Philobiblon

P. 50 “When a plump Protestant Irishwoman stepped of an immigrant ship at the Port of Adelaide in December 1879, there was nothing to suggest that she would rewrite the rules of the political world. Mary Lee, 58 years old, recently widowed and mother of seven, had sailed to Australia on domestic business: to care for her critically ill son John. But he died soon after she arrived, and Mary, unable to afford the passage home, was struck… within 10 years she had become a star gladiator in the largest arena she could find: votes for women… [Adelaide] more women earning money from prostituion per capita than in any other Australian city, and thousands more providing cheap labour for Adeliade;s rapid industrialisation… Mary Lee was in no doubt that only women’s suffrage would improve the social and economic position of women.”

P. 62 By 1897. There were organised and effective suffrage societies operating in all colonies bar Tasmania .. the convergence of feminism and Federation produce the perfect storm for democratic reform.. In South Australia, at least, women would be able to vote in the Federal referendum”

P. 110 

Vida Goldstein after her visit to the US “vowed to help our English sisters and American cousins in their struggle for freedom… Our chief care will be to use our right of suffrage that the men of other nations will soon want to follow the example of Australian champions of women’s enfranchisement. … You want, and must have, the support of the rank and file of working people.. That is how we got it in Australia.”

P. 136 1903 first federal election “Press, public and parliament alike had to admit that the experiment had been a success. Female electors had come out in great numbers. There had been no discord at polling booths and no more than usual in homes. Women had voted in about the same numbers (proportionately) as men, which was not as exhilarating as it sounds, Vida Goldstein had to admit, given there had been a small voter turnout: 1.7 million voters had registered on the rolls, and only 900,000 went to the polls… female electors had not been moved by some great impulse to cast their ballots in a block and hence sweep the polls. Women had largely voted along class lines, not gender lines. It was widely acknowledged that the women’s vote had increased the Labour vote… women who earned their own living and women in country areas were far more likely to actually vote compared to the city toffs… their presence as electors had changed political culture irrevocably.. Alfred DEakin .. added ‘women’ to his standard salutation ‘Men of Australia’. Others observed that not only was the language of citizenship more superficially inclusive, but some politicians had also needed to quickly change their policy stripes… Ida Husted Harper, reporting for the Washington POst, noted that what Australia had just witnessed was the most important event in the history of the world movement towards woman’s suffrage.

AT the NZ general election of 1908, David McLaren’s Independent Labour League won 3% of seats. Canada didn’t even have a federal Labour party until 1917. When it came to Labour’s electoral strength, Australia was in a league of its own….

P. 308

13 April 1910 .. Labor won 49.97% of the primary vote, a stunning increase on the 18% it mustered in 1901 and 36% in 1906… the first time that an openly socialist government had been elected to govern in its own right anywhere in the world. It had campaigned on three discrete virtues: moderation, respectability and competence. … an Englishman, who had recently returned from Australia and watched the elections … reported that voting in the southern colonies was a pleasant family affair … Women’s part in politics is taken as quite natural, the man wrote… They do not neglect their husbands’ meals, nor are they in any way unwomanly in appearance.”

.. Vida received 54,00 votes, an impressive 25% share, but it was not enough.”

P. 322 “Muriel found that her Australian audiences were as enchanted by her account of her time in gaol as any British reading public would be – and she milked it. After recalling the night of her arrest for obstruction, she would step offstage, only to reappear dressed in full prison garb ,,, described in fine detail the tiny, foul-smelling cell it its wooden shelf and sleeping may, its small ventilator clogged with dust… concluded her hairiraising description of her incarceration with the revelation that she had come out of gaol a wiser woman. She kept her eyes and ears open, vigilant for danger but also revitalized for social reform. If Muriel Matters was ever lukewarm in her commitment to helping British women win the vote, prison had set her on fire.””

P. 325 “For Muriel the impeccably well-connected and respected Vida was the key that would unlock the halls of power. She would not have to chain herself to any railings to get a hearing in the big house. After all the picketing and deputations and rallies and rushing and interrupting required to get close to a politician in England, the openness and proximity of Australia’s MPs was a revelation to Muriel. The ease with which the Australian woman can approach the politician and have their wants attend to, she reflected, is conclusive proof of the power of the woman voter. … Muriel: small and fair, 33, cabinet-maker’s daughter, raised in the bush and public schooled, an aspiring actress turned political street fighter. Vida had used nothing but constitutional means to push forward the case for women’s political equality. Muriel had gone to extraordinary lengths to break rules. … Both were described by the press as having the saving grace of humour and a brain of masculine strength. They got along like two peas in a politically charged pod.”

P. 366 by the end of her tour of the United States in October 1910, Dora had seen enough of the faux-philanthopy of American millionaires – with their lavish bequests to institutions to keep present competitive conditions where they are – and prevent the workers demanding  radical upheavals – to be convinced that it was capitalism that must be fought (in tandem with sexism) if the world’s social problems were ever to be solved.”

P. 378 “Now Vida knew why Muriel had put herself at great personal risk to stage her most famous militant protest. To Vida, standing behind that iron trellis in the Ladies Gallery, the grille represented the smallness of the English mind, a symbol of British contempt for Woman, the mother of the race… She’d been bred a democrat, and a feminist one at that. The grille was quite simply galling.”

P. 396 April 2, 1911 Census Day

“In Sheffield, Adela Pankhurst and Helen Archdale hosted a mass evasion in Helen’s home at 45 Marlborough road. A total of 57 people sheltered in the eight-room house on 2 April, including one male and 48 female visitors.”

P. 406 “White women were safe in their political rights while in Australasia, but when they left the sanctuary of the antipodes, they were again vulnerable to a precipitous loss of status. Once in England, Australian women were no longer voters – as Nellie Martel, Muriel Matters and Dora Montefiore had been pointing out at every opportunity for the last five years. But their was a further dilemma. In Australia, laws had been passed to safeguard the British subject status of Australia’s married women. Customarily, a woman assumed the nationality of her husband upon marriage, just as her name, children and property became his. In 1903, urged on by campaigns run by the Women’s Political Association and other female-led lobby groups, the Naturalisation Act 1903 created equal nationality laws for men and women… But should an Austalian woman marry a non-British national… and live with im in England, under the British Naturalisation Act she acquired his legal identity and automatically lost her right to British subject status. It was like being transported back to the days of the femme covert”

P. 408 “The Australian and New Zealand Women Voters’ Committee… the first time that Australia and New Zealand joined forces in an acronym representing Australiasian kinship. Two sister dominions joined by the political pre-eminence of their female citizens. They would be the ANZWVC… Sir John Cockburn’s wife, Lady Sarah Cockburn, was the founding president. She and her husband had been active suffrage campaigners since moving to London from Adelaide in 1898, when John became agent-general of South Australia. Lady Anna Stout came forward as the heavyweight from New Zealand… the founding objective of the committee was formulated and affirmed: “To watch over the interests of Australian and New Zealand women under Imperial legislation, and to promote their welfare generally from this side of the world. To help forward the Women’s Movement in every part of the British Empire.”

June 17, 1911 “the Greatest Procession Known in History” – the Women’s Coronation Procession

P. 448 “the fact that Andrew fisher’s wife was marching at the head of a continent of Australian women – behind the official Coat of Arms of Australia, in a WSPU-sponored rally – was an incontrovertible no=confidence motion in the British government.”

P. 458 “To Bermondsey, a densely populated working-class borough two miles from the City where, in August, the factories emptied s 15,000 female workers went on strike. The Bermondsey Women’s Uprising, as it became known worldwide, was attributed to the combination of the usual appalling pay and conditions and the effects of the long, hot summer. Spoiled food, rising infant mortality, a general air or irritability and fed-upness. And a mood of female defiance. These women – who weren’t unioned – took to the streets, marching together with banners and a sense of industrial solidarity”… the streets were now their streets. They expected more and better. Prominent among the organisers who came in to lend moral and organisational support was Muriel Matters.”

P. 466 “Andrew Fisher is remembered now for saying that Australia would follow Britain into war until the last man and the last shilling. Who recalls that he also told a captive London audience that a true democracy can only be maintained honestly and fairly by including women as well as men in the electorate of the country?

Or that two weeks later his wife would march..

“Seen in this context, Gallipoli, with its militarist narrative of youthful sacrifice, not youthful optimism – was not the birth of the nation. It was the death of the nation we were well on the way to becoming.”

p. 25 “there is considerable uncertainty about the actual scale of women’s property ownership. A handful of studies have used rentals and leases to examine female landholding within small groups of manors or parishes. Jane Whittle, for example, demonstrated that female tenants rarely made up more than 10% of landholders on her four north-east Norfolk manors in the 15^th and 16^th century. Other studies of medieval landholding suggest that women made up between about 12 and 18% of tenants. Amanda Capern has demonstrated that women – most of women were widowed or single – made up 15% of leaseholders on the Jervaiux lands in North Yorkshire between 1600 and 1800, while Sylvia Seeliger has suggested that female tenants held up to 1/5 of the land in many Hampshire parishes between the mid-16th and mid-19^th centuries. Yet far less is known about the proportion of land owned – as opposed to tenanted – by women.

It is exactly this deficit that the remainder of the chapter sets out to remedy, exploring the issue of women’s landownership using a large sample of date from the parliamentary enclosure awards.

p. 26/7 “of the 250,000 acres catalogued here, almost 26,000 acres were owned by female landowners, that is 10. 3% of the land in the sample owned by a woman, either alone or jointly with one or more other parties. Female landowners were, moreover, a relative commonplace within rural communities up and down the country. As the data makes, clear, not only was more than one in 10 acres owned by a woman, but female landowners existed in the vast majority of the sample parishes….it seems likely that somewhere in excess of 3 million acres in England were owned by women in the later 18^th century and more than 6 million acres in Great Britain as a whole. The tally of female landowners – great and small 0 almost certainly ran into the tens of thousands and perhaps reached upwards of six figures.”

p. 40 While the involvement of middle-class women in business accounting has been increasingly acknowledged in recent years, the contribution of elite women to estate accounting has received far less attention. Yet some elite women kept very detailed estate accounts, rentals and ledgers. One such woman was Lady Elizabeth Dryden, a moderately wealthy widow who managed the Canons Ashby estate in Northamptonshire between 1770 and 1791. Despite an avowed dislike of writing letters, the accounts are written in her hand and cover the entire period of her management. In one book she recorded her annual outgoings against her yearly income, including her tenants’ rents and the sums she raised from the sale of underwood, bark and hay from the home farm and woods. Another book for the same period was organised by tenant rather than by year, and recorded the rents paid to her on a half-yearly basis, along with various memoranda concerning their tenancies. Her writing became increasingly untidy as she grew older … we know from a letter written to her niece that she suffered a stroke in 1790 and the shaky, almost illegible handwriting of the final year’s entry demonstrates that she wrote it after her stroke. This is testimony to Dryden’s sheer determination to record and audit the estate finances, but also definitive evidence that she kept her own accounts rather than relying on her steward.”

p. 41 “Elizabeth Hood of Butleigh Wootton (Somerset) kept the accounts for her modest estate not just as a widow but also as a young unmarried woman and a wife. Aged just 18, Wood inherited the Wootton estate from her father John Periam (d. 1788) and later married Alexander Hood, a captain in the Royal Navy who was killed in command of the HMS Mars six years later. The estate was a relatively small one: in 1806 the rentals brought her just over £1,000 a year, plus smaller sums for bark, corn and livestock and regular dividends from her funds in stocks. The core of the estate inherited from her father amounted to no more than 600 acres in 772, but Hood spent more than £11,000 purchasing land and houses in the neighbourhood, and her son’s portion of the estate amounted to nearly 1,700 acres in 1846. She was thus at the lower reaches of the gentry. .. Entries in the account book suggest that she had begun to keep the accounts prior to her father’s death in late 1788 … probably reflects her father’s failing health, but presumably also the desire by an elderly estate owner  – Periam was then 74 – to ensure his young heiress knew how to manage the estate… Her only brother had died before her own birth and Hood was brought up as the heiress to the estate, but we can only guess exactly what lessons her father provided for her. She was sent to Wells School from the age of 10 .. sometime later Hood wrote on the front cover of the account book, perhaps reflecting the lessons taught her as a young women:

Keep your accounts clear,

Throughout the year;

Let no mistake be made,

Either in paying, or pay’d.”

p. 79

“Lady Elizabeth Monoux was said by Arthur Young to be responsible for introducing improvements following the enclosure of wastes and warrens on an estate belonging to her husband at Sandy (Bedfordshire). The parish was enclosed in 1804 under an act of 1798, and both the act and the award recognised Sir Philip Monoux as the landowner. Yet [Arthur] Young attributed the improvements to his wide, noting that Sir Philip’s estate was ‘entirely under the management of Lady Monoux, who takes much pleasure in husbandry’. She had planted several parcels of the newly enclosed warren with oats and achieved excellent yields with the need to marl, limr or manure the land. In the previous year, Young also reported that she was growing Lucerne on portions of the the new enclosures, again with good results. The Lucerne was used as fodder for horses and was said to be ‘a very fine crop’ which over 20 weeks produced a yield valued at more than £9 n acre after the labour. Young praised ‘the agricultural talents on the intelligent farmeress” and her “very great exertions”.

p. 89 Elizabeth Illive, wrote at least one article for the Annals of Agriculture. “Also known as ‘Mrs Wyngham’, Ilive was the mistress of the third earl of Egremont, chatelaine at Petworth House (Sussex) and later countess of Egremont. Her origins are obscure and nothing is known of her early education, though she certainly had access to the large library of agricultural periodicals at Petworth House and probably also discussed agriculture with the earl – himself a keen agricultural improver – and his many visitors. In her 1797 article in the Annals, she described her experiments growing potatoes on land she had rented, making a careful study of the effect different methods of planting had on yields. Her work was underpinned by rigorous scientific method and demonstrated the value of planting the shoots removed from the chitted potatoes. The article appeared anonymously, the earl apparently having refused to allow her name to appear, though it is unclear if this was because of her gender or her unusual social position as his live-in mistress. [Arthur] Young commented specifically on Ilive’s piece, noting that she as an ‘ingenious lady’ and the article was ‘highly satisfactory, and proves clearly that the method detailed is of real importance.

The potato trials were not Ilive’s only scientific venture. Young – a regular visitor of the earl’s – also brought her equipment for the laboratory at Petworth House and taught her how to use it. In early 1796 she wrote to the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce describing a new method of using levers to raise large weights. Her letter – which included both a diagram and a model – outlined how the workmen on the estate ‘all approve of it very much,’ though she also hinted there had been some laughter at Petworth about her invention, at least initially. Her letter was apparently well received at the Society and the Mechanics Committee awarded her the silver medal in May 1796, the first woman to receive a medal from a scientific section of the Society, though others had previously won for Polite Arts. She was by then heavily pregnant with her seventh child and did not receive the medal in person, instead nominating the Society’s president Samuel More to collect it for her.”

p. 118 The most substantial programme of activities aimed at improving the lives of the poor was probably that undertaken by Elizabeth Prowse at Wicken (Northamptonshire) from the late 1760s onwards.. involved in a range of charitable activities both on her estate and beyond it. Some of this giving was irregular and ad hoc. Examples include providing five of her tenants with medicine after they were bitten by a rabid cat in 1776, helping one of her gardeners get sober and repay his debts, and finding apprenticeships and jobs for her coachman’s seven children when he suddenly left after being discovered ‘making money in what he had no right to do so’. She also made small gifts of money and clothes to villagers, local children and unnamed paupers, all of which were recorded in her pocket expenses. Such charitable acts were primarily reactive rather than proactive, but Prowse was also involved in a number of philanthropic projects which aimed to improve living conditions and educational achievements amongst the poorest Wicken residents in a much more systematic way… while undoubtedly a committed agricultural improver… Prowse was neveretheless uneasy about some of the things her predecessors on the estate had done in the name of progress. She was also aware that the social and economic costs of enclosure and estate improvement were often borne disproportionaely by the poorest in society. Her religious upbringing, staunchly Anglican beliefs and contacts with London Evangelicals and anti-slavery campaigners though her brother Graville Sharp no doubt played a part in shaping her attitudes towards farming, improvement and the poor, as did a close reading of Nathaniel Kent’s General View of the Agriculture of the County of Norfolk. Like Kent – whose Hints to Gentlemen of Landed Property she bought in 1775 and whom she probably met in Fulham in the winter of 1791 – Prowse seems to have recognised agricultural labourers as the very ‘nerves and sinews’ of rural society without whom ‘the richest soil is not worth owning’.

“Soon after acquiring the estate, Prowse embarked on a programme of repairs and improvements to the estate cottages. She paid for the cottages to be rethatched and glazed, and may also have installed water pumps in some of the cottages, as she did in the tenant farms … Prowse was paying for the cottagers’ children to attend a school in the village from at least 1768. She may have founded the school and certainly contri8buted significant sums to the running costs: in the mid-1770s she spent more than £30 a year on the schoolmasters’ wages along with clothes and shoes for the children, which together accounted for between about a third and a half of all spending in the cottage accounts. There were then at least 12 ‘charity boys’ in attendances, as well as several girls who were taught to make lace and cloth.. Prowse was also involved in establishing an early Sunday school at Wicken, which was first held in the spring of 1788. .. she continued to support both the day and the Sunday schools postmortem with the gift of a share in the Grand Junctions Canal Company, which by the 1830s contributed about £10 a year to the running costs.

p. 119 “Prowse … was concerned to provide locally available and affordable foodstuffs to her tenants … very little of the produce from the home farm was sold at the market. Instead, most of it was used in the house or sold locally, either to the village butcher or direct to the tenant farmers and labourers… sold meat and cheese to the poor at a subsidised price.. She sold a beef cow to the poor every winder at 2d a pound and in 1783 gave them the meat for here ‘it having been a hard winter for them’. She also sold firewood from the estate woodlands to the village poor, presumably again at a subsidised rate. Much of this activity was focused in the winter months, when conditions were at their harshest. Importantly, this was also the season Prowse spent in London and it is clear that she sought to improve conditions for the poor even whilst in the capital, something which Jessica Gerard argues was unusual amongst country-house women whose charitable hand-outs were not normally a year-round benefit to the rural poor.”

p. 123 “elite women .. might actively involve themselves in parliamentary politics, whether by controlling voters on their estates, by directly canvassing for particular candidates or by hosting political meetings and debates. One of the most straightforward ways … was to canvas their tenants and attempt to control their votes, either by only installing tenants whose political allegiance was already known or by evicting – or threatening to evict – those who voted against their wishes. Anne Lister worked hard to try to establish an interest at Halifax, suggesting names for Tory candidates to the head of the local selection committee, directly canvassing voters – both by letter and in person – and refusing to let her land to anyone but ‘blue tenants’. ”Regardless of their sex, most landowners expected to direct their tenants’ votes. Yet the moral case for tenants complying with the landowner’s wishes was arguably greater in the case of propertied women: as Lister wrote in her diaries, the tenants of properties women were doubly obliged to vote with their landlady, who was herself unable to vote and whose political views ‘would otherwise not be represented at all’.

p. 34 It is, moreover, notable that women appear to have played a significant role in literature and learning throughout the period, whether as recipients of complex and challenging Latin works, such as Aldhelm’s twin work in both prose and verse on virginity, sent to the nuns of Barking, or as teachers of ppetry and producers of their own verse, such as Eadburh, abbess if Minister-in-Thanet (d. 751) and her younger contemporaries Leofgyth and Berhtgyth, both of whom have left poems associated with Boniface’s mission to Germania. Powerful women in the late 7^th century also fostered learning and literature in the north, notably Abbess Hild of Whitby (614-680), whose monastery was the setting, Bede says, of the first Christian poetry in traditional Old English metre, by the illiterate cowherd Caedmon. Bede is uncharacteristically shy  about asserting that Caedmon reported his first faltering verses to Hild herself, and it seems likely that the supposed event took place in the time of her successors, Eanflaed (d. c. 685) or Aelflaed (654-714), respectively the sister and niece of King Aldfrith of Northumbria (r. 685-705), who himself had a well-documented interest in verse in several languages, including both Latin and Irish.”