Women and Politics: Into Local Government

It is possible to assess the differences in male and female perceptions of politics in a practical way by looking at the impact of women’s contributions in the arena of local government. From 1869, a number of measures affected women’s participation in a whole range of municipal offices.  The Municipal Franchise Act 1869 gave women ratepayers the vote “in the election of councillors, auditors and assessors” from which they had been excluded since 1835 on the same terms as men. Despite the Married Women’s Property Act 1870, the courts ruled in 1872 that this vote should be confined to single and widowed women. It was not until 1894 that the Local Government Act extended these rights to married women and allowed women to serve as councillors.  In the Education Act 1870, (that established school boards to set up and manage state board schools) these women became similarly eligible to vote for and stand in elections to the new School Boards. Around 70 were serving by 1879. Similar provisions applied to Scottish women from 1872 onwards but it was not until 1882, following feminist pressure and representation from Glasgow’s MP, that they enjoyed the municipal franchise and the right to vote in burgh (town) elections.  It was unclear whether women were eligible for election to the poor law boards established in 1834. Both the electors and board guardians were required to possess property and women could not use the property qualifications of their husbands. In 1875, Martha Merrington became the first woman to be elected to as a Poor Law Guardian. It was harder for women to be elected partly because of the property qualifications required (until 1894) and because farmers, shopkeepers and the businessmen who dominated the boards and put financial considerations first, feared those women would be extravagant.  The Local Government Act 1894 allowed women to serve on parish rural district and urban district councils. By the late 1890s, they were in evidence in local government, on School Boards and Poor Law Boards, on parish, rural and urban district councils and on London’s vestries. Only the city and county councils eluded them. The Local Government Act 1907 admitted women to all local government authorities (including borough and county councils) and women ran their first candidates that autumn. By 1914, some fifty women were serving on borough and county councils in England and Wales.

The slow growth of direct female involvement after 1869 became a rapid rush after the 1894 Act. In 1892, there were some 136 women among the 28,000 Poor Law Guardians in England and Wales[1]. By 1895, women accounted for 800 or 900 of the total though a large number of Boards of Guardians still had no women members at all. By 1900, there were around 1000 women Poor Law Guardians, more than 200 women members of School Boards and about 200 women parish councillors. Women formed 13.7 per cent of the eligible local government electorate. Female involvement in many levels of local politics may be interpreted as an extension of philanthropic and improving work. The establishment of School Boards to supervise state schooling provision and of Poor Law Boards concerned with relief of the destitute, were clearly areas in which many middle class women found scope for quasi-public charitable work. Coming into local government from philanthropy, moral reform, suffragism and party politics, the elected women shared a feminist perspective which they deployed, quite explicitly, on behalf of women and children, the old and sick, the morally, mentally and physically deformed. Patricia Hollis argues, “They spoke to the moral community”. They also linked the local and parliamentary franchises, maintaining that the one led logically to the other.

The metropolitan and provincial school boards drew in many able women -- including Lydia Becker, Emily Davies and Elizabeth Garrett -- who gave a larger commitment to their tasks than many employed male colleagues. They learned how to play politics, build support networks (which included male family allies), make policy and administer it, cope with demanding workloads, adapt middle-class attitudes to the working-class communities they frequently served and persuaded the working class to accept features of the educational system, such as compulsory schooling, that they viewed with dismay.

The 1869 and 1894 Acts did not given women access to all areas of local government, and in both the 1880s and 1890s, setbacks occurred. The London County Council Act 1888 resulted in three women candidates being put up for election, all of them active feminists. Lady Sandhurst’s success was short-lived and the Court of Appeal held that her sex made her ineligible to be a councillor. This prompted the founding of a committee to secure the return of women to the London County Council, a committee that widened its remit in time as the Women’s Local Government Society. The success of their adversaries was further entrenched by the London Government Act 1899 that replaced the older administrative unit of the vestry with new metropolitan boroughs. Women could sit on vestries (a by-product of the 1894 Act) but under the new act, they could vote but not run for election on the new metropolitan boroughs. In 1902, school boards were abolished, to the dismay of the women’s movement. Elementary education passed to borough and county councils to which women could not be elected, though they could be statutorily co-opted on to all local education authorities (LEAs). By 1914, seven hundred or so had been co-opted onto the LEAs and other committees.

The accent on the domestic and the setbacks in London should not obscure the significance of the public political context in which women were now required to act. The Local Government Act 1894, pressed for by women’s groups, created secular parish councils and rural and urban district councils for which women ratepayers and married women owning property separately from their husbands could vote. District councillors automatically became members of boards of guardians, while the Act abolished the £5 property requirement and ruled that any adult who satisfied residence qualification could be elected. As a result, the number of women guardians increased. The number of women elected to the new councils was modest: 200 on the 8,000 parish councils in 1896 and by 1900 about 150 rural and 10 urban district councillors. The elective nature of these bodies meant that women fielded as candidates would have a high public profile, a high degree of accountability when elected and, of course, be required to work in mixed gender committees. The stand taken by women on a range of issues -- from corporal punishment to sewerage and housing -- was generally less allied to political factions and more concerned with improving social conditions. Middle class women were particularly strong in local government in the great industrial cities of the North and Midlands, reflecting the dominance of the political structure by the liberal middle classes and women’s activities there in suffrage societies, philanthropy and liberalism. However, women were disappointed that so few of them had broken into the final citadel of local power, after all their struggles. It was difficult. Borough councillors needed a property qualification, just as guardians did before 1894 and this limited the field to the single and the well to do. There was the further hurdle of election. Most women candidates stood on the left, while local government after 1906 was swinging to the Conservatives.

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[1] The 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act set up poor law unions (groups of parishes). Each union was managed by an elected Board of Guardians.

Women in Politics: 1800-1850, a period of dislocation

Working class women

The first sixty years of the nineteenth century were ones of dislocation and transition as industrial growth and change bedded down. Working women’s part in the collective lives of their communities and their own authority within their families declined as the household economy was increasingly disrupted and the concept of the separate spheres gained in potency. Different approaches to the threats posed by change can be identified[1].

Working women were oriented towards the collective life of the family and the community, where the domestic sphere was intimately related to the public and where the notion of a separate private life had little meaning. Women were actively involved in crowds demonstrating against those who contravened local patterns of morality, by the nineteenth century as likely to be against regular wife beaters as scolding wives. Food and enclosure riots, and women’s participation in them, lasted well into the nineteenth century. These were areas where women might be thought to have a particular concern but they should not be separated from other areas of conflict and protest.

Religious language and experience was one way through which the responses of women to the threat to their familiar pattern of life could be translated. Female preachers from within the evangelical and Methodist tradition -- Primitive and Quaker Methodists, Bible Christians and others -- accepted by their communities as speaking in the language of the family and household economy, expressing in biblical terms their sense of grievance and threat. Female preachers did not accept the ‘separate’ values of family life, but their message could seem to overlap with in.

Women’s participation in movements of protest before the 1820s is difficult to quantify. Women did take part in significant numbers in resistance to the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 and in the Chartist movements of the late 1830s and early 1840s. Women Chartists raised funds, took part in political demonstrations, organised Chartist schools and Sunday Schools and used their control over family resources to deal only with sympathetic shopkeepers. Yet the force of the chartist campaign was directed to a political remedy and, though some male chartists did support the case for women’s suffrage, its objective was universal manhood suffrage. By the mid 1840s, what Dorothy Thompson had called the ‘withdrawal of working class women’ from the history of working class movements had begun to occur. Women were more likely to retain their commitment to chapel and temperance organisation than to the formal associations or the demonstrations of earlier years. Patterns of labour were changing, so that the household was no longer the focus of work, uniting the interests of all its members. Women might retain considerable authority within the family, but they had no public role. Even within the family, where parents had once held responsibility for the training or education of their children, the educational policies of Church and state were gradually taking over this role.

Increasingly in the lives of working class women, neither employment nor domestic values offered a route to the assertion of authority. Working class culture, however, was not necessarily rooted only in work. In the north the third quarter of the century saw the emergence of the first generation of working men’s political clubs, Liberal and Conservative, in which women had no part. The organised forms of leisure, including sport, had little to offer women and reinforced the division of space between private and public worlds.

The participation of women in the labour and socialist movements of the late nineteenth century raised new issues. In Britain labour politics owed most to the trade unionism of skilled men, an area of work in which women had no part. For them the route to an improved standard of living was the maintenance of a division of labour within the family that entrenched a separation of spheres, with husband and father as breadwinner, wife and mother as household manager. Practically the movement drew its strength from the workplace as the primary place of association among men.

Jill Liddington and Jill Norris have provided a description of the range of activities that fed working class women’s suffrage campaigns in Lancashire. From Methodism, to the trade union and co-operative activities of so many women, we gain a sense of areas where women’s employment and a long-established community life could to some extent unite the interests of men and women. Within the weaving towns of northern Lancashire women worker, married and unmarried, could win an unusual degree of status from their skill. By the 1890s the Northern Counties Amalgamated Association of Cotton Weavers, a mixed union, represented 65,000 workers, two third of whom were women. In this context the socialist and labour movements could appeal to both men and women. In the West Riding of Yorkshire, by contrast, there were marked differences in working women’s political interests. The nature of the economy, where women stayed at home, meant that the primary focus of agitation related to the reform of marriage and to women’s employment. The emergent Labour party in the West Riding was therefore deeply interested in these issues. Though the suffrage issue brought more women into the ILP, it was the weakness of women’s trade unionism in the West Riding, compared to its strength in Lancashire, that accounts for the failure of any strong initiative in Yorkshire.

Middle class women

The participation of middle class women in a variety of activities apparently crossing from private to public life must be seen in the following light. First, it may be seen as a defiance of gender prescriptions. Secondly, it reflected the broader challenge by the middle classes to the social and political power of the landed classes.

The language of evangelicalism emphasised individual salvation, the discipline of self and the moral powers of women. At the same time evangelical doctrine brought with it a zealous missionary force, a sense of mission that was translated in the role women played as organisers and fundraisers. The language of mission could, however, be extended in other directions. The Unitarians and Quakers, though influenced by the evangelical movement, retained something of the older, egalitarian outlook towards relations between men and women. This should not be over-stressed since the exclusion of women from much part in church government remained. Yet Unitarian and Quaker women did play an important role in the nineteenth century movement for women’s rights. They fought for many causes, from the battle against church rates to the Anti-Corn Law League and the case for secular education. Their battle was for ascendancy, and the struggle to improve, progressively, the rights of women, could make one part of the liberal ideology. By 1830 a sense of ‘Woman’s Mission’, which rested on the unique qualities of women, could be extended to allow women to claim a part in movements for ‘moral reform’: in the anti-slavery and Anti-Corn Law League movements and in peace and temperance campaigns. Radical and nonconformist pressure groups -- a major channel of middle class opinion between 1832 and 1867 -- drew very considerably on women’s support.

It is not easy to locate the significance of the reforms sought by middle class woman’s movements, in relation to both gender and class. The campaign from the mid 1850s for the reform of marriage laws was certainly rooted in the recognition by women of the injustices created by the antiquated and patriarchal structure of the common law of marriage[2].

By the late 1850s middle class women were beginning to address a different agenda, an agenda that challenged the principles on which male domination was based. It moved beyond the purely philanthropic towards demands primarily rooted in the experience of single women, for education and for employment. Such demands crossed the new barrier for middle class women, that which divided the home from the market place: they even suggested the possibility of married women’s work. They raised different issues, not necessarily to be accommodated within the liberal vision of the freeing of old restraints on the individual. Women felt divided loyalties. Some wrote on popular political economy and worked for political equality for women. Others continued to identify with their gender, as in work for the repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts and other areas of moral reform. Many did both.

Middle class reports and cartoons of working class women in early nineteenth century riots and protests often provided a hostile representation of their role. These representations played of their sexuality, combining both ugliness and lustfulness, as did some cartoons of Female Reform Societies. However, within such movements, the public presence of women, dressed in white with appropriate sashes, as at Peterloo, in processions and on the platform could take on a symbolic quality, a quality suggesting the supportive role of women. Literature might satirise most effectively the participation of women in public life. The powerful representation of Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House [1853] may indeed have had a significant impact on the ways in which subsequent generations regarded female philanthropy. In The Daisy Chain [1856] Charlotte Yonge contrasted the failings of the Ladies’ Committee in attempting to run a local school, with masculine good sense. By contrast, one way of breaching the restraints on women lay in imaginative writing. Fiction could be deployed for different purposes. Frances Trollope’s Jessie Phillips [1842-3] attacked the ‘bastardy clause’ of the New Poor Law. Eliza Cook’s Journal [1849-54] advocated legal reform of the position of married women and urged sympathy for unmarried mothers. Harriet Martineau’s Deerbrook [1837] highlighted the lack of employment for single women, as did so many novels on the theme of the governess.

There was a considerable class differential in the nature of public speaking. Working class women did speak in public to mixed audiences, as preachers, in the first half of the century. Working class women spoke to other women in the Female Reform Societies of the post-Napoleonic period, recognising the novelty of what they did. The Owenite movement saw a considerable expansion of women lecturers in the 1830s and 1840s and there were Chartist women lecturers too[3]. Middle class women were only beginning to breach this barrier by the 1850s as some used the National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences from 1857 to 1884 as a platform on which to try their powers of public speaking. By the 1870s women were speaking, albeit rarely, to mixed meetings of all kinds, including meetings for women’s suffrage, where the preponderance of male speakers was still a matter for comment. And though the need for moral reform might justify the broaching of previously taboo subjects such as prostitution and the sexual abuse of children, women still could not easily, without cost to themselves, explore broader issues of sexuality or question the very framework of their private lives.

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[1] On the role of women in popular protest see: E.P. Thompson Customs in Common, Merlin 1991 for the role of women in food riots and in communal action against those who offend community values and morality; Deborah Valneze Prophetic Sons and Daughters. Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England, Princeton University Press, 1985 and J.F.C. Harrison The Second Coming. Popular Millenarianism 1780-1850, Routledge, 1979 on women and religion; Barbara Taylor Eve and the New Jerusalem. Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century, Virago, 1983, M. Thomas and J. Grimmett Women in Protest 1800-1850, Croom Helm, 1982 and Dorothy Thompson ‘Women and nineteenth century radical politics: a lost dimension’ in Juliet Mitchell and Ann Oakley (eds.) The Rights and Wrongs of Woman, Penguin, 1976, reprinted in D. Thompson Outsiders.

[2] The common law had been irrelevant for many years to the landed and upper middle classes, who used legal trusts under the law of equity to protect married women’s property, and for the working classes, who had little property to protect.

[3] On the role of women in these radical movements see Barbara Taylor Eve and the New Jerusalem, Virago, 1983 and Dorothy Thompson The Chartists, Wildwood Press, 1984. Anna Clark The Struggle for the Breeches. Gender and the Making of the British Working Class, River Oram Press, 1995 covers the period from 1780 but has much to say on the post-1820 period.

Women in Politics: 1

The symbolic importance of the vote to generations of feminists and subsequent historians has meant the obscuring of women’s broader political culture and history. The possession of the vote qualified women finally to enter that purely masculine and public world of national politics from which they had so long been excluded. Women’s interest in securing access to political rights was not limited to the campaign for parliamentary suffrage[1]. The growing powers acceded to various levels of local government in this period also attracted their keen interest and in the arena of local politics women were to play a prominent role as early as the 1870s[2]. We have already seen feminists agitate on a range of issues that affected public policy from education through official attitudes to prostitution to ‘moral purity’[3].

Gender was not necessarily the primary factor determining women’s loyalties and interests[4]. There were other loyalties, most obviously to class and community. Nineteenth century England was a society in which class boundaries were increasingly complex. A landed class maintained its personal hold on the institutions of national government but acknowledged and compromised with the industrial strength of the manufacturing middle classes. The professional and upper middle classes grew in importance as shapers and leaders of public opinion. Yet the expansion of the middle classes at all income levels down to the suburban clerk confused both social aspirations and political loyalties for women and for men. Such shifts meant the erosion of long-established community patterns and could mean the creation of new ones with different male and female patterns of political and social association.

Nineteenth century women did employ the language of their own experience, of motherhood, of domestic labour, of religious commitment, whether their links were primarily with other women or when they were operating in more formal mixed institutions or political movements. While challenging injustice, many drew their considerable strength from what they regarded with pride as their most fulfilling tasks, as wives and mothers. Yet many, whether working women or middle class campaigners felt the justice also of the class for equality that recognised them as political beings.

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[1] Christine Bolt Feminist Ferment: ‘The Woman Question’ in the USA and England 1870-1940, UCL Press, 1995 is a valuable comparative study. Marion Ramelson The Petticoat Rebellion: A Century of Struggle for Women’s Rights, Lawrence & Wishart, 1967 and J. Rendall (ed.) Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800-1914, Blackwell, 1987 are useful starting-points. Philippa Levine Victorian Feminism 1850-1900, Hutchinson, 1987 and Feminist Lives in Victorian England: private roles and public commitment, Blackwell, 1990, OUP, 1992, Jane Lewis Women and Social Action in Victorian and Edwardian England, Edward Elgar Press, 1991, Olive Banks Faces of Feminism: A study of feminism as a social movement, Blackwell, 1986 and David Rubenstein Before the Suffragettes: Women’s emancipation in the 1890s, Harvester, 1986 look at feminist protest before the Suffragettes. A biographical approach is adopted in Barbara Caine Victorian Feminists and M. Foster Significant Sisters, Penguin, 1993.

[2] 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.

[3] Women’s participation in public life is explored in Patricia Hollis Ladies Elect: Women in English Local Government 1865-1914, OUP, 1987 and in collection of documents P. Hollis (ed.) Women in Public: The Women’s Movement 1850-1900, 1979 and in Pat Jalland Women, Marriage and Politics 1860-1914, OUP, 1986. Jane Rendall (ed.) Equal or Different: Women’s Politics 1800-1914, Blackwell, 1987 contains a variety of papers on the politicisation of women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

[4] On this issue see Dorothy Thompson Outsiders: class, gender and race, Verso, 1993.

Legally emancipating Women: 4

Campaigns for moral purity

Much of the moral stance of late Victorian feminists assumed stemmed from fear. Feminist attitudes to sexuality revolve largely around the dangers it implied[1]. Campaigns around marital violence pre-dated the murders by a full decade and one of the most powerful arguments that campaigners against ‘wife-torture’ had was the inadequacy of the law in protecting women from reprisal. Frances Power Cobbe and many others were convinced that levels of male violence were made worse by the consumption of alcohol; an analysis not exclusive to feminists as long-standing temperance societies show.

The moral stance that characterised the feminist position should be understood against a background tinged with both economic and physical threats as well as with theoretical objections to legislative or even cultural injustices. They saw themselves as victims of a male ideology, as victims of a lust denied to them, of a right to speak denied to them, of a society shaped by male requirements. Feminists took hold of the position to which they were limited by Victorian ideology and inverted its precepts, turning the duties of moral guardianship into a campaign that castigated the laxity and degradation of precisely those who ascribed them that role. Yet the element of philanthropy that surfaced in almost all the campaigns is apparent here to: some of the activity centred around the prostitution controversy and laid emphasis on the rescue of ‘fallen women’ and their moral re-education.

From the early part of the nineteenth century, until absorbed by the new social purity movements of the 1880s, the Society for the Suppression of Vice [founded in 1802] remained the Victorian’s basic legal force against the obscene. Its work demonstrated the often close relationship between private vigilance and public authorities. It was the persuasion of the Vice Society that led to the Obscene Publications Act 1857. Through the 1870s and 1880s, the ‘abolitionists’[2] were a major social force and the stimulus for the emergence of vigorous social-purity organisations such as the National Vigilance Association. Why was there a major attempt at moral restructuring in the last decades of the nineteenth and first decade of the twentieth centuries? Various causes can be identified:

From the 1870s, following what was seen as a decline in standards in the 1850s and 1860s, a new confidence in the moralistic ethic can be detected[3]. In the early years of the century moral reformers had been sustained by the threat of revolution. No such fears limited them in the 1880s and 1890s but there were a series of causes and scandals that maintained their momentum: the iniquities of the CDA to the scandalous leniency meted out to high class ‘madams’; from the exploitation and abduction of young girls in the White Slave Trade to the divorce case of Charles Dilke in 1886 and the Irish leader Parnell in 1890; the scandal of the Cleveland Street homosexual brothel 1889-90[4] said to involve the eldest son of the heir to the throne and the Cranby Croft gambling scandal of 1891 that did involve the Prince of Wales.

There was a constituency ready to be stirred by such scandals, in the lower middle class and the respectable working class whose values were being attacked by radicals and libertarians. Respectability, with its stress on values such as self-help and self-reliance, the value of work and the need for social discipline and the centrality of the family, was threatened by public immorality. Here was a strong basis for social purity. Behind this, giving the campaigns a tremendous dynamism was an evangelical revival, bringing large sections of the feminist movement into alliance with nonconformity, an alliance sealed in outrage against double standards. Many of the leaders of the campaigns in the 1880s were products of this Christian revival. W.T. Stead described himself as ‘a child of the revival of 1859-60’ which had swept across the Atlantic and won hundreds of thousands of converts. Social purity was also able to mine very deep fears of a more secular kind. 1885, an immensely important year in sexual politics, was also the year of the expansion of the electorate [Third Reform Act], there were fears of national decline following the defeat and death of General Gordon, anxieties about Ireland and all this in the context of a socialist revival and feminist agitation. Social purity became a metaphor for a stable society.

By 1885, social purity was able to tap an anxiety that found a symbolic focus in the ‘twin evils’ of enforced prostitution and the exploitation of young girls. W.T .Stead’s sensational expose of the latter in his articles on ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ generated a sense of outrage with which a wide range of public opinion found itself in sympathy. The result was the Criminal Law Amendment Act which attempted to suppress brothels, raised the age of consent for girls to sixteen and introduced new penalties against male homosexuals in private as well as in public. Further changes, in the Vagrancy Act 1898 and the Criminal Law Amendment Act 1912, underlined the new legislative involvement with prostitution and homosexuality. Reformers in 1885 had no doubt that their cause was right: a crusade against ‘a dark and cruel wrong’. Yet reformers were directing their energies at many of the wrong targets, illustrating the typical nineteenth century preference for moral campaigns rather than structural social reforms.

Social purity was linked with the issue of birth control and eugenics in the period after 1870. The birth control controversy spanned the century. Utilitarians like Jeremy Bentham and James Mill proposed various kinds of birth control. It was in the 1860s and 1870s that there was a real extension of propaganda on birth control directed at the middle classes. Charles Bradlaugh’s National Reformer carried articles on the issue. It was, however, the trial of Bradlaugh and Annie Besant in 1876 for republishing a banned pamphlet that gave the birth-control movement wide publicity and created a demand for more information and led to the setting up of the first organisation to campaign on birth control, the Malthusian League. Between 1876 and 1881, over 200,000 copies of the banned tract were sold in England and Annie Besant’s own The Law of Population, published in 1877, sold 175,000 copies by 1891. The arguments in favour of limiting the size of the family had never before been presented to so large a public.

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the sexual question was inextricably linked with the politics of population and the case for racial as well as social purity. A major sign of this was the re-emergence of neo-Malthusianism in an organised form with the founding of the Malthusian League in 1877. The consequence of a failure to limit population was, contemporaries believed, growing degeneracy, a view reinforced by the drastic unfitness of the imperial race shown during the Boer War. There were different approaches to these perceived problems. Maternalism marked a partial shift in the dominant ideology away from the nineteenth century stress on woman as wife towards woman as mother. Motherhood was seen as a major key to a healthy population. Therefore it was not poverty that was seen as the major cause of physical deterioration and high infant mortality, but poor maternal training. The result was the tackling of working class ignorance by a host of unofficial voluntary bodies that sprang up in the years prior to 1914 like the Institute of Hygiene [1903] and the Women’s League of Service for Motherhood. A change in official attitudes away from child rearing as just an individual duty to it as a national duty. This was reflected in increased state intervention. Compulsory education had already undermined parental choice and the measures associated with the Liberal reforms accentuated this trend: school meals in 1906; medical inspections in 1907 and the Children Act of 1908. Most of the policies that were adopted were ad hoc rather than part of a national strategy. Nevertheless, they did contribute to an improvement in health underlined by the reduction in infant mortality and the growth of child-welfare centres after 1918.

Control of aliens was grounded in the thesis that race-mixing was an evil, causing degeneration of a biological stock appeared in 1853 and was particularly influential in Germany were the term ‘anti-Semitism’ first appeared as a biological rather than religious concept in 1879. Yet Jews in Britain had long been received more liberally than in many other European countries but there was a change of mood, reflected in literature as well as reality, by the end of the century[5]. A Royal Commission on Aliens was set up in 1903, rejected the contention that immigrants were unclean or unhealthy and concluded that fears about alien immigration were largely unfounded. Nevertheless it recommended controls which became law in the Aliens Act 1905[6]. The underlying belief behind eugenics was a conviction that it was possible to intervene directly in the processes of producing the population by regulating sexual selection between stocks and individuals.

Anxieties about moral standards reflected a deep belief that the roots of social stability lay in individual and public morality. The marked interest in the moral sphere that grew to such significant proportions towards 1900 was a double-headed beast. In part, it was a logical successor to early moral reform campaigns bringing into feminism women who had championed more immediate rights, but it also gave those women a means of understanding those grievances through the lens of gender.

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[1] This can be seen in Judith Walkowitz City of Dreadful Delights, Virago, 1993 which uses the Ripper murders of the autumn of 1888 as its liet-motif.

[2] They were in favour of the repeal of the CDA.

[3] Trevor Fisher Scandal: The Sexual Politics of Late Victorian Britain, Sutton, 1995 is a useful and readable examination of this issue.

[4] On this see Lewis Chester, David Leitch and Colin Simpson The Cleveland Street Affair, Weidenfeld, 1976. This book demonstrates clearly the ambiguous attitudes to homosexuality by the Establishment. When the affair seemed likely to become the most explosive scandal of the nineteenth century and the taint of homosexuality came close to the royal household, it was quickly and quietly buried.

[5] David Feldman Englishmen and Jews: Social Relations and Political Culture 1840-1914, Yale University Press, 1994 is now the standard work on this issue and much else besides.

[6] On this issue see Ann Dummett and Andrew Nicol Subjects, Citizens, Aliens and Others, Weidenfeld, 1990.

Legally emancipating Women: 3

Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Acts

Growth in population and in the corresponding preference for urban living mobilised an increasing degree of state intervention in the private lives of its citizens. Sanitation and housing, water supplies and the control of disease, all became subject to government directive in some way during the century, alongside the cross-over from the definitely public to the obviously private. Government’s role was an increasingly prescriptive one laying down acceptable sexual behaviour and policing sexual relations through laws governing such areas as prostitution, homosexuality and contraception. In many respects, the state assumed the role previously played by the church. This can be seen in its sanctioning marriages and its pronouncements as to the grounds on which divorce was valid, in its defining the forms of licit and illicit sexual behaviour and in its treatment of prostitution[1].

Legislation and repeal

In the urban context, increasing anxiety was expressed over the perceived increase in prostitution and its corollary, of venereal disease. Military reports had reported a steady increase in venereal infections among the men since the 1820s. A series of government inquiries in the 1850s and 1860s, precipitated by the Crimean War, testified to the seriousness with which the dual problems of VD and sexual immorality among the lower ranks was regarded in official circles. In 1862 29 per cent of all army men admitted to hospital and 12.5 per cent of all naval hospital admissions were for sexually transmitted diseases. From the 1840s public anxiety had also been focused on prostitution, the ‘great social evil’, by studies from evangelical clerics and doctors and by rescue and reform societies campaigning for a police crackdown on the London streets. Attempts to subject enlisted men to periodic genital examination met with considerable rank-and-file resistance and government turned instead to the regulation of the women with whom soldiers and sailors consorted leading to the passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts of 1864, 1866 and 1869 [hereafter CDA].

The 1864 CDA applied to a number of naval ports and army garrison towns in England and Wales. Under its provisions, both police personnel and medical practitioners [acting under the direct supervision of the War Office and the Admiralty, rather than the local constabulary] were empowered to notify a justice of the peace if they suspected a woman of being a ‘common prostitute’. The woman would then be apprehended and taken to a certified hospital for medical examination, where she could be detained for up to three months to effect a treatment if the examination proved positive. A woman’s refusal to co-operate with what was effectively a suspension of habeas corpus could lead to a prison sentence of one month, doubling for any subsequent offence. Infringement of the hospital rules, or quitting without medical consent, also carried penalties of up to two months imprisonment. In apprehending a ‘common prostitute’, the police relied on certain indicators of guilt: residence in a brothel; soliciting in the street; frequenting places where prostitutes resort; being informed against by soldiers or sailors; and lastly, the admission of the woman herself. There were also penalties for brothel keepers.  The CDA 1866 and 1869 extended the geographical locations covered by the regulations, while the Admiralty and War Office were now mandated to provide hospital facilities for inspection and treatment. Provision was also made within hospitals for adequate moral and religious instruction of the women and for regular fortnightly inspections of former detainees, while the period of compulsory detention was extended to six months.

Supporters of the acts did not see the principles of state hygiene as contradicting the moral emphases of the public health movement. Far from the state sanctioning male vice by providing men of the forces with a clean supply of women, it claimed that the acts were essentially moral in aim and intention. In reality, the acts were concerned with the regulation of the sexual and moral habits of two particular groups within the urban poor: female prostitutes and the lower ranks of the armed forced. But the tactics used to discipline these two groups were markedly different.  The legislation understandably angered women, and many men, the more so because of the opportunities it afforded the police to harass women. The result was organised opposition to the acts which gained ground during the 1860s and led to the setting up of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Act in 1869 led by Josephine Butler. The repealers were well organised and effectively vocal. As soon as it was established it issued a strongly worded protest in The Daily News signed by prominent figures like Florence Nightingale, claiming the acts were not only an attack on the civil liberties of all women but also implicated the state in sanctioning male vice. The Shield, a weekly circular giving news of the acts and of protests against them, began publication in March 1870.

The women’s protest was received with expressions of outrage and puzzlement by men within the dominant political culture. Divorce, prostitution and women’s emancipation were designated as outside the parameters of political discourse and MPs customarily prefaced speeches on these topics by apologising to the house for intruding on parliamentary time. Repealers soon grasped this and drew on the only vocabulary able to bear the moral and intellectual weight of their challenge. This was the militant language of radical dissenting religion. Many LNA women came from a background of similar, if less explicitly sexual, moral reform campaigns, anti-slavery and temperance in particular. The recognition that class was an important consideration won them support from working class men fearing the effects of the acts on their own wives and children. In the feminist context, the CDA agitation proved important in crystallising the value of a wider feminist analysis. In the wake of the suspension of 1883 and the final repeal of the acts in 1886, many women choose to concentrate not on older-style feminist campaigns such as those in education, but on obtaining a single moral standard for men and women alike.

The repeal campaign in retrospect

The issue that concerned Victorian feminists in the 1870s and 1880s was what the proper balance should be between state intervention and individual liberty. The passage of the Contagious Diseases Acts in 1864, 1866 and 1869 crystallised much feminist thinking and led to the development of the Ladies’ National Association for the Repeal of the Contagious Diseases Acts [LNA] in 1869 as the leading pressure group for repeal. This was eventually achieved in 1886 following suspension of the legislation three years earlier.

The LNA leadership included veterans of the Anti-Corn Law League and the abolitionist campaigns in which women had forged themselves an important role that stopped short of feminism. The timing of the CD Acts was important for British feminism and the campaign against the legislation absorbed women who might otherwise have been attracted to the burgeoning temperance movement with its comparable stress of women victimised by male vice and power[2]. The consequence for the LNA was that its critique of male-dominated society was far more radical. In contrast to the feminist organisations of the 1850s and 1860s, the LNA, like the suffrage movement of the 1870s, was national in scope rather than London-based, claiming 92 local associations in 1882. The LNA was particularly strong in big cities where prostitution was widespread and in middle class, Nonconformist families.

However, there was a tension between married and single women within the repeal campaign and within feminist agitation generally. Married women received priority in the agitation for property law reform, single women in the push for employment and educational gains. In was the divisive British emphasis on a limited suffrage that would disproportionately benefit single women may have strengthened the determination of married women in the LNA to take the lead on matters where there sexually inexperienced sisters were at a disadvantage.

Josephine Butler embodied the background and preoccupation of the LNA leadership. She was the daughter of a Northumberland agricultural reformer and abolitionist, married to a supportive Anglican clergyman and educator established in Liverpool. She could speak for the middle class provincial activist independent of the London elite. Like many women who undertook moral reform, religious conviction and faith drove her. She had not herself been an abolitionist but she shared with anti-slavery activists’ empathy with powerless fellow-women debased by circumstances. The LNA attracted some working class women to its meetings and Mrs Butler, together with its other middle class leaders, stressed that repeal was essentially a women’s cause and a cause of all women. Butler stressed medical moral and constitutional arguments against the CD Acts. The underhand ways in which they were passed. Their failure to detect or check venereal disease; the unfair way in which they penalised women but ignored her better-off client; the infringement of women’s civil liberties. The attempts to condone sanitise and regulate sin; and the physical results that might be visited on innocent married and unmarried women. The Acts were, she maintained, a mockery of formal Victorian veneration of womanhood.

Middle class evangelists had worked for the poor since the early part of the century, attempting to stamp out their alleged immorality. Leading repealers took a far more direct and, on occasions, dangerous action. They believed in the power of united womanhood and openly worked with, as well as for, the objects of their concerns. They sought out registered prostitutes, gave them practical help and moral support in opposing the legislation. Feminists of the LNA supported the contemporary campaign for female doctors and challenged male doctors, politicians and army men with a number of telling points. First, they denied the naturalness of male lust and the double standard of morality for the sexes. They rejected the commonly held view, directed at middle class women, that prostitutes in the public sphere protected virtuous females in the private sphere against unreasonable sexual demands and argued that all women were vulnerable to sexual exploitation within their profession of marriage and that men should raise themselves to women’s levels of sexual self-control.

Secondly, activists condemned MPs’ prurient interest in the sordid matters raised by the repeal campaign and criticised doctors’ insistence on internally examining arrested prostitutes. The support for the CD Acts by Elizabeth Garrett who, like male doctors, put checking disease before defending liberty, was an embarrassment to the LNA that was not concerned with the control of venereal disease. Thirdly, feminists argued that a Parliament of rich men was unfit to legislate for poor women on such matters, contrary to the politicians’ assertions that they looked after the interests of disenfranchised females. Feminists resented the way in which women were defined only in relation to men and motherhood. Men predictably objected to changing a state of affairs from which they benefited considerably.

There were problems of emphasis. Some repealers argued that prostitution was a result of women’s exclusion, by men, from most rewarding and reliable work. Others, however, focused on its immorality and, in presenting the prostitute as a helpless victim of male lust, drew attention away from her social context and attitudes to the institution thereby reducing the woman at the centre of their fight to an abstraction. The LNA leadership and rank and file also had different priorities: the former stressed the importance of political agitation while local workers, outside exceptional branches such as Bristol, highlighted religious objections to regulation. It was these individuals, concentrating on the less controversial and well-established work of providing refuges for prostitutes, who formed the backbone of the more repressive purity campaigns of the 1880s and 1890s.

The campaign against the CD Acts did not destroy the double standard of morality for the sexes any more than it materially improved the position of prostitutes. Politicians may have become disenchanted with the CD legislation and tired of the struggle in provoked, but they had not been persuaded that Parliament should abandon other attempts to regulate vice. Women were divided on the issue. Rescue work attracted both feminists and non-feminists members of the LNA, and women outside the Association. It reinforced those notions about feminine mission and moral superiority that had encouraged female community and justified women’s involvement in reform earlier in the century. During the 1880s and 1890s it led some of them, mobilised in a host of social purity groups like the National Vigilance Association to believe that legislation could be used to ‘force people to be moral’.

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[1] There is a growing literature on prostitution. The best starting point is Judith Walkowitz Prostitution and Victorian Society: Women, Class and the State, CUP, 1980 and Paul MacHugh Prostitution and Victorian Social Reform, Croom Helm, 1980 deal specifically with the debate on the Contagious Diseases Acts. Linda Mahood The Magdalenes: Prostitution in the nineteenth century, Routledge, 1990, Eric Trudgill Madonnas and Magdalens: The origin and development of Victorian sexual attitudes, Heinemann, 1976 and Frank Mort Dangerous Sexualities: Medico-moral politics in England since 1830, Routledge, 1987 provide valuable background. Philippa Levine ‘Rough usage: prostitution, law and the social history’, in A. Wilson (ed.) Rethinking social history: English society 1570-1920 and its interpretation, Manchester University Press, 1993, pp.266-292 provides an up-to-date synthesis. Trevor Fisher Prostitution and the Victorians, Sutton, 1997 is a useful collection of sources.

[2] In the United States the rise of abolitionism in relation to alcohol arose at the same time as the CDAs and LNA in Britain. Its critique of male attitudes was far less radical. Had the CD legislation not been passed, it is possible that British feminism would have also taken this route.

Legally emancipating Women : 2

Marriage and property

Feminists campaigning in this arena centred on inequalities and problems relating to the institution of marriage and on efforts to wipe out the double standard of morality based on gender that licensed male freedom an female suppression. The two areas were linked by the legitimation of the double standard enshrined in matrimonial legislation. The high incidence of marriage and its centrality in women’s lives, determining their status whether they were married or not, made it an obvious and important feminist concern. Campaigners embraced the property of married women, their access to divorce, custody of children, violence within marriage and the curious controversy over marriage to a deceased wife’s sister.  It was marriage that remained the common majority experience in women’s lives. The very earliest of all feminist campaigns focused on highlighting the inequalities within marriage: the loss of political and legal status that a married woman exchanged for social status within marriage; the differing moral standards to which wives and husbands were expected to conform; and. their effect on the dissolution of failed marriage.

On marriage, the legal assumption of coverture determined a woman’s loss of all rights of economic independence and property. The eighteenth century jurist laid down the legal relationship: ‘By marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law; that is, the very being or legal existence of the women is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband: under whose wing, protection and cover, she performs everything.’ At marriage, both possession and control of a woman’s property -- including any money she might earn from paid labour -- passed to her husband unless property had been set up in trust for her under the law of equity. The husband’s right to property extended further into the human field as well: the children of the marriage were his children and where a marriage was dissolved, custody was automatically ceded to the man. Married women could neither sue nor be sued, nor enter into controls and her debts and legal wrangles were her husband’s responsibility. He could even set aside her will on her death. Women were disallowed any responsibility or competence within marriage and were tied to a moral standard to which their partners were not expected to adhere. In the few divorce cases heard in parliament before the marriage reforms of the 1850s, few women came forward as petitioners. Where they did present cases involving adultery by their husbands, their bids for divorce were rejected, while adultery on the part of the wife would always be sufficient grounds for a husband’s petition.

In the 1854 Barbara Leigh Smith published a tract on women’s legal disabilities entitled A Brief Summary, in plain language, of the most important laws of England concerning Women, together with a few observations thereon. It was the start of a campaign that was to become one of the more prominent and indeed successful of all feminist agitation[1]. By 1856 a petition bearing 3,000 signatures and demanding a change in the law affecting married women’s property was presented to both Houses of Parliament with the organisation of public meetings on the topic. It is in this context that the Divorce and Matrimonial Causes Act was passed hurriedly in 1857. Before 1857 responsibility for divorce had been vested entirely in the hands of the church. Ecclesiastical law recognised very few grounds for divorce and the only other recourse was the obscure and costly one of a private petition to parliament. Consequently it remained a rare and restricted option with only about 200 such petitions ever being granted. The 1857 Act was passed through parliament very quickly to head off the more alarming prospect of a proposed married women’s property bill. Legislation affecting divorce arose largely from the government initiated Royal Commission on divorce set up in 1850 whilst the less successful attempts to change the law on married women’s property arise directly from feminist lobbying.

The 1857 Act was an unsatisfactory one for the feminists in three respects. First, it had been used as a political football that was to set back the cause of married women’s property by more than ten years. Secondly, the inadequacy of its provision for deserted wives. Finally, the act enshrined the double standards in the grounds in established for securing a divorce. Women’s access to divorce was limited to cases where the husband’s adultery was compounded by further sexual misdemeanours while for the man his wife’s adultery was sufficient cause. There were some 150 divorces per year in the 1860s following the 1857 Act, a surprisingly high proportion of them among the working and lower-middle class [perhaps approaching half]. For 1890 to 1900 this had risen to 582 annually.

The major injustices of the 1857 Act were the subject of little feminist attention in the years immediately following. It only surfaced again when organisations like the Women’s Emancipation Union made divorce reform a plank of their policies in the early 1890s. The Clitheroe case of 1891 was also instrumental in re-opening the wider question of women’s status within marriage. Mr and Mrs Jackson had lived apart throughout their brief marriage and when Jackson returned from New Zealand, his wife refused to live with him. He abducted her and held her captive while a legal suit was set in train. The judges initially upheld Jackson’s claim but this was overturned by the Court of Appeal which set Mrs Jackson free. A husband could not longer physically compel his wife to live with him.

In the previous thirty years, however, the marriage debate centred far more crucially on the property issue. The first married women’s property committee was set up in 1855 but it failed in its legislative attempts in 1856-7. It was an issue that raised interest across class barriers, more particularly in relation to a husband’s rights over his wife’s earnings. The history of the property campaign is essentially a history on the one hand of parliamentary manoeuvre, of bills and amendments through the late 1860s and 1870s, and on the other hard propaganda and lobbying on the part of women. When the first and inadequate instalment of the Married Women’s Property Act finally won royal assent in 1870[2], the campaigners were not mollified and maintained their attacks. Bills and amendments came before parliament in 1873, 1874, 1877, 1878, 1880 and 1881 before finally becoming law in August 1882. The 1882 Act was widely regarded as a victory equalising the rights and responsibilities of women irrespective of marital status[3]. Even after 1882 it is likely that relatively few women had sufficient income or property on which to live conformably alone or with children after divorce.

Of far more central concern in the 1870s was a growing awareness of and anxiety over violence within marriage. Legal opinion did little to prohibit male violence. It was Frances Power Cobbe’s denunciation of wife-abuse, an act she saw as resulting in large part from the degrading pressure of poverty that re-opened the marriage debate in the late 1870s. She argued that the new divorce courts remained an option beyond the reach of poor women, whom she felt to be more at risk. The passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act in 1878 established a class distinction: wealthier women could still obtain full divorces under the 1857 Act, while working women were offered the cheaper but more restricted alternative of a separation order granted through a magistrate’s court, which prohibited the option of re-marriage. Cobbe saw the 1878 act as a means of empowering women. Yet her suggestions were more far-reaching than those actually implemented in the legislation. She argued that the right of separation should be amplified by automatic maternal custody of children and by maintenance orders for a wife and children against the offending husband. From 1883 about 8,000 separation orders per year were being granted. The subsequent history of these changes shows that the option of separation was utilised largely by women while divorce remained primarily a vehicle used by men. The social stigma attaching even to an ‘innocent’ divorced woman in respectable circles [though not to a separated wife in the working class, figures suggest] may have remained a considerable deterrent to ending a marriage.

Another area of feminist protest was whether men’s rights extended over their children as much as their wives. A divorced woman also risked the loss of her children. From 1839 an ‘innocent’ mother might legally be granted care and custody of children under seven. This was extended to 16 in 1873 and from the Guardianship of Infants Act 1886 the welfare of the child rather than the ‘guilt’ or otherwise of the parents was supposed to determine custody arrangements. It was still difficult for a women to prove in court the unfitness of a comfortably off father to bring up his heirs and, if she succeeded, to support them on her own. The financial problem was most acute in case of illegitimate offspring and many feminists believed that the bastardy clauses in the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 and effective until the 1870s were another means of sanctioning and protecting male vice. The provisions of the 1834 Act made mothers almost wholly responsible for their bastard children, a measure that sat in curious contradiction to the legal power fathers exercised over their legitimate offspring. The Bastardy Law Amendment Act 1872 was carelessly drafted such that mothers had no legal redress against the fathers of children born before the passing of the act. This again catalysed feminist action.

The growing challenge to the conventions of marriage among the middle classes appears to have coincided with a peak of enthusiasm for formal marriage and associated religious ritual among the working classes. Older irregular customs of co-habitation and separation were disappearing except in remote rural areas and illegitimacy rates were exceptionally low. The argument that working class women promoted formal marriage as a source of security does not take account of the enthusiasm of working class men for stable partnerships. Both men and women were dependent for a reasonable standard of living upon a stable relationship.

Some historians have argued that changes to the statutes governing marital relations should be understood in the broader context of legal reform. Mid-century judicial review was certainly an important element of the reforming spirit of these years. However, the issue of married women’s property, where the two systems of common law and equity were clearly at odds, had been the subject of vigorous lobbying for a number of years before the first instalment of reform was carried in 1870. It is difficult, therefore, to interpret it as merely a product of the general zeal for reform. Gradually, it seems, in complex and still incompletely explored ways, divorce court judges were moving towards a conception of marriage as a contract between husband and wife embodying reciprocal rights and obligations, rather than as a relationship of patriarchal dominance and dependence. Nevertheless divorce was still not an easy path for a woman to take and in the circumstances it is surprising that so many had the courage and determination to end their marriages.

Many women cut their feminist teeth within this area of protest and through addressing the problems of property within marriage came a clearer understanding of other aspects of female subjugation. The feminist critique was not on marriage and they did not seek to undermine the practice or prevalence of marriage but to realign the rights of partners within that institution. As the movement grew in numbers and in confidence, and as to analysis of the position of women grew more sophisticated, so it widened its net to other areas of civil disability.

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[1] Important primary sources are Josephine Butler Personal Reminiscences of a Great Crusader, London, 1896, Life of Frances Power Cobbe: By herself, London, 2 vols., 1904. Useful collections of material can be found in Candida Ann Lacey (ed.) Barbara Leigh Smith and the Langham Place Group, Routledge, 1987 on whom see also Hester Burton Barbara Bodichon 1827-1891, John Murray, 1949 and Sheila Herstein Mid-Victorian Feminist: Barbara Leigh-Smith Bodichon, Yale, 1985. Jane Lewis (ed.) Before the Vote was won, Routledge, 1988 provides significant materials for and against extending the franchise to the mid-1890s.

[2] The 1870 Act allowed all wives to retain any property or earnings acquired after marriage rather than, as before, losing them to their husbands.

[3] The 1882 Act allowed women to retain any property possessed at the time of their marriage, thus extending to all women with property a right which the better-off had previously been able to acquire through establishing a trust in equity.

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

 

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[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, 2^nd 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.

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.

Educating Women: 1

The education of women and girls had been an issue in England since the 1790s[1]. The foundation of new educational opportunities for women was one of the major areas of feminist activity that emerged at this time. Women saw education as the key to a broad range of other freedoms. It was a means of training for paid employment, a means of alleviating the boredom of everyday idleness and a means of improving their ability to fight for the extension of female opportunities in a host of other areas. Education was, as Philippa Levine puts it, ‘the first step’.

The urgency of education

Certain social pressures gave the claims of writers like Mary Wollstonecraft, that equality of education with boys was a means of securing independence for women, an extra urgency by 1850. Women were still less educated than men. Female literacy rates in 1851 were still only 55 per cent compared to nearly 70 per cent for men. The proportion of women in the population was steadily rising from 1,036 females per 1,000 males in 1821 to 1,054 per 1,000 in 1871. This meant that there was a surplus of women over men and accordingly over a quarter of a million women had little expectation of marriage and the lifetime protection of husband and home. This situation was exacerbated by the rising age of marriage that also left more single women waiting for, and often not achieving, marriage. With more women detached in their expectations from reliance on parents or putative husbands and children, they were forced to think in terms of earning their own living in a career. This brought the education issue to the forefront of feminist thinking.

A class education

The education of women was a class-riven as that of boys. In the context of the rigid social divisions that ordered Victorian society so thoroughly, there was nothing unethical in decisions to cater only for delineated social groups. Indeed to attempt to mix children from different classes was to court disapproval and severely limit growth. Well-to-do girls were educated at home or in small academies in 1830. The academic content was low and, with the transformation of the grammar schools, girls found themselves excluded from establishments they had attended in the eighteenth century. Lower class girls attended the National or British schools along with boys and were destined, if not for the drudgery of a working class marriage, then for factory work or the vast army of domestic service. The education girls received before 1870 was very similar to that followed by boys, with the probable addition of some sewing and knitting. The concern to develop a more distinctive curriculum with a focus on domestic science, cooking, laundry and needlework came after 1870 and especially in the 1880s and 1890s.

The problem in the 1840-70 period was largely a middle class one of finding careers for unmarried middle class ladies and of fashioning an education that would fit them for it. Existing careers were limited in 1850 and becoming a governess was the only means of earning a living for women of gentle birth. In 1851 there were some 25,000 governesses in England but they had no proper training and often an education barely above the accomplishments. Moreover there were uneasy status incongruities: hired to impart ladylike qualities to her charges, the governess by taking paid employment forfeited her own status as a lady.

Education for the working class girl

The effect of the 1870 Education Act was to widen the gap between the education of different classes. It marked the increasing involvement of the state in the financing and control of elementary education. The age of compulsory schooling was raised from ten, to eleven and then fourteen in 1800, 1893 and 1899 respectively. However, exceptions were made for part-time working under local byelaws[2]. From 1870 to 1914 the state also increased the number of grants for certain subjects taught in elementary schools and supported scholarship schemes for entry to secondary education. Both these measures sharpened further the existing sexual divisions between working class boys and girls.

The Education Department influenced the elementary curriculum through the provision of grants and for working class girls the influence was in the expansion of domestic subjects. The Education Department Code of 1878 provided for compulsory domestic education for girls in the state sector. In 1882 grants were made for the teaching of cookery and in 1890 for laundry work. The textbooks used in schools made it quite clear that the ‘new’ subjects should involve the learning of useful, practical skills and character building. Such habits were, of course, to prepare working class schoolgirls to become good women, capable of being efficient wives and mothers.

Writers such as Anna Davin and Carol Dyhouse link the expansion of domestic subjects with fears about the future of the British race and the decline of the British Empire. The Report of the Inter-Departmental Committee on Physical Deterioration [1904] contained many statements by the middle class about the low standards of living among the poor in congested urban areas and particularly the inadequacies of the working class wife. Since children were seen as a national asset, it was believed critical to educate working class elementary schoolgirls for wifehood and motherhood. The results were, however, not always as anticipated by government officials. Working class women interviewed by Elizabeth Roberts about their lives in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century stated that school domestic science was ‘never any help’. It would appear that for many working class girls, it was their mothers’ training at home that was valued more than the unreal situations created in schools.

The increased emphasis on the sexual division between boys and girls between 1870 and 1914 was evident also in the scholarship system whereby poor elementary pupils could be offered a free place in a fee-paying secondary school. The number of scholarships was severely limited. More were, however, offered to boys than girls and this was especially so after the Technical Instruction Act 1889 enabled counties and county boroughs to make grants to secondary schools for scholarship purposes. In addition to this handicap, working class girls might also find themselves discriminated against both by their parents and teachers when they had scholastic ambitions for secondary schooling.

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. How can we explain the development of mass education and how does it provide insights into girls’ education? Historians have provided three main explanations. First, it is argued that Britain needed an educated electorate after the extension of the vote to working men in 1867. Secondly, it is also stated that Britain needed an educated workforce that would be able to produce goods in the competitive international market as well as for home consumption A third explanation, grounded in a Marxist analysis, argues that education was seen by the middle classes as a means of reforming, civilising and controlling a decadent working class.

None of these explanations take into account gender divisions. While the first two explanations may be relevant to the schooling of working class boys, they hold no relevance for working class girls, since women did not have the right to vote and neither could they enter the range of skilled jobs which, it was believed, would bring economic prosperity. A fourth explanation does, however, consider gender differences. Feminist historians, such as Anna Davin and Carol Dyhouse, argue that mass schooling was an attempt to impose upon the working class children a middle class family form of a male breadwinner and an economically dependent wife and mother. Such family forms would benefit all family members -- and the wider society. Such a stable unit would provide a secure environment for the rearing of healthy children, the future workforce and for the care and comfort of the male wage earner.

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 thus working class schooling was through membership of School Boards. In the 1870s, 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.

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[1] June Purvis A History of Women’s Education in England, Open University Press, 1991 covers the period between 1800 and 1914 and is the best introduction to the subject. . It should be supplemented by the following: Margaret Bryant The Unexpected Revolution: A study of the history of the education of women and girls in the nineteenth century, NFER, 1979, Carol Dyhouse Girls Growing up in Late Victorian and Edwardian England, Routledge, 1981, Deborah Gorman The Victorian Girl and the Feminist Ideal, Croom Helm, 1982, Joan Burstyn Victorian Education and the Ideal of Womanhood, Croom Helm, 1980 and Sheila Fletcher Feminists and Bureaucrats: A study in the development of girls’ education in the nineteenth century, CUP, 1984. Daphne Bennett Emily Davies and the Liberation of Women 1830-1921, André Deutsch, 1990 provides a detailed biography, for a brief study see the relevant section of Barbara Caine Victorian Feminists, OUP, 1992. Felicity Hunt (ed.) Lessons for Life: The Schooling of Girls and Women, Blackwell, 1987 contains some useful papers. Dale Spender (ed.) The education papers: women’s quest for equality in Britain 1850-1912, Routledge, 1987 is a valuable selection of documents on women’s education.

[2] This half time system was ended in the 1918 Education Act and fourteen became the national compulsory school leaving age.