Girl Trouble

by Dyhouse, Carol

  Allegations that higher education encouraged girls to dress and deport themselves like males led to controversy about what was meant by femininity. Was it feminine to be clever or ambitious? Those Victorians who judged womanliness to depend on self-sacrifice thought not. In 1890 a two-volume English translation of the diaries of Marie Bashkirtseff, a young girl who had been living in Paris, caused a sensation in literary London.31 The beautiful and talented Bashkirtseff had died of consumption in 1884. When she died, she was only twenty-five years old. A gifted painter and writer, Marie Bashkirtseff had kept an intimate journal since her childhood. In this she had recorded every detail of her ambitions, fears and fluctuating emotions. These confessions enthralled readers across Europe. Those who cherished a view of girlhood as all sweetness and innocence were horrified. Photographs of Bashkirtseff show her looking demure and extremely pretty, but her views were strong-minded and staunchly feminist. She wrote of her ambition, above all, to avoid the domestic fate of the ordinary woman:

  To marry and have children? Any washerwoman can do that … What do I want? I want GLORY.32

  The newspaper editor W. T. Stead, now widely seen as a champion of young girls’ innocence and purity, was certainly unsettled.33 Recognising Bashkirtseff’s cleverness, he confessed that he found her writings ‘poisoned by egotism’ and altogether unwomanly. He claimed that in reading her journal, he was never quite sure whether she was posing, theatrically or melodramatically, or whether he was reading the ‘genuine outpourings of a girl’s heart’. He judged her undisciplined, and blamed her parents for having ‘over-trained’ and ‘overstrained’ her, for having failed to teach her self-control. Stead judged that ‘Marie Bashkirtseff might have been a splendid woman if she had ever been broken in’.34 George Bernard Shaw responded to Stead’s review by taking up cudgels on behalf of Bashkirtseff, whom he saw as a kind of Ibsenite heroine.35 Self-sacrificing women were always a drag, he insisted: Bashkirtseff was understandably rebelling against the phoney notion that womanliness depended on a capacity for self-obliteration.

  Marie Bashkirtseff’s writing raises basic questions about the nature of gender and femininity. ‘I have nothing of the woman about me but the envelope,’ she asserted, ‘and that envelope is deucedly feminine. As for the rest, that’s quite another affair.’36 Was femininity merely a question of dressing up, then, nothing more than a performance?37

  To castigate clever young women as self-deluded egotists was common enough. But late Victorian anxiety about the ‘unsexing’ effects of higher education extended further, into pseudo-science. From the 1870s onwards, doctors and evolutionary thinkers started to raise the possibility that higher education was damaging to women’s bodies. One of the earliest to think along these lines was the sociologist Herbert Spencer, who suggested that high-pressure education might enfeeble women and render them unattractive to men.38 In America, in 1875, Dr Edward Clarke fired a notorious broadside with the publication of Sex in Education; or, A Fair Chance for Girls. In this he complained that higher education was destroying girls. It was directly responsible for a whole catalogue of horrors, such as ‘leucorrhoea, amenorrhoea, dysmenorrhoea, chronic and acute ovaritis, prolapsus uteri, hysteria, neuralgia and the like …’39 He himself, he claimed, had seen many instances of girls who were excellent scholars but who turned into pallid, hysterical women. They were tic-ridden invalids begging for opium, chloral and bromides. Sometimes their brains rotted and as adult women they were frequently sterile. Schools encouraging women to perform intellectually were encouraging girls in ‘slow suicide’ and threatening the continuation of the race.

  Foremost in Clarke’s defence in the UK was the psychologist Dr Henry Maudsley, of University College London, who aired his views in the journal Fortnightly Review.40 Feminists were deluding themselves because ‘They cannot choose but to be women; cannot rebel successfully against the tyranny of their organisation,’ Maudsley asserted somewhat opaquely.41 Like Clarke, Maudsley kept referring to ‘the woman’s apparatus’, meaning her reproductive system. Girls had to rest during adolescence in order to let their ‘reproductive apparatus’ get started. If they insisted on study, their energies were diverted, and these bits might atrophy. Being female wasn’t just a matter of dress, Maudsley pontificated, although some intellectual women with ‘wasted organs’ might try to disguise this with ‘dressmakers’ aids’.42 This was a rather sinister insinuation. He probably meant padded bosoms.

  In England several doctors fell over themselves to agree with Clarke and Maudsley. The President of the British Medical Association Dr Withers-Moore was one of them.43 A number were specialists in gynaecology and obstetrics, such as John Thorburn, Professor of Obstetrics in Manchester, and Robert Lawson Tait, sometime president of the British Gynaecological Society. Both elaborated on Clarke’s views and asserted that higher-educated women were a danger to themselves and to the race. Others, such as the Edinburgh psychiatrist T. S. Clouston, wholeheartedly agreed.44 A great deal of scaremongering followed. Thorburn, for instance, occupied the Chair of Obstetrics in Manchester just as women were being admitted as students. When one of the first female students to register, Annie Eastwood, died tragically of tuberculosis before completing her studies, Thorburn contended publicly that her death was caused by over-education.45

  The battle for women’s medical education had been particularly hard-fought, but some gains were evident by the 1870s. The London School of Medicine for Women was founded in 1874, and after 1877, female medical students could complete their clinical training in London at the Royal Free Hospital.46 Male doctors in Victorian times were insecure socially and professionally and there is no doubt that some felt threatened by women’s determination to practise medicine. Obstetricians and gynaecologists might well have feared losing women patients who would feel easier with a female doctor. The idea that women were biologically unfit for study appealed to such men.

  Women educators were forced to defend themselves. Elizabeth Garrett Anderson was the first woman doctor to qualify in Britain. She became a member of the British Medical Association in 1873. A vote to exclude any further women members ensured that she remained the only woman on the register for the following nineteen years.47 But Elizabeth’s lonely position conveyed a certain status and strategic advantage. She was able to contest Maudsley’s opinions in public, for instance. Urged by her friends Emily Davies and Frances Buss, she replied to his article in the Fortnightly Review with brisk common sense.48 Morbidity and hysteria were less common in educated girls than in those bored to death by a lack of meaningful occupation, she suggested. It was interesting that doctors emphasised the fragility of the middle-class girl, showing little concern for her working-class equivalents in domestic service. Girls were not necessarily enfeebled by menstruation, Garrett Anderson insisted. In any case, the burden of their intellectual work in higher education would become a lot lighter if men would stop opposing women every inch of the way.

  Edward Clarke’s views had dismayed women educationalists in America. In Boston, a group led by Annie G. Howes set out to collect evidence which would reassure the public that university-educated women were perfectly able to stay healthy and to mother children. Their report was published in 1885.49 In England, this inspired Mrs Sidgwick, Vice-Principal and later Principal of Newnham College, to attempt a similar venture. Under her lead, a small group of women academics set out to investigate the health of some five hundred women who had studied in Oxford and Cambridge, using their non-student sisters or cousins as a control group.50 The writer and poet Emily Pfeiffer was similarly encouraged by the Boston study to collect a mass of evidence and opinion on the subject of women’s health, work and higher education.51 Neither study found any evidence to suggest that women were rendered infertile or otherwise physically damaged by university work. Doctors more sympathetic to the women’s cause included Queen Victoria’s physician, Sir William Gull, and Professor Lionel Beale at King’s College Hospital. These insisted that they saw no danger in women s
eeking higher education.52 But the panic didn’t easily die down.

  One of the implications of this panic was that women schoolteachers and headmistresses had to take particular care over the health and physical well-being of their charges. Most middle-class girls’ schools – such as those run by the Girls’ Public Day School Trust (GPDST) – instituted regular medical inspections and kept detailed records of pupils’ health.53 A great deal of consideration went into thinking about the role of games, gymnastics and physical exercise in the curriculum. This careful regulation extended into higher education. Following Annie Eastwood’s death in Manchester the university authorities insisted on parents of female students signing health disclaimers before entry.54 The demand for properly qualified medical women who would serve the new girls’ schools and colleges increased.55

  Among women, there was widespread mistrust of professional men – doctors, academics and clergymen – some of whom had played an important strategic role in frustrating women’s access to higher education. This mistrust combined with a growing disillusionment with male politicians to foster a new and less compromising phase in feminism after 1900. This was the era of the ‘rebel women’, some of whom focused their entire lives on fighting for the vote. A determination to fight with ‘deeds, not words’ reflected impatience with the lack of progress brought about by many years of careful argument and persuasion. The Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) was founded in Manchester in 1903, with Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughter Christabel taking a leading role in its affairs. It marked a new departure and a new resolve.56 In its early years the WSPU had strong ties with socialism and the Independent Labour Party (ILP). It attracted powerful support from women textile workers in the North of England. These working-class feminists had a very different background from the mostly middle-class leaders of the movement to open higher education and the professions to women. Many had started work when barely out of childhood, and for them work was often an oppressive necessity rather than a right to be fought for.57 For such women, the fight for the vote was, at least in the first instance, a route to improving working conditions and fighting for a better standard of living rather than a ticket into higher education.

  Working- and middle-class women nonetheless found themselves shoulder to shoulder, making common cause in their struggle for the vote. Between 1900 and 1914, feminism swelled into a mass movement, loud and impossible to ignore. There were spectacular demonstrations and processions – the suffrage procession mounted for the Coronation in 1911 numbered some 40,000–50,000 women and produced some stunning pageantry and street theatre. It was estimated to have been seven miles long.58 The leaders of the Liberal government prevaricated and were evasive about plans to give women the vote. The suffragettes – unlike the more constitutionally minded suffragists, who put their faith in reason and debate – resorted to direct action. They began with heckling and disruption, and there were battles with the police in Parliament Square. They escalated their tactics, with stone throwing and attacks on property. Such tactics were met with violence and imprisonment. Denied the right to be treated as political prisoners, suffragettes in gaol went on hunger strike and were subjected to the humiliation and brutality of being strapped down and forcibly fed with tubes inserted down the nose or throat.

  Many suffragettes dressed carefully, not least in order to look feminine and disarm the opposition. They were sensitive to media caricatures of feminists as harridans. Countering such representations, Emmeline Pankhust was always stylish, resembling an Edwardian society hostess in pleated silks, lace and velvets. This complemented her natural beauty. Rebecca West marvelled at Mrs Pankhurst’s ‘pale delicacy’, and her ‘pansy-shaped face’ with ‘a kind of velvety bloom on the expression’.59 But militancy never looked womanly, and the less ladylike the women’s behaviour, the worse was their treatment at the hands of the authorities. Working-class suffragists might be treated particularly harshly. The well-connected Lady Constance Lytton, daughter of a former Viceroy of India, disguised herself as ‘Jane Wharton’, a working-class seamstress, when imprisoned in Liverpool’s Walton gaol for throwing stones at an MP’s car in 1910. She was treated with contempt, force-fed eight times, and slapped for vomiting.60 This was very different from the experience of her earlier imprisonments, when the authorities had been aware of her real identity.

  2.1 Girl suffragette in Trafalgar Square, London, 1900s (photograph © Chusseau Flaviens/George Eastman House/Getty Images).

  In her book Rebel Girls, the historian Jill Liddington has shown how magistrates were often at a loss to comprehend the motives of working-class women activists, particularly the younger suffragettes.61 ‘Baby Suffragette’ Dora Thewlis was a sixteen-year-old weaver from Huddersfield who was arrested and sent to Holloway for attempting to rush the House of Commons in 1910.62 She had persuaded her parents to let her come to London with a contingent of local WSPU supporters. The magistrate dealing with the case suggested that Dora should be in school. He was clearly horrified that her parents had ‘let her loose’ on the streets of London, seeing this as an example of poor parenting. In fact Dora’s mother, Eliza, also a weaver, was a strong supporter of the WSPU. She was extremely proud of Dora’s independence, boasting that her daughter had proved herself a diligent reader of newspapers since the age of six or seven, and was well able to hold her own in political discussion or argument. The family were all employed in the textile industry, where it was common for young girls, like Dora, to start work in the mills as half-timers as early as ten years of age and to leave school for full-time work at twelve. This kind of background could produce an independence of mind in girls which middle-class magistrates totally failed to understand.

  Suffragette militancy called for courage, whatever a woman’s social background. It wasn’t easy for a respectable middle-class woman to venture out with a hammer or a brick in muff or handbag, bent on damage. An intrepid Jane Brailsford once concealed an axe in a bunch of chrysanthemums.63 Jane was described by one of her many male admirers as pale and thin, with ‘a flower-like, plaintive beauty’. He added that her eyes were ‘dove-like, but full of dangers’.64 Many men were unsettled by the combination of femininity and steely resolve. To go on hunger strike, knowing about the torture of force-feeding, must have taken real guts. The government was wary of creating martyrs for the cause. But that is exactly what they did. One of the most moving elements in the Coronation suffrage procession of 1911 was the contingent of some six hundred women or their proxies who had been to gaol for their belief in women’s suffrage, carrying silver-tipped arrows.65 Suffragette leaders – particularly Emmeline Pankhurst – became, for many, both martyrs and heroines, sanctified by their devotion to the cause.

  For girls growing up in the 1900s, the suffrage movement could be inspirational. Unlike the respectable matrons who had positioned themselves in opposition to the ‘revolting daughters’ of the 1890s, many mothers and daughters worked together in the struggle for the vote. Margaret Ker, daughter of Dr Alice Ker, the thirteenth woman to be entered on the British medical register, joined the WSPU with her mother in 1909.66 Dr Alice Ker was sentenced to three months in Holloway after breaking shop windows in Harrods in 1912. In the same year, Margaret was sent to gaol and threatened with expulsion from Liverpool University for having set fire to a pillar box in the town.67 For Mrs Pankhurst and her daughters Christabel, Sylvia and Adela, the battle for suffrage, though productive of much rivalry and contention, was nevertheless a family business.68

  Women teachers were often feminists, although they had to tread carefully and many prudently concealed their views from the educational authorities. A young Vera Brittain, at school in Surrey, recalled ‘an ardent though always discreet’ feminist teacher, Miss Heath Jones, who lent her students books on the women’s movement and even escorted some of her senior pupils to a constitutional suffrage meeting in Tadworth Village in 1911.69 Winifred Starbuck, interviewed for BBC Radio’s Woman’s Hour in 1958, remembered how she and her
fellow pupils at a girls’ private school before the First World War had been greatly inspired by the WSPU.70 They had followed the news with excitement, and had decorated their desks with the WSPU colours of purple, green and white. Photographs and newspaper cuttings of the exploits of the Pankhursts were regularly displayed round the classroom. Their mistresses had kept very quiet, Winifred recalled, although the girls knew full well that many were sympathetic. One day the girls were scanning the lists of those who had been imprisoned for their activities only to find that one of their mistresses was among them. This teacher had gone on hunger strike and was forcibly fed. The girls were awed by her courage and sickened by the response of the authorities. They became active supporters of the movement, distributing pamphlets and attending meetings. Things came to a head when Winifred and her friends entered the sixth form. The headmistress and four other teachers were given notice to leave, clearly because of their sympathy with the suffrage campaign. The prefects canvassed their parents and organised a petition for the mistresses’ reinstatement, but this was to no avail. A term of complete disorder followed. The girls rebelled and there were near riots; a number of replacement teachers left, and several girls were suspended but broke into the school at night and painted slogans on the walls. The police were called in. This sequence of events was eventually interrupted by the outbreak of war in 1914.

  If girls were showing spirit and rebelliousness before 1914, there were also signs of backlash and repression. Working-class girls whose education was generally limited to a few years of elementary school rarely enjoyed the opportunities for self-development afforded to those of their more privileged middle-class sisters who attended high schools. The board school curriculum, controlled by the government, was highly gendered.71 Girls had to do needlework and domestic subjects. Many educationalists argued that there should be much more emphasis on training girls for household duties, because this would remind them that their most important role was as wives and mothers. It was assumed that before they married, working-class girls were most likely to find employment as domestic servants. It was therefore deemed fitting that they should know all about blacking grates and clear-starching. Recruiting soldiers to fight in the Boer War drew attention to poor standards of health and physique among male town dwellers.72 Many blamed working women. It was feared that standards of housewifery were declining and mothers no longer knew how to cook or feed their families. Pressure was put on the Board of Education to increase the amount of domestic economy in the schoolgirls’ curriculum.73 Women teachers of a feminist disposition sometimes contested this emphasis on domestic education, but their views made little impact at the time.74