Bill of Indictment for bigamy to be drawn up against the supposititious duchess. The case was heard before the House of Lords, where she was convicted, the Duke of Newcastle, her neighbour in Nottinghamshire, alone adding to his sentence of ‘Guilty’ the words ‘but not intentionally’. Elizabeth Chudleigh escaped corporal punishment by pleading the privilege of peerage which was allowed her³. An intolerable possibility of scandal was removed in 1857 when the Matrimonial Causes Act at last ended the jurisdiction of the Church courts in matrimonial causes and established the Divorce Court for all suits touching marriage.

A society which aimed at a general reform of abuses in the law had been formed in 1844 as the Law Amendment Society. Ten years later, a young woman of twenty-seven, Barbara Leigh Smith, persuaded the society to consider the disabilities of married women. She herself belonged to a highly intelligent Unitarian family. Her grandfather represented Norwich in Parliament from 1802 to 1830 and her father from 1841 to 1847. When Barbara came of age in 1848 he settled on her £300 a year, so that she was unusually independent. In 1845 she produced A brief Summary in Plain Language, of the most important Laws concerning Women, which was all the more impressive because the author herself was not a sufferer. A family friend who was one of the founders of the Law Amendment Society helped her in preparing this tract. After a public discussion in 1856, which women attended although they did not speak, the Society promoted a Bill to provide that married women should be free to own property on the same terms as unmarried women and that they should be able to make wills touching other property than their personal possessions. The Bill was introduced in May 1857, but got no farther than a second reading owing to the simultaneous passage of the Divorce Bill through the House. During the course of the debates on the Divorce Bill Lord Lyndhurst secured the insertion of a clause affording protection to the property acquired by married women separated from their husbands¹. The Saturday Review, the persistent enemy of women, declared that the proposals put forward by the Law Amendment Society ‘were enough to remove the whole discussion from the region of reality to that of burlesque’².

Divorce, which before this Act could only be obtained by a private Act of Parliament, was now placed under the jurisdiction of a court erected for the purpose. The Act of 1857 opened a regular procedure for divorce to both men and women, though on unequal terms. Equality was not secured until 1923. It is hard at this distance of time to look back into the minds of those who opposed the changes in the law of husband and wife now set in motion. The considered opinion of an outstanding Anglican churchman of the time may fairly be taken as representative. In 1857, Christopher Wordsworth, Canon of Westminster, afterwards Bishop of Lincoln, delivered a series of discourses in the Abbey on the subject of divorce. After examining the Scriptures, the Fathers of the Church and later canonists, he came to the reluctant conclusion that after a woman had been divorced for adultery her husband might be allowed to marry again, though he pleaded that the clergy might be relieved from the obligation to perform such marriage ceremonies. In 1879, when he republished the discourses in his collected works, he described the social and religious evils which in his opinion had followed inevitably upon the operation of the Act. ‘The apprehensions expressed in these Discourses’, he wrote, ‘have been realized. Divorce before that time’—that is, 1857—‘was scarcely mentioned in Christian Society among us, without a feeling of shame and a shudder. But the newspaper reports of the proceedings in the Divorce Court—then constituted by Law—have now made it familiar. And the examples of conjugal infidelity in fashionable society and high rank—displayed to public view with all their loathsome details—have destroyed much of that salutory abhorrence with which men recoiled from such things, as too revolting to be named. … It is too much to expect the Divorce Act will be repealed, for some time to come. But it is possible to create a more wholesome public opinion on the subject, and so either to prepare the way for repeal, or at least to diminish greatly the number of cases in which it is applied. This is the work for the Clergy and Laity of the Church’¹.

In 1859, Wordsworth made the introduction of a Bill to legalize the marriage of a widower to his deceased wife’s sister the occasion of a sermon which calls to mind the rhetoric of a robuster age. ‘And let us not’, he cried, ‘inflict an injury on those sisters of a wife, who are now received into the most confidential and endearing intercourse in the home of their sister’s husband. All those tender relationships, which impart an inexpressible charm and delicate sanctity to our English homes, would be scattered to the winds by the repeal of the law of God, which requires a husband to regard his wife’s sisters as his own sisters, and to honour and love them as such’. After a rhapsody on the delights of gaining a sister, he continued: ‘But, let this law be repealed, and all these blessings are gone—gone for ever. The morrow after its repeal, the sisters of all the wives in England, and the wives who have sisters, and the husbands of such wives, and the children of such husbands and wives will find their position changed. The husband will have lost the sister whom he gained by marriage. The wife will have lost the sister whom she had by blood. The wife’s sister will have ceased to be a sister, and have become almost a stranger. She can no longer enter the house with the same freedom and familiarity as before. Or, if she does, what jealousies and heartburnings may arise! The wife may be less fair than her sister… The bishop pursued this unprofitable theme to see divorce easier still and the wife’s sister ‘set up in her sister’s house, at her sister’s table, and in her sister’s place’, so that ‘the wife’s children may loathe their own home and may hate their mother’s sister, and their own father, as the authors of their mother’s misery and of their mother’s disgrace’¹.

These discourses, reprinted in 1879 with ample footnotes, obviously represent the mature views of the Bishop of Lincoln as well as the opinions of the Canon of Westminster of twenty years before. They must have been widespread, for Parliament did not legalize the marriage of a man with his deceased wife’s sister until 1907 and that of a woman with her deceased husband’s brother until 1921. Christopher Wordsworth was himself a fine scholar, he had been an exemplary parish priest and he became a venerated bishop. He sympathized with women’s aspirations towards scholarship, and rejoiced when his daughter became the first Principal of Lady Margaret Hall at Oxford. The attitude of such a man to these problems of conduct may help to explain the slow progress of emancipation in the later nineteenth century, at a time when a large number of eminent people desired it to come. To Christopher Wordsworth, and to a great multitude of Englishmen, both clergy and laity, the views of the reformers threatened the end of all that was of good repute in life.

The women who led the movement for the reform of English laws relating to their sex were not those whose own achievements had brought them contemporary fame. Harriet Martineau (1802–74) and Florence Nightingale (1820–1910) were in the years after 1855 perhaps the two most famous of contemporary women. Mary Ann Evans, better known as George Eliot, was still at the beginning of her career for she started on her first novel in 1856. Mrs. Somerville was famous only among intelligent people and she lived much abroad. Harriet Martineau came of a Unitarian family of Huguenot descent settled in Norwich since the late seventeenth century. She had been well educated according to the standards of the day which did not envisage a professional career for women. In 1826 her father, a Norwich manufacturer of bombazines, was ruined in the widespread financial troubles of that year. The market for his products failed, and he died. Harriet had already earned for a story and determined to be a writer. In 1827 Mrs. Marcet’s Conversations on Political Economy came into her hands and she realized that a story she had written about machine-breaking was an illustration of one of the principles which Mrs. Marcet expounded. The idea of a series of such stories at once occurred to her, and her mother and brother encouraged her to write it. It was not easy to find a publisher, as she sets out in her autobiography, and if her struggles sound harsher and her triumphs more splendid than either can have been, Miss Martineau may be pardoned for her slight exaggeration. Her autobiography is a vivid document although her friends felt that she did herself no justice by her plain-spoken criticism of those with whom she had disagreed. Her brother was hurt by her attitude towards members of her own family. But the autobiography reveals a woman of generous Radical sympathies and complete intellectual honesty. She scorned to conceal her Unitarianism for social reasons when she began her literary career in London, nor would she conceal her doubts about revealed religion in her later years.

Harriet Martineau trained herself to become a first-rate political journalist. She could master a wide range of related matter and reduce it to a clear narrative which the intelligent reading public could understand. Her power is well displayed in The Thirty Years’ Peace, a massive work in two volumes treating contemporary history in the form of annals¹. Neat obituary notices of the famous people recently dead appear at regular intervals and the modern reader feels that he is enjoying the ‘review of the year’ in the leading journal of the day. Harriet Martineau wrote as a Radical, and her political outlook helps to preserve the freshness of her work. She had the enthusiasm of a reformer and was not burdened by the overwhelming mass of material which the modern scholar writing of the same period would feel obliged to consult. Her powers as a novelist were small, for she had no understanding of the passions which sway ordinary men and women. Her friendship with Charlotte Brontë did not long survive candid criticism of each other’s books, but her stories on political economy were followed by stories illustrating the Forest and Game Laws, which delighted a Westmorland poacher so much that he made her an anonymous present of turf for her garden at Ambleside. Her faith in ‘mesmerism’, for which she has often been criticized, was based on the fact that her own temporary recovery from painful illness coincided with hypnotic treatment. In 1855 she began to prepare for death, but she lived nearly twenty years longer, contributing from her Westmorland cottage innumerable articles to the Daily News and other journals of an advanced tendency.

Her attitude to the women’s movement, as revealed in her autobiography, was that of a woman strong enough to make her own way, but lacking imaginative insight into the feelings of others: ‘It seemed to me, from the earliest times when I could think on the subject of Woman’s Rights and condition, that the first requisite to advancement is self-reliance, which results from self-discipline’. She had therefore little sympathy with Mary Wollstonecraft, whom she described as ‘with all her powers, a poor victim of passion, with no control over her own peace, and no calmness or content, except when the needs of her individual nature were satisfied’. ‘I felt’, she continued, ‘forty years ago, in regard to her, just what I feel now in regard to some of the most conspicuous denouncers of the wrongs of women at this day;—that their advocacy of Woman’s cause becomes mere detriment, precisely in proportion to their personal reasons for unhappiness, unless they have fortitude enough (which loud complainants usually have not) to get their own troubles under their feet, and leave them wholly out of the account in stating the state of their sex. Nobody can be further than I am from being satisfied with the condition of my own sex, under the law and custom of my own country; but I decline all fellowship and co-operation with women of genius or otherwise favourable position, who injure the cause by their personal tendencies. When I see an eloquent writer insinuating to everybody who comes across her that she is the victim of her husband’s carelessness and cruelty, while he never spoke in his own defence: when I see her violating all good taste by her obtrusiveness in society, and oppressing everybody about her with her epicurean selfishness every day, while raising in print an eloquent cry on behalf of the oppressed; I feel to the bottom of my heart that she is the worst enemy of the cause she professes to plead’.

‘The best friends of that cause’, continued Miss Martineau, ‘are women who are morally as well as intellectually competent to the most serious business of life, and who must be clearly seen to speak from the conviction of the truth, and not from personal unhappiness. The best friends of the cause are the happy wives and the busy, cheerful, satisfied single women, who have no injuries of their own to avenge, and no painful vanity or mortification to relieve. The best advocates are yet to come,—in the persons of women who are obtaining access to real social business,—the female physicians and other professors in America, the women of business and the female artists of France; and the hospital administrators, the nurses, the educators and substantially successful authors of our own country. Often as I am appealed to to speak, or otherwise assist in the promotion of the cause of Woman, my answer is always the same:—that women, like men, can obtain whatever they show themselves fit for. Let them be educated,—let their powers be cultivated to the extent for which the means are already provided, and all that is wanted or ought to be desired will follow of course. Whatever a woman proves herself able to do, society will be thankful to see her do,—just as if she were a man. If she is scientific, science will welcome her, as it has welcomed every woman so qualified. I believe no scientific woman complains of wrongs. If capable of political thought and action, women will obtain even that. … I have no vote at elections, though I am a tax-paying housekeeper and responsible citizen; and I regard the disability as an absurdity, seeing that I have for a long course of years influenced public affairs to an extent not professed or attempted by many men. But I do not see that I could do much good by personal complaints, which always have some suggestion of passion in them. I think the better way is for us all to learn and to try to the utmost what we can do, and thus win for ourselves the consideration which alone can secure us rational treatment’¹.

Harriet Martineau was a better friend to the women’s movement than this arrogant statement suggests. In 1857 she supported in the Press the abortive Married Woman’s Property Bill of that year². As a woman journalist, she could not resist the opportunity of writing a comprehensive review of recent publications illustrating the different ways in which women were earning their own living. Her long article on ‘Female Industry’, written anonymously as if by a man, appeared in the Edinburgh Review for April 1859¹. It informed a wide circle of influential readers that a vital change had come over the position of women as a result of the industrial expansion of recent generations. Far more women, instead of being supported by some man, husband or father, were now economically independent. The accuracy of many of Miss Martineau’s historical generalizations is open to doubt, but she proved her main thesis beyond question. ‘So far from our countrywomen being all maintained as a matter of course by us “the breadwinners” three millions out of six of adult English women work for subsistence; and two out of the three in independence. With this new condition of affairs, new duties and new views must be accepted. Old obstructions must be removed and the aim must be set before us, as a nation as well as in private life, to provide for the free development and full use of the powers of every member of the community’².

In spite of the masculine disguise which she had assumed when writing this article the robustly successful femme sole impatient of incompetence is clearly in the background. ‘Wearied as some of us are with the incessant repitition of the dreary story of spirit-broken governesses and starving needlewomen, we rarely obtain a glimpse of the full breadth of the area of female labour in Great Britain’³. ‘The proceedings in the new Divorce Court’, she wrote, ‘and in matrimonial cases before the police magistrates, have caused a widespread astonishment at the amount of female industry they have disclosed. Almost every aggrieved wife who has sought protection, has proved that she has supported her household, and has acquired property by her effective exertions’. All this in itself might be satisfactory, but it meant that Harriet Martineau could no longer, as sometimes in the past, feel complacent about the attitude which men were likely to take when confronted by a further expansion of women’s activities. She admitted in this article that there might be difficulty in the way of women who wish to be doctors and surgeons. ‘The jealousy of the medical profession is, to be sure, proverbial’. Although Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell had secured her qualifications in America ‘in our country, more time will, no doubt, be required. Prejudices are stronger; the capabilities of women are less tested and understood⁴.

The obstruction which Florence Nightingale had met in the Crimea had already shown that Harriet Martineau’s apprehensions were well-founded¹. Miss Nightingale had learned how policy could be directed to her ends by the force of public opinion and she realized that opinion could be moulded by the Press. She, naturally, sent her report on her experiences in the Crimea to Harriet Martineau, who responded by lending her influence to the causes in which Miss Nightingale was engaged. In 1858 she based a series of articles for the Daily News on Miss Nightingale’s report, and in the next year she published them in a book, England and her Soldiers. The alliance between these two outstanding women thus formed continued to the end of Harriet Martineau’s life. Her pen was always ready to support Florence Nightingale’s schemes, whether directed at the reform of the Army Medical Board, the prevention of state brothels for the army in India, or the training of nurses. In the article on ‘Female Industry’ Harriet Martineau wrote ‘The function of industry which might be supposed to be standing wide for women is not in fact so,—the nursing function in all its directions, in private dwellings, in workhouses, in hospitals, in lunatic asylums, where it is at least as much wanted as anywhere else. We shall not argue or plead for it here. Florence Nightingale and her disciples have inaugurated a new period in the history of working women, and the manifest destiny of the nursing class will fulfil itself’².

In her youth Florence Nightingale had been bitterly resentful of the emptiness of her life as a well-bred young lady, but as she grew older she disclaimed all interest in the movement to widen the opportunities before women. ‘I am brutally indifferent to the right and wrongs of my sex’, she wrote to Harriet Martineau in 1858³. She had never felt that her sex hindered her work in the Crimea or afterwards. She hardly realized how much she owed to her secure social position. Only a woman with friends in high places and a wide acquaintanceship could have harried the Government into the reform of army hygiene. ‘The more chattering and noise there is about Women’s Missions’, she wrote in 1865, ‘the less of efficient women can we find’⁴. She was convinced that if women were unemployed it was because they would not work. Her difficulties in finding the right women to train as matrons made her unsympathetic with women who wanted to be doctors. It was embarrassing to those who were trying to further the cause of women that a woman whose own life had been so conspicuously successful should show no interest in their work. Even John Stuart Mill could not induce her to join Harriet Martineau, Mrs. Somerville, and 1,498 other women in signing the first general petition for women’s suffrage, which he presented to Parliament in 1866¹.

1 Strictures on the Modern System of Female Education, London, 1799, vol. ii, pp. 21–2.

2 Ibid., p. I.

1 Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography, ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 2nd ed., London, 1877, vol. i, p. 399, quoted hereafter as Harriet Martineau.

2 Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Mrs. Hannah More, ed. William Roberts, 3rd ed., London, 1835, vol. ii p. 372.

3 Catharine Macaulay Graham, Letters on Education, London, 1790, p. 203. This book was lent to me by Mr. Arnold Muirhead, of St. Albans.

1 Letters on Education, p. 210.

2 Ibid., p. 214.

3 London, by J. Johnson, 3rd ed., 1796, p. 236. First printed 1792.

4 William Godwin, Memoirs of the author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 2nd ed., London, 1798, p. 84.

1 Observations on the Reflections of the Right Hon. Edmund Burke on the Revolution in France. In a Letter to the Right Hon. the Earl of Stanhope, London, 1790, p. 95.

2 A Vindication of the Rights of Man in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, 2nd ed., London, 1790, pp. 152–3.

3 Vindication, 3rd ed., p. 53. Dr. Gregory’s arguments are disposed of on pp. 215–24.

1 Vindication, p. 228.

2 Ibid., p. 451.

3 Godwin’s Memoirs, p. 28.

1 Thoughts ott the Education of Daughters with Reflections on Female Conduct in the more important Duties of Life, London, 1787.

2 Dublin, by W. Sleater, 1788.

1 Enquiry concerning Political Justice by William Godwin, ed. F. E. L. Priestley, Toronto, 1946, vol. ii, pp. 507–8.

2 Ray Strachey, The Cause, London, 1928, p. 12.

3 Letters on Education, p. 210.

4 Godwin’s Memoirs, p. 168.

1 A Defence of the Character and Conduct of the late Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin founded on principles of Nature and Reason, London, 1803, p. 143.

2 Ibid., pp. 27–8.

3 Ibid., p. 127.

4 Ibid., p. 148.

5 William Thompson, Appeal of one half of the human race, London, 1825, p. vii.

6 Halkett and Lang give, without evidence, ‘D. Geddes’ as the author of this Appeal, but Thompson’s statement cannot be ignored. It is possible that Mary Hays may be identified with Mrs. Mary Hay, evidently the daughter of Mrs. Hay, of Hartrow, Somerset. Both women subscribed to the poems of Miss Mary Jones in 1750. In her Preface to the Appeal the author describes herself as ‘living in an obscure corner of the kingdom’.

1 London, 1799, p. 1.

2 The Female Advocate, pp. x—xi.

3 Ibid., p. 20.

4 Ibid., p. 77.

1 Thompson, Appeal, p. v.

2 Ibid., pp. vi-vii.

1 Richard K. P. Pankhurst, William Thompson, pp. 70–8.

2 George Jacob Holyoake, The History of Co-operation in England, London, 1875, vol. i, p. 140.

3 Ibid., p. 379. Holyoake mentioned Miss Reynolds as a ‘lady lecturer who excited great admiration’, also Kate, wife of Goodwyn Barmby, and Mary Hennell, who wrote for the same cause. ‘The most notable of all the ladies who have been lecturers among this party was Mrs. Emma Martin, who had the wit and courage of several men’. She was ‘the most womanly woman of all the lecturesses of those times’. Ibid., pp. 379–80.

1 Thompson, Appeal, p. 197.

2 Ibid., pp. 199–200.

1 Another woman, older than these, deserves a note: Mrs. Anne Seymour Darner (1749–1828), daughter of Field-Marshal Conway, was Horace Walpole’s executrix and residuary legatee. She was described by Harriet Martineau as ‘the acknowledged head of amateur sculpture in Europe’, The Thirty Years’ Peace, vol. i, p. 586.

2 Extracts from the Journals and Correspondence of Miss Berry, ed. Lady Theresa Lewis, London, 1865, vol. i, p. 12.

1 Miss Berry’s Journals, vol. ii, pp. 74–5.

2 An engraving of a delightful drawing of the Marquise du Deffand, then preserved at Strawberry Hill, forms the frontispiece to vol. i.

3 Miss Berry’s Journals, vol. ii, pp. 458–9.

4 A beautifully printed volume, on the best paper, by A. and R. Spottiswoode, New-Street-Square.

5 Some Account of the Life of Rachel Wriothesley, Lady Russell … followed by a series of Letters …, London, 1819, p. c. This also is a beautiful piece of printing.

1 Miss Berry’s Journals, vol. i, p. xvi.

2 Ibid., p. xv.

3 Lady Russell, p. c.

4 Autobiography, vol. i, pp. 369–70.

1 Miss Berry’s Journals, vol. ii, p. 88.

2 Miss Carter’s Memoirs, p. 300.

3 Autobiography, vol. i, p. 358.

1 Quoted in the D.N.B.

2 ‘So many books have now been published for young people that no one at this time can duly estimate the importance of Mrs. Marcet’s scientific work’, Martha Somerville, Personal Recollections from early life to old age of Mary Somerville, London, 1874, p. 114.

3 Ibid., p. 28.

1 Personal Recollections, p. 3.

2 Ibid., pp. 79–80.

3 Ibid., p. 88.

4 Ibid., p. 104.

1 Personal Recollections, p. 167.

1 Personal Recollections, p. 176.

2 Ibid., p. 177.

1 Personal Recollections, pp. 289–90.

2 Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Qirton College, London, 1927, pp. 73–4.

3 Personal Recollections, pp. 344–6.

1 The Cause, p. 32.

2 Ibid., p. 43 n.

3 See above, p. 149.

1 C. Norton, English Laws for Women in the Nineteenth Century, London, 1854.

2 Quoting on the title-page from Thackeray’s Lecture on Swift, ‘Only a Woman’s Hair’.

3 Talbot v. Talbot, A Letter to the Hon. Justice Torrens, 1855. A Report on the Judgment of Dr. Radcliffe in the case of Talbot v. Talbot, 1855. Talbot v. Talbot, A Report of the Speech of Wm. Keogh, Esq., 1855.

1 A Narrative of the Case of the Marchioness of Westmeath, London, 1857, Dedication.

2 Ibid., p. 213.

3 The Whole of the Evidence of the Trial of Her Grace Elizabeth, Duchess Dowager of Kingston … together with an authentic copy of Her Grace’s Defence as Spoken by Herself. This was published by order of the duchess and sold for two shillings and sixpence.

1 An Act to amend the Law relating to Divorce and Matrimonial Causes in England [28 August 1857], Clause xxv. The wife in case of judicial separation is to be considered a femme sole with respect to any property she may acquire and [Clause xxvi] for the purposes of contracting and suing. The Statutes at Large, London, 1857, pp. 532–46.

2 Quoted by Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies and Girton College, pp. 40–3.

1 Chr. Wordsworth, D.D., Miscellanies, Literary and Religious, 1879, vol. iii, pp. 202 ff. ‘On Marriage and Divorce’. The copy of the bishop’s works which I have used was given by him to my husband’s father at the time of publication.

1 Miscellanies, vol. iii, pp. 237 ff. ‘On Marriage with a Deceased Wife’s Sister’. The passage quoted is on pp. 253–5.

1 Covering the years 1816–46, London, 1849.

1 Autobiography, pp. 400–2.

2 Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies, pp. 41–2.

1 Vol. cix, pp. 293–336.

2 Ibid., p. 336.

3 Ibid., p. 294.

4 Ibid., pp. 331 and 332.

1 Cecil Woodham-Smith, Florence Nightingale, first published in 1951 and now available in Penguin Books, No. 1110.

2 ‘Female Industry’, p. 331.

3 Quoted by Cecil Woodham-Smith, p. 245.

4 Ibid., p. 359.

1 A printed copy of the petition and signatures can be consulted at the Women’s Service Library, Fawcett House, 27 Wilfred Street, Westminster, S.W.I.