by Bart Schultz
urged the great importance of an improved physical training for girls; in respect
of exercise and gymnastics this would approach more nearly to boyish education.
On the other hand the roughness that is expected from, and encouraged in boys,
makes some of them little brutes, and the lives of others miserable. E.R. seems
to despair of a change in this respect, because mothers will always bring up their
daughters like themselves: but surely on this principle the world would not have
progresseed at all. It is only because parents have generally a desire to raise their children, if possible, above themselves, that we are not now savages running wild in the woods.
As to the further question I agree with H.G.D. that it is not necessary to
say beforehand whether women could ever become like men. I would rather ask
“could their education and position in society be assimilated to that of men with
advantage.” For example () E.R. confesses that their mental training is miserably
deficient: it ought therefore to be altered: the only conceivable ways of altering it would render it more like that of men. () I agree with H.G.D. that we ought to
give women certain rights which they may fairly claim, and which we at present
withhold from them. I am amused however with my friend professing a desire
to proceed with the greatest moderation: and then coming out with a measure
so violently radical as that of giving women votes in election . . . but I think that simple justice would make us give them a right to hold property, and throw
open to them such professions as they can be qualified for. When these are done
(the latter is being done), and when further by an insensible elevation of public
opinion, the social stigma attaching to “old maids” is entirely removed (so that
the disproportionate cultivation of the arts of attraction which must be degrading, ceases): then it will be time to reconsider the evidence for the “natural inferiority”
of women to men. E.R. asks “Why have they let themselves sink” etc. She forgets
that the progress of civilization is only a gradual emerging from the savage state,
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in which the relations of the sexes is determined solely by physical force. The conditions of women has always improved as a nation has become more civilized:
but it has taken a long time for them to shake off a yoke that ages of barbarism have hardened. It is not too much to say that in no time or country have women had a
fair opportunity of measuring their natural mental powers with those of men.
Following the selection from these remarks reproduced in Henry
Sidgwick, A Memoir, there is a footnote explaining that “Some twenty
years later Sidgwick’s view on the franchise question had changed.” Thus,
in a letter on the subject addressed to the Spectator for May , , he
insists that
in refusing to treat sex alone as a ground of disfranchisement, the Legislature
would simply recognise in our political constitution what the best reflection shows
to be an established fact of our social and industrial organisation. . . . So long as the responsibility is thrown on women, unmarried or widows, of earning their
own livelihood in any way that industrial competition allows, their claims to have
the ordinary constitutional protection against any encroachments on the part of
other sections of the community is primâ facie undeniable. (M )
This position would be elaborated in The Elements of Politics, where
Sidgwick declares the “most important consideration on the other side is
the inferiority of women in physical force and their unfitness for warfare,”
an argument he regards with appropriate scorn.
Hence, despite their greater political conservatism, one can still find in
Sidgwick’s early statements at least the roots of a fairly Millian view about
the progress of civilization being gauged by the progress of women, with
the savage and slow history of human progress being sufficient to explain
women’s supposed inferiority. Education, in both the broad cultural sense
and the narrow institutional one, is the key to further such progress, which
will involve not only political equality but also the larger cultural reform,
the growth of sympathetic capacities resulting from better marriages, in-
dependence, and so forth. The school of sympathy was, for the Sidgwicks,
rather literal.
But of course, there was the matter of the “superior man.” Did this work
somehow betray a patriarchal mentality that filtered through everything
from epistemology to sex? It would be much easier to answer this question
if Sidgwick had been good enough to submit a case history to Symonds for
his work on Sexual Inversion, or had at least composed a major treatise on
women and women’s higher education. That he did not is also revealing
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in its way, indicative of Sidgwick’s conflicts. Plausibly, he really did, like
Mill, wish to maintain an agnosticism about just where gender traits and
relations would end up, once reform had really got under way. Gender
traits seemed to puzzle him, more than provoke him. Certainly, though,
like Mill, the Sidgwicks did tend to prioritize intellectual inquiry and
autonomy in a curiously disembodied way – as both Symonds and James
recognized.
Consider Henry’s assessment of Millicent Garrett Fawcett:
On Saturday was the Newnham Council, and Mrs Fawcett came to stay with us.
We had pleasant and instructive talk and yet I felt that she did not quite satisfy
me as a “political woman”: – and, again, that I was wrong in being dissatisfied.
She discussed things in an attitude that was neither feminine nor unfeminine,
but simply that of a thoroughly reasonable and sensible unsexual being – who
happened to have taken up the enfranchisement of women as her business. But
somehow one demands that a woman going into politics should exhibit all feminine
excellences and no feminine defects! – which is asking too much. (CWC)
This critical self-interrogation, sparked by failing to appreciate as such
“a thoroughly reasonable and sensible unsexual being,” would seem to be
quintessential Sidgwick and suggestive of a certain presumption about
who defines reason and how. One should remember, however, that his
conception of “feminine excellences” undoubtedly owed much to George
Eliot, a warm admirer of the Sidgwicks, who held that “there lies just
that kernel of truth in the vulgar alarm of men lest women shuld be
‘unsexed’. We can no more afford to part with that exquisite type of gen-
tleness, tenderness, possible maternity suffusing a woman’s being with
affectionateness, which makes what we mean by the feminine character.”
If Eliot was no Virginia Woolf, at l
east she was equally far from Eliza
Lynn Linton and, like more recent “feminine feminists,” cautiously per-
suaded that the special relationships of care and dependence had produced
some admirable character traits worth preserving. Needless to say,
however, Eliot also had a “strong conviction” that
women ought to have the same fund of truth placed within their reach as men
have; that their lives (i.e. the lives of men and women) ought to be passed together
under the hallowing influence of a common faith as to their duty and its basis. And
this unity in their faith can only be produced by their having each the same store of fundamental knowledge. It is not likely that any perfect plan for educating women
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can soon be found, for we are very far from having a perfect plan for educating
men. But it will not do to wait for perfection.
Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch, a favorite of Sidgwick’s, had had the
following line excised from it:
. . . it was never said in the neighbourhood of Middlemarch that such mistakes
[Dorothea’s] could not have happened if the society into which she was born had
not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a girl less than half
his own age – on modes of education which made a woman’s knowledge another
name for motley ignorance – on rules of conduct which are in flat contradiction
with its own loudly-asserted beliefs.
Plainly, moreover, Eleanor herself cannot easily be pigeonholed accord-
ing to recent stereotypes of Victorian feminism: Lady Bountiful, Florence
Nightingale, Eliot, and so on. True, she had Tory sympathies and gravi-
tated toward the Jane Addamsish, and she was not happy with the “New
Woman” given to “disorderly conduct.” When Virginia Woolf questioned
whether there might not be some connection between good thought and
good food, and carried on at witty length – in the wonderfully titled A
Room of One’s Own – about the prunes served to the fictional guest lec-
turer at “Fernham College” Cambridge, she canonized the difference that
Bloomsbury sought to place between itself and Sidgwickian feminism.
For all that, Bloomsbury was simply another offshoot of the “New
Chivalry,” and Woolf would for the most part find her enemies in just
the same institutions that the Sidgwicks did – the church, the traditional
university, the medical men, and the aesthetically uninclined. Yopie Prins,
in a cogent discussion of Newnham and such Newnham successes as Jane
Ellen Harrison, has argued that
In their imaginative identification with Greek maenads, these Victorian spinsters
redefined spinsterhood not only in their different styles of writing but also in the
lifestyles they chose for themselves. As various critics have argued, the generation
of unmarried middle-class women that came of age in the s and s played
an important role in the transition from mid-Victorian Old Maid to fin-de-siècle
New Woman; during the last three decades of the century, single women were be-
ginning to redefine familial relations and conventional female domesticity. Thus
Bradley and Cooper turned the relationship between aunt and niece into an alter-
native marriage, while Harrison, resolutely refusing to become “Aunt,” chose the
communal life of a women’s college where she cultivated passionate friendships
with colleagues and students.
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Education, with the personal touch and a sexual undercurrent, produc-
ing at least the work of transition to the New Woman – this was surely
something that Sidgwick would have happily recognized.
It would appear, then, that the Sidgwicks’ feminism came to something
like this: themselves a near-perfect embodiment of the Millian notion of
high-minded, highly intellectualized marital friendship – indeed, a more-
than-Millian model of a mutually active, professional academic couple –
they nonetheless remained cautiously open and flexible about just what
assortment of feminine/masculine gender traits would emerge as women
progressed toward greater intellectual autonomy and social independence.
Neither cared for the “frivolous and doll-like women,” any more than they
cared for the Hugh Herons. Although earlier on, they both had harbored
various doubts about what women might ultimately prove themselves ca-
pable of, and about what degree of political equality they might be given,
these doubts had rapidly diminished once they began actively working for
women’s higher education, and they ultimately allowed that women had
demonstrated their capacity for even the most “masculine” intellectual and
political endeavors (e.g., physics and mathematics, political reformism).
Consequently, they favored women’s suffrage and greater opportunity
for women across the board in higher education and career opportuni-
ties. Treating the universities as the chief vehicles for reform and societal
guidance generally, they hoped that the ancient and most influential ones
would become “mixed,” just as the newer ones were. Correlatively, while
recognizing that many women would naturally prefer to continue along
the paths to which they had been socialized, they favored reducing the
pressure to marry as opposed to considering other options, hoping that
higher education would also make for better (more Millian) marriages. The
pressures of a suffocating domesticity were, of course, linked to precisely
the religious orthodoxy that both thought a relic of an earlier era.
Newnham even stressed that women were capable of physical education
and sports. Indeed, it could afford a quite wonderful existence for its for-
tunate students. As a student from the nineties would (much) later recall:
Our lives were so excitingly novel. We worked, some of us, ten hours a day, and
there were so many College societies and preoccupations that there was little time
or energy for anything else. There were the Political, Debating, Sharp Practice
societies, the Historical, Classical, Scientific societies, The Browning, Shakespeare and other Literary societies, the Sunday Society, the Musical Society and many
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others. Those were recognised by authority, and there were many not recognised
and indeed concealed from authority. (I remember my special contribution was a
secret society called the L.S.D. And the letters hadn’t the significance they have
‘Leaving Sunday Dinner’. A small group of us signed off for Sunday dinners and
we hired a room in Grantchester Street, I think for &s d a term. Each of us had
in turn to provide a meal for the group. And there I may add we used to make our
own cigarettes after a fashion.) For athletics there were tennis, hockey, cricket,
fives, boating and the fire brigade. Life was never dull.
Interestingly, smoking was prohibited only “because it was pointed out
that parents wouldn’t send their daughters to Newnham if they thought
that they might get contaminated by the pernicious habit.”
Naturally, there was a good deal of social control, curfews, chaperones,
and the like. And again, the Sidgwicks were plainly not interested in the
female equivalents of Hugh Heron. For them, education was a sacred and
serious business; one year, when the women won only five Firsts, Eleanor
warned them about devoting too much time to the societies. Still, the
women themselves found it liberating.
Also interestingly, despite the rampant talk of eugenics during this era,
nothing came of a proposed scheme by Frances Galton to create a “dower
fund”: “to be used in rewarding candidates who had been selected by a
board of women for their good physique and morale, ‘especially such as
appeared to have been hereditarily derived and therefore to be the more
probably transmissible’, with £ on marriage, if before the age of twenty-
six and £ on the birth of each and every living child.’”
Thus, Newnham was to be different – different from the men’s educa-
tion at Cambridge generally, and different from Girton’s imitation of the
masculine domain. Different right down to the architecture:
When Philip Webb, Norman Shaw and Bodley began to design houses, not in pon-
derous stucco or bewildering gothic, but in the potpourri of styles which came to be
known as Queen Anne, some members of the intellectual aristocracy responded.
Henry Sidgwick at Cambridge and the philosopher T. H. Green at Oxford both
commissioned houses designed in the new style of sweetness and light, with bay
windows, verandas, inglenooks and crannies crammed with a clutter of objects
intended to delight the eye and interest the mind. Girton College was built as a
