A History of Britain, Volume 3

by Simon Schama

  Her refusal of what had been the accepted confines of proper women’s work was becoming less of a rarity by the 1870s, a decade when the Victorian litany of the Great Exhibition – Peace, Prosperity, Free Trade – was starting to sound off-key. The great pillars of commerce had been shaken by a series of bank upheavals and mergers in the late 1860s. In Europe, the Pax Britannica seemed helpless to stop the wars of national aggression by which new nation states and empires were being roughly forged. Irish violence and Balkan massacres were beginning to supply the sensation-hungry popular press with headlines. But something even more explosive had been set off in the libraries and debating circles of the Victorians and that something was Darwin’s Descent of Man (1871).

  In their mothers’ and grandmothers’ generation, the urgent longing to be, above all, useful – beyond the duties set out by Mrs Beeton – had been filled by Christian works of healing and charity. But although Darwin himself often protested that the implications of his theory were no threat to faith (starting with his own), there was at least an element of disingenuousness in the protest. The fact was that the great sheltering dome of faith – authority based on direct revelation – had been shattered by Darwin’s vision of a morally indifferent, self-evolving universe. Once it was read, digested and believed, it was hard, if not impossible, for at least some young women born around the time of the Great Exhibition to surrender themselves to the male-governed kingdom of prayer. In place of the old gospels of Church and Home, they now needed the new gospels of Education and Work. And since competition, the struggle for survival, seemed to be the truth of the way in which the world worked, why should they themselves flinch from the fray? Against Ruskin’s appeal that the ‘queens’ stand above and against the noisy, frantic shove and bustle of the world, the champions of women’s higher education and more ambitious fields for women’s work argued that, on the contrary, it was direct experience of the wider world that would make them better wives and mothers, and at the very least better women. The queen needed to get out of the garden and into the urban jungle.

  Ruskin, of course, had been a sponsor, not a critic, of women’s education. But he had made it very clear that the content of that education was never to extend beyond subjects deemed fit by males; and that its function in the end was to make young women more interesting wives and companions. Better a dinner table at which the Angel of the House could talk about Tennyson or Tintoretto rather than crinolines and curtain lengths. Whilst Emily Davies, a friend and contemporary of Elizabeth Garrett, certainly agreed that marriages would be the better for educated, rather than uneducated, wives, she wanted more out of that education than the training of amusing partners. ‘All that we claim’, she wrote when arguing, unsuccessfully, for women to be awarded degrees at the University of London, ‘is that the intelligence of women … shall have full and free development.’ And for that to happen required not just schooling but higher education. Of those men who insisted that women were somehow biologically unsuited to mathematics or science, Davies inquired how they would know when so many men could be accused of precisely the same failing. What she hated most of all was the acceptance by so many women themselves of the degrading assumption of ‘mental blankness’.

  Since London University was evidently not going to countenance the award of full degrees to women students at Bedford and Queen’s (at least not until 1878), Davies herself, the daughter of an evangelical minister, began in 1866 to raise funds for the creation of a women’s college. In 1869, Hitchin College opened its doors to the first six undergraduates, and four years later reopened as Girton College, a few miles north of Cambridge. Fired by her battles to prove that women’s intellect was indistinguishable from that of men, Davies insisted on a curriculum identical to that offered by the Cambridge faculties. A fellow-enthusiast, the moral philosopher and economics don Henry Sidgwick (who founded a residence for women students in 1871, which evolved into Newnham College in 1880), disagreed with Davies on what kind of education would best advance the learning and professional skills of women students. Let the ancient disciplines decay in their male seminaries, he thought, while women would be the vanguard of those embracing the new sciences – economics, history, modern philosophy and politics – and be all the better fitted to become full citizens of the world. Davies, however, was not convinced by arguments that only a ‘soft’ education was suitable for women. If making the point of their intellectual equality meant compulsory examinations in Greek, so be it.

  At least as important – and revolutionary in its implications for the fate of women – was the fact that colleges like Girton now provided young women with an alternative home, a community of the like-minded. Among the most precious gifts bestowed on each Girtonian was a scuttle of coal every day, so that she might be as independent as she wished in her own study. Sometimes, however, the elation of the child became (as parents of college-age offspring have known ever since) the transparent unhappiness of a mother or father. As one young Girtonian, Helena Swanwick, later the author of The Future of the Women’s Movement (1913), wrote:

  When the door of my study was opened and I saw my own fire, my own desk, my own easy chair and reading lamp – nay my own kettle – I was speechless with delight. Imagine my dismay when my mother turned to me with open arms and tears in her eyes saying, “You can come home again with me, Nell, if you like!” It was horrible … I hardly knew how decently to disguise my real feelings. To have a study of my own and to be told that, if I chose to put ‘Engaged’ on the door, no-one would so much as knock was in itself so great a privilege as to hinder me from sleep.

  Whether it meant the first break with a life of idle grooming for the marriage market, or the makings of a new professional career, college represented freedom, self-discovery, the beginnings of independence. Another Girtonian, Constance Maynard, who recalled that she and her sister had been ‘shut up like eagles in a henhouse’ at home, now could exult, ‘At last, at LAST, we were afloat on a stream that had a real destination, even though we hardly knew what that destination was.’ For some of them, that destination might be other schools or colleges so that they might produce further cohorts of ambitious, independently minded young women. Constance Maynard, for instance, went on to found Westfield College, London University. Others – like Elizabeth Garrett’s sister the suffrage leader Millicent Garrett Fawcett – might re-create the Mill–Taylor equal intellectual partnership in their marriage. Millicent married the blind political economist and Radical politician Henry Fawcett, Postmaster-General in Gladstone’s second government, and, after he died in 1884, instead of shrinking into the shell of the devoted widow embarked on an outspoken career of promoting public causes. But almost 30 per cent of the first generation of Oxbridge women graduates (from the colleges of Somerville, St Hugh’s, Newnham and Girton) did not marry at all. And, faced with a barrage of evidence about the immense and increasing distance between rich and poor Britain, many of them decided to abandon not just domesticity, but the whole world of liberal, Victorian middle-class comfort, and take their hard-won independence into the factories and the slums. In 1887 the Women’s University Settlement opened its first lodgings in Southwark, where young women from Oxbridge colleges went to live alongside some of the poorest people in London.

  Many of the women who came of age in the 1880s looked around and saw that, if you were middle class, there was much to celebrate. By 1882 married women finally got control over their own property. Nine years later, legislation was passed making it unlawful for husbands to lock up their wives for refusing sexual relations and to beat them ‘so long as the cane was no thicker than his thumb’. By the mid-1880s it was possible for women to vote in some local elections and for school boards, and in 1885 no fewer than 50 of them, including Helen Taylor, Harriet’s daughter, were elected to the London School Board. And there were other subtler but no less subversive agencies at work – the latch key, the cheque book and the bicycle – all of which would render obsolete the Patmore fantasy of the h
ermetically isolated priestess of the domestic shrine.

  If, on the other hand, you happened to be a 15-year-old East End girl and needed a pound or two to make the difference between food and famishing, fancy talk about repossessing the integrity of your body would not mean much. Middle-class women reformers had first become involved in the life of street girls in the 1850s. Led by Josephine Butler, they had campaigned more vocally against the double standard of the Contagious Diseases Act (1864), which required brutal physical inspection of prostitutes while doing nothing about diseased male clients. The Act was repealed in 1883, and in the same year the age of consent raised from 13 to 16, thanks to the efforts of the muckraking editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, W.T. Stead, who, to prove that his allegations about the trade in virgins were not a figment of his overheated imagination, went to the East End, bought one for himself, got her story and then turned the girl over to the Salvation Army.

  Stead was one of the most eloquent of a generation bent on doing constructive damage to the complacency of late Victorian Britain as it moved towards the Queen’s Golden Jubilee year of 1887. Instead of the middle classes reading the queen’s sequel to her massive best-selling Leaves from a Journal of Our Life in the Highlands, with its picture of the royal couple taking tea with adoring crofters, Stead wanted them to wake up to the destitution of outcast London, and read George Sims’ How the Poor Live (1883). As far as Stead was concerned, the steady drumbeat of imperial self-congratulation, the histrionic wailing and weeping over the martyrdom of poor General Charles Gordon at Khartoum, and the elaborate fanfares tuning up for the queen were just so many charades masking a society divided between the swells and the slums. His pessimism was contagious. One day, warned the young George Bernard Shaw, sheer force of demographics would force a reckoning: ‘Your slaves breed like rabbits, their poverty breeds filth, ugliness, dishonesty, disease, obscenity, drunkenness and murder. In the midst of the riches which they pile up for you their misery rises up and stifles you. You withdraw in disgust to the other end of town and yet they swarm about you still.’

  It was, in fact, the apparent correlation between ‘breeding’ and poverty that moved one of the most daring young women of her generation, Annie Besant, to try to do something about it. In 1877, Besant, the estranged wife of a Lincolnshire clergyman, was tried alongside the atheist republican MP Charles Bradlaugh on a charge of obscenity. Their crime was to have reprinted a treatise, the ‘Knowlton Pamphlet’, originally published in 1830, euphemistically called The Fruits of Philosophy but actually full of practical advice on contraception. It was all very well, Besant and Bradlaugh believed, for the fashionable classes to have – and increasingly make use of – this knowledge, but until it had become part of working-class life there would be no possibility (especially in the hard times of the 1880s) of their ever being able to budget for survival, much less savings. All the high-minded lecturing that philanthropists such as Octavia Hill inflicted on her tenants in the Dwellings would be pointless hypocrisy unless poor families were given some control over their size. Bradlaugh and Besant went out of their way to make sure they would get prosecuted – and so attract the necessary publicity – by actually delivering copies of the book to the magistrates’ clerks at the Guildhall.

  During their trial – in which the Solicitor-General himself handled the prosecution – the two shamelessly used the proceedings to proselytize for sex education and birth control. They were eloquent enough for the judge to declare that he thought the case absurd. The jury was less enlightened, finding that, although the book was indeed obscene, the defendants had not meant to corrupt public morals. The order to desist from publishing was, of course, just what the accused were waiting for. They duly refused to abide by the judgement. Bradlaugh went to jail, but The Fruits of Philosophy, with its graphic description of pessaries, condoms and sponges, enjoyed brisk undercover sales for months.

  Annie Besant suffered a harsher penalty for her temerity than prison. Her husband, who already had custody of their son, now brought a suit to remove their young daughter, Mabel, from her mother on the grounds that consorting with atheists and purveyors of filth proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that Annie was unfit to be a parent. The loss of her child threw Annie into a deep depression. What pulled her out of it was socialism. ‘Modern civilisation,’ she wrote in 1883, ‘is a whited sepulchre … with its outer coating of princes and lords, of bankers and squires and within filled with men’s bones, the bones of the poor who built it.’ Two years later she joined the Fabians, who worked for a peaceful and democratic revolution.

  The attraction of socialism to young, altruistically minded women of Annie’s generation was an inadvertent payback for years of being told that their sex was supposed to be the softer, humane face of capitalism. Even John Stuart Mill had written of Harriet Taylor’s governing impulses as social and humane while his were theoretical and mechanical. Now women could do something in keeping with this unasked-for assignment as nurses to the wounded of liberal capitalism – they could try to change it. This was what moved another young founding Fabian, Beatrice Potter (later Webb), to leave Octavia Hill’s organization of philanthropical snoopers and go to live among the Lancashire mill girls of Bacup; she ended up editing the 17 volumes of Booth’s Life and Labour of the People in London (1892–7).

  Annie Besant found her workers’ cause in the plight of the teenage match girls who worked for Bryant and May’s at their Fairfield Works in the East End. The match girls had a history of conspicuous public action: they had participated in a mass demonstration at Victoria Park in 1871 against Gladstone’s government’s proposal to impose a tax on matches. The publicity was such that it moved even the queen to write indignantly to Gladstone that it would punish the poor much more heavily than the well-off and ‘seriously affect the manufacture and sale of matches which is said to be the sole means of support for a vast number of the poorest people and LITTLE CHILDREN!’ The mass meeting and the march down the Mile End Road were shamelessly exploited by Bryant and May themselves, who had no interest at all in seeing their product penally taxed. When the measure was dropped, the company paid for a victory celebration and the construction of a drinking fountain in Bow Road.

  The factory-feudal mobilization of their young workforce, however, backfired against Bryant and May a decade and a half later, when The Link, the crusading investigative halfpenny weekly founded by Stead and Annie Besant, published an article exposing the conditions under which the match girls worked. Wages were between 4 and 12 shillings a week, at least half of which went on rent for a single room, often shared with brothers and sisters. The girls were subject to a managerial regime of draconian severity. If they were judged to have dirty feet (few could afford shoes) or an untidy bench, fines would be deducted from their already meagre wages. Many of them suffered from the disfiguring condition of ‘phossy jaw’ caused by the phosphorus fumes they inhaled, at a time when other matchmaking companies had abandoned the chemical. Whilst the company claimed that narrow profit margins made it impossible for them to be more generous, it was paying hefty dividends to its shareholders, a disproportionate number of whom seemed to be Church of England clergymen. For the muckrakers this was pure gold. ‘Do you know,’ Annie asked rhetorically in The Link, piling on both the agony and the irony, ‘that girls are used to carry boxes on their heads until the hair is rubbed off and their heads are bald at fifteen years of age? Country clergymen with shares in Bryant and May, draw down on your knee your fifteen year old daughter, pass your hand tenderly over the silky clustering curls, rejoice in the dainty beauty of the thick, shiny tresses.’

  To crank up the publicity machine further, Besant stood outside the gates of the Fairfield Works along with her socialist colleague Herbert Burrows, handing out specially printed copies of the article to the match girls. A few days later a delegation of the girls came to their Fleet Street office to tell Besant and Burrows that they had been threatened with dismissal unless they signed a document repudiating t
he information contained in the article. Instead, they had gone straight to The Link with their story. ‘You had spoken up’, one of them told Annie. ‘We weren’t going back on you.’ A strike committee was formed to resist the threats of the company. Photographs of the plucky, photogenically salt-of-the-earth girls were taken. In another brilliant and shaming stunt, Besant and Burrows solemnly promised to pay the wages of any girls dismissed for their action. George Bernard Shaw volunteered to be treasurer and cashier of the strike fund. Some 1400 of the girls came out. Hugely embarrassed and economically damaged by both the publicity and the stoppage, Bryant and May eventually settled, and the match girls won a rise in July 1888. Annie Besant was hailed as the champion of London working women and was immediately sought after by many other constituencies in need of a campaign – boot-finishers and the rabbit-fur pullers who worked for the felt trade in even more horrible conditions than the match girls. In 1888 Annie entered the political fray through the same route used by many of her generation of ‘platform women’: election to a school board, in this case Tower Hamlets. She campaigned from a dog cart festooned with red ribbons. Incredibly, 15,296 votes were cast for her.

  Could the queen – just entering her 70s – comprehend, much less sympathize with, any of this? The answer is less straightforward than one might imagine. Her chosen role, now that she was a little more in the public eye again, was that of matriarch, and her motherliness or grand-motherliness extended to utterances and even acts of sympathy for the victims of an increasingly plutocratic Britain. She was much more likely to erupt in rage against the immorality, idleness and general worthlessness of the upper classes than the lower classes and took special exception to those who defamed the working families of Britain by painting a portrait of them soaked in beer and beastliness. She too read The Bitter Cry of Outcast London (1883), by the Congregationalist minister Andrew Mearns, and was so shaken by its revelations of the one million East Enders living in horrifyingly overcrowded and insanitary conditions that she pressed Gladstone’s government to spend more of its time on the problem of housing for the poor. Her indignant pestering paid off with the setting up of a royal commission.