High Minds

by Simon Heffer

  Mill told her he knew ‘how fully you appreciate a great many of the evil effects produced upon the character of women (and operating to the destruction of their own and others’ happiness) by the existing state of opinion’ and said he had pushed her towards the LNSWS since he believed it was ‘aimed . . . at the very root of all the evils you deplore and have passed your life in combating.’71 Replying to him in August 1867 Nightingale said: ‘That women should have the suffrage, I think no-one can be more deeply convinced than I. It is so important for a woman, especially a married woman, especially a clever married woman, to be a “person”.’72 However she added, with a note of prophetic realism, ‘it will probably be years before you obtain the suffrage for women.’ She also asked whether there were not ‘evils which press more hardly on women than not having a vote . . . I do not know. I ask the question very humbly and I am afraid you will laugh at me.’73 She had her own ideas: ‘Could not the existing disabilities as to property and influence of women be swept away by the legislature as it stands at present? And equal rights and equal responsibilities be given as they ought to be, to both men and women?’ She knew this from having been a matron and had such women work under her. ‘Till a married woman can possess property there can be no love and no justice.’74

  She wrote that ‘I have been too busy for the last fourteen years (which have never left me 10 minutes leisure – not even to be ill) to wish for a vote – to want personal political influence. Indeed I have had, during the 11 years I have been in Govt offices, more administrative influence than if I had been a Borough returning two MPs.’75 She said there was nothing she would not do for Mill, but she was too busy to go on the committee – ‘I could not give my name without my work.’ She added that she was ‘an incurable invalid’. Mill replied four months later, from Avignon on New Year’s Eve 1867, saying that ‘if you prefer to do your work rather by moving the hidden springs than by allowing yourself to be known to the world as doing what you really do, it is not for me to make any observations on this preference . . . other than to say that I much regret that this preference is so very general among women.’76 He told her that ‘I think that man, and woman too, a heartless coward whose blood does not boil at the thought of what women suffer.’

  He tried to make her see that many of the other reforms she sought – such as easier entry of women into the professions, from some of which, like the law, they remained absolutely barred – would be facilitated if women’s suffrage were granted. Knowing the power of her name and reputation, he was frustrated and angry that she would not take the lead in this movement. ‘Political power’, he told her, ‘is the only security against every form of oppression . . . at the present day in England it would be easier to attain political rights for such women as have the same claims as enfranchised men, than to obtain any other considerable reform in the position of women.’ He concluded with the veiled rebuke: ‘While I have seen with much regret that you join in so few movements for the public good, I have never presumed to think you wrong, because I have supposed that your abstinence arose from your devotion to one particular branch of public-spirited work.’ Despite his entreaties she held her ground, but eventually sent a guinea to the LNSWS in December 1868.77

  Mill castigated ‘advocates of the “rights of women”’ for being ‘ready to make what appear to me far too great concessions as to the comparative unfitness of women for some occupations.’ Nightingale told him that in America, where women had begun to become doctors, ‘the women have made no improvement: they have only tried to be “men” and they have only succeeded in being third rate men.’78 Lest Mill savage her for this assertion, she added: ‘I am only here stating a matter of fact. I am not reasoning, as you suppose.’ Mill replied that, given the novelty of women’s entry into that profession, ‘it is to be expected that they will be pupils at first, and not masters’.79 He maintained that they had a ‘moral right’ to enter the profession.

  By the 1870s there were more concerted attempts to extend suffrage to women. For radicals such as Mill it now became an issue above party politics. He told George Croom Robertson in November 1872 that ‘the time, moreover, is, I think now come when, at parliamentary elections, a Conservative who will vote for women’s suffrage should be, in general, preferred to a professed Liberal who will not . . . the bare fact of supporting Mr Gladstone in office, certainly does not now give a man a claim to preference over one who will vote for the most important of all political improvements now under public discussion.’80

  William Forsyth, the Liberal MP for Marylebone, introduced a bill in April 1875 to allow unmarried women who had the appropriate property qualifications either in boroughs or in counties to have the vote. Forsyth, progressive though he was, remained strongly opposed to married women voting, because to do so would ‘introduce discord into married life’.81 He argued that public opinion strongly supported allowing unmarried women with a property qualification to vote: and that women had shown their active interest in politics and the parliamentary process, by petitioning Parliament in large numbers on the Deceased Wife’s Sister’s Bill – a perennial measure designed to allow a widower to marry the sister of his dead wife – and the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act, a highly restrictive and controversial measure designed to keep prostitutes away from barracks and naval dockyards that was intensely degrading to women. Forsyth claimed that both Disraeli and Gladstone had expressed conditional support for female suffrage – in Gladstone’s case, in a speech in 1871, through a male proxy. Petitions had been presented in favour of Forsyth’s bill signed by some of the most eminent women in the land, including Nightingale.

  However, the proponents of women’s suffrage were up against some formidably prehistoric arguments. One MP had argued that because women had not stood alongside the barons at Runnymede who forced Magna Carta out of King John, they did not deserve the vote. Another, Henry Chaplin, argued that ‘the collective wisdom of the ages, the teaching of all religion in every form and under every guise, and, as I believe, the instincts of the whole human race’ were against women having a vote.82 Women were also ‘not great logicians’.83 It was extensively argued that granting equality in the franchise would bring demands for it in legislative and administrative areas: in other words, it would be the thin end of a wedge that would culminate in allowing women equality in every field of life. Patrick Smollett, the MP for Cambridge, demonstrated the full extent of the hypocrisy of the time towards women. The example of women’s ‘hysterical crusade against the Contagious Diseases Act’ had been an episode in which women ‘championed the right of their fallen sisters to spread disease broadcast among the brave defenders of their country in seaport towns and in camps’.84 When another MP challenged this, calling the Contagious Diseases Act ‘grossly unjust, unconstitutional and immoral’, he was shouted down.85 Another statistic aired during the debate suggested one reason why some men resisted more power for women: there was a surplus in the United Kingdom of women over men of 925,764.86

  The 1864 Contagious Diseases Act was a prime example of the sort of law that could be passed when no woman, other than the Queen, had an input into politics. It was put on the statute book without debate in either House of Parliament. It followed an investigation by a Civil Service committee in 1862 into the high incidence of venereal disease in the armed forces. It empowered police in eleven garrison and dockyard towns in England and Ireland to apply to a magistrate to have medically examined any woman suspected of being a prostitute and carrying a venereal disease. If a woman were found to have a disease she could be detained for up to three months. The 1864 Act was of limited duration and was replaced by a new one in 1866, this time with a cursory debate in the Commons. This enabled women to be medically examined over a period of twelve months, and to be detained for up to six months. In 1868 there were attempts to extend the Acts, and more garrison towns were added to the list.

  This savage legislation had widespread support among doctors and clerics: however, those
against it included Mill, Nightingale and Harriet Martineau. Mill was angered by the brutal treatment of women by the police, whose ‘abuses of power’ were not ‘accidents which could be prevented. I think them the necessary consequences of any attempt to carry out such a plan thoroughly.’87 He felt the Acts were a means of oppression that far outweighed any advantages they might bestow on servicemen. Mill also wondered why the soldiery was being kept in ‘idleness and vice’ and why the country was ‘keeping a large army of prostitutes to pander to their vices’, a state of affairs he thought ‘monstrous’.88 He was also offended by the ‘gross inequality between men and women’ that was caused by the Acts, which he felt should be ‘swept away . . . in accordance with democratic principles of government’.

  The debate raged for years, and caused a new bill to be introduced by Gladstone’s Home Secretary, H. A. Bruce, in February 1872, aimed not just at containing contagious diseases but also at protecting women. Bruce’s bill would apply to the whole country and not just garrison and dockyard towns; and said that a woman could be arrested for prostitution and, if found after her conviction to be diseased, could be detained for up to nine months after serving her sentence. The bill was never enacted; and the Acts, whose provisions came to be used less and less, were repealed in 1886.

  V

  Votes for women had almost another half-century of argument ahead of it; another injustice was, as with divorce, rectified more swiftly. The Married Women’s Property Bill had its second reading a week after the failure of the Women’s Franchise Bill. It proposed to allow a woman to keep any money she earned or inherited as her own, and not have it made the property of her husband. Several attempts had been made to secure a reform for which Parliament had received numerous petitions, and for which a growing number of men, convinced of the injustice of the status quo, were now calling. One particularly iniquitous effect was that ‘although a husband might have deserted a wife and be living in adultery, the wife supporting her family, a portion of the property would go to the husband or his creditors.’89 The Court of Chancery had said that while it should consider the fate of a wife and her children, it should consider that of the wife and children of an estranged husband’s creditors too, whose wronged wife, it was stated, would have to be robbed of her money to pay his debts.

  Nor was the effect confined to those well-to-do families with a house or land: women shareholders in cooperative societies found their husbands had a claim on the money they made in dividends: however, ‘so strong was the public feeling in Rochdale in support of the payment of those profits to the women that none had ventured to enforce their claim.’90 One other shocking case had been that of Susannah Palmer, a battered wife from London, who had been thrown out of her house by her husband. She had gone out to work and made enough money to rent a room for herself and her children: but no sooner had she done so than her husband, aware of her new circumstances, turned up and claimed her house as his – as he had the legal right to do. Only when her accommodation was put in the name of the Sheriffs of London was she allowed to stay there unmolested. The duty of a husband to provide for his wife and children – even with her money – was limited to a requirement under the Poor Law to see that they did not starve.

  There had been several earlier attempts to right these injustices. In 1869, George Jessel, the Liberal MP for Dover, had echoed Mill’s doctrine in saying that the present law was a relic of slavery. In addition to denying her property rights, the law also (and Jessel spoke as a lawyer, one of sufficient eminence that he would become Solicitor General) still allowed the husband the right to beat and imprison his wife, as he would a slave. Nor could a woman sue for libel or personal injury: her husband had to do that for her, if he were so minded. These iniquities had only survived so long because ‘the laws of this country were made by the rich for the rich’.91

  However, there remained serious objections to such a law. One who objected to the 1869 bill, Massey Lopes, did so because ‘it would go far to impair the confidence that ought to exist between husband and wife, and which was the mainspring of domestic happiness.’92 In the end it failed not just because the proposal seemed an intrusion of the State into the private affairs of married couples, but also because of inadequate protection of the interests of children against a mother who, despite being granted her own property, surrendered it to her husband, or who was extravagant. The 1870 bill ‘proposed to interfere between husband and wife only when there was a presumptive necessity for such a proceeding.’93

  The question of the Rochdale cooperative society was raised again. Russell Gurney, who introduced the measure, said that

  there is in Rochdale a co-operative society with 7,000 members, including many married women who hold shares in their own name. In some cases the husbands have claimed these shares, to which, of course, they have a legal right; but the Committee, consisting as it does entirely of working men, have invariably resisted the claim, and such is the state of public feeling that in no one case has the husband’s right been enforced. I have heard of another co-operative society where a similar course has been pursued. In legislating, therefore, in the way I propose, we shall not be running before public feeling, but shall be rendering that legal which in these cases is done in defiance of the law. The effect of the present state of the law seems to be equally bad on the husband and the wife. It makes—as one of the witnesses said—‘the men idle and the women reckless.’94

  Henry Raikes, who had moved the rejection of the bill the previous year on its third reading, had had a change of heart. He saw ‘the miserable and scandalous state of the law’ and ‘the absolute necessity for a great and speedy change’.95 On the same day another bill to give women property rights would have a second reading, proposing an alternative means of protecting women from bullying or criminal husbands. The House heard of women whose earnings were taken from them on a Saturday evening by their brutal husbands, to be spent on drink. The bill had full government support. A further Act of 1882 would allow a married woman to keep all her own property, whatever its source. Despite these reforms, and the progress being made in female education, women were still denied the right to participate in politics. However, the establishment in law of the principle that women had a life and property independent of their husbands can be seen as the opening of the route to full female emancipation that would be achieved over the succeeding century.

  VI

  One of the keys to the emancipation of women was educating them: a process for which hardly any means existed at the start of Victoria’s reign. By the mid-1840s the desire of women to be properly educated could no longer be ignored. Schools for girls existed largely as establishments to teach deportment and the management of households; or they were rudimentary, harsh, uncivilised institutions such as that attended by the Brontë sisters, which made no pretence of feeding the intellect. Most girls who had an education were taught by governesses, usually, again, to a rudimentary standard, and with no expectation of the education being put to any use – there were no places of higher education for females, and the professions were closed to them. Domesticity was the only prospect for most of them.

  Frederick Denison Maurice and his disciple Charles Kingsley steered the movement to effect change. Maurice’s interest came through his sister, a governess who had talked to him about the importance of training women such as herself properly for their educational duties. At the same time a Miss Murray, one of the Queen’s maids of honour, was raising funds for women’s education. The two forces collided, and the result was Queen’s College, in Harley Street in London. Maurice, who would also found the Working Men’s College and, later, the Working Women’s College, became principal on its foundation in 1847. Two of the finest girls’ schools were given an impetus by Queen’s College: in its first intake of students were Frances Buss, who would found the North London Collegiate School, and Dorothea Beale, who in 1858 would take over, and transform, Cheltenham Ladies’ College, the first girls’ boarding school in England
. Miss Buss and Miss Beale exemplified the aims behind the foundation of Queen’s College: to train women to go out and teach girls to a higher standard than ever before, to help women aspire to a place in the world away from hearth and home.

  Among intelligent and independent-minded women the foundation of Queen’s caused something like a contagion. Henry Crabb Robinson, the diarist, reported in April 1848 that Elizabeth Jesser Reid, whom he had seen at a dinner, was ‘all alive to the new female College which has been instituted for the education of Governesses’.96 Mrs Reid was a unitarian philanthropist. She was famed for the zeal with which she enforced her opinions and was unafraid to pick fights and make enemies. The success of Queen’s College inspired her to attempt to replicate it, and supporters of that enterprise endorsed the idea of another establishment to meet the demand from the daughters of the affluent middle classes.