If the emancipation of women from the last traces of their feudal subjection seems to have been achieved slowly it should be remembered that it was but one aspect of the great movement for reform which swept majestically, but with irregular momentum, through the nineteenth century. Those aspects of the reforming movement which specifically concerned the welfare of women advanced more surely as an ever-increasing number of well-educated women came forward to share in the work. As early as 1847 Tennyson in The Princess had written about a women’s college, and although his playful nonsense reads oddly today, it shows that the idea of the higher education of women was already in the public mind. In 1848 Frederick Maurice, the leader of the Christian Socialists, secured the establishment of Queen’s College to be a training school for governesses. The foundation of Bedford College by Mrs. Reid in the next year gave additional opportunities for the education of young women. Mrs. Reid was the widow of a doctor and a friend of Harriet Martineau. In 1860 she provided for the future of Bedford College by establishing a trust specifically for the higher education of women there. One of the trustees whom she chose was Miss Jane Martineau, Harriet’s niece. Women trained in these colleges could teach in schools where a standard of education inconceivable to previous generations was constantly improved as students from the new women’s colleges at Cambridge and Oxford came to join in the work. North London Collegiate School was founded in 1850 by Frances Mary Buss (1827–94), who had begun her teaching life at fourteen in her mother’s school. She prepared herself for her life’s work by earning her living teaching in the daytime and attending classes at Queen’s College in the evenings. Dorothea Beale (1831–1906) entered Queen’s College as a student in 1848 and became mathematical tutor in the following year. In 1858 she was chosen as principal of Cheltenham Ladies’ College, founded four years before. In 1865 girls’ schools as well as boys’ schools were the subject of an enquiry by royal commission and two women were summoned to give evidence. The way was slowly opening for the Girls’ High Schools of the late nineteenth century and the Grammar Schools for the girls of today.
The fight for the admission of women to the examinations for university degrees went on side by side with the struggle to create good girls’ schools and persuade parents to send their daughters to them. The most effective woman associated with both movements who was not herself a schoolmistress was Emily Davies (1830–1921). Her brother, Llewelyn Davies, was ordained to a Limehouse curacy in 1851 and moved on to a London living in 1856. He had become a follower and friend of Frederick Maurice and a member of his Christian Socialist group. When Emily Davies came to visit him from her father’s Gateshead rectory she found herself among people who believed in the capacity of women and were working for their better education. In 1858 Emily Davies went to Algiers to accompany her invalid brother home and there she met Barbara Leigh Smith, now Madame Bodichon, who spent every winter there with her husband. Emily Davies had already met Elizabeth Garret in the north and their friendship grew closer in London. In 1859 Dr. Elizabeth Black-well, the only Englishwoman who had acquired a medical degree, visited London and lectured on her work. Elizabeth Garret was interested and Emily Davies urged her to begin her training for a doctor. The first approach to London University about the admission of women to its degree examinations was made with Miss Garret in mind. Its failure meant that she approached her end by way of private study for the qualifying examination of the Society of Apothecaries, which she passed in 1865. This enabled her to practise as a doctor, but the Society in 1868 refused to allow candidates to enter for the examination after private study, so that no other woman could qualify for the medical profession in London until the medical schools of the university were opened to receive them after 1878.
In assisting the campaign which ended with Elizabeth Garret’s acquisition of her medical qualifications Emily Davies found her vocation. She realized that the universities must be approached with caution and tact. And she understood and sympathized with the attitude of the London senate, which felt diffident about being the first university to open its degrees to women. Miss Davies desired the full emancipation of women as strongly as Barbara Bodichon, but she realized that she would be more likely to secure the future of women in the universities if she held aloof from the Radical activities of those who were working to secure the vote for women. She secured the admission of girls to the Cambridge local examinations, a victory won after a real campaign. Leslie Stephen, asked to go up to Cambridge to vote for the proposal, refused on the ground that he was writing against it in the Saturday Review1. After considering and abandoning the possibility of converting Queen’s College into an institution for higher education where girls sent on by the schools might hope in the future to work for a degree, Miss Davies turned to Cambridge and began to plan for the creation of a women’s college there. The little group of students from which Girton College grew started work at Hitchin in 1869.
Before his election to Parliament in 1865 J. S. Mill had openly expressed his desire to see the franchise extended to women. His candidature at Westminster was supported by young women working in the interests of women, such as Madame Bodichon, Emily Davies, Bessie Parkes and Isa Craig, who drove about the constituency in a hired carriage covered with election posters. In 1865, Mill was at the height of his reputation. A whole generation of men engaged in public affairs had grown to maturity under the influence of his writings. His advocacy secured for the women’s cause a degree of respect which could have come to it in no other way. Behind the closely reasoned arguments of his famous books on philosophy and economics there had always lain a passionate desire for justice in human relationships. In the tract entitled The Subjection of Women which he published after long reflection in 1869, the passion comes to the surface with a force which carries the argument from the sphere of practical politics into the wider region of public morality. The tract cannot have been pleasant reading in the family circles, typical of the age, where it was felt that women needed protection rather than independence. But it would be hard to name a single event more significant in the history of women’s emancipation than the appearance of the Subjection of Women in 1869.
The effect of this book on public opinion was less marked in the campaign for women’s suffrage which individual reformers intermittently maintained than in the new momentum which came over the women’s cause as a whole during the following years. In the same year the municipal franchise was granted to all ratepayers. The first woman entered the higher branches of the civil service when James Stansfield appointed Mrs. Nassau Senior as a poor-law inspector in 1872. Stansfield was not only a courageous supporter of causes which concerned women, but also sacrificed his political career in their interest. In 1874 he abandoned Cabinet office to give his support to Josephine Butler’s campaign for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts. In 1883, after a long struggle, the reformers carried a resolution in favour of repeal through the House of Commons and in April 1886 a repealing statute became law. A Bill to secure married women in the possession of their own property was introduced in 1870, and although in its passage through the Lords its provisions were limited, it allowed married women to own whatever they themselves had earned. In 1882 married women were given for the first time since the Norman Conquest rights of separate ownership over every kind of property so that at last their position was again assimilated to that of the femme sole. Four years before this momentous Act London University had opened its degrees to women. The new university colleges growing up under the shadow and protection of London were now able to enter all their students, women as well as men, for the external degrees of London University. Young women of modest means all over England owed gratitude to London University for the opportunity which it had given them.
A review of the fortunes of women through the centuries of English history reveals certain landmarks pointing on the one hand towards full participation in the rights and duties of the social order, and on the other towards a state of irresponsible subjection to men. The evidence which has survived from Anglo-Saxon England indicates that women were then more nearly the equal companions of their husbands and brothers than at any other period before the modern age. In the higher ranges of society, this rough and ready partnership was ended by the Norman Conquest, which introduced into England a military society relegating women in general to a position honourable, but essentially unimportant. With all allowance for the efforts of individual churchmen to help individual women, it must be confessed that the teaching of the medieval Church reinforced the subjection which feudal law imposed on all wives. Nevertheless some traces of the Anglo-Saxon attitude towards women lingered through the Middle Ages, notably among the farming families of the country-side and in the towns. But the homilies and sermons of the Reformed Church, insisting that subjection was the natural lot of wives, created an atmosphere in which the least intelligent male could feel superior to all women. On the other hand, even feudal law had never been able to force the widow or the unmarried woman of full age into complete subjection to any man. English history provides a continuous line of women who have left their mark on English life. Their growing influence was checked by a general reaction against the too eager advocacy of the women’s cause by the founders of modern socialism. But the succession of women eminent in literature and affairs was never broken. If J. S. Mill’s argument seems overstrained to a modern reader, it is because he ignored the achievements of English women in history. They deserve a salute today.
1 Barbara Stephen, Emily Davies, p. 100.
PLATE I ENGLISH QUEENS
1 and 2. Silver pennies of the Canterbury moneyer EOBA, c. 790, with the portrait of Queen Cynethryth, the consort of Offa. No. 1 acquired before 1838; No. 2 from the Tyssen and Banks Collections and an eighteenth-century find at Eastbourne. [Both coins enlarged 2 ½ times.] See pp. 2–3. 3. Gold ryal (15s. piece) of Mary I of England, dated 1553. From the Barré Charles Roberts Collection (1810). [Actual size.] 4. Gold ryal of Elizabeth I of England, c. 1583. From the T. B. Clarke-Thornhill Collection (1934). [Actual size.] 5. Silver medal with portrait of Princess Mary on the occasion of her marriage, in 1677, to William of Orange: unknown artist. From the Edward Hawkins Collection (1860). [Actual size.] 6. Gold five-guinea piece of Queen Anne, dated 1703. From the Bank of England Collection (1878). [Actual size.] From coins and medals in the British Museum.
PLATE II LADIES' SEALS
(See page 56)
1 Rohais, wife of Gilbert de Gant, 1149–56 (B.M. Cat. vol. ii, No. 6645).
2 Idonia de Herst, late twelfth century (Ibid., No. 6662).
3 Matilda de Alberville, early thirteenth century (Ibid., No. 6569).
4 Mabel of Gatton, thirteenth century (Ibid., No. 6648).
5 Ela de Audeley, 1274. (Ibid., No. 6573).
PLATE III
The End of the Feudal Lady (See pp. 73–4.)
PLATE IV
The central part of Blanche Parry's monument in Bacton Church, Herefordshire. (See page 135.)
PLATE V
A page from the Book of the Queen's Wardrobe, 3–27 Elizabeth I, recording the grant of second-hand gowns to Ladies of the Bed-chamber, with the signatures of the recipients.
PLATE IV
The title-page of Richard Brathwaite's The English Gentlewoman. (See pp. 145–6.)
PLATE VII
Letter from Elizabeth Elstob to George Ballard. (See page 242.)