Hidden Heroines

The Forgotten Suffragettes

Maggie Andrews, Janis Lomas

• Publisher: Robert Hale Non Fiction
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780719827624
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire moderne de la Grande-Bretagne

The story of the struggle for women's suffrage is not just that of the Pankhursts and Emily Davison. Thousands of others were involved in peaceful protest and sometimes more militant activity and they included women from all walks of life. This book presents the lives of forty-eight less well-known women who tirelessly campaigned for the vote, from all parts of Great Britain and Ireland and from all walks of life. They were the hidden heroines who paved the way for women to gain greater equality in Britain. Fully illustrated with 52 black and white photographs.

1

BARBARA LEIGH SMITH BODICHON (1827–91)

Victorian suffrage campaigner

Janis Lomas

In 1857, Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon wrote:

I am one of the cracked people of the world, and I like to herd with the cracked … queer Americans, democrats, Socialists, artists, poor devils or angels; and am never happy in an English genteel family life. I try to do it like other people, but I long always to be off on some wild adventure, or long to lecture on a tub in St. Giles, or go to see the Mormons, or ride off into the interior on horseback alone and leave the world for a month…. I want to see what sort of world this God’s world is.¹

Barbara Leigh Smith was the eldest of Benjamin Leigh-Smith and Anne Longden’s five children. Her mother was a milliner and her father a radical MP, a Dissenter, a Unitarian, and a benefactor to those less fortunate than himself. Anne Longden met him when he visited his sister in Derbyshire, and when she became pregnant Benjamin moved her to Sussex and rented a lodge for her where Barbara was born in April 1827. Benjamin lived at his own house nearby, Brown’s Farm, but visited his family daily and eight weeks after Barbara was born her brother was conceived. After his birth, the family went to America for two years. On their return, they lived openly together, but after her fifth pregnancy Annie became ill with tuberculosis, and when Barbara was just seven years old her mother died. Barbara’s biographer Pam Hirsch suggests that it could have been Benjamin’s objection to the marriage laws, which would have made a wife and children his property, that prevented her parents marrying.² Whatever the reason, Barbara felt the stigma of her illegitimacy for the rest of her life. Her cousin Florence Nightingale and the rest of the Nightingale family refused to acknowledge the existence of Barbara or any of her siblings. Barbara’s father played a large part in her childhood, which she spent in Hastings, and, like all her siblings, when she was twenty-one she received investments, which provided an income of £300 a year. Barbara as a financially independent woman gave generously to help people less fortunate and supported her many friends her whole life. Importantly, her money also allowed her to take up the cause of women’s rights and fight for change.

Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon. THE WOMEN’S LIBRARY COLLECTION, LSE LIBRARY

Perhaps due to her unusual upbringing, Barbara’s views in relation to women’s work and education were ahead of her time. Her brother Ben studied at Jesus College, Cambridge, but, as universities were not then open to women, she attended Bedford College and studied art, becoming a skilful artist. Years later she wrote:

… ever since my brother went to Cambridge I have always intended to aim at the establishment of a college where women could have the same education as men if they wished it.³

She was unconventional and, in her early twenties, she embarked on an extensive, un-chaperoned walking tour of Belgium, Germany, Switzerland and Austria with her friend Bessie Parkes. While abroad, they decided to stop wearing corsets and to shorten their skirts to four inches above their ankles as they were so uncomfortable. Barbara celebrated her freedom in a little verse she wrote:

Oh! Isn’t it jolly/To cast away folly/And cut all one’s clothes a peg shorter/And rejoice in one’s legs/Like a free-minded Albion’s daughter.⁴

Barbara may not have been a great poetess, but her ditty celebrated their jollity and freedom, three decades before the Rational Dress Society advocated the abandonment of restrictive corsets. By the age of twenty-five, Barbara had established her own progressive school in London with Bessie Parkes’s help. It was an experimental school, non-religious, co-educational, and admitted children of differing class backgrounds; other experimental ideas followed. In the 1850s, 1860s and 1870s, Barbara was a leading figure in four major campaigns: for married women to be given independent status under the law; for women’s right to work; for women to have an equal education to men; and for women to be allowed to vote.

In 1854, Barbara wrote an influential pamphlet titled A Brief Summary, in Plain Language, of the Most Important Laws concerning Women. In her opening remarks, she acknowledged the importance of the vote for women:

… a single woman has the same rights to property, to protection from the law, and has to pay the same taxes to the State as a man. Yet a woman of the age twenty-one, having the requisite property qualifications, cannot vote in elections for Members of Parliament.⁵

She saw clearly that if married women had the right to their own property and earnings, it would make it harder for politicians to refuse to give women the vote. She was asked to give evidence to the Law Amendment Society, which was looking into the legal position of married women. Its deliberations led to the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act being passed, allowing divorce for the first time outside the ecclesiastical courts and the Houses of Parliament, making divorce possible for more couples through a separate civil divorce court. Although the law was by no means equal, it did protect the property rights of divorced and separated women, something that Barbara had campaigned for.

However, for married women the position remained unchanged: when a woman married, her husband controlled her possessions, earnings and property and she could not dispose of any belongings without his consent. Barbara formed a committee, the Langham Place Group, to try to change the law. Within a year, Barbara’s committee had become a nationwide campaign group, and she drafted a petition, which, when presented to the House of Lords in March 1856, had 26,000 signatures on it and was the first petition organized by a woman in the UK. Unsurprisingly, it was rejected; it took until 1870 for the first Married Women’s Property Act to be passed, and a further twelve years until a more comprehensive act finally gave women the rights to both their own property and their earnings. Barbara campaigned for these changes throughout that period.

In 1857, Barbara published Women and Work, arguing that a married women’s dependence on her husband was degrading. Her views on the legal position of married women led her to say she would not marry, as she was fearful of losing her independence. Yet, in 1857, she met Eugene Bodichon, and compromised her principles by marrying this French doctor. She hoped to have children and did not want her children to be illegitimate, as she had been. Eugene lived in Algeria, North Africa, for much of his life. He dressed in Arab robes, spoke little English and was seventeen years older than Barbara, but he shared Barbara’s radical political views and loyally supported Barbara in her many campaigns for women’s rights. Unsurprisingly, their marriage was unconventional. He continued to live in Algeria, and Barbara travelled to and fro, between winters in Algeria and her campaigning in London. Her family was shocked by her marriage, and her father set up a trust to safeguard her money. As a result, she had less freedom as she now had to ask the trustees before spending money. Eugene treated poor patients for free and had no money of his own. Although at first they were happy, in time their differences became more marked and Barbara spent more time in England where Eugene refused to live. She remained loyal to him; they wrote to each other when separated; and she paid all his bills, even when he began to drink heavily and had dementia. Barbara even sold her London home to pay for live-in help for him.

Alongside marriage and a honeymoon in America, Barbara founded the English Women’s Journal (EWM) in 1858. This monthly publication was owned and run by women; even the press machinery was operated by women. The EWM discussed education, female employment, equality issues and the reform of the laws regarding women. She also founded the Society of Female Artists. In 1859, Barbara, with Jessie Boucherett and Adelaide Proctor, also set up the Association for Promoting the Employment of Women, one of the earliest women’s organizations, and the EWM became the society’s mouthpiece. As Elizabeth Crawford recognized, the groups Barbara assembled were extremely important in establishing a feminist network to promote later campaigns.⁶

In 1865, Barbara, as one of the founding members of the Kensington Ladies’ Discussion Society, helped to organize a petition calling for women’s suffrage, and persuaded John Stuart Mill MP to present this to Parliament. He asked for 100 women’s names: in fourteen days, Barbara and her friends used a chain-letter technique to secure almost 1,500 signatures.⁷ Mill attempted to amend the proposed 1867 Representation of the People Act to replace the word ‘men’ with the word ‘person’. The amendment secured seventy-nine votes, but was lost by a majority of 123. At a meeting of the Kensington Ladies’ Discussion Society, Barbara gave a talk on women’s suffrage that led to the formation of a Women’s Suffrage Committee. This talk became an article in 1866, Reasons for the Enfranchisement of Women, and was read at the Social Science Association in Manchester. One of the women who heard it was Lydia Becker, who was immediately converted to the women’s suffrage cause and who, the following year, went on to become the secretary of the newly formed Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. Lydia asked for 3,000 copies of Barbara’s article, which were distributed to all women householders in Manchester. Lydia Becker became an important early leader of the suffrage movement, founding and editing the Women’s Suffrage Journal in 1870.

In 1869, Barbara finally realized her long-awaited dream of a college where women could be educated to the same standard, and in the same subjects, as men, when she co-founded Girton College, Cambridge, with Emily Davies. Emily was incensed when friends suggested that Barbara was a co-founder, insisting that the idea for the college was hers alone, and the two women often clashed. Emily was more autocratic and a strict disciplinarian, who wanted her students to concentrate on the Classics and mathematics, while Barbara, putting the women students’ needs first, wanted a more radical, wide-ranging course of study. Barbara raised much of the money to found Girton, giving £6,000 of her own money over her lifetime. The college was the achievement of which she was most proud, and she left £10,000 to the college in her will.⁸

Barbara was under no illusions that the struggle for the vote was going to be anything other than difficult and protracted. Apparently, she remarked to Emily Davies: ‘You will go up and vote upon crutches and I shall come out of my grave and vote in my winding-sheet.’⁹ These were prophetic words, as Emily Davies was aged eighty-eight when she was able to vote and Barbara had been dead almost thirty years before the vote was finally achieved for some women in 1918. Throughout Barbara’s adult life, she wrote an average of fifteen letters a day,¹⁰ but, tragically in 1877, when only fifty years old, she suffered a stroke that left her weak, partially paralysed and dependent on others to write the letters she dictated. She had great difficulty in walking and was only able to paint for short periods. Her condition also largely curtailed her political activities, although she built a room onto her house in Hastings and set up a school for working men to study in the evenings. In 1884, she had another small stroke and, with her husband Eugene (with whom she had an unconventional relationship) becoming more and more mentally unstable in Algiers, they were not able to see each other before his death in 1885, aged seventy-four. Barbara herself died in Hastings in 1891. Her obituary in the Hastings and St Leonards Observer was in no doubt about her achievements:

While she was still Miss Leigh Smith a movement started by her culminated in the Married Women’s Property Act … [and] with a little help from Miss Davies she founded Girton College … Her aim through life was to do as much good as she could and no matter who they were, the poor always found a friend in Madame Bodichon.¹¹

2

ROSE CRAWSHAY (1828–1907)

Philanthropist and Welsh iron-master’s wife

Maggie Andrews

When, in 1870, Mrs Crawshay addressed one of the first public meetings to discuss women’s suffrage in Wales, she was criticized by local newspapers for disturbing the peace of South Wales and requested to ‘reconsider before she sows the seeds of politics amongst the female population of her part of the country’.¹

Rose Mary Yeates was born in Horton Grove, Berkshire and, at the age of eighteen, married Robert Thompson Crawshay, whom she had met at the Reading County Ball. Robert, who was then aged twenty-nine, had a home in Berkshire, but his family’s main residence was Cyfarthfa Castle in Wales, a mansion with seventy-two rooms and fifteen towers, which was built in the 1820s and stood in 154 acres of parkland. Robert Crawshay came from one of the larger iron-making dynasties, who owned Cyfarthfa Ironworks near Merthyr Tydfil, and it was in Wales that the couple lived and brought up their five children and where Rose focused the majority of her philanthropic and suffrage activities.

According to Angela John, Robert Crawshay was ‘an autocratic showy man … who ...