800 Years of Women's Letters

by Olga Kenyon

  The internal arrangement of the prison is not very satisfactory and there is not enough space for individual cells. In each ward the beds, wooden constructions six feet long and two feet wide, are arranged in two or three tiers like berths on board a ship. There is a large table in the middle with wooden benches all round it; this is where the prisoners eat, work, read and write. On close examination I found the wards very clean and well-kept, but as they are dark and poorly ventilated and the floors are very uneven, their general appearance is unpleasing.

  Nearly all the women I saw there were of the lowest class; prostitutes, servants or country girls accused of theft. Four were on charges carrying the death penalty for crimes classified as felonies under English law. Most of them seemed to be of low intelligence, but I noticed several whose tight thin lips, pointed nose, sharp chin, deep-set eyes and sly look I took as signs of exceptional depravity. I saw only one woman there who aroused my interest. She was confined with six others in a dark, damp low-ceilinged cell; when we entered they all rose and made us the customary servile curtsey which had embarrassed and irritated me from the moment I set foot in the prison. One alone refrained and it was this sign of independence which attracted my attention. Picture a young woman of twenty-four, small, well-made and tastefully dressed, standing with head held high to reveal a perfect profile, graceful neck. My eyes filled with tears and only the presence of the governor prevented me from going up to her and taking her hand so that she might understand my interest in her fate and so that my sympathy might calm for a few minutes the sufferings of her heart.

  Beauty can only be supreme when it reflects the noblest qualities of the soul. Without that inner radiance even the most beautiful woman in that sad place would have left me unmoved; but there was such dignity in this beauty which bore the depths of misfortune with pride and courage.

  TRANS. J. HAWKES, THE LONDON JOURNAL OF FLORA TRISTAN (1982)

  EXPLOITATION OF THE HUNGRY

  Josephine Butler spent years in public speaking to help working-class women. When she heard of a servant girl being made pregnant by the Master of an Oxford College, dismissed and then imprisoned for the death of the child, she took this girl into her own service. ‘Mrs Butler takes an interest in a class of sinners whom she had better have left to themselves,’ remarked a male leader-writer. In 1864 her life was devastated by the death of her five-year-old daughter Eva, who fell from an upper landing.

  Soon afterwards she moved to Liverpool when her husband George became a headmaster. She visited Brownlow Hill Workhouse, where 5,000 women worked in the oakum sheds. Impoverished women picked the tough, tarred hemp in return for their food, in damp, unhygenic sheds. She decided to help such women usually termed ‘sinners’ by society, partly to forget the pain of losing her daughter ‘in pain greater than my own’. Butler was horrified at what she learned and wrote letters to newspapers to draw public attention to the exploitation of the hungry.

  I have seen girls bought and sold just as young girls were at the time of the slave trade. Are you aware that there are gentlemen among the higher classes who pay so much per girl? When a gentleman sends to a professional brothel for a girl he pays for her. Is that not buying? By such a system the path of evil is made more easy for our sons and for the whole of the youth of this country. In as much as the moral restraint is withdrawn, the moment the government recognises and provides convenience for the practice of a vice which it declares necessary and venial.

  Florence Nightingale supported Josephine Butler during her untiring work to repeal the Contagious Diseases Act.

  private

  London Dec 20 1869

  Dear Madam,

  I return you my signature to your Circular and Petition, in the objects of which I most heartily and deeply concur.

  The only correction I offer, as you have decided it, is to omit the word ‘permanent’ in the petition – altho’ I think, had I had the wording of the petition I should have indicated that no statistics exist, which justify the Acts protested against, (or upon which to have the Acts protested against).

  I am afraid that I cannot refer you to the statistics which you desire. They exist in all the Returns & scattered thro’ all the Reports on Health which reach the War Office from home, the Colonies, and India. Comparative statistics of Health from foreign armies and foreign civil[ian] life being often included in them.

  All these have come to me in the way of business for many years – a very melancholy business it is, I assure you. But it would take me several hours even to collect these Blue Books, to look out the passages in them referring to the subjects and to make a list of them.

  The Government however is perfectly aware of their existence – since they are all Government Blue Books. Indeed the opinion of the Medical Officer of the Privy Council was asked by the government on this very subject – and was given in conformity with the facts I have mentioned to you. You will find the last official statement in a pamphlet which you probably have – but if not, I enclose a copy. It is the best reply to your request which I am able to give. The chief points are marked in the margin; but the whole pamphlet is a refutation of the ‘Society’ mentioned by you in your protest. There are however, things in the pamphlet not based on experience, which are unfortunate.

  I am sorry that I am really unable, from the press of business, to enter more fully into the subject in correspondence. Pray believe me, dear Madam, ever your faithful servant,

  Florence Nightingale

  FAWCETT LIBRARY

  MILLICENT FAWCETT COMMENDS A HELPER OF WOMEN

  It was not only women who went to prison in the late nineteenth century to help women. An editor, Mr Stead, attempted to save a girl who had been forced into prostitution. He was arrested and brought to trial on charge of abducting the girl. Stead was found guilty and sent to prison. Millicent Fawcett immediately wrote to him.

  1855

  I cannot find words to say how I honour and reverence you for what you have done for the weakest and most helpless among women. I always felt that by some legal quibble you might be tripped up, as it were; but this is as nothing; your work will stand. . . . I really envy you as much as I admire and honour you; very few people, even among heroes and martyrs, have had the happiness of seeing their faithful work so immediately crowned with good results. Everything I have written sounds so cold compared to what I feel; but if gratitude and honour from myself and many hundreds and thousands of your countrymen can help you at this stress, I want you to have that help.

  RAY STRACHEY, MILLICENT FAWCETT (1931)

  Stead needed comfort, as he was treated as a common prisoner. Fortunately Fawcett knew how to make the system work. She wrote promptly to Sir Henry Ponsonby, Secretary of State.

  12 November

  Your kindness to me and my late husband on more than one occasion emboldens me to ask your advice and assistance as to the propriety and possibility of bringing under Her Majesty’s notice the fact that Mr Stead is not being treated as a first-class misdemeanant. I yesterday saw the Rev. F.B. Waugh, after he had had an interview with Mr Stead in prison. Mr Stead was in the ordinary cotton prison dress, and appeared to be extremely cold; his cell is very dark; it contains a Bible, but the cell is so dark that it is impossible to read it. Mr Stead therefore has to remain all day long doing absolutely nothing; he was very cheerful when Mr Waugh saw him, and complains of nothing, and desires his friends not to complain for him; the warder treats him with respect and kindness. . . . Mr Stead’s friends, however, cannot help dreading the effect upon his health if he remains during the term of his imprisonment in cold and darkness on a lowering diet, without materials for writing and reading, and they venture to think that the fact that the Judge, both the Juries and the Attorney-General having drawn special attention to the purity of Mr Stead’s motives, gives him a claim to be treated during his imprisonment as a first-class misdemeanant. I have written as briefly as possible in order not to intrude too much on your time, begging your indulgence if t
here is any impropriety in my writing at all. Believe me, etc.

  RAY STRACHEY (1931)

  HELPING PROSTITUTES

  In 1887, Millicent Fawcett wrote to the leader of the Liberal Party about ‘the utter rottenness of the whole of public opinion on morals.’ Little by little, she began to attend less to the details of the rescue work, and more and more to the great political remedies. In the same year she wrote to a friend about one of the local societies for the Protection of Public Morals.

  I don’t think you show anything like sufficient activity in proceeding against the people who TRADE in vice in the town. If you analyse the accounts you will see that during the year the great sum of £1 9s.2d. represents the expenses of the Society in its proper work. According to Mr H.’s first letter to me, the town is swarming with houses (the report speaks of one only having been closed). Who keeps them up? Who runs them? Who are the customers? Get at these facts and make them public, and you will have done something to attack the evil at its source. Prosecuting victims, children who are the products of the evil rather than its causes, does absolutely nothing but obscure the real issues.

  RAY STRACHEY, MILLICENT FAWCETT (1931)

  Nine

  Travellers and Travelling

  The desire to see the world existed, no doubt, long before any accounts, but the desire to write about travel began relatively early. In the fourteenth century a woman who made the voyage to Jerusalem became the first travel writer of whom we have a record. The first travel writer in English is Celia Fiennes (1662–1741). She kept a lively Journal for her family, describing her extensive tours, which has provided the first comprehensive survey of change in the British countryside.

  Women have travelled for multifarious reasons. The motives were often to discover themselves, other ways of living their lives, as well as other cultures. Some were precipitated into foreign travel by chance, such as Lady Fanshawe, who accompanied her Royalist husband into exile after the English Civil War, and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who travelled with her husband to Turkey when he was made ambassador there. Both these women wrote unusually appreciative accounts of different cultures. Lady Fanshawe noted the generosity and liveliness of the Spaniards, their choice wines, bacon, sausages, bread, ‘sallad, roots and fruits’. These women were unaffected by English xenophobia, and might have made our culture more open if they had had a wider audience than friends.

  Aphra Behn (1640–89) went to Guyana at the age of nineteen, probably with her Dutch husband, and used her experiences to create the first novel in English, about a handsome black slave, Oroonoko; she praised the qualities of the ‘noble savage’ well before Rousseau developed his influential theory. Left an impoverished widow some years later, Behn used her knowledge of Dutch to try to (though she was, in fact, never paid) earn some money – she worked as a spy while England was at war with Holland.

  Some women set out with ideas of service, to become missionaries; Mildred Cable and Francesca French crossed the Gobi desert. Others went to study, such as the botanist Marianne North, whose paintings of tropical flora hang at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew. Some went to improve their health; the indomitable Isabella Bird suffered migraines in England, but recovered during long hours in the saddle. Even in old age she showed remarkable resistance to appalling weather – as long as she stayed abroad. She travelled to seek, not merely to escape.

  Some wished to escape. The public imagination was caught by the wealthy Lady Jane Digby who left her drawing room for a far more exotic and flamboyant existence. She travelled to Corfu, then Syria and eventually scandalized her family by letters home explaining that she had married a Bedouin sheik and lived in his desert tent.

  Some used travel to ‘work’, that is to say, to study foreign cultures. Harriet Martineau and Barbara Bodichon, both dedicated reformers, were so horrified by the conditions of slaves in the southern states of America that they spent time writing public and private letters, describing the ill treatment. Ocassionally women went abroad to work, including the wives of settlers in New England and Canada, whose lives are now being studied through letters home. The writer Frances Trollope (1780–1863) travelled to America in order to support her family, destitute because of her husband’s incapacity to manage their financial affairs, either as barrister or farmer. Her Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) made her a bestselling author at the age of fifty-two.

  Many travellers had private means. However, there were others who exercised ingenuity to increase their small incomes in order to travel: Freya Stark, born in 1893, successfully gambled the little money she had on the stock-market. Mary Kingsley (1862–1900) had only a tiny inheritance, and traded toothbrushes and fish bait to support her years in the Congo. She lived fearlessly among the Congolese whom she admired for their strength, their hospitality, and their culture. After publishing Travels in West Africa, an original and informative account of her journeys and African religions, she was asked to advise the British government, proving extraordinarily enlightened compared with most male politicians.

  Some women travelled with retinues of servants; others travelled alone, lived with the natives, or very simply, such as Gertrude Bell, the Arabist. From the time of Byron, the East offered attractive images of a sensuous life with fountains and perfumes, but above all of the capacity to live in the present. Women visitors mentioned losing a sense of time in Arabia and praised a culture which valued being, over having or doing. Such writers anticipate anthropology in observing other cultures with few preconceived ideas, and with an openness to alien values.

  Travel could occasionally transform existence, bringing openings and possibilities almost unprecedented in the previous history of women’s restricted lives. It took the factory girl Mary Slessor a decade or more of saving and studying to realize her ambition of going out to Africa as a missionary. But when she arrived, she tackled tribal abuses like human sacrifice and twin-murder with such vigour and success that the government made her a ruling magistrate. Though single, she also became the adopted mother of no less than twelve pairs of the twins she saved from ritual sacrifice. Back in Scotland, she would have been still at her loom in the mill.

  Adventuring women could escape too, from the rigours of Victorian sexual repression. The redoubtable Isabella Bird, having investigated the menfolk of Australia, the Pacific, China, Iraq and Tibet, and having now become the first woman Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society, lost her heart in the American West to a ‘dear desperado’, ‘Rocky Mountain Jim’. The famous lepidopterist Margaret Fountaine briskly collected more than butterflies in her travels and, when she startled a handsome young dragoman in Syria, made this particularly fine specimen her common-law husband. Louisa Jebb, who with only another woman for company rode through Turkey and Iraq narrowly escaping death at the hands of Islamic fanatics, described coming upon a ‘screaming circle of dancing stamping men’. Although vividly remembering ‘I once did crochet-work in drawing rooms!’, Louisa did not hesitate: ‘A feeling of wild rebellion took hold of me: I sprang into the circle. “Make me mad!” I cried out. “I want to be mad too!”’

  Some women travelled against their will, to accompany their menfolk. Emily Eden went to India to keep house for her brother and became engrossed in the multifaceted life. Her letters home were published, like Bird’s, and both became bestsellers. Vita Sackville-West accompanied her husband to Teheran. Her witty letters offer differing reactions to those of Freya Stark, who was more interested in Arab culture.

  The chapter ends with some recent letters, sent by a Buddhist nun to her friends as she travelled around India in 1990.

  AN EARLY TOUR OF ENGLAND

  Celia Fiennes (1662–1741) is one of our liveliest travel-writers. For eighteen years she toured England extensively, initially for her health. She wrote a Journal for her family, an incomplete version of which was published in 1888. Her style is breathless, but direct, the spelling erratic, the enthusiasm genuine, as in this prefatory letter.

  As this was n
ever designed, soe not likely to fall into the hands of any but my near relations, there needs not much to be said to excuse or recommend it. Something may be diverting and proffitable tho’ not to Gentlemen that they have travelled more about England, staid longer in places, might have more acquaintance and more opportunity to be inform’d.

  My Journeys, as they were begun to regain my health by variety and change of aire and exercise, soe whatever promoted that was pursued; and those informations of things as could be obtain’d from inns en passant or from some acquaintance, inhabitants of such places, could furnish me with for my diversion, I thought necessary to remark.

  Now thus much without vanity may be asserted of the subject, that if all persons, both Ladies, much more Gentlemen, would spend some of their tyme in Journeys to visit their native Land, and be curious to inform themselves and make observations of the pleasant prospects, good buildings, different produces and manufactures of each place, with the variety of sports and recreations they are adapt to, would be a souveraign remedy to cure or preserve from these epidemick diseases of vapours, should I add Laziness?

  It would also form such an Ideal of England, add much to its Glory and Esteem in our minds and cure the evil itch of over-valueing foreign parts; at least furnish them with an equivalent to entertain strangers when amongst us, or inform them when abroad of their native Country. . . .

  It must be owned that many Gentlemen, in general service of their country are most ignorant of anything but the name of the place for which they serve in parliament; how then can they speake for or promote their Good or redress their Grievances? I shall conclude with the hearty wish and recommendation to all, but especially my own Sex, the studdy of those things which tends to improve the mind and makes our Lives pleasant and comfortable, as well as profitable in all the Stages and Stations of our Lives, and render Suffering and Age supportable and Death less formidable and a future State more happy.