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Saturday, 9 February 2008

Legally emancipating Women: 1

 

Both feminist campaigners and the ideologues of Victorian respectability placed much emphasis on the value and importance of rigorous and well-defined moral standards as a means of ordering society[1]. It was not, however, until the later years of the nineteenth century that the state felt confidence enough to intervene in the more ‘private’ areas of morality. Marriage and divorce, venereal disease, prostitution, male homosexuality, contraception and incest all became areas of judicial attention[2].

The state and sexuality

The legal process was clearly a powerful mechanism whereby men and women could be written into their separate spheres. The values of respectability, of social and sexual purity that were deemed the ‘natural’ preferences of women were upheld stringently in legislation affecting the areas of personal and indeed of public morality. This point was not lost on contemporary feminists who were tireless in voicing the opinion that a male parliament would inevitably articulate the needs and desire of men in every sphere.

Victorian perceptions of sexuality[3] were built round a fundamental belief in sexual difference. Women and men were categorised by their biology and that biology was seen as central in determining their social roles. Separate sphere ideology, with its division of public and private, had its sexual connotations and ramifications. Nineteenth century feminists drew parallels between men’s political and sexual power. The timing of the new approach to female sexuality corresponds largely to the period in which fundamental economic changes were also occurring. The separation of home and workplace was the physical expression of the separate spheres. In moral terms, the public world of work was dirty, brutal and often immoral while the home signified peace and purity. This constant and potent overlap between moral economy and political economic made the area of morality a crucial site for feminist attack. Their intrusion into public spheres -- employment, political recognition and government -- had been shocking enough in itself. This sphere, which involved their transgressing the private and bringing it into the public arena, was in itself a radical statement.

A chronology of change

A number of events improved the legal status of women:

 

1839

Caroline Norton[4] campaigned to get the Custody of Infants’ Act 1839 which stated that if the parents separated, the wife should legally be able to claim custody if the children were under seven. Furthermore, if older children were taken by the husband, the mother could claim access

1857

Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act abolished the need for a private Act of Parliament in order to obtain a divorce. Now there would be Divorce Courts and women were allowed to sue for divorce if they could prove two of the following charges: cruelty, desertion or adultery. The husband could divorce if she was to prove one of these offences. The number of divorces slowly increased but still carried a social stigma

1861 Abolition of the death penalty for sodomy

1864

Contagious Diseases Act passed

1866

Contagious Diseases Act passed. This extended the 1864 Act

1869

Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts formed

1870

Married Woman’s Property Act

1872

Bastardy Law Amendment Act passed

1873

Social Purity Alliance founded [by men!]

1878

Matrimonial Causes Act passed making it possible for a wife to separate from her husband on the grounds of cruelty; furthermore she was legally entitled to claim maintenance and custody of the children

1879

Association for the Improvement of Public Morals founded

1881

Moral Reform Union founded

1882

Married Woman’s Property Act which, combined with the 1870 Act, made it legal for women to keep their money and property when they married

Married Woman’s Act enabled the wife to claim maintenance on the grounds of desertion. This granting of maintenance payments saved many ‘injured’ wives from the union workhouse or even prostitution

1884

Matrimonial Causes Act passed

1885

Criminal Law Amendment Act passed

Scandal over W.T. Stead and the ‘Maiden Tribute’ affair

1886

Guardianship of Infants Act passed

Maintenance of Wives Act passed

Contagious Diseases Acts repealed

1889

Incest Bill

1891

Clitheroe case: Regina v Jackson

1895

Matrimonial Causes Act passed

 


[1] Kathyrn Gleadle The Early Feminists: Radical Unitarians and the Emergence of the Women’s Rights Movement 1831-51, Macmillan, 1995 argues that the origins of Victorian feminism can be found in the 1830s and 1840s rather than in the 1850s. This is a major challenge to the established historical position.

[2] Colin Gibson Dissolving Wedlock, Routledge, 1994 provides valuable insight into this area of women’s experience looking at divorce over a long period. Allen Horstman Victorian Divorce, St Martin’s Press, 1985 and Lawrence Stone Road to Divorce: England 1530-1987, OUP, 1990 are more specific. Lee Holcombe Wives and Property: Reform of the Married Women’s Property Law in nineteenth-century England, Toronto University Press, 1983 and Mary Lyndon Shanley Feminism, Marriage and the Law in Victorian England 1850-1895, Princeton University Press, 1989 provide an entree into how the law was changed. Maeve Doggett Marriage, Wife-Beating and the Law in Victorian England, University of South Carolina, 1993 looks at a neglected subject. Frank Mort Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-Moral Politics in England since 1830, Routledge 1987 is good on the Contagious Diseases Acts and three papers in Mary Langan and Bill Schwarz (eds.) Crises in the British State 1880-1930, Hutchinson, 1985 deal with the role of women.

[3] On this subject J. Weeks Sex, Politics and Society, Longman, 2nd ed., 1991 is the best introductory work. It should now be supplemented with M. Mason The Making of Victorian Sexuality, OUP, 1994.

[4] See Alan Chedzoy A Scandalous Woman: The Story of Caroline Norton, Allison & Bushby, 1992.

Thursday, 7 February 2008

Educating Women: 2

Secondary Education: a middle class preoccupation?

Some historians have argued that the improvement in girls’ schooling was consonant with a more general attempt at reforming secondary education and owed more to the attention of government through such bodies as the Taunton Commission than to feminist lobbying. This view neglects the role of feminists to widen the concerns of that commission to include girls’ education. Had Emily Davies and other feminists not pursued their case, the Commission would have looked only at the state of boys’ education. Various explanations have been suggested.

Some historians have stressed that the demand for improved educational opportunities for women was part of a wider extension of democratic rights and liberty for individuals. There are certain problems with this position especially the fact that the individuals who gained legal and political rights before the 1880s were both middle class and male. Middle class men, more than any other social group, were opposed to the extension of legal or any other sort of rights to middle class women. A second explanation suggests that industrialisation, which brought increased job opportunities for women, in turn created a need for more education. This too is problematic. Industrialisation and the entrenching of capitalist values led to a focus upon separate spheres and upon domestic respectability. A third explanation focuses on the demographic consequences of growing numbers of unmarried middle class women. Many writers of the new women’s history such as Delamont, Dyhouse, Vicinus and Pedersen favour this view. The final explanation relates the emergence of the women’s educational reform movement much more centrally to the wider women’s movement. This focus was established by Ray Stratchey in her 1928 classic The Cause, A Short History of the Women’s Movement in Great Britain and has been particularly continued by Olive Banks, Jane Rendall, Philippa Levine and June Purvis. Women saw education as the key to a broad range of activities and freedoms: as a means of training for paid employment, of alleviating the vacuity and boredom of everyday idleness and of improving their ability to fight for the extension of female opportunities in other areas.

The Governesses’ Benevolent Institution was formed in 1843 to help active governesses seek positions and aged ones to live in retirement. The central problems of education were addressed by founding two women’s colleges in London that were to play an important role as pioneer institutions. The first, Queen’s College, was founded in 1848 as an Anglican institution run by men sympathetic to the need for women’s education with an academic curriculum that developed sciences and languages as well as basic subjects and accomplishments [drawing, music, dancing, needlework]. A similar institution, Bedford College, was opened in 1849. It differed from Queen’s in one crucial respect; its founder was Elizabeth Jesser Reid, a woman committed not merely to the extension of educational provision for women but to granting them institutional autonomy.

Both took girls of 12 years and upwards, and though their academic structure hinted at a higher education with their appointment of professors, they in act fulfilled a rather less elevated need, providing a thorough if basic grounding for their students. Pupils from these colleges influenced many areas of feminist life in the 1860s and 1870s: The English Woman’s Journal, the Social Science Association, the early suffrage and married women’s property movements all stemmed from them. Ex-Queen’s students dominated many areas of feminist development, for example, Sophia Jex Blake, the first English doctor and Octavia Hill, the social work pioneer. But most important were Miss Beale and Miss Buss.

Dorothea Beale and her friend Frances Mary Buss created respectively the girls’ public boarding school and the girls’ grammar school. In 1858 Miss Beale took over the recently founded Cheltenham Ladies College [she remained as principal until 1904] and turned it into the model of the high-quality girls’ boarding school. St Leonards and Roedean were founded after 1870 based on its example. The North London Collegiate School began in 1845 as a fairly typical small private school in Camden Town to meet the problem of the lack of education for middle class girls. Frances Buss remodelled the school along the lines of Queen’s and it rapidly became an academic success story. She believed in the important of home life in the upbringing of girls and it deliberately remained a day school. In both institutions the curriculum included subjects like science and Latin. Both institutions might have remained unique in their own areas had not feminist educators brought other powerful factors into play.

Public examinations were opened to girls. Oxford and Cambridge had started Local Examinations for boys’ schools in 1858 providing an external common standard. The Victorians placed great stress on examinations as a means of raising academic performance and deciding the fitness of candidates for public office. Feminists saw that without the standard demanded of boys the new academic girls’ education would not be taken seriously. Emily Davies, the future founder of Girton College and sister of a Principal of Queen’s College, urged Cambridge to admit girls to its Locals, which it did experimentally in 1863. Miss Buss sent 25 candidates and following this success Local school examinations were formally opened to girls by Cambridge and London universities in 1865 and 1868 and Oxford in 1870. Edinburgh and Durham soon followed. The success of this campaign had two longer term results: it was proof that women could undertake the rigours of academic testing without compromising their ‘femininity’; and, it underlined the need for a greater number of schools serving the more academically-oriented girl.

As a result in 1871 the National Union for the Improvement of the Education of Women of All Classes -- rapidly known as the Women’s Education Union -- was founded by two sisters, Maria Georgina Grey and Emily Anne Shirreff. The union had broad aims both in its commitment to raising academic standards and increasing provision, and in its attempts to standardise and raise the status of women teachers. It offered a variety of financial incentives, financing teacher trainees, though its Teacher Education Loan Committee and offering various scholarships to women students. The most ambitious and long-lasting of its activities was the foundation of the Girls’ Public Day School Company in 1872, later known as the Girls’ Public Day School Trust. Though the union was disbanded in 1882, the company continued to expand its operations and by 1900 was administering more than thirty schools.

Girls’ education was also strengthened and spread after it secured financial aid through endowments. In the 1860s the Taunton Commission examined the issue of endowments for grammar schools. Feminists saw this as another crucial opportunity. Emily Davies insisted the Commission should examine girls’ education and she, and Miss Beale and Miss Buss, gave evidence before it and Miss Beale edited the volume of the report devoted to girls. The result was the Endowed Schools Act 1869 and the creation of the Endowed Schools Commissioners to reform grammar school endowments. They created 47 new grammar schools between 1869 and 1875 and their successors, the Charity Commission, created another 47 after 1875. The North London Collegiate gained an endowment from the reorganisation. The Endowed Schools Commissioners had power to make provision for girls and was widely used by them. By the time of their demise in 1874 they had made schemes creating 27 schools for girls; schemes for another twenty were in the pipeline. The Charity Commissioners proceeded at a much slower pace but as further 45 girls’ schools had been added by 1903. Parallel to these developments went the creation of proprietary schools for girls under the Girls’ Public Day School Company. A handful of new girls’ schools, such as Cheltenham, Wycombe Abbey and Roedean, were boarding, modelling themselves more or less on boys’ public schools; but the vast majority were day schools.

The effect of the 1870 Education Act was to widen the gap between the education of different classes. The Education Department Code of 1878 provided for compulsory domestic education for girls in the state sector. In essence, working class girls were being trained in domestic skills while a proportion of middle class girls were offered at least a route out of that sphere. Feminist philosophies were applied in the many new fee-paying schools rather than in the new state schools.

There was some minor activity in feminist educational provision for working class women and girls. A Working Women’s College was established in London in 1864. The only means, by which women were able to influence government and working class schooling was through membership of School Boards. In the 170s, many women took local government office, a new avenue of political participation opened to them in 1869. Women became eligible for election to Poor Law Guardianship positions and in 1870 to School Boards. Between 1892 and 1895 128 women were elected on to English and Welsh School Boards. However, they were not dealing primarily with girls’ schooling but with the schooling of all working class children and were often allotted to suitably ‘feminine’ committees such as the Needlework Sub-Committee.

The assault on higher education

The early movement for higher education for girls and its outcome occupied the 1860s. The prime mover was Emily Davies. She wanted higher education for women to widen the range of occupations open to them, fit them for public life, raise the standard of teaching in girls’ schools, advance the cause of women’s suffrage and match the experience of France, Germany and Italy where women were accepted into universities. She took a house in Hitchen in 1869 to prepare girls for Cambridge examinations and in 1873 moved to Cambridge itself as Girton College. At the same time Anne Clough moved to Cambridge in 1871 to set up what was to become Newnham College. Owens College in Manchester admitted women in 1869 and this was followed by London in 1878 and Oxford in 1879. These events were of great importance in their timing since when the civic universities movement began in the 1870s they accepted the admission of women as a normal policy.

The feminist role in education

The growing responsibility that the state took upon itself in the provision of education after 1870 did not, however, address in any practical or serious manner the problem of providing women’s education. In effect, compulsory education meant that working class girls attending state schools were educated primarily to a domestic role, with classes in laundry, home management, needle skills and the like, while in the private sector a crop of feminist inspired and feminist managed schools offered middle class girls a curriculum almost identical to that of their brothers. Feminist principles had no impact on the syllabus laid down in state schools. Feminist agitation was far more prominent that state intervention at the tertiary level.

The effective role of feminist agitation was thus limited primarily to the middle classes. Several issues need to be considered. How radical were the feminists? Carol Dyhouse and Sarah Delamont have argued that women educational campaigners perhaps fit more readily into the camp of the liberal reform movement responsible for introducing universal elementary education than into an explicitly feminist mould. They argue that traditional notions of femininity were not challenged in these new establishments, which thus reinforced conventional sex roles rather than seeking to undermine them. There were many who argued that the function of expanding the education of women was to fit them more adequately for domestic middle class wife-and-motherhood. Writers such as John Ruskin felt that female education should take into consideration a husband’s need to share his interests with his wife and conduct intelligent conversation with her.

Others propounded a moral reason for widening women’s education. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, among others, explained the crucial role played by mothers in determining the early education of their children. Conservative thought this thinking was, her argument on this matter was qualified and reflects more a shrewd understanding of women’s common situation rather than a desire simply to perpetuate it, ‘Though it is important to show that higher education would fit women better to perform the duties of married life ... the object of girls’ education should be to produce, not good wives merely, but good women.’ Educational activists can be divided into three categories: instrumentalists, whose goal was equality of opportunity; liberal humanists, for whom the function of female education was to fit them for their wife-and-motherhood role; and, moralists, whose chief interest was the inculcation of youngsters with Christian principles. Educational reformers, feminist or not, were working within strictly bounded areas. The middle class nature of the enterprise, concentrated on private education, forced some measure of caution and compromise on them through their need to establish and maintain a paying clientele. This led to a double conformity: the necessity of enforcing both an appropriate ladylike code of behaviour and an acceptance of cultural values adopted from male definitions.

Both the campaigns and the schools and colleges which succeeded them were constrained to some degree by the practical and pragmatic need to attract a paying clientele and sustain some measure of influential support. The attitude of the feminists to their male supporters strongly suggest that the women understood in clear terms the necessity for tactical modification of their visions on occasion. The consequence of these compromises was to ensure that little activity was undertaken outside the middle classes. Their concentration on the private sector, their need to maintain a ‘moderate’ profile as far as possible, their accent on academic excellence, were all factors that inhibited the percolation of these ideas down the social scale.

By 1900 feminist educational thinking, whatever its class limitations and these cannot be ignored, had established for itself an institutional focus in the new breed of girls’ schools and in the new women’s colleges. It was a movement aimed for the most part neither at the highest nor at the lowest segments of this rigidly stratified society but at the growing middle classes where the vagaries of the economy were seen as more likely to push unprepared and untrained young women into the labour market.